Tamerlane's Boys 25

By Pueros

Chapter 25 – Recruits

(Shiraz, Persia, September 1393)

“So how did you gain access to Shiraz so easily?” an incredulous Vissarion asked of Arman, who was now without other company whilst attending to his best friend’s recovery. The doctors, recruited urgently to check the young Georgian’s welfare, had departed, having assured the dreaded conqueror that the 16 year-old was fine, apart from some bruising to his oral and anal cavities. This damage would heal with time, aided by the proficient herbal salve the young Armenian had recently intimately located in the latter orifice, after gently bathing his patient.

Vissarion was now redressed, and lying on the magnificent bed in the opulent palace quarters previously occupied by the now former ruler of Shiraz. Meanwhile, Tamerlane, assured as to his favourite catamite’s welfare, had vengeful business to conduct elsewhere, from perpetrating certain of which his more merciful boys knew that it would be useless to attempt to dissuade the furious conqueror.

Arman, whilst sitting on the bed next to his resting best friend, who was 16 but looked 14, and whose silky golden locks he was gently stroking, smiled at the big sensuous blue eyes gazing back at him. The young Armenian then began to relate the background to Vissarion’s rescue.

(Yadz, Persia, same time)

News about Tamerlane’s taking of the city of Shiraz had not yet reached Yadz, far to the northeast, where Rashu was watching the arrival of another Chinese caravan in his city. The young Zoroastrian had just reluctantly said farewell to his fellow 10 years old, Teimuraz.

Teimuraz, despite the very pleasant local company and the fact that he had not had time to recover fully from his recent ordeal, had left Yadz. The dutiful boy had wanted to return immediately to Shiraz and, more importantly, Arman, accompanied by the cavalry escort kindly left behind by his young master to assist Rashu to continue the search for him.

The sight of Chinese caravans, passing through Yadz on their trading journeys along the mighty Silk Road, to and from their distant homeland, was not uncommon. However, the beautiful Rashu suffered a worrying feeling of foreboding regarding this latest arrival, which, like the one that had abducted Teimuraz, counted a number of attractive young slaveboys amongst the goods purchased and being taken to the far east.

Rashu was sad at the thought that all of the boys would undoubtedly soon be converted into nullified eunuchs for the Chinese market, where such goods from the west were greatly prized. However, the young Zoroastrian somehow did not believe that this consideration was the root cause of his distinct unease.

(Shiraz, Persia, same time)

Tamerlane, standing near to a platform in Shiraz’s main central square, was supervising the initial stages of the very slow deaths to be suffered by Vissarion’s three gaol abusers. Alongside this currently exceedingly anguished trio was a fourth man, sentenced to experience a similar terrible fate. However, this condemned miscreant was not a citizen of the city but had formerly been one of the conqueror’s senior generals, whose final merciful demise would not arrive for another week.

Qazagh, furious at Vissarion’s accepted counsel to try to secure the surrender of Shiraz without a fight, which promised to deprive him of the lucrative spoils to be gained by looting, had despatched his own secret emissary to the city in advance of the young Georgian’s embassy. One of the principal reasons for the general’s previous rise, in the hierarchy of Tamerlane’s vast mobile army, had been his proficient use of local spies. This practice had not only enabled him to provide his master with useful campaign information, which had brought his advancement, but also secured other private data that had led to furtively acquired rich plunder, invariably not shared with others.

Qazagh had regularly tampered with the intelligence that he passed onto Tamerlane, whenever it suited his greed. However, this avariciousness had eventually caused the general’s downfall.

The man, whom Qazagh had despatched to Shiraz, was a local merchant, well-known in the area and therefore someone to whom the gates of the city, not yet surrounded or besieged by Tamerlane’s army, would be opened. The trader was also of sufficient importance to have his request for an immediate audience with the local prince granted, not least because the ruler also knew him as a provider, in return for a monetary consideration, of useful information.

The merchant had been commissioned by Qazagh, in return for an eventual slice of the booty gained from the violent sacking of Shiraz, to tell the city’s prince that he had learnt that Vissarion’s mission of peace was false. The trader had untruthfully suggested that, if the young Georgian managed to persuade the ruler to open the gates of his metropolis, then Tamerlane would let his army destroy and pillage the place, regardless of any guarantees his 16 years old emissary had delivered.

The prince, having acquired very useful and truthful information from the mercantile source before, foolishly believed the man. However, the ruler’s reaction to Vissarion’s later arrival as Tamerlane’s emissary was not as the devious treacherous Qazagh had anticipated.

Qazagh had expected the local prince, known for possessing a short violent temper that often caused him to act unwisely, to murder Vissarion, having been aggrieved at Tamerlane’s supposed perfidy. The general was therefore highly displeased that the ruler, in the event, did not act in this manner, which would have triggered the dreaded conqueror’s vengeful fury, so dooming Shiraz. Instead, the young Georgian was imprisoned as a hostage.

