At the end of it, we all returned our weapons, which bore enormous top magazines filled with colorful balls, to a small wooden structure with a corrugated metal roof in what I recognized as the far east side of Pecan Grove, the easternmost of Icarus Township's three neighborhoods. Having had helpful dreams like this before, I watched carefully as a bald man carefully locked the guns in one large trunk set into the floor, detached the magazines and put them in another, and tossed the spectacles into a third. Behind him were tall metal cylinders with wheel valves on them onto which he stuck cylindrical reservoirs he'd taken from the guns, apparently filling them with highly compressed air—
And that's when we suffered our very first attack, the first battle since we'd cleared out the Alfa witches and freed their slaves. It was the deep bellowing curses of the enemy that woke me first, rather than the alarm bells.
I strapped on my leather armor, the Dawn Sword at my side, and hurried to the door of my chamber. By then, the wife with whom I had been sleeping, Freddie, was already fully armed with her double swords, multiple knives, bow and arrows, and the other various deadly things that she, as a former U.S. Special Forces operative, habitually kept about her person. "Frieda!" I called as I hurried to catch up. "You're 14 weeks pregnant! You can't run off to battle!"
"Watch me!" she called back. I just hurried faster.
They'd chosen to attack on a night with a new moon, and the best lights we had were torches, so all I could see of the forces attaching were large, hulking shapes who seemed to be wearing horned helmets. Luckily, although the new wall wasn't entirely finished yet, the entire township border was fenced, and the engineers and artillery squads had built enough mangonels and trebuchets to fill the gaps. They served adequately for the relatively small force—in terms of numbers, not physical size of the opponents—that was attacking. Somehow, these huge women had thought they could sneak in, despite their size and our state of readiness, and steal their prize. Which apparently was me.
"Just give us the boymaker and we'll let you live! We need bulls for the herd!" a deep voice shouted as I hurried up.
"Kiss my rosy red rectum!" my Seventh Paramour, Montana, shouted back. She had been a Marine before the Step Through, and had a rather impressive insult vocabulary. She was also three months pregnant, though on her muscular ten-foot frame, it wasn't yet obvious.
I stepped up to the front line as a rather large spear flew overhead, and in retaliation, Montana fired into the darkness with her ballista-sized crossbow, which could send a bolt right through two adult terrans. I'd seen it happen.
I reached up and rested my left hand on Montana's right hip. "Who are they?"
"Not sure yet, hon. Big 'uns, but not giants. They keep hollering about how they need you for their herd."
"Really? Huh." Nothing surprised me anymore; there were hundreds of new races, and I was still meeting ones new to me, like Serafina's Red Caps.
(The day after Sera had arrived, incidentally, Bellerophon shot me a double thumbs-up at dinner and mouthed, Mission accomplished!)
I heard a deep voice holler, "Get off me, little bugs!" followed by a series of small voices yelling, "Take that! And that! And that, too!" "You're not getting our Old Man, you horny old cows!" "Go eat grass"! "Yeah, eat grass an' die!" "Stupidheads! All you hadta do was ask!"
I cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted, "Dixies! Get back here! We're preparing to fire!"
There was a chorus of buzzing wings, and suddenly seven Dixies crowded around me (Dion was still out looking for the fairies). "We gave them hell, Father!" Apollo crowed, and suddenly he started singing the Dixie fight song, or trying to anyway. "Here come the hero Dixies, hurray, hurray! Right here and now we'll... something something... cows..." He trailed off, and then wailed, "Oh, dear, what will we do? What rhymes with cow, anyway?"
"How! Pow! Wow! Yow! Bow! Meow! Plow!" Filotus yelled in rapid succession.
"Plow these cows?" Gray offered.
"Yuck, no! I ain't plowin' no cows! Dad does the big ones!"
"Shut up, Kyoop!" the other boys and I shouted in unison.
"...with lots of taunts and tricksies?" Chaos finished hopefully.
