Under the Rushes

by Amy Lane

  The lokogos looked disgusted. “Naw. They was bleeding somethin’ fierce. Left a trail almost to the bloody great graveyard, they did. But the blood track disappeared, and we ain’t been able ter find where it picked up again. We’ll get them, though. We’ll get them what started the riot.”

  Dorjan fought the urge to roll his eyes. “Two men started that great riot?” he asked innocently. “May I ask what the military was doing to stop it?”

  “We was doin’ our part, Forum Master! We was under Triari Septra’s direct orders to shoot anyone out of doors.”

  Dorjan heard Krissa gasp next to him, and he found his own temper spiking. “Even the innocent civilians trying to get away from the people robbing their houses? I’m sure the Forum Master didn’t mean that too!”

  And to his disgust, the lokogos shook his head eagerly. “Oh aye, Forum Master. Triari Septra didn’t want nothing stirring in those quarters when we was through with ’em.” He shook his head proudly. “We did a right good job too!”

  Dorjan was suddenly besieged with darkness. “I’m sure you’ll do a right good job apprehending the two villains you are searching for, as well,” he said gravely, “but I’m afraid you will not find them here.”

  “Oh, aye, sir.” The lokogos’s shoulders drooped. “Let us know.” He turned away and spoke to his companion, a lowly sergeant judging by his uniform, before they even cleared the doorway. “Ye know, I think the Triari’s mistaken about this one. He said the boy’d be a right idiot, but he was all right!” And the two of them walked out the door and closed it behind them without bowing either to Krissa or Mrs. Wrinkle or even begging their leave.

  As soon as the door snapped shut, Dorjan’s knees gave, and he sat down hard right there in the hallway, disengaging from Krissa before he could carry her with him.

  “Lock the door, please, Mrs. Wrinkle,” he said calmly, and she did so, guaranteeing them at least some warning should the two soldiers return. “Is it my imagination,” he said idly, leaning his head against the staircase railing, “or have the requirements for the Biemansland military gotten less strict than they were when last I served?”

  Areau spoke up from his side, shoving one hand under his back and the other under his knees. “Oh, no. You were really as stupid as that prat, I just didn’t have the heart to tell you.”

  Dorjan chuckled weakly. “You think you would have mentioned it when I told you we were going to frag our careers.”

  “No—I wanted to see the blast pattern when they imploded. Spent the last ten years studying it from the inside of my eyeballs. It’s glorious.” With that, he stood up and carried Dorjan, and Dorjan allowed him to do so. It was Areau. He trusted Areau.

  “Hey, Areau!”

  “Yeah?”

  “When I pass out again, do me a favor and buy Krissa a whole new wardrobe.”

  Areau shouldered his way through Dorjan’s door without hesitation, and Dorjan had no problem with him in the bedroom. That wasn’t them anymore. It was no longer a fear. “I thought you’d already done that.”

  “Well, find something better to get her, you git! She’s totally fucking earned it.”

  Areau set him down gently on sheets it looked as though Taern had changed while Dorjan had been clinging to the stair rail and a girl’s arm. “That she has. I’ll try to find her a trinket that will do.”

  “Good man. Taern?”

  “Karanos, you arse!”

  “Wake me up in two days, right? I’ve got something I need to do.”

  Dorjan’s eyes closed again, and Taern was right next to him, kissing his temple and smoothing back his hair.

  “That’s something to wake up to,” Dorjan murmured and fell asleep once again.

  HE DIDN’T get out of bed for the next two days. Taern would wait on him and keep him company until Dorjan harried him outside for exercise and fresh air. It was getting cold outside, and Taern would come in hours later, his fingers cold and pink under the light gloves and his face chilled, and then come and bury his face in the hollow of Dorjan’s throat, just to make him giggle.

  When first day came around, Dorjan got up early and Taern helped him dress carefully, padding all of his hurts with extra gauze and making sure his coat and loose breeches hid all of the lumps that indicated healing flesh. Areau carried him to the stable for the rabbit, and Taern piloted it while Dorjan dozed fitfully on the cushions. As Taern followed the directions to the front of the Forum, he gasped.

