Chapter 218: Steela

Does this guy ever leave the estate?

I soon got the impression that the butler was stalling for time, but not why. He was all excited to escort me to Toledo to see it from the eyes of someone who grew up there.

“Please pardon my needing to step away. That was someone I hadn’t seen in years. They were telling me about those in their family who had passed away who was close to my wife and her family. Talking to you had brought back memories as if I had made them days ago. Thank you for humoring me,” he explained before asking if I minded walking some more in the city. “I was so young then. With all our novice mistakes, Andy and I had to work much longer each day to produce three times the steel for the sword cores, so we had at least ten that the master felt he had met his requirements. We slowly got better to the point that each tested out correctly. Since we learned how to follow his directions to the letter, he began having us making the softer steel as well as the steel for the cores. Traditionally, he would have done each in a big crucible all at once, but it took much longer to cool that much to see if it met the requirements, or we had to start over again. Soon Andy and I were working around the clock with the man’s daughters bringing us meals. With what we learned, the softer steel took us less time to have it how he required and we moved onto the third formulation of the steel. To have enough for him, the two apprentices, and his three older brothers to craft, we had to stay on top of it. Even as young as we were, our bodies were developing quickly and we needed to get our rest. He hired some men to come in to take away some old equipment in the back corner of the shop. They built us a small bedroom and a shower so we didn’t have to lose time going upstairs. We both worked like dogs for over a year straight before things in the shop finally slowed down a bit. By then, we both had some serious muscles. Andy was a bit stronger than me then, but not by much. One day he told us that we had worked so hard that if we made any more steel, it would rust before anyone could use them. He gave us a week off. Andy and I slept for two days straight. We would have slept longer, but one of the man’s daughters told us we stunk so much that if we didn’t bathe and put on clean clothes, they would have some men do it for us.

The man grew silent as we walked, only waving to those who would say hello to him.

After a long sigh, he continued, “His daughter was right. We both smelled like a hot barn full of manure and rotting animal carcasses. Since we didn’t have to take a quick shower, so we could keep a close eye on the furnace, we should go upstairs to use the enormous claw-foot tub. We had water heated by the cooling metals, or from the pipes against the smelting furnace, so Andy said we had plenty of hot water for us to bathe for as long as we wanted. If I hadn’t worked with Andy and slept in the same bed with them, I would have suggested I go home to bathe while he bathed in his home. I knew we weren’t gay. I never had the energy to pleasure myself, much less play with each other. Upstairs, Andy had me fill the tub and get in while they went to get us towels and clean clothes. I was dozing when I felt Andy getting in the tub in front of me. Neither of us ever worried about getting our hair cut. Anytime it got in the way, we cut it off with a knife or sword. Not yet needing to worry about shaving, yet, meant no beards. After bathing with my siblings for years, I had Andy scoot forward to get their hair wet and then started automatically washing the many times it took to get it clean. We turned around so Andy could do the same for my hair as I scrubbed myself free of the built-up grime. I stood to get my front clean while Andy stood to scrub my back. I rinsed off and then turned to scrub Andy’s back. We drained and refilled the tub five times before it didn’t turn as soon as we filled it up again. By that point, the hot water wore us out. I woke later when one of the swordsmith’s daughters pushed on us to tell us to wake up because the water was cold. I drained and refilled it while Andy moved away from the spigot. Once it was hot again, I stretched out in the tub and had Andy sit between my legs to lay back against me. We had spooned up to each other’s backs so much over the last year that it just felt normal, instead of weird like it would otherwise. Working with hot steel all the time made the bedroom noticeably cooler, so we always slept in our clothes. I woke up finding I was rubbing Andy’s chest idly as I slept. That wasn’t anything new since we found ourselves doing that to the one sleeping in front from time to time. I went to pull my hands away, but Andy pulled them back to hold them in place, saying it felt very nice. We both had a lot of muscles everywhere, and my chest muscles would hurt from time to time. I could massage Andy’s chest to relax their muscles. Andy would do the same for me if I asked.”

Andy went off in his mind again. I tried to bring up things like the area where were walking, houses, and general chatter, but he wasn’t paying attention.

“You see, Darren, we had worked closely together for almost two years at that point. For a whole year, we didn’t leave the shop other than to visit our families for a few hours even now and then before returning to work. That day was the first time we had both been in the same place, at the same time, to be naked in front of each other. Sure, we would see each other changing when the door remained open, but we always respected each other’s privacy. I thought Andy’s soft moan was from my chest massage. Finally, Andy said we better get out and dress if we wanted to eat dinner before they stopped serving it for the night. I turned my back when Andy got out. Andy did the same for me. When I dried off, I went to dress in the clothes Andy brought us,” the butler said with a small laugh. “Andy was still drying off, so when I saw a bra, panties, camisole, and a dress in one pile, I teased Andy that I got first the pick of the clothes because they were so slow. When Andy came to dress, I was standing there completely naked, so was she. I got a hard punch in the arm, which left a big bruise when Andy told me to stop gawking, we had to hurry if we wanted to eat. She even joked that the dress would look better on her anyway since she had a bigger chest than I. All through dinner, I was in shock. I stayed that way when we returned to go into her room, strip, and go to sleep with her spooned up behind me. The next day we took a long walk around the city to talk.”

