Paroxysms Of Caesars

It is the fifth year. The warden’s attendants remain long enough to humiliate their captive in their familiar way with blows and curses, to string him up and stand clear of the lash; they bear with them a basin of water (in case good M. Dorléac objects to the state of sanitation in which his prisoners wear out their days?) and are both dismissed. It doesn’t take two men to carry their master’s coat nor to stand guard with the key; Dantès’ first thoughts at this change in routine are still wholly savage – that he could kill him here if he had to, though he is still a starving captive and his captor is a well-built and well-funded aristocrat with armed men under his command. The warden’s keys are at his belt, as they are every time Edmond’s seen him; know a man’s habits and you know the man. The warden of the Chateau d’If is not a man, but a nightmare.

“Five years – a small milestone, certainly, but not an insignificant one. If you had a son, my dear Dantès, he would be walking and talking by now. If you had a wife she would already be growing tired of you. But alas, it’s only me, unless you’ve grown attached to the men who feed you. Have you discovered their names? You’ll have to tell me.”

Edmond Dantès no longer tries to flinch from the lash, but when a gesture is made with it in his direction, even coiled, his head jerks back.

“Frightened? This sort of thing is quite standard in other institutions.”

Edmond is still reeling breathlessly from the beating and can see nothing for the black spots swarming before his eyes. But he can feel the warden’s ungloved hand present between his legs, the ring on his finger cool and hard against his raw-rubbed thigh. He would have thought his skin to have lost all sensitivity in the course of this ordeal, dulled by beatings and cold and filth; it has not.

Every hair on his body prickles with alertness.

“But really you needn’t worry. The Chateau d’If is not like other institutions, and I happen to be a great believer in gestures.”

He withdraws himself (though Edmond’s loins still burn with confusion) and sets his hand against his back admiringly, the way a man might touch the flank of a particularly handsome horse. Edmond has never seen his own scars, but he knows they are extensive; the old man has seen to those of them that hadn’t healed and now he knows by feel where they must be. (He cannot flinch away, can’t tremble.) Ugly marks in parallel, new ones still smarting and old ones reopened under the lash. They alternate thin and thick; sometimes he’ll favor one hand, sometimes the other. Whether it’s a certain number of blows he metes out or if he gratifies his whims until his arms grow tired, Edmond doesn’t know. (Even in the stinging cold, he is dripping with sweat, and there’s a thin stain of color on his death-pale cheek, exertion or overexcitement. After a point he drops the pretense of deliberation in his punishment and revels in it, but he is always exacting.)

Nothing so severe as the first time, or perhaps it’s Edmond who’s grown harder and more capable of endurance. The blood is running down his legs from the stripes now marking his thighs – not deep ones, but without the earlier padding of scar tissue to spare him. When he tries to look down at the stones of the floor, he catches only the impression of a few dark drops and a sickening wave of vertigo.

“Good work, if I do say so myself. You are a model prisoner.”

Dorléac circles him like a bored housecat, each footfall sounding louder than it can possibly be. The light is failing, or a cloud’s passed in front of the sky. Edmond swallows, with difficulty.

“If one had money, a man might conceivably come to an arrangement – you could have clean laundry, a fireplace, wine and the occasional woman. But you’re honest, my dear Dantès, and honest men are poor. So here you will remain until you die.

They kept the Chevalier de Lorraine here once, you know, long before any of our times. Face like an angel, or so they say. While we’re on the subject of sodomy, have you any prior experience of it?

“No,” Edmond says, intending defiance and falling short of it. His captor has a laugh like the Devil’s.

“So much the better! You were a sailor once, were you not?”

The intended insinuation is lost on him, not when the thought of Mondego is always there, perpetually just below the surface in his brain– and surges to meet him at the slightest suggestion buoyed on an acid tide of bewildered hate. Dantès keeps this to himself, and makes his face a mask.

“Well, you’re no delight to the eye,” he says, with indifferent malice, though when Edmond can bear to look at his face his expression is fixed with lust, or some other cruel aspect he can’t identify. “You were remarkably fresh-faced once. But you’ll do.”

He prods him in the small of the back with the handle of the whip, then takes a step back. For a moment the perverse fear seizes him that his captor intends to violate him with the whip, but no such thing is immediately forthcoming and his mind scrambles desperately to make another assessment and to predict the inevitable.

He hears the chain rattle before the awful slack seizes him, and Dorléac lets him drop. He’s learned to expect this by now sooner or later but still he lands hard, and badly; the juddering shock of impact slams through his arms and wrings another scream from his raw throat. His ears ring.

