Daphne Boy

Renaissance

The Ninth Tale of the Daphne Boy

by George Gauthier

Author's Note: This is a tale of an eternally youthful young man and those he encounters in Italy during the Italian Renaissance.

This is another in a series of tales about an undying youth named Alexander, called Alessandro in this story. The other stories in this series so far are 'Antebellum', set in the American South just before the Civil War, 'Daphne Boy', set in Roman Syria, 'El Dorado', about the conquistadors, 'The Erythraean Sea', set in Arabia just before the rise of Islam, 'Stupor Mundi', about the Sixth Crusade, 'Ferghana', a tale of the Silk Road in Central Asia, 'Zulu' set mostly in Southern African during the Anglo-Zulu War, and 'Sol Invictus' set in the Roman Empire during the reign of the dissolute androgynous and sexually insatiable gay emperor Elagabalus.

It contains graphic descriptions of the male human body and of consensual and non-consenual sexual activity between adult males. If any of this would offend a reader, read no further. This is not intended for persons younger than an age where they may freely and legally select their reading matter in whatever jurisdiction applies.

It is offered for entertainment. If it manages to both intrigue and to provoke prurient interest, it will have succeeded in its aim.

It is as historically accurate in its setting as I could make it, with only minor poetic license. This story, after all, is fiction. It is not a historical monograph. Aside from the obviously historical characters, the persons depicted herein are not intended to resemble any one living or dead.

For the historical and geographical background you could do worse than to read the novel 'The Prince of Foxes' by Samuel Shellabarger.

Readers who like these stories might want to try my 'Jungle Boy' series of tales in a modern setting, posted in the Gay/Authoritarian section of the archive. See also my series 'Naked Prey' in the Gay/Historical section (also listed in Gay/Beginnings), my newer 'Mer Boy' series in Gay/Beginnings, and the 'Track and Field' series in Gay/College. For links to my stories, look on the list of Prolific Authors on the Archive.

Comments and feedback welcome.

Chapter 1. Milano 1493

"Goosebumps! Why are you grumbling about goosebumps, Alessandro? You should be warm enough there in the afternoon sun. Hold your pose. Whatever you do, don't shiver."

"If I have goosebumps, Master Leonardo, it's because I am the one standing here stark naked while you sketch me in a nude pose."

I did my best to comply with Master Leonardo's wishes but even in direct sunlight and with the heat reflected off the garden wall, October in Milano can be chilly, especially when modeling in the nude. It did not help to have a physique as slight and slender as mine, one with such low body fat. No insulation at all.

That day I was supposed to be young Acteon, depicted just before the vengeful Artemis magically changed the hunter into a stag and torn to pieces by his own hunting dogs. A classical subject like that was always a good excuse for Leonardo to pose me nude. Indeed he never sketched me in clothing. The depiction of ideal male beauty was a major theme of ancient art, thankfully taken up again during what men even then were calling the Renaissance or Revival of Learning. I had already modeled Leander, Narcissus, Hippolytus, Pyramus and Hylas -- all young males out of classical mythology and all with some plausible reason to be depicted in the nude. No fig leaves either.

Leander is just emerging from the water after swimming the Hellespont to visit his lover Hero (sadly, despite the name, a girl). Narcissus is admiring himself in a pool of water he had gone to bathe in. Hylas is bearing Hercules's heavy shield unburdened by anything else including the least scrap of clothing. Hercules liked him that way, I suppose, a bum boy always conveniently to hand. I suppose Ganymede would be my next pose, the Trojan prince carried off by Zeus. The king of the gods transformed himself into an eagle and swooped down on the lad while he was exercising naked in the fields, carrying him to the top of a mountain to ravish the lad at leisure. Finding the boy so remarkably delectable, Zeus offered him the gift of immortality to stay with him forever.

I would have taken that deal myself if nature or whatever perverse gods exist had not already decreed that I would never age like other men. I was born in Germany in the late second century BC. For reasons I have never understood, I had stopped growing and aging after reaching seventeen. Now, more than sixteen hundred years later, I still looked like a boy in his late teens. No, there had been no encounter with a sorcerer nor a pact signed in blood with eldritch powers. It just happened that way.

I became a model for Leonardo partly by accident. We originally met as fellow engineers and inventors, both of admirers of the writings of Vitruvius (1st century AD) and of Roman engineering in general. I could speak authoritatively on how the Romans built roads and bridges and aqueducts having seen the process with my own eyes. My command of the Latin language was unsurpassed. For me it was nearly a native tongue. I had spoken and read it almost as long as German and far more often in ancient and medieval times. Of course I was not at the master's level in mechanics; no one was, but I could understand his dreams and projects better than the artsy crowd around him, so we became friends.

I like to think our relationship was a meeting of the minds as well as of the bodies, though he certainly liked my trim little figure. Given Leonardo's taste in pretty youths, it wasn't long before he had me out of my clothes and into his bed. Our love affair was short-lived but intense. Modeling was one more reason for him to keep me around him without benefit of clothing.

At this time in his life, Leonardo was a vigorous forty-one, a man with tremendous strength in his upper body. He could easily lift me one-handed above his shoulder. I should say that I am slightly built, standing only five and one half feet tall (165 cm), with a mere 122 pounds (56 kg) on my frame, though I had a fairly strong upper storey and a wiry musculature.

He displayed similar strength and prowess in lovemaking -- taking control of my limbs, spreading my body for his delectation, rolling me back on my shoulders into position for a good fucking. His masculinity aroused my deepest longings to surrender to his power, to be possessed and penetrated, impaled on his truncheon of a cock, shuddering and dizzy with arousal, moaning and whimpering as he used me. I am by nature a sexual submissive and Leonardo was very much a master. With him I knew that I belonged on my knees worshiping his manhood or on all fours, like a dog of the streets, letting him thrust into me, finding my prostate with his long member, setting me to coming just from the vigor of his fucking. He always left me both satisfied and exhausted.

His patron was the Duke of Milano, Ludovico il Moro, called such for his dark complexion. The master worked many different projects for Ludovico. He designed a dome for the cathedral, prepared floats and pageants for special occasions, and sculpted a clay model for a huge equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza, Ludovico's father and predecessor. He also painted the Last Supper, though little of his own work on that picture has survived centuries of decay and unwise restoration work. I cannot bear to look on the mutilated painting myself.

Approaching chatter and footfalls announced the presence of the duke himself and an entourage. We were in his garden after all so he had every right to just barge in on the proceedings. He looked me over, studying me the way he might assess a new sculpture in his garden.

"So this is the lovely boy I have been hearing about, the one you have been posing all over my gardens in a state of nature. You would rather paint a nude of this shameless youth than finish that equestrian statue for me. As your patron, I should be cross, but I suppose your infatuation is understandable given his extraordinary beauty of face and of form. It's almost enough to make me rethink my own preference for the female of the species."

What the duke saw was a comely youth, apparently of no more than seventeen or eighteen summers and pretty as a girl with as flawless a complexion. I did not have the classic muscular physique of the Discus Thrower. I was quite slender and boyish -- almost skinny, with narrow shoulders and a flat but corrugated chest and stomach sporting well-defined abdominals, prominent ribs and sharp hip bones. The tracery of veins on my forearms, calves, and belly showed how very little body fat I carried. I like to think my manhood is more than adequate but I wouldn't be scaring the horses. It takes both my small hands to cover an erection, but only one when it was soft. My face was comely with almost elfin features: a straight nose, high cheekbones, and large green eyes.

"I see he is one of those plucked chickens, smooth all over, and not shy about it either, willing to strut about the grounds where anyone might gaze on his denuded form. I really don't understand the youth of today, disdaining that token of manhood." he sighed theatrically.

The duke was referring to my total lack of body hair. In the first century BC I had lived in Alexandria, working in a boy brothel for wages. That is where I took up the Roman habit of having all my body hair, little as it was, plucked with tweezers. After several decades of plucking it stopped sprouting. Now I was completely hairless and would stay so forever. Italian dandies of the period emulated that look, except they shaved with fine steel razors to make themselves smooth, a method far faster and less painful than the old Roman way of plucking with tweezers. Leonardo spoke up in defense of the practice.

"You cannot believe how smooth it makes his skin feel, especially at night, your grace, in the throes of passion, when he is all hot and slick with sweat from his exertions, as it were. Recently unearthed statues of Roman torsos confirm what their literature has always said. The Romans despised body hair as animalistic and had it plucked regularly. They didn't have to worry about lice either."

"Yes and the Romans were said to bathe every day too, my friend, in public baths no less. But few today would care to emulate that unhealthful habit."

