Boy Crazy

Constructed of pinkish-gray sea stone, the Dolphin Temple stood upon a low hill overlooking the fish-filled sea. Oleander and pomegranate bushes dotted the hillside leading up to an entrance flanked by phallic porpoises. Behind the temple, the high timber blued the horizon. Against the primeval forest’s oaks, firs, and cypresses, the Dolphin Temple glistened like a rich pearl.

Following a farm lad herding his pigs along the pebbled path, I saw two boys approaching along the shore. The boy wearing the yellow loincloth was my boon companion Phaeax, and the other was Dreros, an Eteocretan (of the racially pure Minoan bloodlines—as Dreros regularly informed us). I was glad to see Phaeax, who was gorgeous in body but dim in mind; however, I groaned to see Dreros.

“Hail, Androgeus,” Phaeax called. Dreros sniffed condescendingly. The boys’ purple-stained mouths gave clear evidence that they’d been raiding a mulberry tree.

Dreros lifted his nose another inch. “I worship the Snake Goddess,” he boasted. “We pure families are children of the serpent, the Great Mother. We never sacrifice to heretical gods; not the Dolphin God, or the God of Flora, or Bechanos, the God of Beasts, or Yakinthos, the Child God, or Stafylos, the Grape Man.”

“Come on, Phaeax,” I urged. “You and I will make the sacrifice to the porpoise. Leave Dreros to get hoity-toity with the snake woman.”

Dreros sniffed. I sniffed back. The warm air was scented with iodine from the sea and wild anise, mingled with the more heady scent of the goats grazing upon the hill. Leaving Dreros, Phaeax and I hurried to the temple and begged admittance from Nausitheus, the priest.

Nausitheus smiled upon us. “Two of your friends arrived just a few minutes ago,” he said, pointing toward the small room behind the altar. We hurried through the nave, where lamps made the blue plaster walls shine eerily. Worshippers felt like they were standing on the floor of the sea. In the curtained changing room, we found Lyktos and Asterius, who had just finished stripping off their sandals and loincloths. After greeting our friends, Phaeax and I quickly bared our bodies.

“That smug boor,” Asterius said. “I’m glad he didn’t come. Can you imagine masturbating with him? He would brag about how much better they do it for the Snake Goddess.”

“I don’t think they masturbate to the Snake Goddess,” Phaeax said. “Worshipping the God of the Playing Porpoises is more fun.” That was the most intelligent thing Phaeax said all day.

“Oh, Nausitheus would allow him into the masturbation sacrifice—if Dreros asked with all of his heart,” Lyktos corrected. “Not being initiated would only prevent him from understanding the significance of the ritual or being permitted into the inner circle of the great rite.”

Dropping to our hands and knees, we parted the curtain and crawled down the shaft. Lyktos crawled in front of me. I could feel the closeness of his bare ass and hanging ball sac. Behind me, Phaeax kept tickling my buttocks with his hair.

We emerged into the Masturbaria, a magical room where blazing torches provided light and heat. Balancing the torches were the shafts to the surface that brought cool, fresh air. Frescoed scenes of human boys and men handling their own cocks, humans fondling the cocks of various deities, and ejaculating porpoise phalluses covered the circular wall.

That afternoon, my three friends and I were the only occupants. We sat in a square on the smooth stone floor. The sacred amphora of lubricating oil sat in the center. I poured a generous dollop into my palm and slicked my hardening penis. Sitting directly across from me, Asterius grinned at my growing erection. His own cock was already hard. With his gaze still locked on my cock, he touched the tip of his own and toyed with it dry before he lubricated it.

Asterius smirked at me, and I winked back. Lyktos may have been trying to please the god, but Asterius and I both knew that we were pleasing ourselves. Lyktos’s mother was priestess of the women’s rites, and she took her duties seriously. So did her son. Lyktos was a true believer.

