Shannivar

by Deborah J. Ross

  “What—what is it?” she asked, her voice half-choked with awe. Surely this rapture unfolding above her must be the door flap to Tabilit’s own country.

  “I do not know.”

  “It is the Light of the North.” Chinjizhin came to stand beside them. “We call it Tabilit’s Veil. It is said that births and weddings under such a sky are greatly blessed.”

  For long moments, they watched the curtain wave and swirl overhead. The lower edges seemed to catch fire, flaring red and orange. Blues and purples appeared as points of brilliance. The diaphanous display rippled faster, as if caught in a celestial storm. The sky ignited with swirling color.

  A hush fell over the watchers. Shannivar’s heart ached. In her mind, she saw the draperies part to reveal a far country, like the one she sometimes glimpsed when the rising sun pierced mountains of cloud. She had yearned then to spread wings like her totem, the Golden Eagle, to rise above the earth and sail through those canyons of light to the lands beyond.

  “How could I have doubted the words of the te-Ketav?” Zevaron murmured, his words for himself alone. “How else could there be such glory in the world?”

  Shannivar and Zevaron had drawn together as they watched the shimmering display. She felt his warmth on her face. Almost, she could hear the beating of his heart. No, it was not his heart, but her own, and for a moment there was no difference.

  In wonderment, she turned to him, and they gazed at one another in the multi-hued light. His breath was on her skin. His heart beat within her body.

  Truly, she had been guided to this moment by the spirit of Saramark, by Tabilit herself, by the thousand tiny decisions that might have turned her path in another direction. She might have let two strangers go on their way, or she might have returned to Golden Eagle clan with Rhuzenjin, or she might have joined some other clan as an unattached warrior . . . She might have died at the Gelonian fort or in any of a dozen raids. Might have let Zevaron go up to the enarees’ promontory on his own.

  There was but one small step yet to take, one veil to sweep aside. She reached out her hand and his fingers curled around hers. An absurd joy bubbled up in her like a never-failing spring. She wanted to laugh aloud.

  Together they moved toward the jort. Behind them, the Snow Bear men began chanting in praise of Tabilit’s gifts, petitioning the goddess for protection.

  Inside the enclosed darkness of the jort, diffuse light sifted through the smoke hole. Zevaron put his hands on her shoulders, and she moved into his embrace. Her skin tingled with the pressure of his arms tightening around her, the muscled length of his body pressed against hers.

  His mouth was surprisingly soft and warm. She had been kissed by men before, and lain with them, but never with such delirious care, such delicately paced arousal. Here she felt no frantic haste, but a deep awareness of each moment. Each movement of his lips on hers, each touch of his hands, each curve of his body carved itself into her memory.

  They piled the carpets into a single luxurious layer, then slipped out of their clothing and beneath a shared blanket. She was as eager to explore his body as he was hers. In the purification tent, they had stolen glimpses of one another, but now she could touch and taste him as well.

  She rolled him on his back and stretched out on top of him. He put his hands on her buttocks, pulling her closer. Between her parted thighs, she could feel the hardness of his erection. Her own body was ready, moist and swollen, but she wanted to draw out the moment, to savor every part of him. To remember this night forever.

  The skin of his torso was warm and smooth, except for the surprisingly soft hair along the center of his chest and downward. Burying her face in the angle between his neck and shoulder, she inhaled his masculine scent. He smelled of the trail and like other men, yet unlike. Cushioning her teeth with her lips, she took a mouthful of his skin and bit down. He gasped, shuddering. From his reaction, this was not a common form of love-play among his people, but from his breathing, she could tell he enjoyed it.

  She planted little kisses, sometimes with her lips alone, sometimes with tongue and gentle teeth, in a line down the center of his body. Like most young women who had fought against the Gelon, she’d had her share of celebration afterward, usually after too much k’th, but she had never got so drunk that she could not remember the lovemaking she particularly enjoyed. One lover had delighted her with running his hair and lips up and down her body. By his soft moans, Zevaron found the experience as pleasurable.

