THE ROAD TO ANTIOCH

By Rex Antioch

1.
	Meeting my daughter out of school was one of the real nuisances of my life, but unless I was to leave her to make her own way across town to an empty house I had no choice.  Her mother had died giving birth to her in what is euphemistically called ‘medical misadventure’ and although I had eventually remarried - largely in an attempt to provide her with a mother - it had not worked out leaving me with a daughter now twelve, a struggling printing business, a heap of debts and a load of hassles I could have done without, one of which was to drop whatever I was doing in the middle of the afternoon and meet my daughter out of school.
I was sitting in my car among the many lining both sides of the road outside the school gates on the same errand, with a very depressing bank statement spread open on the steering wheel, when someone tapped lightly on the window beside me.  It was a man I did not recognise.  I wound down the window.
“It’s Russel Walker, isn’t it?” he asked as though he knew perfectly well it was.
“Yes,” I agreed, wondering where I might have met him.
The other man nodded.  “How’s business?” he asked as people often do by way of greeting.
“Fine,” I lied.
He nodded again, thoughtfully.  “Got time for a quick word?” he asked.  I still couldn’t remember meeting the man before but I’m nothing if not courteous and anyway if he wanted to offer me some business I was all ears.  I didn’t want him getting into my car, though, so I opened the door and climbed out.
“‘Fine’ is not what I’ve heard,” he observed somewhat pointedly once I was standing beside him.  I felt myself bristle slightly but I lived in a town rather than a city and the business community is small enough for gossip to spread widely.
“Well, it could be better,” I said blandly.  “But then, who’s couldn’t?”  I wanted to know what he wanted with me, and getting uptight wasn’t the best way to find out.
“Ever heard of the King of Antioch?” the other man asked.  He was my age and smartly, expensively, dressed.  He had an air of quiet confidence and competence about him which suggested ‘professional’ yet did not have the aura of pushy charisma that shouted ‘sales’ and I was sure I had never seen him anywhere before.  I was conscious that he hadn’t offered me his name and this made me a little suspicious.
“What?  No,” I responded.  I’d a vague idea that Antioch had been a city in the Middle East in ancient times and that St. Paul might have written some epistles from or to there but other than that was utterly bemused by the question.
“Ah.”  The other seemed unsurprised.  “Shakespeare, you know.”
I was even more bemused.  What on earth did Shakespeare have to do with anything?
Children were beginning to stream out of the school gates with parents moving in to meet them.
“Many men would envy the King of Antioch,” the man said meaningfully.  “But few have the courage to claim the kingdom.”.  I was beginning to wonder if he was some religious nut about to start trying to covert me.
“There’ll be something in the mail for you in the next few days,” he prophesied, low voiced as though in a conspiracy.  “Remember the King of Antioch.”  With that he turned and walked away.  Momentarily I considered going after him for an explanation but something about the set of his shoulders told me that he had finished with me and I wasn’t about to start what could well become a scene in front of several hundred children and a large number of adults.  In any case I was rather relieved to see him go as the conversation had resembled the sort you have with a Jehovah’s Witness on your doorstep and they can be a real trial to get rid of although the man’s pitch, if that’s what it was, had been even more peculiar than that of an all-powerful god in need of financial support.
My daughter Julie arrived at my side, school-bag trailing and hat as ever tilted rakishly and illegally to the back of her head.  “Hi, dad.  Who was that?”
“Hi, sweetheart.  Just a chap I must have met sometime.  He recognised me, but I’m damned if I can remember him.”  I gave her the regulation peck on the cheek.  “Good day?”
“So so,” she conceded and trailed off around the front of the car to climb in the passenger’s seat.  I retook the driver’s.
There was a lot of her mother, the woman I had loved, in our daughter and it was becoming stronger as she approached womanhood.  She was pretty without the perfect, honed beauty of the model, still had the innocence of childhood but was also, I knew, acquiring a new coyness about what was happening to her body as her breasts became irrefutable presences on her chest and the curves of her body drew men’s eyes.  I’d done a few things, awkwardly and with a great deal of mutual embarrassment, to prepare her for those changes and knew I should have done more but she was still a child at heart and I was reluctant to pitch her into the cares of adulthood until I absolutely had to.
Happily she settled down in the car seat and began to tell me all about her day at school as I tried to extract the vehicle from the chaos which reigned for fifteen minutes every day in term-time outside the gates and tried to forget the implications of the bank-statement tossed hurriedly into the back seat, and completely forget about the odd conversation with a stranger I had just experienced.

2.

I recalled it two days later when, out of the blue, I received in the mail an invitation from a large commercial organisation to quote for a major print job.  It was an organisation with no base anywhere near my town and of a size which would normally not trouble itself with, or even have heard of, a small outfit like mine.  Indeed the order was of a magnitude I was only able to consider taking on because I had virtually nothing else on my books.  It was also a lifebelt to a drowning man and I gave it all my attention as I put together a price and prepared the submission.  It was only when this was safely posted away that I allowed myself the time to fully recall that odd meeting outside the school.
The organisation I had supplied the quote to had no obvious links or connection with the Middle East even in the present, let alone an ancient kingdom which, I discovered from Britannica, is now part of Turkey and hasn’t had a king of its own for eight hundred years.  Baffled I was tempted to put the arrival of the invitation to quote so soon after the meeting down to coincidence, except that I couldn’t.  The man who had spoken to me had known the invitation to quote was on its way, I was sure, while on the face of it such an invitation would never in a million years come my way out of the blue as it had.  
The clandestine air of the meeting with its obviously meaningful but incomprehensible references to the King of Antioch could even seem sinister if whoever was behind it also had sufficient influence with a major corporate to get it to divert work from its usual suppliers to a small outfit like mine, and I even began to worry if I could be involving myself in something I might regret.  Yet what that might be I had no idea.  I wasn’t about the turn to work away, though.  I couldn’t afford to.
It was only when I was waiting in the car again outside Julie’s school mulling over the man’s remarks that I remembered his single, seemingly irrelevant reference to Shakespeare.
I took Julie home, prepared her tea, helped her with her homework, watched TV with her for a while and then sent her off to bed.  Once she had gone I powered up my PC, logged onto the net, linked into Google and fired up a search with the parameters ‘Shakespeare +Antioch’.
Bingo.  The King of Antioch is a character in Shakespeare’s play ‘Pericles’.  So I searched ‘Pericles’.
The results came back in two seconds and I linked to a University site offering the text and a summary of the play.  Half-an-hour later I logged off, closed down my computer and sat staring at the blank screen, my heart pounding and the palms of my hands sweating slightly.
In the play the character Pericles, who is a Prince of Tyre, visits Antioch seeking to marry the King’s daughter.  Anyone wishing to do so must first answer a riddle set by the King, with a penalty of death for a wrong answer.  The riddle is:
		I am no viper, yet I feed
		On mother’s flesh which did me breed;
		I sought a husband, in which labour
		I found that kindness in a father.
		He’s father, son and husband mild,
		I mother, wife and yet his child.
		How that may be, and yet in two,
		As you will live, resolve it you.
Pericles realises the answer is that the King’s daughter is also acting as his wife - that they are committing incest.  Deciding on that basis to forgo the Princess he flees Antioch and the King sends an assassin after him to preserve the secret.  The rest of the play deals with Pericles’ travels and the true love he eventually finds, and the King of Antioch and his unnamed daughter only appear again in a report that they are both dead.
A footnote to the text informed me that, “While the riddle would have been obscure and the answer shocking to a Christian audience such as the one Shakespeare was writing for, incest was far from unknown, or even shocking, in the period in which the play is set.  Both the Greek and the Roman pantheons are riddled with incest, with Zeus in particular impregnating many of his daughters and Adonis, the embodiment of physical beauty, born of an incestuous union of a King of Cyprus and his daughter, while Egyptian Pharaohs regularly married their sisters.  The Roman emperor Caligula made no secret of getting his own sister pregnant and the Emperor Nero was widely known to have often slept with his mother.  Whether incest was an accepted norm among the lower classes is less certain but the absence of any sanctions against it in early Roman Codex Lexis and the frequency and passion with which the early Church fathers fulminated against it suggests that it was.  Certainly in a highly patriarchal age where daughters were quite literally the property of their fathers until marriage, where the concept of romantic love had yet to be invented and where no great store appears to have been placed on virginity it seems likely that in fact the activities of the King of Antioch and his daughter would have raised few eyebrows in their own cultures thus making the riddle relatively easy to solve and imposing no great incentive for the King to keep it secret.”
Pericles, Prince of Tyre, had been given a riddle by the King of Antioch, solved it and not liked the answer.  I, too, had been set a riddle by a King of Antioch, I believed I had solved it and I didn’t like the answer either.
Clearly some modern-day King of Antioch, presumably a man committing incest with his daughter, had taken sufficient interest in me to do me a very great favour.  The next riddle was, why and what did he want in return?
I left my desk and poured myself a stiff whisky.  I was shaken and coldly angry, for I had never committed incest with my daughter Julie.  I had never even laid an improper finger on her.  So who was the bastard who thought I had?
I swallowed my drink in one angry hit.  Of course I was a prime candidate for such suspicions - a man living alone with a pretty, young daughter.  But that someone thought I would actually take advantage of the situation..... I resisted the urge to hurl the empty glass across the room and poured myself another drink instead.
‘Many men would envy the King of Antioch,’ I recalled the stranger outside the school saying to me, ‘But few have the courage to claim the kingdom.’  In the light of my new understanding I could see this as a challenge - many men desire to have sex with their daughters, but few have the courage to do anything about it.
The alcohol was taking effect, numbing my mind and soothing my anger.  I believed it was all beginning to make sense.  Some pervert who had sex with his daughter had singled me out as being a man who had the opportunity to do the same and wondered if I did, adding a challenge for me to do it if I didn’t.  Well, I didn’t, and was most certainly not the sort of man who could even think of using his little girl for sex.  And if I found out who it was that thought I did or could I’d break his neck.
Feeling better, I took another slug and then went to bed.

3.   
	Probably because of the alcohol I slept like a log and had to fight my way back to consciousness through a crashing headache when I woke, wondering what had woken me.  Julie, I became aware, was standing beside my bed with a tray in her hands.
“Wake up, Sleepyhead,” she said again with a shy giggle.
“Urgh.  What time is it?” I croaked, still trying to gather my wits.
“Nearly eight o’clock,” she informed me.  I was usually up at half-six to get our breakfasts and Julie off to school but in going to bed half-drunk the previous evening had obviously forgotten to set the alarm. 
I woke up rapidly.  “Oh Lord.  You’ll be late for school.”
My daughter gave a peal of delighted laughter.  “It’s Saturday, silly,” she informed me triumphantly.
I collapsed back onto the mattress with relief.
“Brought you breakfast,” Julie announced with pride.
The tray in her hands held a mug of coffee, some buttered toast on a plate and a jar of marmalade - my usual breakfast - and the coffee in particular looked delicious at that moment.  But I also noticed that my daughter was still in her nighty and in the same instant I recalled what I had discovered the previous evening about the King of Antioch and his daughter, and the implications of that for me.
Julie’s nighty was a shorty, and probably a size or two too small for her as she was outgrowing her wardrobe on what seemed practically a monthly basis and I’d had to be careful what I spent for some time.  It barely covered her bottom and when she twisted and leaned over to place the tray on my bedside table it rode high to reveal thin white panties stretched tight across her little bottom.  The material of the nighty, too, was thin and as she straightened up it moulded itself to her tiny breasts and for a moment outlined the hint of pimpled nipples at the centre of a suggestion of shadow of darker rings which tipped them.  Sex kicked me like a horse.
After the disaster of my second marriage and the divorce, which had cost me a substantial financial settlement that was a large contributor to my present difficulties, I had avoided becoming involved in a relationship and to meet my sexual needs had patronised a massage parlour in the town.  However, that even more than my daughter’s wardrobe had been a casualty of my enforced financial cutbacks and it had been several months since my last visit there.  Catching me unprepared the outline of my daughter’s body beneath the flimsy nightdress ignited a flare of desire in my blood which for a moment paralysed me.
I fought it down.  Julie regarded me slightly quizzically and I concentrated on her familiar face while trying to ignore the body beneath it.
Yet even the face was not as familiar as it should have been.  It was the same shape, neither too round nor too thin, and was framed by the same bronze-brunette shoulder-length hair hooked as ever behind her left ear but falling over her right.  The tiny, pert nose she’d had as a baby still lay between two clear, dark, sparkling eyes and her lips, red and slightly parted, were as kissable as ever.  It was a face I’d known all her life, yet it was a face I’d never seen before.  It was no longer the face of a child.
My prick pulsed, fully erect, my blood was burning and my insides were in turmoil.  I forced myself to look at the tray instead.
“Is it father’s day already?” I croaked.
“No,” Julie giggled, a little girl again.  “But we’re going to go shopping this morning, remember?”
I remembered, and knew we couldn’t really afford it.
“Yup, so we are,” I agreed.  “You’d best go get dressed.  I’ll be down soon.”
“OK,” she agreed cheerfully, turned with a spin that had her nightdress hugging her body again and flounced from the room giving me another tantalising glimpse of her white panties.
I flopped, shattered, onto the mattress.  My daughter was still tiny, the top of her head barely reached my shoulder, and I had never before noticed that her legs were long, smooth and elegant.  I had never  realised that her waist had become so slender, yet it must have been for some time.  I had known my daughter was growing breasts - I had given her money to buy bras - yet I had never before been so aware of their reality.  I had been saddened by the knowledge that my daughter was becoming aware of the awful things which can happen in the world but had still missed the moment when she had begun to view that world with eyes which looked beyond what they saw.
Many men would envy the King of Antioch.  Oh yes. As though someone had taken a blindfold from my eyes I had become aware of my daughter’s sex and yearned to know it, and could feel a pang of envy for a man who had satisfied that yearning.  But few have the courage to claim the kingdom, the stranger had added.  When I was finally able to reach across for the cup of cooling coffee on the tray my daughter had brought me I noticed that my hand was shaking as though I had a fever.

