The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Erotica

Plague Lovers ^{Lucy Taylor}

Word spread quickly in the tiny, plague-ravaged town – the Flagellants were coming!

Gabrielle, sequestered in the house with her father and her dying mother, heard the news shouted out in the street beneath her window. She felt her blood quicken at the thought of witnessing such a spectacle – a band of penitents whose submission to the Lord was made manifest in deprivation and self-wounding. Despite her fear of mingling with the plague-infested crowds, she felt compelled to see them.

Snatching up her shawl and wrapping it around her thin shoulders, she crept down the wooden stairs, hoping that her father, exhausted by his day and night vigil at her mother’s deathbed, would be dozing. She didn’t want to have to speak to him, or witness the reproach and anguish in his eyes as she hurried past without so much as gazing at her mother.

Her father’s back was turned to her, his head lowered into his big hands. Gabrielle took a breath and tiptoed towards the door.

All I want, she thought, is to get out of here. Get away from the death and dying.

The plague, or the Great Pestilence as some were calling it, had arrived in early summer. Word of a terrible illness sweeping the port cities of Pisa and Genoa had reached the town a year earlier, but here in this secluded Tuscan valley the villagers had felt secure and safe in their relative isolation. With spring, however, the plague had reached Orvieto, where a spiritual revival that added fifty new religious dates to the municipal calendar had failed to spare the city from devastation. Now death was everywhere – evidenced in the rattling of the carts that carried bodies for burial outside the village, the cloying, rotten-flowers scent of sickness that permeated the air, the moaning of the sick, the wailing of the bereaved.

Gabrielle had heard that, according to the priests, who divined such things by studying the book of Revelations, a third of the world had died.

And the plague had not yet run its course.

An idea, borne of terror and desperation, had been nudging its way into the back of her mind. Many people had already fled the town to take refuge in the countryside. No one really knew what caused the sickness, but escaping the “pestilential atmosphere” of more populated areas was thought to help. It was said the air was cleaner in the country, the food less apt to be contaminated.

When she was almost at the door, her father looked up.

“Where are you going?”

“Don’t you hear the drumming? The Flagellants are on their way to the cathedral.”

“Hah,” her father snorted. “The Brethren of the Cross they call themselves. I call them the brethren of lunacy. Why expose yourself to the crowds to see a troop of madmen beat each other bloody?”

Her mother moaned and went into a coughing fit. Blood foamed around her mouth. Gabrielle’s father dampened a cloth in a bowl of water and wiped her face. “There, there, my love,” he whispered. “I’m here with you. I’m here.”

The tiny woman, little more than bone and gristle, reached up and stroked her husband’s face, a gesture rich with the tenderness and caring of devoted lovers after a long and passionate night. Gabrielle felt that she was witnessing something private and precious between her parents, something she could never hope to exprience herself.

“She hasn’t long,” her father said. “Can’t you just sit with her?”

She shook her head. “I have to go.”

“What kind of daughter are you? You feel no love for your own mother?”

But how could she? thought Gabrielle. Until the plague struck, until her midwife mother fell ill, neither of her parents had shown the slightest warmth or caring towards one another or, for that matter, towards her. Theirs was a union based on practicality and the running of a household, a way to satisfy the needs for sex, security, and mutual support. Love was a luxury for idle, wealthy ladies and lovestruck troubadours. The poor had no time for such frivolity.

Now Gabrielle observed the change in both her parents, a transformation that appeared wrought by suffering, and found herself both horrified and envious. For never had anyone shown her the kind of tenderness her parents now bestowed upon each other. It was as though, through suffering, they had paid some terrible price required for the giving and receiving of affection.

Looking at neither her father nor her mother, she hurried towards the door.

“Gabrielle!” The undercurrent of fear in her father’s voice brought her up short. “You are coming back, aren’t you? Aren’t you?”

“I–I don’t know.”

“What if I fall ill? Your mother’s taught you about herbs and medicines. You could make my dying easier.”

