A Match for the el Maiens Ch. 17

"Still, bear it in mind," she said softly. "Yer not a nothing, yer know: el Maien van Sietter and so pretty 's a maiden under the flowering trees in spring. They will all be offering me I know not what to lie with them since they know I had yer favour. Why el V'lair will give me whats'ever I ask fer now, he is that hung about the fingers of yerself and yer brother. Take yer fun wherever yer want and du not pay over the odds for it the more."

She left him leaning on the wall, spent. After a short while the curtain was gently pulled back and one of el V'lair's officers in the pale blue black diamond patterned parade silks looked in at him with a sympathetic grin on his face. "Come along, my dear," he said in the lazy aristocratic tones of a Knight. Considerately he buttoned Clair up before heaving his tired body up as if it was just that Clair was too drunk to walk. He helped him back to the van Sietter family rooms, Clair leaning heavily on his broad muscular body as they went.

None of the servants were up. Clair turned to thank the officer - he was a Captain, as they came in the door. He was a little too close, they looked into each other's faces and then their mouths met and Clair's tired head went back in the kiss. The Captain's mouth was large and soft, not like Hanya's firm lips. Possibly like Arianna's but Clair had no way of knowing and by now he did not care, he was beyond thinking. He only opened his mouth to the pressure of a tongue which caressed his tongue and the inside of his mouth. He gave way to the familiar strength of an officer pushing him back.

He was being pushed to the sofa in the reception room. His breeches were being pulled from him. He was being turned. He lay over the sofa, holding to its back. Fingers came caressing his arsehole, pressing lubricant. He moaned and trembled with the rising pleasure in his body. The tears were softly rolling down his face again. The pleasure in his arse was familiar and sweet. He spread his hips as much as he could in the restriction of the breeches he was still wearing. He could hear the officer grumbling about trying to put on the condom in the low light of the reception room and he just knelt waiting until the cock came pushing at his hole, an arm about his chest, a kiss kindly pressed to the back of his neck where it tickled up his fancy. He started to smile and respond - tiredly.

He leaned back in the arms of the Athagine Captain and whispered, "give it me slow, I am so tired." The Captain fucked him softly and slowly, grunting happily into his neck, making the feeling dance about Clair's body so that he knew he was alive and might one day be happy. He was spent with the mouth fuck el V'lair's bird of paradise had given him. He just held onto the sofa back and let the feelings buzz softly about his body. The Captain suddenly shoved up into him and grunted in his ear with casual pleasure and that was satisfying in a different way.

The Captain did not take a jewel off Clair, only gave him another kiss to the back of his neck as he pulled free, leaving him lying over the sofa in the family reception room. Whenever Clair saw the Dames sitting primly stitching on that sofa afterwards he would struggle not to snigger. He was not quite sure how he had made it back into his bed but he had a decent night's sleep, the first for months. When he woke up he lay in a sort of stupor for a while and then fell asleep again and only got up to go back to el V'lair's rooms to see if el V'lair was doing anything entertaining that night. And he certainly was.

They came flocking: men, women; with big soft breasts and small delicate breasts, muscular chests or a sexy leg. It would always give your spirits a lift, when you dragged yourself out of a night and someone's eye lit on you, narrowed up and made it plain that they wanted your body. It would always help you get to sleep.

You took them in some corner you found or their room and went back to your own room for a bath the men-servants prepared with expressionless faces (meaning they disapproved but you only gave a thanks with your habitual courtesy) and you slept long and deep and easy. Sometimes you woke in the morning to a warm soft friendly body with whom you had another idle caressing tumble. Few of them were like Hanya and none of them were like that chaste honourable beauty, Lady Arianna el Jien, so sometimes he could even forget the two of them for a whole evening.

He had never expected a life of the body to be the means of escaping the heartbreaking grief of warfare but when he went to the lectures at the King's University he too often found he was staring out the windows, still stricken in his mind. Only if he had some other means of distracting his heart could he concentrate on the thoughts about Northern architecture which danced like moths in his head.

