A Note on the Chapter Title: Mars was the Roman god of war.
The white expanse of the villa's walls was now behind him, though Kurama, in the midst of his struggles, had never gotten a good look at it. He remembered trellises, and shy spring flowers, but little more. Kurama was resisting his captors with single-minded bitterness by this point, frightened of the men dragging him forward through a thick stone archway and out into a courtyard, shaking him violently by his collar when he tripped.
Once inside, Kurama paused in his struggles, allowing them to pull him forward, stumbling, a few steps so he could take in his lavish surroundings. There was an entrance to a stable along the left hand wall, with horse scent and the stamping of hooves and whickering of the great beasts easily heard echoing out through the open doorway and square windows cut into the wooden walls.
Servants paused from their work in the courtyard, a man carrying a huge bowl of fruit staring, a woman who'd been scrubbing a mosaic that led into the main house with a rag she still had dipped into a big wooden basin brimming with soapy water, distracted for a moment by the entrance of Kurama, looking up curiously at the newcomers.
The house itself was an ornate monster of a thing, typically Roman with arching marble and beautiful polished stone, crisscrossed with gardens blooming with flowers that made Kurama's eyes widen, having never seen such well-tended beauty before, all vibrant colors, some with delicate fluted tops and others appearing to be a type of rose, though they looked nothing like the little primroses Kurama's mother had tended when she was still alive. There was nothing growing on the impressive walls of the house, though, which loomed stately and frightening over Kurama's head.
A high, fluting voice halted the three embattled men in their tracks. By now, after all these months, Kurama could understand the gist of what was said.
"Halt! Why do you treat the poor boy this way? Leave him be."
One of the soldiers jerked Kurama brusquely under the guise of checking the rope they'd cinched over his hands, making Kurama double over in pain before he could get a good look at the woman who'd taken to his cause. The other legionary answered deferentially, "Begging your pardon, domina, but all these Northmen are cowardly trash." Kurama surmised the gist of what the lanky bastard said, knowing there was an adjective he hadn't caught before trash, and wondering what domina meant. "This is the slave your brother sent word of."
"I guessed as much," the woman said, still polite, but pained, thinking very little of these two soldiers. Kurama smirked to himself as the two honor-less dogs tripped over themselves to apologize to her. Unfortunately, the one who had shaken him noticed, and when Kurama was ushered towards the woman, a petite thing with blue hair feathered behind her neck and big red eyes, he found himself suddenly falling with a squawk to the cut stones of the courtyard, which he struck painfully, his jaw clacking as it hit stone. He moaned, bleeding and curling in pain, hearing some of the servants who'd been watching his performance chuckle.
Seconds later, soft hands, tiny as those on a girl's doll, touched his chin and helped him up. He looked into the concerned eyes gratefully.
"Your services are no longer needed."
"But domina, it isn't safe to be around one of them alone," the second man pleaded.
"Nonsense, he won't hurt me. Will you? Do you speak my language?" she inquired, looking down at him worriedly.
Kurama said nothing. Kindness or no, he wouldn't betray one of the few advantages he had to this woman so easily. He was trying to affect a look of bewilderment when a second voice, familiar and hated, broke through him.
"Of course he does," the short general stated, servants rushing forward to help him off his horse. "His guards tell me he practices Latin night and day; it can be heard clear as glass through the horse blanket we threw over his cage."
Kurama's sour look was answer enough.
"Sister," the general continued, "these men know better than you how to treat one of those Northern wolves. Take him to the cellar," Hiei instructed them. "Guard him. I'll have food brought down."
"Brother," the lady said reproachfully, "this boy is not a wild dog."
"No," he agreed, "not once we train him. Now come, greet me properly, Yukina. I tell you, the gods pissed on me all through that awful war."
Yukina didn't rise, or take her hands from where they rested gently against Kurama's cheek. "Oh, Hiei, I know you," she said fondly, and sadly. "You enjoy your soldiering far more than you let on."
Hiei, Kurama thought, finally able to discern some meaning from the fast string of foreign words. So that's his name.
Hiei grunted. "Against people who can fight, not those feckless Northern savages, in the interminable mud and ice. I just hope word comes from the senate soon that they've approved my triumph," he said sullenly. "You there, legionaries: you're dismissed. Follow your orders."
