by Gaie Sebold
“Oh, no,” she said. “If you could, from your experience, advise me, yes, I would be grateful. But I was merely explaining the background.”
Well, it isn’t unusual to have a client walk a mile around the thing they want to say before they say it.
“Background to what?” I said.
She sat down. “When my marriage took place,” she said, “I thought I was prepared. I knew the basics. I knew that once it was over, the transformation would begin, that it would be painful, perhaps fatal. I did not know that even making the attempt would be so difficult for me. It was not necessary for me to admit to, even to feel desire. Malleay had to.”
I nodded. He had to feel desire, or the essential aspect of the marriage, Enthemmerlee’s transformation, couldn’t have taken place. Gudain and human anatomy were that alike, at any rate.
“If it had not been for Lobik,” Enthemmerlee went on, “I think we would have failed. He was so kind. So understanding. With me, and with Malleay. He understood that... He knew, and he...”
I waited.
“He knew I felt desire. For him. And he was not disgusted. He was happy.” She realised she was crying, and wiped impatiently at her eyes. “I did not know... I did not realise it was possible. There was even pleasure. Not much, that first time, but it was there. But poor Malleay... He tries to think like a revolutionary, but he is still a Gudain. He felt desire, but this disturbed him; greatly.” She paused.
“He stopped attending privaiya, didn’t he?” I said. “Now he’s not taking the smoke, he gets lustful.”
“Yes. And I hoped that would... But...” She got up, and messed with the lamp again, so she wouldn’t have to look at me. “I disgust him now,” she said, softly. “He flinches away from me. It is not necessary, of course, that he desire me; there is no need for us ever to be together again, in that way, if he does not wish it. But he is unhappy. I want him to be happy. And also... This is vile, but it is politics. His disgust is visible. It is damaging, for others to see him flinch when I am close. You have seen it?”
I nodded.
She sighed, and sat back down, turning out her hands in a helpless, beautiful gesture. “I do not know what to do,” she said.
“Do you feel desire for him?” I said. “For Malleay?”
She hooded her eyes. “I did,” she said. “His mind – there, he is very passionate. He always has been. Since we were children, we have talked about how the world should be changed. I loved him, I think. I still do. But desire? I do not know.”
Desire is a powerful thing. Powerful enough to change lives, to punch through city walls. But it’s fragile, too. If it’s constantly rejected, it can wither like a flower out of water; and sometimes, it can’t be revived.
“I can talk to him, if you wish. Just to find out what’s going on.”
“Would you? Please?”
“Of course. But how would you feel if the discussion took a more practical turn?”
She just looked at me.
“I mean,” I said, “if I decided the only way was to get him between the sheets, and see where we went from there, how would you feel about that? Because I can talk with the best of ’em, but if I really want to know someone, well, that’s where I find out the most. This is assuming he can be persuaded.”
“If you can help him to be happier,” Enthemmerlee said, “I would only be grateful.”
Not so much as a hesitation. I wasn’t sure whether to be glad about that, to be honest. On the one hand, it made things easier – but on the other, it meant that she had no jealousy about Malleay. I don’t like jealousy, I think it’s a waste of emotion, but it can be a useful indicator of where someone’s passion lies. And if Malleay had managed to completely kill hers, it might not be capable of resurrection. But it wasn’t her desire, it was Malleay’s that was my immediate problem.
And I didn’t think he liked me that much.
But that was for later. “I need to ask you,” I said. “Would you be willing to talk to me about what pleases you? Because if I can get him back to your bed, there’s not a lot of point if he’s not going to make you happy in it.”
“Oh. Oh!” She flushed again, even darker. “I... Is that important? So long as he is happy...”
“Well, you can just put up with someone in bed, yes. I’ve done it, often enough. But I’m trained to make them think they’ve pleased me. You’re not trained like that, and people know. He’d pick up on it, trust me. People do, when they care about the person they’re bedding.” The memory of my last conversation with Hargur caught at my throat, and I had to push myself on. “You don’t have to show me. Just tell me. When you’re with Lobik... What does he do, that you like? What makes you tingle?”
