Faustina and the Barbarians (3 page)

Straddling your man, on his back, with his knees drawn up, like this fine big negro, with one leg to the side of his hip and the other between his muscled ebony pins, gives a girl the utmost control as to the depth and angle of penetration, not forgetting the fine-tuning of clitoral stimulation this position allows.
 

That pretty slave girl was certainly a past mistress at the scissors, and it was only the dildo which she bit down upon that prevented her letting loose a flood of groans and curses that would’ve brought the park wardens running.
 

I tried not to look, but it was difficult. The African was a real beauty, a mass of muscle playing beneath his fine black skin, oiled with aromatic sweat, like a man-shaped harp, as he drove his great black punctum up through the flooded folds of cunnus with each scouring grind of the girl’s slim body. Holy Aphrodite, it was an effort not to look. As I stood, waiting for the attention of the wine and sun-flushed Quislincus, the motion of the completely self-absorbed slaves imparted a slick wetness to my pussy. I had to be careful, there was something in there I would shortly need and I couldn’t afford to get over-excited.

 
The girl started to come, and as she did so, Caecilius could restrain himself no longer, and freeing a lengthy but rather narrow-gauge cock from the folds of his toga, started to toss himself in concert, grabbing hold of the girl’s hair and curling it tightly round his fist.
 

“Why not save it, Caecilius? You may need it in a moment.” Quislincus drawled, eyeing me suddenly.
 

“I can’t,” he grunted.

“Anyway... plenty...” His cock began erupting, shooting strings of cum into the girl’s fine golden hair. “Where this came from.”

His final spasm coincided with the girl sinking exhausted upon the African, and his final gout flew past her head to lace the African’s face. The African did not look pleased.

“What is it you want, my dear?” Quislincus and the others turned their full attention to me, bloodshot eyes dilated.
 

“I am a poor woman of the same district as you, Master. My children are starving, their father was killed when the Goths broke in”—a giggle or two from those hyenas here—“and I was told I could approach you for a small loan, if you would be so gracious, Master.”

The stinking dog liked the ‘Master’ bit.

“A loan, you say? Perhaps. But what could you offer in return?” More saliva-rattling giggles and laughter.
 

“Maybe I could serve you in some way?” I loosened the neck fastening of the short cloak I was wearing with a show of nervousness.

“Well, let me have a closer look at you. Take that thing off.” I undid it. I wore a very short thin tunica high on my thighs and plungingly low cut over my breasts.

“And the rest. Keep going.” The pig waved a porcine finger at me. I undid the belt and pulled the tunica over my head. The breath of the five men, including the African, who was staring at me from his elbowed position on the ground, could be heard drawing sharply in, and remaining there.
 

I am now almost forty-one years of age, Flavia, and yet my body remains as fresh, as upstanding, as outthrusting as a twenty-year old’s. I say this with only a modicum of exaggeration. I brought my hands to my hips and filled my lungs with the dry air that five pairs of male lungs now struggled to grasp. I parted my legs, feeling the fire beads, dangerously moistened within. I’d have to move quickly.

“I am willing to give you a taste of my services right now, Master Quislincus.”

“Indeed.” Quislincus eyed my thong-guarded pussy—where his death lay—dry-mouthed.

“And your illustrious friends.” Hands slipped beneath togas as the four sat up erect.

The slave was still staring at me, his hands unable to hide the thickening coils of the python between his legs.

“Who is first? Yes, I will begin with you Master Quislincus.” I came close to the gawping bag of bearded slime and lifted up his toga. He was hard. All the better.

I bent forward over it, and tugged at my thong. Out popped the three balls of Greek Fire mixed with tinder. A quick rub of them together ignited them to flame and I flung them in Quislincus’ face. He screamed. But the scream became a blood-curdling howl as the knife I had whipped out from between the back of my arse cheeks sliced his cock clean from his body. Next to him, Caecilius sat suitably frozen in terror. I yanked his toga up and repeated the procedure. The senatorial character had torn through the folds of the tent and gone. Rufinius tried to get away but the African tripped him and I castrated him as he lay screaming on the floor.
 

I could hear alarmed voices outside. I’d been a little too slow. I slipped my clothes back on and poked my head through the tent.

