Honey is Sweeter than Blood (4 page)

Act Six: Wounded

Spring has come and turned feverishly lush, becoming summer, and the kingdom is crowded to its borders with life and fertility.  Even now, servants are assembling a first child for Tristan and Iseult.  And yet, this brings him no joy.  He has been abject, as if mourning a death, ever since learning that his uncle King Mark has married the princess Isolde.

One day, he reluctantly accompanies his father-in-law the Duke and others on a hunt.  Anything to get away from the tiresome ecstasies of his bride.  For when she is not brow-drilling him, raping his already mutilated brain, whose thorns can not compete with her steely teats, she is brow-beating him, accusing him, mocking him.  She is well aware of the reason he was banished from his own palace.  Fully aware of his crime.  And she has noted how much more glum he has become since learning of the marriage of Isolde.  Iseult is jealous, contemptuous   …but determined to be the one who owns him.  Her lust for him is a triumphant ritual of dominance.  It is as though he is a prize she has won from the other princess in a war of passion.  He can’t imagine that his wife loves him any more than he does her.

The hunt takes place at twilight, when the larger and more challenging animals of the kingdom begin to venture forth on their own hunts.  Tonight the musk of skunk is heavy on the thick summer air.  But it is an opossum they encounter, and which they surround and lunge at with their weapons.  The Duke lets his fellows make the first lunges, so that the great white beast will be adequately wounded before he administers the final thrust with his darning needle.

But the opossum fights wildly, its fleshy tail whipping across the Duke and several others, scattering their light bodies.  With various needles and nails hanging from its bleeding flanks, the animal rages away from its tormentors by charging directly at Tristan.

A long sharp splinter of wood has been lashed to both his wrists with twine, so that he might use it as a spear, but he has not thought to really take part in the killing tonight.  Thus, it does not even occur to him to raise his weapon until it is too late.  Maddened by its pain and frenzied with fear, the ghost-like animal seizes Tristan in its jaws and front paws and begins savaging him madly.

His new black garments are shredded, tattered by sharp fangs and claws.  An arm is ripped from him.  His tweezers drop from his loins to the forest floor.  And his withered chestnut brain is dislodged, rolls away into the dense vegetation and is lost from sight.

The Duke and the others have righted themselves, and attack the briefly preoccupied beast from behind.  It releases its struggling prey but rolls upon his body, trampling and crushing it, while it thrashes horribly in its protracted death throes, the Duke’s long aluminum lance deeply embedded in its side.  But as its spasms grow less violent, become more like a diminishing succession of electrified jolts, the others are able to get close enough to Tristan to pull his ravaged body clear.

They all know, him most of all, that his wounds are mortal.

He is lifted so that he might be borne back to the palace.  He is too weak to ask them to remain and locate the lost chestnut.

Act Seven: The White Flag

The blood of the opossum is painted on Tristan’s pallid face, his head propped up so that blood can be poured into it like a bowl, but these efforts only prolong the inevitable.  He is dying, and this knowledge frees him; he becomes bold.  By feebly scratching in the dirt, he tells his servant to summon to his death bed Isolde the Beautiful, wife of his uncle King Mark.

If it is her intention to come, she is to send the messenger back to Tristan bearing a white flag in his arms.  If she will not come to his side, the servant is to return carrying a flag of black.  Then he will know whether or not to cling to these last shreds of life.

Tristan may be dying, and thus emboldened, but the servant is not nearly so free.  Afraid to comply with Tristan’s wishes behind his wife’s back, the servant makes known to Iseult the final request of her husband.

Iseult is enraged, but her rage burns cold even in this summer swelter.

Wildly waving two leafy twigs in a kind of semaphore, she commands the servant to fashion a flag of black.

After waiting a suitable amount of time, so that it will seem he has indeed traveled to the far palace of King Mark, the servant enters the bed chamber of Tristan carrying a stick to which has been tied a scrap of black plastic trash bag.  The servant stands at the foot of the cigar box bed nervously, as if awaiting Tristan’s next command.

