Slaved Prince

I had no knowledge of or complicity in the events that led to my fleeing Tyre, but then no possible claimant to the throne of Phoenicia had innocence to excuse them, especially when my suspicion was that my claim was bogus. By my very officially represented existence, I was a threat to my father, King Hanno, and most certainly to his older sons. As soon as he realized that, my fate was sealed—or at least would have been if my mother, Eleni, and the king’s counselor, Babak, had not taken matters into their own hands. Of course, taking matters into their own hands had been what had drawn the king’s attention and ire in the first place. They apparently viewed me as a possible successor to the king and had dropped that possibility in the court whisperings. They did this despite my mother changing, depending on the direction of the wind, the question of whether the king or the deceased claimant to the throne of now eradicated prominent family was my father. Even it if were the latter, I would be considered a prince in waiting, depending on the fates of those in line before me.

I doubt that King Hanno even knew I existed until two of his other, acknowledged sons, by Phoenician wives, Philosir and Abosir, both being well past twenty, not only were becoming anxious and began measuring his throne for fit but the two primary contenders were also starting to point out the subversive activities of the other to the king. They also were looking around for the possibility of paring down the list of contenders. The king must then have had a list made and been informed that a Greek wife who once had intrigued him and had since relocated to another palace up the Mediterranean coast from Tyre had given birth to and was raising a son. Not only did he, some were claiming, have a mixed-origin son, but that son, having reached his majority, was being trained as a prince. Prince Philosir, for one, was making noises that that were several too many princes, and some of the other princes were mysteriously going to their greater reward, so Eleni, the Greek wife, wisely decided that it may be time for me, Hyllos, to visit her homeland, Greece.

This came to pass, but not exactly in the way Eleni—and her confederate in the king’s palace and councils, Babak—planned.

I had a tutor as I was growing up, a magnificent soldier named Yaalon, who was my devoted companion and, as I came of age and into a pleasing form myself, increasingly more than a companion. Part of the training of a prince was in agility and strength, both served by the sport of wrestling. Wrestling in the Greek cultural world, and the court of the Phoenicians had incorporated the basics of Greek culture, was practiced in the nude. Also of the Greek culture was the institution of mentors being sexually dominant over their students. Throughout my world there was little distinction on who you could love or lie with, certainly not one based on gender. Sexual satisfaction and breeding were not always seen as inseparable.

I was a prince, even if in neglect, and Yaalon was a common soldier, so there was a taboo to us taking on the traditional Greek mentor-student roles, but as Yaalon and I progressed in our use of wrestling in exercise and building of bodily grace and strength, it became increasingly evident that we desired each other and that I was fully capable of desiring another man.

It was only a matter of time that, social class distinctions notwithstanding, I would be initiated into sex and receive my training in the techniques and pleasures of that art at the hands of Yaalon. We were of a culture where a man could go with other men as well as with women and male-to-male coupling was common, especially in the Phoenician court. When Yaalon was told to be my companion on the sea journey to Greece to my mother’s people near Olympia in the Greek city state of Elias on the Peloponnese peninsula, we both assumed we would become lovers during the journey. I am sure that my mother assumed this as well, even if she couldn’t publicly countenance it, or she would not have turned me over to Yaalon as my guide. She surely had seen the two of us growing together. We had been kissing and touching for some time, and Yaalon, at least, was a little difficult to overlook as being in magnificent erection as we wrestled in the palace courtyard. That Yaalon was one of my mother’s lovers was seen as no impediment to Yaalon being my lover as well.

My mother was Greek and the Greek way was also the style at the Phoenician court. Sometimes a young nobleman coming into his majority in Phoenicia was initiated and taught the ways of sex by women of the harem and sometimes by their male tutors—and sometimes by both simultaneously. My mother knew it was my time. If I hadn’t been a prince, I would have been initiated far earlier than this.

Thus, Yaalon and I looked forward to our sea voyage from the Phoenician coast to Greece as a time for the beginning of intimacy. The first three days on the sea, however, the sea was so angry that we both, not being sailors, spent our time hanging over the rails and heaving into the sea. Neither of us was able to think of coupling at all. And the relentlessness of the stormy sea saw to it that Yaalon and I never fully coupled—but I was to lose my virginity to men soon enough anyway.

