Prophecy of Noto

Old King Severmist of Kerastis, Aram, and Akamantis stood on a rock outcropping on the sea side of the pass through the Golden Mountains down into the rich plains of Tharsis and shook his fists in frustration and despair. For the third time in as many days the frontal assault on the High Castle of King Kleemus, his cousin and erstwhile ally, had failed.

“How much longer will you hold against my might?” the old king roared out in his obsession. “Two long years. See this beard? It nigh reaches the ground and is as gray as the skies over your winter land.”

“Perhaps it is time to suggest just going around the castle and down into the valley, sire,” one of the king’s advisers said timidly, cowering at the king’s side. Unfortunately, he had come too close, though, and, with one swipe of his mail-encased hand, the king slapped him across the path, from whence he did not rise.

The king knew they could not continue this siege for two more years. His own health would not permit it. He would not live to enter Tharsis then, and all would be lost without him at the helm. Then his mission would be frustrated—to seal his legitimacy even after his death and put to rest for all time the ebbing rumor of the Oracle at Noto’s declaration of High Kingship over all of the lands in the region for the progeny of old King Cresum.

“The High Castle remains the key,” he growled. “It is the strongest point in Tharsis. If we take the castle, all of the rest in the valley will open its doors to us. If not, it is a fight on every doorstep and a lance at our backs, between us and the sea. We must have the castle. Must I do the thinking for us all? Is there no one here with the wit to follow on from me?”

“Sire,” a low, but assured voice spoke up from the shadows, “Might I—?”

“Why be you here?” the king cried out, almost in anguish. “You are nothing but the king’s dancer and the sheath for my sword. You belong in the train with the women and the other women in men’s clothes. How dare you attend and speak out. Better yet, get you to the High Castle. From what is reported to me, those within are sodomites all.”

“We have Raum in the castle.” Cleus gritted his teeth at the arrogance and convenient memory of Severmist. Where was he, Cleus thought, when I led the storming of Enna. He was sipping in his cups on his flagship off the beach at Cefalu, Cleus added in his mind, supplying his own answer. He was determined to continue in the forefront of this siege, though, and to show his metal to all those who would survive Severmist. He was posturing for the ages now, seeing the nearness of the end of his life in this world. With determination, Cleus continued with his counsel, “Perhaps we—”

“Be damned and be gone with you, pup. It is because of you that Raum is there. I’ll have no more words from you, boy.”

And then all was silent as the shadows of night descended on the pass from the sea through the Golden Mountains and down into Tharsis, and the lights in the High Castle yet burned, telling of comfort and safety.

And yet the king’s catamite was so bold to have not returned to the train as ordered. He knew the old king. The man he’d known as the Prince of Madness was mercurial and would call for him in the night, not remembering he had been dismissed, and roaring with anger if he were not there.

And sure enough, the many moldering war wounds and advance of age in King Severmist’s body were denying him sleep, and he called for his calamite. And the young man was there in an instant, naked and bearing the soothing oil with which he rubbed his king’s body before taking the old man’s phallus in his mouth and bringing him to life and then straddling him and riding his staff like a camel in the Aram desert until the old man dribbled his seed and drifted off to sleep with no more than a murmured, “Thank you, Cleus.” Seemingly nothing in the way of homage, but far more than Severmist accorded any other human being.

If the king were introspective enough and capable of telling a truth, he would acknowledge that he loved this catamite of his as he loved no other. And both the Watchman and Cleus had worked tirelessly to make this so—to make what happened with Severmist in the end that much more satisfying and fitting.

From the shadows, the Watchman kept vigil. He could end it now for the traitor to his own king with the sigh of a dirk. But this fulfillment of the prophecy of the oracle needed to be public, the ultimate disloyalty needed to be equal to that which Severmist had shown two kings of Aram. And, for the sake of the ancestors, the one who delivered Severmist into the hands of the gods of the netherworld should, the Watchman believed, be a progeny of Cresum. And that was not all. The prophecy was fading. It needed to be brought to life in a way that all could see and there would be no doubt, no hesitation for all to bow their knee.