I knew better than to pipe up and say that I was one of them. I also did not point out that the duke was clean shaven himself, disdaining a beard, that most public token of manhood. A nobleman like the duke would not take kindly to being corrected or twitted by a naked artist's model cum bum boy, as I so obviously was. In those days sexual relations between males was both a crime and a sin everywhere in Italy however much the authorities might look the other way for artistic types with powerful patrons. I know Leonardo himself had been arrested in his twenties for sodomy.

To titters from the ladies present, the duke ran his hand down my chest and belly and groin, back to my rump, finally cupping my manhood briefly, studying my genitals, though without any lascivious interest. He tsked tsked then remarked

"What a waste of breeding potential. The seepings of these spheres might easily sire a dozen beautiful children, six lovely lasses for men like me, and a like number for those with your more refined tastes, master Leonardo."

As master Leonardo bowed to concede the point, the duke and his entourage moved on, not before more than a few hands caressed my butt cheeks in passing. After they left, Leonardo quipped.

"Well one thing is clear. He doesn't go for boys. Anyone who could fondle you so unfeelingly has no use for pretty lads. Good. I hate it when I have to share."

"You old goat," I remonstrated, "describing how you feel me up when we are together in bed with a dozen people looking on and listening, all the while I am standing there stark naked, in mixed company, with my balls cupped in his hand, his thumb toying idly with my cock."

"The Duke's party numbered far fewer than those who have ogled you from that balcony these last three days. How can that embarrass you anyway, shameless boy that you are, bronzed all over from sailing the seas entirely bare ass. It's a wonder the crew didn't jump you and subjugate you to their lusts."

"That is because I am the owner, not some hapless cabin boy, master Leonardo."

"How many ships do you have now, sixteen? I envy you young Alessandro Caro, ship owner, merchant prince, and captain of your fate at such a tender age, Carino mio."

His pet name for me was a play on words. Carino, the diminutive of my assumed surname Caro means pretty one.

Rich merchant and captain of my fate. Yes I was then, though that had not always been the case. The truth is that all my long life I have been both blessed and cursed by a form and a face that inspire admiration and lust in the heart of any male who appreciates a lovely boy. I am small and comely and uniformly tanned from habitual nudity, and I look entirely too much like someone's catamite or pleasure boy. With a physique like a fawn and my lack of body hair, even at the fork of my legs, I often wasn't taken seriously as a male. With my androgynous if wiry physique and girlish features I fell far short of normal male standards in height, muscular development, and secondary sexual characteristics like beard and body hair. Since I had stopped aging before my beard grew in I have never had to shave. Add to that my light tenor voice and soft-spoken unaggressive ways, and everyone drew their own conclusions.

Consequently I have had much too much experience of rape and sexual servitude over the centuries. I spent my true youth as a rich man's catamite, a slave and a spoil of war first for my captor, a Roman centurion, then for a merchant he sold me to in Massalia in Gaul. Then there were the many gang rapes by bullies, soldiers, sailors, or bandits -- at least till I mastered the arts of unarmed and armed combat. I cannot count the times I have been stripped searched and probed by guards at city gates, ostensibly searching for contraband. I also worked voluntarily in boy brothels in ancient Alexandria and Antioch in the first century BC or as a houri boy in the Islamic lands. It's hard to assert your masculinity when everyone knows you bend over for coin.

In the early years of the first century AD I was enslaved for debt and bought by the temple of Daphne in ancient Antioch to serve as a temple prostitute. The cult of the nymph Daphne is allied to that of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Daphne Boys, for that is what they called us male acolytes, offered themselves to boy lovers. We were very popular because we were scrupulous about personal hygiene, trim and fit, and hand picked for our beauty of face and form. In some ways I still have fond memories of my time as a Daphne Boy, slave though I then was. As much through luck as anything I was set free a few years later for heroic public service during an earthquake.

Other stints of sexual slavery were not so pleasant. I spent three years working at the dangerous trade of pearl diver on the southern shore of the Persian Gulf. My owners kept me perpetually nude, set me to dangerous work, and allowed me to be taken sexually by guards and my fellow divers regardless of my wishes. Our masters were strict about segregation from females. It was 'common knowledge' at the time that sexual activity increased buoyancy, so we divers were kept locked up away from possible contact with women. Slave owners confined us divers to male-only quarters, with the inevitable result that same sex relations were nearly universal among us, with me very much at the bottom of the pecking or rather the fucking order. Our masters punished us for fighting. They would have punished me severely if all I was fighting about was my long lost virtue.

No wonder I was no longer embarrassed by casual public nudity. How many times I had gone for years at a stretch without any clothing whatever. How often I had been used sexually as a pampered catamite, a houri boy, a joy boy, a sex slave, or simply as a captive of pirates and bandits, happy to pass the time with me till they could collect a ransom. I had spent a year as a gladiator in the Colosseum at Rome, fighting naked before crowds of tens of thousands. For that matter I had often walked the streets of Alexandria, Antioch, and Rome nude whether slave or free, as Daphne boy, gladiator, or brothel boy. Besides, the truth is, I really like being on naked. Even more I like being seen naked and admired for my trim sexy body. I suppose that is a fault but I hope not a grievous one. Where would great artists like Leonardo be without shameless pretty boys like me to model for him?

For all his sketches, the master never did get around to painting me. A notorious procrastinator, he often failed to finish what he started. Still he started so many things. Though best known as a painter, he was a sculptor, poet, inventor, engineer, botanist, anatomist, and musician. A polymath, the original Renaissance Man. His notebooks more than his thirteen surviving paintings are his real legacy. What a mind he had!

He was the most fascinating person I have ever met, able to converse knowledgeably and intelligently on almost any subject. I was able to hold my own only because of my centuries of life experience. His intelligence was almost frightening in its speed of apprehension. To think that this man in a few decades had reasoned to or intuited conclusions that had taken me so very much longer to reach. He never condescended even or especially when he was right about something. I know that he was fond of me too, even if I was never one of his great loves. He once described my come-hither look as attractively mischievous. I rather liked that turn of phrase and have always tried to live up to it.

I was very sorry when I had to leave Milano after a few months and return to Genova to manage my enterprises. Besides shipping, I had investments in mining and wine production.

He gave me three of his drawings as keepsakes which I have safeguarded all these years. Though they are worth a small fortune, I have no intention of ever selling them or even donating them to a museum. Besides, I am hardly in a position to certify their provenance and authenticity by admitting that I was there when Leonardo drew them -- using me as his life model -- and that they have been in my personal custody for half a millennium.

Chapter 2. Genoa and Florence 1498

Genova or Genoa owes its existence and prominence as a seaport to its location at the most northerly point in the Western Basin of the Mediterranean Sea. (Venice is similarly situated with respect to the Eastern Basin.) Both were entrepots for trade with the East, either with the Levant or into the Black Sea to the Crimea. From those ports goods were carried overland through the passes in the Alps into the heartland of Europe.

Still the prominence of these routes were threatened by the ocean explorations of the Iberian powers. After three voyages of discovery across the Atlantic sponsored by Spain, Cristoforo Colombo had found something, whether a route to the Indies or a New World. The outflow of the river he named the Orinoco certainly indicated that it drained a continent, but which one? The Portuguese were trying to find a route around Africa. They had already rounded it southern end and lately dispatched Vasco da Gama to try to reach India and the Spice Islands bypassing the middlemen of the Near East on whom the Italian maritime republics relied.

My own businesses were flourishing despite the outbreak of war in 1494. The Ligurian Alps sheltered the Republic of Genoa from the turmoil of continental Italy. The French had eventually seized Milano overthrowing their sometime ally Ludovico il Moro, thereby dominating the North. Meanwhile master Leonardo had left the city, disgusted and disappointed after the duke used the metal that was to have gone into his equestrian statue to cast bronze cannon for his losing war. Fighting also reached far down the peninsula with France and Spain jousting for supremacy in the kingdom of Naples.

The warlord Cesare Borgia was active in northern Italy too, trying to carve a kingdom for himself with the full support of his father Pope Alexander VI who provided the funds for hiring bands of mercenary troops led by men called condottieri or contractors. He even threatened to absorb Florence, where the power of the dominant Medici family had slipped badly since the death in 1492 of Lorenzo, called the Magnificent.

I happened to go to Florence in January of 1498 to salvage what I could out of the financial collapse of one of my correspondent firms in that city. The muddle looked more like bad judgment and record keeping than embezzlement, but large sums of money were unaccounted for.

"If any one can straighten out old Donato's accounts, it would be you master Alessandro. You seem to have numbers in your blood, they way you grasp bookkeeping and accounts and and even this new-fangled double entry system."

Massimo was my factor in Florence and its seaport of Pisa, and though he was skeptical of every recovering much of the missing funds, he knew how much a head for figures I had. Like my stamina and agility or skill with weapons or facility with languages, it is one of my gifts. Quite handy for one who usually earned an honest living as a merchant. Unfortunately, Donato used the old-fashioned single entry system.

