"Marcu," I whisper," are you still awake?"
"Yes Mikael, I can never sleep after sex; I'm too wired."
"I need to ask you something. If something should happen to me..."
"Don't think of it, Mikael," Marcu says, putting his strong hand on my naked shoulder.
"I have to, Marcu." I say as I return his caress feeling his heart beating strongly against my cold hands on his chest. "If something should happen to me, I choose you to succeed me, to keep everyone safe, to seek sanctuary."
Marcu leans over Joachim's slumbering body, takes my face in his hands. I see his deep brown eyes glittering in the firelight.
"Mikael, for you I will do anything." He pulls me in close for a kiss. Joachim slides further down on the bed, still asleep.
"Not for me, Marcu, but for our family. Help them." I return his kiss and we remain like that for a few minutes, then I rise.
I head out of the room. I'm not in the mood for more sex tonight. Chances are we'll have to pick up and move our stuff again. We're pretty good at hiding out, but lately the soldiers have been finding us. If only they didn't keep hanging out in the gay bars, looking for a screw.
I close my eyes and feel sick when I think of the last time they infiltrated our sanctuary. They thought they could destroy us by killing Sardanapalus, our leader, descendant of Assyrian kings. He fought them to the end, and was forced to watch a soldier cut the throat of his favourite slave, Myrrha, her blood running onto the white satin sheets and merging with his own as he bled from their swords. As he lay dying, Sardanapalus whispered to me to take over his reign. Now I am responsible for the well-being of our enclave of sexual deviants.
I gathered as many of our family together as I could. We ran, leaving him and the other massacred bodies unburied, but mourned, deeply mourned. In the middle of a quiet night, when all is still, I hear Sarabella weeping for her lost lover, her king. He understood her needs, allowed her to shove her cock roughly in his ass over and over like a man and then would gently caress her womanly breasts.
Once Sarabella was caught by the soldiers, who thought they'd found another womb to fill. When two of them stripped off her long skirt and revealed her thick penis, they were brutal. One took out a machete and would have cut off her cock, but she kneed him in the nuts and brought her sharp stiletto heel down on the other soldier's cock before either of them had time to act, and then she ran. Albumar found her in the gutter outside our sanctuary.
He nursed her back to health. The soldiers had scarred her pretty face with the points of their swords. Albumar cleaned her wounds and brought her a new satin gown. Now he is her slave, licking her boots clean. Every night he washes her uncut cock, pulling down the foreskin and tenderly soaping it and rinsing it for her. Sarabella treats him well, chaining him to the foot of her bed where he remains all night as her pet.
I hear a sound as I shower off the night's debauchery. Perhaps it is Sarabella filling Albumar's water dish, or Marcu and Jochim fucking again. Footsteps are coming toward me. I turn off the shower and take up my position, nude behind the door. My body is no longer the weak skeleton of brittle bones that Sarabella and Albumar discovered in the alley. I am hard muscle, strong hands, powerful legs. I know how to kill with one small movement of my hand to the back of a soldier's neck. I hold my hand upright as the door cracks open.
Four sets of shiny black boots march in to the room.
I feel the sharp tip of a rapier sword puncturing my lungs as I kick and punch and pummel, but I am overpowered.
You don't expect to survive long in this world. I am not surprised.
As I die, images flash before my eyes: Joachim's tight round ass filled with my come, the ring pulling tightly around his cock, Albumar lapping at Sarabella's erect nipples, and Sardanapalus, the smile of death in his eyes as his children find another home. I know that at this moment, they run and will find another sanctuary. At least for a short time.
I smell fire. The soldiers are burning our house down. With my last breath, I throw myself into the flames.
Rather let them be borne abroad upon
The winds of heaven, and scattered into air,
Than be polluted more by human hands
Of slaves and traitors. In this blazing palace,
And its enormous walls of reeking ruin,
We leave a nobler monument than Egypt
Hath piled in her brick mountains, o'er dead kings
So much for monuments that have forgotten
Their very record!
—Sardanapalus, a Tragedy, Lord Byron, 1821