  After a time, he hooked one leg around her back and rolled both of them over. He laced his hands in her hair, tipping her head back to cover her throat in unbelievably soft kisses. Each touch of his lips spread ripples of sensation over her skin. He went farther down, between her breasts, pausing at each nipple. Her breath caught in her throat. She wanted him to stop, to slide into her now, now, and yet she also wanted each moment to last.

  The farther down on her body he went, the slower and more sensual his kisses became. He breathed across her skin and her entire body quivered.

  Yearning built up deep within her, spreading out from the sweet aching between her thighs. In an instant, he lifted himself, and then he entered her, not all in one stroke, but with a rhythmic, rocking motion, easing in and then out. Each thrust was deeper, and there seemed to be no end to them.

  She dug her fingers into his buttocks, pulling him deeper inside her body. His muscles flexed and hardened as he pressed against places she had not known existed inside her.

  Oh, now!

  She was on fire, in an agony of impatience. Any moment, the building storm would break, flooding all through her, and yet each heartbeat, each racing pulse, carried her further.

  Just at the moment when she thought she could bear it no longer, a storm of pleasure ignited where their bodies joined. It surged and pulsed all through her. She felt herself as a stream of melting intensity, as if she had been seized and swept into an endless sky of light.

  Zevaron shuddered, and Shannivar felt his breath as if it were her own, his wordless cry issuing from her own throat.

  The crest of ecstasy peaked and began to fall away, but only for an instant, a heartbeat, a single exhale of amazement before it flared up, as powerful as before. She gave herself over to it, and this time, she sensed, it was her orgasm that transported them both. Zevaron was in her body, in the soaring currents in her mind, in her heart. Her vision went white, then filled with colors that paled the lights of the north.

  My blessing upon you, my children. Words formed in her mind, dissolving as she came back to her senses. Laughter spilled from her. He was laughing inside her, outside her, along with her. He said something in his own language, and she did not care what it was.

  Spent, he rolled off her and onto his side, one arm still holding her. A slight shift, and he rested his head on her shoulder. Her arms went around him. She felt utterly content. She trailed her fingertips over the smooth skin of his shoulder. She felt the firm, elastic texture of his muscles, a softening of the indefinable tension that never seemed to leave him. He murmured in pleasure. Smiling, she continued stroking him, over the flatness of his shoulder blade and the bony tips of his spine, like a chain of nubbly pearls.

  When her fingers slid over a ridge of harder tissue, she paused. She had seen those criss-crossed scars during the purification ritual. From her own experience with battle wounds, she knew what kind of injury would cause them, how deep the slashes must have been. How deliberate. The scars were white and some years healed, but they were not the work of a blade, not the way they followed the contours of his back.

  Not a knife. A whip. A whip laid on again and again, slicing skin and muscle, laying bare the bone underneath.

  “Don’t stop,” he whispered.

  She had not realized that her hand was now still, resting on the hieroglyphics of pain etched in his flesh. She wanted to ask and yet did not know how. Would the telling
open old wounds, not of the body but of the spirit?

  Gelon whipped their slaves, beat them mercilessly and sometimes unto death, or so it was said. Had Zevaron been a Gelonian slave?

  He shifted, raising himself on one elbow. She felt his gaze on her. Questioning, testing, demanding. Demanding what? That she not shrink from what must be asked? She lifted her chin. “I want to know about your scars, how you got them. Will you tell me?”

  His breath left his body in a rush. In the near dark, she felt him nod. He lowered himself to lie once more on his back, no longer touching her.

  So alone, she thought.

  “You have heard how my mother and I escaped the fall of Meklavar and made our way to Gatacinne, in Isarre. How the city came under Gelonian assault. She was taken prisoner and then sent by ship to Gelon. To Aidon, where I found her four years later. What I did not tell you is that I tried to find her before she left Gatacinne. The city was in turmoil—Gelonian soldiers and Isarrans fighting in the streets, the port on fire, buildings burning everywhere.”

