She just looked at me, knowing the decision had been made. What an enormous, painful shock to this girl would suffer if I refused her.
I stood. “Excuse me,” I said to them.
Thorn straightened. Nantar reached for his sword, which he’d forgotten to bring. The girl just watched me from beside the fire.
I couldn’t help thinking that this had to be a huge insult to the tribe. Well, maybe they shouldn’t have ambushed me with it, then.
My boots took me away from the circles of Long Manes eating by their fires, past the horse herd and the cattle herd, past the tee-pees to where my horse was grazing and a couple warriors watched him.
They nodded to me but I ignored them. I whistled for Blizzard and he trotted up to me, making me smile as he batted me with his head. I rubbed his nose and then his jaw line when he pressed his head against me.
“Am I offensive to you?” the girl asked me from behind.
I’d have been more surprised if she hadn’t followed me.
Again – why lie? “You’re an amazing beauty,” I told her.
“You prefer men, maybe?” she pressed me. “Or your horse?”
Nice try, cutie.
“Horses don’t talk too much.”
I felt her fingers on my back, still hot from the fire. This girl actually burned. Blizzard yanked his head back up and stared at her, wary of any living thing that wasn’t me.
When I’d broken up with that first girl, the one who’d broken my heart, I’d actually prayed for another girl, someone whom I could love, who would love me back. In a few months I actually met a girl like that, and I just humiliated her for no reason – to get back at the other girl, I think.
I used to have faith before that. I used to believe in God. If He could send me someone like that, though, and I could be that way to her… no. I stopped having faith then.
Now I didn’t need faith. Now I had proof. War had spoken to me, and he’d made it clear that I was a solo act.
I turned, and she dragged her finger tips over my shoulder to my chest, tucking her fingers into the head-opening to my shirt.
Her brown eyes sparkled, her head tilted back, looking up to me without a smile or a frown, regarding me like a horse-trader sizing up a stud, nothing more.
“There’s a saying among my people, White Wolf,” she told me, stepping close to me, her breasts just touching me, her breath tickling my skin.
“A lonely soul is an empty vessel, and wants the rain to fill it,” she said. “Leave it out too long, though, and it collects dust first, and then the rain just fills it with mud, and no one wants it.”
“So you’re saying I’m a dirty, lonely soul?” I asked her.
That got her to smile. “No,” she told me. “I’m just saying you could become one.”
“And why do you want this, girl?” I asked her. I think this summed up my biggest worry: ulterior motives. Genna had hers, I didn’t know about Aileen. Other women had – I’d be crazy to think that this girl didn’t.
“What’s in this for you?”
She took her hand away, and she looked into my eyes, and past them, as if she could see right into my brain, as if she could seek out where I was the most vulnerable. I didn’t like it, but I didn’t turn away, either. I think I needed to know what that answer would be.
“I want this, because I think this needs to be, White Wolf,” she informed me. “I think that you came to this nation, that you came to my people, to get what you don’t have, and that what you don’t have is me.”
I smiled wide, tilted my head and opened my mouth as if to laugh, but didn’t. I felt her hand back on my chest, cool now, not warm. I lowered my head and felt her gaze on my face, searching for my eyes.
When she caught them again, she looked back deeply into them, and she said to me, with a little smile, “It’s good enough if you don’t believe me yet, White Wolf. All I ask of you, is that you have a little faith.”
There’s a lot of things that she could have said right then, and I really had to wonder why she chose that.
“She’ll need a horse,” I said.
“She has three that are hers,” he father informed me, still sitting at the cook fire, where we’d found him, walking back hand-in-hand. “None are the mare I plan to use tonight.”
Tonight? I thought. The noose pinched me as it closed and the fall came fast. They wanted to do this tonight?
Such things do depend on timing. Mares don’t stay in heat forever.
I looked at Thorn and Nantar. The latter grinned ear to ear.
“I am sure you have noticed already that Blizzard doesn’t mate casually,” I said.
Kills grinned and turned his head from me. Two Spears jabbed his ribs with his elbow. Busted! At least they didn’t pretend that they were trying to get for free what they knew they should pay for.
“We think that your friend will do what he sees you doing,” Two Spears said. “Which is why we offer you my sister.”
I hope my jaw didn’t drop then, but it probably did. Even as a sailor, this made me uncomfortable. Kills and his daughter had played and won. I wondered what sort of seed would issue from Blizzard, if they could make their plan work.
“Done.”
Two Spears, my brother-in-law now, stood and slammed his own hand on my back in congratulations. Why couldn’t he have offered that Two Spears come with me?
“Done and done,” Kills said. He took my forearm in his, and I took his in mine. While we held each other, his daughter stood, pulled off her skirt and halter-top and tossed them casually into the flames. My eyes widened as she revealed herself naked in the firelight, standing proud, looking up at me no differently than she had in the field. The fire caressed her skin; the washboard stomach muscles made hard by a life that demanded strength, the bushy pubic hair and her dimpled butt.
I turned to Thorn knit my eyebrows. “Those were the clothes of a virgin,” he said, and shrugged.