The entertainments where he was picked up by fancy favours and sometimes a more elegant sophisticated night's companion were not always louche affairs like el V'lair's parties. (Although they once went to one of van Athagine's dos which made even el V'lair blink and say, Um, how would it be if we just went out to that woodland hotel for a quiet game of cards? They stole a couple of van Athagine's lovelies to take along and play each other for and had a highly pleasurable couple of days, swimming in the woodland lake to clear their heads early in the morning with the sunlight dawning softly through the mist floating on the cool waters.)

Clair tilted his head at his Lady wife and said with a soft snigger in the back of his nose that was reminiscent of Tashka, "I miss it a bit," a look glinted out of his eye so sexy that she could almost regret asking him to give up whatever games he played at in other people's beds, "but it is not worth going by the chance of a full marriage with an high stepping beauty such as yourself. If you ask it of me, I will be true to your body alone. You are an honourable chaste Lady with the force and matter to make a robust moral framework that you live by and you insist to love me by it too. I will take the time to show it you, I can live in your high morals for the sake of your love, my dear."

"Why did you stop ... going to parties?" she asked him. Her head tilted back at him with the deeper question still in her eyes. Was he or was he not a man whose kisses she could trust?

He sighed and rested his head in one hand, leaning his elbow on his knee and looking off into the sunlit woodland where the leaves twirled softly in a breeze. "There were a lot of pleasures," he said quietly, "but sometimes ... there was someone who had been hurt. I did not like it, when someone got hurt." When you thought some ladybird or kid was coming freely with you and then she or he started to cry in your arms and you realised they had just drunk too deep and had got scared, that was no fun. He used to push them out with a sharp lecture on playing in the shallows if you were a tasty little fish but he fretted about them afterwards, wandering the parties in search of fun with their vulnerable innocence the legitimate prey of people like his friend el V'lair van Athagine, people who were completely selfish about what pleasure they took and did not care if you got none. He saw el V'lair at his worst during that time because it was then that his marriage was broken. Initially el V'lair had been a surprisingly congenial companion. He would even go to art exhibitions and poetry readings with Lady el Farin but in the end he and Clair argued badly about the way he had behaved to a woman of great intelligence and warm humour. Clair knew that their friendship survived only because el V'lair insisted to continue his friend - and he was too loyal to slight someone who had stood by him in some very dubious situations.

Finally there was the one serious affair he got into. He looked sideways at his Lady wife and he knew he was going to have to explain that to her.

"You know that I got into an affair," he said. "You must have seen it when I bought that stables."

She gave a sudden sigh. Her fingers trembled on the leaves she was shredding and her head stooped down. He realised with a dreadful pang at his heart that she was crying. He watched in a stricken shame her long fingers tearing down the veins of the dried old leaves in her hands.

"Yes," she said finally in a soft voice blotted with tears. "I never normally look at your accounts but they brought them to me that time because it was so much money. I realised ... it must be for a lover. I thought it was probably that hads't f-finished with s-s-someone but I was not sure. I waited. To see if woulds't break the marriage. Arkyll was so small. I was s-so scared to be made to leave him!" She stooped her head into her hands and sobbed and he sat watching her in a bitterly sorry silence.

"I prithou pardon me," he said at last in a husky softly ashamed voice. "It never occurred to me that you would think I might ever make you do any thing you had no wish to. I knew I would not abuse any power I might have over you, particularly since it involved the happiness of a child, and so I did not realise I had that power. I thought that you had so much power over me and that it was obvious that I would keep your happiness under my eye. I was so sick in my mind, I had treated you so badly, I should have realised that you could not know I would never separate you from your baby. There are many people who do not take their responsibility to those in their lives seriously and you did not know me, you could not know that I am not that kind of man. Forgive me."

She was wiping the tears from her eyes with her long fingers, soaking them into the cuff of her dark blue sleeve. He sighed and shuffled closer to offer her his kerchief, her hand came out to take it but she would not look at him.

"It was more of a friendship than an affair," he said in an apologetic tone. "Do you blame me, that I made a friend of such an one?"

"What one," she said.

"You do not know?" he asked. "You do not know who my lover was?"