But there is no final command.  Tristan simply lowers his head back.  His eyes are still bright in his cracked, blood-caked white face, and his lips are still curled in a great smile, but his soul rolls out of him as his desiccated brain has already rolled out of him.  As the chestnut became lost amongst the rich flora of the kingdom, so his soul vanishes into a greater, invisible kingdom to which only spirit, not matter, is discarded.

It is as if a hand has been withdrawn from inside a puppet.  Tristan is no longer a prince, in his dismembered state not even a doll.  And yet despite this, he is loved.  Despite his wife’s betrayal, word of his death reaches the palace of Isolde the Beautiful.

Act Eight: Inanimated

Though both King Mark and Iseult protest, Isolde insists that she must go to the side of her fallen, former lover.  She can not be dissuaded or denied.  Reluctantly, the King accompanies her, as he feels obligated to pay his respects to his disrespectful nephew.  But when they arrive at the impressive toilet-palace of the Duke, King Mark allows his wife to first go to Tristan’s side alone.  He is heart-broken by Isolde’s greater love for his nephew, but loves her enough to grant her this private mourning.

Even the servant beside the bed leaves her alone with her suffering and the still form of her lover, lying in a cigar box packed with layers of leaves and plastic bubble wrap (it was one of Iseult’s pleasures to make love with him upon this material so that it popped beneath them).  Isolde nearly swoons at the sight of him.  The unabsorbed animal blood crusted to his grinning handsome face.  And that poor, empty, empty skull…

She kneels at his side, gently stroking his cheek with her pink plastic hand, recalling how his face vibrated in nervousness the first time she touched him thus.

She will never love her great husband as she loved this humble being.

Since learning of his demise, Isolde the Beautiful has been secretly planning to dismantle herself violently by using her scissored sex organs and her lover’s tweezers, so that she might join him in death, if such a thing is possible, or cast herself into oblivion to escape her torment if it is not…but she finds his gleaming tool has been torn away.

No matter.  She is strong.  She is a princess.  Her will is powerful.  She knows she needs no weapon, ultimately, to achieve her aim.

Rising from her kneeling position, she lies down inside the cigar box, upon the very body of her lover, and slowly withdraws her existence.  Unwills the animation of these gathered scraps of pretty junk.  Her lovely blue glass torso becomes an empty perfume bottle.  Her porcelain head like that of a marionette with its strings cut by its own hand.

They are found that way.  They are remembered that way.  There are a few who resent them, betrayed by them.  But for most of those who dwell in the three palaces of the kingdom, they become legend.  Their love inspires.  It lives on in the bodies of the inspired.  It lives on without vessels to carry it, as a fable and an ideal.

Their parts are not reused, recycled.  They are not buried together, but they are both buried.  And part of the legend that survives like a thing that can not be killed is this: that even now, those buried pieces are reanimating themselves under the soil, the leaves.  He, finding new pieces in that soil to complete his sundered body.  Even now, so it is told, they are working their way toward each other through the very flesh of the kingdom.  Slowly, arduously, crossing the great distance between their respective palaces.  It may take years.  It may take until those greater beings who live beyond the rusted fence have themselves all passed into the earth.

But such is the patience of immortals.

Clouds and Rain

The naked man stood before the plate glass window, its curtains fully drawn back to unveil the nightscape of Hong Kong.  The window was like an aquarium through which the naked man gazed into the ocean’s deepest depths…black, but filled
with the alluring light of life.  The phosphorescence of hungry creatures.  Like most great cities, at night Hong Kong looked to be a city made of volcanic glass and scintillating jewels.  But that was the glamour of midnight, the painted gloss of a prostitute.  By day, the city showed its ulcers and tumors.

But the flesh of the naked man held no such imperfections.  Against the window, he appeared to be floating in space, some serene god.  His short black hair was still slicked back from his shower, beads of water still clinging to him like dew.  Behind him, Cheung watched one bead wind down the man’s lower back, and vanish at the cleft of his small, hard buttocks.

