The Devil's Mark

Romance short. In medieval Bohemia, a young man trails after the executioner after the hanging of his father. 

11k, rated E, M/M. After the hanging of his father, a young man lingers on the doorstep of the village executioner. Eventually taking pity on him, the executioner invites him inside. 

Some age difference, intimacy, oral sex, and masturbation, but the E rating here is more for heavy themes, including social ostracisation, religious trauma, past rape, and past incestuous abuse.

---

Jan strings up Wójslav on the bailiff’s orders – he’d been caught thieving, Jan is told, not that it matters all that much to him. “Thieving” is a charge that can account for all manner of charges, and if he spent all his time wondering what the men and women he hangs have done, precisely, he’d have little time left for other things. 

It’s blood on his hands, either way. Such is the nature of the thing. 

When Jan walks down the hill, his hands stained with grave dirt, he finds a boy sitting outside the gate of his house. He’s a scrawny, underfed thing, openly weeping, and Jan sees in the planes of his face a similarity to those of Wójslav’s – his son, probably. 

“Away with you,” Jan says harshly. “There’s no place for you here.”

The young man doesn’t move, stays on his knees in the dirt and sobs into his hands, and the executioner grabs him by his upper arm and hauls him physically off the ground. He weighs barely anything, and his big wet eyes are brown and dark. There’s something pleading in them. 

The boy doesn’t say a word, but Jan feels himself baulk, staring down at him, and he drops the boy: he falls in a heap in the filth, and Jan hurriedly steps over him and into his yard, goes inside the house, and closes the door. 

The boy stays. 

* * *

A day passes, and then another – he doesn’t eat, drinks straight from the bucket of Jan’s well, a holdover from where more houses were out this way, and he sits in the dirt on a scrap of fabric. 

When it starts to rain, he sits under the eaves of one of the open sheds in Jan’s yard – the dogs have given up barking at him by now, and although the boy doesn’t entice them closer, they keep walking up and examining him, sniffing at his feet, his hair, his shoulders. 

By the time the dark is setting in, Jan sees that he’s shivering in only the sodden shirt and coat he has, his knees up to his chest. 

Jan walks outside with his lantern held up, his hands still feeling filthy from burying the boy’s father those days past, although he’s long-since washed them clean. 

(The boy had watched from the farthest distance possible, and then disappeared from the executioner’s sight, returning to his place at the gate of Jan’s homestead.)

The young man stares up at him, shivering, damp. 

“You’re not to stay here, boy,” Jan tells him, putting out one hand to touch the dog that that comes nearest to him, his head against his master’s thigh. The dog is not looking at Jan’s face, but at his hand on the dog’s head, his expression… something. “I and this house are unclean,” Jan goes on. “I handle death, have unclean hands, am an unclean man. I have no wife and no children – no one looks my way in the village, will not so much as brush my shoulder, or share a table with me in a tavern. Would you have them treat you the same way?”

The young man keeps shivering silently in the wet mud, and Jan, frustrated, stalks back inside. 

The young man flinches when he strides back out again, raising his hands to shield his face as though expecting a blow. Jan sets a horse blanket and a bowl of stew, still hot enough to eat, below the eaves beside him, and whistles sharply to call the dogs away when their eyes immediately go to the bowl. 

The young man touches neither until Jan is inside, and then dives upon them. 

Jan watches through the window, watches as he devours his meal, uses his filthy hands and then drinks greedily from what is left in the bowl, licks his fingers, licks clean the surface.

Only then does he reach, hands trembling, for the blanket, and begin to unfold it. 

The rain has let down some, only a spray now, but he still retreats further into the shed, under the eaves – it’s a hay shed, one wall open to the elements. Enough moonlight gets in that as the young man strips off his clothes, Jan sees white flesh. He sees his skinny thighs and backside, his torso, his ribs. He turns away before the boy can turn and show more of himself, however incidentally, only lets himself glance back to see he’s wrapped himself in the blanket. 

The boy sleeps on hay that night, instead of in the dirt beside it. 

* * *

The young man lingers, then. 

Jan knows it’s no different to stray dogs or cats – that now he’s fed the boy, he like as not won’t leave. He gives him a bowl of stew two evenings in a row, the both of them silent. 

On the third, he asks, “You’ve no family elsewhere?”

The boy is as dumb as he ever has been, cupping his bowl between his palms. 

“Answer me,” Jan orders, and the boy looks up at him defiantly, his jaw set. 

When Jan raises his hand threateningly, the boy flinches, but still doesn’t speak. It’s never sat well with him, hitting dogs or hitting other men – bad enough he should slaughter them without bruising their faces beforehand. 

“Go inside,” he tells the boy, who stares up at him, disbelieving. “Wash your bowl before you go to bed.”

The boy is all but running into Jan’s home before he’s finished the sentence, and Jan picks up his undershirt and leggings from where they’re drying over a post. 

Two of the dogs are looking up at him pleadingly. 

“One animal inside is enough,” he tells them, not without affection as he knuckles the tops of their heads, and goes inside. 

“You’ll take the pallet over here,” Jan tells the boy, nodding to the straw bed in the corner of the main room. His own bedroom has two wood cots in it, but for now they’re pressed together with the mattress spread between them both, and he’s not about to sacrifice that for the boy when he’s happy enough sleeping in the dirt. 

“Thank you,” he whispers when Jan presses a parcel of sheets and a battered pillow into his arms. 

“It speaks,” Jan remarks dryly, and watches him undress for bed. 

He should look away. 

He should turn his gaze away, retreat to his own room – at the very least, he should busy himself quieting the fire for the night, occupy himself, but he doesn’t. He stands, arms crossed over his chest, and observes obviously, blatantly. 

The young man has no shame as to his body, stripping off his coat, his tunic and leggings, stripping off his shoes and socks. 

“The under tunic too,” says Jan, and the boy turns to look at him, seeming to realise for the first time he’s being watched. 

If he’s frightened by that, it doesn’t show in his face. He looks back at Jan unblinkingly, unflinchingly. 

“There’s soap there, on the mantel,” Jan says, and gestures. “Water in that jug. Should still be warm.”

The boy hesitates, but then he slowly does pick up the bar, wets his hands, and begins to scrub himself. It’s nothing like a proper bath, or even bathing in the river down the hill, but at least most of the grime comes away from his naked body as he roughly scrubs suds all over himself, ending up covered in lilac foam. He’s not as white under all that filth as Jan had thought. 

He's pink and red in places. 

Has a birthmark splotched across his shoulders, a devil’s head or something like it, horned and obvious – underneath that, on his back, his thighs, are marks from a whip or a cane, criss-crossing in stark, raised white and shiny, raised pink. He has a pretty cock, small, his bollocks seeming a little oversized in comparison, and he’s modestly hairy for such a young man, curls of it all over his arse and the parts of his thighs that aren’t a mess of ghosts from beatings past. 

“If you’re to be in my house,” says Jan, “you’re to be clean and well-kept. No filth under your nails or your skin or in your hair – no stink coming off you. I handle corpses here, and they stink bad enough – no need for the living to stink as well.”

“Yes, sir,” the boy says. 

