The southwest coast of England
Medieval times
“Hurry up, Osbert! It will be morning soon.”
“Don’t rush me, Alizon. I cannot do it if you rush me.”
She held his pizzle in her hand and jerked on it as he had shown her. “Why aren’t you getting hard?”
“You’re not doing it right,” he whined. “I am not a cow to be milked.”
“You certainly feel spongy as a cow’s teat. You’ll never get it in me if it stays like this.”
“Devil take you! If I don’t, it won’t be my fault. You’re the one who doesn’t know what you’re doing. You’re the virgin.” He said it with a taunt in his voice, and she was glad of the dark of the shed, which saved her from seeing his face and being tempted to slap it.
“I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t a virgin and well you know it. Sheep would speak Latin before I would let you touch me.”
“Be nice to me. It’s a favor I’m doing you.”
She bit off the retort that came to her tongue, knowing that she should not alienate Osbert, however much she loathed him, loathed touching his damp and floppy pizzle, and loathed being here in this dark shed, fuggy with the stink of sheep and cow.
She had to be nice, at least until she had gotten what she wanted. Even as she reminded herself of that, her hand betrayed her, giving his cock a jerk that made him yelp.
“Christ’s blood, Alizon! It will be of no use if you tear it off!”
She took the protest as an excuse to give up the task of arousing him. “You do it, then.”
“You could suck on it.”
The thought made her gorge rise. She would never let him put that filthy thing into her mouth. This time it was her own face she was glad could not be seen; otherwise her grimace of revulsion might have angered him into giving up this foul task. “We’ve no time. Please, do what you need to and let’s be done with it.”
“You’d do it wrong, anyway,” he grumbled. “You’d probably bite me.” And then he was quiet but for the catching of his breath as he worked on himself.
Alizon turned to the shed door, where through the spaces between the rough slats she could see the lightening of the sky. Sick anxiety roiled through her stomach, cold-hot panic pouring down her chest like water, and she had to clench her jaw to keep from urging Osbert yet again to hurry. Morning was almost upon them, and his family would be rousing. Time was almost up.
She had to lose her virginity.
The body heat of the livestock took the worst of the chill off the damp spring morning but could not keep her from shivering. For all her urging Osbert on, she dreaded the hurried, clumsy coupling that awaited her. There would be pain, and a humiliation greater than she thought she could bear.
Her fear turned quickly to anger, as it had many times in these past weeks. God’s breath, she could not believe this was how she had chosen to lose her virginity. She was fourteen years old, and she should have managed a better deflowering for herself before now.
Like others before her, though, she had been hoping against hope that something would happen to make it unnecessary—maybe she would be married, or have a chance to leave Markesew, or maybe her menses would wait another year to start and she would still be considered a girl, too young to take part in the annual lottery of virgins.
None of that had happened. No one had shown any interest in taking her to wife. Her menses had begun three months ago. There had been no opportunity to leave Markesew.
She was an orphan, and lucky to have been sponsored by the church for an apprenticeship to the widow Bartlett, who wove tapestries with her sister. It would be suicide to leave her apprenticeship and run away; a young girl alone was too easy prey.
Better Osbert in a shed at her own bidding than unknown men on the road at theirs.
Even knowing this, she had hung on to hope, waiting until the last minute to get the deed done. Osbert had been trailing after her like a hungry dog ever since her breasts had begun to bud two years past, and she had known she had only to whistle and he would drop his braies and be on her.
Only, now that the time was at hand, he was having trouble fulfilling the promise of those two years of leers and unwelcome fondles.
Dawn was coming, it was the summer solstice, and at noon the lottery would be held, just in time for low tide and the march across the exposed causeway to Devil’s Mount.
She heard Osbert’s grunting breath, his body a hunched wraith in the gloom. “Are you ready?” she asked.
“Almost, almost . . .”
She pulled up her long woolen skirts and leaned against the stone wall. She touched herself, the soft, sparse growth of new hair around her sex, and felt a welling of sadness for what she was about to do. The feeling took her by surprise; before this, she had spared no time to dwell upon the loss of any girlish dreams of a more tender bedding. But her body had always been her own, her private vessel, and now she was being forced to share it with one who would foul it with his dirty hands and his pizzle, and she would never be the same again.