This acute disappointment had caused Qazagh to make his literally fatal mistake. As Tamerlane removed his army from the environs of Shiraz, in response to the local prince’s promise to catapult Vissarion from the city walls if he did not, the general refused to reward the returning merchant for his covert mission.

Qazagh’s lack of generosity was based on his angry declaration there was to be no plunder from which the trader could earn commission. However, the unhappy merchant was not the type of person to be messed about with in this manner, particularly as he realised that the general was already enormously wealthy and so could afford to provide him with at least a little financial recompense for his efforts. The trader also appreciated that there was someone else who would undoubtedly pay him vast riches for his particular knowledge, if the data could be safely delivered.

The merchant was astute enough to recognise that a direct approach to Tamerlane would be very unwise, given the conqueror’s notorious short temper, which was often fatal towards those upon whom it was inflicted. It was the sight of Arman, rushing back from Yadz on his own, that eventually provided the clever man with the idea as to how he might accomplish another, this time hopefully highly lucrative, trade.

The merchant was aware not only of Tamerlane’s famous boys, and their influence on the dreaded conqueror, but also the well-known common sense and reasonableness of Arman and Vissarion. He therefore approached the young Armenian, with confidence as to how the 16 years old would treat his story, which, of course, would be slightly amended from reality in order to sanctify the trader’s own role in recent affairs.

The merchant managed to intercept Arman one evening, after the young Armenian had left the tent of Tamerlane, who was distraught at his favourite catamite’s fate, to return to the canopy the youth shared with Sibur. He told the young warrior that he had information that might be of great benefit to the welfare of Vissarion and, accordingly, the 16 years old was more than happy to hear what the man had to convey.

Having found a quiet place in which to talk, the merchant confessed to his own role in undermining Vissarion’s embassy, believing that the truth about this might now eventually emerge anyway, to his undoubted excruciating detriment. However, he excused his action by advising, with an air of guiltlessness, that he thought that he had been sent by Qazagh as part of a convoluted plot to take Shiraz, organised with Tamerlane’s knowledge, although the trader himself was ignorant of the full details. He then told the young Armenian that subsequent happenings had made him realise that the general had been acting on his own, for perhaps treacherous reasons, and that he should somehow warn the conqueror about such duplicity.

Having secured his revenge on the greedy general, the merchant now sought monetary riches by telling Arman that he could try to make amends, for his role in Vissarion’s misfortune, by obtaining information as to how the defences of Shiraz could be furtively breached. The trader lied that he would need a substantial amount of gold to secure, from others through bribery, the full details, of which he gave a brief outline, whereas, in fact, he was already aware of the requisite knowledge. He additionally requested, in return for the data, anonymity and protection from Tamerlane’s wrath for his, using his own words, “Innocent involvement in Qazagh’s evil plot.”

Arman was not foolish enough to believe totally in the merchant’s claims, including the contention that he had been an unwilling stooge in Qazagh’s wicked design. However, just as the crafty trader had anticipated, the young Armenian also did not care too much about the extent of the man’s involvement, as long as the situation was put right and Vissarion was rescued.

Arman therefore agreed to the merchant’s terms, even securing, from the keeper of his master’s mobile treasury, substantial largesse as a down-payment for the supposed bribe. Naturally, the official in charge of the conqueror’s vast wealth could not deny the relevant request of one of Tamerlane’s trusted boys.

On eventually delightedly receiving the information from Arman about a way to circumvent Shiraz’s walls to gain furtive entry into the city, Tamerlane did not immediately turn his vast army round to return to the Persian metropolis. The conqueror did not want to alert the defenders to their possible renewed danger until it was too late.

Tamerlane instead secretly retraced his steps at night with two small mobile forces, having had the rightfully terrified Qazagh arrested and encouraged to confess fully to his deceit, by means of a visit to a tent full of torture apparatus, always ready in the encampment to question captives or traitors. The conqueror then personally organised his soldiers in their damming and diverting of the narrow stream, hidden in nearby hills, which fed some of Shiraz’s wells through a long secret tunnel, usually totally filled with water.

Clambering through the drained, but still damp and very confined, lengthy tunnel was not pleasant. However, as soldiers, led by Sibur and Arman, subsequently climbed up and out of some wells to surprise Shiraz’s garrison and open the gates to another, bigger, furtively waiting warrior force, headed by Tamerlane himself, all felt that the arduous endeavour had been well worth the effort.

