Dragon Emperor Deceived

[Written with thanks and a nod to a fairytale told by early twentieth-century Italian diplomat Daniele Varè]

The weight of the man lifted off young Han Li, who sighed, and attempted, unsuccessfully, to move from his prone, bent, and spread position. The imperial guard captain had been on top of the eighteen-year-old young man, between his legs, inside him, thrusting for so long that Han Li was numbed into that stance, his buttocks raised on satin pillows, his sleeping robe hanging open underneath him. He had been transported into the heavens.

The guard captain stood over the prone, divinely proportioned Han Li, staring down at the vulnerable, open stance of the young man, whose arms, the wrists bound together, were raised over his head, pushing the young man’s smooth, slim, boyish chest out. The young man was gazing back into the soldier’s eyes, with an expression of awe, surrender, submissiveness, and satiation while the guard stroked the last drops of his cum on the young man’s belly. The soldier was muscular, fit, at the height of his virility. The shaft he was stroking would not wither. The young man was just too inviting, too open to the soldier, wanting more. As if to confirm that, Han Li drew his knees up into his chest and rolled his pelvis up, to show the rosy-rimmed hole that had been opened by the thick-cocked guard was still open—and puckering. Rivulets of white cum dribbled from the pulsing opening.

This had been the first opening and invasion of the young man’s passage by a man’s shaft. Han Li had taken his deflowering well—more than well. The soldier dropped to his knees, gathered a moaning Han Li into his arms, penetrated the passage for a second time, and the two rocked against each other in renewed copulation. The second taking gave the young man more pleasure and passion and less pain than the first one had. Han Li dreamed of a third coupling.

The soldier, twenty-eight-year-old Ke Chuan, untied the red silk sash of Han Li’s robe from around the young man’s wrists and rose from on top of Han Li on the kang—the hard bed—in the center of the small pavilion off the Pavilion of the Tortoise in which Han Li’s father, the general of the imperial troops in distant Chinghai Province, Han Shui, was snoring away. He stealthily moved to the beaded curtain in the doorway between the two pavilions to ensure that the old general had slept through the deflowering of his young son.

Han Li lay there, still trembling and unable to close his legs and watched Ke Chuan move stealthily around his chamber. The young man’s eyes were dreamy with awe of the handsome, muscular guard captain who had coaxed his virginity to anal penetration from him, taking all guilt from him by binding him as he whimpered his fear mixed with want.

Although Han Li had been ripe for the deflowering and had carried his own in the tease to the bedding by the guards captain, Ke Chuan had masterfully seduced the sheltered country student, presenting himself as a young god, cultivating him, whispering encouraging and praising words to him whenever they were close to each other, fondling him and telling him how beautiful and desirable he was when they were in private, and taking Han Li’s hand in his, penetrating the folds of the guard captain’s robes, and introducing the young man to the arousal of a magnificent erection, whispering how much pleasure it could give Han Li inside him. Then, tonight, being so patient in preparing him and, only when Han Li begged him for the attention, binding, mounting, penetrating, and seeding him—and then mounting, penetrating, and seeding him a second time to assure the young man of the lessening of pain in repeated copulation. Having led a reclusive, protected student’s life to that point in a palace in remote Chinghai, Han Li had been vulnerable to the dazzle of Ke Chuan—and he had been more than ready to enter the bitten peach world.

It had been frightening and painful. It had been glorious, and Han Li wanted Ke Chuan to copulate with him again. He had thought for some time he would be with men as well as women. Many men in his family enjoyed the variety of bed partners. He’d no idea it would first happen at the center of the universe, in the Forbidden City itself, lying under the, perfect in every way, captain of the emperor’s own guard. His eyes followed Ke Chuan’s movements around the room, willing the masterful cocksman to return to him and take him again, teach him more positions and techniques, taking him again and again until there was no more pain, only pleasure.

When the guard captain had first crept into the pavilion and accosted the half-breed son of the western general, Ke Chuan had taken the precaution of coming masked and robed in the colors of the night and had bound and gagged the young man in his own silk sleeping apparel. The young man had struggled in surprise initially, but as Ke Chuan had surmised, his attentions were welcome and once he had smothered the young man in attentiveness to his sexual arousal and impulses and had thrown off his mask and robe and Han Le had seen who it was who was on top of him and between his legs—although of course he already knew—Ke Chuan was able to replace the gag with his mouth and to hold the young man in thrall to his demanding kiss, as he mounted, penetrated, and rode him. Han Li shuddered and writhed as Ke Chuan penetrated him deep, as his endowment allowed, and, eventually, the young man went docile and then fell in the rhythm of the strong, virile soldier’s possession.

