The infamous Borgias had risen from minor nobility in Renaissance Rome to a position of supreme national power ... Roderigo Borgia, now Pope Alexander VI, manipulated the armies of Europe against a disturbing scene of international intrigue while his children, Lucrezia and Cesare, vied in an unparalleled debauch of domestic carnality. Roderigo plotted the slaughter of the French armies descending on Naples even as the vile rumors spread throughout the city: Lucrezia, tiring of her young husband, had reverted to her brothers, Cesare and Giovanni, who-with her father, the Pope-she found the most exciting of men. These were the years when the House of Borgia took what it wanted from the body and blood of Italy!
INTRODUCTION
THE BORGIAS By L. T. Woodward, M.D.
The astonishing family history of the Borgias, that flamboyant tribe of Renaissance Rome, is not so much a view of a period of human culture as it is an insight into the darker side of human life. Every imaginable sin and has been credited to the fantastic Borgias of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries: incest, torture, crimes against nature, murder by various hideous methods, and foul sacrilege. Most of the sins of the Borgias, it seems, were invented by imaginative chroniclers eager, for one reason or another, to heap infamy on this family. Yet even when we discount ninefold the exaggerations of the anti-Borgia faction, a rather remarkable residue of amoral behavior is left-enough to make the life and times of the Borgia family of interest both to the casual reader and to the serious medical-psychological student of the distortions of the human sexual impulse.
Who were these Borgias, anyway, and what were their terrible crimes?
For one thing, they were Spaniards-even though their base of operations was the holy city of Rome. The Borgia family, which is still in existence today, traces its ancestry back to an eleventh-century King of Aragon. In the middle of the twelfth century, a certain Don Ricardo de Borja migrated to Italy and founded an Italian branch of the family, changing the spelling of the name from the Spanish "Borja" to the Italian "Borgia"-but this is not the Borgia family of infamy. Those Borgias remained in Spain, as Borjas, until the middle of the fifteenth century.
The Borgias who claim the attention of students of crime and sexology are three in number: Roderigo Borgia, elected to be Pope Alexander the Sixth, and two of his illegitimate children, Cesare Borgia and Lucrezia Borgia. (Already the unusual nature of the Borgia family starts to be apparent, when we begin speaking of a Pope and his illegitimate children!) However, the family fortunes began their upward climb in the person of Roderigo Borgia's uncle, Alonso de Borja, the Bishop of Valencia. At Eastertime of 1455, Pope Nicholas the Fifth died. The Cardinals of the Holy Roman Church met at Rome to elect his successor. At that time, the office of Pope was virtually the property of a few great Italian noble families, who passed it around among themselves in a kind of rotation scheme. But in 1455 there was a stalemate between the candidates of the House of Colonna and the House of Orsini. Fifteen out of the twenty Cardinals were present at the election, and they were hopelessly deadlocked. At last a compromise candidate was proposed. On April 8, 1455, one of the Cardinals emerged from the conclave to declare:
"I announce to you great joy. We have for a Pope the Lord Alonso de Borja, Bishop of Valencia, who wills to be called Calixtus the Third."
This first Borgia Pope was no monster of sin. Far from it. He was a kindly, somewhat colorless old man of 77, feeble and interested in nothing but his churchly duties. In this he was quite different from most of the swashbuckling Renaissance Popes. The theory behind his election was that he would live only a year or two, long enough for the feuding aristocrats to make up their minds as to who the real next Pope ought to be.
And indeed Pope Calixtus the Third occupied the Throne of St. Peter only three years. But before his death in 1458 he succeeded in selecting three new Cardinals. Two of them, by some coincidence, happened to be the Pope's own nephews: 20-year-old Don Luis Juan de Mila y Borja, famous for his good looks, and 25-year-old Don Roderigo de Lancol y Borja, famous because he would later become Alexander the Sixth, the most corrupt Pope in the history of the Church.
Mark well, there was nothing unusual in choosing such young men as Cardinals. Today, Cardinals are always men of mature years who have worked their way up through the hierarchy of the Church; but in the fifteenth century the Pope thought of himself not just as a religious leader but as a worldly ruler, who commanded armies and owned vast estates, and the College of Cardinals was in effect his "cabinet." He needed young, vigorous, loyal "cabinet ministers" to serve him. And so the red hats of Cardinals were handed out, not on the basis of age or wisdom, but on the basis of family position. The Pope built alliances that way.
As for naming two of his own nephews as Cardinals-well, that was a little irregular, but certainly not illegal. And it is to Pope Calixtus' credit that he did not give the red hat to his own son, a handsome young man of fifteen. (Yes, Pope Calixtus had fathered a son at the age of 63, while Bishop of Valencia.)
Young Roderigo Cardinal Borja came to Rome, started spelling his name Borgia, and began amassing churchly power. He also filled his Roman palace with a variety of comely mistresses. Then as now, prelates of the Roman Catholic Chinch were supposed to take a vow of celibacy, but in brawling Renaissance Europe that vow was mostly honored in the breach. The young Cardinal was dashing and handsome, and liked worn en. They liked him, too. A contemporary chronicler describes Don Roderigo Borgia as "a comely man, of cheerful countenance and honeyed discourse, who gains the affections of all the women he admires, and attracts them as the lodestone attracts iron."
In the Vatican, Popes came and went, and all the time Cardinal Borgia grew stronger, richer, fatter, and more sodden with lust. Pope Julius the Second, poet and novelist as well as churchman, was chosen in 1458 and died in 1464. Pope Paul the Second followed him, and then in 1471 Pope Sixtus the Fourth. Upon his death in 1484 the Papacy passed to Pope Innocent the Eighth.
Roderigo Cardinal Borgia took an active part in the wheeling and dealing of all these elections. In exchange for his support and his vote, he demanded favors from the candidates, and he got them. He won power and splendor for himself, and as the ranks of his illegitimate children grew, Cardinal Borgia obtained high places for them. He had many mistresses, and many children, but only one openly admitted "family". These were the children he had sired by the voluptuous Giovanna (Vannozza) dei Cattani, who had had a variety of husbands but who spent most of her nights between 1470 and 1486 in Cardinal Borgia's bed. There were four recognized children of this unofficial relationship. The eldest, Giovanni, born in 1474, became Duke of Gandia when still a boy. The second child, Cesare, born in 1476, was the Cardinal's favorite; when Cesare Borgia was only ten years old, his father succeeded in having him appointed to the richly influential post of Treasurer of the Cathedral of Cartagena, Spain. In 1480 Lucrezia Borgia was born, a golden-haired child of great beauty who one day would gain a perhaps undeserved sinister reputation. A year or two later came the Cardinal's third son, Giuffredo or Giuffre.
In 1492 Pope Innocent the Eighth, enfeebled by his sins, sank toward death. Neither drinks of women's milk nor boys' blood could save him. When he died, twenty-three Cardinals came together to elect his successor. Christopher Columbus was sailing westward across the Atlantic during the month that Cardinal Borgia, now 61 years old and made more vigorous by decades of riotous living, decided to make himself Pope.
He was one of three leading candidates. Using his great wealth, Borgia was able to buy many votes, including that of one of his three rivals. He poured so much gold and silver into the election that he was elected Pope by the unprecedented landslide of twenty-two to one. When the results were announced, seventeen-year-old Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici, of the great Florentine family, turned to another Cardinal and whispered, "Now we are in the jaws of a ravening wolf, and if we do not flee he will devour us."
Cardinal Borgia chose the name of Alexander the Sixth-and now, more like a bloated pig than like a ravening wolf, he rose like a colossus above Rome.
Feasting and drinking were the order of the day at the Vatican. The Pope's trusted agents engaged in foreign intrigue in many lands. Enemies of the Borgias disappeared and were found to have mysteriously died. The Pontiff was interested mainly in enhancing the power of himself and of his family, as though, having gained the Papacy, he planned to make it hereditary in the Borgia family.
But it is hard to sort the fact from the fantasy when reviewing the career of Alexander the Sixth. Was he-really such a monster? Ravisher of his own daughter, indulger in bestial sins, glutton, wanton, murderer? He covered his tracks well, if so. All we have are the rumors, the bitter accusations. We can judge Alexander the Sixth as we please. As one of the family's biographers said at the beginning of this century, "No man, save One, since Adam, has been wholly good. Not one has been wholly bad. The truth about the Borgias, no doubt, lies between the two extremes."
We can attach one sin to Alexander the Sixth's record without any doubt at all, because he boasted proudly of it himself: He kept mistresses and fathered illegitimate children. That in itself does not seem too terribly shocking to us, except for the circumstance that he was a priest, a bishop, a Cardinal and finally a Pope. For a priest to break his vows of chastity is bad enough; for a Pope to do it is monstrous.
Yet we have to look at Alexander against the context of his time-a time in which sexual and moral values were quite different from what they are today. If a candidate for President in our country should admit the fathership of a bastard, or if it should merely be whispered about, his career would be doomed. But in Renaissance Europe, and particularly in Italy, there was no duke nor count nor baron nor churchly lord who did not have his retinue of concubines and his collection of openly acknowledged bastards. Alexander the Sixth's immediate predecessor as Pope, Innocent the Eighth, was not quite so innocent as his name implies; he admitted the paternity of seven children. A successor, Pope Paul the Third, was also a well-known family man. Even the venerable, saintly Calixtus the Third, first of the two Borgia Popes, had at least one child.
So Alexander the Sixth, it seems, was no demon. He merely carried the loose morals of the time to their ultimate conclusions. Larger than life, hungry for power and the gratification of his lusts, this Vicar of Christ denied himself nothing, but differed from his contemporaries only in the quantity, not in the quality, of his sins.
When we look at the Pope's children, though, we enter a different sphere of morality.
Cesare Borgia seems to deserve all that rumor says of him. He was Alexander's darling boy; and, sheltered by the might of his indulgent father's high office, he rampaged through Europe in a lifelong orgy of sex, brigandage and terror. When his father became Pope, sixteen-year-old Cesare was made Archbishop of Valencia-a mockery of that sacred office. A year later, Cesare was a Cardinal. Despite this dignity, he spent his days wenching and gambling. One thorn in his side was the existence of his elder brother Giovanni, the Duke of Gandia. Giovanni, as a duke, had received great territorial possessions, which Cesare envied.
On a June night in 1497 the 23-year-old Duke of Gandia disappeared. In the morning his body was found floating in the Tiber, fully clothed, his dagger still in its sheath, none of the jewels with which he had adorned himself taken. He bore eleven wounds or more, including a great gash in his throat. Pope Alexander, hearing the terrible news, roared with grief and vowed to reform not only his own ways but the entire Church, two vows that were never kept. But who had slain the duke? Soon all Rome was whispering the answer: His brother Cesare was the murderer.
The mystery remains unsolved; but there is good reason to place the guilt at Cesare's door. He was known to be envious of his brother's power, and to Cesare Borgia no such rival could be allowed to remain. Furthermore, there were dark rumors that Cesare and the duke were rivals in love-the joint object of their love being the wife of Giuffre, their youngest brother! There was also talk that they were incestuously involved with their sister Lucrezia.
After the murder of the duke, Alexander the Sixth was more restrained and austere in his ways, as though sadness had drained his vitality. In any case he was near seventy. There was no holding Cesare back, now.
He became the most powerful-and the most feared-Roman of them all. Whenever he needed funds to support one of his military or sexual adventures, he simply extorted them from some rich Cardinal or bishop or nobleman, using his father's power as a threat. He left a trail of blood through Italy.
In 1501 an odd episode occurred involving father and son. The Pope issued an official document declaring that the newborn bastard of his son Cesare with a Roman girl was to be considered legitimate. Later that same day, Alexander issued a second document, which said that the child was not Cesare's at all, but rather the Pope's own offspring! Evidently Alexander and Cesare had been sharing the same mistress at that point. But why did the seventy-year-old Pope first call the child Cesare's, then change his mind and claim it as his own? Pride in his virility? A quarrel with Cesare?
In the summer of 1503 both Cesare and his father fell ill at Rome. For a while both their lives were despaired of; then Cesare's youthful vitality pulled him through; but the Pope, weakened by dissipation and age, died. Rumor had it that a butler in the Papal household had prepared a poisoned drink for a guest, but that through error it had been served to Cesare and the Pope. However, malaria was rife in Rome that summer, as it was every summer in those days, and it seems that the Pope's death was a natural one.
With Alexander gone, Cesare's swashbuckling days were just about over. His ferocity brought his enemies down on him. Arrested several times, imprisoned at one point for two years, he escaped from a Spanish jail only to meet death in 1507 in a common brawl. He was little more than thirty years old.
The career of his sister Lucrezia is the most enigmatic of all. We know that Alexander the Sixth was a gaudy old sinner, and that Cesare Borgia was a rapacious adventurer. But Lucrezia Borgia has attained a sinister reputation as a poisoner on virtually no evidence whatever.
We know that she was of great beauty, with shimmering golden hair and a lovely body. We know that she was intelligent, a patron of the arts. We also know that her father used her beauty as a pawn in his own political schemes.
She was raised and educated by Giulia Famese, one of the Pope's mistresses of later years. There were dark stories of her incestuous sexual involvements with her brothers from her earliest youth, but of course none of this can be proved. When eleven years old and of dubious virginity, the fair Lucrezia was betrothed to a Spanish nobleman, but almost at once the engagement was broken when her father found a wealthier grandee for her to marry. The twelve-year-old bride soon was not a wife, for when Roderigo Borgia became Pope in 1492, he used his authority to annul Lucrezia's marriage, thus making her available for a still more ambitious union. This time she was affianced to Giovanni Sforza, the 26-year-old lord of Pesaro.
Ten Cardinals and fifteen members of the Roman nobility were present at the Vatican in June of 1493 for the feast that celebrated the wedding of a Pope's bastard daughter. The Pope himself gaily thrust sweetmeats into the plunging bosoms of the aristocratic women guests. But in a few years Alexander had need of Lucrezia's matrimonial services again; he annulled her marriage to Sforza on the scandalous and probably false grounds of his impotence, and married Lucrezia to Alphonso of Aragon, the Duke of Bisceglie.
Alphonso met a bleak fate in 1500. He was assaulted on the steps of St. Peter's Cathedral by masked men who stabbed him repeatedly. Severely wounded, he dragged himself into the Vatican seemingly at the point of death. Lucrezia nursed Bisceglie back to health so successfully that a month later, on an August evening, it was necessary to make a second attempt on his life. Cesare Borgia entered his brother-in-law's room and stood by approvingly while a hired thug strangled him to death. Cesare explained later that the Duke of Bisceglie had tried to murder him, first, as if that justified the murder. Wagging tongues told of Cesare's jealousy toward the man who shared his sister's bed.
A year later Lucrezia married the Duke of Ferrara and seemingly lived happily ever after. She devoted herself to poetry and music, was famed for her lovely embroidery, and her court enjoyed the presence of such men as the poet Ariosto and the painter Titian. Only occasionally did anyone connected with her meet a violent death. She is the great enigma of the Borgia family. Was she the terrible murderess of legend-or merely a beautiful and gifted woman, no better and no worse in her morals than the other aristocratic belles of her time?
With Lucrezia's death in 1519, the most celebrated members of the Borgia family were gone. But this remarkable house had one final prank left: it produced a saint. Francis Borgia, great-grandson of Alexander the Sixth, was born in Spain in 1510 and lived a pure, self-denying, blameless life. Respected and admired by all for his piety, he rose high in the churchly ranks, modestly refused the honor of becoming a Cardinal, and served as the third general of the Jesuits. In 1671, a century after his death, Pope Clement the Tenth entered him in the roster of saints. Saint Francis Borgia! How the salty, lascivious old Pope Alexander would have loved that!
The borgias are worth our attention today, and we can rejoice that Marcus van Heller's magnificently readable, superbly vivid HOUSE OF BORGIA has at last broken the chains of prudery and become avail able to the American public. With unsparing honesty, this young European scholar and novelist shows us both the majesty and the depravity of the Borgia family. He reveals keen insight into the underlying perversions of the sexual impulse that left their imprint on the Italian Renaissance. His book is at once marvelously readable and entertaining-almost like a novel in its profusion of lively scenes-and yet a serious, important contribution to history as well. No one who reads The House of Borgia is likely to forget the dark deeds of the Borgias in times to come. This amazing family displayed vitality, colossal audacity, a kind of cosmic energy in lust and ambition. And this equally amazing book about them shows us that unique period, the Renaissance, at its best ... and at its sordid worst.
-L. T. Woodward, M.D.
CHAPTER ONE
When she was only ten years old Cardinal Roderigo had doted on the remarkable physical development of his daughter and now, at the age of eleven, he thought of her as a fresh, young woman with her breasts and buttocks as full as cannon balls.
But it was not only her voluptuous dimensions which produced the burning erection under Roderigo Borgia's robes every time he watched her playing in her little girl's shift which seemed so unsuitable. It was the deep, knowing look in those bright blue eyes, which seemed to look past his apparent paternal smile and see the incestuous desire beyond. And in the look was the hint of a smile, as if she were daring him to translate his desire to action.
Of course, Cardinal Roderigo was aware that his own feelings interfered with his objectivity of vision. It was hardly likely that his daughter, raised in a true God-fearing way, could really have the faintest inkling of the lustful labyrinths of men's minds. And yet there was a definite sexual aura about her which he could not reconcile with his imagination, nor with her youth.
He sat on a log in the grounds of their house near St. Peter's watching her playing now with her brother Cesare. Cesare pushed the swing while she, with her shift above her knees and her legs apart as she urged it to greater heights, sat on the wooden platform as if on a horse.
The paternal smile was fixed on Cardinal Roderigo's face. Any observer would have felt his heart stirred at the sight of the busiest, most important cardinal in Rome relaxing with his children. But through that smile, the Cardinal's eyes dwelt on the uplifted breasts as she reached upward, holding the ropes of the swing. Their outline was forceful; they seemed to spring out toward his eyes. It suddenly occurred to him that she hadn't put on her undergarments today. "Higher, higher," she urged her brother.
Even the voice, he mused, was that of a woman; it had body and modulation. It had a soft, caressing warmth, the way her flesh would be if it nestled nakedly against one.
The swing was mounting. Back and then forward toward him. His eyes dropped to her well-formed legs. She squirmed her bottom on the swing, exhorting it with passionate fondlings to fly up and up. The Cardinal found the movement exciting. He imagined, tried to imagine, the feel of that bottom against his loins. He stared at her hips. His face coloured slightly. He could see right up those delicious, milky thighs to the darkness of their junction. Oh those thighs! He raised his eyes guiltily, with an effort, and saw that hers were on him, lids slightly lowered, suggesting a smile. He started. The little minx. She was positively inviting him. He was convinced of it.
"Lucrezia, my child," he said. "Have you no warm clothes under your shift?"
She squirmed her bottom and kicked her legs forward, urging her mount on.
"No, Father. It's so warm today."
"It's not a question of warmth, my sweet one. It's unlady-like to be naked under such a thin garment. It shows off too much of your body."
He enjoyed this sort of conversation. It was fatherly because he was, after all, speaking to his little daughter for her own good; it was also rousing because he was speaking to an unknown woman about her raw beauty. It could be indulged in with safety.
"I thought it wouldn't matter," Lucrezia purred. "There is nobody to see me but you and Cesare."
"Paternity and fraternity, my dear, do not turn men into marble statues."
He continued to look at her, suddenly, overwhelmingly aware that he was talking to no child at all. He was talking to some strange, instinctive essence of woman which needed no experience to know about the effect of the apple. She looked back at him, unspeaking, her eyes Sphinx-like, her thighs still wide, her arms relaxed a little on the ropes so that her breasts jogged slightly as she jerked forward.
Roderigo glanced past her to Cesare. His son was two years older and as beautiful as his sister. But he was not so aware. Even now, he seemed not to have followed the conversation. He concentrated, grinning, on his job of hurtling Lucrezia up to a horizontal sweep. His secret ambition was to see her swoop right up and over the bar.
"You must always wear underclothes in the Orsini Palace," the Cardinal said, determined to keep the conversation going. "It would be unbecoming to your tutors to treat them like suitors."
She stared at him for a few seconds as the swing flowed forward and back. He knew she was working over his words, but she was clever enough to make it appear that she understood.
"Passion is a poor accompaniment to scholarly disinterest," he pursued, revelling in the train of his thought, the sequence of images-of tutors mixing Greek with French in confusion, while his daughter calmly surveyed their discomfiture with deep eyes and a half-shown bosom.
"Will study make me scholarly and disinterested?" You precocious little bitch, he thought. I ought to spank you-but I should hover over your flushed buttocks even as my hand lashed them.
"You are too bursting with the good things of life," he answered.
"Cesare," Lucrezia said, "I want to come down."
Reluctantly Cesare caught the swing, moved back and forth with it, slowing it. With the courtesy he'd always been taught, he moved around and lifted his sister down. She slipped down him, still watching her father. Her limbs seemed to cling to her brother's like slowly relaxing rubber. As her feet reached the ground she looked up at his face suddenly and her round mouth parted in a smile to which her brother responded.
Her father saw the smile and sensed the desire behind it. But his son, he saw, was not awakened to his young sister's potentialities.
He looked at Cesare. The boy was already tall and sturdy. He must have had sexual desire, must experience it often, but it did not focus on his sister. A pity, the Cardinal decided. The little witch needed to know what it was like, and she had a bit of a crush on her brother-that he had noticed in years gone by.
Cesare would be more or less of a handsome stranger to her of course, away as he was most of the time, studying at Perugia. An idea occurred to him and he smiled at it. He would open Cesare's eyes to the little fruit that his sister was. She would, surely, do the rest without any encouragement. Then, when she had been deflowered by Cesare's growing manhood, the way would be prepared for his own hour or two of passion with her.
"Why don't you go and bathe in the pool," he suggested. "Take off all your clothes and let the sun fill you with goodness."
Lucrezia looked quickly at her brother. Cesare looked at his father. A number of unuttered questions clouded uncomfortably in his eyes.
"Oh, don't worry," the Cardinal said, paternally.
"There will be nobody to see you and you are well sheltered by the pergola."
Cesare continued to look uncomfortable and his sister caught his hand.
"Poor Cesare. I think he's embarrassed," she said, innocently. "Why are you embarrassed, my darling brother?"
Cardinal Roderigo heard the innocent-sounding words mincing provocatively from her pretty lips and smiled inwardly. He wondered just how far her mind went, how much of the next hour or two she anticipated.
"Embarrassed," he roared, with mock impatience. "Of course Cesare's not embarrassed. He has too fine and athletic a frame to be embarrassed to let his little sister see it. Give her a spanking, Cesare, when there's nothing to protect her-and then duck her head in the pool."
Cesare smiled. He was still embarrassed, but now he dared not show it. His father's praise of his body had pleased him.
"TO make her scream for mercy," he boasted.
"Mind she doesn't make you scream for mercy," the Cardinal muttered more to himself than to his son.
"Off you go now," he urged. "I have some work to do."
He watched them run off in the direction of the pool, Lucrezia leading, her buttocks straining against the shift as she moved, laughing over her shoulder at Cesare, who followed, smiling, superior in the knowledge that he could overtake her as he wished.
The Cardinal waited for several minutes before he followed them slowly through the grounds, stepping quietly toward the pool.
The pool was surrounded by a covered walk with a single entrance at one end. The Cardinal pushed his way gently through the trees and bushes bolstering the trellis-work. He crouched and peered through the rose-twined woodwork to where the clear, blue pool glittered in the sunlight.
Cesare was immersed in the pool, keeping to its edge, obviously still embarrassed at his sister's presence. She, however, was standing on the marble surround, brazenly drawing her shift over her head.
Cardinal Roderigo's eyes became transfixed. She threw the shift down on a wooden seat and stretched, looking down invitingly at Cesare. The curves of her body were generous, her waist tight and slim, breasts opening out like an enormous flower above, hips vying with breasts for roundness and maturity below. The sun, which turned her golden hair almost silver, made her pink flesh shine with an almost luminous whiteness. The large red nipples stood out astonishingly dark against the white background and the down at the solid triangle between her thighs was another quick flash of silver.
If I had been more thoughtful, Cardinal Roderigo told himself, I would have got rid of her nanny and her maids and enjoyed the sight of her womanly body often before.
Lucrezia was walking along the edge of the pool away from Cesare, staring up into the sun, opening her arms to it like a lover. Her buttocks bulged under the slimness of her waist, stretching one against the other as she moved, her legs tautened, hard and slim, and then relaxed as each swept forward with her step.
Cardinal Roderigo was hot all over, and sweating between his thighs. His eyes gloated over the fullness of her body, the movements in it as she moved, little eddies of shadow, ripples of half-formed muscle. He watched her parading for Cesare's benefit as if she were an experienced harlot, and he was amazed. The little bitch really needed it good and hard and deep enough to make her tremble from her toes to her golden plaits.
Cesare, too, watched her every movement. His own nakedness had suddenly made him aware of hers-as a woman, not as his sister. He clung to the edge of the pool, whose water was so clear that if he moved out into the middle she'd be able to see him just as he could now see her.
Lucrezia turned and walked back toward Cesare.
"Isn't it lovely not to have any clothes on?" she called out. "I feel like a nymph."
"Hurry up and come in," Cesare answered gruffly. "The water's warm."
"Why do you sound so cross?" she pouted. And with a quick movement she swept her little foot down into the water beside him and shot a spout of water into his eyes. Cesare gasped, released his hold on the side and plunged out into the centre of the pool. The shock of the attack robbed him of his embarrassment.
"I'll get you for that," he called, laughing.
You'll get her anyway, the Cardinal chuckled to himself. He was envying his son the view he must have had of Lucrezia's soft, little body as she stretched her foot down to splash him.
"I don't care. I'm not afraid of you," she cried, laughing too. And with that she gave a neat little dive down into the pool, out of sight of both father and son.
Leaning forward, the better to see, Cardinal Roderigo heard his son shout and saw him begin to flail his arms as he disappeared under the water. In another second Lucrezia shot to the surface and broke into peals of laughter at her skill in ducking her brother from underneath.
Cesare came to the surface, furious now at the impudence of the trick. He began to race toward his retreating sister.
"I'm going to spank you as father said," he cried. "And then I may kill you as well."
Shrieking insults, Lucrezia turned her back on him and swam with all her strength to the edge of the pool. She reached up, gripped the edge and hauled herself up, lying along the marble and wriggling herself out of the water.
Cardinal Roderigo could feel the painful pressure of his rigid penis against his clothes as he devoured the back view of her wriggling escape. Her buttocks stretched out, her thighs pushed and flailed in the air. He could see the slim walls of flesh between her legs. She would be the most beautiful, the most voluptuous woman in Italy in a very short time.
Cesare reached the pool's edge and grabbed at one of his sister's feet, but all he succeeded in doing was getting a hearty kick in the shoulder as she swung clear, climbed to her feet and began to run.