She reached out her hand to me, and I took her hot fingers in mine. The things I do to keep the peace!
Blizzard and the mare, She Runs and I went off into the plains – on different pathhs but parallel directions. It surprised me how much reverence they had for the sexual act as the horses experienced it. One of the stallions had put up a fuss when he got downwind of the mare in heat, but the handlers were ready for him. None of the stallions were a match for Blizzard, and a wild stallion would kill them and take the herd if given the opportunity.
Not that Blizzard would. Blizzard looked down his nose at “lesser” horses. I don’t know that he considered them horses at all. I wondered what would happen if he snubbed the mare’s advances.
Runs had two mares and a gelding. We rode off on one of the mares, roughly parallel to Blizzard and his girlfriend. We rode bareback, I wore a breechcloth and leggings, bare-chested, Runs remained naked in front of me, pressed against my chest and stroking my arm. Her hair smelled like hay and her skin felt soft and cool again.
“I want to be able to see your stallion the first time you take me,” she said frankly.
I smiled. “OK.”
She looked back over her shoulder, up into my eyes. “This isn’t your first time too?”
I looked back into her eyes. “No.”
“Good,” she said. “Any wives?”
I thought of Genna.
“One close call, but no,” I said. “And no children I know of.”
She settled back against me. “I think I will change that.”
I laughed and squeezed her.
She looked back, “You doubt me?” with just a trace of anxiety in those cool brown eyes.
I rubbed her nose with mine. Might as well start the marriage off on the right foot. “I laughed because you want them so fast,” I told her. “You barely know me, how do you know that you want my children?”
She leaned back against me. “Oh, I know you, White Wolf,” she told me. “I know you well.”
Blizzard took the mare about a mile from
the herd before she finally turned on him. You could hear them, posturing, snorting and rearing. There were a few handlers shadowing them, but I knew they couldn’t handle Blizzard. It didn’t matter, though. We weren’t going anywhere.
We slid from the mare together, Runs giving her a pat on the butt to send her back to the herd. It must have been uncomfortable to ride naked and bareback, but She Runs didn’t say anything and just brushed herself off. She stretched her full length and wrapped her arms around my neck. Standing about 5’4”, she would get a stiff neck with me for a mate. At least, that’s what I thought as I leaned down to kiss her.
She had my clothes off before I knew it, handling me first curiously, then with confidence. Her body felt as firm as an athlete’s, her butt a little wide from years spent in the saddle, but not unattractive in any way. When the time came, she got down on all fours, watching as Blizzard finally subdued his girlfriend. He and I both mounted at the same time and relatively in the same position.
“Ow,” she complained.
“Too hard?” I asked.
She shook her head, throwing her long, black hair like a mane. The stallion grunted about a hundred yards away. You could hear his efforts and the mare’s reaction.
Perhaps Blizzard understood the situation in his own way. Perhaps he just took the opportunity. Stallions are very much sexual beasts, yet Blizzard had rejected all opportunities up to now. Maybe now that the offer came so blatantly, he had decided to take it.
Other than the fact that he finished before I did, and that afterwards the mare tried to kick him before finally settling beside him, I think Blizzard and I did equally well. Near the end, She Runs did a lot of groaning and pulling up of grass. I had no doubt that I had years of sore backs before me. She climaxed before I did, then we settled down in the grass where she laid her head on my shoulder.
“That was – I mean,” she said, her long fingernails on my skin. “I didn’t expect – not at all. I mean, it hurt, and it still hurts, but it was good.”
I laughed and kissed her head.
I liked her – I found it impossible not to. So frank of beauty and mind, taking a world she served in, and forcing it to serve her instead. The fire that burned in her had lit in me, as well. This one would not likely need much protecting.
“How old are you?” I asked her.
I could feel her head move to look up at me. I didn’t look down. “How many summers have I seen?” she asked.
“Or falls,” I said.
She punched my ribs with a tiny fist. Did all women do that here?
“I have seen sixteen summers and sixteen falls,” she said. “I know some people count the day of their birth, but an Andaran knows better. My mother bore me when the wheat turned golden, like most people in my tribe.”
I nodded. Sixteen! Rob that cradle! I felt a twinge knowing that this was illegal where I came from.
“I know,” she told me. “Most girls are mated from their first blooding, but my father withheld me.”
Well, at least I wasn’t a perv by local standards. She reached up and kissed me, her tongue in my mouth before I realized it. Frank of beauty and mind, I thought to myself. If she wanted it, she took it.
But something would go wrong – I knew it. Something always went wrong. It had to be me – it couldn’t be that many women finding something in me to hate without there actually being something there. Too aggressive, not aggressive enough; too needy, too distant; either I didn’t know what love was or the other didn’t.
And, in all that time, I had never loved one of them. Not Genna, not Aileen, not the girls in college, not my girlfriend in high school. The long relationships and the short ones, they had all found their way to disaster because of something in me that seemed designed to bring out something in them.
She Runs lay warm on my body and wet on my thigh. The grass smelled good and the night burned starry. Blizzard nickered nearby by way of settling down, and I felt ready to do the same.