“Have you any family?”

“No, sir.”

“No brothers or sisters, no mother, no grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins?”

“No, sir.”

“No job?”

“I was an apprentice carpenter, sir, but they let me go, what with my father, sir.”

“You help him thieve?”

The young man is quiet, standing there with soap suds all over him, clinging to his hands, his little tits, the flesh at his chest soft, his nipples shouting out to be bitten and bruised. He’s so unashamed and unabashed he doesn’t even cover his cock with his hands, leaving them at his sides. 

“How old are you, boy?”

“Seven and twenty, sir.”

“You lying?”

He frowns, seeming surprised, looking from the floor to the executioner’s face. “No, sir.”

“You look younger, seem younger.”

“Well, I’m not.”

“You’re a man, are you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then why weep on my doorstep like a widow?”

The boy’s gaze flits back down to the boards, his hands, still at his sides, now clenching into fists. 

“Where else am I go to go?” he asks lowly. 

Jan doesn’t answer him, and goes to bed. 

* * *

Come the morning, the executioner wakes to find the boy is awake already – the scent of fresh-baked bread comes from the loaf, newly made and sitting on the table. The floor is swept, the room tidied, organised. 

“Feed the dogs,” Jan orders the boy, who is standing aside with his hands behind his back, his gaze to the floor. It’s an automatic stance, he thinks, up against the wall – must have been made to do that for his father, or at the very least, fell into the habit with him. “There’s what’s left of a rabbit for them in the cellar.”

Now, the boy’s eyes rise, narrowing, his expression cool and thoughtful. He mustn’t have thought until now what meat was in the stew. 

“You’re a poacher?”

“Privilege from the local lord, for being executioner,” Jan tells him, feeling his lips twitch. “What would they do if I poached, boy, have me executed?”

The boy hums and pulls up the trap door, descending into the cool air of the cellar. He feeds the dogs, puts out hay for Jan’s goats, brings in the eggs from his chickens. 

“I’m going into town,” Jan tells him, putting on his coat, and the boy doesn’t say anything, just nods his head and keeps himself busy as Jan departs. 

He shouldn’t get into too much trouble. 

* * *

Jan buys his parcel of necessaries from the same girl he always does – she’s deaf, but reads a man’s mouth well enough, and from what he’s managed to gather, she just feigns not to understand when people tell her he’s unclean. He’s still got coin, after all, clean or filthy. 

“Bailiff,” he says in the street, and the man turns to look at him. 

“Oh, you got word already, Jan?” he asks, seeming surprised. “Father Mikulás was just about to send a boy to fetch you. Whole family dead two miles north – gravedigger will need help.”

“Great,” he mutters. “I wanted to ask about the thief I strung up the other day.”

“Oh, just keep his valuables, Jan, I don’t care,” the bailiff says dismissively, and Jan steps into his way before he can walk past – the bailiff actually stumbles back to keep from touching him. 

“His son,” Jan prompts. 

“Son?” the bailiff repeats, scrunching up his face. “Wok, I think. What about him?”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Wrong with him? He’s a thief’s son.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“You meet him? Arrest him? Know anything about him?”

The bailiff huffs out a sigh, one hand on his hip, and he looks searchingly into the middle distance before he says, “The mother died in childbirth – Wójslav never remarried, just busied himself bothering women at the bathhouse. Was stealing for years, but never got caught.”

“Until he did.”

“Until he did,” the bailiff mutters. “Was drunk and pilfering from the lord’s own cellars.”

“Where was the boy?”

“Working wood, I expect – apparently he was an adequate carpenter. He’s obviously moved on now, has like as not gone on to some other place.”

“What else about him?”

“Christ’s blood, Jan, the fuck do you want from me? He was a freakish boy, quiet, came out of his mother with the devil’s mark on his back.”

“Ah, fuck off, Bailiff,” Jan mutters, and goes to the church to speak to Mikúlas. 

* * *

When he comes back to his house, he smells not only bread, but roasting meat – the boy, a thief as much as his father was, has evidently taken on the executioner’s rule as his own, and has hunted and brought in a—

“That’s not rabbit,” Jan says.

“You can poach rabbit, but not deer?” Wok asks, turning to look at him from where he’s in the process of butchering the thing, his head raising up. The dogs are lapping up the deer’s blood from where he’d slit its throat and some has spilt outside of the bucket, and he has parcelled out most of the meat already. 

“Was I even out of your eyeline before you went and caught that fucking thing?”

“What else was I supposed to do?”

“You poach with your father?”

Wok is quiet, looking at him with a bit of scorn showing in his eyes. “I can sell the pelt to Miller Bartosh,” he says uncertainly. “I’ve done it before, no one’ll know.”

“Keep it.”

Wok stands there, gripping the pelt in his hands, his fingers stroking back and forth over the hair of the deer. “Keep it?” he repeats, almost wonderingly. 

“If you’re my apprentice, you live by my rule,” Jan says. “You’re not a poacher – you can keep the pelt, if you want it.”

“I want it.”

The words come out of him almost before Jan has finished speaking – he’s holding the skin against his chest, his palm flat against the brown hair that covers it. Jan can smell the meat and fat and blood on the air, and the pelt itself still needs salting and tanning. 

“Tell you what,” he says. “Tomorrow, you’ll go to the tanner’s, and you’ll ask him to show you how.”

“Don’t I need to salt it?”

“I don’t have enough salt,” Jan says. “You’ll take it to Andrev tomorrow. For now, hang it up in the cellar, and wash all that blood off you.”

He’s biting the inside of his lips. “Why don’t you show me?” he asks, churlish, surprisingly demanding, although his hands are trembling slightly. 

“Because I’m digging graves tomorrow.”

Wok hesitates. “Who died?” he asks.

“Some family a few miles away – poisoned themselves at a party, seems like. Drank beer that had gone off; gravedigger needs help.”

Wok looks at him, his face unmoving. “I’m your apprentice?” he asks. 

“Seems like,” Jan answers.

The young man’s smile is a thin thing, like a crescent moon, as he walks past Jan to head inside. 

“Have you been overfeeding my dogs?” Jan asks. 

“No,” Wok says. 

The dogs are looking far too lovingly at him for that to be true. 

* * *

The boy knows how to cook meat, and how to flesh skins – he’s got a vague idea on how to cure them, evidently, but doesn’t know the tanning process from start to finish, and Jan knows that Andrev will teach him from start to finish if he sends him over with a note tomorrow. 

“Can you read?”

“Not really, sir. Can you?”

“A little,” Jan says, gesturing vaguely. “Enough to read a ledger and notes when they’re sent to me.”

“You own books,” says Wok, and Jan looks at him coolly. 

“You’ve been through my things, have you?”

Wok looks back at him. There’s something uncanny about his gaze, about the tilt to his head – Jan puts no stock in this anxiety people would have about the birthmark on his back, has seen far too many corpses with too many marks to put mythology behind them. 

But the boy is a thief, and a good one too, though he apparently isn’t too good at hiding it. 

“I’ve a few books, yes,” he says. “Books on butchery and poisons, mostly. A few histories.”

“Will you teach me?”

