Consequences of Lion Hunting

The best hunting for lions in the Kingdom of Urartu was in the south, near the border with Assyria. This area was not the safest place to be in those years of Assyrian expansion into the region between the Caspian and Black seas, but it was where the lions were. So, when the prince of Urartu took his hunting party from the capital at Tushpa, on the Nairi Sea, in search of Asiatic lions, the Assyrian border area was where they went to hunt, set their tents, and take their pleasures. The young prince of Urartu was one for taking his pleasure with other men.

The prince took the hardiest warriors of Urartu for the lion hunt, but his tent harbored the most beautiful of young men, meant for other forms of sport other than game hunting for the pleasures of the evening and the night after the hunt. No entertainer or servant in the prince’s tent could be younger than eighteen nor could he yet have attained his nineteenth year. The cream of the youths transitioning into men of the kingdom were dedicated to the entourage of the prince. Once they were men, which in Urartu was when they reached nineteen, they went automatically transitioned into intensive combat training if they had been in the prince’s service. Even the dancers and musicians were destined to do this if they were in the prince’s entourage. Thus, the youths enlisted in the prince’s entourage were brave and fit, destined as warriors, not for the male brothels.

Night had descended on the royal encampment after a bloody and invigorating day of the hunt in which the count of lions killed barely exceeded the count of Urartu warriors lost in the pursuit of dispatching the lions. Only short spears and close combat between man and lion were permitted at the final kill of the noble beasts. The prince also decried his warriors were to hunt naked and thus to regale all viewing the hunting with the beauty and manliness of the hunters as well as equalizing the hunters with the animals they pursued.

Lusts and juices were high in the prince’s tent. The young musicians and dancers were performing their art as best they could in the intervals in which warriors of the prince’s house guard were not dragging them off into the corners to perform wanton acts upon them, acts that the youths were trained to and readily accepted in exchange for the privilege of living in the king’s palace and the promise of becoming warriors for the prince and king themselves. The servants, as well, had to balance their service to the prince and his lover with the attentions of their own lovers. This was all part of the beautiful young men’s duties, however. The lion hunts were primeval and lustful. Only the most fit and commanding warriors and the most desirable and yielding eighteen-year-old servants and entertainers went on the lion hunts. It was a privilege to be included to serve at the pleasure of the prince and his guard.

The royal bed dominated the middle of the lounge section of the tent. The beautiful young Aramu was bent over the iron footboard of the bed on his belly as the magnificently muscular Menua crouched behind him; grasped the hips of the small, perfectly formed body between his strong, calloused hands, still marked with flecks of lion’s blood; and buried his face between the moaning Aramu’s buttocks cheeks. The gold bracelets snaking around the young Aramu’s biceps and calves were all that the young man, about to be spitted on Menua’s thick, throbbing shaft, was wearing.

Aramu wriggled his hips and groaned his surrender as Menua rose up over the young man’s back, covered him closely from above, grasped the eighteen-year-old youth’s wrists as they held onto the rail of the footboard, mounted Aramu’s ass, and started his long journey up into paradise. The youth held, steady, panting hard, his attention focusing on the depth the cock was reaching inside him and the sensation of his channel walls giving way to the insistent invasion. As they did so, the talented young man set the muscles of his passage walls rippling over the assaulting shaft and Menua’s grunts and groans harmonized with Aramu’s moans and pants as well as with the music of the musicians playing for the dancers undulating before the copulating couple’s eyes.

One of Menua’s beefy, muscular arms encircled the young man’s slim waist and he turned Aramu’s body, placing the youth on his back on the bed. Grasping the youth’s legs and spreading them, the massive warrior knelt between them, kissing Aramu’s inner thighs, kissing up to where the legs merged and Menua could take the erect and throbbing cock of the youth in his mouth and give it suck. Aramu moaned, arched his back, and ran his fingers into the thick lion’s mane of the older man’s head.

As the fuck had begun, the youth, Aramu, had signaled his surrender to the seasoned warrior. “Indz hima dur yekek’: Verts’rek’ indz, duk’ karogh yek’ uzhegh arryuts mardaspanin—Fuck me. Take me now, you mighty lion killer!” Aramu cried out.

And Menua obeyed, moving his knees in between the youth’s thighs, holding Aramu’s legs spread and raised, as he positioned the bulb of his magnificent thick, long, and throbbing cock at the young man’s hole, already open to him, and thrust forward and up, deep into the passage. Aramu cried out, “Ayo, ayo, spanir indz k’vo hzor nizaki het!—Yes, yes, kill me with your mighty spear!” as he arched his head, gazing wildly up into the ribbing of the tent overhead and reached out to his sides with his arms, grasping up wads of the silk bed covering.

