Mutiny Release

The man wasn't old and he wasn't young. He was dark of complexion and had the aspect of a fox about him—all sharp angles and secretive, speculative looks. He turned from looking at his swaying cobra to looking at me out of dark, piercing eyes, as he played his haunting melody on the flute. I went down on my haunches there several feet from him and became lost in his mesmerizing eyes and the tune he was playing.

As he played his tune and his cobra swayed above the surface of the basket, I found myself totally lost to the snake charmer as well. I was swaying to the same rhythm as the snake was. The soft sound of my bells was merging with, complimenting the melody of the flute. Just as the snake was lulled into a hypnotic trance, I was as well.

The snake went down into the basket and the charmer closed the lid over it as his tune slowed down and got softer. But I was still deep in a trance, conscious of what was happening but having no control whatsoever over my body. I continued to sway to the music of my bells.

The snake charmer put his flute down next to the basket, slowly rose, and walked over to me. He placed the palm of a hand on my sternum. I understood immediately that he wanted to fuck me—that he was going to fuck me. I lay back onto the pathway, spreading and opening my legs to him. I rolled my pelvis up. Without either of us having said anything, I knew he was going to cover and fuck me—and I welcomed that.

He raised his hand and a bitter-sweet smelling cloth covered my face. I breathed in deeply and went numb, my nerves coming alive and tingling. I was completely under the snake charmer's control. He grasped my ankles with his hands, pulled me around to where my head was pointed at the outer wall and the abandoned basket with the cobra in it, and he dragged me by my ankles into the depths of the garden foliage.

He stood over me, pulling his tunic off his torso and then untying his dhoti and letting the material fall to the ground. His cock was a snake—extraordinarily long and thin. The bulb flared like the head of a snake and had a bar through it with beads, like eyes at either end and a forked trail of red material, studded with red gemstones handing down from it. The shaft would have reached his knees—and he was a long-legged, gaunt man—if it hadn't been in full, extended-straight-out erection. I lay there before him, whimpering, but incapable of moving. Having no idea who he was or where he had come from, but so much in need of a man's cock that all I could think of was him being inside me. This despite the fear of the longest snake of a cock I'd ever seen looming over me.

But then I realized that I could move a bit, and I did. I spread and bent my legs again. And I raised my pelvis and arched my back. I raised and extended my arms in supplication, welcome, and pleading. The man came down onto the earth on his knees between my legs in our patch of open moss with a glimpse of the sky above through the leaves of small trees. His bulb found my anal opening through the slit in my salvar, and I moaned as he snaked inside me and slithered and slithered deep into the quick of me, the eyes of the cock bar and gems of the forked tongue biting into my sensitive channel walls as he moved deeper inside me. I cried out in pain and ecstasy, all of my concentration going to that serpent slithering inside me. He hovered over me, his hands pressing my upper arms into the soil of the garden, his eyes still capturing and controlling me by holding my glazed gaze in his mesmerizing power.

He slid inside me deeper than any man had been before, not just to my soft core but farther. He came into me hard, punishing me with the beads and gemstones, but I felt him become not hard but not soft inside me. He was a slithering snake inside me, his jeweled bulb kissing me everywhere at once, the cock rubbing the walls of my channel at every point at once and sending flashes of pain-pleasure and electricity through me. My channel spread open for him, his thin cock not needing accommodation for girth, but taking advantage of the wide channel to coil and slide inside me. My body went into convulsions with these first strange sensations pulsing through me. I'd never been fucked like this before. Never before had a cock been this alive, giving and demanding, inside me, kissing and biting me in my most tender and vulnerable secret treasures, grasping me at my deepest and tearing my guts out of me.

My pelvis went into motion and I stretched my arms out to the side and arched my back, my bells making soft music as the cock slithered and danced inside me, moving unlike any other man ever had—not just slithering around inside me. Where most men who could reach my soft core with long cocks would be, pressing into my spongy core with their deepest thrusts, this man's bulb was reaching much deeper inside me at his burying of the cock to the root and his jeweled bulb was kissing my soft core when he pulled it back.