As he had planned many years ago, the Watchman assumed that Toma would be the vehicle for this part of what needed to be.

At that moment, though, the Watchman felt the searing pain as of a lightning bolt coursing through his body from the top of his head through to the vitals of his torso, and he sensed more than heard the voices of the gods ripping into and through his body, telling him that the hand of neither Toma nor Cleus could dispatch Severmist, the last tyrant standing in the way of the unity and time of peace spoken of by the Oracle at Noto, if each was to fulfill his own destiny. To one it would provide something that was not his to have. And for the other, it was not a fitting start to the reign of a High King who was to bring unity and peace to the people. Thus, the gods seared into the Watchman’s consciousness, it was he himself who would have to take on one last task before he could rest. But all in the proper time.

Turning his eyes to the skies, the Watchman lifted his hands and cried out, “Let what is to be be.” And then he fell down in an exhausted stupor from which he did not awaken until those in attendance to him feared he was dead.

* * * *

The Grand Marshal of Tharsis, the man closest to King Kleemus and his principal military adviser, the man who had devised and carried out the successful defense of Tharsis against the invading barbarians from the sea in close consort with his king for the past two years, was galloping through the forest at the valley base of the High Castle with his small band of hunters, bringing home venison. The Grand Marshal disdained the forces of the Akamantises and went out on these forays on purpose to show those under siege in the High Castle how safe they were in his hands. Few of the besieger’s raiding parties ventured beyond the castle and down into the valley, and the Grand Marshal’s spies knew when they were afoot.

But on the road to the castle, the Grand Marshal pulled his horse up and his lip curled up. Here was something he had not been apprised of. Heads would roll for overlooking this. This was a king’s highway. What was such a vehicle doing here?

Off on the side of the trail he spied a gypsy wagon, turned on its side, its contents strewn out around it and obviously the subject of pillage.

The Grand Marshal trotted over to the wagon, its scarlet and yellow wheels still spinning, and reached down and jerked an arrow out of the undercarriage and lifted it up for all to see.

“Double-edged point,” said one minion.

“Red feather,” said another.

“An arrow of the Akamantis,” chimed in a third.

The Grand Marshal nodded his head in grim agreement. The forces of the Akamantis and of their new king, Severmist of Aram, were becoming bolder. They were foraying too far into the valley. And his spies had missed this intrusion.

All of the riders were startled by the sound of a groan—coming from under the overturned wagon. Quick as a dart, two of the minions dismounted and, with all of their strength, lifted the wagon while a third pulled out the body of a young man.

The rescuer turned him over on his back, and the Grand Marshal’s heart leaped in his chest and his cock stood at immediate attention.

The young man was beautifully built and provocatively displayed. He was a dusky beauty, and with an athlete’s build—but dressed as a dancer—one of the rare firmly muscled, well-worked dancer’s bodies, with every part perfectly formed. The Grand Marshall liked fucking men, not effeminate boys. And if the man were trained to the dance and the art of seduction, all the better. The youth had an achingly beautiful face, with full, sensuous lips and short, tightly curled hair most often seen in Nubians but quite fetching in a young man as handsome as this. He was nearly naked, stripped to the waist, gold belted, and wearing diaphanous, billowing pantaloons of some white material shot through with threads of gold. He had gold snake bracelets encircling his biceps and gold rings in his nipples, and, as could clearly be seen, a gold ring in the bulb of his cock as well.

“Does he live?” The Grand Marshal asked in a strained voice, and upon hearing an assent, he dismounted and moved in one graceful, fluid motion to where the young man lay.

“Lay him on the carriage body,” he commanded, and the young man was lifted and laid on his back on the edge of the carriage.

The Grand Marshal withdrew his dirk knife and gathered up the flimsy material of the young man’s pantaloons at the crotch in one fist and slit through the material with the knife he held in the other hand. Sheathing his knife, he spread the young man’s legs with hands fisting his ankles.

