2,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Olympia Press
- Kategorie: Erotik
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
In this lusty historical saga set against a background of intrigue in fifteenth-century France, the valiant Charles the bold and his beautiful, ambitious sister Katherine of Burgundy attempt with erotic wiles and by military force to wrest the crown from the cruel King Louis XI.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Ähnliche
Fit for a King
Anonymous
This page copyright © 2014 Olympia Press.
http://www.olympiapress.com
His strong and bony hands, so deceptive in their hidden strength and subtle agility, gripped at the shoulders of her dress as though to rip it bodily from her creamy flesh, but instead he refrained as his long fingers slipped the filmy material of her expensive gown slowly down over her upper arms, revealing the smooth creamy whiteness of her flawless skin. So enthralled was he with the delightful beauty of her mere shoulders that he bent his leonine head with its “helmet-shaped haircut” and laid his lips reverently and gently on that pearly milky flesh she so ardently loved to have caressed. As his mouth crept across her skin, his tongue was busy flitting back and forth from one corner of his mouth to the other and quickly flicking tiny drops of masculine saliva across the small expanse his red tongue managed to cover on each whipping stroke.
Beneath his expert and adoring hands, Louise felt herself become more and more excited as she let her body's small restraint loose and felt the pounding of blood through her delicate structure, laving her face and neck with heightening shades of pink, flooding her exposed flesh with the internal heat only a man could ever give to her....
—From FIT FOR A KING
CHAPTER ONE
It was the Year of our Lord 1475. The grim Hundred Years' War had ended twenty-two years earlier, begun in 1337 when those English kings who were Dukes of Guienne were by treaty and law vassals of the French kings, opposed the centralizing policies of the French crown and showed increasing reluctance to do homage to France for their continental terrain. By the year 1429 the English and the Burgundians were masters of nearly all France north of the Loire, but in that immortal year Joan of Arc appeared, relieved the besieged city of Orleans, defeated the English at Patay and saw Charles VII crowned King of France at Rheims.
But now France was ruled by Louis XI, son of Charles VII, who had been married as the young Dauphin to lovely young Margaret, daughter of King James of Scotland.
Louis XI, who had nearly cost his mother her life because of his enormous head and hunched back and thin bowed legs, had been stricken with apoplexy on his wedding night, and gentle Margaret had turned in horror from her grotesque husband. The festering malice borne in his soul from that night forth was to extend throughout all France, for it had been destined that he would not ascend the throne of a united France until the year 1461. Yet even as Dauphin, he had joined several conspiracies against his father, and had fought in battle in a manner that belied his deformities and his infirmity which was to plague him all his life. History shows that he achieved the goal of creating a new, national state based on the central power of the crown of France, in spite of the military superiority of his many enemies (for all the great nobles of that era were arrayed against him), by dint of stubbornness, skillful and unscrupulous diplomacy, and bribery.
Four years after his accession to the throne of France, the League of the Public Weal headed by Charles the Bold of Burgundy and Francis II of Brittany forced him to grant concessions of territory which he soon violated. Though he forced the Peace of Ancenis on Francis of Brittany in 1468, he was mortally humiliated by Charles the Bold who lured him to Peronne for an interview, and then refused to let him go until Louis had helped him suppress the revolt of Liege, which the “Spider King” himself had stirred up. He had never forgotten the humiliation of Peronne, when he had been forced to walk before the mounted Duke of Burgundy, the eyes of all the Burgundian soldiers mockingly upon him, lectured as a naughty child by the great Burgundian soldier-noble. He swore then unremitting vengeance, but the mercenaries and Charles' own loyal troops seemed to outnumber him always at every turn and to dash his hopes. Now on this July night in the Year of our Lord 1475, the Burgundian armies besieged Paris itself, and the realm of the “Spider King” seemed doomed....
