The II AM Trilogy Collection

by Christopher Buecheler

  * * *

  Someone was knocking on the door. A thin structure made of branches and woven reeds, it shook and rattled with each hit. Ashayt, awake again on her cot, knew that the sound would carry throughout the meager three-room house of mud bricks. She heard her foster parents murmuring, wondering who it might be that would come calling. Her foster father, Bes, would be the one to open the door.

  “Greetings and welcome to this, my most humble home,” Bes said to the visitor, as was custom. Ashayt knew there would be polite bowing to accompany these words.

  “May your home and fields be blessed by the Gods with many long days of prosperity,” came the reply, and Ashayt found herself sitting bolt upright in her bed, a newfound energy coursing through her body. There could be no mistaking that voice; Amun Sa, her love and lover, the very reason for which she woke each morning, was standing at the entrance to her home.

  “You have my thanks, stranger,” her foster father replied, and Ashayt could hear in his tone a wariness that suggested he had noticed the quality of Amun Sa’s trappings and understood that this man who had come to their home was of some greater class than had any business on the outskirts of the city. “Of what service can I be to you?”

  “My name is Amun Sa,” her lover said, “and I would be stranger to you no longer. I am third-cousin by marriage to King Pepi, Lord of all the Earth, Descendant of Ptah the Maker, may he rule forever.”

  Bes was clearly at a loss for words. He stammered for a moment before finally regaining his wits and saying, “My Lord, you bless our home with our presence.”

  “Truly, it is I who am blessed to be here,” Amun Sa replied. “For today I have been given a great and wonderful piece of news, and it is because of this that I have come to stand at your doorstep. I have come to speak with you, sir, and to beg you if I must. I have come to ask permission to court your daughter.”

  Ashayt was unable to keep herself from making some small, strained noise of joyous disbelief. If the words that Amun Sa was saying were true – and he would not have been there if they weren’t – then he had been granted permission by King Pepi to divorce. The thing they had both hoped and prayed for had happened.

  Despite her weakness, despite her thirst, despite the fever that seemed to be raging through her body, Ashayt leapt from her bed and began to dress. She could hear her foster father stammering, again, and her foster mother making a sort of disbelieving noise.

  “Are you sure you have the right home, my Lord?” Nephthys asked. “Our daughter is … she is not our true daughter, though we have loved her as such for many years. She comes from the south, from—”

  “From the desert, yes. I know.” Amun Sa laughed. “I assure you, I have the right home. Her name is Ashayt, and she has lived with you as your daughter these past dozen years. She is dark skinned, with lovely, swirling tattoos that cover her body from head to toe, and she is the most beautiful and wonderful creature that the Gods have ever put on this earth, and I love her with every fiber of my being, and I cannot stand for one second more to be apart from her.”

  “My love!” Ashayt cried, bursting now through the fabric that hung between her bedroom and the common area and racing toward him, seeing his face light up and his arms open wide. “Amun Sa, my beautiful Amun Sa!”

  And then he was holding her, and she had wrapped her arms around him, and he was pressing his lips to the top of her head, and she put her face against his chest, and she was weeping, weeping with joy and love and the simple disbelief of all that was happening to her now, at last, after so many years of being alone.

  She heard her foster mother say, “I told you she had someone,” in an amused tone.

  “Please, sir, may I court your daughter?” Amun Sa asked again, still holding her close to him, and she heard Bes give an incredulous laugh.

  “I’m not sure we have a choice,” the man said.

  Ashayt had managed to get some amount of control over herself and turned now to face her foster parents. “I will have no other. I love him. I love him, and I will never love another as much as I love him, not should I live a thousand years or more.”

  “Ashayt,” Nephthys said, a joyous expression on her face. “My lovely Ashayt, my tiny little mau … you don’t need to justify yourself to us. You are a grown woman, and you have earned the love of a fine man who can give you a life that we could never provide. How could we say no? How could we stand here and look at the love on both of your faces and tell you that we do not approve? All we have ever wished, from the moment we took you into our home, is that you would find happiness. Does this man make you happy?”