She held her hands to her face, and looked at me, eyes huge. “I don’t think I can.”
To make it easier for her, I tucked my legs up on the bed and turned so I wasn’t looking at her, though I kept an eye on the door and window. “Well, shall I talk about things I like?” I said. “Then you can tell me if it’s the same for you. I don’t know how different our bodies are. Now, breasts.” I knew she had those, I’d seen when the sea breeze blew her gown against her on the trip over. Although if she’d been wearing full Gudain costume I never would have.
She made a faint noise, that might have contained a question.
“I like it when they’re touched,” I said. “Not too rough. Nothing worse than someone acting like they’re milking a cow. Or that thing when they pull on your nipples like they’re trying to get a cork out of a bottle.”
I heard a stifled squeak, and risked a glance. She still had her hands over her mouth, but her eyes were squinched up with amusement. “People do that?”
“Oh, yeah. Much nicer when they just stroke. Or kiss. Or lick. You?”
Barely above a whisper, she said, “Kissing. Kissing is nice.”
“Where?”
“On... on the breasts.”
“You like his tongue? I’ve an Ikinchli friend,” (at least, I hoped I still did; if things here went badly, I might never again be able to drink in Kittack’s bar – or do any of the other things I enjoyed doing with him). “He’s amazing with his tongue.”
“You have done... this... with an Ikinchli?”
“Oh yes. Very much so and quite often.” I sighed. I was feeling a bit deprived, one way and another. I tried to get back to the matter in hand. “Other places than the breasts? Thighs, maybe? Having your thighs stroked or kissed?”
“That’s nice, too.”
“How about between them? What do you like there?”
There was a long silence. I didn’t look at her, but stared at the hangings. Dark blue lilies, done too large, heavy heads bent as though in sorrow.
“When he strokes... There’s a place where I join, that is very sensitive. And stroked the right way, that is very pleasant.” Her voice had strengthened a little; she sounded more, now, as though she were discussing what to have for dinner. If that was how she felt easiest talking, then I wasn’t going to stop her.
Sounded like our anatomies had some similarity, too, though I wasn’t sure about the ‘join’ part. “Slow, fast?”
“Slow. Then fast.”
“What about when he’s inside you? What do you like him to do?”
Silence.
“Once he is inside me, I don’t care,” she said, finally. “The feel of him, the feel of him, oh, Great Artificer, I love him so much.”
Well, that wasn’t going to help poor Malleay.
“But you do notice how he feels?”
She gave a little choke of laughter. “Yes. He feels wonderful. Either side.”
“Oh, right, of course. Well, Ikinchli are usually pretty symmetrical. But you enjoy the actual sensation.”
“A little more so in one than the other. It seems I am not so symmetrical.”
I wondered for a moment if we were talking about back door play, but then it struck me. “You have two,” I said.
“Yes.”
Ikinchli males have two penises. Why wouldn’t Gudain women have two vaginas? And she must have had them before her transformation. ‘Mated at the same time to both a Gudain and an Ikinchli’ obviously meant exactly that.
It also made sense of the Gudain men and their snakes. Their Great Artificer was having a bit of a laugh, if you ask me.
“Right, well. If you like things in one more than the other, then I’d suggest you guide the gentleman to the one which works better for you. You don’t have to say anything, if you find that difficult; just use your hands. Now, generally I like things to start off slowly in there, and get faster, which is convenient because that works for most of the men I bed. What about you? I know you like it, and that’s good, but there must be some things that feel particularly pleasant?”
“If he... if he touches my breast... while he’s...”
“Good.”
And so the conversation went on, until I had enough, at least, to give Malleay some idea. If he was willing to listen, of course. Enthemmerlee had relaxed a little, though she still found it easier to talk if I wasn’t looking at her.
At the end, I couldn’t resist asking. “So with both of them... that must have taken some arranging,” I said. “The first time I tried that I fell out of the bed. Twice.”
