its-whump - Tumblr blog

its-whump · 8 months ago

Text

Bluebeard's Pet Part II

part one

This is a whumpy retelling of the folk/fairytale figure of Bluebeard in three parts. It replaces Bluebeard's new wife with a male "pet" (slave/concubine). It takes place in an indeterminate year in a fictional medieval Europe.

cw: slavery, pet whump, slave auction, stocks, power imbalance, language barriers, gruesome elements like torture, execution, and draconian policies throughout, whipping, sexually explicit scenes, dubcon because of social status, light “knifeplay” (non diegetic bdsm), alcohol consumption, slight praise kink

Part Two: The Golden Cup

Slowly, Luca began to feel safe with the Baron, even alone. Especially alone. He liked sitting at the councils for an hour or two, but almost no one spoke in English at those meetings and some of the people who approached the table glanced at Luca like his presence was an insult to them personally.

Alone, Baron Illés welcomed Luca’s tentative warmth without taking any invitation any further than it was meant. After that first blunt conversation about the role of a “pet”, Luca had been worried he would never be used to that sort of open frankness. Was it true what the priests had always said, that the countries of the east were filled with libertines and impious women? An instinctively cautious part of him feared the Baron would simply take what he wanted and tell him it was custom here. Don’t be prude, he might say, or more in his style; you’re more English than you look, aren’t you? He’d never felt like one of them in that land until he’d been taken away.

But the Baron never touched him more than a brief, nearly reverent touch to his hair or his face, or in returning any physical closeness that Luca initiated. This made him bolder as well as hungrier, and soon he found himself inching closer to the nobleman whenever he could, hoping to be met with one of those swordsman’s arms around his shoulders or about his waist. If it was a deliberate tactic of winning him over, he admitted it was working.

Best of all was the Baron’s praise, which he gave easily whenever Luca came closer on his own or initiated some new form of contact. “There now,” he would say, pleased but never lascivious. “Good. Here you are.”

After his years being largely ignored at Thistledown, unless he was being snapped at to do something differently, and weeks of casual abuse by slavers he couldn’t understand, words of encouragement directed into his ear in the kindest English had a profound effect. He was almost ashamed of it, but he couldn’t stop seeking it— like a drunk being poured another cup of strongwine. Often accompanying this praise was a chaste, dizzying kiss pressed to his hair.

One evening, the Baron asked for a lock of it. He had to go on a short trip to the north, he said, and it might be a fighting sort of trip, if some intel proved true. He would like to wear a lock of that beautiful dark hair of Luca’a in a silk pouch around his neck, under his kaftan, if he found himself in a battle. It was good luck, after all. Flattered, Luca consented. The Baron pulled a curved dagger from a hilt at his belt, and motioned for him to come closer. The golden hilt shone and flickered like a dragons hoard in the firelight.

Ah. Something alluringly wicked about being asked to come closer to a man holding a drawn blade. He thought the Baron was able to sense this delight in him, this preclusion to a certain kind of sinfulness. He remembered the invitation to bite when he was in those humiliating stocks, and the wink the Baron had given him when he said he wouldn’t. That was their agreement. Good treatment and good behavior, and from that stemmed this strange trust, this courtship.

He knew a slave once that had been indomitable- feral in his refusal to obey a single request or command. Luca had asked him once, after he’d been beaten to a pulp by the master and a young, zealous priest, why he would not simply pretend to submit— especially when it was a small matter. Why would he not pick his battles as the rest of them did? Was he not exhausted of it? But the slave said he’d rather die than give them any satisfaction. He would rather be beaten to death like a mule than be complicit to anyone who dared say that had enslaved him, be it the master or the priests or the King of England himself. He did not share that conviction. True, he’d never loved the priests or the master, he cared not for the King, and the slavers who had arrived armed on the island in the blue fog of dawn would never have a sliver of his love, or anything but obedience that comes from powerlessness, and fear.

With the Baron, it was a different sort of dance. The more he learned of who he was dealing with, the more interested he became in submitting to him out of curiosity, and interest. The more curiosity and trust he showed, the more interested the Baron became in him. In that regard, they were made for each other.

He went and sat where he was beckoned, on a great carved bench by the hearth, turning towards the Baron and tucking his legs up under him so they were facing one another. He was trembling, which he attributed to old treatment and old instincts, days when he was kicked and beaten like a dog until he felt like one. The Baron’s eyes were warm and calm. “Just a lock of hair,” he said, sensing keenly his new pet’s discomfort. “I won’t hurt you.”