"Hey, that's pretty good. "Yeah, why didn't you think of that?" "No, we should hit them with some bricksies!" "Oh, hey, I didn't see that pile of 'em over there!" "That works too."
"Still ain't plowin' no cows!"
"Stupid Cupid!"
"...Right here and now we'll wow these cows, and bonk them with some bricksies!" Kyoop sang out defiantly.
"Okay, so maybe Cupid's not always so stupid," one of his brothers muttered, and then they were all singing the new verse in adorable harmony.
Here come the hero Dixies, hurray, hurray!
Right here and now we'll wow these cows
And bonk them with some bricksies!
Hurray, hurray, here come the hero Dixies!
Hurray, hurray, here come the horny Dixies!
They sang it in honor of their baby brother Icarus. It was he who had invented the song before the Battle of Scarborough Faire, in which he had died courageously—the archetypal hero Dixie.
They were already arming themselves with bricks, two to a stone, before I put an end to it. "Boys, let Mama Montana and her girls take care of this. You need all that energy for loving women, not fighting them."
"Those aren't women, Old Man, they're cows!"
"Bellerophon, I know they're our enemies, but you can't go around calling women cows. What would your Mamas think?"
My son shouted, "If they could see them, they'd think they were cows!"
"Bellerophon—"
"No, Toby, wait," Montana said. "Pixies have excellent night vision, remember? Leftenant Bellerophon, what did these attackers look like? Exactly?"
Bill snapped to in midair, practically vibrating as he saluted. "Ma'am yes ma'am! Colonel Mama Montana, the enemy consists of nine women almost nine feet tall who have the heads, shoulders, and tails of cows! Otherwise they are human, ma'am! And quite naked!" He licked his lips. "Very attractively human, ma'am, now that I think of it! They have enormous knockers, big, sexy muscles and bubble butts, and no hair on their—!"
"Enough!" I snapped. Trust him to notice things like that. "Any race you recognize?" I asked my Seventh.
"Yes," Montana said, looking sidelong at me. "The Cows."
"Oh, for Goddess's sake..." I began in frustration, but trailed off as I recalled something I'd read long ago, about a jerk named Theseus, an underground maze, and a ball of string. "Minotaurs? Seriously?" That explained the horns I'd seen. They weren't on helmets; they were on heads.
Monty looked at me or a long moment before going, "Huh. I hadn't thought about that, what with the minotaur being male in the old story... but yeah, I guess they are minotaurs. Cow minotaurs."
Dear Goddess. Weren't the centaurs, who were mashups of the cavalry soldiers and horses the Colonization Force had thought they'd need in a medieval world, punishment enough? I suppose the minotaurs had been drovers? Which meant there were probably races based on greeps and any other livestock the drovers had been tending, dammit. And I would have to... attend to them to give them males if they asked.
Well, at least the minotaurs were female from the chest down, and if Bill said they had "bubble butts," then they must, because Dixies noticed such things. No non-human hindquarters to deal with, not with this race, at least. And being married to Montana, I was accustomed to mountain-climbing, as we jokingly referred to our romps.
But seriously. Minotaurs?
I worked my way over to Petra, who was managing the mangonels. "Dump the debitage," I told her. "We need a non-lethal response. You still have those big net rounds, right? The boys say there are nine of the attackers, and they're, well, minotaurs. You might know them as 'Cows.' Think you can tangle them up?"
"With enough light, assuming they're close together." She held up a fat luminium cylinder. "M87 flare. Gunpowder and magnesium don't burn anymore, but Willy Pete sti
ll does. Different kind of reaction, I guess."
"Willy Pete?"
"White phosphorus. A pre-Ruin chemical compound. Got a case of these left. I can use one of the mangonels to toss it out there and light up the area, long enough for us to net 'em. It'll burn for about a minute, coming down on a little parachute, and light up six or seven acres."
