Wax
- 4 years ago
- 33
- 0
Wax free porn video
Wax
By Jacquie Windsor
'The world was created neither by gods nor by men; it
has always existed; it is, and it always will be, an
everlasting fire, burning according to a law and
dying according to a law.'
----Heraclitus
I am free. I serve no master. I walk as a king upon this
island of Taquus--Queen of the Adriatic. My subjects are
the souls of men and women who rode in chariots led by a
single evil horse. I know that all human beings were borne
originally by a team of horses, one good, the other evil.
Harmon, my closest advisor, is typical of the men and women
who now call Taquus their home. After the good horse
bolted, he had a choice: He could let go of the reins,
whereupon the evil horse would also run away, allowing his
soul to descend to earth in the form of an animal; or, he
could hang on for dear life.
"I held on," he once admitted, "since I would rather have
half the sense of a man than none at all."
"So then you arrived on Taquus to be judged although the
judgment has already been made," I had rebuked him.
###
Hiero Friogato, sailing along the northwest coast of Africa
in a vessel borrowed from a Balearic merchant, saw land off
his starboard bow. Unless the carrack had somehow turned
around, the place was not a promontory of the continent.
Hiero's first mate, an old seahand who nevertheless had
three of his own teeth, approached the captain with his own
theory on the discovery.
"We've turned about almost certain of it."
"We might know better," replied Friogato, "if you hadn't
tossed the astrolabe overboard with the admiral."
"Cagamosto was in the way," snarled the mate. "Asides, he
was a Pisan, and them from Pisa don't know Africa from
Norway. Did you hear how he always shrieked? 'A fjord! Oh
look, dear fellows a fjord, a fjord.' Like a sissy. And
every time we bumped into a piece of land that had a hill
on it."
The first mate, a callous, sunburned Portuguese--the same
nationality as the captain--gambolled in a fey mockery of
the Italian who had splashed into the ocean after only
three days sail from Porto Xira. Hiero Friogato was
suddenly elevated to the captaincy by popular demand. He'd
had the foresight to steal the admiral's personal effects
before the mutiny, and could afford to pay those who
remained aboard double what they were previously promised.
All the Italians, roughly half the crew, were defeated in a
bloody pitched battle on the deck. That was a half hour
prior to the admiral's ignominious exit.
Only the loyal Portuguese stayed with the vessel.
Hiero remembered the point at which he realised the voyage
was in danger. The admiral had summoned the five passengers
to his cabin; unaware that one of them had already taken
his money from its hiding place. There was a creased, ink
stained map tacked to a long oaken table inside the
admiral's quarters. The room was cramped. Not only did it
contain an enormous bed, which had been rebuilt after being
brought aboard in pieces, but there was also a bronze
cannon pointing aft. The gun should have been directed
towards the port, where its shuttered hole was, but any
attempt to fire it from that spot would probably splinter
the bed during the recoil.
"You are all my personal guests. I have invited you along,
on this historical journey, for you are all veterans of the
struggle to destroy the power of the Moslems in the
peninsula."
The admiral stuck a bony finger on the map. The peninsula
to which he pointed was marked in eighth century Latin.
Friogato knew it was not Iberia. It was in fact the Crimea.
"We sailed from Porto Xira two days ago," explained the
admiral, indicating the Genoese trading station of Furia
Brava in the Black Sea. "We intend to discover the Ex
Quadra Navigium, where the Atlantic Sea connects to the
Great Holy Waterway here."
"Uh where did you learn about this?" asked Hiero, peering
closer at the chart where, indeed, a four-branched canal
clearly connected Jerusalem with Samarkand, the Black Sea
with the Indian Ocean. The Black Sea, though, was marked as
the Atlantic.
"From Spurcus the Elder his book about sailing from the
Holy Land to the country of the Ghuzz. Look, too, at the
wonderful mountains through which the Holy Canal makes its
way. A fjord!"
"Are you planning to sail from Porto Xira to Jerusalem?"
"No, silly. From Porto Xira to Samarkand."
The admiral scarcely needed to say more. From that point
on, Hiero conspired tactlessly with his countrymen to rid
themselves of the deluded officer.
###
I am free to use fire, to warm my house, to cook my food,
to punish my subjects when they default on their taxes.