Gabrielle stared at this man whose love she’d never managed to win, who’d never offered her a moment of affection. “I know nothing of my mother’s skills,” she said stubbornly.

“She taught you everything,” her father insisted. “Please, girl, I don’t want to be alone. Promise me you’re coming back.”

“I’m sorry,” Gabrielle murmured.

Behind her, her father’s voice rose in anger.

“You think you’re safer in the outside world? The plague is everywhere. Only God can keep you alive.”

Only God.

But God was nowhere to be found these days. The young abandoned the old, the healthy left the sick to expire in alleyways and filthy deathbeds, even priests refused to hear confession from the dying, lest they contract the sickness. Some people reacted to the danger by living lives of ascetic abstinence, while others, wanting to make the most of what time was left, indulged in every kind of excess and debauchery.

At the cathedral in the town square, Gabrielle stood at the edge of the crowd and held a handkerchief dipped in perfume to her face, for it was common knowledge that pleasant odours helped protect one from disease.

The Flagellants marched up the main street, men in the lead, women following. The men were stripped to the chest. Each carried a hard leather whip festooned with little iron spikes which he brought down, rhythmically and slowly, across the back of the one preceding him. Bent and bloody, the procession snaked towards the cathedral. They were silent and sweaty and a great stench rose from them – not the sickly sweet odour of sickness, but the musky tang of unwashed, bloodied bodies.

Gabrielle watched the blood streaming down their raw backs, saw how the sweat glistened and ran in the deep furrows that the pain had etched in their faces. Some appeared to be in agony, others simply exhausted. And some appeared to have gone beyond the pain and seemed entranced in what looked like ecstasy.

Gabrielle stared, transfixed by the bizarre spectacle, amazed by the stoic silence in which the Flagellants bore their pain. As one man passed by, she could not stop herself, but reached out to caress his mutilated back.

“What do you suppose it feels like?”

At first Gabrielle didn’t realize the voice was speaking to her. Then fingers gripped her elbow. She whirled around, appalled and startled by the presumption of this stranger.

A young man with fair hair, tanned, pockmarked skin, and black eyes that glittered like a raven’s regarded her. He was dressed in the rough, simple garments of the Flagellants, but his clothing had no rips or bloodstains, nor did his sturdy-looking arms bear signs of abuse. Something in the cunning, slyly mirthful way that he appraised her made her uneasy, as though he knew things about her she did not even know herself.

“What are you talking about?” she whispered, holding the scented handkerchief tighter to her face. “What what feels like?”

“The whip, of course.”

“Pain beyond my ability to imagine it.”

“At first, there’s terrible pain,” the young man said, “but still it seems bearable at first, or so you think. Then the lash keeps falling and the pain mounts. It fills your whole body, your whole being. At that moment, you’d sell your soul to make it stop. You think that you can’t possibly bear it another moment, that you’ll lose consciousness or die.

“Then it’s as though the body becomes completely overwhelmed, and there’s a giddiness. You laugh, you scream, you weep. At that point, you’ve gone beyond the pain – it’s still there, but it’s not your body any more, or you’re not in it. That’s when it begins to feel like a holy sacrament, like you’ve touched the face of God.”

Gabrielle looked at the man’s hand where it still rested on her elbow – large and heavy-knuckled, covered with fine wheat-coloured hair.

“How would you know about such things?”

“In the spring, I marched with the Brethren for thirty-three and a third days – to commemorate the life of Christ, as is the custom.”

“And do you think your suffering will save you from the plague?”

“No. Only luck and my own wits will do that. But I learned a great deal about pain – and what lies on the other side of it.”

He turned and pulled his shirt up to reveal his back, a gouged and furrowed tapestry of scar tissue and half-healed wounds. Gabrielle ran her hand across the scars. “You must be insane. Who in their right mind would choose pain when there’s so much of it to be had without asking?”

“The Flagellants believe it brings them closer to God.”

“I don’t believe in such a God. No loving father would willingly send such misery on his children.”

