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  Lust-addled, I agreed without understanding. Then I watched as the mountain of a man began to unfasten his leathers. It was exactly the sight I anticipated: hairy, muscular thighs and a thick thatch surrounding a huge, rigid shaft. My fingers itched to touch it, and Valushkin chuckled as I tentatively reached out.

  “Go on,” he encouraged, leaning over to release my own straining member into his mighty grip.

  Together, we knelt in the cold, the stars our only witnesses as we stroked each other with single-minded resolve, gazes locked to feed on the desire reflected in the other’s eyes.

  “I’ve been too rarely touched by a worthy opponent,” Valushkin muttered, his voice thick.

  I groaned. “I have rarely desired an opponent so greatly.”

  At that, he withdrew himself from my grasp and bent before me to take my heavy meat into his mouth. Such an act was not an inclination I often gave way to, either in the giving or the receiving. But the sight of his shaggy head at my groin, accompanied by the warm wetness of his tongue, roused me further. Soon enough, I realized its purpose. With neither oil nor tallow available, Valushkin was providing what little lubrication he could for himself. Rugged and ruthless he might be, but it was his hole that would be plundered.

  After a short time, he pulled off, and I held myself firmly while he turned onto his hands and knees, leathers at his ankles. It is no exaggeration to say that I had never beheld so enticing a view. And I was ready and willing to take advantage of it. As I knelt, parted his cheeks and spit generously, he craned his neck to glance back at me. Those penetrating eyes, narrowed with need, bored into me just as surely as I would bore into that waiting orifice.

  “Take me,” he commanded.

  I thrust home. When I began to withdraw, my foe and lover responded by tightening his muscles against me, so I had to fight to claim him fully. Our union was little different from our combat, though less bloody and far more brief than I wanted. Though I longed to give him the best shafting he had ever taken, my desire overwhelmed my ambitions. After only moments of riding him hard and fast, I reached the precipice. Balls deep, fingers clutching his brawny backside, I sprayed my seed into him with unrivaled force.

  Soon thereafter, I withdrew and sat back on my heels. Valushkin hiked his leathers and came to sit beside me. He reached for the fur that had fallen from my shoulders and wrapped us both within it. I breathed heavily, as did Valushkin. Placing a hand on his cock, I found him thick but soft. Glancing beside us where he had knelt, I saw the small pool of his own release and was pleased.

  “Now,” he said, roughly brushing my matted hair from my brow, “it is time I tell you the truth about the nature of victory.”

  I nodded blearily, relaxed despite the cold and our vulnerable position. Were I caught with Valushkin on all fours, I might have explained it away as my due—the spoils of war. But there would be no answer for sitting in my enemy’s arms as he shared a bedtime story.

  “Like you,” he began, “I was born into poverty, deprived of opportunity by circumstance. Quick of mind and great of stature, I easily assembled a band of rebels that grew, along with my reputation, as I fought for control of other groups of resisters and outlaws. Eventually, we defeated the warlord’s troops.” He paused to rub his throat before taking a clump of snow from the little wall and dissolving it in his mouth with relish. I regretted not having brought my leather flask and followed suit.

  He continued. “The structure of such a tale is common, you are no doubt aware, even as the details vary. In my case, the lord against whom I campaigned was haply both loathed and loathsome—having suffered some debilitating, disfiguring ailment given to him, it was said, by his foreign-born wife. I made use of his weakness by demanding single combat, and easily bested him.”

  I listened with astonishment. I had not known there were any similarities between Valushkin and me. I’d always been told he’d been a spoiled youth, willful and barbaric. I heard more than once that he had sold his soul for power to some unnamed demon, though I did not truly credit it. Before I could consider the parallels between us further, Valushkin went on in a different tone, a faraway glow now in his eyes.

  “I was overjoyed to have won freedom for the land I loved. I vowed to be a beneficent ruler, just and fair. My army of rebels would stay strong and honorable, like the noble cause that had united us.”