"Thank you for the vote of confidence, but only time will tell. I wish I could enjoy myself more in the city. During the time of il Magnifico it was exciting, a center of culture and entertainments, with all manner of parties and festivals and masked balls."

"The gloom today is the work of that morose monk Savonarola. He rules the city with an iron fist and expects everyone to live as soberly as one who has taken holy orders. He particularly despises men and youths who prefer, shall we say irregular attachments. A word to the wise, Alessandro, if you take my meaning, and no offense if I am guessing wrong about you."

"No, you are not guessing wrong, my friend, and yes, I am on my guard. Thank you for the warning."

Homosexuality had previously been openly tolerated in the city. The lively boys of Medici Florence with their slender physiques and uninhibited appreciation of sex, were appreciated all over Europe by travelers fortunate enough to visit the city on the Arno. Indeed young Italians are among my favorite sex partners, both then and now. Unfortunately many of my kind had already fled the city before my arrival. One of the monk's first acts after he emerged as the secular and religious leader of the city was to make sodomy a capital offense instead of a misdemeanor with transgressors liable for a fine.

About eight years earlier he began preaching passionately about the Last Days, claiming prophetic visions. He claimed to have communicated directly with God and the saints who warned him of an approaching Apocalypse. Few paid him much attention at first. Such fiery preachers were common enough at the time, what with the approach of the year 1500, but circumstances worked in Savonarola's favor.

The Medici family's grip on power had weakened in the French-Italian wars which brought widespread destruction and looting. The flowering of Renaissance art and culture among the wealthy sort seemed now to mock the growing poverty and despair in ravaged Italy, unleashing a backlash of resentment among the common people. Wars and economic disaster were followed by the sudden onslaught of syphilis, an entirely new affliction in Europe, probably brought back by sailors from the New World. It led to an epidemic nearly as deadly as the bubonic plague. Florentines called it the ÒFrench pox" because it spread to Italy with the invading French armies during the Italian Wars.

In 1495, after the Medici fled the city, Savonarola emerged as the new leader of the city, combining both secular and religious authority in what he called a Christian Republic. In 1497 he and his followers held a Bonfire of the Vanities. They sent boys door to door confiscating items associated with moral laxity: mirrors, cosmetics, lewd pictures, pagan books, immoral sculptures, gambling tables, chess sets, musical instruments, fine dresses and womenÕs hats, immoral and ancient poetical works, and burnt them all in the Piazza della Signoria, near where (the copy of) Michelangelo's statue of David now stands. Many fine artworks were lost Ñ including paintings by Sandro Botticelli and Michelangelo himself. Surely a sin in itself.

Why do these crazy preachers always think their God needs intermediaries to bring the word to the faithful or to carry out his wishes? Surely an omnispresent God can speak directly to every heart. What need has he of intermediaries? Claiming that an omnipotent deity needs physical assistance of any kind is an implicit denial of that god's omnipotence, one of his essential attributes, and is tantamount to blasphemy. Even worse, claiming that the deity needs your own assistance in particular is surely megalomania.

That damnable religious fanatic was not only a real threat to persons of my ilk. He was a general menace setting people against one other, making them feel overwhelming guilt for the most minor of frailties. He had the fervor of an old testament prophet and appealed to the existential anxieties of the populace, blaming their problems on their own immoral misbehavior. He claimed the pox and other epidemics were God's scourge for a dissolute populace.

How wicked a tactic that is, to blame the victims themselves, to heap guilt atop misfortune. What sins might infants in the cradle be guilty of I surely did not know. Why would a loving god kill them wholesale with a plague, laying the guilt for their deaths on their parents or instead kill their parents leaving these children orphans? Are those the works of a loving being or of a fiend? Was it not blasphemy to suggest he was really that cruel and/or that clumsy with his punishments, letting them fall on guilty and innocent alike?

I hoped the populace would eventually turn against the monk. Already I sensed he had overreached, attacking the Pope himself. As far as the man himself, Savonarola was right on the mark there, I'll give him that much. Pope Alexander VI was a Borgia and the father of both Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia. Enough said. The Pope had responded by excommunicating him, giving those who worried about their salvation to turn against the monk. The problem for a popular prophet (or revolutionary for that matter) is maintaining power and popular fervor in the long run against opponents whose power is entrenched, institutionalized, and back by tradition.

I hoped and expected people to grow tired of his constant preachments and chastisements. Even to the guilty, constant hectoring grows tiresome and guilt loses its sting. Eventually even the most guilt ridden would start to wonder why, having repented and renounced their sinful ways, God had not intervened to remedy their political and economic ills. As with all millennial cults, disappointment would set in when the Last Days did not arrive with a sounding of a celestial trumpet.

Meanwhile I had my latest assignation with raven-haired Pietro to look forward to. I dressed in a doublet and hose made of rich fabric though of dark and sober hues. My hose were solid black, even the codpiece, as was my cap. My doublet was deep purple with only a hint of gold thread at the wrists. The contrast with the white of my shirt and collar and my blond locks made a very attractive picture. Also I like to think I filled out my hose, my tights, rather well, with my flat tummy and small but curvaceous rump. My legs were slender but muscular -- helping project an air of youthful well-being, just the impression I wanted to create.

Pietro and I ate a quiet dinner in an upstairs room of the tavern where I had taken lodgings. We were on familiar terms after two months. After eating, we relaxed on a bench in front of a fireplace, shoes kicked off. I already had my doublet off and my silk shirt lay open to the navel. The flames gleamed off my buffed pectoral and abdominal muscles and the thin sheen of sweat raised from our proximity to the fire.

"Here let me make you more comfortable, little Sandro. There, that's more like it." Pietro said, sliding his hands over my pectorals and then to my shoulders pulling the shirt smoothly from my body, letting it slip to the floor.

"You have me at an advantage sir, half naked as I am, in just my hose. What are your intentions?" I asked archly.

"The same as last time, you naughty boy, to strip those tights off you and render you fully naked the way the gods meant you to be, and to take every advantage of that opportunity."

"Oh yes, please."

I loved it when a stronger male took charge, ordering me about, stripping the clothes off me unceremoniously, maybe turning me over his knee for a a bit of a spanking, treating me like a wanton, a slut boy who needed it badly. At twenty-four Pietro was an accomplished lover who knew how to use a young male for their mutual pleasure. I loved what his talented hands did to me, touching me in all the right places, the right way, at just the right time to get me into position, aroused, and eager to be taken.

Our love affair was really a pleasant interlude for both of us, nothing serious. For him I was a harmless diversion from the humdrum problems of the woolen trade. His family organized the production of woolen cloth, importing both the wool and the dyes and providing finance and distribution to their subcontractors. Since I was invested in silks locally, we don't have to guard our tongues as competitors.

Pietro Giordano was a industrious young merchant by day and a pleasant companion of an evening. I was pleased that he was not one of the idlers that rich families are all so prone to produce in the second or third generation. Intelligent though not particularly well-read, he was excited by tales of the New World, reading everything he could get his hands on about the Spanish and Portuguese voyages of discovery.

"Still it is too bad that these days the grand houses no longer host parties or throw masked balls for fear of drawing the attention of the authorities. I wish I had visited Florence in happier times, Pietro."

"True, my friend. I would love the chance to show you off and start everyone wondering about us. We make a fine looking couple."

His ready smile made his whole face light up with good humor. Our warm relationship was based on mutual attraction, respect, and some overlapping intellectual interests. I was fascinated by the New World too.

I wasn't staying in town long enough to rent a house and engage servants, so I had just taken lodgings at an inn. Unfortunately that meant the premises were accessible to the public. Without locks and stout doors, my valet was not able to delay the intruders effectively. Not long before dawn, enforcers for the monk's regime pushed past him and burst into my bedchamber finding Pietro and me asleep and spooned together in bed.

Totally surprised and cut off from my weapons and clothing, I tried for a window. My intention was to proceed over the rooftops, jumping alleys and scaling walls, till I reached the home of my factor Massimo. He might hide me or lend me clothing and funds to escape the city. For centuries, as a form of both acrobatic recreation and training, I have practiced climbing and scrambling across urban structures precisely as a means of escape and evasion. I almost made it to the window but blows from stout cudgels numbed a knee and an elbow then rendered me helpless with jabs to my kidneys and solar plexus. When I finally managed to speak, all I could do was try bravado.

"What is the meaning of this intrusion?" I challenged as a dozen armed men dragged Pietro out of bed and bound both our arms behind us.

"Silence you spawn of Satan!" declared their leader, a monk with a zealous look about him.

"You, Alessandro Caro have been discovered naked in bed with the young fop, Pietro Giordano, one we have long suspected of sinful proclivities. This room is no less than a den of sodomy. You will pay the ultimate price for your corrupt and damnable ways."