4.
	The morning was purgatory.
Julie as ever flitted around the supermarket like a hummingbird, loading up the basket with delicacies we couldn’t afford only some of which I managed to return to the shelves when she wasn’t looking.  I had to buy her some new clothes, too, as I couldn’t challenge her assertion that she needed another pair of jeans and a top, and tried not to stare too obviously at those tempting feminine mounds on her chest as she twirled and posed in a variety of styles and colours for my approval in the shop.  We dined in town as we usually did as she had a two-hour music lesson in town in the afternoon, and for every single second I was acutely aware of the jut of her little breasts beneath her top, the firm curves of her waist and hips, the round fullness of her bottom and the smooth flawless skin of her shapely legs beneath her jeans, and for the first time in my life wondered what lay between them.
I knew, of course.  I’d bathed her as a child and seen often enough the parting of her body in its tiny split pad of flesh that made her a girl rather than a boy.  But that had been six or seven years ago.  Now, like an itch I couldn’t scratch, I worried at what lay there in this girl I no longer knew.  Did she have a small patch of hair or a bush, or still none at all?  Was that cleft still closed and tight, still unready for its purpose, or was it opening like a rose, moist and blushing with the petals of flesh unfolding from within it?  Did she explore herself there, masturbating in her bed at night?  Had she in her curiosity plumbed the depths of her vagina with perhaps a pencil, or even bigger things?  Had some boy, perhaps, already had his finger there?  Perhaps his penis?
The thought of some brain-dead, gauche  fourteen or fifteen-year-old boy poking about between my daughter’s legs sent a surge of primeval fury through me and across the cluttered restaurant table I saw Julie’s worried eyes watching me.  With a grin that was more of a grimace I let the anger go.  My daughter was still only twelve, and I was sure she was not one to let boys put their hands into her knickers.  As far as I knew she had no boyfriend, and she spent little enough time in situations where even if she had one they could get up to that kind of mischief.  That could easily change, though, and quickly, and I knew I dared not let matters drift along the way they had until then.  I was going to have to give my daughter a talking to.
I walked with her to the music school and left her there with her violin, taking myself across to a nearby park to wait out the two hours of her lesson.  In better times I would have filled the time with a visit to the massage parlour but in my current financial state that was totally out of the question, however badly I might have needed it.  Even if my quote for the work offered so unexpectedly was to be accepted the money it would earn was already spent.
If my quote was accepted.  What if this King of Antioch were to let me know that it would only be accepted if I actually did have sex with my daughter?  Out of the question.  Even though I was technically bankrupt and another few months with no orders could see me calling in the liquidators I could not debauch and defile my own daughter just to keep my business going.  It didn’t make sense anyway.  Even if he was having sex with his daughter why should he be concerned whether or not I did with mine?  But if he did have sex with his daughter and thoughts I had sex with mine he might perhaps see me as a kindred spirit, know I was in trouble and be prepared to extend a helping hand to me.
That certainly seemed the least sinister of the scenarios I could but didn’t like to imagine.  But who the hell could it be?  I knew of no-one in or with any connection with the organisation I had quoted to, and while the Police could possibly find out who in the organisation had caused the invitation to be made to me I had no chance of doing it.  What was I going to tell the Police though?  Track down that man because he’s committing incest with his daughter - I know because a complete stranger outside my daughter’s school rambled on about the King of Antioch and Shakespeare and told me that I was going to get a business-saving letter in the next few days.  They’d be more likely to take Julie away from me.
My blood went cold at the thought of losing my daughter to the Social Services people.  Julie was my life.  Bright, beautiful, breathless Julie with her small, budding breasts and her cute bottom.  I groaned as I realised how close I was to ejaculating into my pants.
My researches the previous evening had, I realised, let a genie out of the bottle and it wasn’t going to go back.  Only a day previously the word ‘incest’ had meant only grubby police-courts, sad, disgusting fathers being jailed for abusing their daughters and jokes about inbred idiots in hill-billy land.  Now I knew that entire societies, complete cultures had accepted and thought nothing of it.  Gods and kings did it all the time.  An Egyptian Pharaoh married his sister as an act of divinity, not debauchery.  A man owned his daughter and if he chose to take sexual pleasure with her that was his right.  Neither he nor she was tainted or depraved by the act.  It was what people did.
I saw the way my thoughts were tending and slammed on the brakes.  Those were primitive societies with lower standards.  They also indulged in human sacrifice and read the future in bird entrails.  We know better.
I released my breath in a gust.  I could no longer deny that I yearned to lay eyes, and hands, on my daughter’s little breasts, burned to kiss the lips on that mouth between her legs.  Yes, I was boilingly envious of the King of Antioch and any other man who had done those things with his own daughter.  But the standards of modern society required that I denied those yearnings for my daughter’s own sake, and deny them I would.

5.
	Deny them I did.  Masturbation helped take the edge off my desires, and I worked hard at converting my sexual interest in my daughter into more proper, conventional affection.  I could tell Julie was aware that something was troubling me and from one or two little, cautious, probing questions or comments from her realised that she was aware that not all was well with my business and that she was worried for me.
I could not help touching her, but was acutely careful to do so only in the most innocent way - resting my hands lightly on her waist or shoulders, giving her a light peck on the cheek or kissing her harmlessly on the top of her head.   I even went so far as to let her know that indeed all was not well with the business in the hope that she would attribute my occasional distraction or tight grin down to my own worries.
Then the package arrived, accepting my quote and delivering the sketches and colour separations prepared by the organisation’s own art department.  The initial payment, too, was made to my bank account and I could actually afford to pay my staff for the next few weeks.  Relieved beyond measure, though aware the reprieve was only temporary, I immersed myself into preparing the print run and tried to forget the swell of my daughter’s new breasts beneath her clothes.
I had never been able to afford to pay a girl just to type letters and answer the phone and the rule was that whoever was closest to one when it rang would answer it.  Thus it was that, a few days later, one of my staff picked up the phone when it buzzed and then called across the workshop to me, “Russ? A Mr. Pericklees for you.”
For a moment I was baffled.  Then the penny dropped.  Pericles, Prince of Tyre.  Shit.
“I’ll take it in the office,” I yelled over the clatter of machinery and crossed to the cubby which served me as an office, shutting the door behind me to cut out some of the noise.  I picked up the handset on the instrument on my desk and waved it at the window looking out into the workshop.  My employee put his extension back in its cradle and returned to his work and I hitched myself onto the corner of my desk, putting the phone to my ear.
“Russell Walker?”
“Hello Russell,” a voice said over the line.  “Can we talk?”
“Yes.”
“Good.  How’s business?”
“I’m managing,” I said cautiously.  I knew I was talking to the same man who had asked me that question outside my daughter’s school.
“Doesn’t sound as good as ‘fine’,” the voice observed pointedly.
“These are hard times,’ I pointed out.  I had wondered whether the mysterious King of Antioch could even have been somehow behind my difficulties - manipulating me into a position where I would be beholden to him - but had decided it was unlikely.  The whole economy had been struggling for a while with a lot of firms cutting back on the spending and promotions, particularly the kind of advertising flyer which had always been my bread and butter, and I could think of no customers who had unexpectedly taken their business elsewhere.  They had just stopped spending, and this plus the financial hit I had taken in the divorce four years before and a couple of ambitious investments which had still to pay off, had left me particularly exposed to any downturn.
“Yes.”  I heard an undertone of reluctant agreement in the tone.  “Mind you, at times like these it’s good to have friends.”
“It’s always good to have friends,” I observed.
“Does the King of Antioch mean anything to you now?”
“Yes,” I agreed.
“And the riddle?”
“And the riddle,” I said coldly.
“That’s well done,” the voice conceded.  “It’s not an easy conundrum.  Few get there on as few clues as we gave you.”  I did not miss the ‘we’.  “And I guess the fact you haven’t already hung up on me means you have some interest in joining the few?  The elect of the kingdom?”
I hesitated. ‘Many men would envy the King of Antioch, but few have the courage to claim the kingdom’, I remembered.  And he was right.  I was talking with a man who presumably had sex with his own daughter and had felt not the slightest disgust or contempt.
“I don’t qualify,” I said sharply.  “And I’m not sure I want to.”
“If you were certain you didn’t want to I’d say goodby and you’d never hear from us again.  If you’re merely ‘not sure’ then perhaps we have something to offer.”
I had known in my gut that I would be hearing about the King of Antioch again.  A powerful part of me - the part that accepted the necessity for taxes and understood and forgave the arrogance of policemen - wanted nothing to do with him, but another part of me - a darker, fundamental, newly released and equally powerful part of me which was frightening me a little - wanted to know more about this man, and his daughter.  These two parts of me were at odds and had not even managed any sort of dialogue let alone a resolution.  Caught helpless between them I hesitated.
“Look at it like this,” the voice said soothingly over the ‘phone.  “We are well aware that what we believe might seem like heresy to you.  You’re like a good, God-fearing Catholic at the start of the Reformation, hearing the first whispers of a siren-song of a belief which you’ve been brought up to believe is dark and evil and yet aware of a small voice at the back of your mind that’s saying, ‘listen.  How can you be so sure you are right and they are wrong?’  You can close your mind to it if you want, and blindly follow the path of orthodoxy.  It’s certainly the easiest way.  Or you can open your mind and use it for yourself.  If you then choose the path of orthodoxy it will at least then be from your voluntary choice, not blind obedience.  We can’t turn you into a King of Antioch if you don’t want to be, and will certainly respect your choice.  We’d just like to see you make the choice rather than let it pass and be lost forever.  And perhaps regretted forever.”
Paralysed between my own conflicting impulses I saw the compromise offered as the only way forward.
“I suppose it could do no harm to listen,” I capitulated.
“OK.”  The voice at the other end sounded happy.  “As you’ve discovered we are sometimes in a position to help one another out and like to do so.  We’ve also no problem with those who don’t necessarily agree with us, as long as they respect our right to follow our beliefs and don’t try to interfere.  You’ll understand, though, that we do need to take stringent, and if necessary drastic, measures if we are attacked, or betrayed.  We’ll be in touch.”  The connection went dead.  I hung up slowly.