She let anger burn away the sadness. It was the townsfolk of Markesew who were to blame for this, they who had managed no better solution to their curse than the sacrifice of virgins.
Damn them! Damn them all for their cowardice!
Damn them for making her do this thing, in a shed that stank of wool and droppings, with a boy whose nose ran constantly with snot.
Osbert stumbled nearer, then fell against her, the firmness of his erection against her belly. He kissed her, his tongue plunging inside her mouth. She turned her head away, grimacing against the salty taste of the snotty mucus that had transferred to her lips. He went on slobbering at her neck, his tongue sticky with thick saliva, while his hand fumbled and groped between her legs. She felt him shifting his organ, the tip of it like a thick, hard knob of wood prodding at her.
“Spread your legs. I can’t get it in like this.”
She did as bid, and Osbert squatted lower, jabbing with his cock against her soft folds, trying to find entry.
“Just get it in!” Her revulsion made her want to retch. Could she truly go through with this?
“Do not tell me what to do! Peace, Alizon! You cannot command me in this!”
“I would not need to order you if you did it right!”
“Shut up!” He panted and strained against her, then she felt him softening, his pizzle bending against her. “See what your ordering did? See? I told you to shut up, I told you not to tell me what to do!”
She was torn between relief and desperation, his failure both a deliverance and her sentence of death.
“Lie down; it’s this standing that is spoiling it,” he said.
“I’m not lying down in here.” The floor was made up of matted straw and excrement, and she would not so much as bend her knee to it.
“Then bend over the stall wall.”
“What?”
He pulled her to the stall and pressed his hand to her back, making her lean forward until her face was pressed into the warm side of the cow on the other side, the animal shifting its weight away with a soft sigh. Osbert fumbled with Alizon’s heavy skirts, then shoved them up past her hips.
She was still confused. “You’re going to do it like a sheep?”
“Peace! Unless you want to ruin it again.”
The idea of a ewe must have appealed to him, because he was back at her, harder than he had been moments before, albeit no closer to success.
“By all the saints, Osbert, not that hole!”
Suddenly she could stand it no longer: the shed, the stink, the cow her face was pressed against, Osbert and his bungling of this simple task. It was too much to bear.
She could not do this. She could not let him enter her with his dirty pizzle, could not let him grunt and groan above her and take his animal pleasure from her body. She suddenly knew that she would rather die than give herself away like this.
“No!” She pushed back from the rail, taking Osbert by surprise and knocking him off balance. Sheep bleated, and he cursed as he fell into the muck.
“I would rather lie with the Devil than let you take me,” Alizon screeched. “At least he would know what he was doing!”
Osbert sucked in a breath of horror, and his voice came from the shadows of milling sheep. “God hears such blasphemous thoughts, Alizon. He will make you suffer for them.”
“It is the innocent girls of Markesew who suffer, and if that is how God cares for the devout, then I will gladly go to the Devil!” Tears in her eyes, she pushed her way out of the cowshed and into the gray morning.
“The Devil take you, then!” Osbert called after her. “He will welcome a slut like you!”
She ignored his words, running across the dewy grass until her breath came in gasps and her sides ached. She stopped and stood, looking down over the misty sloping fields to the town that sat upon the edge of the coast. Her gaze then traveled across the gray water to the black silhouette of Devil’s Mount.
The rocky island and what it contained had been a blight upon the coastal village of Markesew for nearly thirty years. There were a few still living who recalled the days when the mount had been home to the de Burroughs, rich and powerful barons who had ruled from their castle atop the island, and who had gathered riches from the trading in their harbor.
And then the dragon had come. Some said the de Burroughs had brought it on themselves by reaching too high, and thinking themselves holy; they said God had sent the dragon to teach the de Burroughs their place.
Others said it was the Devil who had sent the dragon to devour the de Burroughs, that the barons had been born in Hell and were being called home. But once loosed upon the earth the dragon had been impossible to recall, and, its hunger not satisfied with the de Burroughs, it had turned to the shore for its appeasement, laying waste to the innocent.
In truth, no one knew why the dragon had come to the mount. And no one knew how to be rid of it. The only way the villagers could keep it from ravaging their shores was to feed it a steady supply of sheep—and once a year a virgin.
