This is a fanfic of my book It Will Not Last the Night, by my friend, Aurora Wozzeck. It plays with occult magick and the craze for all things Egyptian that took many hearts during the 1920s. Included, too, is a picture I drew for it, and a couple photos from the time–one of which is specifically mentioned in the novel. Thanks, Aurora!
A Reluctant Pharaoh
(A fan-fic story of Sid Prise’s It Will Not Last the Night, by A. Wozzeck)
Set about a year after they started going together, in 1923.
Theodor could never quite figure out why Katya was a masochist. She was surely the farthest thing from a “submissive” or “passive” personality. She was a fiery, tough, thoroughly independent “New Woman,” as the short-haired, short-skirted, sexy girls all over Germany today were calling themselves. But with Katya, the “New” went deeper than fashion and jazz, or even sex and wine, pills and reefer. She was an anarchist—so radical that, next to her, even Communist Theodor seemed conservative. He owed her the grateful loss of his virginity, along with the loss of many other pesky innocences the Wilhelmine, Victorian world before the War had saddled him with over his first nineteen years. Though he often played the part of her “master,” her torturer and ravisher over the last year of their bedroom playtimes, it was she, not he, who truly led it all. And more than that, she led a whole crowd of anarchists—sometimes in nothing short of street battles with Nazis and monarchists and all the other right-wing scum that infested the boulevards and back-alleys of this Berlin in the last months of 1923.
She was, in short, no man’s slave.
Yet that fantasy, of slavery, of being abused and forced to serve Theodor, was the one of the couple’s many fantasies that was sure to get her going, and guaranteed to get her off. And Theodor, for whom sex itself was a new thing, no older than his year-long friendship with Katya, wondered whether he was up for the challenge of a more sophisticated, more decadent, or at the very least, more ornate flavor of sexuality than simple sex, simple lovemaking. He knew his times embraced such things; and he’d learnt from Katya that all times had embraced these things. Her library in the little hovel her family stipend and her freelance sex-work paid for in the derelict Alexanderplatz, in the east of Berlin, contained much erotica, from many places and times, in between occult treatises and political tracts. She had translations of Ovid and Sappho and other Greco-Roman poetic pornographers, texts from Assyria and Babylon and ancient China and India. She had, too, apocryphal screeds her Great Aunt—the rebel matron of her bourgeois family, old enough to remember the 1848 Revolutions all round Europe, and an active participant in them—had collected over the last century: Cabbalistic writings, and even older stories from before the Babylonian Captivity, stories consciously left out of her and Katya’s people’s Torah, tales of daevas and goddesses hearkening to a time before the Ancient Hebrews had fallen into what Katya called “the pit of monotheism.” Katya’s library continued from that ancient, pre-biblical epoch right through to modern times between the pamphlets and bookends, from occult treatises of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance detailing elixirs of aphrodisiacs and astrologies connecting constellations to the glands and humors—on through Sade and Sacer-Masoch and dozens of other, lesser known (and much better) erotic poets and poetesses, till the generation just before last. Katya had gotten hot reading passages from Confirmo te Chrysmate, a cycle of pornographic poems by Maria Eichhorn, called Dolorosa, a cabaret chanteuse of sadomasochistic songs of her own life and pen, who lived the bohemian life of poetess and prostitute and died obscurely, somewhere in Istanbul in 1907 or 1908. Katya got hot reading it aloud, donning Matahari fantasy headdresses and myriad swaths of diaphanous scarves, a waterpipe of hashish and fruit tobacco bubbling beside her as she sipped the smoke from it; and Theodor had gotten more than hot hearing her read—though anything she said, in that voice, would bring him nigh to boiling.
Yet, Theodor still didn’t quite know what to do with that boil. The Catholic girls he’d dated before Katya did not like his boiling, and certainly would not help him get to steam. They seemed to like him best when he could simmer himself down—rewarding him with kind words and kisses, and many, many promises. It made him proud of his ability to simmer down, and to distrust the feeling of being too turned on. It made him fear like plague the loss of control he sensed lay beyond the boil, when the steam took over and would not stop as long as the heat remained. Being with someone who did not want his simmering down, but actually wanted the boiling and the steaming—to point of explosion—was entirely virgin territory to the boy. And that, with what was left of Catholic guilt from his ancestral lineage, and what had been built upon its ruins—half-understood Freudian theories of his time of the grim necessity of repression and neurosis—made Theodor’s easing into a healthy, free sexuality frustratingly elusive.
