The Shepherdess

What follows is a tragedy and ultimately a love story. As in life, it contains some distressing events including a description of assisted suicide. Assisted suicide is a controversial topic and I thought long and hard before including it in my story and I am not advocating its use. It is included because it tells the reader more about one of the protagonists Emily. If you find this distressing please do not read on. There is also a metaphysical part to this story so if this is not to your taste be warned.

All protagonists in this story are over eighteen years old. None of the characters depicted are real and any similarity to real people, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

As always, any grammatical errors or typos are mine alone. Whilst I am sorry that they happen, they are almost inevitable on a site hosting stories written by amateurs for fun. Contrary to what the occasional critic may believe, I proofread, many times over, what I have written. Unfortunately, however hard I try, something always slips past. Hopefully, any errors will not prevent readers from enjoying the story.

As I often do, I have included endnotes to explain the story's background to anyone interested. They are included to provide background to the story and sometimes to explain English slang to those readers not familiar with it.

Please score and comment. Constructive comments are valuable and help authors write better and encourage them to write more.

The Shepherdess

It is almost a decade since my wife, Emily, took her own life. The day she passed, she told me that she loved me and that she would wait for me in heaven, instructed me to live a good and happy life, kissed me goodbye, and drank a glass of burgundy laced with phenobarbital. Then, I held her hand as she lay back in bed and slowly fell asleep. For half an hour, I watched her chest rise and fall under the bed sheets until imperceptibly the movement slowed before she stopped breathing and died. It was only then that I let go of her tiny hand and kissed her forehead, and as I cried for my loss I knew that she was finally at rest.

***

I had known Emily for most of my life. We first met at primary school In Liverpool where we were in the same class. Back then, she lived with her parents on Penny Lane, and I lived not far away with my mum and dad on Church Road, less than half a mile away. Right from the beginning, we were inseparable, and even though we went to different secondary schools we stayed best friends and sometime during our late teens, we found we were dating each other. I don't know that we ever discussed it, but somehow, even then, we knew we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together. We went our separate ways for a short while when we finished school. Amy remained in Liverpool to study history at the university, whilst I was accepted onto a degree course in physics at the University of Lancaster.

Lancaster is about sixty miles north of Liverpool and was just over an hour by train from Lime Street Station, so staying in touch with one another was relatively easy. Most weekends, one or other of us would board a train on Friday evening to return home on Sunday evening, Our preferred option was for Emily to stay with me in Lancaster because I had my own room (and double bed) away from the prying eyes of my patients, whilst Emily still lived at home with her mum and dad.

***

When I first moved to Lancaster, both Emily and I were virgins - although not for long. The first weekend after I moved, she arrived at my house late on Friday afternoon. I was sharing the house with three other guys and, fortunately, we had not had enough time to turn the communal living space into a tip. Nonetheless, Emily's "clean freak" and bossy sides showed themselves. She spent several hours cleaning the kitchen and bathroom, and then a further half hour hoovering and dusting my room before she declared herself satisfied.

"Do you have clean sheets and pillowcases?" she asked.

"I've only slept on them for a few days."

"I don't plan to lose my virginity in a bed with dirty sheets. Now go and have a shower. When you come back, get into bed, and wait for me."

She picked up a pillow, removed the pillowcase, and then my pyjamas from where I had left them under the pillow. She placed them on the armchair in the corner of the room and then smiled before speaking.

"You'll not need these... and you won't need condoms. Mum and I went to the GP, and I'm on the pill."

***

I stood in the shower and lathered myself. My uncut cock jutted out in front of me, and I covered it in soap and gently pulled the foreskin back and forth a few times. The moment when I would finally put my dick in Emily had finally arrived and I was both excited and frightened in equal measure. My apprehension was born of inexperience. We may have been going out a long time but the most I had ever done was touch her breasts under her sweater when we kissed in the back row of the cinema. I had felt her nipples harden before she took my hand away. I still remember what she said.

"Please stop before I can't control myself. I love you and I will sleep with you. But when I do, it will be in a bed with clean sheets, and we'll take our time. I'll not have a quick knee-trembler in some back alley like a cheap tart. I'm better than that."