“Perhaps that’s how He wins their love – by sending misery and then, according to his whim, providing minor comforts.”

Gabrielle laughed. “Then you aren’t talking about God. You’re talking about Satan.”

“Maybe he’s the one in charge.”

“That’s blasphemy.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s not the truth.”

His hand, which up to then had rested lightly on her elbow, moved slowly up her arm. Heat spread through her belly as his fingers curled around the back of her neck and collected a great fistful of copper-coloured hair.

“My name’s Gerard. You remind me of a woman I was once in love with.”

“What happened to her?”

“She died of plague. That’s when I joined the Flagellants. I thought the pain of the whip might take away the greater pain of losing her.”

“And did it?”

“For a while. And then it made it worse. Now I think that only death will truly cure me. But I’m not ready to die yet.” He released her hair, let it tumble in long glossy coils around her face. “I’m on my way now to the countryside. If I keep to myself, stay in abandoned houses, I figure there’s a chance I’ll survive. If you like, you could go with me.”

She shook her head. “Nowhere is safe from plague.”

“Perhaps not, but some places are better to die than others.”

The crowd surged around them, pressing them close. So thick was the odour of blood, so sharp the cracking of the whips, that Gabrielle felt light-headed.

“Good luck to you, then,” said Gerard, and began to elbow his way out of the mob.

Gabrielle thought about her mother, the foul-smelling boils that swelled along her armpits and groin, the dark blue spots that blotched her skin. Before long, she thought, her father would be dying, too, and it would fall her lot to tend to him, to comfort him in his death throes, press cool cloths to his brow, wipe up the waste that would gush from him. She knew she couldn’t bear that.

But on her own, she also knew, she would be prey to the roving bands of looters and marauders that, emboldened by the almost complete absence of the law, terrorized the towns and countryside. That possibility terrified her, too.

“Wait,” she called out, catching up to him. “Before you go – I want to know – I want…”

She hesitated, felt an unfamiliar heat creep up her cheekbones.

“I know exactly what you want,” he said, and took her hand.

They traveled along narrow, rutted roads leading through the countryside of Tuscany, sometimes cutting through untilled fields and deserted orchards. Occasionally they passed through abandoned villages, where dogs and livestock roamed at will. Along the roadside, the corpses of those who had fallen while trying to escape lay bloated and putrescent.

The first night they camped in an open field with others fleeing the plague. The second night, after Gerard had led them on a circuitous route along the ridgetop of some hills, they came to an abandoned town where the only signs of life were feral dogs that roamed the dusty streets and wild-eyed rats that held their ground almost until the last instant, then skittered away as Gerard and Gabrielle approached.

Gerard picked out the most luxurious of the deserted houses. Like a lord and lady returning from an outing in the hills, he and Gabrielle made themselves at home.

“Who lives here?” asked Gabrielle, looking around the beautifully appointed rooms.

“We do, now.”

“Whose house was it?”

Gerard shrugged. “Whoever it belonged to, they’re gone now. Like everything else, the house belongs to whomever takes it.”

That night, when Gerard moved on top of her, Gabrielle found herself aroused, but strangely distant. It was as if she watched herself from a corner of the room, moving beneath this man, arranging her body to accommodate his, but somehow profoundly absent. She let him penetrate her body, but knew that he could never touch her heart.

“You don’t want me,” he said finally.

“I want to want you. I want to feel something. I just – don’t.”

She turned away from him, finding no way to describe the sense that vines and briars encased her body and leaves of deadly nightbane numbed her heart.

“Have you ever loved anyone?”

The question seemed unfair, humiliating. “Of course I have.”

But she saw he knew that she was lying.

Later that night, she dreamed of her mother. Saw her father bending down to wipe her mouth with a wet cloth and stroke her face. Her dead mother’s eyes were open. Her father reached down and gently closed them, placed the cloth across her mother’s face.

Something was wrong. She was awake now, but couldn’t get her eyes open. A rag or cloth was tied around her head. When she tried to remove the blindfold, her wrists were seized. She was roughly shoved onto her belly and her arms bound behind her.