The second seeding had been just as glorious, and Han Li had invited it.

Han Li had given Ke Chuan every hope that his attentions would be welcome earlier, after the western general and his entourage had arrived in the Forbidden City, summoned by the emperor but with an urgent need as well to apprise the emperor of the unrest to the west. The entourage had included the son he begat from his Italian wife, who had been the widow of an emissary to the imperial court who had died en route there and whom Han Shui had added to his collection of wives. Han Li, small of stature in his eighteen years on earth, perfect of body, with alabaster skin, and dark, shining eyes and hair, had come to Peking with his father. Han Shui wanted his son to pass the exams for the imperial civil service, and the young man had advanced as far as he could go with frontier tutors.

Han Li had not been part of the entourage that was granted an audience by the emperor Pu Yi in the cluster of Dragon Pavilions deep in the protected grounds of the Forbidden City, but he had been permitted to come to a courtyard in sight of the vermillion and gold pillared, open-sided throne room while his father gave his periodic report to the Son of Heaven on the military situation on the empire’s western borders.

As Han Shui reported, the emperor’s imperial guard stood at attention around the edges of the throne room pavilion. The attention of the guard’s captain, though, had strayed to the courtyard off to the side, where he saw the young, exotic, mixed-breed young man, Han Li, wandering around, admiring the plantings and the colorful architecture of the emperor’s compound within the Forbidden City. Ke Chuan was smitten and immediately decided that he must have this young man writhing under him and sheathing his shaft. Ke Chuan was accustomed to having his way with young men, and mostly with virgins he deflowered.

Han Li looked up to meet Ke Chuan’s gaze and smile and he was equally smitten.

Later, by judiciously asking, Ke Chuan informed himself on who the young man was, what he was doing in the imperial capital—and, to his delight, that he was a virgin to men using his anal passage. The guard captain had already ascertained from the looks he’d shared with the young man that there was hope that Ke Chuan could cure Han Li of his virginity.

Unbeknownst to Ke Chuan or Han Li—or that matter to Han Shui—Ke Chuan was not the only one who speculated on the beauty of the graceful and exotic young man roaming around in the side courtyard. From another pavilion before he belatedly arrived in his throne room to receive the general from the western province, Emperor Pu Yi had looked into the side courtyard and taken pause—a long pause—in seeing the form of Han Li.

Emperor Pu Yi made the same vow to himself as Ke Chuan had. He would deflower this young, exotic-visaged man, bestow his imperial seed on him, and add him to the secondary stable of mates he had—the stable of the young male concubines.

Over the next two days, Ke Chuan made it his business to approach the young visitor from the western lands as opportunity arose and to engage him in conversation and flirting, a familiarity that the emperor could not engage in. He was delighted to find that the young man was open to flirting with another man and that he seemed frustrated by the restraints his father put on him and was ready to spread his wings and fly in his own chosen direction. At the same time, the young man had been sheltered and was naïve and susceptible to the advances of such as Ke Chuan. Han Li innocently revealed that the bitten peach world of men pleasing men was more alluring to him than the court scholar direction his father was planning for him. Han Li knew that his mixed-parentage heritage made him exotic in the world of men seeking men.

In turn, the emperor made it his business to find out more about the young man, the reason why he was so exotically beautiful, and that he as yet was untouched, having been closely guarded by his father on the remote frontier of the empire, destined for the life of a scholar rather than a soldier.

For his part, General Han Shui was oblivious to the interest of the captain of the emperor’s guard, attentions from that direction being unspeakably below his status, but he wasn’t oblivious to the emperor’s interest. This became a delicate balancing act for him. He acceded to opportunities for added contact with the emperor by arranging to have his son nearby and in view, but he did so for the chance to discuss with the emperor how precarious the military position was on the western border, which already regularly was being breached by foreign hordes, and to focus the emperor’s attention on meeting the threat. In addition, one word from the emperor and Han Li’s entry into the court realm of the scholars would be assured. The general was not a fool, and he was a schemer. If finding favor with and gaining the ear of the emperor came from his son being bedded by the emperor, so be it. Having been bedded by the emperor and having pleased the emperor in this congruous accorded status on its own. If emperor experienced pleasure in deflowering Han Li, the young man would readily find a place in the halls of the academy. If he was taken as male concubine by the emperor for any length of time, this would not be openly spoken of, but he would have a place at court as long as the emperor reigned and was pleased with Han Ii.

