“You cannot put it off any longer, my friend. If you do not choose for Karim soon, the priests will take him. The choice will no longer be yours—or Karim’s. Now that he has turned fourteen, he is of age for starting the life chosen for him. He cannot do other than meet his destiny.”

“I know that, Seb, it is just so hard...”

Bast, the wood merchant, was sitting at a table outside of the tea shop in the bazaar, sipping a blend that the owner of the shop, Seb, had recently received from the East and had invited his friend to try. Seb had, in fact, been pestering him to stop by, but Bast had been keeping to his own apartments above his shop for some time—precisely because he didn’t want to have this conversation with anyone.

“You know what Karim is meant for, Bast. You’ve known for years. His destiny for it has been evident since he was born. He knows too, I am sure. He has not tried to leave the city, as some others have under these circumstances—until they are dragged back. So, he is resigned to it. I think he even desires it.”

“Yes, yes. All of that is true. He does desire it, although he is frightened of getting started into it. It’s hard...”

“I could recommend the perfect place for him. There is a wine shop just inside the bazaar on the high road, almost in the shadow of the palace. That would be perfect for him. The wealthiest merchants and even the king’s officers go there. He would be your family’s fortunes. He is a beautiful and well-formed boy. The patrons of that shop would be better than he could do on the streets and in the alleyways.”

And yet Bast hesitated.

“It is inevitable. He is fourteen, perfectly formed, and highly desirable. The priests would do the same with him. Why not secure the family’s fortune rather than just having some meaningless tablet of favor from the temple to hang on your shop wall?”

After a brief pause. “You know of this wine shop? Do you really think it is the best opportunity for him?”

“I go there myself. He is more desirable than any I have covered there.”

“Do not wiggle away from the patrons like that,” the wine shop owner, Hewani, hissed at Karim as he took him aside at the end of the long table the wine was served from. A soldier of the Palace Guard, Naguib, was leaning on the end of the table, several cups of wine into his evening. He, like all of the palace guardsmen, was a massive, heavily muscled man, battle forged. His chest and arm and thigh muscles were bulging. Clearly discernible as a mark of the elite palace soldiers was his short, heavy-leather slab skirt, sandals laced up to his knees, a chest medallion declaring his rank, and nothing else. In contrast, the merchants and other private citizens of the town wore long gowns, called thawbs, of various quality of material. Most worn on the street were white in color.

“Sorry, master,” Karim whispered back. “It is just so difficult.”

“Do you want to be here, performing as required, or shall I take you to the priests at the temple myself?”

Hewani held his breath for the answer to that. The fourteen-year-old Karim was far too beautiful for Hewani to want to lose him at the shop—and just as he and the tea shop owner, Seb, had discussed, it would be one of the world’s tragedies to see Karim taken into the temple, not to be seen again, even if then, until after his youth and beauty had been wiped away by continuous sacrifices to the gods. The ceremony in which the boy would lose his virginity in the temple would be quite a spectacle, with every priest including in the deflowering.

The boy was small, but perfectly formed, with curly black hair and a sensuous smile. It was hard to believe he was fourteen and not younger, but everyone in the bazaar knew of everyone else’s age. They had all watched Karim grow to the age of losing his virginity to men—some watched more closely and with much greater interest than others. Some with flashing eyes and licking lips and members that would harden under their thawbs as Karim walked by.

If his virginity was to be put on public auction, he would bring in a fortune. He had not been chosen for that ritual, though.

There was no hiding that it was time for Karim. Everyone knew it. Therefore, the ravenous priests knew it as well. The giving of Karim to the wine shop by his father, Bast, estopped the certain plans of the priests, but for how long? If Karim could not cross over that curtain here willingly, the priests would take him and force him across the barrier. Karim knew that.

And Karim had just now traded his short cotton skirt, which, as he grew older and formed into perfection, drove many in the bazaar to distraction, for the thawb. The thawb could hide his form, but it could not hide his beauty. The priests will have noticed by now that the changing ceremony—the change from a short skirt to a thawb—that marked for all to see the cross to manhood had been performed.

“I know, I know,” Karim said, a slight edge of panic in his voice. “Just be patient with me, please. It’s such a hard curtain to cross.”