But then he was going hard again and thrusting hard and deep. When he pulled back to my core, his bulb was striking at my sensitive walls, sending charges through me that made my body clutch and jerk and caused me to cry out with each strike into the tender sponginess of my core until I tensed and he tensed and I released my seed, and he released his seed. And then again and again. He fucked me and fucked me and fucked me, continuously, as the day dragged on and the shadows lengthened.

And then I blacked out.

Chapter Seven: Insurrection

His name was Rani Peshwar. I would do anything for him as long as he put his snake of a cock inside me. I did do everything for him. I gave him the Satrap of Sagala—at least for a short time.

Life in the men's harem wasn't quite as dull after that first encounter with Rani. Either I was waiting for the next mysterious appearance of the snake charmer at the end of the garden from who knows where? Or he was there, with me, in our secret garden bower, casting a spell over me, deep inside my gut, pulling my very soul out of me, fucking me like I'd never been fucked before. Or he had just been there and I was recovering from him.

He came to me periodically, demanding everything from me, and I gave him everything. Eventually, I gave him the keys to the palace. Over time—it was only a matter of weeks, but it seemed like forever—he conveyed to me that he wanted me to study the patterns of the guarding of the harem. He could get to the terrace garden, but he needed, he said without telling me why, to be able to get beyond the harem and into the palace proper. He didn't say that he had come to me to fuck me like I'd never been possessed before because he wanted to use me to be able to access the palace, but of course that was the sum total of his plan.

I did what he wanted. I watched the guarding of the harem and identified the vulnerable times when the guard could be counted on to be more lax than usual. The harem was only loosely controlled and the guard force wasn't changed sufficiently to keep the guards from becoming friendly with the harem men. They managed to arrange the schedules so the guards who liked to be with men had a period during the night when they could be bedding the young men rather than standing guard at the access points to the harem. The young men were bored enough with life that they would relish any attention they could get. The guards were selected for their strong, muscular bodies.

Indeed, in my need, I had cultivated a strapping black, big-cocked guard myself to relieve me and entertain him during this period in which the guard force had managed to have men who covered men scheduled. The men of the harem certainly didn't complain.

Rani Peshwar named the night he wanted access and I named the time period in which he could operate and told him where the exit doorways were located behind carpet hangings. I even devised a plan that would enable me to be there to guide him in his coming and going.

I can't say that I was entirely ignorant of why Rani Peshwar might want access to the palace. The fact that there was unrest across the subcontinent, much of it centered on growing dissatisfaction with the presence of the British and the heavy controlling hand of the East India Company, had reached the harem. Small uprisings were cropping up everywhere in the British-controlled areas and where, as the Maharaja of the Satrap of Sagala had now done, local prince states had allied with the British. Thus far they were isolated and at the nuisance level, but the pot was boiling.

It occurred to me that Rani Peshwar might be an assassin. He certainly had that look and feel about him, and he assassinated my gut each time he penetrated me. It wasn't lost to me that perhaps he wanted access to the palace to assassinate the maharaja and thus plunge Sagala into chaos. I didn't really care. I wished him luck getting past Mahmoud if that was his intent, but I held no loyalty to the maharaja—or, truthfully, at this point—to British policy in India. At the same time, though, I refrained from warning him that if he got as far as the maharaja's bedchamber, he was likely to find an alert, protective, and capable Mahmoud in bed with the monarch, but with weapons near to hand.

As it turned out, I was on the right track but had completely misjudged the scale of Rani Peshwar's intent.

I was lying, naked, in pillows on a divan in a corner of the large harem room when the big, black guard came to me in the semidark, the gas-lit wall sconces having been turned down low. The general sound across the room was of low moaning of harem young men satisfying themselves or each other or entertaining early-arrived guards and the soft jangling of jewelry bells as bodies were being set in motion by the swaying of the fuck. I was on my back, legs spread and bent, one hand stroking my hard cock and the other working my lubricated and perfumed channel with an ivory dildo when the strapping black appeared in my vision between my legs. As he was accustomed to doing, he stood over me, stripped off his salvar, and then reached down and took over the working of the ivory dildo inside me as he worked up his mammoth cock with his other hand. Then he was on top of me and inside me, with both of us moving our pelvises in countermotion and me pressing my fingernails into his shoulder blades and moaning low to the rhythm of the fuck. He was thick and vigorous and adequate to the task, although no comparison to Rani Peshwar or any number of other lovers I'd had inside me.

