The Lycian Prince 42

The servant was pleased to hear Anthonius’ screams as he re-entered the private entertainment chamber with two young prostitutes and, despite the boy’s pleas, was in no hurry to release the lad from his bondage and genital agonies. These were the usual finishing repartee of the recently departed duo, regular clients who would enjoy Anthonius for three more long sessions before the boy left the brothel. “You’ll have to wait,” the man told Anthonius, “as we’ve more important things to do than attend to you, selfish whore!” The suffering Anthonius was bewildered by the servant’s sudden return to unpleasantness but was soon to learn the reason for Prodicus’ imminent change of attitude to the newcomer had emboldened the man.

The servant supervised the tidying of the room and the removal of the food dishes and wine goblets by the catamites. On their return from the cellar kitchens, the man removed the wooden plug from the bath and issued instructions for the now cool water in the large urns to be poured away. He grumbled “What a waste. We take all the trouble to provide hot water for all the entertainment chambers and it’s rarely used.” Meanwhile, Anthonius incessantly groaned and begged for release, giving the servant another reason to complain. “Shut up, whore, or I’ll leave you there all day,” the man warned. However, there was soon little else to do and so the two prostitutes released the other from his ties. Anthonius immediately jumped from the bed and, as all the water had drained away, was forced to use his discarded thong to wipe the pepper mustard mixture from his very painful cock.

The servant commented “Filthy ungrateful slut! How dare you ruin one of the expensive garments that the owners of this excellent establishment have kindly provided for you to wear.” He walked round the nude boy, who was finally gaining some relief from the hurt in his groin, and smiled when he observed the stripe marks across the lad’s back and bum. However, they were also evidence that the man could not chastise the whore in the usual manner for his impertinence for he had to be in good condition for his next shift, only ten hours away. Most customers did not mind, even liked, to see punishment marks on a boy but not usually to excess unless they had provided them and, as it was so valuable, special care had to be taken with this particular whore’s body, at least until his formal discipline session. This would not take place until the boy’s popularity had fallen sufficiently for the value of hiring the lad for this delight outweighed that of the normal sex sessions that he would have to miss as a result of the resultant wounds.

The servant decided that, as he could not beat the new whore for the offence just committed, he would send him instead to spend a couple of hours in the water cellars. This would, of course, reduce the amount of time that the boy had for recuperative sleep but could be compensated for by increasing the amount of stimulant contained in the obnoxious aphrodisiac drink that the lad would have to consume before again going on duty. It would also provide a useful lesson for the miscreant and a little more revenge to assuage the man’s hostile ire towards the newcomer.

The servant pulled the soiled thong from Anthonius’ grasp and gave it to one of the catamites, ordering that it be placed in the laundry basket in the boy companion quarters. Anthonius’ expectation that he would soon be in those quarters was dispelled when the man escorted the nude, still tearful, boy past the relevant entrance door and led him instead down a few flights of back stairs to one of the water cellars. This was a large cold enclosed chamber through which water flowed from the city’s fast running supply, obtained from the hills of Albanus, to the south-east of the capital, by ingenious hydraulics in which aqueducts of many sizes played key roles. This culminated in the cellar with semi-circular channels, about a pace wide and half a pace deep. Some of the water was diverted by means of sluices into deep storage baths in this cellar and through smaller channels, via an adjacent water-heating cellar, to the brothel’s main kitchens, baths and toilets, which shared the basement. The water-heating cellar was similar in layout to the room at the Imperial palace where the Emperor’s bath water was warmed.

In the cellar to which Anthonius had been brought, there was a large water wheel in the main water channel, which performed two functions. It scooped water up and transferred the liquid to adjacent containers, which were linked together, and also drove those containers to move continuously in a loop through a narrow shaft to provide the floors above with their supplies. However, the power from the running water alone was not sufficient to fulfil this task and a boy prostitute was assigned, usually as a punishment, to help by stepping within the wheel where there was a treadmill arrangement. The boys generally had to be at least 12 years old to be capable of turning the wheel for prolonged periods. It was hard exhausting work and some preferred to be beaten rather than be occupied here but the brothel management recognised its value for keeping the whores fit as well as chastised. The system usually only needed to operate for about four separated sessions of two hours each for the upstairs supplies to be sufficiently replenished. Anthonius was going to provide a quarter of that day’s necessary boy power.

The naked Anthonius was ordered inside the currently motionless wheel and given instructions as to what he had to do. The servant noticed that the boy was shivering with the cold and remarked “This labour is to compensate the owners for having to arrange the premature laundering of your thong. It will also help you to keep warm. You may start now and I’ll watch for a while to make sure that you gain proficiency before I must go. I have other things to attend to, much more important than tending to your welfare, selfish whore. You must not stop turning the wheel until I return. I’ll be about two hours and I’ll know from the level of the water in the concrete tank in the boy prostitutes’ quarters whether you’ve slackened. If that happens, you’ll be spending the time, when you should be resting, next door instead, busy helping to fill and carry the heavy warm water urns to the private chambers!”