Emily had taken charge, as she often did. Most of the time, it suited us both for her to lead and for me to follow, but as I stood naked in the shower it occurred to me that on this occasion I was the one with the penis and Emily would expect me to perform. I desperately wanted to make her happy but wasn't sure how to do It.

I needn't have worried. Emily made sure of that.

***

I lay under the duvet and waited. The room was toasty warm and smelt of freshly laundered sheets and lavender. Emily, organised as ever, had fed the coin-operated gas fire and had remembered to bring both one-pound coins and air freshener.

Shortly, the door opened, and Emily appeared. She turned and locked the door behind herself, before crossing the room and standing at the end of the bed. I saw a pretty brown-eyed girl with ruby-red lips and short black hair smiling down at me.

"Would you like to see what you're going to get?" she asked.

I nodded.

"I didn't hear you."

"Yes, please."

She slowly undid the buttons on the quilted house coat she was wearing, slid it over her shoulders, and let it fall to the floor. For the first time, I saw her naked. She was of medium height with pale white skin, tits the size of grapefruits, narrow hips a big arse, and fleshy thighs. Between them, I could see her hairless slit - Emily had planned well.

"You like?" she enquired.

"Oh, yes. You're beautiful."

She got into bed beside me, rolled over to face me, and kissed me. She smelt and tasted of strawberries and cream. As we embraced I felt her belly pressing hard against my prick, and she must have felt it too because, after a minute or so, she stopped kissing me.

"I want to see," she said and threw back the duvet.

Lying flat on my back, my penis pointed vertically into the air, and I saw Emily studying it.

"You're beautiful too," she murmured, before she leaned towards me and tentatively took it between her fingers.

"Do you touch yourself and think of me?" she asked. "Or do you watch porn? Don't lie. You don't lie well."

"Both," I gasped.

"Well, now you can watch me and then I'm going to give you something you can think about when you're alone."

With her knees bent and legs apart, she licked two fingers and placed them between her legs. Then, as she slowly rubbed herself, her fingers slid up and down my shaft. I moaned in pleasure and Emily's confidence grew. She gripped my foreskin firmly between her fingers and pulled it to cover the penile tip before retracting it to reveal the swollen engorged head - whilst all the while her fingertips moved in a circular motion against herself.

I had never known such pleasure, and as she continued to jerk me, she reached across, took two fingers of my right hand in her left, and guided them to her sex. For the first time, I felt her swollen bud, now slick with her love juice.

"That's my clitoris - my little penis. Use two fingers, like I've been doing, small circles, nice and slow."

I did exactly as she asked. At first, I was hesitant but emboldened by her enthusiastic response, I enthusiastically moved my fingertips against her, oh-so-sensitive, bud.

"That's good, so good. Yes, like that. Just like that," she moaned, as her fingers worked on me.

Eventually, I heard her whisper.

"I'm ready. Please put it in me. I want to feel you inside of me."

Then, as I rolled between her legs and, supported myself on my elbows, I felt her take my penis in her hand and guide the tip between her cunt lips.

"Now," she murmured.

I stared down at her beautiful face, watched her closely, and started to push myself inside of her. As I entered, her cunt muscles gripped me tightly, but I slowly continued to inch into her. For just a moment, there was brief resistance, but my ramrod stiff prick moved past it with ease. I saw Emily flinch, then sigh, and I was fully inside.

"Did I hurt you?"

"Of course not. I'm so full. You feel huge inside of me."

I imagined that, at that moment, my prick was harder than it had ever been, and I started to move in and out. At first, I was cautious, moving slowly back and forth and keeping a gentle steady rhythm. I was scared of hurting her and Emily must have sensed this too. She certainly felt it and had no hesitation in telling what she wanted.

"I'm not a doll," she murmured. "I'm your woman and I need a good hard fucking. Now give it to me. I've made us wait too long."

Her words had precisely the effect that she wanted, and I started to drive myself hard and fast against her. The bedboard banged against the wall, the mattress creaked, and my balls slapped. She raised her thighs off the mattress and started to talk.

"That's better. That's so much better.

Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yes.

Fuck me like a whore. Fuck me like a whore."

