Dark Enchantment Page 17

  I would giggle and reach out to him even as a baby in my mother’s arms, they tell me.

  When the oracle first advised my father to lock Asterion up for the protection of us all, he had his finest craftsman design the place of incarceration. The rock-hewn cellars beneath every palace room, where grain and fleeces and water were stored safe from the burning sun of summer, were all knocked together to make a single basement. Everything of value was removed. Cisterns were sunk. Trapdoors were nailed shut and plastered over. By the time the workers had finished Asterion had a palace all to himself, as extensive as the King’s own palace above it, but one that existed in eternal night. Only two entrances were left open: the central light-well in an inner courtyard, which had once been a pit in which dogs were set on bears, and a door at the back of the palace compound that opened onto a steep stair. That is still the route down which prisoners are driven.

  There is one other entrance to the Palace Below, but I’m the only one who knows it.

  They had to force Asterion into his new realm with spear points and torches, they say. Even then, when he was only entering into the full strength of his youth, he was too dangerous for any one man to control, and he harboured a particular aggression towards the King. They shut the door behind him and threw oaken bars across it and set guards, yet for days if you passed that door you could hear him thudding his head against the wood.

  This was all before my time, of course. I’ve only picked up palace gossip.

  Every night the royal family assembles about the central well. It is my father’s one act of contrition. A rope has been run over a roof beam and with this is lowered a basket containing bread and wine and cheese, and a bushel of whatever fruits are in season. Asterion has a hearty appetite. Sometimes he will speak, asking for things he desires: a blanket, a lamp, a songbird in a cage, a wreath of the wild roses that grow on the hills, more straw for his bed. His voice is deep, as you might expect from such a broad chest, but surprisingly melodic. My father is not unkind, though he never agrees to send down any palace slave. He learnt that lesson long ago, and if Asterion wishes to be entertained with the lyre then the musician stands at the top of the well and Asterion must stand beneath, out of reach. The only humans who enter the Palace Below are the youths given in tribute by Athens, which was laid siege to years back by my father’s armies and capitulated rather than burn.

  I too go below, of course. I have no memory of the first time it happened, though the story is familiar from countless retellings. I had as a very small child been in the habit of lying upon the edge of the pit and talking to Asterion, or singing to him, or recounting the stories of gods and heroes that our tutor had had us learn. Asterion did not deign to speak to me, but that did not seem to matter. I was never in the least afraid of him. One day my nurse turned to find me gone. There was panic, and a search, and eventually guards were sent into the basement in a squad, armed to the teeth and bearing torches. Asterion has always been wary of fire, though impervious to so much other pain. They found him and me together in an antechamber under a guttering lamp. I was sat upon his broad knee, singing to him the song of Europa. I must have thought, in my naivety, that the theme would appeal to him. The guards stopped, aghast. One swipe of Asterion’s huge fist would have been enough to kill me outright; they could not snatch me from danger. But Asterion only glowered and lifted me from his knee, setting me on my feet before he shambled away into the darkness.

  My nurse was torn apart between horses in the agora, for that carelessness.

  I must have fallen, or jumped, that first time. He must have caught me. Later on I know I used the rope to shin down.

  I’m certain that that was the time the King realised that I was my mother’s true child, as wilful as she. According to the family historians she was a daughter of Helios the sun god, and that thread of divinity has come down the bloodline. We are not constrained like other people. We are not afraid. My father was only a king, and knew better than to set himself against the gods. He consecrated me to Artemis, thinking that would save him from finding me a husband, and let me grow up how I would.

  So the years wore on. Nothing changed in Asterion’s world. Every year a ship with black sails would arrive from Athens and the tribute would be offloaded, seven young men and seven young women a part of it. Every full moon one of those captives would be taken to the back stairs and sent down into the Palace Below. The noises they made would be covered up by the playing of musicians. It made no difference to Asterion what time of year it was, because where he lived it was always dark and always cool.