“Perhaps, in time. You might like the tanner’s.”

“All the tanners smell of piss.”

“They do, but Andrev’s eldest boy died last winter, and he might well take you on as a worker, if you show him you’ll do the work. At least they’ll still look at you in town, if you go to him – you might marry.”

“Marry?” the boy repeats. 

It hadn’t occurred to Jan that the boy could look so stunned, so utterly baffled, and Jan peers at him across the room, across the roasted venison between them on the table, the two of them eating like fucking kings, instead of death merchants. 

“Yes,” Jan says slowly, “marry. You’re seven and twenty – you don’t want a wife, children?”

“You don’t have a wife and children,” says Wok immediately. 

“Well, my traps have only caught rabbits, as yet. If I catch a woman, then I’ll have a wife.” 

It’s a dark joke, the sort of thing he says to offset the priests and keep them from treating him as worthy of pity as they do the gravediggers – it makes Wok blink, but otherwise, his expression doesn’t change. 

“I don’t… marry,” he says in the same slow tone Jan had used a moment ago, as though trying to make him understand. He says it as if it’s Jan that’s missing something obvious here, and Jan sits back in his chair and looks at the boy consideringly. 

“Don’t you know? And why’s that?”

“I’ve a devil’s mark,” says Wok plainly. “You’ve seen it. I’m not fit for such things.”

“Mm hmm,” says Jan. 

* * *

 

He goes off to Andrev’s that day to tell the tanners that Jan sent him over, and Jan attends to his day’s work amongst the gravediggers.

He strips off his stained coat and hangs it on a post as he steps into the carpenter’s ground, watching the men winding down for the day. He has to wear particular clothes, to show that he’s executioner, and he knows they won’t know his face. 

“Help you, sir?” asks one of them, not looking up from his work as he sands down a board. 

“You had an apprentice, Wok,” Jan says. 

“Aye, I did,” he says. “Funny lad – son of Wójslav, that thief that got strung up last week. Decent woodworker.”

“Why cut him loose?”

“I didn’t want to,” the carpenter says, shrugging his shoulders. “But the lord insisted – apparently he thought the boy had helped his father burgle, had taken tools from us to do it, but it’s not true. He’s just superstitious, really. Why do you ask?”

“He’s come to me for his trade instead,” Jan says, and the woodworker looks up, but doesn’t examine him closely. 

“What’s that?” he asks. 

“Butcher,” says Jan. 

“He should serve you well,” the carpenter says. “He’s no squeamish child, for all he looks young.”

“Is he touched in the head?” Jan asks, and the carpenter’s sanding stops on the wood. For a moment, his expression is deeply serious, pensive. 

“Maybe,” he says. “A bit. He was afraid of his father – more afraid of him than most grown men are. A lot of my lads still think he’s dumb, but he just doesn’t speak to most people.”

“He doesn’t speak much.”

“No, he doesn’t,” the carpenter agrees. “Not until pressed on, no. But he’s a good lad, and I’d expect he’ll serve you well at butchery.”

“What’s wrong with him?” Jan presses – he lowers his voice to ask the question, leaning in closer. 

The carpenter raises his head, and this time, he recognises Jan’s face. Jan knows because his eyes widen and his lips part, and he leans back from Jan as though they’re in danger of touching. 

“Tell me,” Jan says quietly. “What’s wrong with the boy?”

“His father’s dead, thanks to you, sir, and his lordship, sir,” says the carpenter, his voice quavering slightly. “There shouldn’t be anything else wrong with him now, with that man gone.”

Jan picks up his coat, and makes his way home. 

Wok is out of doors as he starts walking up the hill – as he bends to greet the dogs, he sees the boy, sitting back on a pile of hay with one of the goats sitting with her head in his lap. He’s stroking her gently from the nose to the tips of each of her horns, and her eyes are half-closed. 

“Are you glad your father’s dead, boy?” Jan asks. 

“I don’t know,” says Wok, seeming suspicious of the question. “Why, are you glad you killed him?”

Jan shrugs. “I did my duty,” he says. “I’m never all that glad of it.”

Wok looks up at him from his place near to the floor. One of the chickens is on top of his outstretched ankles instead of in her coop where she should be, at this time of night. 

“Going to come inside?” asks Jan. 

“Can I go to the bathhouse?”

“… Now?”

“You’re unclean,” says Wok. “As a— As your apprentice, can I go to the bathhouse?”

“The girls won’t serve you,” says Jan. “They might pour you hot water, but they won’t come in the tent with you, let alone scrub you or wash your hair, and they won’t touch your clothes to launder them.”

Wok nods his head. 

“Go to the bathhouse a lot, do you?”

“My father did.”

Jan looks down at him, takes in the sight of him, sad on the floor, dirty – smelling of piss, no doubt, from the tanner’s.

“I’ve a cauldron to heat water,” Jan says. “We’ll bathe tomorrow.”

The young man’s expression of open joy is the most blatant he’s been in having an emotion yet, his lips parted, his eyes wide. 

“Come inside,” Jan orders him, “but put those animals to bed first.”

The smell of piss isn’t so bad as Jan had worried about – the boy had obviously washed his clothes well once he’d come home, and traded them for some spare Jan had set aside. They’re too big for him. He all but swims in the shirt he’s wearing, and something primal in Jan burns with heat at the sight, thinking about dragging down his leggings and bending him over, about the ease of access to his boycunt, in one of Jan’s shirts. 

“Tell me about this devil’s mark,” he says. 

“It’s as it sounds like,” Wok says. “I don’t mention it, usually, but you’ve seen it, and my father is dead. He said it marked me as a devil child, unlucky, accursed.”

“How so?”

“Just naturally sinful.”

“What sins?”

“Disobedience, laziness, rudeness. Disrespect of authority, greed, slothfulness. I’m messy, dirty. Unkind. Thoughtless.”

Jan hums. 

“What did you know of my father?” Wok asks. “Beyond that he was a thief?”

“I know he beat his son.”

Wok is quiet at that, glancing back at Jan over his shoulder, and then he slowly nods his head. “Yes,” he says. “Yes, he beat me. When I erred.”

“How often was that?”

“Often.”

“You expect me to beat you?”

“If I err, I suppose.”

“I won’t,” Jan tells him.

Wok gives him a sceptical look, and Jan supposes he has no reason to believe him. 

“What did you do, when not working for the carpenter?”

“Cleaned, hunted, cooked. I shared rooms with my father in town.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“Your friends?”

“The other carpenters?”

“If you like.”

“They weren’t unkind men. Loud, sometimes, cheerful. They know a lot of working songs – I don’t sing. I make an ugly sound.”

“You never went to taverns with them?”

“No, beer is the devil’s drink.”

“Your father drink beer?”

Wok is fiddling with the linen of Jan’s tunic, the hem resting far down on his own thigh. Jan itches to rip it off him, push it up his body, bare more of his scarred skin. To kiss and mouth at him from his ankles up to his throat, his neck, to make him whine with want. 

“Was your father an executioner?” asks Wok. 

“Yes.”

“And his father?”

“And his father’s father.”

“How did they marry?”