The butler confessed that no one had ever said, or even hinted, about Andy being a girl. She was just Andy, the person he apprenticed with at the forge. Girls didn’t do that sort of work, so he never even thought Andy was anything other than a guy. When waking up in Andrea’s bed the next morning, she told me that she wanted to see if things had changed. Oddly, nothing had for him. Sure, he found she had breast and a vagina, but she had that all along, and it didn’t seem to matter. Andrea was stronger than him, both had the same build, except for her breasts which weren’t all that big given her muscles, and she worked harder than him most of the time. He never even knew she got her first period a month before they started working around the clock for over a year. Andy explained how painful her periods were, and yet she toughed it out to prove to her father that she was as much of a man as I was, even if she happened to have a woman’s body.

They talked a lot about everything on that walk. It turned out that even the old apprentices seemed to have forgotten that Andrea was a girl when her father began calling her Andy right after she came down to start learning from her father.

What did change for them was that they showered before bed and didn’t sleep in their work clothes anymore. The master swordsmith noticed the changes. One day he took them both aside to speak to them about how they both had to work as hard going forward as they had before the butler finding out that Andy was a girl. Andy may look like a man in the shop, but she was a woman, and he wouldn’t allow her to continue working in the shop if she got pregnant. Andy and the butler both asked her father how Andy was going to get pregnant. Her father found out then that Andy knew about girls becoming women when they started to bleed each month and learned to take care of her period from the years of watching her older sisters take care of theirs. The two knew their bodies matured but had no idea why.”

“The orgasm I gave her from rubbing her breasts was the first for either of us. I never had a single wet dream,” the butler explained. “When her father didn’t answer us on how Andy would end up pregnant, we took a day off to go talk to my grandmother. After having seventeen children and twenty-nine grandchildren, I was sure that she could answer our question. I should have known we learned a lot more than the answer to our question. After asking Andy about her period, my grandmother went to her cupboard to get a box of sheepskin condoms. She had us undress, and then we got a hands-on sexual education. After we reviewed that lesson, repeatedly, she taught us that Andy could feel as great as I did when I climaxed, but Andy being a woman meant that she could do it repeatedly without having to wait to do it again like me. My grandmother was a dear old soul. I’ve had many in my family who have passed on, but I miss her the most. For two months, we slept at my grandmother’s house as she showed us both multiple ways to know when a woman would ovulate sometime in the next seven days, when she ovulated, and then how to know when the egg died. During the two days after her period and the ten days before her next one started, we had unprotected sex as often as we could. The other time we used rubbers, even we had gotten so in tune with the other’s body that each knew when I had to pull out before the first sperm left my balls. By the time we were seventeen, we were experts at making carbon steel swords from mixing different ratios of steel with various powders that gave it the desired qualities. Knowing how to create a sword doesn’t mean it isn’t just some shiny piece of polished metal in a sword-like shape. As we learned to make authentic Toledo swords, we had to learn to make the swords perfectly. It was one thing to make them look and feel like they were perfect, but it was another for them to be perfect. The master swordsmith taught us how to fight with a sword so we would know when we properly crafted a sword, for it would fail otherwise. I just turned nineteen when he told us it was time for a test. We each needed to make the best sword we possibly could. Once completed, we would use them every day to fight for real, as we wore armor that he had crafted for us, until one of our swords broke. Both swords were beaten to hell when mine finally broke off at the hilt.”

He pulled out the same hilt from his bag.

That is fucking amazing. The fine details that the butler accented with silver and gold.

After looking at the hilt for a minute, or three, he said, “I made a novice mistake. I assumed I was smarter than all the old swordsmiths. Instead of fitting the blade in the hilt, I made the hilt from the last two layers of steel. Those were softer types of steel, so I tempered it as I made the sword. The outer layer of the hilt came from the steel we use to harden the cutting surface on the edge of the blade. I spent two weeks on the details before heating it to follow the same process we do for details on the blade itself. That was what Andy’s father told me was a big mistake. It was a sound idea, but the heating and cooling caused hairline cracks at the base of the blade where the hilt began. I’ve kept it with me for all these years.”

“So, did you end up marrying Andrea,” I asked.

