Pietro Valignano was unhooking the butterfly fastenings of his black cassock from his waist down as fourteen-year-old Matteo Comboni entered the Jesuit priest’s shadowed study. The butterfly fastenings were more readily available in the rural Chinese province of Sichuan in the mid-nineteenth century than the Western-style buttons were, so they were in use here. He was naked under the cassock. He turned his chair toward the door to the outer corridor as Matteo closed the door behind him and looked, diffidently, down at the cotton slippers on his feet. He awaited the Jesuit doctor’s orders.

The doctor priest who ran the sickness home and orphanage in the village of Huangjie on the Wei River to the east of the provincial capital of Xi’an always had orders for Matteo, usually to perform the most onerous servants’ tasks in the mission complex. And when those were done, the orders were usually to take the priest’s shaft in his mouth or in his anus. The beautiful little Italian boy was handed around to the other Jesuits who had such itches to scratch as well. Matteo resented the disdain with which the demands of a servant were made on him more than the sexual demands. Lying with men was in his natural inclinations and, if anything, the priests at the mission weren’t as forceful with him sexually as he would have preferred.

“Come, kneel to me,” Pietro said and Matteo did so. The older priest took the boy’s curly black hair in his hands and brought Matteo’s face to his crotch. He was in erection. “Take it in,” he commanded, and Matteo did, giving the man suck. He was long and thick in erection. As Matteo sucked the priest’s shaft, Pietro reached down and released the sash on the boy’s Pao—his peasant robe—and ran a hand in to stroke the tender flesh of the boy’s chest. Matteo moaned for the priest. His hand then glided down the small boy’s back to his buttocks, and a finger entered his passage. Matteo groaned for this attention.

At length, Pietro pulled the boy up into his lap, shrugging the Pao off Matteo’s shoulders so that boy was naked to him. Matteo groaned as the priest set his anal opening at the head of the cock and started pulling the boy’s passage down on the hard erection as Matteo sat in his lap, facing him, his legs hanging over the priest’s thighs.

Although the man fucked the boy regularly, Matteo’s passage was not opened enough to comfortably receive the shaft and he panted and groaned and sobbed a bit as Pietro slowly brought the boy down into his lap. When he was fully saddled, he held Matteo to his chest, the two naked chests rubbing, waiting for the boy to stop trembling and to calm down. When he had, when he had stretched sufficiently internally to sheath the cock, the Jesuit squeezed and separated the boy’s bare buttocks and began raising and lowering him on the cock.

“Do it yourself,” Pietro commanded, and Matteo placed his feet on the arms of the chair, squatted over the priest’s lap, locked his fists behind Pietro’s neck, and raised and lowered himself on the shaft. Matteo yielded in all sexual demands by the priests. He knew of no other option in life. When he had opportunity, he lay under the muscular Chinese farmers in the rice field as well, more in tune with the forcefulness and passion of the crude farmers than the refined priests.

At length, the man tensed and held and then jerked and flowed inside the boy, who was moaning low and panting. Pietro pushed the boy off his lap to stand before him, both of them readjusting their clothing. As if nothing had happened—and it happened enough now that Matteo was developing into a man that it was nothing unusual—Pietro Valignano turned his chair back to his desk and said, “Go and see that the dining room is set properly for the lord’s visit.”

“Yes, Father,” Matteo said, turning and going to the door to the covered, open-sided corridor overlooking the central courtyard of the old Chinese mansion complex that housed the orphanage and sick house.

“You will serve table tonight—the lord’s dish. Be attentive. We wish the inspection to go well. The Chinese are becoming increasingly suspicious of the Catholic services. We must have Lord Liu on our side. Ensure he sees you and is pleased with you. Do whatever he wants in the night if he calls for you.”

“Yes, Father,” Matteo said, casting his eyes down and sliding out of the Jesuit doctor’s study.

Pietro Valignano wasn’t really Matteo’s father. He was the ranking priest at the orphanage and sick house complex, so he was addressed as “Father.” He was the mission’s doctor as well as its administrator and God to any who dwelled here. He had arrived with other priests more than twenty years previously and set up a Catholic mission in this small village on the Wei River near Xi’an. He had made people well and he had taken in orphans and raised them to be healthy and good workers in the rice paddies or as accomplished servants for the wealthy of the region. So, he was tolerated if not loved and, just a bit, he was feared for his knowledge of the medicines who could cure—or, rumor had it, kill.

