C2 CHAPTER TWO

Stablehand and Axle

Marco busied himself rubbing down the horse. He found it difficult to control the strange tenseness welling up inside himself. This strange young man—this foreigner, as was only too obvious from his awful Italian—was having a strange effect on him, and he couldn’t discount it. The man didn’t seem much older than himself, and his good looks and friendly, cheerful manner were attractive. But he was definitely not like any of Marco’s village companions among whom he felt at ease. Despite the man’s youthful looks, he was reacting to him as someone of superior age and experience. This foreigner exuded confidence, and oddly Marco felt like a bambino near him. And the way he had openly admired and scrutinized him, as if Marco were a pretty wench to…

He quickly suppressed the unworthy thought that had squirmed into his mind like a sneaky grass snake. Marco broke into a whistle, joining the stranger’s tune as best he could. This was silly, he was imagining things. The foreigner was just a young man who had seen a bit more of the world and was therefore cocky with it. What did Marco care?

He finished rubbing down the Englishman’s horse, put away the brush and walked over to where he had his blouson. He picked it up and flung it over his shoulder, attempting a casualness he didn’t feel. He turned and forced himself to look the man in the eye. The song faltered.

“Well, buona notte, signore. My working day is over.”

“You look hot.”

“Oh, I am. But there’s a stream just back of here.”

The young foreigner would not stop fixing him with his cool, level gaze. Marco moved to walk past, but when he was level with him, the man lightly gripped his shoulder.

“Why not… you get flask… er, una fiaschetta of vino from trattoria… e portala oltre, bring over here. We have a quiet drink before you rush off… er, correre?”

He smiled and pressed a coin into Marco’s hand. Marco felt obliged to say yes. The tingle of current from the warm hand on his bare shoulder was oddly compelling. He broke into a laugh.

“Oh, si, signore—cool vino!”

And with that he ran off across the yard.

It was working fine. Eric knew he’d won already, knew the lad was ripe to be plucked even though he did not understand that yet. Eric broke into another ditty.

Virgins eighteen, ready for plucking,

Looking so hot, begging a fucking…

Five minutes later Marco returned and led his new friend out through the stable’s back door and they sat on the bank under the angel fronds of a weeping willow overlooking the small river. He poured wine into two tumblers he’d remembered to bring and held up his for a mock toast. He had convinced himself this was fun. The young foreigner called Ereec had a funny way of trying to speak Italian, and helping him out with the missing or badly pronounced words was amusing. Ten minutes later they were both laughing over Ereec’s broken Italian. They quickly emptied the carafe, and Marco happily acted with a rumbustious, boyish sense of fun, just as Ereec wanted him to.

“Ah, the vino! It is bere esaurito… runned out! Marco, go fetch ancora. There’s a good fellow!”

He slapped Marco’s knee and gave it a strong clench. Marco laughed and rushed off, only noticing half way across the yard the sensation Ereec’s hand on his knee had caused. But he was soon back, still merry, and his friend jumped up and gripped his shoulder.

“Oh come on, let’s go down to the river and drink it.” The words meant nothing, but then he pointed at the stream. “Il fiume, bevere!” He spoke with the exuberance of a slightly drunk merrymaker, and Marco’s sense of fun could do nothing but join in, despite the vague misgivings anxious inside him. They climbed down the steep overgrown rocky slope behind the stable. Marco led the way and a stumbling Ereec followed him. Obviously the vino had gone to his head, and his limbs. Marco didn’t mind Ereec’s hands on his back and waist every now and then, it just seemed to strengthen a comradely bond. His pangs of anxiety were already forgotten, and his mind was only on wine and fun. Soon they were sitting on the river’s narrow bank among some large round boulders. Their merrymaking went on as a summery dusk slowly clothed the trees in a darker indigo against the flaming horizon. And then the wine was finished.

They were both laughing at some of his bad Italian when Ereec jumped up decisively and began to unbutton his tunic.

“I swim!”

Marco looked up in surprise. Then he laughed uproariously at the funny Englishman. He had heard enough of the coarse language from passing mercenaries to recognize the word.

He stripped off and turned to face Marco. Ereec’s big cazzo swung heavily. Marco could not help but look at it and the rest of the muscled body. Catching himself off guard he glanced quickly up at Ereec’s face to find himself fixed by the foreigner’s cool appraisal. The light was failing and he could not quite make out the expression on the young man’s face.