She knew about the bands of rogues and thieves who preyed upon those fleeing the cities. Surely it was such a miscreant who had her now.

“Gerard!” she cried out. “Help me.”

“Silence,” he hissed. “Not one word or cry or I’ll gag you, too.”

He pulled her up off the bed and dragged her into another room, where he shoved her up against a beam or column and bound her there face first.

“What are you doing?”

“Just because we’ve fled the plague doesn’t mean we aren’t going to die. I want to make the most of every moment. I want you to learn to love me. I’m going to make you love me.”

So saying, he bent her over, kicked her legs apart, and entered her from behind. This time he made no effort to be gentle. His ramming hurt her, but when she squirmed and tried to pull away, he withdrew from her and forced his way into her other orifice, wringing forth screams of pain.

He gripped her hips and forced himself in deeper.

“You want this, don’t you?”

“No!”

“Tell me you want it harder, deeper!”

“No, I hate it! Stop!”

“Tell me you want more!”

Finally, desperate to appease him and end the torture, she whimpered, “Yes, please, harder,” her voice choked with tears.

When she said that, he thrust one more time, released his semen into her and then withdrew.

She sank to her knees, weeping.

Gerard grabbed her by the hair and yanked her head back.

“That was good,” he said. “I’m proud of you. We’re off to a good start.”

Their next night in the deserted house, he again tied her to a beam, wrists secured over her head, and began to twist and squeeze her nipples. The pain was beyond anything she could have anticipated. She begged and pleaded, made promises of future acts of submission, but he increased the pressure. Then, because the pain was so unbearable and there was no escaping it, her body reacted by convulsing in a fit of laughter. She laughed and sobbed and, in between, implored Gerard to stop hurting her, but by the time he did her nipples had gone numb and, with the blood flowing again, the pain this time was greater than what she’d felt before.

He left her sobbing with fury at the pain and the futility of fighting it. When he returned, what seemed like hours later, he kissed her swollen nipples and fed her grapes he’d found growing in a nearby vineyard.

“Tell me how much you love me.”

“I hate you. You’re a monster.”

“Tell me how much you love everything I do to you.”

“Let me go. Please, just let me go.”

“There is nowhere to go. The plague is everywhere. There’s only death.”

She spat the chewed grapes out at him, spattering his face with sticky pulp, then caught his finger in her mouth and bit it to the bone.

He cradled his bleeding hand and eyed her coldly.

“I’d thought that you were doing well. I see now I was wrong. I must be stricter with you.”

He left her then, still tied, and came back brandishing a lit candle. At the first touch of the flame against her flesh, her courage failed her. She began to beg and weep, but Gerard was implacable. He moved the candle up and down her body, its shadow dancing across her flesh. Rarely did he let the fire make contact, but when he did, the agony elicited a howl. He singed a spot below her nipple, touched the flame to her thigh and the tender spot at the base of her spine, while she thrashed against her bindings.

“Tell me how much you like this! Tell me!”

The flame blazed in her face and burned her eyes. It filled her head with an unnatural light that grew brighter and brighter before exploding into darkness.

She dreamed she was a young child, ill with the fever that had swept through her village one winter, killing half a dozen babies and a few of the older children. Her mother had held her and sung her lullabies that had been handed down for centuries.

She had not got better right away. Instead, the fever had buoyed her along like a flooding stream, sweeping her far into the depths and byways and canyons of her mind, but, for the first time in her life, she had felt loved and safe, unafraid of the death the sickness seemed to be carrying her toward.

She opened her eyes.

He had cut her down from the beam and laid her on the bed. When she moved, the pain from her burns flared, making her gasp.

“Lie still,” he told her.

“Why are you doing this?”

“Shhh.”

He slid into the bed with her and spooned himself around her. His naked flesh was warm and comforting. When he cupped one hand around her breast and slid the other up between her legs, her sigh was both of pleasure and of resignation. His mouth roved over the back of her neck, his breath disturbed the tendrils of hair along her cheekbone, his tongue probed the delicate convolutions of her ear.