“They married daughters, cousins, sisters, of other executioner’s, mostly, or other unclean people. My mother was a knacker’s daughter.”

“Other executioners don’t have women as relatives anymore?”

“I’ve never cared enough to go out looking for a wife.”

Wok nods his head. “I understand,” he says. 

“Because you’re not to marry?”

“I suppose.”

“Your father’s idea? That you shouldn’t marry?”

“My own.”

“And why’s that?”

Wok bites the inside of his lip, looking away, and then says, “I think I’d like to go to bed now, sir,” he says. 

“Go,” Jan tells him, and retires to his own bed. 

* * *

The young man comes to hover over him at some time in the night, looming at the foot of Jan’s bed like a ghost draped in Jan’s own clothes. Jan stirs at the feeling of the boy’s gaze on him, and he doesn’t shock, but merely opens his eyes and stares at him, takes him in.

The boy scarcely dares even to breathe, teetering on his feet, and in the scant light from the moon outside, Jan can see the worried marks up and down his lower lip, bitten all over.

“What?” Jan asks, his voice coming out hoarse from sleep.

“Aren’t you cold?” Wok asks him after a moment’s pause. A leading question, one that can easily lead to an invitation, but the night is temperate enough, and Jan has never cared for an indirect dance.

“No,” Jan tells him, and not only because his skin is singing with sudden heat. “Got to your own bed, and sleep.” 

The boy hesitates before he obeys, and Jan watches him go before he rolls over and lets his eyes close again. 

* * *

After his work is through the following evening – collecting debts from the brothel some miles south – Jan makes good on his promise and heats water, filling up the large, wooden tub.

“Aren’t you getting in?” Wok asks.

“You can bathe first,” Jan says, and walks away. 

He doesn’t watch the young man undress himself this time, but he does watch him from the house as he bathes, scrubbing himself in the hot water before commencing to wash his hair. He’s careful and focused about it, measured, and Jan suspects from the way he approaches the tasks step by step, the level of dedication he pours into the attention he gives his own hair with the soap Jan had available for him to use, that he’s never had cause to use the services of the bath wenches as often as his father had, but certainly, he’d observed them at work.

When Jan comes to take his place, Wok hovers, naked, beside the tub.

“Go get dry,” Jan orders him, but the young man takes up the soap and lathers it on his hands, going to Jan’s back before Jan can tell him otherwise again. He groans despite himself at the contact of the young man’s hands, calloused from his carpentry work, strong, keen. 

They feel good, digging into the knotted flesh of Jan’s well-worked muscles, massaging over the old, tough meat – yes, indeed, this boy has watched the girls in the baths time and time again.

“Boy,” Jan growls, but Wok continues undaunted by his warning tone, scrubbing at his back and at his shoulders – when he tries to reach around to do the same to Jan’s chest, Jan grips him by the wrists and holds him still. Jan’s cock is hard under the water, and Wok is staring down at it, his mouth slightly open. 

“Is this why you wanted for the bathhouse?” Jan asks, trying not to think of how much slimmer Wok’s wrists are than his own, how easily he encircles them in his grip. “Want to try your hand as a wench yourself?”

“Isn’t this what you wanted?” Wok asks. The boy sounds genuinely perplexed at the rejection, mildly hurt.

“Did I ask you for it?”

Wok is staring at him searchingly, his lips quivering, as though he barely comprehends the question. 

“Is this your sin, boy?” Jan presses. “That of sodomy, of wanting to lie with another man?”

“I want only to be of service, sir,” says Wok. “Do my duty, as you said – wanting it is by the by.”

Jan lets go of his hands, and Wok slowly picks up the soap again, keeping his gaze on Jan’s face as he does so. Jan looks back at him evenly, and this time when the young man reaches forward, Jan lets him start to scrub at Jan’s chest, rubbing white suds through the fur that covers him. Jan groans at the pleasure of it, at the firm press and rub of the young man’s clever fingers – they rub over his nipples, and he hisses at the sensation, at the thrills it sends right down to his cock.

“You’re a big man,” Wok says in a small, faint voice.

“Yes,” Jan agrees.

“Your… manhood, too.”

“I suppose.”

“Have you lain with many women?”

“No.”

“And— and boys?”

Jan stands from the water and grips the young man by the water, water splashing over the edge of the tub as Wok cries out and tries to dodge back. He struggles in Jan’s grip, tries desperately to struggle free, but Jan keeps tight hold of him, unwilling to let go, and grips his wrist to keep him from struggling further.

“Boy,” Jan says, “these are not questions you ask of your master.”

“Sorry, sorry, sorry, sir, please—”

“I’m not going to beat you.”

Wok’s struggles seem to stumble as he reconsiders his fervent wriggling and kicking, and as he falters, he looks up at Jan quizzically, somewhere between baffled and disbelieving.

“No?” he asks.

“No,” Jan says. “I’m not your father – I won’t beat you.”

The young man relaxes in Jan’s grip, just slightly, and Jan releases the hold he’d had on his wrist, although he keeps Wok’s jaw clasped between his thumb and fingers. He can feel the boy’s pulse under his fingertips.

He narrows his eyes as he looks down at him, and asks, “Did your father fuck you?”

Wok stares up at him dumbly. His pulse speeds under Jan’s grip.

“Answer me.”

“He said it was my duty,” whispers Wok. “Given that I’d killed his wife.”

Jan nods his head and lets Wok go, sinking back into the warm water. Once more, the boy reaches for him, and Jan shakes his head. “No,” he tells him. “Go inside, this time, get dry.”

“But I—”

“You will obey me, Wok. You will do as I tell you.”

He adds no threat of punishment – none is needed. The boy is silent for a moment, and then does as he’s told. 

* * *

“Are you going to fuck me?” Wok asks later that night, over dinner.

“Why?”

“I would like to know.”

“Why?”

“I don’t like not knowing. It frightens me, not to know what tomorrow will bring.”

“Sodomy is sinful, boy.”

“So is taking another’s life, and you do that.”

“That I do.”

They sit in silence on that point, looking at one another over the wooden surface of the table, and Jan examines the boy’s expression, the defiant, unblinking focus in it, the sense that he’s unwilling to back down on this point. 

“Well?” he finally prompts. “Are you going to?”

“Do you want me to?”

Wok stares at him, and although he doesn’t flinch, doesn’t shift in his seat, doesn’t even let his eyes widen by a fraction, Jan can still see the change in his face – he can see the slight shift in his pupils, see his face go a shade paler.

“You don’t ask for what you want,” Jan observes aloud, sipping from his drink. “Not food, nor shelter, not clothes, nor a bath. You either take and steal, or you simply wait to see if what you desire will be given you.”

“So?” Wok asks, seeming discomfited by this line of questioning, and fidgets in his chair.

“So,” Jan repeats.

“I said I wanted the deer hide,” Wok says.

“Yes, that’s true,” Jan allows.

Wok sits there, silent, brimming over with tension, before he finally breaks and demands, “What does it matter?”

“Do I remind you of your father?” Jan asks. “Do I resemble him, resemble his manner, seem as though I would do as he did?”

“No,” Wok says lowly. “On no point do you resemble him.”