His chest raised, his hands grasping the young man’s waist, as Aramu hooked his legs on the muscular man’s hips, Menua cried out, “Yes dzez yem talis im nizakin `ays ory spanvats arryutsi patvi!—I give you my spear in honor of the lion I have killed this day!” and started to pump.

“Ayo, ayo, indz p’at’at’ek’, lav heros mardaspan yek—Yes, yes, fuck me well, you mighty lion killer!” the young man responded, his concentration going to the cock working deep in his gut.

Menua thrust and thrust and thrust. He tensed and cried out. Aramu turned his head to look at the magnificent chest of the man hovering over him, to see a blossom of red in the center of the man’s chest and the point of a small spear emerge. Menua’s eyes rolled up into his head and his body collapsed on top of Aramu, covering the youth in blood.

* * * *

Pandemonium reigned in the tent as warriors of the Assyrian raiding party flooded in. The lithe young musicians, dancers, and servants who weren’t otherwise engaged were quick enough to flee to the adjoining curtained-off section of the prince’s tent and many were able to escape under the tent walls and fading into the trees surrounding the encampment—and thus back to safety to report on the Assyrian raid. Those who were caught were put first to the swords between the Assyrian warriors’ thighs and then dispatch by spear, sword, knife, or choking hands. The prince’s guards were not as quick, already having their personal spears engaged in young men’s passages. Before the invaders covered the servants and entertainers they’d captured, they double teamed the surprised guards of the prince, who had no chance against the raiders in hand-to-hand combat.

Aramu was discovered late in the carnage, after all were subdued and others his age were being ridden to oblivion. When they did discover him, pulling him out from underneath the body of the noble, but quite dead, Menua, there were enough of the muscular and randy raiders not otherwise engaged to give him, the fairest youth of all in the tent, their full attention.

More nimble than his attackers, Aramu was initially able to break away from their grip. He spun away from them and moved, not toward the main entry where they had come in from, but toward a chest where he knew a short sword was encased. He could at least take a few with him, he thought. He had no idea who these attackers were, but in the back of his mind he thought they might be part of a palace coup that had been rumored of late—a cousin of the royal family taking out a prince before making a bid for power. Regardless, Aramu would not die without a fight.

He nearly made it to the chest, but one of the raiders had a bullwhip and knew how to use it. He cracked it out, the leather wrapping itself around Aramu’s slim torso, and pulled the youth back into the clutches of a group of the raiders. One of the attackers had a hand whip, which he used to subdue Aramu, as the young man curled up into a ball to protect himself as best as he could. The panting and whimpering Aramu, the fight in him beaten out of him, was hauled back up on the edge of the bed and laid down, panting and groaning, on his back.

The general debauchery was over, the victims too dead to provide more sport. The raiding party wanted to continue partying, though, which is what saved Aramu from a quick death. They needed someone to toy with until their lusts had cooled.

Five of them fucked Aramu in rotation, with four of them holding him down on his back on the bed, in Menua’s blood, one gripping and stretching out each extremity, and the fifth between his legs, making sport of him. When the fifth had had his satisfaction, he withdrew a knife from a sheath on his calf and raised it to send Aramu to the gods with his noble lover, Menua.

A stronger hand than the Assyrian warrior’s grasped his upheld hand with a grip so powerful that the Assyrian warrior yelped and dropped the knife. When he turned to see who dared interrupt his sport, though, he blanched, backed off, and went down into a bow. So did the other four warriors. The Assyrian lord of Kirrui, Tilglath, had arrived in the tent to survey the work of his raiders. There was no doubt he was the commander here. He was taller, heavier, more magnificently built, more handsome, and more of commanding presence than anyone else.

He also was more magnificently hung than any of his warriors, and seeing the five raiders working on the beautiful small Aramu had put him into erection. He had saved the youth from the knife because he wanted his turn with him while Aramu was still alive.

Tilglath fell upon the youth, back-handing Aramu across the face so that he fell back, exhausted; crouching over him on the bed; gathering the panting youth into his embrace; and breached his passage with one cruel, brutal up thrust of his massive shaft, which would have split almost any other man or youth in the tent asunder. But Aramu wasn’t just any other man or youth. He was trained to take a massive cock. He barely took this one, though, crying out, “Shnorhakalut’yun: Dandagh, im tery: Duk’ indz hamar ch’ap’azants’ mets yes: Tramadrel indz harmarets’nelu hamar: Oh, Oh! Ch’aghlik!—Mercy! Slowly, My Lord. You are too big for me as yet. Give me a moment to adjust . . . Oh, Oh! Yes, fuck me!”

