Solstices Obscurity "dus"

"I know you."

Looking up from my contemplation of a lizard crawling over my boot, I see a young man, naked like all such here except for me, standing a half dozen feet from me.

"You're that scoundrel that betrayed the king!" He was pointing his finger at me like he needed to some how single me out in that massive crowd of one I was standing in.

"Which king would that be? I can easily recall at least three that I have betrayed. Not that it matters, one royal cock of an arse is no better than the next. Their Majesties are one and all a collective pustular hemorrhoid upon the face of humanity." His face goes flush red at that. I sigh, it's going to be one of those. "Sir, I would beseech you to begone. Your peasants yammer is already vexing me with its lack of civilized tones, while the smell of your entrenched royal-loyalty is sickening and your obvious and tedious morality offends. You, sir, are in short, making my rapier itch something fiercely. Go wait for the boat like all the other plebeians and bother me no more."

I wave a hand to shoo him away, and turn back t watching this lizard. By far and away a better conversationalist than the peasant.

It was the warrior's instinct that turns me back around in time so that I duck my head out the way of the branch he picked up from by his feet. As that cudgel passed over head my sword cleared its scabbard.

"Misbegotten son of a whore!" He shouts at me. "I'll do you right and proper for what yous did!"

I let the tip of my blade snake a line of red up his cheek.

"To begin with, my mother was many things, a whore however was not among them. She was at times a slave, both to fashion, certainly to drink, often to the consumption of opiates and of course to the pricks of a few men." My blade moved like a viper, to prick his shoulder, as he took another swing and it too missed. "But for the likes of you, son of a peasant farmer and a village slattern no doubt, to call me misbegotten is such an absurdity that I will not let it stand."

My blood rising to a gentle boil, I felt alive! Yes, this was what I had been missing sitting here penning my life into those empty pages. The roar of the warrior's heart in your ears, that fierce thunder in your temples, the mad dash here and there. Would that this fool had a sword and not a stick, so that this could be prolonged and thus more enjoyable. The outcome was never in question, not from beyond his first swing but at least it would have been a diversion.

Across the muddy, brackish pools of scummy water to the quay and out onto those slimy rock I drive him. Back and back till his feet were but inches from the end of the pier. Not willing to let him go easily, I lined up the point of my sword and drove its needle like sharpness between the bones of his forearm, right behind his wrist. As his club fell, from numbed fingers into the water, my poniard clears it sheath and I sent its point low and with hellish force into his crotch! His scream, when the blade sank to its full length, was a delicious music.

He leaned his head in weeping upon my shoulder like a jilted lover might.

Looking past his oily hair, I saw Charon approaching, pushing his pole into the deep muck of the river Styx. He was a good dozen yards from the quay.

Pulling back from him, I looked into the face of this Jacobite fool.

"You are less than the most common roach crawling under my foot. Did you for some reason think that simply because you were dead all would be equal between you and a noble born? That a peasant with a stick would be a match for one born with a sword for a birthright?" I give the dagger a twist making him scream again. "You see it is that very kinda of thinking that has you with a poniard for a pintle."

Somewhere he found the wherewithal to spat at me, his face flush with pain and rage.

"You'll get yours in the end, Bastard!"

"Trust me, fool, my "end" has been more than gotten." Looking past him at a pair of hollow eyes, I grimace. "Your boat is here."

Planting my boot into his gut, I yank my blades free and kick him off the end of the pier. He falls shrieking to the icy water, clutching at the side of Charon's boat as he falls past it. He grabs again for the side when he resurfaces and begins to try to pull himself up. Then he is suddenly caught from underneath and with a scream of terror and pain is sucked down into those so appropriately named, Stygian depths.

I look to Charon, leaning there on his pole looking at me so very ominously. I give a half shrug. "Oops."

Dismissing the Dread Ferryman and his ire, I head back to my tree stump.

Looking at the red glut upon my blade, I pick up my quill and wet the tip.

"Waste not, and thou shall want for not after all," I mutter to myself. When I apply the tip to the page, I watch in rapt fascination as the sanguine ink rolls off the page like a bead of water down the back of a geese, leaving not a trace of its passing. I try again and again to write with the blood from my blade but it will take no root upon the vellum page.

Dropping my rapier, I wipe the point of my dagger across the side of the tree stump, letting the moss clean it. Then I stick it into the old wound on my wrist, reopening it. A dip of the quill.

Well of all the most bitter of ironies! Ha, ha, ha! Oh, Fate you cunning bitches three!"

With a laugh and a shake of my head I sit down upon my stump and begin to write in earnest.

While I have ink, and before my winged friend shows up to put in a claim upon it, I will try to pen down a few moments of what happen after that fearful beating in the stable.

Pain!

I was in the greatest agony I had up until that point in my life felt. Would that I had known of the tortures that were to come, in the nadir years, I would have cozened that agony as a golden moment of joy. As it was, I was bemoaning my situation in a most contemptible way. They cut me down from the hook, and left me naked, crying upon the floor in the minute detritus of old soiled hay and horse manure, while they arranged my mode of travel.

A sack.

A sack of rough cloth, that had till just before the moment it was place over me been the home of a uncountable number of turnips. In the coming years I would never again be able to eat another turnip. I would, by far and away, rather starve than to take a single bite of one. Forever ingrained into my mind is the smell of turnips with my enslavement. I retch at the very odor.

