C1 CHAPTER ONE

The Warrior

He was sore. His backside ached, his shoulders felt heavy, his lips parched, and his eyes gritty. No surprise. It had been a long day’s ride. He’d meant to leave Verona early in the high summer’s morning, but a last-moment lucky hit on a young ostler the night before resulted in an unplanned later start. Firm limbs, willing body, and compliant ass made for some compensation, and he hadn’t stopped drilling the lad until well gone midnight. He paused at some point well after noon for a quick bite at what passed for a wayside inn on the well-traveled track and then pushed on, grateful for the cool breeze wafting down from the ever-present distant Alps. When the sun touched the higher tree-covered tops of the hills to the south. He decided to call it a day. Somewhere ahead in the gloaming lay Padua, last stop before his goal. A rambling assembly of dilapidated stone buildings ahead, with an assortment of wagons and carts strewn around its forecourt, proclaimed a welcome trattoria where he might spend the night.

He felt horny—nothing unusual. Eric Random liked that friends and enemies—more enemies—knew him as a randy son-of-a-bitch. Which, he reflected, was the main reason that had him riding a lathered gelding along Italy’s sunbaked highways. Only three months earlier in the Year of Our Lord 1527, Eric had been in London in pursuit of his fortune; his trade—fighting and war. In the end, that hadn’t gone too well.

A passerby would have seen a lean, mean, rugged specimen of a man. He knew himself to be twenty-three years in age and felt older in his mind. Even the shabby clothing he wore failed to disguise his lithe fighter’s build. Extensive exercise with the sword gave him well developed shoulders and arms—a marked contrast to his slim but muscled waist and small compact buttocks which crowned a sturdy pair of legs. His face was an odd mixture. At first sight he might have been taken for an adolescent, but that was overlooking the sinuous but tough planes of his pronounced cheekbones and the knowing twist of his slightly cruel lips. His eyes were those of a wildcat, alert and shimmering with hidden fires, protected by a strong forehead and framed by thick eyebrows a shade darker than his tangled chestnut hair.

Eric knew others found him good-looking, and he prided himself that anyone attracted to his looks didn’t find them to be a false promise. He possessed everything one could hope for to quench the desire aroused by his appearance—a much practiced warrior of a cock, satisfactory in length and power, backed up by a fulsome supply of ammunition in his heavy balls, ever ready for action. Admirers were never disappointed, that is, if they were young and male. Eric Random had no time for women. Those he had been allowed to know were built in the manner which attracted his fellow men—soft and full-rounded. Eric found them flabby, no match for his ruggedness. He liked, loved, and thirsted for youths. Their bodies, firm, spare and unyielding, a challenge to his lust. To turn them into squirming, helpless toys in the grip of their own passions was all he craved and cared for. Eric had endless resources of animal lust, and he sometimes felt a slave to it. He didn’t mind, even though it was not always to his good fortune—proof: his rapid departure from London and England.

* * *

Eric Random started life a lowly farmer’s son from East Anglia and rarely ever in his father’s good grace. This might have been because in bursting lustily into the world, Eric had killed his mother, a common enough occurrence, but one which, reasonably, his father had no experience of and never forgave his son for causing. As he grew up, he found both the life on the land and the people surrounding him increasingly vapid. His agile mind turned to adventure, fame, and fortune. Not for Eric the hauling of hay bales from the men scything in the meadows, the mucking out of the swine sheds, or digging of beets until his sore hands ran bloody from chapped fingers. He yearned to eat good beef instead of stewed Fens eel and mop the juices with fine white bread, not some sopped, stale trencher.

The only memories which carried anything of pleasure were from his regular tupping of Jed, the cowherd’s son, who being a couple of years the elder taught young Eric the basics of sex if not the finesse of giving pleasure. Other tumbles, of a more violent nature, resulted from an intemperate nature born of frustration at his bucolic imprisonment which found release in brawls with other lads of the village. His father provided the example in his treatment of Eric, and the boy soon came to realize that there was no profit in waiting to be hit. First in with the blow was likely the winner at the outcome. In this, Eric soon earned a reputation for speedy viciousness which inevitably left his opponent flat on the ground, nursing bruised eyes, cheeks, mashed balls, and burning limbs from their rough usage.