Sitting to my left, Lyktos gripped my cock with his right hand. Following the formula, I squeezed Phaeax’s penis, Phaeax grabbed Asterius’s cock, and Asterius latched on to Lyktos. As we gently stroked, Lyktos raised his voice: “Oh, Divinity of the Playing Porpoises,” he prayed according to the Dolphin Heresy. “We assemble to masturbate for you. We stroke our cocks with holy purpose. We stroke the cocks of our companions that the act be pleasing unto you. We will not cease until we let fly the sacred seed even as the gods of old spurted the starry sky. So I, Lyktos, dedicate my semen to the Everlasting Powers.”

Though Phaeax was intellectually slower than the rest of us, there was nothing wrong with his dick. It filled my hand. I stroked up and down his shaft, taking care to tease his big foreskin with my thumb and forefinger. Phaeax’s face assumed a dreamy expression as I fondled his cock, but that did not stop him from giving his best attention to Asterius. I could see that he was pounding Asterius’s cock hard and fast.

Using one hand, Lyktos grasped my shaft steadfastly and evenly stroked my cock’s hood with his thumb. He didn’t move his hand; only his thumb circled my dickhead, and his speed did not fluctuate. The sensation was agonizingly pleasurable. I feared the manipulation would bring me to orgasm too quickly, but it only kept me hovering near the edge, with tiny tingles rippling though the tip of my cock that defied expansion into a soul-shuddering discharge. My heart rumbled as if it might burst. The blood sang in my head, and Lyktos’s hand evoked a pleasure so powerful that I could scarcely tolerate it. Yet utter satisfaction held in abeyance: I did not cross the threshold of discharge.

Learning quickly, I duplicated the action on Phaeax’s dick. His face soon lost the dreamy expression. His tongue began to protrude until he resembled an animal in extremis. Soon we four were performing the same hand movements on each other, each hovering near ejaculation, but unable to rise to the supreme height. In this state of acute arousal, my memory rippled back, washing through the months to the first time we had sacrificed in the Masturbaria.

Lyktos’s father was important to my father’s business interests, and my mother had always been a mite jealous of Lyktos’s mother. Thus, it came to pass that one night Lyktos’s family dined with ours at my father’s villa. We sat in chairs under the moonlight, with braziers and lamps providing additional light. We did not toss food into our mouths with our fingers or segregate by gender in the perverse manner of the Dorians. We ate with utensils as civilized people do, and the women dined with the men, as equals.

Lyktos’s father had brought a barrel of beer, which everyone enjoyed, even the slaves. I laughed to see one slave child guzzling down the rich thick beer in her bottle. The little one had a real taste for the heady beverage. The dark, pungent beer made my head swim, but it was pleasant, nonetheless. My mother had added a little opium to the barrel, which made it even more enjoyable.

My father was an exporter. He traded with Rhodes, Naxos, Athens, Tyre, Sparta, Corinth, Lesbos, Babylon, Joppa, Sidon, Thebes, Cairo, and Troy. He primarily dealt in timber, though at times he exported cloth and purple dye, currants, herbs, olive oil, medicines, wine, wheat, and wool. He also schemed to corner the beer market, and Lyktos’s father was the principal brewer of the Minoans.

Both fathers were dressed elegantly in elaborate red kilts, with much jewelry on display. They had colored their eyelids, darkened their lashes, painted their lips, rouged their cheeks, and colored their nails. They wore their hair long, but shaved their faces, as is our custom. Lyktos and I did not need lipstick, but we had colored our fingernails and toenails (we ate barefoot, as is polite). We were also clean shaven. In Lyktos’s case, the razor was barely necessary, but I had become embarrassingly hairy at the age of thirteen, and I fear I grow worse every year. My mother claims that she once mistook me for Thoth, our pet monkey, whom an Egyptian merchant had given to my father.

Though my father was intent on seducing Lyktos’s father (in the business sense), it was Lyktos’s mother who dominated the conversation, causing my father to gnash his teeth. Like my mother, she was dressed to highlight her femininity. She wore an elegant dress draped to accent the curves of her buttocks and a wide belt that pushed up her bare breasts. The women also wore elaborate cosmetics and jewelry. They had hennaed elaborate designs on their breasts and rouged their pointed nipples.

