Alfons delivered another tankard of beer to the well-dressed gentleman seated at the best table, near the fireplace. It still ranked as the best, with the most substantial chair, even though the table was functionally only the best in the winter, when a fire was going, not now, in high summer. When he set the beer down, the man grabbed Alfons’s hand and didn’t let it go for the longest moment. Their eyes met, and Alfons shuddered.
There was something demanding and controlling in the nearly obsidian eyes of the dark-complexioned, dark-eyed man with the swarthy goatee beard. Beyond that there was an aspect of the fox or wolf about him. He was handsome and not above thirty, but he was a man of darkness and of the shadows–all dressed in black other than the lace at his wrist that denoted a man of importance and wealth. After a moment, though, he released Alfons, the expression on his face changing from a piercing assessing look to a sly smile, almost a sneer, and he slightly bowed his head to the server.
Alfons turned away, finding eye contact difficult to break, but needed elsewhere in the tavern room. The inn’s taproom was crowded that evening. The blond, openly sunny, boyish visage of the young man was a sharp contrast to the vulpine aspect of the man sitting in the shadows by the fireplace. The man’s eyes followed Alfons around the tavern. The next time Alfons had a moment to locate the man in the room, the seat by the fireplace having been vacated, was when he saw him talking in low tones to the Innkeeper, to whom Alfons was indentured, by the bar. The two men were looking at Alfons as they spoke. Alfons blushed, having a good idea what the discussion was about.
The walled town of Rottenburg am Necker in the fifteenth century was a prosperous German market town, catering to many styles and preferences. A man looking for a tavern or inn accommodating his personal comfort and interests could find one without difficulty. The inn to which Alfons was indentured, having recently been brought into service, was one that catered to men interested in other men. It was Alfons’s androgynous beauty and affable disposition that had led to his indenture being sold to Hermann Eberle. Alfons had orally served men before, but it was his virginity to anal penetration that had piqued Eberle’s interest in purchasing his indenture and husbanding the young man’s initiation.
Eberle wanted his investment back in double, and there were few men capable to paying that in Rottenburg. It would likely have to a rich nobleman or merchant passing through Rottenburg, in high need and of special interests, who would be the first to master Alfons.
Tonight was the night.
Alfons wasn’t surprised to see the two men talking earnestly and letting their eyes pick him out as he moved about the tavern, taking orders and serving steins of beer. From the look the man had given him and when the man had held his hand moments longer than was necessary, Alfons had figured he would be in some nook or cranny, on his knees to the man. That could happen once or twice on any given night in the tavern–and he wasn’t the only serving man here serving more than beer.
The fox man left by the door out into the stable yard, and Hermann called Alfons over. “The man who was just here is the Count Franz von Türbingen, an important and wealthy man. He wants you to join him in the stable now.”
“He wishes me to go on my knees to him?” Alfons asked.
“No. He wishes for you to present your buttocks to him, Alfons. He will mount you. He has paid a high price to be your first.”
Alfons began to tremble and lower his face in fear and embarrassment.
“Don’t withdraw from it, lad,” Eberle hissed, placing a hand on Alfons’s arm. “You knew that was what you were indentured here for. You have gone unmounted longer than most. The count has paid a large sum from your chastity. He has bought you for two nights. He has a room at the inn, but he wants to mount you first in the stable. You will stay with him for two days and you will lie under him as he wishes. You will not bring questions on this inn of our reputation from what can be bought here. If you do not give him satisfaction, I will whip you within an inch of your life and give you to the beggars on the street for sport. You should be happy that your first time will be with a clean nobleman. After this, you will take whoever pays a much lower price, I assure you.”
The count fucked Alfons over a saddle stand in the stables, Alfons’s torso draped over one side, his face staring at the loose hay on the rough-wooden planks of the flooring, his arms hanging down, knuckles dragging on the hay, wrists bound with leather strips, and his mouth gagged with the count’s belt fastened around his head to keep the noise down. Alfons still produced muffled cries and huffed and puffed the pain of the first breaching of his sphincter muscle by the slow, but relentless invasion of the count’s staff as he crouched over the young man from behind, held Alfons’s hips between his hands, and insistently bottomed out with his cock before he plowed and seeded Alfons for the first time. The count wasn’t appreciably long or thick–not that Alfons was in the position to have comparisons to gauge–but he was cruel considering it was Alfons’s first time, giving the young virgin little time to prepare for and open to him before he was forcing himself inside. This aspect of forcing a virgin ass seemed to be the man’s primary interest in paying the extra fee to be able to do so.