The first fuck over and having rested and drunk from flagons I provided, his drugged and mine not, we moved on to the new innovation I had introduced for the last week. There were restraint holds and leather straps all around the sides of the divan. I had suggested the higher pleasure he could receive if he were bound and I rode him. He had agreed and had, indeed, enjoyed the times I'd done it earlier in the week. Now I put him on his back on the divan, bound his wrists to the frame above his head and his ankles to the frame below. I didn't stint with him. I mounted his hips, facing him, swallowed his erection with my channel, leaned back and grasped his knees with my hands, and rode him hard and fast to an ejaculation. He managed to come but already was fading from the effects of the drug in his drink by the time he was finished.

I gagged him with one of my scarlet sashes in case he woke before I returned and raised questions and objections. Then checking how the others were doing with the effects of the flagons across the room I had drugged, I pulled on a less-revealing salvar than I usually wore and a vest and went to the end of the garden to find Rani Peshwar. There I received a shock. Peshwar wasn't the only one there. There were a good dozen armed men hunkered down there, waiting for me.

"What—?" I stammered.

"There is no time. Just show us the way," Peshwar said.

I did so, leading them to the unguarded door of the harem into a palace corridor. The men with him had fanned out around the room but gathered again at the door. I didn't want to even think about what they had been doing.

"You too," Peshwar said to me as the men fanned out into the corridor.

"Me?" I asked.

"Yes, you can't stay here. They will know who let us in." And then we were off down the corridor, to stairs leading down, and then through other corridors, searching for and finding an entryway to the forecourt. Dozing guards were set upon and dispatched at these doors. The doors were flung open, and a motley horde of insurrectionists, armed with varied weapons, some primitive, until better ones could be torn from the hands of overwhelmed palace guards, poured inside.

At the door, Peshwar turned me over to another man. "Here. Take this Frenchman to the rear. Bind him and hold him for me."

"Rani," I cried out in confusion.

"Hush, Frenchman!" Peshwar growled. His repeating of "Frenchman" made me understand. I could not survive here as an Englishman. I had to be someone neutral to the purposes of the insurrectionists. Peshwar was trying to preserve my life. I clamped my jaw shut as the insurrectionist tied my hands behind me.

Peshwar said in Hindi simple enough for me to get the gist of, "We will hold him for hostage. He may have some use for us." Then he pulled me away from his man for a brief moment. I whispered, "What are you doing, Rani?"

"I am trying to save your life," he hissed at me. "But, indeed, your only use to anyone but me now is as a hostage. Do what you can to survive. It's all up to you."

Just what everyone was telling me. It was what my father told me when he banished me from England. It was what Lord Dinwiddie told me when he abandoned me to life in a harem. And now it was what the snake charmer was telling me as he sent me off into uncertain captivity.

And then Peshwar was gone and I was being led away through the milling, teeming crowd of angry villagers, as flames began to lift up from the roof of the palace.

* * * *

"Hsst. Wake, but don't make a sound."

Even in a hoarse whisper, I recognized the voice from somewhere, but when I opened my eyes, it was just another turbaned Indian in a white cotton tunic over a dhoti and a handkerchief over the lower part of his face. Or was it? I was exhausted. Rani Peshwar had left me not long ago to lead his men on a raiding party of a village and he had ravished me before he went. I took great pleasure from it, of course, but when he fucked me, he took everything from me, leaving me a panting, moaning shell, albeit one swimming in his cum.

The man cut the bonds at my wrists, unhooked the cloth covering his face, and then worked at releasing my ankles. We were several yards inside the mountain cave, one of several in this mountain that Rani Peshwar was using as a hideout as his band terrorized the neighboring area. It had been two weeks since they had attacked and burned the Maharaja of the Satrap of Sagala's palace. I had asked what had happened to the maharaja, but Rani refused to tell me. I didn't care all that much, although I would be slightly sad to know that Mahmoud had perished.