* * * *

“And no matter what the young prince tried to think about, he could only think of the golden crown secured deep in the cavern of the Minotaur, the half man, half bull, who used and devoured any young man who tried to pass him to get at the treasure because he wanted to be king. And there came the day that the prince himself could hold off no longer and went in a quest to seize the crown, for he wanted to be king.”

The storm had abated a bit and Yaalon and I were huddled together at the bow of the ship en route to Greece from Athens. Our time to initiate total intimacy had come. Yaalon wove me a tale of royal succession machinations in this quadrant of the Mediterranean Sea, of the great Minotaur monster who inhabited a deep cavern on a nearby island and ravished and destroyed young princes from the surrounding territories seeking their kingships. Yaalon, a bull of a man, was about to initiate me and was spinning this story to calm and distract me as his gigantic member came closer and closer to my virginal passage.

“The mists of the cavern began working their spell on the young prince when first he entered the cave and soon he was lost in the labyrinth of passages, stumbling around as if sluggish and drunk, losing his usual agility. The mists were working their magic on him. He heard the deep snuffling of the man-bull creature and smelled its musky, arousing, enticing scent before the monster itself came into view, sitting upon its throne, surrounded by the bones and skulls of those princes who had gone before this prince.”

I was naked and Yaalon had pulled me into his lap, crosswise, his left arm embracing my back, his left hand suspended over my left breast, the fingers of that hand touching and stroking my nipple. My right leg was thrown across his thighs, my left leg was dangling between his slightly spread thighs. His right hand was encasing and stroking my cock. His enormous erection pushed up under my balls. It was moving back and forth, now the top of the hard shaft stroking over my puckered hole, now the bulb teasing the hole, mere moments from starting to penetrate and enter me. I was panting and moaning low in anticipation of what was to come, concentrating on Yaalon’s telling of the tale, but yearning for the moment the bulb of his staff lodged inside my entrance and the shaft started working its way up inside me.

“The Minotaur was a being of monstrous proportions. The head was that of a bull, the horns curving up from the sides of its head into cruel sharp points. The torso was that of a man, but with monstrously bulging muscles. The chest was the color of a man, but at the edges it tapered off to a blue-gray matting of downy hair. The arms were those of a man, but the legs were those of a blue-gray haired bull, ending in cloven hooves. The thighs were turned out, with the monster’s groin thrust forward. The cock was that of a magnificent bull in heat. The Minotaur, sensing the approach of a human sacrifice, was in full, thick and long, pulsating erection.

“The prince’s attention was caught by the glitter of the mound of golden coins behind the throne of the Minotaur, a king’s crown perched on top. His mistake was not in correctly gauging the reach and agility of the Minotaur, who lashed out, seized the young man, and pulled the prince into his body. He held the young man there, crosswise on his lap, holding him fast with his left arm wrapped around the prince’s back, his left hand pressing on the young man’s left breast. Drugged to near immobility by the poison of the mists, the prince’s right leg was thrown over the Minotaur’s lap and his left leg dangling between the monster’s thighs. The Minotaur’s erection pushed out from underneath the prince’s balls as the monster seized the young man’s cock with his right hand and quickly stroked the prince to a release of his virginal juices.”

I cried out my release as Yaalon’s hand brought me to climax. We had been here before, but no further. We both knew we would go further now—all the way to paradise. We kissed passionately, and he grasped and lifted my hips, setting my entrance on the point of his thick erection, the blub of the shift pushing into my anus.

“The Minotaur lifted the prince’s hips, brought his massive shaft into position, and the young man screamed out in surprise, pain, and passion, as the Minotaur pulled his anus down hard on the shaft, which buried itself up in the soft, previously unknown-by-man passage. The prince’s eyes rolled up in his head and he collapsed into a faint as the Minotaur raised him and slammed him down on the penetrating monster shaft, raised him and slammed him down, going deeper, stretching the virginal passage to near the limit of endurance, raised him and . . .”