Alfons struggled against him initially, which Von Türbingen seemed to enjoy, but as the pain receded and a certain pleasure started to creep in, Alfons settled down, and with a thought to the threats his master had hissed at him, submitted to the plowing. Yes, he’d known this day was coming. Yes, Eberle was right that it was better from a man of position and breeding than from the usual rough workman who came to the tavern. Yes, after this, it would be rough workman.
Toward the eventual moment of seeding of the man inside him, his cock steel hard, throbbing, and rapidly digging into Alfons’s quick, Alfons succumbed to his own nature and began to move his pelvis, falling into the rhythm of the thrusts of Von Türbingen’s shaft. The count laughed, slapped Alfons on the bare buttocks, and released his seed.
The fucking of the next two nights in the privacy of the count’s bed in the inn was a time of adjustment by Alfons to the inevitable and learning from the count what a man of refinement wanted from a beautiful young man underneath him, which included Franz holding Alfons in a close embrace and stroking off the young man’s cock beyond Alfons’s endurance to resist shooting off his own seed. After this, the count would want Alfons to lie between his thighs and make love to his cock–and then to saddle himself on the count’s pelvis and ride the staff.
By the time Franz was in the courtyard, mounting his horse, and bidding Alfons farewell, the young man was clinging to the saddle, not wanting his new master to leave him–fearful and anxious about what came after this when he no longer had a single patron.
“Oh, we will meet again, you and I,” the count said before he cruelly spurred his horse in the flank and lurched out onto the road in front of the inn.
In the succeeding weeks, Alfons learned just how refined the count had been. He no longer was a valuable commodity, his chastity intact. He was given over to any man willing to pay double the price of a suck, and he lay under a progression of men who smelled, were animals, and took him in every rough way they could imagine.
Thus it was a godsend when the innkeeper, Hermann Eberle, received a letter from the Count Franz Von Türbingen, with a significant amount of money enclosed, engaging Alfons’s services in the larger town of Türbingen two day’s horse ride to the northeast of Rottenburg to stay for a month’s time.
When the innkeeper’s wife saw the letter, she said, “A pity the young man cannot go, as it would require a journey through the accursed forest of Höllewald.”
“Curse be damned, woman,” Eberle answered. “For this amount of money, I would send the lad into hell itself. I will not be giving this money back.”
“Sending him into hell–that’s what I said you’d be doing if you send him to Türbingen by the route the count demands. He says he’s arranged for the lad to overnight at the Monastery of Die Bruderschaft. You’ve heard the rumors of that place–of the monks living there.”
“Prepare yourself, Alfons,” Eberle said, ignoring his wife. “You can take the old mare. I wouldn’t want to risk the gelding.”
But you are willing to risk me, Alfons thought. It was thought without lingering bitterness, though. He welcomed a month in the count’s bed opposed to a single night writhing under the rough men Eberle was selling him to. Among other reasons, he now had discovered that the count didn’t have the most demanding cock that would challenge Alfons’s passageway. He happily went to the stables to prepare the mare for travel.
Eberle’s comment on not wanting to risk the gelding hadn’t escaped Alfons as an indication that the innkeeper wasn’t as contemptuous of his wife’s superstition about the forest Alfons would have to ride through as he had let on. The innkeeper’s fear that Alfons might not come back, though, became obvious when Eberle trapped him in the wine cellar that night, bent him over a table, and rode his ass hard himself as if the innkeeper might not ever again have a crack at the young man himself.
* * * *
The weather was perfect as Alfons entered the Höllewald forest shortly after passing through the village of Missinger. He heard the gurgling of a stream off to his right, deeper into the trees. He had been sweating hard under the sun before reaching the cover of the trees and decided that he would bathe himself if the creek to his right had any depth. It did have a pool at the bottom of a rock outcropping with a waterfall, which must have been the source of the gurgling noise that had attracted him to the water.
Alfons was stripped and gliding into the pool of water before he realized that he wasn’t alone in the water. As he swam to the center of the pool, a head and two arms, connected by a very-well-muscled chest, appeared from behind the base of the waterfall.