  “More so than I have ever been in my life,” Ashayt told them.

  “Then, by all means, marry him,” Bes said, and he laughed. “Marry him now, before he comes to his senses and realizes that a cousin of the King has no business with the daughter of a struggling farmer. In fact, good sir, could we not convince you to do this tonight?”

  Amun Sa laughed as well, and he shook his head. “I would be happy to do it – happy to pledge the rest of my life, this very night, to the daughter of a struggling farmer, but I cannot. Not yet. My King has approved my divorce from the woman I was forced to marry, but it is not yet finished in the eyes of the Gods. In five days’ time I will be free, and I say to you now that I will marry your daughter on the sixth day. I will do it gladly, and I will welcome her and all those who love her into my family.”

  Ashayt turned again and pressed herself against him, taking in the scent of him, the feeling of his strong arms wrapped still around her body. It seemed impossible, this thing he suggested – like a wisp of dream, borne upon the summer breeze, that must inevitably fall to earth. How could it be that she had come to have everything she had ever wanted? How could it possibly be?

  “My love,” she said to him, and felt again the urge to weep with joy. “My love. My love.”

  It seemed to her as if she could never say these words enough.

  * * *

  “I feared you had given up on me,” Amun Sa said. “You’ve not been at the market for two days.”

  Ashayt smiled at this idea, and she shook her head. “No, I would never leave you. I have been … unwell.”

  They were walking together under the moonlight, and while Ashayt supposed that Amun Sa thought the winding path he was taking terribly clever, he could no more disguise that he was maneuvering them toward the fisherman’s shack than if he had announced the destination out loud. Ashayt, for her part, did not mind. She lacked the strength to perform as enthusiastically as sometimes she did, but she still wished to be again with her lover after two days without.

  Amun Sa glanced over at her, an expression of concern on his face. “Should we turn back? If you are not feeling well, my dearest, then I do not wish to … that is, I won’t make you—”

  Ashayt laughed and touched her fingers to his shoulder. “I know where you are taking me and want nothing more,” she said.

  “But you—”

  “I am a woman in love who feels much better than she did during the day, and I want to be with you. I might still have some fever – I feel hot inside, though Nephthys says I am cold to the touch, and I am still so very thirsty no matter how much water I drink.”

  “What have you eaten today?” Amun Sa asked, and Ashayt tilted her head, trying to recall.

  “I … don’t think I have eaten anything, my love. Truly, I’ve had no desire for food. Just water and more water. I spent most of the day sleeping, if truth must be told.”

  “I hope the Gods will favor you with a swift recovery, my Ashayt. We have many long years ahead of us to enjoy in good health.”

  Ashayt shuddered with pleasure at these words and gave her lover a brilliant smile. Oh, how wonderful that plan sounded to her ears, to her heart. She felt the sudden and overwhelming physical desire that Amun Sa so often inspired in her, swelling up from within, and realized that she wished to wait not one moment longer, much less the fifteen or twenty more mi
nutes it would be until they arrived at the fisherman’s hut. She took his hand and slowed, then stopped, peering around her. It was dark, now, and there were few people out of doors. Surely there must be somewhere …

  “What are you doing?” Amun Sa asked, perplexed, and she stood up on tiptoes to whisper into his ear.

  “If we went and stood in that alley, there, we would be deep in the shadows, and no one would see.”

  “My darling …” Amun Sa murmured, his tone slightly nervous as he glanced around, looking for any others who might be out sharing the evening cool with them.

  “I don’t want to wait. I can lean against the wall, with you behind me, and you could cup my breasts with your hands while you fill the part of me that is empty.” She longed to feel his arms around her, his fingers pinching at her nipples, his teeth at her neck.

  “Are you sure?” Amun Sa whispered back, and Ashayt felt something wild and animalistic open up within her, a ravenous desire that seemed impossible to deny.