In the end he was certain his long-suffering father—but a man who he fairly considered deserved everything bad life had to throw in his path—would be pleased to see the back of his wayward son. Eric ran away on his sixteenth birthday and made for London, sure that an able-bodied youngster with violent tendencies would quickly find employment. And true enough, after three weeks in the sleaziest and most dangerous districts of London—pretty much all of it—he found a place in Lord Kenilworth’s armed retinue.

Kenilworth’s landed estates sprawled across thousands of acres of middle England, adjacent to the marches of the powerful Earl of Warwick, but Eric’s new master preferred to sojourn in his castle at old Verulam, or St. Albans as the clerics insisted on calling the filthy, raddled streets of the tumbledown town. The castle was a comfortable residence in comparison to the slums rubbing at its skirts, and conveniently handy for the cities of London and Westminster, and the king’s court. Here, after the initial training period under the redoubtable Italian condottiere Farrante Gonzaga, who at the time commanded Kenilworth’s men, he proceeded to learn his profession.

His proficiency with sword—broad, saber, or foil—pike, and lance when mounted, mace, and old-fashioned axe soon made Eric Gonzaga’s star pupil and earned him a fearsome reputation among his peers and those his senior. Few—and mostly the foolish—failed to give Eric a wide berth in the matter of arms. On the other hand, in the matter of lying in the grasp of his brawny arms, there were equally few who dared refuse his importuning. The armed Italian retainers he held in some admiration as his peers in fighting and so in addition to the arts of war, he learned a working knowledge of the Italian language. This he hoped would be of use one day, should he decide to take to the road as a soldier of fortune in that war-ravaged country, so at odds with the all-pervasive Italian culture now seeping through Europe.

In the space of five years, young Eric rose through the ranks to the point that when Gonzaga retired his command to return with his entourage to his native city of Venice, Eric won command of the private army. Kenilworth favored Eric, despite the fact that he well knew the rumors that most able-bodied young men-at-arms, squires, pages, and male servants of his retinue had been debauched by this formidable young warrior.

All went well and a knighthood dangled, but Eric should never have met the Lord’s young nephew who had been dispatched by his father to remove the lad from his mother’s petticoats and have him toughened up in his redoubtable uncle’s household. Robin’s aloof, cold, and surly manner quickly angered Eric. Unfortunately, the pretty devil fired Eric’s lust and gave him no peace. The thought of bedding the arrogant young fellow grew into a challenge he could not ignore and he ached to demolish the boy’s uninterested haughtiness.

Anger and desire combined and channeled toward a single goal can be a terrifying force. Eric thought of nothing else for weeks. Like the lions in Roman arenas he starved his phallus of pleasure, until it bucked and drooled beneath his generous codpiece at the very mention of his prey’s name or the merest glimpse of a buttock, shapely thigh, and ankle disappearing around a corner.

Finally, Lord Kenilworth himself inadvertently delivered his nephew into Eric’s ensnaring cage. Fencing lessons were ordered, and who better than the captain of the guard to administer them. The opportunity unleashed Eric. Two days of swordplay and close physical proximity got Robin where Eric wanted him. Aloofness toward him gave way to a fear-tinged respect for a superior fighter. The youth quickly learned that he would never match Eric’s ferocious fighting skill. And Eric pressed him hard in the exercises, driving the boy before him until the walls stopped his retreat.

On the third day Eric Random decided he would have his way. Frankly, if he didn’t advance his needs urgently, he knew he would explode and do something regrettable, probably hacking some innocent soldier’s head from his shoulders. He predicted little would stand in the way of his path to the boy’s most secret places, for he had observed that Robin was noticeably vulnerable to his rugged maleness. He would succumb. The swordplay became more strenuous and violent than before. After two hours the youth ran out of strength, sword blows whanged on his blade in furious succession, the empty exercise chamber echoed with their barbaric clashing. Eric beat Robin back and down until the lad could take no more. Sweat streamed down his face and neck. By his movements, Eric could see that the boy’s sword hand ached and his thigh muscles twitched with fatigue. Suddenly Eric lunged and actually grazed Robin’s arm. A thin line welled blood. The youth gave a breathless shout of surprise and slid down the wall he had been forced against into a sitting position.