This night, the royal flag of Louis XI, the gold fleur-de-lis on a sky-blue field, flapped idly from atop the gloomy tower of the fortress of Montservat, in the southwest quarter of Paris. Here the “Spider King” met often with his ministers and with his two most trusted servants, the royal executioner-torturer Tristan l'Hermite and the dwarfed little Olivier le Malvays, who had begun his station in life as barber to Louis XI and was now doctor, advisor, and but recently ennobled with the name of Olivier le Daim. There were those in France who whispered that Olivier might well have become the favorite of the “Spider King” because he too had bandy legs, a hump on his back and long ape-like arms. And in his own grim and macabre humor, Louis XI often let his barber wear his royal robes and his cap with its row of leaden saints circling the rim to visit taverns and houses of ill repute, there in his own royal name to spy upon the temper of the people and to learn whether they were loyal in this life-and-death struggle against Burgundy....
The “Spider King” had wed again, in 1459, the lovely sixteen-year-old Charlotte, the daughter of Duke Lodovico of Savoy, and she had given him three daughters and a son, Charles, who would become Charles VIII and reign from 1483 to 1498, marrying Anne of conquered Brittany.
But the “Spider King” thought nothing of his Dauphin son now as with Tristan and Olivier he moved towards a dungeon where the palace guards had incarcerated a young tavern wench who answered to the name of Isabeau la Jolie— Isabel the Lovely—who had been seen by one of the king's spies shooting an arrow over the city wall towards the camp of the besieging Burgundians....
The castle of Montservat was a grim structure of gray damp stone and rusting iron, squat, without windows, a monument of the remote age from which it dated, a relic of the Dark Ages of the Twelfth Century. It had once been the castle of a Duke and Grand Marshal of France, but now it served as prison. The damp odor of fungi from the cellars and a profusion of bats that swarmed at sunset from a crack in the masonry of one of the ruined watchtowers made the superstitious people of Paris cross themselves when they neared this grim edifice. Louis XI put his tongue to his thin dry lips, glanced cunningly at his royal executioner. “Well, Tristan, there'll be good sport, I'll warrant, this night. Mayhap we shall learn what treason my own citizens of Paris plan against me in aiding my hated enemy of Burgundy.”
“Sire,” the massive giant rumbled, pulling at his gray beard, his dark blue eyes singularly glowing with a rapacious lust, “I much doubt that this tavern wench knows aught what it was she did in shooting that arrow. It is my belief, Majesty, that some traitorous noble in your own palace bribed the poor slut to do the deed. True, it will not spare her torture, but she shall not at least die of treason if we learn that such is the case.”
“My Charlotte is at Montplessis enjoying the spring baths,” the “Spider King” cackled, “so perchance a bit of diversion will not be amiss with this lusty wench. You say she is lusty, good Tristan, broad in the bosom and the hips?”
“Aye, Majesty,” the royal executioner chuckled thickly, “but danger there is of the pox from lying with such a bawd.”
“That is why I have brought my good Olivier. With his drugs, he has saved me from many a fainting spell and stroke of my sickness, and he knows a wench's private parts better than any doctor should—aye, Olivier, you rogue?” He turned to his right, where the newly ennobled dwarf-hunchback hobbled along, and Olivier le Daim winked salaciously. “I can tell in a trice,” he boasted in a reedy voice, “whether this harlot is fit for Your Majesty's royal scepter. But if she is not, Ventre Saint Gris, I shall have a comely wench to warm your bed, Sire.”
“See that you do, you ugly rogue,” Louis XI cackled as he clapped his barber-surgeon-advisor upon his hump, “or I will have good Tristan stretch you straight again, I swear it upon the saints!” With this, the King of France touched with his bony fingers the leaden images sewn to his purple hat, and Tristan opened the door of the torture chamber, its binges squealing as if in a kind of anticipatory agony which the poor, luckless victim within would soon echo!
Indeed, as the sinister trio entered the torture chamber, the attractive culprit uttered a cry of abject terror, cringing back against the damp stone wall to which she had been shackled with her wrists drawn high above her head and fixed by two heavy iron gyves set into the stone itself.
To her right, and in the broader portion of the dungeon, the terrible apparatuses of torture were visible. Two men, naked to the waist and their faces masked in black as befitted their terrible station, blew on the bellows to fan the flames of a huge brazier in which branding irons were heating. The vaulted ceiling in this broader portion of the dungeon was higher, and from the ceiling dangled chains and ropes, while in a corner to the victim's left stood the rack, and in the opposite corner a round heavy wooden post in which a single circular iron gyve was fixed at the very top—a whipping post. Against the central wall to the girl's left, there were other dread objects of torture for which this savage age was famed: the iron boot, tongs and pincers of varying sizes, and a set of shining knives with murderously sharp edges, used to flay a convicted criminal.