6.
	That evening I sat in my chair in the lounge watching my daughter poring over her homework scattered across the dining table, the tip of her tongue just peeping out from between her lips as it always did when she was concentrating, and I felt just what a traitor must feel as he watches the friend he is betraying walk innocently into a trap.
I had agreed to open myself to arguments that I should have sex with this beautiful, innocent creature.  The Dr. Jekyll part of me was appalled and horrified that such a thought should even have found its way into my head, let alone that I was allowing it to stay there.  The Mr. Hyde in me only had eyes for the fall of my daughter’s hair across her shoulders, the curvature of her little breasts as she sat with them laid almost like offerings on the table beneath her books and the remembered firm sleekness of the flank I had felt with my hand when patting it playfully earlier in the evening.
This helpless child was under my protection, Dr. Jekyll argued desperately.  It was my duty to deliver her safe and whole into adulthood, from where she could launch into freedom on the wings of her mind.  But oh, Mr.  Hyde whispered into my ear, think of those soft curves, that silken creamy skin under your hands.  Imagine unloading that cauldron of semen boiling and throbbing between your legs into that sweet, beautiful body.  She is yours.  She belongs to you.  She would not complain.
Even my Dr. Jekyll knew that was true.  My little Julie would know well enough what happened to fathers who were found to have had sex with their daughters.  She read the same newspapers I did, watched the same TV news.  She had to know what would happen if she let it be known I had interfered with her, so for her it would presumably be a case of choosing between the lesser of two evils.  And I knew that she loved me, for every daughter loves her father unless he gives her good enough reason not to and I had never done that, until now.  I was sure she would endure a very great deal rather than destroy me - see me sent to jail with a ruined business - and pitch herself into an uncertain world of Social Services or foster homes or the alien world and begrudged care of distant relatives she barely knew.  
“So why not?’  Mr.  Hyde whispered in my ear.  “Why not take her upstairs and undress her?  Kiss and caress that little, slender body, lay it on your bed and pierce it with that throbbing rod between your thighs and let all this surging, burning desire burst like lava into it.”
“You cannot.  You must not,” an appalled, dismayed Dr. Jekyll cried as my control wavered and my muscles tensed to lift me from the chair and propel me across the room to rape my daughter.
“Dad?”  Julie was looking at me, her little nose wrinkled and clear forehead furrowed as they did when she was perplexed.  “Why did they make Charles the Second King when they’d chopped the head off his father and gone without a King for a while?”
“Ah.  That’s a very good question, sweetheart,” I flailed around for moment or two, getting myself back under control and gathering my thoughts.  Fortunately I had always been interested in that period of history, although more particularly the Civil War Battles.  
“They were different sorts of King, Honey,” I told her.  “Charles the First was an old kind of King who believed he was King because God had intended for him to be King, and so wouldn’t listen to anyone else.  But people didn’t believe that any more, so when he wouldn’t change his mind they had to get rid of him.  When they asked Charles the Second to be King it was as a new kind of King, on the understanding that he was only King because the people wanted him to be, so he had to listen to what the people said.”
“Uh-huh,” Julie said, and I saw a little smile of comprehension play across her lovely face.  Then the wrinkles were back.  “But why did they make Charles the First’s son King, when his father was a bad king.  Why didn’t they choose someone else, who would be a good king?”
“You can’t chose a King,” I said gently.  “Because that just makes a President.  Everybody has to accept his right to be King, not just those who might vote for him.  And a man who makes himself King because he has the biggest army is just a dictator until someone with a bigger army comes along.  So you make a rule that decides who is the King that no-one can argue with, but make sure that the real king won’t misuse the power you give him and always does the right thing for all his people.”
“Oh.  I see.” My lovely daughter grinned her understanding, although as an introduction to the concept of constitutional monarchy my explanation was woefully inadequate.  Then, frowning again, she looked down at her pad and began scratching away again with a pencil, the tip of her tongue appearing again between her lips.  I relaxed back into my chair, shaken by how close I had come to forcing sex on my own twelve-year-old daughter, and took a deep breath.

7.
	Four days passed and though my daughter’s sexual presence was a continuing thrilling awareness in my blood, the hidden mounds on her chest a constant distraction and the brush of her jeans between her thighs as she walked an electric tingle in my ears I struggled to play the part of a properly behaved, loving father, although it was easiest when I was at work and she was at school.  After dropping her off there on the fourth day I drew into the yard beside the little industrial unit where I ran my business and climbed out for another day.
“Mr. Walker.  Hello.  My name is Pericles.”
The man approaching me with his hand outstretched could have been waiting for me in the yard or had just been dropped off by a car on the road outside, I couldn’t say.  It was not the same man who had accosted me outside Julie’s school, being older, shorter and bespectacled with a man of short grey hair framing a bald pate.  He was in a lawyer’s pin-stripe complete with waistcoat and his shoes shone expensively.  Presumably, though,  he was another man who had sex with his own daughter and I pointedly ignored his hand.  After a moment he shrugged and lowered it.
“I had understood you wished to hear the arguments pro a certain contention,” he said mildly.  “But if your mind is made up I will go and you will not hear from us again.”
‘Yes, clear off you pervert,’ Dr.  Jekyll prompted into one of my ears while, ‘No, don’t go.  I want to hear what you have to say,’ Mr.  Hyde shrieked into the other.  I stared at him for a moment of indecision and then shrugged. 
“Well, I’ll listen,” I said begrudgingly.  “But it seems to me that it is the sickest thing a father.....”
The other man’s eyebrows lifted warningly as one of my employees cycled past to begin work.  “Do you have somewhere we can talk?” the man calling himself Pericles asked.  “Perhaps you’d like to take me for a drive.  Show me the sights. I don’t know this part of the world at all.”
Being the boss I could start work when I wanted and my six employees were well able to work without my supervision, and I was confident they would.  I nodded agreement and as Pericles walked around the car to the passenger’s door I opened my own and thought about the implications of what he had said.
It was reasonable to assume that any man willing to argue in favour of my having sex with my daughter was likely to be having or have had sex with his own, if he had one. Mine was not a big town so there was a reasonable chance I might one day meet any of the men within it, socially or on business.  To meet in such circumstances a man I had good reason to believe committed incest could be awkward for both of us and potentially dangerous for him so it made good sense to bring in for this meeting someone from another region altogether.
That this King of Antioch was actually able to do so, however, was a strong indication that he had tentacles that stretched a long way.
I turned the car out of the yard and drove back towards town.  Pericles did up his seat-belt.
“I can’t tell you the history of the Order of the Kings of Antioch,” he began.  “Because I don’t know it.  It can hardly pre-date 1608, when ‘Pericles’ was first staged unless, of course, Shakespeare himself was already a King in the Order and the play was a nod to it.  After all, Shakespeare’s own daughter was in her late teens at the time.”  He shrugged the speculation away.  “I doubt it has any written records.  As far as I know it has no Grand-Master or committee, no constitution and certainly no membership lists.  It does have a number of rules but I don’t know who drew them up.  They were passed on to me, and every King I have met subscribes to them because if you don’t recognise their inherent rightness you have no business being a King at all.
“There are no subscriptions or fees and only two qualifications for membership.  One I’m sure you can imagine.” He gave me a significant sideways glance.  “The other is that you agree to abide by the rules.”
He fell silent for a moment as I drove, as though considering what he was going to say next.
“If you join,” he said eventually.  “You will find that men you already know are Kings in the Order.  They will introduce you to others and you will become part of a circle, maybe a number of circles.  Wheels within wheels, as it were.  How much involvement you want will be up to you.  One of the few requirements is that you keep you eyes open for other men who might qualify as a  King, or has the potential to, in order that the Order can extend offer such assistance as it can.  As it has in your case.”
So someone who knew I lived alone with my twelve-year-old daughter had seen the possibility of incest between us.  It surely had to be someone I knew, too.  Two of the men who worked for me had daughters, though in one case the girl was only six.  Did my accountant have a daughter?  Did my lawyer?  Both knew of my circumstances.  So did my doctor, come to that and yet I didn’t even know if he was married.  Or was it one of Julie’s teachers?  I had friends with daughters, too.  Which one of that long list was having sex with his daughter?  I couldn’t begin to guess.  Why should it be just one of them, come to that?  Surely in a town the size of the one I lived in the circle of Kings would know pretty much who one another were.  And I had heard not a whisper of it.  I was impressed despite my reservations.
“I am a King,” the man said softly, looking ahead through the windscreen.  “Have been for twenty years.  It has been the joy, the jewel of my life.  My daughter is happily married to a wonderful man and has four children, none of them mine.  She has a career of her own and if you were to ask her she would tell you that she has no guilt, no regrets, no shame about her relationship with me.  The love she has with and for me is every bit as full as the love she shares with her husband and in no way diminishes or conflicts with it.  It is as it should be.”
He sighed.  “But as it so often isn’t.  The purpose of the Order is to provide guidance for our Kings and support for our Princesses.  It is an uncomfortable fact of life for biologists, behaviourists, anthropologists, sociologists, jurists and all sorts of ‘ists that incest is quite common in nature.  Animals seem to have no instinctive aversion to it as was once assumed, even among the higher primates.  A young male chimp is often initiated into sex by his mother.  A silverback gorilla will aggressively include his daughters in his harem and mate with them.  Early missionaries taking the Word of God to primitive societies often commented on promiscuous sex within families, particularly in Polynesia.
“But once you have complex societies you have social manipulators and with them, eventually, you have the great paranoia, Judaism.”
He shot me a sideways glance.  “You a Jew?”  I shook my head.  He accepted it neutrally.
“Take a jingoistic, backward, paternalistic bronze-age tribal grouping and invest it with a bloody-minded, vengeful, bean-counting god.  Equate pleasure with frivolity.  Blame your failures on god’s wrath for your frivolity rather than your own inadequacies and you have a thought-police stamping out everything not sanctioned by your god, as interpreted by the aesthetes.  From Judaism to Christianity and the monastic misogynists denying the sex act even between husband and wife except for procreation.  Hence to Islam, female circumcision and women wrapped in curtains from head to foot in an attempt to deny the very existence of sex.”   
He snorted.  “That’s not official Antioch policy, by the way.  As far as I know it doesn’t have any.  That’s just my own slant on history.  The historical reasons why even today we have to have sex in dark corners with the light off rather than glory in it under the sun on the steps of the Temple as the ancient Greeks did, an act of divine worship.”
He paused as though for me to comment but I negotiated the traffic in silence, still digesting this new view of my cultural history.
“And of course the Romanics further refined the notion that denial and suffering was good for the soul, that sexuality was base and that abstinence, like fasting, earned you credit points in heaven.  The harder the temptation was to resist the greater the rewards for resisting it, in the afterlife.  Poor fools.  That’s the route to obsession and breakdown.  How much Grand Opera ends in suicide?  Call that healthy?”
“OK,” I cut in.  “I’ll grant you that a man who.... His daughter...”  I paused awkwardly.
“Screws his daughter,” the other man supplied helpfully.
“Yeah, screws his daughter,” I echoed angrily, “Isn’t going to go to Hell for it when he dies.  Sure it’ll make him feel great.  What middle-aged man isn’t going to enjoy screwing a girl young enough to be his daughter rather than a woman his own age?  But what about her, eh?  What about the poor bloody kid who’s being screwed by her father?”  I steered the car around a corner with unnecessary violence and had to correct the line abruptly to avoid a parked lorry.  With an effort I eased my white-knuckled grip on the wheel and let the car’s speed fall back towards the legal limit.  I didn’t want to get stopped by the police with a man in my car who screwed his daughter.  The authorities would take Julie away from me at the slightest whiff of what he was talking about.  He seemed unperturbed.
“What indeed.  You cut to the chase.  Our Princesses are what the Order is really about.”
I shot him a scornful glance but he met it and nodded a slow confirmation.
“I and every King of Antioch understand what you are coming, painfully, to understand, which is that incest is perfectly natural.  More than that, it is beautiful.  The love a father has for his daughter and she has for him is, or should be, incredibly special.  It is unconditional.  It doesn’t have to be earned, though it can be lost.  It comes from what you are, not what you do.  The love of mother for son is similar and though mothers love their daughters and fathers their sons that love is not the same for it is not...” he paused, flapping his hands helplessly.  “It is not ying and yang.  Not male and female.  If you don’t know what I mean I can’t explain it.” He looked across at me and I nodded.  I didn’t have a son but even if I had I could not imagine loving him the way I loved Julie.
“Add to that love the intimacy, the shared joy of sex and you have something approximating the love of a Romeo for a Juliet, which few of us can hope to experience with our wives or partners.”
I nodded again.  In my way I had loved Julie’s mother, but not like that.
“We Kings can understand that,” the other man went on, encouraged by my agreement, “ as we have lived and loved, and experienced sex.  But our Princesses can’t.  Your daughter loves you, and part of her yearns to have sex with you....”
I stiffened and he shrugged again.  “OK.  I don’t know that.  I know your daughter’s twelve, her mother’s dead and she lives with you.  I don’t know her name or anything else about her.  The King of Antioch who has observed you together says she’s clearly very fond of you and you of her, as it should be, and suspected that if you had not already moved on to a sexual relationship you would both be very tempted to have one.  So often that situation leads to one or other tragedy, which is what the Order of the Kings of Antioch tries to avoid.”
“One or other tragedy?” I asked, as he seemed to want me to.
“One, that each thinks the other would be repulsed by and reject the introduction of a sexual aspect to the relationship and so denies it and lets it pass by for ever or, two, that it begins but you are each burdened by shame and guilt, making it a thing of lust rather than passion.”
That made sense.  “But still......” I said.
“If your daughter is a normal girl she is becoming aware of her sexuality.  She is becoming aware of the effect she has on men.  And you are the most important man in her life.  She cannot help affecting you with her sexuality, and cannot help seeing how you respond to it.  But she sees you resisting it and fighting it and so starts blaming herself for something she cannot help.  She wants to explore this exciting new world, test her power, experience orgasm - especially the ultimate orgasm only a penis in her vagina can give her- , she needs to reassure the mother in her that she can draw seed from the male whenever she wants, so that when she needs it for fertilisation, it will be there.  She may not think in those terms, but that’s what it is.  If she’s fortunate she’ll have an elder brother to fulfil that role and bring her to maturity.  The Kings of Antioch would always encourage incest between brother and sister for that reason.  But  I understand your daughter has no brother so unless you are going to lock her away from boys, or brainwash her with threats and inhibitions to repress her sexuality, she will have to open herself and experiment with some older boy or boys from her school, and probably become abused, gossipped about, infected with an STD or even pregnant.  And this while the man who loves her and wouldn’t hurt or harm her in any way, and who she loves and respects and trusts, and who she really wants to lead her through this new, strange, intimidating, thrilling, world, acts as though her body, her sex and her sexuality are the most repugnant things on earth.”
The truth of that pierced me.  The more I had become aware of my daughter’s lovely body, her budding sexuality, the harder I had tried to ignore or deny it and she must have been aware of it.
“So you succumb,” the stranger in my car said.  “You take her to your bed and you share joy.  And you tell her it has to be a secret, which she understands.  She feels fulfilled, a woman able to satisfy the needs of the most important man in her life, yet she has to hide it and pretend to be a virgin schoolgirl.  She’s done something which felt wonderful to her, but which all her experience of the world says was a terrible thing - something so bad you could be sent to prison for it and she could be ‘taken into care.’  Her girlfriends gossip about boys they’ve teased or flirted with and she, with no need for such things, has to pretend or avoids her peer groups.  She thinks the fathers of other girls don’t touch them the way you touch her and despite herself will not be able to wonder if it isn’t quite normal after all, that you might after all be perverted for taking her, and her perverted for wanting you to and enjoying it.  Two or three years of that gnaws away at even the most loving of father-daughter relationships.  The sweet innocence and delicious complicity of the beginning is forgotten and doubts creep in, hints at blame - you should have been strong enough to resist, she must have been a bit of a slut to let you.  Oh, it happens.  For all that the Order tries we miss so many.” He grimaced with chagrin.  
“Yet if you were a King in the Order,” he went on after a moment, “Your princess will meet other princesses.  Girls her own age and older who are doing what she is doing, with loving fathers.  Girls she probably already knows and respects are sharing her experience of joy with no guilt or shame, so why should she feel any?  Women like the woman she hopes to become will tell her that their fathers screwed them when they were girls and are screwing them still, and it is one of the most beautiful things they know.  Oh, your princess will know it is still something she has to hug to her heart, that one word of your relationship to the wrong person or at the wrong time could have awful, devastating consequences.  But she will no longer be alone.  She will no longer be burdened with a huge secret she thinks she alone carries.  She will have friends who know and understand, and who share what she shares.  The Order of the Kings of Antioch exists mainly to support, protect and nurture our Princesses.”
My hands on the steering-wheel were shaking and my mouth was dry.  “Perhaps you’d better think about getting back to work,” my companion said gently.
I had to concentrate in order just  to work out a route back.  I felt shattered by what I had heard.  We drove for a while in silence as if the other man was allowing me time to order my thoughts.
“But,” I said eventually.  “Julie, my daughter, is only twelve.  Surely that’s too young.”
“Maybe,” the other man said.  “I don’t know her.  Physically she’s probably not too young even if she’s still growing, but psychologically.....?  You’ll have to judge that one.  But if she’s coming on to you, even if she’s not fully aware that’s what she’s doing, I’d say she’s psychologically ready as well.  You could wait, but the back of the bike-sheds are already there and waiting.”
I remembered my fears that some boy might already be getting into Julie’s knickers.  I was reasonably sure she hadn’t let one yet, but was also sure she was well aware that they wanted to.
“What about... Well.... I mean.... The genetics and all that?” I worked up to.
“The second rule of the Order is that you must never, ever get your Princess pregnant.  Ever.”  He shrugged.  “Of course it happens.  No contraception is 100% guaranteed and at times desire overcomes the most sensible rule.  If it happens the Order can help, for abortion is the only real option.  The genetic risk is actually very low in the absence of an obvious family genetic defect and in fact genetics can work the other way as well, reinforcing positive traits like intelligence or certain talents.  The problem is dealing with the child’s inevitable ultimate curiosity as to his parentage.  How can you tell a teenager that his or her father is also his or her grandfather?  And DNA testing can now penetrate that secret, however deeply hidden.  It has happened.  If the Princess as an adult really wants to bear her father’s child even after the counselling we provide, we will support her with DNA profiling and anything else she wants, but we really, really don’t recommend it.”
“What are the other rules?” I asked
“Well, they aren’t written down so they don’t exist word for word.  Any King of Antioch you talk to will tell them differently but the gist is the same.  Number one, never forget that your daughter is a Princess and always treat her like one.  Don’t forget that if she hadn’t agreed to kiss you, you’d still be a frog.”
I shot a puzzled glance at him.  “Remember the fairy-tale, the frog and the Princess?” he prompted.
I did, of course.  I’d read it often enough to my daughter as she lay motherless in her cot during her early years.  The princess who agrees to kiss an ugly frog, which is transformed into a handsome prince as a result.  No man could become a King of Antioch unless his daughter first agrees to kiss him.
“Number two,” he went on.  “Never, ever do anything to harm or hurt your Princess, or risk getting her pregnant.  Ever.
“Number three, the word of your Princess is law.  If she says she has a headache, she has a headache.  To take her by force or against her will is rape.”  He shot a sideways glance at me.  “Were you aware that the rape of a Princess is one of the two crimes still punishable by death in this Country?”  I wasn’t, but I believed him.  ‘Treason is the other,” he added calmly.  “And then only in wartime.”
“Number four,” he went on.  “Always help a fellow King where you can.  You’re not a Mason,” he added with certainty, which I assume meant there had to be Kings among Freemasons to know that.  “But the principles are the same.  There are no guarantees, of course, but I think you’ll find your business will improve.”  I couldn’t help pricking my ears up at that.  “In return if you can help a fellow King you should do so, although not to your own detriment.  Like the Masons’ we do have signs we can use to identify one another.”
“Finally,” he said slowly, “Betrayal is unforgivable.  There have been men who have tried to join us in order to be able to write a tell-all book, or sell the story to the tabloids.  We hate that,” he added lightly but with an edge to his voice.  “And we will do what is necessary to protect ourselves.  If there is a Princess involved we will do what we can to protect her but ultimately.....”  He let the threat hang, then, “But we have few doubts in that direction concerning you,” he ended cheerfully.
“Finally, it is not a rule of the Order but you could keep a look out for potential Kings of Antioch.  If someone you know has a daughter and they seem close...”  He shrugged.  “Well, that is how we came across you.  I hope you don’t regret it?”  I couldn’t respond to that.  I still didn’t know.
“Most of our leads, though, come from our Princesses,” he went on.  “Girls who are being abused can rarely keep it secret from their peers, even if they want to.  If we can, we intervene and can usually turn an abusive father into a King with a daughter he can look on as a Princess instead of a slut.  Even where it is a proper loving relationship a Princess can often spot the signs, girl to girl as it were, and drop us a hint.” He gave me a smile.  “Not all of us become involved in the recruiting.  It can be a bit tricky.  But rewarding, too.”
We were back in the industrial estate, almost at my unit.  “You can drop me at the corner,” he offered.  “Any questions?”
I had none.  My mind was still struggling to come to grips with what I’d heard.
“Well,” he said as I drew into the kerb.  “We will not contact you again.  If you want to contact us, place this ad in your local paper for three consecutive nights.” He drew a small piece of paper from a pocket and placed it on the dash.  “On the back is an IP address and a password.  The password is changed every Sunday.  You might find it interesting.  You might not.”
A black saloon pulled into the kerb behind me.  I realised it had been following me for some time, perhaps all the time.  The man opened the car door beside him but kept it pulled to.
“If you wish to join the Order there are two ‘initiation tests’, as it were,” he said, his voice deadly serious.  “They are not easy, but if you think about it you’ll see how necessary they are.
“First, if you place the ad. you will be contacted.  You must show the contact a photo of yourself having intercourse with your daughter.  It must be clearly you and her,” he added sharply as I drew breath to protest, overriding me.  “Then,” he went on as I glared at him, shocked by the suggestion, “You will be contacted by a man you know, with a daughter your daughter knows, and you will be required to make love to your daughter in their presence.”
“That’s.... sick,” I spluttered, furious.
“Think about it, Mr.  Walker,” the other said calmly.  “Can we let men join the Order and know what they will know about the fathers they will meet, purely on their say-so, an unsubstantiated claim that they screw their daughters?  But even photos can be doctored and, moreover, we need to know that the relationship is consensual, based on love and mutual joy, not fear or moral blackmail.  How else can we judge that except by seeing it in action?  The King and his Princess who bear witness to it will themselves prove their love to you at the same time, for trust requires trust, yet they risk much just by agreeing to meet with you, for you will know a terrible secret about them the moment they contact you.  Hence the photograph produced to a stranger first.  Think about it, and if you can think of a better way we’d love to hear it.”
He slipped out of the car leaving me still shaken by what he had proposed.  “I hope we’ll meet again one day, Mr. Walker,” he said with a smile and was gone.  The black car pulled away from the kerb and swept past me, and still I couldn’t move.  Take photographs of myself having sex with my daughter? Have sex with her in front of witnesses?  It was outrageous.
When I had calmed down enough to think about getting the car moving again, I was still too wound up to face the hustle of my business and I drove out into the countryside instead, where I parked up and thought long and hard about all I’d heard that morning.

