‘May I adorn your face?’ he asked.
The woman nodded. He stood and touched the blackened tine to her chin, gently dabbing the coal stain into a mark of Venus. He dipped the comb into the coals once more and thickened the mark, then leaned backwards to behold his work. ‘Perfect,’ he said.
He returned to sitting and reached again for the jug of wine. He took a long draught, never taking his eyes off the woman’s face. ‘Rhiannon,’ he whispered. He might have been a sculptor naming his bust—his lusty, lifelike bust that seemed to have been polished by the very hands of Venus.
‘Will you not make love to me, Husband?’ she asked in soft, melting Latin.
The Beast sighed, then bowed his bald head so that it came to rest against her smooth white belly. ‘Ah, Rhiannon,’ he said. ‘Wife.’ He reached to the woman’s hips and pulled her closer, burying his face in the creamy white flesh of her stomach.
He sat there for a long while, his head resting against her stomach, as if she were some familiar, domestic goddess and he had come to offer his daily prayers. And then he did begin to pray, or so it seemed, for a torrent of words sprang from his lips. They were strange, tangled words—words so full of breathy desire that they might as well have been kisses themselves.
Arria had no idea what language he spoke, but she could feel what he was saying in her very bones. He was speaking of love and lust, of sweetness and yearning, of things that Arria had never known. They were words so lovely, they might have been birds, or tiny fishes swimming beneath some invisible wave of emotion that Arria could sense was about to crash.
And then it did. He rose to his feet to face the naked woman, speared his fingers through her hair, and lavished her neck with the hungriest, most passionate kiss Arria had ever witnessed.
His mouth rioted down the long column, biting and tasting and sucking in a torrent of urgency and lust. He gripped the woman by the waist and pulled her against him, and Arria had to brace her shoulder against the low wall to keep her own legs from buckling beneath her.
And then, just when she thought the wave had dissipated, just when the bruising neck kisses had subsided into soft, tender caresses, he bent to take one of the woman’s breasts into his mouth.
Blessed, sweet Minerva.
A strange heat invaded Arria’s bones—pleasurable, radiant, alarming. He released the woman’s nipple and followed a winding path down her belly, festooning it with small kisses, until he was sitting once again on the bed before her and his lips came to a halt at the soft curly mass atop her Venus mound.
Was he going to…? Arria covered her eyes, then peeked between her fingers. Yes, he was going to. Arria watched in fascination as his tongue slipped into the woman’s sacred opening.
‘Oh,’ the woman sighed and Arria felt another disconcerting wave of heat. The woman arched her back, gripping the Beast’s naked skull as he began to move his mouth around her folds, kissing and sucking and…licking. It was the most forbidden thing Arria had ever seen in all her life. The woman began to whimper and Arria noticed her own breaths growing short.
What could it feel like to be kissed in such a way? In such a place? She strained to imagine it and found herself growing warmer still. She watched his hands slide slowly from the woman’s hips to her backside, which he squeezed and caressed as he continued to pleasure her with his tongue.
Arria could not look away. She could not close her ears, even as the woman’s moans transformed from soft sighs into low, rhythmic groans of the sort that Arria occasionally heard outside the baths. The woman’s arms stiffened. Her body shuddered. Her moans crescendoed as her whole body convulsed and Arria felt a shiver ripple across her own skin.
Slowly, the woman’s breaths subsided. She was still whimpering when he pressed his head against her stomach once more and hugged her close. He was breathing her in—deep, gulping breaths whose exhales sounded like sighs.
If the woman had been a goddess, he might have been her truest acolyte. But Arria knew she was even more than that to him. She was his beloved wife.
The cruel, hardened gladiator had disappeared. The monster that had taken life with cold efficiency had retreated to some faraway arena and in his place was a man—a gentle, loving man who seemed to overflow with tenderness.
At last he raised his head and stared up at the woman. ‘Wife,’ he said. In a single motion, he stood and guided her on to the bed and Arria noticed an alarming protrusion inside his loincloth. He closed his eyes and began to speak again: husky, lilting words that made Arria’s heart beat faster still.
What was he saying to the woman? What lavish words of passion were trilling off his well-used tongue? He stretched out on to the bed beside her and placed a series of small kisses down her arm. Leaning closer, he continued to whisper—a never-ending stream of small words strung together like kites.
They were words of love—Arria was sure of it. The kinds of words she imagined passing between a husband and a wife. The kinds of words, Arria realised, that she was certain never to hear.
Slowly, he arched over the woman, leaning on his arms as he kicked off his kilt and deftly untied his own loincloth. His taut, muscled form made a kind of arch above the woman’s prone body, dwarfing her in size and strength. Arria tried to imagine what it would feel like to lie beneath such a titan and an unfamiliar muscle deep inside her flexed with yearning.
His loincloth dropped to the floor. Arria stared, then looked away. She looked again, blinked. She told herself to breathe. It was nothing that she had not seen before, after all. Practically every corner of Ephesus was etched with some depiction of male desire or another. The images were common as clay: they were painted on walls and chiselled above doors, not to mention their prominence in statues and mosaics. Such figures even functioned as signposts, helpfully pointing the way to bars and brothels.
Why was it, then, that she could not take her eyes off his? Perhaps it was because she had never seen one in the flesh. She had always gone early to the baths, long before the patrician matrons arrived with their male slaves. And she had never even dreamed of lingering into the ‘trysting hour,’ or so was called the middle of the day when the women’s and men’s hours overlapped.
Now she wished she had lingered at the baths, if only to observe the variety of male forms, for she was sure she had nothing by which to compare him. Were the images lying, then? Did they universally under-represent the immensity of a man’s desire in its fully engorged state?
A small quake rumbled through her. She should not be watching them. It was indecent. Surely she was incurring the wrath of one god or another. But how could she not watch as he slowly settled his desire between the woman’s thighs?
Arria’s throat felt dry.
He took the lobe of the woman’s ear in his lips and began to suck. Suddenly, the woman gasped and Arria saw her hips rock upwards. The Beast was pushing himself into her. They had joined.
Arria gulped, looked away. She felt herself flush with the shame of a spy. Or perhaps it was another kind of shame pumping so much heat into her cheeks.
She sat back against the wall and closed her eyes. Other sounds of lovemaking filled the stony barracks. They made a strange, stirring kind of music that seemed to collapse time. When the chorus of gasps and moans began to diminish, Arria dared to glance at the two lovers once again.
The Beast was posed on his side, his stony expression transformed into a wistful smile. He appeared to be playing with the woman’s hair. ‘Fy nghariad,’ he said, and the words were so sweet and mysterious that Arria could do nothing but sigh.
‘Did you hear that?’ he asked suddenly. Arria held her breath as she watched his eyes search across the darkness.
‘I heard nothing,’ said the woman. ‘Probably a mouse.’
The woman was right, in a sense. Arria was a kind of mouse. A large, skinny, lonesome