Her father's eyes followed, lustfully. Her buttocks swayed like helpless jellies as she fled; her breasts sprang up and flopped back within their small range of movement. She laughed as she ran and glanced over her shoulder to where Cesare had quickly pulled himself up to the marble surround and was getting to his feet. Her eyes took in the water-cooled limpness of his organ, the patch of dark hair around it. She wondered fleetingly what it was like to touch that thing which performed the functions of which she'd read vague descriptions in some of the best literature of the times. Then Cesare was on his feet and running dangerously fast after her and she turned her head frontward again, racing breathlessly around the pool's perimeter.
Cardinal Roderigo drew back a little as her rippling, trembling figure turned the end of the path and came toward him. He looked back at his son and was proud of him. Slim, strong body. He could have been eighteen or nineteen and his penis was a good specimen, a worthy initiator for Lucrezia.
Cesare was overhauling his sister with ease. She glanced back again and began to laugh with that breathless hysteria of someone in desperation.
She was practically opposite the point where her father was hidden in the mass of foliage when Cesare caught her. She turned away from the pool onto the soft bank of grass next to the inside trellis-work, trying to dodge, to double back. But it was too late, Cesare's muscular young arms had fastened, one around her neck, the other across her breasts, and all she could do was kick and struggle and laugh and pant helplessly.
The battle between their fine young bodies, his lean, muscular, hers ripe, voluptuous, took place about six feet from the unseen Cardinal, who moved forward again, so un-likely were they to see him in the concentration of their struggle.
"Now I shall spank you," Cesare shouted, flinging her down on the grass, falling with her.
"Oh Cesare, how rude and brutish," his sister laughed.
Cardinal Roderigo looked down at her close, fleshful body so near to him and felt a fierce gripping in his rod, so that he longed to burst through the flimsy trellis and the roses and sink himself into the soothing well of relief she promised. He watched their struggle on the ground. Cesare had forced her down on her belly and she had caught one arm and held it firmly gripped under her breasts. He had twined one leg around hers while he raised the other hand and gave her the first sharp-sounding slap across her rearing buttocks.
The Cardinal watched the hand descend, saw her squirm and cry out, half-laughing, half startled, saw the pink mark on the white mounds as the hand rose again.
Lucrezia struggled again, desperately, and managed to throw Cesare's leg off her. The Cardinal grinned avidly as he saw that his son's penis had stiffened out, was cleaving the air alongside his daughter's buttock.
Cesare was flushed; he looked a little confused. He noticed, too, that Lucrezia was trembling.
With a sharp movement of his strong arms, Cesare gripped her shoulders, holding her flat on the ground, only her legs kicking wildly in the air. Again he lifted his hand and it lashed down across her behind, and again. His erection had expanded to the limit of its capacity as he half lay, half knelt beside his, sister and administered punishment to her darkly blushing bottom.
Watching closely the Cardinal saw Lucrezia's mouth open, was aware that she was pressing her body into the grass as she smarted under her spanking.
"Oh Cesare!" she gasped out at last.
Her brother eased up, wondering at last if perhaps he hadn't been too harsh. Lucretia stayed still, her shoulders trembling, her face against the fresh grass.
Cesare lay down alongside her, concerned, and tried to turn her over.
"I didn't hurt you really, did I?" he asked.
Lucrezia turned over at this, lying along him, edging half under him. She smiled.
"You didn't hurt me at all," she said.
"Well don't be too cocky or I'll give you another," Cesare warned, put out a little.
Lucrezia trembled against him, her soft flesh moving against his. She put an arm over his shoulders.
"Don't spank me any more, Cesare," she begged. "It's made me feel all funny."
Cesare looked down at her. Her flesh against his was an undreamed-of torment all of a sudden. He knew what went on, but had never seriously considered it. But here was his sister's body all naked, and exciting curiosity and a pent-up emotion.
She wriggled under him again, her face close to his, and suddenly the other arm had gone around his neck.
"Oh Cesare!" she said once more. And then she pressed her lips against his.
Great God, the Cardinal was muttering. Great God! Eleven years old and with all the wiles of woman born in her! Cesare my son, consider yourself seduced and your father as a serious rival. He was hot as a furnace around his loins and his head was tight with lustful concentration.
Cesare kissed her back. He was flushed in a way he hardly understood. Just the touch of her flesh, her lips, her breasts, the round, nude hips, made him feel almost nauseous with desire.
She took her mouth away from his and looked at him with her deep eyes, half-lidded and deeper looking than he'd ever seen them before. She ran her tongue around her lips and wriggled her body against him.
He bent his head and kissed her lips again and ran his mouth violently over her face. He was afraid at the heat inside him and where it would end.
Get in Cesare, for the Lord's sake, his father was urging through his will. The little minx wants it so much she'll bite it off out of spite if you don't manage it.
He watched her wriggling her hips under her brother's and he wished with a great prayer-like wish that he were lying on her now, ready to give his life in love of her.
"Oh Cesare!" he heard her say more softly. Her arms were hugging him, her hands moving gently over his lean shoulders. Her eyes were closed. The Cardinal could see the slightly crushed globes of her breasts prodding up into Cesare's chest, heaving against him like a sea washing the hull of a ship. Her hips were washing like waves against his loins, too.
"Cesare, dear-do you know how to?" she asked breathlessly after a while in which they pressed against each other and kissed and he felt afraid.
"Have you read about it in books?" she whispered.
"Yes-yes," he said brokenly.
"Let's do it, Cesare, darling. I feel all tight and it must be the time to do it."
My God, my God, the Cardinal thought. Listen to my daughter. She might be her mother for the way she's talking and acting. Her tutors would be shocked out of their wits.
Lucrezia pushed her hands down Cesare's back, tentatively, letting the palms run over the long, lean curve until she felt the sudden hard jut of his buttocks. She caressed his buttocks and pushed them at her gently with an inspired instinct. She could feel the heavy heat of him on her loins and she wanted him, so desperately, to do what it was they did. Deep in her belly, deep in her being she needed it.
Gently she pressed her face against his and bit him on the neck. He uttered a little gasp and his hands tightened on her shoulders, squeezing them until they hurt. His loins pressed against hers with a new pressure. She felt them slither around against her skin.
Perhaps I should really go out and show them exactly what to do, Cardinal Roderigo was thinking. If he doesn't shove it in and blast her for all he's worth she's likely to turn into a man-hater. He caught his bulging penis through his robes and held it, comforted slightly by the alien pressure.
He watched her hands. What hands, he thought. They moved fluidly, as if in the movements of oft-practiced caresses, over Cesare's back and buttocks. She obviously loved the feel of his skin. He watched her squirming and arching her body upward. The sexy little bitch'll have an orgasm any minute now, he thought, and then she'll probably be coy and refuse to let him.
But, while his eyes began to bulge at the sight, he saw Cesare slide down on her and, feverishly, but inaccurately, push between her legs. At first he was too low. It was as if he intended only to get his knob in, if that. But then Lucrezia, eyes still closed, mouth open, snuggled down against him and brought him against her with a rush.
Cesare prodded uncertainly. Lucrezia in a sudden gust of passion opened her legs wide.
More vague proddings, with Cesare breathing so heavily that the Cardinal wondered if his own breathing would reach them.
"That's it! Oh Cesare, Cesare!" The words exploded from her lips and she arched her back, thrusting her breasts up and back with the shock.
Cardinal Roderigo watched Cesare, trembling from head to toes, clamp his little buttocks awkwardly between her thighs as he uncertainly made a bridgehead. Lucrezia, too, was trembling and whimpering, and holding his shoulders with such force that the Cardinal could see the flesh white against the boy's tan, where her fingers were digging.
There, there, at last you little witch. The Cardinal's eyes gleamed with vicarious satisfaction. How does it feel, eh? But you won't really know until you've been screwed by your father's royal rammer.
Lucrezia's body was shaking with continual spasms. She kept her hips still, enduring the certain pain, excited beyond endurance at the obscene thrill of Cesare's entry into her well cared-for treasure. She moved her face against his, brushing his face with her lips, clasping his lips in hers, wanting to swallow his lips.
The Cardinal watched his son gradually advancing through his bridgehead, wriggling awkwardly into her, squirming his hips up from their rather distant stance between her lower thighs until he was in the correct position for a full thrust.
After a time, as his hard little buttocks rose and fell above her, Lucrezia began to wriggle under him, too, moaning, kissing him passionately, mouthing his name.
The Cardinal was suddenly aware that he was wet from the pitch of excitement he'd worked up. Not a bad performance for the first time, he thought through clenched teeth. But they have a deal, a great deal, to learn.
Every so often Lucrezia would throw out her arms on the grass and lie there moaning in abandonment for several seconds before clasping them once more and with renewed passion around Cesare's back.
Cesare was panting furiously. His jerking was getting a smooth, more powerful flow, but the Cardinal could see that he hadn't sunk into her to the full and probably wouldn't before he came.
Lucrezia's thighs began to clasp Cesare's hips, rubbing them as she lifted her knees from the ground and twisted her loins in her passion.
When she lifted her knees and her thighs rode up with them forming an angle with the grass, Cardinal Roderigo could see Cesare pushing into her. He noticed that there wasn't any blood. Cesare would enlarge her just enough to make the shock of his assault, when she got it, not too unbearable.
The sun shone down vividly on the bright green grass and the two passionately-fitted bodies writhing out their exquisite pleasure beside the pool. A fine picture of son and daughter with father watching from the bushes, the Cardinal thought with a chuckle.
Lucrezia's plump buttocks were flattening against the ground, oozing and spreading from under Cesare's hips. She was gasping, uttering his name. Her climax was near. Hot little bitch, her father murmured. What a delight you'll be to me.
"Oh Cesare, Cesare my darling brother...!" Her words tumbled out in the whine of her breath and she sucked his lips again, straining her body at him.
Cesare tried to utter something, failed, and gasped instead.
"Oh Cesare, Cesare! Oh, oh, oh!" She pushed against him so hard that she almost lifted him off the ground on top of her, her buttocks hollowing with the strain; her arms clasped him to her as if she wanted to envelop him with flesh. The breath exploded from her open mouth in a great whoosh as if someone had sat on her belly and expelled it as from a cushion. She gave several wild, self-concerned convulsions and then sank back under him.
Cesare had stopped his action, shaken out of his stride by her passion. She put her arms back around his neck, calmer but still loving, and he resumed his hard, probing entry.
How sweet-sweet minx, the Cardinal thought, passionately. Lie there and wait for him to know the climax of pleasure you've just had.
Lucrezia drew up her thighs a little. It was too late now for Cesare to learn the art of complete penetration. His head was rolling on his neck, tendons were standing out on that strong young neck of his and a vein pulsed in his forehead.
Lucrezia whispered, but more lazily this time. "Cesare, darling Cesare!"
Cardinal Roderigo watched his son's body twist up into the culmination of passion as he pressed his sister into the grass. His breath was coming in a series of quick little gasps, he put his arms around her body, hugging it to him, he gasped her name at last, the first time it had ever been gasped in passion.
"Lucrezia ... Lucrezia ... Aaaaah!"
He convulsed against her, lost control of his movements, actually drew out of her in his excitement and fear at what he was doing and swung over the grass.
Lucrezia, breathing hard again, stroked his face and shoulders as his hips jerked in the air like a death spasm. She glanced down as he rolled immediately away from her, doubtful and half-ashamed now that it as finished. She saw his penis, deflated and small, ..ow.
"Cesare-we've done it," she whispered. She seemd astonished, now.
Cesare didn't look at her. He lay on his stomach with his head in his arms. She rolled over to him.
"Cesare, darling, are you cross; do you wish we hadn't?"
He didn't answer and she put her arms around him in an almost motherly way and kissed his head.
"Cesare-don't wish we hadn't ... because then I should feel terrible that I thought it was so wonderful."
At that Cesare lifted his head and smiled at her.
"That's better," she said softly. "You did like it, didn't you?"
He nodded his head and she kissed him gently on the lips. She glanced around them and the Cardinal crouched softly back.
"We'd better have another swim," Lucrezia was saying. She looked at her brother with her deep eyes. "We will be able to do it again before you go, won't we Cesare?"
Cesare nodded, jumped to his feet, helped her up and took a running dive into the pool.
Lucrezia followed, smiling. And the Cardinal slowly withdrew through the bushes. The sexy little bitch, he kept repeating. The sexy little bitch.
CHAPTER TWO
Cardinal Roderigo's mistress, the beautiful Vannoz-za Catanei, was sleeping in her room in a wing of the house when he went through to see her later in the day. She was recovering from one of those ridiculous and unexpected summer chills.
He sat on the edge of her bed. She was certainly still beautiful although her youth was past. He still found her delicious in bed. But every so often he felt the need for a fresh body, words and whimpers of passion from a strange voice. He felt the need now. Not an abstract one, but the need for Lucrezia, on whom his whole lustful attention had focused.
He leaned over the sleeping woman and kissed her forehead. She awoke and smiled sleepily at him.
"I'll leave you tonight," he said. "You still need rest. Is there anything you need?"
"Nothing, Roderigo, nothing. What have you been doing?"
"Watching the children. They're growing up."
"Yes, indeed," she said, sadly. "I wish they could call me Mother."
"Hardly becoming, my dear," the Cardinal answered, with a chuckle. "The Pope would have the final fit to finish him if such a thing were openly admitted. Think of the disrepute the Church would fall into. Think of the Church, my sweet."
She pressed his hand with a smile.
"The Church is a hypocrite, Roderigo. You are the Church."
"Hush, dear, never let it be said. Now, if there's nothing you need I shall go and read for a while in the library, or perhaps I'll take a stroll in the grounds."
"Yes. I shall be better in the morning," she said.
He bent again and kissed her on the forehead and she pulled his face down and kissed him on the lips. "Goodnight, my sweet."
"Sweet dreams."
He left her chamber and strolled through the wing of the house, meditating. He didn't head down the stairway toward the library, nor yet to the grounds. He directed his feet instead toward the children's wing.
Candles were burning in Cesare's room when he looked in and Cesare was sitting in bed staring vacantly at the opposite wall.
"Very pensive, my son. You'd better go to sleep now. I want you to be at your best for our little hunting trip tomorrow."
"Oh yes, father. I was thinking about it."
Liar, thought the Cardinal with an inward chuckle. You'd forgotten it completely. You were dreaming of your little sister's soft breasts, reliving your first flesh-to-flesh liaison.
He went to Cesare's bedside and kissed him on the forehead.
"Goodnight, my son."
"Goodnight, father."
Cardinal Roderigo blew out the candles and retired from the room.
His heart beat faster and his penis was already at half mast as he walked down the corridor to Lucrezia's room at the end. Anticipatory thrills licked down his spine at the thought of what he was going to enjoy. He hadn't decided exactly how to bring it about, but somehow or other he was going to have her tonight.
He opened her door softly, without knocking, and stepped inside.
Candles were burning in her room, too, but she was not in her bed. He glanced around the room and saw her sitting on a stool beside the window, gazing out into the grounds. She was clad in her thin nightdress, but the evening was warm.
She turned, startled.
"Oh, Papa. I didn't hear you come in."
He came across to her and peered through the window.
"What are you doing, dearest, dreaming about the stars?"
"Oh, it's such a lovely night, Father, and I don't feel a bit sleepy."
She had risen from the stool and stood beside him, looking out with him over the trees. He glanced down at her. Little did she know that he knew what she'd been up to. He found himself breathing nervously. Her breasts swelled out below the square neck of the nightgown, pushing the material out in a twin range of hills with just a slight indentation between them.
In spite of his years, the Cardinal felt quite nervous. Astonishing, he thought, after all my experience, to feel like a schoolboy with my own daughter.
He put his arm around her and she leaned against him affectionately. How often before I've put my arm around her without the slightest tremor, he thought. And now he could hardly keep his fingers from quivering on her soft shoulder. He wondered how she felt, now, with her new awareness. She'd been growing more and more provocative toward him, but, perhaps now, paradoxically, her extra experience had turned her mind infatuatedly on her brother Cesare; perhaps she could think of nothing and no one else.
"Have you had a pleasant day?" He tried to keep his voice normal.
"Oh, I've had a wonderful day, Papa."
"Has Cesare been good to you?"
She looked up at him and he could see those deep eyes in the moonlight! They were not a bit apprehen sive, but she was searching his eyes, as if wondering.
"He's always good to me, Father. I sometimes think he'd die for me."
"A very romantic notion, my dear young lady. Maybe you mean you'd die for him, eh?"
He squeezed her shoulder and ran his hand down her arm, as if in affection. She moved her other hand onto his and pressed it.
"Perhaps that is what I mean, Papa. I never feel I can hide anything from you."
"Ah, you'll learn, my sweet, to have admiration for others than your brother."
"Oh but I have, Papa. I love you at least as much as Cesare."
Am I reading into those words what I want to read into them? the Cardinal asked himself. Are they as innocent as they could be-were it not for what I'd witnessed this afternoon? Or is she really being provocative again in a way that only a she-devil could be?
He bent and kissed the top of her golden head, moving his hand from her shoulder, under her armpit so that his fingers lay lightly along the outside bulge of her womanly breast.
"You speak like someone very old in years, my dear."
"I often feel very old in years, Father. Much older than Cesare."
He laughed, gently. The breast under his fingers was solid and sleek-feeling even through the nightdress. He longed to tear off that flimsy garment and grasp her breasts in his hands while he devoured her lips and felt his hips riding up between her thighs.
"Well, you'd better go to bed," he said. "Come, I'll carry you."
And with that he reached down and swung her from her feet, ensuring as he did so that his arm rested under her thighs with his hand against the intimate, rounded crevice formed by the tops of her thighs and the beginnings of her buttocks.
He swung her playfully to and fro once or twice, enabling himself thus to let his hand slip, as if accidentally, between her legs.
"Oh, Papa!" she uttered sharply. And then she added, quickly, to hide the real motive for her cry: "I thought you were going to drop me."
"Drop you," he cried jocularly. "As if I'd drop my beautiful daughter."
He swung her again, his hand slipping along her thighs with every movement. She threw back her head over his arm and closed her eyes with a smile on her lips.
Got you now, my beauty, he thought. A little more of this and you're mine.
"Heave ho, heave ho!" he cried in a jolly tone, while his hand pressed and slid along her.
For a minute or two he swung her back and forth, toning in an occasional circle, raising her, lowering her, all the time his hand working on that newly-initiated core of her being. She remained with her head back, laughing nervously every now and then, saying "Oh Papa!" and flushing with ill-concealed excitement for the rest.
Suddenly, his intruding hand felt a change through her gown. His hand slipped more easily against her. She was getting really excited. The time had come where a facade of fun and games was no longer necessary.
He carried her to the bed and laid her out on it. He stood up then as if to go, eager to see her reaction. She opened her eyes. Her position was one of abandon, with her legs apart under the night-shift.
"Kiss me goodnight, Papa," she said. And it seemed to him that even if he made no further move she would embark on an attempt at seduction.
He leaned down over the bed. Her beautiful young face with those full, indefinitely formed lips was very close. She put up her arms and caught his neck to pull his head down. He kissed her on the lips and it was certainly like no father-and-daughter kiss they'd ever had before. He felt those soft lips pushing hard against him, heard her body rustling, knew that she was rubbing her legs together.
Even now, for the last vestige of delicacy, he pretended to lose his balance as she pulled his head. He tumbled down beside her on the bed. She was still kissing him, but now she released him and laughed delightedly. Such a laugh, he thought. It was a mixture of amusement at his fall, of sensuality, of nervous excitement, of triumph-yes, perhaps, even, triumph. "You little minx," he said, aloud.
"Why little minx, Papa, darling?" she asked.
"I heard you and darling Cesare by the pool, today," he retorted. "If I were a father like some, I'd send you to a convent."
Lucrezia was obviously taken aback, but his attitude reassured her.
"Didn't you mind, Papa? Was it very wicked?"
"Very wicked in the eyes of the world, my dear. But, in your father's eyes it was enviable."
"Papa-are you going to kiss me goodnight again?" Her thighs were working together and the gown rising and falling from her breathing. With an ecstatic sigh he kissed her mouth, hard and then harder, forcing her lips apart so that his teeth grazed hers before he pushed his tongue through and into her mouth.
His hand went away, wandering over her body, trembling over the luscious, still-hidden flesh. He reached right down to the hem of her gown and slid his hand along her leg, up over the knee and up the thigh. He played with the thighs, teasing them with his fingertips, drawing his nails over the glossy, young flesh, teasing her without touching her cranny. She moved and slithered on the bed, eyes closed, in a heat of sensuality.
He too was fluttering inside. This was it. This beautiful, precocious daughter of his with her firm, fleshy body was his. He moved his mouth from her and ran his lips over her slim, soft face.
"Put your tongue in my mouth," he murmured.
Her lips sought his and then he felt the soft, wet sliver of her tongue edge between his lips and push into his mouth. She flicked it in and out like a cobra, she breathed into his mouth, breathing her passion.
Good God, your mother would never believe it, he thought.
He sucked her tongue, his saliva mingling with hers. He forced it to retreat with his, filling her mouth with his.
Her hands moved around his head and neck the way they had around Cesare's, but occasionaly they jerked when his experienced technique gave her more of a shock.
Softly he began to brush her with his fingertips. Gently, gently, back and forth, until the moisture began to develop along her smooth, young thighs. Then he moved, searched for and found the wet, hard, little objective. This was something Cesare hadn't known. He'd have to tell him.
Gently he massaged it, feeling it thicken, harden in his fingers. Lucrezia began to squeal and jarked her head away from his and then back in little gusts of uncontrollable passion.
"Oh Papa! Oh Papa!" she squealed, and thrust her tongue wildly into his mouth the way he'd instructed her.
The Cardinal, his face hot, perspiration beading on his almost bald pate, worked his fingers along, pushing up through the tight, moist flesh which was as smooth as sealskin. Lucrezia jerked and pressed her thighs tightly over his hand, hindering his progress. He felt the warm flesh of her thighs bulging around his hand. Gently he tickled her with his fingers and gradually she relaxed again and opened her legs.
I can't stand this much longer, he thought. I'll have to get in the minx or I'll come in my clothes.
He leaned up from her a little and looked at her. Her face was flushed, she didn't open her eyes, her lips were open, quivering every so often. He looked down at her body. The nightdress was up around her hips, revealing the delicious proportions of her thighs, the soft bulges of skin between her legs, the little area of down at her thigh junction. The top part of her body was still covered. The hillocks of her breasts heaved in shapely unrest beneath the white material. Swiftly he grabbed the shift with his free hand and pulled it right up, exposing first the full roundness of her little belly and her hips and then the bulbous symmetry of her breasts above, with their slim, pointed nipples.
"Oh, you beauty!" he exclaimed aloud. "You beauty!"
He swooped down to her breasts. He kissed them, sucked the nipples, making her squirm with unbearable ecstasy. He ran his lips down over her ribs, her belly, which yielded, spongily before the presure. He covered her hips with hot, wet kisses, following the crease of her groin, licking the smooth, warm-tasting skin of her thighs.
"Oh Papa! Oh Papa!" She seemed incapable of saying anything but those two words as she wriggled her shoulders in the air and squirmed her hips and belly under his lips.
He moved his lips tantalizingly along the fleshy tops of her thighs.
"Oh Papa, I can't stand it!"
But she didn't close her legs and he thought-you'll have more than this to stand before I've finished, you lovely little minx.
Gently he pushed his hands under her buttocks. Oh, what delightful buttocks! They were tightened now, tense in his hands as she strained up toward his lips. He grasped a buttock in each hand and felt them, digging in his fingers, feeling them relax onto his palms, flood out in a sudden give of flesh all over his hands.
He gripped them, pushed her thighs wider with his bald head and licked her.
She made noises of torment, as if she were gargling with water in her throat. He flicked his tongue into the aperture, which seemed to give way on all sides.
She began to squirm even more, gripping his face between her thighs in convulsive spasms. Her breath passed through her lips in the form of a continuous groaning whimper. He hoped they would not disturb any of the household.
Her movements became more wild and uncontrolled and at this point he eased off and eventually removed his mouth from her.
Reaching up, he pulled her shift over her head. She stretched out her arms above her head and he slipped it over them and threw it on the floor. He got up from the bed quickly and began to slip out of his clothes.
Naked, with the warm air like a cool hand on his body, he turned back to the bed and saw her wide open, anguished, desiring eyes.
His penis was sticking out like a pike. He was afraid she might run from the room at the sight of its size, but instead she fixed her fascinated gaze on it as if hypnotized.
He lay down on the bed beside her and kissed her neck.
"Oh Papa I'm frightened-it's so much bigger than Cesare's," she whispered.
"Don't worry, my darling-you'll find that after the first shock you're a match for it."
He ran his lips all round her neck and put his tongue in her ear until she shivered with the sensation and put her arms back around his neck.
For a few seconds he kneaded her again until she was moaning with pleasure, and then, he slithered onto her body.
Oh, the delight of feeling that warm, soft flesh meet his at so many points at once! It was as if she was gently kissing him all over. Oh the joy of having that lovely body, that other personality waiting to submit to him, to join with him in an orgy of heart-pounding pleasure!
For several seconds Cardinal Roderigo just lay on his daughter, rubbing her fleshy lower belly, grating his chest, his hairy chest, against the smooth silk of her breasts, moistening her lips with his tongue, licking her closed eyelids, stroking her golden plaits as he worked his loins into an unendurable state of dynamic tension.
"Lucrezia, my sweet darling," he whispered. "Now I am going to give you real delight."
In answer she gripped him with her slim arms and hugged him tight, murmuring still, simply "Oh Papa, Papa!"
Cardinal Roderigo slipped his hand down between their bodies, rough hair of his on one side, glossy, white flesh of hers on the other. He found the vagina and moved down for the entry.
Lucrezia's arms tightened around him in frightened anticipation, her legs hung limply apart.
"Now, my darling," he muttered.
His cudgel slipped on the moisture of her thighs, encountered-deliciously cool-the soft, giving wetness of her, and then, with a gasp from them both, moved into the opening.
Inside his breast was a sudden rush of relief. He thought "Oh at last. Thank God, thank God!"
He thrust smoothly forward to a tighter region and Lucrezia uttered a stifled scream and jerked her hips backward. But he followed them with his loins and jogged gently on her, probing in no further, moving in and out just an inch or so while she became accustomed to the pressure.
Gradually she relaxed and her thighs went limp again on either side of his hips. He put his hands under his chest, between their bodies, and squeezed her breasts hard and she drew in her breath with a swoosh, and wriggled invitingly down in the region where he was waiting to advance.
He flexed his hips in a little more and Lucrezia gasped and drew back again.
"Oh Papa, Papa," she moaned. "It hurts, it hurts!"
"We'll go gently, my baby," he breathed. "We have plenty of time. Soon it won't hurt you."
After a second or two she untensed again and he screwed his loins in little circular motions on hers, pushing no farther into her.