It was a testimony to Kot’s trust in Cheung that he would turn his naked back to him, knowing that Cheung had a pistol holstered beneath his jacket.  And it was a testimony to Cheung’s skill at his job that Kot would have made him his personal bodyguard, not knowing that Cheung was an undercover agent…a constable with the Royal Hong Kong Police.

It was beginning to rain.  The first drops pattered hard against the glass wall, like bullets attempting to pierce it.  They trickled down, resembling the bead of water Cheung had watched run down Kot’s back.

“Clouds and rain,” Kot murmured in Cantonese.  Cheung could see the man’s reflected face, saw him smiling.  Clouds and rain was Chinese slang for the sex act.

A half hour ago, a handsome male prostitute had left Kot’s apartment.  Cheung finally
spoke up about the man.

“It isn’t wise to bring…guests into your own home, Kot.  You shouldn’t make yourself vulnerable.”

“What do you propose, Cheung? That I become celibate?” A soft crackle as Kot drew on his cigarette.  He took a savoring, almost sensual approach to smoking.  “My career has its dangers.  But I’m not willing to give up the pleasures of living.” He held his cigarette in front of his face in pointed contemplation.  “This could kill me, too.” He shrugged.

Although he masqueraded as Kot’s bodyguard, Cheung truly was a bodyguard of sorts.  He didn’t want any of Kot’s potential enemies to kill him…not until he had used the man to get closer to his bosses in the 24K gang, as it was called…the most powerful of Hong Kong’s Triads.

“You should at least take just one trusted lover.  Not strangers each time,” Cheung persisted.  His own voice sounded distant to him.  He found his eyes drawn again to Kot’s bare ass, smooth and dully shining with the light of the room.  He imagined the flesh was still warm from the hot shower.  He imagined the flesh was as soft as a satin pillow.  In his trousers his penis had roused, an agitated snake hiding in its den.  Cheung wrenched his eyes from the man’s nude figure.  He forced them up again to Kot’s reflected face.  And his heart flinched when he saw Kot’s eyes on his in the glass.  Kot was smiling again.

“I should take just one trusted lover, eh, Cheung? One man I trust—as I trust you, for instance?”

“Yes,” Cheung said, and cleared his voice.  “One you trust as you trust me.”

“You’re jealous, aren’t you? Jealous of my guests? Is that the real source of your concern?”

Cheung felt his face flush with hot blood.  “No…of course not,” he stammered.  “Like I told you, I’m only…”

He broke off.  Kot had turned to face him.  Now his naked front was plainly displayed.  Cheung had briefly seen the man without clothing, in recent weeks, as Kot had come to trust him more and more.  But never so blatantly.  Not like this.

Kot took hold of his own scrotum and rolled his balls in his palm languidly, running his thumb up over his slumbering penis.  “You like to look at me, don’t you, Cheung? You needn’t be embarrassed.  I’m not embarrassed, obviously, am I? Do you think I didn’t recognize right away that you like men as I do?”

Cheung swallowed hard.  He felt more naked than Kot was—as if it were not his attraction to men that had been found out, dragged into the light, but his deception.  Yet despite his desperate discomfort, he couldn’t help but stare, his heart thudding, as Kot coaxed his prick awake, now concentrating more effort there, stroking it, pulling at it, until it strained alert and eager, a fleshy spike thrusting up from a patch of glinting black hair.

Cheung’s own cock now tented out the material of his loose-fitting white trousers.  He had to reach into them to readjust the painful angle of his erection; there was no sense in further denial of his arousal.  But with his hand on his cock, he found it impossible to let go of it.  He stroked it as Kot fondled his own, across the carpeted room from him.

“It feels good, doesn’t it?” Kot cooed, his grin lopsided, boyish and mischievous in a way Cheung had found winning from the start.  “Yeah…rub your cock.  Make it hard.  It feels so good.”

Cheung swallowed harder yet, and let out an
imperceptible moan.

Kot gave a nod toward Cheung’s body.  “Take your clothes off.” He made no attempt to approach the other man across the room.  “It’s only fair that I should see you, too.”