“Yes,” Lyktos’s father agreed brightly, “but the new king does not object to heresy. Some suggest that he is an initiate himself.”

There was a pause as the slaves cleared away the bowls of green turtle soup. I waited until they had served the roast kid with quince and currants before I suggested, “Perhaps I could be initiated?”

My parents beamed at me. My father saw my offer as a path to increased profits; my mother probably viewed it as a step to higher social status. Neither gave a thought as to what the initiation ritual might involve. I might have volunteered to be castrated or sodomized, but they could think of nothing but their own ambitions. Not that I was worried: Lyktos still had his balls. I had seen them many times while we were swimming. I had no information regarding the condition of his asshole, but sodomy didn’t frighten me. Obviously, he had passed through the initiation without harm. If he could stand it, so could I.

“I will broach Androgeus’s candidacy to Nausitheus,” Lyktos’s mother proposed. “I’m confident that the Divinity of the Playing Porpoises will find Androgeus acceptable.” There was only the slightest trace of doubt in her voice.

“I’ll talk to the priest,” Lyktos offered later when he and I were alone in the lavatory where we had gone to piss. “My mother doesn’t have any real influence with Nausitheus. Dolphin Priests don’t think women are even human—but not a word of that to my mother.”

Lyktos’s response was totally unexpected. He kissed me on the lips. I was startled, but I didn’t pull away. I found my tongue slipping into his mouth. It was my first romantic kiss, and with another boy, and my entire body felt as if it was on fire. Lyktos placed his hand behind my head, holding my mouth against his. When we broke apart, I found myself grinning like an idiot. Lyktos also looked preposterously happy. “Don’t worry about the initiation,” he advised. “You’re a shoo-in.”

Thoth had followed us, and the little fellow leaped up and down on the edge of one of our ornate terra-cotta bathtubs and chattered playfully. I picked him up, and he threw his long, hairy arms around my neck. Lyktos laughed at the affectionate monkey and stroked Thoth’s head. I wondered whether the time might come when Lyktos would stroke my head again.

Two days later, Lyktos approached me after a session with our tutor. “The priest would like to meet you, Androgeus,” he said. His gaze included Asterius and Phaeax. “All three of you.” That’s when I found out that my fellow students had also requested initiation into the Dolphin Temple.

We raced through the market stalls, past merchants hawking legumes, golden jewelry, cereals, art objects, vegetables, pottery, fruits, wine, family seals, and colorful cloth. We passed the oil mills and wine presses tended by happy slaves. On Crete, the burden of slavery is light—slaves are considered members of our families. A Cretan who ill-treated his workers would be a social outcast, and might come to the House of the Axe for judgment.

A hot wind was blowing as we crossed the hill. Gray donkeys carried baskets of fresh-cut flowers to market. We passed shepherd boys tending their flocks of sheep and goats and a dark grove of olives in the valley. We ran past lush vineyards and wineries tended by slaves, some wealthier than their owners. Our loincloths were stained with soot and sand by the time we reached the temple. The priest stood just outside the entrance. He was a towering man, almost five foot six, but dark-skinned, clean shaven, and curvy-shaped like the rest of us. His kilt was purple with white piping.

It seemed that our initiation was to commence on the spot. That surprised me, for I assumed that elaborate rituals, fasting, bathing, purging, and weeks of prayer must occur before the actual ceremony. I soon learned that the Dolphin Divinity was a happy-go-lucky god who did not go in for time-wasting formalities. He demanded absolute submission to immediate gratification. “Orgasm Now” was his motto.

The priest, Nausitheus, explained how the arousal of the masculine organ, with its subsequent orgasm and ejaculation, were the gifts of the Porpoise or Dolphin god. That was the mystery of the rite, the secret that no noninitiate, and most certainly no woman, must ever know. He bade us turn, and looking back through the door, we saw that the phallic porpoises resembled erect penises. It must have been an ocular deception, but the statues appeared to be spurting their fluids into the air. The sight quickened my heart and stiffened my cock in my loincloth.

