She turned swiftly and walked away, disappearing behind a panel that vanished as mysteriously as it had appeared. Toby stepped out of the shadows.
“Good evening, sir. I have the last of your instructions. Firstly, if you care to look above you, you will notice a skylight set into the ceiling. This is placed so the sun’s rays will hit the ritual at the exact moment Pisces moves into Aries, when Dionysus will be reborn as the New Year. You are to time your climax to that moment.”
The valet grinned at Alistair’s worried expression. “Don’t concern yourself, sir, Lady Whistle is an expert at such matters. There is an herbal concoction by your bed to ensure that you get a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow a maid shall come to you at eleven o’clock. She will bathe you and anoint you—an initiation during which you are to remain chaste. At quarter past eleven you shall be dressed in your costume and brought to this room, where all shall drink a ceremonial goblet of wine. Then the ritual will begin. And, sir, a tip from an expert: try to banish all intellectual thought from that point on. You are here to live completely within your skin, to harness a power that stretches far beyond the civilized mind.”
The archaeologist woke the next day to a room flooded by a mauve luminosity. His head wasn’t as cloudy as he had expected after the sleeping draught. Before he could climb out of the high bed a pretty maid hurried in and pulled open the curtains. She was dressed in a tight pinafore, a crisp white apron stretched over her voluptuous hips. Was this his test, he wondered, as she instructed him to strip entirely while she ran a hot bath for him in the adjoining bathroom.
She emerged ten minutes later, her face flushed from the steam. Alistair stood there shivering, his dressing gown clutched to his groin. The maid, smiling mischievously, walked across the room and pulled the gown away from him.
“My lady was right,” she murmured, glancing at his quivering yard.
In the bath he lay like a child while she washed him, running the sponge over every curve, into every crevice. Alistair shut his eyes and concentrated on declining every irregular Latin verb he could think of. He must not spill his seed, he must not—the phrase ran like a chant through his head as the maid’s hand tracked its seductive path across his skin.
Afterward he stood, legs apart, while she dried him, running the towel between his buttocks, patting
him dry under the scrotum, exquisitely encircling his erect organ. He caught sight of himself in the looking glass. There was something sacrificial about his nudity: his pale body with the golden hair running down between his nipples to his groin, his yard maintaining its proud stance as the maid delicately continued her task.
When he stepped out of the bathroom a saffron silk robe lay on the bed. The maid slipped it over his shoulders. It fell in pleats to the ground, loose around his naked torso. She fastened it with a cord of plaited silk, then, standing on tiptoe, blindfolded him.
Despite the daylight outside, the temple had been transformed into twilight by three blazing oil lamps, held by glinting bronzes of male nudes. The flickering flames illuminated the painted walls and the heady scent of smoldering spikenard, myrrh, and ambergris filled the air. Alistair was led to the center of the dome. Fingertips brushed his face as the blindfold was pulled off.
He stood in the center of a circle of twelve people, each masked, each one’s body oiled and adorned with a girdle of leather. The men’s shoulders were draped in purple silk—the royal color. There were, as promised, six men and six women; he was the seventh man. Through the glow of the flames he saw that the men varied in age. Three seemed of middle years, their torsos solid and covered in the body hair of the mature man. One, over six foot in height, looked as if he might be an athlete, his muscled belly and chest a progression of cambers, his penis lolling heavily under a short fringe of goatskin.
Another Alistair recognized as Toby; he was wearing the halfhead of a goat’s mask and his oiled flesh was nude except for two anklets of gold chain. His body was as beautiful as his face; his tumescent yard, delicate in shape, a stark contrast to the rest of him, which still held the physique of a youth with narrow shoulders, smooth buttocks, and slim hips.
But it was the women toward whom Alistair’s eye was naturally most drawn. Three of them were young, very young, no more than eighteen he guessed—one was a petite blond, her long hair cascading over the mask of a lioness, her breasts small and round with large pink nipples, her hips wide and full, her sex a golden bush. Beside her stood a tall brunette with olive skin, older, her physique a stark contrast to the girl, with full high breasts and impossibly slender hips. Her sex appeared naked, without hair at all. On the other side of the circle stood a Negress, her skin a glistening polished ebony over abundant curves. It was as if her flesh cascaded down from her neck, breasts trumbling down onto an ample belly and full hips. Her eroticism lay in the very bountifulness of her.
Lady Whistle herself wore a silk robe of gold, naked underneath except for a single gold chain that looped around the top of both thighs then encircled her waist, there breaking into a fine lace mesh that ran across her upper torso, encircling but not covering her breasts, to finish at a choker around her neck.
She was crowned by a wreath of vine leaves and a feathered mask covered her eyes. Athene, the owl, Alistair thought, the goddess of wisdom. She held two goblets of wine: golden vessels in the shape of a goat’s horn. It was then that Alistair noticed that the eleven other participants held such a goblet in their hands.