His passioned cry to “Give me opportunity to adjust to you, and I will give you the lust sport you want,” as Aramu clutched Tilglath’s buttocks to between his thighs, got through to the Assyrian lord, who settled in with a less frenzied taking.

Aramu was taking the cock. Aramu clearly wanted the cock. Not understanding the Urartu language, Tilglath didn’t understand that Aramu’s cries were as much in passion and surrender as in pain and being shredded inside, but he did realize that the youth wanted the fuck—and, amazingly, that the young man could manage the huge shaft. There weren’t many men who could give Tilglath the depth and stretch that gave him the maximum pleasure. How, ultimately, would this youth fare?

Tilglath fucked on, cruelly and brutally, expecting to, as usual, feel the blood of his lusty work to flow around his cock and the youth’s eyes to roll up into his head and his body to collapse as the captive he held and fucked slowly gave up his life in the ravishing. But Aramu didn’t give up his life. Aramu adjusted to the copulation and went with it, putting his hips into a rocking motion and becoming one with the Assyrian lord in the fuck.

Tilglath was amazed and conquered in turn. They fucked and they fucked and they fucked, coming almost together, and when Tilglath let Aramu fall back on the bed when he finished him, they held there, panting, looking in each other’s eyes in wonder, in awe of what each had given to and taken from the other.

Soldiers stepped forward, knives drawn, but, once again, Tilglath stayed them with raise hand. “Bind and take this one to my horse,” he growled.

Aramu didn’t fall under the knife. When the raiding party went to their horses to race back into Assyria before their deadly attack on the royal house of Urartu just within the borders of Urartu was discovered, Aramu was traveling with them, bound hand and foot and draped belly down on Tilglath’s steed in front of the lord. Aramu was bruised and totally fucked, but he was still alive, taken, along with a great deal of finery and just one or two other eighteen-year-old youths cut in the woods outside the slaughter tent as booty. The other youths would be passed around by the campfires in the fortress of Kirrui for sport until they were all used up as the raiders relived the raid and extended the exercise of their shafts. Aramu, though, was destined for the personal sport of Lord Tilglath and of a prolonged ordeal by magnificent sword before being released to the heavens.

* * * *

Lord Tilglath didn’t save Aramu from death in the Urartu prince’s lion-hunt tent as an act of kindness or for romantic interests. It was for his sport, because the youth could sheath his cock without expiring and could pleasure him in the process. The Assyrian chieftain didn’t intend to let the Urartuan courtesan live, just be played with as he was terminally used. It was just the lord’s pleasure to draw out the terminal process.

Aramu was tough for such a delicate-looking youth, but he was being worn down. It was two weeks later, and the lord of Kirrui had summoned the youth for playtime in his chambers at the top of the fortress for the third time. Each time he had both beaten and brutally fucked the young man. He then had let one of his chamber servants, the twenty-two-year-old slave, Ruben, who had been captured in the Assyrian conquest of the Kingdom of Israel, take the youth and nurse him back to enough health to serve the lord’s sport again.

On this day Aramu had been tied, naked, to the whipping post on the stone terrace of the fortress battlements outside the lord’s bed chamber, within sight of the warriors encamped below, and Tilglath had whipped him until the Assyrian lord was gigantically erect, and then he’d had Aramu taken to the kneeling rail of the stocks and raised platform hovering over the warriors gathered below, with his wrists and head trapped in a wooden yoke to immobilize them, a cross bar to raise his belly to put his ass in the air, and ropes to bind his ankles in a spread-leg position. Then Tilglath had mounted the youth’s ass, penetrated him before the young man had been able to fully open to him, stretched Aramu’s channel to the limit, and fucked him hard and deep. The warriors below voiced a cheer with each long, deep stroke of the lord’s cock.

As Tilglath thrust up, the young man had disconcerted the lord by taking the assault in stride and calling out, “Blh, ma skht khdawnd bh fake!—Yes, fuck me hard, My Lord!”—loud enough for the warriors below to hear. What was most disconcerting was that, finding that the Lord Tilglath knew none of Aramu’s language, Aramu had tried several that he was at least familiar with and found that they could converse in Persian. It was in Persian that Aramu was declaring his own pleasure to.

