“So you are saying that these male subjects drink this elixir of their own free will?” I asked. “They drink it to serve of their own free will—just as slaves are here of their own free will now in Bellavalten?”

“Yes and no, my lady,” said Lexius. “Some male slaves are brought as tributes—as these are the ways of war in all the world, and my Khaharanka is part of the world. But in the main, yes, the population is made up of those who have come of their own volition, and those who remain because they have embraced the elixir and the transformation it offered them.”

A dreamy expression came over his face.

“It is not such a great thing, you see, this transformation.” He smiled. I could feel his excitement. His anxieties were being burnt away in his zeal for what he was describing. “Yet at the same time the elixir changes everything! The genius of the elixir is that it feeds one part of a man while not starving the other. Some elixirs nourish one aspect of the supplicant but destroy another. Ours does not. It goes to the primal root of the being, and waters all the seeds meet for watering!” His eyes were bright and his lips were smiling. “And the end result,” he said, “for those who dare to drink the cup to the dregs, is magnificent.”

I said nothing. I could see that the Queen and the King were both staring at him in awe. And I too was much impressed by what he said.

“And what precisely does happen to the man who drinks this cup to the dregs?” asked the King.

Lexius looked at the King, and then his eyes moved to the Queen, and then to me.

He was quite the picture now, enormously improved by his zeal and the high pleasure he was experiencing at this moment. His face had the rapt expression of someone gazing into the heart of a miracle.

Slowly he lowered his eyes, and his hands went to his jewel-encrusted robe, and slowly he broke open a long multitude of hooks that were near invisible for the decorative gold and silver threads that concealed them. He opened his long robe a mere half of an inch and then he opened it all the way and dropped it to the floor to reveal his entire naked body.

Queen Beauty let out a gasp. I almost fainted. I have never fainted in all my life, but at this moment, I almost fainted.

There standing before me was a sight I’d never beheld in all my life except in statues or in old paintings.

Every inch of his magnificent skin seemed to shimmer in the light, and from his loins rose a cock nearly as big as that of the King, just as thick, and just as dark as it stood erect, but what had caused me to weaken and nearly collapse was not the dazzling beauty of all this, but of his breasts—his breasts which were as large as mine, as full and as round, and as high and as firm. His womanly breasts with their hard dark rosy nipples.

I was staring at a gorgeous androgynous god. And he regarded us calmly, his eyes moving from face to face, as we beheld him.

Queen Beauty gave another soft expression of shock.

The King wore a radiant smile, so like him, but his eyes were huge with obvious wonder.

I moved towards Lexius, this exotic being, this god, drawn as if by a chain, and then caught myself, caught myself as my hands reached out for his breasts.

“Oh, you may touch them, my adored mistress, if you wish,” he said.

I did.

I went up to him and I felt them, felt them as I would the breasts of any fulsome female slave under my authority. I squeezed them gently assessing their firmness, my fingers pinching the dark tender aureoles and the prominent jewellike nipples.

And then I stared at the cock, the hard crimson shaft, and I felt the passion kindled uncontrollably. Never had desire ripened so fast as it did in this instant. I buried my face in his breasts, pressing them to my cheeks and my lips. I slipped my arms around his naked form and held him to me, nuzzling and feeding off his breasts. I could not resist his nipples, and as I squeezed them, twisted them, challenged them with the firm play of my fingers, there came another astonishing revelation.

Pale drops of translucent milk began to flow from them!

I lapped at them with my tongue! I was going mad.

I stepped back as if to save myself from some engulfing madness in which all restraint would be lost.

He merely gazed at me with narrow smiling eyes. His hands hung at his sides. “Go on, my adorable lady,” he said softly. “Taste it. It is yours as I am yours.”

And I did. I suckled him hard, embracing him again, and felt the sweet and salty flavor of it.

“The milk of Aphrodite,” said the King.

I wrapped my arms around him, feeling his hard cock push against me, and I sucked and sucked as if I couldn’t stop, and the milk now was the smallest part of it. My right hand went down and felt his cock, as my tongue lapped at the milk, as my lips drew hard on his breast, and my desire swelled and burned until I was moaning.

