Captive Prince (Captive Prince 1)

‘I’m to be Kastor’s welcome when he returns from Delpha.’

He said Kastor’s name with its honorific, as all slaves did when they spoke of those above them, Kastor-exalted.

It had never made sense that Kallias was being trained for Kastor. Yet for some reason the Keeper of the Royal Slaves had decreed that his finest slave-in-training should go not to the heir, or the King, but to Kastor.

‘Do you ever wish for a lion pin? You’re the finest slave in the palace. If anyone deserves to be in the retinue of the future King, it’s you.’

‘Damianos doesn’t take male slaves.’

‘Sometimes he—’

‘I don’t have your colouring,’ Kallias said, and he opened his eyes, reaching up to put his finger around a curl of Erasmus’s hair.

His colouring, if truth were told, had been carefully cultivated to the Prince’s taste. His hair was daily rinsed with chamomile, so that it brightened and improved in lustre, and his skin kept from the sun until it changed from the golden cream of his early boyhood in the gardens of Nereus to a milky white.

‘It’s the cheapest way to get noticed,’ Aden said, his eyes displeased as he stared at Erasmus’s hair. ‘A slave with real form doesn’t draw attention to himself.’

Kallias said later, ‘Aden would give his arm for fair hair. He wants a Prince’s pin more than anything.’

‘He doesn’t need a Prince’s pin. He’s training for the King.’

‘But the King is sick,’ said Kallias.

The Prince’s taste was for songs and verses of battle, which were more difficult to remember than the love poetry Erasmus preferred, and longer. A full performance of The Fall of Inachtos was four hours, and the Hypenor was six, so that every spare moment was spent in internal recitation. Cut off from his brothers, he strikes too short at Nisos, and, Held steady in single purpose, twelve thousand men, and, In relentless victory cleaves Lamakos with his sword. He fell asleep murmuring the long heroic genealogies, the lists of weapons and of deeds that Isagoras wrote into his epics.

But that night, he let his mind drift to other poems, In the long night, I wait, Laechthon’s yearning for Arsaces, as he unpinned his silks and felt the evening air against his skin.

Everyone whispered about First Night.

It was rare for boys to wear the pin. The pin meant a permanent place in the retinue of a member of the royal family. The pin meant more than that. Of course, any slave might be called on to serve in private, if the royal eye fell on them. But the pin meant the certainty of a First Night, in which the slave was presented to the royal bed.

Those who wore a pin received the best rooms, the strictest training, and first privileges. Those without dreamed of acquiring one, and worked day and night in the attempt to prove worthy. In the male gardens, Aden said with a flick of his shiny brown hair, that was almost impossible. In the female gardens, of course, pins were more common. The tastes of the King and his two sons ran along predictable lines.

And since the birth of Damianos, there was no Queen to select slaves for her own retinue. The King’s permanent mistress Hypermenestra had full rights and kept slaves as befitted her status, but was too politic to take any but the King into her bed, said Aden. Aden was nineteen and in the last year of his training, and spoke about First Night with sophistication.

Laying himself down on the bedsheets, Erasmus was aware of the lingering responsiveness of his body, which he could not touch himself. Only those with special dispensation were allowed to handle him there, to wash him in the baths. Some days he liked it. He liked the ache of it. He liked the feeling that he was denying himself something to please his Prince. It felt strict, virtuous. Some days he just wanted, beyond reason, and it made the feeling of self denial, of obedience, stronger, wanting it yet wanting to do as he was told, until he was all confusion. The idea of lying untouched on a bed and the Prince entering the room. . . it was an obliterating thought that overwhelmed him.

As yet untutored, he had no idea how it would be. He knew what the Prince liked, of course. He knew his favourite foods, those that might be selected for him at table. He knew his morning routine, the way that he liked to have his hair brushed, his preferred style of massage.

He knew . . . he knew the Prince had many slaves. The attendants spoke of this with approval. The Prince had healthy appetites, and took lovers frequently, slaves and nobles too, when the need was on him. That was good. He was liberal with his affections, and a King should always have a large retinue.

He knew the Prince’s eye tended to roam, that he was always pleased by something new, that his slaves were looked after, kept in permanent style, while his eye, roaming, frequently fell on new conquests.

He knew that when he wanted men, the Prince rarely took slaves. He was more likely to come from the arena with his blood up and pick out some display fighter. There was a gladiator from Isthima who had lasted in the arena for twelve minutes against the Prince before he’d fallen to him, and had spent six hours in the Prince’s chambers, after. He was told those stories too.

And of course he only had to choose a fighter and they would yield to him as any slave, for he was the son of the King. Erasmus remembered the soldier he had seen in the gardens of Nereus, and the idea of the Prince mounting him was stunning image in his mind. He could not imagine that power, and then he thought, but he will take me like that, and the deep shiver went all the way through his body.

He shifted his legs together. What it would be like, to be the receptacle for the Prince’s pleasure? He lifted a hand to his own cheek and it felt hot, flushed as he lay back on the bed, exposed. The air felt like silk, his curls trailing like fronds across his forehead. He drew his hand to his forehead and pushed the curls back and even that gesture felt over-sensual, the slow motion of one underwater. He raised his wrists above his head and imagined the ribbon binding them, his body the Prince’s to touch. His eyes closed. He thought of weight, dipping the mattress, an unformed image of the soldier he had seen silhouetted above him, the words of a poem, Arsaces, undone.

The night of the fire festival, Kallias sang the balla

d of Iphegenia, who had loved her master so much that she waited for him though she knew what it meant to do so, and Erasmus felt the tears well up in his throat. He left the recital and walked out into the dark gardens, where the breeze was cool in the scented trees. He did not care that the music was growing distant behind him, needing suddenly to see the ocean.

In the moonlight it was different, dark and unknowable, but he felt it before him nonetheless, felt its vast openness. He looked out from the stone balustrade in the eastern courtyard and felt the reckless wind against his face, the ocean like a part of himself. He could hear the waves, imagined them splashing his body, filling his sandals, the foaming water swirling around him.

He’d never felt it before that yearning, tossed feeling, and he became aware that the familiar shape of Kallias was coming up behind him. He spoke the words swelling up inside him for the first time.

‘I want to be taken across the ocean. I want to see other lands. I want to see Isthima, and Cortoza, I want to see the place where Iphegenia waited, the great palace where Arsaces gave himself to a lover,’ he said, recklessly. The yearning inside him crested. ‘I want—to feel what it is to—’