Conditions on the border were enough in crisis for such a sacrifice. Already, in the general’s absence from his defense of the west, a foreign force was inside the borders and was advancing toward the capital. To add to this, Mongols from the north were even closer to Peking in the movement of military forces. The emperor needed to focus on the military threat, not the desires to dip his shaft in unused passages. If he was indulged with Han Li once, perhaps he would give attention to the real danger.

Ke Chuan was aware of the emperor’s interest in the Chinghai youth. He also was aware that if he were first in enjoying the young man’s passage and the emperor heard of it, his head would roll off his body. But he was a lustful, randy example of a risk taker, used to getting his way sexually because of the power and magnificence of his body as well as his position at the head of the emperor’s personal guard. And the luscious young man in question was a virgin.

As he had lain on top of the young man in the small pavilion off to the side of where the powerful, western general father of Han Li was snoring, Ke Chuan forced silken pillows under the young man’s buttocks to raise his virginal passage to the sacrifice, coaxed the young man’s thighs apart with his knees, and savored the young man’s muffled virgin cries reducing to whimpers and eventually to acceptance and a coordinated rhythm and deep sighs as he buried his cock deep inside Han Li’s channel. He reveled not only in the pleasure of stealing the exotic young man’s virginity but also in the danger of the moment.

Later, when Ke Chuan had unbound Han Li and been brought to wariness by the possible sounds of movement in the larger pavilion beyond and had stolen over to listen at the beaded curtain of the doorway into the central Pavilion of the Tortoise, he nearly laughed out loud when he turned to see Han Li, still on his back, still with his legs open and his buttocks raised, turned to him with a pleading look on his face and his arms raised and spread open to the guard captain.

Ke Chuan strode quickly back to the kang and climbed on top of the young man and they coupled for a third time. The virile guards captain was ever hard and the erstwhile virgin was insatiable. It was Han Li, who took the guard captain’s thick, long shaft in his hands and guided its bulb into place. Ke Chuan instinctively clamped his hand over the young man’s mouth to stifle the inevitable cry when he thrust his cock home. Mere moments later, as Han Li controlled the brutal slash of pain-pleasure, he grasped the guard captain’s buttocks in his hands and the two bucked against each other through deep panting and muffled moans in a frenzied dance of the fuck.

Ke Chuan smirked in the knowledge that the young man was lost to the power of his cock. All young men he got his shaft into were lost to his mastering. This was well worth the risk he took, Ke Chuan thought.

* * * *

“But, oh Son of Heaven, these are primitive subjects from the western edge of the empire. He may not be suitable.”

“I have checked. Do not presume to question my order. Bring the young man to my kang tonight. I wish to take a first bite into his peach tonight.” The Emperor Pu Yi gave his guard captain a look of surprise and disapproval for daring to trying to dissuade him from something he desired as if the soldier were a dog that had unexpectedly hopped out of a tranquil garden pond.

Ke Chuan presumed to continue, though, suddenly frightened what he might have done to disturb the order of the empire. The emperor could not have that first bite. Ke Chuan already had done so—and the bite after that and the one after that. “I am just noting the ritual of the emperor’s conquest of purity, Exalted Dragon of China—the ill luck that would come from a first lie with a concubine who was not a virgin.”

Mollified a bit, Pu Yi said, “You needn’t worry about that. I have thoroughly checked. I have queried the western general himself, and he has assured me his son is a virgin. The general would not lie to me about such an important matter. I have also had enquiries done among the general’s retinue and among my spies in his western household, and not a hint of scandal has surfaced about the general’s son. Besides, the young man is too young and has lived too sheltered and protected a life to have lost his virginity to a man. Considering who his father is, no man in Chinghai would have dared violate the young man.”

No, you want to violate the young man yourself, Ke Chuan thought, without entertaining the reality that he, Ke Chuan, had already violated the young man—repeatedly. And not that the general would know, the guard captain mused. The general had been snoring in the chamber next door when Ke Chuan had been ripping the young man’s virginity out of him and wantonly taking him again and again. And he nearly laughed at the emperor’s naivete in suggesting any youth was too young to cover and fuck.