How I managed to turn away, I don’t know. Except that I did. I remembered the King and Queen. I staggered away, and when I turned around again the King was making love to Lexius, kissing him, and kissing his breasts just the way he so often kissed mine, and he put his powerful hand on Lexius’s cock. And the King was moaning as I had moaned.

The Queen stared in shock with both her hands up to her lips. But her eyes were vague with wonder. No horror. No condemnation.

I turned and looked at Dmitri who stood in the shadows. He watched me, he watched all of us, but he said nothing.

Then, as if he could not prevent himself, he unfastened his heavy tunic at the shoulder and let it fall to reveal his shirt and trousers, and slowly he undid the ties at his throat and opened his shirt.

“They are much smaller,” he said in a small voice. “They are supposed to go away when the elixir is withdrawn. But they have never entirely gone away, and I conceal them, though I die every hour of every day for someone to touch them, someone besides me.”

The Queen reached out for him, and Dmitri drew close to her. And only now did I see the remarkable similarity of Dmitri and Lexius, see the same shimmer of the skin, the same long full hair, uncommonly long and proudly long falling to the shoulders, and both seemed to me great gods of Eros, surpassing all ordinary beings in their pursuit of joys that make the rest of us cowards.

The Queen put her right arm around Dmitri, and with her left hand she touched his small breasts reverently, and gingerly she touched his nipples. The blush was burning bright in his face, as he looked down at her.

The King and Lexius were now bound together in a hopeless embrace as the King drank the milk lustily and hungrily.

I turned away. I couldn’t contain myself. It was not only the desire thrashing inside of me like an angry serpent locked in the prison of my body, it was my soul, my heaving soul. Magnificent.

I went past the bed and towards the window. I sought the air, parting the heavy curtains, and I looked up into the night, the shining night of the half-moon and its drift of faint stars, and I sighed.

Behind me I heard the Queen’s voice. “And all men who serve must take this form?” she asked.

“Yes, my queen,” said Dmitri. “And how they throb with every wave of desire.”

“Oh, but you see, I know,” said the Queen. “For we share this, don’t we?”

“Yes,” he said. “Oh, yes.”

I lay my head against the stone arch, and felt the warm caressing breeze of the night, my eyes closed and my mind filled with vivid images. All men who serve.

The heavy window curtains had fallen shut behind me. Yet I could hear the creak of the bed, of its boards, and I heard the sudden muffled rhythmic cadence.

Through the tiny seam between the draperies I peered and saw Lexius on his knees, his back to the King, his hands out to the coffered headboard of the bed, as the King rode him, the King’s hands clutching at Lexius’s breasts, his hands squeezing them with greater abandon than he might ever enjoy the breasts of a woman. A god and a god.

I turned back to the night, alone in my closet of velvet hangings.

The harsh and driving rhythms of the bed came suddenly to the pinnacle in a great explosion of cries and groans.

Then silence, and in the silence distantly, the Queen’s sweet and subtle sighs and with them those soft shuffling indefinable sounds that meant another species of lovemaking. It seemed that in the very midst of this Dmitri was weeping.

In a ragged fervent whisper, he said, “My secret is yours, yours . . . yours.”

I slipped from behind the curtain and, cleaving to the margins of the room, I went to the door.

I looked back. The King lay as if in a dead sleep.

The Queen and Dmitri were a hopeless and tangled shape on the floor in the shadows before the leaping flames of the fire.

How dare I leave without permission? And yet I had to leave. Had to go. I opened the door and ran down the passage, and when I reached my room, I fell down on the bed, my face in the pillow.

Severin had come. Severin begged to know what I might want. Severin took off my slippers.

“Go,” I said. I was as one blinded by a fierce new light and could not just now look upon the old things, which had once seemed so wondrous.

Beauty waited. She sat by the fire. The night outside was mild and lovely as it always was, but here in this vast chamber the stone walls were damp, and the warmth of the fire, as well as its dancing light, soothed her.

Dmitri and Alexi sat with her in chairs opposite. Beside her sat Rosalynd, her beloved Rosalynd, buxom, pretty, and practical and truthful. Her slaves, Beauty had sent away, including her devoted Becca whom she already missed, but this was a time for privacy with her privy council.