I gasped when the cloth dropped from the man's lower face. "Owen," I exclaimed in a hoarse whisper. "How? When?" My lieutenant, Owen Smythe had dropped out of the heavens.

"Shush," he pressed. "Wait until we're well away. I'll tell you all I know then."

He helped me to the entrance to the cave. The man left to guard me was lying on his back by the opening, his unseeing eyes looking up at the afternoon sun. I didn't regret his passing. He had been mean to me, which was probably why Rani had chosen him to stay with me and guard me. He had no interest in men and he had no use for me. His loyalty was to Rani Peshwar, which was as it should be. He kept any but Peshwar away from me. There were plenty of the men in the band who would like to be friendly to me and to use and abuse me, but that hadn't happened to me. The insurrectionists had come away with some other captives from the harems—young men as well as women, and for several days and nights I'd had to lay here, guarded by this dead man, and listen to their cries farther back inside the cave as, one by one, they were used up. All had been quiet for days now, other than the few hours after the raids, when there would be fresh victims to satiate the insurrectionists' lusts.

"Come. Down this path. Hurry," Lieutenant Smythe urged, and, allowing him to help me as I had been sitting or lying in the cave for some days, we scrambled and stumbled down the path to a grove of trees. There it was my time to gasp again.

"Malcolm," I exclaimed. "How? What?"

But yet again, I wasn't permitted to query further what the deputy East India Company manager in Delhi, Malcolm Randall, who had taken me to and in the hookah den in Delhi, was doing there, holding the reins of three horses.

"Later, when we're well away," Owen said again. "We will stop somewhere safe for you to clothe yourself in something less conspicuous." I had been wearing just a white cotton salvar since I'd been in the palace harem. My gold jewelry, of course, had been stripped from me as soon as we'd left the palace forecourt. I had regretted the loss of the emerald navel plug. I had spent several hours in boredom in the maharaja's harem estimating what more I was worth with the emerald than without. When we did stop next, it was only long enough from me to change into a white cotton tunic over a white cotton dhoti and a white turban, with face covering, matching what both Owen and Malcolm were wearing.

We rode until dark, seeing nearly no one on the road or in the fields. All were hiding from the effects of the insurrection across British India. Near twilight, Owen halted the pace. "We must stop. The horses can't take much more of this." He pointed to the ruins of a building at the top of a nearby hill, the sides of which had been denuded of whatever crop had been growing there. "We will spend the night up there, if there aren't others hiding there," he said. "It's defensible. A clear view in all directions."

Ever the soldier, I thought. But what was a British soldier doing out here, I thought, rescuing me? Owen took it upon himself to make sure the ruins were clear before he let Malcolm and me ascend the hill.

There was enough grain left on the verge of the hillside of the ancient ruins of the abandoned Hindu temple for the horses to graze and there was a well in the temple to provide water for the horses and the men. Malcolm saw to the horses, while Owen made a fire and cooked some supper and boiled coffee. It was all I could do to stay conscious as I leaned against one of the horses' saddles on the stone floor of the small temple.

Over dinner, Owen and Malcolm, together, provided me an explanation for what had transpired.

"The sepoy regiment in Meerut, east of Delhi, set off the tinderbox," Randall said. "The sepoys there were a Hindi and Urdu mix cavalry unit, which was the backbone of the British native forces in the Delhi region. They wiped out the British there, men, women, and children, in a single night. Your Colonel Franklin was in Meerut at the time."

"So, he is—?" I started to ask.

"Surely dead, yes," Owen said.

"He was your superior officer, wasn't he?" I asked Owen.

"He had been, yes," Owen answered. "But I had mustered out of the army already. I was on the road."

"Mustered out of the army?" I asked and looked at him, but he looked away and Randall continued. "Two days later the rebellion had reached Delhi and the slaughter of British nationals continued there. They've set up the old Mughal ruler of Delhi, Bahadur Shah Zakar, as the emperor of what they now declare is Hindustan. I doubt he'll last long. He's eighty-one, so I think he'll die of the excitement before the British can depose him, which they surely will do. This rebellion won't stand."