“But you are not mine?” she said, her frown deepening. “You are in my power to destroy.”
“That is where I wish to be, said Thomas.
She slowly went to her knees, her legs across his strained shoulders, so that her sex was only inches from his face. “You are not terrified by the cruelty of La Belle Dame Sans Merci?”
“I adore your cruelty.”
The Faery Queen lowered herself still further, so that the thorns at her pubis ground into Thomas’s face. His tongue darted forward through the thicket of points to dash its cut tip against the moist acorn he had earlier seen. Blood sprang from his cheeks and his lips and his nose as his tongue made its frantic foray again and again. Moaning her own delight, the Queen pressed ever more firmly against him, so that now his tongue could caress all the folds of her sex, tracing them around and around, lapping her saltiness, then returning ever and again to tease the hard little nub once more.
The Queen was moaning her pleasure as she rode his face. “You are my captive,” she grunted softly, each word isolated from the next.
“And you are my captor,” agreed Thomas, the words likewise seeming to be pulled individually from him. His back was arching against the ties that held him to the wheel, his hips in free air, the spasms of his excitement coming ever more frequently, ever more strongly, so that a new dull ache of his shaft came to replace the lingering pain of the nettle-stings.
And then the Queen’s thighs suddenly locked around him and she growled like a wolf – growled once, growled twice, paused, howled as if to a cold and distant moon. From her sex poured sweetly salty nectar, golden in the twilight of the cavern she had made for them, glistening as it trickled through the knitted thorns.
“I am your captive,” said Thomas softly to the heat of her sex, smelling her elixir, then drinking of it all that his bleeding tongue and lips could seize.
For a long time the Queen quivered, her cool smooth thighs flat against him, and for a long time did Thomas drink of her essence, absorbing it into him so that gradually, gradually some of her became a part of him and he, Thomas, became partly her, his eternally powerful captor. There was no world at all outside the curtains of her hair and wings; only those two, each possessing the other, sharing her soul.
And then there was a cool breeze on Thomas’s face. He opened his eyes, which he had closed some while before in order more fully to savour the taste of her, and saw that she had swept her hair back over her silvery-yellow shoulder, letting the world in once more.
She was smiling at him, her coral eyes gentle at last, and now he saw that her cruelty had been only a mask donned for him; or perhaps this lover’s guise was just another mask that she was wearing, for he knew from having drunk from her that the Queen of Faery was not just a single person, as mortals must be, but many.
The Queen stood and stepped away from him. She swirled her wings once, and where there had been courtiers there were now only tall sunflowers, bobbing their heads as the light wind played with them. She swirled her wings twice, and the vines that held Thomas’s wrists and ankles to the wheel sprang apart, wriggling away from him to tunnel themselves into the ground like blindworms. She swirled her wings a third and final time, and the blood on Thomas’s body dried into flakes that became red butterflies which rose in a cloud above him and fluttered away on the air; and where there had been wounds on him there was now unmarked smooth skin; and where there had been pain all through him there was now only warmth.
She reached down to take his mortal hand in her long-fingered faery one, and pulled him to his feet. When he was standing directly in front of her she threw one winged arm around him as a cloak of light; her other wing she draped across his manhood, which, hard as ever, felt the weightless touch of her gossamer. He put his own hands to her breasts, so that her firm little nipples pried between his fingers, then dropped one hand to her sex, garlanded as it was in flowers once more.
“I am entirely your captive,” he said.
“We are both the captive, both the captor, she corrected. We are both now merely the one, Thomas.
Then she led him to another patch of grass, and laid him down on his back, and straddled him, guiding his eager ship into her warm wet harbour where, time after time as the day rolled into evening and the bright birds watched, he gave her in return the essence of himself.
Thomas remained with the Queen of Faery for a week and a day, but when he returned to our world through the portal, guided there by the Gate, he found that all the others of his band Critical Assembly were now fat and fifty except one, who was fat but dead this past year. Without him, and without his guitar that could sing of the spaceways where the stars are a blaze of cold and distant light, they had turned from music to paint their world instead with children and three-car garages.
But Thomas, still youthful though his mind was now aeons old, took to playing lead guitar with Look at the Evidence, where he stands on the stage as if apart from them, ignoring the screams and yells of the fans and focusing entirely on his fingers and the frets while behind him the banked speakers sing and wail as they slide from something that is a bit like Mozart to something that is a bit like Bo Diddley to something that is a bit like Led Zep. He is the quiet one of Look at the Evidence, the one who always isn’t there when the groupies penetrate the carefully lax security and gatecrash the band’s hotel suite. He is the one whose long, pale, smooth, almost girlish face, framed in hair the colour of polished oak, the unloved imagine as they give themselves comfort to keep away the loneliness of the dark.
And what they see set in his face above them in their solitude are eyes that are deeper than the ocean of time himself, and wiser than the night. And the hands of his that they feel upon them are the sensitive hands that caress the neck of his guitar – hands that seem to have fingers twice as long as mortal fingers, and twice as supple.
San Sebastian by Justine Dubois
It is half past five in the morning. The sky is a haze of half grey, curiously illuminated. Under a canopy of wrought iron the fish market is setting up. The street shutters are painted blue and orange. He is tall and she only a little less so. His dark hair is slicked back cruelly from his forehead, above eyes that are cool and grey. His wide mouth, whose smile spells sensuality, is downturned in disappointment. She dances at his heels. They pass another couple quarreling.
There is something familiar in the shape of the argumentative man’s head, distracting him momentarily. “It seems as though the whole world is quarrelling today,” he sighs. “Not just us.”
“Can’t you understand that I am too tired to climb some damned mountain at five in the morning,” she says shrilly, “just in the hope of seeing an exceptional sunrise?”
He looks at her with a frown, shocked, as always, by the philistine in her. But she doesn’t notice.
“You always were impossible, and selfish,” she continues. “Yesterday, we walked all round Madrid in the midday heat, which was your idea; we stood up all night on the train without a seat, and now you want to go for a walk, rather than find our hotel?” The look in her eyes is close to hatred.
“But it is almost dawn and still cool enough to climb,” he pleads gently. “The view of the town and the bay will be spectacular, breathtaking. God knows, we only have one night here. And you can rest as much as you want later on. By this time tomorrow morning we will be back on the train. And it could be years before we return.” He scans the lines of her face for some sign of relenting good humour. “Couldn’t you just make the effort?” But she is closed off.