She turned and sobbed against his chest. “It’s all right,” he murmured. “The things I do may seem a strange way to win your love, but don’t forget I marched with the Brethren of the Cross. I know the sorcery that pain and then the absence of pain can work upon the mind. I know that pain can penetrate a heart that can’t be opened any other way.”

He held her and she clung to him and sobbed harder.

Knowing how desperately she wanted closeness, comforting, appalled at the price she was willing to pay for it.

She had escaped the plague, thought Gabrielle, in order to endure something worse – the ever-increasing torments Gerard devised for her.

Sometimes it was merely being bound in humiliating positions and left alone to wonder when or if he would return. Sometimes it was being spanked until her buttocks burned as if she’d sat upon hot coals, or having the wax from a lit candle dripped onto her breasts and thighs.

When he wasn’t using her, Gerard kept her bound much of the time and never let her move about freely without his supervision.

But sometimes, usually when the punishments had been most brutal, he would make love to her as though she were his heart’s desire – indeed he swore she was exactly that – soothing her bruised flesh with tender caresses, moistening her sore and swollen places with his tongue. And this she found almost more difficult to tolerate than the punishment, for she both longed for his sweet comforting and despised herself for craving it.

It was after just such a time, when Gerard had followed up his punishments by making love to her slowly and in silence, each move deliberate and delicate, as if they were underwater, that he fell asleep without remembering to tie her.

Gerard was snoring deeply, and from outside came the snarling and yapping of feral dogs, but the only sound that Gabrielle heard was her own heart racing at the possibility of escape. Nothing else mattered.

Outside the night felt vast and unforgiving, stars pulsing coldly overhead. She picked up a stick to ward off wild animals and started across a field towards a stand of trees, thinking to hide there until the sun rose.

She had gone only a short distance, though, when the sky sank so low it pressed against her head and the earth seemed to undulate and roll beneath her feet. The shadows of trees became the outlines of marauders come to ravish her and kill her. The sighing of the wind became the hiss of air leaking out of bloated corpses that she, unable to see, might tread on in the dark.

Never had she felt so vulnerable and desperate for solace. The memory of Gerard’s cruelties dissipated like fog. All she could think of was the softness of his kisses, the skilful pleasuring of his hands when he rewarded her endurance with some small kindness.

Near panic, she returned to the house, only to find Gerard waiting for her, brandishing a whip of the type used by the Flagellants.

“Ungrateful whore, is this how you show your love for me?” he said, but something in his voice made her believe it had all been a trick, that he had given her the chance to escape on purpose, either to test her or to seek an excuse for greater punishment.

How confident he’d been, if that were the case, she thought. How sure that she’d return.

No amount of begging could persuade him to forego the whip. He bound her wrists above her head and brought it down across her shoulders.

The pain devoured her, obliterating everything.

“Do you want more of this? Tell me you want more!”

“Yes!”

“Do you love me? Tell me how much you love me!”

“Yes, I love you, yes!”

The agony was terrible and breathtaking – it ripped the air out of her lungs and seared her flesh as though she were a witch burning at a pyre.

When it ended, her mind seemed to stop, to fog over with a pale, cool cloud of blissful nothingness.

Oh God, she thought, the pain has stopped. Oh God, oh God, oh GodohGodohGod…

Gerard pressed his mouth against her ear. “I’m here,” he said. “Don’t worry. Only a few more blows. I’ll help you get through it.”

Then the chorus of pain began again, the song of the whip mingling with that of her screams, carrying her down and down into a place beyond thought, beyond fear. Without dying, she had somehow ceased to exist. Her flesh did not belong to her, nor did her name – how could it when she no longer was – nor her past nor any thought at all. There was no room for name or past or thought in the brilliant, all-consuming clarity of her agony.

The god she called out to was no longer the God of the priests and penitents, but her private god – Gerard, who gave and took away her suffering.