With the first strong thrust of his engorged cock in the young man’s channel, the youth’s obsidian-black eyes opened in shock and he cried out in the taking. “Oh, oh, Lord. Nay, please I beg you. I have never . . . Oh, no, I am undone.” His cries turned to moans and groans, as the Grand Marshal’s minions just stood about, looking at the ground—when they weren’t stealing furtive looks at the taking of the young man. No one raised a hand to stay the Grand Marshal. He was the second-most powerful man in the land, his blood and lust ran hot, and—save for deference to King Kleemus himself—he took his pleasures when and with whom he would.

The young dusky god’s cries of undoing changed in short order to cries for the taking. He arched his back and raised his pelvis and started meeting the Grand Marshal’s relentless thrustings with counterthrusts of his own. He cried out of the Grand Marshal’s artistry and mastery of the cocking and of how he’d never known it could be like this and how much he loved the movement of the Grand Marshal’s superior member deep inside him. He writhed and trembled and shuddered beneath the onslaught of the old warrior, and his hands reached out and caressed the thick matting of hair on the Grand Marshal’s chest and reached up and palmed the back of the old warrior’s neck and brought his face down to his and opened his sweet lips to the invasion of the Grand Marshal’s tongue.

Not long before the Grand Marshal experienced the longest and strongest ejaculation of his recent memory, the young god had given up his own seed with the rubbing of his gold-ringed cock head on the old man’s still-hard belly.

By the time the climax ensued, an objective observer would be hard pressed to suppose just who had fucked who—and the Grand Marshal was hopelessly smitten.

The young man, Cleus by name, and, by his own declaration, a wandering musician and dancer by trade, was taken up to the castle and installed in the Grand Marshal’s apartments, where the Grand Marshal became besotted with watching him dance and then fucking him day and night until it became clear to King Kleemus that he was not being as fully attended as he once had been by his principal adviser.

This did not necessarily set well with the king.

The king was not the only one who had taken notice of this change in circumstance. His young attendant and sometimes lover, Raum, known to Kleemus since the days of King Cresum’s court in Aram’s principle stronghold of Mascus, had also heard rumors of the young, enticing god living in the Grand Marshal’s apartments, a handsome, dusky young dancer with obsidian-black eyes; full, sensuous lips; and golden rings at the nipples and cock head. Raum knew of only one person in the world who met this description. He therefore availed himself of the first opportunity to seek the now infamous youth out. That opportunity came with the first hunting foray the Grand Marshal made—now reluctantly made—out of the castle since he had happened upon the young lover who had melted years off his felt age and made his penis a strong sword upon demand once more.

Cleus was gliding along the corridor in the Grand Marshal’s apartments that afternoon, when a strong hand reached out from behind a hanging tapestry and pulled the young man into the darkness behind. Raum devoured Cleus’s lips with fervent kisses. Cleus, in turn, climbed Raum’s pelvis with his thighs, and Raum fucked him deeply and long, pushing Cleus against the wall of the castle behind the shimmering tapestry and bouncing the shoulder blades of his prey mercilessly against the hard stone.

Thus were reunited the lovers—the son of King Cletar and the Nubian princess Nailah, but known only to King Severmist as his own catamite, and, Raum, who had been banished from Severmist’s court for being found lying with Cleus to the almost certain death of spying inside the besieged High Castle of the Tharsisians as long as his wits could keep him alive.

Afterward the two slithered off to Raum’s own humble room, and Raum gave Cleus a proper and prolonged fucking, Cleus on his back, legs akimbo and pelvis thrust up to received Raum’s strong cocking, being ridden hard and for a great distance in contrast to the old Grand Marshal’s almost pitiful pokings, and Raum stroking Cleus to multiple comings with thumb rubbing piss slit through the center of the golden cock ring.

“What are you doing here?” Raum asked through heavy breathing after they had spent themselves and were embracing, each part of them held as closely together as possible. “It would be the death of you if you were discovered. Did the Grand Marshal capture you without realizing who he had?”

“Nay, the Grand Marshal captured me because I meant him to—because the Watchman willed him to,” Cleus answered. And then he laughed. He became immediately more serious, though. “We are getting nowhere with this siege, and the time of King Severmist’s passing is close at hand. The Watchman declares it is time to put the kingdoms in the hands of the rightful heir, and I mean to aid that by delivering Tharsis into the hands of a new High King at long last.”