“Now, you will join the outer circle of the great rite,” Nausitheus commanded. He summoned two temple boys, about our own ages, who had dedicated themselves fully to the god. Scamander and Teucer seemed jolly fellows, and they were eager to assist Asterius, Phaeax, and me in performing the ritual. Of course, Lyktos, already an initiate, was also showing us the way.

Lyktos, Scamander, and Teucer led Asterius, Phaeax, and me through the great room and behind the altar. There stood a smaller room concealed by a curtain of purple cloth. The boys had us remove everything: loincloths, our sandals that laced to our knees, and our ornaments. Scamander and Teucer stripped alongside us, though they had far less to remove. Then Scamander dropped to his knees and revealed a narrow tunnel sloping downward. Constructed from thick stones cut fine and closely fitted, the tunnel was just high enough to navigate on our hands and knees.

Crawling behind Scamander, I felt my friends behind me. Once the tip of my nose brushed the crack of Scamander’s ass, which made him giggle irreverently. After a long crawl, we emerged into a circular room high enough for a tall man to stand comfortably. Shafts brought fresh air to us and flaming torches illuminated the scene. The walls around the circle were frescoed with explicit scenes of masturbation. I looked at one grouping of six boys, sitting in a circle. Each boy was fondling the erect penis of the boy next to him, and some of the cocks were already spurting.

Asterius, Phaeax, and I had no doubt regarding what the boys expected us to do there. I, for one, was thrilled, and I could see from their torchlit faces that Asterius and Phaeax were equally eager.

We six boys stood in a circle. “Place your hand upon your penis, and rub it while I offer the prayer of the Dolphin Heresy,” Teucer commanded. Grinning, we gripped our cocks and masturbated slowly while we listened to the charge.

“Oh, Divinity of the Playing Porpoises. We stroke our cocks with holy purpose. In your honor, we will take extreme pleasure from our hands and phalluses until we fill the air with spurts of our sacred juice.”

Before that day, masturbation was an act I had performed in secret, alone, and never mentioned. Touching my hard dick in a circle of boys was a little frightening, but tremendously liberating. The approval of the god only made it more exciting.

An amphora sat on the stone floor in the center of our circle. Scamander dipped his hand into the vessel and emerged with a palm cupping oil. He poured some oil into my palm, and repeated the ritual with each of my friends. Scamander commanded, “Do exactly as I do.”

Curling his fingers around his cock, Scamander lubricated the shaft, stroking its length, including his generous foreskin. After several strokes, his stretched skin was slick. As we mimicked his actions ardently, my cock trembled as though beckoning me to milk it. Still, I could not beat it, as I desired to do. I had to follow the actions of the group, as led by Scamander and Teucer.

The sexual tension grew until I thought I must erupt. Just when I thought I could wait no longer, Scamander formed a ring around the base of his dick with his right thumb and forefinger. He slid the ring up his shaft and when the ring reached the foreskin, he formed a parallel ring with his left and worked it up. Teucer duplicated Scamander’s stroke. Both boys returned their right hands to the base of their cocks and repeated the process. Their fingers stroked up, never down.

Even as I hastened to follow the boys’ movements, I couldn’t pull my eyes from their dicks. My companions were attempting the same finger slide, not without a little giggling. Asterius, Phaeax, and I felt deliriously strange to be performing so intimate an act with others. My face may have reddened slightly as I slid my fingers up my cock and pumped my foreskin two handed. A thrill shot through me. However strange and intimate the circle seemed to me then, I found group masturbation almost unbearably erotic.

I watched the other boys’ cocks and hands while I stroked my own in this curious way. Lifting my eyes to the wall frescoes, I observed that the unknown artist had depicted our game exactly. Staring at the picture enhanced the pleasurable sensations building in my cock, and not wishing to ejaculate too quickly, I lowered my eyes. Surprisingly, my gaze met Lyktos’s, and the memory of our kiss flooded into my brain. My lips recalled the sensation of his warm lips on mine, his hot tongue pushing into my mouth, my tongue meeting his, and my tongue slipping between his lips.