“Try faster,” Hewani hissed. “See your sponsor over there. His cup is empty and he is showing its emptiness to you. He’s a rich and powerful man. Take him this cup of wine—and do as he wishes. It is your time.”

Karim was trembling as he came around from behind the wine table. He was watching the nearly full cup he was carrying, trying hard not to spill any of the wine, his mind racing on this trip he was making—just across the wine shop floor, but perhaps across the curtain as well. As he passed around the side of the table, the burly soldier, Naguib, grabbed one of Karim’s rounded buttocks cheeks through the material of his white cotton thawb, and Karim nearly spilled the wine. When he looked into Naguib’s face, the soldier winked and leered at him.

Karim scurried over to the table Hewani had directed him to.

“Put the wine cup down,” Karim’s father’s friend, Seb, said in an alcohol slurred voice, low and husky. “And come, into my lap, and feel what a man is like.”

The tea shop owner pulled Karim roughly down into his lap and held him close to him in the embrace of an arm slung across Karim’s little chest. Seb was big and fat but his grip was strong. And his demanding lust was obvious. As Karim was pulled into Seb’s lap, he could feel the strength of a hard cock poking at his virginal buttocks.

“I have waited for years for this little one,” Seb growled. “Feel what I have for you?”

Indeed, Karim could feel it. Although he would normally wear a loin cloth under his thawb, Hewani had told him not to wear it in the wine shop. The shop owner had made no secret why that was so, and Karim had not needed to wonder why. The wine shops were brothels as well, and this one was a male brothel. The patrons did not come here only for the wine. The fate of each of the male citizens of this city was sealed long before they reached manhood at fourteen. It depended on their family status and business—and in the case of the soldiers on their size and musculature and promise of fighting skills. For boys as small and beautiful and as well formed as Karim, their destinies were set for either a wine shop such as this or the priesthood, where their bodies would be used just as fully—and perhaps more brutally and more often throughout their fourteenth year. They just wouldn’t receive the recompense that a wine shop gave, and the life span of a temple serving boy was sometimes marked in months, rather than the full fourteenth year.

Seb obviously wasn’t wearing anything under his thawb either. Karim squirmed around on his lap—not being unwilling or railing against his fate, but being scared and needing more patience than he was being given. Seb was fat and gross and smelled not just of the wine, but also of the opiate he smoked and the spices he was served in his food that few others in the city could afford. And he was being rough and brutal. With his free hand, he reached around and grabbed Karim’s balls through the material of the thawb, and squeezed.

“Don’t fight. Or do fight me, it will make the taking all that more pleasurable. I will have you here and now. I have waited and schemed for too long.”

Karim, eyes watering, looked toward the wine table in panic. Hewani and the solider, Naguib, had their heads together in quiet conversation and were watching him.

Seb was moving Karim’s rump around on his cock, almost, but not quite, achieving penetration through the two layers of cloth. His hand stopped squeezing Karim’s balls, but only so that it could gather up the hem of Karim’s thawb and work its way onto Karim’s leg. His long fingernails were scraping their way up the inside of Karim’s thigh.

The boy wailed, “Not yet ... please,” and managed to break away from Seb and almost stumble out onto the floor beside the table. He did go down on his knee, but while Seb roared his anger behind him, Karim found his footing and struggled, the other men now in the hunt, each wanting to be the first, snatching at him with their hands as he passed.

He was nearly sobbing when he reached the relative safety behind the bar table again.

Surprisingly, Hewani didn’t admonish him. Rather, he held out a cup of wine and said, “Here, calm yourself, Karim. Drink this to calm yourself.”

Karim downed the cup of wine. Wine was not something that you were permitted to have before you came of age. Thus, although Karim had had a bit now and then and more than a bit in the week since his ceremony of change, this wine was stronger than he was accustomed to. So was the second cup.

He was feeling a bit woozy when he felt one of the soldier’s, Naguib’s, hands on his arm and the other one on his waist. Karim looked, with unfocusing gaze, at the soldier’s face. His expression was inscrutable. He was looking stern, but Karim noted a hint of a smile—and something else. The same lust that had been in Seb’s eyes.