  When Dorjan looked out the window, he saw it as Taern would. The Forum of Biemansland was supposed to be the model government for all of the provinces: it stood four stories tall, with straight beveled columns supporting half of the great height of it. It was built on granite foundations, out of marble, with marble steps leading up to the main floor. Speeches were given on the steps of the Forum, and great things had been heralded from the Triari platform that sat square in the middle. The making of the monorail system, which utilized their power resources the most efficiently and had once kept the streets from being too crowded or polluted, had issued from this building, and Dorjan still thought it was a wonderful testament to what a government could do.

  “This?” Taern breathed, looking up even as he followed the monorail to the multilevel stable used to house the conveyances of the Forum Masters.

  “Yes, this.” Nobody rode the hexahorses anymore, but the design had stayed the same. Dorjan had a slot specially made for his rabbit, just like the others, but it was dusty with disuse when Taern swung it in. Once Taern had parked the vehicle, he dimmed the windows and turned to Dorjan, who hadn’t moved yet, because he was trying to gather his strength.

  “You said you could do this!” Taern muttered with supreme unhappiness. “You promised. ‘It will be no problem. I’ll make it to my seat and sleep!’”

  “I will,” Dorjan affirmed, knowing he could do it, just needing that last mental push to get him up.

  “But Karanos, Dorjan—”

  “See, I’m up! Glory under the aether, Taern, I’ve heard fishwives nag a body less than you!”

  “Fishwives aren’t as handy with a knife as I am!” Taern shot back, and Dorjan was relieved. If Taern was bickering with him, Dorjan must not be in too much trouble.

  “It’s not your knife I’m worried about, it’s my sword. Now do you remember the directions?”

  Taern nodded seriously. “Yes. Should anyone ask me, I’m a page. I run down to the courtyard and slip through the alleyway, and it leads straight to the stews—I still can’t believe that, by the way, I can’t wait to see it for myself. I go down to Madame M’s and find a way to slip silver to her or aid to as many people as I can.” Taern had his armor on underneath his page’s robe, and his mask as well as silver in his heavy satchel.

  “And if anyone stops you?”

  “I’m your page, and I have an important message for you and you alone!”

  Dorjan nodded. “Excellent. And if they try to send me home?”

  “You’ll sleep in the rabbit and wait for me,” Taern sighed. “Dorjan—”

  “We’ve gone over this,” Dorjan said patiently. “Any sign, Taern. He’ll use any sign to strip those mines from me, and this is not going to be it. I can do this, I have in the past. Not with quite so much fanfare, but I’ll take it in the spirit with which you meant it. Now are we ready?”

  Taern grunted. “Aye, sir. Just a lowly page reporting for duty, sir. Do you have your walking stick with you?”

  Dorjan nodded and grasped it, glad that he had enough of a reputation as a dandy to make it look as though he didn’t need it. “I’ll leave first, right?”

  Taern nodded, and then, before Dorjan could open the side door, he ran up to Dorjan and gave him a gracious, gentle kiss. “Just imagine,” he whispered. “Someday you will go up in front of these wankers and you’ll be able to tell yourself that you’ve been inside my body, felt me move around you, and you know the noises I make while you’re fucking me until the world turns white. How’re you going to
do your job then?”

  Dorjan groaned and pulled back. “It’s a good thing we have to wear robes,” he said, meaning it. “I’ve had to disguise wounds before, but I’ve never had to hide my erection.”

  Taern snickered. “Good. It’ll help you remember why you’re fighting. Now go!” And with one step down the side of the rabbit, Dorjan reentered the fray.

  Not the greatest day, no. The blessing was he could only remember some of it, because he did sleep through quite a bit of the most onerous meetings. He woke up at one point in the middle of a debate about the sly and the straight because a fellow Forum member poked him in the side.

  “Look here, Dorjan—you’re young and hale! Why should we let these sly ones corrupt the city from the inside out?”

  Dorjan squinted and tried to orient himself against the seething pain that permeated about everywhere. He’d missed a step coming down into this conference room, and he was pretty sure he’d torn his stitches.