He struggles up onto his hands and knees, lungs heaving; before not his aggressor is upon him. Dorléac makes a comment to the effect that needs must when the devil drives, wetting his fingers in his mouth before forcing them in. The sensation sends a twist of revulsion through him; he groans in complaint and he is violated further for it.

The invasion sends a wrench of disgust through him, an outcome that the warden seems to have predicted and to take great relish in. The pain of entry is hardly slight, but in the sum of all his injuries there’s a traitorous thread of enjoyment – in comparison with the whip, the man’s touching and prodding is obscenely gentle. His body has been brutalized in such a way that the sensations which are least painful are cast into sharp relief, seeming completely alien, and all his mind will fix on are these. As if this is happening to a body other than his own.

“Lift up your hips,” he says, sounding bored already. “You’re welcome to struggle, if you like.” He strokes his cock to hardness with his other hand, where Edmond can feel it but not see, can feel the hot stickiness of its head brush hot and eager against his skin just below his buttocks. His imagination fills in the details. “You’re healthier than you have been; what have you been doing differently?”

Edmond thinks of the Abbé Faria, the old man and his books, not so far away at all. Salvaging something from the wreck of his own identity has been a full-time occupation, and the Abbé has promised to teach him to fight. To teach him patience. Is he meant to suffer this patiently? There’s no chance of escaping this without incurring a worse fate (and his mind provides, in an insinuating tone not unlike the warden’s own, that one man who’s known a bath at some time in his life might be preferable to a half-dozen guards) and merely struggling to get his bound wrists behind him to make a half-hearted grab at the keys sends a punishing hand to pin him more firmly and another to press his face into the familiar flagstones. The cold is a relief inasmuch as it forces him to continue consciousness.

“Spread your legs,” he says, voice low and insistent. Edmond complies. “And do try to enjoy yourself. Others would pay for the privilege.”

He takes him there on the floor, like an animal; he buries his teeth in the muscle of his shoulder and spits blood with a complaint about the taste.

The animal knot of panic in his chest has steeled itself into hate. Panic ebbs and comes back again, flutters, makes his legs quake and his mouth shape cries and prayers like an idiot; hate braces him, and he submits stock-still. With hate to sustain him, he can draw away inwardly to some cell beyond this cell, go through his arithmetic or the Greek alphabet or the letters of his own name. But he cannot evade the stink of blood or of oiled leather or overpowering jasmine, his flesh burns from being stretched too far and his anatomy betrays him even now. This isn’t how he wants to die, spitted torturously deep on this cock, the plaything of a monstrous degenerate. He slips his bonds but his resistance is only feeble. All the scratching and groping he can manage yields nothing.

With every thrust he seems no closer to spending, and the indignity is drawn out, Edmond doesn’t know if it’s simply the nature of the act or something he’s doing on purpose but he’s just on the verge, just on the cruel knife-edge of losing himself in the most shameful way he can imagine, and yet he doesn’t. Or Dorléac won’t let him. He is making him suffer after all, pressing into him with his obscene grip. Edmond can barely breathe, he is sick and ragged. He’s going to be torn apart, he’s going to die here,

“You’re killing me,” he gasps, “please,” for all that begging has gotten him so far. His captor doesn’t respond to the accusation except to persist.

Hate isn’t enough to sustain him now. He breaks.

The weight of the man’s body is suffocating; the cloth of his shirt sticks to innumerable fresh wounds. When he finally finishes he comes with a hoarse cry, muffled against Edmond’s torn shirt, a blasphemy. Edmond feels his whole body hitch on top of him, then the monstrous rumble of laughter. When he withdraws it is an unimaginable relief. Edmond wants nothing more than to faint.

He rolls him over onto his bleeding back and finishes him in a few tosses of a loosely closed fist, without comment, as if it is a particularly ugly chore. Edmond comes so hard that he cries.

“There,” he says, “our anniversary present,” and licks the tears from Edmond’s cheek.

Dorléac fastens his breeches and goes to wash his hands at the basin. It’s Edmond’s blood his shirt is stained with.

Edmond is slumped, dazed, miserable as the Crucifixion. Dorléac sets his cruel black boot heel against his throat; he can do nothing but stare dully, eyes aching in his head, and above him his captor is a swimming blot of white and red.

“Cherish the memory, my dear Dantès; I expect I’ll have quite forgotten about you by the same time next year. Until we meet again.”

The warden of the Chateau d’If is a madman. He jostles him with a press of his heel, and is gone.