I cried out as Yaalon’s cock penetrated me beyond the rim of his cock head as he pulled me down on the shaft. He lifted me off the cock in preparation for pulling me down hard on the full length of him, and . . .

The storm was upon us again with a fury. In our preparation for my initiation, we had not been aware that the storm was gathering again and bearing down on us. Just when Yaalon was at the point of consummating the deflowering of me, we were hit with a giant wave that pushed me hard again the rail of the ship and sent Yaalon over the side to be swept away in the current.

Chaos took command of the vessel and the sailors were struggling here and there as the waves and wind allowed them. Some, like Yaalon, were swept overboard in the initial attack from the sea. The captain seized me and tied me to the mast to keep me from going overboard as well. He well knew I was his most important cargo. But in the process of securing me, the captain himself was swept overboard by a wave.

I saw no other human aboard as the ship continued to be tossed about by the fury of the storm until, as I blacked out, I saw the rocks and foaming surf of a ragged shoreline looming ahead and sucking the ship into a cauldron of splintering destruction.

* * * *

I came to on a sandy beach amid rock outcroppings that went down and into the water, which was calm as glass now. Remnants of the ship were hung up on the rocks a short distance off shore. I was tangled up in the roping and netting of the ship’s mast, and it would be some time, if ever, before I would be able to untangle myself. The sky was cloudless, the sun overhead relentless. I was naked, as I had been on the brink of being deflowered by Yaalon. Regret sliced through me like a knife at the thought of beautiful Yaalon, there in one moment, magnificent in erection, and gone the next.

Something blotted out the sun and, focusing, I saw that it was a warrior—a Greek soldier in short skirt, helmet and shield, sandals with lacings up to his knees, and a sheathed dagger lashed to his calf. And not just one soldier, although the one between me and the sun was the largest and most muscular. I looked around. There were six of them in all standing over me. Had I gone to the afterlife, I wondered. And how did I know they were Greeks? I realized I’d instantly recognized them because of their distinctive helmets, my mother having shown me one and explained the difference between a Greek war helmet and a Phoenician one, and because beyond them I spied a Greek naval vessel, a small one, pulled up onto the sand away from the rocks. My mother had spent a lifetime showing me the differences between Greece and Phoenicia.

“What do you think, Spiro?” a soldier said to the oldest, more battle seasoned appearing of the six. And that confirmed their origin. They spoke Greek.

“I think we sup first, then we sport, Giorgos,” their apparent captain replied. They all laughed.

That was when I realized they must have been lost in the storm too but had ridden the tempest better than my vessel had and had come onto shore to forage—unless we were in Greece, and I did not think I’d been on the sea long enough to be at my destination yet.

The leader, the one called Spiro, was swinging a wine flagon. One of the others had a loaf of bread he was taking chunks off of to pass around. Another held the roasted leg of some animal bigger than a chicken but smaller than a sheep in his hand. It wasn’t just food they had foraged either, I could now see. Protruding from the edge of a sand dune nearby were the bare, slender legs of what appeared to be a woman on her back. The legs were spread open, but they didn’t move.

“Is it a man or a woman?” asked one of the soldiers. They were all peering down at me, and I realized they were talking about me rather than the woman lying still on the sand.

“Does it matter?” said another, and again they all laughed.

“Could be either from the face—a handsome young devil,” Spiro answered. “But from what dangles between his legs, I’d say a man.”

“And does this man—surely not much more than a boy—have a hole too?” the one who spoke was the one who had asked if it mattered what gender I was.

“Let us see,” Spiro said, and a couple of the soldiers helped him turn the mast so that I went over on my belly. I cried out, “Please, no!” and then whimpered a repeated, “Please, no,” as the captain penetrated me with a thick finger. “He’ll be good sport,” Spiro said. “He’s tight. But he’s for later.” Then he said, “And he speaks. And in Greek. Where are you from and where are you bound for, boy?”