He turned her face, which was pressing, sideways, into the bed, and kissed her, slipping his tongue into her mouth, licking the comers of her lips until she responded and thrust her own little tongue at his.
He screwed her gently, so gently, moving in a fraction of a centimeter at a time. Every time he moved in she tensed and he moved no farther for a while.
He found it excruciating not to be able to plunge right up her to the very hilt of his power, but it also inflicted on him a fresh innovation, a self-torture which was exquisite.
A considerable heat had been generated between their bodies and he saw that little beads of perspiration were bursting forth passionately on her forehead. He slid his hands up the sides of her body, lingering over the rims of breasts which oozed out from under him on either side. He moved his hands under her armpits. Yes, they were sweating, too. She was in a real answering fever heat.
I shall shoot into her soon, he thought, having difficulty to keep his thought coherent.
The thin pricking of sensation seemed to be a bursting point; it seemed, of its own accord to be bursting up and up, and it was only when she cried out again in anguish that he realized he was thrusting with greater and greater force. Only this time he couldn't slow down, couldn't stop and mark time to allow her to recover.
Tightly he held her upper arms while he wriggled his hips in closer.
"It won't hurt, it won't hurt, in a moment it won't hurt," he wheezed through his leaping breath.
"Oh it hurts, it hurts, oh, oh, oh!" Lucrezia moved her head from side to side, but made no further effort, realizing the futility, to jerk her hips away from her father's.
She felt as if her belly, her loins, were being purged in a painful splitting scourging. And always, always as she thought it eased, the pain broke out afresh and the great object tearing and thundering inside swept up, impossibly, farther and farther.
She closed her eyes, trying to stop the tears oozing from them. She bit her lips and gritted her teeth. She couldn't stand it. She wished it had never begun. It wasn't like with Cesare. It was pain such as she'd never experienced. Was this how women were when they had a child? She would never have a child. Never!
But Cardinal Roderigo was in delirium. He moved his hands under her behind, pushed his fingers right round, crushing into that tightly-grasping pipeline. He squeezed her buttocks in a paroxysm of sensuality, thrust his fingers at her little rosebud. And all the time the fire was growing and growing, drawing oaths and obscenities from his mouth. He had nearly disappeared into her body now. There was little left to go. By the time of the explosion which was twisting his lips with its imminence, he would be crushing right in, stuffing her with the entirety of his penis. He pulled her thighs up to facilitate his last two centimeters.
"Oh, oh. What a delight," he choked. "Daughter-you're the best-the best-I've ever-had."
Lucrezia heard these oaths and mouthings with a slight chill of fear. This had got beyond expectations. But she was relieved to find that the pain had got no worse and that, apart from a soreness, everything seemed to be much easier and she was actually recapturing some of the earlier sensation which had flattened in her as soon as the pain came. Papa had been right after all. It would only hurt for a while. In fact, now, as it became easier with every thrust he made and she began to wriggle her loins and thighs against him, it seemed impossible that a few minutes before she'd been ready to die from anguish.
"It's all right, Papa," she whispered. "It-it doesn't hurt so much any more."
Her words spurred Cardinal Roderigo on as if she had suddenly bitten the blunt end of his rod. There was a sweetness, a submission about the way she told him that made him feel strangely sadistic.
He pulled her thighs up at an even more acute angle with her belly and pushed home the last length of pulsating flesh. Lucrezia gasped, but a gasp which was three parts pleasure, one part shock.
The Cardinal's loins were aflame. He was heavy and prickling inside her. It felt ready to burst along its whole length. His belly was heaving in and out enough to give him a heart attack, his hands rifled her bottom, pinching it, grabbing it in paroxysms, digging at her while she squirmed on his finger points.
"Oh Lucrezia! My daaarling!" he moaned.
"Papa, Papa," she answered tenderly through her regrowing passion.
His lips moved, but no sounds came out except his shaking breath. It was coming. He rammed smack into her, burying his staff so deep that his force made her squeal. In his belly there was a chinning, a churning that was pure essence of sensation. Everything paled, he felt dizzy. The heat and solid pricking fury of the sensation was everything, but for dazed impressions of this beautiful body, this beautiful daughter lying under him, giving him this ecstasy from her lovely passionate flesh.
In the depths of his chest a long-drawn, choking gasp slowly followed the course of the long-drawn, loin-convulsing drawing of his fluid. He called her name through his groaning. He leaned up from her except for his loins. He gripped her waist just above the hips and squeezed it with more and more force as the sensation rushed inside him, and with a last rush shattered out and into her as he jerked uncontrollably, until he let go of her waist and slipped exhaustedly down onto the warmth of her flesh. Red marks were left on the tender white flesh where his hands had gripped.
Lucrezia had been aware, through her own passion, of the groaning and writhing around her as if a thousand demons were suddenly raping her body from all sides. She felt the hot jets spurt inside her, with a twinge of pleasure. And then, a few seconds later, she felt fresh twinges of disappointment when her father sank limply onto her and the solidity was withdrawn, leaving a sudden cool rush of air and the shadow of solidity in its place.
She was hot and a piquant burning remained. She was sore, but not so sore that she wouldn't have invited further entry to assuage her desire. She sighed and tensed her thighs against the Cardinal's hips.
He seemed to come out of the heavily breathing state of coma he'd fallen into and he stroked her thighs without moving from his position astride her.
"You learn very fast, daughter," he said. "I'm exhausted as a galley-slave."
In answer she wound her legs around his and rubbed her cheek against his chin.
He lay on her, inwardly chuckling, now, knowing her unquenched desire. It was warm and highly pleasant having her provocative body as a cushion.
Lucrezia unwound her tightly clamping legs after a few minutes and slithered them in underneath his. He felt her soft little belly squirm against the rotundity of his and then the live pressure of her well-covered hips. "Did I not hurt you, my sweet?"
"Yes, Papa-but it changed halfway and I began to feel that I wanted to die in such happiness."
And she has yet to die in it, he thought, yet to feel the soporific spread of satisfaction from her father's punishing penetration.
He rolled off her at last. His penis, hot and tender, had half-risen again. He took Lucrezia's hand and placed it on the hot length of flesh.
Lucrezia looked down at the organ which had begun to expand in her hand. She held it gently as if it were a hand, wondering at its great heat.
"Caress it, my love," the Cardinal said, pressing his thighs one against the other.
His daughter obeyed, drawing her fingers gently, as if afraid, over the smooth, white skin.
Cardinal Roderigo felt an explosion inside him as if passion had broken out from a small cell, shattering the walls, and was now pervading the corridors, the antechambers of his entire body. He flexed his hips against the side of her thigh. He crossed one ankle behind the other, turning his body into an arch. His heart began to gather speed in its pounding once again.
Lucrezia gained courage-or curiosity-as the Cardinal became more and more impassioned. She allowed her fingers to slip away. The very feel of his genitals excited her, too, making her wet and exposed-feeling between her legs so that she closed her thighs and grazed them together achingly.
The Cardinal began to undulate his legs, breathing noisily through his hairy nostrils. He leaned his head over onto her, laying it against her breasts, brushing his smooth cheek from one to the other, sucking a nipple, descending the hill into the valley, climbing the opposite hill and kissing that other nipple which shot out like a flag on a mountain top.
Lucrezia felt overcome with a desire to kiss his whole body in return. She swayed over and laid her head on his chest as he relaxed backward before her gentle pressure. She kissed his hairy chest, loving his breasts with her mouth. He placed his hand on her soft head and pushed her gently downward. She let herself be pushed, let her head move down him, her lips moistly blazing a trail down his hairy flesh as they passed.
He caught her head by her hair, roughly, so that she gasped, and pushed her face down the last few inches.
She got the idea immediately and he felt her lips, tantalizingly light and feathery, running up the stem of flesh. He cringed within himself, gritting his teeth.
He held his breath for what seemed an asphyxiating length of time and then he let it out in a long, gasping sigh as the mouth closed softly.
From what seemed a great height above him on the bed, he could hear her lips gently sucking. There seemed to be no correspondence between the noise which inflamed his ears and the actual pulling of her lips.
He had released her head, but now, wanting to plunge farther into the tightness of sensation, he reached down again and forced her blonde head down. He felt his solid heat shoot forward, grazing her teeth. She gave a choking, muffled cry. He undulated his hips with the fury of a whirlpool and heaved them up at her face. He looked down at her slim, flushed face and the distended lips. The sight added to the sensation and his eyes narrowed, his lips broke apart, his hand tightened on her soft, fine hair.
His whole loins were an urge. His hand moved hard and violently over her head, pulling on those golden plaits, pressing the head with convulsive fingers.
He watched her cheeks hollowing, her eyes closing and opening in her passion. Her slim, sleek back, white and without a blemish, was presented to him, blooming abruptly into the luxury of her hips and soft, full buttocks that invited caresses, invited the pressure of another body.
He watched her buttocks. They slithered whitely one against the other, an outward sign of her inner excitement. They were smooth, lovely convexes of flesh. He longed to reach out and touch them but he couldn't reach. He longed to press against them, to feel their convexity in all its voluptuousness crushed against the elastic roundness of his own belly and loins.
He pulled her head sharply from his loins. Her mouth came off with a sharp sucking noise. She looked up at him with her deep, blub eyes half open. He was tingling, the feel of her mouth still needing to be replaced.
He slithered down behind her, lying along her back, and put his arms round her to fondle her breasts with their erect nipples. The coolness of her buttocks exaggerated the heat of his penis against them. He pressed against the soft mounds of flesh, biting his lips.
With his hand he reached down and explored her thighs from behind, pushing his fingers between them until he found the long portals of ultra-smooth mois ture. He began to caress her once again.
Immediately she began to wriggle in the most abandoned way and to moan in a manner which made him impatient to plunge in and give her something to really moan about.
He eased her over onto her face. She went just wherever his hands guided. She seemed quite lost to anything but his touch.
Quivering with anticipation he lowered himself onto the provocative pertness of her buttocks, feeling them warm, soft and giving under his loins. His penis waved between her thighs which she had opened. Now he couldn't wait. Every moment was torment.
Swaying back onto his knees, he pulled her up onto her knees in front of him. Her bottom reared up at him, her face was pressed into the bed within the framework of her arms.
There, like a great cleft moon, her behind was juicily presented to him. Her thighs were spread, the lines between her knees forming the base of a triangle, the point at her thigh junction where he could see the apex. She was kneeling before him like a sacrificial offering. She was his to do with as he wished.
He placed himself behind her. He eased her open with his thumbs and ranged against the opening. Then with an all-pervading tremor of sublime pleasure he surged into her.
Lucrezia, her lips working, her mind confused with desire, knelt before the Cardinal, with her bottom right up in the air under his eyes. She felt his thumbs against her vagina and she squirmed against them, contracting in concentrated passion. She moaned again-and the moan became a cry as, with the force and relentlessness of a battering ram, his great rod tore into her and raced up with great momentum into the depths of her belly. This time it was easier and less painful, but these thoughts didn't occur to her at the time. She was aware only of the slight pain, the nakedness of her bottom, her whole body and her desire to submit, to be used, raped, hurt even, and to enjoy, to wallow in her enjoyment, which transcended any other type of enjoyment she'd ever experienced.
She heard her father grunting behind the weight of his hips which pressed at her so hard that they edged her forward on the bed and made her push with her hands to keep her position.
He bludgeoned in and drew back and then thrust right up again.
On her waist his hands were cruel in the way they gripped her with such force. She felt his knees edging her knees apart. He seemed to want to embed himself deeper and deeper in her. It made the whole of her loins itch and flame. She was aware of the contraction and expansion inside her, the sensation that a regular wave of movement was getting faster and faster, deeper and deeper.
The Cardinal gritted his teeth as the tight sheath of flesh slipped back along his complementary dagger.
He thrust in and out, up and up with a regular, strong flow from his hips. His stomach was fluttering, his thighs twitching. At the extremity of his inward stroke he gave an extra flick, feeling her buttocks give and spread under the weight of his loins, hearing her gasps and gulps. Every few strokes he would thrust right in and leave it there, tightly held in her body while he squirmed his hips against her cool buttocks, revelling in the brushing contact of their separate flesh.
He moved his hands from her waist, which, it seemed, he could almost span, tracing them over her back, the lean, firm flesh. He pressed her into the bed, saw her shoulders shake and quiver, her bottom sway and rotate against him.
He felt like a trail of gunpowder rushing toward its annihilation in explosion. He ran his hands under her belly, clasping her to him as he spread her thighs still wider with his knees. He clasped the flesh of her belly in small, elastic handfuls. He lowered his own belly onto her bottom, holding her in a close abdominal embrace as he smashed his loins against her, splitting her with his ever-growing intrusion.
Subject under him, a willing slave, Lucrezia felt him filling her whole body. It seemed to surge right in up to her breasts with every thrust. And every thrust brought an involuntary explosion of breath from between her lips. Her hot face twisted in torment against the bed. Her hips waved and squirmed beyond her control.
Lucrezia heard her own groans as if they came from some other throat. She felt as if she were being dredged, all her entrails being dragged down into that channel. With a confusion of wild words in her head, many of them unspoken exhortations to him to destroy her, she felt a great warmth spreading inside. It was a feeling she hadn't had before, an inexorable advance of nothing which shook her body and made her feel that the end of her life was near. She tried to say something to her father, to ask him something, but when she opened her mouth only muffled exclamations came out.
And the inexorable sensation went on and on and her hips waved as if they had their own delirium and her belly was afire with a burning like snow. Snow rushing in an avalanche which was lovely and terrible, unbearable and all-desirable, unending yet moving quickly to an end. She groaned and cried out in loud grating cries. Her whole body was moving downward to pass out between her legs. She gasped and weaved her hips and pressed back against her father's belly, wanting him, loving him, loving the sensation, frightened of it-and now it was there, everywhere, a great bubble which was bursting, bursting and...."Oh my God! Oh-oh-oh-oh-oooooh!" A great flowing through, an escape and a slow ebbing, ebbing slowly, slowly, back to normal, which was not normal because it left a wash and a new feeling.
Cardinal Roderigo was inflamed with the sight and sound of Lucrezia's culmination. Her tortured face, pressing into the bed, remained in his mind even when it had calmed and the movement of her lips was nothing more than a muted recognition of the force of his continued penetration.
He felt a great out-reaching for her, as if he needed to destroy her to ensure a truly positive action.
He pistoned into her, and his mouth opened and closed with furious wheezings. When he gripped her he crushed her tender flesh sadistically, reflecting the force of his grip with a renewed vigour of his thrust. With every forward motion which tightened his buttocks into hard, male globes he crashed against her behind, pushing her forward, pulling a little cry from her.
Within him he felt the curling up of the spring which would suddenly snap straight again at the point where it could curl no more. He wanted to push farther and farther into her body to some impossible point. His grip on her waist grew. He fixed his gaze on her buttocks. He would have to have it again some day soon. He watched the focal point of those revolving buttocks. He moved his finger, prodded her, felt the cringing reaction. The spring was winding to breaking point. He felt he couldn't stand any more. He couldn't get any farther into her. It must come to an end now. He heard the murmurs of her breath. He gasped, gritted, thrust forward in a long, hard stroke and then convulsed in a series of quick tremoring jerks.
Lucrezia wriggled a little, at last, from under his dead weight which had become too much for her. Her back ached a little where it had been curved in a concave while the Cardinal satisfied his passion on her.
Feeling her movement, the Cardinal rolled off her and flopped down on his back. He watched her nestle down beside him and wondered how long he had better stay. Then he thought of the sleeping household and decided he had time to show her a few more things yet.
CHAPTER THREE
Cardinal Roderigo's thoughts were turned on his future as he sat in his big library which led, by a terrace, into the grounds. When he thought of his future he always thought back, first to Calixtus, who had given the family such a sudden rise to eminence. Don Alonso de Borja, as he had been before ascending the throne of St. Peter, had been a fine old man and Roderigo felt he owed it as much to him as to himself to fully recapture the family's previous office.
And such an aim appeared to be within his grasp. There were many amongst the pontifics who hated him, but he was convinced of his ability to buy them-with money or promises of estate-when the time was ripe.
The only slight stumbling block was the pertinacity with which Innocent III clung to his fading life. Already he had violently disappointed the Cardinal-amongst others-with unexpected recoveries from cataleptic trances after he'd already been taken for dead.
Under his lethargic rule, the Church had again begun to lose much of the vigour it had possessed under his predecessor, Sixtus IV-a fact which filled Cardinal Roderigo with fury when it occurred to him that he would have the task of rebuilding its strength. What a stupid man he was. He had even openly acknowledge his children for his own, thus enabling his enemies to create open scandal about him. And in fact it often seemed that provision for his seven bastards was the only aim of his pontificate. Truly, Rome would be well rid of such a man.
Cardinal Roderigo idly flicked the pages of a book as he allowed his imagination to flow where his ambition prompted. As Pope he would immediately start a system of alliances which would increase the power of the pontifical troops; he would create fresh cardinals to ensure his personal strength and he would force the proud barons to pay the taxes which for so long they'd ignored. That would be but a start. In the process, of course, he would clean up Rome of its lawlessness. It was indeed scandalous and dangerous for the authorities that the present Pope had allowed such lawlessness to scourge the streets. Every morning there were fresh corpses in the streets and it was dangerous to be abroad at night without an escort. Such a step should certainly gain him a certain immediate favor with the common people....
But then he realized that he was sitting in his library, that he was simply Cardinal Roderigo Borgia and that the Pope, weak and near-helpless, was still hanging stubbornly onto his life.
However, the possibility of ridding Rome of the old man seemed rather nearer to the Cardinal today, for an idea had come to him.
He had in the past considered ways and means of doing away with Innocent, but a practicable method had never presented itself to him. There was always some snag either in the form of the Pope's vigilant attendants or the old man's own suspicious nature. Recently, however, he had been turning over in his mind the knowledge that Innocent was the toppling monument to grasping sensualism within himself. The only reason the old man was no longer visited by his courtesans was because his enfeebled state made him fear a fatal stroke if he indulged in the excitement of sexual intercourse. But, the Cardinal smiled to himself, supposing he were forced into it by a seduction he could not resist. In his present state that could well bring about the end of him, clearing the way.
Several hours later Cardinal Roderigo was ushered into the Pope's chamber in the Vatican. Officially he was paying a duty call, to offer his hope of a quick improvement in the old man's health; in actual fact his thoughts were bent on quite a different path.
The Pope raised a weary hand from his bed. He was thin and pale. He looked worse every day.
"Ah, my dear Cardinal Roderigo, I am happy to be able to tell you I feel considerably better today." His voice belied his words with its thin, scraggy tone. The Cardinal sometimes felt that the old man divined his wishes and enjoyed trying to annoy him with declarations about his improved state of health.
"That is very pleasing news, your Excellency. May it be God's will that you are soon risen from your bed and with us in body as spirit without delay."
"Ah, you are too kind. But I trust your earnest hopes may be granted."
The Cardinal proceeded to sketch recent events within the Church as well as various communications which had passed through the embassy, notably from the King of France, who had his eye on the acquisition of Naples. Finally he discreetly described items of scandal which had come to his ears. These he knew the Pope loved to hear most of all, whilst pretending to be shocked and scandalized. Had he been hale and hearty he would have retained in his memory the names of women involved in doubtful intrigues in the hope of procuring them for his own pleasure at some future date.
"And that seems to be all that I can report at present. I trust that before I come again you will be even farther on the road to recovery."
The Pope made a sign of thanks and settled back in his bed when, as if in afterthought, Cardinal Roderigo added:
"Oh, by the way. I have a niece who has been with me of late-home from her studies-a very beautiful girl. She begged me to crave audience with you for her, saying that just to touch the foot of your bed would be a divine experience for her. For her, your Excellency embodies all that is great and of any consequence in any sphere.
"I told her that in view of your indisposition such an audience was out of the question, but I promised to beg that you might receive her at such time as you felt able."
The Pope stared up from his bed, his dull eyes alight a little with interest.
"The girl is only a virginal eleven years old, but her mind and body are those of a mature woman," the Cardinal continued. He smiled. "So-if I might use a worldly term in a spiritual sense-infatuated is she with your holiness that she has said to me 'Did he bid me go to a convent I would go without a thought, did he bid me sink into a slime of carnality, likewise I would obey him.' Truly a remarkable devotion in one so young-and so beautiful that a worldly career would be easily within her grasp. In fact I almost wonder if such passion in things spiritual doesn't go a little too far."
The Pope had sat up again, resting against his pillows. His eyes were sparkling more than they had since his illness had begun.
"Indeed she is a child of God by all accounts," he declared. "And is she really so much a woman at such a tender age?"
"Modesty forbids me to describe how lovely is her form and face," the Cardinal replied. "But Helen of Troy would have recognized her peer."
"Ah you go too far, you go too far," the Pope chuckled. "But I should like to see her. Her audience is granted whenever she would wish it."
"I will communicate with her," the Cardinal said.
At present she is away from Rome in pursuance of her studies, but within a few days she may be again in the city."
"Excellent," the Pope murmured. "Tell me, what is the child's name?"
"Her name, your Excellency, is Lucrezia."
CHAPTER FOUR
While Cardinal Roderigo was meditating in his library, Lucrezia and her younger brother, GiufEredo, were on their way back to continue their studies in the Orsini Palace, Monte Giordano.
They rode on horseback, as usual, with their attendants and men at arms-for the highway could be a dangerous spot, particularly toward nightfall-strung out around them. They were both excellent horsemen. Giuffredo, who was almost two years younger than his sister, had shown particular promise almost the first time he was put on a horse some years previously. The horse had, for some reason, suddenly and unexpectedly bolted from under the eyes of the lad's teachers, but he had clung grimly on with his young, sturdy arms and, white as death, but determined, had still been seated when the horse was overtaken at the end of a furious five-minute chase.
Like his brother and sister, he looked older than his years and his body had been strengthened with continual exercise in archery, wrestling and swimming. His character was already taking a determined turn which brought him the respect of those elders who came into close contact with him.
He glanced over at his sister. He was very proud of her and her beauty and he hoped she would soon be tired so that he could take her in front of him on his own horse as was their established custom. Nothing made him feel more male and protective than to know that his sister was tired and dependent on him while he manfully guided their horse forward along the trail.
Lucrezia glanced back at him and smiled. He was rather like Cesare although his nose was slightly retrousse and his hair had faint tints of red in it. She had found, during the journey, that her thoughts, so much centered now on the sexual events of the past few days, wandered to Giuffredo and imagined what it would be like with him. Of course he was younger. But he was always so masculine that she was sure he'd be quite commanding if led. She rubbed her crotch along her saddle. The soreness had almost disappeared, but its traces left the strangely intangible memory of Cesare and her father, both with part of their bodies actually inside her body, crushing wetly, deliciously into her. The memory made her feel suddenly chill in her belly and she pressed down hard on the rough saddle.
It was dusk before she changed over to Giuffedo's horse. It always happened the same way: eventually she felt she couldn't keep her shoulders from sagging forward and her neck began to ache.
The lieutenant of the guard respectfully helped her up in front of her brother and then ordered his men to light the lanterns they carried.
The procession continued, slowly, with the lanterns throwing long, vague shadows on the road and dimly showing up the faces of the riders, glinting on the swords of the men-at-arms.
Lucrezia arranged her long, loose skirt around her. She still wore no underclothes but for her petticoats and she felt the cold leather of the saddle against her genitals with a shock of pleasure. She leaned back against Giuffredo, who put one arm protectively around her waist, guiding the horse with the other. Around them was the clip-clop of the horses, the shadows of the long barrows made weird and stark by the lantern-light. None of the attendants or the guards chatted around them-they were too tired after the day's ride. The procession had a slow, clip-clopping rhythm of its own which seemed to be lulling everyone to the brink of sleep.
Lucrezia's thighs slipped gently against the saddle. The movement of the horse jogged her in a gentle rise and fall. Once again, unconcerned now with the guidance of a horse, she let her thoughts dwell on the events of the past days. In cold blood she could hardly imagine herself prostrated in front of her father while from behind her, unseen, he took her with his unbearably big weapon. She wondered what she looked like to him in that position. The thought of herself stretched out with all her openings spread out before his eyes gave her a delicious little thrill of horror. She thought how big it had been. How could it have gone in her? All of it! But how wonderful it had finally been!
Her crotch slipped on the saddle, bringing her back to the present. She was getting wet again with the thought. Now that she knew exactly what she longed for, knew the sight and feel of it, she felt she needed it every time her thoughts strayed in a sexy direction.
Up and down she jogged on the saddle. She wriggled her bottom slightly against it on the downward movement. Her breath was a series of small sighs in her throat as she leaned against Giuffredo. His presence and her feelings combined to make him seem the object of her desire. If only they were alone, she'd make him leap down from the horse and fuck her in the field alongside. She wondered if he'd ever done it, and came to the conclusion it was out of the question. He was simply too young, and they spent most of their time together.
Back and forth, up and down. She squirmed on the hard leather, flattening the slim wedges of her sex against it. There was really very little separating her from Giuffredo, she thought: just her tucked-up skirt lying across the horse's back between them, and his thin hose. He was so close to her. She could actually feel the pressure of his legs against hers where he sat behind her on the same saddle. If only they could do it now.
She pushed her bottom back against his loins. She could feel the pressure of his body down there against the voluminous folds of her skirt; his free hand was still around her waist, her head against his shoulder.
Gently she edged her hips right back along the saddle, straightening her body imperceptibly, so that her bottom was tight against his loins. She held her breath and let the horse's movement jog her behind against his loins. With every pace forward, her buttocks crushed back against the point where his penis was hidden by his tight hose.
The main trouble, she realized, after a few minutes-in which her face became hotter and hotter-was that she couldn't feel what effect she was having on Giuffredo. The folds of cloth between them were too many.
She reached behind her, as if simply to arrange her skirt, and deftly drew it up a little above the point where her buttocks rose above the saddle. At the same time, she pushed her hips back again so that her naked flesh was in contact with the thin cloth of her brother's hose.
As she did so-and totally accidentally-her hand brushed against his loins and she knew what the effect had been. She had felt a small, but very definite bulge.
'My sweet young brother,' she thought. 'You're beginning to feel how nice it would be to possess your sister."
They jogged for a while longer and then Giuffredo pushed out his thighs along the horse so that Lucrezia was virtually sitting in his lap, with the point of his bulge pressed against the slit of her buttocks. Her skirt draped over them, falling over his legs quite naturally, so that their point of contact was quite hidden.
Now, with every movement of the horse, her but tocks crushed back around the bulge in his hose, rubbing down it with a pressure which sent a spear of delight up Lucrezia's spine.
Giuffredo's hand had tightened on her belly, his arm surrounded her more tightly than it ever had before on their journeys. She felt his chest heaving and pressed hard against her back.
