roses before swine

“What’s wrong with what I’ve got on now?”

“Don’t worry about it, you’ll understand before long. You can’t follow me where we’re going if you’re looking like a sheep-farmer.”

Sander grunts. “The hell’s wrong with being a sheep-farmer? I paid for this shit, you know. These aren’t rags I’ve got on.”

Plenty of life in this jacket yet, it’s not blown out at the elbows or hopelessly spattered in horseshit, and Jan’s acting like he’s ashamed to be seen with him. You’d think he’d be smug about looking all the better turned-out by comparison. All this business, acting like Sander is some valet or lackey or retainer to him instead of whatever the fuck he is. Jan is a rich man’s son, bastard or not; no doubt he’s used to being waited on all his life and dressed like a prince to boot. Sander’s seen him in inconspicuous homespun full of moth-holes, passing himself off like a poor clerk, and he’s seen him in velvet the color of wine with a fur edge thick as a whore’s bush. He has no fucking right to fuss about an old coat.

Jan is giving him one of those creepy smiles that’s as good as a kick under the table. “You need to learn to take a gift when it’s given. Now stay put, just where you are, and do whatever this good fellow tells you. I have some business to attend to with my friend.”

Jan makes an unmistakable gesture even as he turns away to greet the master of the place. The weight of his purse speaks of money in the offing, the kind of money that gets measured out on scales careful as you please and not tossed down with a snort. It figures that he gets sniffy whenever he has to pay anyone he can’t rook with pretty manners and clipped coins. The old man must be a goldsmith or a jeweler or something when he isn’t stitching houppelandes for rich twats.

Jan speaks to the tailor himself as sweetly as you please, inquiring after the price of so many ells of this and of that and a bunch of other shit that gets monosyllabic answers and goes right over Sander’s head. When the two of them retire to the upper room, Jan is all steady smiles, and even the dusty old fucker looks in good temper, so it must mean money. They’re here for more than a suit of reasonably priced clothes, that’s for damn certain.

The tailor’s assistant is a scabby little fellow of the type Sander is used to biting the ears off in muddy thoroughfare scuffles, but he keeps his eyes down and doesn’t give any lip as he takes the measure of him from tip to toe. The only part where it gets a bit tickly is when the man is down on his knees taking the measure of Sander’s crotch for the codpiece of a pair of split hose, and the idle thought of bashing the little shit in the nose gets him to briefly stir – the man makes a noise of dismay, but when he looks up, Sander bares his teeth and the little under-tailor wisely holds his tongue from then on.

New clothes – might as well put him in livery, stick a stupid badge on his hat, call it a uniform. The thought gives him a queer itchy feeling under the skin.

The assistant tailor steps out with his grubby string and stick of charcoal to go and have a rummage for something likely to fit. Sander has never been the kind to shit himself over the fine things in life, and the whole prospect of this event before them makes him itch. Jan must be seen with the right people, to be supporting the right causes – guilds, maybe, a bunch of paunch-bellied poots with sick young wives and fat gold chains around their necks. He hasn’t explained why, but there’s something there beneath the surface, some story prickling under the skin and ready to be gripped tight and spooled out like a great worm. Whatever it is that pains him, Sander won’t be bought for the price of an ell of wool or a little gold lace – he’ll never wear a badge or a stupid fucking cap

The man returns with a bundle of white linen, pricked out with black designs – Sander slips off his tunic, nice and quick so the vermin don’t have much chance to hold on for their lives, and fumbles through the thing looking for the neck hole. There’s a latchet around the band that frustrates him into tearing open the knot with his teeth and forcing his head through.

When he surfaces from the mess of linen, Jan is watching him from the doorway. A fresh band of gold now glitters around his neck, studded with fat red stones like thumbnails. Jan is cut out for that sort of thing – Sander would look like a proper twat in a velvet coat, but there’s nothing that looks soft about Jan when he’s dressed like a gentleman. Wealth makes him look hard as stone. The brushed black wool makes his hair shine and his fair skin look even fairer.

“Don’t you look fine.” His tone is clipped, not effusive, but there is frank desire in the way Jan looks him over, the sort of warm look Sander is only used to receiving stark-naked and spread-eagled. “You’ll need a proper pair of hose, but he’ll deliver them before tomorrow night, as soon as they’re made up.”

Right now Sander couldn’t give a shit if he went in front of these rich cunts with his balls swinging in the breeze, but Jan wants him there at his elbow, minding his health for him. Jan is a clever, clever man, but even he can’t be everywhere all the time,

*

All that black velvet, all those thin pinched ugly old men and their anemic little wives, and he’ll remember none of it. They are back at the fat man’s house again when his head stops spinning, in the narrow corridor past the stone steps, and for a thrilling moment, Sander knows only that he is alive.

It plainly hadn’t gone as badly as it could have if that’s the case. It could have gone a hell of a lot worse, if Sander hadn’t been there – new coat or not. He’s killed for Jan before or at least maimed without too much care for whether the bugger woke up again afterward. He’s bled for him too, but he barely registers the dull scabbing trickle from his nose to his chin. His blue woolen doublet is sodden with blood, already drying, but the shirt is the surest casualty – he’d just gotten to like it, and now it’ll serve some old slut for a rag.

Jan has a stiff arm tucked around him as if he’d been unwillingly bearing Sander’s weight for some time, but now he removes himself with such brisk efficiency that Sander thinks he must be gutted after all and he’s trying to avoid getting splashed with bowel juice. His seams are split, his good linen is stained with Christ knows what, Jan is leaving him for dead, and he’ll take his purse full of false coins and his shiny gold chains and his –

“Get those things off,” Jan hisses, pushing him back against the paneled wall. “Leave them on the ground. Quietly.”