  “Yes,” I breathed, “just so.” I felt my own heart and hopes laid bare in Valushkin’s words.

  He frowned and pulled away to face me, brow furrowed. “How long do you think it was before my own lieutenants became greedy and corrupt? How long until the villagers fell back into their petty squabbles? Until warrior tribes demanded a return to the lifestyle they knew, stealing crops and women as they had since time immemorial? How few years thereafter before new bands of rebels began to form in the woods, aiming to bring down the ruler that had become a despot to keep some semblance of peace in his kingdom?” He stroked my cheek, tenderly. “And how long before I faced a reflection of my younger self in you?”

  I was shocked, outraged. This could not be true. It was some trickery, a calculated plot by a ruthless madman to wean both the strength from my body and the sureness from my mind. “You will not reclaim the throne, Valushkin!” I spat. I rose to my feet. “I swear my life upon it.” My heart pounded in my chest and I cursed myself for not lacking wit enough to have a sword at my side.

  Valushkin looked up at me and gave a hearty and derisive laugh. “You idiot,” he replied with a snort. “I don’t want to reclaim it!” Rising beside me, he added, “Keep the rotten kingdom, O Mighty Conqueror, and may it give you as much misery as it gave me!”

  Once again, Valushkin reduced me to silence. I stood, frozen to the spot, my thoughts racing. What if all he said was true? I recalled the frequent brawls among the tribesmen and the callous talk of riches and privilege among my deputies. I quickly faced the truth that it would not be long before I was as hated as Valushkin himself.

  Valushkin had turned and began walking from the square.

  “Where are you going?” I called after him, as loudly as I dared.

  He turned back. “To exile myself—unless you have means to kill me?”

  “I could summon aid,” I said, without conviction.

  “So you could,” he answered, and smiled. The brightness of his eyes and his strong, white teeth were a beacon.

  “My horse can carry two,” I offered.

  “Indeed it can,” he agreed.

  So we rode, far into the night and as far as we could get from the civilized world of soured causes and heroic tyrants, to claim together the spoils of freedom.

  CAPTIVES

  Richard Michaels

  I can do nothing for him.

  His face is impassive, except that the sharpness of his jaw is perhaps more incisive than usual because he is clenching his teeth, exercising self-control. And when his eyes meet mine for even less than a heartbeat, is there a flicker of something—or am I just imagining that slight light because I want it to exist, because it would be a sign, however ephemeral, of what is between us? Or perhaps I am simply imagining that there is something between us? No, there is something, though I know only incompletely what it might be.

  And part of that something—a very substantial part—is his cock.

  His body, his almost impossibly sculpted body, is a mobile aggregation of flowing muscle and shimmering skin: the firmness of his chest with its scattering of short black hair, the conjunction of wide shoulders and rounded arms and forceful hands, all of this fleshy vista expansively spread above the thigh-length skirt, and below the skirt the revelation of his tree-trunk legs. He is solidly handsome and handsomely solid, beyond handsome, so magnetic that I am irresistibly drawn to him, and I have had to fight staring at him and expressing more than my admiration, my fascination, but also rendering entirely too obvious the connection between us.

  And we had been connected two nights ago. I had knelt before him, and he had lif
ted the skirt, releasing his cock, his hard, hard cock, and I was on one side of the bars and he was on the other, and his risen skirt had covered the back of his prick as I covered with my yearning lips the front, and the mask shielding the head retreated, granting me full access to a masculinity as muscular as the rest of him. His hands were clenched around the bars between us, and he leaned his head against the metal, and I could tell that I was giving him pleasure.

  His pleasure enhanced my own, and I found pleasure indeed in his taste and in the texture, and I wished that my ravenous tongue could reach the large low-hanging testicles, but the iron columns prevented access, and so I contented myself—no, more than contented myself—with taking his cock as fully into my mouth as I could and relishing the rough yet tender terrain and attacking each part, every part of his plentiful prick, and this was more than contenting myself; it was sating myself with the richness of his rigid manhood.