“I came from the sea, bound for Greece—Olympia, archontas—master,” I answered as calmly as I could, giving him a high honorific to please him. “Please, archontas, unbind me. I am Greek, like you.”

“You are not Greek like me,” Spiro said. “You are something else as well. But you do speak well-born Greek. And you seem to be the only survivor of your vessel. Are there others of your ship about?”

“No, archontas, just me—I think. We were set off course in the storm. I think all of the others were washed overboard. The ship’s captain tied me to the mast so I would not be.”

“So, you were the captain’s catamite, were you?”

“No, archontas, just a passenger.”

“Just a passenger important enough to try to save above all others? And now shipwrecked on a Cyprus beach where we too were diverted from our fleet. What do you know of Phoenicia? That is where we’re headed. To raid and pillage and make our power known.”

I didn’t respond to that beyond a weak, “I know nothing of these matters, archontas.” Phoenicia and Greece were not allies at the moment. And I wasn’t about to reveal that I was of royal Phoenician birth. It wasn’t safe to reveal that in the Phoenician court. It was less so to rough Greek soldiers.

“Well, you just stay tight here for a bit,” Spiro said to laughter from the others, “we’ll come back for you and give you some attention.”

Then they went off foraging. The one who had been called Giorgos stayed behind to make a fire in a pit he dug on the beach. He came to me a couple of times to ask if I was in pain or needed my bonds relieved, not that he could free me. But he made me a bit more comfortable. While he did, his hands fondled me and he became erect. I did, as well. He did nothing to me then, but he did ask, “Are you sure you were not the ship captain’s catamite?”

“No, archontas,” I answered. “I am not known by man.”

“As yet unknown by man? And you purport to be Greek and are a comely young man of fine body? How can that be? You are how old?”

“Eighteen years, archontas.”

“Well, I will tell Spiro so—that you are yet unused—but I fear that will make the men more excited rather than more prone to be less rough with you. Would that I were first, though.” He ran his hands over my body and encased my cock with one. I engorged further for him, aching for my first release, seeing that he was a beautiful, well-muscled man, and needing for him to view me favorably. He leaned down to me and we kissed. I yielded to him.

“You rise for me. When the time comes will you yield to me fully?” he asked.

Even then, I realized that survival lay in pleasing these men. “Yes, I will yield to you,” I whispered.

My gaze went over to the parted legs extending from the sand dune over toward where they had pulled their vessel up. The legs had not moved.

He penetrated me with a finger and moved it inside me. I gave a low moan and rolled my pelvis up to give him deeper purchase inside me, which he took advantage of. “You are ripe for it, aren’t you?” he said.

I didn’t have a chance to respond as we heard the other Greek soldiers regathering before we saw them, so Giorgos withdrew his finger and was back tending the fire when they arrived. They had brought food and drink—for them, of course, not me, although when they were done eating but not drinking, Giorgos brought the leavings of a roasted haunch of something, bread, and a cup of wine over to me, releasing me from the roping long enough for me to sit up and eat it.

“Here, you will need strength,” he whispered, running his hand through the hair of my bush and touching my cock. He gave a little laugh as my shaft responded to the touch.

Spiro called over from the fire, “Romancing our little chicken, are you, Giorgos? You know that I won’t let you be first—especially having told me that he is unused.” He got up and sauntered over to the tangled mast. I was nearly finished eating and drinking what Giorgos brought and turned my attention to Spiro, working at untangling me.

If ever I was going to get out of this dire situation, it was going to be before it began, when the soldiers were off guard. When I thought I was free, I tossed what was left in my wine cup in Spiro’s face, jumped up, and made a run for it.

I wasn’t entirely free, however. My ankle still was entangled in the rope. I made it some distance away, though, with hope of escaping, when Spiro laughed, jerked on the rope, and brought me to ground, where I landed, the wind knocked out of me, onto my back. From there, I watched the muscular and battle-scared Greek soldier, magnificent of body, remove his skirt and loin cloth as he advanced on me. He was in enormous erection, ready for what he then did. I tried to rise and he backhanded me across the face in one direction and caught me with a slap in the other direction before I fell back, dazed and in shock. He was on top of me before I could rise.