  “Take me there,” she snarled into his ear. “Take me there and press me up against the wall and … and fuck me. Hard and fast, like a beast. Like a brigand in the night. I am not yet your wife; for another five days, I am only your woman, and I wish you to lay claim to me.”

  Amun Sa, visibly aroused now underneath his tunic, seemed to need no further encouragement. He led her quickly to the alleyway, away from the torches that lined the main thoroughfare they had been traversing, until all she could see of him was an inky, purple silhouette, and then he turned and pressed his lips to hers. Ashayt could feel his member against her. She made a growling noise of desire and lifted the linen fabric up, exposing him and taking him into her hands.

  Amun Sa made a noise of desperate need as she stroked him, and in only a moment more he took her by the shoulders and spun her around, pulling at the sash that bound her dress at her shoulder. Ashayt felt the cool night air caress her body for a moment as her dress slipped to the ground, and then Amun Sa stepped up behind her, his hands coming up to cup her heavy breasts, and she pressed her arms up against the wall of sandstone blocks.

  “Take me,” she whispered, and bent a little at the waist, and she felt him encircle her belly with one arm and pull backward even as he thrust forward. Then he was inside of her, and the force of his entry caused her buttocks to slap against his belly with a noise that Ashayt felt sure must have been heard by every living thing in this great city, but she no longer cared. She felt him withdraw and thrust again, and again came the noise, and Ashayt followed it with a long, low moan of pleasure.

  Amun Sa, lips at her ear, now whispered, “Someone will hear.”

  “Let them,” she hissed back, and pushed against him. “Let the whole world hear and know that I am yours.”

  Amun Sa seemed to acquiesce to this, at least temporarily, and for a time there was only the sound of their coupling accompanied by rough panting and the occasional gasp of pleasure. Then he leaned in to her again and seemed to make one last, ridiculous attempt at propriety.

  “We must be quiet,” he said, and Ashayt felt a sort of mad rage streak through her. Quiet? They were animals, animals like lions on the plains that mated where they pleased and when it suited them. She pulled herself from him and spun, barely registering the surprise in his eyes, and with a single shove, startling in its strength, she sent him stumbling backwards. He lost his footing and landed in the sand with a thud, and he might have voiced some protest if Ashayt had not knelt immediately astride him and stopped his words with a kiss.

  She found his manhood again, hard and hot and slippery, and slid it easily back inside of her, and by the time she had finished kissing him, Amun Sa seemed no longer interested in keeping silent. He was making harsh, high grunts, his hands wrapped again around her breasts, squeezing her dark nipples with each thrust of his hips. Ashayt knew he would soon finish, wanted him to finish, wanted him to feel that pleasure.

  She leaned down and in, kissing him, kissing his lips and his chin and his cheeks and his neck. She stayed there at his neck and felt a curious warmth in her upper gums, accompanied by just the slightest hint of pain, but it was distant and could not compare to the pleasure between her thighs and the unnamed, ravenous need that seemed now to fill her entire body.

  “Darling …” Amun Sa said in a strangled voice, his last living word, and when he pumped again with his hips and she felt him loose his seed within her, she bit deeply into his neck, and drank his blood, and so at last satisfied the thirst that had raged within her now for so many hours.

  * * *

  It was only after the death of her lover, the only man whom she had ever known as a woman and the only man whom she would ever love for all her long, strange life, that Ashayt pulled away from Amun Sa’s neck and realized what she had done. Feeling slow and disoriented, drugged, she touched her fingers to her lips and held them before her, slicked red with blood. How was it, she wondered, that she could see them so clearly in this dark alley?

  Below her thighs, which shook still in pleasure, her lover was no longer thrusting his hips. His chest no longer rose and fell with breath. His eyes stared up and out into the night, vacant and expressionless, and if his face betrayed anything at all of the violence that had been done to him, it was nothing more than the slightest hint of confusion, as if he searched for answers among the stars and found there nothing satisfactory.