“He was a thief, your father. A philanderer, I take it, too – bothered girls and women in town. Had he debts?”

Wok nods.

“He beat you. He was a drunk too, I suppose?”

Wok hesitates for longer this time, then nods again.

“And I resemble him on none of these points?”

“No, sir.”

“Did you like it when he fucked you? Did you ever want it, ask for it?”

Wok shakes his head, and Jan can see now that he’s trembling like one of the dogs, see that he’s turned paler still. There’s a tinge of green in his cheeks.

“So,” Jan says, and asks more gently this time, “do you want me to fuck you?”

“No one touches you,” Wok says in a low voice, his eyes on the tabletop instead of Jan’s face. “No wife, no women in town, no wenches at the baths. People stumble out of your path when you walk in the street.”

“I collect debts from whores and gamblers, when I’m asked – I could pay for a whore, if I truly wanted.”

Wok furrows his brow, pursing his thin lips.

“And I fuck men that pass through,” Jan goes on. “I’m not some untouched flower for being born and dying a dealer of death – sodomites, failed priests, young men on the run, I’ve fucked them in my time.”

“Why not fuck me, then?” Wok asks, and Jan’s lips twitch.

“Do you want it?”

“Yes,” the boy decides.

“Which part of it?”

“… What?”

“Which part of me fucking you do you want, boy? If you want it, it shouldn’t be hard for you to say.”

Wok does look faintly green now, and Jan drains his tankard and stands from his seat.

“My cock spreading out your tight hole?” he asks. “My chest against yours or my weight on your back? Me gripping at you, cradling you, holding you down? Hoisting you against the wall to bounce you on me?”

Wok’s mouth opens and closes like a fish’s, his head moving ever so slightly from side to side. 

“All of that,” he says falteringly.

“Which ones most?” Jan presses him.

He looks damn close to tears, or to vomiting, or both.

“That’s what I thought,” says Jan, and retires to his bed.

He wakes some hours later to the boy creeping into his bed, carefully insinuating himself beneath the blankets. He doesn’t move immediately, doesn’t let on that he’s awake, as Wok shifts closer. He must be half Jan’s size, as skinny as he is, lacking fat and with only bare muscle.

His hand touches Jan’s chest, fingertips brushing through the hair there, and then slides lower. Jan catches his wrist in a tight grip, and Wok gasps. 

“Thieving again, are you?”

“I want it,” says Wok. “You can take it from me.”

Jan turns over, and Wok lets out a breathless whine as Jan pins him on his belly, one knee hooked between his thighs. Wok is down on his belly, his face mashed into the pillow, and God, he is warm. It’s been a while since Jan had a man in his bed, let alone one drawn so tight as this one is.

He knows how Wok will respond, if Jan fucks him, that if Jan does it right, he can have him crying and coming again and again, have him squirming and begging for mercy in less than an hour. He smells the back of his neck, the scent of the young man, craves to taste him, to bite down and mark him, bruise him – wants to slide his cock into the tight channel of the young man’s arse, tug his nipples, feel him arch and wail for more.

Right now, he’s stiff as a board, and he can’t hide his frightened trembling like this, his body beneath Jan’s. 

“You’re afraid,” Jan murmurs against the back of his ear – his breath must feel hot, because Wok shudders hard. “What of? The size of my cock? The pain?”

“I want it,” says Wok, even less convincingly than before, his voice quavering. Jan supposes the boy has never learned to lie, and that’s for the best – he doesn’t care much for lies himself, and as visible as he is, untouchable as he is, there’s never a great cause for complex acts of deception. 

He drops his weight down further, settling in on top of the boy’s heat and the scent of his skin, and closes his eyes.

“Sir,” the boy says urgently, some minutes later – Jan had been dozing, just about to drop off, and now he grunts, dragging the young man closer beneath him, nuzzles his nose through his curls of hair, wraps his arms tightly about his narrow waist. His arse, flat and underfed, radiates warmth.

“Sir,” Wok says again, this time with a slight whine to his voice, and Jan nearly laughs as he feels the movement of him, can feel him pressing his cock down against the sheets beneath them, a slight thrust of his hips. He can feel the rub against his own prick through his leggings.

Wok is only wearing one of Jan’s linen under shirts, the fabric of it rubbing up against Jan’s shirtless chest, and Jan can feel the young man’s bare legs pinned in beneath his own. 

“What, boy?” Jan asks, not working the husky sleepiness from his voice.

Wok’s answering noise is soft and full of want, bitten back. “Please,” he whispers then.

“Please what?” Jan pushes him. “Can you breathe?”

“Yes.”

“Need to piss?”

“N… No.”

“Then shut the fuck up and let me sleep.”

Jan’s cock is half-hard against Wok’s arse, and he feels it when he starts grinding it back against him directly, trying to entice him, trying to get him to harden – and at the same time, feeling Jan on top of him, Jan’s breath on the back of his neck. 

“Sir,” Wok whines, and Jan grazes his teeth over the side of his exposed neck, tasting the sweat gathered on his skin – the boy goes suddenly stiff and still in his weak thrusts, squeaking out a strangled noise, and then shudders, his body going limp. 

“Good lad,” Jan murmurs, and relaxes on top of him again.

When the young man tries to squirm out of the wet patch he’s made for himself, Jan feigns sleep, and he feels the moment when the boy finally relaxes and lets sleep come for him too. 

Jan sleeps well on his pillow that night, and is warm for its presence. 

* * *

Jan wakes in the morning and rises from bed, adjusting his cock, most of the way hard with the morning and the sweet, pliable young man sprawled out beneath him, in his leggings. Wok is still asleep, snoring softly as Jan gets up and leaves the room.

He squeezes his cock in his palm once he makes it out to the outhouse, leans his shoulder against the wall and groans as he grips at himself, twists his grip, thumbs over his cock head as he gets himself off. 

After he comes, he pisses, and then turns to find Wok is watching him, standing there in just his oversized shirt and boots in the mud.

“You could have done that inside me,” he complains.

“What, pissed in you?”

The wrinkle of Wok’s nose is an unpleasant confirmation of past experience.

* * *

The bailiff brings out a woman the next day – the beer at the party of the dead had been poisoned, not gone off, and she’s come forward as the perpetrator. Wok hangs by the house, not coming up the hill toward him, but he watches as she hangs.

“That why you were asking about him?” asks the bailiff in an undertone as Jan pulls her body down. “The fuck’s he doing here?”

“Carpenter let him go,” says Jan. “Apparently the lord ordered him cut loose, what with his father’s reputation.”

The bailiff’s expression darkens somewhat, a shadow passing over his features, and Jan hums.

“Yeah, he said it was something about superstition. I sent him to Andrev, have a look at the tanner’s, but he said he wants the executioner’s role. More pay, more privileges. The isolation doesn’t seem to deter him.”

The bailiff is quiet a moment, and then he says in a very low voice, “he’s not right, that boy. He’s a funny sort – quiet, odd. Shifty, he is, like a dog that’s been kicked and is liable to bite.”

“Ideal as an executioner, then,” says Jan.