Cheung was beyond questioning the professionalism, the ethics of his actions.  He was not celibate, either…like Kot, did not believe in forgoing the pleasures of life.  Without further hesitation, he removed his white jacket, tossed it across a chair.  He slipped out of the harness of his holster, and carefully draped that across the jacket, his passion too insistent now for him to be alarmed at his own vulnerability.  He next unbuttoned his shirt to bare his smooth, hairless chest, unzipped his pants so that his cock dropped free like a heavy tree falling, so anxious was it to point toward the object of its desire.  Cheung stepped out of his shoes, the trousers, his underpants, until he stood naked across from Kot like a second reflection of the handsome gangster.

Gazing at each other, Kot grinning and Cheung’s face slack as if he were the stunned victim of his own craving, the two men continued to work their tumescent organs.  But Cheung could take this game no longer.  Still clutching his cock in his fist,
he at last broke forward and approached the other man.  It didn’t matter that the window was unveiled behind Kot, that the whole of Hong Kong seemed to be watching with its myriad, glittering diamond eyes.  All that mattered was to touch the naked flesh of
the smiling gangster.

Kot reached out his left hand invitingly, put it on Cheung’s hip and drew him closer.  Cheung put both his hands on Kot’s shoulders as if to support himself, his trembling legs feeling as insubstantial as smoke.  Now Kot wrapped both his hands around both their veiny poles, and tugged at them, the shafts rubbing against each other even as Kot’s strong hands rubbed them.  Tears of clear lubricant wept from the slits in their shiny twin heads.

“I want to fuck you,” Cheung whispered.  “Please let me fuck you.  I want to be inside you.”

“I’m the boss, remember?” Kot replied, grinning.  “I should fuck you, shouldn’t I?”

Cheung wrapped his arms around Kot’s back, and hungrily clamped his mouth over the other’s as if to suck the very life essence from him.  Kot let Cheung’s tongue into his mouth, and twined his own around it until the slick organs were joined together like those other organs below.

Kot at last broke his lips free and pressed them into Cheung’s ear.  “You can fuck me this time.  Next time I fuck you.  Just don’t tell the boys, okay? I’m supposed to be the dominant one here.” His voice had a wink in it.

And with that, Kot turned again to face out the window.  He braced his palms flat against the glass like suction cups, and spread his legs far apart, arching his back to thrust out his rear.  To Cheung, it looked unsettlingly as if Kot were allowing himself to be frisked.  Cheung blotted the thought from his mind.  He blotted the fact that he was a police officer from his mind…and stepped up behind the handsome gangster.

Kot winced at the first penetration, let out a little grunt and glanced over his shoulder.  Cheung was afraid to press on, almost withdrew, but Kot blurted, “No.  Don’t stop.  Don’t be afraid.” In more of a whisper he asked, “Have you ever fucked a man before?”

“Never you,” Cheung whispered back.

Cheung bored his way deeper into the other’s flesh, slowly and gently, until at last his entire shaft was skewered up into the molten interior of Kot’s body.  He was able to withdraw now, press in again, withdraw, press in, as his shaft became naturally moistened.  The slick sound of this slow piston action only heightened his intoxication.  He put his hands on Kot’s hips and gave the strokes a little more force, withdrew a bit more fully before plunging in again, until his balls were audibly slapping against the other’s.

Kot’s palms squeaked against the glass but he held his crucified pose.  The sound made Cheung look up from the taut, bunched muscles in Kot’s back, out at the city again.  What if there were someone out there with a telescope? Tourists with binoculars? Or even other investigators like himself with binoculars, staking out Kot’s apartment on their own?

It didn’t matter.  Nothing mattered.  Corruption was rampant amongst the Hong Kong police in this year of 1990.  It was seven long years before the city would revert to Chinese rule, and the Triads had not yet really felt the challenge of that day of reckoning, still controlled the city like a second government.  Or, more accurately, like a linked parasitic part of the government, their power was so deeply rooted and entwined.  It was said that at least 35 percent of the police force was either affiliated with the Triads or actual members of the gangs themselves.  Cheung was not one of these men.  He had never taken money from a Triad.  He had never been corrupted.  It was why he had been trusted to become part of the dangerous undercover investigation team.