We were roughly handled and taken to an odious dungeon to await our trial. The inquisitors tried to persuade me to take the easy way out, merely displaying the tools of the torturer to get me to confess. They promised that a confessed and repentant sinner might be hanged so as to die quickly rather than burned to death as a recalcitrant sinner. I did not see that as much of an incentive to confess.

I argued with the chief interrogator, pointing out quite logically that all that his agents had really discovered were two men together in bed. It was quite common in those days for travelers to share beds in taverns. So what did it prove save that Pietro was a bit too drunk and careful of his safety to venture out on the streets alone at night, and a chilly one at that. Of course we were asleep naked. It was quite common for people in those days to sleep entirely unclothed, without even a nightshirt. If we were huddled together under the blankets on a chilly spring morning, well, what could be more innocent.

I did not expect them to really believe me, only to allow the possibility of their own error and my innocence, reasonable doubt in modern terms. In any fair court, my argument would have constituted an alternative theory of the case, worthy of evaluation on its own merits. Of course they would never admit the possibility of error on their part or that they relied far too much on anonymous informants -- mostly nasty gossips or enemies with scores to settle. I think the only reason they let me talk at all was the chance I would say something compromising. Our back and forth did delay the onset of actual torture. Unfortunately my friend Pietro did not have my gift of gab. I could hear his screams and pleas as they went to work on him. It made me not only afraid for my own bodily integrity but also sick at heart at what they were doing to such a fine and essentially harmless young man.

Then it was my turn. The guards dragged me to a corner of the dungeon and locked my wrists into shackles behind my back suspending me from a rope in the painful strappado position. The body weight pulls the arms and shoulder backwards at an unnatural angle especially when they lift you high then let you fall almost to the floor. The sudden jerk that stops your descent can break shoulders and arms. Since they were just getting started, they lifted me only half way before letting me fall. With my slight weight and my acrobatic frame and musculature I was able to take that much abuse without permanent damage, but it was incredibly painful. They left me dangling and spread my ankles wide and shackled them to rings set into the floor. My toes barely grazed the stones because of my slight stature. The chief interrogator, a nasty looking piece of work if I ever saw one, stood nearby, assessing me. Near him was a large man in a leather apron, the torturer obviously. The interrogator reached out to stroke my naked body, smiling as he saw my fear and felt me tremble.

I am not ashamed of displaying fear at that moment. A display of courage or stoicism would not impress men who would only see it as mere obstinacy, another indication of my allegiance to Satan. I had no reason to expect mercy and every reason to fear the torments they would inflict on my helpless body. Even my vitality could not recover from the damage they would inflict, should I somehow live through this. This was my worst nightmare come true, death by torture, whether to force my secret from me or, in this instance, to force me to confess a capital crime.

I think that at that moment, with death looming close, I came closest to despising the human race root and branch for its sorry history of persecution and injustice. Oppression has victimized so many for reasons of religion, politics, fear, greed, and ethnic hatreds. What justification can there be for persecuting persons like myself who feel sexual attraction only for those of our own gender. It is the way we were born to be, or as the gods made us. We are not as we are by choice or by the exercise of free will. Despite Church dogma or penal statutes, what we do with our own bodies is neither sin nor crime.

The interrogator, who never told me his name, reached up to stroke my slender arms from bound wrists down to my hairless armpits, then the firm pectorals pinching and tugging my tiny red nipples in their small aureoles. He slid his hands down my flanks to my hips, weighing my manhood, rolling the spheres in his hand, squeezing them between thumb and fingers, poking into my cleavage, emphasizing my nudity and vulnerability. They controlled everything about my body, most especially my manhood dangling vulnerably between my wide spread legs. The man was very tall and loomed over my short lithe form trying to intimidate me with his size. He even took me by the chin and turned my face up to his and kissed me in a parody or mockery of the sin for which I had been arrested.

"You see, my young friend? Tommaso here would enjoy applying his skills to your delicious body, but it would be a shame to damage such a lovely youth as yourself, to see those angelic features screwed up in pain, to make your soft voice hoarse from screams and howls. You are really the most beautiful boy I have ever laid eyes upon, like an angel from a work of church art. So small, and slight of build, yet with a wiry musculature. Completely hairless too, a deliberate choice, rejecting hair on the body as if it were not a proper mark of masculinity. But then you are not properly masculine, are you young Alessandro?"

I wanted to challenge him on his own clean shaven face but deemed it wiser to hold my tongue as he continued with his evalution.

"Even more shamelessly, you are deeply tanned all over. To have such a deep even color you must spend much time out of doors in the sun, entirely naked. Did no one ever instruct you to cover your loins decently?"

Indeed I did spend much time in the sun entirely naked. Genoa is sheltered by the mountains from the worst of winter, and my villa there faces south over the water. It is enclosed on three sides by white retaining walls that reflect the sun's heat onto the property, allowing me to indulge myself with outdoor dining and entertaining, or reading or exercise in all but the two coldest months. I have a small terraced garden to potter around in too.

The torturer shoved thorns through my nipples. The interrogator watched the blood trickle down my chest and over my ribs, occasionally reaching up to twist and twirl the thorns. He smiled to see me writhe in pain, trying to turn away from the torment. To make the punishment fit the crime, they next shoved a huge leather phallus up my ass, the large knob at the lower end keeping it from sliding out. I have never been so impaled before or since, sure this would rupture me irreparably. This was not sex play but torture pure and simple. I found myself sobbing helplessly, all hope abandoned. It seemed my long life was over at last.

They did not gag me, ostensibly so I might confess, but really because they were sadists who enjoyed hearing the useless pleading and screams and whimpers of their victims. They enjoyed inflicting suffering even more than watching it. I have never been able to understand anyone who would cause a beautiful youth to suffer that way for his own perverse pleasure, for that is what motivated them whatever they might say about their duty to save souls.

In the event, Tommaso was just fitting a nut crusher to my right testicle when a clamor in the levels above drew their attention. Horns blew and swords clashed as armed men poured into the dungeons, overwhelming the guards and setting the prisoners free. The torturer retreated into a hidden passage leaving the interrogator to be cut down by the rebels. The revolution I had longed for had finally overthrown Savonarola and his regime and only just in time to save me from physical destruction. I was in bad shape as they tugged on the leather lead of the huge phallus to extract it from my bleeding orifice. It took weeks even with my constitution before I felt anything like normal.

In little more than a month Savonarola was himself put to the torture, tried, and burned at the stake for a heretic on the very site of the Bonfire of the Vanities. The burning took several hours. Soldiers broke his remains apart several times then mixed them with more brushwood so that the fire would not leave the slightest piece of him. Otherwise SavonarolaÕs followers might have collected a finger or small bones and venerated them as holy relics of the fiend they still considered a saint. His ashes were tossed into Arno near the Ponte Vecchio. I like to think that subsequent floods of the Arno have scoured every last trace of him out of the city and into the sea.

Savonarola deserved his hard death for his tyranny over the minds and bodies of the citizenry and especially for the wreck his men left of young Pietro, utterly broken in body and spirit, disfigured, crippled, and castrated at age twenty-four. Within a month he killed himself, unable to bear any longer the horror his life had become. I provided him with a nearly painless fast acting poison of my own confection to do the job. The Church looked the other way, burying him in consecrated ground, despite suspicions that his death was a suicide, a mortal sin. They owed him that much at least.

I quickly concluded my business in Florence and retreated to Genoa. Some years later the Medici returned to power, eventually to reign over Tuscany as grand dukes, but their glory days and the salad days of Florence were over.

Chapter 3. Naples 1509

As those two episodes show, the Renaissance had both light and dark sides to it. On the positive side of the ledger: the rise of humanism, the revival of classical learning, new forms of art and architecture, widespread educational reform, and the use of vernaculars in literature. The Renaissance influenced literature, philosophy, the arts, politics, the natural sciences, and religion. Renaissance scholars sought realism and depicted human emotion in art and literature.

The prosperity that underlay the Renaissance was the result of the opening of trade routes, flourishing cities, and better methods of production, distribution and exchange. A commercial infrastructure developed with such modern features as double-entry book-keeping, joint stock companies (corporations), an international banking system, and markets for foreign exchange market, insurance, and government debt. Genoa was the pioneer, but Florence later flourished as the centre of the new financial industry, its gold coin, the florin, becoming the main currency of international trade.

The technical arts advanced too. For the first time in a thousand years, Europeans built aqueducts to supply clean water to cities. Huge numbers of books were published with the new printing press. European civilization expanded and flourished geographically as well. It was the start of a great age of overseas exploration and the settlement of a new world hitherto unknown to Europeans.

The dark side included continual dynastic wars especially the Italian Wars that reduced Italy to a geopolitical sideshow, the excesses of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic or Counter-Reformation and the Wars of Religion they touched off. In the seventeenth century Germany and Central Europe became the cockpit of Europe losing a third of its population in the Thirty Years War.