  He shuddered, and I looked up, and his eyes were closed and he was biting his lower lip, trying not to create some commotion that might awaken the sleepers. He flowed into my mouth, richly and profusely, and I released myself onto the ground beneath me as I answered the quake of his body with my own.

  Then, wordlessly, we separated, and he walked away, and I watched as he adjusted his skirt to cover his magnificent ass. When he had lain down with his noisily resting companions, I stood and brushed myself off and tried to erase with my foot the signs of my sexual seizure and wiped on my leg the liquid remnants from my sole, and I joined my group, and soon, lulled by the susurration of soft snoring and the warm recollection of my sensual encounter, I surrendered to sleep.

  I don’t know if he was there the first day or even the first week my group of captives was brought into the cell. He may have been in the forces who arrested my compatriots and me and threw us into our constricted confinement.

  We had fought as well as we could, my squad and I. No one remembered how long the war had been going on. And nobody knew who was winning—although by that time, many of us, and perhaps many of them, realized that no one would really win. But no matter how many understood the futility of the combat, we, and perhaps they, comprehended that by the rules, the explicit rules, the implicit rules, neither side could retreat. Strategy had to be followed, even if the strategy was at best ambiguous and at worst injurious and most of the time impossible to discern.

  So my comrades and I had been captured and incarcerated. Here we were, in an unfamiliar environment and an unfamiliar situation.

  Initially, I was far too frightened to attend to my surroundings. I was jostled and jolted into a confused clump of men in the middle of our new home. We were to live here, and some of us would die here, and, according to the soldiers who had brought us, all of us would have to endure, strive to endure, pain and denial. When the soldiers told us this, the previously stony men grinned with indescribable evil.

  Through the seemingly endless days that followed, we were subjected to loss, physically and emotionally, sometimes as relatively small as the withholding of meals, sometimes as great as beatings so severe that many men did not survive. And our spiritual space was more and more restrictive as we wondered what would happen to us and when and who would not make it past the next onslaught.

  Our captors planted in us the seeds of fear that for some of my compatriots grew to madness, which gave our jailers great satisfaction.

  In the beginning, we were stripped of our clothing. It was—it still is—a strange sensation being totally naked among many other naked men. There is so much individuality in body type and yet so universal the similarity in behaviors caused by the lack of even a minimal covering as identification, as protection. At the start, we all resolutely stared only at faces, and then no lower than chests, and soon blatantly at crotches, indulging in the masculine pastime of comparison and contrast. And then some of the glances became brazen invitations. Certain men turned away to hide what was so attractive, which presented another target for inspection and appreciation, and other men masked their own responses to invitation.

  Our guards told us that anyone who succumbed to temptation would be severely punished. And no matter how clandestine the assignations, which were usually very obvious to all of us as we lay in feigned sleep and listened to the slap of flesh against flesh and the muffled cries of excitement, many were discovered by our guards, who themselves pretended slumber on the opposite side of the bars. And the transgressors were hauled away, with great ribald ceremony, not only naked but sticky and sometimes still joined, to unknown punishment. They did not return.

  Self-satisfaction was frequent, and of course the satisfaction at the only permissible expression of sexual release was fleeting and not really fulfilling. The sentries laughed to hear and see men indulging in at best momentary enjoyment, and the culprits (for that is how they were made to feel) curled up in shame and pretended that they were not the ones who had surrendered to weakness. I observed these feelings not only in those around me but also in myself.

  So at the beginning, I was interested only in trying to find my place in my new life, to locate some small space to call my own, some boundary within which I might discover safety, no matter how temporary, no matter how illusory. And I was not immune to the abundance of manly charms around me. My cock spent a lot of time rising and falling as if it was drawn by some strange tide, and sometimes I wanted to accede to my desires, which were often virtually uncontrollable, and yet, with an often superhuman effort, I did not give in.

