Todd had never played in a medieval movie — his face was far too contemporary, and his acting skills too rudimentary for an audience to believe him as anything but a modern man. But he’d seen his share of epics: the kind Heston had made in the fifties and early sixties: all rhetoric and pose-striking. The men approaching them looked nothing like the well-fed heroes of those epics. Their bodies were wizened, their looks so intense they looked more like escaped lunatics than hunters.
Goga raised his right hand (which was missing two fingers) and with a silent gesture slowed the advance of the party. The men — sensing their leader’s apprehension — proceeded to scan the landscape around them, looking for some sign of their enemy, whoever, or whatever, it was.
Todd stayed very still, just as Katya had instructed. Had these men been gun-slingers, he would have described them as trigger-happy. Plainly they were nervous and exhausted; not men to meddle with.
But even as he lay there, barely daring to breathe, he felt Katya reach down between his legs and proceed to stroke his balls. He gave her an astonished look, which she returned with a mischievous little smile. She stroked him back to full erection, and then subtly maneuvered her body so that he was once again fully sheathed by her. The sensation felt even more extraordinary than it had a few minutes before. Without seeming to move her hips she contrived to make waves of motion move up and down her channel, massaging him.
All the while, the horsemen approached, and the closer they came the more desperate they looked. These were men who apparently lived in a constant state of fear, to judge by their expressions. One of the Duke’s four followers, the oldest and the most scarred, mumbled a prayer to himself as he rode, and in his hand he clutched a plain wooden cross, which more than once he kissed, for comfort’s sake.
Todd was somewhere between ecstasy and panic. He didn’t dare move, even if he’d wanted to. Katya, meanwhile was free to play havoc with his nerve-endings. He didn’t move his hips; he didn’t need to. She had all the moves. Her internal manipulations were becoming more elaborate all the time, driving him closer and closer to losing control.
Todd had always been a noisy lover; sometimes embarrassingly so. (A memorable night with a girlfriend in a suite at the Chateau Marmont had been brought to a premature halt when the manager had called up his room to regretfully report that the guests in an adjacent suite couldn’t sleep for all his moans.) Now the best he could do was bite his lip until he tasted blood, and will himself not to let a sound escape him.
The horsemen were so close now that he did not dare move his head to look at them. But he could just see them from the corner of his eye. The Duke gave an order, in Romanian: “Stai! N-auzi ceva?” The men brought their horses to a halt, the Duke no more than four yards from where Todd and Katya lay on the ground. Had it not been for the fact that the eclipse rendered the light here so deceptive, the pair would surely have been seen, and dispatched: a single blade skewering them both in an instant. But as far as Todd’s limited vision could tell, the men were looking further afield for their quarry, scanning the distant landscape rather than the ground yards from their horses’ hooves.
There was another exclamation from the Duke, and this time a response from one of his men. Todd had the impression that they were listening for something. He listened along with them. What could he hear? Nothing out of the ordinary. The cry of birds, wheeling overhead; the coarse breathing and snorting of the horses; the slap of the reins against their massive necks. And closer by, the breathing of the woman beneath him; and — a smaller sound still — the rhythmical click of a beetle as it made its clockwork way over the small stones close to his hand. In his mind’s eye all of this around the tender place where their bodies met: the bird and the horse and the stones and the beetle, orbiting his pleasure.