In that revoltingly odoriferous confinement, I was carried and rudely tossed upon a wagon and then, with many a shriek of pain by me when we hit poorly laid cobblestone or mud ruts in the road, I was taken from my home. Those screams would be quite often met with heavy "thwacks" of a large drovers stick and rough curses to be silent, or that a more vigorous beating that the last would be administered. Now, given that my back was a red whelp of agony, I did indeed ride in as much silence as I could endure.

Hearing a flutter, I look down to see my dear friend licking at the bloody blade of my rapier.

"Careful now, that is not so gourmet a meal as you have become accustom to, of late. More in the nature of black-bread and beans, than succulent roast of peacock. And mind you the vintage is more than a bit off, so come not to me, Stygie, with a sour stomach. I will give no sympathy to said sad plight, thou hath been forwarned."

~"Squeek."~

"Of course, your answer for everything."

I was biting that befouled sacking, between clinched teeth to keep from screaming, long before we reached our destination. The eternal reek of the seaport began to make its way through the overpowering smell of turnip and gave me some idea what was going to come to pass. Still when the wagon stopped and I was, still in my sack, dragged from the back, and allowed to fall upon the docks I lost my breathe. Then, while I still struggle to drawn air, I was lifted from the fish-smelling stone quay, passed hand by hand and taken aboard a ship I was never to see. In a sack I was taken aboard it and it was in a sack, the same turnip smelling rag, that I was later removed.

"Would that I had remained in that sack the whole time. How much fairer a journey that would have been."

Looking out over the river, I wish I could close my nostrils to that smell of it. So many filthy memories to be had, while enveloped in that smell of dank water. I look around at the shadowed realm around me, the slimy pier with its empty or often crowded surface jutting out into the brackish sludge that is Styx. I look at the reflected eye-shine from a dozen pairs of demonic eyes. They watch me from the darkness, from behind other tree stumps like mine. They watch, but come no closer to me. The wandering souls they will often pull down and devour bloodily, but me they give a wide birth.

I dip the quill with distaste and try to pen down one of the more retched times I had...well, up until that point anyway, in my sordid life.

The ship sailed just hours later with me laid in the hold like so much bulk cargo. the sway of the ship, an unknown thing to me till that point, churned my stomach even as that continuing smell of turnips brought bile to my lips.

Then I heard laughter. Coarse, rude laughter. Voicing profane suggestions in a language I did not speak fluently, but knew enough of to gather their intent.

Kicking, fighting, trying will all my might to pull free of them when they emptied me from that sack, achieved me nothing so much a rougher handling, a hard punch to the gut and the face and a mouth full of blood. Then a hammer like punch into my crotch! Gasping for air from the low blow, I was dragged to a near by barrel and laid over it. I tried to fight their hands but their strength was that of men that worked the sea. Hands, hardened by salt and wood and endless days of adjusting sails, were like mahogany next to my own.

My body, still naked from the earlier beating and abuse, rubbed on the barrel wood as they held me to it. Hard, splintery coarse-cut wood, they dug into the skin. I found myself looking into the grinning, bearded face of the man who held my wrists. He made kisses at me and winked.

Then there were hard hands on my hips! Warm, hairy legs pressed into the backs of my thighs, and then harsh hands were taking hold of my arse cheeks, spreading me wide.

I close my eyes to the memory of that moment of first intrusion in vane hope that I shan't recall it in such perfect detail. That rough taking of my anus, already wounded by the whip handle, by that foreign sailor's cock. The mocking laughter of the man that held me as I screamed. His grinning mouth, two teeth missing, I remember it so clearly. The burning pain, the hard rod, the tight grip of his hands one on my hip the other upon my shoulder, pulling me to him to make his cock go deeper. That terrible stretching that I felt myself doing to accommodate him.

"And would that it had just been the one." I tell Stygie. He looks up at me all sanguine mouthed. " That could have been born."

In what seemed like endless hours to follow I was taken, down there in that dark of that stinking ship's hold. My nose filed with the scent of old brine. By how many? Well I think the whole crew had a go at least once, that first time. When my feeble attempts to resist gave way to exhausted capitulation they let go of my hands. But a passive receptacle wasn't enough for a few of them, they wanted, relished hearing me scream. I was again whipped, this time with a knot-ended length of rope. It gave them the screams they desired, then when they were at their aroused hardest they would take me like a ravaging beast. Rough, quick and with utter brutality toward their mate of choice. Soon in their hole of chose as well. A fact that still brings rage to my eyes. No amounts of later fellatio, both forced and freely give, will ever drown away those first times. The smell of them. Their obvious gleeful joy at the rape of my mouth. Their sadly predictable jokes about the French making love with their faces I unfortunately understood all to well.

And should my teeth touch their flesh in the slightest, I was again beaten with the the rope. In the long days and endless nights of that voyage I was trained by them. Trained in a dismally brutal school of the male to male fuck.

"But certainly no more brutal than the schooling that was to come, when that voyage ended." I look down at my furry friend. "Only more remember for its begin the first such."

~"Squeak...belch!"~

"I did warn you my friend." I tell him when he makes a sad sound and licks at him lips with his minute tongue. "My own unwanted feast on sailor's smelly flesh was no less disdainful, or sickening to the stomach. But it did end."

Looking up, my mind flickering with the memories of those fist glimpses of the place I had to call home for five years of my life, I take noticed of the fact that the landscape around me is grown more shadowed. A deepening of the mercurial dusk that has enveloped this place since my arrival. bending down, I pick up my bat and hold him close to my chest.

"Stygie le Brix, my grumble-bellied friend, I do believe that night has truly fallen."

"par la mort de dieu."