Musa, the Spy Who Became Queen

Musa, the Spy Who Became Queen

Author's Note

The persons described in this story were real historical personalities. Many of the events in the story actually took place. However, the following story is still essentially a fiction because no one really knows how the main protagonists actually related to each other. This story attempts to fill the empty spaces between the known events.

This story is nothing like any of my other stories. The erotic element is definitely secondary to the plot which takes place in a world that existed more than 2,000 years ago. If there are any history buffs in Literotica world, you might, or might not, like my attempt to put some flesh on the bones of ancient history.

The Resentful Prince

Phraates was mulling over his family's history. Arsaces, the first king of Parthia, was the leader of a nomadic tribe who had carved out a small kingdom of his own while Alexander the Great's generals were fighting a bloody civil war among themselves.

His immediate successors, who became known in history as the Arsacids, undertook the arduous task of conquering more territory and gradually turning Parthia into a major empire and Rome's most implacable foe. Phraates IV reflected on the fact that he was both the beneficiary of his ancestors' achievements and the heir to a history of dynastic intrigue and sometimes outright civil war.

Phraates had despised his father. He was a cruel and vindictive man who justified the mistreatment of his sons on the grounds that they needed to be tough and inspire fear to rule their empire.

"That's why I'm king," Orodes II had bragged as if imparting a vital lesson to his sons. "The King is the law," he intoned. "I am the law. My authority is not to be questioned. Whatever I say must be obeyed. Whatever I do is legal."

It was no secret in the Arsacid court that his father, Orodes II and his older brother, Mithridates IV, had murdered their father, Phraates III, to take the throne. For a while, they shared power, but soon, the brothers had a falling out and a civil war had ensued that culminated in Mithridates' capture and execution.

So, as a child, Phraates, not only despised his father, he feared him, and for good reason. After all, his father had killed his grandfather and his uncle.

When Phraates matured into adulthood, he was happy to get out of his father's palace in Ctesiphon, the Parthian capital city. He gladly took father's money, which he spent freely in a life of luxury and depravity, and took advantage of his position as heir apparent to the throne, to shake down local merchants and exploit the local citizenry.

He was rake, a roué, a libertine who knew he could victimize other fathers' daughters and other husbands' wives for his personal exploitation. But the King was the law and the Prince was the law as long as he didn't cross his father and the armed guards who came with him forced them to stand by as the Prince violated their women.

His rapacious behaviour to the women of his realm never really ended even after he had acquired four wives, but at least the occurrences of women snatched from the streets of Ctesiphon had dropped off somewhat. The citizenry hoped that he would find additional wives in neighbouring kingdoms to keep him busy in his palace.

Although he had learned the arts of war and occasionally went hunting, what Phraates craved most was sex. Maybe he wasn't the King of Parthia but he could still be the king of his bedroom which he had populated with four wives through dynastic marriages, temporary concubines and one-nighters with young women snatched by his guards from the city's streets.

Tonight, he decided, was a good time to remind his four wives who was their king and master.

"Guards, tell my wives, I want them here, now!"

"Yes, sir!"

The guard quickly scurried off and came back a few minutes later. "They are on their way Your Majesty," the guard averred.

Good," he said, "as soon as they arrive, you leave, close the door and stand guard outside. I am not to be disturbed. Understood?"

"Yes, Your Majesty."

Just as the guard headed for the door, the four wives arrived. "There you are, girls," he cooed. "Your master is ready to be serviced."

Since they all came from the roughly same part of the world, all four were average-sized with black hair and alive complexions although the faces varied as did the breast sizes. All four were the daughters of either Parthian dignitaries or the royal families of nearby kingdoms, all of whom he had married for essentially political reasons.

He didn't love them. His father told him time and again that love was for women, children and the weak-minded. Women only served three purposes: reproduction, entertainment politics. These women were just vessels to him, play things. They didn't rank much higher than his dogs. He suspected they didn't love him either but neither did he care. He wasn't about love; he was about power.

Once the door closed, Phraates said, "Take off my clothes and join me in the bath."

