The Cross and the Black Box Set by Wando Wande & Luwa Wande

Author:Wando Wande & Luwa Wande [Wande, Wando & Wande, Luwa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: literary, Toulouse, vampires, gay, paranormal fantasy
Publisher: Crazyfish Olefish Press
Published: 2014-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Four

Toulouse. The bells called upon bells, toll upon toll, like a rotund of a thousand foundlings crying for succor. Pont St Julien yawned its gates to the tight stench of yesterday’s corpse and yesterday’s excrement. Still, to the trio’s eyes Toulouse was not the cauldron of rot downriver but the shiny city on the hill. This shiny city rocked with royal gossip. The Duke of Anjou was dead, the maid delivering fish said to the coifed crone. France has no proper Catholic heir to the throne, the maid said. Quel horreur! The Heretic of Navarre has claim to the throne by Salic law. The Heretic, another Henri, another name, another rustle of wind brushing past Claude’s peeling ears. He slugged past the maid, clutching his cloak, eyes dimming over the haze of sunset.

The three men stopped off at Picard’s inn. Claude had coin, Guy’s coin, but coin enough for a room. A great bustle unfolded of swinging braids, stretchers of bread bowls, ewers, boys still with high voices. It was not Aurin with its grey people and dull minds. The troubadour crooned, not about the Virgin, but of knights with swords the sizes of which men wished their manhoods to be, and of maidens holier that the Virgin. Claude winked at him, and the strums of the lute hiccupped in an apoplectic moment.

Merrily, Claude doffed his hat and sidled over to the corridor where stood Picard looking slimmer in an apron the shade of earth. Picard leered at Alphonse who was leering at a maid setting a flagon before a guest leering at the low cut of her kirtle. He switched back to Claude with a downcast gaze of disappointment. “Your beard … would repel even the sickly hags.”

Coins bounced in Claude’s hands as he chewed on choice insults for the innkeeper: the ill-shaped head that the Devil himself would envy or the face that would turn away the Whore of Babylon. He just sighed. “Your wife would be pleased with it.”

“And you may have her beastly rumps.” Picard pointed to Alphonse doing an impression of a rabbit to a serving girl. “She may not have him though.” Alphonse proceeded to poke happily the cheeks of the girl.

Claude sighed a round of gloom. Scabby hands and a sun-dried face darkened the masculine allure of Alphonse’s hard buttocks. “Propose him a trade, I shall enjoy his gelding you.”

“At my age, I am a poor man, but the poorer bits pleases you, eh?” Picard walked over to the counter, waving fingers here and there to the maids. “Where have you been? Clovis tires my ear about your absence.”

“Learning my letters.”

“What need you have for letters?”

“Guy said—” Claude fell dumb-stricken to the memory of Guy’s murderous eyes. The paradise of fucking and fighting, the men who would line up to kiss his member…. Claude wanted to kick himself for being so impressionable, so taken in with Guy’s mystique. And Serge and his long stares had since lost its sting—somewhere in the trek from Aurin to Toulouse.

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