Harmon, as the others who dwell here on Taquus, must endure
the morning fog and the winter winds without warmth. Heat
and fire are the products of what is good, and what is
purely good is godly.
Frigid nights, cold rains and January squalls must be
endured by good and evil people alike, but those who chose
to become evil before they formed as sentient earthbound
bipeds even to escape the bonds of animal existence are
forced to do so without Providence.
"I sometimes wish I'd let go of the evil horse," Harmon
confided to his wife.
"Me too," she whispered, shivering between frosty breaths.
Harmon had found his wife, now a mature woman of thirty-
seven years, as a beautiful, embittered vixen, deposited on
Taquus during the Cimbri raids. Then she was half her
present age, blessed with the appearance of youth and
vigour, cursed with a dark brooding and particularly
indisposed towards straight lines, the number seven and
happiness.
She remained vigorous, and her antipathies had become
obsessive.
"Slouch, damn you," she once screamed at Harmon. He was
forced to bow his spine in her presence, to contort his
limbs in whatever way she fancied, and to whirl about in a
wonderful circular path as he walked with her into the main
marketplace on Taquus.
"Grant me solace; divorce me from this wretch," he
henceforth implored me, knowing full well that it was
outside my power to do anything to alleviate the pain of
evil.
"Wretch? Dear Counsellor, you are the wretch. Now, be off.
I have seen that Uitula Rumperius is late with her rents."
I whistled on the way down from my hearth to her hovel in
the meadow, then read her the eviction in a loud voice
before scattering lit coals on the thatch. I stood close to
the warm blaze, keeping Uitula at a safe distance from its
succour.
###
"Sailing to Samarkand can you believe it?" Hiero asked his
adjutant. "Samarkand is in the middle of the desert."
"Yeah, the admiral got too many cracks on the bean from
fight in' the Corsicans " The first mate was interrupted by
a loud 'Haloo!' from the masthead. A gnarled grin appeared.
Toothless he may have been, but the sailor was genuinely
happy with the command of the hitherto land based captain.
The admiral, among many of his idiosyncrasies, had
forbidden shouting on the ship. To the chagrin of
everybody, mess call was announced by formal written
invitation although less than a tenth of those aboard could
read, and the lookout was made to relay sightings by a
flagless semaphore system--not terribly distinct from the
pantomime. The crew frequently ignored the signals. Most of
them were ill equipped to remember the two hundred coded
messages communicated through strange waving and flapping
of the arms. Others were near sighted or simply heedless.
"Aye, there's a call I'm glad to hear," beamed the first
mate.
"Shouts from the riggin' land, I'd garner should be Africa,
nothin' more. We'd better steer clear."
"How long have you been at sea, sailor?" asked Hiero.
"Comin' up, five days."
"No how many years have you plied the waters in various
ships and so forth?"
"Ah oh, you mean, most o' my life--five and twenty years, I
think."
Hiero knew that the man must have been telling the truth.
He had to be in his mid-thirties, possibly older, certainly
looking aged and bent from a lifetime of hard labour.
"When we try to follow the African coast, we must do so at
some distance from the shore, right?"
"Aye."
"And why is that?"
"Oh, because," growled the mate, "if we didn't then we'd
wrack up on the shoals--them miserable African shoals "
"Driven onto the offshore rocks. Barely submerged rocks.
And what would throw us onto them?"
"Yeah the wind. That steady breeze a flappin' landward,"
said the first mate.
"And yet?"
"I see. Right now the wind is comin' from that land just
seen."
"So," prompted Hiero, continuing without awaiting the
experienced sailor's reply.
"Either the wind is blowing the wrong way, or that land out
there isn't Africa at all."
"You make an excellent skipper," asserted the lifelong
mariner. "I wouldn't have ever figgered it out so fast.
What is that place, then? I've heard that Kara Khitai lies
somewhere out in the Atlantic."
His last statement was full of encouragement. Friogato had
heard his children speak in the same tone when they
expected gifts from him. The men in his cavalry company El
Carosello had expressed a similar sentiment during a
vespers, the previous autumn.
That came eight hours before they all plundered a Castilean
depot outside Palos. The elected ship's captain smiled in
fond memory of this last incident.
"My Lord," had exhorted the priest after the vespers. "May
you please restrain your men? The Castileans have helped us
against the Hafsids many times. I implore you to spare them
this insult."