“That’s why we need a Ritual,” Katya said, matter-of-fact, over their breakfast after a night of more conventional lovemaking under the canopy of her big, four-poster bed, yawning, stretching naked in the naked dawn. “A Rite. Something to consummate our union properly—and consecrate it properly, to Eros . . .”
“I don’t know if I wanna do that, love,” Theodor said, in a measure of distaste. “I mean, I know we live in a time that’s inundated by spiritualism and occult rites and weird, arcane beliefs—but I’m a materialist. A dialectical materialist. Our love-life shouldn’t be contaminated by any queer mumbo-jumbo. It’s natural—or, it should be. Not a matter of ‘magick.’”
“You don’t think there’s magick between us, Theo?”
“Well—well sure there is. Sure there is. But it’s a natural magick. Just from us, you know?”
“Ah, love—but that’s all I mean. Magick is a means to focus one’s will—projecting it from inside ourselves outward—into the world. That’s all it is. And its form is altogether arbitrary. Whatever we choose, whatever symbols, sigils we craft from the ether of our thoughts—whatever rites or rituals, costumes, whatever made-up, bullshit prayers or made-up, bullshit deities—they’re all just aspects of ourselves that we deify in order to focus our power—our energy—outward. It’s like a target to aim the arrow of our will for, or the bow we used to shoot it. The magickal symbols are just tools, vehicles, to aim an energy that we can feel, in reality—every time we’ve ever made love. They’re things of no meaning that we make meaningful, because we choose to—and because it helps us do the work of making our will reality. That’s all it is.”
“That’s all it is?”
“Yeah, liebling. Nothing more. Except that it—it has to be fun, too. Sexy, you know? That way, it’ll stir our subconscious, and all our senses—our body, emotions, all our visceral reactions—and our intellect, too. A new kind of fantasy, for a new level of our play.”
Theodor thought of it for a moment, minding the kettle of coffee on the flame from the wood stove in Katya’s flat. He smiled as he doused the flame and brought the kettle to the armchair he’d been sitting in. He poured from it into two bone-china cups, hers first, then his.
“How would we do it?” he asked, stirring sugar into his coffee with one of Katya’s dainty silver spoons. “Should we go to a hypnotist, or something? Have some spiritualist medium channel a sex-crazy satyr into my blood? And some yielding faerie damsel, some nymph or sylph, into yours?”
Katya smiled coyly, her kohl-streaked eyes sparkling, her black bangs curling down the sides of her bright olive face, shaking a little as she tilted her head in thought.
“Not a bad idea, Theo, love. But I think we don’t need any outside help. We’ve got all the magick we need, right between us. Right here . . . and here . . . and here . . .”
And she made little obscene, upside-down crosses with her long, skilled tongue—on his forehead, on his lips, then several key points south. She ended up on her hands and knees, licking her blasphemous homage on both his naked feet, first his right and then his left.
Seeing her there, all her ample curves enlarged like ripe fruit as the muscles beneath them flexed, prostrating herself so suddenly, so abjectly, made an unexpected jolt take his middle and a quickening of his pulse. She giggled and winked from down there on the floor, then jumped to her feet and sat down again on the armchair beside his in her parlor. “Don’t you think it so, my pretty boychik? That there’s magick in us—even before we do our Rite?”
And he smiled, shifting a little embarrassed in his chair. He got himself back under control, and told her yes, there is certainly magick in us.
“Or at least, schätzelein,” he added, “in you.”
She smiled a gentle, elder’s smile.
“There’s magick in you, too, liebling. The Rite won’t create it. The Rite will just show you where in yourself to find it.”
And he wanted to linger, wanted to stay and prove to her, gratefully, that she was right. He still had enough heat simmering in him that he could again turn up the flame, both from her sexy homage just now, and their morning kiss and more they’d had in the next room before this breakfast.
But he had to go to work.
He clothed his naked feet in his hard, heavy workboots, his body in his hard, heavy overalls, his sandy-blond head in his heavy leather cap with its heavy red star pinned upon it. Then heavily, he left her there, to muse and plan her own next hours in the world.
“Think of me, mein schätze,” she called out the door as he hit the tenement steps, clothed only in her curvy, dusky glory, shameless and sweet in the doorframe, “when you’re slinging those hard, heavy boxes in the warehouse. Think of your muscles flexing, and the aches you feel, the good aches mingling into the bad. And think of that hunger you’ll feel in your belly, and below—after your long, hard shift. And think of me, working the streets in my soft leather boots, and my soft, lacy lingerie, my soft mouth and soft breasts and the softness of my ass in your hard, callused hands—and form a sigil in your mind—of Revenge.”