I cannot lie. I indeed was ripe for it, and although I struggled, below a thin surface of resistance, I wanted what he did, and he was a magnificent man to be the one doing it. In fifteen painful minutes I no longer was a virgin to anal penetration by a man. Spiro turned me, belly down, and, at least at first, crouching on my knees and elbows as, without preparation or preliminaries, he worked at stuffing his thick, hard cock inside me and, having accomplished that, swiftly fucked me to his ejaculation, his cock bruising and stretching at my insides, and after the initial pain, setting me on fire with the need for his filling thrusts.

As he fucked me, the other soldiers gathered about us, laughed and clapped, made suggestions and lewd comments, and took their own shafts in their hands.

When Spiros was done with me, he turned me over to the others.

All of the breedings were rough, being the first I had experienced, and most of them being brutal, but after the taking by the Greek solider captain, Spiro, who had all of the attributes of the Minotaur in the tale Yaalon had been spinning to prepare me for deflowering when he was washed overboard, the rest were manageable. Spiro had both the manners and shaft of a bull. He didn’t just take what he wanted from me with an extraordinarily thick, long, and vigorous cock, but he tore his pleasure out of me with cruelty as well. Still, despite being frightened for my life and being brutalized, I was happy to have been with a man at last and there were times in my later life that I looked back on that first fuck as the most arousing, satiating I’d ever had.

After the one named Spiro had deflowered and breeded me, the others took me in positions they preferred by the light of the fire as day turned to evening and then to night. I certainly had to admit that Spiro opened me up to be able to take the following five, none of whom had the shaft and vigor that Spiro had. After him, I just lay there, moaning softly, open, and vulnerable, a gaping sheath to assuage the lust of the other men.

Giorgos was last. I might have thought he would spare me for that night at least, as he had been kind to me earlier. But he fucked me as well; he wanted me no less than any of the others. He was more gentle in the taking and spent more time at it than the rest, trying to give me some pleasure, if that had been possible when my first experience with a man was with six rough Greek soldiers in succession. But he made some effort at mutual pleasure. With him, there was kissing and whispering words of encouragement and praise in my ear.

I was bound again with the roping from the mast and laid near that as the others settled for the night. Giorgos visited me in the night and took me again, but he was even more loving at it than he had been the first time. I had some hope of an ally in this perilous situation.

I woke in the morning, my eyes spying the legs in the dune, which still had not moved, and would not move, I realized, to being unbound and passed around to the Greek soldiers again. This time Giorgos did not take his share—he had taken an extra share during the night, and I think some sense of remorse was setting in with him. I more than once saw a look of concern on his face as one of his fellow soldiers was taking his exercise on top of me.

The last was Spiro, as the rest were preparing to push their vessel back out into the sea. This was a crucial point and I despaired of surviving this moment, especially as, after fucking me, Spiro took a knife out of a sheath lashed to one of us calves. Giorgos had held back from the others but he seemed too timid to attempt to protect me, no matter what his personal feelings might be.

I closed my eyes, anticipating never opening them again, when I heard Giorgos’s voice. He was nervous, but the voice was strong and assured. “Do we want to do that, Spiro? He is handsome and well formed, and he speaks impeccable Greek. We might as well return to Athens. The raid on Tyre must be over now or the rest of the fleet has had the same trouble in the storm as we have and the raid has been called off. In any case, there will be no spoils from Phoenicia for us on this voyage. Think of how much this man would go for as a slave in Athens. We could take him back to Athens with us, put him on the slave block, and share out the sale of him between us.”

Spiro was swayed by this argument, adding how much more I would be worth as somewhat fresh but well trained to the needs and pleasures of men when I was presented on the Athens’ slave block.

All the way back to Athens the six men took turns training me in taking what men enjoyed giving with their cocks, and, indeed, there was little I didn’t know about what a man liked to do to another man, including taking two men’s cocks at the same time and taking a man’s fist, by the time we reached Piraeus, the port of Athens.

Did I lie down and take it? Yes, I did. It was my gateway to survival and, besides, I was increasingly content with being submissive to vigorous muscular men.