"Sir!" the two men barked, snapping to attention and saluting, the girl removing her hand and stepping back with a forlorn expression. Kurama was dragged down towards a doorway, head reeling with fear and all the words and ideas he hadn't caught from their long and quick conversation. He looked back to see Yukina embracing her brother shyly, heart turning to stone as he thought of his own little brother, and then the wooden hatch they'd pulled him into closed over his head, and he was in darkness.
It took some time of struggling and cursing before the second legionary, existing only in thumps and mutters in the gloom of the cellar, found a torch bracket on the wall and, removing its burden, felt his way tenderly up the ladder to the trap door leading outside. He left the boy to be forced to his knees in the brief light, his neck bent and held in place by the Roman's feet. The legionary had found a rough chair to sit on, and knowing how easy an escape attempt or attack would be in the darkness, used the pretext of touching him to keep Kurama subdued.
A small eternity passed for Kurama of kneeling cowed on chilly stone with the legionary's sandals crossed on his neck, and his hands still lashed behind his back, without enough light to see. It made Kurama feel as though he were entombed in a murky barrow, a chieftain's spirit holding him in thrall until he died under the weight. The second legionary came back with a lit torch flaring next to his face, spitting ash and sparks, and went around untying and lighting sticks from the fagots of them kept bundled along the western wall while chatting with his fellow soldier, until the usual shimmering firelight illuminated the long shelves full of fired terra cotta amphorae of oil; big barrels of root vegetables; milk pails brimming with fresh cream; the butchered corpses of animals; even dozens of eggs in an iron cask, crisscrossed with straw to keep them from cracking. Anything that could spoil was held down in the frigid air of the cellar, and with an extended household as large as Hiei Jaganshi's, scion of the patrician Jaganshi family, fresh provisions were in constant demand.
A few hours passed with raucous conversation between the first legionary, a bullish man who kept his weight on the heavy feet across Kurama's neck and left his face in shadow, and the second, a man whose sandy hair was turned ghostly by torchlight and skin unusually pale for a Roman's. Kurama slipped into agony, slowly, his muscles seizing from his miserable position under the legionary's leather-wrapped heel. The soldier shifted, sometimes thoughtlessly and sometimes to hear Kurama moan, chatting with his friend and, more suggestively, with the disapproving slaves who occasionally came down through the entrance that led into the house and collected meat or oil, vegetables or fruits, whatever was necessary for the midday meal in the process of being cooked.
Kurama didn't try to understand their prattle. He didn't want to know. He didn't want any part of those whoresons and their bastard language inside of him.
Finally, the influx of servants thinned out, then stopped altogether. The legionary subduing Kurama was stretching his legs and kicking Kurama in boredom when the cellar door opened and General Hiei came down the crude wooden stairs, a flabby Persian eunuch with his eyes outlined in kohl following behind him.
"Get up," Hiei ordered. The legionary pulled his feet back guiltily, saluted, and stood to attention. Hiei scowled when Kurama, his muscles so cramped he knew he'd scream if they moved him, stayed crouching, biting back groans when he tried to stretch his feet.
"Up, you little shit!" the legionary who'd been using him as a footrest barked, and kicked Kurama in the side, making him yell out in pain and flop over sideways, skidding. Still he couldn't get up, in an excess of agony. The soldier reached down and grabbed him by the hair, eager to please his general, and pulled him from the floor like that.
The pain was so intense tears leaked from Kurama's eyes, and he yowled breathlessly. The legionary, laughing, pushed Kurama forward, the eunuch cackling when Kurama tottered forward a few steps, and then leaned his shoulders against a nearby shelf to stay upright, sobbing in wet gasps at the excruciating agony in his legs. Suddenly, coarse but small hands were urging him forward. "Walk," Hiei said gruffly to Kurama, and Kurama did, belatedly.
It took nearly all of the octava hour to get Kurama walking again without limping. Kurama was dumbfounded by the General's patience. He even ordered the boy's bonds cut, after which Kurama, scuffing his wrists to get some feeling back into them, looked into Hiei's red eyes searchingly. Hiei wanted to look away, but didn't, glaring the boy down. The slaves and soldiers watching stood shocked, unused to seeing such gestures of kindness from the General.