With the somnolent garrison quickly overcome and Shiraz soon at Tamerlane’s mercy, it was very fortunate, for the citizenry of the city of the poet Hafiz, that the conqueror’s current forces were too small in number, as well as preoccupied with security matters, to bother immediately with vengeful rape and pillage. By the time the main army later arrived, it was also then too late to wreak such havoc because a rescued Vissarion had prevailed upon his master to forgive the people. Having learnt of Qazagh’s treachery, the beautiful young Georgian had used all his substantial charms, not least his pleading sensuous blue eyes, to beg his master to reprieve the local populace from terrible retribution. However, the 16 year-old had himself been too late to save the local prince and some of the ruler’s immediate male family, not from death but from being blinded and castrated.

Tamerlane had perpetrated these appalling acts because of some early unwillingness on the part of the local ruler to relate where Vissarion was being kept prisoner. The conqueror proposed to follow the extracted eyes by detaching many other parts of princely anatomies, but the eventually released young Georgian’s intervention had brought this to a halt. Accordingly, only the visual organs concerned, along with some regal testes, were subsequently fed to feathered predators of carrion.

The blind emasculated local prince was eventually despatched, along with his family, some of whom were now as unfortunately disabled as him, into distant exile. Meanwhile, the wily merchant, who had revealed the rescue route into the city, not only escaped retribution, for his own original role in Vissarion’s imprisonment as a hostage, but also retired from trade to live the rest of his long life in wealthy luxury in another part of Persia.

(Yadz, Persia, next day)

Rashu, beginning to miss the presence of Arman and Teimuraz in his city, was going on an errand for his guardian. As the boy traversed a shortcut, along one of Yadz’s many, narrow back alleys, he heard footsteps behind. The 10 years old turned his lovely head, crowned with silky brown hair, which matched his eye colour, to see who was also taking this path. The young Zoroastrian noticed that two Chinese merchants were following.

As Rashu returned his gaze to his front, he then saw two other Oriental traders approaching him from the other direction. A shiver ran down the beautiful boy’s body but nevertheless he tried to dismiss the concern that had invaded his mind. Surely, the 10 years old reasoned, there was nothing sinister in such a situation and his sudden worries were just paranoia. However, the young Zoroastrian’s attempt to dismiss his fears was soon proven to be inappropriate when, shortly afterwards, four pairs of adult arms grabbed hold of him in the otherwise quiet thoroughfare and a strange-smelling cloth was placed firmly over his rosy lips.

Darkness then overwhelmed Rashu’s appalled mind.

(Silk Road, east of Yadz, Persia, two days later)

As Teimuraz had so recently found himself, the tremulous Rashu was now part of a long single column of approximately twenty similarly naked and bound beautiful young boys, all aged between about 7 and 11, positioned between a central pair of wagons amidst a Chinese mercantile caravan. The young Zoroastrian’s delightful 10 years old body was shimmering in the strong sun, a result of the effect of the light on the oil that had been smeared on his delectable, completely smooth form, as protection from the fierce solar rays.

Rashu had been rendered unconscious by his abductors by means of a cloth drenched in a mysterious fluid, the tranquillising properties of which would not be known to the western world for centuries. When the boy had later woken, he had found himself already naked and far from Yadz. The 10 years old then subsequently quickly found himself walking, as Teimuraz had done, towards his new destiny. The young Zoroastrian’s small slim penis also incongruously rigidly pointed the direction, with his protestations at his predicament having been rapidly ended by several harsh agonising lashes of a leather crop across the lustrous curvature of his lovely bottom.

Rashu’s hands were bound behind him and his lithe neck was attached by rope to the young pretty nude in front. However, unlike Teimuraz, the young Zoroastrian did not have to ask the leading boy about the identity of other youngsters, whom he had noticed were lying in the covered wagon immediately ahead, with their groins covered in bandaging. From knowledge acquired previously, the 10 years old also appreciated that, before long, he was scheduled to be placed in the cart too, whilst he recovered from the removal of his genitalia.

(Shiraz, Persia, same time)

Arman and Teimuraz set off, with their usual cavalry protection, to return to Yadz. The young Armenian thoughtfully wanted to thank and reward Rashu for the young Zoroastrian’s help in saving his squire from nullification and transit to China.

Arman and Teimuraz knew that the arduous journey, across the Zagros Mountains, to the home city of the delightful Rashu would take at least four days.

(Silk Road, east of Yadz, Persia, ten days later, early October 1393)

Rashu now endured what Teimuraz had so recently suffered at an alike spot, although that dreadful circumstance had ended happily for all concerned, except the Chinese merchants involved. The young petrified Zoroastrian, now tied, in a spreadeagled standing position, between two sturdy wooden posts, somehow did not believe that this similar event would turn out equally well for him, even after praying to his religion’s supreme deity, Ahura Mazda.

