‘Yeah, and a wife with a mouth closed that fucking tight won’t be much for blow jobs either, right?’ She chortled delightedly. ‘Bet he’s lucky if he gets three of those in a fucking year.’
‘Strictly feast nights only,’ agreed Egar, reaching up and cupping a calloused hand to each of the breasts under discussion. He thumbed the thick, rope-end nipples back and forth, squeezed gently at the jellied weight with his palms. Dropped another broad hint. ‘And of course, she’s a woman of leisure, so, you know, probably got no strength at all in her fingers like you have.’
Sula’s eyes smeared wide with renewed lechery. She put her hands back on him, gathered up his prick and began to work it slowly up and down. Ahhh, milkmaid’s fingers. He felt himself slam back to fully erect in seconds. Sula felt it too, grinned again, leaned down and brushed one breast softly back and forth across the head of his prick, then across his face. He gaped after the nipple, twisting his head to catch it and suck it in, heaved up and grabbed after her hips. She swayed sharply back up and shook her head.
‘Oh, no. First things fucking first. We’re going to get the edge off. I’m not looking for a two-minute drunken herder’s fuck out of you, just so you can head off to the ceremonies in fine fucking form. You just fucking lie there and do as you’re told, Clanmaster. I’ - in time now with her slow, rippling strokes - ‘am going to milk you fucking dry. Just like one of my fucking buffaloes, yeah? You like that? Then we’ll see what you can do for me.’
Egar chuckled. ‘You make me suffer, bitch, you know I’m going to hand it straight back. I’ll have you yowling like a steppe fox.’
Sula lifted one hand from her work, made a flapping mouth with fingers and thumb. ‘Yeah, yeah - talk, talk. You’re all the fucking same, men. Clanmaster or herd-boy, you tell me where’s the fucking difference.’
The clanmaster tipped a meaningful glance around the trappings of the yurt, the rich tapestries and rugs, the brazier in the corner.
‘Bit cold to be sneaking out and tumbling herd-boys in the grass this time of year, I’d say. That’s one big difference.’
A shadow crossed Sula’s face, a light, watchful tension, and her hands slackened a little in what they were doing. She didn’t know him well enough to read his moods yet, to know rough humour from genuine displeasure, a growl from a drawl. He had to force a smile, stick his tongue out at her and clown the moment away before she eased.
In the end, he had to remind himself, tits and milkmaid’s fingers notwithstanding, this is just one more foul-mouthed Skaranak herd-girl you’ve got here milking your cock for you, Clanmaster.
It made him unaccountably sad. Sula was gorgeous, supple, succulent in his mouth and hands, utterly joyous and abandoned in her fucking. But afterwards, afterwards ...
Afterwards, as they lay sweat-stuck together, the inescapable truth would seep back in. That Sula was less than half his age, had been nowhere, seen nothing, knew nothing beyond the big sky limits of the steppe - and was eminently content to stay that way. That she had nothing much to say about anything but herding or fucking or the current clan gossip or the endless fucking squabbles of her extended family.
That she could not even read. And - he’d broached the subject once - that she did not much want to learn.
Oh, you were hoping for book-learnt pussy, perhaps? Some Yhelteth-bred courtesan with an astrolabe out on the balcony and an illustrated binding of Tales of the Man and the Woman on the table beside the bed?
You were hoping for Imrana, maybe?
Fuck it.
Yeah, fuck it. You can take Sula to Ishlin-ichan when the ceremonies are done. She’ll love that, marching into all those fabric places down Rib Whittle Row with a clanmaster’s purse at her disposal. You can bask in her reflected squealing joy as she buys everything in sight, and call it happiness.
And now she had him up in the near reaches of his own brief joy - the heat of orgasm pulsing and pooling in his groin, the strong-fingered strokes coming shorter and harder, his own grunts and gasps in his ears, his thoughts fading out in the clamour for ecstasy and release.
C’mon, how bad can it be, Clanmaster ? As the feeling rushed him, stormed up the column of his prick and he exploded, splashed hot salt white into her hands, and she cackled and smeared it over her throat and breasts and belly with one hand, the other still pumping at him hard. How fucking bad can life be?
You seem unhappy, Ergund.’
‘Yeah, well ...’
Poltar stifled a sigh. He didn’t much like Ergund, any more than he did any of the clanmaster’s other brothers. But they were influential, and must be catered for, the more so since Egar’s demonstrated blasphemy and lack of regard for the traditions. And Ergund did at least show a modicum of respect. The shaman put aside his flensing knife, nodded at his acolyte to go on with the work, and wiped his hands clean on a rag. He indicated a curtained alcove at one side of the yurt.
‘In here, then. I can spare a few minutes. But the ceremonies are almost upon us, I have to get ready. What is it you need?’
‘I, uh.’ Ergund cleared his throat. ‘I had a dream. Last night.’
