A/N: More Ashur smex, to fill the aching void, as it were. Very M. Warnings for rough (BDSM-y) sex.

I have included several Latin words/phrases with immediate translation, since the show does a reasonably good job of using appropriate Latin terms. Please let me know if you find this distracts you from the flow of the story.

I do not own the characters described below.

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"I've never had a Syrian before."

The words drifted lazily down from the balcony on the evening breeze. Ashur's eyes cut toward Dagan, who naturally ignored the comment, not having understood the Latin. The Gaul, Crixus, checked a snicker and returned to hoisting his lignum, bringing the heavy wood up to chest level and then back toward the ground. Indus studiedly pretended to have heard nothing, but a smirk threatened to escape the cage of his lips.

Ashur was glad in his heart that only the new recruits were on the sand this late to witness such a remark; the Brothers had retired to leisure pursuits after the evening meal. He glanced surreptitiously upward at the woman who had spoken, but the two female figures on the balcony were merely silhouettes against the light from inside the villa. It had not been the Domina's voice speaking, he knew; the diffident tones then of her friend, the widow Gaia.

"The tall brute?" came the Domina's laughing reply. "He has as much Latin as that fig."

Ashur grunted as he levered the lignum up and thus almost missed Gaia trilling that the slave's tongue should find other uses with her. The smaller woman leaned on the railing, and Ashur intuited rather than saw her raise a burst fig to her lips and mouth the sweet flesh from its skin. "How does he understand commands?" she asked, the ripeness of the fruit silkening her voice.

"The stockier one, there. He is able to re-form their barbaric grunts into civilized speech. And not good for much else, if you ask my opinion." The Domina turned toward the house and rested her elbows on the railing. Ashur bristled at the mistress' casual dismissal of his gladiatorial skills, but then her head dipped to kiss Gaia's bare shoulder. The sight sent a frisson crackling through Ashur's exhausted muscles, despite his bruised pride.

Gaia's lips twisted in a devious smile, and she called, "Syrian!" She could only mean Ashur. Wincing, he let his lignum fall to the ground and trotted obediently to stand below the balcony. Unsure whether to raise his eyes to his interlocutor or keep them focused groundward in a more servile manner, he eventually settled on a blank, if uneasy, stare into the depths of the ludus underneath the villa. Gaia leaned over the balcony and spoke to him in a voice that would have been intimate, had it not been meant to carry so far. "Tell your countryman that I will send for him." She smiled, turning her face slightly toward the Domina. "Tonight."

Lucretia produced a moue of distaste but did not contradict her friend. The slave sucked the insides of his cheeks in annoyance. "Would that Dagan could himself hear your dulcet tones requesting his presence." Ashur's slightly-accented words carried, gracious and dignified, in the fading light. "My voice shall serve as but poor substitute."

Gaia raised her eyebrows in acknowledgment of his blandishments and fanned herself as Ashur returned to his comrades, where Dagan was performing press-ups on a grounded lignum. "What says the slut?" he grunted in Aramaic between repetitions.

"She sought information about yon Gaul," Ashur answered in the same language. "I gave her to understand that the cock of even a newborn Syrian boy-child would put that savage's to shame."

"Sister-fucking shit-stain," Dagan chortled, flashing toward Crixus his toothy grin, which even in Ashur tended to inspire concern rather than merriment.

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The slim woman lounged on her lectus in a studiedly casual odalisque pose. Eyes made darker by the lamplight narrowed to see the guard shove Ashur into her room. Gaia rose to her feet slowly, her lithe frame nevertheless communicating danger. "I did not realize Syrians were noted for their sense of humor," she drawled, mouth curving in a smile that did not reach her eyes.

"I crave but a moment of your time, domina, to..." Ashur's head cocked slightly in the tic he sometimes betrayed when searching for apt verbiage. "...to demonstrate how much more suitable you would find me."

"In comparison to your countryman?" she clarified. Her tone suggested that she was indeed fascinated by his bravado, despite his subversion of her authority. Her gaze strayed toward his subligaria, apparently expecting him to make some extravagant claim of priapic enormity. Ashur unleashed his dazzling grin instead and padded across the room toward her. Gaia stood her ground regally. "Does Batiatus encourage such...independence in his slaves?"

"'Independence', domina?" he repeated, in as gravelly a growl as he could muster. "Might we not call it 'initiative'?"

Her lips twisted in something between a smirk and a sneer as she raised her hands to trace her fingertips lightly across his muscled chest. Ashur puffed up, proud of the physique that his recent training had only improved.

He had been a sickly child and therefore coddled by his mother, wet-nurse in the house of a Romanized Syrian spice trader, while his blood-brothers grew strong and quick. Had he been raised away from the familia with the other boys, the trader might never have noticed how clever young Ashur was; never taught him to read and figure, to speak Latin like a Roman and haggle like a Syrian. As Ashur aged, however, his health improved, and he would often abandon his studies to tag along with the trader's oldest son, Ashur's own milk-brother, who soon discovered a natural athleticism in the servus. The young master soon claimed Ashur as his body-slave and sparring-partner. It had required four of the pirates who slaughtered the trader and his son near the port of Durrachium to take Ashur alive.

He straightened his spine now, thoroughly enjoying the way Gaia's eyes played over the body he had attained as a man. The matrona stood silent, waiting.

Ashur inhaled, planning his attack. "What use should my lady find for a man such as Dagan?" he began. She interrupted him with a sharp laugh. "Indeed, what use?" he continued doggedly, leaning forward to tilt his bearded chin toward her ear. Her hair (the woman's own, not that henna-dyed whore's wig, or the golden locks shorn from some German ancilla) was fragrant with rosewater. "Is it my lady's wish to lay out for her poppet his role, step by step? To feed him his lines? Mark his stances?" His lips brushed her earlobe now as he spoke. "Why should my lady suffer such indignities, when she could instead enjoy the attentions of a plaything who senses her desires before she herself knows them, let alone gives voice?"