His heart pounded wildly, like the hare, as Constantin Illés lifted that arabesque curved blade, dragging it lightly and harmlessly along his loose linen shirt. He could not hide the way his breathing became shallow and more labored, his lips parting at the scrape of the blade against his collarbone. He knew this man would not cut him unless he meant to, and if he meant to he could cleanly cleave out his heart in a matter of moments, like the huntsman in the old fairy tale.

“Good,” the Baron crooned, praising his stillness. One little word, good, but Luca felt it between his legs and nearly whimpered aloud.

The Baron’s eyes never left his as the blade made its way lovingly, slowly, up his neck, past his artery, and kissed the unblemished beauty of his face, cool and flat. He was caressing him, Luca realized, holding his face with the dagger like he liked to do with his hands.

“You’re forgiving me this indulgence, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” Luca said with eyes low.

“I thought so.”

The Baron reached his free hand and lifted a lock of Luca’s hair up away from the rest to cut it. The blade made a little hiss, so sharp it did not even pull as it separated the lock from his scalp. He stared at the dark, curling softness in the Baron’s palm.

“Now I will take you with me,” he said matter-of-factly. “And we can speak to each other under the full moon.”

The full moon, he realized with a start of dread. The Baron would be away when he was supposed to tell him his final decision. He hoped the offer still stood. As far as he knew, it did. He would have to tell him now, or wait. The high of fear and arousal the blade of the dagger had given him was fading, and left a hollow space in his chest.

“It’s almost full now,” he said cautiously. “Do you still want me?”

It was coy, girlish. He cringed later to remember it. But the Baron took it correctly as an invitation. “I do,” he answered with a grin, tucking the lock of hair into a green pouch of silk. “You have only to allow me.”

Standing together in the middle of his ancestral chambers, the Baron stripped Luca slowly of his clothes, as if unwrapping a present, with the utmost patience of a circling wolf. Luca panted and squirmed under the heavy hands that roved over his hot skin, quickening him to the sort of desire he’d only thought of in private, guilty moments when his mind did not lend to images of bare breasted nymphs by the creek or even of a stable boy his own age he’d exchanged clumsy touches with once, but of this— of lying down for the master, the Lord. Of being a possession, and being possessed, not as a slave but as an object of desire. He could imagine it, but the real thing was startling.

Still fully dressed, the Baron kissed him like one would a wife, on the mouth, lowering his rough beard to kiss his chest and his belly, to nuzzle between his legs and kiss his naked inner thighs until he was moaning. When the Baron undressed it was swift and automatic, the way a knight removes a breastplate and helmet. He was just as at ease naked as he was clothed in rich silks and furs, no less a noble in his every blink and breath. He asked Luca if he’d done this particular act before and Luca answered truthfully, no, though he would have had the good sense to lie if he had.

“I won’t hurt you,” said the Baron, and not for the first time that night. “I promise.”

At this Luca blushed so deeply he felt the heat like a fever on his chest as well as his face. There was oil, and fingers, as he knew there might be if he was lucky, and then the act itself, the consummation he had agreed to under the last full moon.

“May I?”

“Yes.”

No matter the civility the Baron treated him with in the light of day, no matter the emerald Hydras or the anklets or the trays of fruit and honeycomb, this was a feral act— animal and base. It was so illicit, so condemning and yet so privately desired that he soon felt the pleasure that lived just underneath pain; he felt both speared and crushed and wondered how he’d ever live with anything less than that ever again, that overwhelming fulfillment. The Baron did not have to ask if he’d hurt him, for he knew he hadn’t, they both knew it. Luca finished with a whimper and a cry, almost shamefully, from a light but persistent touch. But the Baron was pleased, and praised him low in his ear as Luca came over his hand.

He slept in the Baron’s bed that night, a mahogany four poster like a great sleigh.

In the morning, a servant came with fresh water in a basin. She saw Luca under the master's covers and froze for a moment before catching herself and setting the basin in its place on the dresser.

He would have expected her to be a little scandalized, maybe. But it wasn’t that. Scandal or plain surprise had not been in her eyes. It was fear. They’d locked with his and he’d felt it as instinctually and purely as he knew it was the light of the sun coming through the thick drawn curtains and not the moon.

Who had she been afraid for, if not herself?

Before he left on his trip on horseback with a sword at his hip, the Baron gave Luca a thick set of skeleton keys. He held them out halfway, almost playfully, making Luca reach close and take them.