This time, Poltar could not entirely hold back the sigh. It was a major effort, in fact, not to roll his eyes. In a couple of hours, he had to go out into the chilling northern breezes and caper about dressed only in buffalo grease, his wolfskin robe and a Ynprpral mask that weighed as much as an axe. He had to squawk and screech himself hoarse, and be chased around by small children and submit to being ceremonially driven out of the camp, where he’d have to squat for at least an hour in the cold until the celebrations got well underway, and everyone was too drunk to notice him slip back in.
In his father’s day, of course, the shaman stayed out on the steppe the whole night. But in his father’s day, there was respect. In his father’s day the self-same children who chased Ynprpral from the camp went out later with food and wine and blankets for the shaman’s vigil. Later still, the younger warriors might come and keep Olgan company, shyly ask him advice on how to garner or keep the attention of this girl or that, how to bid shrewdly for a horse or a sword, how to resolve tricky issues of honour and family and ritual.
But Olgan was long gone on the Sky Road, and there would be none of that old respect in these times. Stay out all night for vigil, the most Poltar was likely to get was some stumbling drunk herdboy come out to take a piss and drivelling inebriated nonsense at him. Everyone else would be busy cavorting. Since Egar returned from the south, the old ways simply held no sway. There was no sense of honour or tradition now, no respect. Ishlin-ichan beckoned, the young men went there often, and the girls around camp acted like the whores they mostly were these days. No one felt the need to listen to the shaman any more, they’d rather have cheap advice and tales of the south from those Skaranak who had been there and returned, as if riding a horse over the horizon and back was some kind of fucking achievement.
And this moping idiot wanted to talk about his dreams.
Poltar got them both seated in the alcove, pulled the curtain and put on a show of patience he didn’t feel.
‘Dreams are the path on to heights we may see afar from,’ he intoned tiredly. ‘But the view can be uncertain. A rock may look like a horse and rider, a river like beads of glass. Tell me what you have seen.’
‘It was outside the camp. At night.’ Ergund was clearly uncomfortable with all this. He was, Poltar knew, a blunt, pragmatic man, a herdsman all his life and pretty much content to stay that way. ‘I think I’d gone out, you know, for a piss. But the weather was warm, like spring, maybe even summer. I was barefoot and I kept going, kept walking into the grass, trying to find a good spot.’
‘A good spot to piss?’
‘Well, that’s what it felt like, yeah. Then I turned around and the campfires were gone, there wasn’t even a glow on the sky where they’d been. It was cloudy, so there was no bandlight, or not much anyway. There’s this cold wind blowing, I can hear it in my ears all the time. And there�
�s something in the grass, and it’s watching me.’
‘Watching you?’
‘Yeah, I could feel its eyes on me. I wasn’t worried at first, you know, I had my knife. And I got the feeling this thing was a wolf, and they generally leave you alone unless it’s a bad winter.’ Ergund stared at the ground, held up his hands. He seemed to be trying to frame his thoughts between the blades of his palms. ‘But then I see it. I see the eyes in the dark, and just like I thought, they’re wolf eyes, but they’re, like, way above the height of the grass. I mean, four or five feet off the fucking ground.’
He shivered a little. Tried on an unconvincing little smile.
‘That’s got to be the biggest fucking wolf anybody’s ever seen, right?’
Poltar made a noncommittal sound. He’d heard sightings of every kind of monster out on the steppe in his time, from the long runners to spiders the size of horses. A gigantic wolf wasn’t all that original.
‘So now I’m worried, right? I pull my knife, I stand there, and then this fucking thing just comes walking right out of the dark towards me.’
‘And was it a wolf?’
‘Yeah. No. I mean’ - Ergund’s expression was still queasy - ‘it looked like a wolf, a she-wolf, I think. But it was walking on its hind legs, man. You know, like one of those beggar’s trick dogs you see in Ishlin-ichan. But - big. Tall as a man.’
‘Did it attack you?’
The herdsman shook his head. ‘No. It fucking talked to me. I mean, its mouth didn’t move or anything, but I could hear this voice in my head, like really soft snarling. It just stood there all reared up on its back legs with its paws held out like it wanted me to take hold of them, and looking me in the eyes the whole time. Close enough I could smell its fur. Close enough to lick my fucking face if it wanted.’
‘So it spoke. What did it tell you?’
It told me to come to you. Told me that you were waiting for a message.’
Poltar felt the faintest shiver of his own now.
‘It called me by name?’
‘Yes. It said it knew you. That you’d been waiting for a message, a second message, it said.’
Kelgris’s words, in the shadowed upstairs room, out of the dead girl’s throat. I bring a message from my brother Hoiran, the one you call Urann. That message is wait and watch. Poltar recalled the languor in that voice, the searing pain as his prick split and bled, the tethered helplessness. He felt an inexplicable stirring in his groin at the memory.
He moistened his lips.
‘So tell me the message.’
Ergund looked down at his hands again. ‘It said ...’
His voice died on the syllables, the breath hissed out of him unused. The shaman felt a slow pounding begin in his chest. He held himself in check, and waited.
Finally, Ergund looked up, and now there was something almost pleading in his face.
‘It said my brother’s time as clanmaster has come and gone,’ he muttered.
The quiet descended like the finest muslin cloth, coating everything in the curtained alcove and, as it seemed, beyond. Poltar felt it tick through his veins, settle in his ears, send everything commonplace away.