The two assistants were burly rogues, famed in their skill of inflicting exquisite agony while prolonging a victim's life to the utmost; but Tristan l'Hermite was their acknowledged superior and master at the hideous trade of torture and death. For Louis XI, beset by the most powerful nobles of the land, ruled not only by intrigue but by terror as well, and he made use of this weapon, which had the added virtue of whetting his inordinate sadistic appetites.
The girl at the wall stared incredulously as he, centered between the hunchback barber and the massive executioner, approached. His cloak and doublet, as his royal hat with its rows of saints, was a dusty and faded purple, and his hose emphasized the spindly and bowed shape of his malformed legs. Even if she had not known by the hat and the medals and by the royal purple, however faded, which adorned him, Isabeau would have divined from his sly face and enormous head and his crooked body that this was the terrible “Spider King.”
She had been seized at the tavern after the king's spy had pointed her out to the men-at-arms, and so she wore a low-cut blouse which excitingly set forth the upper curves of a magnificent pair of round, closely spaced breasts, and a dirtied skirt whose fullness did not hide the tempting promise of her ripe hips and thighs. Her face was round, her lips overripe, her nose dainty and with broadly flaring wings, but the terror in her supremely widened dark-brown eyes added an indefinable nuance of helpless femininity to her features which Louis XI found particularly stimulating. Apprehension and suspense were an integral part of the torture chamber, and so sensitive and deliciously attractive a victim would, he knew, provide hours of titillating pleasure.
“Bow your head, slut,” the giant Tristan boomed, “your sovereign stands before you and has come to judge you!”
“Oh, pitte, ayez pitte de moi, Votre Majeste,” Isabeau la Jolie heartrendingly sobbed.
But Louis XI did not listen to her plea; his crafty, watery little eyes were squinting at the generous thrust of her round bosom against the brazen immodesty of her blouse, as if they sought liberation to his eyes and hands and lips.
“A toothsome wench, indeed, Tristan,” he cackled as he winked at his executioner. “Nay, how fair this flower of the gutter might be were she washed and then gowned! But what would you, the treasury of my poor kingdom is still too paltry to bedeck every pretty wench in Paris with a fine gown. Besides, she will have no need of clothing at all very soon, eh, my Tristan?”
“None whatsoever, Sire,” the giant smirked, he too intent with glittering eyes upon the shuddering body of the helpless girl. Isabeau's dark-brown hair had been loosened in the struggle during which she had tried to escape her captors at the tavern, and it tumbled down nearly to her hips.
“My poor child,” Louis XI declaimed in a wheedling voice, “it grieves me to see one so fair in such pitiful straits and in so gloomy a dungeon. Happily, it is unlikely that you will catch a quinsy from the cold, since I see that Tristan's good cronies are making the flames leap in that brazier. For your own welfare, girl, I counsel you to speak the truth to your King and overlord. I am told on good authority that you were seen shooting an arrow into the Burgundian camp. To whom were you signalling and who bade you to do this treasonable act? Know you not that Burgundy is my mortal enemy and that his vassals besiege the walls of Paris to the peril of every honest and upright citizen of my city? You must speak, girl, or your tongue will be loosened, for I must know all of plots and schemes to topple my throne.”
“Oh, Majesty,” Isabeau quavered, “I—I have a lover who has taken service with the Duke, and it was to him that I sent the message tied to the shaft of that arrow. I swear it upon my hope for salvation.”
The superstitious King of France hastily crossed himself. “Take care not to blaspheme, wench,” he whined, “lest your immortal soul perish here and now! The Omnipotent One who knows all truth and all error, all falsehood and all deception, hears you now beyond these walls. Nay, do not take me for a child, you pretty creature, and do not think to cozen me with your fair charms. Were you my sister herself, you should be stripped and put to the question if you dared betray your King to whom you must owe allegiance to the very death!”