“Ah, my Lord…” Eric quickly knelt by his victim. He feigned concern and tugged the boy’s shirt off, from which he tore a strip and proceeded to bandage the arm with it. Robin breathed in rasping gulps, his mouth gaped beautifully, his eyes stared vacantly.

He doesn’t notice my fingers brush against his heaving nipple. Ah, slightly when I touch his wrist. And does he tingle when he feels the warmth of them on his earlobe?

Robin looked up sharply. Eric leaned in closer and fixed his green-eyed gaze to the boy’s curious stare. He enveloped the lord’s son in his seductive power.

Eric gloated. His lips would taste the boy; now.

So close to the prize, he could no loner contain his lust. He needed to show the pretty brat that aloofness did not exist when it came to sex. He pressed forward with urgent mouth and forced his tongue between Robin’s parted lips, pressed him hard against the wall, while his fingers played with his young hard nipples and groped their way down his taut, shuddering stomach under its quilt-padded jacket.

Eric’s weight pushed the boy over so that he sprawled on the cold floor. He forced his hands into the waist of Robin’s light hose and inside his under-drawers, and then impatiently tore and clawed at them until the garments were dragged down below the knees. Moments later and he had the jacket ripped open from its simple fastenings. Eric’s lips, teeth, and tongue now plied the youth’s navel and belly, and his hard cock ached with the need to be let loose on the quaking adolescent body.

Robin put up only token resistance, and when Eric’s fingers grasped his hot young balls the first helpless moan of pleasure escaped the boy’s lips. Eric’s lust was violent. He wiped his tongue over Robin’s balls and along the downy path into the dark delights between the youth’s moist buttocks. The boy tasted of honest sweat, but fresh youth and of sexual desire as he licked the pucker which protected the virgin channel.

Robin’s legs squirmed when Eric ate at his private hole, and it inflamed Eric’s passion to imagine that his victim was horrified at the intrusion and aroused at the same time. Now give the aristocratic brat what he doesn’t yet know he really wants, a finger and then two plied to his sphincter muscles, now lips to lick the tender head of his erect cock.

After a few moments of this delicious foreplay, Eric swallowed the boy’s shaft with his saliva-drooling mouth and he sucked its length from tip to root between his sharply constricting lips.

Robin writhed in undeniable ecstasy at the twin attention of Eric’s mouth on his cock and fingers in his ass. The boy’s legs opened wider and Eric could no longer ignore the demands of his randy weapon. In one relentless attack he plowed its glistening head into the soft opening and past the resisting gates right up the hot passage to hit the innocent prostate gland. The explosion of unexpected pleasure reduced the once cold, surly youth into a whimpering pile of orgasmic submission. As Robin jerked his cum into Eric’s throat, Eric climaxed and filled the boy’s tight ass with his urgent seed.

Eric had his pleasure all right, but the following morning he hightailed it to Dover and the next boat to France to evade the hue and cry.

And how did this come to pass? Fortunately, one of the Kenilworth retinue who had much to thank Eric for—many nights of bliss—overheard the barely contained outburst of teenaged outrage and alerted Eric in time to make good his escape. The Lord’s nephew recovered from his squirming and writhing, but what had occurred filled Robin with disgust, so he confessed between tears of distress and anger—not at the fact of the sex, which it was clear he had hugely enjoyed—but that it should have been at the hands of a jumped-up soldier. The thought that he would have to continue to live under the same roof with the commoner and become the butt of jokes and sneers was too much, he told his uncle.

He steered cleverly around his embarrassment at the episode by telling his uncle how he’d been attacked when at his most vulnerable. He contrived to make it sound that he’d been knocked senseless and only came to when the violation was at its conclusion. Given Eric’s reputation, Kenilworth accepted that Robin was the innocent victim of a terrible crime, and set loose his men-at-arms to arrest the monster.