"Castileans? Hafsids? Weigh the one against the other,
Frater Fedorigo," had replied the conquistador, a veteran
of several battles against both neighbours to the
Portuguese.
"Strip them of their crosses and crescents and they stand
as one--the enemy."
Fedorigo had hastened to back down from his position.
The smile now broadening across Hiero Friogato's face
belied nothing to his first mate, any more than El
Carosello had revealed to its detractors that its
membership was exclusively Jewish.
###
I resist fluctuations. I am unhappy with change. I abhor
turmoil. It was with this last thing in mind that Harmon's
wife stomped into my private study on Taquus.
"You keep filling the head of that idiot husband of mine
with the same nonsense, day after day," she cried.
"Nonsense? What nonsense?"
"Oh that you're a god and that he's so special because he
can talk to you even though he's a mortal and so on."
"Well, I am a god."
"Oh yeah? Do something god-like," she challenged. The woman
was easily as bitter as when I had first seen her with
Harmon. I did not remember exactly when I allowed her to
land on Taquus, but it must have been during one of those
times when I was excessively tired.
"God-like. Hmm," I thought aloud. Brandishing a long necked
metal flask from my desk, I then shouted my proud reply:
"Here this will prove my divinity."
"What's this?"
"Ambrosia. Only gods drink ambrosia. It was brought to me
by my good friend Poseidon."
"Let me taste it."
"You aren't a goddess," I spat. "Drinking this will only
injure you--maybe even kill you--or worse--"
I began to think evil thoughts. I attributed this,
instantly, to my environs. Specifically, I realised that
the presence of this iniquitous woman was defeating my good
sense.
"Ambrosia, shmambrosia," she screeched. "Give me that "
I was so lost in thought that the intruder was easily able
to snatch the flagon from my limp grasp and drain it of
half of its contents before I could stop her.
"Brr-rechh," she belched. "Uh huh, big shot. Bit of a kick,
maybe, but deadly?"
I waited a moment. Harmon's wife stared at me.
I peered at her eyes. Were they flickering?
"Are you all right?" I asked.
"Are you?" she countered.
"I--I guess so. Maybe that was old ambrosia or something."
"Yeah, right. If you're a god and everything, the passing
of time shouldn't affect you or any of your god stuff. Like
this weak, watery stuff in the flask."
The woman, still possessing the fire of youth as well as
the remnants of my ambrosia, stalked out of the study. She
wheeled to face me just before slamming the door.
"Listen, you fake god stay away from my Harmon and quit
filling his little mind with stupid ideas. Advisor to the
gods. How insipid."
Wham!
"I'm going to have to get a lock for that door," I vowed.
###
Hiero Friogato promised to quintuple the wine ration if
landfall was made before twilight. That meant some eight
hours of skilful sailing by the green crew.
"Should've kept at least one of the Italians around,"
muttered the skipper before retiring to the admiral's
cabin. He sprawled lazily across the enormous bed and
quickly fell asleep as the carrack eased through the calm
Atlantic waters.
Bang!
Friogato awoke with a start. A candlestick grazed his head,
falling onto the mattress beside him from its perch on the
bedstead. The cabin door had been torn from its hinges, and
the bronze cannon was no longer crowding the room. The
floor tilted forwards and to port. Noise from the deck
penetrated the dimly lit quarters.
"Oh no let me guess," shuddered Hiero. He blinked four
times to purge the sleep from his eyes and set out to
investigate the commotion.
The vessel became level as the popularly chosen skipper got
to the doorway, then continued to list backward, gradually,
and finally to starboard. A low rumble. Hiero looked up in
time to see the gun, still mounted on its carriage, rolling
toward him on the shifting deck. He dived back onto the
bed.
The cannon narrowly missed him, crashing first through the
table holding the inaccurate map, then through the aft
timbers of the ship. When Friogato recovered from his
desperate manoeuvre, little more than the breech was
visible. The better part of the barrel was stuck through
the untidy gash it had punched through the wall.
"Damn! I hope the ship isn't ruined," fumed the captain. He
crept from the bed a second time, up the tilting floor
toward the door. Bedlam prevailed among the crew.
"Drunk. They're all drunk. First mate! Report to me
immediately."
"Yesshir," slurred the ruffian. "We're maked it dalanding.
Shee? Shee fer yershelf."