Giuffredo himself wasn't quite sure what was happening. He felt tight and prickly inside, particularly down at his reproductive organ. That was what his tutor called it in his advanced biology lessons. Giuffredo had never quite been able to believe in the process which it was alleged took place. He had never even felt any desire to masturbate, which he understood was a phase some boys got earlier than others. He'd always been rather frightened of the idea-as if something terrible would happen to him if he did.
But now Lucrezia, his beautiful sister of whom he was so proud, was pressing against him in a way which was having a strange and exciting effect on his organ and his whole being. And, what was more, he was certain she was doing it on purpose. She'd deliberately pulled her skirt over his legs and he could feel she had nothing on underneath, and her hand had brushed his center of excitement, making it jerk involuntarily against the tight hose he wore and causing him considerable embarrassment.
He felt very strange, almost sick in a pleasant way-if that were possible. And every step the horse made with the consequent jog of Lucrezia's bottom against him, he felt stranger and sicker.
Guiltily he glanced at the surrounding horsemen. They were dim, unreal figures in the flickering light of the lanterns. They all appeared to be asleep. They could almost have been ghosts, following them, lit up in their own auras of ghostliness.
He closed his eyes. His fingers on the reins were clenched. He closed out everything but the strong rubbing sensation of her bottom on his organ under the skirt as the horse jogged forward. He became aware of his hand on her belly and he clenched it hard against her. He could feel the warm, firm arc of her belly under the skirt and the feel of it made him want to explore it with his hands, to feel it naked.
Lucrezia, he noticed, was squirming in a slightly unnatural way on the saddle. She leaned back her head against him so that their faces touched and for the first time in his life the touch excited and embarrassed and delighted him. Her face was warm and her eyes were closed and their bodies were together from the saddle to their heads and the pressure on his loins was making him want to burst through his hose.
Suddenly he felt his sister's hand upon his leg, stroking his thigh-and moving up his thigh, reaching awkwardly under the skirt until her fingers lightly landed on the bulge of his penis. The touch sent a shock right through his body and he drew back his hips involuntarily. But her hand pursued and he let it fondle him there, with an excitement growing in his loins which he couldn't control.
It was at this point that the lieutenant of the guard coughed-and Giuffredo moved sharply, guiltily back from his sister again.
The cough was a preliminary for an announcement.
The lieutenant thought they should ride a little faster to reach the Orsini Palace at a reasonable hour. They had, still, rather farther to go than was wise on a night as dark as this.
Reins were tightened throughout the party and the pace increased to a canter.
The extra attention directed on horses and road and the greater noise of the canter seemed to Giuffredo to act as a cover for his secret activity with Lucrezia and he pressed the bulge of his loins back against the warm nudity of her backside. Her hand, which she had momentarily withdrawn, also came back and rose and fell against his protrusion as they cantered forward into the night.
Giuffredo felt hot and almost dizzy with excitement. He kept having to control himself with an effort. Lucrezia, he saw, breathing very heavily as if in the throes of some strong physical exertion.
Under cover of the noise she half turned to him and whispered something.
Now that she had spoken, re-established with the sound of her voice that she was his sister, he felt a new wave of embarrassment.
"What?" he asked, leaning forward, blushing.
"I said put it in me," Lucrezia said brazenly.
Giuffredo was horrified and flustered-and then freshly excited. The actual thing! The hand that came back and pinched and poked the hot mound of flesh which seemed bent on escaping from his clothing. He pushed his hips forward and pressed them against her flesh with a furious desire.
"It's not possible," he whispered back.
"Yes it is. Nobody'll even notice with the jogging of the horse-it'll look natural. I can lean forward on the horse's neck as if I'm asleep."
Guiffredo was silent for a moment. He wanted to try it now to the point of desperation. He could never forgive himself if he lost this opportunity.
"But my clothes."
"Slit them with your knife," Lucrezia replied immediately. "You can change them as soon as we arrive and throw them away. Nobody'll see in the dark."
Guiffredo's heart was pounding with excitement. It was all incredible. He couldn't think it out. There was something which would make it dangerous. It was dangerous. Riding through the night on the back of a horse in the midst of a crowd of men-at-arms!
But Lucrezia had suggested it and she sounded as if there was absolutely nothing to worry about. Her confidence was infectious. They were in it together and he was so wild with a frightened excitement now that he couldn't keep his loins still.
"Hurry!" Lucrezia whispered.
Giuffredo glanced around at the dim, riding figures. Their lanterns illuminated them in little tents of light. He and his sister were in the central shadow. Besides, everybody was concentrating on the road.
Carefully he took his small, jeweled dagger from his belt. He held it in his hand and glanced around again. Then with a quick movement he inserted the tip in the stitches of the cloth and slid the knife downward between him and Lucrezia. He was very careful. He felt the flat of the blade, cold against the heat of his genitals. He withdrew it, shoved it back into his belt. His belly was frozen with nervous tension. Now he couldn't bear to look around him, sure that someone had noticed. But when at last he did, he laughed nervously at his own stupid imagination. It was un-likely that anyone would have been able to see clearly enough to know what he was doing even had they looked.
He sat against Lucrezia, who was still squirming on the saddle. His stomach was so churned up that he felt unable to move. And then she did it for him. He felt her fingers, cool, and as foreign and strange as the knife blade, pull apart the slit in the material and pull out his penis under her skirt.
His organ shot rigidly at her, short, but stubby in its adolescence. He couldn't bear her touch. But there was nothing to be done. He couldn't pull back his loins more than a few centimeters, and her fingers followed relentlessly.
He gasped aloud and tried to smother the noise in a cough. Her fingers stroked and then her hand closed around the fleshy branch and squeezed gently and then harder.
Hei hand went under him and in through the slit and he winced as it caressed him. He felt he would die of the sensation.
"Oh God-now," Lucrezia murmured. He felt her two bottom cheeks come back against his naked pin of flesh. Flesh against flesh! The thought as much as the sensation nearly made him swoon. His hand tightened on the rein, the other tightened on her stomach.
Lucrezia lay forward on the horse's neck, breathing hard against its mane. This position presented him with a half-full access to her, while her skirt was still sufficiently long to cover them both.
Giuffredo felt suddenly very hopeless and incompetent. He wished the first time didn't have to be on a horse in full canter. But it seemed that only the unknown thing would give a natural outlet to his feelings.
He pushed against her, gently and then more firmly. He wasn't sure where he was or how to find out. The pressure of his organ against her flesh was enough to make him cough with stifled passion, but he couldn't seem to find the spot.
Lucrezia in her forwardlying position would have made her movement too conspicuous by reaching back to guide him, and their position would have meant a dangerous disarrangement of her skirt, so she lay still, waiting for him to find the place.
Giuffredo edged between that rift right down at its base near the saddle. He had to find her. He wanted desperately to find her. He pushed harder. His penis was prickling furiously and it felt suddenly moist. The horse cantered on and the echoes of the others sin-rounded them in the dimness.
Then suddenly Lucrezia gave a jerk which she controlled immediately and he felt a grip which filled him with a fresh wave of sensation. It gripped him like a claw and he tried to push straight in in his mad delight that he was fucking a woman, that the unbelievable, the impossible, was happening-actually happening.
Oh that claw! Such an excruciating grip! He pushed and Lucrezia jerked and he heard her stifled gasp. Even in his desire he was frightened enough to look guiltily around. The horses cantered on, jogging up and down, gathering speed a little-a bustle of noise.
Giuffredo edged in farther, sliding forward on the saddle, jogging up into Lucrezia as the horse jogged, drawing out with the descent.
She was very tight, pulling back his skin with a bruising force which was painful and delightful at the same time. He occasionally heard a murmur from his sister. But she was controlling herself fairly well and pushing her bottom back onto him.
Lucrezia was in an agony of mixed pain and an excited desire to debase herself.
Lying along the horse, with her head so far from her extended bottom, where she could feel Guiffredo's flesh stiffly prodding, she had early realized that he was unwittingly probing into her buttocks. She had been about to swing upright and back to tell him when something about the blunt exploration had stopped her. The point screwing there, pushing hard into the cleft of entry, made her strain as if she were emptying her bowels. It was a not unpleasant sensation and she suddenly wondered what it would be like. She felt, too, a desire for a completely new sensation and there was something so wicked-seeming about the idea that she quickly resolved to let Giuffredo continue.
She even helped him by stretching back her behind and straining in an attempt to open the tiny posterior for him.
He was neither as big as his father nor yet Cesare, but when the first penetration came it gave her a nauseous shock of pain. She tried not to cry out and hid her face in the horse's thick mane.
From then on it was shock after shock, becoming gradually less of a shock but always with the possibility of relapse into an unexpected pain.
Her rectum was inflamed with pain which gave way to a sensation of being turned inside out, naked and debased, but pervertedly thrilling. She tried not to wriggle and gasp, but she couldn't even be bothered to look up to see if anyone had noticed them.
His penetration, which became easier and easier, began actually to have an erotic effect on her normal sexual organ. She began to get more and more excited. It became more and more difficult to control both movement and sound. She was thankful that the canter of the horse hid their jogging to a considerable extent, making it seem quite natural.
He seemed to be right up in her bowels. She thought of her inner tubes, wondered exactly where he was in them, felt the excitement growing in her, knew she was going to come and pressed her head furiously into the horse's sweating neck and gasped out her fulfillment.
Giuffredo, quite unaware of his mistake, pushed deeper and deeper into the unseen gulf which seemed to hold it in like a whirlpool, refusing to let it withdraw without difficulty.
A million sharp pins seemed to attack his tender organ. It felt sore with the effort of penetration, yet the soreness was an exciting, wonderful sensation. He had kept his hand on Lucrezia's hip as she lay before him and he dug his fingers into her flesh, intense with his passion.
He no longer looked around him either. He didn't care. His movement was compatible with that of a horse-rider.
His jerking seemed to get naturally faster. He found that his penis seemed to lead him, working and throbbing with its own life. It was being swallowed in Lucrezia. He could feel the flesh of his loins touching the smooth flesh of her bottom, which wriggled ever so slightly and secretly against him.
The horse cantered on. Its loud clip-clopping drowning the scarcely controlled noise of Giuffredo's growing passion. Around their horse the men-at-arms scrutinized only the darkness on either side, watching for lawless bands of robbers.
Giuffredo jogged-a natural jogging with the horse. Lucrezia was still, lying along the horse's neck apparently asleep-except for that secretive squirming of her buttocks under the sheltering skirt.
Gradually Giuffredo's loins became transformed into a mass of sensation such as he'd never felt before. So this was it! His loins were no longer flesh and blood but some strange, unearthly substance which glowed and burned in its own fire.
He felt himself becoming more and more helpless down in those nether regions. He could hardly disguise his audible passion and every so often a barking gasp broke through his lips and he tried to cover it with a cough. The burning sensation down there was carrying him along with it. He no longer guided, no longer had control. His loins were running away with him. It was excruciating delight and rather frightening, as if he were about to have his blood sucked out of his body.
He felt ridiculously that at this stage he should stop before something terrible happened. But it was too late; he was no longer able to. He heard Lucrezia give a slight gasp into the horse's mane. He jerked harder, harder. He gasped again, trying desperately to cover his noises. The horse jogged and he rammed up into her. Again, again, he gasped again, finally-and then he bit his lips, smothering his groans in the depths of his throat as he felt the sudden release flowing from him, leaving him after a few moments weak and almost unable to hold the reins.
Now that it was over and Lucrezia sat up as if she'd just awakened from sleep, he felt acutely embarrassed. His embarrassment became wholesale confusion a little later when his sister confided in him what had happened. But she assured him it had been quite pleasant for her, and was so open and provocative in her speech that his shame finally left him.
When they reached the Orsini Palace after another hour's ride, he managed to slip into his quarters and change his hose-under pretext of caring for his horse. On the whole he felt glad, now, and excited at the new future the day had opened up for him.
CHAPTER FIVE
Innocent III lay on his back, forming images in his head of his past loves and what he had done with them. That was what he regretted more than anything about his present illness: his doctors had strongly warned him of the danger of any exercise, which had cut out the possibility of having Caterina, his favorite courtesan, brought to satisfy his needs. In spite of his weakness, his sensuality had not left him. In fact, spending all day lying on his back imagining his loves in all sorts of positions, seemed merely to have added to that aspect of his being.
Every so often he thought about the niece that Cardinal Roderigo had told him about. It was so frustrating he could have wept. Now the most he could do was grant her audience and rue the fact that he had not been able to, and would not be able to enjoy her sexually. What a loss! The thought made his stomach ton over. A virgin, beautiful, had said she would do anything for him-even to the extreme of giving herself over to the lusts of the flesh. It needed only a word from him. Innocent felt like weeping, again. Was she as beautiful as Cardinal Roderigo claimed? Could she really have a woman's development at such a youthful age? Anyway he hoped it would not be long before she came to him and then he could truly wallow in self-pity at what he had missed.
For Innocent really doubted his capacity to recover from his present malady-his capacity to recover enough. He saw himself spending the remainder of his life in a continuous convalescence. He would, of course, be waited on hand and foot, and other people would take care of the running of the State, although he would hold absolute power still. It was a not unpleasant existence, one that appealed to him. Again the one thing he regretted was his inability to drown himself in the delicious torment of sexual intercourse. But, after all, if he really took great care of himself, perhaps some day....
He clapped his hands and an attendant came round from a screen at the far end of the room.
"Bring me some grapes," the Pope ordered.
The attendant bowed and withdrew, to reappear almost immediately with a large silver salver piled high with fruit.
Innocent began to eat the grapes slowly, spitting the pips out onto the floor. His fingers caressed the taut, cool skin of each little morsel. It reminded him of Caterina's breasts-her whole body. If only ... He cursed suddenly to himself and flung a half-eaten grape petulantly across the floor.
Cardinal Roderigo had lost no time in arranging for Lucrezia to return to Rome. The sooner he found himself in St. Peter's chair the safer he would feel.
He had spent a week or two sounding out his situation. It seemed a good one on the face of it. The Medici, who had long been friendly to the House of Borgia, were for him; Venice, Mantua, Genoa, Siena, the Orisini, all were for him. Naples doubted him, rightly fearing the possibility of an alliance between him and Charles VIII of France, whose designs on the Neapolitan kingdom were well known. The French themselves favored Cardinal della Rovere as next Pope, but Roderigo was certain that with judicious gifts they could be won over and withdraw their strong backing of their candidate. Now seemed to be as good a time as any for dealing a death blow to Innocent, who, after all, was serving no good purpose lying sick in his bed with the anarchy of his misrule spread around him.
Lucrezia arrived back in Rome with a small cortege of attendants. The city was still given to the ravages of lawlessness and she made haste to her father's house.
There he had her stay for several days, instructing her in what she must do, explaining the necessity of Innocent's removal if the city and State were to survive-and enjoying Lucrezia's body himself the while.
With Lucrezia clear as to the exact-and fairly simple-nature of her duty, audience was arranged between her and the Pope.
Cardinal Roderigo had her dressed for the occasion in richly embroidered but simple clothes which would show off the womanliness of her body. He had her plaits let out so that her hair flowed, long and silky, to below her shoulders; he placed a string of sapphires set in silver around her neck, where they gleamed and threw a blue sheen down onto the visible portion of her bosom, and reflected the bright blue of her eyes.
"My darling daughter-you are already the most beautiful woman in Italy," he declared when she was ready. "The old sensualist will have an orgasm at the very sight of you."
"Oh Papa, I trust all will go well," Lucrezia said, anxiously. "I feel a little afraid."
The Cardinal placed a hand on her buttocks and kissed her gently on the neck.
"Don't you worry, my sweet. A beautiful creature such as you can get away with anything she wishes."
A little later, Lucrezia and her father were ushered into the Pope's chamber. He had propped himself up against his pillows and had his scanty remaining hair brushed and combed. He stared at Lucrezia with unabashed interest, hardly deigning to acknowledge the Cardinal's greeting.
"Truly you did not exaggerate," he said, not taking his eyes from Lucrezia.
Lucrezia curtsied and fixed him with her lovely, deep, knowing eyes.
"It is a great honor for me to be in the presence of your Excellency," she said softly as if in awe. "It is more than such a humble creature as myself could have considered in the realms of possibility."
"Ah, my child-if child you truly be-you are one of the lucky ones who in their natural goodness and humility deserve the highest honors," the Pope replied with an attempt at a winning smile.
"My niece is overcome in the presence of Christ's Vicar," Roderigo cut in. "Such an audience has been her life's object. She did not expect to achieve it so soon."
"I feel unable to speak," Lucrezia said in a hushed tone. "Your Excellency must forgive me."
"My child, come here and give me your hands," Innocent said, paternally. "You shall not be afraid of me. Such beauty as you have, particularly if matched by the beauty of soul your uncle gives you, should fear nothing."
He took her hands in his skinny, cold fingers. He was amazed at her loveliness and the warm hands in his filled him with a yearning to be well and active. It had taken him but a fraction of a second to appraise her body as best he could see it under her dress, and now he allowed his eyes the delight of fleeting anew and resting on the exposed portion of her bosom and on her neck, so young and smooth.
"I am afraid, your Excellency, that I cannot stay," Cardinal Roderigo said. "I have some important business to see to. I trust you will not find a while with my niece too wearisome. Send her away if she displeases you."
"My dear Cardinal," the Pope answered, in sugary tones, "surely you forget yourself. As if such an infant of Christ, reflecting as she does the glorious emblem of early-gained womanhood, could displease me. Pray go your way, Cardinal Roderigo, and much as it grieves me to be deprived so soon of your company, I'm sure I could have no more pleasing visitor than your lovely niece."
Lucrezia wished she knew how to blush at will. But blushes came less easily than tears. She just dropped her head a little, as if overcome at his words. He still held her hands in his.
Cardinal Roderigo bowed and left the chamber. Even as he stepped over the threshold his thoughts were racing with plans for when the Pope was dead.
Innocent watched the exit of his cardinal. The girl's hands were still warm in his. He didn't speak until Roderigo had left and the door had closed after him. Then he looked back at Lucrezia with eyes which he tried to make kindly.
"But tell me my dear, is it really true that you are only eleven years old?"
"I shall be twelve in a few weeks' time," she replied demurely.
"My child, you have matured far beyond your age. God has seen fit to prepare you for womanhood-who can tell what his wishes for you are."
The Pope's mind gloated over her. He could have given his answer to the question he'd just posed. He looked into her face. Truly those eyes were remarkable. There was ... what was there? ... There was ... yes, there was an aura of the devil about them. His eyes widened as this intuition came to him. But then Lucrezia smiled, as if in flattery at his remarks, a shy, innocent smile and Innocent dismissed the devil from her eyes. What nonsense!
"You are studying, I believe, my child. Tell me, how do you find yourself disposed to the acquisition of knowledge?"
"My studies are simple," she replied. "I find the knowledge of good and evil much more difficult."
In view of his own thoughts, the Pope was quite startled by her words. What precocious thoughts! And what, exactly, did she mean?
"Good and evil, my dear?" he echoed, querulously.
Lucrezia suddenly spoke earnestly; she allowed tears to come into her eyes. She hoped she was sounding convincing.
"Your Excellency, I dared not tell my uncle, but I'm beset by problems. That is why I was so anxious for this audience. I knew that in the light of your holiness and wisdom, I should find guidance."
The Pope stared at her. The conversation had taken an unexpected turn which had almost thrown him out of his stride.
"My dear," he said, at last, "you are very young and it well may be that the Lord will send you guidance through me. If you would pour out your heart to me, do so."
So far, so good, Lucrezia thought with an inward smile. She allowed a tear to slip over her cheek. The Pope responded to this display of femininity by pressing her hands.
"My child, my child," he said-rather theatrically she thought-"I had no idea you were so upset."
"Most Holy Father," she blurted, "for most of my life I have known what is good and right-and indeed I still do-but recently things have happened which have made me doubt my strength and courage to continue along the path which I know is that of God."
"Tell me, child, tell me."
Innocent's interest was quickening. This confession from one so young and beautiful and now so obviously upset might prove very entertaining-on the other hand it might be dismally dull. He moved his hands on hers as if comforting her. He wished he could move them on her breasts.
"It is so terrible-I-I don't think I can."
"Now child," the Pope made his voice slightly stem. He didn't want to miss this now. "You surely would not try to hide anything from God-and I am his representative on this Earth. You can confide in me without fear."
Lucrezia hesitated a minute, cleverly.
"You must forgive me, Holy Father," she whispered pathetically.
"Don't be afraid," he replied, majestically. "God is love. All sinners may be forgiven their sins."
"Well, your Excellency, as I began to tell you, until recently my life was blameless. As a child, they tell me I was extremely good and always obeyed. I was brought up to understand the difference between Good and Evil-it all seemed very simple. A saintly life did not seem an impossible idea." She paused, and another tear slipped down her face. She brushed it away and tossed back her hair, nervously.
"Until-until a little while ago, I visited a friend's house and the friend put me in the charge of her eldest son. I liked him very much ... and he talked to me. He told me lots of things about men and women, until my mind was all confused with what he told me." She stopped and hung her head, letting the tears flow more freely.
The Pope forced himself to fight against impatience. He thought he was beginning to catch on. What a delightful story. What an unexpected enjoyment his afternoon was providing him.
"Go on, dear. God and I are with you."
"And finally," Lucrezia went on, brokenly, "he didn't stop with talk. He ... he took me in the grounds and he kissed me and ... and ... I believed him ... it seemed right ... I was all confused ... until after it was over I knew I had been wicked."
The Pope's thought dwelt on the unmentioned, the undescribed. God, what a lucky fellow this friend was. The thought sent shivers up and down his spine. He felt a ripple in his loins which he knew he should smother or the frustration would be too terrible.
"My dear," he said, after a due interval for consideration, in which Lucrezia broke down and sobbed quietly and he paternally pulled her closer and put an arm around her. "My dear, you had a terrible experience and this man-he should be whipped-took advantage of your innocence in a most unscrupulous way. But, my dear, it often happens that young girls deceive themselves about the seriousness of what has happened. You say that he kissed you and then made advances. That is not too bad, after all."
As he had hoped, his dimness brought a protest from her.
"Oh but ... Holy Father ... he did more than that."
"But he may not have done what I fear, my child. Tell me what he did. Don't be afraid or confused. We are in the presence of the Almighty Lord."
Lucrezia hesitated, as if overcoming a great reluctance.
"I was wearing only a long shift, because it was so hot," she said. "It was modest-it came down to my ankles. But after he had kissed me-it was in a tiny copse in the grounds, out of sight of the house-he put his hands on my bottom ... and-he-he pressed me against him so that I suddenly felt quite faint. And he put his tongue in my mouth and told me to do the same, and he felt all over my body with his hands ..
She wiped away a tear. The Pope's hand had tightened around her. She had given him an erection. He couldn't wait to hear the rest of the story.
"Go on, my child. Forget nothing. I must know how far it went in order to pray."
"Well, first of all it was over my shift. He felt me all over and everywhere he touched me, particularly when he put his hand between my legs, he made me feel faint. And then I felt so dizzy and helpless that I suggested we sit down. We sat down on the grass beside a tree and, before I really knew what he was doing, he took my shift right off and left me lying there without any clothes on at all. I was ... I was very frightened, but then ... then he started feeling me all over again and I only remember the rest as if I were dreaming...."
"What do you remember, my dear? If you tell me you will be rid of it. You will have confessed."
"He-he kissed me all over-my mouth, my neck, my shoulders, my ... my breasts and everything. And then he put his hand in between my legs. It made me feel as if I was swooning. I remember thinking that it was wrong, but then it seemed so strong and necessary that I even believed him and thought it might be right after all.
"And then after he'd had his finger in me for some time I began to get terribly excited-even though it was rather painful. I think he put more fingers in me then, because I ... I felt more pain and I asked him to stop ... but ... but he wouldn't and I hadn't the strength to push him away. He went on like that for some time, until it wasn't painful any more ... and sometimes he stopped and just kissed me and felt my breasts. And when he did that I wanted him to put his fingers back inside me again because I felt empty and naked and as if I needed something....
"And then he seemed to leave me for a minute and I just lay there because I was too giddy and too frightened to move. But then he lay down beside me again and pushed me back and I could feel that he was naked, too.
"Then I became very frightened. Because I knew he was going to do something terrible. But ... but one part of me kept telling me that it wasn't wrong and that I wanted it and that he was right and it would be all right....
"He put his lingers back inside me and he told me to open my thighs wide. I must have done it, although I don't remember deciding I would ... because ... because-oh Father it's too terrible!"
The Pope, agog with ill-concealed excitement, had one hand on his erect penis under the sheets. He was inflamed by the story she was telling him about herself in her soft voice, with her head bowing against his shoulder in shame and agony.
"Go on, child," he said, with a great attempt at majestic calm. "You are bound to finish it now."
After a few sobs, Lucrezia continued, as if reluctantly.
"The next thing ... he was ... he was lying on top of me and he had my thighs wide open and he ... he was pushing himself at me ... pushing his his you know, Father, against mine until suddenly ... oh ... suddenly it was in and he was-he was making love to me completely ... and he went on and on and he got terribly excited and so did I ... I was almost fainting ... and there was a little pain ... and ... and he began to gasp and groan and then ... and then he made a great noise ... and ... and it was all over ... it was finished."
"My poor child, my poor child (oh to have been that young man! the Pope thought) what a terrible time."
"Of course, afterwards," Lucrezia added, through her tears. "I was terribly sorry and ashamed at what had happened-and terribly embarrassed. But ... but he laughed at me and tried to-what he called-reason with me. But I knew I'd done wrong."
The Pope was silent for a while, letting her cry against his shoulder. He appeared to be deliberating.
In fact, he was trying to live through what had just been described, trying to imagine every part of her body-the secret, intimate places, trying to imagine that enormous emotional chill that was felt at the moment of entry. Oh, he had been ill and unable for so long. He felt overcome with self-pity and defiance.
"What you did, my child, was wrong in those circumstances," he said, at last. "But you have little to reproach yourself for. We all sin-it is inescapable, and some sins are greater than others. But you are only a young girl-even though you may have the appearance of a Woman-and you were led astray by an older man who, obviously, well knew how to prey upon what, after all, are perfectly natural appetites. The fault is entirely his, my child. God will forgive you, have no fear. His mercy is boundless."
Lucrezia took a deep breath behind her veil of mock tears.
"But, Holy Father, the main trouble has come after the event. I told you I was having difficulty about Good and Evil. Well ... I find, now, that I'm beset with overwhelming desires to repeat what happened. I do my best to overcome them, but I'm likely to give way at any moment."
"I see-I see."
Innocent's hand moved slightly on his prick. He felt very disturbed. This was better and better, but the thought that he couldn't take advantage of it was killing him.
"Have you seen the young man since?"
"No, your Excellency. I do all in my power to keep away from him. But I feel the desire with any man-oh I know it's terrible. You must think I'm unbelievably wicked."
"Not at all, my child, not at all," Innocent reassured her. That hand in mine is so near, he was thinking. I could just take it and put it under the sheets. It would take about two seconds in time and mean moving it a distance of thirty centimeters.