8.
	That evening I watched Julie closely for any sign that she was ‘coming on to me’ as my contact that morning had suggested she might.  She was as lively, bustling and cheerful as ever and yes, my Mr. Hyde side argued, she did seem to throw her shoulders back and thrust her little bust out at me sometimes, she did seem to wiggle her little bottom in its tight jeans a little unnecessarily as she walked across the kitchen in front of me, she didn’t draw away when I leaned ‘accidentally’ against her as we shared the washing-up at the sink.
Nonsense, snapped my Dr. Jekyll furiously.  She’s just a lively, supple twelve-year-old girl with no idea what she is doing.  When I sent her to bed she stood meekly before me as I laid my hands on her fragile shoulders and kissed her forehead as I so often did, and she gave no hint that she had the slightest interest in what was behind my flies only an inch from her little flat stomach.
I gave her half an hour to fall asleep and then powered up my PC and logged onto the Net.
A DNS look-up of the dotted IP address I had been given came back with shttp.E080C4F9.org.  So I typed the numbers into my browser and hit the go button.  It returned with a password logon window so I entered the password I had been given.  My browser informed me that it was setting up a secure connection and then gave me a page with a several dozen folder icons and not a letter of text.  I selected a folder at random and it opened into an index of numbered jpeg images and still no text.  Half suspecting what I was going to find I clicked on one and then others.
The image was of a man having intercourse with a girl who looked not a day over fourteen.  The setting was clearly a family home - quite an upmarket one - and the man screwed the girl in what looked very much like a teenage girl’s bedroom, on a thick sheepskin mat before an empty Scandinavian-style fireplace and on a wide shining-oak dining table while she sucked him off in a marble shower and against the background of a blue indoor swimming pool.
It was pure porn and I’d seen it all before on the Net, except this was different.   Partly because the girl was clearly underage in most jurisdictions, but mostly because it became clear as I scanned the images that she was either the man’s real daughter or a great deal of trouble had been taken to make it look as if she was.  For as well as the photos of them having sex there was a snapshot of the man and the girl fully clothed and together on a beach, of them posing hammily with a trolly of groceries in a supermarket car-park and, convincingly, one of a bride and groom with the wedding-guests arranged around them and including the girl as one of the bridesmaids with the man standing proudly behind her, his hands on her shoulders just as a father might do, and only a father could decently do.
Dry-mouthed I reviewed them.  In the photos of their incest the girl’s face was sometimes blank, introverted as she concentrated on the sensations her father’s penis was waking in her vagina or mouth, or sometimes bright-eyed and laughing or gaping in ecstasy.  In none did I see any suggestion of sullenness on her part, no unhappiness in her eyes, no body-language that spoke of reluctance or coercion.
I viewed another directory, and another.  The homes were often not as plush as the first, yet were homes and not motel rooms or brothels.  The girls were often older, but some were even younger.  As a printer I had an eye for photography and saw some sequences clearly taken by a professional with good equipment, some by amateurs with mediocre equipment and two which were clearly stills taken from a fixed video camera.  All seemed to be father and daughter.  Many included what were either genuine or would have to have been very carefully staged family snapshots, father, mother and children, with the same father and his daughters engaged in intercourse in other photos.  A studio shot of a proud father standing beside a happy girl in a graduation gown and a quality shot of him lying between her legs with his penis deep in the same girl’s vagina.  
And in all of them the girl was clearly a happy, willing participant in sex.
If the site was connected with of the Order of the Kings of Antioch it was clearly international in extent for where the photos contained clues as to the country of origin they ranged from northern Europe to the Mediterranean, the USA to the tropics and in one set father and a rather tubby daughter sported in naked abandon in a vast, empty red desert which could only be Australia.
With my prick aching I logged off and closed down my PC.  Yes, I envied the Kings of Antioch.  I envied them their laughing, beautiful, twelve-or-thirteen-year-old daughters who clung bright-eyed and tousled to their arms as daughters will in crowded, bustling airport concourses, sit astride their thighs with their backs arched and little breasts taut in passion as their father’s penis filled their vagina and sit at his side at a crowded family table, arm flung around his neck but all their attention and a point-making finger aimed at someone out of shot.  I envied them their sixteen-year-old daughters, elegant in the saddle with their fathers proud at the horse’s head and the cup in his hands at a County Show, braced naked against a side-board bearing the cup to one side and her father shafting her from behind, and grinning broadly from the grainy pixels of a newspaper photo with the cup beneath her black-jacketed breasts and the caption missing.  I envied them their adult daughters, manicured professional women with BMWs no-longer the freckled gymslipped-girls in the school photographs from the ‘70's but still gasping with pleasure as their father’s seed flowed into them.  I envied them their daughters, but I too had a daughter.  Did I have the courage to claim this kingdom?
I turned off the downstairs lights and crept soft-footed upstairs, blood pounding.  At Julie’s bedroom door I paused.  Other fathers had sex with their twelve-year-old daughters.  I had seen it.  Why shouldn’t I?  I quietly opened the door and crept in.
The room was dim with light from the sodium street-lights filtering through her curtains.  Her body was an indistinct mound beneath her quilt, her head wrapped in tousled hair black against the virgin white of the pillow.  She was breathing quietly.  She could do little to stop me, would do nothing to stop me if I slipped into her bed.  She was so tiny, so innocent, so defenceless.  I stood looking at her for a long time, and then crept out of the room again.