Phraates stood still as his wives performed their task. When his robes fell away, he had another idea, "Bisthelbanaps, suck my cock," he commanded.

Phraates knew that she hated oral sex. That was exactly why he chose her to do it. Cruelty was, after all, a kingly virtue and humiliation was part of a woman's condition.

'If I can't make a mere woman obey my every whim,' he reasoned, 'then I'll look weak and my brothers will see me as weak too. Besides," he told himself, "God created women to serve men.'

Bisthelbanaps had experienced his fury before. He had severely beaten her and whipped her for her reluctance to obey his commands. She didn't want to go through that again. She took him down her throat, resisting the urge to gag, and then went up and down his cock with her mouth in the manner that he liked. After a few minutes, he blasted his semen down her throat.

In the back of her mind, she wondered what he would do with her if there were a rupture between her father and Phraates' father, Orodes.

He turned to Olennaire, "You sit beside me. Your job is to bring my cock back to life."

He sat in the warm water and she sat beside him. She reached over to massage his limp cock and began to stroke it while his eyes focussed on his two remaining wives.

Based on their previous experience, Cleopatra and Baseirta knew, as the remaining pair of wives, what they had to do. They had to have sex with each other while their husband watched. Phraates was aroused by lesbian spectacles. Initially, Phraates had forced them into having lesbian sex with each other. As he always did with his wives, he beat them if they hesitated too long.

But Phraates was too self-absorbed to see that these two women had come to enjoy their physical relationship with each other. They deliberately showed a hint of reluctance because they knew, if Phraates ever suspected that there was a genuine love between them, he would make them do everything but make love to each other. So, they had to make him think that they were unhappy with what they were doing.

Phraates watched the show for a while and saw that they had become passionately involved with each other. He thought they were doing it to avoid being beaten for not pleasing him. So, it turned him on.

As for Olennaire, she stroked his cock until it finally came back to life. She sucked on it too for good measure. Satisfied that his cock was hard enough, he ordered Olennaire to stand up by the edge of the bath with her back to him. He stuck his fingers in her vagina until he thought it was wet enough to take his cock. The he guided it in and pumped into her until he finally released his semen inside her pussy. He didn't give a damn if she got any pleasure from it as long as he got his pleasure and she got pregnant.

Eventually, his four wives each produced a son who he named Vonones, Phraates junior, Seraspandes and Rhodaspes each by Olennaire, Cleopatra, Baseirta and Bisthelbanaps respectively. He took enormous pride in the fact that that his seed was so potent that it produced four boys in four women.

While he was abusing his wives and producing sons, Phraates senior grew more resentful of his father and ever more determined to show his father that he was indeed the rightful heir to the Parthian throne.

He knew his dynasty's bloody history. He eventually concluded that there was no better way to show his father how strong and powerful he really was, and how well qualified he was to be the King of the Parthian Empire, than by actually applying the lessons he had learned through his father's example.

So, Phraates murdered his father. He organized the plot and paid an assassin to do the deed. In doing so, he committed the triple act of homicide, regicide and patricide. And just to make sure that he wouldn't find himself in a civil war like the one that took place between his father and his uncle, he decided to add fratricide to his list of dynastic crimes by murdering his brothers as well. Only his older brother, Pacorus, was spared but only because he had already serendipitously died.

As King Phraates IV, he seemed to be at the top of his game. But he had hardly ascended the throne when he had to go to war against the Romans. Between battles, he spent his free time with by enjoying the local women. He put a sword through the body of a husband who objected to the monarch's raping of his wife.

'Peasants can be so annoying,' he thought at the time. 'Don't they know that a king has rights to everyone's wife? He should have been honoured to share his wife's pussy with his King.'

On his way back from stopping the Romans, the King learned that an enemy he had tolerated at court because he was both a cousin and a friend of a friend, Tiridates, had taken advantage of his absence to usurp the throne. Phraates was furious and rushed back to the capital and easily reclaimed his throne. Fearing retribution, Tiridates kidnapped Phraates' oldest son, Vonones, and brought him to Rome.