And Theodor laughed, and said he’d think about it. And then, he didn’t give it another passing thought as he caught a tram out of the Alex and down toward the East Harbor.
But after the bosses yelled at the boys on the floor of the warehouse, eight long hours after he’d been slinging boxes for the cargo load of a ship on a pier outside, and his comrades Klaus and Old Max yelled back, and he got a feeling of unprecedented power when he and the other Communist workers on his shift linked arms and threatened a walkout, forcing the foremen to take back their demand that the workers work overtime tonight—Theodor realized that it was not so wrong to enjoy the flexing of strength, the winning of power. He pictured the boxes he’d moved all day over his shift to belong to the shipping company who owned the ship docked at the pier, and directed the hatreds and angers and vengeance he felt against his own company instead against the shipping line. And he pictured the shipping company to be the one owned by the family of Katya—before she’d claimed her rebel name and had been called Katharina Von Rosen—only daughter and heiress of a bourgeois family three generations already millionaires. And the sigil he’d been asked by Katya to form earlier came to him then—as if from a dream.
It was a Red Star—with a Scarab in its center . . .
It made him understand that there might yet be something to all this talk of magick.
Of course, he should not have been surprised, that magick had entered his life, or at least his consciousness, after a year of dating such a crazed beauty as his love. Katya in a sense came out of the same tradition of materialism as Theodor, anarchism and communism having the same roots in the ecumenical, scientific socialism of the First International. But because she was an anarchist, deep and to the core, Katya resolved to take orders from no one in matters of thought and theory—not even acknowledged anarchist thinkers and activists, like Bakunin or Kropotkin or Rocker or Mühsam, who might object to her “queer mumbo-jumbo.” She was more than a believer in magick; she was an actual practitioner. And she’d shared much of what she knew and did with her Theo over the last months.
She especially liked the overlap between the magickal realm and the sexual. One of the fellows she’d been smitten with from afar for years was the writer and choreographer Ernst Schertel. Whilst the older man had never given Katya a proper tumble, he liked her well enough to give her an autographed, advanced copy of his daring photography book, all on sadomasochistic themes, called Magic: History, Theory, and Practice. Theodor and Katya had long dwelt on the images of the dances in that folio, exploring them under the influence of schnapps and cigarettes dipped in opium—and more than once, they’d attended together performances of Ernst’s troop, excited beyond measure by the daring dances, and excited no less by the tension in the theaters, the very real dangers of raids by the vice squad. It had always made them hot, and led to many latenight sessions of their own dancing in praise of their goddess Katya miscalled Eros. There was something magickal in unleashing the primal forces of the body, and they’d both ridden these forces to explosions of the ego—a triumphant nothingness—the most their souls could ever in this life be.
There was magick all around them in this thoroughly spooky, thoroughly ancient, thoroughly modern time. For generations now, the Empires of Europe had been penetrating the frontiers of the world, conquering, raping, murdering—settling them. But that racist project had not always gone entirely according to plan. For those “darker peoples” had traditions of their own, knew of forces the Europeans had long suppressed, till they’d utterly forgotten them. Questions Europeans had not asked since they’d mutated into “white” men, centuries ago; questions white men had not in all their history thought to ask; these questions other peoples had founded whole cultures in answering.
And they had answers. Whole religions, whole schools of philosophy, whole sciences, whole languages were based on answering these questions. So, it was only inevitable that these Johnny-come-lately white barbarians would come to be entranced by that which, grudgingly, they realized was deeper than anything their culture had, superior to their kindergarten catechisms and their paltry, e’er-incomplete science.
The natives were starting to win.
Given this, it was not so very strange, really, that Katya would settle on something both ancient and foreign from which to craft her rite. Ancient Egypt. A land that all were turning toward now, with all the recent archeological finds. For the land was half myth, half-conjecture; and a better part of the other half was the genesis of all True Western History. And no small measure of the rest was the modern land which even now was plotting to overthrow European tyranny and claim back the wondrous sovereignty of their Alexandria, their Cairo, their Giza and Luxor, and their sacred, forever-flowing Nile.
Too, it was the land that, at least in hoary legend, was the place of Katya’s ancestral slavery.