"I never listen the more to idle gossip," she said. "I had enough of it when they tried to tell me my own mother had pinned your favours. And cousin Vee. As if she would have you with her preferences." Her proud head lifted and turned to him. Her full lip was curled with scorn, she was starting to rise, she did not want to know but he had to tell her.

"I had an affair with a groom," he blurted out.

She was arrested half-risen in the rustling brown and yellow leaves on the bank in the woods, her fair face turned back down towards him, her clear blue eyes looking into his upraised grey eyes.

"Say it," he said with a twist of his head, not exactly ashamed; ashamed that he might be made to feel ashamed. "I am like my mother."

"And if ar't like your mother?" she said. "What is there wrong with that?"

"What are you saying?" he asked. "She lay with her own Guard of Honour!"

Arianna sat down again and turned to face him. Her pale face was tear-stained, her blue eyes were concentrated with intelligence on him. She said, "is that a serious problem for you?"

"Is it not for you?" he asked.

Her creamy brow creased in a frown. She said: "I am planning to ask the King's Council to give voting rights to merchants and you think I will be troubled because your mother lay with a guard?"

"Well ... yes," he said. Then he started laughing. She was staring at him in incomprehension, he said, "so you care nothing for it; that I had an affair with a groom?"

"Saids't it was more of a friendship," she said stiffly.

"Mm, yes," he tilted his head at her with that sexy glint in his eye so that she knew it might have been more of a friendship but it had not been only a friendship. The blush went rising in her cheeks and her blue eyes snapped crossly at him.

"It is done with, is it not?" she demanded. "I have paid out enough, I hope! not to be troubled by demands to support him the more."

"Well ... I go to see him sometimes but only in friendship," Clair said. "He has an husband now and their relationship has a closed door."

Her face looking back at him was frozen to hear this. He started laughing again, saying, "my dear, he is a merry soul. You would like him yourself. No no! I understand. I will never introduce him to your notice, I promise it, but I must tell it you. This is why they say, el Maien van Sietter is a scandal and has crossed the boundaries of decency. Not because I had a string of men and women falling in and out of my bed but because I would have married my junior officer and I had a serious affair with one of the palace servants whom I still hold dear in my heart. They say I am like my mother, who lay with her personal guard. For those madmen in the H'velst Mountains it is not just that he was a servant; he was supposed to guard her honour and she laid it at his very feet to sully. And because I met a groom I liked enough to take to concerts and out for meals in the fine restaurants, I am like her! There. Do you ask me not to see Stevan again? I swear to you, it is only in friendship. You need not fear he will fall dependent on you to fund him the more. He does very well with the stables. The King may make him his own horsedealer."

"I am so pleased to hear that has't made such a good investment," she said in a frostbitten voice, "with my money. I hope hads't a little fun out of it too."

He felt he deserved this so he took it with a deprecating grin. The glint remained in his grey eye, he knew, he tried to hide it by turning his head away.

He did not want to pretend to her that this serious affair was a nothing. It was the point on which his life had turned, away from the bitter grief and hard hunting for pleasure in which el V'lair had been his companion and paradoxically, back towards her.

He said: "I prithou pardon me that I never explained why I had to buy a stables for ... for a friend. He was just a sweet lovely whom I had picked up without considering the consequence. At court they would have thought nothing of it if I had run an affair with my friend's wife or my wife's mother, who are of the high nobility, but they did not forgive me treating a groom like an equal partner in life. I ...liked him, and instead of hiding him in a set of rooms to visit when the mood took me, I took him to concerts and poetry readings and exhibitions. Those who go to concerts for gossip not music looked at him sitting by my side, his face lovely with pleasure in the music, and whispered behind their hands.

"I was not troubled for it, of course, but Hell did he pay for it! How much trouble did they give him in the King's stables. He was pushed here and there for it, that he had dared raise his eyes to Commander-Lord el Maien van Sietter, they did not consider that it was I who had lowered my eyes to him. He was forever coming to me with cuts and bruises, a black eye or twisted arm that he could not explain until finally I realised what was in the breeze. In the end I had to buy him out and so I set him up in his own stables - yes, my dear, I am sorry for it, with your money."