“Sorry for the noise, ladies and gentlemen. Just disciplining my slaves. They seem to think today’s a holiday.” This provoked ripples of reassured laughter. I closed the flap, tore the bloodied togas off the three men, draped the unstained one over the African’s shoulders, and throwing a rope around my captives, boldly marched out, dragging them behind me. To the sound of patrician applause.

“That’ll teach the uppity bastards!”

I got my captives home without arousing too much inquisitiveness, and in the dead of that night, I chained Quislincus, Caecilius, and Rufinius to the pillars outside the Senate House, with their castrated cocks in their mouths and a sign across their shivering hairy bellies: ‘Friends, Romans, Countrymen, Beware Treason.’

I do hope you are not balking at the savagery of this act, Flavia. Remember, these men, by opening the Salarian Gate, were responsible for the deaths of Roman citizens, many of them women and children. They were lucky I did not kill them.
 

As it is, they will live, to find jobs as eunuchs. There are an increasing number of vacancies for the cockless ones, particularly in the East.

I was rather tired after the day’s vengeful exertions, but, as I lay amidst my muslin curtains I was unable to sleep. You can perhaps guess why. The African slave, who spoke shockingly perfect Greek and Latin—I’d ascertained that he’d been educated by a commendably humanistic master, a Greek scholar, in Corinth—stood before me, his lustrously black skin glinting in the darkness behind my closed eyelids.

I had put him in downstairs with the house-slaves, and doubtless he was sleeping. But I could not. My blood, fired by the sight of him that evening with the lovely slave girl, swirled restlessly round and round my sweating body. Repeated self-gratification would not quell it. It only made it more firey. I got out of bed, wiped myself down with a cloth, and donning a loose palla, went downstairs.

As I stood, dabbling my fingers in the pool in the garden, I could hear Mannus, my head house-slave, snoring fit to shake the foundations of the house. Who could sleep through that? Certainly not Numidius, who suddenly appeared on the other side of the pool, a cautious smile breaking the darkness of his face like an upturned crescent Moon.

I smiled back, my eyes coming to rest on the great pack that bulged within the brief loincloth low around his waist. As I watched, it grew, shifting like some animal struggling in a sack.
 

“Can I give my Mistress Faustina anything to help her sleep?” A shy young man, but not a little bold.

“Mistress? No, I’m not your Mistress.”

I enjoyed seeing his smile wilt a little, and then spring up and open wide when I told him my plan.

“You will be your own master. I will pay you to tutor my house-slaves, and give you a little something with which you can open a school to tutor the less fortunate children of the area. What do you say?”

“Mistress.” He came round to me and threw himself at my feet. “Mistress.”

“No, no, no, Numidius.” I pulled him up.

“No, I... I just like saying the word… Faustina.”

Our mouths locked together and we kissed passionately, the breath leaving my body with the sheer fierceness of it, stars bursting before my eyes. My legs would not hold me up, but before I sank, his great hands were cradling me by the buttocks. With a mere flick of his great oar-lock wrists he pulled me up against him, and wrapping my legs around him tightly, he walked me to the big palm tree. In those few paces his cock was as stiff, as wide, as tally arching as its trunk, and pushing deep inside me.

If I was breathless a moment before, I was now gasping like a landed fish. I’ve never felt such blind panic, I struggled for breath, but just as I managed to snag a tail end of air, his great black ballista pushed it out of me. I felt ashamed, for I was quaking and shaking like a drunk in delirium, thrashing against him like a fever sufferer. I, Faustina, had lost control.

Numidius kissed and soothed me into ease, but not enough to quell the savage blood-surging energy to live he’d aroused in my flesh. He pressed me against the hard hairy trunk and pushed his whole length up inside me.
 

I’m not usually a fan of the standing position, Flavia. Most men aren’t strong enough to hold me in this demanding posture for long. But not my African. His hands supporting me by the arse effortlessly, he fucked me deeply and slowly, raking my clitoris with each long motion and caressing my stretched anus-hole and the even more tightly elongated, liquefied lips of my cunnus.
 