Until that moment, Luca had not considered the fact that he, a pet, would be entrusted with anything in this great man’s absence. There were others more credentialed and titled than he, surely, but maybe the Baron didn’t want those people having the keys to all his personal compartments. The status of pet here was more respected than he'd thought, farther from slave than he'd ever imagined.

The heavy and intricate keys were of varying sizes, some small as to open the drawer of a cabinet or some ornate box, and some as large as Lucas' hand from wrist to fingertip. His master told him these were the keys to every room in the castle, every lockbox and secret compartment, from the Baron’s private offices to the few old prison cells in the dark bowels of the castle he said he had converted to wine cellars.

Here was the key to the kitchens and a key to the stables once it was shut up after dark. Luca was uncomfortably aware that any slave or pet planning an escape would envy the keys to the stable after dark. The Barons' knowing eyes seemed to read this very thought from him so he had to turn to the keys and pretend to be mesmerized by the teeth of one in particular. He seemed to possess an uncanny ability to read people, Luca thought, which might be why the servants all scurried from him like frightened mice and hurried about their duties in the day like they couldn’t wait to be out of those chambers.

But Luca had nothing to hide. He had no intention of escaping a home better than any he’d ever had, and very dreamed of having. The Baron loved him, he thought for the first time, and felt a surge of love returned for him. That was a dangerous thought, but he’d had it, hadn’t he? It could not be mistaken for anything else.

The last key on the ring looked older than the others, as if it were moldering or barnacled from being at the bottom of the sea in a shipwreck for the last sixty years. The Baron hesitated when he came to it, looking like he might say something but deciding against it.

“What is that one?” Luca asked. He’d told him the rest, painstakingly. Why leave out the last key?

“Oh,” said the Baron. “It wouldn’t much interest you, I’m afraid. It’s a little room at the end of the east wing, past the old chapel. There’s the most beautiful stained glass in the chapel, that might please you. But the other... it’s nothing. Cobwebs and the hobbies of rich, eccentric men. In fact… why don’t we agree that you simply won’t go to that room? That would be best. I try to respect your privacy and your wishes, and I know you will respect mine.”

He left the ugly key on the ring.

While the Baron was gone, Luca ventured to the nearby village. He’d been in most of the castle, the Bailey and the stable and the aviary. He wanted to see the people of this strange country, not servants or Lords but the people who owned shops and pulled carts and swept the steps of their homes every evening. He brought some money in a belt against his waist, tucked tightly to deter even the most skilled pickpockets. He doubted there would be as many in the little mountainside village as he’d heard there was in London, but he would hate to lose any of the Baron’s money and have nothing to show for it. He left his ring and his anklet in the castle, and dressed in the most modest linen clothes he could find.

The village center was lively at mid morning. It was a sunny June day and the snow caps on the blue mountains were almost gone entirely. He passed a church and a well, an outdoor market with stalls and booths, a post office with a coop of crooning and fluttering pigeons, and a number of residential apartments as well as a small inn that seemed to serve mostly as a pub for locals, even in the midday. There was no wall surrounding the village like there was the castle and the town within.

He was eating a soft boiled egg he bought from a booth, it’s yolk as orange as the flowers that dotted the hillsides and still warm, when he noticed a remarkable fountain in the middle of the square. It was white, cool marble, and had the now familiar Hydra carved into the side, one of the serpentine heads jutting out to serve as the fountain.

He approached to look at it more closely. On the lip of the fountain was a large golden cup. Puzzled, he looked around. No one was paying the golden cup any mind. On closer inspection, he noticed it was inlaid with a ruby on either side. He picked it up. It was heavy. Was it solid gold? Truly? Even just coated in gold, it had to be worth half of the town.

A girl came close to wash her hands in the stream of cold mountain water that came from the Hydra head.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Who does this cup belong to?”

The girl looked at him with wide eyes but shook her head. Likely she did not speak English.

“It belongs to all of us,” a woman responded in her place. She had come out from the tavern and looked a bit disheveled, with dark hair slipping slowly out of a kerchief on all sides. Her English was thickly accented, and she smelled of ale. She lifted the cup to fill it and took a demonstrative swig.

“I’ve never been somewhere where someone would not steal a gold cup from a public fountain.”

“Then you’ve never been in Hwenn.”

She was being coy, and he was curious to the point of annoyance with her coyness. “What keeps someone from stealing it? I don’t understand.”

Her playful smile dropped at his impatience. “I was going to get you a drink,” she muttered, gathering her dingey skirts and standing from the edge of the fountain. “Maybe give a pretty dance for a pretty boy. But you are rude.”

“I didn’t mean to be rude. I’m sorry.”

