The Mammoth Book of Erotica presents The Best of Lucy Taylor (8 page)

Looking at neither her father nor her mother, she hurried toward the door.

“Gabrielle!” The undercurrent of fear in her father’s voice brought her up short. “You are coming back, aren’t you?
Aren’t
you?”

“I–I don’t know.”

“What if I fall ill? Your mother’s taught you about herbs and medicines. You could make my dying easier.”

Gabrielle stared at this man whose love she’d never managed to win, who’d never offered her a moment of affection. “I know nothing of my mother’s skills,” she said stubbornly.

“She taught you everything,” her father insisted. “Please, girl, I don’t want to be alone. Promise me you’re coming back.”

“I’m sorry,” Gabrielle murmured.

Behind her, her father’s voice rose in anger.

“You think you’re safer in the outside world? The plague is everywhere. Only God can keep you alive.”

Only God.

But God was nowhere to be found these days. The young abandoned the old, the healthy left the sick to expire in alleyways and filthy deathbeds, even priests refused to hear confession from the dying, lest they contract the sickness. Some people reacted to the danger by living lives of ascetic abstinence, while others, wanting to make the most of what time was left, indulged in every kind of excess and debauchery.

At the cathedral in the town square, Gabrielle stood at the edge of the crowd and held a handkerchief dipped in perfume to her face, for it was common knowledge that pleasant odors helped protect one from disease.

The Flagellants marched up the main street, men in the lead, women following. The men were stripped to the chest. Each carried a hard leather whip festooned with little iron spikes which he brought down, rhythmically and slowly, across the back of the one preceding him. Bent and bloody, the procession snaked toward the cathedral. They were silent and sweaty and a great stench rose from them – not the sickly sweet odor of sickness, but the musky tang of unwashed, bloodied bodies.

Gabrielle watched the blood streaming down their raw backs, saw how the sweat glistened and ran in the deep furrows that the pain had etched in their faces. Some appeared to be in agony, others simply exhausted. And some appeared to have gone beyond the pain and seemed entranced in what looked like ecstasy.

Gabrielle stared, transfixed by the bizarre spectacle, amazed by the stoic silence in which the Flagellants bore their pain. As one man passed by, she could not stop herself, but reached out to caress his mutilated back.

“What do you suppose it feels like?”

At first Gabrielle didn’t realize the voice was speaking to her. Then fingers gripped her elbow. She whirled around, appalled and startled by the presumption of this stranger.

A young man with fair hair, tanned, pockmarked skin, and black eyes that glittered like a raven’s regarded her. He was dressed in the rough, simple garments of the Flagellants, but his clothing had no rips or bloodstains, nor did his sturdy-looking arms bear signs of abuse. Something in the cunning, slyly mirthful way that he appraised her made her uneasy, as though he knew things about her she did not even know herself.

“What are you talking about?” she whispered, holding the scented handkerchief tighter to her face. “What
what
feels like?”

“The whip, of course.”

“Pain beyond my ability to imagine it.”

“At first, there’s terrible pain,” the young man said, “but still it seems bearable at first, or so you think. Then the lash keeps falling and the pain mounts. It fills your whole body, your whole being. At that moment, you’d sell your soul to make it stop. You think that you can’t possibly bear it another moment, that you’ll lose consciousness or die.

“Then it’s as though the body becomes completely overwhelmed, and there’s a giddiness. You laugh, you scream, you weep. At that point, you’ve gone beyond the pain – it’s still there, but it’s not your body anymore, or you’re not in it. That’s when it begins to feel like a holy sacrament, like you’ve touched the face of God.”

Gabrielle looked at the man’s hand where it still rested on her elbow – large and heavy-knuckled, covered with fine wheat-colored hair.

“How would you know about such things?”

“In the spring, I marched with the Brethren for thirty-three and a third days – to commemorate the life of Christ, as is the custom.”

“And do you think your suffering will save you from the plague?”

“No. Only luck and my own wits will do that. But I learned a great deal about pain – and what lies on the other side of it.”

