The Prayer

Cardinals

Chapter 1

Greenwich Palace, England. 1530

        “Cold day…” Munthir said as he slid back into his breeches, “Astaghfurilah. Ya Rub-” No. He would not invoke his name, not this soon after. What did his mouth just do, yet now try to say? The feeling of her eyes ran up and down the stalwart sinews of his back, formed of years of what Royse knew nothing of. Did she know he could feel her stares as though weight was in it? As though brass balls rolled across him, massaging the meat of him soothful tender, Royse's eyes went around and around. The brass balls of her gaze then set on one point on his flesh, then the other, pushing, compressing. On the left and right shoulder blade, rising out from the map of scars without meaning, two brands sat. The stamps of the serpent, coiling down to their singular center. And every time he was reminded of their existence, he was reminded as to why he needed to pray in penance. But his fate, fiery and homing, knew no remedy, “Mother…” he muttered.
        The baron’s wife queried as she wiped some drool off her lips, grinning, “Where wend thee? Leave me aching?” She winced as she chuckled, holding her belly.
        And although by now the act was as mundane as any other, the realization of the gravitas that this sin held could not help but manifest itself at moments most inconvenient, reminding him that indeed his sister was right. An animal was all that he could ever be, worthy of a leash, a bridle. An upright beast, like some kind of bipedal horse or mule; that now served as a plaything of pleasure, loaned out to the highest bidder. Of course, he was not immune to basic sensation. She felt good, inside and out. And as putrid as it may be, the thought of cuckolding a man bestowed upon him an immense yet fleeting sense of power. It was one of those ‘sickly sweet’ feelings. But now, no feeling inside of him felt sweet. He turned back to her, “Can you say you are happy?”
        Wearing a sultry grin, Royse moved the blonde hair from her eyes and lips, “With you in my future I am.” He forced a smirk, “Are you?” He shifted away. From his behind, her hands wrapped around his chest, fondling his missing nipple, “Oh, your conscience cries out, for that which we just concluded?” His head lowered, “Oh poor thing.” She grabbed his face and gently jostled it, squeezing his pronounced cheek bones, “Confessionals my dear, confessionals, mine own…” she snorted a chuckle, “remarkably, stout sir.” Her finger ran down the scar on his face, bouncing over his lips, “Confessionals are…they are Christ’s way of sparing us from our very own beastliness.”
        The appeals to his sexual vanity slid off of him as if he were slickened stone, “I don’t like that.”
        “What is there not to like?”
        “Just how…” He sighed,  “Oh, pay no mind to the estimates of he who is owned meat.” A cardinal came up to the window, chirping, “Royse.” She looked up at him with blue eyes pretty, ones that shined with lust and desire, but no future of his laid within their gaze, “What does it feel like to have a slave in your arms, inside you? Does mating with a being of such stupendous lowness bring you joy?” His chiseled face remained dormant in its brooding gaze, as though comprised of marred granite. His calmness made him appear insane, as it was blatant to any who were not blind that there was some caged feral thing residing beneath the bones of his skull.
        The English lady studied his hand, which was well over twice the size of hers and more callous leather than it was skin. Royse mouthed something, then she remembered to put voice behind the words, “I came to Edward because of three merits: your exoticness, your titanic stature, and your unbearably unreadable demeanor. At least that is what I told him.” Royse tip toed her fingers along his, then looked up. Her blonde hair shifted off her face, revealing her mischievous gaze, “Never before have I ever seen a man with an eye black. Not what they say by black eyes. Not a single spot of pearl lies between thy lids. Just night. And it is only one eye. Never before have I seen thy similitude in any other design of God.” She rimmed his obsidian eye with her nail, “I was terrified at first.”
        “Were you now?”
        She smiled, "No." Her hand ran down his cheek, “Not now.” Munthir lowered his head. Royse grabbed his chin, feeling his thin beard, pulling him, “I must admit…as much as I deny it, there is some eroticism derived from being a pleasure to someone so…forlorn of status. And I don’t say that to wound you.”
        The slave smirked, “I know.”
        Her blue eyes lit up, “I live for the way you look at me.”
        “But does it feel…good?”
        “Physically? Painful. Painful and invasive at first. Like nothing I have ever once prior endured then…saccharine. Thoughtless, animalistic, and pervasive. I prefer to imagine that you are some mindless beast, and I was just a lady lost in the woods on a trail to deep. And you just…took me. But now, as I hear you speak, I no longer am able to believe that you are that beast without a mind, and in some regard, the fantasy is sundered.” She scratched his back, following the pattern of the concentric brand, “It’s your eyes. They make me feel things that…” Royse wiped her cheek, leaning away so Munthir would not notice. He did, but pretended not to. She whispered, “The things I’d sacrifice for a portion of that…” She laughed as she wiped her cheeks, looking up, “I just wish you were English…and marriageable.”
        He chuckled, nodding, “Yes. Marriageable.”