I did my best to navigate the shifting currents while partaking of the cultural riches of the period. In search of peace and stability I moved my operations to Naples, which was securely in Spanish hands after the ouster of the French. Under their rule, the city, already the fourth largest city in Europe would grow so much that by the middle of the sixteenth century only Paris would be larger. Naples was well placed for trade with the Orient and then on to Pisa and Genoa. It was part of the Aragonese, now united Spanish, maritime empire that stretched from eastern Spain, to the Balearics, Sardinia, Sicily, and the southern half of the peninsula. Of the major Italian islands, only Corsica was not in their hands. Corsia was ruled by Genoa.

In Naples, the Renaissance was ushered in under the patronage of Alfonso I who conquered Naples in 1443. Like a true prince of the Renaissance he favoured men of letters whose works would preserve his reputation for posterity, men like the poet Jacopo Sannazaro and the humanist scholar Angelo Poliziano and his panegyrist Panormita He was a builder who founded the Academy of Naples and, added a magnificent triumphal arch to the main gate of Castel Nuovo, the formidable fortress that is still the signature architectural symbol of the city.

I did not worry much that the Spanish authorities might look too closely at my lifestyle. The Spanish Inquisition did not operate in Naples. Indeed popular opposition ensured it never would be introduced to terrorize noble and peasant alike. So my investments flourished and I had time for leisure.

"If we stay in this hot spring any longer Alessandro we will turn into prunes. Why don't we clamber out for a while."

We were bathing in one of the hot springs in the Phlegrean Fields northwest of Naples, famous as a resort area since antiquity. Taking the waters was supposed to be good for what ails you. My friend Andrea Orsini was really talking about himself. My own skin did not dry out so readily as his. Still I had to think of him too, a fine looking lad of nineteen with olive skin and hair so black it looked blue.

"Come on," I called out. "Let's cool off in the sea."

Suiting actions to words, I stepped out of the hot spring, walked across the rocks then plunged into the waters of the Bay of Naples. Mount Vesuvius loomed on the horizon. It had been dormant for three centuries. Its slopes were covered with gardens and vineyards just like before the great eruption of 79 AD. Shrubbery grew even inside the crater.

After some initial horsing around, we began swimming in earnest. I love to swim back and forth, to prove my mastery of the watery element. Sometimes I just floated with my head back and chest up legs slanting down, the only way my body will float without moving. I am too muscular to float easily, though even a little sculling will let me keep my limbs at the surface. The exercise also improved my strength and stamina for whatever emergencies might eventually arise. That day I swam for nearly an hour.

Andrea stayed in half as long. His small body was arguably skinny rather than just wiry, and his boney frame floated worse than mine. He wasn't much shorter than I, though I was more muscular. Still he was a good swimmer as long as he stayed in motion. While his black mane and olive skin were typical of a southern Italian, I rather fancied he looked liked a lovely mer-boy, a native creature of the sea come to visit the surface world and grace it with his beauty. He had a taut hairless body, long wavy hair, a straight nose, large brown eyes, and fine white teeth. He had a mischievous look about him even when he was doing something entirely innocent, which wasn't always the truth, but his infractions were minor ones, practical jokes really. A charming boy indeed.

He was already swimming toward shore when I surfaced dived and swam underwater to came up beneath him, tweaking his dangling manhood then darting away. He was just too tired to give chase. I eventually swam to the beach where I stretched out on my back next to him in the sun and sighed my contentment.

"Life is good my young friend. I am content."

"You always call me your 'young friend', Sandro, as if, at twenty-three, you were so much the senior. In reality, you look no older than I do. We are both too small and pretty and hairless to look our ages. Neither of us looks even eighteen. And we run around naked so much -- just like boys do -- always plunging into the sea or working in the gardens naked so we don't get our clothes dirty. And then there is all that time we spend wrestling and running along the beach which is more like the gamboling of naked boys than the preoccupations of young men."

"Yes, well their chief preoccupations are first with girls and then with work. Neither of us likes girls, and I am comfortably rich. Not that either of us is lazy or idle. We just don't have to put up with the long hours and drudgery of an impoverished existence."

"Not any more, Sandro, thanks to you. And now that you have taught me to read, write, and figure, I could always find a good job as a clerk for the church or the government."

"Do not worry that I will tire of you soon, Andrea. You are positively scrumptious and so delightfully uninhibited in the way you have gone along with casual nudity. Some boys would have balked at giving up their body hair to the razor, little though there was, but you like the way it made you even more naked than before, your cock and balls more prominent on your slim frame. Anyway, even if we go our separate ways, I will do right by you."

Indeed I always have done right by my lovers over the centuries. I despise those who take advantage of a youth's poverty and desperation, don't prepare him to support himself, then callously discard a boy when he grows too old to be pleasing. Anyway, with care and healthful habits and good genes, pretty boys can look good into their thirties. As to the more masculine sort who are the second kind of male that turns me on, well I have had lovers who grew into their forties or even beyond. Peroz of Basra was one of those, not to mention one of the most thoroughly decent men I have ever known.

I lay there resting, taking in the very smell of the sea. Though some thought that a sour smell, I had always found it intoxicating. I know the pair of us looked utterly alluring, two boys lying on the sand, one blond, one dark, both small, naked, and hairless. Our physiques were trim and taut. With our eyes closed as we dozed our delicate features suggested a pair of angels though it was rare in art to see those heavenly messengers depicted nude and equiped with well-formed genitalia. After a while Andrea sat up and kissed me, tasting rather saltier than usual but still sweet as only a nineteen year old boy can be.

I had taken him into my home three years earlier. We had actually met on a beach when I went for a swim from my seaside villa. That was the way we liked best to spend time with each other, totally naked and outdoors in the sun whether on the beach, in the gardens, or on the terrace. He had a green thumb and enjoyed tending to plants as much as I did. Having been raised on a farm that supplied Naples with fresh produce, he had the skills and knowledge I needed in a gardener, which is where I eventually put him to work. I won't support idlers, not even very pretty ones. Not that his duties were tedious to him. He particularly liked the chance to work with ornamentals.

We often would work side by side kneeling on the ground, brown cheeks resting on bare feet, lithe torsos bent over, ribs and spinal bumps prominent as, smudged with dirt and trowels in hand, we worked at our humble tasks while the sun warmed our bare butts. I love to feel the heat of the sun kissing my ass. It is a pleasant tactile reminder of public nudity, of being naked outdoors in the sun where anyone might see my trim body in its entirety, even its most intimate parts. I guess that appeals to the exhibitionist in me.

Sometimes we boys threw clods of earth at each other as in a snowball fight only we were all hot and sweaty and naked instead of cold and bundled up. A little more dirt was no bother to us naked as we were anyway -- nothing a quick shower would not take care of. As for getting smudged and dirty in the first place, this was not ordinary dirt. This was topsoil, black earth, a volcanic soil that was perfect for growing things. Top soil is clean dirt and has a pleasant fresh smell to it.

Sometimes we engaged in sex right there in the garden. What could be more natural, more like a primeval fertility rite, than to lie naked belly down in the earth, legs spread wide, and offer yourself to a male, to dilate your anal ring and submit while he plowed your ass and planted his seed in you. With Andrea pumping away at my rump, my own rigid cock would dig into the earth, plowing it, preparing a furrow for my spurting seed. For a while we would lie together, breathing heavily, pasted together with sweat and dirt. Andrea would touch the chevron of my ribs in that affectionate way he had, a gentle petting and an acknowledgment of the good ride I have given him. Even after he shot into me, his teenaged cock stayed hard. In the afterglow, I liked him to keep it there for a while, as we lay locked together, the entire length of our now languid bodies in contact.

As we got back our second wind he might start in again entirely or get to work preparing me to mount him, nipping the back of my neck or tonguing my ear. Then it was time for me to get out from under and address his croup. He liked to kneel and bend over to put his head in his arms, bracing his rump high off the ground, allowing either of us to reach under and play with his turgid member. Outdoor sex in the garden brought the two of us together like nothing else. No hiding away indoors as if in shame. Whatever gods exist could watch or not as they wished. We were lovers and we were proud of it. Afterwards, we helped each other bathe, to scrub the earth from back and rump, providing yet another reason for our hands to explore each other's trim bodies everywhere.

"Do you think the mountain will explode again like in Roman times?" Andrea asked about Vesuvius. The legend of the catastrophic eruption lived on even after the volcano became quiescent at the end of the 13th century.

"Not in your lifetime I would wager."

"That means yours either." he pointed out, completely wrong of course.

I lived to see the mountain awaken again in 1631 and eight times in the eighteenth century. Although I had missed the original big eruption I did see its devastation at first hand. In 81 AD, I had traveled from Rome to see the changes, visiting both Pompei and the more upscale city of Herculaneum where I had stayed for a month only a few years before. I could hardly credit the changes. Everything I had known was buried under ash and solidified mud.