He turned and pulled his shirt up to reveal his back, a gouged and furrowed tapestry of scar tissue and half-healed wounds. Gabrielle ran her hand across the scars. “You must be insane. Who in their right mind would choose pain when there’s so much of it to be had without asking?”

“The Flagellants believe it brings them closer to God.”

“I don’t believe in such a God. No loving father would willingly send such misery on his children.”

“Perhaps that’s how He wins their love – by sending misery and then, according to his whim, providing minor comforts.”

Gabrielle laughed. “Then you aren’t talking about God. You’re talking about Satan.”

“Maybe he’s the one in charge.”

“That’s blasphemy.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s not the truth.”

His hand, which up to then had rested lightly on her elbow, moved slowly up her arm. Heat spread through her belly as his fingers curled around the back of her neck and collected a great fistful of copper-colored hair.

“My name’s Gerard. You remind me of a woman I was once in love with.”

“What happened to her?”

“She died of plague. That’s when I joined the Flagellants. I thought the pain of the whip might take away the greater pain of losing her.”

“And did it?”

“For a while. And then it made it worse. Now I think that only death will truly cure me. But I’m not ready to die yet.” He released her hair, let it tumble in long glossy coils around her face. “I’m on my way now to the countryside. If I keep to myself, stay in abandoned houses, I figure there’s a chance I’ll survive. If you like, you could go with me.”

She shook her head. “Nowhere is safe from plague.”

“Perhaps not, but some places are better to die than others.”

The crowd surged around them, pressing them close. So thick was the odor of blood, so sharp the cracking of the whips, that Gabrielle felt light-headed.

“Good luck to you, then,” said Gerard, and began to elbow his way out of the mob.

Gabrielle thought about her mother, the foul-smelling boils that swelled along her armpits and groin, the dark blue spots that blotched her skin. Before long, she thought, her father would be dying, too, and it would fall her lot to tend to him, to comfort him in his death throes, press cool cloths to his brow, wipe up the waste that would gush from him. She knew she couldn’t bear that.

But on her own, she also knew, she would be prey to the roving bands of looters and marauders that, emboldened by the almost complete absence of the law, terrorized the towns and countryside. That possibility terrified her, too.

“Wait,” she called out, catching up to him. “Before you go – I want to know – I want . . .”

She hesitated, felt an unfamiliar heat creep up her cheekbones.

“I know exactly what you want,” he said, and took her hand. They traveled along narrow, rutted roads leading through the countryside of Tuscany, sometimes cutting through untilled fields and deserted orchards. Occasionally they passed through abandoned villages, where dogs and livestock roamed at will. Along the roadside, the corpses of those who had fallen while trying to escape lay bloated and putrescent.

The first night they camped in an open field with others fleeing the plague. The second night, after Gerard had led them on a circuitous route along the ridgetop of some hills, they came to an abandoned town where the only signs of life were feral dogs that roamed the dusty streets and wild-eyed rats that held their ground almost until the last instant, then skittered away as Gerard and Gabrielle approached.

Gerard picked out the most luxurious of the deserted houses. Like a lord and lady returning from an outing in the hills, he and Gabrielle made themselves at home.

“Who lives here?” asked Gabrielle, looking around the beautifully appointed rooms.

“We do, now.”

“Whose house was it?”

Gerard shrugged. “Whoever it belonged to, they’re gone now. Like everything else, the house belongs to whomever takes it.”

That night, when Gerard moved on top of her, Gabrielle found herself aroused, but strangely distant. It was as if she watched herself from a corner of the room, moving beneath this man, arranging her body to accommodate his, but somehow profoundly absent. She let him penetrate her body, but knew that he could never touch her heart.

“You don’t want me,” he said finally.

“I
want
to want you. I want to feel something. I just – don’t.”

She turned away from him, finding no way to describe the sense that vines and briars encased her body and leaves of deadly nightbane numbed her heart.

“Have you ever loved anyone?”

The question seemed unfair, humiliating. “Of course I have.”

But she saw he knew that she was lying.