"Do it." I stood and watched them prep the munitions in their three mangonels: the flare with its slow fuse in one, and two tangle rounds in the other that might get all the Cows if they were clustered close enough together. If they retained bovine instincts, they just might be. Meanwhile, they kept shouting for us to hand over the boymaker and tossing the occasional huge spear at us. Where had they found tool stones big enough for those exquisite spearpoints? They were almost as long as a Dixie.
In less than five minutes, the first catapult hurled the Willy Pete shell up into the darkness. Soon after there was a loud crack and a brilliant white light, brighter than a lightning strike, exposed the massive cow-headed women huddled together about sixty feet away as it drifted slowly downward. The Cows were in fact as bare, voluptuous, and hairless as Bellerophon had reported earlier. The light didn't last as long as expected, maybe 20 seconds, but it was long enough for the gun crews to orient their mangonels, set the distance based on the marker stakes in the kill zone outside the wall, and send their rounds downrange. Bellows of outrage and the sight of the minotauresses struggling and stumbling heavily to the ground in the dimming light told us the net rounds had worked, and my defenders and I cheered.
The Dixies started up their song again, and I yelled, "No bricksies, boys! Taunts and tricksies will be enough for now!"
"Yay!" Chaos yelled triumphantly.
"Major Emlett," Montana called out. We had no formal military yet, just a loose militia, but things were starting to firm up, and we awarded ranks according to seniority and ability.
"Ma'am!" a younger giantess, obviously second-gen, replied immediately. She saluted with her left hand; the other ended in a gopherwood hook. As I understood it, she'd lost her hand to a chupacabra as a child, while protecting her pregnant mother and unborn sister. The chupa lost its head.
"Send someone to round up Soren, Glenda, and all the faunlets, and have them drag those women inside the wall. Meanwhile, I want you and everyone big enough to handle them out there keeping them under control until we can get them inside. Dixies, that does not include you or your bricksies!"
The Dixies chorused, "Awww," as one pixie.
Soren was the other adult giantess; Glenda was her teenage daughter, a mere six and a half feet tall. After Montana gave her orders, she then headed out with some of the larger wolfin women and terran men, including Keenan Dree, to hold down the Cows. It was an onerous task, and they were relieved when the giantesses and ten faunlets trotted up.
"Faunlets" was something of a misnomer for the tough women — now. Each stood well over six feet tall, with the legs and hooves of goats, and small horns peeking through their curly hair above their foreheads. The story was, some of the general staff in the Colonization Force had brought along sons, nephews, and other deserving young tweens and teens to serve as pages and errand runners. Officially, they were assigned a rank called, for some reason, "middie."
Well, the boys had completed Step Through looking like the Greek god Pan, though gender-reversed to female, with the burning desire to play the Zamphir-flute. The universe's odd sense of humor again. They were quite cute, so someone had called them faunlets—apparently a term for attractive boys invented by some perverted butterfly collector—and the name stuck. No one expected them to grow up to be so big.
As far as I knew, they had no nymphs to chase here—but the faunlets were notorious for trying to boink anyone who would hold still long enough, despite their lack of penises. I'd already learned that this was true, and that it included the younger ones, which could be rather embarrassing. But they were popular among the other ladies, because they were fun, inventive, and couldn't cause pregnancies. I couldn't be everywhere, and none of the new ladies wanted to get pregnant while they were waiting for me to service them, or Keenan Dree would have had more women than he did.
Being a stud could be a real pain in the rear end. I really hoped my Goddess and Little Magic found a few more of us to take up the slack. I think they had, because Little Magic had sounded cautiously optimistic about it.
Speak of the devil: We need to talk about that, Father, my unborn son stated gravely. But later, sometime next week maybe.
Uh oh.
One of the faunlets approached, tugging her spiked beard, which I knew was sandy-blonde under the light of day. "We got 'em inside, sir. Now what?"
I considered for a moment. "How about you lock them in the Climbing Tower for now?"