“A heavy task,” Raum whispered, his voice displaying his fear for his young lover. “You have seen how it is with the Tharsisians. How strong Tharsis is.”

“But not as strong as it was before I came,” Cleus said.

“What do you mean? What are you planning? What can I do to help?”

“Many questions, and I love you all the more, Raum, master of my seed, for your last question. What we must do is divide King Kleemus and the Grand Marshal. The strength of Tharsis has been their strong union. I have already started weakening that. And then I must be put within striking distance of the king at the right moment. There are, indeed, actions you can take to serve those ends.”

“Command my hand, my liege,” Raum said.

“Fuck my hole; mingle your seed with mine,” Cleus countered, “that is how you can declare your loyalty.” And then both young men laughed, as Raum proceeded to do just that.

* * * *

From that point began the campaign of Cleus and Raum to divide the Tharsisians’ strength.

The king was already irritated at the Grand Marshal’s unaccustomed absences, and while Cleus made sure that the Grand Marshal was abed fucking him as much of the time as possible, Raum was working on the king, asking him if he knew of the new, young, mesmerizing dancer the Grand Marshal had acquired. He kept asking the king if the Grand Marshal had ever offered to share the delights of watching Cleus perform.

The king had not been so invited. Indeed, before Raum started mentioning the possibility, he’d never thought of this being a slight at all. But the king was already just a bit unhappy with the Grand Marshal, and now he wanted to assert his kingship. His rights including bedding anyone he pleased as well, which, no doubt, was why the Grand Marshall hadn’t invited him to watch Cleus dance.

He commanded the Grand Marshal to bring the dancer Cleus before him in a private audience of just the three of them. And the Grand Marshal, seeing that he had no choice or that there was anything amiss afoot, quickly brought the young Cleus, perfumed and fluffed up and sensuously costumed, forth to the king’s private chambers.

Cleus danced a dance of passion and provocative display for the king, a dance that wound up with Cleus only in a golden belt, his gold snake bicep bracelets, his nipple and cock rings, and a warm smile on his face and a fluttering of his long eyelashes over obsidian-black eyes, his face turned toward the king, but his channel lowered into the lap of the overcome-with-lust Grand Marshal.

Three days later, at the king’s strong suggestion, the Grand Marshal ventured out on another one of his hunting trips into the forests on the valley side of the High Castle. When he returned, however, he found the gates of the castle closed to him and a large force of the Akamantis coming over the hill.

The king was not seen out of his apartments for two weeks after that, busy as he was in discovering the charms of his new lover, the dancer Cleus.

Toward the end of that period, the king found Cleus lying on his couch, naked and despondent one afternoon. The king dropped his own robes and came in beside Cleus and lifted his young lover’s leg and thrust a cock that hadn’t been this hard for anyone else in years into the young god’s passage. Although Cleus returned his kisses and murmured his love and devotion and praised the masterful cocking of the king, the king sensed a continued despondency.

“What is wrong, my fine young lover? I sense you are sad.”

“It is only thinking of the future, sire. I want nothing more than for this to go on forever—your magnificent strong cock showing me new avenues to paradise daily. But where is it going? What is to become of us? The barbarians are at the gate. I fear for our lives. I could not bear our lives to change from what we have become.”

“Never fear, my love,” the king said. “I have a secret.”

“A secret?” Cleus asked, his eyes full of innocence. He turned his face to the king’s and nibbled on his ear, while his hand went to the king’s rouged nipples.

“Yes, a secret. A secret passageway. We can escape into the mountains whenever we need to. And I have another, hidden castle in the mountains, not far from here, and stronger than this one. We are safe. We will always be safe.”

“A secret passageway.” Cleus repeated.

“Yes, I will show it to you. A passageway to a water gate coming out in a cave by a mountain stream.”

