Empress Alamonda
by Anna Austen Leigh

Published by Anna Austen Leigh at Smashwords

Text Copyright © 2012 Anna Austen Leigh
All Rights Reserved



This book is a work of fiction.  Names, characters, events, and locations are fictitious or are used fictitiously.  Any resemblance  to actual persons or events, living or dead, are entirely coincidental.

This file is licensed for private individual entertainment only. The book contained herein constitutes a copyrighted work and may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into an information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means (electrical, mechanical, photographic, audio recording, or otherwise) for any reason (excepting the uses permitted to the licensee by copyright law under terms of fair use) without the specific written permission of the author.

Also by Anna Austen Leigh

The Diligence de Lyon – an escapade published by Liquid Silver
Pilgrim for Love – published by Logical Lust

on Kindle:
A Grand Tour

on Smashwords:
Natural Sympathies
 Emma
How Not to Have Sex
The Duel
The Swing
The Netsuke
La Belle Dame Sans Merci



She would get so jealous she would faint.
Her husband had two thousand chambermaids. Not all at once, of course; but he probably had had them all, at one time or another. He hired them for their beauty, for their wit, for a certain indefinable poise, and it was the rules of the game that they were available for him, in whatever way he choosed to use them.
Him, she could live without.
She'd slept with him three times, and that was enough. An heir, a spare, and a single son, who couldn't inherit but would be useful if they wanted to marry him into a foreign dynasty, or keep a troublesome satrap in order.
But to think of the waste! Such delightful, lovely creatures as the chambermaids, so young, so full of life, and of course whenver one of them became pregnant, she had to be sacked. They never stayed long.
Rose Petal had been the first for Alamonda. She'd come from one of the far provinces, an elegant girl of the minor nobility whose flower name was true to her dreamy, melancholy nature.
Alamonda was just out of childbed, her breasts still heavy with milk. Rose Petal was rubbing oil into Alamonda's stomach, to banish the stretch marks, when Alamonda reached out for her and pulled her down on the bed beside her. Rose Petal hid a full blown rose between her legs, and its fragrance, if not exactly like roses, made Alamonda delirious with desire; she stroked it, licked it, heard Rose Petal sigh – she would never have screamed – in delight.
It lasted three months. Then Rose Petal disappeared. The usual problem. Alamonda stood as godmother to her daughter, a few months afterwards, and saw Rose Petal again, but things could never be the same.
She would get so jealous her breath came short and her heart hammered. Seeing her husband with one of the chambermaids, she'd think how wrong it was for that hairy, thickset brute to enjoy them. The male member, so arrogant and blunt and comical and just plain ugly, compared to the delicate frills and petals of the feminine sex.
Then there was Tyrie, a dairywoman from the rich lands east of the capital, tall and bursting with health and exuberance and pinkness and with a voice that was rich and almost baritonal in timbre. She lasted over a year; the emperor-consort never particularly liked that type. 
Tyrie loved to fuck, or be fucked, she wasn't choosy, as long as it was hot, fast and noisy (yes, Tyrie was a screamer), and as long as Alamonda chose the biggest dildo she had. Tyrie liked it in bed, in the swimming baths, outdoors, any way Alamonda gave it her. Alamonda didn't weep at Tyrie's departure the way she had at Rose Petal's, but the loss went deep all the same.
So many girls since then, and now a new one had her heart flip-flopping every time she looked at her. 
No one knew where Salteena had come from. Elements of every race in the empire mingled in her features; the eyes of an Egyptian cat, slanted, but green like the Celtic sea; the purplish dark skin of the Kushites, the blond hair of the Alemanni. Every feature was sharp, and she was so utterly alive, like a street cat, alert and quick. Salteena was everything Alamonda had ever dreamed of.
Alamonda thought age had given her gravitas, that she was past that youth when her emotions would buffet her till her body gave way, that she no longer fainted from desire or jealousy. She was wrong.
When she revived, Salteena had her clasped in her arms; her entire world had contracted to the sight of Salteena's generous cleavage. She noticed the hint of darkness at the edge of a nipple, just covered by Salteena's gown. She closed her eyes again, and breathed in the scent of orange zest and cedar that Salteena wore – Salteena, Sal-tee-na, what a lovely name – mixed with a hint of the scent of the girl's body, and she hoped no one had noticed that she had come to.
Her husband, gods damn him, was running about in a panic, shouting for doctors, for the head of the Praetorian guard, for smelling salts. And she was lying there, breathing deeply as sleepers do, a slight smile on her face, in love, and happy.
She was so happy she could faint, all over again.
***
Alamonda traced the underside of Salteena's left breast with a fingertip, feeling the soft skin around her nipple start to prickle and pucker.
"So where do you come from, really?"
"The capital," Salteena said. "I'm as Mediolanite as you are."
Alamonda ran her finger round and round Salteena's nipple. "I suppose you're tired of being asked that."
"I don't mind if it's you doing the asking." Salteena kissed her, flicking the tip of her tongue against Alamonda's teeth and tongue, lightly, salaciously. She was in a flirtatious mood tonight. Alamonda's hand started a slow journey down the chambermaid's body.
"And the emperor-consort?"
"He won't get an answer. As a matter of fact, he's already asked me three times."
"Asked you to sleep with him?"
"No, silly... asked me where I came from."
"Oh." Her hand had reached the beginning of the light fleece above Salteena's sex. She stroked it gently.