Hiero brushed the sailor aside, furious as much at himself
as at anyone for quintupling the rations before hiding the
wine barrels. The ship had been dashed against the shore of
the new land with sails full. The breeze was fresh and out
of the north-northeast. The mast was cracked in three
places, and the lookout who first spotted their destination
had fallen from a considerable height to have his brains
splattered onto a capstan. All the rest of the crew was
sloshed, singing and quite oblivious to the world.
###
Harmon's wife was still angry. She walked away from the
palace on Taquus, down one of the many paths radiating from
that central location, past the charred remains of many
huts, until at last she came to the beach.
"What's this? A floating house?" she asked herself.
It was the borrowed vessel, now occupied by a besotted
crew, run aground through Friogato's thoughtlessness. He
was struggling with two large barrels that he had lowered
from the swamped ship by means of an improvised block and
tackle.
"You there," challenged the woman. "What strange conveyance
is this? Or is it some kind of winged house?"
Hiero saw her staring up at the crumpled rigging.
"Do you live in this land?" he asked. "What place is this?"
"Taquus is its name, and yes I live here."
"Well, my name is Hiero Friogato. I am a Portuguese
explorer. I appear to be lost somewhere in the Atlantic,
and my crew is out of their heads. Is there someone here in
Taquus who could help me re- pair my ship?"
"Hold it," said the woman. "Did you say you're in the
Atlantic? The god--uh--I mean, our king thinks this is the
Adriatic Sea."
"No, this is the Atlantic Ocean. Africa is somewhere over
that way."
Hiero was about to ask another question, when he followed
the woman's silent gaze. Upward. The figurehead on the bow
of the carrack. She seemed to be mesmerised by it.
"Do you appreciate fine woodcarving?" he asked. "She's a
beautiful piece of work."
"Sure--sure is."
"Is there something about it? It is said to be the likeness
of a dead Pisan admiral's own mother. You seem to be--"
"Yes. Yes there is something about it. I'm thinking."
Harmon's wife allowed the self-proclaimed explorer to
continue to struggle with the two barrels. He managed to
roll them up the sandy incline to where the vegetation
began. He returned to stand beside the woman, who was still
gazing intently at the wooden sculpture attached to the
front of the vessel.
"Does it remind you of anyone?" he queried, showing a
remarkable empathy for the woman's thoughts. "Uitula."
"Who?"
"Nev-never mind. Is it possible to remove that statue? To
bring it down onto the beach?" she asked sweetly.
Not one to refuse a polite request, especially from a woman
of such poise as the one before him, Hiero Friogato climbed
up the side of the ship and gently pried the figurehead
from its spot using a straight iron pole. He looped a rope
under its arms and around its back once it had been partly
dislodged from the ship. The line was secured to the
bowsprit so that the statue would not tumble to the beach
once he was done prying the rivets loose.
All the while he engaged in a lively dialogue with the
woman, who remained on the sand below. He knew the crew
wouldn't interfere in any way, as all of them were either
exhausted from their binge or fast asleep.
"What's in the barrels that's so important?" asked the
woman.
"Wine and powder," he called back.
"Powder?"
"Yeah--you know, gunpowder."
The concept of guns was alien to the woman, whose soul had
fallen intact to earth, unsullied by schooling or
technology. He had to explain partially through
onomatopoeic syllables like 'bang' and 'pow'.
"Bang? Pow? Yes, I think I understand," she shouted. "Fire
and smoke?"
"That's right."
She smiled upward, nonspeaking, while Friogato completed
his task and brought the statue down to the beach. She
continued to radiate friendliness while quietly admiring
the remarkable likeness of the figurehead to Uitula
Rumperius.
###
I like light. I dislike motion, except where it produces
light. Such is the nature of fire.
Here on Taquus, I am the only one allowed the pleasure of
enjoying a fine twilight fire in my magnificent hearth. The
crippled Hephaestus made the masonry and iron structure for
me.
"I salute you, dear friend," I stated quietly, lifting a
silver goblet of ambrosia to my lips.
"You! You in there. Get out here. I have a bone to pick
with you."
"That infernal woman, again. If she didn't live with that
noble wretch, Harmon, I would have long ago burned her
house until only ashes remained.
"What is it?" I asked, carefully unlocking the door, but
pressing my foot up against it in case the woman tried to
burst in.