Kurama found himself pushed through the sumptuous halls of the house after that, past curious slaves and soldiers and halls bedecked in white linen and mosaics of strange beasts with scaled skin or circular orange plumes around their head. They reached the inner halls, and then turned into the General's sleeping chambers, a lavish room with a canopied bed and rich Persian rugs overlapping the floor. There, Kurama was let go. He turned and backed up quickly until he reached the wall, then stayed plastered against the silk drapes with his hands behind his back, holding two fistfuls of cloth smoother than Kurama had known it could be woven. The sandy-haired legionary, who had been summoned with Kurama, and a burly slave had to pry him from his cower, delicately untangling his hands so as not to hurt the silk, and then yanking him before Hiei with significantly less care, who disrobed calmly in preparation. Kurama, perceiving what was about to happen, shouted a single, desperate no in his own language and flung himself backwards against the holds of the two larger, stronger, and in the legionary's case better-trained men. His traveling clothes, a Roman-style tunic of linen in the last days of the journey, were stripped from him with no fanfare, just rending cloth, leaving him shrinking and bare, restrained by two men's arms.
The congeniality and kindness were gone. "There is an art to what I'm going to teach you tonight, slave. The sooner you learn it, the sooner these meetings between the two of us will end. Over the next few weeks, as they approve and arrange for my Triumph, I will be personally preparing you for his Imperial Highness. Oh, and for your sake, you must tell the Emperor when you meet him that you are a virgin. Act virginal. But believe me, slave, this is for your health that we do this—even I am not so cruel as to let the Emperor loose on a barbarian who knows not a slave's place."
"Please," Kurama begged throatily in the Latin tongue, "No." He shook his head bleakly. "Please."
Hiei looked at him, surprised, as though seeing him for the first time. There was a moment when pity condensed in Hiei's heart, and stayed his hand. The moment passed quickly, however, and yawning to show off his boredom, an old patrician trick, the caustic General instructed the two men restraining Kurama to put him against the bed and leave him. Kurama, the moment their hands were off him, leapt over the soft mattress, quick as a cornered hare.
They chased him—he ran, dodging to a corner to get them all on one side of the room and then streaking to the room's entrance, fully intending to run all the way back to Britannia, his cottage, Cornu, Shuuichi, Briar, and Mother, all of whom he had the vague but urgent sense were waiting for him all that distance away. He found only that the door was locked, and that Hiei had seen his intention and was too close.
Kurama swung out, using all the skills he'd learned from boyhood brawls and warrior training, and smashed his knuckles into Hiei's face, leaving a red stripe and a flash of pain and disorientation that momentarily stunned the General.
Kurama ducked and feinted and hurled anything hard he could get his hands on at Hiei and his minions, breaking, in the end, a mirror, two vases, a bowl, and a chair Hiei had been fond of. They cornered him finally. There was brief excitement when Kurama tried to wriggle through the open window and the slave tackled him to the wall and pinned him roughly, yelling in his own language. A hanging Kurama's grasping hand found ripped from the stitches adjoining it to the wall and fluttered down over them like a canopy. Kurama deftly attempted to use it to his advantage, but at the last moment the hanging caught a gust of wind and wafted in a delicate curve to the left of the ruckus, ruining Kurama's opportunity for escape.
By that point, Hiei wasn't thinking of the dent Kurama's body had left in the plaster. He wasn't thinking of the bowl that had knocked his cheekbone with a painful clack and left a bruise, the scuff on the other side from Kurama's punch, or the loss of his chair. Hiei was burning cold with battlefield anger, which let him see clearly the road to Kurama's destruction. He grabbed the ripped curtain, tore a strip from it, and used it to tie a noose around Kurama's neck, instructing the soldier and servant to grab an arm and stand on a foot each so he could tighten it, brutally, until Kurama's breath was so loud they could all hear him straining.
At the edge of unconsciousness, when Kurama could fight no more, Hiei barked an order that Kurama was too fuzzed to understand and let out some of the taut length of cloth, allowing Kurama to breathe. They dragged him back to the bed bodily, snarling, when he made feeble motions toward the open window.
"You're lucky I can't have marks of torture on you, slave," Hiei panted, sweating and exhausted from his strenuous run around his room. The men were holding Kurama in place through brutal pressure on each shoulder and elbow, one on either side.
Hiei finished disrobing in jerks, letting his tunic fall onto the ground next to the shattered sepia pieces of the vase, all compassion and mercy momentarily purged from his soul. He advanced to lean forward just behind Kurama. Kurama's ass was bared by the position Hiei's subordinates had forced him into. Red hair, fanned on the sheets, rippled as Kurama jerked away. He mewled in pain when the servant and legionary's hands yanked him back, nearly dislocating his shoulders and breaking his arm.