The chilled Anthonius stepped onto a knee-high step of the treadmill to allow his weight to begin to move the wheel. It took a few minutes of hard graft to establish the tempo that brought the turning contraption to a speed that satisfied the servant, who said, as he was leaving, “Keep that up for the full two hours or else!” As Anthonius was left alone in the cold gloomy cellar performing the demeaning and tiring task, after spending the previous fourteen hours as a working prostitute, tears formed again in the boy’s beautiful eyes. They were not of pain but of despair. Anthonius wished that he could die instead of leading such a life but knew that he could not whilst his mother and sister remained the Emperor’s hostages. His only hope was Sebastian. Unfortunately, at this very time, Sebastian had been ordered by the Praetorian Prefect to move from Neapolis to conduct his vacuous search for Armillatus in Salernum, even further south from Rome.

Anthonius’ only consolation from performing his new physically very stressful task was that the pain in his cock had abated and a lot of water dripped from the upper sides of the revolving wheel. The latter helped in two ways. It cured the boy’s raging thirst for the only client who had been thoughtful and kind enough to permit him some water had been the old senator, over eleven hours earlier. The cool water dripping on his nude body also helped to remove some of the sweat that he was to generate over the two hours of this particular unpleasant misery.

Anthonius could not keep up a regular rhythm or velocity because of the weariness that gradually began to overwhelm his leg muscles and had almost stopped when the servant returned. “Lazy, whore,” commented the man, unfairly for he had found the concrete tank in the boy prostitutes’ quarters almost full when he had checked it just a few moments earlier. He continued “I’ll obviously have to leave someone to supervise you in future for you’ll now be returning to this task every morning until I’m satisfied that you no longer derelict your duties.” The servant ordered the now damp, but also warm and sweating, Anthonius from the treadmill and escorted the exhausted lad back to the boy prostitute quarters. He left the whore to gain some much-needed respite. The servant had never really intended to move the boy to the next cellar to help fill and deliver the hot water urns, even if the lad had genuinely under-performed the treadmill labours. The man knew that he could have trouble with the mistress if he presented the current star catamite in a sleepy condition to clients.

Boy prostitute’s coming off-duty would normally first have any damage to their bodies, caused by their latest customers, tended before being given their only full meal of the day, stew brought from the kitchens. Nominally, these necessities were undertaken under the oversight of one of the eunuch servants but in practice the lads usually managed themselves without such supervision. Those on kitchen waiting duty never pinched any of their colleagues’ miserly rations as they brought the unappetising fare to their quarters at the scheduled conclusion of each shift. They instead tried to supplement their own diet from scraps given to them by dining customers or by stealing a little of the patrons’ food from the full plates they delivered from, or almost empty plates they returned to, the kitchens.

After their meals, the invariably exhausted catamites would usually be quickly asleep, within an hour of the end of their shifts. They would generally be woken eight hours later to be given a much smaller portion of the stew, washed down with the awful physical and sexual stimulant, before preparing their bodies to return to duty an hour later. In other words, their time awake generally comprised just two off-duty hours, and these were mainly spent repairing their bodies from the harm caused by, or making them ready for, their long and exacting work. The regime of 14 hours of duty, 2 hours of wakeful recuperation and preparation and 8 hours of sleep was relentless for all 365 days of the year, apart from times of festival when demand usually caused shift periods to be extended or when the catamites were recovering from particularly serious injuries inflicted by their kind clients. Even the latter were required to perform menial chores if they could.

Most boys spent many years enduring this existence, first in this and later in other more plebeian brothels. Most remained less than a year in the ‘House of Ganymede’ before being sold to the cheaper establishments when their novelty value had disappeared, for this high-class and expensive locale specialised in fresh boys. However, Prodicus was an exception to many of these rules because of the special regular, who was considered a very valuable client whose infatuation with the boy needed appeasing because he had, over the years, introduced many other rich and influential palace courtiers as new customers.

Few boy prostitutes attempted to escape for they had nowhere to escape to and being a street urchin instead promised an even worse and shorter existence. The penalty for those caught trying to escape from the ‘House of Ganymede’ was also very harsh for the boys would be sold to a particular wealthy client who liked to castrate them and subsequently regularly torture them. Most did not live for more than six months afterwards and the man’s needs were insatiable. He bought most of his victims from the slave markets but was always happy to help his favourite whorehouse. Most of the boy prostitutes therefore resigned themselves sadly to a life whose conscious hours were almost exclusively spent satisfying the sexual and other hungers of Roman males, always humiliatingly and frequently agonisingly.