“Oh, I didn’t realize anyone else was here,” Alfons exclaimed.
“You must forgive me,” the man said in a pleasing, cultured voice. “I heard you approach and hid myself until I was sure that you were no threat. Then I could not help myself in watching you take off your clothes. You’re a beautiful young man. One of God’s gifts to the world surely.”
Alfons was embarrassed. “Perhaps I should leave. You were here first.”
“The pool is big enough for both of us,” the man said. “My name is Paul.”
“Alfons,” the young man instinctively answered.
“And the pool is deep enough too. Where you are swimming is quite deep. You know you can dive in there from the lip of the waterfall and have no danger of hitting bottom. Here, I will show you.”
Without waiting for comment from Alfons, the man paddled over to the side of the pool and stood up from the water. He immediately started climbing the rock to the lip of the waterfall and, when he reached it, he stood and posed there. He was naked and his body was magnificent. He was perhaps ten years older than Alfons. His hair was a reddish auburn, showing more red highlights as it descended his body down his chest and into his pubes, the bush of which was curly and a golden red. He was in erection, long and thick. Alfons sucked in his breath as the man dove into the pool, coming up just in front of Alfons, his hands glided up Alfons’s legs as he came back up to the surface. One hand went to the young man’s waist, but the other one cupped Alfons’s cock and balls and remained there.
As Paul’s face came up level with Alfons’s, he took the young man’s mouth into a deep kiss. Alfons hungrily returned the kiss and initially grasped the older man’s shoulders in his hands, rubbing their chests together. But then, with a gasp and remembering the circumstance they were in–that he wasn’t in the inn now, subject to the desires of any man with money to pay–he broke the kiss, pushed off from Paul and backpeddled to the side of the pond, where he could find footing on the bottom. He had gone to the wrong side of the pool. The man was between him and the bank of the pond where his clothes were. He backed further toward the side of the pond, and the man advanced on him to where he was able to stand on the bottom as well. Alfons was crouched down on his knees, trying to stay under water, trying not to reveal the effect of seeing the man naked and then kissing him had on him.
“Please . . . why . . .?” he sputtered.
“I have been to Rottenburg,” Paul said. “I have seen you in Eberle’s inn. You work there. You lay under men.”
If he’d been in the inn, Alfons realized, the man knew what sort of inn it was. “That doesn’t mean–”
“I think it does mean that,” the man said. His voice was calming. What he spoke was made to sound so natural, so sensible. “I watched you disrobe. You’ve seen the effect that had on me. I made sure you saw by leaving the water to say I would dive from the top of the waterfall. I made sure you saw the desire and readiness in me. I have felt the effect that I have on you. You lay under men. We are both in heat. Your response to the kiss told me all I needed to know about your desire for my body to lie on yours. I’m sure that, if you think about it, it told you all you need to know too.”
“I don’t . . . we can’t . . .”
“Yes we can.” Paul was right there with him. “I have money I can give you. I will pay you the going rate. You need share none of it with your master. If I were to come into your tavern and pay the innkeeper for your services, you would lay under me there. Your master would give you no choice. What is the difference in doing so here? Am I so unappealing that, given some choice in the matter, you do not want me to cover you?”
Alfons couldn’t think of a countering argument to that. And the man did have a magnificent body and would be clean. He’d just cleansed himself in the pool. The man took the failure to answer as enough of an answer.
“Rise to me,” Paul said, standing in water that reached only to his knees. He reached down and lifted Alfons to his feet. Alfons was shorter then he was, his face only coming to the matting of hair between Pau’s pectorals.
“Perhaps you need a reminder,” Paul said in a low, cajoling tone. One arm went around Alfons’s waist, pulling him into Paul’s embrace. With the other hand, Paul raised Alfons’s chin and lowered his own face into another kiss that started out tender and flamed into a raging fire of mutual need. Paul moved his free hand to between them and frotted their hard, throbbing cocks together.
Nothing was said between them thereafter. There was no need for anything to be said. Paul pulled them back into the pond to where he could crouch down, creating a lap for Alfons to sit on, facing away from him, with the water coming up to their nipples. Alfons panted and huffed and moaned, as Paul positioned the young man’s entrance on the bulb of his cock and then slowly brought Alfons down on the staff, the young man’s passage opening to the invading shaft, trained now to taking a man inside him.