As for Seb, he was still loudly mouthing his indignation at his table, but was soon stopped as Hewani hovered at his table, another one of the serving boys beside him, Hewani’s hand gripping the wrist of the boy, who was in his fourteenth year. Karim saw Seb lifting the hem of his thawb to his belly, and Karim saw the plump, hard cock of the man. And then Karim watched the ass of the other serving boy being descended on the cock. It was all unreeling like it was in a surreal dream, though.

The serving boy was five months into his fourteenth year. He no longer was virginal or even tight channeled. Seb was built big, so the boy did suffer as he was possessed by the shaft, but when Seb was fully saddled and the taking was inevitable, the boy settled down with a low sob and went limp as Seb raised and lowered him on his cock to a satisfying ejaculation.

When Karim turned away from seeing how easily this could have been the time he lost his virginity, the soldier, Naguib, grasped his arm. “Your master is done with you for now,” Naguib said in a growl. “I am taking you home.”

“No,” Karim whined. “He must give me another chance.”

“You will come with me,” Naguib said.

And there was no arguing with that, as Naguib merely leaned over, taken Karim by the waist, and flung him over his shoulder.

Outside, after barely twenty steps, Karim was aware enough to say, “This is not the way to the wool merchant’s quarter. This is not the way to my father’s house.”

Naguib reached up and slapped Karim on the rump and said, “Perhaps we are not going there. Perhaps I am taking you to the temple for the priests to debauch.” And then he gave a hearty laugh.

Supper couches, with gently raised backs, were fanned around the stone walls of the room. The floor was stone. So was the ceiling. There were torches, only half of them lit, fixed to the walls around the four sides. All of these couches were facing one, in the center of the room, that was flat.

The center couch had red-leather ropes attached to each of the four corners. The two at one end were tying off the wrists of a boy, deep brown in complexion, and foreign in demeanor. The boy, fourteen as Karim was but having had more experience in manual work and the demands of a boy warriors life than Karin, was not much taller than Karim, but he was more heavily muscled. His foreign origin was evident, as he was covered in blue-tinted tattoos of primitive symbols. He was thin of waist, with flaring thighs, and bulbous buttocks cheeks. Bound as he now was, the weight of his torso was supported on his shoulder blades. His belly was inclined up toward the reddish, auburn bush of the man holding his torso on the incline who was kneeling between the darker-skinned boy’s thighs, grabbing his waist, and fucking him in hard thrusts. The boy’s jet-black cock was waving back and forth to the rhythm of the thrusts inside him of the man. The captive’s hole and passage were small; the soldier’s shaft was long and thick. The boy suffered the taking to a stretched limit.

Three other burly, hung soldiers of the Palace Guard were standing around, watching, and stroking themselves erect. Each of them had had the foreign captive boy already. Each wished to have him again.

The foreign boy was still alive in this land with its fetishes because he was fourteen. The soldiers were fucking him because he was fourteen. Such was the fetish of the men of this land.

One of the black boy’s arms appeared to be broken—he screamed each time the thrust of the cock of his assailant jerked it. There were bloodied slashes across his chest and his thighs, and a dirty rag tied around one of his ankles. He was bleeding from a knife wound in his side. His knees were bent and lacerated—Naguib remarked to Karim that this was caused by sinking to them in defeat on the battlefield—and his bare feet, his ankles bound to the long, red cords at the foot of the couch, were flat on the surface of the lounge on either side of the assaulting soldier’s beefy thighs.

A warrior already at fourteen, the boy’s soldiering had been short-lived and had now come to a conclusion. His cause was vanquished and he was now suffering the indignity of defeat. If he had been older, he would have been dispatched on the battlefield. As this was a nation of men with a fetish for fourteen-year-old boys, he was being used for sport in his defeat.

He had been brought into the chamber a virgin to the cocks of men. He no longer was a virgin.

It was obvious that it was a member of the Palace Guard who was fucking him. The short skirt with the leather slabs was on the floor next to the couch, the soldier’s sandals next to that, and the medallion of rank was still around the soldier’s neck, swinging back and forth in rhythm with the thrusts of his cock. The soldier’s musculature was magnificent, as it was with all of the palace guardsmen, and his cock was thick and was pistoning hard and fast.