He sat rigid.
Ergund opened his mouth. The shaman raised a hand for silence, got up quickly and went back into the main space of the yurt. The acolyte looked up from his flensing, saw Poltar’s expression and set down his tools immediately.
‘Master?’
‘That knife looks as if it could do with sharpening. Why don’t you take it over to Namdral and see if he can’t put a decent edge back on it. Or better yet, see if he’ll dig you out a couple of fresh blades and edge them up for us. Tell him I’ll settle with him after the ceremony.’
The acolyte frowned. There was nothing wrong with the flensing gear, and they both knew it. And new knives weren’t cheap. But he knew better than to argue with Poltar, or expect explanations. He bowed his head.
‘As my master desires.’
Poltar waited until he’d gone, watched from the yurt’s entrance as the man moved away through the fire-lit bustle of the camp, then pulled the hangings tight and went back to Ergund. He found the clanmaster’s brother getting to his feet.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Look, it’s ... I shouldn’t have come. Grela talked me into it, she said you’d know what to do.’
‘Yes. She’s right. I do.’
‘Well?’ Ergund grimaced. ‘I mean, it was just a dream, right?’
‘Was it?’
‘It felt like a dream.’
The shaman trod closer. ‘But?’
‘But I ...’ Ergund shook his head. It was like watching a buffalo only halfway stunned by some incompetent butcher. ‘When I woke up, there was grass matted on the bottom of my feet. Still damp. Like I’d really been out there.’
‘You were really out there, Ergund.’
‘In this cold?’ The herdsman snorted, common sense shouldering through the press of arcane fear. ‘In bare feet? Come on, I’d have fucking frostbite by now. My toes’d be turning black.’
Poltar crowded him back to his seat, stood over him. Kept his voice low and hypnotic.
‘The dream world is not this world, Ergund. It echoes this place, but it is an otherness, another aspect. It has its own seasons, its own natural laws. You did walk there, the grass on your feet is a sign. It’s the Dwellers’ way of showing you what you dreamed is real. It’s a warning to take this seriously. Your wife was right to send you to me. This is a path we must walk together.’
‘But, I mean, this thing, the upright wolf. It might have been a demon, sent to trick me. Sent to sow discord in the clan.’
Poltar nodded as if giving it consideration.
‘That’s a good point. But demons do not have the power to cross the expressed will of the Dwellers. If it was a demon that drew you out there and spoke to you, then it did so with the Sky Home’s blessing.’
And inwardly, he recalled something his father had once said, in an unguarded moment as they sat out at vigil together one spring night. Poltar’s mother had passed away the previous winter from the coughing fever, and Olgan had changed with her passing in ways the young Poltar was still trying to fathom.
Common men make a distinction between gods and demons, Poltar, but it’s ignorance to talk that way. When the powers do our will, we worship them as gods; when they thwart and frustrate us, we hate and fear them as demons. They are the same creatures, the same twisted unhuman things. The shaman’s path is negotiation, nothing more. We tend the relationship with the powers so they bring us more benefit than ruin. We can do no more.
And quickly, glancing guiltily up from his brooding. Never speak of this to anyone. Men are not ready to hear this truth - though sometimes I think women may be. Sometimes, I think ...
But he lapsed into brooding silence again, staring at the fire and listening to the ceaseless wind off the steppe. And he never spoke of the matter again.
‘You really think,’ said Ergund uncertainly, ‘that the Sky Home has taken against my brother?’
Poltar seated himself with care. He leaned forward. Spoke softly. ‘What do you think, Ergund? What does your conscience tell you?’
‘I ... Grela says ...’ Ergund stared down at his hands and his expression suddenly turned harsh. ‘Fuck it, he doesn’t behave like a clanmaster any more. You know, coming here, I passed that little slut Sula on her way to his yurt again. I mean, she’s what, fifteen? What’s he doing with a girl like that?’
‘I don’t think you need a shaman to answer that,’ Poltar said dryly.
Ergund didn’t appear to hear him. ‘It’s not even like it’ll last. This is going to end up just like that half-Voronak bitch that threw herself at him last year. Couple of months, he’ll get bored and drop her. If there’s a child, he’ll use his mastery privileges to claw settlement for it out of the clan herds, and then he’ll move on to whichever big-titted slut next widens her eyes at him across a feasting boa
rd.’
He stopped, appeared to rein himself in. He got up and tried to move about in the alcove. He threw out the blade of one open palm.
‘Look, if that’s how Egar wants to piss his time away, I won’t gainsay him. A man pitches his yurt where he will, and then he has to lie in it. I’m not some fucking southern priest, trying to nit-pick every ball-scratching moment of every other man’s life. But this isn’t just about Egar and how he lives. I mean, it’s fucking Greasing Night, for Urann’s sake, it’s a ceremony. He should be out there with his people, showing himself, setting an example. Showing the children how to do their faces for the cold. Inspecting the masks. Not ...’
‘Getting greased in private between the legs?’
The Steel Remains (Gollancz) Page 18