Paul moved Alfons up and down on his cock in the water, using the leverage of his arm encasing the young man’s waist, as he stroked Alfons off with his other hand. When Alfons didn’t have his head turned for a kiss, Paul’s lips were buried in the hollow of the young man’s throat. At length both men came in a peaceful flow, enhanced by the motion of the water. Then they just held there, kissing, as they both reveled in the feel of Paul, once so long and thick and hard, slowly going flaccid inside Alfons’s passage, albeit still long enough to hold deep purchase inside him.
No taking that Alfons had ever experienced at the inn was as pleasurable to him as this was. No man had stayed with him through the mutual pleasure of an afterglow of feeling the once-raging staff inside him go flaccid in satiation–and then, as happened here, stir to life and engorge again.
“Come,” Paul said at length, “I want to make love to you on the bank of the pond. As you can feel, I desire to have you again.”
The man moved over to the side of the pond–still on the opposite side from where Alfons had stripped and the mare was grazing–and pulled Alfons up onto the bank, laying the young man on a mossy spot next to the man’s clothes. Paul was in full and magnificent erection again. He glided his hands up the inner surfaces of Alfons’s thighs and the young man opened to him, widening his stance, bending his legs, and placing his feet flat on the moss. Paul hovered over him, on his knees between Alfons’s spread thighs. He reached up, grasped the young man’s wrists, and held Alfons’s arms over his head. Alfons grasped the thin trunks of two trees over his head and raised his pelvis to Paul. He jerked and gave a little cry as Paul slid inside him again, hard and thick and long once more, and began to plow him slowly, but with increasing speed and thrust. The older man lowered his face to Alfons and took him in a kiss that lasted for the time of their coupling, Alfons thrusting his pelvis up to Paul as Paul thrust down, each of them wanting the union to be as deep as possible. Alfons was lost to the man. He’d been fucked before but he’d never been made love to before, like this.
Afterward, the man’s payment for Alfons’s sex laying on the young man’s pile of clothes, Alfons half dozed, as Paul teased his naked body with long blades of grass.
“I don’t know where you were going,” Paul said with a low, hoarse voice, “but I would like you to come back to my village with me.”
“Your village? Which is your village?” Alfons asked. He knew it was impossible–that he had a charge to keep, bound by his indenture–but he didn’t want this afternoon to stop.
“I live in Missinger, just outside the edge of the Höllewald.”
“Ah, I have just been through there, just now. I am headed into the Höllewald.”
“That is not a good idea. Young men like you go into that forest and sometimes don’t come out again.” He was standing, pulling up his clothes, pulling his black cassock over his head and letting it cascade down to his ankles.
Alfons looked up and his eyes went wide. “You are a priest.”
“Yes, I am a priest.”
“I can’t go with you,” Alfons said, rising from the moss. “Priests are celibate. We cannot do this . . . what we just did.”
Paul laughed. “Priests obviously aren’t always celibate. And the proof of that is that we just did ‘this.’ We did ‘this’ twice. If I had the time to be absent from my village, we would do ‘this’ again. I want you to come back to my village and I will do ‘this’ to you all night and all week and all month. I am smitten with you.”
“You can’t. We can’t. You belong to the church.”
“We all belong to the church, and it is God who made us with the desires we have. I’ve heard tell that the pope himself has a mistress and enough bastards to fill Rome,” Paul said. “Priests have needs. I have needs. You have needs. You can’t tell me you don’t have needs. You are hard for me again, even now.”
Paul pulled his cassock off, pushed Alfons onto the moss on this belly, came down on top of him, entered him strongly, and they were fucking again. Paul grasped Alfons’s wrists over his head again, Alfons raised himself slightly on his knees to give Paul deep purchase, and, groaning and whimpering, he moved his pelvis with the rhythm of the fuck.
“We are doing ‘this’ and ‘this’ and ‘this’ again,” Paul growled, punctuating every “this” with a thrust. Alfons moaned underneath him. “Tell me you love ‘this’–that we can be doing ‘this.’”
“Yes, yes. It is as you say,” Alfons whimpered with a groan.
But when Paul had released his seed again, Alfons rolled out from underneath him with a grunt, dove back into the pond and swam swiftly to the other side. Paul sat on the opposite bank, watching the young man hurriedly put his clothes back on and mount the mare.