The boy tied to the couch had been screaming when Naguib carried Karim into the room over his shoulder. They had not gone to Karim’s father’s house, but they had not gone in the direction of the temple, either. The solider had carried Karim into the entrance of the king’s palace and turned immediately to the right, entering the guard house and proceeding through that to the living quarters of the Palace Guard.

The foreign boy on the couch had long, black hair, in ringlets, and as Naguib and Karim entered the chamber, hearing the boy’s ever more weary and surrendering screams from as far away as the entrance into the palace forecourt, the soldier fucking him had grabbed him by the hair, punched him in the face with a fist, and pounded his head against the hard surface of the couch until the captive boy was reduced to moans and groans.

The soldier grabbed the boy’s legs by the ankles and wishboned him in a wide, high spread to the limits that the red cords binding his ankles would permit, and started fucking his hole with deeper, anger-filled stabbing thrusts. Other soldiers came forward to grasp the captive boy’s ankles to keep his legs spread and his hole fully accessible and vulnerable.

Upon entering the chamber, Naguib stopped about five paces from the center couch, pulled Karim down the front of his body, and held Karim to his pelvis. Still dazed, Karim had no trouble discerning that Naguib’s cock pressing in the cleavage of his buttocks was harder and bigger than Seb’s had been.

Naguib pulled Karim’s thawb over his head and cast it aside on the floor. All Karim was wearing now were his sandals and the golden chain around his neck that his father had given him for good luck.

“Hewani has taken my money for me to be first and to get you over your reluctance,” Naguib said. Both he and Karim had their eyes trained on the taking on the couch. “He wants it done fast and completely, and he wants you returned fully conditioned and resigned to it. Are you going to fight me?”

“No, Sire,” Karim murmured. “I want it done as much as he does.” His voice, however, revealed the great fear and regret with which he spoke this accepted truth.

“A pity perhaps,” Naguib said. “I like an attempt to fight. That boy on the couch has fought. He has fought like a man, but he has lost. A captive from battle yesterday out on the plains. Taran there saw a friend of his lose his life to this boy in battle. The captive was given to Taran. I thought that Taran and the others would be finished with him by now, but he is toying with him. He had started when I left for the wine shop. I thought the taking couch would be free. No matter, though, I will initiate you standing here while we watch.”

Karim moaned and trembled in Naguib’s embrace. Naguib was holding the shorter boy off the floor, with just one arm encircling his waist. Karim’s body was jutting out from his at the pelvis, and his arms were dangling beside him. His head was lifted, though, and he was watching the brutal fucking on the couch. The soldier was up on his feet, crouching, taking deep, slamming thrusts into the captive boy’s channel. Rearing his buttocks back to where the long, thick cock came out of the small, until-now virginal hole, and then ramming it inside with a hard thrust of his hips. The captive was groaning quietly, just hanging there, supported only by the soldier’s hands on his waist raising the boy’s pelvis to the punishing cock. The wounds on his chest, side, and thighs had opened and blood was oozing out of them. There also was a trickle of blood coming down from his scalp in front and his lower lip and an ear, torn where the soldier must have taken bites out of him. Cum was dribbling out of his now-gaping hole. There had been several takings. The soldier had even taken time out for refreshment and then come back to resume the attack.

Karim felt the leather skirt of his own soldier hit the floor and get pushed aside with a foot. And he felt the hard cylinder of the cock, skin on skin. Long, hard, thick. Another Palace Guard requirement. Virility was the pride of the city. When the guardsmen marched on parade in the city, they marched naked except for their medallions of rank. If they could not take pride in what was swinging between their thighs, they would not be in the Palace Guard. Naguib’s cock was lodged between Karim’s thighs, pushing at the base of his balls and cock. He was slowing stroking, dry fucking Karim already.

“You are so big,” Karim murmured in fright.

“The best to initiate you. When you can take the cock of a palace guardsmen, you will have no trouble in the wine shop. This is best for you. Tonight you will take more than one palace guardsman’s cock. I promised to return you fully prepared.”