She gave a hitch of laughter. “Yes, so did I! It was most embarrassing.”
“You need a bigger bed, then.”
“You think the three of us... Oh, I don’t know if...”
“You’ve done it once, my dear. If you all want to do it again, I see no good reason why you shouldn’t.” Oops, the ‘my dear’ was a bit of a slip – she was my employer, after all. But she didn’t seem to notice. “If you do, don’t be surprised if the boys discover they enjoy each other, too, though.”
“This happens?”
“You know, you really need to come to Scalentine for longer next time. It happens. It happens with women, too. It happens with people of any gender, including those who are more than one.”
“I had no idea. How fascinating.”
“I would have thought it would be mentioned in the Moral Statutes,” I said. “Places that have lots of rules about sex often have a problem with it, I’ve never really been sure why.”
“I don’t think the people who created the Statutes had any idea that such things were possible,” she said. “There is in fact no Statute against what we did. The idea that a Gudain woman would voluntarily bed with an Ikinchli is simply not considered.”
“I’ll eat my hat if you’re the only one who’s ever done it,” I said.
“You do not have a hat,” she said. “You think so?”
“Well, if they’ve managed to avoid the privaiya smoke for long enough,” I said.
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
I RETREATED TO my own room to change my shirt, which had suffered slightly from my hasty supper. Rikkinnet gave me a frosty look as she left. That was a bridge that needed mending, but right now I didn’t have any more tact left in me.
I’d barely got my clean shirt on when someone bashed on the door.
I opened it, sword in hand, to see Captain Tantris, two of the guard, Rikkinnet, and the seneschal. Again. “What is it?”
Captain Tantris stood with his mouth open, as did his two guards, as though they’d been frozen in mid-explanation. Tantris was flushing a dark, unhealthy green. Rikkinnet hissed, “Is maybe a little trouble. Out by the gate.”
“Right, I’ll be there. Captain?” Neither he nor his guards had moved; he was staring very hard at a point somewhere to the left of my ear. The guards... weren’t.
Honestly. Gudain are mammals, and not that different from humans. I knew this lot had seen breasts at some point in their lives, however long ago. I did my shirt up, slung on the nearest bits of armour, and shouldered past them. “If you’re that easily distracted, better hope that no assassins turn up naked,” I said.
They weren’t assassins. They were just... Ikinchli. Some sat outside the gate, patient, quiet, with babies clinging to their shoulders, impervious to the constant slow drizzle. Some came walking up through the darkness, left something by the gate, and walked away again. Fish. A root vegetable. A piece of parchment scrawled with words.
Standing there in the night, the rain whispering down all around, falling sparkling through the soft lamplight from the gatehouse, I remembered a temple with the sound of the sea coming through the doorway. A young girl laying out her basket of pitiful treasures at the feet of what she thought was a goddess.
A sudden brutal shudder took me, all my flesh clenching tight to my bones.
“Babylon?” Rikkinnet said.
“Nothing. I don’t see a threat here.” If there was a threat to Enthemmerlee, surely Fain would have been aware of it. Mind, Fey oaths are twisty, they seldom work in the way you might expect.
“What if one of them decides to climb the fence? Eh?” Tantris growled.
“They’re not stupid,” I said. I walked up to the fence. “Hey. Anyone here planning to cause trouble?”
“Like they’d tell you,” Tantris said.
A few of the Ikinchli exchanged glances, then looked at me. Rikkinnet snapped out a stream of liquid-hissing Ikinchli phrases.
An older male pushed himself to his feet, and walked up to the gate. He limped badly, and even in the flickering firelight I could see long twisting scars on his back and legs. The gate-guard moved forward. The Ikinchli stopped a few feet away, and said something to Rikkinnet.
She said, “They are hoping to see the Itnunnacklish, that is all.”
“They really think she’d be wandering about out here this time of night?” Tantris said. “So Ikinchli aren’t stupid, eh?”