"You have had an experience," he said, "which was bound to shake you to your roots. It has opened up a whole new channel of experience...." He grinned to himself at his words...."and, naturally given you a desire for sensations and emotional experiences that you hardly realized existed. We all have these desires, my dear. Don't think you are alone."
"But what must I do?" Lucrezia pleaded.
She could see his erection through the sheets and the coverlets. So Papa had been right. He would want to. So far, very good. But now she had to take what chances came to her. She rested her head against his shoulder so that her lightly perfumed hair was brushing against his face. Leaning forward toward him, she was able to expose much more of her bosom-showing him more than a third of their rounded fullness.
Innocent's head was in a whirl. Looking down on her, as if with compassion, he could see down the front of her dress. The cleavage of her lovely white breasts was agony to his loins. He could hardly restrain his hands. Her golden hair was against his face. It smelt slightly of lavender. He could see those full, ill-defined lips in the lovely, sad face. If only ... he thought. If only ... What did the doctors know about it? Half of them were fools and the other half scoundrels. Supposing he did-what then? His desire for life fought with his desire for her flesh. But the desire for life was weakened because he wasn't sure he'd lose his life if he had her. That could be all eyewash. And her flesh was here, so real and near and unbearably tantalizing.
"It is probable," the Pope said, slowly, "that you've built up a myth around this one occasion when you made love. And because it seems so unholy and wicked to you, you therefore, in your deprivation, desire it the more-a very natural reaction.
"In very few cases would I suggest this course of cure. But you know, to overcome a greater, even God will allow a lesser evil. So it may be that if you permitted yourself intercourse just once again-and without any feeling of wrongdoing to add to the excitement-you would get the whole necessity out of your system. At least, you would rid yourself of its full power as you now feel it and would pave the way to a beginning at controlling it. This may seem a very strange recommendation, but reflect, my lamb, that the ways of God are often strange beyond belief-but always with the end in mind. If, by this means, you can help to overcome the acuteness of your desires and thus, eventually, overcome them completely, you will have taken the right and only course. If you go on as you are you will either go mad or give way again and again until you are no better than the lowest whore."
There was a long silence after his words. Lucrezia let her hand slip from his and flop against his thigh, as if accidentally, in weariness. She could feel his skinny thigh under the coverlet-and against the side of her hand she could feel the rising bulge of his erection. Knowledge of his desire had given her courage to be bold.
"I thank you, Holy Father. I'm sure your advice is good. And as it is your advice I'm willing to follow it with a glad heart-even though of my own willing the idea must have seemed wrong to me. I see that it well may be the only way. But there is one thing that frightens me still."
"What is that, my child?"
"Holy Father it's just something I feel. It hardly makes sense. But I'd know that it was simply lust in the man with whom I made love. I'd know that although I was trying to purge myself, that he was on a different plane simply using me as an object of his passion. Although I could have holy aims and thoughts about what I was doing, it would shame me that the man would feel completely differently."
The Pope turned this over in his mind, gloating, playing cat with the mouse, unaware that he was being outplayed, that his thoughts were being directed along channels which would lead to the inevitable. Amidst his thoughts he was aware of her hand against his erection, the slight pressure making him involuntarily strain the mast up against her hand, trusting that she wouldn't realize what was happening.
"I think I could only do it, now, after what you've said, with someone who knew why I was doing it and sympathized and made love to me with the intention of curing me of my desires," Lucrezia told him.
"For that you would need the holiest of men," said the Pope innocently.
"Yes," Lucrezia replied from his shoulder, "the holiest of men."
She raised her head and stared into his eyes for several seconds.
The Pope felt her words sinking into his mind like a physical force. They startled and excited him-and her look heightened the effect. He was sure, now, that it would be a simple matter. The girl was very susceptible; she would really imagine she was ridding herself of evil.
Slowly he looked at her breasts again. How lovely they would look swinging free to the air. And her body! What would her body be like? And how would her face look screwed up and lost in passion. His hand clenched in a fierce surge of emotion. He couldn't pass up such an opportunity-even if it was the last thing he did. The last thing! He wondered. But doctors always exaggerated. It was part of their business to frighten the patient into submission. And surely he wouldn't feel so much like having intercourse with her if it were likely to do him any real harm.
Lucrezia had seen the lust in Innocent's eyes. She had very nearly won. She wondered what it would be like with such an old man, but the thought didn't appall her-in fact she rather liked the idea of being screwed by fatherly old men. The contrast between their balding heads, her golden locks, her young, firm body and their slack flesh added to her excitement, made the whole thing seem less permissible.
Without looking up she raised her hand to her cheek and then allowed it to drop back casually onto the bed-onto his stiff penis. She could feel the bulge under her hand and she felt him tense with her touch.
The Pope felt his breath rise up through his body, as if from his loins, strangling him in a weight of emotion. This was it; this was the moment of choice-but it was already too late to choose. Knowing the inevitable he nonetheless raced through a number of arguments in his mind against having her. But now her fingers were moving gently on his penis, stabbing it with needles of fire and she had raised her eyes to his again, was looking deeply into him as if she knew the depths of his soul.
"You are the holiest of men," she whispered. And her mouth opened gently and her eyes closed as if she were overcome at the awe the thought inspired.
He seized her then and drew her up to him
"We will drive the evil out of you," he said with a voice he could hardly control. "Together we will prove the strength of the Lord." Inside he burned with excitement and laughed madly at his hypocritical words. He would do it-if it was his very last act he would do it.
"I will do anything you think should be done," Lucrezia whispered, with a fine show of youthful, feminine weakness. So saying she pressed her breasts into him and pushed her young body alongside his in sign of submission.
Innocent's lips trembled with lust. He tried to think clearly for a moment, forcing his thoughts away from a desire to rip her clothes from her with his ebbing strength.
"We are un-likely to be disturbed," he said, softly. "My attendants wait in the ante-chamber when I have visitors, but against emergency perhaps you would go and bolt that door, my dear-and then you can remove your clothes-behind the screen if you wish-and come back here."
Lucrezia ran her hand along his hard tower and then obediently got up from the bed and went to the oak door. She slid the heavy bolt across, looked back to the bed, smiled nervously at the Pope and slipped behind the screen.
She took a fair time about undressing, flinging her garments one by one up onto the top of the screen. She peered through one of the cracks at the joint of two panels and saw Innocent's eyes avidly taking in the items of clothing which had intimately draped her body. What a lustful old man he is, she thought-and with all that nonsense about the strength of the Lord. She sniggered to herself. She'd show him her strength and see how he stood up to that.
She pressed her hands down her buttocks. God, what a thrill he was going to have doing that-astonishing that her own body meant so little to her. She smoothed her belly and glanced down at the globes of her breasts. She felt a little nervous about what this was all leading to, but when she glanced for the last time through the crack and saw the Pope playing with himself so obviously under the sheets she took heart and walked round the screen, utterly naked, toward the bed.
Innocent's eyes goggled at her as she came toward him, with her head bowed slightly.
"Don't be afraid of your nakedness-you have a rare beauty," he said in an attempt to sound pontifical. But his eagerness seeped into the words making them sound comic.
Lucrezia raised her head and fixed her eyes on him. She had adopted an expression of young and tender helplessness.
Innocent let his gaze rifle her from top to toe. What beautiful proportions! If he couldn't have had her now he would have been willing to die rather than live with the memory of her body denied him.
Her slender neck ran into slim, sloping shoulders, well-covered with flesh; her breasts were firm and impudent, the sleek ovals begged to be cupped in a hand, to be squeezed. Her waist was very slim, which accentuated the sexy outward curve of her hips and the tapering into firm luscious-fleshed thighs. He could see the slight trace of blonde down on her lower belly and what was little more than a shadow of flesh at the nest between her legs.
Halfway toward him she turned and went back to the door to look at the bolt, as if afraid she hadn't fastened it completely. Her ruse to show off her body was effective.
Innocent strained up in bed, his old penis throbbing, at the sight of her oval buttocks which shadowed into gentle hollows as she walked. Seen from the back her waist seemed even slimmer in comparison with her hips, filled out as they were by those incomparable buttocks. What a rump! His fingers itched to hold it in his hands.
Lucrezia came toward the bed once more, quickly this time, and the Pope stretched out his arms toward her.
"We must make it as if we were completely given to the lusts of the flesh," he said hoarsely. "If there is any self-consciousness about our lovemaking it will fail to satisfy and exorcise."
She slipped into his arms and threw back her head as he began, feverishly, to kiss her breasts. He released her and grasped a breast in each hand, sucking the points as if they were trumpets. Lucrezia felt cold shivers slide, convulsively down her spine. She abandoned herself to his lips which ran all over the top part of her body, sucking as if he wanted to draw blood from her skin.
She put her arms round his skinny body and pressed his head against her breasts. He was quivering with excitement.
His hands began frantically to explore her body, moving down her back, smoothing her buttocks, gripping them, catching them in voluptuous handfuls of flesh; he ran his fingers along the warm ravine of cleavage between them, pressed the puckered flesh of her anus until she squirmed and whimpered; he stroked her thighs and sought her lips with his. His breath smelt of bad teeth and his tongue was rough. When she poked her fresh, little tongue back through his lips she felt spaces where some of his teeth were missing.
The Pope began to pant with a mixture of excitement and shortness of breath through his efforts. His heart was pounding unhealthily. But his penis was as stiff as a ramrod.
In a very short time his hands, which had savagely ravished her body, lingering over her most intimate parts with a dalliance which betrayed his utter sensuality, became insufficient instruments for his lustful satisfaction.
With each fistful of flesh he clenched-buttocks, breasts, belly, her vaginal lips, his hands showed a wild catholicity-his hips strained up under the sheets and he pulsated like barrels of heated gunpowder.
With a shock, sudden and overwhelming as if cold water had been poured on his loins, the Pope felt Lucrezia's cool hands slip under the sheets and enclose his burning heat in their soothing balm. He shuddered from head to toes.
Her fingers soothed and caressed with what he would have remarked practiced excellence had he not been so immersed in his own feelings and satisfaction. Then, gently, they began to rub up and down the stiff, brittle-seeming stem of flesh.
The Pope's lips moved the way they did when he prayed.
"For God's sake get into bed!" he managed to utter at last. Lucrezia quickly slipped under the sheets, with his clawing hands helping her in.
His body was cold against hers-the body of an old bloodless man-an astonishing contrast overall with the heat of his penis, the one part of him truly alive.
She pressed the warm overflow of her flesh against his chill skinniness, warming him, exciting him so that his hands jumped over her body, unable to keep still on her.
Innocent's lips shivered an accompaniment to his quivering body. He had seldom come across such a completely rounded, filled-out delight of womanliness and his hands could hardly take sufficient fill.
Lucrezia, too, was squirming with delight as his fingers brushed her vagina and pierced into its moist outskirts. She rolled over on top of him, infusing his body with her soft warmth She pressed down on him and rubbed her hips voluptuously against his penis which she felt rolling like a length of doughy bread between them, a length of hot, newly-baked bread.
His skinny old arms encircled her, pulling her at him, his hips pressed up against her, indenting her slight, sensual superfluity of flesh.
Gently, for several minutes they pressed together, with his hands holding her buttocks, his lips sucking her open mouth. And then she wriggled up a little on him until his penis waved wildly between her slightly opened thighs, cleaving up so that she could feel its upper side against her buttocks.
She broke from his ardent kissing and levered herself towards an upright position, sitting across his loins, one thigh on either side of his body. She caught his rod in her hand, gave it a last squeeze, knelt up and placed it against her.
The Pope raised his head from its horizontal position and let his eyes augment the pleasure of his bodily senses.
He watched her lower herself gently and then flop down with a gasp of pent-up breath. Immediately he felt an abandonment of his soul; it rushed down through his body. It made the rest of his body, his mind, seem so much putty, so much lifeless clay. It was only down there that there was any reason for existence. The rest of him could have died if only that would go on living for ever and ever amen.
Lucrezia plunged farther down on that stiff pike, feeling it tear up inside her as if a pikesman had made a fierce homeward thrust. Her breasts jumped with her plunges, her thighs sank lower and lower, her knees slithered farther away from his body on either side.
From time to time she opened her closed eyes or brushed the hair from her face. Then she would see the Pope lying back, only his hips tensed, moving up at her in slight undulations as she descended. She would see his lips moving and his white strained face. And through her own stimulation she had the double satisfaction of knowing that things were going according to plan.
The Pope, too, opened his eyes every so often and fixed her with his gaze. Then-and it took very little acting on her part-she would screw up her beautiful face in passion, to excite him, mutter obscenities her self and let her hair swing forward over her face in abandonment.
His body began to writhe and twist as he sank deeper and deeper into her moist, hot body. It was frail bony and covered now with a thin film of perspiration.
He could feel the pounding of his heart. It seemed to fill his ears and his whole body. He was panting wildly, but having difficulty in breathing. But these discomforts seemed to add rather than detract from the pure exquisite quality of his sensation. The physical torture of his body whipped up his senses to a fine point of receptivity.
Through half-closed eyes he watched her full breasts leap and sway in their smooth, glossy skin; he felt her thighs warmly press into his loins as she came down impaling herself on the rod which had impaled so many before her and which, in spite of the Pope's weakness was still in a state of perfect workability-the only part of him which functioned as always.
He was getting more and more excited. A thrumming in his loins joined with a thrumming in his chest and ears.
Lucrezia pressed harder and harder on him, giving him no respite, drawing herself right up above him, and then crashing down again so that the movement made her stomach turn over. At the end of the downward stroke she ground her buttocks against him, squirming on him for a few seconds until gasps burst from his lips.
Occasionally his hands twitched out to her and managed to grasp and feebly squeeze her thighs or even reach to her breasts.
So furious was her youthful onslaught that she began to feel the excitement of culmination and forced herself to slow down the pace so as not to lose any ferocity of attack until Innocent was ready himself.
The Pope was no longer chill. His whole frame was flushed with a pink heat which was a frame between his legs. His thighs and back ached with the upward pressure he'd continuously exerted at Lucrezia's bobbing crotch. The drumming in his ears was almost unbearable. He was trying desperately to force the explosion below before there was an explosion in his head or in his chest.
His breathing had become a pitiful consumptive whine but Lucrezia showed no mercy at his tortured, pathetic state.
Innocent opened his eyes. In his aching head he suddenly felt a power of great emotion. She was beautiful, so beautiful and innocent and trying to do right. He would keep her after this day; he would keep her and look after her and any future intercourse she had would be with him and then she'd be able to enjoy it because she could tell herself always that it was purifying her, giving her a holy outlet for desires which would, of course, continue to beset her.
In that moment Innocent felt that he loved the child with the woman's body. He wanted to reach out and hold her to him, but he no longer had the strength and he had already closed his eyes and become acutely conscious once again of his swelling in her so that it seemed it might never come out again.
He writhed his loins against her. The desire to come was intolerable and yet he couldn't quite seem to manage it. It would happen, but his head felt as if it was splitting and his chest was constricted and he hoped it would hurry.
Feebly he tensed his thighs, felt a twinge of cramp and relaxed them again. He pressed his abdomen against her descending nether parts. He opened his eyes again and fixed her with a gaze which did not take her in clearly.
Lucrezia sensed from his writhing, his agonized expression, his gasps and groans that the end was approaching and she unleashed her body and began to pummel him for all she was worth, letting herself be carried away by her own momentous passion.
She could feel her loins swarming as if a thousand snakes were writhing inside. She released a stream of gasping cries which broke through the blackness in Innocent's head and revived in him a last flush of passion so that he thrust his loins up at her, mumbled painfully through dry lips, groaned agonizingly in an evident warning climax and clenched his fingers into her thighs with a last strength.
Dazedly he opened his eyes again. He saw her face mistily, head thrown back-beautiful neck-lips moving. His fingers dug hard into her fleshy thighs in a last paroxysm of life. He felt the climax near ... on him ... there! He gasped deliciously, fought for breath, fought for consciousness, felt himself losing both, tried to appeal to her with his eyes and slowly slipped off into a painful darkness.
Lucrezia had echoed his feelings with precision. Her flood of sensation had swamped up in her loins with a dragging delightful pain, swamped up and over just as he had seemed to be at his biggest in her so that she felt he would smash right through her and into her belly. With moan after moan echoing his moans she had emptied her passion onto the tops of his skinny thighs.
For some seconds afterwards, still excited and hardly knowing where she was, she had swayed about on his prostrate body and then she had flopped down on top of him.
It took her almost a minute to begin to collect her wits.
The first thing she realized was that Innocent was just not lying still through exhaustion. He had lost consciousness. Lucrezia wasn't dismayed: this was all part of the plan-except that it appeared to be succeeding almost beyond expectations.
Swiftly, methodically, she got up and dressed. With the inside of her dress she wiped away any tell-tale signs of the Pope's incontinence and then she re-arranged the bed and his body. After that she collected herself for a moment, checked everything, quietly went to the door and unbolted it. She tiptoed back to Innocent's bed, let out a high-pitched scream and rushed back toward the door.
She hadn't reached it before it was flung open and two attendants rushed in.
Lucrezia pointed to the bed.
"God protect us," she cried. "His Holiness just passed out in the middle of talking."
CHAPTER SIX
The news of the Pope's collapse spread like pillage through the city.
His doctors came forthwith, pronounced that the strain of receiving visitors had obviously been too much for his weak heart. There was little hope of his survival beyond a few hours.
His doctors stayed at his bedside and visitors from the Pope's circle were frequent. He got weaker and weaker at a very rapid rate. His physicians were agreed on their helplessness in face of his critical state.
The following day, Innocent, without having regained consciousness, was still clinging weakly to life and a Hebrew physician came to his bedside, claiming to have a prescription which would save the dying prelate's life. For his task, he said, he needed the blood oh young boys. The Pope's sceptical physicians eventually found him two young boys, who, for a ducat each were prepared to give him all the blood he needed.
But so complete was the failure of his remedy that the two boys died and the physician was forced to flee to save his own life from the wrath of those who had doubted him from the beginning.
For just one more day, Innocent III lay in his bed breathing very feebly. In the early hours of the following morning he was found to be breathing no more.
Cardinal Roderigo lost no time in organizing the succession. Even during the prescribed nine days of ceremonies connected with Innocent's death, he was busy arguing, offering, bargaining, encouraging to wards his own ends.
On the tenth day the cardinals assembled in St. Peter's to hear the Sacred Mass of the Holy Ghost recited on the tomb of the Prince of the Apostles. They swore upon the gospels faithfully to observe their trust and the Conclave was immured.
A few days later Cardinal Roderigo Borgia was elected Pope Alexander VI. He had bargained well.
Many were the cardinals who benefited from Roderi-go's election. To Cardinal Sforza went the vacated vice-chancellorship and the bishopric of Agri; to the Orsini the Church of Carthage and the legation of Marche; to Colonna the Abbey of Subiaco! to Savelli the legation of Perugia; to Raffaele Riario went Spanish benefices worth four thousand ducats yearly. They, too, had bargained well.
Lucrezia, who had played the largest part of all, was rewarded with a beautiful diamond necklace and a passionate night in her father's bed in which he mounted her five times and both were completely satisfied. She was then sent off to continue her studies under the tutors who were shocked at her provocative display of bosom and would have died of horror had they known exactly what had been displayed to the Pope before his death.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Cesare had been brought back to Rome on the news of his father's election. Cardinal Roderigo felt it only fitting that his son, whom he hoped would one day succeed him, should be present at the ceremony.
Ever since his adventure with his sister, Cesare had been in a fever heat to renew his relationship with her, but there had been no opportunity.
Over and over in his mind he had re-lived those furiously passionate moments by the pool, over and over he had thought of how next time he would be less embarrassed, more expert, more concerned with prolonging the pleasure. His incestuous love-making had given him a new awareness of women as well. In Perugia he had watched them walking down the street with their bosoms soaring, had imagined their breasts untrammeled by clothes. He had stared at the occasional traces of a round and protruding buttock under a dress such as the peasant girls wore and had longed to move up behind and place his hand on that undulating mound of firmness. He had longed for lips, for fondling hands, for the aching sensation of that body-grip on his penis-until he walked around with an almost permanent erection and a slight flush always on his face. At night he was haunted by dreams of his sister's passion-wracked body, images of other bodies. He masturbated with a new vigour. He almost wept with desire. And on return to Rome he conceived of a daring plan to achieve the aided orgasm he so desperately needed.
The interregnum between the death of one Pope and the election of another was invariably filled with a furious outburst of lawlessness in Rome. Bands of lawbreakers would roam the streets. Murders were committed on an average of several a day, robberies took place on an unprecedented scale and rapes were so numerous that count was lost. It was this savage jungle state within the city that Cesare decided should cover his own fulfillment of his desires.
In the grounds of Cardinal Roderigo's house was a gardener's shed in which Cesare had previously noted some old, cheap clothing such as would be worn by the ordinary citizen. This, he decided he would don one evening when his father was not at home. He would rub grime into his face, tousle his hair and, with his gold-hilted dagger in his belt under his doublet, sally out into the lawless streets in search of a woman.
It was a wild plan, this he realized. It was full of dangers. He, himself might be attacked, he might be caught in the act of rape; he might be beaten up by the city guard which functioned in a desultory fashion from time to time. But on the first count he hoped his old clothes would make him seem too worthless an object to make it worth anybody's while to assault him-and on the others he'd take a chance so dearly did he need to plunge his dagger of genital flesh into a female sheath.
For a couple of days, while he awaited his opportunity, Cesare wandered through the city, which was calmer by daytime, watching the women who quickly came and went, or-in large bands for safety-washed their clothes down at the river's edge. He particularly frequented the poorer sections of the city as it was here that he was more likely to succeed in his plan without too many later investigations being made. And it was in one of these quarters that he found the sort of situation he had been seeking.
At dusk, he noted, at a particular spot, three goat-swains-two men and a girl were in the habit-if two evenings running were any evidence-of driving a large herd of goats from the city gates into their pen within the city. They all stayed together until a point near the Bridge of St. Angelo across the river where the girl would bid them goodnight and slip across the bridge to her house which was close to the far bank. The two men would continue with the goats under the assumption that their companion was safe with only such a little distance to go.
Cesare made a survey of the area. His heart raced in anticipation of the deed. As he marked the spot-dangerously near her home-where he could drag her over the low parapet onto the shrub-covered, shelving bank-his breath came quickly as if he were already lying between her legs.
The girl, herself, was a peasant girl with a saucy good-looking face and a strong, loose-limbed body with large breasts and a behind that was pert under the thin country dress she wore. She would be no easy conquest, Cesare was well aware. But he thought he could subdue her and the sight of her body, revealed in a way that only peasant clothing would allow, infused him with a nervous excitement that gave him butterflies in his stomach.
The day fixed for the crowning of the new Pope came nearer and Cardinal Roderigo spent more and more time away from his house fixing the details of the ceremony.
Cesare's chance came at last. In a sudden fit of trembling he donned the old clothes in the gardener's shed. The hose he slit between the legs-just enough so that another tug would give his organ free exit. The doublet came down far enough to hide the spot.
He stole out of the house, leaving a door to the grounds unlatched for his re-entry, hoping that no would-be robbers would discover it before he got back.
Along the main streets people were still passing in groups, sometimes singly. He avoided these more frequented places after a time and set out through the growing twilight to the poor quarter.
Narrow, cobbled streets led him down toward the river. Sometimes someone flitted quickly from one doorway to another, sending his heart into his mouth, sometimes a shutter would slam, making him jump and twice he brazened it past a group of men who peered at him in the half-light but made no move to interfere with him.
At the bridge across the river he stopped and leaned on the parapet for a moment to calm himself and quell the thumping of his heart. He peered through the gloom. He was sure they hadn't yet come. Below, the river was a smooth, dark sheet, behind him odd noises rang out from the Castle of St. Angelo which towered up in a ghostly form. In the distance he could still dimly see the outline of St. Peter's. There was nobody about, now. The majority of honest citizens who were able would now be safely locked behind their doors with the shutters barred.
Cesare listened. On the still air he heard the faint bleat of a goat.
Quickly he set off across the broad bridge. His heart was still pounding wildly. The seriousness of what he was doing crept over him and in the middle of his hurrying he wondered, without slowing his pace, if he shouldn't just turn back and get home as quickly as possible. But in his head he had an image of the goat-girl with her loose-limbed walk and her body curves embraced in her peasant dress, and he hurried on.
By now the dusk was settling in; in a short time it would be completely dark.
He reached the point where the bridge ran into the far bank. He took a quick look round. He could almost see the girl's house to which he'd followed her twice already. Then he swung himself lightly over the parapet and crouched down out of sight.
The parapet at this point was only three feet high and there was a further six-inch drop on the bankside. From where Cesare crouched, trying to still his heaving breath, the bank, divided into patches of knee-high scrub and dusty sand, stretched gently down to the still edge of the river.
There he waited, not daring to look back over the parapet. He was so nervous that he ripped open the slit in his hose and urinated quickly against the wall of the bridge. He need still do nothing, he told himself. He could just let her go by and then go home. He still hadn't definitely decided he was going through with it when he heard her light footfall on the bridge.
He pulled the dagger from the belt under his doublet. His hand was trembling as he put it over his mouth to try and quieten his breath. In spite of his bladder-emptying, his organ was at half-cock with nervous excitement.
Suppose she was not alone today. Suppose someone came toward the bridge from the opposite direction and saw them. Suppose she broke away from him and screamed for the city guard. What would happen to him? What would his father say? A thousand doubts sprang in on him. But there was her footfall, unsuspecting and so close. He held his breath. There was no other noise at all. She was alone as usual.
Tense as a bowstring he waited. Now she was about ten paces away, now nine, now eight ... now one ... he put his hands on the parapet in the half-darkness ... and with a spring he was up and over it just behind her.
The girl half-turned in horror before his hand clapped over her mouth and he flashed the dagger in front of her eyes.
"If you scream or make any sound I'll kill you," he whispered fiercely.
The girl stared at him with wide, horrified dark eyes. It was rather a shock to find himself so near her, touching her, the object of her terrified attention, after watching her from a distance for two nights.
Her body was very warm against him through her thin dress. She held herself taut, but didn't make a sound.
Still holding one hand over her mouth Cesare, glancing nervously across the bridge, prodded her toward the the parapet.
"Climb over and drop down the other side," he ordered. "And don't make a sound. I don't intend to kill you and I shan't unless you scream."
For a moment the girl wouldn't move and he thought she was going to resist. He prodded her side with the point of the dagger and she went in front of him to the parapet and swung over it, dropping down with him to the other side.
Cesare prodded her on down the bank toward the water's edge and away from the bridge. Behind them on the land side, the bank ended some distance up in a high wall. He was safe from that direction.
The girl made no sound as he walked with her, hand still on her mouth in case she tried to shout. It had all been very easy. Through his excitement he looked down sideways at the bulge of her breasts. It was really here at last-and so easy.