Tilglath didn’t necessarily see the need to converse with a Urartu captive he intended to fuck to death, but it both put him off his stride and intrigued him that the youth knew so many languages and also claimed to enjoy the fuck. This curiosity is probably what had kept the young man alive for the previous two weeks. Tilglath was a brutal taker, but he had, on every occasion, including the one in the prince’s tent, not gone over the edge in his taking of this strange and delicious youth.

At the moment he had another worry on his hands, though, and thus he once again didn’t go over the brink in using the Urartuan courtesan, and the young man was still breathing and able to walk with only the assistance of Ruben when Tilglath had ejaculated and pulled out of him.

The bigger worry for Lord Tilglath now was why his fortress of Kirrui on the southern border of Urartu was being invested by an army from the kingdom to the north. It was inconvenient because those in the town at the base of hill the fortress was on top had withdrawn into the castle. Tilglath now had to see to their sustenance. Why, he wondered, had the Urartuans taken such umbrage to his little raid of the hunting party? His spies told him that it was because it had been a hunting party of the Urartuan prince and his people hadn’t taken kindly to the killing. His spies had not told him until now that the man they murdered on the bed in the tent had been a Urartuan prince.

As Aramu was being helped off the terrace, Tilglath, who had had little to say to his toy before now, asked Aramu, “Does Urartuan not have enough princes that one or two wouldn’t be missed?”

“Nh tnha ake shahzadh, perwrdguarm—No, only one prince, My Lord,” Aramu responded.

“How very strange,” Tilglath commented.

Aramu explained that the Urartuan king rarely lay with a woman, but, delicately, he made no comparison with Tilglath, who Aramu had seen lying with all manner of bed partners, although he enjoyed ruining youths just beyond the border of manhood the best. He added that there was a great love by the king for his young son, the prince.

“Enough to risk the ire of the Assyrian king by investing the fortress of one of his lords?”

“Blh, Khda—Yes, My Lord,” Aramu answered truthfully, not in defiance but with eyes downcast, which nonetheless earned him a backhand that sent him to the stones of the terrace again. Lord Tilglath stomped off into his bedchamber, leaving Ruben to help Aramu up and to the healing room, where the captive of Israel would do his best to heal and sooth the captive of Urartu in providing the love and hope that Lord Tilglath did not have to give.

Tilglath reacted the way he did because even he realized now that the Assyrian king was jealous of Tilglath’s ambition and irritated that he had taken the action he had without consulting the king and was not sending his army to help raise the siege.

* * * *

“You mustn’t provoke the lord like that,” Ruben said, when he’d lain Aramu on his belly on a table in the healing room and was gently rubbing healing unguent into the whip welts. Tilglath had not struck to cut the youth’s back, buttocks, and thighs deep. He’d only wanted to raise welts, which told Ruben that he was spinning the taking of the beautiful Urartu youth with the yielding and accommodating channel out for much longer than usual. Ruben wasn’t sure that it was better to be slowly beaten and fucked to death like this rather than finished swiftly and mercifully.

Ruben himself had been one Tilglath had toyed with during and upon returning from the conquest of the Kingdom of Israel. But Ruben had survived, primarily because fresh sport had caught the lord’s attention and been diverted from Ruben before he was completely used up—and because Tilglath had discovered that Ruben gave great body massages. Now he was past twenty-two and no longer of sexual interest to Tilglath. But Ruben was valuable to Tilglath as a healer, so Ruben remained alive. Ruben told himself that he must cast about for a substitute to introduce to the lord before the Urartu courtesan was totally used up, as he was quite fond of Aramu. Indeed, he had fallen into love with the young man. For truth, Ruben had already been looking for a substitute youth and was considering several.

The love had come no less because even while coping with the brutal sexual demands of the lord, Aramu was giving Ruben leave to claim more loving attention—full attention. Ruben had been drawn deep inside Aramu and given pleasures beyond all imagination. The courtesan had talents worthy of a prince. And Ruben knew he would be welcomed and accommodated as long as the young man was able to respond to him.

Aramu responded to Ruben on this day. While Ruben was applying salve and massaging Aramu’s tired muscles, which led to massaging the youth’s inner thighs and then, when Aramu had opened his legs to Ruben, massaging the lad’s cock and balls—and his passage—with greased fingers, Aramu gave himself to the older slave. He turned his face to the side of the table, reaching out with a hand and unknotting Ruben’s loincloth, causing it to fall to the floor. Taking the Israeli’s hardening cock in his hand and then Ruben’s cock in his mouth, the Urartuan captive showed his appreciation for the care Ruben took of him.

