Guya

I kneel behind him, on the bed, my damp cloth slipping over his chest, and under his arms, as I wash him. And I see what he is, and he is beautiful.

He learns to climb the rigging, and is agile and fast, nerveless at the height of the mast, where he proves a capable lookout with a strong understanding of what he sees – steering us clear of rock and reef and storm. The men notice these things, and grow to respect him more than they ever imagined they would. They hadn’t, and I hadn’t, imagined the prince as a beautiful workhorse.

Look at him. Can you see? Is he not so very beautiful? See the chin. The jawline, hard and straight. I can only say it is the chin of a man, knowing you will know what I mean if you have ever held a man, or loved a man as I have.

You would not recognise me. The boy and the man have grown far apart. There is no possible line from there to here other than the specific and very narrow one I walked. I write at the age of fifty. This is the story of my time with the Princes. Qatan and Qalin. Chahin and Cheruh. I am worse than the kitchen boy, filthier than the coal scuttle, on the first day of the tale I will tell you.

Everything about you is hard. The warrior arms and thighs. The solid planes of your chest, the stark flat belly, all straight lines. A smile reaches your lips. Here there is a curve. Sensuous. I imagine the kiss of a prince, your mouth on mine insistent, your tongue a probe against mine: the first but not last stage of opening me to your will. And still my fingers gently slide, tickling, twisting up and around the shaft. Veins of silver in the moonlight. Ridges of gold for me to find, and touch, and worship.

Beruh’s ass as he climbs the coconut palm is an amazing thing. The prince stands with me watching, and we watch from twenty and then thirty and then fifty feet below as the man bones up as he climbs, his flimsy robe loose and taken by the breeze, and he is a sight that is impressive even from such a distance.

Slide quietly into shadow. That must be my plan. Instead, and within a month, I will buy The Pearl Garden. I despair, utterly despair of this thread of impetuosity that runs within my nature.

I will not tell you all their names, out of respect, as many were to die in the wars. I walk past their carved memorials, the ones that found themselves on the right side when at last the fighting ceased for long enough to make an hour for a decent burial. Even now I remember their faces. Their heraldic devices. The hang and the swing of their cocks as my tongue reaches out towards them, the wet tip curling to guide them into my mouth.

I will reshape you. Broken as you may be. Fractured as you seem, each of your thousand tiny splinters refusing to coalesce back into that thing we call a man. Let me hold you, and have your spirit return to you. Experience the gulp as it finds you – purest oxygen, purest life, flowing back into your lungs and your heart. I hold you against my chest as it fills you once more with what has been lost. Bring you back from death. Bring you back to humanity.

They stand at the river’s edge as I swing from the willow’s branches, somersaulting with a whoop and a splash to the water. And I am watched for a season long while I perfect this technique, and while the branches I dive from grow higher. The men of the temple see my progress as the splashes turn into dives, and as the dives gain the perfection of hard practice, until I leave no bubbles, no ripples, behind.

His hands on my back? Slow. His fingers as they smooth my hair back from my eyes? Gentle. The strength, confidently applied, as he lifts me high until my legs straddle his head and my head knocks against the ceiling, so that he can take my cock between his lips? Everything gentle, everything calm, everything beautiful.

By night he holds me down, in the sands. Ties me, knee to elbow and wrist to ankle, in ways that I cannot escape. Even if I wanted to. In ways that leave me defenceless beneath his hands. Beneath his mind. He dreams me open, and he opens me.

The fighting life. It was not my opportunity. They saw my speed and agility and harnessed these things in service of…standing still for hours with a ten foot long pike by my side. They saw my quick mind, and acknowledged it by…rendering me immobile.

The next boy emerges from the pool like a spirit of the water. Deeply submerged and then slowly rising at my feet. He knows what he is, this boy. Knows he draws the eyes of the whole courtyard as he stands, water cascading from the fine muscle of his chest.