Sander grunts, jostling against him as he fumbles, but Jan pushes him back hard and his fine white hands force through the buttons of Sander’s doublet to strip them out of their slits. He tears the blood-wet cloth away like the skin off a dead hare’s back, without a care; it makes Sander’s chest hair prickle, and his prick jump in his woolly codpiece. He runs through a swift mental index of his vital parts, cock first.

“The cunt didn’t even scratch me,” Sander says with savage pleasure. He’s vaunting in it now, but the truth is that he remembers nothing of the man he killed – not even what the fucker did first to ask for it. Sander’s good at only brawling when he’s provoked, but not always the sort to remember the provocation afterward.

“Not so loud, right? That cunt had Cod gold in his pocket.”

Sander thinks of asking how he could tell, but it occurs to him that that might be tipping his hand about remembering. He shuts his eyes tightly in the moonlit dark and grins until his scabbing nose splits again.

“Now the fucker’s dead.”

“Not dead,” Jan says, running his fingertips through Sander’s coarse beard and tracing the line of his cheek. “Alive, and talking. You did very, very well, Sander.”

What a happy coincidence, a sheer stroke of luck. The difference between dead and near-dead is a palm’s breadth, not even that, a pube’s length, and stopping himself isn’t always easy – from the blood on his sleeves and the throbbing in the meat of his palms, he’d done it bare-handed.

Jan is unharmed; he looks cool and unruffled, imperially slim in all his silk, and the rope of gold around his neck glimmers darkly in the light from the window. Rings on his fingers, gold around his neck, and the line of his sallow shaven cheek shining with stark bone from the light of the fat moon – Sander wants to kiss him. He also wants to get fucked silly.

He can taste the blood in his mouth when Jan kisses him as if it is the first time all over again. Jan wraps his hands around Sander’s throat, squeezing until the knuckles in his fingers creak and the blood in Sander’s cock throbs. Sander moans lowly, grinding against his leg and gripping fistfuls of his silk-velvet huque without a care for the bloodstains.

Jan breaks away and speaks to him in a low voice, very close – almost nose to nose, as if he is speaking the words to Sander’s own lips.

“You are my man, Sander, the only one I can trust with what I plan to do. None of those superior old sons of whores – only you. We’ll come through this as rich men, and fortune will spread her legs for both of us, do you understand?”

Sander tries to say something clever, with a stuffed-up throat, and snorts a noseful of blood. Jan strikes him across the face – his rings clack against Sander’s teeth and leave his mouth a smarting gash of pain. The tears spring to Sander’s eyes, wild demented tears, and he roars with animal pain – the weight of him slams Jan back against the plaster before Jan kicks his legs out from under him and Sander lets him do it. Sander lets Jan clamp a hand over his smarting mouth to muffle his cry, and he doesn’t even bite him.

This is their way. Some men like brown beer and some like malt wine; some lovers like to pinch and others like to slap. Jan lets his outer garment drop and tugs a fistful of Sander’s hair, wrenching him into place – he has his own brutal strength, for all his nice manners and nice-smelling linen, and he knows exactly how to hurt him.

The stab of pain stirs him from the very guts – Sander grinds his face against Jan’s erection, mouthing at the shape of his hard cock through the stitched wool, and Jan unlaces his codpiece with torturous slowness.

Sander sucks his cock desperately and dutifully, down on his knees with spit and spunk trailing from his raw broken mouth; he takes the length of him into his mouth, almost to the root, even when driving Jan’s cock to the hilt makes him drool and wince. Jan is saying something, but exactly what does not matter. The exact words are drowned out by the sound of the blood between Sander’s ears squealing like seabirds – there in the corridor of some rich fucker’s townhouse Jan could be cursing him or blessing him and it couldn’t even matter.

Jan finishes in a salty wash and Sander drinks it down gratefully. He can cease to exist like that, with a raw broken mouth and the ghost of a silk sleeve against his cheek.

“My faithful lad,” Jan says, in a very low voice indeed. Jan is rubbing a lock of his hair between his fingers.

Sander rests his head against Jan’s thigh, with Jan’s fingers running through his hair – these dribs and drabs never lose their charm for him, and he’s spent enough time getting fishy looks from the same village boys who let him suck their cocks not to cherish moments like these. It’s so nice that he’s hardly even thinking about getting his rocks off. He tugs at his yard out of tender nostalgia, though he risks blowing his load all over Jan’s nice pointy shoes.

Jan puts away his tackle, still spit-wet from Sander’s mouth and a little bloody, and he takes a step back on the creaking boards. This leaves Sander lurching on his knees, with a storm raging in his head and a stiff prick, and for one terrible mad moment, Sander thinks Jan is leaving him there for good, without even a safe travels. But when Jan withdraws what he’s looking for from his belt-bag, his bearing registers instantly as so smug as to be unmistakable, and Sander perks right up:

“Here, you beauty. Try this on and see if it fits.”

In his ring-studded hand, there is a scarlet rope. Not rough splintery hemp but something else entirely – Jan twists a loop of it over two knuckles and rubs it against the raw skin of his bottom lip, making Sander hiss and groan. The fibers are so soft it’s almost an insult, but when Jan spools it out to make the first knot the luster of them is painful, strand twisted against strand with pearly neatness. The silk rope slithers around his throat with insidious lightness, and Sander sighs with inexpressible pleasure until his nose bubbles with fresh blood. Call it what you like, it’s a lot fucking better than a poncey fucking chain