Ke Chuan was thoroughly backed into a corner, though. If he revealed what he knew, his head would roll. If he didn’t, there was the curse of an invalid emperor’s conquest of purity. It was enough to bring the empire down. Which was the greater tragedy?

He wasn’t stupid. He knew what the greater tragedy for him would be. He also was fully capable of believing in the traditional rituals when and as he chose. He was close enough to the emperor to know that the Son of Heaven did that himself.

* * * *

“What is this? What is this doing here?” Han Li asked in a shaky voice. He’d been called into the Pavilion of the Tortoise, where he had spied, on an elaborate sleeping kang, a richly embroidered, large silk quilt. The background color was a bold yellow. His father, General Han Shui, was standing on one side of the kang and the captain of the imperial guard, Ke Chuan, was standing on the other side, one hand lifting up the corner of the quilt. Both men looked quite serious.

“Were you bathed as I commanded?” Han Shui asked his son in strained voice.

“Yes, father. But again, what is that quilt doing in here? That is exclusively of the emperor’s quarters. No one but the emperor can use yellow.”

“It is the ritual. You may not have heard of it in distant Chinghai,” Ke Chuan answered dully, his voice as much strained as Han Shui’s had been. “The ritual of the emperor bestowing favor on a virginal concubine.”

“Yes, I know of the ritual,” Han Le said. “I am here to study further for the civil service examinations, of which knowledge of the rituals is central. I’m not just starting my studies, though. I understand what the quilt is for—to deliver a concubine to the emperor for the first coupling and entry into his house. But how does that—?”

“I think you know how that applies here—how that applies to you, my son,” Han Shui answered in a tired, regretful voice. “The emperor has seen you. His interests are broad. I have no idea how he came to observe and choose you, but he has. I can do nothing about it.”

“But this can’t be. Tell him, Ke Chuan. Tell him why this can’t serve the ritual.” He looked imploringly and accusingly at the guard captain. He could not openly say it in front of his father, and he knew that it would be insanity and suicide for Ke Chuan to reveal that Han Li could not go to the emperor this way, as the ritual required the concubine to be a virgin. The question had been made without thinking, in shock.

Han Li was not a virgin. Ke Chuan knew exactly why Han Li was not a virgin. Ke Chuan had made sure Han Li was not a virgin three times that night. Han Li saw the predicament in Ke Chuan’s eyes, but he was a scholar of the rituals and believed in them. He couldn’t remain silent.

The ritual could not be observed under this circumstance. Ke Chuan knew it would be a sacrilege, not helped because the emperor did not know it. But anyone who knew it knew that it would be an insult to the gods, who would surely take their revenge. So, it could not happen.

“Tell him that it can’t be, Ke Chuan,” Han Li said, again, but Ke Chuan looked away from him to Han Li’s father and spoke to the general. “We cannot keep the emperor waiting. You know that. The emperor has spoken. You know that too.”

“Remove your robe and lie on the quilt,” Han Shui said in weary voice.

“Father!” Han Li exclaimed.

“Call in the guards, if you must,” Han Shui said to Ke Chuan. Bind and gag him, if necessary. Rumor is that the emperor enjoys such games.

The guard captain called in the emperor’s guards, and they stripped Han Li of his robe. Whether in shock or surrender, Han Li struggled only a bit but said nothing as they bound his wrists and ankles together with red sashes. And then he couldn’t protest aloud anymore, as they gagged him with another red scarf. They rolled him into the yellow silk quilt and carried him from the Pavilion of the Tortoise across the Forbidden City grounds to the Dragon Pavilion, the sleeping pavilion of Emperor Pu Yi.

And there He was, the Emperor Pu Yi, Son of Heaven, when the soldiers had deposited the quilt on the sumptuously pillowed kang in the vermillion and gold leaf-adorned Dragon Pavilion and unfolded the quilt from around Han Li’s slight, perfectly formed body and had backed, kowtowing, out of the pavilion. He stood at the foot of the kang, ensconced in a cobalt blue silken robe embroidered with a dragon, symbol of the emperor, in golden threads. The robe was open at the emperor’s groin, and he was fisting his erect cock in his bejeweled left hand.