9.
	My Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde had fought each other to an exhausted draw.  When Julie clattered down to breakfast the next morning, her little breasts pushing at her white school blouse, the pleats of her blue school skirt swinging from her slender hips Mr. Hyde howled like forlorn wolf alone in frozen arctic wastes but Dr. Jekyll, who was maintaining that icy control, could say lightly, “Good morning, sweetheart,” and kiss her chastely on the cheek.
In fact I was numbed by a vast truth with implications too huge to take quickly in board.  A man could have sex with his twelve-year-old daughter without its being the abuse that I had always believed, that all the commentators on TV and in the newspapers maintained and the whole of society seemed to assume.  In fact it could be the opposite of abuse, and a joyous affirmation of love of the sort which sex in marriage was supposed to be but so often wasn’t.  I had seen that love in the eyes of girls looking at their fathers as they made love, seen it in the eyes of fathers looking fondly at those same daughters crewing sailing-boats, collecting tennis cups in grassy courts and receiving ribbon-wrapped scrolls in college halls.  Since the age of twelve when I first heard the word I had been conditioned that incest was something evil and foul, the work of deviants and perverts, the sick and the inadequate.  Now, in Biblical terms, the scales had fallen from my eyes and I was blinded by the light.  Incest is beautiful.
My Dr. Jekyll coughed warningly.  OK.  The father who has forfeited his daughter’s love, beaten it from her with his fists or let it shrivel and die through want of care and attention, and who then forces sex on her is a piece of scum who deserves jail instead of her.  But the father who loves his daughter and is loved by her can, when they are ready, mix those two separate loves in the fiery crucible of sex and cast from them a single golden, unbreakable ring which will forever bind them together in love and trust, which will survive whatever their separate futures may hold.
Even my Dr. Jekyll had accepted that.  My conscience no longer told me that I was depraved and corrupt to desire sex with my daughter.  It no longer insisted that an act of sex with her with be the moral equivalent of laughing as I tortured a kitten or of deliberately pimping her virginity to the highest bidder.  The only thing stopping me having sex with my daughter was Julie herself.  Or, rather, my fear of what Julie would think of me if I did, for I could not bear the thought of losing her love and turning it into fear or disgust.
Many men would envy the King of Antioch, but few have the courage to claim the kingdom.  Now I understood only to well what the stranger had meant outside my daughter’s school less than a month before.
Numbed by the shock, by the immensity of what I had discovered, I let the rest of the week drift past, burying myself in work.  I received a repeat of the print order and knew the Kings of Antioch were still dangling a carrot in front of me but it wasn’t necessary.  I had been well and truly converted.  The problem was my daughter.  She could not but help know that I fancied her.  She was learning what it was to be a woman and knew I was a man. She might even enjoy teasing me a little.  But the gulf between that and actually having sex with her was huge and she might not be prepared for that.  Might not want it to go that far.  Might yet flee from me in horror and disgust if I actually fondled her, flee in her mind if not with her feet.  
If I had sex with my daughter I did not know whether she would look at me afterwards with eyes of love or eyes of loathing, and that was what I was risking.
Like a man awaiting his own hanging it was in my mind whatever else I did, running with it round and round until the issue bobbed to the surface like a log below a waterfall.
It was all about virginity.  
In my cultural upbringing virginity had been a powerful archetype.  While never strongly religious I had still been immersed in the Christian story, particularly at Christmas with its constant, potent imagery of the Virgin Mary, pure, meek and mild.  Central to my heritage, too, were the Arthurian Romances with the Knights and their ladies, chaste and virtuous, and the compelling picture of the unicorn, untamed might and beauty combined, submitting its wild power to the innocent will of the virgin.
Then, as the King of Antioch in my car had pointed out, came the Romantics and the near-total divorce of love and sex culminating in the Victorians and Arthur Rackham’s paintings of white-gowned maidens with their glow of innocence keeping at bay and even unaware of the sexuality drawn as the lurking monsters in the dark, wild, tangled forest of raw nature surrounding them.
I had no real doubt that my little girl was a virgin, and her virginity was what I was yearning to take from her.  It had nothing to do with the physical state of her hymen.  Her vagina would not be altered in any way by the first penis to penetrate it, even were it to be her father’s.  Yet she would know she was no longer a virgin.
A virgin, pure and unsullied.  Thus the non-virgin must be impure and corrupted.  What is the opposite of virgin?  In English it is whore.  Only one other role is available to the female - wife/mother.  Woman is only allowed to be Virgin, Wife/Mother or Whore.  Even the English language conspired against me.  My little girl, knowing herself to be no longer a virgin and unable to lay claim to the title wife/mother would be left only with whore as a self-image of what she was.
How could I make a whore of my own daughter?
Not that I despised whores.  How could I after my visits to the massage parlour?  The girls I’d had sex with for money had seemed a cheerful lot, confident, unabashed and well-adjusted.  I didn’t want my little Julie to be amongst them, though, my Dr. Jekyll correctly observed.
That’s because you want her all for yourself, Mr.  Hyde told me just as accurately.
As my daughter had grown I had imposed the image of Virgin on her just as society expected, even required me to.  And she, having no reason to do otherwise, had accepted it.  I had protected her from exposure to sex just as my society, my culture did - separate changing-room for boys and girls, censorship, criminal sanctions against sex in public.  Though little Julie was well aware pornographic films existed and was bound to be curious I would never have dreamt of letting her see one.  I even made sure she was in bed before the nine-o’clock deadline after which TV allows a little nudity and very soft porn.
As a result I knew she was virginally embarrassed and confused about sex.  I recalled her giggling once at a sexy joke on TV, and then giving me a little nervous sideways glance as though I might be angry at her for understanding it.  Oh my poor Julie.
With my new understanding my heart bled for her.  I had shoe-horned her into the role of Virgin and she had accepted it  because she had no other choice - no awareness of another choice.  Now she was starting to kick against it, wanting to explore this mysterious, exciting, strange new world of sex opening up before her but which ran entirely counter to the way she had been brought up believing she should think and act.  And very well aware that if she were to chose to give up the role, the self-image, of the Virgin, the only other thing left for her to be in the absence of a wedding-ring was Whore - impure, dirty and corrupted in the eyes of society even if not her own.
How many of the girls I had paid for sex in the dingy rooms of the town’s massage parlour, as brothels are now called, began the path to that room in their father’s bed, I wondered?    Had accepted that path because the role of Virgin had been taken from them leaving them with no option but to accept  the self-image of Whore?  How many young woman with children by half-a-dozen different men had been in court on drugs charges and blamed their tragic lives on abuse by their fathers, because they had been stripped of the role of Virgin and so seen themselves as Whore?  How could I make love to my own little Virgin without forcing her into the role of Whore?
Then I realised that, thanks to the Kings of Antioch, I knew.