Rashu’s small ball sac had been tied tightly with thin leather cord to help to stem the later blood loss. The young Zoroastrian’s desperate pleas not to suffer the same fate, as all the other boys in the possession of the Chinese traders, had then been not only ignored but also stifled by an effective gag. The 10 year-old could also now see the cauterising iron glowing red-hot in an adjacent brazier, and the emasculating knife in the hand of the smirking Oriental mercantile leader as he approached.

The merchant knelt before the terrified tearful Rashu and pulled the boy’s doomed genitals, incongruously displaying a small but fulsome erection, harshly downwards to stretch and expose the smooth scrotum in readiness for severing. The trader then let his knife come to rest against the left side of the base of the young Zoroastrian’s ball sac, before soliciting a muffled scream as he squeezed and pulled down further on the 10 years old testes.

The merchant then paused and, in decent Persian, asked Rashu “Do you know, boy, why I organised your abduction from Yadz in order to perpetrate this on you and then sell you in my homeland as a nullified slave?” The tearful anguished 10 years old was obviously not expected to answer verbally because of his gag and so just nodded his sublime appalled head negatively.

“Well,” the man advised, “I recruit you for service as a eunuch because I discovered in Yadz, from boastful citizens, that you played a prominent role in the massacre of the traders in the previous caravan, which had passed through your city on the way to my homeland. Their leader, murdered by Tamerlane’s men, was my brother!”

As the Chinese mercantile leader appraised Rashu of this actuality, the boy felt the sharp blade begin its dastardly and excruciating deed. Meanwhile, a small amount of white fluid was expelled from the young Zoroastrian’s resolutely hard cock, representing the first and last time that he would expel such reproductive juice. Of course, the 10 years old was in no fit state to reflect on the fact that the ability of his endangered genitalia to produce such a substance, at such a tender age, was remarkable.

Rashu’s beautiful frame experienced a strange concoction of intense ecstasy and agony as he was being slowly and carefully deprived of his boyhood, the unparalleled delight of previously unknown sexual orgasm mixing with the similarly unprecedented excruciation of nullification. However, despite the agonising intensity of the latter, the 10 years old somehow remained conscious. The young Zoroastrian was therefore able to appreciate fully the close-up view of his own severed bloody genitalia, presented to his appalled eyes by the now standing and happy Oriental emasculator, before the small organs were eventually nonchalantly cast onto the ground nearby.

Rashu was to retain the awful memory of his severed boyhood, little erection still oozing a little cum into the merchant’s palm, for the rest of his life. However, perhaps thankfully, immediate recall was short lived, as the horrific feel and smell of burning flesh, caused by the cauterisation of his terrible wound, now induced unconsciousness.

(Shiraz, Persia, two months later, December 1393)

Tamerlane, wintering with his army in the environs of Shiraz, had been forced to commission yet another bigger personal tent. Not only did his present coterie of lovely catamites, Vissarion, Nicolai and Rezan, respectively 16, 12 and 10 years old, have to be accommodated but also his guest, the young Muscovite’s 8 years old brother, Yaroslav, and a new recruit to the conqueror’s service.

Meanwhile, 16 years old Arman shared, with his older lover, Sibur, another nearby tent. This canopy had also recently been enlarged, on this occasion to accommodate the young Armenian’s 10 years old squire and sporadic sexual playmate, Teimuraz.

Vissarion and Nicolai were currently fussing over the latest recruit to Tamerlane’s service, not in the conqueror’s vast, luxurious and warm tent but in the cool open air of this bright but cold winter’s day. Accompanied by the usual mounted bodyguard, the young trio had gone hunting, an activity rarely undertaken by the newcomer previously. Rezan had reluctantly remained behind in the encampment because it was his turn to look after their master’s immediate daytime needs.

Vissarion and Nicolai had been gratified to observe the look of delighted exhilaration in their younger companion’s face whilst they had gone about their enjoyable business. The young Georgian and Muscovite had been especially pleased to see the regular broad smiles on the boy’s beautiful visage, now happily accumulating a healthy cheerful rosy hue once more.

As Vissarion, Nicolai and their new younger friend finally returned to Tamerlane’s encampment, with their bodyguard and their copious hunting trophies, the newcomer asked “Can we three do that again some time soon?” “Of course we can,” the young Georgian answered. He then looked at the young Muscovite and winked.

Nicolai knew instantly, from the signal, what was required of him. The young 12 years old Muscovite was to join the young 16 years old Georgian in a refrain they often mutually indulged.

“Of course we can,” the beautiful and broadly smiling Nicolai and Vissarion joyously shouted simultaneously, in an almost melodic tone, “because we eunuchs have to stick together!”

Rashu could not help but join his new friends in their subsequent laughter, as he finally came to terms with the fact that there was, after all, a life to be enjoyed after nullification.

(To be continued in chapter 26 – ‘Battles’)

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