Karim moaned and began to shudder.

“Do not fear, my sweet little one. I will take good care of you. I have paid dearly to be the first to have you—to be the first in one like you—to ream you to Palace Guard requirements. I will be assured that it is money well spent.”

Over the next several moments, Naguib worked to get his cock inside Karim’s hole, but it just wasn’t working. Naguib was too big and Karim too virginal. Naguib gave up on the direct approach. He carried Karim over to one of the other couches, crouching down as he moved and retrieving the leather bands used as belting for his leather skirt. Laying Karim’s back on the end of the couch, he called out, “Bring me taking grease.”

In short order a Nubian slave arrived with the requested lotion. In the meantime, Naguib had tied Karim’s ankles together, pushed his legs up to his chest, and then tied his wrists in front of him, so that his legs were encased between his chest and his bound arms. When the slave arrived, Naguib was tonguing Karim’s hole and patting it, commanding it to open for him.

Karim was moaning at the unexpected pleasure of this sensation. He arched his back and groaned loudly, though, when Naguib’s beefy, greased fingers started to work at opening his channel up.

“Sorry that you must be bound,” Naguib whispered. “But this must happen, and quickly. There will be no running away from me as you did from that fat, rich merchant, Seb. Hewani has declared that when you come back you will sit on Seb’s cock—or not come back alive.”

Karim moaned as much for what Naguib had said as for what he was doing with his fingers.

“Servants,” a voice rang out from the center couch. “I think it is finished for now. I wouldn’t want to use him up in one session. Come clean up and throw him in the cells.”

Karim heard a scurrying of feet, the sound of something being carried off, scrubbing of the center couch and the floor around it—and then silence.

“Ah, good,” he heard Naguib say. “We can use the taking couch after all.”

Bound at all four corners of the couch, but with enough give that he could kneel on all fours, Karim had his head raised and his mouth hanging open, panting heavily and whimpering. Naguib was covering him close from above and slow pumping his cock inside Karim. He had, at last, and with great effort, managed to penetrate the boy’s passage to the depth of getting the bulb past the guarding sphincter muscle.

The screaming and begging for mercy were over—had been over for nearly half an hour. It had been difficult even with the taking grease and the preparation by the fingers, but Naguib was insistent and determined—and Karim was bound and helpless. Karim could take no more of the demands on his knees and elbows and, with a groan, he sank to the surface of the couch.

“Just as well,” Naguib muttered. “I must ensure full access.”

Karim had no idea what the soldier meant until he felt the giant pull out of him and the leather strips being secured around his thighs and his calves, holding his legs close together. He arched his back and screamed again as Naguib started working his cock deeper into the now-tightened channel to the point of burying the full length of the erection.

There had been a change of shift in the palace guardsmen, and those going off duty had passed those coming on duty in the supper room. The city was large, but the repute of Karim for beauty and the end of the counting of his days for the change ceremony were well known, so all stopped beside the center couch while passing from and to their duty. They could not believe their good fortune, when Naguib told and showed them what he was doing with Karim, why, and that they all might have a part in it.

“We are preparing him for his wine shop duties, training him to take the cocks of men,” Naguib told all who asked. “If you wish, those of you coming off duty, stay and you may have him too. And for those who are going on duty, we will still be here when you are relieved. But he is not for rough taking, lads. We are conditioning and hardening him, not punishing him. Keep that in mind, as hard it is, I know, for you not to be rough. I’m sure that all of you, like me, want to have him survive for our visits to Hewani’s wine shop. He is our guest tonight, not our captive. The bindings are for his benefit.”

Naguib came this time inside Karim. Karim had already come countless times in nervousness, fear, shock, and, eventually, the glory of the taking. As Naguib untied the leather strips around Karim’s thighs and calves, another strapping, young palace guardsman stepped forward.

“Retie him on his back; just the arms,” he said. Nearly a dozen hands moved quickly to untie Karim’s wrists and ankles from the red cords; turn him, groaning; onto his back; and then rebinding his wrists to the corners of the couch. Taking a plump pillow from another couch, the strapping soldier climbed up onto the center couch with his knees, pushed the pillow under the small of Karim’s back, wishboned his legs with fists grabbing his ankles, and slid a throbbing, hard cock inside him, easily opening a channel that had already been stretched by Naguib.