“Alla al asholachn. Hefa alyy. Tasha eithi va.—Come up on the table. Cover me. Make love to me,” Aramu whispered to Ruben in his own native language, which Aramu had known to some degree and was being taught more of by the older slave.

Ruben was amazed, not only that this mere serving youth of only eighteen years knew so many languages or even that he was such a quick language study, but mostly because the young man was willing and able to take another man’s cock so soon after being brutally ravished by the huge-cocked lord. Ruben had nothing like the lord did swinging between his thighs, but he was thick and long enough to make any young, slim-hipped youth moan.

And moan Aramu did when Ruben covered him from above as the young man lay on the table on his belly. Ruben kissed Aramu on the neck and then down across the welts on his shoulder blades. He rose off Aramu and continued kissing down his back and, as Aramu raised his buttocks to the attention, on his luscious, firm mounds. He buried his face between the youth’s cheeks and used his tongue to open and lubricate the young man’s passage again, and Aramu panted and moaned.

“Achshio, achshio. Kach eothi achshio—Now, now. Take me now,” Aramu murmured in Hebrew, and Ruben did so—not in anger to conquer, but slowly, deeply, to express his love and his need to fully possess the youth. Mounting Aramu’s raised buttocks, Ruben’s knees pressing in on the young man’s thighs to restrict the passage and to fill and stretch it to some semblance of what Tilglath’s shaft was able to do, Ruben grasped the youth’s hips and rode him and rode him in long, slow slides, both of them sighing and groaning and coming almost together.

“You must be more careful, little one,” Ruben whispered in Aramu’s ear as he lay stretched out on the youth’s back after having fucked him. “You provoke the lord in not holding back. He is in stress over this siege and he is quick to anger. Surely you know that he is prolonging your life for a bit because of the pleasure you give him, but that he is only doing it for a bit. There is no affection of mercy in the man.”

“Yes, I understand that,” Aramu answered. “I am resolved.”

“I am not. I have become too fond of you myself. I would not have this take its usual course. If only there were not the worry of the Urartuan army’s siege at his gates—”

“I could end that, I believe,” Aramu said. “And I have become fond of you too. If there were only a way we both could escape this place and Lord Tilglath with our lives.”

“You say you could lift the siege? I can hardly believe you could.”

“But, if I could,” Aramu asked, “would you trust me and leave with me—if you could?”

There was a pause. “It would be worth the risk, if there were a way. I can get us beyond the walls of the fortress, but what then?”

“Would you trust me on the ‘what then’? Would you go with me and be my master?”

“I would gladly go with you and be your slave. But what can be done?”

“How would you get us beyond the walls of the fortress?”

“The slaves have to venture out beyond the walls to gather wood. The Assyrians don’t want to take the risk of being found by the siege troops, so they send only captured slaves. The Lord Tilglath does not exempt me from this duty, although he gives me a horse and lets me take another slave to help carry the wood and to help in defense if we are caught.”

“And I could be that other slave—the gate guards would let us through on a horse?”

“Yes, the lord has perhaps made a mistake in keeping you out of close view. The warriors see him use you on the battlements, but that’s too far away from them to identify you. If we blacken your hair with ink, the guards at the gates will not know you as the lord’s current plaything. But we would need a distraction for the lord so that we can slip down to the stables without him missing us.”

“A distraction?”

“Yes. One named Hayk, I think. A comely lad of eighteen who has been brought into the kitchen for duty, but one of foul enough of a disposition that I, for one, would not miss his presence. I will have to plan.”

“But for now, my hand seems to have hardened something again,” Aramu murmured. “Perhaps you could—”

“Of course I can,” Ruben answered, and, taking up a position mounted on Aramu’s buttocks and sliding inside him again, Ruben could and did.

* * * *

Hayk, the new eighteen-year-old kitchen youth, who was destined not to ever return to the kitchen, was writhing at the whipping post, as Lord Tilglath whipped him and built to an enormous erection. The youth had been pointed out by Ruben, one of Tilglath’s favorite personal servants, who Tilglath had seized in Israel, had used to the limit, and then had been taken on for service outside his bed in his chamber. Ruben had pointed out likely youths in the past and he had selected well. The small, dark Hayk, brought to Kirrui from a raid on the Medes on the shores of the Caspian Sea, was delicious, Tilglath found. He was delicately built, though, with very slim hips and a small hole and a particularly challenging channel. He probably was for one-time use, Tilglath originally surmised. But the youth proved to be such entertainment in his whining and unheeded begging for mercy that Tilglath, as Ruben had hoped, decided to play with him more than once. So, he used him up slowly.