10.
	That Friday after school I surprised and delighted my little Julie by driving her forty miles to the city to watch an inter-counties school netball match, tickets for which had been as rare as bargains in a brothel.  During the match she had screeched herself hoarse in company with ten-thousand other adolescent girls and I had wallowed in the sight of the adolescent schoolgirl players on court in their little pleated dresses with their long athletic legs and hard-muscled thighs.
Near the end of the forty-mile drive home again I again surprised Julie by stopping at a restaurant for a meal - not a roadside café nor yet one intimidatingly up-market - where I treated her courteously like the woman she would one day be and allowed her a surreptitious glass of wine.  By the time we reached home at near midnight she was drowsy and content and I was honed to a state of acute tension like an overstressed wire.
Such was the care and intensity of my planning that I had prepared the house for this return before we left and, yawning and sleepy, my little girl trailed me into a dimly-lit lounge with curtains tightly drawn.
“Sweetheart,” I took her by the hand and led her to a chair.  “I want to talk.”  I released her, sat down and patted my lap.
It had been years since she had sat in my lap - years since I had decided that it was no longer appropriate for my Virgin to sit on her father’s penis - and I saw the fact penetrate my daughter’s sleepiness to cause puzzlement and a tinge of worry as to why I should be inviting her to do so now.  Was I going to impart some bad news, perhaps?   After a moment she settled into my lap, far heavier than she had been the last time she was there.  I put an arm behind her shoulders, a hand on her waist and pulled her against me.  She snuggled into my arms but I could feel an alertness in her, a worry that the whole evening had been a preparation for something she wasn’t going to like.  Perhaps it had been.
“Sweetheart.”  I gently kissed the top of her head.  “I love you.  I will never stop loving you.  There is nothing you could do to make me stop loving you.  But I want to love you even more.  Love you in ways people say is wrong, but I can’t help it.  Sweetheart, I want to sleep with you.  Would you permit it?”
No, cried my Dr.  Jekyll in dismay.  You can’t ask your own daughter that.  She might say yes. 
No, howled my Mr.  Hyde in dismay.  You can’t ask your own daughter that.  She might say no.  
I felt Julie’s little body jump as she realised what I had asked her.  I heard her breath catch in her throat.  Imagined her thoughts freezing up with shock.
“You can say no,” I told her steadily.  “And I won’t stop loving you.  I just won’t be able to love you as much as I would like.  Or you can say you want to think about it and take as long as you want.  Years, if you want.  I shall not ask you again.”
I could feel her tense little body in my arms and wondered what she thinking.  
“Or you can say yes, and allow me to make love to you.  You know all the rules say I shouldn’t.  You know fathers are not supposed to make love to their daughters even when they’re sixteen and seventeen, let alone when their just twelve.  You know I’d be in big, big trouble if I slept with you and it was found out.  I’m asking you to break the rules, sweetheart, and come hand in hand with me to somewhere new.  Somewhere not too many fathers and daughters go.  Somewhere rare and beautiful, but perhaps a little bit frightening and dangerous too.  Somewhere I’ve never been before and where there aren’t any guidebooks or signposts, where I will be as dependent on you as you are on me.  And that’s a big ask.  
“And of course,” I added with a little sad laugh which was all my own tension would allow me.  “You’re quite entitled not to fancy me.  After all, I’m old enough to be your father.”
She didn’t laugh and was silent, and I held her quietly, letting her think.  When a minute had passed I eased my arms around her.
“Go to bed, sweetheart,” I urged her.  “Think about it.  For as long as you want.”
“Dad,” she whispered in response.  “If you want to..... I don’t mind.  But I’m a little scared.”
Of course she was.  She was a twelve-year-old virgin.  I was a thirty-six-year-old man, and a father..
“You don’t need to be scared, sweetheart.  I would rather die than hurt you.  We’ll take it slowly, a step at a time.”
She nodded, solemn eyes on my face.  “When.... I mean...”
“Whenever you want, sweetheart.  I will never come to your bed and you can sleep there whenever you want.  But if you’re willing to let your old dad love you, you can come to my bed any time and we will share it.”
She nodded again.  “OK.”  She even managed a tight smile.  I relaxed my embrace and she slipped out of my lap.  “I’ll be up shortly,” I told her.
She walked from the room and I sat trembling.  What had I done?  I had set about my daughter’s love for me with a sledgehammer, that’s what, my Dr. Jekyll told me. 
I heard her use the bathroom and a door close gently upstairs.  Part of me wanted to sit there all night and crucify myself on the most appalling conjectures of what my daughter now thought of me.  Poor kid, with a dirty, disgusting father.  How could she not loath me?  Part of me wanted to wind the clock back a day, undo what had been done so that I could go on enjoying my daughter’s love, pure and unsullied.  But a part of me needed to go to the loo, and that part eventually overbore the others.
I made my way slowly upstairs, used the loo, had a quick shower and brushed my teeth.  Then I crossed to my bedroom and pushed open the door.
I could see Julie in the double bed she had been conceived in, a shape beneath the blankets on what had been her mother’s side.  I undressed and slipped into the bed on my side of it.  I guess she’d dozed off waiting for me, the little angel, but as I disturbed the mattress she woke and let me know it by shifting her position.  I reached out for her and took her in my arms.
She was warm, sleepy and naked.  I felt her small, soft breasts against my side, her smooth flanks beneath my hand and her thighs against my leg.  I kissed her softly on the forehead, stroked her hair and told her to go back to sleep, and after a while she did.  A long while after that I did, too.
I woke in the grey dawn with my daughter in my bed.  As the light strengthened I lay watching her face on the pillow, innocent with sleep.  Then suddenly I was looking into her eyes, momentarily startled and confused as she wondered where she was and why, then steady and calm as she remembered.  I took her into my arms again and caressed her.
Her breasts were small and round and surprisingly firm, and beautiful.  Her arms and fingers were long and slender, her back was smooth and her bottom soft and round.  My prick was rock hard and brushed her leg but I promised her that I’d take it slowly and I did.  She was passive, still not sure enough of herself to make a move towards me, and I did not force myself on her.  
Her stomach, though, was a silken pillow and between her thighs my gentle fingers brushed a patch of tight curls although I did not linger there, or probe lower.
“Gotta go to the loo, dad,” she breathed and slipped from the bed.  White and sinuous in the clear morning light she scampered from the room.  Five minutes passed, then she came back.
She came back to my bed.
She scurried again, perhaps because the dawn air was cold on her skin, perhaps because she was still shy of my seeing her naked.  Yet I saw her little breasts, bold-nipple tipped, saw the thin tangle of young dark hair between her thighs.  Then her cold body was next to mine in the warm nest of the bed, and nestling up to mind with a giggle.
My prick was hard and yearning for her, pulsing between against her skin and trying to burrow between her legs but I could tell she was still nervous of it, shy of it, and I did not press her.  We cuddled for a while and then I climbed from the bed to begin getting her breakfast and mine as I always did, leaving her there.
I watched her during the day and saw her changed, although still Virgin.  She was no longer a child.  In the supermarket she stayed closer, consulting my list, commenting on prices, making suggestions.  Over lunch she was quiet and smiled, instead of chattering like a jackdaw.  I dropped her at the music school and retired to the park to wait, turning my back on the massage parlour.  Thanks to the Kings of Antioch I could afford it again, but thanks to the Kings of Antioch I had no need of it.
In the evening, knowing no thirteen-year-old girl would want to be seen being taken to the cinema by her father, I took her to a jazz concert which she tried to enjoy.  Then, back home again, I kissed her on the forehead and whispered, “Your bed or mine.  It’s entirely up to you.”
She chose mine.
I kissed her gently on the lips, and on the nipples.  Her breasts were as young, as firm and as beautiful as they had been in the dawn.  I stroked her stomach, ran my fingers through the hair between her thighs and stroked her slit.  With a delicate fingertip I woke her clitoris, roused it from its nest and teased it.  She responded, hot and lush, so I took her hand and put it on my prick, letting her feel its size and strength as I plumbed lower between her legs, oiled my finger in the hot wetness I had woken there and used it to stroke her clitoris more powerfully.  Carefully I brought her to a clitoral orgasm - my little twelve-year-old daughter with her breath gusting in her throat, the body shuddering as her empty vagina convulsed, my fingers hot and wet between her legs, her hand gripping my prick and squeezing it, pulling it towards her.
I rolled onto her and she spread her legs wide.  Her fingers guided my prick to her tight, virgin vagina as it cried out to be filled and fulfilled, demanded its own orgasm as the fires lit by her clitoral one died away.  I felt myself slip inside her and then stop as the ring of her virginity resisted my penis.  Still quivering with the echoes of her clitoral orgasm and the need to trigger her vaginal one my little daughter reared against me and I speared myself home.
I said I would not hurt her, and hurt her.  As her hymen tore I felt the jag of pain in her body, felt it in the gust of her breath against my throat.  Then my black pubic hairs met hers, the glove of her vagina squeezed the shaft of my prick and the bulging red head of my penis met her cervix, forcing it open like a flower and I ejaculated thick and creamy into my daughter’s uterus, her womb, as she squealed and convulsed to the orgasm born of it, the pain of her lost virginity forgotten.
Holding my weight off her little body I moved gently inside her, still iron hard, as she gathered her senses, little orgasmic tremors still quivering in her like aftershocks of an earthquake.
“Oh, wow,” she breathed, panting.
“How was that, my princess?” I asked, kissing her forehead, which was the only part of her I could reach. 
“Oh, dad, that was....”  She squealed again as another aftershock shook her, her legs closing against mine to trap me inside her and her vagina pumping on my prick.
I shafted her gently until I managed a second, weaker ejaculation into my daughter, by which time she was lying exhausted and shattered beneath me, glowing.  Then, carefully, I eased myself out of her vagina and lay beside her.  Wearily she brought her legs together.
“Eugch.  I think the bed is a bit soggy,” she observed.  I knew there would be blood in the stain, too.
“I’m afraid it happens, sweetheart,” I reassured her.  “We’ll sort it out in a moment.”  I drew her to me.  “I love you.  You’re my Princess, now.  Princesses are special people, who the usual rules don’t apply to.  They can do things ordinary girls can’t.”
I saw her grin in the dim light of the bedside table.  The title I had given her had pleased her.  She was Virgin no more and could not be Wife/Mother to me as the King of Antioch’s daughter had been to him.  Yet she had an alternative to Whore and I had given it to her.   Princess.
My strength returned slowly and Julie began to fidget restlessly as the damp patch she was lying in cooled and became clammy beneath her.  
“Go have a shower,” I told her.  “I’ll remake the bed.” She slipped seal-like from between the sheets. “Princess,” I stopped her.  “You can come back here, or go to your own bed.  Whatever you want.” She grinned and left me.
Wearily I rolled out of the bed and stripped off the sheets.  Where my daughter had lain beneath me was a damp stain made by her vaginal sweat and my semen which had leaked out of her, all stained cherry by her virgin blood.  I added the undersheet and bundled them up for the laundry basket, turned the mattress and  remade the bed with fresh sheets from the mattress up.  Just as I was finishing Julie entered the room again.  Her flawless skin glowed and she was patting her hair dry.  If she had any shyness about me seeing her naked now I saw no sign of it.  “All yours,” she said, referring to the shower.  “I bled a little.”
I crossed to her and hugged her fresh, clean, dry body to my sweaty one.  “I’m sorry, Princess.  And sorry if it hurt.  But always it does, the first time.”
“Yeah.  I know,” she said knowledgeably.  “Now it’s done, though....”
“Yes, my Princess.  Now it’s done.”
She smiled and made her way to the bed, where she was clearly intending to sleep.  I had a shower, reflecting how good I felt, then joined her and slept the sleep of the innocent.

11.
	
	Lying in bed with my daughter in my arms the following morning, listening to the distant church bells summoning the faithful to mass, I asked my Princess how she felt.
“A little sore,” she confessed ruefully.
“Sorry.” I kissed the tip of her nose.  “But how do you feel in yourself? Now....”  I hesitated and took the plunge.  “Now that you’re not a virgin any more.”
She wrinkled her cute little nose.  “Who wants to be a virgin?” she asked scornfully.
I had to laugh.  I felt so good, for the last night’s sex with my daughter had exhausted and drained all the urges and demands of my body leaving me feeling content and at peace, and here I was holding her lovely body gently in my arms, her head on my shoulder.  I had been so worried about the consequences that taking her virginity from her would have on her self-esteem, her image of herself, while all the time it had not mattered greatly to her.
“It’s nicer being a Princess,” she added, giggling.

12.
	Though she came to my bed every night we only kissed and cuddled until the following Thursday when she announced shyly that she thought she had healed up, and if I wanted ......  So I had careful intercourse with my daughter a second time.  Afterwards I lay panting on top of her with her nubile young body writhing gently beneath me and her tight little vagina pulling and squeezing at my prick in the aftermath of her own orgasms.
“Better?” I asked.
“Mmmmm,” she agreed, stretching languidly under me with her eyes still closed.  “Didn’t hurt at all.”
I nodded, pleased.  “Princess,” I asked after a moment.  “Do you know any other girls who do this with their fathers?”
She stopped squirming.  Looking under me at her face I found her eyes on me and that she was chewing her lip as she did when unsure of herself.
“Well,” she said slowly. “There’s gossip.  But nothing for certain, that I know.”
“Do you think there might be gossip about us?” I asked, heart in my mouth.  Meeting Julie out of school on that first Monday after I had screwed her I had half expected to be met my a posse of teachers, policemen and social workers who had seen some signs in the no-longer virgin twelve-year-old which had given the game away.  But there had just been Julie, trailing as ever out of the school gates with her hat on the back of her head, her jacket slung over one shoulder and her socks as ever around her ankles.  She looked every inch the Virgin she had been the week before, and I couldn’t help but wonder how many other twelve, thirteen or fourteen-year-old schoolgirls passing out of the gate with her and looking just like virgin school-girls, were in fact anything but.
My little daughter, still with my prick its full length inside her, hesitated.
“I have been asked, a couple of times,” she admitted reluctantly.  “If you’ve ever...  You know.  But you hadn’t then, so I said you hadn’t.”
“And now?” I asked gently.
“I shall say we don’t,” she declared defiantly but I heard a doubt at the back of her voice, a small uncertainty betraying her lack of confidence that she could carry off the lie convincingly.
“Princess,” I said softly.  “I’m not the only father who loves his daughter like this.  Lots, perhaps most, fathers want to.  But quite a lot don’t do it.  Maybe they don’t have the opportunity.  Maybe they don’t think their daughters love them enough to want them to.  But a lot do.”  I gently slipped my penis out of her vagina, rolled onto my side and gathered her into my arms, aware that I was going to have to change the sheets again.
“We, the fathers that do, are a bit like witches in the Middle Ages.  Did they teach you about them at school?”
“Uhmm, not really.  They were burnt at the stake, weren’t they?”
“Sometimes.  They weren’t really evil women, though.  Not like the witch in ‘Snow White’, or in the fairy tales.  They were just women who believed in a different,  older religion than Christianity.  They thought herbs and magic could heal illnesses.  They thought the power of the mind could do things and perhaps it can if you believe it.  But they didn’t believe in Jesus, and the Bible, because they were someone else’s religion.  But Christianity thought it was the only true religion and that anything else had to be the work of the Devil so if they caught a witch they tried to make her believe in something she couldn’t believe in and if she wouldn’t they burned her.”
“Uh huh.”   I heard in her voice that Julie was wondering what I was on about.
“Well, fathers who love their daughters like this,” I gave a naked body a squeeze against mine, “Are like those witches in the Middle Ages.  A lot of people say this is wrong.  If you asked them why they wouldn’t have a real answer any more than the people who burned witches would be able to say why being a witch was wrong.  They just learned as kids that their parents thought it was wrong and have never used their brains, or had the guts to ask themselves why it should be wrong, or they think everybody else thinks it’s wrong and are scared of saying something different even if they have doubts.  Why, long ago, someone decided it was wrong and scared everyone else into thinking it is something we’ll talk about later,” I promised her, kissing her on the nose, “But for now we have to accept that I would be in almost as much trouble if I was caught doing this as a witch would have been in the Middle Ages if she was caught casting spells.”
 Witches in the Middle Ages had been liable to be hunted down by a self-righteous mob and burned at the stake.  A man sleeping with his own daughter was just as liable to being hunted down by a self-righteous mob and his life destroyed, even at the beginning of the Twenty-first Century. I caught my daughter’s little nod and was confident she understood as much.
“But just as witches had their covens in the Middle Ages, where they could be with other women who believed the same things, there are a lot of fathers who sleep with their daughters who have formed a secret society so that they can be friends with each other.  And their daughters can be friends with other girls who sleep with their fathers so they don’t have to feel ashamed and guilty about it all the time.”
I felt Julie’s interest perk at the mention of a secret society.  Kids find such things fascinating.  So do grown-ups, come to that.
“The fathers call themselves the Kings of Antioch, after a character in one of Shakespeare’s plays who sleeps with his daughter.  And so their daughters are Princesses of the Order.”
I kissed her on her tiny nose again.  “You’ll always be a Princess to me,” I said softly.  “But now that we’ve done it, I could qualify to be a King of Antioch and you one of the Order’s Princesses.  How would you feel about that?”
She screwed up her lovely face in thought.  “What would I have to do?” she asked doubtfully.
“Nothing.”  I laughed.  Hell, I felt good.  “You’ve just done it.”
She gave a big, slow nod as she understood.
“But I think there are girls you already know who are Princesses of the Order,” I added encouragingly.  “Girls at school.”  The more I thought about it the more likely I was that it was through some connection at Julie’ school that the Kings of Antioch had come to know about me.  “But they can’t let you know who they are until they know you are one of them,” I told her.
I watched her beautiful eyes widen as she took that on board, then narrow as she calculated and speculated.
“But they’re not just girls and their fathers at your school,” I went on.  “I think it’s girls and their fathers all round the country and all round the world who are in the Order, But you understand that it really has to be secret as this,” I squeezed my daughter’s naked breasts against me again.  “Isn’t allowed anywhere.”
She nodded slowly.  “Sounds kind’a fun,” she said with a mischievous grin.
“To join, though,” I said, “We’ve got to pass some tests.”  I told her what they were and she grimaced.
“But if you don’t want to, that’s fine,” I assured her.  “We could always wait a couple of years.”
She wriggled a little, considering, and then said.  “Nah.  Let’s do it.  Who are you going to get to take the ‘photo, though?”

