The Pope Scorns Cardinal Batenburg’s Bespoke Fleshlights

“No, no, a thousand times no! What were you thinking? Why would I endorse such filth?”

The Pope stared angrily down at a prone, kneeling Bishop Gregory Batenburg. He could feel her glare on his neck. He kept his own frustrated stare fixed on the polished granite floor below. It wouldn’t Do to provoke her still further.

“You forget yourself, new Bishop! The Pope giveth, and the Pope taketh away! Ah, thank you. Yes, two.” Batenburg could hear the clinking of glass, and the gobble-gobble of something nightcappy. “Obliged. Off you go, Julio.” A patter of retreating feet. Gulp. Swallow. “Divine.”

Drinkies. He risked a glance up. Her Holiness’s desk now contained, among other things, two gorgeous crystalline champagne glasses, next to a half-empty bottle. Just out of arm’s reach. Chateau de Bovril. His favourite. He’d barely told a soul. How did she know?

One vessel was already half-drained. The rouge of her lipstick tinged its rim. The second sparkled with a full bubble payload.

He could feel himself salivating.

“No, they’re both for me.”

His eyes dragged up to her. The fire had receded slightly from her eyes. Still righteously pissed off, just no longer furious.

“What am I to do with you, Bishop Batenburg?” she said. She turned from him with a swish of her purple robes, yoinked both glasses off her desk, padded to her office window, and stared outside with her back to him. “Get up. I want to show you something.”

What was she playing at? He clambered to his feet. Ouch, that floor is hard.

“I have a massage at half past three,” Her Holiness added. “One of the new Thai ones. The likes of you are not important enough to displace that. Hurry up.”

He hurried.

“The Silken Mouths,” she said at last. She took another sip of the Chateau de Bovril. Her fingers clasped the cup’s stem. Mottled window-light glinted across the glass. “Do you understand why my predecessor introduced them?”

Goodness. Batenburg allowed his thoughts to scurry across that sentence. He and all Christendom knew why the Silken Mouths existed. Napoleon. As sombre contemporary historiography typically phrased it: that sultry prick had single-handedly smashed Europe.

Prior, the peasants knew their place. It was all forelock-tugging, and monogamy, and sombre piety, and nice full collection plates. Happier times.

Then bloody Napoleon rampaged across the world, coaxing out the innocent populace’s raw animal instincts, in ways no-one had ever seen. Overpowering romance! Unbearable sexual tension! Armies throbbing with protege Casanovas! Holy crap! The man obsoleted every army in the world overnight.

Just imagine. You’re a cunning king in, say, Bulgaria. You’re sandwiched between the Austrians and the Ottomans. Violent bit of the world. Raiders galore. Fuckers burn your farms, raid your towns, and steal your subjects for the heaving slave markets of Istanbul. You’re what’s for dinner.

So naturally you’ve just paid through the nose to equip your loyal lads with the latest in flintlock musket tech. You’ve trained them and drilled them and marched them through sandfly swamps and up yeti mountains, and now your grubby peasant conscripts can crash hellish roundshot volleys through even the most loathsome raider armies. And the bigger guns, the cannons and the mortars, they can drop thirty-two pounds of spherical lead, right down the Vizier’s throat, from five miles away.

Unbelievable. Your treasury may now stow within a gnat, but holy shit your loyal lads are actually winning. Never in your lifetime did you think you could even lift your gaze to the raiders, let alone fight back, let alone massacre them as once they did you. A vast weight lifts from your soul, and from the kingdom.

You exult in your triumph. At last.

Then five minutes later, freakin’ Napoleon marches from the other direction, leading ten thousand fire-breathing whores. Breasts! That’s what they look like!

He announces your Bulgaria now serves his France. In return, in his beneficence he will allow his soldiers to fellate you and yours to happy orgasmic death. Defy him, and with a heavy heart he will order his soldiers to fellate you and yours to happy orgasmic death.

Like hell, buster. You scream your loyal lads into a mighty firing line, trying to conceal your own erection. You roar the Royal order to blast their ragged ranks into a red mist of leaden death — but your lads are just ginning woozily at the breasts, and the smiles, and the gaiety. Napoleon’s whores have already nipped across the battlefield in a soaking tide, twinkled your lads’ trousers down, they’re sucking happily away, heads bobbing like clockwork, and before you can even howl your anguish, France’s courtesans are upon you and your bodyguard, spear tackles galore, overwhelming heady crush of divine perfumes, swishing of silks, your erection rages against your undies, sheer-blue-balled agony! You can barely think!

It’s almost a relief when seven courtesans faceplant you at once.

Twenty-three seconds later, their teasing fingers and lips grant you the best orgasm of your entire life. As your body heaves with sweat and your eyes roll back in your head, finally, finally, you understand how Napoleon has quite literally consumed Europe in mere months. That throat of his could de-barnacle hulls.

Now. Imagine you’re the Pope. Napoleon is the crystal meth to your Rip van Winkle. The Austin Powers to your Methuselah. How the hell does your church resist all that?

It’s not just Napoleon himself. It’s not just his armies. It’s his culture! Exporting the Revolution! Liberté, egalitié, fraternitié, sexié. It’s the sentence on the quivering, pouting lips of every revolutionary on the planet.

Frankly, Batenburg had often thought, we Catholics still hadn’t come up with much of a counter. But he’d had a bloody good go at it. Or so he’d thought.