“Captain Tantris?” I said.
“What?”
“Insulting a large number of people who can certainly understand you, even if they don’t always choose to speak Lithan, and who up until now have been behaving perfectly peaceably, is not necessarily wise. Nor is insulting the Ikinchli Ambassador to Scalentine, who is standing next to you, in case anyone had failed to inform you of the fact.”
“The wha...” Tantris turned to look at Rikkinnet, who was examining the tip of her knife with every appearance of unconcern except for her tail, which was ticking back and forth like that of a cat about to pounce. “She’s the... You’re the...”
“I am, yes.” She turned away, towards the gates, and raised her voice so the watching Ikinchli could hear her. “And as the Ambassador to Scalentine, I tell you, the Itnunnacklish is sleeping now. If you cause no trouble, no one will drive you away...”
I looked at the guards, hard. They glanced at Tantris, who scowled.
“...but she will not come out tonight,” Rikkinnet went on.
“It doesn’t matter,” a young voice said in the darkness. “We watch with her. We hold her in our hearts. We ask the ancestors that they should watch over her and keep her safe. We bear witness.”
“You don’t think she is safe, here among her family?” I said.
“Surrounded by Gudain, guarded by Gudain?” someone else said. “No, we do not think she is safe. We do not know if she is even alive.”
“Not all of us are Gudain,” Rikkinnet said.
“No, we’re not, thank you,” I said.
“And who are you to guard the most precious Itnunnacklish?”
“My name’s Babylon Steel. I am here as her bodyguard, and her friend.”
Their eyes went back to Rikkinnet. She gave me a long look, then said something else in Ikinchli. There were a few rustles of laughter in the dark. I recognised a couple of words, and grinned. Funny how the obscene ones are the ones you learn first in any language; after, ‘a drink, please.’ Fine by me if knowing what I did meant they felt better about me.
“No trouble?” Rikkinnet said.
“No.”
Whispers, a rising chorus of pleas and declarations.
“No trouble.”
“We don’
t want trouble, we just want to watch over her.”
“To be near her.”
“Drican Thelash.”
“She is the one promised.”
“Itnunnacklish.”
They quieted; the pupils of their eyes, brilliant yellow with the glow of the fire, fixed on the house where their hope lay sleeping.
As we walked back, I glanced at Rikkinnet. She caught my look. “What?”
“If I offended you, I’m sorry.”
She shrugged. “You are not Ikinchli.”
“No, I’m not. And I can’t know how it’s been for you. I hope... I hope it gets better.”
“Yes.” It seemed like that was all I was getting. But I hoped I’d rebuilt enough of a bridge to walk on.
WE SWAPPED GUARD partway through the night, and I managed a little sleep. I woke to grey light to find my worries had woken up before me, and were waiting around the bed.
I had told Captain Tantris that I would be on the practice ground at daybreak; well, since I wasn’t going to get any more sleep, I might as well go straight there.
Rikkinnet took one look at me and said, “Training?”
“Yeah. But...” I glanced at Enthemmerlee’s door. “You need to sleep. Damn those guards. We need someone else we can trust.”
“For now, we have to make do.”
So I went to Bergast’s door. I raised my hand to knock, and heard him muttering. Dreaming, or already awake? “Bergast?”
“What? Wait, who is it?”
“It’s Babylon.”
“Just a moment!”
He sounded embarrassed, almost panicked.
“You’ve nothing I haven’t seen before, Bergast,” I said. “If you’re human. You are human, are you?” Acting on some half-felt suspicion, I shoved at the door, which opened to reveal Bergast, fully dressed, frantically shoving books and papers into a pile. The candle in his lantern had burned to a stub.
“Do you always burst in that way?” he said. He picked up a shirt that was lying on the bed and dropped it on top of some other papers. “I must ask about laundry.”
Funny, that shirt had looked perfectly clean, and crisply folded, to me. Now, though, it did need the laundry; a brown stain of ink was blooming on one cuff as I watched.