Fortunately for Phraates, the Romans were preoccupied with own domestic troubles of their own and were ill equipped to go to war against Parthia, at least for now. So, they had agreed release his son in exchange for the standards that the Romans had left behind a fewer years earlier after losing a battle with the Parthians.

From Slut to Spy

By any standard, Musa was a highly unusual woman. Born into a Roman clan with an ancient lineage, she shared none of the attributes that one expected in a noble Roman woman. Although she was of marriageable age, she was not interested in marriage, at least not yet. She was endlessly curious, took a deep interest in the politics of the Emperor's court and the Senate wanted to go on adventures, all of which would be stymied by a marriage that would confine her for the rest of her life to serving her husband, bearing his heirs and running his household.

Musa was also sexually precocious, losing her virginity without any thought of marrying the man who took it from her. While she could not go where men could go, she discovered that her body was her chief asset. She might not be able to be physically present in the Senate or the Emperor's court, but she could experience what happened there vicariously by enticing prominent men into her bed with her perfect body, loosening their tongues with her skilful hands and orifices and her sexual enthusiasm, and then inducing her lovers to spill the beans to her while the spilled their semen in her. It was fun and exciting to be a slut and she had become quite skilled both as a lover and as a collector of gossip.

One of her lovers had the presence of mind to realize that she was inordinately curious about the affairs of state. In fact, at first, he thought she might have been a Parthian spy. He had fought against the Parthians when Mark Antony had his foray into Armenia. He was in the region long enough to avail himself of the local brothels and learned a few coarse Parthian words. So, he said them out loud.

Musa reacted with a 'what the hell did you say' look that convinced him that her knowledge of Parthian was exactly zero.

"I've lived my entire life in Rome," she pleaded, not knowing how she should have reacted, but trying to assure him she was no foreign spy. "I don't anything about Parthia. All I've heard Parthians is that despise us Romans and won't even make an effort to learn Latin."

"That's true," her lover replied. "The Parthians communicate in Greek to us. They think Latin is a barbarian language. And the truth is that Greek is the language of diplomacy in that part of the world."

A few days later, that same lover, his name was Marcus, accosted her and said, "The Empire needs your services. We want you to go on a mission for us."

"We?"

"To be specific, the Augustus."

"The Emperor? Me? What can a mere woman do for the awesome Augustus?"

"He doesn't like to be called Emperor," Marcus corrected. He wants to be known as the Princeps Civitatus."

"First Citizen or not, he still the Emperor," Musa retorted saucily.

"I like your spirit, girl," he chuckled. "But right now, we have business to take care of. Come with me," he said in commanding tone.

Musa followed him. He wasn't lying. She knew the lay of the city and its government buildings although she was never let inside. She could tell that he really was heading toward the imperial palace.

Hours later, Musa was in state of shock. The Emperor himself, asked her to go on a mission to Parthia. She was to learn everything she could about the country, its people and particularly its politics and the intrigues Arsacid dynasty. Rome was in frequent conflict with the Parthians and yet knew very little about them. Rome needed more information about Parthia, and especially its rulers, so that it could implement more effective diplomatic and military policies in its dealings with the Parthians.

Augustus told her that a Parthian noble named Tiridates had unsuccessfully attempted to seize the throne from Phraates IV but had failed. When he realized his coup had failed, he had kidnapped the king's first-born as a hostage and then had fled to Rome bring the son along with him.

"I don't want to make the same mistake Mark Antony made," Augustus explained. I don't want to send men and resources into Armenia unless I know we're strong enough to win and then hold that territory. We just don't know enough. We need to learn more."

"But I'm just a girl," she pointed out.

"Precisely why you would make the perfect spy," Augustus replied. "Marcus told me you're not a typical Roman woman. You're interested in politics and what happens here at court when most women would take no interest at all. Those that do discretely keep their interest to themselves. But not you, you made yourself quite noticeable, not only by the interest you showed in the affairs of state, but in the way that you so skilfully extracted it from your lovers. He also said you're an adventurous type, and he says, you're a slut. We want you to be a slut for Rome."

Musa blushed at that characterization but she knew that it was true. She also wondered what he meant when he said "a slut for Rome."