Napoleon’s sexy, sexy wars had raged across Europe for a generation. He was unstoppable — until he came up against the ol’ one-two-three of Tsar Nicholas blue-balling Napoleon across half of Russia; the Sixth Coalition gang-banging him at the torrential battle of Leipzig; and finally, the Duke of Wellington literally submerging the chap in what would later be known as history’s first ever Bukkake Blitzkrieg.

Right. That was twenty-five years ago. A war of invigorating free love. Since then, STDs have multiplied, and raged across the world. So many deaths, so many lives ruined. You need contraception. You need good, solid family planning. It was his responsibility as a pillar of the Baden community to save countless lives.

But how do you tell the freakin’ Pope that?

Batenburg cursed his foolishness. He’d arrived half an hour before, in such high hopes. Passed through the well-guarded borders of the Papal State, clambered through the Vatican gates, a suitcase of experimental condoms and other paraphernalia clasped safe under one arm. Hopeful.

“Stop gawking,” snapped Her Holiness, still holding a glass in each hand. “Answer me. The Silken Mouths.” She sipped again from the first glass. “Why do they exist?”

“To … to test our faith,” said Batenburg. “To strengthen our will against the seas of sin around us.” Standard doctrine. Every altar boy knew that. His eyes followed the second, untouched glass waving around in Her Holiness’s grasp. God knew he could do with a drink. Jagged anxiety churned through him, and a wee dram of booze would smooth it all away…

“Eyes on me. Yes. Our faith,” said the Pope. “Our faith. So much vileness exists in our fallen world. Our faith is as a sword and shield against it. Under certain circumstances — certain circumstances — we may wish to channel that vileness. Inflict it upon us. Self-flagellate. With me so far?”

“Yes, Your Holiness,” he managed. “Of course I follow you.”

“Of course you follow me.” She swung an arm across her vast Papal office window, giving them both a grand view of St. Peter’s Square. “Describe what you see.”

What was she getting at? “Fifty nuns training for a wet T-shirt contest.”

“The window itself, imbecile.” She knocked back her remaining Chateau de Bovril.

Oh, right. “…It’s a stained-glass artwork depicting St. George penis-fencing Attila the Hun.”

“Indeed. Homoerotic, yes? Just look at those cocks throb. Why, it makes a girl’s ovaries quiver. Why might you suppose the Pope would install such a thing in her own office?” Her eyes glinted at him. “Think carefully now.”

“It’s another test?”

“You can do better than that, Bishop.”

Batenburg tried to think. Ah, right. “It’s a … continuous test. It’s unceasing. It forces you to set an example to the world. What better way to keep the head of the Catholic Church firm in his or her dedication to root out sin?”

“Got it in one. I must admit,” her tone softened a tad, “even I was mightily impressed with your initiation last month. Six of the other nine candidates orgasmed within three minutes, I was led to believe. But you? An astonishing performance! The College of Cardinals had never heard of a candidate staying fully flaccid throughout. I believe the Silken Mouth assigned to you for the initiation was expelled from the Mouths for her appalling performance?”

“Only at first,” said Batenburg. Firmer ground! He suddenly felt safer. “Her behaviour at the initiation was impeccable. Her failure to bring me to orgasm was my doing, not hers. My faith was stronger, that’s all. I had to personally intervene in her disciplinary hearing, then allow her to fellate me before her judges, this time without attempting to resist orgasm. She completed me in nineteen seconds.”

“Oh?” said the Pope. “My information is not as current as yours, it seems. But no matter.”

Her tone hardened once more. “I am at a loss, then, to understand why you should besmirch my office with the likes of this!”

She stabbed her unBovriled arm at his suitcase, open on her desk. Condom snowdrifts sprawled from it. Vibrators. Dildos. India-rubber vaginas. Floggers. A fascinating medley of apparatus to spice up even the dustiest orifice.

Or so he thought. Batenburg’s heart sank. What a fool he’d been to think the freakin’ Pope would approve?

Batenburg opened his mouth.

“Choose your words carefully, Bishop. They may be your last.”

Batenburg closed his mouth. Behind it, his soul howled. What a fool she was being! How could she be so blind? The sexual disease epidemics had ravaged Baden for over a generation! Napoleon’s folly, some called it. His church’s graveyards bulged with Baden’s victims of syphilis. Batenburg’s heart ached to think of it. But how could he fight back? Surely God would provide…?

The years rolled by, and the churches vanished beneath their graveyard payloads. God hadn’t provided.

And a group of young mothers approached Priest Batenburg in the dead of night, whispering of vileness. Like condoms. Contraception. Family planning. And of the possibility of at least one child outliving them.

It took them months to talk him round. But talk him round they did. And, turned out, sexual pleasure and lovemaking was bloody amazing! Being sucked off by adoring ladyfriends was bloody amazing! Gorgeous tingles of pleasure coursed through him, through them, through the world. Lurking beneath midnight blankets, they taught him how to reciprocate.

Come on. There’s no way God would frown upon this. It’s amazing.

But what of the STD problem? You can’t go around shagging all willy-nilly. You get infected, and you infect others, as Napoleon’s Grande Armée discovered the hard way.

So Batenburg and his new lovers had researched, and self-taught, and discovered the sublime delights now spilling across the Pope’s desk.

But how could he ever win her over? Cunnilingus coupons? Batenburg cursed his foolishness at his lack of preparation.

“I’m … sorry, Your Holiness,” he managed. His voice felt and sounded thick in his throat. “I don’t know what came over me. I must have got overexcited.”

“Good boy. You won’t mind me disposing of them, then?”

“N…. no, Your Holiness.”

“Well done,” said Pope Jezebel XIII. “Care for a drink?”