“You can be the Pharaoh,” Katya smiled coyly, putting on the various trinkets she saw in a barrel at the oddments store some blocks away from her dilapidated street, holding two scarab-spangled bangles to Theo’s wrists, as if binding him in shackles of his own potency. “And I can be your Hebrew slave-girl.”
She giggled in a nymphet’s sexy triumph, bursting a taboo so ancient between them that it predated their ever meeting. The polarization of Jew and Gentile was beginning to tear their country, their whole world apart; but it was something to giggle at now, in this costume and prank shop filled with the discarded stuff of so many theater companies gone out of business in this insane Inflation—a difference between them, like his being Communist and her being anarchist, that might have meant something once, when they knew each other less, but had long been parodied into merest play.
Theodor had taken longer to giggle, to play. He was, for all his forward-thinking, all his rebellion, an awkward and staid sort of fellow. He feared his own potency, feared to give into it, to let go and experience life without a clear plan. This was a lingering reason he could not join Katya in anarchy. Poor darling, Katya had said to herself, early, when she was still quite new to him, still but Katharina, and only later said to his face. This culture’s fucked you hard. You don’t even trust your own cock; and you fear what moves it. . . . Generations of Catholicism had borne heavy on his soul, and all his childhood, raised with his father’s Social Democratic dreams of a gradual liberation was not enough to buck that cruciform saddle off his back. Not even his own chosen politic, the politic of his manhood, Communism, Spartakism, Worker’s Revolt in defiant pride in a Workers’ Republic, could give him what he needed to fuck that guilt away—fuck it right up its Ass, she laughed, as she wiggled a little, and bent down to pick up a Pharaoh’s headdress from the bottom of the barrel of costume regalia.
Theodor looked to Katya’s ass. It was wide and round, ripe as a plum or peach. Deep inside him, a tremor took his gut—an energy which wanted to travel up and out—and deep, deep in. A stabbing, shooting pleasure which he knew would become pain if he could not release it, and bury it deep in that delicious softness, that tantalizing roundness. But they were in public—in this corner oddments store. There were people right over there, beyond that curtain, that could overhear anything done in this backroom. Any of those people could be listening, and soon could be seeing the two randy young people, teasing in the back of the place. He could not fuck Katya now. Society would not allow it. Even though he knew well that she would love it if he did, love it if he took her now—take her by the waist in his work-callused hands and press her against the barrel and rip apart her little tasselly skirt, hoisting its rags up her back—yank her little strip of lacy panties aside—and ram her asshole so hard she’d shriek and have no choice but to yield all she was to his thrusts—his power—his knowledge . . .
But he hurried outside instead, to conceal his embarrassment at getting too hot in a place so cold. And she followed him, confused, to find him folding his overalls tighter over his middle to cut short his fantasy and its sign in his body, and dragging fiercely on a cigarette to get his mind on something—anything—else.
“What are you afraid of, Theo?”
Her question came later, after they’d taken the tram back to her dilapidated neighborhood, her dilapidated street, and were in the privacy of her derelict flat, drinking fine cherry schnapps and sharing a tin of caviar and crusts of black bread.
“Oh, I—I dunno. I dunno what I’m afraid of. A whole mess of things, I guess.”
“I think you’re afraid of yourself. Your own darkness. Your power. You’re afraid you won’t be able to control it once you let it out—that it’ll take over—make you do things—things you’re afraid to do. Things that’ll embarrass you, things that will make you ashamed. That might make you cruel, hateful. That might make you hate yourself.”
Theodor said nothing. He sipped his schnapps, then guzzled it. She refilled his glass.
“You’re afraid you’re some kind of bastard—aren’t you, Theo? Like you’re some kind of fucking Nazi.”
“What are you afraid of, Katya?”
“Ah . . . I suppose that’s a fair question. What am I afraid of? Let’s see . . . ah, lots of things, I guess. I’m afraid of lots of things, too, liebling. I guess what I fear most is that everything I play with will become real someday. That I really will become a slave. That I really will be raped, killed. Tortured. Made to confess, made to denounce my comrades, give up my friends and loves to the bastards who run all this. That I’ll really end up a bootlicker to cops, Nazis, Kaisers—all that scheiβe, you know?”
“Then why—then how can you do it? How can you play with it?”
She smiled, sexy, wise, utterly knowing.
“Because, Theo, if I make it happen, if I can give up to it—give all of it away—then I conquer it. Don’t I? I survive it. I take it away from the real world—these all-too-real fears—and I make it my toy. I take its power, and make it serve mine. I get off on it! The bugaboo, the taboo, the monster gives me pleasure, then.”