At a distance from the bridge they stopped. Cesare glanced quickly back. Nobody on the bridge could see them at that distance. He jabbed the girl with the knife.
"Lie down-and if you try to shout I'll slit your throat."
The girl looked round at him. She had long dark hair which was mussed up now around her dark face. Her eyes had lost some of their startled horror and were gleaming with anger.
"What do you want?" she said fiercely. "I am poor-I have no money."
Cesare was beginning to feel very sure of himself.
"You have something worth its weight in gold," he said, softly. "Now lie down and I will show you."
The girl's sudden defense took him unaware. He had come to expect an easy victory. She twisted suddenly from his grasp and took a half step toward the bridge. But Cesare's reaction was quick. He caught her again before she had even the time to cry out. He clamped his hand roughly over her mouth and pushed her to the ground. She fell under him and he dug the knife at her ribs.
"I told you I'll kill you," he hissed.
But this time his warning had no effect. The girl probably thought he would slit her throat anyway when he'd finished with her and she resolved to sell her life dearly.
She twisted over and struggled furiously with him so that Cesare, who'd had no intention of using the knife and adding murder to his crime, was forced to drop the weapon and use both hands in an effort to overcome her.
His penis, which was erect as a raised drawbridge had flipped out of the slit in his clothing and was crushed and rubbed between them as they struggled.
He managed to stretch her arms out on either side, but her legs continued to writhe and buffet him as-he lay along her.
Her face, wrinkled with dark fray was directly below his. With a little gust of triumph he closed his mouth over hers as she struggled. He could tell he was much stronger than she. When he took his face away she spat in his face. He released one of her arms and slapped her face with his free hand. She pushed with her released arm, jabbing him with her elbow and he fell off. The girl took full advantage of her gain and slithered out from under him, rolling over on top, clawing at him, reaching for his throat with strong fingers.
Surprised, Cesare decided that time had come for stronger measures. He was afraid someone might hear their scuffiing from the bridge-and apart from that he was almost coming against her wriggling body.
He pulled back his right fist, pushing her wrists away with his left and punched hard and straight into her belly.
The girl collapsed on him, gasping with pain and he rolled her off and swayed over on top of her again. She was completely winded. She lay there helpless for the moment, with her dress halfway up her strong, naked thighs.
Cesare lost no time, now. He was very scared that somebody might have heard the noise. He ripped her dress up what remained hidden of her thighs, felt between her legs for the area she was in no position to protect and guided his hungry flesh at it.
He held the girl's arms with his hands and then pushed in against her.
For several seconds he couldn't seem to make progress. He released an arm and reached down again, feeling for the opening. He pulled her flopping thighs apart to facilitate his entry and pushed again.
The girl squealed even through her lack of breath when his throbbing knob pierced into her. Automatically she swung her arm up and tried to push him off, gasping with the pain in her belly and the fresh pain down at her thighs.
Cesare caught the arm and forced it down again. He was really in now. And it was tight enough to hurt. He was flooded with a great sense of relief, as if the frustrations of a lifetime had suddenly been put right.
The girl was squirming with pain. But his push had so hurt and winded her that she could hardly groan-far from put up any serious opposition to his assault on her maidenhood.
Cesare breathed out his relief. At last he was able to quench his desire. He thrust in as if he were ramming shot into a cannon and with each thrust he expelled a toe-shaking "oooh" of relief.
With his body quivering all over he wriggled his loins into her pelvis. He didn't want to take long now that he'd succeeded at last. His penis was heavy and prickling and the girl, her face creased in pain, had almost given up struggling under the fury of his attack.
Cesare lowered his face onto hers and kissed her lips. Her lips were unresponsive, tight together and she forced her face away from him. So he kissed her dark neck as he seared up into her clam-gripping vagina. He wriggled in and in until, for the first time, his whole penis from throbbing knob to tingling base was buried in a soft female passage.
He shagged her furiously with quick hard strokes. He couldn't take too much time, but he had to have that final world-shattering explosion; that had to take place in her soft, tight body.
The girl lay under him, still too wounded in her belly to resist. He let go of her arms and put his hand under her buttocks, scraping the backs of his fingers against the sand. Her rump was firm and springy. The feel of it sent a new zest winging through his hot ramrod. He pulled her up against him and looked down at her belly which he could see, dimly white ip the darkness. He could also see his weapon, dimly white, moving into the cranny at her thigh-junction.
He held her buttocks tightly. Each stroke now was as if he was bursting into her for the first time. It was coming. He gritted his teeth and fixed his eyes on her dim face, sideways turned, still creased in pain. She was a stranger, a total stranger. And he was joined with her here in this most complete of intimacies! They were one flesh-united by his bridge!
As he felt the soaring mount in him he never took his eyes from her face. She moved her legs occasionally, but simply because she was uncomfortable. From start to near finish there had been little resistance.
He burst in and in and with each burst he felt the moment edge excruciatingly nearer. He was trying to keep his noises back in his throat. There he was coughing and growling, trying not to lose control.
He felt the last movement in his loins. It was joy and joy and beauty and savagery all combined in his screwing into this firm and beautiful unknown body. He squeezed the buttocks in his hands as he thrust, and his thrusts slowed to grinding heaves. He was losing control. It was heaven. It was hell. He couldn't keep it back. It was coming, coming, into the body of this strange, prostrate girl whose buttocks were in his hands, whose face was there pressed into the sand in the darkness. It was coming, whirling, here, oh God, here....
"Aaaaaaaah!" ... the final cry groaned from his throat, forcing his lips apart and he flopped and bit her strained neck.
The girl lay as though dead and after a while he pulled his hands out from under her behind and rolled off her. Now that it was over he felt a flatness. It certainly didn't seem worth the extreme and violent measures he'd gone to to get it.
His thoughts turned on the difficulty of getting home, of getting away from the girl-it seemed too unnatural just to get up and walk off-of keeping clear of her in future, of avoiding recognition. It was, chilly, too, now.
He glanced back at the bridge, wondering if anyone had heard the cry of his climax. As far as he could see nobody was there. But, by now, it was impossible really to see anything at that distance.
A slithering movement beside him brought his glance quickly back to the girl. He recoiled. Having had time, at last, to recover from her winding, she'd reached out and grabbed the dagger which he, so carelessly, had left lying beside them on the sand.
Now she had drawn herself up onto her knees and was glaring at him with eyes whose gleaming fury he could feel even through the gloom.
He drew back, without a word, slithering back onto his knees, getting warily to his feet as she did.
"Now I shall kill you," she said with a quiet intensity. "Now I have the dagger and I shall kill you."
He didn't answer. He kept his eyes on her and the dagger, whose gold handle gave off a slight lustre in the darkness.
Crouching, she came toward him. He faced her, arms bent out towards her like a wrestler, watching intently. There was danger in running. He might fall; she might overtake him on the rough ground and stab him from behind. He waited for her to come at him.
When she did, leaping forward suddenly with the knife upraised, his foot lashed out and caught her in the groin. She fell on one knee and he leapt on her. In spite of her pain, she clung desperately to the dagger. But he was too strong for her. Slowly he forced her arm down until the knife was between them. He brought up his knee under her elbow from his standing position and the knife fell from her momentarily paralyzed fingers.
He pushed her back with his foot and groped quickly for the knife. He was half aware of her body flying at him once more as he rose with the knife. There was a slight moan from her lips and she fell heavily against him.
He twisted and leapt away. But the knife didn't come away in his hand. Behind him the girl slumped heavily to the ground and lay face down without a tremor.
Cesare stayed stock still where he was. A flush of horror washed over him. He waited for her to move, to groan, but she lay like a corpse.
Cautiously he moved back to where she lay. He looked around for the knife, but he couldn't find it. He looked back at her still figure, chilled. He stood over her. He could see both her hands and the knife wasn't in either of them. Overcoming a sudden urge just to leave, to rush off info the night, he bent and turned her over. The cold sight of what he had known from her stillness petrified him. The dagger was buried in her breast almost to the gold hilt. Around it her brown, peasant dress was stained a darker brown. Her eyes were open, but unseeing.
Cesare's mind became a confusion of irrelevant, frightened thoughts. It was some minutes before he was able to think with any clarity. Then he forced himself to be calm and work out what to do. The main thing, he told himself tensely, was to be quick. The next, leave nothing to identify himself. He looked down at the hilt of the dagger and shuddered. He stopped his gaze from rising to the girl's face just in time and, closing his eyes, caught the handle of the knife and pulled. It came away with a smooth, springy pressure and when he opened his eyes it was wet and dripping in his hand.
Have to wash it. He glanced round at the river a dozen paces away. He started toward it and then stopped and looked back at the body. He went back to it and put his hand on the girl's breast. No, of course she was dead. Steeling himself, he took her under each armpit and dragged her as quietly as he could manage to the edge of the bank. He swilled the knife in the almost still water of the river and wiped it on her dress. Then, very gently and carefully he rolled her over into the water.
He stood up, breathing quickly. Now the city guard wouldn't see the body immediately if they came down onto the bank. He glanced back at the bridge which was like some great conscious presence, a witness to the drama. Suppose her people were out looking for her there, wondering why she hadn't got home. But surely they'd have come straight down onto the bank. Maybe there were a dozen reasons why she might be late on any particular day. He'd only watched her for three days in all-far from conclusive evidence that she followed an unchanging pattern.
Cesare stuffed the dagger back into his belt. He glanced at his hose and then pulled his doublet down as far as possible, hiding the slit as best he could. He didn't look back at the river.
At the parapet he heard voices. They filled him with a consuming dread. He knew they were looking for her. The voices came from people who must be standing on the bridge. There were several voices. He listened. A voice came out distinctly from the others....
"She came across the bridge just like every day..
And then another.
"Never should have left her. It was so near..
Cesare didn't stay to hear any more. With his heart in his mouth, he crept down toward the river and slipped into the darkness of one of the great spans of the bridge. There he waited, quietly, hardly daring to breathe, hoping that the obvious wouldn't occur to them-to come down and scour the river bank.
For half an hour he waited, but nobody came down onto the bank and after a few minutes more he crept slowly back to the parapet higher up. The voices had gone; there was nobody about.
Not much later he let himself into the grounds of Cardinal Roderigo's house. His clothes were still in the garden shed. He changed, rolled the others into an unrecognizable ball and went into the house to his room. He was there, reading, when his father came to see him much later and tell him the news of the morrow-it was to be the crowning day for Christ's Vicar.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Cardinal Roderigo was crowned Pope Alexander VI next day on the steps of the Basilica of St. Peter. The streets of Rome were crowded with citizens, shouting, laughing, applauding.
Their common eyes were dazzled by the colorful beauty of the procession to the Lateran, the Pope's cathedral church.
Alexander, smiling and serene, completely confident and happy in the fulfillment of his aim, rode on a huge white stallion surrounded by banners including the arms of the Borgias-the Bull. The new Pope held his hand high, blessing the populace with the Fisherman's Ring which glittered from his forefinger in the sunshine.
The magnificent cortege included seven hundred priests and prelates, two thousand knights on horseback, three thousand archers and Turkish horsemen and the Palantine Guard with their flashing halberds and shields.
Watching the procession in all its blaze of color, listening to the music, smelling the incense and the flowers which heralded a night of festivity, Cesare could hardly believe in his adventure of the previous night. A desire not to recall the details of its ending denied him the liberty to enjoy remembering the beginning. It was an episode he preferred to forget.
One of Pope Alexander's first acts was to deal with the violence which had been rife in the city. To this end he used an iron fist.
His first decree was that the house of a murderer should be razed to the ground and the ruffian hanged for all to see above the ruins.
CHAPTER NINE
Lucrezia was fourteen years old and a woman of great and varied experience before the Pope succeeded in arranging for her a marriage which suited his ambition. Such a marriage as would have been worthy for a daughter of Cardinal Roderigo Borgia was no longer good enough for Pope Alexander VI. He sought for her an alliance among Italy's princely houses.
It was thus that she became bestowed upon the Lord of Pesaro with a dowry of 30,000 ducats.
The Lord of Pesaro, Giovanni Sforza, himself no more than a youth, thus provided the Pope with much desired stronger relations with Milan-albeit though Giovanni himself was no more than a bastard of the powerful Milanese house of Sforza.
The nuptials were celebrated with magnificence in the Vatican, and culminated in a supper party given by the Pope to which ten specially picked cardinals and a number of the ladies and gentlemen of Rome were invited.
After a meal of much good food and more good wine, the Pope announced a special attraction and following on his words some fifty courtesans were brought in and set to dance with the servants.
Many amongst them were of considerable beauty. They were well known to the Pope, the majority of them having already shared his bed.
The dances were stately and well-performed and the guests applauded politely, wondering what was so special about a spectacle which one could see at any Roman ball.
But, just about the time when those present were beginning to get a little bored with the dancing, Alexander clapped his hands. And at his signal, both courtesans and their partners stripped off their clothes and continued the dancing stark naked.
There was an appreciative buzz of excitement at this unexpected novelty in the holy place. The men felt their pressures rise as they examined the stately sway of some of the most curvaceous bodies in Rome. The ladies, for the other part, tried discreetly to hide their enormous interest in the flopping lengths of meat which dangled between the husky servants' legs.
The Pope, well flushed with liquor, stretched back in his chair and appraised the comparative qualities of various breast and buttocks. To his nearest male neighbors he gave descriptions of the bedworthy qualities of many of the female dancers, while the ladies within earshot sniggered and replied with quips about the men, wagering on how big they would grow, which would be the longest under titillation.
Already having anticipated this argument, Alexander clapped his hands once again, and, continuing with their dance, the courtesans, each time they came into contact with their partners, gave a quick, expert rub or tickle to their organs until the latter were rising up majestically.
"Now you will have the answer to the problem," the Pope said with a chuckle to the Lady Manfredi who was his nearest neighbor. Her hand stole over to his lap and pressed him playfully at his genital region.
"I'm sure there can be no better than the holiest," she said with a grin.
The Pope leaned towards her with a smile.
"You flatter me," he said, "but modesty prevents me from comment. Perhaps you would like to join me in consideration of the possibility after the spectacle."
"You are very bold, Roderigo," she replied, softly. "But a bold man usually gets what he wants."
She gave his penis a squeeze and withdrew her hand smiling, to turn her attention back to the scene.
All the servants had big erections by this time. The great cudgels soared out from them like artificial fixtures. In spite of what must have been some turmoil in their loins, they contrived to keep poker faces as the Pope had previously ordered.
The eyes of the spectators were goggling. It was the first time most of them had seen such mass nudity and such mass sexual excitement so openly displayed.
Another sign from Alexander and more servants appeared with huge baskets of apples with the centers hollowed out so that only an outside husk remained. These were fitted onto the stiff rods of the nude dancers.
There were gusts of uproarious laughter throughout the great hall at the comic sight of the artificially bloated knobs which had changed colour to green, yellow and rosy-apple pink.
Still with perfectly serious faces, the servants sank to their knees on the beautiful mosaic floor and remained kneeling while the laughter shook the chandeliers.
As the first wave of hilarity from the guests began to fade into a ripple of private titters, the naked women dancers knelt down on all fours with their backs toward each of their partners. There was a fresh craning of necks, goggling of eyeballs at the fresh views which were presented.
Slowly, without looking backward, the courtesans moved back until the apple-bloated rods were touching the soft flesh between their thigh-tops. Then began a series of hip and bottom-wrigglings as they tried to take the apples. It became clear that the idea was for them to take the fruit and then withdraw it if they could from the male organ it surrounded.
Cardinals watched with panting lips.
"It's a race," the Pope confided. "The first woman to get the apple off can choose the biggest man to delight her in bed tonight."
The fascinating race was on. Some of the women seemed unable to expand sufficiently to get around the large husk of apple. They were forced to rub against and around the fruit until they were able to slip backward more easily. Others got halfway impaled but could get no farther, while others again soon got the whole of the apple inside them but couldn't pull it off.
The male servants were very excited and many of them gripped the hips of the woman kneeling against them, whereupon they were warned that they were not allowed to help her task in any way.
In some cases, careful watchers suspected that a woman was really making little effort to remove the apple, but was, on the contrary trying to keep it in place while she jogged excitedly back and forth on it and the hilt behind it.
In fact, the race appeared to be something of a put-up job for the benefit of the spectators' lustful instincts, for it certainly wasn't won quickly and soon every woman had swallowed the apple. But each continued to push sexily backward and forward on her apple-crowned staff.
At last, however, one of the performers contracted tightly and determinedly around the bulging apple which was killing her with its size and pulled it off its stem with a fierce sucking 'plop' which was heard throughout the hall. There was an immediate, raucous round of applause and a number of the spectators stood up to get a clearer view of the winner.
She was a slim, dark girl with top-heavy breasts, surprisingly slim hips and strong, unusually big thighs.
She was kneeling with her head hanging as if in exhaustion, her lips apart, the apple spreading her like a large, fruit-filled cavern. Her partner's rod was red and chafed from the friction of the apple during her efforts to remove it. He, too, was panting and had fallen forward onto his hands, his stomach heaving deeply.
The Pope stood up and clapped his hands yet again. There was a gradual slowing down of the tempo in the hall. Reluctantly, the remaining couples recognized that someone had succeeded. There was a cascade of fresh 'plops' as one after another they followed up their achievement. Now they were in a hurry for the last to succeed was to be refused sexual intercourse for two months-and a supervision was to enforce the condition.
At last all the apples had been confined in their temporary dwelling-places. The servants stood up, showing off the extended proportions of their stimulated stems.
"Right gentlemen." The Pope addressed himself to the guests. "I'm sure you'll all agree we've just witnessed a delicious spectacle. What would happen to the apples? Well, gentlemen, it's-not often that you can have tasted the finest fruit. So the ladies will now pass over their delectable morsels."
With that, the courtesans divested themselves of their fruit. Some squatted and ejected the apples with a straining effort into their hands, others pulled out the fruit with their fingers, others still allowed their partners to pull out the spheres.
Each of the women then carried her issue to the long banqueting table and presented it to a man of her choice-a cardinal, a knight, a baron, whoever took her fancy.
Each recipient eagerly took the fruit, raised it to the donor and then bit into it with relish.
The courtesans watched with gleaming eyes, smiling at the avidity with which the orbs were munched in the mouths of the princes and prelates.
Alexander gave a fresh order and the woman who had first managed to suck the apple from her bloated branch looked around at the specimens of genital rigidity. They were of all lengths and thicknesses-little to choose between them. She walked among them, feeling them for heat and fleshiness and eventually she chose that of a handsome young man whose penis was so shaped that it grew thicker and thicker from knob to base. Thus she would be ensured of fresh delight and surprise through all its length.
At a sign from the Pope, the servant pushed the woman's face forward over the banquet table. He seized a banana from a cluster in a nearby basket and thrust it into her from behind. In and in he jogged it while the spreadeagled strumpet wriggled against the heavily draped edge of the table in front of a hundred pairs of high-ranking eyes.
For some minutes the servant shoved the banana into her, holding it by one ripe, yellow end until it had almost disappeared. Then he withdrew it at last and with the first sign of animation he'd shown, rammed into her.
The ladies present didn't know what to look at most, his handsome, passion-wracked face or his enormous, penetrating penis. They watched in a thigh-rubbing fascination as he thrust deeper and deeper and the woman, bent under him, her breasts crushed against the table, groaned and pleaded for more.
He had settled down to a steady, moan-drawing rhythm, gripping her table-flattened hips, pulling at the same time as lower down he pushed, before Alexander glanced at where Lady Manfredi was wriggling on her seat, a slight smile on her lips.
"It pleases you to see such a scene?" he whispered with a smile.
"I can think of only one thing to please me better," she whispered back, glancing significantly at the place where his organ was hidden by his robes.
"We needn't wait for the end," he said. "Cardinal Rovere will take over."
"Let's go then," she said. "I can't wait."
CHAPTER TEN
Against the disturbing scene of national and international events which saw Charles of France claim Naples and advance with his enormous army upon Italy, the domestic carnality of the Borgia family continued.
While the Pope was trying to gain time by refusing passage to the French troops, and then giving way when Charles, supported now by the unruly northern barons, made it clear he would brook no refusal, Lucrezia, tiring of her young husband, had reverted to relations with her brothers whom she still found-with her father-the most sexually exciting of men.
Her two favorites were still her brother Cesare and, now, his older brother Giovanni, the Duke of Gandia. She had seen very little of Giovanni in her youth as he had spent even more time away at his studies than Cesare. During his young manhood, however, he had been brought back to Rome and had been kept in close attendance on the Pontiff, while Charles of France, revelling too early in his victory on Naples, had been cut off from the north by allied States and attacked from the south by the Spanish under Gonzalo de Cordoba.
Charles had escaped from the trap somewhat precipitously by the skin of his teeth leaving King Federigo of Aragon to be crowned in Naples behind him.
Throughout this period, Cesare and-unknown to his brother-Giovanni, had been sharing their beautiful sister during a long holiday she was taking from her husband in Rome.
It was only two nights before the two brothers were due to leave Rome together to the crowning of Federi go that Cesare arrived, unexpectedly at the apartment that Lucrezia had been given by her father. He let himself in, discreetly, with the key he'd had made for his own purposes, and walked into the apartment to find Lucrezia spreadeagled on a couch, her knees pulled up almost touching her breasts, urging her sweating brother Giovanni to greater efforts to satisfy her.
They were making such a bustle with their squirmings and pantings and her obscene encouragings that neither was aware of his presence until he spoke.
"I had no idea that we were all so in love with the family."
His cutting tones, broke through their abandonment and brought them both to a standstill. They lay together on the couch, staring at him in confusion. Lucrezia slowly put her legs down from their exaggerated position. Both lay, nude and panting, in a momentary, shocked silence.
Lucrezia gathered her wits first.
"Cesare, darling, you surely didn't think your rights on me were exclusive." She gave a little laugh at the monstrosity of the thought and smoothed her round belly with her hand.
"I didn't expect to find my own brother sticking you." His tone was hostile, controlled but dangerous. Again it was Lucrezia who spoke.
"You're sounding very moral all of a sudden, dear," she said smoothly. "After all, Giovanni knows all about you and he doesn't mind." She laughed again as if she was thoroughly enjoying the situation. She swung her legs off the couch and came towards Cesare, her big breasts pointing out at him. His eyes flickered. He was furious. It had shocked him to find his brother with her. He didn't analyze his feelings, but his reaction was very simple: he was consumed with a sudden, hating jealousy.
Lucrezia reached him and put her arms around his neck.
"Im surprised at you, darling," she said. "You sound jealous-anyone would think you were my husband." She laughed a third time.
Cesare caught her arms, holding the flesh so hard that she cried out. He pulled them from his neck and pushed her away from him.
"You're just a whore," he snarled.
Lucrezia colored, her eyes pin-pointed, but she kept control of herself.
"You're being quite ridiculous Cesare," she snapped. "I think you'd better go and come back some evening when you've got a sense of proportion and reality."
She looked round at Giovanni, who had slid slowly off the couch in front of them. "Besides," she added spitefully, "Giovanni and I have some business to finish."
For a moment it seemed that Cesare would strike her. His dark eyes raged furiously from her to her brother. Then he turned with a scowl and went out.
Lucrezia turned to Giovanni. Her eyes had assumed a wide, innocent look of wonder.
"Well, well," she said, "would you ever have believed that-from him of all people?"
"Amazing," Giovanni agreed. "I do believe he's really in love with you."
Lucrezia looked thoughtful. Her eyes softened. She had already forgiven Cesare at the thought. Her mind wandered off on one of her now frequent fantasies.
Giovanni came over and stood behind her. He put his arms around her and pressed her breasts. She turned her face sideways towards him as she felt his hips pressing her rump and his trunk growing fat again.
"I wonder which of you I'd choose if I had to," she mused. "Do you think Cesare's reallv ansry?"
"It won't last long."
He drew her back to the couch and pulled her down on it. She seemed to come suddenly back to the present, to become aware again and she opened her legs and put her arms up to him, opening her mouth and beckoning him with the deep, reawakened desire in her eyes.
She closed her eyes with the sharp sensation as he drove into her and she dug her nails into his shoulders. For the moment she had made her choice.
Cesare was not outwardly hostile to his brother when they met the next night. Their mother, Vannoza-the truth had been admitted to them at last-was giving them a farewell supper in her vineyard at Trastevere.
They dined in the rose-surrounded terrace with a number of other guests-including their younger brother Guiffredo. The conversation was easy and quite gay although a close observer would probably have noticed that neither of the two older brothers addressed each other directly and hardly once so much as glanced at each other.
However, the two left together in the early hours, accompanied by a number of servants and set out for Rome on horseback.
Within the city, Giovanni reined in his horse and took his leave. He announced to the company in general that he was going elsewhere to amuse himself. With one attendant, he set off towards the Jewish quarter.
Again, a very close observer whose attention was on Cesare rather than his brother would have noticed that a faint smile which contained both vengeance and a shade of triumph, fleeted over the former's face.
After the Duke of Gandia had left, the company continued on their way for a time until Cesare in turn announced that he, too, was going in search of a little relaxation. He set off alone in the opposite direction to that taken by his brother.
Giovanni trotted his horse gently down the narrow streets towards the river. He had said a passionate farewell to Lucrezia last night. Now there was a little Jewish maid with a body like quicksilver that he wished to take his leave of in an equally passionate manner tonight.
He allowed thoughts of Cesare to interrupt his excited anticipation of the fleshly joys in store for him. He didn't relish the journey with his brother tomorrow. He was aware that he was still culpable in his brother's eyes and the knowledge disquieted him; he knew how ruthless Cesare was capable of being.
With a quiet clatter of hooves, the two horses crossed a little, deserted square.
From it they passed into the gloom of another narrow street with the deeper oblong gloom of courtyard doorways.
They were near the river. Giovanni decided he could soon tell his servant to leave him. He didn't want the man making use of his knowledge of the little Jewess during his absence.
He called to the man, who was riding a little ahead of him.
"You may leave me now."
The servant saluted, glad to be relieved at last of his duty, and cantered back the way they had come. Giovanni continued on his way down the narrow street.
Hardly had the sounds of his retreating servant died before something flew from a dark alley and hit him on the side of the head.
It dazed him, but he remained in his saddle with an instinctive effort and drew his sword, turning wildly in the direction of the dark alley mouth.
Immediately he was pulled off his horse from behind in a sharp, muffled bustle of grunts and swishing and the sudden rearing of his mount. Flashes of silver flew rapidly in quick arcs and the next moment the body of the Duke of Gandia was being dragged into the alley, while his mount went trotting on without him.
"Is he dead?" a voice asked in the sheltering gloom of the alley.
"Aye sir, he's dead all right," came rough answering voices in loud whispers.
"Right. Sling him over my horse-and then lead on to river."
There was a bustling in the darkness, followed by a moment's silence and then three rough-looking men in the garb of sailors crept out of the dark passage and started off in a slanting direction from the path taken by the riderless horse. At the first comer one of them looked back and beckoned.