  Upstairs, of course, things did change. My father remarried: a mousy woman from Thera whom I despised. I grew taller and stronger and changed in other ways. And I discovered another entrance to the Palace Below – a cupboard around the corner from my room that had once been a stairwell. It now contained old masks and props from the Bull Festival and was rarely entered, but at the back, I discovered, was a badly mortared brick wall and when I pulled out enough bricks I found a descending shaft choked with rubble. Surreptitiously, one piece at a time, I removed that rubble, enough to make a narrow slot I could squeeze down into the dark below, where it came out in an obscure corner of some abandoned storeroom, behind a stack of roof tiles. It became my private entrance and I never told anyone, not even Asterion, that this was how I gained access.

  You will note that I never had any plan to clear the stair completely. I did not want to release Asterion into the world; I knew his capacity for violence. And, though it shames me to acknowledge it, I was proud to be his only link to the world above. Beneath the innocence of my pleasure in his friendship was a more selfish pleasure in having him all to myself.

  And we were friends. It might seem impossible to believe that such a man could crave company of more than the most basic sort, but Asterion was lonely. He was gruff and short-tempered, but he tolerated my girlish chatter and my teasing and even my clambering upon his frame. He listened to my stories and complaints, and when I grew older I passed on to him palace gossip and news of the outside world. I treated him carelessly, only visiting when the mood took me, blind to his feelings. Until one day I tried to sit on his knee and he brushed me off.

  ‘No. Stop that.’

  ‘But I want to sit there!’

  ‘You are too heavy now, Ari.’

  ‘Too heavy?’ I was outraged. I slapped his huge thigh, as hard as a slab of oak. ‘You mean you aren’t strong enough to take my weight on your skinny legs?’

  He shifted uneasily. ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘Don’t you like me sitting on your knee?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  I put my fists on my hips. ‘Why not?’

  ‘You wouldn’t understand. You’re too young.’

  I glared. ‘I’m too heavy and too young?’ That made him growl deep in his chest, but my pout gave way to a smile. ‘Don’t you like my bottom, Asterion? Isn’t it soft enough for your lap?’ I turned my back briefly, pulling my skirt tight so I could wriggle it at him.

  ‘Ari!’ His warning rumble was like distant thunder.

  But I was all heavy-lidded eyes and sly smile now. ‘Why don’t you want me sitting on your lap, Asterion? Are you scared I might touch something I shouldn’t? You scared of my soft little bottom pressing against your naughty –’

  ‘Ari. You are too young to play this sort of game.’

  ‘Too young?’ I repeated, cupping the curve of my breast. My tight bodice nipped in my waist but left both of them bare and enticingly framed, and I knew it. ‘Have you not noticed these?’

  ‘Stop this. You are just a child.’

  I bared my teeth. ‘I am not! If it wasn’t for this stinking vow to Artemis I’d be married by now. I’d have a husband and a baby!’

  ‘Don’t mock the goddess. She will hear you.’

  ‘She won’t.’ I cast a disparaging glance at the ceiling. ‘She walks the hills and doesn’t come down beneath the earth. I think she’s scared of you.�
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  ‘Don’t. The gods are merciless, Ari.’

  I stuck my bottom lip out. ‘Let me sit in your lap. I want to.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I like it. Go on.’

  He glared at me, his exhalations loud. But he didn’t stop me moving in to his knees. This time I didn’t sit demurely on one knee, though; I picked up my long skirt and straddled both of them, facing him. His legs were hard under my thighs and bottom.

  ‘Don’t you like this?’ I asked in my meekest voice.

  ‘You shouldn’t be doing it.’

  ‘I’m not a baby any more, you know. Look.’ I gathered the flounced linen folds in my hands, drawing them up my pale thighs. Asterion looked down between us and seemed to stop breathing, as I revealed the dark delta at my groin. ‘I have fur.’

  His brown eyes widened.

  ‘Would you like to touch it?’ I asked softly.

  Very slowly, he shook his head.

  With a moue of disappointment I let the cloth fall again, veiling my immodestly spread thighs. ‘Can I see yours?’