  Ashayt took in a breath to scream. There was nothing else she could think to do – she had murdered her lover in a dark alleyway in the throes of passion. She was going to scream and scream until her voice died and her lungs burst, until she wept blood, until the Gods themselves relented and, begging her to cease, saw fit to bring Amun Sa back from the land of the dead.

  She was going to scream, but the chuckle she heard locked the breath in her chest and brought her up short. It was just a single, brief laugh, grimly amused and dark, but in that moment all of her memories flooded back into her mind, and Ashayt recalled every second of her encounter with the thing that stood now behind her.

  I will make you mine, and when next he sees you, he will not know the woman who stands before him, the thing had said, and surely this had been proven true. Amun Sa had gone into the alley not to lie with the girl from the desert, who he thought was going to marry him in six days’ time. He had gone instead to his death at the hands of some new and awful creature that had taken her place.

  “I could not have hoped for better,” the thing said in its murky, disgusting voice. “The harlot and her lover, absconding into the night for one last, fatal embrace. Tell me, my dear, do you think he understood what you’ve become, when you bit him? Do you think he understood that his death was at hand, and had time to regret ever meeting this filthy, black-skinned orphan bitch now sucking his very life away?”

  Ashayt was up on her feet and turning, fingers hooked into claws, before she even had time to realize she meant to attack. With a howling cry of despair, and rage, and hate, she threw herself at the man-thing that had done this to her, meaning to claw its eyes from their sockets and chew its foul tongue from its mouth.

  The creature reached out with its right hand and slapped her, the force of it hard enough that Ashayt was thrown bodily against the sandstone wall, her face mashing into the rough surface and tearing open in a dozen places. The blow should have killed her. It should have killed her – and there were many times in the long years hence that she wished it had – but it did not, and instead she fell backward to the ground and lay there, hands covering her battered face, writhing in miserable agony.

  “You’ll not lay a hand on me, whore,” it said, its voice filled with grim mirth, and it took a step forward and into a shaft of moonlight. Ashayt had taken her hands away at the sound of his footstep, and she saw now for the first time its ghastly visage. The creature’s face was a mass of scars, as if its flesh had been chewed on by rats for some extended period and then left to heal. It possessed neither hair nor eyebrows, and where its nose should have b
een there were only two grotesque slits, malformed and damp with mucus. One eye had gone milky and dead. The other glittered out at her with horrid, malicious glee.

  Ashayt again drew in breath to scream, this time in terror, and the thing made a sort of hissing noise, slashing its hand through the air, and her throat locked tight again. What came out instead was a wheezing sound that was barely audible.

  “Already you have made too much noise,” it told her, crouching down to look at her better as she lay, naked and battered, on her side in the dust. “It is a miracle that none have yet come to investigate and found you here with your dead lover. Now there will be no more. Now you will listen.”

  And so the thing began to speak. It told her of the six centuries it had lived since first its master had brought it into the world under the moon, a thing to be caged and tortured, experimented upon, burnt by the sun and blinded by acids. Disfigured. Always, the blood would bring it back from the brink of death, but even the blood could do only so much, and so the thing now was forced forever to skulk at the periphery of the human world.

  “I killed him, of course. My master. It took more than one hundred years – a century of torture – but at last came a moment of weakness. A moment of distraction. I put a shiv into his eye that I had made with a bone from my own finger. A small sacrifice for one’s freedom, don’t you think? As he screamed and cursed, I shoved him into a vat of viscous, oily pitch and set it alight. I stood and watched as he burned alive, and each time he struggled to free himself from the sticky, flaming mess, I shoved him back in with his own staff.

  “His shrieks were like the sweetest song played by the most talented of musicians, and I savored every one of them. When at last the flames guttered to a stop, I carried the entire trough out and cast it into the merciless sea. I can think of no more fitting a burial, no better a casket. I do hope the fishes there enjoyed his remains.”