“Just ask for Father Paul’s church in Missinger,” he called out to Alfons as the young man rode away. “Anyone in the village can tell you where to find me. I can offer you a comfortable bed and all of the ‘this’ that you would want.”
* * * *
Once Alfons entered the forest of Höllewald the warnings of the innkeeper’s wife came back to him and he very well could understand that the forest was haunted and cursed. The old mare he was riding seemed to understand that as well and became more skittish as they moved deeper in the woods, with the gray trees with gnarled trunks and branches blotting out the sky and the air becoming increasingly fetid. He would have missed the monastery of Die Bruderschaft all together if the mare hadn’t stopped, laid her ears down, and backed up, with a wild look in her eyes. He slid off her and pulled on her reins to no avail. Looking around to see what could be spooking her, he saw the monastery.
The gray stone walls of what was more a moated fortress than a religious institution blended into the gloomy aspect of the forest. The trail, such as it was, went right past the edge of the moat, giving those inside a clear view of any travelers trying to use this path through the forest, while the traveler, especially when the day was misty as it was today, could pass immediately beside the structure and hardly be aware it was there. This gave the monastery effective control over those who came and went through the forest. Indeed, Alfons thought, there surely could be no other path through the forest, which was more swamp than forest, the path he had been taking running along the top of a rise from the surrounding marshy area under the trees.
He could think of only one way to get the mare to proceed to the monastery, where he had been told to stop for the night, let alone pass it by. He pulled his tunic over his head and wrapped it around the mare’s eyes so that she was blinded. Having done that, she became docile and he approached the monastery, looking for an entrance. As he was studying the blank wall with the fetid moat, covered with floating moss, between the wall and the path, he heard the sound of a thump and saw that a drawbridge had been lowered, not in the front wall of the structure, but at the side, near the front edge. A tall, thin, gaunt, and bald-headed man in a brown monk’s habit and barefoot walked out of the monastery and across the drawbridge. He turned, looked at Alfons, showing no surprise that there was a visitor, and motioned for the young man to approach.
The young man did so, studying the monk as he came closer–and noticing that the monk was studying him closely also, with a sly look on his face that Alfons recognized in the faces of men who used him in the tavern. Alfons felt naked, having stripped off his tunic, and he flinched when he came up to the monk to receive, in a greeting, not anything spoken nor a hand gesture of any sort, but an intense, hooded gaze from the monk and the monk’s hand gliding intimately up the young man’s bare chest.
Alfons stepped back, in surprise and embarrassment, released his tunic from the mare’s eyes, and slipped it back down over his torso.
“My name is Alfons, from Rottenburg,” he said in a nervous voice. “I have been summoned to Türbingen by Count Franz, who said lodging for the night was arranged for me here. This is the monastery of Die Bruderschaft, is it not?”
The monk, not showing any apology for having touched Alfons intimately, merely nodded agreement–agreement of what in the words Alfons had said, the young man wasn’t sure–and used hand motions to indicate that Alfons was to bring his horse and enter the monastery. The elaborate signaling the monk provided and the fact that Alfons found he could easily understand what the monk was conveying told Alfons that the monks here must have some sort of vow of silence and had become experts in signaling their messages. The gestures included the admonishment that he was expected to maintain silence as well.
This didn’t make Alfons comfortable–and the intimate touch of the monk had made him quite uncomfortable, although it was little different than he was subjected to at the inn–but there was no other choice. After his recent encounter with the priest named Paul, Alfons’s understanding of what men dedicated to God did and didn’t do. He know knew that they had desires as any man did. He was no longer confident that he would make it through the night here without being in some man’s bed. To this, though, he just sighed and continued into the monastery. If he had learned anything over the last few months, it was that he was powerless and at the whims of the desires of men–but that he didn’t mind lying with most men he had serviced. He certainly hadn’t minded writhing under the priest named Paul.
The night was coming on, and this was where he had been told to break his journey to Türbingen. These were monks. What harm could come to him here that wasn’t in his lot already to endure? Still, he shuddered as he was guided over the drawbridge, as the monk walked closely beside him and had a hand on the small of his back. It was almost as if the monk knew that Alfons lay under men for money. Somehow Alfons thought that perhaps his room and board for the night here would be considered a substitute for money.