As those pleasant memories weakened my knees, Scamander called for our attention. “We will now change our stroke.” He interlocked his four fingers, overlapped his thumbs, and slid his cock through the hole. He closed his hands and slid them up and down.

I wobbled as I followed his action. The effect was pure bliss, but we could not continue this action long. It made us too weak in the legs. When we were all close to falling, Teucer nodded to Scamander.

“Let’s sit now,” Scamander said. Grateful and quivering, we sat in a circle, our hard cocks jutting between our legs, the stone floor slightly cool against our bare asses.

Using one hand, Teucer grasped his shaft firmly and lightly rubbed his thumb over his cock’s head. He didn’t move his hand; only his thumb circled his foreskin. His speed never varied, and the rest of us followed suit. Directly across from me Lyktos sat with an expression of feral bliss seaming his face as he stared lasciviously at my cock.

I felt like I would orgasm at any moment, but the rhythm was insufficient to force me over the threshold. I could only turn my thumb as raptures rippled through my cock, tingles that could not grow into delirious thrills.

Scamander switched us from the circular motion to a back and forward movement; Teucer shifted quickly, with Lyktos, Asterius, and Phaeax following. I didn’t have to think about it; my thumb followed suit. Each soft swish of my thumb caused my penis to quiver. My eyes were riveted upon Lyktos’s cock, in between stealing glances at Teucer’s, Asterius’s, Phaeax’s, and Scamander’s soaring members. Their dicks trembled at the torturous touch. I became aware of an intense ecstasy in my cockhead, which deepened as I swished my thumb. My dick hovered on the verge of orgasm, but still the movement was sufficient only to keep me on that precipice without tipping me over the brink.

Without warning, Scamander gripped his cock with a clench that looked like the one I’d always used in solitary masturbation. However, looks were deceiving—his stroke was light. He chased this series of slow strokes with a run of quick jerks. The effect of this grip was miraculous. I wanted to discharge, and I felt like I was about to discharge, but I couldn’t. The stroke produced a sensation that degenerated into slow torment.

My cock throbbed, but my thigh muscles were tearing. Lyktos pulled down on his balls as he rocked his ass to fuck his fist. We duplicated his motion. As I thrust into my hand, I knew I would explode soon. I swung my rump, driving my erection through my sturdy fist. When I pulled my cock back to thrust again, the tension sent spasms through my leg muscles. I was seconds away from those pelvic contractions that would fling semen from my penis. Pre-orgasmic tingles tore through my foreskin and burrowed deep into my cock’s head.

Scamander resumed command of our hand motions before we crossed the point where orgasm became inevitable. He reclined onto his back, elevated his legs so high that we could see his dark hole in the crack between his dark-skinned buttocks, and gripped his cock shaft with his right hand. Using only a fingertip, he performed a circular motion under the head of his cock. He pressed hard, so his finger did not slide over the surface, but shifted the skin.

This peculiar stimulus left my cock blaring for deep kneading. I had trouble keeping my finger on the spot because my dick kept bucking. The intense pulsation traveled down the shaft and rippled up my stomach. Phaeax raised his hips, but Scamander admonished him. “Don’t give in to it, Phaeax. You do not have permission to ejaculate. Not until I give the order.”

The torment increased exponentially. The god was summoning my fluids; I had to spurt for him. I thought that I could not stand the torture for another second.

Unbidden, a moan escaped my mouth. I was convinced that another game would ruin my dick forever. “Now, please,” I gasped, making Teucer giggle.

To my delight, Scamander latched on to Lyktos’s cock. He gripped it hard, squeezing it like a piece of citrus. Lyktos grabbed Asterius’s cock, Asterius did the same with Teucer, and Teucer seized hold of mine. The effect was phenomenal—my heart leaped up and I felt the semen rising in my dick. I was so far gone in lust that I gripped Phaeax’s cock and squeezed unthinkingly. The thrill of touching a cock that was not my own made me gasp. I was hardly aware that Phaeax had laid his hand on Scamander’s penis, thus completing the holy circle.

Releasing his squeeze, Scamander drummed the side of Lyktos’s cock with his fingers; then he slapped Lyktos’s dickhead with his palm. The movement traveled around the circle.