  And some of the other men were winsome, and some of the men were exceptionally equipped, and most tempting were the men who were both.

  But I resisted—until I saw him.

  He was, at first, just one of the helmeted, faceless enemy on the other side of the bars. I first noticed him in a sort of anonymous way. I looked admiringly at his remarkable legs, at their mighty size. And then he bent over to do something and revealed the splendor of his uncovered ass, which looked so solid that it could stop an arrow.

  My cock sprang up and pointed at him. I quickly turned and walked to a corner of our cell where I could hide my excitement until it subsided.

  He was frequently in the opposite compartment. I did not know if he was new or if he had been there all along and I had not noted him until now.

  But so much more shapely were his legs than those of the other jailers that I could recognize him even behind his helmet and his armor.

  One day, he removed his helmet and mopped his brow and then laid the helmet on a table, and I was nearly undone. His face was striking, with a strong jaw. When he looked my direction, before I quickly turned away, I could see—or at least I thought I could see—deep brown eyes with lustrous eyelashes, and again I had to hastily retreat to a corner of the cell until my unruly cock would behave.

  You are a fool, I told myself. You cannot possibly have seen the details of his face before you retreated, and your imagination has been overheated by your confinement, and you had better regain control before you do something for which you will be punished.

  For a few days, I kept myself constrained, but finally I looked through the bars, and I found him.

  And he was looking at me.

  Quickly, I looked away. When I glanced back, he was talking to another guard whom he called Marcello and who called him Barradd. He was paying no attention to me, and I chided myself for letting my imagination carry me into the realms of fantasy.

  But the next time I let my gaze fall on him, he was again looking at me—I was sure he was looking at me; no matter how brief the glance, it was a glance.

  Our eyes met like that two more days. Then, in the middle of the night, something woke me, and I saw Barradd standing at the bars, and he was wearing only his skirt. He was so beautiful that my breath stopped for a moment.

  He beckoned to me. I checked around me to be sure that he was not gesturing to someone else—why would he choose me, D’Meter, a lowly captive? Quite entranced by the eyes that seemed to be drawing me to him a
s if he were a magnet, I stood and walked over to him. We stared at each other for a few seconds, and then he put his hand through the bars and guided me to my knees and lifted his skirt, and his magnificent, munificent cock jutted toward me, and I took him in my mouth.

  I was utterly enthralled by the taste of his flesh, and I lost track of time and surroundings. Coherent thought left me, and I was subject only to the delights of his dick.

  Then he breathed heavily and shuddered and spurted into my mouth, and I held him and his moistness for a moment, a much too short moment, and then he withdrew and moved away and lay down among his fellow guards, while I returned to my fellow prisoners and fell asleep.

  I was abruptly awakened by one of the guards shaking me, and when I could focus on what was happening, I saw that another guard had Barradd by the arm and was taking him to a door at one end of the bars, and this guard unlocked the door and shoved Barradd through and into the midst of us captives and said, with a nasty laugh, “You like our hostages so much, let us see how you fare among them!”

  Barradd was still wearing only his skirt, and as the other guard pushed Barradd again, he pulled the skirt off, and Barradd was now, like the rest of us, completely naked.

  It was obvious what had happened. Someone—another guard or a prisoner who was hoping to curry favor with his captors—had seen Barradd and me and had reported us, and now Barradd had been judged as a traitor and sentenced to be among us. Perhaps his former friends hoped that we would punish Barradd for what he was presumed to have done, might indeed have done, as a guard. Certainly Barradd would be subject to the stringent rules set for the captives.

  And as I look around, I see the hatred on the faces of my fellow detainees. Barradd is one of the enemy, and now he is with us, defenseless. Here is an opportunity for revenge. Who knows what will occur later? Now is the chance to pay back some of what has happened to the prisoners.

  And I can do nothing for him.