Thorn Boy and Other Dreams of Dark Desire by Storm Constantine Page B

‘That was wonderful,’ he said. ‘You should have
joined me.’
    ‘ Your
teeth are chattering,’ I replied. ‘Perhaps we should go back
now.’
    He smiled, and
stroked my thigh with his damp fingers. ‘No, Darien, if you want
me, you must have me here.’
    I remember
uttering an anguished cry, and throwing myself against him, taking
his cold, wet body in my arms. His shuddered in my embrace with
silent laughter, wound his legs around my own. ‘Take me, Darien!’
he said. ‘With Alofel, you have to be a dutiful boy, but I want you
to be a man for me.’
    ‘ And how
would you behave with Alofel?’ I couldn’t resist asking.
    ‘ He
waits for me to ask for his love,’ Akaten replied. ‘He will wait a
long time.’
    ‘ Don’t
ever go to him,’ I said harshly. ‘If you do...’ I couldn’t finish.
I meant that I did not want to have to look upon him as a rival,
someone against whom I would eventually have to take
action.
    ‘ Give me
a reason not to,’ Akaten said and pulled my face towards his
own.
    We are all so
many people; a hundred burgeoning personalities confined within a
single body. I am weak, I am strong. I am afraid, I am courageous.
I am a vessel, I am the fluid that fills it. Akaten was languorous
beneath me, and I was not the person who had swooned in the arms of
the stranger in the shrine. I felt powerful, twice as tall, capable
of anything, but entirely tender. My love-making was as gentle as
the dew falling around us. When I slid into him, he opened for me
like a flower. He was a lily on the water, and I rode him slowly,
so slowly, to the shore.
    From
that moment, we became one. In the days that followed, we never
spoke of love, although I was sure that was what I felt for Akaten.
From a young age, I had been trained to suppress my feelings, and
never to speak of them. Therefore, I had no way of knowing whether
Akaten returned my feelings, or was simply comforted by our
closeness. I was obsessed by him, wanted to be him, be absorbed by his flesh, sucked into
his mind, so that we would be utterly inseparable.
    We tried to
keep our alliance private, but it is impossible to keep secrets in
the palace, and soon it was common knowledge that we spent most of
our nights together. I was unsure as to how Alofel would react to
this news when it finally came to his ears, but he never mentioned
it to me, and his attitude towards me remained unchanged, even
though he must have known I left his bed at midnight to go to
Akaten’s chambers.
    Alofel
continued to shower Akaten with presents and now, because it was
obvious that Akaten was no longer stricken, Alofel commanded his
presence. Every day, in the late afternoon, my lover would go to
the king’s rooms and talk with him for over an hour. Several nights
a week, they ate their evening meal together. I did not feel
jealous exactly, but could not entirely eradicate the sense of
unease that these visits conjured within me.
    Porfarryah was
scathing of my relationship with the foreigner, and I felt myself
cooling towards her. Our friendship became brittle and fragile,
although we were careful not to let it break entirely. We still
needed to be allies at court.
    The summer
passed like a hazy dream. I can still recall the flavour of it; the
endless days in the garden when Akaten would gaze at me smiling,
his long eyes hooded with promise, and the hot nights when we lay
together in the moonlight, our sweat fusing our bodies together,
wrapped in the heavy perfume of night-blooming flowers and sexual
musk. I should have known that nothing ever remains the same. As
Harakhte had once said to Akaten, life is a dynamic process and
change is inevitable.
    The Mewts had
accepted their Cossic conquerors only grudgingly, and Alofel’s
advisors had been busy constructing a new government in Mewt, and
making promises to the people in order to keep them tractable. Near
the end of the summer, when the gardens were baked dry and the
lakes almost rancid, a delegation of Mewts