And so I was sent to my room for the first night of many, with nothing but school books for company and a prisoner’s rations.My exile brought one incalculable benefit, one utterly unlooked for bonus which would, years later, maturing, consolidated.
You came to my room, having persuaded a servant to you in with a pass key, so that you might apologise for what you said was your part in my offence. You brought a little pink cake you’d taken from the kitchens and hidden in your
You knelt by my bed. A single bedside lamp lit my tear swollen cheeks and your wide, dark eyes. You handed me the small cake two handed, with a near comical reverence. I took it a nodded, eating half of it in one munching gulp, then popping the rest into my mouth.
You stood up then with a strange gracefulness and lifted your dress to expose flesh from sock top to navel. I stared, mouth.’ stopped with a sugary pink pulp. You tucked your dresshems under your chin, then reached under my bedclothes and took,’ my nearer hand, guiding it gently to the downy cleft between your legs, and held it there, pressing and softly rubbing back’ and forth. Your other hand closed around my genitals, then began to pull and stroke my sex. Moistened, encouraged, my fingers slipped into you, startling me both with that upward swallowing and with the heat discovered. I too swallowed, the pink mouthful of cake reflexively gulped.
You kneaded both of us, then, while I lay, still amazed, paralysed by the novelty of what was happening, by this next latest and most bizarre reversal of fortune. I was afraid to react, hesitant to will any action at all lest whatever astounding (and so surely of necessity precarious) combination of circumstances had brought this unexpected rhapsody about be upset by the smallest contrary deed of mine.
Guiding my engulfed fingers with a quicker, stronger beat, you shuddered suddenly, sighed, and in a moment, withdrew my hand and patted my wrist. You let your dress down, pulled the covers back, then knelt and took me in your mouth, sucking and bobbing, hair tickling my thighs.
I simply stared. Perhaps it was just that surprise, maybe more likely it was simply that I was still too young. In any event, there was, on that dry run, no climactic surge of joy and no issue either in the time we had. The tickling, bobbing, sucking went on for a little while until the servant, grown nervous of being discovered, knocked at the door and cracked it to mutter a warning. Letting it plop out of your mouth like a glistening lollipop, you kissed my own pink swelling, then covered it and walked with calm daintiness away; the door opened and closed for you and I was left alone.
Or not quite; I unrolled the bedclothes again to gaze upon my new but now slowly waning friend. I plucked experimentally at it as I sniffed my curiously scented fingers, but my manhood went down simply of its own accord, and I would not fully see its like again until that day the wind and rain ambushed me in the muddy woods.
You, my dear, would not witness the spectre you’d raised for a second time until our tryst on the castle’s roof, a decade later, one warm night, above a party.
Chapter 15
The well’s black water stinks; a soil sweat perfume that for all its rankness seems as though it should at least be warm and enveloping, but instead is cold and sharp. I catch a hint of human odour, too, indicating that wine and food, vomited up to fall down here, have mingled with urine to create still more pungent tones to accompany the hole’s own earthy scent.
I sniff back blood from my nose; the noise is loud inside the closed metal helm. I try to rise but feel paralysed by cold. I wonder how long I have lain here. I tip my head, clanging the helmet against the side of the shaft as I try to see the summit of the well. Light. Light through the perforations of the helmet, perhaps. Or not. I blink, and the view swims. My neck aches. I lower my head and still see the lights.
Seeing stars again, I lie back in the castle’s gutted heart, its nightbraided reaches holding me encupped, its stealing coldness infecting me, and feel myself part of its choking debris; another scattered mote, cast first to the quicker elements and then the ground, rolled along a course, a road, a bed I have no choice in determining, nor any way of leaving.
I am cells; no more, I think. This present assemblage bones, flesh and blood is more complicated than most such gatherings to be found on the world’s rude surface, and my quorum of sense holding plasm may be greater than other animals can muster, but the principle’s the same, and all our extra wisdom does is let us know the truth of our own insignificance more fully. My body, my whole dazed being, seems like little more than a pile of autumn leaves, blown and bunched by a swirling wind and trapped, corralled by a chance of ancillary geography into a localised drift. Of what greater consequence am I than that temporary heap of leaves, that collection of cells, collectively dead or dying? How much more do any of us signify?
Yet still we do ascribe a greater pain and joy and weight of import to ourselves than to any mere clump of matter, and feel it too. We seduce ourselves with our own images, perhaps. The leaf dryly tumbling along the road is not really like a refugee.
We carry the silt of our own memories within us, like the castle’s loft stored treasures, and we are top heavy with it. But ours is geological in its profundity, reaching back through our shared histories, blood lines and ancestries to the first farmers, the first hunting band, the first shared cave or nested tree. By our wit we look further back, and out, so that we bear the buried stripes of all our planet’s, earlier geology in the strata of our brains, and contain within our bodies the particular knowledge of the explosion of suns that lived and died before our own came into being.
The deeper silt implies the grander flow, and I cannot fully join the rubble underneath, not while I breathe and think and feel. My bones could lie here comfortably enough just minerals, cold things, ‘stuff’ but not the man who thinks of this eventuality.
From this sunk hole I once thought to see the depths of heaven, to look into the past that is the ancient light of stars, and just so now, lowered to a heightened understanding, by my tormentors aided, I think I see the way into the future. From here, with this new perspective, I believe I view the castle whole, its plan spread out above me, transparent and confirmed, the earth made unopaque, revealing the building’s stones raised from the land into the commerce of the rain and air.
Here is the house militant, a blocked in enterprise huddled round a private, guarded void, its banners and its flags flown flagrant to the vulgar, following winds; a mailed fist prevailing against all levelling air.
Seminal, germinal, I lie there; something mud bound, landbound, evolving, and quite undismayed both by the burden of the abysmal past compressed beneath and by the columnar weight of atmosphere above bearing down, each together squeezing me, forcing me, tributary, to a greater, crasser surface.
But now is now, now is demand, and I must act.
I try to shrug or scrape the helmet off, but fail. I decide to free my hands first.
I struggle, numb with cold, attempting to undo myself. I bend my fingers and try to find purchase on the tied length of rough textured bell pull securing my hands. I tug and haul and wriggle my wrists inside their bindings.
A noise, above.
I look up into darkness, and am pissed upon; the urine patters down upon me, softly clanging off the helmet and hissing into the water. It is barely warm, cooled almost to the same chill as the well’s still water by its passage down the cold air of the well’s throat. Some shouts, and then, with a start that has my elbows jerk in beside my body, something solid hits the helmet and splashes into the water. Laughter, above; more shouts, fading then returning. Then the sound of retching.
Sickness, this time. It feels warmer than the urine. Its acrid stench rises up around me. Mostly wine, I think. More laughter, and then silence.
I continue to struggle with the bonds round my wrist. I think that if I could only see properly, even in the near darkness, I might succeed. But I need my hands to release me from the helm. I try, instead, to stand inside my little bucket, thinking that I might be able to nudge the helmet off once I can better wedge it against the side of the well. That fails too, my legs refusing to work.