“But it is the truth, as heaven is my judge, Majesty,” Isabeau pleaded, tears welling into her lovely large eyes, breaking and running down her contorted, flushed cheeks. Her tears added to the sensual delight of the “Spider King,” for he could not purge his soul of the rancor he had felt when his beautiful young Scottish bride Mary had recoiled from him on his wedding night. And he could see in the eyes of the terrified and tethered Isabeau la Jolie that faint shadow of repugnance which insulted and infuriated him and which made him, conversely, all the more savagely eager to punish any such bold jade who would flout him because he was not handsome as a courtier.
He put out his bony hand and brushed her bare shoulder, and Isabeau shrank back against the unyielding stone wall of her dungeon with a stifled cry of horror. The cold, bony touch of his fingers on her naked skin made her nearly swoon with terror, as did the relentless and deliberate preparations of the assistant executioners beyond her.
“Such fine white skin, my pretty little dove,” he crooned, his forefinger tracing its way down the narrow valley between her heaving titties. “What a pity it would be to mark it with the purple and dark red and black of the hot irons. Or to trace upon it the kisses of the lash.” His eyes narrowed, his voice grew cold and ruthless:
“But mark it I will assuredly do, you obstinate slut, unless you now speak and reveal the truth! Quickly, the irons are almost white-hot and they yearn for your naked flesh, you young, misguided trollop! You have enough lovers, I vow, in the tavern where my men made you prisoner, without offering yourself to those dogs of Burgundy.”
“She is a common bawd, Sire,” Tristan impatiently interposed, “and any rogue with a few ecus in his purse and the wherewithal to pay for a flagon of wine and a bed in some grimy hotel can enjoy her favors.”
“That's not true, I swear it's not true, I'm no bawd!” poor Isabeau hysterically cried out.
“So you deny then, slut,” the giant Tristan growled as he cupped her chin with his thick, mercilessly strong and cruel fingers, and stared gloatingly into her tear-drenched eyes, “that you sell your body at that tavern? Mark you, girl, you will not lie to me long, for I have ways of extracting the truth even from a deaf mute! I will bring into this dungeon a dozen cutthroats who will equally swear upon their hope of salvation that they have lain with you. Even that rogue of a poet Francois Villon, who fancies himself to be of nobility and calls himself Francois de Montcorbier—he, I know for certain, is one of your legion of lovers. But I have had enough of this idle banter! Jules, Pierrot, put this girl to the post and strip her naked for the lash. We shall begin with the whip, and perhaps you will tell us how virtuous you are or are not. If not, then the irons will be more than ready!”
“Oh no—in the name of mercy, oh no, Majeste, do not let him torture me, I know nothing, I have told the truth!” Isabeau shrieked as the two masked, half-naked torturers eagerly approached her.
CHAPTER TWO
At this very moment, though the army of the Burgundians was camped around the walls of Paris, Charles the Bold himself was dining in state at the castle of Drienne, a powerful fief which was still held in thralldom by him and not by the crafty Louis XI. The Comte Henri de Drienne, feudal lord of this magnificent estate and the fortress-like castle which commanded it, had ceded it to his Burgundian master for a great feast. It was a stratagem of war more than a festival, although it entailed a marital alliance, the purpose of which was to weaken the power of the “Spider King.”
The great hall of this castle, a magnificent new structure with ten glass windows, was brilliantly lighted with scores of torches that burned with a steady clear yellow flame. A pleasant scent was wafted into the air, for these torches had been impregnated with beeswax, a substance reserved in France for the finest quality of candles.
The hall was crowded with magnificent tables, spread with superbly figured Flemish linen, and had robbers entered and seized the decor of these tables, they would have netted a fortune, for there was a veritable treasure in silver plate: silver forks, silver candlesticks, pastry castles three feet high, churches of cake with genuine golden bells ringing from their edible steeples, a silver unicorn with a candy-stick horn. For viands, there were cranes stuffed with pheasants which in turn were stuffed with quails, and these in turn were stuffed with hummingbirds. There were swans covered with white sugar feathers swimming in a lake of their own delicious juices, in which bobbed oranges, the eggs of plovers, and ripe plums. In one corner of the largest table, a Dutch windmill with sails of cake frosting pumping a miniature river of wine into a silver ewer from which the noblemen dipped their goblets into it to toast the health of the Duke of Burgundy, the Comte de Drienne, and of Philippe, the Comte de Valois.