"You keep insisting you're a god. Well, I can prove I'm a
goddess--just come on out here and I'll show you."
"That'll be the day. You? A goddess? Even Harmon is twice
the goddess that you are."
I placed a pair of slippers on my feet and walked out of my
palace to the front gate of the property, where Harmon's
wife urged me to follow. Out on the lawn, not far from a
large maple tree, stood Uitula Rumperius.
"So?" I asked. "You have brought me a tax evader. Are you
the Goddess of Unpaid Rents? Foreclosuria?"
"Cut the sarcasm, you windbag, and watch!" The woman hurled
a fistful of sand at the ground next to Uitula. The flat
patch where she stood looked yellowish and powdery, even in
the dim moonlight.
Flash--Bam! PWAFFFT!!
I recoiled slightly, averting my eyes for a second from the
unexpected pyrotechnics.
When I looked back at Uitula, all I saw was a wooden
statue.
"There, big shot. I turned Uitula into wood. Now, prove
you're a god. Anyway you want--no big deal."
I walked closer to my transformed tenant.
"I'm surprised. I really am. I--I--"
"Quit stalling, or I'll turn you to wood, too," cried the
woman, readying another fistful of sand.
"Ah uh uh. No need to do that. I'll prove it."
I took a sharp knife from my belt and drew it slowly and
purposely across my wrist. Where a mere mortal would have
begun to bleed in crimson profusion, a translucent white
substance issued from my veins.
"So, what's that?" demanded my challenger.
"Ichor. Gods carry ichor in their circulatory systems. This
is ichor."
"That's not ichor, you retard," laughed the woman, "it's
wax. It's molten wax."
I heard some rustling in the branches of the maple,
followed by the sight of a man I'd never seen before. He
jumped from one of the larger limbs onto the ground near
Uitula's image.
"What is the meaning of this?" I demanded. "Who is this
person? He didn't arrive by one-horsed chariot."
"No, but he has some pretty interesting claims. Hiero,
darling, tell this fake god where we are."
"On an island in the Atlantic."
"No," I countered. "This is the Adriatic--the Adriatic
Sea."
"Not true," said Harmon's wife. "Your mind is gone has been
for a while, I'd imagine, and so is your life's essence,
there."
She was pointing at a congealing puddle of wax at my feet.
My goodness. It really was wax.
I continued to reaffirm my divinity, albeit with some
alarm.
"Life's essence is blood, dear madam, not wax--um--ichor.
Whatever. A man dies when he loses too much blood. This
isn't blood."
"You don't get it, do you?" Scorn gripped her voice. She
summoned the very much alive Uitula Rumperius from where
she had hidden behind the massive trunk of the maple during
the explosion. "Eighteen millenniums have gone since Taquus
was born. Your power is gone. There won't be any more
chariots coming here. It's a different era now. Nobody
needs good horses or evil ones for that matter. Or
chariots."
"There have to...be...chariots," I muttered, shaken by the
sardonic blasphemy reaching my ears. "It can't be...wax..."
"You know how out of touch you are?" she continued. "This
is land used to be square. Now it's round. Explain that,
you pretender. It's moved from one ocean to another without
you even figuring it out. Taquus is irrelevant and so are
you. You're no god--you're a big fool."
"And that's not simply the end of it," sneered Uitula. "I
would not have been here to enjoy your fate without the
available substance of a certain admiral from Pisa. Those
deeds ascribed to destiny are more often those of souls
free of the tendons of one mere bag of skin."
"I hope you'll forgive me for throwing you overboard,"
sighed Friogato. "Sometimes I get carried away."
"If I deigned to hold a grudge," answered Uitula, "you'd
have still been sleeping when that big metal thing rolled
off the deck through your cabin."
I couldn't believe the innocent patter being exchanged
while the wax kept flowing from my arteries.
"You--you brought that vessel here?"
I fell forward onto my knees, now drenched in slippery
ooze. Waxy tears filled my eyes. Before they solidified, I
watched as the man who had arrived without a chariot took
Harmon's wife firmly in one arm and Uitula Rumperius in the
other. The wax still flowed. Just before my sight and my
doom were sealed, I watched the three turn their backs on
me, and slowly wander down the path towards the sea.
THE END
Emely
- 17.07.2021
- 25
- 0