Many dreamed of their former lives. Some came from towns and villages that had been overwhelmed by invading Roman legions. Others were the sons of disgraced families, formally sold into slavery by magistrates or less formally by soldiers, gaolers or executioners. Others had simply been vended by impecunious parents or uncaring guardians. However, Prodicus was not one who cared to remember his former childhood. He remembered little of his life in Belgica apart from losing both parents early through plague and being sold as a lonely 5 years old at a local slave market by a cruel man whom he had thought was his uncle. Prodicus had been bought by a trader who had brought the boy to Rome, where he knew a substantial profit could be secured for such a beautiful young virgin.

The naked Anthonius approached his bunk, hoping that Prodicus could help him tend to the marks vividly displayed on his back and bottom and ease the pain in his anus. The starving boy also hoped that his friend had saved him some food for he was returning two hours after most others on the night shift. Prodicus was lying nude on the lower bed, still awake and waiting for Anthonius’ belated return. He had been unable to put his thong on because of his now very sensitive and extended ball sac.

Prodicus stood and awakened the two 15 years old catamites who occupied the adjacent bunks. They jumped off their beds and stood either side of the 16 years old. “Prodicus,” said Anthonius but, before he could utter anymore, his friend responded, apparently with affronted authority, “Shut up, fellow whore, you don’t call me by that name. I’m not even Narcissus to you. I’m sir instead from now on!” However, Anthonius observed what the 15 years olds could not. Prodicus’ tearful eyes as he related these words did not display menace and hate but pleading and sorrow. Anthonius observed his friend’s scrotum, presumably damaged by Lysus and perceptively put two and two together for he knew all about blackmail.

Prodicus had been afraid that his brave friend would not submit to his bullying but recognised what the sudden slump in the boy’s shoulders, accompanied by a look of resigned sadness in the gorgeous sky-blue eyes, meant and it was sacrifice not surrender. Both the 16 years old and the 14 years old therefore began their respective acting roles, which they knew they would have to play well throughout the remaining 59 days of Anthonius’ stay.

“Yes sir,” said Anthonius simply and meekly, immediately losing the respect of the 15 years old audience for the newcomer was obviously a coward after all. “You no longer sleep here, slut,” announced Prodicus convincingly, “in fact, you no longer have a bed for all are taken.” Anthonius saw another in the bunk above Prodicus’ and already knew that, by this time, all the other 38 beds of the 19 double bunks would be occupied by the sixty or so boys of the night shift, some of the smaller ones having to double up, albeit not unpleasantly. “Instead,” continued Prodicus, “find yourself a place on the floor somewhere, well away from the rest of us. I don’t want your kind near. You never know what we could catch from your ugly filthy body. So filthy in fact that it needs cleaning straight away. Get in the bath!”

Anthonius reluctantly complied and went to stand before the sluice gate. “Not there, you stupid brat,” he ordered Anthonius, “but kneeling face towards us just the other side of the toilet hole.” Anthonius now realised what the older boys proposed using to wash him. Prodicus soon stood in front of his kneeling friend, on the opposite side of the hole. He aimed his cock at the boy’s face and ordered “Open your mouth. You must be thirsty, so I’ll kill two birds with one stone!” Anthonius obeyed and immediately found urine pouring onto his hair before moving down his face to his oral orifice. The taste of the golden liquid as it entered him almost made him gag but the flow suddenly eased and he began to swallow. The two 15 years olds took their turns whilst Prodicus went to wake some of the others to help. He deliberately prioritised those who might be Lysus’ informers. Anthonius was eventually soaked all over, back and front, with the piss of twenty boys. “You’ll be washed this way every time you finish your shift,” Prodicus finally loudly declared, “and we must organise the completion of your initiation. There must be about seventy boys who haven’t had you yet!” He left Anthonius to clean himself up but not before mouthing a silent, clearly saddened, “Sorry; thanks” to his friend, unseen by the others. He then returned to his bed, where he covered his head with his arms so that no-one could see him cry.

For obvious reasons, the thoroughly humiliated Anthonius had to spend a long time under the cold water pouring through the sluice gate from the concrete tank, much of which he had put there himself. After eventually drying and putting some salve onto those rear stripes that he could reach, the boy lay in a far corner of the room. His mouth, anus, back and bum were all sore, he was chilled from the bath water and famished, and the floor was hard. His despair and desolation were now extreme but his weariness soon overcame everything and he fell into a deep sleep. It was now half an hour past noon and he would be awakened in 5½ hours to prepare himself for his second fourteen hours shift.

(To be continued in Chapter 43 – ‘Sebastian’)