The black-sailed ships which ringed the bay had set the priests to jabbering, the eldest among them dewy-eyed at this latest prophecy fulfilled. They buzzed like flies, waiting on the pirates to arrive with ultimatums and desires. The temple scribes put forward a list of names, possible hostages for the barbarians to sport with. The ships rode at anchor, and still no one was seen rowing towards shore. The queen, the youngest prince, a minority of the council began to whisper resistance. The sun settled into the bowl of the western mountains and there were sightings, unconfirmed, of the tribes massing along the snowline, soon perhaps to descend upon the coastal highway. Citizens were seen at sundown assembling on their rooftops, some to pray and flagellate, begging forgiveness via guesswork, while others reeled and jerked in wine-red chaos, breakage of jugs their party music, and sprinkled throughout, couples at cunnilingus or fellatio, in open-air defiance of convention and dignity, as though inviting wrath from both sea and air.
The pirates showed themselves at last, with a tale of a city to beggar Carthage, a city whose glory choked the brightest into awe. A city now lifeless, no longer even smoldering, whose towers without number now littered flat so no stone topped another. Queen Dido wept, as much at the triumph of the slaughtering Greeks as at the fall of Troy. Proud Troy. Tribute-swallowing Troy. Slave-demanding, insult-dispensing Troy. Whose refugees now brooded in her, Queen Dido’s, bay, and streets, and stables, and palace gardens. Whose broodings she would caress away, embodied in this prince shorn of a kingdom, this sad Aeneas. She fed him and took away his thirst, stripped him for the bath and listened to his lament while her slave girls stripped her in turn.
Like a goddess made manifest by mist and longing, Dido played the hostess to her damaged guest. His tale was an onrush plagued by stops and starts, as memories bolted from the burning stable, tipped like coals from a fire, bedding themselves in the black unfolding epic. She was moved as much by the catch and tumble of his voice as by any of the images he forced upon her. She did not wish to believe the truths he showed her, and willed him to hallucinate her beauty as a boon, a luscious accident, a sign the gods were satiated after all, bellies full of Greek and Trojan flesh.
Slowly then, as though memory were blood and he an open-veined suicide, Aeneas quietened, and the shuddering spasms of a breaking fever allowed themselves to still beneath her caressing words, her languorous hands. The aristocrat in him was revived and reawakened and he filled his mouth with gratitude and an ambassador’s display of the all and little he knew of her land. Her beauty though! He claimed this was a new discovery, unmentioned by Troy’s chroniclers, and Dido smiled at his skill, and wondered how much the prince, how much the actor, how much the man?
Like a waterlogged petal her hand drifted among the suds and settled slowly to its clasp, tip of index to tip of thumb too narrow to enclose his risen desire. She would help him forget his lost world, and the evidence in his eyes, on his breath, in the flesh which grazed and filled her submarine hand, the evidence declared him a willing amnesiac.
But first she combed and oiled his stallion hair, and brisked her own black-as-night boy’s crop with a lather of Berber shampoo, dunking her head and quivering her back like a dolphin, blowing bubbles along his legs and surfacing into laughter.
Dido led Aeneas to her deep and many-pillowed bed, bid him play sad-stallion-mounting-happy-mare, soap-sudsy rump in air, bucking to his burrow, biting her pillows to ribbon and offering him first her tuliped cleft and then the rosy other. She arched her sacrificial back through nightmare fuck, and sorrow fuck, and vengeance fuck, till she thought she heard his orgasm arc and shift from bitterest shout to sweetest weep. So gratitude fuck, and tender fuck, and past-be-buried fuck, his fists upon her shoulder blades, his equine stump deepening the swell of her welcoming glove.
Each fresh encounter was a higher step on Dido’s stairway of wanton skill. Queen fusing with python, she lipped, and mouthed, and throated crown and shaft, eyes upturned and serious to his own, the ocean’s gurgle and slap in one ear and out the other. Aeneas gripped her working shoulders and bellowed like a murdered man. And for reciprocal tribute his forehead on her belly, dipping till his beard brushed her ticklish thighs, his mouth first nibble-fish, then octopus, straining to pierce her center, rinse her core till it purpled like an open flower, catching her exposed pearl with each upsweep of his tongue. Dido held him by his ears and howled like typhoon.
The lovers broke for daily councils with their own. The Queen to urge patience for these strangers in their midst, to reassure the twittering whitehairs that her negotiations with Aeneas were nigh on climax, would shortly resolve to a state of mutual satisfaction. Aeneas, joshing his motley warriors, bruised and sorrow-shod, urging patience for these strangers whom they found themselves among, reassuring his lip-biting, restless comrades that his negotiations with the Carthaginian queen pulsed towards a breakthrough, the tensions simmering in market stalls and temples soon enough to cool in mildest and most general affection. In the meantime, there were details to caress, sticking points to hammer smooth. And, in the mind-blanching crisis of their lovemaking, was there an element of snake and ladder, shuttle and cock?
When Aeneas, gasping to a finish behind her, drew Dido’s buttocks tight against him, to hold her as they strained to catch a breath, was there a thought which washed over his thoughtlessness, like the leak of still-warm sperm slow-spilling out of her? When Aeneas rolled Dido on her back, lowering himself for a full-mouthed kiss, then righted himself to take her with his eyes, did what he saw whisper yes, or no, or tomorrow?
Her breasts like African suns, the blush-points where his fingers had gripped and kneaded, the stretch of white Sahara from breastbone to navel, the oasis of her smoke-dark bush, the glisten of royal lips, drizzled with pearl.
The sea breeze through the archway dried their sweat to goose bumps. They peered through half-closed lids upon each other, nocturnal animals amazed at their surrender to the fierce sun.
Dido moved her hand along the inside of her thighs, watched him watching her, dandled her nails along his love-limp sex, sighing that they should sleep, the sooner to resume their close diplomacy.
The Carthaginian councilors took the heart their queen had given them, hanging on the after-perfume of her words, the oldest, like the youngest, more than half in love with her themselves. Our Dido will swallow this fellow’s hurricane and spit it back as reddest wine and sweetest cream. She’ll smile and sparkle and see his quivering mast brought low.
The ragtag Trojans, bolstered from their wheedling shame, boasted of better days to come. He’ll see we’re cushioned and well-provisioned, driving a hard bargain but a fair one, our honest Aeneas, unseduceable Prince. This Dido is but a woman, however rare and heat-provoking her beauty, still a woman.
Aeneas dreamed of sailing on the black waves. Light was everywhere, and nowhere, and the western storm-clouds towered higher than the sun, reminding him of a world gained, and loved, and lost. A fire burned on the beach behind him, diminishing as the keel found its watery groove. Aeneas shuddered and cried out, stagged by demons with black Greek eyes. Dido pressed against him all her tenderness, petting his throat, his chest, his balls, and sang a wordless lullabye, a comforting hum to draw him up from the clinging reeds of sleep, calling him with a loving tongue he could not hear.