  He paused. She felt how the memories crowded around him, enshrouded him. His voice turned hoarse, as if with remembered smoke. “Before the attack began, we had been housed separately. She was in the Governor’s mansion, and I was in a barracks with the young men. I didn’t like us being apart, but we were dependent on the hospitality of her kinsmen and in no position to demand anything. It turned out I was right. When the fighting began, the Gelon targeted the mansion. It was one of the first places they captured. I couldn’t get to her in time. I couldn’t—”

  Meklavar had come under Gelonian rule four years ago, or was it five? Shannivar tried to imagine Zevaron then, barely grown to manhood, alone in a strange city, cut off from the one person he knew, fighting against men older and more experienced. He was lucky to have survived.

  “I heard that a foreign lady fitting her description was on a ship setting out for Verenzza. That’s a Gelonian port. I had no money for passage to follow her. I went down to the wharves, and—what happened next doesn’t matter. It was a stupid, impossible scheme. I was caught up in a Gelonian raid and became fodder for their oar-ships.”

  “Taken prisoner?”

  “Taken slave. And the first law of the slave—” Zevaron drew a breath, and in that silence, Shannivar heard the echoes of the lash.

  “—is that the masters will do whatever they wish, whenever they wish—”

  In Shannivar’s mind, parallel lines of fire seared his skin. The pain took his breath away. He hunched over and tried to cover his head. Back-handed, the lash struck again, knotted strips of leather biting deep. They landed on Zevaron’s back, too fast and heavy to count. He tried to twist away, but his tormentor kicked his legs out from under him. Within a few minutes, his back and shoulders had turned into a mass of cuts, some of them clear down to the bone.

  “—simply because they can,” he finished.

  She breathed in his pain, his bitterness. In her heart, she understood the Zevaron he had been, the boy struggling for the breath to scream, but all that came were sheets of agony, cold and burning at the same time. The hiss of the lash filled his ears. Tears spilled down his cheeks, and he felt the sticky warmth of blood as each new blow landed. Sweet Mother, he was being flayed alive.

  She reached out and rested one hand on his cheek. A shudder passed through him. With a sound that might have been a sob, he curled on his side, facing away from her. She moved closer, fitting her body to the curve of his back. Her breasts pressed against those terrible scars. She thought how her breasts might someday nourish a child and provide the sustenance of life. If only, in some illogical way, her woman’s body might somehow lift his pain, draw it out as she might draw out venom from a wound, and then change it into a blessing.

  His back was adamant, unyielding. On impulse, she shifted her position. Gently, with her heart in every movement, she pressed her mouth against first one line of scars and then the next. Her lips followed the gnarled and corded ridges. She tried to put into each kiss all the tenderness she could express. Over and over, she traced the pattern of his suffering, his humiliation, and his despair. As she worked her way along the lines of indurated tissue, she left a trail of tears as well as kisses.

  Finally she came to the end. Of scars, of kisses, of tears, she could not tell. In the pit of her stomach, she felt a silence. There was nothing more she could do, except to hold him.

  She had slipped her top arm around Zevaron’s waist as she pulled herself to him. Now she felt his hand tighten around her arm. Against her belly, the hardness of his spine and muscle softened. They moved as one with his breathing.

  Gradually the movement faded, until he lay almost inhumanly still. As still as a stalking predator, as still as its prey. He gripped her hand, her arm folded under his. They lay in this position for what seemed like half the night, with only the pressure of his fingers betraying that he did not sleep.

  The stillness broke when he took a shuddering breath. “That . . .” he began, “that was not the worst of it.” He paused, his back still curved into a protective shell.

  He could not bear to say what came next, not face to face, Shannivar thought. Only in the dark, only when turned away from her.