13.
	I wasn’t going to get anyone to take the ‘photo.  No way.  There was an outfit in town from which I hired specialist equipment if I needed it to prepare a print run and from them I hired a top-of-the-range digital camera with a timer and tripod together with some lighting for the weekend.
It was all in the boot of the car when I picked Julie up from school and she helped me lug it into the house.  While part of me knew it was nonsense another part of me was convinced that if my neighbours were to see what was clearly photographic floodlight brightening my bedroom behind closed curtains they would know instantly that I was taking pornographic photographs of my own daughter, so I set it all up in a back downstairs room which had heavy thermal-lined curtains and was not overlooked.
Julie was duly impressed with what amounted to several thousand pounds worth of gear as I unpacked it from its boxes and set it up and, although I had not told her, she could have no doubt what it was for.
I set up the lights and focussed the camera on a couch which served as a spare bed if we had visitors and pinned a white sheet over the existing curtain to act as a diffuser.  Julie hovered in the background, fetching and carrying, and I explained the technicalities to her as I went.  
Trying to get the lights right I turned to her.  “Would you just lie on the couch, Princess?  I need to check for shadows.”  I heard her move and peered through the view-finder.
Julie was posing on the couch with all the feminine beauty of a Renoir nude, quite unaware of it.  Reclining propped on an elbow with one knee forward the crisp, sharp pleats of her school dress lay lightly on her thighs and emphasised the soft, rounded creaminess of her lower legs while the loose billows of her school blouse hinted at the developing loveliness within.  She had never looked cuter, or more sexy, and I digitally recorded it on disc.  Slightly anxious eyes looked back at me through the viewfinder.
This was no ordinary family snapshot.  This was going to be a pornographic photograph and my little Princess knew it.  I had never shown her any porn but some must, surely, have done the rounds of the school, to be sniggered at and whispered over.  Julie, surely, had looked at such dog-eared photos with wonderment and confusion, looking at the faces of the girls allowing men to take photos of them having sex with other men while knowing that yet more men would gaze on them in the photos and lust.
How could a twelve-year-old virgin begin to understand how older girls and women could do that?  I didn’t fully understand it myself.  Sometimes it was just a matter of money, I supposed - working girls doing what they do for a fee just as the ones in the massage parlour did.  Yet not always.  Perhaps even not often.  The girls in the photographs were just girls willing to pose for pornographic photos because...  I didn’t know why, and if I didn’t how could I expect my twelve-year-old daughter understand either.
Yet here she was only minutes away from posing for such a photo herself, not knowing who was going to look at it to see her little naked body engaged in sex, and sex with her own father to boot.  Of course she was going to be feeling a little anxious and uneasy.
“Princess,” I said softly, peering at her over the top of the camera.  “If you want we can leave it.  It doesn’t really matter.”
She frowned back at me.  “But you want to, don’t you?” 
“Yes,” I admitted.  “I do.  I’d like you to meet other girls who are doing what you are doing, because  I think it would be good for you.  But if you’re uncomfortable doing this, we can leave it for a while.”
The frown turned stubborn.  “No.  You’ve got everything here.  Let’s do it now.”  She could be an obdurate little minx. 
“OK.  Before or after dinner?”
“Before.  Then you can ring out for a pizza.”
If she wanted a pizza as a reward for having sex with me in front of a camera, she could have a pizza.  She could have a damn van full of pizzas.
“It’s a deal,” I said a little gruffly.  “You get ready and I’ll be back in a minute.”
I left the room and made sure every outside door to the house was locked and bolted and every window shut tight.  Then I entered the room again.  Julie was reclining on the couch stark naked, her breasts small but proud, her little tuft of black hair like an arrow at the closed join of her legs pointing at lay what lay hidden between them..
I took off my own clothes and crossed to perch on the couch next to her.
“We need a pose that shows both our faces,” I said, feeling uncomfortable.  “And also that I’m..  well.... you know.”  I couldn’t say that the camera also had to see that my prick was inside her but she nodded her understanding.  On the Order’s web-site I’d seen several photos that met this requirement and knew what I wanted.  “We’ll practice it first, then I’ll set the camera.”
I wormed around behind her and pulled her against me with her back to my chest and her bottom in my lap.  Getting the idea she spread her legs either side of my thighs.  Her hand groped between them, located my prick and guided it against her.  She wriggled her hips and I felt myself ease into her dry vagina perhaps two inches.  I peered over her shoulder and tried to adopt a camera’s eye view even as my spine tingled to the sensation of my daughter’s body embracing my prick.
“How’s that?” Julie asked in a small voice.
“I think that’s perfect,” I agreed.
I popped my penis out of her tight vagina like a cork from a wine bottle, disentangled my legs from hers and climbed off the couch.  At the camera I set the first delay for 20 seconds and then 10 exposures at 5 second intervals, which I knew would be likely to fill the floppy.  Triggering it I began counting.
“One....two...three...four...five...,” I was back at the couch, climbing over my nude daughter.  “Six...seven...eight...nine...ten...”  Her warm, smooth back was against my chest with her soft buttocks nestling back against my thighs.  “Eleven...twelve...thirteen...”  Her upper leg hooked back over mine and the lower slipped beneath me as I pushed myself forward between them.   “Fourteen...fifteen...sixteen...”  Her hand reached down between them, took my prick in her fingers and aimed it at her vagina.  “Seventeen...eighteen... nineteen...”   I popped back into her, wilting as the soft glove of her cunt stroked the bulge of my penis.  “Twenty...twentyone...twentytwo...”  Damn.  What had I done wrong?  Set it for minutes instead of seconds?  With the tight warm clasp of my daughter’s vagina gently squeezing my prickhead it was hard to think.  “Twentythree...twentyfour....Hell!”
Flash.
“Bugger...two...three...four...”
Flash.
“Say ‘cheese’, Princess,” I urged, laying my face alongside hers and trying to smile at the camera as I hooked my hips round and penetrated her a further inch.
Flash.
“Cheeeeeese,” my little princess trilled obediently and I thought to take my hands off her tiny breasts, where I had been holding her, so that the camera could see them..
Flash.
I couldn’t help shafting her.  It just felt too good.  I’d lost count of the flashes and didn’t care any more, anyway.  I rolled onto my back with my daughter facing up on top of me, her thighs spread wide to either side of mine, and jammed my prick in and out of her as the fire flared in my prickhead until my ejaculation hosed into her.  Then I could only lay puffing and helpless beneath her.
Flash.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Honey,” I apologised.
“It’s OK,” she replied, sounding surprised.  “Have we finished?”  My prick pulsed in her but it was just firing the dregs of my semen into her womb.
“Yeah.  I think so,” I said.
Flash.
“Damn.”
It was the last, though, and when that became obvious Julie rolled gently off me, my prick sliding greasily out of her.
“Got a tissue, dad?” she asked, standing beside the couch and peering down at the mess between her thighs.  I could see white globs of my semen oozing from between her vaginal lips.
I hadn’t.  I had several thousand pounds worth of hi-tech digital gear, complete with cloths and cleansers but there wasn’t a tissue in the room.
Julie scurried naked upstairs to the shower, my semen sliding down the insides of her legs like soft white slugs and I flogged my sated body into action.  I wiped my prick on my underpants and dressed, switched off the camera and turned off the lamps.  Then I picked up the ‘phone and ordered my daughter the best, most expensive pizza money can buy.
Ninety minutes later, with the debris of the meal spread over the table, I called up my graphics manipulation program, slipped the floppy from the camera into the PC’s slot and Julie and I reviewed the photos.
I was appalled.  Her tiny, neat, young white body crucified against my flabby, middle-aged one looked so small, vulnerable and helpless.   My stiff prick between her legs looked so big and brutal, spreading her little cunt-lips wide and forcing its way into her like a torturers’s truncheon.  In the first shots, too, I was glowering and looking angrily at the lens while in the later ones, when I was on my back, my face was obscured by the fall of Julie’s hair.  In all of them, though, my little girl’s face was serene with the slight, self-contained, enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa.
“Number three, I think,” she announced.
She was right.  Although I still had a hand cupping one of her little breasts I was at least looking at the camera and leering if not smiling, and my prick half-buried in her cunt was plain to see.
“Number three it is, then,” I agreed.

14.

I ran the advert in the local paper for three consecutive nights the following week.  Photo number three I added to my lap-top’s hard-drive as an image called ‘Rose’ in a sizeable collection of jpg clipart images.  The images on the floppy I ran through an encryption program and stored on another floppy which I hid very very securely.  The original floppy I burned.  I then defragmented the hard-drive on my PC and DoD cleaned the free-space.
The advert was a ‘wanted’ for a set of Baxter’s Children’s Encyclopaedia, which Google had never heard of, with a ‘phone number which was unobtainable when I tried it.  So I waited.
I kept the lap-top with me at my office and had it on the back-seat of my car when I waited for Julie outside her school, where it seemed to scream for attention like a murder-victim’s decapitated head.  Anyone stealing it and taking the trouble to wade through 200Mb of clipart images would possess something I would give a very great deal indeed to get back.  In the hands of the police it was worth five years in jail.
Nothing happened.
Then on the Friday evening just as Julie was settling down to do her homework, the door-bell rang. 
It rings quite often.  Sometimes it is girl-friends of Julie’s and they disappear upstairs to her now largely unused bedroom to play bad music loudly and do what ever else it is that adolescent girls do in each other’s bedrooms.  Sometimes it is the neighbours wanting to borrow half-a-cup of olive oil or search our garage for their missing cat.  Often it is someone selling brushes, cosmetics or religion.  This time it was a stunning attractive, trendily dressed girl in her mid-twenties.
“Hello, Mr. Walker,” she said into my stunned surprise.  “You wanted a set of Baxter’s Children’s Encyclopaedia, I believe?”
“Er, yes,” I stammered as my mind caught up with events.
“Can I come in?” she asked mildly.
“Er, yes.”  I let her in.  Beyond her on the road I saw a taxi parked, engine running.  Inside the hallway she turned to me.
“My name is Toni.  I’m a Princess of Antioch.  Is Julie home?”
“Er, yes.”
“Does she know why I’ve come?”
“Er, yes.”
“She was pointed out to me outside her school, so I don’t need to meet her.  But I’d like to.  She might feel better about it if she knew who had seen the photo.”
“Er, yes.”  I led her to the dining room where Julie, her ears bristling with curiosity, sat surrounded by books.
“Princess, this is Toni.  She’s a Princess.  Of Antioch,” I added meaningfully.  My daughter’s eyes went wide.  “She’s come to see the ‘photo.”
Our visitor slipped past me into the room.  “Hello Julie,” she said cheerful.  “We’re lucky girls, you and I.”
I watched the two for a moment while my mind tried to work out what it was supposed to be doing and then remembered.  I left them to it while I retrieved my lap-top from its nook in my den, booted it up and opened ‘Rose.jpg’ onto the screen.  Then I carried it back into the dining room and set it on the table before the two girls, who were discussing the Colorado River which was part of Julie’s homework
Toni looked at it for a long three seconds and then up into my face with a smile, although I could not smile back.  This stunner had just seen me with my prick half-way up my own daughter’s cunt.
“That’s fine, Mr.  Walker,” she said.  “I’ve seen enough.  You’ll be contacted again soon for the second part of the initiation.  That was explained to you?”
“Er, yes.”
She turned to Julie.  “Don’t worry about it,” she told my daughter softly.  “You’ll find it easier than you might think.”  She turned back to me expectantly and I led her back to the front door and opened it up for her.
“Thank you,” she said softly.  “I hope I’ll get the opportunity to meet Julie again.  She’s a great kid.”
“Er, yes,” I agreed.  She walked beautifully back down the garden path to the taxi.
“Cool,” Julie breathed in admiration from behind me.