Throughout that time, I favored Giorgos and gave him particularly good service because, although I was in dire straits—balanced by not at all rejecting some submissive play with men—I was not lying on my back on the sand of a Cypriot beach, legs splayed and motionless for all time, staring blankly at the sky. The story of my life didn’t end on a Cypriot beach.

* * * *

I believe I must have been some sort of bargain sale at the Athens’ slave auction if only because the Greek philosopher Cleon bought me. He came from a prominent family in Athens, but he, like most of the philosophers, of whom most in Athens said there were far too many, was known to be stingy. He barely had enough income to feed himself let alone servants, but, of course, the Athens’ patricians couldn’t do without their slaves. I was somewhat out of any convenient class of male slave, sold in the catamite and sodomite category, meant for those who served both at and on couch equally. But in Athens, I was really too old to be sold this way. I really should have been sold in the soldier’s attendant category, I think, where I still would be sodomized, but it was probably my small size and very young appearance that placed me in a category meant for boys rather than young men having just reached their majority.

But Cleon was looking for someone outside of category, so I was meant to go with him, I suppose. He normally would buy a young boy, as most philosophers would, the older the philosopher the younger the boy. But Cleon had a dual need. He wanted a boyish type for himself, and my small size and youthful look served that purpose if the philosopher was short sighted, as Cleon was. But Cleon also needed someone more sturdy and experienced to use as a party favor for powerful men he was trying to enlist to support him remaining in Athens—and alive.

Cleon had a propensity to be too political and for backing the lame horse. He was on the cusp of being exiled or forced to drink the hemlock—or exiled and then forced to drink the hemlock.

The philosopher did good research into his needs and he came up with seeking a comely, perfectly proportioned, young-looking submissive with patrician manners and speech who took a cock like a whore. My natural good, young looks, breeding as a Phoenician prince—although I’d never reveal that—and my two weeks on the sea with six randy and rough Greek soldiers made me the best fit of what was in supply relatively cheaply at the Athens slave market when Cleon desperately needed a match for his needs.

Cleon proved to be a tolerant and helpful master in his own behavior, grateful that I spoke Greek well, and had patrician manners and was willing to teach me how to serve at couch in a Greek villa and then to lie on the couch under a guest. His sexual demands were few, but they were refined. He was slow to erection, so he heated me up considerably with his hands and mouth before he was hard enough to penetrate. Sometimes he never got hard enough to penetrate, but he could bring me off and dribble himself in the process. He added finesse to the rougher aspects the Greek soldiers had taught me to meld with. He was quite old, so he didn’t need me in his bed often and mostly was content with fondling, kissing, and me sucking or hand-stroking him off or him doing the same for me.

His guests were another matter, running the gamut from being as refined and limited in demands as he was to being as demanding, vigorous, and cruel as the soldiers who had enslaved me had been—and beyond. There were those who could only become aroused enough to ejaculate by either whipping or binding me or for me doing that to them. In the months I was in Cleon’s villa in Athens, and I don’t know how long it was, I just know it wasn’t more than a couple of seasons, certainly not a full year, I learned the skills of a high-class male sex server. I also learned how to survive another man’s sexual needs, no matter how brutal, and to cajole him not to put an end to me.

Cleon didn’t keep me under lock and key in his villa as many in Athens did with their slaves. He gave me considerable rein to move about the city, either buying for the sexual needs of the villa—there were other servants to take care of the household supplies needs—or discovering what the city had to offer on my own.

One thing the city had to offer was men seeking coupling with other men encountered on the streets and in the wine houses or just wandering around in the parks looking for other men to mate with. The cultural world for Athens at that time was “hedonism,” with “sodomy” being a popular subset. I’m somewhat ashamed to say I had no trouble following that culture. Indeed, although normal life in Phoenicia didn’t follow this culture closely, the Phoenician court certainly did.