“There,” she pointed. “Go around church and see why no one steals golden cup.”

He followed where she had pointed, noticing two carrion birds high in the sky, flying their slow arcs like rangers of dead flesh. He turned the corner of the church and stopped fast.

Blood rushed to his ears leaving his feet rooted and heavy where they stood. The sunny June morning went as cold for him as if a dark shadow had blocked out the sun. He could no longer hear the din of shopkeepers or the chirping of birds, the creaking of the wheels on the cart that passed him.

Three men and a woman were nailed to crude wooden crosses on the side of the busy street. Dead. Their mouths hung open in echoes of screams, faces badly decomposed and eyes plucked out, likely by vultures or crows. Luca covered his face with his elbow when the warm breeze brought him the smell of death.

An old woman saw him staring at the bodies and shook her gray head, covered partly in a black shawl. She muttered something disapproving in a tongue he did not know. He turned away from the hideous display of corpses and into the inn.

It was cool, and relatively quiet inside. The rough beams of the ceiling were so low he had to duck a little at the entrance, but then it opened up a few more feet above his head.

He paid for an ale and drank it slowly, wishing it was the heady burgundy his master had in endless supply.

“You alright, lad?” asked the barkeep.

“He’s just seen the way they do justice in Hwenn,” laughed a man on the stool next to him. He shared Luca’s own accent. “I know that look. And I’ve never seen you around before. You come from some place were they throw thieves in jail to rot for six weeks, dont you? I come from a place like that. I admire how they do things here.”

“They were thieves?” Luca asked. “The ones on the crosses?”

“That's right. And the next thief that comes along will take one of their foul places. Sometimes they get to be almost skeletons, in the summer, before that happens. But someone always tries their luck. Don’t you think a gold cup out in the middle of town is a bit suspicious? Wouldn’t you think hey now, wait a minute, maybe I ought not to try and nab this here shiny piece of bait?”

“Who sets this bait?”

The barkeep gave the man a lingering look and walked away, tossing a dish rag over his shoulder.

“Do you know where you are, man?”

“Hwenn.”

“And who is the Baron of this fine fief, those in Hwenn are under?”

“Illés.”

“The Bluebeard Baron.” The man spread his hands. “No safer or fairer land than this.”

“Safer?” Luca repeated.

The man gave him a leveling look. “Murderers and rapists are boiled to death in a giant pot. They wheel it out special for that, it’s somewhere in the castle the rest of the time. Go fifty leagues from here. You’ll be robbed blind and left for dead in a ditch if there ain’t a wall around you, and even then. Not here. No. No one even takes the cup.” The man lowered his voice to a mumble for his next half-treasonous sentence. “The King ought to take a page from Bluebeard’s book, if you ask me.”

Luca slipped off the barstool, leaving half a cup of undrunk ale and heading back out into the sunshine. He felt drunk, but not from the weak tavern ale. He left the village and made his way back to the castle, where he climbed the many flights to the Baron’s chambers and fell asleep in his ancestral bed, sunsick and dazed. When he woke it was a dusty pink dusk, and fireflies lit the field below his window.

He took the ring of keys and began a thorough search of everywhere big enough to store a cauldron that was big enough to boil people inside of. He was getting more and more confident the man in the inn had been yanking his chain with every cellar and empty room he searched. There was no man-boiling cauldron. That was a story to scare misbehaving children with. Or naive foreigners like himself. In these days of growing reason and humane law, no one less than a King would be allowed to terrorize a fiefdom under such iron cruelty.

Something drew him on, through the last light of dusk and into full night. He carried a light with him, a torch from the wall that’s light was better than a lantern. He opened the door to what he assumed would be the last wine cellar, full of dusty bottles in their hundreds of slots. It was empty, except for a wooden platform on which sat a massive iron pot, bowl shaped like a witch’s cauldron and big enough to fit three grown men inside, black on the bottom from fire.

—

The Baron returned within the time frame promised. He brought Luca gifts from the northern regions he’d visited: a pale blue cloak lined in softest mink, barrels of the citrus fruits he’d mentioned missing from his long lost home (bought from a southern trader), and a seventeen key kalimba with a stag head painted around the sound hole.

“My pet,” the Baron held him tenderly, kissing his hair now even in front of the servants. “I’ve missed you, Luca.”

That evening, Luca plucked a gentle tune on the kalimba to steady his nerves as he thought of the question that had been burning in his mind for days. The song he remembered was long, and he couldn’t remember all the stanzas. He remembered a maiden growing jealous of a Knights affection for her fair younger sister, and drowning the younger girl in the river.

