Excerpt

George & the Virgin

Chapter One
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 like 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 spongey 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, that saved her from seeing his face and tempting her 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 make 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 may 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 out.
    She had to lose her virginity.
    The body heat of the livestock took the worst of the chill off of the damp spring morning, but could not keep her from shivering.  For all of 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 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, and 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 of prey. 
    Better Osbert in a shed at her own bidding, than unknown men on the road, at theirs.   
    Even knowing this she had hung onto 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 her mound with its soft, sparse growth of new hair, and felt a welling of sadness for what she was about to do to herself.  The feeling took her by surprise:  she had taken no time to dwell upon the loss of girlish dreams for a more tender bedding.  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 towards her, 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 mucous 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 her 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 grey 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 side 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 travelled across the grey water to the black silhouette of Devil's Mount.
    The island mount 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 upon their mount.  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, barons who 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 mount, 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.