Later that night, she dreamed of her mother. Saw her father bending down to wipe her mouth with a wet cloth and stroke her face. Her dead mother’s eyes were open. Her father reached down and gently closed them, placed the cloth across her mother’s face.

Something was wrong. She was awake now, but couldn’t get her eyes open. A rag or cloth was tied around her head. When she tried to remove the blindfold, her wrists were seized. She was roughly shoved onto her belly and her arms bound behind her.

She knew about the bands of rogues and thieves who preyed upon those fleeing the cities. Surely it was such a miscreant who had her now.

“Gerard!” she cried out. “Help me.”

“Silence,” he hissed. “Not one word or cry or I’ll gag you, too.”

He pulled her up off the bed and dragged her into another room, where he shoved her up against a beam or column and bound her there face-first.

“What are you doing?”

“Just because we’ve fled the plague doesn’t mean we aren’t going to die. I want to make the most of every moment. I want you to learn to love me. I’m going to
make
you love me.”

So saying, he bent her over, kicked her legs apart, and entered her from behind. This time he made no effort to be gentle. His ramming hurt her, but when she squirmed and tried to pull away, he withdrew from her and forced his way into her other orifice, wringing forth screams of pain.

He gripped her hips and forced himself in deeper.

“You want this, don’t you?”

“No!”

“Tell me you want it harder, deeper!”

“No, I hate it! Stop!”

“Tell me you want more!”

Finally, desperate to appease him and end the torture, she whimpered, “Yes, please, harder,” her voice choked with tears.

When she said that, he thrust one more time, released his semen into her and then withdrew.

She sank to her knees, weeping.

Gerard grabbed her by the hair and yanked her head back.

“That was good,” he said. “I’m proud of you. We’re off to a good start.”

Their next night in the deserted house, he again tied her to a beam, wrists secured over her head, and began to twist and squeeze her nipples. The pain was beyond anything she could have anticipated. She begged and pleaded, made promises of future acts of submission, but he increased the pressure. Then, because the pain was so unbearable and there was no escaping it, her body reacted by convulsing in a fit of laughter. She laughed and sobbed and, in between, implored Gerard to stop hurting her, but by the time he did her nipples had gone numb and, with the blood flowing again, the pain this time was greater than what she’d felt before.

He left her sobbing with fury at the pain and the futility of fighting it. When he returned, what seemed like hours later, he kissed her swollen nipples and fed her grapes he’d found growing in a nearby vineyard.

“Tell me how much you love me.”

“I hate you. You’re a monster.”

“Tell me how much you love everything I do to you.”

“Let me go. Please, just let me go.”

“There is nowhere to go. The plague is everywhere. There’s only death.”

She spat the chewed grapes out at him, spattering his face with sticky pulp, then caught his finger in her mouth and bit it to the bone.

He cradled his bleeding hand and eyed her coldly.

“I’d thought that you were doing well. I see now I was wrong. I must be stricter with you.”

He left her then, still tied, and came back brandishing a lit candle. At the first touch of the flame against her flesh, her courage failed her. She began to beg and weep, but Gerard was implacable. He moved the candle up and down her body, its shadow dancing across her flesh. Rarely did he let the fire make contact, but when he did, the agony elicited a howl. He singed a spot below her nipple, touched the flame to her thigh and the tender spot at the base of her spine, while she thrashed against her bindings.

“Tell me how much you like this!
Tell
me!”

The flame blazed in her face and burned her eyes. It filled her head with an unnatural light that grew brighter and brighter before exploding into darkness.

She dreamed she was a young child, ill with the fever that had swept through her village one winter, killing half a dozen babies and a few of the older children. Her mother had held her and sung her lullabies that had been handed down for centuries.

She had not gotten better right away. Instead, the fever had buoyed her along like a flooding stream, sweeping her far into the depths and byways and canyons of her mind, but, for the first time in her life, she had felt loved and safe, unafraid of the death the sickness seemed to be carrying her toward.

She opened her eyes.

He had cut her down from the beam and laid her on the bed. When she moved, the pain from her burns flared, making her gasp.

“Lie still,” he told her.