And, after Cleus had fucked the king to heaven once more, the king, indeed, showed Cleus the passageway to safety. And Cleus showed Raum the passageway that could be used in either direction. Then Raum, on a clear night within the week, when he was standing duty on the castle walls at the sea side, shot off the fire arrow with message attached that was a prearranged one-way communications means between the forces of King Severmist and their spy within the High Castle.

And on the night that the army of King Severmist crept into the cave beside the mountain stream and under the castle walls and into the very center of the castle keep, Cleus was abed with the king of the Tharsisians.

Cleus was on his back with King Kleemus knelt between his legs, sheathing his sword inside Cleus’s channel. And at the first hint of the sounds Cleus was waiting to hear, he unsheathed his own dirk knife from under one of the pillows and sheathed it again up through the underbelly of the king of the Tharsisians.

“Thus it is for traitors, a traitor to his own cousin, King Cresum,” Cleus murmured lovingly in Kleemus’s ear as Kleemus grunted his last breaths. “And this is for my father, King Cletar,” Cleus continued, his voice raised in triumph, as he pulled the knife out and plunged it in yet again.

He was standing, in robes of gold, beside the bed of the dead king, taking on a kingly stance as the forces of the Aram and Akamantis—his forces—rushed in the room to celebrate Prince Cleus’s victory over the Tharsisians, undeniably won by wit and cleverness where brute force could not prevail.

* * * *

Prophecy Fulfilled

“You are pensive and sad of countenance, Cleus, when I would think you would be leaping with joy—on top of the world.”

“Perhaps it is just the shock of your dispatching King Severmist at nearly the same instant that I was the undoing of King Kleemus. You surprise me, Watchman. I have observed you often working through other men, but hardly ever by your own hand.”

“Oh, the Lords of Sorso and Jerzu were ever so helpful,” the Watchman responded. “They have ever borne a grudge against Severmist for using—and then losing—Toma. I do believe each one of them was deeply in love with his talented channel. And then, when Severmist moved against his own cousin, the two lords believed one or both of them would be next. So, they struck first—and the death that came to Severmist was an ignominious one, one that gave him no majesty in the eyes of the people whatsoever.”

“And the lords? Where are they now?”

“Dispatched as well. It was rather messy, I’m afraid. They did not die well.”

None of this helped with the pensiveness in the dusky young prince that the Watchman had discerned.

He had waited to approach Cleus in the king’s chamber of the Enna palace until Raum had finished with him and had left the chamber.

The lovemaking between the two had moved the Watchman and made him mourn what he knew and accepted was the ending of any relationship he himself might have with Toma. Cleus was stretched, half on his side, half on his belly on the king’s bier in the center of the chamber and Raum was kneeling over him, hands kneading the dusky beauty’s shoulders, and cock buried deep in Cleus’s channel. Cleus was moaning his pleasure and acceptance and moving his hips in rhythm with the pumping of Raum’s well-trained staff. The taking was languid, as if they had forever. As if that was a choice Cleus could make. As the taking continued, they both become more vocal in their moans, and Raum lowered his body on Cleus’s, stretching out along the line of his body and moving him onto his belly. Raum was encasing him from above, touching him at every point he possibly could with his own body. His arms were stretched along Cleus’s, and the Watchman would have thought they had drifted off into sleep, were motionless, except for the entwining movement of their fingers merged together, the wave-like motion of Raum’s hips and Cleus’s pelvis, and the curling and uncurling of Cleus’s long, sensuous toes to the rhythm of the fuck.

At length both gave a low cry and the intensity of the movement at their loins quickened—but only momentarily, as they both gave out a long, low sigh and relaxed their bodies in one entwined whole. They slept then, but only briefly. Raum knew his position. His life, his function at court, had not changed. To Cleus’s low, huskily voiced objections, Raum raised himself from the platform and padded out of the chamber. Now was not the time for the court to have to officially acknowledge Raum’s function in Cleus’s life.

“I saw you with Raum, just now,” the Watchman said when Cleus had dozed briefly and returned groggily to life. “Is that what has made you sad?”

“You see everything,” Cleus said. And then he gave a quiet laugh, but it was not a happy laugh.

“I have seen you raised from the womb to manhood,” the Watchman said. “Our family was small, there all those years on the beach at Gela. It would have been hard to miss what developed between you and Raum. Is that what is troubling you?”