Eric Random dismounted and secured Duke, his tan gelding, to a railing and entered the trattoria to seek a room for the night. Another reasonable day’s ride and he would be in Venice, the destination at the end of his trek across Europe. A soldier can earn his bread in only one way—fighting. Italy had a lot of petty wars and needed good men for its many contesting private armies. Eric hoped to make his fortune there like many of Norman-Saxon descent for two hundred years before him. The Republic of Venice, richest of Italy’s city-states, was going through a period of warring squabbles with the surrounding states of Milan, Ferrara, and the holdings of the Pope, which Eric thought was just fine by him. He could do with the money, as little work had awaited him anywhere on his travels this far, and his purse jingled only with poor coin sufficient for a few more days.

It had been a bleak, featureless trip even though he’d bedded lads of all shapes and sizes on most of the nights. The very thought reminded Eric of his never-ending urge for action, even though the night before outside Padua had been one of long and repeated pleasure. Had his potent weapon after all not turned a young man’s panting fancies to Romeos rather than pouting Juliets?

But that was last night. Eric had little time for the past, his fertile imagination always prowling ahead to the next conquest, for was it not well known that what was to come always tasted better than that which had gone before?

Reality slapped him down. There were no free rooms in the crowded trattoria. The landlord, clearly unhappy at the potential loss of custom, cordially invited Eric to use the stable across the courtyard in return for a discounted price. Bone weary of his long ride, Eric accepted with poor grace and led Duke across the part-cobbled yard. An ostler came out and took charge of the gelding and indicated some space behind the stalls where he could make a rude bed for the night. After a quick meal, with double his usual intake of wine to compensate for the poor specimens of manhood he saw around him, Eric decided grumpily to call it a night. After all, he was tired even if his mind kept wandering to ripely sensuous thoughts. He left the building and crossed to the stables.

It was still sunset bright outside, so when Eric stepped through the open doors he paused to let his eyes adjust. When he grew accustomed to the dimness he noticed he was not alone. There was a man, bent over his task of curry-brushing a fetlock, his buttocks clearly outlined by the strained, tight material of his woolen breeches.

Eric walked up and brushed his hand lightly against the fetchingly bobbing backside. The stable hand’s concentration in clearing hair from between the bristles made him oblivious to Eric’s presence. Eric let his eyes wander over the straining bare back and the muscles flexed in sweaty work. All he could see was long, straight black hair which glistened with blue highlights. His hand lightly touched the base of the spine.

This time he was noticed. The man looked around in surprise.

With a pleasant start, Eric saw he was much younger than he’d expected, a stable boy barely in his manhood, with a trusting innocence in his big black eyes. Soft boyish lips did not fit the muscled back Eric had admired up to now. The lad straightened up with an embarrassed, deferential smile. His chest glistened with sweat which punctuated his erect nipples with highlights. His broad shoulders shrugged. “I’m sorry, I did not hear you, signore.”

Eric’s weariness vanished in a flash. The husky voice and white teeth made up Eric’s mind. He was going to have him tonight. Nothing would interfere.

No one could say that Eric ever lacked confidence. But he decided he would lack in his Italian—it always aided his intention if others thought he didn’t understand much. Sometimes it made him seem helpless and so made people helpful in reciprocity; at other times it made them underestimate him, to his advantage.

“I’m to, er… sleep night in here.” He unashamedly looked the youth up and down, took in the taut stomach and neat little belly button, the slim hips—and, undisguised beneath his tight hose, what looked like a very perky cock. He would know it well by the time the night was through.

“Look me my horse. He’s in next stall, the one.”

The boy blushed at Eric’s obvious scrutiny and uncomfortably blundered past to reach the bay gelding and coax it from the stall in which the ostler had placed it.

“Your name, it is what?” Eric stepped aside to let Duke through.

“Marco, signore.”

The boy busied himself with the horse. Eric watched him as he removed the saddle and enjoyed his evident discomfort under Eric’s intent gaze. He decided to sing an old English bawdy song, knowing that the verse would have made Marco even more uncomfortable, had he understood its meaning. Eric thought they were most appropriate for the things he had in store for the young Italian.

Some can whistle, and some can cry,

Some can flatter, and some can lie,

And some can set the prick alight,

With little more than a touch so right.

Some be lewd,

Some be shrewd,

But wither they go…

All get screwed.