And yet here he was…stripped naked, fucking a member of the 24K gang in the ass before the whole of the city.  And it didn’t matter.  Nothing mattered, but the secret heat that sheathed the thrusting sword of his cock.  The feel of Kot’s smooth hips in his crushing fingers.  The carnal smells rising up from them.  The slick sound of their joining.  Cheung watched a bead of sweat trickle down Kot’s lower back, become lost in the crack of his spread ass.

The rain now pounded against the vast window, gaining in force also, until it blurred the whole city into running, melting, multi-colored light.  Cheung watched their joint reflections in the glass; Kot squinting in intensity, his cock bobbing crazily with each smacking thrust into his rear…Cheung’s own face, clenched with an almost severe determination.  It was as if they were wrestling with each other.  Locked in a desperate battle to wring the passion out of themselves.

Abruptly Cheung dug his fingers harder into Kot’s waist and drove in one last thrust like a killing coup de grace, launching his sperm as if firing a gun into the very guts of the handsome gangster.

*     *     *

“Have you ever been to the Walled City, Cheung?”

The two men lay in Kot’s wide bed, Cheung bent over the gangster’s belly; with a slow, dreamlike rhythm he sucked on Kot’s saliva-slick cock.  Kot stroked the policeman’s head absentmindedly, as if petting a favorite dog.  Cheung only shook his head slightly in reply to Kot’s question, not releasing the erection from his mouth as he did so.

“I was born in the Walled City,” Kot went on.  “I fought my way out of it like you would fight your way out of hell.  My father died in the Walled City.  He never saw me make my success.  Never saw this apartment, the way I dress, the places I eat.  But neither has my mother, and she is still alive.  Do you know, Cheung, that some people never set foot out of the Walled City, not once in their entire lives? My mother is one of those people.  As much a hell as it is, it is the only world she knows.  She’s frightened to leave it.”

Cheung wasn’t lying; he had never entered the infamous Kowloon Walled City.  For many years, few policemen had.  It was a relatively small spot, but a place like all of Calcutta concentrated into a fraction of the space; it was the most densely populated spot on earth.  The buildings of this hive-like slum had been added onto and reconfigured over the years so that they formed almost one unified structure, a nightmare fortress, a crazy human honeycomb in which the sky could no longer be seen and day was indistinguishable from midnight.  In its single-room factories and miniature sweat shops were manufactured children’s toys for export to glamorous America, and edibles for the posh Hong Kong hotels.  For many years, the spot’s ownership had been in dispute between the Chinese and the British, leaving possession of the Walled City open to the Triads, who were its only government as such.

But finally, an effort was underway to begin cleaning up this blight now before the changes of 1997 arrived in earnest.  The police were entering the Walled City, slowly but surely its denizens were being flushed out and relocated.  The ghetto was ultimately to be destroyed and a park, by contrast, created in its place.  If nowhere else quite yet, the Triad presence in the Walled City was fading.

“Tomorrow is my mother’s birthday,” Kot said softly.  “I want to go see her.” At last Cheung lifted his head, slid Kot’s glistening cock from his lips.  

“That isn’t wise.  There are enemy gangs in the Walled City, and now policemen…”

“The gangs are weak in there, now.  And I have been back to see her when that wasn’t the case.  I’m not afraid of the police, either.  I must see my mother.  Not only because it is her birthday.  I must try again to convince her to leave the city, before she is forced to do so.”

“But…can’t you send some other relative?”

“There is no other.  It’s my mother, Cheung.  Mind your position.  You’re my bodyguard, my assistant…my lover.” He smiled.  In the past few weeks, he had invited no more guests, no more strangers, to his bed.  Just this one trusted companion.  “But you are not my adviser.  We are going.”

“I understand,” Cheung replied quietly, respectfully.  But he was worried that danger might befall this man he was using to gain access to more powerful men.  And more than that, he was afraid danger might befall his lover.