The bailiff is quiet, and Jan looks over to Wok, who’s standing still, his arms at his sides, the dogs sitting obediently about his feet and looking in the same direction. The bailiff is older than Jan – close to sixty, though he’d not admit it, Jan expects.

“You remember when he was born?” Jan asks. He wasn’t in town then, he doesn’t think – he’d been a travelling executioner for years until he’d settled here at the lord’s service, where so close to a market town like this, nestled in a fort, he keeps his important prisoners, has one criminal or other shipped this way.

“My mother was Elsa’s midwife, one of her last births before she died,” the bailiff says, crossing his arms over his chest. He doesn’t look at the corpse of the woman as Jan wraps it in cloth – he’s not squeamish, exactly, but he’s never taken pleasure in death or corpses, and Jan respects that. “I remember her talking about it, the mark on the boy’s back – she never liked him. But he was always a good enough boy.”

“Not a thief?” Jan prompts him, and bailiff clucks his tongue.

“Never,” he says. “And it wasn’t a matter of us never catching him, either – I had people keep a careful watch on the boy. He’d pawn things off to the miller, from time to time, but—”

“So you knew he was a thief, then. Or does poaching not count any longer?”

The bailiff thins his lips, then mutters, “Well, if he’s your apprentice, he’s no poacher any longer.”

“You think he’s the devil?”

“No,” the bailiff says. “His father, yes. His father was…” He shakes his head.

Jan waves him off and picks up his shovel, commences digging the dead girl’s grave. Once the bailiff has disappeared down the base of the hill, into the trees, Wok walks silently up the hill with another shovel and starts digging across from him.

“Not like that,” Jan stops him. “Back higher, don’t bend at the waist like that – bend your knees. That’s it. Okay.”

The girl weighs almost nothing, and Wok watches as Jan pulls her burial shroud tight and settles her down into the earth.

“This ground isn’t consecrated,” the boy says.

“No,” Jan agrees.

“How many dead are here?”

“A few dozen.”

“None of them shall enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

“Criminals, all of them,” Jan says. “Each of them executed – each of them denied a grave plot and an honourable burial.”

“Who gets their valuables?”

“I give them to family, if they come asking,” says Jan. Most of them don’t.”

“Most of them don’t have valuables to ask for,” Wok says, as if finishing the sentence for his master, and Jan inclines his head. 

After helping Jan fill in the hole, the boy kneels in the dirt, and as Jan begins to descend the hill, he can hear him praying quietly. His Latin is good, sounds about right. 

Jan rarely appears for church services, and when he does, he lingers at the back of the hall – he knows last rites well enough, for all he has no understanding of Latin.

When Wok comes inside, after washing his hands, Jan asks, “You want to be a priest?”

“No, sir,” says Wok.

“You thought about it, though,” Jan says. “What, you thought about running away to Břevnov, offering yourself up as a brother? Get away from your father, from all the stares, the whispers?”

“No one stares or whispers,” says Wok. He’s still no good at lying, and there’s a slight flush on his cheeks. “I wanted to. Once.”

“Once?”

“A group of monks came through town some years ago, on their way to Břevnov.”

“Oh?”

“My father was away,” Wok says. “He wasn’t, often – I wasn’t meant to go out, usually. I could go to work, but wasn’t to linger or tarry, go to taverns, go anywhere. But he was away.”

“So you want to the tavern?”

“To chapel. One of the brothers met me in the yard.”

Jan says nothing as he lays a fire, watching the boy pull out a parcel of deer meat to roast. He butchers it with neat, easy movements of his hand – he’s good with a knife. Jan will teach him, in short order, how to wield an axe and a sword, and he’ll need to build up the muscle for it, but Jan expects he’ll soon master the swing.

“Took you for a nice walk, did he?” Jan asks quietly.

“He taught me the names of different flowers and herbs,” says Wok. “In Czech, and in Latin, and even Hungarian.”

“Then he fucked you?”

“Not until the third day. And he let me try some of their beer.”

“You like that?”

“The beer?”

“The fucking.”

“Yes. To both.”

Jan nods his head, and Wok is quiet for a few moments, tying up the meat with dried herbs and fresh garlic leaves he’d picked up earlier that day. 

“I smelled of sage, afterwards,” he says. “I knew it was sage, that he laid me down in. I didn’t know it before.”

“Then he saw your back?”

“I was on my back,” Wok says. “As he ground us together, I was on my back, so he didn’t see. I wasn’t trying to hide it, I wasn’t trying to deceive him, I just… I don’t normally forget, I can’t forget. But I forgot, for a little time, was able to not remember. And then I stood up while he stayed reclining.  I bent to pick something up – a mushroom, or a flower, I think. I don’t remember what it was, only that I was excited to show it to him, to learn its names, but he made such a horrible gasp, like a death rattle.”

Jan looks at the pain on the boy’s face, weighing down his features – no wonder he looks so much older than he is, with all this weight on his shoulders, and the same dragging down the corners of his mouth into a constant frown. “He tell you you couldn’t be a monk?”

“He said the Devil Himself must have put me on Earth to tempt him to sin,” Wok murmurs. “And that to cross the border of the monastery’s fence line, I would burn alive and turn to ashes – and if I didn’t, I should taint the holy ground.”

“It’s just skin, you know,” Jan tells him. “Doesn’t mean anything. Doesn’t have anything to do with the Devil, or God, or Christ, or any of the saints – it’s just skin. Like freckles, or scars, or burns, or stretch marks. As meaningless as any of those.”

“Scars aren’t meaningless,” Wok says. There’s an air of reproach in the younger man’s voice, in his expression, and Jan inhales quietly.

“No,” he allows. “No, I suppose not all of them are.”

Wok pushes the board toward him, and Jan readies a spit for the fire. 

“They know so much, the monks,” Wok says. “About— about the world, and poetry, and God, and the stars, and gardening, and brewing beer. They settle in those beautiful halls of stone, with frescoes and art on the walls, and it seems all they do is learn and study – that the world opens up to them, to their searching gazes, listening ears. Some of them, that party to Břevnov, they had no Czech – they spoke to their brothers in Latin, for they had other tongues, each of them. The Tower of Babel has fallen for them as it has fallen for all others, and yet through their study of Latin, they reach out to one another across countless borders, and speak and learn from one another as one brotherhood.”

It's the most Jan has heard him speak, and the boy has such passion in his words. How many years, abused by his father, scorned and shunned by the villagers around them, has he lain in the dark and fantasied about this perfect library and hall of study that the monastery makes? How much had it wounded him, that one bastard’s rejection, calling, of all fucking creatures on this dangerous earth, this harmless lad the Devil?

“You’ll learn nothing here from me,” Jan tells him. “I don’t know much of anything.”

“I think you’re wise, actually,” Wok says. “Wise, and kind.”

“No,” says Jan.

“Yes,” says Wok, and walks outside again before Jan can argue further. 

* * *

“I like dogs,” says Wok later that evening. He’s sitting cross-legged in the hay with one of the hounds resting over his lap, and Jan nods his head as he reaches out and knuckles the top of the beast’s head, watching his tail thump against the straw beneath him. 

“Yes,” Jan agrees.

“My father didn’t.”

“Dogs and thieves are natural enemies.”