A servant slipped through the circle, her nude body glistening with reddish ochre. She held out a wreath of vine leaves intertwined with live, writhing snakes. Horrified, Alistair stepped back.
“Fear not, they are drugged and harmless,” Lady Whistle whispered. Tentatively Alistair allowed the wreath to be placed upon his head.
Lady Whistle stepped forward ceremoniously and handed one of the goblets to Alistair, indicating that he should drink. Heart pounding, his cock thickened already, Alistair gulped the liquid—it was a sweetish mead overlaid with spices, with another, unknown flavor that resonated on his palate.
“Let the ceremonies begin,” Lady Whistle announced in Latin. As the others drained their goblets, music began playing—a strange cacophony of lute and drums with a thin reed instrument dancing over the top. Alistair strained his eyes to see a quartet standing in the shadowy corner of the room, dressed as musicians of the era would have been.
Lady Whistle clapped suddenly. The brunette began to run; two of the men followed her and caught her roughly by each arm. She struggled—oversized dramatic gestures that Alistair realized were deliberately theatrical. With a jolt he recognized the scenario: the rape of the Titian representing the formation of Rome. The men carried her back to Lady Whistle who was still standing beside Alistair in the center of the circle. Taking an arm and a leg each they hoisted her up and parted her so that her sex was raised up in midair.
Alistair was transfixed: he had never seen a woman’s sex thus displayed. The labia and clitoris were a glistening ruby, beyond which lay the hills and furrows of her body. Lady Whistle lifted her goblet and poured the rest of her wine over the woman, who wriggled and gasped in the men’s strong hands. Toby then stepped from the circle and, with the woman still held high, took her sex into his mouth, pleasuring her with his tongue, fingers, and lips. The others followed, turning upon each other as they slowly caressed breast, buttock, oiled flesh under fingers, lip upon lip. It was not the impersonal physical taking Alistair had imagined it would be; instead there was a deep sensuality as bodies merged, man and woman, man and man, woman and woman, kissing deeply with tongues lingering, backs arched, arms encircling waists and shoulders. Dreamily he wondered whether they had known each other before to inspire such intimacy.
Lady Whistle herself had two men pleasuring her, one kneeling behind her and one before. The first buried his face between her ample buttocks; the other—in clear view of Alistair—used his fingers to stretch wide her labia, his tongue a flickering lizard between her legs. Two women faced one another, each sucking the other’s nipple as they were both taken from behind, their buttocks held high. One of the men towered over his female companion as his large yard slid in and out of her; the other man, topped with the mask of a bull, was a lot shorter, his fingers pressed into the flesh of the girl’s buttocks.
The music grew louder, the drumming an ancient thumping beat that resounded off the walls. The revelry that encircled him was a gleaming mass of limb wrapped around limb. Overwhelmed, Alistair sank to the ground, his head spinning. One man’s legs and buttocks transformed into the form of a hairy goat; another’s feet split into the cloven hoof of a ram. Hair ridged along the spine of one young girl and a lion’s tail sprouted between her buttocks, shaking wildly into the air. Had he been drugged, the archaeologist wondered as a liquid fire coursed through his veins, drawing all sensations to one point: his loins.
As his vision blurred and then refocused he dimly realized that the orgy had arranged itself into the formation of the second illustration. Lady Whistle was in the center, her thighs held open by the man whose yard she sucked while another thrust into her as he himself was being taken by a half-bull, half-man. Was it Toby, Alistair wondered foggily. The negress caressed the valet while the man beneath her buried his head between her massive breasts. Twelve bodies forming a single connection through lip on lip, hand on breast, organ buried in organ.
Alistair lay on his side untouched, delirious with desire, each glistening nipple, cock, and labia dancing like delicious fruit before his own mouth. He reached out but no sooner had his fingers achieved a caress than the object of his desire evaporated like a mirage as each participant deliberately moved away.
A drumroll and the orgy metamorphosed into the third stanza, moving closer to the diagram of the stars embedded in the mosaic floor. Around the nucleus of Lady Whistle and her two partners, three other couples arranged themselves to make up the tail and hooves of the ram.
Out of the corner of his eye Alistair could see the brunette on her knees, sucking the yard of one man while another took her from behind, both their legs spread. Another woman, her head between both sets of buttocks, licked wildly at the brunette’s clitoris while she herself was being taken from the front.
Alistair rolled over onto his front, every nerve ending tingling with bliss, his senses sharpening with the mounting effect of the Spanish fly lacing the mead. His heart began to pound wildly as he realized his moment was drawing nearer.
Three drumbeats sounded out. Above, he saw the curtain covering the skylight being slowly pulled across, like the lid of a massive eye opening.