I had never heard Emily talk like this before. She rarely swore and her passion and her dirty talk only served to fuel my desire, and now I frantically rammed my penis into her. We rutted like animals united in mutual ecstasy and need. Until, under my gaze, her pretty face contorted, and she screamed.

"I'm going to come! I'm going to come! I'm coming! I'm coming! I'M COMING! OHHHHHHHHHH!"

Beneath me, her body bucked and trembled, her thighs tightened around me, and her cunt already gripping me tight, squeezed further against my hardness. It was too much for me and her rapture drove me over the edge, and as she orgasmed so did I, my penis rhythmically pumping my sperm deep inside her as I too, voiced my pleasure.

We lay entwined recovering.

"Thank fuck they've gone to the cinema," I said.

"What difference does it make? Sooner or later, they're going to hear us. And I'm sure it won't do your reputation any harm to be the guy with the horny girlfriend."

"The beautiful horny girlfriend."

She laughed.

"Aren't horny and beautiful the same for most men?"

"I'm not 'most' men."

"No, you're mine."

***

A little later I was hard again. This time I fingered Emily to her climax before she rode me to another noisy orgasm. Afterwards, she held me tight.

"Thank you," she said. That was beautiful. "

"I should be thanking you. If you hadn't taken the lead..."

"It was time. You'd have got around to it.... Most men do. Mum says that the idea that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach is rubbish. She says it's through his penis."

"Actually, I'm hungry," I said and laughed.

Just around the corner was an Indian restaurant and we got a carryout and brought it home. Then we sat in the lounge with plastic containers on our laps and used plastic spoons and forks to eat our curry and chips.

"Whose idea was the pill? I asked.

"Mum's. She knew what I planned. She told me that It's more effective than condoms, and my father refused to wear them. 'Washing your feet with your wellies on' she told me,' he said."

***

That was life with Emily. Wherever she went, I followed. In our relationship, she wore the trousers. Despite that, she was not overpowering or domineering and never put me down in front of others. She did most of the thinking for both of us, but we shared our lives and everything in them.

We graduated in 2012. The plan was that I would return to Liverpool to study for a doctorate in physics and Emily was also going to study for a doctorate in Middle Eastern and Asian studies at the university. Things were going our way, and the future looked bright. Sadly, but also fortuitously, my eighty-year-old granny had died in January the year before and had left me her house on Smithdown Road and a small sum of cash.

The house was a mid-terrace with three bedrooms and needed a little t.l.c., but when Emily and I moved in together about eighteen months later we had repainted most of it, and with the help of my father, a keen handyman, we had modernised the bathroom and kitchen. We threw out or sold much of Gran's dark old-fashioned furniture and replaced it with a few pieces of modern self-assembled stuff. By then, we had run out of money and part of the house remained unfurnished.

Amy was unbothered.

"We have everything we need, somewhere to cook, somewhere to eat, somewhere to shit, and most important a brand new bed, somewhere to fuck, it's perfect."

The day we moved in we didn't use the bed straight away, First I took her doggy style over the kitchen table and then we sat on the sofa in the lounge and watched porn on our brand-new wall-mounted television. As Emily slowly jerked my cock, we watched a Latino couple fucking. The woman was very pretty with big perfectly round buttocks and large firm tits, and she was also holding a prick in her hand. The guy was well-hung, and his prick must have been at least eight inches long and looked huge between her small slender fingers. Under her touch, he soon became very hard and then she took his swollen tip into her mouth, before kneeling on all fours on the bed to invite him between her fleshy, swollen, and depilated cunt lips.

All the time, Emily had gently slid her hand up and down my shaft, now stiff under her touch and the sight of the activity on the screen in front of us.

By now the stud was driving himself rapidly in and out whilst the woman was giving vocal encouragement, and it was then that I heard Emily speak.

"You'd like to fuck her wouldn't you?" she said, before she dribbled spit onto my nob end, adjusted her grip, and continued to wank me.

I groaned.

"Of course, you'd like to fuck her." There's nothing wrong with fantasies. I fantasise about a huge black cock filling my cunt. It will never happen, but it turns me on. I fantasise about watching you fuck another woman and wanking myself off as you do her."