“And who is this woman who haunts such blue eyes,” she asked me.
My heart stopped.
“Huh – um, what, who?” I sputtered, caught entirely off guard.
Her rich laugh came as if from an older woman. She stroked the side of my face.
“Only the dread of a woman makes a man look like that,” she said. “Have I already a competitor for your love?”
One shot, right to the heart. I remembered her eyes burning into mine – what had she seen there?
I sighed, collected my thoughts.
“My friends, and some others, went on a mission,” I said, not sure how much I could tell her under the fire bond. “There was a girl, her name is Genna.”
“Are you married to her?”
“Ugh, no – not married, no,” I said. “She wanted me to love her, but I didn’t. I – couldn’t.”
“You had no room for her in this heart?” she asked me, laying her cool hand on my breast.
“No one has found a place in there,” I said.
She Runs nodded, holding her lower lip in her teeth.
“Where is this girl now?” she asked.
“She is in Chatoos, now,” I said, “with the rest of my friends. We are part of a bond, she is not in it. She is not well.”
“She was always so?” she asked.
I shook my head. “She had been so vital, and now is very weak. She has a hard time with the weakness.”
“When the strong ones fall and do not die, they suffer most of all. She must have driven you away like an old dog.”
I nodded.
“Do not blame her for that, White Wolf,” she said. “You lay with this girl, she loved you. Now, you remind her of the life she lost.”
“She drove me away and told me to go find another woman,” I said. I looked in her eyes. “I have to be honest, I never wanted to go looking – “
She put her fingertips on my lips. “You owe me no apology, White Wolf. Your heart sang of this lost love the first time I saw you. This comes as no surprise.”
“No?”
She shook her head. “Your heart is true, White Wolf. If you are with me now, then I don’t question how you got here.”
She Runs kissed me, first on the cheek and then the mouth. Then she got up on her elbows, and looked down into my eyes. I saw her more as a being framed against the starlight than by her features. I felt her pendulous breasts as they dragged across my forearm.
“So,” she finally said. “What are you going to name me?”
We slept, and in my sleep, as I so rarely do, I dreamed. In that dream I rode Blizzard, as I had many times, as the sun set, and I challenged it again, as I had challenged it before I left the Great Northern Mountain Range, heading into Sental.
But this time the sun answered back.
You strayed!
That pain I had felt before, the thing that I feared most in the world, in life, hovered on the edge of my awareness – a knife brandished in the dark. I lay asleep on the plains of Andoran, my unnamed wife in my arms, yet I sat mounted on Blizzard, staring down the sun.
All of this, and I stood before my God, War, and He was pissed.
How have I strayed? The bond?
The bond was inevitable; the plan is too far progressed for Adriam to stop it now, even if He cared. I speak of this – this woman.
Oh, I had dreaded that. She was unavoidable, Lord, I almost whined. I’m not ready to take on the Long Manes; I need allies for my plans. Now You have an ally through me, and I have a reserve -
His anger rolled like thunder, growing from the distance and building stronger as it arrived. His mind invaded mine, reading my secrets, knowing me better than I dared know myself, showing me things that I had no business knowing about my strengths and weaknesses.
He made me see that I had been trapped willingly. I had suspected the Long Manes’ plot, and could have avoided it, had I tried. I wanted her only because I felt lonely. I had no plans to use her, to do her wrong.
I had bee
n seeking her – I let myself be trapped.
I felt lonely. A human emotion.
I had shown weakness.
For all the worry and the whining and the self-justification, I wanted this. I wanted her. Somewhere in my soul, I hoped she would love me. If only to prove someone could.
I had been doing that my whole life. That explained the trail of broken hearts – I punished them when I didn’t love them. I felt as if they let me down.
If this one girl really did love me, then I would choose her over War if I had to.
That last thing, more than any other, set Him off. War’s minions were heartless, needing no one but their God.
If another were needed, then another I would have, He said. You alone are My instrument, and you will have none before Me.
Then He hit me with the pain – and I knew that I would not, under any circumstances, betray War again. If I could have done anything to kill myself right then, I would have done it. There is no describing a feeling that rivaled having every cell in your body explode while your mind remained still aware of it.
My scream would have deafened every person on the plains, had I been able to scream it.
You will demonstrate your faith, He informed me, by giving her life to Me.
My mind went blank. I couldn’t react to Him.
The pain slammed into my body. There could be no getting used to it; a fundamental violation of agony and humiliation on every level of my being, worse than anything I could imagine.
And I thought, If I could get to my sword, if I could get it over my neck…
You will give her to me, he told me.
I couldn’t deny him, but I couldn’t tell him, “Yes,” either. I felt capable of a lot of things, but not killing this innocent. Not once he had made me realize what I had done.
I tried to focus on my body, on my arm, on my fingers. Could I feel the grass beneath us? Could I find the handle of the Sword of War?
No!
And then she stood there, my unnamed wife, her arm around me, her hand out before us, facing down War as if she were His equal, and the pain left as quickly as it had come.
Indomitus Est (The Fovean Chronicles) Page 28