Scamander rose to his knees and pushed toward the center. We did the same, and each boy started fucking the fist that gripped his dick. Not one of us lasted ten strokes.

“I’m going off like Charybdis,” Scamander said. His cock was bucking in Lyktos’s hand, and a thick squirt of his jism splattered onto Teucer’s forearm and even decorated his stomach and chest. Meanwhile my own pelvic muscles were contracting as an intense orgasm rippled up my cock. I felt the squirt that shot out the back of Teucer’s fist and hit Asterius directly on the mouth.

Lyktos continued to shoot his juices, which creamed me from groin to chin, and even though I was simultaneously humping Teucer’s fist and milking off Phaeax with my own, I saw Teucer’s boy stuff splattering onto Scamander’s wine-dark and glistening skin.

It was the longest orgasm I’d ever experienced. As Lyktos’s sticky semen slid down my stomach, my own continued to squirt. Our bodies were tingling squirting masses of bucking flesh, and the mad spasms went on.

In the fullness of time, our orgasms stilled and our mighty contractions ceased, we fell in a heap, drenched with semen. My body slid wetly across the skin of my friends and the scent of our spent semen rose to my nostrils. We rested for a while before we departed from the Masturbaria and crawled back up the tunnel.

“Well done, lads,” Nausitheus offered, examining our sticky bodies. “The Holy Eternal Powers are pleased. The Dolphin God accepts your sacrifice.”

So, once again in the holy Masturbaria, my three friends and I tormented the cock to our right, and enjoyed the hand to our left. Three months had passed since the afternoon of our initiation. My parents had been overjoyed by my acceptance. My mother had risen socially, and my father had prospered economically. My own reward had been quite different.

Though he was a greater believer than I, Lyktos was my best friend. As his hand flogged my penis, I thought again about the afternoon he had kissed me. It had been the only time our lips and tongues had met, but I knew that the potential was great. In the future, he and I would do more things together, exotic things, some that would have been acceptable only to the worshippers of Sirius or the followers of Baal, of whom we had heard tales. For the meantime, his hand pounded my cock, and as his thumb and forefinger massaged my foreskin, I felt the semen rising from my balls. My cock grew heavier, even as I pounded Phaeax’s thick erection with all my strength.

“Think not of him,” I groaned as the semen rose higher. The tingles emanating from deep beneath my foreskin grew into earth shakers. Suddenly, I was a believer. I shrieked, “Oh, size-less ones, oh, maker of whales, oh, behemoth, oh, leviathan. I fly to you.”

The lightning of the Titans blasted in my brain. I was the persistence of Cronus, the light of Hyperion, and the water of Oceanus. My hand flogged mightily on Phaeax, giving him no reprieve, no relief from the sexual ecstasy he must endure, while Lyktos forced me to come.

“This is for the Playing Porpoise, Androgeus,” Lyktos howled as the first powerful spurt arched from his penis, flew over Asterius’s head, and splattered against the frescoed wall of the Masturbaria. “The god summons your holy joy. Your fluids join with his, and with ours.”

That was true, for we were all ejaculating. Three months of practice had given us the ability to orgasm and ejaculate as one. Proud we were of our skills and our timing, though we knew that the god accomplished the miracle through us. Our bodies joined with his magnificent existence. Explosive streamers erupted from us as crescendos of increasing pleasure disrupted our cells.

At length, we crawled back out the tunnel, bade farewell to the priest Nausitheus and the temple attendants Scamander and Teucer, and breathed in the brisk air that blew from the wine-dark sea.

“Let’s go to my house,” I urged, knowing that my parents would gladly host my friends. My friendship with Phaeax¸ Lyktos, and Asterius had brought great benefit to our family, and I knew that my mother had ordered a great banquet of roast lamb, preceded by the fruits of the sea, and followed with spiced vegetables, and a pudding of millet baked with citrus. Lyktos’s father’s best beer would accompany the meal, and after we ate, we boys should be ready to submit another blessed offering to the great god of the Dolphin Temple.