She picked up a book from a stack near her feet, some of the readings she’d been doing the last week to help plan their ritual. The book was an old tome from the early part of the century with Egyptian symbols on it, called The Book of Lies.
“That’s what this old bastard Englishman means by his XIth degree—the one that reversed the degree IX that he supposedly wrote about in this book, not knowing it was a secret of the Ordo Templi Orientis, until someone from that order of mystics confronted him about it. Seeing he’d discovered the IXth degree on his own, the fellow from the O.T.O. initiated him into that degree, and made him a leader of the O.T.O. here in Germany, because he’d already discovered the sex-magickal secrets of the Order on his own. Whilst in the O.T.O. here, he got higher, to the Xth degree, and then invented the XIth.”
“I don’t know if I follow all that.”
“Well, in a nutshell, this stuff about sex magic had ‘the highest’ degree centering ‘round sex magick between boys and girls—like us—sometimes.” She winked. “That degree was just after the VIIIth degree, which involved sex-magickal stuff with just yourself. But what I was saying about the reverse of the boy-girl stuff—the reverse of the letters ‘I’ and ‘X,’ into ‘X-I’, is homosexuality—particularly in that Englishman’s case, it means getting buggered up the ass by another boy. The reason I think that has so much power, is because that is something that scared him. The bugaboo, the taboo, the monster. It was so scary to him that, to face it, he was able to create even more power than simple, straight sex magick.”
“So,” Theo said, swallowing some of the caviar off his jackknife, then gnawing off a crust of bread, “you think that my ‘apotheosis,’ or ‘king-making,’ will be like unleashing that ‘highest degree’ for that English wizard?”
“And submitting—truly submitting to you—to whatever dark desires take your fancy—will be the same for me.”
“But you’ve submitted to me before. Lots of times.”
“Yeah, I know. And you’ve been great, and I’ve had a lot of fun. But I always get the feeling that you haven’t been as deeply into it as you might have—never allowed yourself to go as deep as you really might want to. And so, there’s been a part of me that hasn’t gone as deep as I’d have liked, either.”
Theodor looked at her. He put the knife down, and thought a while.
“It really is important to you,” he said, “isn’t it? This masochism of yours. And my ‘dominating’ you.”
“Very, suβe,” she said, taking the jackknife in her own hand, and scraping the last of the caviar tin, then teasing her lips and tongue with the knife’s edge. “But even more important, is for you to get something out of it. It really will be an apotheosis—not just a king-making, but the birth of a God. You, darling. You will really become a Pharaoh, in the Osiris sense, before we’re through. And then you will conquer your fear of yourself—and allow yourself to be the God you were always meant to be.”
“I saw something the other day. Right after work. The bosses were bearing down on us—all week they’d been riding us—giving us impossible orders, threatening to fire people, especially our best organizers. And something I started—telling off some little flea of a foreman who was harassing me—inspired Klaus and a bunch of others to join in. And then, Old Max got the other sections together—and we almost had a walkout. But they all conceded the point—the bosses, I mean—they gave into us, Katya. And just at that moment, I thought of what we’d been talking about—and all your Die Freundin magazines with the Theda Bara lookalikes on them—the girls you like a lot—the Cleopatras, you know? And all the ritual stuff we’ve been reading in the last few weeks. And all at once, I saw a red star—the workers’ power star, you know? And on it was a Scarab. That Egyptian, Pharaonic symbol from all those paintings you showed me. It was a ‘power-sigil’—I guess that’s what you’d call it, yes?”
“Yes, Theo! It was a vision!”
“Well, I—I dunno if I’d go that far, but—but it did make sense to me. I guess I wouldn’t mind being a Pharaoh, an Osiris or Horus or whatever, if everybody could also be that, too, when they want to.”
“And everyone can, Theo. That’s another part of it. If we’re afraid of Power—authority figures, fascism, monarchism—slavery—and we can act it out to make it less powerful than it is, perhaps we can better deal with it in the ‘real’ world—outside our bedrooms, eh? And if we can conquer Power that way—couldn’t we also take some of that power, for ourselves? And be unafraid to wage the war against it that we someday will have to, to make our better world? To fight the battle we fight every day in the world as it is? D’you know what I mean?”
“Yeah! Yeah, schätzelein—I understand! I could play-act any of these masks—and then, in a way, I could steal the strength of them, for me—and for you, too—and for all of us!”