Most of the orphans at the mission were from the surrounding Chinese villages. Matteo, the oldest of these now, was not Chinese, however. His mother, Maria, had come with the mission as housekeeper and nurse. She had birthed a child, Matteo. There were those who whispered that Pietro Valignano had fathered the child. The boy was fully European, not part Chinese.

But anyone who had known the original priests in the mission, knew that Matteo’s father had been another Italian Jesuit, Giuseppe Donetelli. Matteo was an orphan, however, because both Maria and Giuseppe had died two years previously, in an accident at the flooded Wei River. Matteo had fallen into the water, and, although he had not drowned, his mother had in trying to save him, and the Jesuit Giuseppe had in trying to save Maria.

Matteo was afraid that Father Pietro blamed him for the loss of his housekeeper and nurse and the Jesuit who managed the orphanage. Pietro had not sent Matteo away and had made no effort to find him a position outside of the orphanage as he did with the other children, but he worked Matteo hard—and he fucked Matteo even harder. His love of fucking Matteo very likely was more of a reason he did not send the boy away than because a full Caucasian boy would be hard to place in the rice fields or the servant halls, as he said the problem would be, but he really did not want to lose the boy, because he gave Pietro sexual relief and sport.

The truth is that many a provincial Chinese court would have welcomed the presence of a European concubine, even a male one, for the exotic nature of the person, and quite certainly one as handsome and well-formed as Matteo was.

But the Jesuit Pietro Valignano did not blame or hate Matteo for the loss of Maria and Giuseppe. Pietro loved the boy—carnally, as he would any favored concubine. He treated Matteo cruelly as a servant partially because of guilt of the sin the boy caused him to commit but primarily for fear of losing him. The rumors had reached him that Lord Liu Sen at the Court in Xi’an had heard of the beautiful, perfectly formed, yielding full-Italian boy living at the Jesuit orphanage and sick house mission and, being a master of using young, exotic women and men alike, was curious. Pietro had long feared that the lord would ride out of Xi’an to explore the rumors of Matteo’s charms.

That seemed now to be becoming a reality. Pietro deeply regretted the possible loss of the beautiful, yielding boy, but he was a realist and put the welfare of his mission above all else. He would put the boy before the lord and if the lord chose to snatch him away in exchange for continued protection of the foreign mission, Pietro would just have to live with that.

He would not have to like it, though. It assuaged his fears, however, to not show the boy the extent of his love—and lust—at least until the danger was over of losing him.

“The lord has called for you to attend him in his bedchamber,” Brother Jacques, one of the priests said, coming to Matteo where he was helping to clean the supper dishes.

It wasn’t unexpected. Matteo had served Lord Liu Sen at the supper table, as Pietor Valignano had directed him to, and, as the meal progressed, the lord, a tall, muscular warrior of a man in his prime, had shown increasing interest in the Italian boy, who surely was an oddity to the Chinese Lord—like an exotic bird of beautiful plumage. Before the meal was over, the lord was touching the boy and had pulled him to beside his chair, run a hand under the hem of Matteo’s robe and was palming the boy’s buttocks, his thumb worrying the rim of the boy’s anal entrance. It had been all that Matteo could do not to squirm, but he had persevered. There was nothing he could do not to look as delectable to the Lord of Xi’an as the meal that had been laid before him, though.

Matteo passed Peitor Valignano’s study in the corridor en route to the lord’s bedchamber. The Jesuit priest was standing in the doorway, looking a bit forlorn. “You should know, Matteo,” he said as the boy paused there, “that Lord Liu believes you are a virgin to men. It would not be a good idea for him to learn otherwise.”

The boy just nodded in acknowledgement and continued on down the corridor.

Lord Liu Sen was standing at a window, drinking wine from a large gold cup, when Matteo entered the chamber. His richly embroidered, silk robe hung from his shoulders, but the sash was undone and the robe was open to reveal a muscular warrior’s body, complete with battle scars. He was in magnificent erection.

“You know why you are here, boy?” he asked in a low, rich baritone.