Arianna sat listening to this with her head still turned away but he knew her now. She would not punish his lover by taking away his livelihood if she understood that Clair had done this for him out of a humanist sense of obligation not some profligate kiss-off for a particularly fancied favourite.

"Tashka was punished for my indecency too. They tried to send me to the wall at parties but I cared nothing for it so that year they banned Tashka from riding in the King's and Nobles' race. He was the previous year's Champion and to get at me they banned him. I had to sit and watch him cry his heart out because they would not even let him ride over some cheating rule they made up the night before. I swore I was done with court life. It made me live again, my anger that a merry soul like Stevan could be treated so badly or a fine rider like Tashka be unjustly punished. My heart woke from the dead misery in which I had been sunk to recover my love for them."

(He was the lowest degree of servant, but in spite of the scandal of it, Clair loved Stevan Velor then and till the end of his life. Apart from his wife, his family and extended family also always maintained the most affectionate of connections with this one former lover of his.)

"I began to think about the child you had borne me. At first I only thought that there would be an heir so I could be left in peace about the succession. But I was going to see Sevie and try to help her with Hanyan. I learned to love Hanyan for his own sake not for Hanya's and I began to wonder about my baby in blood. I bought out Stevan and set him up in his own business and I came home to help you with the baby - and fight with you about art and whatnot! Forgive me that I never explained to you that I had no intention of breaking our marriage - only trying to do something fair by someone-else for whom I had unintentionally caused problems."

She sat on the bank of dried leaves with her head turned away, looking into the trees at the thin sunshine washing over the brook, the yellow and brown leaves, Sweetheart and True View standing quietly and the hounds lying down or sniffing around each other. She wondered what kind of marriage she could possibly make with Commander-Lord Clair el Maien van Sietter; something between the perfect physical passion she had seen between Clair and Hanya and the happy friendship Clair appeared to have had with a groom whose body he had occasionally also enjoyed? What kind of life was that for a woman of strong moral principles? He was beautiful but he was not the man she would have chosen for her heart's companion: an expensive and highly strung fighting young Lord who had thrown away his favours to sluts and strangers. Yet he had a curious way of looking out over the Sietter landscape or talking kindly to someone or handling some object that seemed to bring the world into vivid life.

"My Lady wife," he said. "I know not if we can patch our marriage up after I have cut it about so cruelly. Might we say ours has been a marriage of words - although also of bodies, since in your generosity you came to me a few nights, but that only recently we have started to make a true marriage of hearts and minds? Might we think of our marriage as beginning from now when we are finally realising we could be serious one for the other rather than before when I tried to run away into sex from losing Hanya. I have learned to know you much better now and I think you are my match. I would be honoured if you would consider bestowing yourself on me of your free will to work together at a marriage. I am willing to work by you as best I can. I will care for the castle and the children so that you may work on your strings of ... of forces and matter. I will do what I can to keep van Sietter at bay while you work with your brother and the merchants."

"van Sietter?" she said with a frown.

"Hear me," he said urgently. "Now is not the time but I must say this to you. You have no idea of the workings of van Sietter's mind. Yet even you must realise that this idea of a King's Council for Trade and Employment is one van Sietter will do all in his power to prevent. I know you and Hanya mean to meet with the merchants while Hanya is here. I have done my best to hide it from van Sietter by making noise about Sevie and Volka and how Prianne should not stand in the way of the match. I hope van Sietter will think Hanya has only come to chaperon Sevie at a family hunting party. Hanya has been more than helpful, becoming so besotted by Tashka's friend Anata!"

The frown was still etched on her brow. "Speakest as if it will be a problem for him," she said.

He raised his eyebrow at her over a surprised grey eye and said, "surely Prianne must be planning to bestow him on one of the oldest daughters of the high nobility? Perhaps Maive el Vaie? Hanya is too honourable to try to keep Anata on the side but Prianne will be angry if he offers his ring to the daughter of a penniless P'shan Knight."