Kurama glared tight-lipped over his shoulder, hatred and fear running through his veins like fire.
"Relax," Hiei snapped, winding the long tail of the noose around his hand, immune to the violence of this, immune to his own cruelty. "Or this will hurt worse."
"No understand," Kurama whispered desperately, before his voice rose in an agonized, offended shout.
Hiei had shoved a dry finger into Kurama, his other hand at the base of the noose, pulling. "That. Hurt. Pain. Have you done this before?"
"No understand," Kurama sobbed, and then his breath caught as the finger curled, Hiei's ire not yet cooled.
"With a man. Have you, I don't know, fucked, fornicated, had coitus with a man."
The legionary, who'd slept with quite a lot of whores and slaves in Gaul and Britannia, supplied a few slang words. Kurama glared poisonously when he understood.
"Yes…" he said, voice soft with hatred, his accent made worse by stress and fear.
Hiei quirked an eyebrow. "Good. But this is not sex, this is to teach you your place. You must learn to obey. Do you understand that? Obe-ey?" Hiei drawled, drawing the last word out into a long lilting line.
Kurama stared over his shoulder blankly, revealing the scrapes on his face from his tackle against the wall.
Hiei harrumphed. "Of the slaves we took, you show the most promise of pleasing his imperial highness," He sneered the last three words.
Seeing Kurama still looking at him blankly, but fearfully, Hiei snorted, suddenly embarrassed by his position, his responsibilities to the court to provide the Emperor with a suitable fuck-toy from his low-class slaves.
"We'll see soon enough," he muttered caustically, and called a slave, without shame, to bring him oil.
The Eunuch, Narseh, brought it quickly, eyes skittering over the scene calmly. Hiei took no notice—a patrician must fuck, eat, shit, and die in front of and with the help of his servants—and oiled his cock up, masturbating himself idly but with intention, until he could shove himself in. It was all brusque, thoughtless, like a child kicking open an ant hill. Kurama felt ridden with shame, shame like lice, itching and biting at his skin. Unable to control himself, unable to fight with both arms nearly broken and half strangled as Hiei pulled at the noose, Kurama began to weep into the mattress as he felt muscular thighs press against the back of his own, himself forced wide, the strange sensations that could not have been farther from pleasant, even though there was pleasure, shooting up his spine as Hiei's cock was forced in with the help of the oil.
Kurama, humiliated, likened Hiei's deft technique with an animal in rut, though Hiei was not that. The long, slow, teasing glides and sudden, deep plunges stirred Kurama's member, but made his mind recoil.
And Kurama wept. He had no breath to rage, but his tears, and the saliva that dribbled from his mouth to the mattress, felt comforting, and so he sobbed in great choking gasps, relieved to do it. He bit his own lips rather than moan when Hiei, out of kindness or cruelty even the General himself couldn't tell, angled into Kurama's prostate, sending unwanted shocks up Kurama's spine.
Hiei had his eyes closed to keep himself from losing his erection, pained by the pitiful sight before him. Kurama's eyes were squeezed tight to let the tears be knocked out, though nothing stifled the ever more exhausted moans. Hiei ordered the two men, in a moment of pity, to let Kurama lower his arms, and hold them in a better position. Kurama tried to bite one man's arm, but found only the hand holding the noose tightening violently, the hard knuckles pressing into the back of Kurama's skull like a blow.
Hiei came, moaning, letting the last few thrusts slow down to a glide as Kurama kept completely still, his eyes shut, willing this to be over.
Hiei sighed and staggered, his body shivering with afterglow, and then ordered the legionary back to his unit, and the slave to the cellars, to be trussed up and tied to a column until Hiei needed him again.
Glossary:
Kohl: A dark-colored powder used as make-up, especially eye shadow, by the Ancients. It was made variously of crushed antimony, burnt almonds, lead, oxidized copper, ochre, ash, malachite and chrysocolla, a blue-green copper ore.
Octava Hour: Obviously, Ancient Civilizations had no solid way of measuring years or time that was functional, universal, or precise. In Rome, they did have sundials, water clocks, and hours of the day, however, and one of those hours was Octava, which would have lasted in spring from around our 1:00 P.M. to around our 2:15 P.M.