Inside the monastery compound, he was met by other monks. No questions were asked or signaled about why he was here. He indeed seemed to have been expected. With that, though, Alfons was afraid that they had also been told what he would do for a man, and he briefly wondered if his fears were justified–that he might be expected to lie under a man–or men–this night. Surely not, he thought, though, in his internal struggle. These were religious men. But then, he thought again, so was Paul the priest.
A couple of monks led the mare off to the stable, after having found that they needed to cover her eyes to coax her to move. Alfons, embarrassed, had retrieved and pulled his tunic over his head. The monk who had welcomed him at the gate and another, evidently senior monk, as he was directing the others, ushered Alfons into a guard house just inside the gate, where the tall, gaunt monk handed him a folded monk’s habit. The senior monk gestured for Alfons to put the habit on–and to strip himself of everything else he was wearing. Everything. He was to wear just the habit, with nothing underneath it and nothing on his feet. The two monks scrutinized Alfons closely as he stripped and put the habit on.
He was then led up stone stairs set against the wall and into the upper story of a cloister rimming the monastery courtyard on three sides and two tiers. The main monastery building was at one end of the courtyard and the cloisters fanned out on either side of that to form two sides of the courtyard square. As they walked down the passageway, Alfons could see that small, stone-walled rooms were set between the cloister and the outer walls. These evidently were monks’ cells.
Alfons was escorted to one of these, shown, with hand gestures the stone platform with the quilt on top of it that was to be his bed and the water jar in one corner and the piss pot in the other. He was left there, and when the two monks backed out of the cell, they closed the wooden door. He heard the sound of the key turning in the lock of the door on the other side. There was a small window in the cell, with bars set in it, and he could see that twilight was setting in. He had made his way to the monastery none too soon.
It wasn’t long before the cell door opened and the monk–the first one he’d seen, the gaunt one of indeterminate age, but probably double Alfons’s age–who apparently was assigned as Alfons’s attendant, entered with a tray of food and a flask of wine. The food was basic, but it was better fare than Alfons was given at the inn unless he was dining with a patron as a foreplay act to being covered by the patron. The wine was particularly delicious–and intoxicating–and the more he drank, the more mellow and sleepy he became until he barely was able to stagger to the stone platform before collapsing onto the quilt into a deep sleep.
* * * *
Alfons slowly came back into consciousness to the sound of far-off chanting. The cell was in total darkness save for slightly less darkness around the barred window. They’d left him a lighted candle, but that had sputtered out. He didn’t become fully conscious–just enough to be aware of thoughts. He thought that it must be some time of a daily office or mass in the monastery because he could hear the chanting coming up from the chapel, but he wasn’t particularly religious himself, so the chanting was no clue to the time of evening or night. He felt mellow and without worries–just floating along.
It didn’t worry him even when he cell door opened and figures filtered into the room. A few of them had torches. They were all humming. They wore black habits tonight whereas in the daylight they had worn brown. They were barefoot. The habits weren’t really like normal monks’ habits, though, he realized in looking at them. They were spilt in front, down to below the belly, and in the candlelight he realized that they opened at the chest enough to see the men’s torsos. They were all lean and muscular. And the openings went down to where Alfons could discern the dark-haired men from the blonds from the strawberry blonds from the color of the men’s pubic hair. The monk signaling directions to the others was the same senior monk from earlier in the day. His chest hair and pubic hair was laced with gray. The gaunt monk was there too–black haired below although bald on top–and, although gaunt, he was sinewy with tight muscles.
Believing in his haze that the men had come to use him, as had vaguely happened in the drugged dream he was having when they came into the cell, Alfons sighed in resignation, lifted the hem of his monk’s cassock to his waist, and spread and bent his legs, arranging himself for the first of the monks to come in between his thighs. But that didn’t happen; one of the monks pulled his cassock back down over his legs and another one was behind him, grasping him under the shoulders.
The gaunt monk and another, younger one, lifted Alfons from the stone platform and carried him between them out into the cloister, down the stairs, and past the chapel, which was open but inexplicably dark–the chanting had not been coming from here–and down circular stairs in a tower. Down, down, down.
Some slight thought deep in Alfons’s mind was telling him that he should have a concern about why he was being carried away from his cell and where they were going, to what purpose. But the monks had not used him in his cell, so, in his muddled state, he didn’t think he had concerns of that sort. He was still under the influence of the drug that had been in his wine–and, mercifully would be so through the time of the ritual and until sometime after he was returned, moaning, to his cell.