        Royse looked up and away, “Yes.” Some pity did reside in his heart for her, as few things saddened him more than a broken heart trying to maintain it’s veneer of joviality. The tears were just at the rim of her throat, causing her to make those clicking swallows. The tears choked her, forcing her words to be uttered that much softer. He stood up and kissed her head. Munthir milled forward, toward the window, “Please, oh foreigner…” her voice grew quiet, nearly whispering, “…don’t mention God anymore. Not in my presence. Don’t remind me, for I cannot bear it. All I know is that I am now here, and I am fond of thee.” The cardinal’s brown wife came to her scarlet husband, who fed her a seed, “So, let what has felt good, feel good for a little longer.”
        He leaned his forehead against his forearm, rolling it side to side, eyes positioned just beside the stained glass. What felt good now would not save mother. There was no one, not a soul, who would remember to withdraw her from the gates of Hell but he, her son. But Munthir would first himself need to pass under the trumpet’s of paradise, and Allah's favor was needed for such a thing. 
        Munthir’s eyes focused on two crucifixes. The abbey’s spires rose high among the green panorama of the campus. For these alien people, these English, that was the house where God resided, “The sweetness you dictate in the name of I does not go unappreciated Your Ladyship. Like a fire, your words warm my heart. Or are my maudlin words to laden with flowery pageantry?”
        Royse chuckled, “They are.”
        “Hm.” With eyes downcast, he tilted his head, “But I think you are mistaken in your passions for me. This is but a simulation of love, because on the morrow, I will look upon thee as though I never heard you moan sweetness into my ear. It swirls my mind in confusion. Does it not swirl yours?”
        She wiped her face, smearing tears over her cheeks, “I never thought this would be me.”
        He chuckled, “Strange. I always knew this would be me. This always was me.” He rubbed between his eyes, re-remembering that every avenue to salvation had been blocked, every juncture to paradise severed. How desperately a normal soul needed Heaven could not be overstated, but how his branded spirit needed the blessing's of Jannah outstripped the very definition of necessity, “Royse, how painfully under admired you are cannot be anything but a crime, and I think it would have been far more to our likings if we had met in more…sophisticated circumstances.”
        She sniffled a laugh, attempting to maintain her chipper voice, “Oh…oh no. How I hate that bloody, ugly word. Sophisticated.” She drew the sheets up to her neck, “So. I will call upon you again. Do be ready, do be yourself. But next time, please just, let me live it.” Hardly turning to her, Munthir pointed his green eye back at her, “Let me live it. Even if you do not care about me, let me just live it for whatever time we have.”
        Sensing her melancholies as if it were his own, Munthir nodded. Beyond the stained glass, a boy chased the cardinals through the grass. They flew away, leaving. An emptiness grew in his chest, one that only brightened want, “I have a son, you know.” His eyes narrowed as his voice grew silent and hard, “And I love him very much. Few things there are that I have care for, for I learn there is little in this world worth a care.” Her head sank, “But you are one of them.” He himself did not know if he meant it, but Munthir sensed the need in her to hear such words.
        He turned to grab a peach and caught glimpse of her stare. Royse looked at him as though he were Heaven himself. She felt between her breasts with two rubbing fingers. The mass that his words had stood in her eyes like mountains of sapphire. How pitiful it was to see how little it took from him his tongue to cast her into such bubbling poignancy, “Not yet.” She whispered, "Don't leave me yet."
        “Fine.”
        “Please, please come hold me.” He wrapped her in his arm. She began to sob into the meat of his hairy chest, “I hate him so much. He tells me…” she heaved, “…I feel cold to the touch. And then…then he goes off to his world. Not mine. His!” She tightened her grip on him, “I’m not cold! I’m not!”
        His fingers tightened around her arms. The motley eyed man could taste her melancholies as though it were corporeal. Hers tasted bitter, yet sugary, “You warm me.”
        “And I don’t even know your name.”
        The slave stared off at nothing, save memory, ‘Mother, how I fail you. If intentions were enough, you would already be free.’ “I know.”
        They held each other for some time. Finally, she let go of the sheets, revealing her breasts, shining with tears, “Tell me something about you. Anything. Where you are from?”
        Munthir grinned with sleepy eyes, “You know I can’t do that.” He petted her hair, “You know that is forbidden.”
        “Please. Tell me something. Anything. Your words take me away from here. That's why I need you.”
        He tilted his head and smiled sardonically, “Distant lands I do hail from. Lands that you have never seen. East, where pomegranates reign. So far they are in my dreams, that whether or not they do exist in reality falls under question, and whether they are real or something I imagined, matters less and less each day. For in my head, the East is all that really remains.” Munthir pointed his sharp nose to the other side of the bedchamber, where the silver effigy of Christ hung over the door, “…I…”
        She stared at him with an eyebrow raised, bedsheets now covering her breasts, up to her chin, “There is someone else? Isn’t there?”
        “I….” ‘Mutter.’ He looked at the floorboards, varnished and shining, “I just need to get to Heaven.”
        “Don’t we all?”
        The brands on his back began to burn, and around it, his flesh trembled.