Then Ereec broke into a smile. “Come, join me… vieni!”

It fleetingly sounded like an order, and Marco felt himself obeying and getting up. He already had his thin blouse off before he felt the rush of blood to his face. He darted a glance at Ereec, hoping he had not noticed. Somehow the ordinary motion of undressing filled him with shyness. Confusedly, he scrabbled to take his tight-fitting hose off, aware that his friend was stood there observing him quietly. For a moment, taking his clothes off seemed like submitting to this amusing foreigner.

But Ereec gave him no time to think further. Slapping him jovially on the shoulder, he briskly stepped into the water and was soon thigh-deep and splashing about.

Marco hesitated, but then began to wade in, feeling the cool water rise up his legs and engulf his balls and dangling cock with a short shock and tingle.

* * *

The boy was ready. Just a little time more… The youngster splashed about, and Eric quickly closed in on Marco involving him in innocent horseplay to dispel any uneasiness between them. It worked, and he soon had Marco laughing and grappling him in a mock wrestling bout. As their hands gripped each other’s arm and shoulder muscles in the struggle, as knees rubbed against thighs and their faces came together, Marco’s laughter died to be replaced by concentrated, rasping breathing.

Numbly, Marco understood that this was no game, that the naked stranger’s hands were manipulating him under the water’s surface. Fire burned where they gripped his wet skin, and waves of shuddering sensation rippled through his straining limbs to meet achingly in his loins.

He suddenly felt weak, and Ereec’s powerful grip began dragging him inexorably down. His head came to rest in the shallow water of the bank, where he looked up into the dark face. He was pinned down, his nakedness a vulnerable offering to the warrior’s desire. Ereec’s face loomed over him, eyes inches away, and then his lips slowly parted. Ereec’s mouth pressed down on his own. He allowed the strange tongue to lick and jab inside his mouth in a fierce ritual of victory. No man had ever done this to him. Marco melted. He felt like a helpless bambino in the young Englishman’s powerful domination.

Eric’s enjoyment of the kiss lay not in itself—he had little time for the romantic trappings of gentle foreplay—but in the surrender of his partner. He’d succeeded. Marco was his to play with. Sitting across him, his thighs registered the boy’s wet skin and the hot pulse of life within, felt the heaving belly under his buttocks. Eric savored the prospect of the games he’d planned. His cock pulsed with energy and he rubbed its hungry head against the youth’s stomach. All the while he worked his tongue in Marco’s mouth, flicking and pushing with seductive violence.

Eric’s experience told him the boy really was a virgin, at least in the joys of manly amorousness and most probably of any. His arms fell limply to the water as he gave in. Eric sensed he was awakening unknown desires in the lad. He felt the brush of Marco’s cock as it stiffened under him and rose to pat his ass deliciously.

The youth now lay still beneath him in the shallow water. Forgetting his Italian, he murmured in soft English tones. “Every inch of your naked limbs is alive with the expectation of the unknown pleasure I shall inflict on them.” A bit of purple prose always got them going. Eric played his fingers lightly over the boy’s nipples and found them hard—and sensitive. At the mere touch a sigh forced its way out of Marco’s throat. Eric moved his mouth to the boy’s breast and licked one of the stiffened nubs of risen flesh while feather-fingering the other. The taut young body he straddled shuddered, and when he tenderly sucked the jutting brown volcano another sigh escaped Marco’s lips. His fingers pinched the other nipple and his teeth closed on the one he was sucking to nibble at it. The youth’s breathing became heavier and his perky cock beat a more insistent tattoo against Eric’s buttocks. He decided it was time to switch his attention to the as yet untouched areas of the lad’s anatomy.

He lifted himself and got off Marco to kneel beside him in the shallows. Water splashed as he slid his hands down over the flat stomach. He bent over the heaving belly and relished the boy’s vulnerability manifested in tensed leg muscles.

Eric gripped Marco’s waist with his left hand and his right clasped the youth’s erect cock. He squeezed it and pulled it up before strongly but carefully sliding the foreskin down. The exposed head, the shape of a small plum, glistened and he sank his mouth over it.