Alizon gazed out at the mountainous island, her heart wrenched with grief and helpless fury. She wept, the sobs tightening her throat and stealing what breath she had left.
The tears were for herself. They were for the girls who had died over these many years. And they were for the girl who would today be sent to the dragon.
“Will it be me?” Alizon asked, holding Emoni’s hands. “Tell me. Have you any sense of who it will be?”
Emoni shook her head, her hazel eyes glazed with tears, the pallor of her face frightening Alizon with the knowledge that it implied. “I do not know.”
Alizon squeezed the fingers of her dear friend. Emoni had the gift of sight, a secret she had shared with no one else. “Do not be afraid to tell me. It is my future, and I will see it myself whether you tell me or no. I would rather be prepared.”
Alizon’s hair was a wild and curling red, her eyes nearly black, her build tall and large-boned. Emoni’s hair was straight and brown, her eyes hazel, her build small and delicate. For all their differences of appearance, though, the two girls were as close as sisters. From their first meeting, it had been as if they had known each other a lifetime already—and the bond they shared had only grown stronger through the events of the last year: Emoni’s marriage and her discovery two months past that she was pregnant.
“I am not hiding the truth from you—you know I would not. It is as I said: I do not know. I have had visions, but they are visions that make no sense.”
“Tell me!”
It was almost noon, and the whole town was gathered at the seawall, milling and mumbling, the mood halfway between that of tragedy and celebration. A dozen flower-bedecked sheep baa-ed from a temporary pen and tried to nibble the garlands off the necks of their neighbors, unaware that they themselves were soon to be eaten.
The sea had receded past Devil’s Mount, revealing the raised stone causeway that glimmered wetly in the cloud-hazed sunlight, curving like a white snake in its path across the gray muck of the sea bed.
“I see you in the lair of the dragon,” Emoni said.
Alizon caught her breath, her blood turning cold and draining down her legs. It was to be her who would be fed to the beast. Her knees buckled, and she caught herself on the seawall.
“But in my vision, you are unharmed.”
“Am I about to be eaten?”
“I do not think so, but there is blood—”
“Blood!”
“Not yours!”
“But blood! Whose, then—”
“I do not know what it means!” Emoni interrupted, in her voice a desperation that matched Alizon’s own.
A boy blew a trumpet, startling them. It was the signal that the lottery was about to be drawn and the virgins must take their places.
“Horrid Tommy,” Alizon said, glaring at the youth. “You know he likes calling us to our deaths.”
“He wouldn’t be so gleeful if it were his little sister in the lottery.”
“Wouldn’t he?” Alizon asked bitterly.
Emoni hugged her. “May God keep you safe from harm.”
“May He keep us all safe. It is what He should have been doing these past thirty years.” She stepped back from her friend. “There are times I think He does not exist at all.”
“Do not abandon faith, Alizon. Never that.”
She touched Emoni’s cheek and swallowed against the tears that tightened her throat. Worse than being devoured by a dragon would be to never again see her beloved friend’s face. “I will never lose my faith in you.”
She turned then from Emoni and nodded to the widow Bartlett and her sister, who were standing at the front of the mass of townspeople. The widow’s jaw was set, her eyes barely meeting Alizon’s own. As Alizon’s mistress the woman was demanding, but never had she been cruel. No words of affection had ever been spoken between them, but Alizon thought she saw in the rigidness of the widow’s stance the signs of a caring heart. If the widow had felt nothing, she would be chatting with her neighbors or eating a bun like some of the others, not standing as if she were trying to stare down Death himself.
Alizon looked around. The frightened faces in the crowd belonged to the girls who would be in the lottery today, and to their families: the baker and his wife, each with a hand on their daughter’s shaking shoulders; a widowed fisherman in gray and tattered clothing, standing stiff beside his wide-eyed girl; a merchant’s wife, her rich gown doing nothing to ease the terror in her eyes as she and her daughter’s nurse stood sentinel on either side of the silent girl, whose lower lip trembled.
The non-frightened faces were those of the other townsfolk, men or women relieved it was not to be one of their own this time to be devoured. They tried to hide their happiness under solemn expressions, but the brightness of their eyes and the quick smiles that slipped across their lips betrayed their hearts.