Philippe de Valois was a profligate weakling, a man of thirty and a fop. He used snuff from a silver box, and his doublet and hose were the most elegant and expensive in all France. He carried a perfumed pomander which he put to his delicate nostrils now and again, affecting a look of supercilious scorn at those who sat at the table with him. He was unmarried, and his passion was for young pageboys, whom he would occasionally dress as girls and, blindfolding them, take them to one of the torture chambers in his sumptuous castle to the south, and there, under the penalty of a flogging or worse, force them to divest themselves of their raiment, to kneel on all fours for buggering.
The burly and stalwart noblemen who crowded this central table at which the Duke of Burgundy himself was seated beside his ally of Valois were distasteful to the effete pederast. Philippe had his own army of German and Swiss mercenaries, and it was precisely this army which Charles the Bold, ruler of Burgundy and of much of the Loire, desperately craved.
So Charles the Bold had ordered this great feast with a display of all his wealth as well as that of his ally and vassal, the Comte de Drienne, to impress the foppish ruler of Valois. And the plum which he meant to dangle in front of this popinjay was his own voluptuous and sadistic sister, Katherine.
Philippe de Valois, pederast though he was, lusted also for women, but he wished to be dominated by them. His own mother had been a cruel and vindictive woman, beautiful and desired by many, and history records that many a troubadour or knight who pined for a night in her bed was often summoned to her bedchamber, only to discover that, after permitting him some daring caresses which only excited him to frenzy, she would call in her maids, have the varlet stripped and flogged with birch switches as he knelt, his hands tied behind his back, while she mockingly sat on a footstool and put her milky hand to his prick and masturbated him constantly until he fainted from the pain and the frustration.
Thus these two diversely contrasting sides of Philippe's sensuality had led him both to the amusement of boy pages dressed as girls and to an ungovernable and almost hopeless yearning for a mate who, while he practiced on her the normal and male right of possession, would nonetheless dominate him. Charles the Bold had planted several spies in the household of Philippe de Valois and had learned of his potential ally's astonishing two-phased lusts. That was why on this eve when he felt secure in the siege of Paris and believed that only the addition of mercenary troops would topple the walls of Paris and bring Louis XI to his knees begging for clemency, he had absented himself from his own armies to lure Philippe de Valois into union with beautiful Katherine....
In the fair city of Beaune, in the heart of Burgundy, that thriving province of Eastern France and famous for its magnificent wines, Katherine of Burgundy was amusing herself this summer evening, little knowing what her soldier-brother planned. She knew that she might rule as regent should her brother perish in battle and that the troops of Charles the Bold would swear allegiance to her under the Burgundian banner, so that her own future was assured. And in these times, Burgundy included not only this province of France but also the Low Countries and Franche-Comte. While the “Spider King” had to levy taxes against his own nobles and suffer their rage at such extortion, Burgundy, a center of art and culture, was also the wealthiest state of Western Europe. And of the women of this thriving land, Katherine of Burgundy was one of the most beautiful—and also the most ruthless and heartless....
She was tall, perhaps five feet eight inches, with jet black hair wound in a coronet braid atop her stately head. Her eyes were a piercing blue, but they were cold and unlike the warm sunbathed sky of Burgundy itself in this soft summer season. Her nose was aquiline, perhaps a trifle sharp, with sensuous nostrils that flared mercurially and denoted her ardent temperament. Her mouth was thin and small and her chin firm as a man's, her face an insolent oval and her cheekbones highset while her skin had the warmth and whiteness of pure ivory.
Her figure was that of a young Diana—goddess of the hunt, and she rode as well as her stalwart brother. But now, at eventide, in her bedchamber, she was naked but for a perfumed silken robe with a silver-cloth belt that accentuated the suppleness of her slim waist and called attention to the alluring flare of svelte hips and highset oval-cheeked buttocks, long shapely nervously muscled thighs and elegantly sinuous calves.
She had supped on roast pheasant and downed several goblets of red Beaune wine, and her small but magnificently firm orange-like breasts rose and fell quickly as her passion mounted. She stood facing her favorite maid, a Norman girl of eighteen, named Marie Castelatte, whom she had bidden attend her in her bedchamber, giving leave to all her other maids to do what they would un [...]