The chamber he was taken to was deep underground. The walls, floor, and vaulted ceiling were of stone block. The chamber was lit, more at the center than in the recesses, by torches hung on the columns holding up the ceiling. The center of the chamber was marked off with a circular pattern of mosaic tiles, with the image of a horned goat in the center. Incense burners were pumping a haze into the air. At one end of the chamber a dais, topped by a large, gold throne, rose up from the floor. Two muscular men, holding spears, butted to the floor, stood on either side of the throne. Their bodies were naked and oiled, gleaming in the torchlight. They wore goat-head masks.
The throne was occupied by another man, obviously the high priest for this ritual. He had a black robe on similar to those of the monks who had come for Alfons, but it was fully open and he was naked underneath. His body was magnificent and he was in erection. He too wore a horned goat mask, but his was gold in contrast to those of the guards, which were painted white.
A second obviously senior figure, also in a black robe open to show a beautiful body with reddish hair and wearing a gold horned goat mask, stood on a platform at a three o’clock position across the circle from the throne platform. He stood there throughout the ceremony, arms folded across his chest, observing all, but remaining above all.
In the center of the chamber, other monks, dressed as Alfons’s escorts were, were moving around in a circle, looking to be in a trance. They were the source of the chanting, usually words of no language Alfons knew–or would have known.
His escort carried him to a position across the circle from the throne, at a six o’clock position from that platform. Here there was another platform, with a frame standing on it, and golden chains hanging down from the ceiling in front of it. Still under the influence of the drug in his wine, Alfons showed no concern–although he should have–as the monks’ robe he’d been wearing was pulled over his head, leaving him naked. His arms were extended out from his sides and lashed with golden rope to the arms of the frame. His legs then were raised and spread and fastened to the golden chains hanging down from the ceiling. He was trussed now, his torso pinned to the frame and his legs spread and extended to the side, his buttocks parallel to the floor, although slightly raised above his chest so that his pelvis was readily accessible for what every man in the chamber save one was going to do with him over the next two hours.
Now Alfons was getting an inkling of what his function was to be in this primitive ritual–and he understood why he hadn’t been sexually taken in his cell.
The high priest on the throne was the first one who fucked Alfons in what was obviously a periodic ritual of the monks of Die Bruderschaft–of the Brotherhood–and when he did, the mystery of why Alfons was here, why he’d been brought here to the monastery in the middle of the foreboding forest where young men entered and were often never were seen again, was revealed to him.
The high priest stood up from his throne, his erection cruelly upturned, his body covered in swirling patterns of curly black hair. He signaled to his two guards, who commenced working their cocks to rock hard too. He descended from the dais and walked across the chamber, through the center of the circle, where monks parted for him but then returned to their shuffling and chanting with renewed vigor and volume. He walked to the platform Alfons was bound on, mounted the steps, moved between Alfons’s spread thighs, grabbed Alfons’s legs under his knees to spread his legs further, thrust inside Alfons’s anus with a cruel, deep upward stroke of his cock, and immediately began plowing him hard. Alfons cried out in pain and violation, but he was trained to the cocks of men, and soon he settled down and took the cock as a trained whore would, without objection and moving his pelvis in rhythm to the stroke.
He also was familiar with this particular cruel cock.
The high priest moved a hand to Alfons’s cock and stroked him in synch with the stroking of the cock inside him. At some point he let the horned goat mask drop away and all was answered for Alfons. The high priest of Die Bruderschaft was, of course, Count Franz von Türbingen. Alfons wasn’t needed in Türbingen. He was needed right here, to serve a periodic ritual of Die Bruderschaft. And chances were good, since the legend was that young men entered the wood and didn’t leave it and there had been no rumors of the ritual at this monastery, that Alfons wouldn’t be leaving here either. He could only hope that it was because the sacrifices were turned into monks rather than they were fucked to death and dropped in the moat. Thanks to the drug in the wine, though, Alfons didn’t really care. He had been trained to the cocks of men and had come to want them inside him. He had been trained to take this cock; this cock had claimed his anal virginity.