“He used to demand I burgle with him,” Wok says slowly. “Because I had a way with dogs. Could calm them, even at night.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I had coin enough from carpentry.”

“You could have had lodgings, if you’d taken them,” Jan points out. “Left your father and worked from dormitories – worked in a mill, at a mine, anywhere in need of carpenters’ hands.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“We are to obey our parents. Honour them.”

“I see,” Jan says. He considers arguing on the point, but he supposes there’s no point in trying – and anyway, the boy’s father is dead, good riddance. “Are you sleeping out here with the dogs?”

Wok looks up at him, still rubbing his thumb under the dog’s ear, his head tipping back, pushing into Wok’s chest with one of his legs kicking out in bliss. “Can I sleep in your bed again?”

“If you keep your hands to yourself, sure. I’m not so easy as Povl here.”

“But—”

Wok cuts himself off when Jan raises his eyebrows. 

Still, that night, Jan slaps his hands away as he tries again and again to touch Jan’s body, to touch his chest, his belly, his thighs, his cock, which is soon hard from wrestling with the little bastard.

“You want it,” Wok whines, and Jan laughs at him. 

Wok grabs his wrist, and Jan lets this touch go, lets him have it – after a moment’s hesitation, seemingly disbelieving that Jan is permitting it, he slowly tugs Jan’s hand to his own chest.

“Is that what you want?” Jan asks. 

“Yes,” says Wok. There’s a slight quaver to his own voice, but no fearful tremble any longer – he guides Jan’s hand to his breast beneath the shirt, and lets out a soft, breathless noise as he tugs Jan’s fingers over the skin, then over his nipple. 

Jan lets his hand be guided, until he’s slowly playing with the young man’s nipple, squeezing and pulling at the sensitive bud, flicking over it with his thumb nail until it’s hard and peaked.

When Wok greedily pulls Jan’s head down too, Jan assents. 

The boy writhes in ecstasy at Jan’s mouth on his chest, arches and squirms and whines beneath him, his hands gripping at the back of Jan’s shaved head, his fingers twitching with a want to grip at handfuls of hair Jan doesn’t have.

Jan bites and suckles and blows out air and plays, goes from the first of his nipples to the other until both of them are bright pink and puffy with the abuse they’ve been suffering. There are bruises and bites all over his chest, in the valley between his pretty little flat boy tits, at the base of his neck, over his shoulders, over his belly. 

The boy’s cock is leaking like a pump tap, wet between the two of them, and as he starts to whine louder, beg furiously for Jan to just fuck him, to “Please, just fuck me, sir, please, please, I’m hungry for it, I’m so empty and you can make me so full, please, please split me open, please—”

Jan ignores him, and when the pretty little bastard begins to kick, Jan pins him down by his wrists.

Leaning in, the two of them nose to nose, Wok’s body trembling like the last leaf on the tree in autumn, Jan tells him seriously, gravely, “You’ll come from this alone.”

Wok’s eyelashes flutter as he blinks at him, but helplessly, he obeys. 

* * *

Afterwards, the boy trembles still beneath his blankets, overwhelmed with all he’s experienced, with the intensity of his orgasm. He’s slow and experimental about reaching for Jan’s hands, and Jan allows it, allows Wok to pull them closer to him, to settle them on his hips.

This is better, Jan thinks, that simply doing as he thoughtlessly begs, desperately requesting the treatment he’s most used to – when the young man guides Jan’s hands, he silently requests a gentleness he doubtless can’t believe can be asked for. 

“More?” Jan asks, and dips his head slightly, not breaking the young man’s gaze. 

Wok stares at him, uncomprehending, and so Jan bows his head lower, bit by bit, until he’s in line with Wok’s spent cock, and then he sucks it into his mouth. 

Wok howls so loudly the dogs join in outside.

“You can’t, you can’t,” he wails, gasping, gripping Jan tightly by what little hair he has to stop him, and he’s so red he’s all but aglow with it, lips quivering. “What the— That was… you can’t—"

“Too much, hm?” Jan asks softly.

“I need to…” Wok starts, gesturing for Jan’s cock.

“No,” Jan says mildly, shaking his head. “You don’t need to do anything.”

“But you…”

“Yes, I did,” Jan says, not hiding how pleased with himself he is. “Because I wanted to – because you wanted me to. Not because I felt beholden to, or obliged.”

“I don’t feel obliged,” says Wok, with a bit of hesitation in his voice, and Jan hums, shaking his head. 

“No,” Jan decides, although he does consider it. “Not yet.”

“Can I— watch?” Wok asks. There’s a delicacy in how he asks the question – a hesitation cut through with eagerness.

“Fine,” Jan says. 

Jan sits back against the headboard, and he ignores Wok’s eyes on him as he spits on his hand and grips himself, slowly strokes his cock from base to head. He spreads his thighs apart and presses his heels down into the mattress, grunts softly as he tips up into his own grip, thrusts into the tight pressure of it. 

When he glances up, he sees that Wok’s eyes are rooted to him, and his tongue wets his lips.

“You don’t touch yourself, do you, boy?” Jan asks. 

“It’s a sin,” Wok says distractedly, unconvincingly, not even seeming like he wants to blink as Jan sighs and twists his hand over his cock head, squeezes over the little bundle of nerves under his cock hood with his thumb. This isn’t like his quick jerks over the outhouse hole – this is slow, more of a performance. The boy, at least, lacks experience enough to be anything but entertained.

“Want me to finger myself?”

“What?”

The boy has ceased to breathe. 

Jan sucks two fingers into his mouth as he keeps palming himself off – there’s a deep depravity in his house, he knows, sucking cocks, sodomising. He takes no pleasure in execution nor any other form of butchery, doesn’t enjoy torture even when demanded as punishment for one poor sod or other, and it must matter, he thinks, that he doesn’t enjoy it, takes no pleasure in other men’s pain even as duty dictates he should end it permanently.

As far as he sees it, he’ll go to Hell regardless for his role – why not take his pleasure elsewhere, when not taking lives?

This boy has never sucked a cock, it seems, nor conceived of sucking one, let alone having his own attended to – he’s frotted and fucked with more men besides his wretched rapist of a father, small mercies, but not much else. 

He seems dizzied at the prospect of Jan’s hand between his own thighs, sliding lower. His jaw drops when Jan’s fingers press under his bollocks and sink into the opening of his hole.

“But,” he says faintly, breathlessly, as Jan spreads his legs wider, to where his arse is waiting, the hair around it darker and thicker than Wok’s, but greyer, too. “But you,” he starts, and doesn’t finish. 

Jan groans quietly as he sinks one finger inside himself.

“Oh,” whispers Wok.

Jan’s not done this sort of performance in quite the while, and his lower back aches a bit as he spreads his legs and performatively arches his back, sliding his finger deeper into himself at the same time as he pulls up on his cock to give the boy a better view. 

“Hadn’t considered this, had you, lad?” Jan asks, hearing the huskiness to his own voice as he thrusts up and into his hands, sinks another finger inside himself. “That my hole is up for play as much as yours is – that that pretty little prick of yours might fit inside.”

“No,” Wok whispers.