Katya grinned wide and giggled. “I think we’re almost ready, now . . .”
There were many kinds of sex-magick. Some forms were old—thousands of years old—tantric and yogic traditions from Buddhist and Taoist and Hindu systems of knowing the mind and the body and the spirit. Others seemed more recent, coming from organizations like the O.T.O., and the Theosophists, and the Rosicrucians and other Western Spiritualists. And some things had always been with humankind (at least Katya thought so), the magickal potentials of orgasm and controlled orgasm and forgone orgasm, too, that dated back to the eldest shamanic cultures, and too excited the most modern scientific thinkers, like Wilhelm Reich, that half-psychologist, half-physicist some of Katya’s friends had been on about of late, praising the power of orgasm along with powers of magnets and crystals and lei lines under the earth. But in the spirit of a true birth, a true genesis of a God and Goddess, and the New World the two of them would make together, the most important kind of sex-magick was the one Katya and Theodor would make up from scratch—together, in the heat of the moment.
The goal of their magickal working was simple: to strengthen their bond so resiliently that no force, neither of god or man, could ever pull them asunder. And, in no small measure alongside that goal, the intent was to emancipate both of them from their fears of the roles they wished to play with each other—or, more truly, to use these fears, and channel the frisson of the lovers’ discomfort and desire into the working.
They stood together, naked but for the smallest frills of their Egyptian costumes, just a few scant things, headdresses, jeweled pectorals, and a few bangles; this was in part because the costume jewelry was so garish, so silly, that it might distract them; but it was also (they decided) because the items, their sacred raiment and holy instruments of the Rite, were so powerful they did not need much of them.
Katya’s eyes were more smeared with kohl than they’d ever been before—a Cleopatra she might have been indeed; except, she was no queen. Theo had his eyes marked thickly, too, in kohl, and he stared a long while into hers in the silence of the flat, naught but candlelight, and little of that, keeping them from absolute darkness. He held the sigil they’d made together, fashioning it from oddments and inspiration and Theo’s red star, over the place in his middle that he’d never allowed to grow sharp enough to stab as deep as he might without fearing to let it go—and he ordered her to kiss it.
“Get down on your knees, my slave,” he breathed, “and do me the homage you owe me . . .”
She looked into his eyes, and past his eyes, to the God he was to become. And she watched those eyes flare at her as he shouted “KNEEL TO ME!!”
She fell to her knees with such force, the floor beneath them shook. The pain of it shot up through her, and shivered cold and fierce through her heart to her face. Before her was her master’s symbol—slavery awaiting her at either end. They’d played often with the idea of his revenge over her, as a member of her class—he a poor, angry boy from the wrong side of the canal, she a haughty, pampered princess whom he abducts from her palatial villa and drags through the poorer streets on a leash to the jeers of all the other poor folk, to his hovel, his hideout, where he forces her to pay him back for every measure of her former vanity. That fantasy had charged them both in times past; and Katya now stared in the face of the Workers’ Star, realizing the price history was about to make her pay.
But, too, there was the Scarab, a more ancient symbol of power—and this, too, stirred her lusts and fears. It was dangerous in the world they lived in now to play with such archetypes, slaveries of blood as well as birth. But knowing deep down that Theodor revolted at any of the very real prejudices that ran so high in Germany, and that such racially-charged play could only really work if, outside this rite, this scene, all was equal and loving and real—that Theo had fought beside comrades Jewish and comrades Gentile, working men and women just like him, against fascists and monarchists and police—that Katya had fought no less violently, no less valiantly against the same threats, and that the two had been bloodied together, side by side, in those fights—knowing this play was just play—gave them the courage to go deeper . . .
“Kiss the symbol of my power,” he rasped his command, “and beg to serve me.”
Katya opened her lips and kissed the symbol, licking it as he commanded, tasting its hard, sour metallic tastes, then looking up to his downturned face, silent and cruel as a stone gargoyle, and begged him, “May I serve you, Master?”
“How would you serve me, slave-girl?”
“With all of me. With anything you wish of me. With my lips and tongue, my hands—my every hole is yours.”
By now, Theodor had to move his sigil forward—for the sight of Katya on her knees, pleading to give him anything at his command was enough to make his heat shoot forward, almost to the point of pulsing wetness pearling at its end. He put the sigil round his neck, then shoved himself forward toward her face, ordering her to show him what her lips and tongue could do. She lunged forward, too—but he put his hand against her forehead and pushed her away. He pulled her by the hair and bent her head back to gaze up at him.