The boy bucked beneath him and thrust up his thighs protectively as though to remove the hot vise Eric clamped around his shaft which pulsed with the boy’s life force. Hands scrabbled over Eric’s stretched back. He forced the raised legs back down into the water and with his fingers went for Marco’s balls. He brushed, prodded, enfolded them, explored every vulnerable cranny. Marco’s legs parted in involuntary invitation. With hard fingers Eric explored his inner thighs and worked between his buttocks, into the moist crevice.

They rubbed the delicate opening. The boy bucked again. Eric stopped sucking and licked his way down the shaft to the firm balls, feeling their surface against his lips and nose. He began to suck them, first one, then the other until he took the whole heavy sac into his mouth. Marco moaned quietly and his legs tensed and eased in a fitful rhythm of possession.

Eric slid his hands under the boy’s ass and heaved him over, so that Marco was on his splayed knees with his chest resting in the water. His rump now reared unprotected as he whimpered in total submission. Kneeling between Marco’s legs, Eric pried the glistening cheeks of his bottom apart and lowered himself to begin licking the scrotum up into the hairless valley and around the firm pucker in it. Then he tested the hole’s entrance with the extended tip of his tongue and pushed into the pristine channel. His lips ate and sucked at the wet flesh of the young ass while he continued to spear the boy’s resisting insides with the point of his tongue.

Marco moaned louder, as Eric pulled the boy’s hard sex back between his legs until it was held jutting out horizontally behind him. Then Eric fingered, teased, and rubbed it with one hand, while he played with the trapped balls with the other. At the same time his expert mouth ate fiercely into the delicious ass. Eric felt the lad’s legs vibrate and twitch, his tortured cock begin to convulse. It was time to pause—he didn’t want him shooting off his juices yet.

He felt his own cock drooling and begging for a taste of the young flesh. He led its hot head to the unprotected opening and began the assault. Eric’s hands firmly gripped Marco’s waist, as he slowly, gently, but unstoppably forced his smoldering weapon past the reluctant sphincter muscles. As Eric slid deeper in him, Marco groaned, his arms flayed in the water, sent waves to splash on the river bank. The mercenary’s powerful cock was in to the hilt and Eric wanted to shoot his first load. He began to ride the bucking youth, his cock advancing and retreating, grinding pleasure into every nerve end of the tight warm tunnel with its pounding head.

An hour later, Eric had expended his urgent seed three times, having kept poor Marco on the brink of orgasm all the time. Now, sitting in the shallow water, he had the boy stretched across his lap. Marco writhed in the throes of sexual abandon, his young cock bobbed up and down, its swollen tip oozed with the overflow from his full hot balls.

Eric slipped his hand between the wet thighs and cupped Marco’s scrotum, so tight with unrealized excitement that the balls inside had contracted to a single entity. He squeezed and pulled it down. Marco gasped and his legs floundered, but Eric clamped his other hand around the base of the boy’s cock and pinned him down. Eric got to work on the throbbing head with his mouth, first coaxing it lightly. His elbows pressed down on the youth’s heaving chest and threshing legs.

Now Eric began the last violent assault on Marco’s straining sexual frenzy. He sucked furiously while with his hands he relentlessly manipulated the boy’s shaft, balls, and ass. A high-pitched gurgling whine began deep inside Marco as he shuddered toward his climax. The veins in his cock bulged convulsively and the whining grew to a breathless shriek. And then his young naked body suddenly arched. He forced the tortured shaft deep into Eric’s mouth and shot hot creamy jets of cum.

As Marco’s bucking limbs jerked and twisted, the lips that milked him foamed with what Eric could not swallow fast enough. Eric dug his fingers into the youth’s dewy ass and pressed firmly around his hard nuts to stop Marco cavorting off his lap. The lad had waited long enough for his release, and now Eric made sure that he squirted every last drop of delicious juice.

A minute later Marco still convulsed, his cock jerked drily in continuing waves of orgasm. Two minutes later the boy’s naked limbs still twitched under Eric’s clever hands. Eventually he subsided and lay limp in Eric’s lap, panting, his legs sleepily pumping as spasms of the spent orgasm rolled languorously through them. Marco was demolished.

Eric lifted him bodily from the water’s edge, carried him to a dry spot of the narrow beach and tucked him snugly under his discarded clothes. They were both soon asleep in the balmy night breeze.