And he courted the eldest with diamonds and rings

Oleander yolling

The other he loved above all things,

Down by the waters rolling

“I went into Hwenn,” he said softly, still plucking the tune with his thumbs.

“Oh?”

“It was very nice.”

“Did you see the fountain?”

“It’s beautiful.”

“I’m going to build an amphitheater there this year.”

Music, art, theater. What sort of man cares for these things, brings them to other people, common people, even? The same man who has men and women crucified for petty theft?

“There were four corpses in the street,” he said in a rush, before his tongue became tied again. He ceased his song on the kalimba. “Thieves. Crucified thieves.”

The Baron frowned. He had peeled an orange in his large, deft hands and was pulling the flesh apart into sections to eat. Luca couldn’t help but think of the way the Baron liked to pull him apart thusly, teasing him to the edge of pleasure half a dozen times before letting him finish— a game they both enjoyed.

“Not likely thieves, then, if they were on the crosses. Murderers, maybe. Horse thieves, occasionally, but that’s a graver offense. If they were convicted of that they’d have been hanged. Possibly put on the crosses afterwards, that’s up to them.”

“Who?”

“Hwenn. The people. They like to do that to foreigners. They don’t like to do it to their own.”

“So the people put them up there? After they’re dead?”

“Did it bother you? I’m sorry if it did, pet.”

“No,” he said defensively. He wasn’t some naive bride who had never seen death before. “I just… I was told they were thieves. That they tried to steal that gold cup.”

The Baron laughed and ate a piece of fragrant orange. “That cup. They love that thing. One day it’ll get lifted in the night and taken where the winds may blow, but they’ve had it there for nigh on a year now.” He laughed again at the thought.

Luca laughed with him, partly at himself. Emboldened by the Baron’s easy demeanor, he added; “a man told me it was your doing. That you kept such order by crucifying petty thieves and… boiling men alive in the town square.”

The Baron’s face fell. He looked at him closely. “This rattled you a good deal, or you wouldn’t have repeated it to me.”

Luca shrugged. He supposed he deserved the loss of levity the conversation had taken. He had pushed too far. He’d nearly made a flat out accusation

”We are beset on all sides by enemies, Luca. I know you know this.”

He did not, specifically, but the Baron never tried to make him feel stupid.

“We have kept them at bay for two hundred years. Kept their armies and their customs and their God out of our land, battled them from the very steps of our kingdom, kept them from crossing the mountains. And what do we get for support from our Church? Our King?” He sighed. “Skepticism and a demand for more taxes. These enemies use every weapon at their disposal. One such weapon is not artillery or horses, but gossip. They start rumors. Priests, generals, Sultans, gossiping like old women until someone writes something in a book and then it is the truth for time immemorial. Is it the truth? What else did you hear?”

“That was hideous enough. I left.”

“Then you did not hear that I drink the blood of my enemies? That I steal their wives for my concubines and rape them, that I murder their children in front of them with venomous snakes?”

“No.” Luca had foolishly waded out of his depth, heedless to the strong current just past where he could reach. “No.”

“You will. In time, you will hear those stories too.” He raised the back of Luca’s right hand to his lips, his recently trimmed and oiled beard still scratching like bristles as he kissed it. “I hope you don’t dwell on such vicious propaganda. I know you have been through more in your time in England than you like to let on, but I would have you think on pleasant things now.”

Yet he looked into Luca’s eyes with that searing golden gaze that so disoriented unsuspecting envoys and dignitaries. “Hideous, you said. What do you think is the proper response to criminality in a land so precariously eastern as ours?”

Luca didn’t know if he meant ours as in his and his peoples, or ours as in you are a citizen now too. “You ask that of a slave?”

“You’re not a slave.”

Luca tilted his head, beseeching the Lord to leave him of answering anyway.

The Baron narrowed his eyes, not unkindly. “Are you afraid?” he asked, and his tone had gentled.

What could he say? “I don’t know.”

"Well," the Baron said, and offered him the last slice of orange as gently as if he were feeding sugar water to a hummingbird. "You needn't be."

In the Baron's bed, Luca dreamt of the Hydra, its many serpentine mouths dripping green venom that burned the earth like Greek fire where it fell.

This retelling initially drew on Angela Carter’s short story The Bloody Chamber (her own Bluebeard retelling) as well as folklore surrounding Vlad Dracula (specifically the golden cup). Luca’s kalimba song is a very old one with many iterations, but the version I’m referencing is Two Sisters by Emily Portman

@starfields08000

72 notes · View notes