“Hindsight being twenty-twenty, I know now that she would have been much happier if I had, but I was too young. We had sex like horny young teenagers, but for me to marry her, I would have needed to generate an income to raise a family. At that time, that would be around when I was thirty,” he told me. “Andy wanted me to marry her and tried hard to convince me that the only way her father would relent is if she got pregnant. We never learned if it was the work in the forge that made one, or both, of us infertile back then. No matter how often we had sex or when we had it every three days, she never conceived. She was heartbroken when her mother told her that she lived as a boy long enough. It was time for her to marry so she could have a few children of her own before her body was too old to have any. Andy was beyond furious, but she also wanted to have children. We weren’t getting the job done, so she went out with various men her mom considered acceptable to marry. The man she wed was an upstanding man who had been in his trade for a few years. It wasn’t much, but it kept a roof over her head, food on the table, and clothes on their backs. She became pregnant almost immediately. We wished hard to find that it was mine but found my grandmother’s lessons were a curse in disguise. Andy’s mom scheduled the wedding for the final day of Andy’s period. Her husband was so clueless about women that he bought everyone drinks at the bar that night, proclaiming how she still pure at twenty-one. When their first child was born, money became very tight for him, so he began working harder to provide for his family. Their next two children, twin boys, came just over a year after their sister. Having twins at twenty-three was a death sentence for the babies and mother back then. If not for her years of apprenticing to be a swordsmith, that would be her fate as well. She had her fourth child a year later. She and her husband were skipping meals to make sure the children had something to eat. When her mom found out what was happening, she came to watch the children so Andy could go work. Even after four children, Andy didn’t show any signs of baby weight. She had me look over her naked body the day she came to tell her father she was returning to work in the forge. Other than some fading stretch marks, I wouldn’t have known she gave birth to any children. Over the following weeks, I found out that her husband never managed to last longer than a minute before he was down for the count. She missed us having sex but was very set in honoring her vows. As you can imagine, soon our being around each other daily was too much for her to stand. She pulled me into the small bedroom intent on raping me, but you can’t rape the eager and willing. Only my deep sense of honor pulled her up into my arms to hold her as she cried. At the end of that day, I hugged her, took the hilt from my broken sword, handed her a note, and moved away.”

He reflected on other tidbits of his life after he left. It was his grandmother who arranged for him to live with some relatives living outside of Madrid. In that area, many wealthy families who had problems retaining quality staff. It didn’t take long to find a house where they needed help urgently. He wasn’t their butler. Instead, he supervised the gardeners, arranged for sewists, barbers, tailors, and any other trades the family required contacting to bring their craft to their home. Over time their butler aged, and he began taking on more of the aging man’s duties. When their butler died, he took over that position as well, without anyone telling him to do so. The master was extremely impressed by his doing both jobs without a complaint or request for increases to his pay.

While working for this family, one of their daughters fell in love with him long before her body began to change from a girl into a woman. He always listened to the man’s children and would offer suggestions of ways for them to consider resolving whatever problem they were having. Most of the wealthy families in that part of Madrid sent their daughters to schools focusing on teaching them how to be the wife of a wealthy man. The butler taught each of the man’s children how to read and do basic mathematics. While he was in tune with this entire family, it appears the butler was the last to find that the man’s daughter was going to be his lover, and by extension, his wife. Back when she was eight, she told her parents he was going to be her husband. One night he found her naked body spooned up in front of his. Only after he exhausted himself sexually pleasing them both did he come to realize that it wasn’t a dream about his times with Andy. He worried that when her father found that the butler took the girl’s virginity that he would cease breathing. The girl came into his bed every night for two months. By then, her period was six weeks late. When the girl confirmed she was pregnant, his master called him into his office.

He feared for his very life. He felt his heart once again torn from his chest when the man told him his services as the family’s butler were complete. That pain only lasted long enough for his former boss to tell him the butler that his new employer owned the estate I bought. The butler was to leave immediately and take his wife with him.

“Unlike most men of the time, I found I never had any choice regarding who I wed. The night I made his daughter a non-virgin was my honeymoon. His wife was very set about marrying him, but her mother said for the girl to have her wish, she still had to go on the dates her mother arranged. Once the girl turned sixteen, if she hadn’t found anyone else, she could come to my bed the day she finished her next period. Her conceiving in that first week proved to her parents that I was as capable in bed as I was at being their butler,” he told me. “I lost her a long time ago, and I’ve had a hard time dealing with the loss. My daughter became a very resourceful young woman out of necessity. I’m very proud of what she has done so far in her life. Few people at my age can say they had a million Euros in the bank.”

Like he didn’t plan to finish telling me his story right as we came to the car.

He gave me directions on where to park. It didn’t take all that long for him to give me the nickel tour of Toledo that the tourists got daily. We slowly made a loop around the city as he told me of the significant places before showing me some of the sword shops, where only two sold swords made in Toledo. All the rest sold swords stamped from cheap steel in China or Taiwan. They weighted down each to give the appearance of being real since tourists expected swords to have some mass to them. Each had a thin layer of chrome plating with brass etchings highlighted with red details. He joked that I could break the sword by hitting it with a broom handle if the sword didn’t shatter the first time it hit the floor. The cheap wood scabbards had stenciled on artwork that barely looked like that on the sword inside.

“You can get them in lots of a thousand for two to three thousand Euros. The shops will sell them for between fifty and two-hundred Euros, depending on how detailed the artwork appears,” he told me when we went into one of the tourist trap shops. “The swords they have in display cases are real, but priced so outrageously that only a fool would purchase one.”