I talked with people who described a dark cloud suspended for a day above the mountain, held up by the force and heat of the eruption. As the eruption paused, the column of dust and ash and rocks and hot poisonous gases lost its support and collapsed, pulled down by its own weight. The roiling cloud fell to the ground and charged down the slopes at a speed far faster than a human could run. The burning roiling cloud, what today we call a pyroclastic flow, smashed into the doomed cities, smashing buildings flat, setting everything on fire, poisoning and suffocating the inhabitants both human and animal and burying under a layer almost twenty meters thick (60 ft). Had the winds been different the cloud might have hung above the western slopes of the mountain. In that case the pryoclastic flow would have destroyed Naples, the city the Greeks first settled and called simply Neapolis or New City.

Andrea and I liked to sail the Bay of Naples, whether to visit the Phlegrean Fields or to visit the scenic islands like Ischia and Capri. I had a small sailboat at the dock of my seaside villa, a pleasure craft not one of my trading ships. It was fully decked but small enough for us to handle alone though I often took along a crew of one or two so we would not have to work the boat. The island of Capri features the remains of the palace that the emperor Tiberius constructed on the high promontory as well as the famous Blue Grotto, the sea cave that was once his private swimming pool. Now it was ours. On our frequent visits, we were careful to throw the boatmen a coin so they would not bother us for bypassing their monopoly. My own vessel simply got close enough to the low entrance for us to strip off and swim inside.

It was wonderful the way the light from outside refracted through the water and into the cave. As swimmers we could take as long as we liked swimming or floating or horsing around and we did not crowd others. There was even an artificial shelf we could hike our butts onto and simply enjoy the experience. As for the usual sort of visitors, they got the titillation of gazing on another form of beauty: two young male nudes, two of the sexiest boys they were ever likely to see entirely naked either alive or depicted in the art of the High Renaissance. Occasionally an aficionado of male beauty would invite us to climb aboard his row boat giving him a close up look at our physiques as we rowed out of the cave into full sunlight. I must admit, that show off that I am, I relished these opportunities. Refracted sunlight made the beads of water on my golden skin glisten like tiny diamonds. Andrea made much of being cooed at or petted, shameless scamp that he was. I cannot think where he got it from. He was such an innocent lad when we met.

My boat also took us to picnics at isolated spots on the islands or the promontories that enclosed the bay or even to isolated rocks. I liked the challenge of climbing cliffs without equipment, relying just on my natural human endowments. We felt like naughty children clambering naked over the boulders, exploring nooks and crannies, and collecting bird's eggs for supper. Not that we were hungry right then. The kitchen always provided a fine basket of delicacies for my picnics. Many is the time we sat in the sun leaning back against the rocks, letting the heat soak into our bones, talking of our hopes and dreams, eating and drinking, though always in moderation, with the boat standing nearby beached or anchored just off shore. It was very sensuous and comfortable to look out over the Bay of Naples with a full belly, muscles a bit sore from our exertions, a glass of wine at hand, a lovely boy at your side.

And so passed fourteen years of an almost idyllic existence. I was prosperous and happy. I had helped my lover Andrea grow into a literate and moderately well educated young man just short of thirty. That is when the differences in our ages came between us. It was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain the fiction that I was young man a few years older than he, in my mid thirties by then, when I still looked like a boy in his late teens especially when I was asleep with all my defenses down and my usual subterfuges useless.

I can seldom stay for even twenty years with one identity or in one place since I do not age as others do. True, through theatrical tricks I can give the impression of getting older over the years, even without makeup. I change my style of clothing, from the casual dress of a youth to the flashy dress of a young man and then the more sober raiment of a maturing man. I speak differently too, first with the shaky unsure voice of a youth, then the confident voice of a young man full of himself, later in the more cautious and thoughtful speech of a man in his thirties.

I changed my hair styles too, from that of a tousled twink to the carefully groomed locks of a young man, to the shorter and more sober cut of a man no longer in his twenties. If I had any kind of beard at all, I might have grown first a mustache and then a full beard, though I really do not like facial hair. Andrea himself did affect a thin mustache in his mid twenties but he spared me the sight of the scraggly beard which would have been the best he could ever have managed. He remained slim and pretty even at thirty, but he no longer looked like a boy. I did.

My subterfuges can be effective for only so long. There is little point in relying on makeup except for very short term disguise. I spend far too much time in the nude exercising, sweating and swimming, cleaning my body in shower or bath to rely on such trickery as false crows' feet put on with ink or powders to make the hair turn grey at the temples. In my sleep my relaxed body looks especially youthful and vulnerable, as my lovers could plainly see.

It was time to move on and assume a new identity. I had decided that I could not trust Andrea with me secret. Not that he did not love me, but he was an incessant chatterbox and occasionally unintentionally indiscreet. Also his love might easily turn to hatred if he realized that he would grow older every year. He would become infirm and grey haired while I stayed young, untouched by time. Few relationships can stand that sort of tension and jealousy. I have told my secret to very few and to lovers less often than to trusted friends like my sometime major domo Diego.

So I secretly contrived to transfer my wealth to a 'cousin' in Venice, faked my own death at sea, and left Naples in disguise. My will provided handsomely for Andrea who, anyway, was already in business for himself as a wholesaler and distributor of fresh produce. The line of business was my suggestion, as was the initial investment, but the hard work and keen mercantile instincts were all his. I hated doing that to a fine man like Andrea, but I simply could not take the chance that he would keep my secret, so I could not take him with me when I started a new life in Venice. The saddest thing about never growing older is that you must eventually lose everyone you ever loved or befriended. Gods know many of them were more worthy of my gift than I.

Chapter 4. Ragusa and Venice 1524

"So how long do you plan to stay in Ragusa, ser Caro."

"Oh perhaps two months, just long enough to arrange regular transshipment of cargos to the Black Sea."

"You seem very young to bear such weighty responsibilities, a stripling really, though a very comely one. Please don't be offended but looking at you here in the steam bath, I can see for myself how small and smooth and hairless you are, a beardless boy then, but surely not a man. You realize that is why you have found it difficult for those in positions of authority to take you seriously. Those pretty boy looks of yours work against you. Though they might work for you as well, if you take my meaning."

"You mean that when they look at me, it is with lust in their hearts. They would rather take me to their beds or even into their harems than to do business with me? As you would yourself. I suppose you are also hinting that something might be arranged if I yielded to their wishes and yours."

"I will make not apologies for responding to beauty when I see it, especially when it is displayed so fully and so close to hand, as if being deliberately offered. Some Westerners keep a towel wrapped around their hips here in the Turkish bath. You did not even bring one in with you, casually displaying your nudity. You just laid yourself on the slats and dozed away, obviously wanting everyone to look at every inch of you. And your hairless physique suggests a boy who wants nothing whatsoever to cover or conceal his body, not even, or not especially, his most private parts. That was why I reached out and spoke to you just now."

"Well you did more than speak to me just now, Ahmed. I usually shake hands with a new acquaintance. You simply explored my sprawled out physique."

"Come come, from the way your member plumped up I know you did not find my stroking your chest and belly just now the least bit offensive, quite the contrary. You like a big man's hands on you, touching you, exploring intimately. I suspect that is why you are here right now, during my accustomed hour at the baths, to tempt me into an assignation. For myself I am very glad of it. There is no reason we should not combine business with pleasure, is there? I am at your service."

"You mean if I am at yours."

"Exactly."

Well I had to do something to break the impasse, to get beyond all the officious bureaucrats and haughty merchants of this town in southern Dalmatia on the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea. Letting this influential merchant and his friends take me to bed would be little enough of a sacrifice. I did not mind the terms, not with as many men as I have given myself to over the centuries or who just took me as they wished. With my looks, I had to expect advances from anyone who likes a pretty boy.

Ahmed himself was presentable enough: in his early thirties, tall and lean with an strong if not exactly handsome face. Besides I was sure the surroundings would be luxurious, the food and wines excellent and many of the company interesting people to talk to, if not always the most arousing partners in bed. Also I was confident that with men of this sort, there would not be any real rough stuff.

So I let Ahmed have his way with me, first submitting to his lusts in the baths and then at his home in the city and finally at his seaside villa. I was his guest for a week, often naked or dressed, if that is the word for it, in the pants of a houri boy, a nearly weightless confection of diaphanous green cloth hanging so low on my hips that it seemed the slightest breeze would surely loosen its tenuous grip on the very back of my ass and make it waft to my ankles. Instead of waiting for gravity or an errant zephyr to do the job, Ahmed preferred to do the unwrapping himself in front of an audience of chosen guests. One sweep of his hand to snap the fragile ribbon that kept the sheer pants so precariously in place and I was joy boy naked, ready to assume the proper position on hands and knees, giving two men at once a crack at me.