Another sailor came out of the darkness and immediately behind him came a horse carrying a richly-cloaked figure with a mask. Behind Cesare on the horse, his brother lay dead with a dozen stabs in his back and chest.
The macabre little party continued cautiously and unchallenged towards the river at that very point near the Bridge Sant' Angelo where Cesare had some years earlier disposed of the first of his corpses.
At a point where the narrow streets of the city emptied onto the key side, Cesare reined in and motioned the men forward. He watched while they crept stealthily out onto the key and surveyed the surrounds, including a number of timber-laden boats on the river. One of them turned and waved him on.
He rode carefully down to the water's edge, to a point where the scavengers normally tipped their refuse carts into the river.
There, he turned the horse's hind-quarters to the river and two of the men seized the prostrate body behind him and flung it as far out as they could into the river.
"Is he well out?" Cesare asked softly.
"Aye-well out sir."
Cesare strained his eyes through the dimness. The river was calm as usual, disturbed only by the disappearing ripple of widening circles where the body had gone under.
"Good work," he said, and tinned his horse into the shadows of the narrow street again.
A little later when he arrived at Lucrezia's place, he was completely self-possessed. He told her he was sorry for his previous night's behavior and that he had already apologized to Giovanni.
He found Lucrezia was delighted with him and she continued to be that way when his body was shattering her. Little did she realize that in his mind he was taking further delicious revenge on his brother.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Rome had been deeply shocked at the murder of the Duke of Gandia, but not a soul dreamed of attaching the blame to his brother-not even Lucrezia. It was generally assumed he had been done to death by some political enemy of the Borgia House.
Cesare certainly felt no remorse and left Rome with a sense of considerable satisfaction to attend the crowning ceremony in Naples.
Lucrezia, robbed of the attentions of both her brothers was forced to rely again on her husband for her nightly pleasures. As before she found him so comparatively frigid that, with her passionate nature, his very presence eventually became quite obnoxious to her. Some months later the Pope, on her request, dissolved Lucrezia's marriage to the young lord-on the grounds that he was impotens et frigidus natura-an impotence which was admitted by himself, and then so widely published and lampooned that he became furious and in retaliation publicly accused the Borgias of incest. It was a charge which seemed so obviously designed to draw attention from his own comic state that nobody-not even the most gullible of the public-believed him.
After the dissolution of the marriage, Lucrezia withdrew to the Convent of San Sisto in the Appian Way-partly to escape the various items of scandal which were rocking Rome, partly to appear to act with the decorum her sudden situation demanded.
She was to spend a period of some six months in her own private quarters, taking part with the nuns in daily prayers, joining with them in much of their work.
For some weeks she lived with them, praying, making baskets, carving small figurines in wood, walking in the quiet grounds, feeding their dozen hens. She was happy for a time to be free of the world in which she always felt a little as if she was living on the summit of a volcano that was likely to erupt unexpectedly.
But, at the end of that time, accustomed as she was to fierce and frequent intercourse, she began to feel an aching void in her loins, began to consider how best to soothe it.
During her walks in the grounds she had particularly befriended a young mm who had been in the convent only a short time before her. This young girl, whose name was Carlotta, was designated to show Lucrezia how to make the baskets and the little wooden figurines.
They got on very well and it soon became apparent to Lucrezia that the younger and unworldly Carlotta was quite fascinated by her.
Lucrezia managed, cleverly, to discover that the girl, who had never had a lover, was taking ill to her new and voluntary exile. She felt in her a need which she didn't understand, although listening to her confused explanations, Lucrezia was only too well aware of the trouble-the young girl needed a good hard fuck.
Carlotta was very attractive in her own way. She was dark, with a long face and a slightly Jewish nose dominating long, well-defined lips. Her body was completely concealed under the shrouds of her long robes, but the melancholy attraction of her face was quite enough to excite Lucrezia in her present manless state.
Giving way to the girl's hinted-at curiosity, Lucrezia began, during their walks in the grounds, to tell her a few things about her sexual life. But always she exaggerated the brutality of the male, making him sound an utter, unbearable brute.
"I don't think I could stand to have a man using me in such a way," Carlotta said one morning as they sat staring at the water lilies in the little stream which ran sluggishly through the lower reaches of the convent grounds. "I should feel stripped of any sense of dignity I'd ever had."
Lucrezia took the plunge.
"Yes. If the choice was between man and this convent, I would choose a cloistered existence within these walls," she said. "But, fortunately there are other things one can do."
The girl raised her fine, dark eyebrows.
"What-other things in place of a man?"
"A woman, Carlotta. Women are much gender and more loving than men. And they understand a woman's needs whereas most men are selfish and oafish in their lovemaking."
"But...."
"I think," Lucrezia went on quickly, "much as I respect the Mother Superior and the individual right of choice, that any woman who locks herself away in a prison is betraying her function as a woman and displaying a fear of the world which belief in God should not justify."
Carlotta stared at her, shocked. She had never dared to voice such sentiments, but they fitted well with her present mood of boredom and rebellion.
"You only have to look at the majority of the women here," Lucrezia continued, "and you see immediately that they're women who are too ugly or too witless to succeed in a competitive and natural world."
She took Carlotta's hand.
"But you don't belong among them, Carlotta. You are lovely and full of life which won't allow itself to be kept in check for ever."
The girl was flattered and moved by the words which were spoken to her in such sincere tones. They sped her own unformed impulses along the channel that Lucrezia intended.
"I feel you are right," she said. She glanced around at the distant figures of the other nuns wandering in the upper part of the grounds among the trees. "I'm beginning to wish I hadn't taken my vows."
"You should make the best of things as they are," Lucrezia said. "We are both in the same cul-de-sac of frustration. We should help each other."
"But what can we...?"
"We can take the place of men for each other."
The girl dropped her eyes and gazed down at the lilies. There was a silence for some seconds.
"I-I wouldn't know how ... and-and I'm not sure that it's...."
"We all have deep centers in our beings which others may never reach," Lucrezia cut in, "But unless they do, unless we try to help them to, we all live lonely, unsatisfied lives, lives which wrinkle us up with bitterness, the feeling of having missed what was essential."
Carlotta raised her eyes from the stream and found herself unable again to withdraw them from Lucrezia's deep, compelling gaze.
"Come to my quarters, after evensong tonight," Lucrezia went on, "and I will show you what it means to reach that center."
The dull peal of a bell calling them in to prayer cut short any reply the young girl might have made. She stared at Lucrezia, dropped her eyes at last and walked away towards the building. Lucrezia smiled after her for a moment and then slowly followed her.
That evening, alone in her quarters-two rooms at the far end of a wing of the convent, Lucrezia, garbed only in a dressing gown, waited for Carlotta to come.
She was almost certain she would come although the girl had given her no answer. She knew how the possibility of sexual adventure could play on one's nerves, stimulating, frightening, exciting all at the same time.
For Lucrezia, too, this would be the first Lesbian experience and the idea filled her with the same lustful chill of eagerness that her first fuck had-especially, as she had been deprived of her conjugal, if fraternal rights for some weeks now.
She found herself unable to keep still as the minutes went by following evensong. She rose time and time again and looked out of the sloping window down to the grounds. At last she sat on her bed and tried to concentrate on the pages of Boccacio's II Decamerone which she had smuggled into the convent with her.
As time passed she became more and more anxious. If Carlotta didn't come now she would die of frustration. She put down the book and stared out of the window again before walking into the next room where she studied herself in a small, silver-backed hand mirror.
Her heart leapt as there came a light tapping on her door. She ran to open it and almost clasped the young girl to her bosom as she drew her into her room.
Carlotta smiled at her briefly and stood uncertainly just inside the door while Lucrezia closed and bolted it.
"Make yourself at home," Lucrezia urged, turning round to her.
Nervously, the girl went to the window and looked out as if to reassure herself that the outside world was there, solid and unchanged. Lucrezia watched her pretending to interest herself in the exploration of the rooms, pretending to examine the few books, flicking the pages over with a pointless speed.
"I was afraid to come," she said, at last. "Wasn't that ridiculous-we are quite free to visit one another's rooms."
"We are quite free to act as we please," Lucrezia added.
"Yes," the girl said uncertainly.
"I have another gown-why don't you make yourself more comfortable and put it on," Lucrezia suggested.
She handed over the garment and Carlotta took it nervously.
Lucrezia turned away and studied II Decamerone, listening to the rustle of clothes as Carlotta slipped out of them. She kept swallowing with nervous excitement.
At a well-judged moment she glanced round and caught her companion naked. Carlotta gazed at her with wide, embarrassed eyes and Lucrezia glanced back at her book immediately. But not before she'd had a glimpse of the girl's small, firm breasts, high up and dark, with the splotch of dark nipple giving them body and her slim figure below it with the eye-catching fuzz of dark hair above her thighs. Lucrezia felt almost matronly beside the girl's small proportions.
She did not look up again until the girl came and sat beside her on the bed. Carlotta seemed to have lost some of her uncertainty. It was as if she'd reminded herself that she had, after all, come for a specific purpose and that there was no point in trying to pretend she hadn't.
Lucrezia replaced the book on a shelf over the bed and lay back on it, looking at her companion. Carlotta looked even more attractive out of her mm's somber garb, and the long V neck of the gown revealed a smooth stretch of her succulent-looking skin between her breasts. The beginning of their bulge on either side of the valley of flesh was heaving with a nervous emotion.
"You are really very lovely," Lucrezia told her. "It was a great mistake for a girl like you to get such a mad idea in her head that she wanted to pass the rest of her days in a tomb."
The conversation brought a sense of normalcy with it and Carlotta's voice hid a trace of relief as if a spell had been broken.
"If you hadn't come, I might never have realized it," she answered.
"Sooner or later you would have-but I'm glad it's through me that your revolution is to be achieved."
Carlotta had again, as in the afternoon, become lost in Lucrezia's eyes. They seemed to hold her hypnotically. She came, as if Lucrezia had commanded her, and lay down on the bed beside her. Lucrezia touched the girl's cheek, lightly.
"Remember that this is the only way to liberate yourself from the horror and monotony of a death in life," she said softly as her lips followed her hand.
Lucrezia was not very surprised to find that a relationship with a woman gave her as strong an erotic urge as with a man. It was as if it were something she'd always known, even when her conscious thought had included nothing but images of Cesare's, her father's, Giovanni's embraces. Now she felt the soft, smooth skin of the girl's cheek against her lips, a softness and a leafy fragrance which were missing in a man, and she felt her spirit stirred with the upsetting excitement of a new and forbidden experience about to come to fruition.
She slipped her hand into the girl's gown and Carlotta winced. Then her hand was caressing the small, firm breast with the lightest of touches. Her lips moved over the girl's face without losing contact-and found her lips. The lips were still, slightly reluctant and unsure. But as Lucrezia's hand moved from one breast to another and tweaked the nipple, as her tongue played hide and seek with Carlotta's lips, the mouth opened with a sound which was near to a sigh, the lips relaxed and then kissed back.
Lucrezia's tongue gave up its game and lunged right out to fill the mouth which opened and spread at its assault.
Gently, her hand untied the belt of the gown. The material slipped slowly down to the bed off the glossy flesh of Carlotta's hips and thighs.
Lucrezia's hand rested on the girl's waist for a moment, the index finger played with her navel. She noticed the girl was trembling faintly, like a leaf in the merest zephyr. She let her hand float away over the glassy expanse of flesh, lingering, unhurried, exploring every part while her tongue continued to caress the moist, heavily-breathing lips.
As her advancing fingers encountered the silky van of pubic hair, she slowed. She let her fingers course through it as through money. Under it she could feel the flesh swollen in a little mound, like a slight rise in the ground covered with a fine grass.
Carlotta wriggled her hips very slightly. She seemed ashamed of their movement, which was like an effort at escape.
Lucrezia sucked heavily on the lips which were trembling now in unison with the body.
With her free hand, she awkwardly pulled off her own belt and then pushed the plump flesh of her thigh against Carlotta's.
Slowly, as if stroking a timid animal, she allowed her fingers to continue on their downward progress. They moved down the rise and into the hot, little hollow between the oozing flesh of Carlotta's tightly-gripped thighs. Her path was barred for the moment by the instinctive inward pressure of those thighs. She stroked all the flesh she could reach and was rewarded with a sudden seepage of moisture around her fingers.
She moved her lips off Carlotta's and kissed her neck.
"Relax, darling," she whispered. "Open your legs."
"I can't bear it," Carlotta whispered back after a moment. "It makes me jump every time you touch me."
"All right-just let it go naturally. It'll come."
Lucrezia went on with her gentle fondling. The hollow was very warm now and Carlotta was letting out an odd "oh" every so often from deep down in her throat.
Moving her lips down the neck, over the slim shoulders, Lucrezia invaded the breasts which were taut and straining with sensation. She closed her mouth over a nipple and sucked hard and strong, bringing forth gasps of torment from the girl.
As the pressure moved from quim to breasts, Carlotta's thighs relaxed and, awaiting her moment, Lucrezia was able suddenly to advance her fingers so that the texture of flesh changed and she knew she was in the beginning of the ravine. Carlotta clasped her thighs together again, crushing the tormenting hand, but Lucrezia bore the weight and tickled the wet flesh with her fingertips.
She drew on the nipple again with her lips, sucking in as much of the breast behind it as she could.
Carlotta thrust her breast at the lips which seemed to be drawing milk from her shapely udders, she arched her hips and gave way suddenly, opening her thighs, relaxing them so that the raping hand was suddenly right between her legs, the fingers in at their target.
Lucrezia moved a finger in the suddenly conquered body. Carlotta groaned in submission.
Slowly Lucrezia titilated and explored. She pushed in through the tight ring of flesh, to the accompaniment of a little squeal from Carlotta. She thrust up, and then up again, feeling the hips withdraw instinctively, pull up away from the hand and then ooze back as they became used to the exquisite pressure.
Steadily Lucrezia sucked the breast, gnawed it, remembering all the things she liked a man to do and doing them all with that greater finesse which was born of her own intimate, subjective knowledge.
Her fingers could move more loosely, more freely now. The ravine had become a great river, like a dried-up wadi suddenly swollen with the seasonal rains, the channel leading from it had become bigger, more accommodating and the hips were moving and bobbing against hers, brushing her flesh with another's exciting, strange flesh.
Carlotta cried out and then spread her thighs in complete, won-over invitation as the finger bit into that sensitive flesh. She was wriggling incessantly, her mouth was wide open, gasping for air.
"Oh God, oh God!" she exclaimed incessantly with her wriggling.
Lucrezia worked furiously and delightedly. She could feel passion growing as her finger and thumb pinched, tweaked, stroked, masturbated. There was only one thing left to make Carlotta's initiating delight into utter rapture.
Lucrezia slid down her body, revelling in the tight, straining pressure of flesh against hers. Her wet lips followed the swells and hollows of the body in their descent. She withdrew down to Carlotta's thighs with them. She ran her lips down the thighs, tantalizingly on their buttery, yielding insides. The thighs twitched, clasped her head, relaxed. She heard the fury of Carlotta's moans washing down upon her ears like the continual flow of waves against a reef.
Her thighs clasped and unclasped, tensed and untensed continually; her hips wriggled like fish on a hook and she was fastened to the bed with her own overwhelming passion which was no longer timid but demanding.
Lucrezia searched, her tongue leading her blindly in until she found that steep, stiff monument. She grasped it in her lips and Carlotta's hips went mad, writhing and twisting so that Lucrezia had to hang onto her prize as if she were on a wild horse. But she clung to it, sucking it voraciously while a thin whine of passion, broken often by a deep moan, crashed down on her ears from the tortured face high up above her.
Her hands grasped those slim hips. How slim they were compared with her own. They made Carlotta seem that much more girlish, innocent, helpless.
She slid her hands under the hips and ran them all round the firm, tense balls of bottom. What an excellent little bottom. If she were a man she'd like to grasp that.
She squeezed and worked its pliable bulk as she sucked and licked. The buttocks tightened and relaxed in her hands, swinging wildly in torment. The girl had become a raging form of sexuality. There seemed nothing left of her except a moaning, writhing mass of sensual flesh.
Lucrezia pulled the buttocks apart forcibly. They were hot, her fingers slipped over them like snakes.
And Carlotta had no reticence any longer. She didn't even try to press her backside cheeks together. On the contrary she pressed them wide and back.
Above, out of sight, she heard Carlotta sob.
"Oh, oh, it's here, it's here," she heard her cry, out of control.
She sucked even more furiously, jabbing her finger deeply. She was terribly excited herself. She got a vicarious pleasure from the girl's helpless passion.
Following on her gasped out words, Carlotta twisted first one way and then the other in a quick, shivering convulsion. Her mouth opened wide and a long, continuous moan of sound exploded from it as she clasped her thighs around Lucrezia's head and squeezed.
The grip on Lucrezia was strong and suffocating, but she bore it until it slowly relaxed and the thighs fell away.
She straightened up, realizing just how hot her loins had become. A little longer and she'd probably have come herself.
She looked at Carlotta. The girl seemed to have collapsed in a coma. She lay with her head thrown back dramatically, her arms wide out beside her head. Her eyes were closed, her breasts heaving in a great swell of emotion.
Lucrezia lay down alongside her and kissed her shoulder. After a while she spoke.
"Wasn't that worth a year in a convent. Isn't it worth anything on earth?"
Carlotta's eyes opened slowly, sleepily. She'd lost all trace of her early embarrassment.
"I feel purged," she said softly. "I feel satisfied and purged of all the frustration and not knowing that I've ever felt."
Lucrezia smiled at her and kissed her bare arm.
"You obviously enjoyed it," she agreed. "You enjoyment was so infectious that I almost had a climax myself."
Carlotta opened her eyes again and looked at her. Realization had dawned that there were, of course, two of them, that Lucrezia had given her undreamed of pleasure, that it was now up to her to reciprocate.
"I'm not at all expert," she said. "I shan't know what to do."
Lucrezia began to quiver with anticipation.
"Just do what I did," she said with a break in her voice. "And that will be wonderful."
"I have to get my breath back a moment."
They lay together for a few minutes longer. Lucrezia could hardly wait and she kept pressing her round belly against Carlotta's side and tensing her pelvis against her.
"God I want it very badly!" she muttered.
At that Carlotta turned over towards her and she fell backwards on the bed. She lay there staring up at the ceiling concentrating on herself, looking inward at the sensation inside her.
She felt the warm face come down on her breasts. To Carlotta her breasts were enormous in comparison with her own. They just asked to be nestled against, to be used as a pillow in which to bury one's face.
The face brushed against the tight, hurting points of her breasts, piquing her with a spear point of ecstatic pain that rushed straight to her genitals. And then those cool, well-defined lips closed on her nipple in a soft, fondling grip that made her squirm already.
They began to suck, drawing her pear of breast into the mouth, drawing it in, in, swallowing it, sucking it, pulverizing it with sharp, needed pain.
Lucrezia's legs began to jerk in spasms and the unknown fingers slid down her body, the image of her own, and went straight to the spot which played no timid games with them but waited, wide open like a trap, thighs wide apart and squirming.
Lucrezia held her breath waiting for the contact, expecting it, but still jumping with delight when it came. Cool fingers caressing her long, deep cleft.
The fingers explored like timid animals-and everywhere they touched and slid they left a burning, a prickling sense of near-destruction.
Lucrezia groaned. She liked to groan. She let the groans escape,! from her mouth-not that she could really have controlled them-to show her appreciation of what was being done to her.
Then with a sudden jump she felt the fingertips find her little erection. That was too much. She squirmed her hips in a movement that was almost circular, that was wild, exaggerated.
And the fingers were relentless. They pressed there, loved there, pinched there, gave no quarter although her moans became helpless sobs of passion.
"Your mouth, your mouth!" she pleaded.
The fingers came out, giving her a brief respite. But they were replaced immediately by a pair of cool lips which seized on her, sending a shock through her whole body.
"Oh wonderful, wonderful!" she gasped. She could hardly utter the words. They tumbled out in a rush of sound which was mostly escaping breath, wheezing out like steam from a hot spring.
The mouth down on her was working hard, giving her no chance to catch her breath. She was out of breath as if she'd been running hard.
And then the hands, remembering, slid round her hips and dug handfuls from her big buttocks, rummaged between them.
"Wonderful, wonderful!" she breathed again, lost and helpless.
She felt the heat like a great wood fire down in her passage. It was as hot as a lump of smoldering charcoal, felt ready to splinter into pieces at any moment.
"It's coming ... it's ... coming ... oh!" she gasped, more as an outlet for her feeling than as a warning. She jerked her legs this way and that as if they were puppets and she held the strings. Speech was now impossible. The sounds from her mouth were animal noises, enlarging in abandon with every lick of that tongue on her.
She clamped her legs around Carlotta's head and squeezed her loins up at her face, forcing, straining arching. She felt the burst, the splintering and she cried out, stifling her cries with her fist.
A new and regular activity was begun in the quiet haven of the convent.
CHAPTER TWELVE
While Lucrezia was still enjoying her quiet life in the convent, Cesare was pondering his future.
For some time now a marriage between him and Carlotta of Aragon, whom he had never seen, but of whose beauty he had heard, had been in the offing. To achieve this marriage, the Pope had been in contact with the new King of France, Louis XII, trying to enlist his support.
As was usual in these cases nothing was given for nothing, nobody gave his support if he gained nothing in return. So it was with Louis.
He chose this moment to apply to Rome for the dissolution of his marriage with Jeanne de Valois, daughter of Louis XI-an application which the Pope readily conceded to.
In the way that this sort of bargaining gathered momentum, the Pope freshly asked that Louis should confer the duchy of Valentinois on Cesare.
In this way he hoped to settle ownership of a morsel of territory between France and the Holy See. The claims of the Church would be given up-but Cesare Borgia would be in power.
Louis granted all this in turn, asking at the same time for a cardinal's hat for an old friend of his and a dispensation to marry the beautiful widow of Charles VIII, Anne of Brittany. So the wrangling, conducted in an aura of politeness and political courtesy, came to an end.
Cesare chose this moment to crave permission to doff the purple. He had had long ago been made a cardinal, but Carlotta's father, Federigo of Aragon, would not have his daughter marry a priest. Her dowry, it was known, would be enormous-and Cesare prized money and territory above all at this time.
The only cardinal to stand out against this move was Cardinal Ximenes, the Spanish representative, who saw through the move and the proposed marriage and imminent alliance between France and the Holy See-an alliance which would not be at all in the interests of Spain.
Alexander routed these objections with the unanswerable pronouncement that he could not hinder Cesare's renunciation of the purple, as such a renunciation had clearly become necessary for the salvation of his soul. To appease Spain, however, he bestowed all Cesare's hielded benefices on Spanish churchmen.
Thus it was that Cesare Borgia, Duke of Valentin-ois, set out for the Court of France where Carlotta of Aragon was being raised.
His suite was enormous, with one hundred attendants, a dozen chariots and a score of mules for his baggage and presents for his future hosts.
In spite of the early hour chosen for departure, Rome was packed with people fighting to catch a glimpse of the newly-created Duke and to cheer him on his journey toward his prospective wife.
Cesare rode at the head of his retinue, following the Tiber along the Trastevere. He was mounted on a large white charger caparisoned in red silk and gold brocade-the colors of France. The Duke's doublet was of white damask laced with gold; a mantle of black velvet covered his shoulders, matched by a black velvet cap, studded with rubies.
Behind him his lacqueys also wore the colors of France, as did his Roman gentlemen. The Spaniards in his cortege, however, retained the costumes of their native land.
The procession, hemmed in by cheering crowds, was escorted to the end of the Banchi by four cardinals. The Pope, his heart swollen with pride at the sight of his son so gorgeously arrayed, watched from a window of the Vatican.
At Ostia, the whole retinue boarded a ship, which, with a protective fleet of galleys Louis had sent to fetch the new Duke, set off for the coast of France.
Over a week later, they dropped anchor at Marseilles, where the Duke was met by the Bishop of Dijon, who had been sent by the King to meet him.
From Marseilles the glorious procession rode on to Avignon, everywhere watched by gaping crowds who broke out into cheers from the very awe of its color and royal appearance.
At Avignon, Cesare was met by Cardinal della Ro-vere, who was to escort him to the King's court at Chinon.
A month or so after leaving Italy, Cesare was welcomed by Louis in an atmosphere of pomp, ceremony and cordiality-a welcome he was not to receive from the lady he had come to woo.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
In spite of Cesare's good looks and strong personality, Carlotta hedged and procrastinated until it became clear to all that she was not going through with the marriage. The background reasons were, of course, political and Carlotta followed the instructions of her father's ambassador. She also displayed a certain hauteur towards the Duke of Valentinois on the few occasions when they came into contact.
The final blow came when, Cesare, who was impressed by the beauty and inaccessibility of the princess, sent word telling her in the most courteous of paraphrasing that he could not wait forever in the court of France and that he failed to see what was delaying her decision.
Carlotta sent back a message saying that her family was not in the habit of being pressed-even by Italian blood of noble ancestry. This was an open slight on Cesare's foreign origin and social history which cut him to the quick. He began immediately to plan his revenge, taking into his confidence his closest attendants and companions.
It was common knowledge that almost every day in the afternoon, Carlotta, a few ladies-in-waiting and a handful of male attendants went riding for exercise in the words near the King's court. They would often be away for two or even three hours, cutting across the hillocks and hollows until the brush and trees became too thick for further progress. Sometimes they would then descend from their mounts and continue their promenade on foot a short time-all dependent on Carlotta's whim of the moment.
Cesare had the movements of the little band watched for a few days while he lingered on in the hospitality of Louis-who was somewhat embarrassed that his end of the bargain had not been fulfilled, through no fault of his own.
During the mornings, Cesare himself would ride discreetly out into the forest with a few of his men to explore, to scout out the ground on which he was going to carry out his plan-the rape of Carlotta.
At the beginning of an afternoon a few days after the princess's curt reply to Cesare's entreaty to make up her mind, the Duke and some twenty of his men rode out into the forest. In a clearing not far from the spot where Carlotta and her company usually began their jaunts, they all changed into a motley collection of clothing such as might well be worn by the bands of outlaws which infested the forests farther to the south. Several of the band then rode back to the forest outskirts and posted themselves to watch the approach of the princess.
Cesare had not long to wait before the first of the lookouts raced back to report the entry of Carlotta into the wood at a certain point.
For the next two horns the Duke and his men silently shadowed the unsuspecting party from the court. They kept well in the wings, only the lookouts keeping the party in sight. The laughs of the women would filter through the leaves and the sunlight every now and again, whetting the appetites of the stalkers who were soon going to enjoy their bodies.
A light breeze rustled through the foliage, conveniently covering the soft swishing of the horses, trampling through the grass and leaves. Nobody in the Duke's band spoke, communication being made simply through signs. The horses had been muzzled.