"Sounds good, sir."
I noticed that her stomach was protruding, which seemed off, because the faunlets had arrived here less than six weeks ago. "Pucky, you're showing already!"
"Yessir! So are my other girls! You should see Titania." She leaned close and whispered, "Seems you're quite the stud, darlin' Tobias." Leaning back, she said proudly, "My previous pregnancies were all year-long affairs, but that new doc of yours tells me we'll all pop at about 20 weeks."
"That's just six months!"
"Yep. Seems Someone is in a hurry to give us some little satyrs, heh heh heh. Well, back to the salt mines, your studship!"
Someone indeed. "Thanks a lot, Aurora," I muttered.
"Mother says 'You're welcome,' Father."
I whirled to see a small, glowing boy standing on the path, wearing a unitard and canvas shoes this time. He looked a little older than before. "Little Magic!"
"Oh, we're back to being informal, are we? I suppose I should call you something cutesy then, like the Dixies do. How about, hmm, gotta be original... Dadday?" He lifted a blond eyebrow above a Fell-green eye. "Dadday it is. Oh, and Mother also says, and I quote, 'Quit your bitching and keep thinking with your dick. You're going to need some strong minotaur sons for defense in a few years.' Unquote." He looked at me curiously. "What does 'thinking with your dick' mean?"
I couldn't help the few thoughts that slipped out.
"OH GROSS!" Little Magic shouted—and when a demigod shouts, everyone hears. Clapping his hands to his ears, he growled, "Now I'm going to have to soak MY ENTIRE BRAIN in bleach. It's all about sex with you, isn't it? As if I didn't get enough spillover from the Dixies!"
"Well, it kind of is our purpose in life. Maybe yours, too. And you'll change your mind about it someday."
"I know. That's what scares me. Goodbye, 'Dadday'." And with a grin that lingered longer than the rest of him, Little Magic giggled, "Enjoy plowin' those Cows!"
"Minotaurs," I muttered. "They're minotaurs. Beautiful, sexy lady minotaurs."
Keep telling yourself that, Dadday! Moooooooo!
Eos was definitely getting too much spillover from the Dixies.
❖
The next day, I had to deal with the beautiful, sexy lady minotaurs. No, not that way. We talked. And that's not a euphemism. We really talked. We worked out a treaty.
If you've never seen a cow pout, you might not think it's possible. But they can. I had the leader, Gertrude, sitting on the floor of my "office," as I didn't have a chair big enough to hold her, and I was sitting on a stool beside her, watching her pout. She also tried puppy-dog eyes on me, which works surprisingly well with those big brown doe-eyes minotaurs have. If I could have looked past the sharpened horns and big teeth, which included the canines of an omnivore, I might've released her from the gopherwood shackles.
Did you know that you can whittle a chain, complete with individual links, from wood? It takes a long time and a lot of sharpened stone tools, but it can be done. For some reason, one of our sylvie carpenters had been struck with the idea to do so weeks before, and had managed two such chains, which she used to make shackles. She wasn't into that kind of kink (seriously, I had experienced almost everything
by that point), so I suspected some back-time tinkering by my favorite Goddess.
When I had entered the room five minutes before, Gertrude had snarled, "I was told I would be seeing the boymaker!"
"You are."
"You? You're no bull! All I see is a scrawny calf!"
"I've been called a mooncalf before. What did you expect me to look like? A horny male minotaur?" I rolled my eyes. People saw what they expected to see, I supposed. "I'm terran, what we call the people originally native to this worldline. We don't get as large as you... ladies." I had to admit, I was taking great interest in her body, which the Step Through had, of course, tweaked to make her impossibly attractive to mortal men. I'd already seen one man walk into a tree while watching her instead of where he was going as she was hustled into my office. Her breasts really were quite large, even out of proportion to her size... udder-like, one might say. How did they overcome gravity like that?
The Fathering Land Page 4