She paused, and when she spoke again, her voice was husky with desire

"Now fuck me. Fuck me like he's fucking her."

Then, she lay back on the sofa with her legs spread wide. Her sex was pink and dripping with her juices and I slid inside her easily. As I pounded Emily, behind me on the screen, I could hear a female voice wailing in ecstasy, and very soon Emily joined her, announcing at the top of her voice that she was going to come.

Later we lay in bed. As I was dropping off, I thought I heard Emily say something.

"I'll never have a black cock inside of me, but one day you'll both fill and taste a different pussy and I shall enjoy watching. It's somewhere on my bucket list."

Unsure I had heard her correctly, I opened my eyes and turned towards her, but she was asleep. By the morning. I had forgotten what she had said."

***

In December, the year before, we had been in a bed together when she first told me of her plan to visit Uzbekistan.

"It's on my bucket list, which is very long," she had explained, in her organised way. "It's never too early to start."

I wasn't surprised. You can't live with a historian without them talking about what interests them. I knew that Emily planned to write her thesis about some aspect of the Persian Samanid Empire that occupied modern-day Eastern Iran and Uzbekistan in the ninth and tenth centuries. She was enthralled by the cities of Samarkand and Bukhara which had been in turn, capital cities of this empire. Both cities lay on the Silk Road, a trade route stretching from China in the East to the Mediterranean in the West, and which was active from the second until the fifteenth century.

***

It was the following June, and in Samarkand, when we stood outside the Gur-e Amir or, in Persian, "The Tomb of the King." This blue-tiled domed building was the tomb of Timur (Tamerlane). If it had been situated anywhere in the West it would have been thronged with tourists, but on that June day in the late afternoon, there were only a few people around. It was a cloudless, windless day and under the blue sky, the temperature was still in the mid-thirties.

Inside the mausoleum, where Timur lay buried in a crypt under the floor, it was cool and quiet, and Emily stood silently for maybe fifteen minutes before she turned and went outside.

"I wanted to bottle my feelings," she said. "I'm not sure that I will ever come back here again. He was one of the greatest military leaders in history."

"Responsible for the deaths of millions," I added.

"And maybe not just when he was alive," she replied.

I was puzzled by her comment, but just then I was distracted by a woman begging, and I said nothing.

A little later, we sat in a nearby café and drank tea. It was only then that I asked her what she had meant.

"Have you heard of the curse of Timur?" she asked.

"No."

"Well, legend has it that Timur placed a curse on anybody who opened his grave."

"Didn't Shakespeare do the same?"

"Yes, he cursed anybody who moved his bones, although nobody has."

"And has anybody opened Tamerlane's grave?"

"Yes."

"And did anything happen?" I asked smiling.

I was already preparing myself for a story about a graverobber who died of some mysterious illness, killed by Timur from beyond the grave.

"The tomb was opened in June 1941 by a team of Russian archaeologists following Stalin's orders, and Timur's embalmed remains were taken back to Moscow for study. It's said that the tomb was inscribed with the words, 'When I return from the dead the world will tremble,' and that when his coffin was opened there was a second inscription saying, 'Whoever opens my tomb will release an invader more terrible than myself.'

Two days after the tomb was opened, Nazi Germany invaded Russia. Stalin wasn't told of the curse until November 1942 when he immediately ordered Timur to be reburied in his mausoleum. He was interred with full Islamic rites in December 1942, and five weeks later the Russians defeated the Germans at Stalingrad, and the course of the Second World War changed.

She paused.

"It makes you wonder."

"Do you really believe that such a curse could be real? "I asked.

"What did Shakespeare write in Hamlet? 'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.' It's good to think that we might be able to influence things after we die. What I dislike most about dying is the thought that I may no longer be able to change things after I'm gone. I find it comforting to think that maybe I'll still be able to watch over the ones I love and have left behind..."

It was only much later that I remembered this conversation.

***

My parents bought me a digital SLR camera for my twenty-first birthday. I had been a keen photographer since childhood, encouraged by my father who was a professional photographer, and Uzbekistan was a perfect place for me to use it.