Deeper into the deserted forest the two bands made their way. Sometimes, from a ridge, they would have a view of the trees stretching out solidly in a great plain before them; at others they were almost enmeshed in a web of leaves and creepers as they advanced.
It was late in the afternoon and the sun was well down in the sky when a lookout came trotting gently back to report that Carlotta and her band had reached a spot near some rocks and had dismounted to pick some flowers.
At a sign from Cesare, his men donned rough masks of sacking which they had made themselves. They dismounted, unhitched bows and arrows from their horses, hobbled the animals and began to creep through the brush toward the spot indicated by the lookout.
They moved slowly, crouching, making use of every available cover, avoiding twigs with mathematical determination. As the sound of voices whispered through, they began to fan out, to surround the unsuspecting flower-pickers.
The wall of foliage became slighter and slighter, until Cesare, slipping slowly from tree to tree, could see the white garments of the women through the spaces in the low-hanging branches. He crouched lower and advanced a step at a time until the whole scene was clear to him. He stopped, a man on either side of him, and listened. There was no sound from his men, invisibly surrounding the small, rocky clearing.
The women, buxom wenches, were laughing and talking as they helped the princess gather her blooms. The princess herself was in a gay mood, which, for the moment, chased the haughtiness from her face, leaving only the tilt of her features to suggest her pride, her disdain of lesser mortals who thought themselves as good as herself.
Around the women, the male attendants-less than a dozen of them-idled and wandered and exchanged a few words with each other.
Such a blissful, sylvan scene, Cesare thought with a grim inward chuckle. What a shock was in store for them. He watched Carlotta, laughing, unaware, bending to the ground. His lips curled in desire and revenge. He'd soon take that haughtiness from her, he'd soon debase her so that she couldn't lift her head again with that proud tilt. He'd provide the French Court and Society with the scandal of the decade-at Carlotta's expense. He'd have her haughty, inaccessible flesh so filled that she'd never be able to close her legs again.
He straightened his bow in front of him, silently fitted an arrow. The two men at his sides followed suit. He took aim, slowly. He gave a sharp, piercing whistle and then let fly. His arrow slashed straight through the neck of one of the men-at-arms. The man uttered a strangled, coughing cry and staggered to his knees before falling flat on his face.
The sunlight of the clearing was suddenly crisscrossed with a hail of arrows. All around the horrified women, their escorts crumpled up and ceased to exist. The attendants had no chance to escape. A few managed, pathetically, to draw their swords and start uncertainly toward the woods at their nearest point. They never got as far as the first thickness of foliage.
In the space of a few minutes the ground was littered with the still bodies of the dead. The women had gathered around Carlotta and were cringing in terror. The forest around them had relapsed into a temporary silence.
Cesare smiled his satisfaction and raised his bow once again. His arrow pierced the clothing of one of the ladies-in-waiting, stabbing through the hem of her dress and pinning it to the ground. There was a guffaw of laughter from his men on all sides at the sign-and then they moved into the clearing, a sinister-looking bunch with their rough masks.
Some of the women screamed as they were seized by the men. Their screams were stifled with rough and ruthless hands. Their clothes were torn from them, their eyes blindfolded with strips from their own undergarments.
Overcome with horror and a helpless indignation, some of the women struggled desperately, others yielded, sobbing and pleading for mercy.
Cesare watched while Carlotta was stripped. She was weeping, but more in rage and shame than fear. During her manhandling she continuously threatened and cursed the men who were denuding her. Her clothes were in rags by the time her cap to s succeeded in getting them off her and she stood between them, trying to cover breasts and loins at the same time.
Cesare's heart began pumping fast as they blindfolded her. She was small and slim, with a sinuous, perfectly proportioned body. Her breasts were not large, but they were high and firm, with a luxurious curve which made him itch to run his hand slowly, gently round it; her hips were well-moulded with a thrust of flesh on the peaks of the bones; her legs were slim and rounded into light curves of muscle.
A delicate morsel, he thought, as his men began to march her toward the point where he still stood in the shelter of the surrounding bushes. If I can't have her legally, I'm sure I'll lose little by having her against her will. She'll still be warm, juicy flesh and blood. Her hips will still yield under mine, her breasts will still press hard against my flesh, her thighs will still ache from being spread so wide, her passage will still grow wet in spite of herself-and her hauteur. He clacked his tongue in satisfaction at the rape of her dignity, her reputation.
The strange trio had reached him while the thoughts wafted through his head. Close up she was more perfect than ever. He could see the moisture on her skin-the sweat of fear. He could make out the light down on parts of her body, a mole beneath her left breast, the puckered, corrugated skin around the base of her nipple, the slight quiver of her thighs as she approached.
He made a sign to his men and took her by the arms as they released her. Nobody spoke, no voices were to leave traces in her memory. With a wave, Cesare dismissed the men back to the clearing, where the rest of his band were drawing lots for the order of ravishing the other women.
Left alone with her, he marched her in front of him, holding a slim bicep in each hand, away from the clearing.
She had a slim, straight back, a firm curve to her spine. The narrow waist rounded out into a fleshy dome of bottom which quivered sinuously as she walked. Her buttocks were like the heads on columns, rounded, well-fitting from the well-shaped classical thighs. He put one hand down against her buttocks as she walked and the brushing of them, smooth as eggs, made his hand tingle, brought his penis crushing up inside his clothing, giving it that solid, blood-filled ache which only intercourse would relieve.
"Whoever you are, I warm you, you'll lose your head for this," she snapped, suddenly, with a choke in her voice.
For answer he slapped each of her buttocks in turn. She squirmed and tried to break free, but his grasp tightened on her arm so strongly that she cried out with pain and stumbled forward.
"If you get my clothes and put me on a horse, I'll arrange a pardon for you personally," she urged with a sob. "You're all doomed-but you who are with me can be saved if you help me."
He jabbed his thumb between her quivering buttocks as she finished her desperate speech and she cried out and tried again to squirm away. He pulled her back toward him to control her, and felt buttocks writhing against his erection. He joggled against her, crushing his penis against her flesh, rotating it around the inner banks of the ravine between them.
"You beast, you swine!" She was crying bitterly again. He rubbed his hands over her breasts and sucked her neck as she struggled vainly. He had to get in her quickly.
Flushed and perspiring, he pushed her forward again. He ran his hand down her spine, let it swoop out with the lift of her buttocks. She kicked back at him and he slashed the flat of his hand across her rump anew.
At a distance from the clearing where he could no longer hear the scuffling of activity, he tied her to a tree while he cut four stakes with his dagger. The stakes he shoved deep into the ground in a rough square. He went back to the tree and looked at his victim. Now that she was in his power he tortured himself, gloating over her body, taking his time in the preparation.
He moved his mouth off hers, and nibbled her nipples, assault. The lips trembled under his and tried to drag away, but he pressed on them hard and bit them so that a muffled cry of protest tried to escape from her throat. He moved his mouth off her, and nibbled her nipples.
"Oh you swine, you swine! If you touch me I promise you, you'll be tortured to death!"
He sucked the breast, letting it bulge right into his mouth like a perfect rounded fruit. He moved his mouth again and kissed her belly. She tried to fight him off with her legs, but emotion was exhausting her.
Cesare stepped back after a while and slowly began to undress. He stripped gradually, garment by garment, feeling the cool touch of air on his naked flesh. He revealed his loins last, and a tremor of excitement ran through his body as his penis shot warmly into the cool atmosphere and soared there, tensed up, in a static thrust against nothing.
He went close to her and untied her from the tree. She felt his naked body as he brushed against her and she began to fight, weeping almost hysterically at the same time. She was no match for him. He held her easily in his arms while he pressed his hot joint against her loins, against her behind as she twisted.
With a grunt of effort he pulled her to the ground and tied her wrist to one of the stakes. She jerked against it while he held her other wrist and moved the second stake to a more suitable distance before tying the second wrist.
He smiled with lustful satisfaction at his work and pulled her left leg wide out from her body, as near a right angle with her hips as he could make it. She tried to kick him, gasping with pain and rage. That leg fastened, he caught the other and pulled it wide, moving the last stake over. The angle between her thighs was now an obtuse one. It left wide and unprotected that mass of delight between her white columns.
Cesare walked in between her legs and pressed her with his big toe. She gave a little scream and tried to recoil.
"You can have anything if you'll get me a horse," she gasped, "pardon, money, jewels-anything you want!"
He inserted his toe slowly. His penis was sticking straight out from his loins like a handle.
He grinned and knelt down between her legs, staring at the opening he was going to abuse. He wanted to make her degradation complete. He lay down between her thighs with his face right up against her mossy opening. He pulled the flesh wide apart with his thumbs and pushed his lips against her warm flesh. He kissed and licked and then he poked out his tongue and wiped it around her flesh.
Carlotta strained at her bonds and gasped out exclamations of horror and shock.
"Please, please!" she begged. "No, no!"
Cesare continued to lick hard, intending to hurt her physically as well as mentally.
At the same time he slipped his hands up under her behind, his fingers rustling on the bed of old leaves on which she was pinioned. Her buttocks squirmed, tight and cringing at his touch.
"Oh God, God, no, no!" Carlotta was almost in a hysterical delirium. But that only increased his thirst for revenge.
He released her after a while and caught both her wide-spread thighs, pulling her pelvis down at his mouth, pushing his tongue as far as it would go. She was small, and obviously a virgin. He wondered if she'd bleed when he had her. He wondered if it would shame her more to bleed. Perhaps he shouldn't finger her too much for fear of making his passage easier.
He knelt up on both knees, looking at her body. She was a flesh and blood dummy there for him to use. There was nothing she could do or say to stop him doing anything he wanted to in any way he pleased.
He lay down on her and slithered up her body. She gasped again at the horror of his weight on her and what it meant. Her breasts were firm and springy under him, balancing him up like two rubber cushions. Down at his thighs was a void, just the leaves under him, no thighs of hers, nothing. She was pulled too widely apart; there was just the almost horizontal line of legs and pelvis.
He put his hand down there and felt for her. It was moist, but tight, difficult to open a little. He took his penis in his hand and aimed. She squirmed away, but there was no away. She began to cry and to mutter a prayer. His knob was against her. He drew back his hips a little and then lunged forward and up.
A choking cry of pain burst from her lips as he smashed through, right in and up, until it was just too tight to take the rest of his thickening stem.
He drew back a little. It was so tight that he felt a stab of pain, a pain that was exciting. He rammed up again, tearing farther this time, so that his teeth gritted with the painful ecstasy of it.
Carlotta uttered a low groan which seemed to expand and contract as if she couldn't get her breath. She seemed to fade into a half-stupor, still crying and very white.
The sight of her pale, agonized face acted as a spur to Cesare penetrating her belly. He wanted to see that haughty face creased in the painful knowledge that a man was raping her, shagging that guarded treasure of hers so that it was numb with pain.
The pull on him was like the hug of a mountain bear. It was almost unbearable, but just bearable because it was so exquisite at the same time.
He flexed his hips at the horizontal bar of her legs and pelvis in sharp, powerful movements, bringing his loins against the fleshy undersides of her thighs with a bump. He was panting hard.
This seemed to be the most pulverizing screw he'd ever had, and the sweet sensation of vengeance made it all the better, all the more sadistically exciting to grit his teeth and curl back his lips in passion as he seared her.
He grasped and squeezed her thighs in a grip that brought her out of her semi-coma and made her groan with a fresh awareness of reality.
He slipped his arms around her, grazing them on the leaves, and hugged her to him, crushing her in his strong arms. She was utterly in his power, crushed in his arms. As a final possession he crushed his lips again on hers, forcing them savagely apart, feeling them yield and slip back on her clenched teeth. He bit her lips and her teeth came apart, enabling his tongue to invade her mouth.
His loins were boiling. With each thrust his loins were churned with chilling, twisting clasps which seemed to be tearing out his very guts.
"Oh, God ... oh wonderful!" he breathed-and then half-remembered that he shouldn't speak, and fresh words merged into animal sounds of passion.
He leaned his body up from hers, pressing his knees into the leaves. Now he could exert more weight, more of a thrust from his loins. He slipped his hand down, holding her buttocks, each oval of smooth flesh in his hands. At each stab he pulled her lower body hard against his loins, letting out a groan of pleasure.
Carlotta, her face wet with tears, could manage no more than a continuous whimper-the proud beauty was reduced to a snivelling, agonized toy. Her lips trembled, the bandage round her eyes was soaked from her weeping.
Cesare felt
THE END approaching in a delicious agony. He pushed ruggedly, full length and pressed there, trying to push farther than was possible, while he wriggled his hips against her pelvis.
He reached to her breasts with his hands as he felt the scorching helter-skelter from his stomach to his genitals. He grasped them, twisted them so that she cried out afresh with pain. He pulled her nipples. His face was a mask of lost, bacchanalian sensuality. His hips jerked and jumped, screwed and squirmed as if of their own volition while his hands trounced her breasts and his eyes glazed over.
"Ah, ah, ah!" He couldn't hold back the eruption of his breath. Carlotta cried out in despair, recognizing she was soon to be filled with the polluting stain of her tormentor, the final, inescapable indignity.
A rack seemed to be torturing Cesare's organ, pulling it, distending it, punishing it with a voluptuous, throbbing clench.
His hands moved off her marked, reddened breasts, clamped on her waist, jerked her hips. He slowed his stroke, surging into her to the very root. His head swayed back on his neck, his chest heaved with choking breath, his buttocks clamped together as he flexed inward, his hands made fresh marks on her waist. It was here, here, gathered, ready to fly, gathered, gathered, couldn't be held. "Uuuuugh!" His head jumped, his teeth gritted and fell apart, gritted again as he pumped the full extent of his lust between her legs.
The princess lay under him, her head turned sideways into the leaves. It was over now, over and done, an eternal, ineradicable shame. The tears dried on her face, her head ached, her body ached and throbbed. Her breasts hurt. She wished she were dead.
Slowly Cesare climbed off her. He looked down on her. There was nothing haughty or inaccessible about her now. Her body was marked in a number of places from the rough usage he'd subjected her to.
He dressed with a feeling of triumph and satisfaction and, leaving her fastened and spreadeagled, walked back through the trees to the clearing.
Most of his men had finished loosing their lust on Carlotta's ladies-in-waiting. Some were dressing, others still naked, yet others still bobbing on the nude bodies of their prey. Many hadn't bothered to seek the privacy of even a small bush in order to indulge their sexual appetites.
Cesare gave a loud whistle and after a few minutes lookouts rode in. They had taken up their posts as a matter of course, although it was highly un-likely that there would be any wanderers to this depth of the forest.
The Duke indicated to the newly-arrived that they were to take the places of their companions, a task they fell to with gusto, while those who had worked out their passion moved off through the trees to keep guard.
Beckoning to three of his men, Cesare led them off toward the spot where Carlotta lay.
"Have her one after the other," he told them in low voices on the way, "and make her suffer."
The men grinned lasciviously. They considered themselves lucky to be offered the most noble lady of the group.
For a while Cesare watched his men tormenting the prostrate body of the princess as a preliminary to fresh rape, then he walked off through the trees to make sure the lookouts were well posted.
He felt highly satisfied with the day's events. He had taught Carlotta a lesson she could never forget. It was very probable she'd feel it necessary to leave the French Court. In any case he wouldn't have her now even if she suddenly agreed to his suit. She could keep her dowry.
Cesare had no fear of discovery. The coup had been well planned and executed. He was aware there was a slight possibility that in some quarters suspicion might fix on him. But he was not afraid of suspicion. And for the most part it would not be dreamed that such a dastardly crime could be authored by any but the crudest of brigands.
He and his men, he mused, would ride back-with suitable scouts-along the tracks made by the princess and her cortege on the outcoming journey. Near the fringe of the woods they would have to separate into pairs and ride off in different directions, getting back to their quarters at different times and from different directions. They would leave the women tied to trees with the dead for company. By nightfall the King's men would be scouring the woods in search of them and their cries would soon bring about their rescue.
He'd have them left naked so that Louis's men would also have a very astonishing eyeful-an eyeful they would hardly be able to keep to themselves. And so the story would be quickly spread.
Whistling softly, Cesare finished the checking of the lookouts, and strolled back to the spot where Carlotta was finding over and again that her flesh was not inviolate.
The sun was still splaying through the leaves, though from a more acute angle. Perhaps he had time for one more act of revenge, a crowning indignity that would prevent her from ever living to forget the previous.
He skirted the clearing, avoiding the locked couples, from whom gasps and screams emitted at intervals in a more or less regular accompaniment to their rustle of movement.
The last of his men was reaching the climax with Carlotta, and Cesare squatted down with his other two henchmen and watched the man from the back view. Carlotta no longer showed an emotion except for an occasional gasp as an extra-hard thrust took her by surprise.
In a low voice Cesare gave orders to his men.
"When he's finished you can leave me with her for a short time. Go back and help the others lash the women to trees. Make sure that they remain blindfolded-and not a word if there's any chance you'll be heard."
The buttocks of the ravisher were whipping in faster and faster, the backs of his thighs trembling. He gave a staccato series of coughing barks in which his body straightened and jerked convulsively. Then he staggered back from her on his knees and rested, kneeling, with his head dropped forward onto his chest.
Nobody hurried him and after a minute or two he turned, grinned without embarrassment at his companions and began to dress.
Cesare waited until all three were disappearing through the trees and then he stood up and walked over to Carlotta. Her body exuded an air of the crushed and beaten animal. She could go no lower-she thought.
He took his knife from his belt and cut through the cords binding her wrists. She lay there, motionless. He pushed her with his foot and she seemed to come to her senses. She moved her hands up to the blindfold, but he knocked them down.
Carlotta cringed in terror, completely subdued by the treatment to which she'd been subjected. He watched her, a cruel smile on his lips, until she moved her wrists and began to massage one with the other. She made no further attempt to remove the blindfold.
Watching her, ready for any movement to release her eyes from their confinement, he cut the bonds from her ankles and painfully she moved her legs together and wriggled her feet. She gave a little moan as she sat up.
For a few minutes he allowed her to move her limbs, and then he gathered the pieces of cord and knotted them into lengths again.
When he seized her, she made no effort to struggle. He turned her over so that she was lying face down on the ground. She lay pressed into the leaves, lifeless while he ended her brief freedom by fastening her wrists to the stakes once more.
He stood up and looked at her buttocks. They were like swollen buds preparing to burst into bloom-a little soiled from their contact with the ground-inviting a touch, to be fondled and held.
She had made no attempt to press her buttocks together or even to close her legs. She lay limp, exhausted, legs and arms slack, waiting for whatever was to come. She'll never be the same again, he thought with grim satisfaction; something in her will be broken forever-apart from her maidenhead.
He undressed for the second time that day. Desire was welling up in him again like a dried-up river suddenly growing again with the floods.
It was still warm in the spots where the sun's rays crept through the tangled branches, but the air was cooling. He braced his wiry body. His penis was the hottest part of him.
Carlotta stirred and groaned. He bent toward her to hear.
"No more...." she murmured. "No more ... have pity ... please."
Her helpless throwing of herself on his mercy produced an opposite effect to the one she desired. It made a nervous throb pulse in his chest, a little crest of sexual excitement, which began to break over his body like the surf on a shoreline.
He kicked her thighs apart with his feet. She let them flop when he kicked them. She had no more strength to racist.
On her thighs he could see the layer of slight, fair down, but her bottom, so smooth as to be almost glossed with a sheen, held his gaze. He gripped his organ in his hand. It felt enormous. He wondered how women could take it all. It moved in his hand involuntarily, a little jerk over which he had no control.
He sank to his knees on the soft bed of leaves and stroked her buttocks with a hand that quivered. He caught each of the glossy hillocks and pulled them apart. She stiffened, tried to close them together and then gave up as he jerked at them rudely again.
He gazed at her.
Cesare ran his tongue over his lips. He settled down on her back, kissing her spine. He slid his hands between them and drew the buttocks apart like curtains and wriggled between them. He let his fingers glide, feeling the way. His index finger encountered the sudden rubbery point of her posterior and he nosed his knob after it, prodding tentatively.
"No, no ... please no!" he heard Carlotta's weak, muffled appeal beneath him.
He pressed down vertically with his stand of rigidity. He felt it come in contact and took his hand away. He wriggled into her closer and put his hands under her loins, gripping her tight.
For a number of little strokes which were just rebuffed pressures on her, he jogged up and down, pushing his kins at the soft cushion of her rump. In out, in out he sawed without any specific feeling but a growing sense of pressure, vague and ill-defined in his genital region.
The princess, who might have been his wife, lay quivering under him, knowing that he was about to sodomize her, not knowing what it would be like, only aware of the intense shame which burned in her like a disease.
Cesare pushed, pushed, levering his whole body on his stiff stem of flesh until it suddenly broke through.
Carlotta uttered an agonized cry which sputtered into a gurgle.
He pushed down, thrusting into her, feeling the clamping pressure fitting tightly and strongly-defined along his inflated flesh.
Carlotta began to struggle, trying to press her thighs together under his, finding new strength to twist and fight against her bonds.
"No, no! I can't bear it!" she cried.
But Cesare held her in spite of her struggles and plunged more and more thickly into her with a slow, swampy advance.
His victim couldn't keep back fresh tears. The pain forced them out of her eyes. The agony from her body spread up into her throat and choked her. She felt sick and slightly dizzy. She continued struggling in her mind even when her body was not making movements, was taking no direction from the mind.
Her head was dazed with pain and indignity. She bit her lips until they were warm and wet. She didn't know it was blood on them.
The daze in her head was a mixture of pressure from her behind and noises from around her. It was only later that she realized the noises-which seemed impersonal-were those of her own groaning and his gasping on her back.
Eventually the pain meant nothing. It was simply a continuous, overwhelming cutting away, an enlarging which felt like the whole of her innards was being pushed up into her chest.
There was pressure all around her, which she also recognized later as the weight of his body on her back and backside.
For a long time the tearing, chafing in and out which was a wave of advancing and withdrawing torment, went on, until she was aware of herself performing certain actions which were dictated by his guidance. She was kneeling up with her head left on the leaves. Her thighs were widespread and pushed in under her. Her legs felt stiff and jelly-like at the same time.
She was aware of a greater edge to the continuity of pain, an extra pricking stab which her new position had enabled him to make. Now she was sure that her body was being ripped.
She became aware of another pressure on her waist just above the hip bones. That was his hands, pulling her back as his weight pushed forward and surged into her with a fresh shattering wave of pain every second.
As he swept in, his belly smacked against her bottom. The well-fleshed buttocks provided a buffer from which his body recoiled with a spring before flowing in again with a smooth, agonizing fluency.
He wished it could go on forever-but he wanted it to gather momentum as well, to sweep to the inevitable climax which was such sweet torment.
He felt the climax growing in intensity and his mind reeled with the pleasure of it. His mind took in the groaning of his soft-fleshed victim, the abandon of her posture, her helplessness, the fact that she was crying again through her groans.
The moment of oblivion, wonderful oblivion, was almost on him. He gasped for breath, his chest heaving in great, gasping sighs. He couldn't keep on the same pitch. It was too much.
He couldn't hold it. His mouth twisted into a multitude of ungovernable shapes. Her buttocks were there, glossy and smooth, lovely and exciting and her prostrate back and her thighs like a tripod under her, and her groans and her sobs. He couldn't hold it. It was rushing suddenly straight through and burst with a force which dragged a long, grating cry from his mouth. Twisting his mouth under the cries, he smashed home again and again, ridding himself of a great weight, hearing her cry out sharply every time he shattered in.
By the time he felt sufficiently recovered to dress and return to the clearing, the sun had gone in and the twilight was on its way.
His men were waiting for him. Their naked victims were already grotesquely attached to the surrounding trees in positions which were at once revealing and comic.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
It was close on the following dawn before Carlotta and her women were found by the search party the King sent out a couple of hours after dusk.
The captain who led the party was hard put to stop his men from committing too many indiscretions with their wandering hands as they untied the unfortunate women. And many a lady-in-waiting had her breasts and behind slyly stroked in the process of being set free. But so relieved were they after a chilly night in the woods at the mercy of any vagabond who might happen upon them, that the women didn't even notice that they were being rather unnecessarily felt as hands fought with their bonds.
Carlotta was too ashamed and exhausted to be indignant about the fate she'd su feted. She mounted a horse with difficulty and conserved all her energy to prevent the physical pain she felt from showing on her face as, surrounded by their fresh escort-bodies of the dead flung over the horses' rumps-they headed back to the court.
By that time, Cesare and his men were sleeping soundly in their beds-a sleep of passion exhausted.
The following day a large band of men-at-arms, including many of Cesare's retinue, set out to scour the woods in search for the villains who had attacked the ladies of the court.
But, although they spent the whole day, they found no trace of any possible aggressors-in fact the forest seemed to be totally deserted and uninhabited for many miles around the spot.
There was much discreet talk about the dastardly fate of the ladies, but nobody seemed even to think of Cesare Borgia as the possible dispenser of the treatment. The King was restrained by Carlotta from offering a large reward for information leading to the capture of the unknown rogues. The less said the better, she decided. As it was, she felt unable to leave her chambers for shame.
His Majesty, after a few more days of searching and interrogating, called off the hunt. But not before half his kingdom was aware of the story-often in a grossly exaggerated form. Some even suggested in the countryside's inns that the King himself had already tired of his wife and desired the haughty Carlotta, who had enhanced her desirability in refusing to accept Cesare's suit. Certainly many were the tongues which wagged over the Duke's part in the plot But they wagged only amongst the peasants, who loved to talk about things connected with nobility, and the more scandalous the better. In the court itself, Cesare, who had always conducted himself in a manner of the utmost courtesy and delicacy, was considered beyond reproach. Besides, he had never had a definite refusal to his plan for marriage from the princess.
Such a scandal, however, certainly put Carlotta out of the marriage market for the time being, and Louis, still wishing for a firm alliance between the Pope and himself, presented Cesare with two fresh possibilities of a wife. He was offered either one of the King's nieces or the daughter of the Due de Guyenne, Charlotte d'Albret.
Charlotte was only seventeen, beautiful, and she was a sister to the King of Navarre. It was she that Cesare chose.
For a short time her father appeared to oppose the proposed marriage. But the King of Navarre needed the friendship of France to withstand any possible attack from Castille, and pressure was brought to bear on the girl's father so that he eventually consented.
The marriage was politically sound, uniting both sides as it did at the time when Milan was noticeably belligerant over disputed territory.
Cesare was able to spend a few months only, consolidating his reputation in France and enjoying his duchess. For the trumpets of war with Milan were soon sounding forth, and the Duke of Valentinois was riding south in Louis's train to chastise the Italian kingdom.
In the Vatican, Alexander breathed with relief that his son had thus consolidated the alliance with France, and began to prepare celebrations for his homecoming.
Lucrezia, to whom news of her family came once in a while, also began to make preparations-to leave her little love nest in the convent and give herself once again into Cesare's arms.