  He groaned. ‘Ari …’

  ‘It’s not like it would be the first phallus I’ve seen, silly,’ I chided him. ‘I’ve been to the games, and seen the bull-dancers. And Cholios, when he’s on guard outside my room, he always touches himself when I walk past. And his sticks out under his chiton. He rubs it like it itches, but that just makes it stick up harder.’ With great daring I put out my hand to touch the bulge beneath Asterion’s tunic. He was wearing the simplest of short chitons, under one shoulder and pinned over the other, with no belt. Undyed linen, it had the labrys pattern of the royal household worked in red thread around the border. It might even have been a piece I’d woven myself; weaving was after all the principle duty of the women of the palace. ‘I just want to see.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To see whether you’re the same as other men.’

  It was easy to pull the cloth aside; he did not stop me. A sigh escaped my lips. His phallus lay flopped in a curve on his upper thigh, smooth and soft-looking like the finest kidskin, but stirring restlessly even as I watched. His foreskin pouted, wrinkly.

  ‘Am I the same, then?’ He sounded a little bitter.

  ‘You look bigger. Can I touch it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Strain was audible in his voice as he said, ‘Because if you touch it, it might get angry, and then I will hurt you.’

  I bit my lip. ‘Will you hurt me with that?’

  His chest heaved. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘You are only little.’

  I fiddled with the edge of my bodice, stroking my breast. ‘What if I were to stroke it very gently – would it get angry then?’

  ‘I fear so.’ His phallus stirred, straightening as it filled out. It trailed a smudge of wetness across his thigh.

  ‘But I can stroke you here.’ I ran my hands down his chest. ‘You like that, don’t you? It doesn’t make you angry?’

  ‘Ah,’ he grunted.

  ‘And I don’t mind you stroking me, Asterion.’ I took his hands and placed them on my breasts. They were warm, and they cupped and enfolded me. They felt so strong that I was washed with dizziness, and pressed myself into his caresses. ‘That feels nice, see. Just stroking.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Shall I tell you a story?’ I wrapped one hand around his phallus. It was definitely bigger now, and almost standing upright, and as I squeezed experimentally I felt it harden under my hand. Asterion did not object; he seemed mesmerised by my breasts, which he was playing with. I’d never touched a man’s phallus before. I was delighted how warm it was, how silky to the touch, how alive. My fingers could not quite circle its girth. It was difficult to take in all the new sensations and to talk at the same time. ‘This is the story: back in the Golden Age, when the gods had first made human beings, men and women were the same as each other and everybody was happy. There was lots of food. There was no fighting. But there were no babies either and although everyone lived for hundreds of years, people started to die eventually and the gods got worried. So they took all the people one night and Hypnos put them to sleep, and Hermes cut a piece out of every woman and stuck it onto a man. Since then people have been able to make babies, but the wounds have never healed properly – women still bleed sometimes. And everyone is unhappy. Women miss the flesh that used to be inside them and long to open their legs and take it back; the phalli are desperate to return to the bodies they came from, so all men want to do is stick it into any woman they meet.’

  ‘Who told you that story?’ he rumbled.

  Both my hands were now sliding up and down his length. He was big – really big – and his ruddy helm was poking from its cowl. ‘Just the servant women, while we were weaving. They always talk about that sort of thing.’ I didn’t tell him that this stroking motion was one that had been demonstrated with much ribald laughter on a wooden shuttle. I was most gratified that it seemed to be working, and that the column of flesh in my hands was no less hard now than the wood had been.

  His voice, when he spoke, was oddly thick too. ‘Well, they are wrong. Women do not welcome the entry of the phallus.’

  I licked my lips. ‘No, they’re right. I can feel it inside me: an emptiness. A wanting. Sometimes it’s so horrible I want to cry. I have put my fingers in that hole just to make it feel better. Would you put your finger inside me now, Asterion?’

  Without a word he slipped one hand between my open thighs, cupping the fuzz of my mound in his big palm. His middle finger slid between the lips of my split.

  ‘You are wet, Ari.’