These were mostly big men, Slavs and Turks and some Greeks. I often felt I might be crushed between them. I am rather small and their muscular or fleshy bodies pressed against me, confining me, sometimes smothering me. Some of them rather liked my distress. A boy who puts out for commercial advantage deserved to be put through his paces. One of those toying with me would say:

"Tut tut, little one. You are not supposed to evade my fleshy spear just because Ali is shoving so roughly at the other end. Hold still now and let me thrust into your rump. A boy as pretty as you was born to be bent over and fucked. Yeeess, just let it slide in all the way. Aaaah, you are so tight. Oooh, it feels so good to be clutched in your warm depths."

Another might chide me for the shameless way my turgid cock had tented out my diaphanous houri boy pants, all the while steadily leaking seminal fluid to produce a dark stain. I became well known for how much fluid would flow when I was aroused. Sometimes they tied me up spread-eagled between two pillars and caressed me lasciviously, teasing me sexually, just so they could watch the thread of pre-ejaculate dangling from the end of my cock lengthen more and more till it reached the floor. I cannot tell you how terribly slutty that made me feel.

Another man might warn me:

"Stop squirming there little Sandro. I know my fingernails must hurt digging into the nubbins of your tiny red nipples, but there is nothing like a bit of pain and blood to arouse a boy for proper service or the man who is playing with him, for that matter. You moan so deliciously boy, but before we are through I would like to hear you crying out. I would like to leave you whimpering afterwards. A man knows he has really put a boy through his paces when he leaves him whimpering and sobbing."

And more of the same. Anyway, exploiting my charms was how I was able to break into the transit market in Ragusa. In those days the maritime Republic of Ragusa acknowledged Ottoman sovereignty but otherwise conducted its affairs like an independent state. Ragusa had exclusive trading privileges into the Black Sea which was used by Venice's geopolitical rival Florence, shipping cargos from friendly ports on both sides of the peninsula. I managed to garner a little of this trade for Venetian interests, suitably disguised through third parties.

The Turks protected the city state against Venice which had formerly controlled the city. The Venetian Republic in those day was a maritime empire stretching from territories on the mainland of northeastern Italy to the Istrian peninsula at the head of the Adriatic Sea then along the Dalmatian coast to Albania. Venice's other possessions included coastal enclaves in Greece, most of the Aegean islands including several very large ones: Cyprus and Crete, respectively the third and fifth largest Mediterranean islands along with fertile Euboea the island north of Attica.

It was the wealth of this empire and the trade that flowed through Venice on more than 3,000 ships that supported the flourishing Renaissance culture that was its chief glory even today. After the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, a flood of refugee Greek scholars poured into Venice sparking the new linguistic studies of the Renaissance, in revived academies in Florence and Venice. Humanist scholars searched monastic libraries for ancient manuscripts. They recovered the histories of Tacitus and other Latin authors. The rediscovery of Vitruvius acquainted builders with the architectural principles of ancient Rome.

Of course I could have just conceded failure and returned to Venice, giving myself over to idleness, living off my investments, but I am constitutionally unable to be idle for very long. Sooner or later my own self respect reminds me that I have a duty to be a productive member of society rather than a parasite. That is why I usually worked as a merchant or businessman. It is honest and productive work.

True, in modern times so many on the left see us businessmen simply as exploiters and certainly many businessmen have been just that. Look at the sorry history of the slave trade over the centuries and all the industries and countries whose wealth ultimately depended on it. Look at all the externalities arising from its operations that business has ignored: political corruption, pollution, global warming, deforestation, destruction of the landscape itself with strip mining or the dumping of mine tailings, etc. Part of Venice's wealth was built on the salt trade, which was really a protection racket. It wasn't that Venetian salt was cheaper, but any city on the Adriatic that did not import its salt from Venice soon found itself at war with the republic. Expensive salt was cheaper than a losing war.

Still, I like to think that the great theoretical economists of the nineteenth century basically got it right. Our main social role is the allocation of capital for the greatest possible return on investment, something a community of businessmen as a whole does far more efficiently and effectively than any state or political party. Even at their height in the middle of the twentieth century, I had little use for the corporate states of the fascist countries or the command economies of the communists. Even the European welfare states, admirable at they were in equitable sharing of national wealth, were often a hinderance to the creation of new wealth. So for all its faults, I still say two cheers for capitalism.

Upon my return to Venice I reported my success to my investors. I had joined a syndicate in order to spread the risk and to associate myself with some of the wealthy men who ruled the Serenissima, as they called the Venetian Republic. As long as I was useful to the oligarchy and did not meddle in local politics, I would be not only tolerated but welcome in the city called the Queen of the Adriatic.

What can I write of that fabled city that a thousand pens have not already conveyed. I had taken a comfortable house on a sunny square overlooking the Venetian Lagoon, just south of the Accademia Bridge. It was within easy walking distance of St. Marks. To keep up appearances I walked to Mass every Sunday: just past the Academy, across the bridge, turning right and heading east toward the Doge's Palace. The statues of the horses seized from Constantinople were set up over the entrance to the Cathedral.

I especially enjoyed the Venetian Carnival for its chance to dress up in outrageous costumes. Everyone wore masks for anonymity. During Carnival, anything might happen and who would know?. Now with my looks, I really did not like to hide behind a full face mask, so my masks were more by way of suggestion than concealment. For example, with my pirate costume, my mask was merely an eye patch and even that was sheer enough to see through. Combined with the tightest of hose and a loose shirt open to the navel plus a cutlass in a scabbard, I looked quite the scrumptious pirate boy.

Sometimes when the weather cooperated, I wore nothing on top but a bit of glitter while my mask was just a band of cloth with eye slits. I once went about in the costume of one of those Aztec Indians the Spaniards had found in the New World: a loincloth and sandals, but with a rich headdress and pectoral made of gold.

One Carnival season, I found myself at a party in the house of one of the leading citizens of the Republic, Giorgio Falcone. I wore almost sheer tights and a tiny houri boy vest on on top plus a very minimal mask. All went well. I chatted and nibbled and sipped their wines and even danced with the ladies, enough to raise a sweat. An hour before midnight I was escorted by a footman to a quiet wing of the palazzo. The host had put aside his costume and was soberly dressed. I removed my mask, though I still looked like a fop in my minimalist costume. A humorless man, Don Falcone tole me that had just been told of my illicit relationship with his fourteen year old son and would not tolerate it.

"Yes that is better, ser Caro. With that mask off, we can see the face that has turned my son Niccolo's head. You seem hardly more than a couple or three years older than my boy. Not much to you is there, with that slight build? I really wonder how you can prance around with your entire body on display. That tiny vest is more suggestion than garment. The waistband of those tights rises no higher than you hips. Indeed the cloth is so thin it is nearly sheer and so form fitting, it delves deeply into your rear cleavage and in front is positively scandalous. You are the next thing to being publicly naked. Have you no shame sir?"

"Frankly, very little, Don Falcone. I like showing off, displaying my trim body. I am very easy on the eyes as many have told me. You can hardly fault me for vanity when this whole city is built on vanity. Its trade in luxury goods is a monument to human vanity. As for your son, I hardly know the boy. There is nothing between us, certainly nothing improper."

The rumors of my escapade in Ragusa had been the subject of gossip and the father was quite distressed that rumor now linked me with his oldest son. The rumors were entirely false. I had no relationship with young master Falcone. Indeed, I hardly knew the lad. I told his father so. Anything else was malicious gossip.

Understand, I will not consort with boys under the age of consent, not only on moral grounds but also because their bodies are simply too unformed to interest me. Also I know that boys of fourteen usually are not attracted to older males. I can remember my own feelings on being enslaved at fourteen and forced to serve as my captor's catamite. I remember that at fourteen, like all boys my age, I was fumbling with my sexuality and looked only to others my own age as potential partners. If the notion of sex with an adult was most unwelcome at that age, the practice of anal sex is something even harder for most youths of fourteen to accept. I had had no choice when I was a youth, but I would never inflict such feelings of shame and and degradation on a boy so young.

Nevertheless I stayed calm. I did not want to fight a duel or face charges before a magistrate.

"What does the boy say for himself?" I asked.

"He denies it of course, but then he would." Don Falcone asserted.

"Yes, and he would if he were innocent as well. Well he is, and am I too."

"I am of a mind to challenge you to a duel. I do have a reputation as a swordsman. Indeed I have my own training salle right here in the palazzo where many young bravos come to train. But I suspect a sodomite like you would be too cowardly to accept a challenge."