Safe in this active cradle of his hands, I responded to the ripping slide of his increasingly rapid thrusts with a matching abandon. Wasn’t I afraid of waking Mannus and the other slaves? No, nothing wakes Mannus, and besides, my slaves are more than used to their Mistress’ nocturnal antics.
 

But I think we created very little noise. I still barely had breath for any oral exhibition, so intently focused was I on the inverted well of bliss slowly but surely filling my body to overflow. And Numidius’ liquid motions, like those of a rutting sleek black panther, were so rapid now as to be beyond hearing.
 

I dug my heels hard into those rippling haunches, sucked at his bulging neck vein jumping with the wild pump of his blood. I dug my heels in and felt our single motion fuse into the blinding rapid surge of a joint orgasm.

But darling Flavia, if only I wrote with the rapidity of Numidius’ great African cock. I must get on to to tell you of my discovery of the plot against Honorius, my meeting with him, and imminent embarkation for Britain.

Numidius, whom the ignorant Quislincus and company took for nothing but an African sub-human, had been privy to their discussion of the plot by a group of senators to assassinate our intrepid Emperor Honorius and, with the aid of a similarly disaffected group of Alaric’s Goths, to install a puppet Emperor who would advance the avaricious aims of both groups. The senator I had seen with Quislincus in the Gardens of Sallust was one of the chief conspirators. My first instinct was to run to the Senate House and warn the Fathers of Rome, but what would that achieve apart from alerting the conspirators that they’d been rumbled? My best bet was to fly immediately to Honorius’ court at Ravenna and warn him. But why help the pusillanimous Honorius at all, I hear you ask. Better a weak legitimate Emperor in Ravenna, brother to the young but rapidly developing Arcadius, Emperor in the East, with his still largely undepleted resources to call upon, than a puppet in Rome who would oversee its final ruination.

After setting my household in order and arranging things for my lovely new African employee, I took myself to the horse-fair in Ostia and picked myself out a magnificent Arab stallion who I immediately christened Bucephalus. As soon as he saw me, I had him eating out of my hand. The magnetism I exert over the male sex doesn’t stop with homo erectus, my dear.

While most of our Italian roads are now in a sad state of repair, the Via Flaminia, being used by the court and government, was still in good condition and Bucephalus and I found ourselves within sight of Ravenna’s walls in eight days. But it was another three days before I could get to see the Emperor. As each year passes, our Emperors, the heirs of the great Julius himself, wrap themselves in ever deeper layers of court ritual and bureaucracy, more like perfumed Persian potentates than austere sons of Romulus and Remus. Of course, it was all started by my great-great-great grandfather Maximian’s co-Emperor Diocletan well over a century ago, and he, at least, had good reason for it. It did surround the Emperor’s office with a much-needed layer of mystique, a protective envelope of awe. And it worked, for them and their successors. But no amount of gilded glory, clouds of incense or rustling purple silks can imbue that stupidus Honorius with a trace of mystery. Not only is he completely un-martial and physically unimposing, though not entirely unattractive, there isn’t a wisp of intellect or artistic sensibility or any other redeeming virtue between his dullard’s temples. This young man, the son of the brilliant Theodosius, consists of nothing but vanity and milksoppish piety in regards to the Christian god; his only concern, apart from more and more of his bloody doves, is to preserve his own pampered skin.

The doves. You may have heard about his obsession with these damned birds, nothing more than pigeons in togas. He spends most of his time within a string of dovecots, feeding the pesky, perpetually shitting airborne vermin. While he feeds and waters and grooms them, his bishops, eunuchs, and other corrupt courtesans run our rapidly diminishing Western Empire into the ground. My first thought on being ushered into his presence was to kill this wastrel myself.

He was sitting on an ivory throne, clad in loose purple linen against the heat, and wearing the diadem. He was also wearing a selection of his dovish favourites, who paraded up and down his arms pecking greedily at the seeds cupped in his palms and lining his lap. Comically languid though his manner was, I could feel that my presence made an impression upon him, as, of course, I’d intended.
 

I didn’t want to speak of the plot before his bishops and courtiers, who, surrounding the ornate, dove-infested ivory throne, made no attempt to hide their admiration of my charms, and I managed to get him to agree to confer with me alone.