He bends me and slides inside. On the chapel roof, in his chambers, in the stable, behind the throne. He fucks me in the chapel itself, in the shadow of a tomb while monks chant prayers and the choir sings of gods and demons.

He isn’t thinking about the first time. He is thinking of his five years as a saint. Thinking of the man he has become, and the way he reached his destination. We are different men. The things the priests have done with us – different. Hafar has looked into our eyes and found different needs there. He has made of my body a receptacle for their love.

Yet the black-clad figure has also now stepped fully into the light. And he too is more than capable of inspiring the mind and heart. He stands, armed folded, and legs apart. And the light behind him finds a shape through the flimsy sheer fabric in which he is draped; a silhouette appears, of a kind that will soon find its match amongst the curves and hard planes of the younger man’s body.

The peal of bells and choir song. Angelic voices rising to the sky. And the sun greets us. Greets a new dawn. And they say the gods anoint the new king as the clouds part and Chahin stands at the great golden gate overlooking the city, glistening in a shaft of purest light; and his people cheer and the crowds part to let his fine white horse proudly make its way among the throng.

Instead, let me tell you of him, and his beauty as he stands there in the light, sun cascading off his wide and muscle-rounded chest, and drawing my gaze to the swollen nipples that guide my mouth to him, and would act as a beacon in the darkest night should I have need.

This is a man I love as my best friend, a man I have shared dangers and adventures with, and fucked, for a decade. The man whose fat hard ass is as willing as any I have discovered in all of Guya. The best sailor on the ship, beating my own skills by a mile and a yard, and a gentle man capable of turning to a mountain of hell for anyone that is fool enough to cross him. If pushed, Golva is the man I trust more than any other. He stands shy in the doorway, a boyish grin on his face, as if he is fourteen again, crushing on the first man that smiles at him.

And this is how I come to see the new king’s coronation. Be a part of it. A hundred feet above marble and mosaic. With the view of a bird.

Shaded in black, hidden behind veils, he nevertheless commands all for many miles around. The way he holds himself. The way he walks. I admit it is fear too, fear of what he is.

The stretch of his jaw is inexorable. He takes me easily though not all men do, this Parshano, prince of the church.

He is indeed tall and strong, as if his background really could be a military one, and at this point as I cannot place his position in the artist’s household I think of him as the Handsome Captain.

He is handsome, as I think a representative of the gods might well be. My eyes slide again to his chest, and I count the lines of muscle as they climb down to the golden-pink sweep of his sash.

Many is the dark night we have sailed into Pavon on the flood tide and left on the ebb, our instructions imparted in the darkness of the dockside by men with faces I’d rather not see or remember. We disappear into the sea fog and emerge where he wills, to do and say whatever he needs, and return with news of a successful adventure. I’ve smuggled the elephants clean out of the Temple of the Elephants in Monsoforro and swum them back to the mainland without any other than the prince and I having the first clue of how it was done. I think I can manage the temporary disappearance of one small boy.

I survey him as he surveys us. The distinguished beard, the flickering eyes of deepest grey. The locks of white and black that fall like a porcupine’s stripes to the nape of his neck and gather high in the topknot that makes him so recognisable as he walks the city streets. They say he is fifty. They say he is seventy. I don’t know. But I can see with my own eyes he is handsome now, and that perhaps, in his youth, he was a real spectacle.

And the sun warms us. And the twins will be ready once more before many minutes have passed. Tap will reach over me, perhaps, to take a glance at the cock of his twin. Seeing life, he’ll take me by the wrist and guide me towards his own cock, and in a moment I’ll have one in each hand.

He follows me to my tent. Fleetingly his hands are on my chest as he reaches down to kiss me. His body is huge as he holds it against mine, his arms strong as they wrap around my shoulders. The hair on his chest is so fine, bleached so golden by the sun that I almost cannot see it.

Handsome as a pirate as he slides his robe to the floor. Hard as teak. Hard as brass.