Eventide by Celia Kyle Page A

underground, for there was no further trail for him to follow. He’d been taught that all streams flow into rivers which then flow to the sea. His manor overlooked a vast coastal expanse, the forest and the fields of his subjects flanking the rear of his keep.
    He enjoyed the view from his home. Not the sunrise, though it was beautiful. Not the picturesque women with their babies strapped to their backs as they tended their pigs, nor the hard, lean bodies of the fishermen putting out their nets.
    He looked forward to the visage of the pearl divers which he could watch from his bed. Seven nubile, pure, golden-skinned young men and women—any one of whom he could take to him with a single command. For he was the prince.
    But taking any one or two of them to him would not be as enjoyable as the voyeuristic pleasures he received as he watched them frolic, their round bosoms, thick uncut members and fleshy posteriors flashing like dolphins at play as they dove into the oyster beds.
    His hand moving against his shaft, he reveled in their dance at the end of their dive. Sisters, drying each other’s hair, brothers drying sisters’ hair, brothers drying their own long, brown limbs, dancing on the bluff in the afternoon sun. More than once he’d spilled his royal seed at the sight.
    Lin sighed as he reclined against a moss-covered rock, warming his hands before his low-banked fire. He’d miss the pearl divers and their dance the next morning. They were his breakfast—just as the washer women were his lunch and the postulants in their garden, his tea.
    Each late night feast brought a bevy of courtesans and wenches to his father’s table. Any one of them would be overjoyed to have her belly filled with a future king.
    Lovely to look at; oft-times, delightful to touch, he was careful not to take his flirtations too far lest he sire bastard children upon these eager women. Bastard children who might someday over power him and seize his throne. It had been done before—and in his own lineage. Children poisoning their father and king to usurp the throne. That would never happen to him.
    Thereby, though surrounded by willing women eager to share his bed, the prince remained untried. A virgin—unknown by women.
    His whipping boy had leaned over a settee for him a time or thrice—so he knew what pleasures awaited him between the thighs of a woman—but the fear instilled in him by his father of usurpers and warmongers hell-bent on taking over the kingdom had kept him from enjoying the company of fairer sex.
    The odd poke at the stable hand or other willing youth brought only physical satisfaction, not true happiness. Even when he closed his eyes and pulled on the long hair of his page as the young man knelt before him and pleasured him orally, he could not envision the soft lips of a woman around his member. The soft lips of one woman in particular. She was his dessert and aperitif and midnight snack all rolled into one shapely, sumptuous meal. Yet, he had never spoken more than a few words in passing to her.
    There was no sweeter treat for Prince Lin than watching the backside of the comely garden-corner wench digging in the soil, a bright sun behind her, making her thin linen dress appear more paper lantern than cloth. She was truly blessed with all the womanly bounty God, in His infinite wisdom had seen to bestow upon the fairer sex.
    Skin like mahogany; hair as a black as the ravens of the old god, Odin. Eyes a piercing green that smiled like a proud house cat whenever she came by with her beetroots and turnips. And her voice! The magical song of her voice as it called, “two a penny” was more enthralling to him than all the sonnets composed by royal musicians at his birth.
    The garden corner wench had parents of low caste. The man of the house created the compost for all the gardens in the realm. A very special humus—the dark matter necessary for the fertility of the earth. A fertilizer made from the faithful dead. He