“Thinking about it now, aren’t you? You think my mouth was tight around you, tight and wet embrace – you just wait until you’ve had my arse.”

Wok is nodding helplessly, thoughtlessly, and Jan gives himself over to his ready and eager audience, grinds down onto his own fingers until he’s coming in appropriately theatrical white pulses, his own seed spattering over his chest.

“Ngh,” comments Wok faintly.

“Mmm,” Jan agrees, and reaches for a cloth to wipe off his hands and his chest.

“Does it hurt?” Wok asks after Jan blows out the candle and curls closer to him.

“Putting fingers inside myself?”

“Not that, that always hurts,” Wok dismisses him, and Jan raises his eyebrows, but stops the rest of his expression from changing. “But, um… Putting your cock inside?”

“No,” Jan murmurs. “Why, did your cock in my mouth hurt?”

“No.”

“Well then.”

After a moment’s pause, Wok, in the darkness, says, “Oh,” once again. He doesn’t say anything else. 

* * *

The night following, Wok doesn’t reach for Jan’s cock. He reaches for Jan’s chest instead, and Jan lets him, closes his eyes as Wok plays with his nipples. He’s clumsy about it, obviously is trying to just copy what Jan had done to him last night, and Jan’s aren’t nearly as sensitive as the boy’s are, but it still feels nice. 

It feels good.

“How many men have you been with?” Wok asks. “Had in your bed, touched?”

“A few dozen,” says Jan, watches the boy’s eyes go wide as dinner plates, and he laughs. “I’m an old man, remember. Older than your father was.”

“I wish he’d been caught sooner,” says Wok. “That he’d died sooner. I prayed for it, sometimes.”

“Mm,” Jan murmurs. 

When Wok tugs Jan’s hands towards him, Jan allows himself to be puppeted, and settles his hands on the young man’s hips. Wok grinds their cocks together, straddling Jan’s waist, and they both sigh, then groan. 

“Your father ever kiss you?” Jan asks.

“Kiss me? No, why?”

He seems baffled by the question, confused by it, even, and Jan stifles his fond and affectionate laughter. He stifles, too, the tears of relief that threaten to burn at the corners of his eyes. 

“Your monk friend, he kissed you,” he says. He knows monks far too well to make it a question.

“Yes. Kissed my feet, my hands, my cheeks, my head.”

“How about here?” Jan asks, and then licks into Wok’s mouth, swallows his moan of overwhelmed pleasure and eagerness and want.

“Ah,” he whines as they break apart, and then he grabs Jan hard and actually gets the leverage – and surprise – to flip Jan onto his belly. 

Jan grunts, spreading his thighs, and he wonders if the boy is going to do it, just fuck in dry. His thumb touches shyly between Jan’s legs, stroking the seam of his balls before he traces upwards.

“Oil on the end table.”

“Oil?”

“Fucking a cunt, it makes its own slick, eases the way. My arse doesn’t do that. Spit is alright, but it’s not enough. You don’t use water on a stiff hinge, do you? You use grease, oil the joint. Get rid of the friction and give it a nice, smooth slide.”

When Wok says nothing, Jan turns his head to look up at him. The boy looks quietly, distantly stunned, staring at the jar on the side as though he’s never even imagined such a—

Of course he hasn’t.

“Let’s try something else a moment,” says Jan, turning, and gives no further warning before he sucks Wok’s cock, this time hard, into his mouth. 

The boy’s knees threaten to buckle beneath him as Jan sinks down onto him, swallowing the young man’s cock into his mouth and letting it slide over his tongue. He’s not got such a big cock, and it’s easy to do.

Easy and fun, too – the boy is whining. 

Jan grabs him by the hips and eases him down onto his back, and Wok’s thighs jump apart in his desperation to get more of Jan on his cock, more of his prick into Jan’s mouth – he’s gripping at the back of Jan’s head and thrusting up and against his tongue. 

Jan relaxes his jaw, lets the young man fuck his throat, lets him be greedy – when has he ever got to be greedy before, when has he ever been greedy in all his life? Got to take his pleasure from another man, got to fuck like Wok is fucking him now, hips jackrabbiting, thighs quivering, whining so eagerly?

Wok comes with a loud noise, gripping at the sheets beneath them and arching his back all the way off the mattress, thrusting into Jan’s face like he’s trying to choke him, small cock be damned.

It’ll be nice when Jan rides him.

To be able to feel the sink of the young man’s cock inside his arse, that’ll be nice, to rock his hips down onto Wok’s and feel him buck up and into him. Not for a while – the first time, at least, he’ll want to let Wok control the pace, let him drive into Jan as hard and fast as he can.

It won’t be that hard, of course, not at first. Not until he knows what he’s doing, until he’s got more of an idea what sex is, what this is for, what pleasure is for.

What their bodies can do, and what they were made for. 

Wok all but melts into the fucking mattress in the aftermath, and Jan looks down at him, pleased with what he’s done, the mess he’s made of the boy. 

Standing from the bed, he walks through to the kitchen and relights the fire, setting the kettle over the flame.

In the time it takes to get the fire hot and the water boiling, the boy has come to slightly, although not entirely – when Jan looks through to the bedroom with a cup of nettle tea in his hands, the boy is sitting on the edge of the bed, his legs hanging down, his expression dazed. 

“You alright, boy?” Jan asks.

Wok nods his head, but his expression is quietly pensive as Jan moves forward and puts a mug into his hands, watches Wok look into the depths of it. 

“How many men have you hanged for sodomy?” he asks. “How many of them are buried out there?”

“Let me show you something,” Jan says, looking down at him, and he comes forward, closer. Wok sits back on the bed, and Jan raises his foot and rests it on one of the posts of the bed, his legs spread before Wok’s face.

The boy looks nervous, uncertain. He opens his mouth, closes it, looks up at Jan’s face pleadingly. 

“I don’t,” he starts, “I don’t know… how—”

“Not letting you to suck my cock, boy,” Jan tells him with a soft laugh, and he reaches down, pulls his bollocks and his cock out of the way. “Thought you might notice earlier, but it’s no wonder you were distracted. On my inner thigh, here, just outside of where my hair ends. See that?”

Wok looks searchingly between his legs for a moment, and then his expression intensifies and he leans forward, staring. Jan’s cock isn’t at all disinterested with the warmth of the young man’s breath on his skin. 

“Is that a scar?” he asks, voice full of wonderment. 

“No. Mark from birth, same as yours.”

Wok traces the lines of the cross, clear and distinct, with his fingertips, his touch gentle on Jan’s skin. He smiles faintly, then and sips at his drink, looks back up at Jan’s face, meets his gaze.

“Can I… I want to, I would like to make you come. Not my mouth, I don’t know how, but I could… Could I feel you in my… in my hand? Can I?”

“Yeah, lad,” says Jan, draining his mug. “You can have whatever I have to give you, that and more, so long as you ask me. So long as you tell me what you want, or make it known to me. We might not have Latin, but we can share some language between us, hm?”

“Oh,” says Wok faintly, and smiles a little wider. 

When Jan bends to kiss him this time, the brush of their lips together is much more tender, and Wok melts into his lap. 

FIN.