  “The sly corrupting the city?” he asked groggily. “Honestly, Colny, what will you think of next? Why should what two people do in the privacy of their own bedroom have any more impact on the state of the city than what they serve for dinner! Our own military was ordered to fire on civilians and damned proud of it too, and you’re debating whether you have the right to care whether two men want to touch each other or not? What’s wrong with you?”

  There was a startled silence, and Colny, who was probably old enough to be Dorjan’s grandfather, laughed for a moment. “Well, if you’re not going to contribute anything useful, you might as well go back to sleep!”

  Dorjan grunted and would have done just that, but someone—not one of Dorjan’s compeers—spoke up. “But what you say about them not affecting the city isn’t true! The military reports that the two masked cowards who fought in the riots were sly!”

  Dorjan lost to his gut reflex and blurted, “How in six hells would they know that?” When he realized he was on the receiving end of several startled stares, he went with logic. “They were busy fighting off half the bloody militia, from what I hear.” (He hoped. He hoped that’s what people were saying.) “They weren’t bloody likely to start having sex in the middle of the street while they were fighting off steam spears, were they?” That garnered laughter, and for a moment he felt equilibrium. He was back to being a clown—he knew that role. “Besides,” he muttered, an ache settling into every pore of his skin, “I was in the military, remember? They called a man sly if he even adjusted his equipment to the wrong side. And in the days when Thenis thrived and Biemansland remembered it was an egalitarian society, nobody gave a festering shite. There are children starving in our streets, gentlemen. I may be a fool, but even I know how to set a priority like that!”

  There was some muttering, and they agreed to table the issue to a later date. Dorjan suggested they put their energy toward a soup kitchen or a donations center, since winter was nearly upon them and many were going hungry. He was laughed at. One of the Forum Masters said that’s what wives were for, and Dorjan made a mental note to rob that man’s house. (He was almost incoherent with pain by then. He would awake later wondering where the notion came from but positive the victim would deserve it if Dorjan ever followed through.)

  He finally dragged himself off to his cubicle, where he lay down on his couch for the rest of the day. Taern woke him up there, long past the hour he was supposed to have met in the rabbit, and Dorjan glared at him in concern.

  “Ta—”

  “Alder,” Taern said, his jaw clenched. “Remember, sir, it’s Alder, your page?”

  Dorjan nodded, feeling slightly less stupid. He looked up and realized that Taern was not alone. The plump little Forum Master who had made his afternoon a misery was there as well.

  “Master Colny!” he said, slightly surprised. “I’m sorry—I must have fallen asleep.” Stupid thing to say, of course he’d fallen asleep. He peered about him with bleared eyes. “It’s fortunate my young page here woke me up. My household will be quite in disarray.”

  Taern rolled his eyes and watched painfully as Dorjan pushed himself up. He managed a sheepish grin in Colny’s direction. “It was quite a couple of rest days,” he murmured, wishing that, like Krissa, he could blush on command.

  “So I heard from the lokogos,” Colny said coldly. “Dorjan, where did this young man come from?”

  Dorjan blinked at Taern good-naturedly and wondered what Taern was trying to tell him with his stolid glare. “A keep near my own,” he said blithely. “My old lokogos”—and he didn’t have to feign the sadness here—“Dre. He became a stratego and died with the rest of his unit. Before the debacle, he had a young man at his place who wanted to see the world, so he asked if young Alder could come visit.” He smiled indulgently at Taern. “As you can see, he’s well worth his ticket!”

  Colny’s manner thawed a little. “Yes, Forum Master. He has been quite devoted to his duty.”

  Dorjan winked. “Well, sir, there’s a young lady he’s been talking to who will be sorely disappointed if we don’t get moving. Thanks so much for helping him find his way!”

  Colny nodded, and as Dorjan took fluid steps to his desk to start rounding up his paperwork, the man bowed and excused himself. Dorjan put his paperwork into his satchel, looking at the tiny dark-wooded desk in the middle of the bright marble room and wondering when it had gotten so close and stuffy in there, when the door closed.