“Show me, first. Show me what you would do, if I gave myself to your mouth.”
She opened her mouth shamelessly wide, and let her tongue dance, a foolish, desperate, hungry dance, swirling here and there, licking upper lips and lower lips and sticking it out till she strained. And her spit got so much, she drooled, and he laughed and called her a slut and ordered her to beg him in words. She prayed to him, begging him in the most vulgar language to let her suck him and drink him in, to use her till he needed no more. And finally, to her delight, he ordered her to swallow all he was in that moment—all other parts of him faded to periphery—and he groaned deep and laughed, his eyes closing, his head falling back—as she made love with his cock, tasting every inch of flesh as if it was the font of all wisdom and life—hungry, she swallowed all till she gagged—and still she took him in! He was so enraptured, he might have fallen over—but he steadied himself against her bobbing head, pulling her hair till he found his footing and hearing a strangled yelp amidst hers gasps and gags. He breathed deep—drawing the power he was building up from his center to all corners in a column, a snake awakening from his root to beyond the crown of his crowned head. He put his hands on his head, then, to steady himself, and forced the power back downward—back through his center and out his shaft—and she gagged anew, drowning in the power she was forced to swallow.
A rhythm they built between them, heavier and heavier, harder and harder—into the softness, the hot wetness—heat building with the stroking, the using, the triumphant devouring—till the boiling reached just beneath the mercury mark that would send it forever into roaring steam.
He ordered her to stop.
She had lost all sense of things, all sense but his command. The tastes, the smells, the swallowing, the mindless rhythm, surrender and humiliation and desire and the visceral lusts to know in her throat the measure of his power—all of it was interrupted in a painful slap. She gazed up at him with tears in her eyes.
“Turn around,” he commanded, softly, for his voice was too regal to be raised. “And take off your loincloth . . .”
She took a moment, a short, delirious moment, to come to herself enough to heed the command. Seeing her in such a deep subspace, and recognizing it for what it was, he did not disturb her spell by shouting his command again. Patiently, he waited for her to come to herself, to obediently remove her black, silky underwear and lay it aside, to get on her hands and knees facing away from him. At his clipped command, she raised her ass as high in the air as she could, her legs spread apart, her face down low till she kissed the dirty floor.
He wanted her now. He wanted to lunge into her spread-out, utterly unguarded backside and ride her till she screamed. But he held himself back—transferring his slowly smoldering rage against her and a thousand passing Succubae Goddesses she represented to him now into an urge to beat her backside black and blue.
He grabbed an old friend—a toy Katya had played with with others before him, a gift from her first Domina, her friend Johanna, who introduced her both to the pleasures of slavery and the business of street-walking, the two of them boot-girls together, a rainbow of colors they wore on high-heeled feet to let tourists and Berliners both know the fetishes they specialized in. Katya had been beaten by this mean-looking lash for years by girls and boys she’d trusted; and she’d used the same flail to punish boys and girls who paid her for the privilege of her punishment. A cat o’ nine-tails, with cruel barbs at the end of each long, leathery cord. He traced the flail between her legs so she might feel a tickling pleasure—and, knowing well what gave it, the searing pain that would follow.
He wasted no time. Without preliminaries, he swung the cruel cat all the way behind his back—and then struck her across her wide, quivering eggshell ass! The very sound of it would scare or sicken a lesser man, a lesser woman. The rasp—the thwack—the cry that followed the brutal sting. But these two now were God and Goddess—and the Rite they enacted was the Whole World.
He softened then, and whipped the thing round and round over his head—to tease her with the whistles of the barbs. He flayed her softly—then harder—then softly again. He built her up, then built up the force of his hands. All his ardor, all the rage of his boiling and bubbling—years it had been, with girls who did not care—years he’d lived, under their thumb, under the thumb of his parents, the thumb of the churches, the government—even the Party, yes, even his comrades, sometimes, he felt emasculated by—all that rage he struck out against now. And the one forced to bear that terrible weight of the world’s sins against this God in this Sacrificial Rite was the girl groveling to him there, beneath his feet.
He kicked her in the ass—over and over—and commanded her to take it! He impugned her ability to take it—spewing cursing doubts upon her willingness. He threatened to give up on her, to leave her like this—quivering hungry and unsatisfied, a frustration so painful it should lead her to despair!—unless she proved to him she wanted him and needed him more than anyone or anything else in the universe.
