WARNING: This book is for sale to ADULT AUDIENCES ONLY. Contains graphic gay male sex, nonconsent, anal sex, and nongraphic violence all of which may be considered offensive by some readers.
All sexually active characters in this work are at least 18 years of age.
This book is copyright © Dirk Hessian 2010
Published by BarbarianSpy in 2010 at Smashwords.
Cover design © S Bush 2010
Cover Photo © Les3photo8 | Dreamstime.com
ISBN Ebook 978-1-921879-15-9
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review or article, without written permission from the author or publisher.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy from Smashwords. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
All characters in this book are the product of the author’s imagination and no resemblance to real people, or implication of events occurring in actual places, is intended.
Not all books listed below may currently be on release.
BOOKS BY SHABBU
Cigars!
Angel in the Barn
Gayly Complicated
Despoiling David
The Tree of Idleness
Rough Road to Happiness
I Met a Man
The Interview
BOOKS BY SABB
Surprise Encounters
She is He
Wrong Man
Loyal to his King
Barbarian Tales - Book One - Traveler’s Tales
Barbarian Tales - Book Two - Journeys Begin
Barbarian Tales - Book Three - The Inheritance
Barbarian Tales - Book Four - Road to Persepolis
BOOKS BY HABU
Cairo Surrender
Fetish Galore!
Homeward Bound
BOOKS BY DIRK HESSIAN
Prophecy of Noto
The King’s Men
Labyrinth
The King’s Men
Dirk Hessian
Chapter One: Peril on Sea and Land
It has never ceased to amaze me that they never see us and yet we know all. The nobility live their lives with their every whim and need taken care of. And yet if someone asked them how that happened, they invariably would stop and ponder and still not know. Those of us who do all of that for them are invisible. There is no limit to what they will do or say in front of us and believe that they were alone, that no one else was there to see—and, more interestingly—to see through them.
Thus it was with those at the court of my king, Claude de Lusane, the man my lady, the Princess—now Queen—Blanche, brought me to and might have loved—perhaps as much as I came to love him. Although of that I must not speak. The high born can think on it and indulge in it. But not one such as me. Unless, of course, I am wanted in that way. But ugly and deformed as I am, I almost never have been wanted that way—at least not since I was young—even though many around me have been. A pity that. Although I have been fucked. Yes, I have. I have exchanged my loyalty for the cock as well as any noble has. Perhaps not as often. Certainly not often enough.
Thus it was that after that harrowing, storm-tossed month at sea and the indignity of the Limonean prison—they called it a castle, but if it was, I’d hate to see how their serfs live—I came to be witness to all that happened in that momentous first half year at the Kibrit court. Perhaps not all, but enough of it to make clear the what and why of it, holding puzzle pieces that none of the confused or scheming lead actors in the drama had in their possession—or bothered to look for, even though they nestled right under their eyes. And all just by being there, standing in the room, being invisible to those who were playing high stakes with their lives—and with the lives of others.
And perhaps that’s another significant difference between one such as me and the nobility. I have nothing to lose or to gain—it’s all on sufferance from them. They, on the other hand, have so much at stake, and it is all on risk during their every waking moment.
* * * *
What appeared at the time the most fearful and endangering moments of my life paled in the light of the to-the-death intrigue I encountered in King Claude’s supposedly sedate court. The sea voyage from Holland to the shores of the island of Kibrit ended, thanks to the capriciousness of the storms of nature, with my lady and her retinue landing, amid the wreckage of the only ship of the flotilla that survived, on an enemy shore rather than in the safe harbor of her newly wed husband. And this not to mention, as the queen warned me never to speak of it, what she had to do for us to survive to see the king’s court.
The welcome Simon Limona gave to my lady, Blanche, at his castle in the harbor of his city state on the southern coast was both menacing and just within the bounds of propriety—or so I have been commanded to say of it. There is a code of conduct and deportment among the nobility of Europe now, one driven by the Holy See in this age that centers on the crusades to reestablish the faith in the Holy Land, but it was not understood here on Kibrit. There was no love lost at all between Simon Limona and King Claude. Limona was hanging onto his miniscule kingdom by a last death hold against the increasing might of the king. And the island of Kibrit we landed upon is at the corner of the civilized world. And as long as I have lived there, I’ve never been sure about which side of the “civilized” line it rested on.
Claude, already the king of Damascus and Acre, had been granted suzerainty over the Mediterranean island of Kibrit in recognition of his defending of the faith in two previous crusades—a prodigious effort for one so young, the king barely having reached the age of two score. His first crusade, in the company of his aged father, King Claxton, had been the old king’s last. And Claude’s next crusade had been under his own banner as king and had been the campaign in which he had subdued and subjugated Damascus and Acre.
The only problem with the pope’s gift was that there already existed city state kingdoms on Kibrit. To establish his kingship there—and acquire what would be the first substantive base for his rule—Claude first had to subdue the island. This he had methodically been doing—he was a suburb military leader and warrior in his own right—right up to the very moment I first laid eyes on his physical visage.
I had seen paintings, for true, of him, exchanged with the House of Holland during the negotiations over his yet-to-be-consummated marriage to Blanche, and he had certainly been handsome and commanding in these. But the paintings were nothing in the stead of the magnificence of the golden-haired young king when I first set my eyes on the in-the-flesh man. I could not see how any man who might succumb to the charms of another man could resist him. And I soon could see—although many others apparently could not—that, with King Claude, many were the men who couldn’t resist him.
King Claude would not have been in the harbor city of Paphaes on the island’s west coast to receive Blanche even if her flotilla had not been thrown off course by the sudden storm on the Mediterranean. The marriage to Blanche was important, yes, but it was secondary to the need for there to be a welcoming and safe home for Blanche to come to and for the young king to start his married life with a queen—with a queen who could bear him sons to solidify the rule of the house of Lusane. So, instead of awaiting her arrival at Paphaes, he was in the north, on the ridge of the chain of mountains running east and west the length of Kibrit, attacking the last mountaintop bastion castle, save one, of the last holdout Kibrit independent kingdom, save Simon Limona’s small city state. At the moment I first saw the king, the castle of St. Jerome had fallen into his hands, and he had broken the back of the proud and ancient kingdom of Turionia, which had been forged on the eastern and northern coast of Kibrit by the remnants of the victory fleet returning home from the Trojan war that had been separated from the main flotilla and washed up on the shores of a paradise even more enticing to them than their Acadian meadows.