The expression on Pu Yi’s face revealed that he was very pleased with what he saw. The fingers of his right hand went to the supple skin of the young man’s arms and thighs and chest. He groaned his need. Han Li could not turn away or resist in any way. This was his emperor. Very few in the empire were even permitted to look on the emperor’s countenance. And here was the emperor, touching Han Li in the most intimate way and places. The emperor untied the red sash binding Han Li’s ankles, ran his hand between Han Li’s thighs, nudging them to spread, and Han Li dutifully opened them, shuddering as the emperor ran his fingers over the young man’s inner thighs. The touch told Han Li that the emperor wanted him to turn his thighs outward and elevate his pelvis, and when the young man did, the emperor ran his finger across the young man’s anal opening, back and forth, thumbing the entrance, watching with interest and pleasure as it puckered and dilated. Han Li moaned for him and his opening puckered further as the thumb moved inside him.

Han Li couldn’t help from being awed by the honor being accorded him and couldn’t say he was unaffected by the emperor’s attention. He had been brought this far. This was going to transpire, and the young man wasn’t a fool. He gave in to reality and common sense. Not only that, he was a lusty-filled lad. He gave in to the coupling that was to follow. He began to rock his pelvis on the penetrating thumb, and the emperor knew the peach was his for the plucking.

The emperor was a handsome, majestic man, albeit heavy of body. His member was not of the girth and length of Ke Chuan’s in full erection, but Han Li’s eyes opened wide in surprise and pain-pleasure as now a long, slender finger crowned with two thick-jeweled rings entered him, the gems applying themselves to his prostate.

The emperor reached up and freed Han Li of his gag. The Son of Heaven was holding his shaft in his hand while the fingers of his other hand were exploring in the crease of the young man’s buttocks, and he was twisting his pelvis toward the young man’s head. Han Li was shuddering and rocking on the bejeweled finger inside him. He knew there would be another imperial digit inside him soon. There was no avoiding that. All he could do now was to try to save his lover from discovery. He had to be a virgin for the emperor. The expectation of what the emperor wanted Han Li to do now was clear. But the rituals of the gods were clear also. He could shield Ke Chuan. It could be someone else, someone back in Chinghai had deflowered him already.

The young man gasped and sighed and started to speak, “Sir, you should know . . . the ritual . . .” but the emperor shushed him, murmured how beautiful his body was and pushed his shaft between Han Li’s lips. The young man opened his mouth to the cock, and whatever he might have wanted to say was silenced.

As Han Li sucked the imperial member, the emperor removed his fingers from the young man’s passage, glided the fingers of both hands down Han Li’s inner thighs, coaxing the young man to open his legs more to him—to spread and bend his legs, place his feet flat on the surface of the kang, and to push up on his feet, elevating his pelvis more. Pulling his now-throbbing staff from Han Li’s mouth, the emperor moved between the young man’s thighs.

Han Li, having already lain with Ke Chuan and knowing what the desired position was for the deepest penetration of the cock, moved as the emperor was coaxing him to. And then he cried out as the emperor impatiently thrust inside him and, holding the young man’s pelvis in place by grasping and raising his hips, plowed him quickly to a first seeding. He was the emperor. He need not be sensitive to the needs of his partner, only his own. It mattered not if they were virgins to the cock. He could take his pleasures as he pleased, and he did so with Han Li.

The surprise and shock of being so abruptly and brutally taken covered for this not having been the first time Han Li had swayed with a man in copulation. Han Li naturally responded and sobbed in pain and violation as a virgin would do. After that there was no reason for Han Li to point out he had not been a virgin. His response to the emperor’s thrusts had been that of a virgin, as they had surprised and taxed Han Li. All of that refinement around them in the Dragon Pavilion and its rich appointments did not change that the emperor fucked Han Li with the abandonment of a rooting animal.

There were no restraints on what the emperor could do. Once his natural sexual desires took over, it, by right, became all about him and serving his desires. When he was copulating with a concubine, female or male, once lust took over there was no sensitivity to the feelings, needs, or even survival of the other. The emperor brutally took his pleasure—there was no restraint to doing so. If the concubine were ruined, there always was another one to take her or his place. Thus, when he lay with Han Li, the emperor ripped his own pleasure out of the young man, who, fortuitously, found he was aroused at such conquering and whose passage had, mercifully, already, thanks to Ke Chuan’s thick cock, become able to take a man’s phallus.