15.
	The summons came the following Wednesday, delivered to my daughter who passed it onto me as I was disentangling us from the traffic outside out school.
“Dad, we’ve been invited to afternoon tea with Jodie Jamieson and her dad next Sunday, if we’re free.”
After a moment’s shock I had to collect myself and concentrate on the traffic.
“Jodie Jamieson?  Who’s her dad, Princess?”
“He’s the builder.  Jamieson and Co.”
I went hot and then cold.  I knew Adrian Jamieson enough to be on first name terms with him after we had both done a couple of years on a local business development forum.  So he was screwing his daughter?  No, his daughters - for I seemed to remember he’d told me he had two, the elder at University and one at Julie’s school.  He’d seemed the big, bluff, bulldozing type who did not suffer fools or bureaucrats gladly but was friendly enough while you were on his side.  And he was a King of Antioch.
“Do I know Jodie?” I asked.  My princess wrinkled her nose at what she obviously thought was a silly question.
“Shouldn’t think so.  She’s a year ahead of me.”
So Adrian Jamieson’s daughter was thirteen, perhaps fourteen.
“So what, er, what do you think of it, Princess?  Do you want to go?”  I assumed she knew what was behind the summons.
“Jodie’s OK,” she admitted slowly.  “She’s got some cool mates.  If they’re princesses too....”
“You know it doesn’t automatically follow,” I warned her.
“Yeah.  But Jodie obviously knows about us and she’s been friendly the last couple of days, and that’s been kind of fun.  I guess we could go,” she offered the way she does when I ask her if she wants me to make a dental appointment for a check-up she’s overdue for.  “You want to, don’t you?”
I drew a deep breath.  “Yes, Princess,” I conceded.  In fact knowing what we now knew about the Jamiesons’ and they knew about us I didn’t really think we had a choice and I think Julie saw that too.
“OK.   I’ll let Jodie know we’ll come,” my daughter said decisively.
I hope we do, I thought privately.

16.
	That Sunday at three I drove up the drive to the Jamiesons’ mini-mansion in an acre or two on the edge of town.  Adrian Jamieson himself opened the door in its mock-Georgian portico to us.
“Hello again, Russell,” he said cheerfully.  “This must be Julie.”
“Hello, Mr.  Jamieson,” my daughter said politely to the man who was shortly going to watch her having sex with her father.  Jamieson turned to me.
“This is my daughter, Jodie.”  
Jodie was a year or so older than Julie at an age when a year makes a big difference, taller, rounder and assured.  She stepped forward from her father’s shoulder and offered her hand.  It seemed small in mine as I shook it.  She was not as pretty as Julie in my opinion but I assumed her father thought otherwise.  Both girls were in dresses.  I had left what she would wear up to Julie and she looked very pretty and sexy, as did the other girl.  I suppose they’d both thought ahead.
Our host ushered us in and through to a room at the back of the house with french windows out onto a patio with a pool beyond and a sizeable lawn beyond that, all secluded by a tall, neatly-clipped hedge.  In the room a table bore plates of sandwiches and cakes, far more than the four of us could possibly eat, some wine-bottles sweating in coolers and a coffee percolator lazily popping.
“Drink?” Jamieson asked.  I took a glass of chilled white wine and so did Julie.  Only a month before I would have been unhappy at the sight but now I knew she could no longer be denied it.  Perhaps Virgins shouldn’t drink wine, but Princesses could.
“Jane is away at University,” Jamieson explained, “And my wife has taken the youngest to visit her mother for the afternoon.”  I’d learned from Julie that Jamieson was divorced from his daughter’s mother and had remarried, with a young son by that marriage.  Did his wife know what he did with her step-daughters, I wondered?
“I apologise for the necessity of this,” he went on.  “I understand you’ve cleared the first hurdle and personally I would be happy with that, but I am going to be introducing you to other Kings and their Princesses, and I am responsible to them for ensuring that you have undergone the same test they did.”
I nodded.  I’d taken up the challenge the King on the car drive had given me and not thought of a better way.  I hoped Julie agreed.
“Shall we wait until after we’ve had something,” Jamieson waved his hand regally at the table, “Or get it done and eat afterwards?”
“Let’s get it done,” I said quickly, guessing this is what my daughter would want.  Jamieson nodded.  “Have you any more questions, doubts?” he said softly.
I had one.  “That web page,” I asked.  “What’s that about?”  I saw Julie shoot me a puzzled look for I had not told her about that.  “It’s not compulsory, is it?”
“No,” Jamieson laughed, but looked a little embarrassed.  “In fact that was only a sample, a site created specially for you.  The Kings’ actual site is much bigger, but it wouldn’t have done for you to stumble across an album of someone you know, would it?  
“The main site follows the same rules, password changed weekly, and each one is  individually computer generated and e-mailed out.  That way if there is any breach of security it can be traced back to source.  And I wouldn’t like to be in the shoes of whoever had misused their password.”  He grimaced.  “But no, it’s not compulsory.  A lot of Kings, though, are proud of their Princesses and would love to shout their love from the rooftops.  They can’t, of course, so the Web is the next best thing.”
My Mr.  Hyde understood that.  He wanted the world to know how strong the love was between my darling little daughter and I.  My Dr. Jekyll was still appalled that we were going to demonstrate it before even these two.  
“Do I have you to thank for, er, bringing me to the attention of the Order?” I asked.  When it had first contacted me I had wanted to break the neck of the person who thought me capable of committing incest with my daughter.  Now I had committed incest with my daughter and it had been beautiful, perhaps the most wonderful experience of my life but my Dr.  Jekyll still hadn’t quite come to terms with it and the question came out rather colder than I would have wished.  Jamieson chewed his lips for a moment, then shook his head.
“No,” he said.  “Fact is, in about an hour we’re going to be joined by three other Kings with their Princesses, two of whom you or your daughter knows.  I believe it was one of those two couples but, well, it’s considered bad form to worry about that.”
I believed him, and wondered who these others were.  I’d find out soon enough.
“In case you’re worried about hidden cameras and suchlike, there are none but you can choose where to do it.  There are three rooms upstairs, there’s a games room with a snooker table in the basement, the pool isn’t overlooked or there’s the summer-house.”  Jamieson said.  I could see the last mentioned at across the lawn, a fancy structure of brick and white wood the size of a small bungalow.  I’d had dreams of a property like this when I had first gone into business, before Julie’s mother died.
“I’m happy with wherever,” I said.  The possibility that Julie and I were going to be secretly filmed having sex had crossed my mind, like a herd of stampeding elephants, but I had a feeling that if Jamieson was going to he’d be able to wherever I chose.  I just had to hope he wasn’t going to.
“Julie?” he asked.  My little girl blushed prettily and said, “The games room?”
“The games room it is,” Jamieson said.  “Follow us.”  He slipped his arm around his daughter’s waist and led the way back into the house.  I took Julie’s hand and we followed.
The Jamieson’s games room underlay a sizeable part of the house.  A full-size snooker table stood under a thick dust sheet in the middle of the room and an extensive personal gym occupied one corner, opposite a sizeable, well-stocked bar.  A raised sauna bubbled gently under thermal covers in a third and the fourth corner had a small stage angled across it.  Folding doors in one wall told me that everything on the shining parquet floor could be stored away leaving a small clear area of dancing.  A pine door alongside the storage area containing a small dark window at face height I guessed gave access to a sauna.  I gave it a close look but could see no camera lens the other side of it, although that would have been the obvious place to set up a hidden camera.  Perhaps too obvious.
“Wow, cool,” said my daughter appreciatively.  I felt sad that I had not been able to provide the same facilities for her.
Jamieson led his daughter to the bar, drew her into his arms and gave her a very unfatherly kiss and she responded by pressing herself against him.  I led Julie over to the snooker table as it was the obvious place.  She was already unbuttoning her dress.  We had talked about this on the way over and agreed to make it quick and clinical.  Julie would show that I wasn’t beating her into letting me have sex with her, or didn’t resent me for forcing it on her, by being her usual bright-eyed affectionate self all the rest of the time.
At the bar Jodie Jamieson slipped to her knees, her father’s fly already open.  She pulled his prick out and took it into her mouth.
I had promised my daughter that I would introduce her to sex slowly, Oral sex was something I had left to come in time and I didn’t even know if she was aware of it.  As she watched her schoolfriend take her father’s penis in her mouth, I saw her eyes open wide with surprise and then she turned to me.  I stopped her saying anything with a kiss.  “In good time, Princess,” I breathed.
Her dress was unbuttoned and I brushed it from her shoulders.  It slipped to the ground.  She was naked beneath it.  She had thought ahead.  I lifted her onto the edge of the snooker table with ease, she was so light.  With gentle hands I pushed her back onto the green cloth, her legs dangling.  Out of the corner of my eye I watched Jodie Jamieson moving her head back and forth on her father’s prick.  Adrian Jamieson was watching me, his face slightly glazed by the immensity of the pleasure his daughter was giving him.  Parting my own daughter’s legs with gentle hands I stepped between them and lowered my face to her thighs.
Her new fine, dark, tightly-curled hair was bushed around her cleft but beginning to spread outwards into the cup of her legs and I kissed it gently.  Then with my tongue I located her valley and burrowed down it, tasting the little folds and creases of her sex.  I found the tiny bud of her clitoris and toyed with it, feeling her response in her thighs against my cheeks, while over the slight furry mound before me I watched Jodie Jamieson undo her father’s trousers and slide them down his legs.
I burrowed lower with my tongue in my daughter’s genitals, parting her soft vaginal lips with it and exploring the sweet entrance to her body, my nose buried in her brand-new pubic hair inhaling the musty, exciting lure of her sex.  Beside us our host settled onto a low stool, his prick sticking rod-like out of his lap while his daughter lifted her dress to her waist.  Like my daughter she had prepared for this moment and was wearing no knickers.  I worked my tongue into my daughter’s vagina, drinking her sex-sweat.
Jodie Jamieson straddled her father’s legs and lowered herself onto his penis.  I watched it disappear slowly into her body as she worked her hips minutely, wriggling herself down onto it until she settled into his lap.
Incest.  Under-age sex, too.  Yet the double criminalisation of the act I was watching was a farce.  There was no abuse in this.  The fourteen-year-old girl was pleasuring herself and her father because she chose to.  Because she wanted to.  Sure there are girls who need protection from thuggish fathers who abuse them by forcing sex on them, but the crime should be the abuse, not the act.
I rose from my daughter’s sex, undoing my trousers and freeing my prick.  Julie had been watching her schoolfriend bob slowly up and down, shafting herself on her father’s prick, but as I stepped again between her legs she turned to face me and gave me a smile.
“Hold tight, Princess.  Here we go,” I promised her.  As the tip of my prick burrowed into her cleft, seeking her vagina, she closed her eyes and that Mona Lisa smile appeared on her face.
I found the entrance to her body and pressed myself in.  She was still tight but I popped through and eased forward, up into her.  My hair pressed against hers and I was all the way into her, the head of my prick pressing into the angle of her cervix.  Shudders of warm delight wracked me and my darling released her breath with a sigh.
“Welcome to Antioch,” I heard Adrian Jamieson breath but I could only nod an acknowledgement.
I had claimed my Kingdom and it was not the body of the girl spreadeagled before me, barely a woman with her private, enigmatic smile framed by her dark boyish hair, her narrow shoulders and half-breasts, for one day she would wish to give that kingdom to another or others and I could only hope that she would still permit me to visit it as and when she chose.  No, my Kingdom was no more nor less than her consent to what we were doing, to the pleasure we were giving each other, to the joy we were sharing. That was my Kingdom, which I shared with the King of Antioch and a million other fathers who saw through the lie of the religious fanatics and the social manipulators and found the courage to ask their daughters, “Will you?”
I felt my ejaculation stir and begin its ecstatic, orgasmic journey into my daughter’s body, and I felt every inch a King.