On this night, in this ritual, he had the cock of every man in the chamber in him save that of the priest standing apart at the side and observing all. Von Türbingen plowed him until he brought Alfons to an ejaculation and then he released his seed deep inside the young man’s channel. He stood aside, and Alfonso found that the two guards had taken up position behind Von Türbingen, and each took his piece of Alfons. As they were done, they joined the circle, where the debauchery among the monks commenced. As each monk from the circle climbed the platform, he tossed off his black habit, fucked Alfons, and then joined a group fuck in the circle. As the ritual advanced fewer monks in the circle were wearing black habits and more were writhing around on the floor having at each other. The ritual was over when no one in the chamber save the silent observer was wearing a black habit and all other men were sexually exhausted–Alfons no less than any of the others.
There was some sort of closing ceremony that Alfons was too far gone to follow and then the monks were donning their habits again, Alfons’s escort released him from the frame, and he was carried back to his cell.
In the night, Alfons’s own moans causing him to slowly awaken, as the drugs wore off and the reality of having taken the cocks of so many men began to catch up with him, Alfons felt the weight of yet another man cover him. Alfons tried to roll from under the man covering him and he did make it to the floor and a step toward the closed cell door, but a strong grip latched onto his wrist and drew him back to the platform, His body completely conquered, Alfons could do nothing but moan his capture. Laying Alfons on his belly on the quilt-covered stone platform, the towering figure tossed off his black habit–but not his mask–stretched out on top of Alfons, skewered him, and covered and fucked the young man until exhaustion and sleep had overtaken Alfons.
* * * *
Alfons had no idea if someone was aiding him for some unknown reason or if this was a game the monks were playing and that he’d be captured and put through the ritual again–possibly fucked to death this time. When he woke, he found he was alone and that the cell door was open a crack. It was still dark out. He scurried down the cloister to the sound of silence throughout the monastery, expecting to be caught and toyed with at any moment.
He had no trouble finding where the old mare was stabled. He had no trouble lowering the drawbridge. The mare was more than happy to be leaving the monastery. Once outside the monastery walls, he mounted the mare. He had escaped–at least for now. The effect of the sudden release of nervous tension combined with the exhausting ordeal he’d been through, though, caused him to collapse into an exhausted coma across the neck of the horse. When he woke again, he was on the edge of the forest but just outside it. He was lying on the ground next to the mare, which was grazing in a meadow.
It took him several minutes to realize that the mare had brought him back out of the forest in the direction of Rottenburg, not on the other side, where he’d been heading–not to Türbingen. There was a moment of panic when he thought that he wasn’t where he was supposed to be–that both his master and Count Franz had determined that he would arrive in Türbingen at the count’s side today. Then at least snatches of the previous night’s events, rising into his consciousness through what had been a drugged haze at the time, alerted him that there had been no intention of him arriving in Türbingen. All along the count, who also was the High Priest of Die Bruderschaft–the Brotherhood–had only meant him to reach as far as the monastery.
What was he to do now? He didn’t want to go back to the monastery or even to try to get around it. There was no reason to go to Türbingen. But as far as he knew both the count and his master in Rottenburg would be looking for him–with intent to do him harm. He know now why young men disappeared in the forest of Höllewald. Who was to say that his master hadn’t knowingly supplied young men for Die Bruderschaft ritual in the past?
He raised his head and looked around. There, in the near distance, was a small town–Missinger, he realized. And in Missinger was Paul, the priest he’d lain with at the waterfall, the man who had asked him to return to Missinger with him.
Paul would give him shelter–at least until Alfons could decide where to go from here. Paul had told him just to ask for the village priest and he’d be led to Paul. He did that when he rode into Missinger and he was sent to a church, with a cottage next to it–the rectory. No one answered the door at the cottage, but Alfons had nowhere else to go that he could think of at the moment. So he tied the mare to a fence post and let her graze on what little grass there was in the plot in front of the cottage and he wearily lowered himself to the cottage stoop.
Paul, riding into the village on his own horse, saw Alfons from a distance. He pulled his horse to a stop. Alfons hadn’t seen him yet. The priest turned to the side to check his saddlebag–to ensure that the black monks’ habit and the gold horned goat mask were well hidden in his saddlebag where Alfons wouldn’t see them before he could get them hidden in the cottage. Then he formed a beatific smile on his face and resumed riding toward the cottage, ready to heartily welcome his young prey.
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