  ‘Yes. The first time I played with myself I got so wet I thought I had brought on my bleeding. But this feels good, Asterion.’

  ‘Good?’ He seemed bemused. One finger, seeking the source of the moisture, plunged into mouth of my sex, sinking deep. I whimpered. ‘Am I hurting you?’ he breathed.

  ‘No! Oh, that is good! It feels nice when I’m filled up like that.’ I had to whisper my next words: ‘I know what you do to the Athenians.’

  His eyes widened, showing rims of white.

  ‘I would like to feel your phallus inside me.’

  ‘No … If I did that it would hurt you. I am too big.’

  ‘I know.’ I was squirming on his hand. ‘But I want it anyway. Do you want to put it in me?’

  He made a funny noise in his throat. ‘Squeeze harder,’ he ordered, ‘stroke faster.’

  I increased my efforts until I was actually tugging his phallus. ‘If I tell you something, do you promise not to tell anyone?’

  He moaned assent, his eyes rolling. Sweat was springing up on his chest.

  ‘I like to have something inside me. Fingers or a weaving shuttle. But what feels best of all is when I do that and touch myself at the front here at the same time. There is a piece of flesh the size of a pea … and when I do both those things I am taken by the gods, Asterion. I come.’

  ‘Women do not come.’ His big frame was shaking.

  ‘We do. It is like a wave curling over and crashing on rocks. And I can do it over and over. Once I tried to see how often, and I got to a score before I fell asleep exhausted. But – this is the bit you must never let my father know – Do you promise?’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘I needed something the right shape and size to put inside me, so I took up the statue of Artemis from the shrine in my room, the one made of olive wood from Delos, and I fucked myself with it, Asterion. It was all knobbly, and when I pulled it out it had my blood on it. I promised her my maidenhead and then I gave it to her.’

  ‘Oh gods …’

  ‘But that’s not the worst thing. After that I wanted to come again so this time I stuck that statue up my bottom and I came with the goddess in my arse.’

  With a bellow that made the room ring, Asterion spurted seed between my fingers. It slopped on my belly and the under-sides of my breasts in big wet splashes. I w
as completely taken by surprise, and all I could do was hold on while he strained and quivered beneath me, his head thrown back and his throat distended. I rubbed the slippery gooey stuff over the head of his shaft.

  He seemed to take a long time to come back to me.

  ‘See,’ I said, unable to stop my voice shaking. ‘I should have taken my dress off; now you’ve got it all messed up.’ I scooped at the gobbets on my breasts, trying to wipe them off but smearing them instead.

  His chest heaving, he held me with his glare. Sweat glistened in the hollow of his throat. ‘Show me,’ he demanded. ‘Show me how you come.’

  I nodded dumbly. Then I licked his seed off my fingers. It tasted grassy and sweet. I was pleased I liked it so much, and he seemed astonished that I would lick it up so eagerly. Plunging my wet fingers obediently between my thighs, I began to stir myself. Asterion pushed me further back on his knees and laid me back in his hands, holding me safely over the floor. Working my flesh, I felt the first gathering of my storm, and over my own gasps I heard his harsh breathing and little grunts. Soon I felt him reach between my parted legs and manoeuvre the head of his spent but still heavy phallus to the split wet flesh beneath my moving fingers. As my inner waves rose to mountains he pushed his helm into my tight slot. His sweat dripped onto my shaking breasts and he stooped to lick me, making me gasp with pleasure. He was right; his phallus was too big even for a deflowered maiden. He could only press in an inch or two, even when I fought to accommodate him. But I came squealing and kicking, my sex clenching around his fat girth.

  That was only the first occasion, of course. In time he taught me to accept his whole length, administered with full vigour, in every position. My visits were sources of sustained and bruising mutual pleasure. And he had a particular liking, almost a compulsion, for licking me; he seemed to go almost into a trance while he was doing that, even when I was straining and shuddering to climax.

  I worried for a while that I might fall with child to him, but perhaps it was not surprising that he, like a mule, sowed parched seed.