The youth was a screamer and one who writhed and sobbed, which Tilglath enjoyed. The Urartuan courtesan was stoic, and just when Tilglath thought he’d broken the young man, Aramu was prone to beg for more and to distract Tilglath from the torture by rippling his passage muscles over the lord’s buried cock in a tantalizing way. That was arousing, of course, but it was good to have the contrast of a youth who screamed in fear and gurgled in surrender—who died under the attention of the conquering cock repeatedly, but who could be revived a couple of times for repeated deaths.

The naked youth had been tied high on the post by the wrists with enough lead in the chain to move about, trying to escape the lash. Tilglath enjoyed the play, whipping the writhing and sobbing youth until he collapsed in exhaustion at the base of the pole. Then the lord of Kirrui had the youth taken from the pole and bound to the four-poster frame, his head facing up and his arms stretched to two opposing polls, his legs to two poles at the base, his body suspended in air between the four-point bindings. His ankles were bound higher on the poles than his wrists, which tipped him backward and left his buttocks raised to Tilglath’s close attention.

Crouching between the lad’s spread legs, the lord worked Hayk’s hole with his mouth and the youth’s cock with his hand until Hayk gave up his seed in an exclamation of involuntary passion. Then, with a laugh, Tilglath stood, moved in close between the young man’s thighs, grabbed his hips, and pulled him onto the shaft. It was hard going and Hayk screamed and screamed and screamed. His passage wasn’t open enough to take the enormous cock—it never would have been open enough as small as the youth was—but Tilglath bottomed in him and used him anyway, pulling the young man on and off his cock in ever increasing vigor until Hayk was reduced to whimpers—and, ultimately, unconsciousness.

Tilglath decided the youth was good sport and had him taken down before he was totally spent.

“Have Ruben fetched to give the captive healing,” Tilglath said. “He pleases me and I wish to toy with him some more.”

“Ruben is not here,” the chamberlain said. “He went out for wood this morning and did not return. We fear the Urartuans came upon him.”

“Mores the pity for him if they did,” Tilglath said, with slight regret for the service he would miss but none for the life of Ruben.

“But there is more about the Urartuans, Sire.”

“And what is that?”

“They appear to be gone—to have pulled away from the field.”

Tilglath went to the battlements and peered down into the meadow where the tents of the Urartuan forces had been. They, indeed, were gone. Did they tire of the game or were they struck with a sickness, the lord of Kirrui wondered. If the latter, those inside would have to be careful not to let the sickness inside the walls.

“They must have heard that the Assyrian king is sending his army to help lift the siege,” Tilglath said. The chamberlain didn’t contradict them, glad to let Tilglath pretend that he was in favor with his king, when they both knew he was not.

So pleased with Hayk was Tilglath over the next two weeks that he didn’t call for Aramu in that time. He quickly forgot the Israeli slave, Ruben, who had served him well for five years. When he did call for Aramu, Hayk having been used to the finish, no one could find the Urartuan slave. It was only when the accomplished courtesan was no longer available to Tilglath that the lord was able to fully appreciate the charms of the young man, but Aramu too was eventually dismissed from Tilglath’s mind.

When Ruben and Aramu had managed to clear the fortress gates on a horse, they had paused briefly at a stream for Aramu to wash the ink out of his hair.

“We don’t have time for that,” Ruben had said.

But Aramu answered, “We must make the time,” knowing that the warriors of Urartu needed to be able to recognize him. When they had set off again, Ruben had been thrown into immediate fear and consternation when Aramu took over the reins of the horse and rode straight for the Urartuan siege lines.

It was only when the sentries and then the Urartuan warriors streaming from the tents went to their knees and proclaimed the miracle of the return of their Prince Aramu of Urartu, inexplicably riding back to them himself from nearly having been killed with his lion-hunting party weeks earlier that Ruben realized that the courtesan Aramu was also prince of Urartu. It was Aramu’s privilege as the only prince of Urartu to be both, as he pleased. Keeping his head and using the talents of his body since having been captured by Tilglath had kept the Assyrians, who had misjudged who was prince and who was prince’s lover in that hunting tent, had been what saved Aramu. He indeed had the intelligence and cunning to be an excellent king of Urartu in his time. He also had the loyalty and love to have the Israeli consort, Ruben, at his side into old age.