I first met Acteon at a sex implements shop, where I had been sent to buy a hand whip, one of Cleon’s less-honest guests having stolen the one he kept on hand for use by the crueler men he was trying to cultivate. I suppose seeing me there, buying a hand whip, cut through a lot of preliminary work for Acteon concerning what I was and what I would do for a man. He obviously liked the look of me and followed me out of the shop. I hadn’t walked more than five steps before he put a hand on my arm to stop me, gave me an appreciate look, and propositioned me.

Athens was a hedonist city at the time; there was nothing to a man stopping another man or a woman in the street, saying he liked the look of the other, and could he fuck them for a designated fee? In my case, I had just purchased a hand whip, so the man was interested in more than just a fuck. I liked the look of him enough that I went with him. He did not know I was a slave until he had invited me to sit and drink with him at a wine shop. I didn’t hide the fact, though.

He said, “Oh, Cleon. He is permissive. He will have no problem. He has been trying to curry favor with me. The poor man has no concept of who to back and what political philosophy to follow in a given month, though.”

“No problem with what?” I had asked.

“I find you very attractive and desirable, and I see you do not shirk from the whip. I wish to dally with and cover you. And I have a fondness for the whip. Do you have a problem with that?”

“Not if my master doesn’t,” I answered. Acteon was an extremely handsome man, young and muscular, much the same bearing and powerful body as Spiro, the soldier captain had. Cleon was good to me, but he was old, as had been most of the men he had brought to the villa to cajole and for me to entertain. The guests who aroused me the most in the using were ones who used the whip and other forms of sexual torture judiciously to enhance their erections, I must admit. I was ripe for the attentions of such as Acteon. “Do you wish to speak with Cleon on this matter?”

“Only if I am sure,” Acteon said. “Will you come to the baths and service me? If you are all that I hope you will be, I then will talk with Cleon.” I assented and he sent his attendants away.

He took me to a rather fancy private-membership bath. He was a refined lover in the baths at the beginning, pulling me onto his lap, facing him in the pool, as he sat on the ledge below the water. We kissed and embraced, and I sheathed his cock and rose and fell on it. He changed the position to my placing my feet on the sides of the tiles of the pool on either side of his waist and leaning back into the water, my back floating, as he gripped my hips and pulled me on and off his shaft. He was thick and long and throbbing and he had the expertise of kissing every surface of my passage with the bulb of his shaft just as I had the expertise of activating the muscles of my passage walls to undulate and ripple over his stroking member. We each climaxed repeatedly during an hour of dalliance in the pool.

He was visibly pleased with our coupling and he was the best I’d ever had.

What he wanted next wasn’t as pleasing to me, but it was, in truth, more arousing and propelled me to a higher plane of satiation. The bath house had a dungeon. There were iron rings and ropes to bind and hang me from. Acteon slapped me and whipped me, none too bitingly, though, as his complete captive and came in behind me, lifted and spread my legs, set my anal passage down on his especially erect and throbbing cock, and fucked me to multiple climaxes.

Acteon declared that he was very pleased with the look of me and my expertise in the coupling. As for me, I was mesmerized by the two sides of the man and accepted him as my master. Even when he said that we should meet here in the baths regularly but that Cleon need not know about the arrangement, I assented. I had hesitated, but he had said that meeting in baths was only temporary until he could make arrangements at his villa. When he could set something more permanent up, he would speak to Cleon. He may even buy me. Denying him nothing, I did not question this.

We met several times at the baths, having glorious sex in the pool and on the massage tables and moving on to more cruel but greater climax sex in the bath’s dungeon. Acteon became more demanding with each meeting, but as it was incremental, I did not realize the toll he was taking on my body. If Cleon noticed it, he said nothing. He was growing increasingly fond of me and treated me less and less as a slave and more as a young lover and confidant. He seemed to realize that I was more than a good-looking young man with a yielding hole. He instructed me in philosophy as well. If he saw the evidence of the hard use by Acteon, he seemed not willing to endanger our relationship by challenging me about it.

I did not awaken to the danger of what I was falling into with Acteon until the day I was in the market with Cleon, who rarely went into the market but this day said he had a meeting with a ship’s captain there. I had no idea the import of that meeting until later. I had meant to ask, but all such thoughts were thrown out of my mind by a sighting of Acteon strolling through the market—with a woman and two small boys.