The emperor was no Ke Chuan in the phallus department. If Ke Chuan had taken Han Li this brutally, the young man surely would have been ruined. Having already been plowed by a thicker and longer shaft, Han Li managed the emperor.

Pu Yi immediately became obsessed with his new toy. Not much later in the evening he fucked Han Li from the back, the young man draped over the side of the bathing pool on his belly and the emperor behind him, hands on Han Li’s hips, fucking him in the position of the dog, as any illiterate peasant in the alleys of Peking would do. And then later, through the night, on the pillows of the kang, with, at last, Han Li straddling the emperor’s pelvis and riding the monarch’s cock in the position of the camel crossing the Taklamakan desert.

Han Li felt the cock of the guard captain more, but the emperor’s technique was more varied and demanding—and cruder and more primeval. The young man melted completely to the demands of and satisfaction provided by his sovereign lord. There was something to be appreciated in the refinement of Ke Chuan, but there was greater animal satiation in the total, unfettered taking the emperor indulged in. If the emperor wished to fuck a young man to death there would be no barrier to or punishment for doing so, and that provided some higher level of arousal in the young man from Chinghai.

The young man gave in to the emperor’s needs and desires completely, and he forgot all about the defilement of the ritual. The gods did not forget, however.

The emperor, young enough and bored enough otherwise with life to call for a wife or concubine two or three times in the space of the day, was so besotted with Han Li that he neither called for another attendant for the next five days, bestowing all of his imperial seed on his new, young, luscious lover, nor appeared on the Dragon Throne in the throne hall to attend to business.

This despite the foreign hordes relentlessly closing in on Peking from both the north and the northwest.

* * * *

“I’m sorry, General, the emperor is not receiving today.”

“He must see me,” General Han Shui told the emperor’s chief attendant. “Foreign armies are nearing the walls of the city. We must mobilize to counter them. I need his chop on my orders.”

“He is indisposed.”

“He can’t get his phallus out of the tight passage of one of his concubines,” the general cried out. “That is not being indisposed when the enemy is at the gates.”

“Not just any concubine,” the attendant shot back with the accusation. “Your son, who you tempted him with. The emperor is in ninth heaven with the young man you yourself brought here from Chinghai to weave your family’s power around the Son of Heaven. Well, your plans to ensnare the emperor are working, but they obviously won’t do you any good.”

“My plans? MY plans?” General Han Shui puffed up and turned red. “These are not the plans I had for my son. They certainly are not what I want for the Central Kingdom. I’ll show you.”

He turned to the captain of the imperial guard, Ke Chuan, who was standing nearby.

“I must speak with you,” the general said. The two went off, beyond the columns of the pavilion onto the platform outside and put their heads together. The guard captain was seen to recoil from the discussion in horror. But the general drew him back in, they talked some more, and Ke Chuan eventually was nodding his head even though he looked decidedly dismayed.

That night, on the walkway at the top of the wall surrounding the inner, imperial compound of the larger Forbidden City compound, a beautiful young man stood, looking to the northwest, beyond the walls of the city to the flares of a thousand campfires of the northern enemy forces. He was melancholy. His life in the emperor’s household as a half Chinese half foreigner, as exotic and sexually appealing as it had made him, had not led him to the life he had hoped to have.

Responding to a sound coming from farther along the wall, he turned, and said, “Oh, it is you, Captain Ke Chuan.”

“Yes, it is I,” Ke Chuan said, coming in close behind the young man, embracing him from behind and gathering up the material of the young man’s robe, getting his hands under the hem and pushing the robe up to the young man’s naked waist. The young man sighed as Ke Chuan buried his face in the young man’s throat, placed a hand on his belly, positioned his cock head with the other hand, penetrated, and started to fuck the youth who he’d first taken as a virgin.

The young man murmured, “Yes, yes, yes,” but his voice was reduced to a gurgle as Ke Chuan wrapped his hands around the young man’s throat and squeezed. Ke Chuan continued the fuck as the young man’s hands ineffectually scrabbled as Ke Chuan’s hands on his throat. The youth relaxed in death as Ke Chuan released his seed.

Before letting the body drop, Ke Chuan sliced the head of a battleax up from out of the darkness and caught the young man in the face, smashing his beautiful face beyond all recognition. Before his body could sink to the stones of the path, the powerful guard captain had caught his small body, wrapped in its yellow silk robe, hoisted the body over the top of the wall, and let it fall to the stones of the courtyard below, allowing the body to fall out of the bloodied robe.