  “The whip was nothing. Skin and muscles heal. But the Gelonian demon who did it, he flaunted the token my mother wore braided into her hair. He told me he took it from her dead body.”

  Pause.

  “He laughed when he said it.”

  Another pause.

  “Chalil—the Denariyan captain who rescued me—he said it was the nature of such a man to be cruel, even when there was no profit in it for him. The Gelon, seeing that I recognized the token, had aimed his words like a spear at my spirit. To torment me in any way he could. Or so Chalil said.”

  Shannivar could not tell if the shuddering ran only through his body or through them both. “But she wasn’t dead, was she? She was alive. You found her in Danar’s stone-dwelling.”

  Zevaron bent his head, but Shannivar could not tell if the gesture meant agreement or simple endurance. “Losing her the second time . . . I saw her body with my own eyes.”

  Each phrase, half-whisper, resonated like a bone-deep drum. Slow, irrevocable. Inevitable. “And there was nothing left for me except . . .”

  Except to bring down those who took her from you, not once but twice, Shannivar thought. Tsorreh’s had not been a natural death either time; not the end of a life lived well and long, not the sweet-sad farewell, the sure belief that the loved one was now gathered into Tabilit’s embrace. Not the mist-white image of Grandmother and Mirrimal, riding their fine horses to the Pastures of the Sky. Mirrimal had died in battle, of her own choice, and no one had used her death to inflict pain on another. Shannivar did not know what to say, how to breathe.

  Finally he said, “I’ve never told anyone. Not the whole story. Not until now. Danar knows a part of it, as did Chalil. You . . .”

  Gently, he rolled over, carrying her with him. He kissed her brow, her lips, her breasts, her belly. Although his lips were as soft and mobile as before, there was nothing sexual about the contact. Instead, she felt each kiss as an offering of his deepest self.

  “You,” he murmured as he rested his cheek against her breast, “now you have all of it. All of me. As much as I can tell. As much as I can give.”

  It was not me, she started to say, it was Tabilit’s grace upon us both. But she had not the energy to form the words. The goddess, she felt sure, would understand.

  Chapter 23

  THE next day dawned clear and mild. The Snow Bear men were cheered, having interpreted the Light of the North as a favorable omen. Even Bennorakh seemed encouraged. Shannivar, riding at Zevaron’s side, could imagine no greater joy.

  Every night brought a new display of lights, each more glorious than the one before, or perhaps that was because Shannivar saw them throug
h new eyes. Soon they would reach the dharlak, the northerly summering-place, of the Snow Bear people, where they would find the rest of the clan. Zevaron would continue his search for the stone-drake. She would go with him.

  During that night’s routine camp chores, when the glowing colors rippled across the sky, Shannivar emerged from her jort to sit and watch the display. She wondered if she would ever tire of the sight. As before, the curtain grew brighter and folded back upon itself. Motes of brightness dotted the fabric of light.

  Where the spots of light clustered the thickest, a blemish appeared. At first, Shannivar could not be sure she saw anything amiss. As she watched, however, the shadow deepened. Soon it resembled a jagged tear, as if a knife had slashed through Tabilit’s Veil.

  Shannivar scrambled to her feet. She could not take her eyes from the widening darkness.

  Zevaron rushed to her side. “What is it?”

  By this time, the Snow Bear men had noticed. They cried out and pointed aloft. Clearly, they had never seen anything like this before. One of them fell to the ground, cowering, barely able to contain his moans of terror.

  “Bennorakh!” Shannivar shook herself free from her own trance. “He will know what to do!”

  The enaree had anticipated her. He strode to the center of the camp, carrying his dream stick and a handful of something she could not make out. He threw it into the fire, which burst into blue-green flames and gave off clouds of eye-searing smoke.

  “Stand back!” he cried, but Shannivar had already inhaled a lungful of the stinging fumes. She broke into a fit of coughing.

  Zevaron put his arm around her. “Look!”