“That man? Oh, that’s Acteon,” Cleon said in answer to my query. “From one of the most prominent Athens families. That is his wife and his sons. A peculiar bird, though. There is talk of Acteon and young men who are here but then are no longer here. I would be careful of that one if I were you. I could have used his patronage, but I did not feel I could risk it.”

Could have used his patronage? Again, from the shock of seeing Acteon with a family when I thought he went only with men and was going to make a trysting room for us in his villa and hearing what Cleon had to say about him and the disappearance of other young men, I failed to consider the significance of what Cleon was saying about a ship and his need for patronage.

What Cleon was saying about his vanishing need for support in Athens and why he was meeting with a ship’s captain here was that he was planning on leaving Athens—and doing so secretly, because the dangers both of remaining in Athens and escaping to some destination unknown by his enemies in Athens were getting to be too great for him.

He would not share that information with me for the present, although he seemed like he was unconsciously begging me to pull the information out of him. I also suspected that what he told me about Acteon was rooted in a knowledge that it was Acteon who was putting the lash marks on my back and buttocks. It happened too often for it all to have been caused by Cleon’s own guests.

What I had seen and learned informed what Acteon said to me the next time we met at the baths. After a very satisfying fuck in the pool, he took me to the dungeon room. Before we started on the crueler, but more exotic sexual practices, he said, “I have had a better idea than meeting in my villa. They have rooms here to accommodate more intimate meetings than the communal pool and this chamber, which any of the members can use at the same time.”

“Rooms?” I asked.

“Yes, just off this chamber.”

As my luck would have it, Acteon was called away momentarily before I was bound and hung from the ceiling rings. I checked out the auxiliary rooms off this chamber. As I feared, they were more prison cells than trysting rooms. They had cots, but they also had manacles attached to the stone walls. They were more for holding someone prisoner to the continued needs of someone like Acteon than love nests—for as long as the captive lived.

When he returned, he suggested that I come to him more permanently, beginning with the next meeting we would have here. I somehow wondered if, when I next came here, I would not be leaving by my own will and before my demise and if young men before me had suffered that fate.

The session of demanding bound sex that then unfolded opened my eyes to how much farther into the testing of endurance this had gone from the first time he had brought me here. Was Acteon a man who used his partners completely up, being finding release in loving them to death? I was a slave. The only one who could object would be the one who owned me, and Acteon had spoken by buying me from Cleon. Already his demands were becoming more stringent.

Still, I found myself going hard and panting for Acteon when I thought of myself being manacled to the walls of one of those rooms, with my knees hooked on Acteon’s hips and him fucking me hard with that masterful cock of his. I sobered when the last image in my mind of such an encounter was me manacled to the wall still, my body bloody and broken, the door to the cell slamming shut, and the bar being shot home for eternity.

Two days later, Cleon told me of his self-imposed exile and that he would be taking only me with him. He was going to the other end and shore of the Mediterranean to the seaside town of Utica, near the larger city of Carthage.

“That’s in Phoenicia,” I said.

“Yes, it is,” he answered, apparently having no awareness that that would be taking me into the jaws of danger, where I would be under the power and palace machinations that my mother, Eleni, had tried to save me from by sending me to Greece. Nor could I now tell Cleon that I was an endangered prince of Phoenicia who was safer here in Athens as a sex slave than I would be in Utica.

I had decisions to make. I could give in entirely to my sexual master, Anteon, getting the most out of sexual pleasure for as long as that lasted. I could risk exile with Cleon, who had been kind to me, back under the sway of Phoenicia. Or I could strike out on my own and try to reach my mother’s family in Olympia, wherever that was from Athens.

In the end, I chose the safer route of kindness. When Acteon next went to the baths prepared to meet and imprison me for the yet more demanding sexual conquest he had in mind for me, I already was back on the Mediterranean Sea on my way to what I hoped would be a secret future in a Phoenicia town far beyond the gaze of the empire’s capital at Tyre.