The worst of the bunch were the wealthy landowners. These had come to be certain the sacrifice would be made, and their flocks of sheep safe for another year—but they were never the ones who paid the price.
Alizon stepped up onto a wooden platform with the five other virgins, their ages ranging from twelve to sixteen. The sixteen-year-old, Greta, had been through the same ordeal thrice before, and had become a town joke between her good luck with the lottery and her poor luck at finding a husband. She was a homely girl, with a harelip and a shambling gait. Whenever speculation was made on what would happen if the town ran out of virgins, someone was sure to say, “There will always be Greta.” Alizon took a place next to her and slipped her hand into the girl’s, giving it a squeeze.
Greta glanced over, and her malformed mouth twisted into a bitter smile that did nothing to vanquish the tears in her eyes, or the knowledge that the only value she had was as a potential meal for a monster. “I wish it would be me this time.”
“God’s breath, Greta, why?”
“It would be a relief, to have it over.”
She gave Greta’s hand another squeeze, for it was a sentiment against which she could not argue. She herself was worn out from the emotions that had been driving her. Now her gut was cramping, urging her to relieve herself, and sweat with the sour scent of fear had broken out all over her body. Her limbs were weak with exhaustion. The thought of finding herself here year after year, like Greta, made her want to lie down and die.
The village priest began reading off the names of the girls for the lottery, dropping a square of wood for each into a black bag. It was yet another sign of the evil that had come to this town that the priest himself should participate in such a profane ritual. If she had succeeded in getting deflowered, that same priest would have stood beside the midwife as Alizon was examined for evidence of her state, and he would have taken the sworn testimony of her defiler.
From the platform Alizon looked over the crowd, finding no set of eyes that would meet hers. Even Osbert looked away, as if he had not just this morning been pressing himself against her, his tongue in her mouth. She saw the merchant whose daughter was on display beside her. The man was standing beside his richly garbed wife, whispering in her ear. As Alizon watched, the wife’s expression showed surprise and then tearful relief. She began to turn toward her husband, but he scolded her, and she faced forward again, her expression glowing.
Suspicion raised the hairs on the back of Alizon’s neck. The man’s joy could have been due to faith, or to the acceptance of God’s will. Or it could be from a certainty that had nothing to do with the divine.
Alizon shifted her gaze to the baker and his wife. Their faces were pale, their eyes fixed upon their daughter. The fisherman was also still plainly fearful, as was Greta’s older brother, and the impoverished parents of the last girl. She knew then that the merchant’s daughter would not be chosen, no matter that the square with her name was supposed to be in the bag with all the others.
Fiery anger flushed through Alizon where moments before she had been cold. Worse even than the injustice of bribery was her own helplessness in the face of it. There was nothing she could do against this town that tossed its poorest and least comely young women to a dragon for the sake of their precious sheep and houses.
“You’re hurting me,” Greta said, and she tried to pull her hand free from Alizon’s.
“Your pardon.” She released Greta’s hand, which she had been crushing in her own.
The priest began speaking a blessing in Latin, as if doing so could make this unholiest of acts holy. A chill breeze blew up, pulling at skirts and cotehardies, tugging at hair.
Damn them! Damn them all! Damn every one of them who encouraged these sacrifices year after year!
She and the other girls faced out to sea, the platform upon which they stood giving them a view over the heads of the townsfolk. For a moment the sun broke through and shone down upon Devil’s Mount, setting aglow the green grasses and trees of its steep, rocky slopes, and the pale yellow stones of the fortress crouched at the top. For a brief instant the island was beautiful, the hideous evil at its heart unseen.
For a brief instant Alizon could tell herself that there was no dragon, and that, if she were the one to cross that causeway and descend into the dragon’s lair, she would find nothing there but an empty cavern.
She met Emoni’s eyes, thinking of her friend’s vision of her in the dragon’s lair, blood all around. Not all of Emoni’s visions foretold the future; some, like daydreams, were but wishes played out in the mind. Which would this one be?
She held Emoni’s gaze as the priest reached into the black bag. His high voice fluted out over the suddenly silent crowd.
“She who will honor the dragon this year is named . . . Alizon.”