Augustus continued. "We have made an agreement with Phraates IV's envoy to return his son to him in exchange for the standards that Mark Antony's legions lost in Armenia. The king will view it as a good deal and a sign of our respect for his power. It will enough to keep peace between for a while."

Augustus paused, glanced at Marcus who shrugged, and then said, "We want you go to Ctesiphon, that's the Parthian capital where the royal court is located as a slave-girl in the entourage that will bring his kidnapped son, Vonones, back home."

"Me? A slave girl? I'm a slave to no one," she pronounced proudly and angrily. She was appalled at the prospect of living the destitution and abuse that was typical in the lives of for most-girls, lives that tended to be short. That was no life for a Roman noble woman.

Augustus could see the tumult in her face.

"You would go as a gift from me, the Princeps Civitatus of Rome to him, Parthian King of Kings. No one will dare touch you on your way to Parthia knowing that you are under my protection. When you reach the Arsacid court in Ctesiphon, protocol will ensure that King Phraates IV keep you in his palace. My envoys will ensure that the King is made aware that I would consider your removal from the palace as an insult. The rest is up to you."

"Why don't you just order me to do it?" she asked.

"I suppose I could," he said, "but in that case, it is more likely you'll try to escape and disappear. From what I've heard of your ingenuity, you just might pull it off. No, I much prefer that you do what I'm asking you to do voluntarily. I know I'm asking a lot from you. So, to persuade, I will promote your brothers to higher offices in their chosen professions."

"How much time do I have to think about it?" she asked.

"The ship taking Vonones back to Parthia will leave Rome for Ephesus in about a month. From there, you would join a caravan headed for Ctesiphon."

"And if I say no?" Musa asked.

"If you say no, we'll send him a statue of a naked woman. What we know of him comes from Tiridates who says that he has, shall we say, a fondness for women. Of course, a statue id a very poor replacement for a Roman woman."

That statement told Musa everything she needed to know about the king of the Parthians.

While taking her home, Marcus gave her additional advice. "It will be a long trip. Start learning the language. Learn from slaves and servants who came with the envoy, but never let on that you know more than they think not even to other slaves."

Marcus glanced sideways and saw that Musa was paying close attention.

"Vonones is a prince," he continued. Since you won't be his slave, he will consider it beneath his dignity and status to talk to you, a mere slave-girl. Never speak a single Parthian word in front of them. Let them think you're completely ignorant. While you're learning from their slaves and servants, act like you stupid and can never remember anything. If Vonones and the envoy hear from their servants and slaves that they tried to teach you Parthian, they will complain that you were too stupid to teach.

"What can I expect from Vonones and the envoy?" she asked.

"Nothing," he answered. "They will see you as a beautiful slave-girl who is reserved for the king. They won't dare touch you. If they think you have the intelligence of Roman olive, they'll speak freely to each other in front of you. You may overhear them discussing affairs of state court intrigues or military secrets."

'Good advice,' she thought.

It was heart-rending decision for Musa. In the end she agreed to go, partly to advance her family's interests, partly due to her strong sense of adventure and curiosity about the mysterious empire on Rome's eastern flank, and partly to serve of her Emperor and Rome.

The Spy as Slave-Girl

King Phraates IV was pleased by his son's return but noted that he had learned to speak a little of the Romans' god-forsaken language and had even acquired some Roman manners.

But Phraates was even more pleased by the Roman Emperor's good-will gesture from the self-declared Princeps Civitatus, a gift in the form of an extraordinarily beautiful exotic Italian slave-girl.

She was petite, but curvy. Although her breasts were averaged-sized, they looked large on her small frame. Her skin was as white as alabaster, contrasting sharply with her raven-black hair. His four olive-skinned wives, beautiful by Parthian standards, looked downright swarthy in comparison to this delicately built foreign slave-girl.

He knew that Rome was famous for the craftsmanship of its statues. Musa reminded him of a perfect idealized Roman statue of a woman come to life. But she was not made of marble. She was flesh and blood. Few Romans had ever come to Ctesiphon. None of them had been women. He felt his loins stir with the thought of the pleasure he would take from her. She seemed so different from those boring wives of his.