Gaia swayed forward subtly, until it seemed that only a hair's-breadth separated her clothed breasts from his bare flesh. "I marvel that such a creature exists," she retorted, mirth bubbling just under the surface. "Is this another mystery taught in the East, sister to fortune-telling and star-gazing? Can the Syrian truly claim such power, to know a woman's desires?"

Without warning, Ashur grabbed her slim upper arm with his left hand, whipped her around, and propelled her toward the wall, his right palm pressing the swelling flesh where her hip met her ass. He crowded her against the cool plaster, not roughly but with purpose. Her skin was soft and creamy and cool. His fingers tightened around her biceps. He could feel her heart pounding against the back of her ribcage, and when he mouthed the soft curve of her neck, half-kissing, half-gnawing, Gaia gasped. The sound reminded Ashur of how long it had been since he had taken a woman. Once he joined the Brotherhood he could earn the coin to pay for cunt, but there were no such allowances for mere novices. His cock hardened with need, and he ground his pelvis against her, but permitted his erection to act for the moment only as another tool in his arsenal. "Tell your plaything this is not what you desire, domina."

The Roman said nothing. Her eyes were closed, her breath passing heavily through flared nostrils and parted lips.

He dragged the sash from her diaphanous gown and looped it around her unresisting wrists. "Call for help, dea, goddess," Ashur challenged, but Gaia wordlessly allowed him to hoist her hands above her head. Pinning her against the wall with his hips, he stretched up to fasten her bindings on a bracket that proffered an unlit lamp above them. When his work was done, she balanced upon tiptoe, an awkward pose that sculpted the muscles of her ass into a very pleasant configuration against his pelvis. "Summon the guards, and see me sent to the mines, or my throat slit here before your very eyes. Or else tell me that you crave the cock of my countryman, who would stand dumb, mouth agape as a toad's for flies, awaiting your instructions." This last word dripped from Ashur's tongue like poison as he dragged up the folds of her stola.

Gaia moaned and began to struggle, but did not scream. His arm encircled her waist to still her thrashing body; his hand found her tit under the fabric and squeezed the hot, yielding flesh. "Softly now, rima, gash," he snarled. "Do not force me to hurt you." She continued to wriggle in his grasp, rubbing her curves against him. The friction set his verpa aching with an insistent flow of blood. He pinched her nipple roughly, and she whimpered. Twisting his arm around her middle, the fingers of that hand worked themselves under her gown and delved roughly into the folds of flesh beneath her curls to find her landica swollen and slick with lust. His calloused fingertips assaulted the taut bundle of nerves. When she sighed with pleasure, he tweaked her nipple again. She struggled to part her thighs and give him better purchase, teetering, levering her weight between his hips and the wall. Ashur gripped the large muscle along the side of her neck in his jaws. Her breath came in tiny, joyful pants as he rubbed her. "Have mercy," Gaia sobbed at last.

He laughed tauntingly, burying his teeth deeper into her flesh before saying, "You wish for missio? Release?" She gasped as he squeezed her nipple again, with more pressure this time, but she continued to writhe, grinding her sex against his fingers. He withdrew his hand from her dripping folds. "Beg me for release, spurium, you cunt."

"Missio, te obsecro, I conjure you," she groaned.

Ashur dropped his hand from her breast to gather the excess fabric of her stola into a bunch at her hip, then stepped back from the wall only far enough to give himself room to spin her about. The dark, drunken pools of her eyes gazed up at him. Her eyelashes fluttered, not coquettishly, but with profound desire. "Sis, please, what do you intend?" Gaia whispered in an obscene mockery of demure naivete. As counterpoint to her feigned hesitancy, she lifted one slender leg to curl it over his hip invitingly.

"What a cock-sucking little whore you are," he taunted, chuckling.

"Sis, te obsecro."

He unwound his subligaria and fondled his erection thoughtfully. "Say it," Ashur demanded. "Tell me you're a cock-sucking little whore."

Gaia's breath hitched. She was staring down at his cock, struggling to bring her pelvis closer to him with her heel against his ass. She murmured the words under her breath. He slapped her exposed thigh. "Say it," he barked.

"Purum scortillum sum," she whimpered.

Grinning, Ashur slid his hand along her thigh and clasped her buttock. He grabbed her other leg behind the knee and lifted her petite frame completely off the ground. She locked her calves around his waist. His tongue found the back of his lower teeth, and he spat out a laugh at her eagerness. She shifted slightly, and his verpa slid into her as naturally as a sword into a sheath. Without delay she was rocking against him furiously, using the leverage of her bound arms to whip her hips forward and back. The slick heat of her cunnus, so long an unfamiliar sensation, startled him into the frenzy preceding climax. He drew in long draughts of air to slow himself down. Gaia, unfortunately, had no such concerns; she continued to exert herself with a will. The growing intensity of her pants and cries suggested that she was well in pursuit of her own crisis. Ashur let slip a stream of Aramaic curses, sure that he would never outlast the witch. He dug his fingers sharply into the yielding flesh of her thighs and ass. Somehow, miraculously, the pain hurled her into ecstasy, and she wailed triumphantly. Giving silent thanks to whatever god had shown mercy on him, Ashur abandoned himself to his orgasm. He groaned aloud as the pleasure rippled through him.

Gasps of release still tore through his lungs when Gaia tilted her head back and laughed. "You make a persuasive argument, Syrian," she drawled.

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A/N: I really liked the idea of including a backstory for Ashur, but I'm not sure if it interrupts the flow/urgency. Please advise! Also, any pairing requests for Ashur? I am happy to write het or slash. Or threesome. p