I sighed. If he was trying to impress me or intimidate me, he had failed utterly. After sixteen hundred years of training, practice, and combat experience against thugs, pirate, bandits, and soldiers, added to my natural gifts of speed and agility and stamina, there was no one on the planet who had the slightest chance against me in a duel. Practice makes perfect and I had sixteen centuries of it.

Still if there was one thing I had learned in my long life it was how to handle trouble. Ideally you avoid trouble entirely. Don't be there when it happens. The least desirable way is to fight. In between were the strategies of bargaining or flight. I decided to try negotiation, although I chose a rather unusual way to negotiate: a mock duel.

"Considering that, as the boy's father, you are acting from the best of motives, even though you are totally wrong about me, I am inclined to spare your life. Instead of accepting the challenge you were thinking of making, Don Falcone, let me make this one to you. Pick any five of your best young men. We will duel with practice swords, rapiers is my choice. I am certain you would find it enlightening."

"You really think you can defeat five of our best, one after another, just like that?"

"You misunderstand me sir. I mean to fight all five at once. I will have two blades, one for each hand, and they one blade each."

"You are mad, young man."

"What do you have to lose? Even with practice blades they could beat me black and blue, rendering me helpless for whatever further insult you might inflict on my battered body. Then I would go into voluntary exile."

"Yes! "offered one of the bravos, "Let's whip his back and ass then parade him naked around the Rialto and St. Mark's square before handing him over to the Doge' gaolers. A few months with his ankles locked into stocks in the depths of the prison, lying in his own bodily wastes, is no less than he deserves. It gets cold in winter too, especially for a skinny youth with no clothes."

Don Falcone said he would be satisfied if the stakes were limited to exile from Venice, terms which I agreed to.

Within the hour I was in the salle facing five young men. None cared to argue for the right to carry two swords themselves, not with five swords already on their side. Our swords were blunted and tipped but could still inflict significant injury. Indeed I knew any number of ways to kill with a practice sword. The five of them sneered at me, mocking my pretty boy looks and small size. They pointed to my skimpy costume, threatening to tear it from my body after their victory anyway and to send me out onto the streets unclad. That is, if I could walk away from this at all.

I shrugged, then remarked that since the tights were my only real garment, I had better set them aside for later, lest they be damaged in the duel. I stripped the tights off and faced them stark naked. You can imagine the looks and remarks that drew. What they did not realize is that by stripping I left nothing by which they might grab me other than by my slippery sweaty body, soon to get a lot sweatier and slipperier. Also I was reliving my glory days from the Roman Colosseum in the early third century where I fought as the Killer Catamite, armed with two long knives instead of two rapiers as I was now.

The odds might have looked against me, five large grown men versus one short naked boy, but I had one other advantage they had not considered: coordination. These were city lads and had trained for formal duels, fighting one on one. They were not rough and tumble soldiers who had learned to fight together as a team, to combine their efforts. That takes different training and battle drill. So it was five to one but on my side were skill, experience, agility, speed, and now the distraction of my nude body. Even for straight males, my naked body is quite hard to ignore. Males just naturally check each other out. We cannot help it.

Of course they tried their best. They were not really bad with a sword, just totally outclassed. Also noblemen that they were, each wanted to be in charge and called out orders to the others, trying to get all of them into harness, but it was hopeless. They just did not have the time to work things out among them: who was in charge, what tactics should they use, etc. I had no such hesitation and went into my (usually deadly) dance of the sword. I am especially effective with two swords, either of which can block or cut or stab. Thanks to centuries of practice, with swords I am truly ambidextrous though normally I am just about as right handed as the next man. I never write with my left, for instance.

I made them look totally inept, a bunch of stumblebums, caught confused and flatfooted as I whirled around, lunging, and parrying, and ducking, and leaping. I am an acrobat, after all, as well as a master of the blade. I deliberately prolonged the bout, repeatedly delivering what would have been fatal wounds in a real duel then going on to laying humiliating slaps to the ass with the flat of my blades. Finally I 'castrated' three of them. For my part, though I was sweating from my exertions, I had made it look easy. Few of their cuts or thrusts had come close, even when they tried to gang up on me. That was when they got in each other's way the worst.

Finally Don Falcone called the mock duel to a halt.

"I see you were truthful about wanting to spare my life. You would have cut me to pieces quite easily. Your demonstration has also spared these five young men as well. None of them will challenge you now. All of us can see that in a real duel, we would quickly die. After what we said about you, you had every right to seek our lives. You didn't. Your forbearance proves you a man of honor and of considerable generosity. I ask your forgiveness, as one gentlemen to another, for having listened to scurrilous rumors about you."

"I grant you pardon sir, with all my heart. This was no quarrel that I sought. And for what it is worth, sir, from the way I saw your son looking at a lass the other day in the piazza, I don't think you have much to worry about. He may be shy around girls now, but he will give you grandchildren some day."

That brought a surprised smile to the man's face. He looked much better that way.

"You really think so?"

"I do."

Indeed the boy married at seventeen and sired seven children including four sons.

After that I had no further trouble in Venice. I became quite popular with the young bravos of the city who wanted to learn some of my moves. I showed up at the salles, though keeping my hose on, glad for a wide variety of opponents to practice with. It was a good way to meet people and make friends too. I never showed quite how good I was. Only those who had watched the mock duel had seen anything like my full capabilities. I was glad of the chance to live in the Serenissima during its glory days. It is sad how Venice has lost its way today, more of a tourist park than a living city. Still there is the incomparable architecture and the art.

Epilogue

The sack of Rome in 1527 marked the end of the period called the High Renaissance, centered first in Florence under the Medici and later in Rome under the popes. The Renaissance continued though in other lands to the north of Italy, France, Germany, England, the Netherlands, Poland, etc.

Decades later I paid a visit to Rome to see the last stages of the construction of the dome of St. Peter's. Designed by the late Michelangelo, it was then nearing completion. Near the Vatican, I ran into Andrea Orsini, or rather he into me. He brushed aside my excuses for the uncanny resemblance I bore to the lover of his youth. He knew me for who I was, having recognized me first from behind just by my walk and build, then from my voice and speech mannerisms, even before I turned to look at who stood behind me.

He persuaded me that at his advanced age, my secret, whatever it might be, was safe. No one would believe a fantastic story about an immortal youth from a doddering old man. They would dismiss it as so much wishful thinking. I finally admitted the truth and explained why I was so afraid of being found out, that I would be tortured for the secret of immortality. Once give men of power a glimpse at immortality made flesh, and they would insist that only obstinacy kept me silent even though I really had nothing to reveal.

With the wisdom that age brings, Andrea admitted that I had been right about him. With his talkative ways he very likely would have let something slip. Also, while it was one thing for him, at the end of his own long life, to accept my eternal youth, he might not have handled it so philosophically as a young man, feeling his own youth slip away bit by bit while I stayed forever young. He told me that his life had been a rewarding one full of accomplishment and friendship and the satisfaction of his curiosity. I had helped him to get off to a good start and awakened him to the realm of books and ideas, for which he was grateful. Now, at the close of his life, his simple faith sustained him in the hope of eternal life to come and of seeing me again one day in Heaven. He was sure that whatever my doubts and lack of faith, I had earned my way into Heaven by good works.

I was so glad we had met and that I had finally spoken the truth to him. I had loved him so very much back then. Only once since we parted had I taken another real lover, a Spanish soldier who had sailed the length of the Amazon with me in the service of the conquistador Francisco de Orellana. Andrea was fascinated by my tales of the New World. He had always hoped to go there but events continually prevented it. I was happy to confide in him and to spin my tales of adventure. He laughed when I explained how, at the end of the first expedition down the length of the Amazon river, I had nearly been drafted into service as a stud to beget sons on the women of a native tribe that took me for an avatar of their sun god, blessed as I was with long yellow hair and green eyes, the color of growing things. Fortunately I was able to talk me way out of that very tight spot, my virginity intact.

Maybe as a young man he could not have been trusted with my secret, but he was a worthy man in every other way. It meant so much to him that I was his Sandro returned one last time to see him off before he died. I stayed on in Rome for some weeks, visiting him nearly daily, reminiscing, speculating on what the future held with a whole New World to explore. I saw him buried decently at the cemetery of Santa Maria delle Grazie. He was eighty seven years old.

As for my connection with Master Leonardo. I had been successful in obscuring my identity despite a close association with the great man. Modern scholars of Leonardo da Vinci's drawings still debate who the model was for the sketches and drawings I posed for since I wasn't any of his assistants or long time paramours. I prefer to fly under the radar, as one might say these days, though I did have some fun last year when an ancient likeness of mine in a gladiatorial pose turned up during excavations in Rome.

Only recently could I write of these things, choosing, from caution, to cast them as fiction, a series of fanciful tales of an immortal youth written under a pseudonym. My secret is safe for no one in these days of modern science will believe it. In this tale, all of the names are real. The events described really did happen just as I have written.