“There, now, it’s all right. It’s over now. It’s over.”

He untied her. She pressed her face against his chest and sobbed with gratitude. He had caused the pain to stop. He was her saviour, her protector, how had she ever doubted him? When he began to kiss her, she kissed him back, then slid down his body, kissing every inch of him, anointing his skin with her tongue.

“I love you,” she said. Then, when he gave no reply, she added, “Now you must love me, too.”

To prove her devotion, Gabrielle worked diligently to please him. In bed, she acquiesced to every demand, and pleaded for new punishments. She prepared meals from whatever meagre food was available, combing the orchards around the house for fruits, making salads of wild grasses. In the fields she picked the pale purple-blue flowers that her mother had so often pointed out to her, gathering the luscious-looking berries in her skirt.

In performing these small domestic tasks, it seemed to Gabrielle that, indeed, she felt real love for him, even as she made a salad of wildflowers and grasses and crushed the purple berries to make a pie.

In the night, Gabrielle woke to hear Gerard arguing loudly with someone. Alarmed, she lit a candle. No one was there. Her lover was sitting up in bed, conversing with great animation. The pupils of his eyes were dilated; his skin felt hot and dry. For an instant, she fancied she could hear the distant drumming of the Flagellants, then realized it was his heartbeat, audible at several feet.

“Harder, I can’t feel it!” he was shouting. “Harder! You must flog me harder!”

This went on for some time, before he fell into an exhausted, feverish sleep.

The hallucinations grew worse. Gerard imagined he saw whips descending and fires blazing at his feet. He cried out and flailed away at imaginary tormenters. So violent became his behaviour that she was forced to tie him to the bed with the same ropes that he had used to bind her.

He complained his mouth was dry and that he couldn’t swallow, so she brought him water and put cool compresses across his brow. When she held and stroked his hand, she could feel his wildly beating pulse.

During a lucid phase, he said, “You could run away now. Why don’t you?”

“You need me,” she said, delicately licking the sweat from along his temple. “You wanted me to love you, and I do. If I can’t take away your pain, at least I can help you bear it.”

The days dragged on. Gerard was able to eat only a few spoonfuls of food, and his illness worsened. No spots disfigured his skin, no boils erupted along his groin, but still he grew ever weaker.

Gabrielle nursed him, fed him, kept him clean. At night she spooned herself around his back and stroked his chest and stomach, kissed his neck and outlined with her tongue the geography of scars that mapped his back.

When she had to leave him, if only for a moment, he would call out for her in fear.

“I’m sorry for what I did to you,” he said. “I saw the emptiness in your eyes and wanted you to feel something. I wanted you to need me. To love me.”

“I do love you,” said Gabrielle.

He squeezed her hand. “I thought that I was different, that somehow I’d escape the plague when everyone else was dying of it. I don’t know why, but I didn’t think I’d die of plague.”

“Nothing else I can promise you,” she said, stroking his face, “but this I do. You will not die of plague.”

Perhaps he even believed her, for he clutched her hand more tightly and kissed her fingers with desperation and desire.

He died later that night, holding tightly to her hand, voicing his undying love for her, even as his heartbeat grew so loud that the pounding filled the room. She had no energy for digging a grave, but dragged his body outside and left it for the dogs.

Some passers-by, headed east from Pisa, told her the plague still raged around her village, but Gabrielle no longer feared it. She had decided to return home to her father. She prayed he hadn’t died. If he was only ill, then she would nurse him. If he was healthy still, then she would win his love the way she had Gerard’s. She would crush more of the purple berries, the lovely, deadly nightbane berries that her mother’d always warned her of, and bake them in a pie. As with Gerard, she would feed him only small amounts, enough to provide a lingering and painful death, enough to give him time to well appreciate how lovingly she cared for him, how desperately he needed her, how exquisitely soothing was her touch.

She fantasized it as she began the journey home. How she would hold her father, stroke his brow, comfort him through his agony. How, at the end, he would pull her close and clutch her hand and tell her that he loved her.