  Taern was there to take his weight as soon as it did, and to help him gently into his office chair.

  “Karanos!” Taern gasped. “That was close. Your wounds are seeping through your gauze, Dorjan. I don’t know how you think you’re going to do this again tomorrow!”

  “What was all that?” Dorjan asked, not wanting to answer his question. “He was after something, but I don’t know what!”

  Taern grunted. “Oh, that.”

  Dorjan widened his eyes. “That?”

  “Yes, well, how was I to know two in ten of you Forum Masters are sly. That one was a regular—Yael’s, mostly, but I’ve had him a time or two. Bottoms like a rutting rhinoceros and likes us to call him ‘baby boy’.”

  Dorjan worked so hard not to laugh that he actually felt a stitch pop over his stomach. “Bimuit!” he gasped. “That one? Arse. Keeps trying to make being sly illegal. Would be lovely to hold that over his head!”

  “You can’t,” Taern muttered. “You hold it over his head, you’ll have to tell them where you really got me, and then they’ll start asking questions from everyone’s favorite piece of pretty. Now are you ready to go home? Krissa really will kill us if we’re much later.”

  “Right,” Dorjan muttered as Taern got under his arm and lifted with his knees. “So, does that mean you’re going to throw me over now?”

  They paused at the great hallway, with its marble floors and white stucco walls, and looked both ways to see. There was darkness coming in through the high windows and the skylight. The contrast of the dark and the light was formidable, but Dorjan had always loved this time of day. None of the Forum Masters remained, Colny being perhaps the only other person who would work late anyway. It had just always seemed to Dorjan that there was a chance with that overeasing darkness that maybe the sins of the day could be washed away with it by the great oceans near his home, and the real use of the Forum would be all that remained.

  “You never answered me,” Dorjan panted, mainly to distract himself from the fatigue as they made their way down the halls. “Are you going to throw me over, now that you know you’ve had other Forum Masters?”

  Taern snorted. “What, do you think the novelty will be gone?” He was bearing a great deal of Dorjan’s weight, and his voice sounded strained as well.

  “It’s a possibility. I’m pretty sure it was only the robes that caught your attention in the first place.”

  The walls may have been marble, but there were enough corners and couches and padded niches to absorb much of their talk, so when they heard something down the h
allway, they separated and walked very quietly and waited for the night custodian to pass.

  As he rounded the last corner, Taern took Dorjan’s weight again and allowed himself to snort. “No, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the robes, you prat! The armor, maybe, but you already wear too bloody much underwear as it is.”

  The laughter was good. It helped Dorjan make it to the rabbit, and he didn’t remember much after that.

  THE encounter frightened him, though. Taern admitted he’d recognized several other Forum members as he’d walked through the hallways, and at least four of them had visited either him, Yael, or the other boy at Madame M’s.

  “That doesn’t, uhm….”

  Dorjan had been lying back in the cushions of the rabbit on their way home that first night, and he pulled himself back from oblivion to figure out what was making the boy so uncomfortable.

  “What doesn’t what?” he asked, forcing his eyes open.

  “I was a whore,” Taern told him frankly, and Dorjan blinked.

  “I am aware. I was fairly certain I didn’t buy your contract from a landowner or a schoolmaster.”

  Taern programmed home into the conveyance and came to settle back with Dorjan. He leaned close and started running his fingers lightly through Dorjan’s sweat-soaked hair. “I’m being serious.”

  “A fact that does not cease to surprise me.”

  “Dammit, Dorjan—”

  “Every time I fucked Areau, it felt new,” Dorjan said brutally. “For ten years, I let him bait me, let him enrage me, until I was ready to do anything he asked, anything he begged for. I knew it was wrong—”

  “It wasn’t!” Taern cried, obviously upset, and Dorjan managed to raise a hand to his mouth to silence him.

  “It wasn’t right,” he said quietly. “It hurt both of us, every time. But every time, it still felt… new. Like there was a chance this time, he wanted it for real. This time, he would be my friend again when it was done. This time, we could go back and start again and make it….” He couldn’t meet Taern’s eyes.