Karim could feel the difference of the cock, which surprised him, and although he cried out at the first thrust, this one wasn’t as thick as Naguib was, so Karim felt prepared to take him. He also was younger than the rest and over anxious. Four thrusts and he exploded, adding his semen to that already contributed by Naguib.

“The gods be cursed,” he cried out.

“No tragedy,” Naguib said. “There is room at the end of this line.”

The third man was content with taking Karim the same way, but subsequent guardsmen each had his own characteristics and preferences and feel. One even had Karim rebound with his knees pulled into his chest and ankles tied to wrists, laid him on his side on the couch, stood next to him, and plowed him sideways. Once taken across the curtain, Karim was grateful for this education—although the lessons could have stopped several hours before they did.

Mercifully, he was not there for the next change in shift. The captain of the guard strutted in on the proceedings, asked the gathered guardsmen what in Hades were they doing with this young civilian of the city. When he was told, he ordered them to unbind the boy. Then he reached down and picked Karim up, threw the spent boy over his shoulder much as Naguib had done much earlier in the evening, and took Karim to his own, private quarters.

The captain of the king’s Palace Guard, Masud, was not of the world of the subordinate guardsmen’s supper couches, or of the city’s wine shops, or even of the city’s merchant world. He was a senior official of the king and was a man of the palace court. His was not of a world of fucking serving boys in the wine shops; his was of the world of courtesans and of taking fourteen-year-old boys fully and well on silken couches and leaving them both sobbing and sighing, unable to close their legs and not wanting to, grasping at him for another throw.

In the world of hung men, Masud was a man more than any other man. In his virginal debauching debut Karim had been opened by several very-well-endowed men. None of this sufficed for what Captain Masud was swinging, though.

Karim was trembling and moaning, hiccupping and groaning as the captain carried him into his bedchamber. The contrast between Masud’s quarters and those of the palace guardsmen was startling. Within the same stark stone walls that held the guardsmen’s supper room, a luxurious chamber had been assembled—tapestries on the walls, carpets from the Orient on the floor, leather-seated campaign chairs, a large sleeping couch, covered by the skins of exotic wild animals, and a many-armed chandelier in the ceiling, casting bright light from a hundred candles.

A fourteen-year-old boy of handsome visage and dressed only in bangles and rouged nipples lay on the couch when Masud entered, carrying Karim over his shoulder. Masud had left him more than a half hour now, but the boy courtesan was still lying there, on his back, legs spread, hole gaping and dribbling cum, and body trembling, the boy panting and moaning his session with the captain of the guard.

Masud waved away the courtesan, and when he, pouting, had removed himself, Masud pulled Karim down to in front of his body, with Karim facing the bed. He encircled Karim’s heaving belly with a strong arm, covered the boy’s privates with a beefy hand, and let his hardening cock part Karim’s thighs, the bulb pressing against the base of Karim’s ball sac, giving Karim the sensation of his torso resting on a gigantic, throbbing cylinder. Karim knew what it was, though, and he panted in fearful anticipation.

The contrast in living styles was not the end of it. Masud’s body was unlike those of the younger Palace Guard soldiers, as well. To their Apollo physiques, he was a Zeus. Massive, barrel chested, and thick waisted, but all hard muscle, his cut torso the model for the shaped body plates the soldiers wore into battle. His thighs were as the trunks of the cedars and his feet and hands were broad and long, with long, plump digits. The shoulder-length hair of his head and short beard was gray-blond, the gray beginning to take control. Other than that, he was hairless except for the blond thatching in his pits and a luxurious blond bush, in which nestled the prize cock and balls of the regiment—his championship equipment contributing to why he was the captain of the guard. Many of the other guardsmen had indulged in body tattooing. Masud only had a double row of black notches running down either side of his trunk, ominously celebrating the men he had dispatched in battle.

Masud kissed Karim on the neck and in the hollow of his shoulders, and on his ears, taking those into his mouth and licking around them, before putting his lips next to Karim’s ear and speaking softly, in a deep voice.