"I haven't slept with him either, if that's what you want to know."
"Oh."
"Men aren't my thing."
"Ah."
"You are."
Her fingers had reached their objective now, and she curled one finger against Salteena's rigid little clitoris, just pressing the side of it, feeling it pulse against her. She nibbled Salteena's ear, and felt her hips push gently against her hand, allowing her to slide her hand down a little, push her fingers between the girl's lips into the moist opening of her cunt. She stroked gently, feeling Salteena's body undulate against hers.
"Please?" Salteena said, her voice suddenly small and anxious like a little girl's.
She pushed the girl down on the bed, bringing her body between Salteena's thighs, moving to bring their sexes together. Like translucent jellyfish mating, she thought, flowing into each other, slowly, like the sea. She moved her hips, and felt Salteena move against her, and felt that same lovely prickling she always did when they were flesh to flesh.
"You're weeping," Salteena said afterwards, and it was true, she was. "You're not happy?"
"There's always an end to these affairs."
Salteena raised one eyebrow. "How so?"
"You'll get pregnant. Then you'll disappear."
"I won't disappear," Salteena said with some bravado. But then she frowned, and bit her lip, and was silent.
"If only I could think of some way to get rid of Albertus."
"Poison?"
"I wish... but there has to be an emperor-consort. If not Albertus, then another."
"Oh." Salteena, wise as she was, was innocent of statecraft.
"So I have to keep Albertus from taking you. But that's not as easy as it sounds."
"I could resist."
"That's not allowed."
"Has anyone ever tried?"
She honestly didn't know. But whether or not her girls had tried to resist, they had all been taken, at last.
They thought. Alamonda began to prickle with the cold; she pulled the quilt over them both. She began to think about life without Salteena, to imagine what it would be like when she had gone; the first step in the process of renunciation to which she had had to become accustomed. Then Salteena amazed her by laughing out loud, a careless, gay, tinkling laughter, and soon Alamonda was laughing too, not knowing why till Salteena told her the wonderful plot.
And so it was that next time Salteena met Albertus, Alamonda was hiding behind the tapestries of the emperor-consort's bedchamber, and heard Albertus cajoling her lover – "So come on, you can tell me, I am the emperor-consort after all, don't you think I ought to know, where do you really come from?"
And she heard Salteena's voice, with a certain huskiness (which she knew was fake, but would fool Albertus), say; "Very far, very far, out from the Pillars of Hercules and across the great ocean..."
The trap was sprung. Albertus was a man, and men never knew when to let well alone. (That was why Mediolanum had an empress; Augusta had first set a bound to the empire, when she realised peace and prosperity subjugated the barbarians far more efficiently and irrevocably than conquest and repression.) Albertus had been an explorer in his youth; he'd visited Gandhara and the Indus empire, and the sands where the wild tribes lived, and he'd always said there was a land across the ocean. Well, let him find out.
Meanwhile, which was the truly clever bit of Salteena's plan, he was still emperor-consort, and unless he was ruled to be definitively dead (which could hardly happen without Alamonda requesting a ruling from her council), he remained emperor-consort as long as he was away, which, gods willing, would be forever.
"I knew it!" she heard Albertus say. "I knew it!"
But then she heard Salteena gasp, and she knew the plan had gone awry. Putting her eye to the little moth-hole in the tapestry, she saw that Albertus was struggling with Salteena, grabbing her, his own clothes in disarray, and that worm-like thing men were so proud of lurching and bobbing its blind head drunkenly. The very thing she'd feared for so long. She felt that familiar weakness at her heart, and her vision started to darken. She couldn't faint, she couldn't; if Albertus discovered her stratagem, all would be lost. She bit down hard on her lip, hoping the pain would keep her conscious.
Then Salteena laughed. Albertus, puzzled, stepped back, his face petulant, like a little boy denied some toy, some candy bar he'd wanted.
"You really don't want to … do that? Do you?"
He stood uselessly, his cock beginning to droop.
"Don't you know about the Sophomoricians? Haven't you ever been told fairy stories about them, the wicked women, the cock-eaters, the man-haters?"
He shook his head, his features slowly blurring from furious to anxious, cupping one hand protectively in front of his crotch.
"Oh, they're not true," Salteena said. He took a step towards her. "We don't exactly eat them." He stopped.
"It's just that we have a particular kind of... I don't know what you'd call it. Juice. Mucus. Chemical. Whatever it is. That eats away flesh."
Albertus' face was crafty. He'd heard this kind of story before. "But then it would eat you away, wouldn't it?" He moved a hand out to her tit, squeezing it hard, so that Salteena gasped, and when she spoke again, you could hear it was through gritted teeth.
"It's not normally noxious. It's only... oh! I can't say! I'm too ashamed!"
"Speak! I command you. Ashamed or not, I don't care. Tell me."
Salteena stammered, put her hands to her face. (She's hamming this up too much, Alamonda thought; he'll guess.) 
"It's only when it's... mixed... with sperm..."
Albertus almost jumped. Suddenly his hand was nowhere near Salteena's breasts, he had both his hands cupped over his cock, he was leaning as far away from her as he could, he was rigid with fear.
"You may go." (Of course he hadn't guessed. He was a man, after all.)
So Albertus sailed for the great continent across the ocean; and Alamonda reigned without a consort, albeit legally and constitutionally provided with one, for another forty years – forty years of peace, and plenty, and happy bedded, if not wedded, bliss with the Satrapess Salteena.