Marco woke with the first sign of dawn, aware of his shivering nakedness. He looked wonderingly at the handsome young man beside him, the hard planes of his musculature catching the low light, the scattering of faint scars which advertised his trade of warrior. The face which could look one moment harshly cruel, the next beguilingly sensuous, now looked affectingly innocent in repose, with damp hair clinging in dark waves to his forehead. Then the previous night’s sensations flooded into his memory and he suddenly flushed with embarrassment. No man had done this with him before.

Still, it had been fun, not what he’d expected… and yet, hadn’t he? From the first touch in the stable, something inside had awakened a desire. His girl in the village, the one he held hands with. This dark stranger had shown him the way. He felt sure he would now know what to do next time they slipped away from a festival to find some quiet time together. Next time, it would be his hands that did the work of arousing unseemly desires…

Eric was faintly aware of the boy scrambling into his clothes and creeping away, but did not let it interrupt his dozing. The coolness of the morning gave his relaxed limbs a tingling sense of wellbeing, and anyway he preferred his lovers to leave quietly and without fuss. He couldn’t be bothered with long goodbyes, and he never had anything to say to them anyway.

An hour later he roused himself, washed in the stream, and dressed. Soon he was riding along the deserted highway toward Venice. In the distant flat fields of the Veneto under the pale blue sky little dark figures were already toiling away, scraping their meager living from the land, hauling nets from the strands of the Po. To think that he might have been doing just that in flat, featureless East Anglia filled Eric Random with sickened contempt. There was more to life than that, he was sure. He had not found it yet, but at least the restless search was exciting. He did not mind that his many boys left no lasting impression on him; the constant need for more kept him too busy to worry. Neither did he care that his warrior’s profession was so destructive, after all only fools thought anything could be built to be secure and lasting in this evil mortal coil. Life was an adventure, fleeting and always new. One had to grasp it as it came, and when one became old—but he never ventured to imagine old age… Eric Random never expected to make old bones in his profession.

A hundred yards ahead on the dusty road he spied a carriage, stationary and surrounded by horses and dismounted riders. They seemed to be having trouble with the vehicle, perhaps a broken axle. In spite of the numbers, they appeared to pose no threat in their evident distress and he decided to ask if they needed aid. Carriages usually meant wealthy worthies, and at this point on the road Venice had to be their only destination. They might prove a useful contact in his search for employment.

As Eric drew near he made out four lightly armed men, little more than set dressing, garbed in yellow and black livery, helping two sturdy servants from the same household who were working on one of the wheels. The carriage was of heavy build, its wooden frame ostentatiously trimmed with red leather panels and brass studs. Strong as the four horses between its traces looked, they would no doubt need to rest every five miles pulling such a ponderous weight. By the cut of their apparel, the carriage’s two passengers stood in the shade of a withered tree, one thin and toady looking, the other mean and square jawed, both obviously annoyed at the delay.

With them, though slightly apart, stood a boy who couldn’t own more than eighteen years. He was slim and blond, and poorly dressed.

A gentle pull on Duke’s reins and the horse came to a halt as Eric offered assistance. The square-jawed fellow just managed a hint of politeness in his gruff refusal. But Eric had no time to get angry at the discourteous response. It was the boy who attracted his attention. And the lad looked back as intently. For several heartbeats Eric became lost in that penetrating gaze. Dizziness almost overcame him. He didn’t really take in any of the youth’s features, all he could see were the eyes in his perfectly formed face. Blue, limpid, beautiful. They engulfed him.

With a start, and before he had realized, Eric spurred on his horse and rode off with the fleeting sensation that he had not been in control. Normally he could outstare any man or boy, so why had he ridden off so quickly? He still felt the eyes burning through his mind. Odd. He thought he’d felt a pang of intense sadness emanating from the cerulean orbs that penetrated to his very soul.

The gelding’s slight stumble on a jutting stone in the track brought Eric back to himself from the strange, dreamlike world he’d inhabited for… how long? Within a dozen heartbeats Eric Random had no recollection of these thoughts. He was back to his usual self, anticipating Venice, money, and new boys to lay.

He cursorily glanced back at the travelers, now small and distant on the road; an unimportant instant in the past. Eric shrugged his muscled shoulders, set his dark eyebrows in a sullen frown, cocked his head jauntily, and continued his journey, a handsome soldier of fortune out for fresh adventures.