She almost drowned in the puddle of tears on the floorboards she was forced to kiss. She grunted like an animal—a pathetic groveling entreaty which only after he demanded she speak clearly—Don’t bray like an ass! Don’t squeal like a swine!!—managed to become words. She said:
“I am here for you, Master—I am the Pharaoh’s plaything—take me with you to your afterlife, where I shall serve you there forever! Be my Baal! My Beelzebub! Let us have this—this Hell—you and I, forever!! I damn my soul for you—if only I can spend eternity with you, Holy Demon—and submit in our eternity to your torture! FOREVER!!!”
Such a declaration was so deep, Theodor almost balked at it, almost broke scene. Wherever was going on in her mind, it was not a place he knew well. But he sensed that she did not know it well, either. Together, bravely, they plunged deeper in . . .
“I OWN you—I am your MASTER!” he roared softly. “Where I command, you shall go—without question—forever—from this day forward! I shall ever be your Master, and you shall ever be my slave—my chosen one—my most sacred bitch—the one who gives me purpose—the one who defines me as her Master. We shall never be separate from this day onward. You and I shall dance through this life, in this way, and in myriad other ways—and through all lives to come—hells, heavens, rebirths into myriad forms—and the dark silence of final, mortal death—through all this, we shall dance. Will you pledge to me this loyalty that I pledge to you? Will you give me your bravery, your blood, your pain and your pleasure—your mouth, your hands, your ass, your cunt, and every other part of you—open yourself to me so wide, so freely, that there should be no part of you that I shall not know? And shall you thus do me honor always?”
There was a pause. It was a pause so monumental that time stopped. For both of them, the universe was just the other, and the rank, sweaty darkness of this one tiny room.
“Yes, my love,” she said softly, her tears swallowed with her pride and her fear, her doubt and her sadness. “I will love you this way forever.”
His eyes moistened, too.
“I will love you also, always. In this way—and in every other.”
And they laughed, then, out of scene for the tiniest split second. But then, Katya called them back, by assuming her slave-girl’s voice again, and begged to be fucked now—screw me so hard I can’t see no more!
And laughing in triumph—a subtle triumph, for her use of bad German, low German, his German—he grabbed her ass by each soft, round side in his work-bruised hands, and stretched her wide enough so he could count every puckering fold in her asshole. And then he spat at it, at her—and spat, too, in his own hand and onto his prick, lathering up just enough—then—he pushed his way in!
The feeling was such that each of them could feel it—and feel the other’s feeling. Katya felt a fullness enter her so slowly and easily that she was wedded to it at once—and minded not the rhythm he established—enjoying the friction, both its sharpness and its smoothness—till she pushed up against his cock and forced him to go even deeper than he thought he could go. He rammed her and RAMMED her–feeling like far more than a man–a superman–an Übermensch!–conquering the world!! Her groans and weeping cries were the fanfare of his victory–over history–over himself–she now but a part of Him–a thing He used to become a God. He felt her tightness massaging every part of himself through the super-sensitivity of a few inches of his flesh—and the heat became boiling and steam–an exploding, spurting roar! As he quivered into a space of gleaming tingles, hearing his own voice scream from afar, its evidence more in the scratching burning of his throat than anything in his ears—he swore he could feel the sharpness and smoothness up his own ass—the sting of the flail against his back and backside—the surrender—delicious humiliation of groveling to the Goddess she might one day become. As the pressure in her welled up beyond reason, beyond bodily consciousness, into realms animal, vegetal, mineral, and finally water, water, squirting and steaming and melting into oblivion . . . she could see herself an Isis, a Great Goddess Pharaonic Queen, with the captured booty of a Roman war-prize brought into her court . . . a Teutonic Prince, a Tribal Chieftain of the North, brought to her in tribute from across the sea, an owing of fealty from some Marc Antony that himself was in her thrall—and the Great Prince of the Barbaric tribes—far lower than the vassal Roman, a mere thing made in offering—stripped naked at her command, in the midst of her courtiers and admirers, his mangy furs falling from his pallid flesh—his golden hair shorn and all his power stolen. She made him bend his knee to her—forced him to renounce his Odin—his Thor and his Freya—his Christ and his Lenin—and kiss her cunt crowned with a symbol of Anarchy—the Black Flag he would one day kiss, salute, and kneel to—while his own Red Banner lay crumpled and soiled beneath her feet . . .
In the dawn, they knew, cuddling together in the silky blankets of their common bed, all fetters and crowns a memory, that there were pantheons untold, whose strange gods they were yet to be.
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