He turned to one of his soldiers, handed him the bloodied yellow silk robe, and said, “Take this to General Han Shui as proof that it is done—that the emperor has no reason not to pay attention to his imperial duties now. I have something else I must do.”

* * * *

The next morning the Son of Heaven, Emperor Pu Yi, was distraught almost beyond himself, but he appeared, as was his duty, in the Dragon Throne Pavilion to receive the report and request of his equally distraught and subdued, Chinghai Province general, Han Shui, and to provide the needed chop on the decree to mobilize the army to go out and meet the enemy at the gates of Peking.

“I only hope it is not too late,” General Han Shui muttered under his breath, adding, “and that we all live to appreciate the sacrifice this has required.”

Having heard what his general muttered, the emperor turned a tear-stained face to his general and said, “Living in this earthly realm is nothing like awaits the Son of Heaven in the beyond.”

Then, having been dismissed like everyone else from the throne pavilion, General Han Shui strode off to see what he could still do to save the city and empire from the foreign devils beyond the gates of Peking. The emperor, demanding that he be left in solitude, walked out onto the raised platform extending from the columns holding up the pavilion and hung himself by the throat from an ornamental Maidenhair tree.

And thus the gods exacted their revenge on an emperor who failed to observe the ritual of the imperial initiation of a virgin concubine, even though Emperor Pu Yi didn’t have the most remote knowledge that the ritual had been breached.

* * * *

Ke Chuan rose from on top of Han Li from the berth on the junk floating off the coast in Bo Hai, the Gulf of China, pulling his cock out of a channel that was oozing his cum from repeated seedings. The young man lay there, panting heavily, moaning in a low tone, his legs spread and bent, his buttocks elevated on a cushion, totally besotted and sexually satiated. Ke Chuan had fucked the young Chinese-Italian for hours, making the young man unquestionably his.

Han Li had left the Forbidden City willingly with the handsome, virile, big-cocked guard captain. It had been flattering to be obsessed over by the Son of Heaven, but, sexually, it hadn’t been anything like being plowed by Ke Chuan. He was so happy to see the guard captain come to where he was being confined for brief periods between sessions with the emperor that he asked no questions about where they were going and how Ke Chuan was able to arrange the escape.

Since Han Li didn’t ask, Ke Chuan didn’t need to decide whether to tell him that another Chinese-European young man had been sacrificed in Han Li’s stead. The young man, a concubine who the emperor had been given as a gift of tribute by a French priest who had acted as a doctor at court until he was dispatched for trying to proselytize his imperial patients and for, unbeknownst to the priest, giving the emperor used goods. In this case, Ke Chuan had reported to the emperor that he had taken the young man’s virginity himself before he’d known the French priest would give the youth to the emperor. The emperor had been enthralled with the young man for a few days anyway and had maintained him in the household without calling for him again. Ke Chuan had been using him since then. He regretted losing him, but he found couldn’t lose Han Li.

Ke Chuan went to the railing of the junk and stared back at the Chinese mainland. He could almost believe that he could see the glow of the fires in Peking from here, although the Forbidden City surely was too far away for that to be possible. If the Chinghai general survived, perhaps he could tell the old man someday that his son had not died—had not needed to be sacrificed to end the Emperor Pu Yi’s obsession with sex with an exotic mixed-breed young man and turn his attention back to his duties of preserving the empire. Until then the duplicitous general deserved to suffer in ignorance.

But Ke Chuan could never tell the emperor what he had done.

It would be some time before Ke Chuan learned that the Emperor Pu Yi was now well beyond any worries of this earth—or that this had been because Ke Chuan had been there first with Han Li.

Ke Chuan heard the musing of entreaty from the kang and turned to find Han Li begging him to return to him and inside him. The virile soldier took his staff in his hand and shook it to stiffen it as he returned to the kang, grabbed Han Li’s ankles, and cruelly jerked the young man’s legs open, knelt between his thighs, thrust inside him, and began to pound him hard. Writhing under the powerful soldier, Han Li arched his back and cried out a “Yes, yes, just as He does. Take me like an emperor,” having told Ke Chuan that he occasionally wanted to be fucked like an animal of the forest in highest heat as the emperor did it.

A man’s work with a randy, demanding young man is never done, Ke Chuan thought, with a sigh.