“Yes,” Cleus answered in almost inaudible tones and after a long pause.

“You are thinking on Cletar, your royal family, and how all of this complexity and treachery began, are you not? How he was. That he would not lay with a woman, would not take up his responsibility to the succession of the High Kingship.”

“Yes.”

“And you do not want to do to the nation what your father did.”

“No.”

“Raum means so much to you that you give this relationship such high regard?”

“Yes. But I am prepared. As is Raum. If I am to be High King, I will take the responsibility fully. I will be a Cresum, not a Cletar.”

“But you would rather just be the commander of the kingdom’s forces, would you not, and partner solely with Raum?”

“You know everything. Yes, yes, of course I would.”

“The oracle knew it would be so. The oracle knew and had knowledge of and faith in the future that I did not. And I believe it is the oracle, the Oracle at Noto, working for the gods, that has given you that trait of Cletar. It is nothing to be ashamed of, my son. You have done all that could be asked of you. What you have with Raum is something beautiful, not something you need—or should have to—deny.”

Cleus stood there, naked, both in body and soul, before his mentor and protector, the Watchman. There was nothing he could say. In days of joy, he was consumed by sadness and the heavy burden that he saw as his.

“Look up, Cleus,” the Watchman said in a commanding, yet gentle tone. “What do you see?”

Cleus looked up. What he saw surprised and perplexed him. But he could not discern what the Watchman was trying to tell him, what was happening here.

“Hello, brother,” a voice emerged from the shadows. The sound was followed by the appearance of a small, but well-formed Nubian.

“Toma. Is it you? Have you abandoned your life and family in Favara to return to us at court to take up duties here? If so, you are happily welcome. I seem to be bereft of advisers, the principle ones having recently been dispatched for treachery.”

“No, I’ve brought my wife and son with me,” Toma answered simply. “The Watchman called and I answered.”

“The Watchman called you to court?” Cleus asked, still confused.

“The misunderstanding is mine,” the Watchman interjected. “The oracle and the gods knew what they were doing. But it was a mistake I’m glad I made—and I believe the gods would not have permitted it if it were not a good thing for the kingdoms.”

“A mistake?” Cleus was still very much in the dark.

“You are not to be High King, Cleus,” the Watchman said. “The Oracle never meant that you were to be. Your making was by my making—because I misunderstood; I did not have enough faith in the oracle. But you can be the key support to the High King—and you can still have what you desire. You can still command the forces of the kingdoms and partner exclusively with Raum.”

“Not the High King?”

“No. The High King for a unified world is to be a king of peace and wisdom in ruling, not a mighty military commander. Does that trouble you much? I would be very wrong if I thought that it did.”

“No, no, it doesn’t trouble me, Watchman. It would lift a heavy burden from me. I would be overjoyed. But how . . . who . . . ?”

“I’m surprised I didn’t see it. If he had been like other men of Aram in appearance, I’m sure I would have. The oracle’s prophecy was that the direct line of King Cresum would lead to the High King who would unify the kingdoms of the region. My mistake was in not realizing that this man already existed before I schemed to coax a male heir from the loins of King Cletar. When I knew the truth, it was too late. You were already among us and loved by us all. My further mistake was not seeing that unity is in the ruling, the governing, not the military conquest. You can be a great soldier, a commander, but Toma has it in him to be a wise and fair ruler.

“The direct line from Cresum led through his oldest surviving son. The Nubian princess Nailah need not have lain with Cletar. She had already borne a son directly from Cresum. The moment Cletar was slain, Toma became that eldest surviving son. Toma is the gods-anointed High King of the lands of Aram, Akamantis, Tharsis, and the Kerastis. And he can and has begotten sons.”

Toma flinched and turned to the Watchman.

“Yes, Toma. Your Maia is bearing another son. What I can and do declare here and now is that the Prophecy of Noto has been fulfilled. King Toma is the High King. Long may his lineage reign in peace and strength—protected by the military prowess and fealty of his brother, Cleus.

-Fini-