by Chris Bunch
“I’m trying to be a gentleman,” I said. “Remember? And whatever happened to concentrating on business?”
“What sort of business should we be concentrating on?” she asked in a husky whisper.
I was about to move back and cuddle her icy buttocks, but my cock stirred, came awake, so I stayed where I was. She was still for a bit, then rolled over to face me, pulling down the blankets.
“You’re willing to let a woman freeze?”
“I thought we were supposed to be taking a nap.”
She looked at me carefully. “Damastes, you know how old I am?”
I nodded.
“And you’re, what, thirty?”
“Almost thirty-eight.”
“Does the difference bother you?”
I smiled wryly. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t see why it should.” I was speaking the truth, remembering Marán hadn’t been much older when I met her, Alegria a couple of years older, and I’d bedded Steffi, in the village of women, without more than a moment of hesitation.
“Or am I being too forward?” Cymea reached out, curled chest hairs around her fingers. “Of course not.”
“Or perhaps you’ve never kissed a sorcerer?”
“That’s certainly true.”
“Well?”
Her lips parted under mine, and our tongues slid against each other, and I pulled her to me. I felt her nipples firm against me, and I slid my hand down, caressing her buttocks, running a finger between them. Cymea sighed, lifted her left leg over mine, came closer. I kissed her neck, teased the lobes of her ears with my teeth, ran my tongue in and out of her ear. Her breathing came a little faster.
I rolled her onto her back, half-lay across her, supporting myself on my elbows. Her eyes opened.
“I heard you were called Damastes the Handsome,” she whispered. “You are, you know.”
“And you’re very beautiful, you know.”
She smiled. “Nobody gets told that nearly often enough, do they?”
“Anybody who doesn’t say that to you has a certain problem with his eyes.”
She opened her lips, and I kissed her for a very long time, then nibbled at her neck, down across her chest until I found her breasts. I kissed them, teased her nipples between my teeth, while my hand stroked her stomach.
Her hand moved down my chest and pushed at my underclothes. I untied them, pushed them down to my ankles, kicked them away. Her fingers found my cock and, very gently, caressed its length, ran a finger around its tip.
“You’re very big, Damastes.”
“I’ll be bigger when I’m inside you.”
I kissed her stomach, ran my tongue in and out of her navel. Her legs opened, and I kissed down her smooth abdomen. She had only a tuft of hair around her sex. I kissed her lips, sliding my tongue back and forth, then moved between her legs.
She lifted one leg across my back as I ran my tongue up and down her sex.
“Am I wet?”
“Yes,” I said, and slipped a finger into her. She gasped, lifted her hips to my moving tongue. I kept caressing her clitoris while I moved my finger slowly in circles inside her.
Cymea murmured wordlessly, her hands smoothing the back of my hair as I loved her.
“Does that feel good?”
“Yes … yes …”
“Shall I put another finger in you?”
“Please.”
She moaned hard when I did, and I licked my left finger, slid it into her anus. “Oh gods!”
I kept both fingers and my tongue moving, working inside her. “Do you like that?” She just gasped.
“Would you like something else inside you?”
“Yes, Damastes. Yes.”
I touched her with the head of my cock, and she jerked, then I slid it in a bit, and she made a sound, halfway between a moan and a low shriek. I moved all the way into her, then almost out, and her legs went around the backs of my thighs.
“Come lie on me, please.”
I moved once, twice in her, then took my cock out, and began caressing her sex with it.
“Oh, don’t do that, don’t, please, oh you fucker, you bastard, put it back in me.”
“Put what back in you?”
“Put your cock, put that big thing in me, please, please …”
And I pushed it hard until I was buried in her, and lay down on her, on my elbows, moving rhythmically, slowly, long, hard movements, and her legs moved up and down on my thighs, her hands pulling at my back, her mouth open, head moving back and forth, face wet with our saliva, gasping, then her body began jerking hard against me, and she screamed and went limp, and I emptied myself in her, and fell across her body limply.
We lay like that for a time; then I came back and lifted most of my weight back onto my arms.
Her eyes opened, and she smiled a bit.
“You’re the first man I’ve ever seduced. You feel good.”
“You feel better.”
“Oh yes. I do.”
I turned her on her side, and, hardening, began moving in her slipperiness, and she sighed happily, pulled herself to me, and again we were a world to ourselves.
• • •
“Now what? Do you want to finish in my mouth?”
“No,” I said. “Lie back.”
She obeyed, and I slid into her, lifting her left leg up onto my right shoulder. Her hands were stroking, almost clawing at the sheets. After a while, I turned her on her side and continued moving slowly in her, my hands stroking her back, her breasts, her stomach.
Again I turned her, sliding a pillow under her upper thighs.
“Gods … this is good, so good. Don’t stop, Damastes. Do anything you want.”
I took the oil I’d found in the kitchen, dipped my finger into it, slid it into her very gently while I fucked her. I moved my finger in circles, felt myself in her, felt her ring relax.
“There, now,” she moaned. “Fuck me there.”
• • •
We made love all that day and deep into the night, neither of us satiated, sometimes fiercely, sometimes gently, while the river waves rocked the boat and the storm drove against the wooden walls around us.
But we never noticed, buried, lost in each other.
• • •
It was somewhere near dawn, and we lay together, bodies wet with sweat and love.
“I hope I don’t have to be a very good boatman tomorrow … today,” she said softly. “I’m going to be a little bit sore.”
“I feel a little stiff myself,” I said.
“Stop bragging and give me a few minutes to get over that last one.” She kissed me. “You’re a very good lover, you know.”
“You make me into a good one,” I said truthfully, for her imagination and desire ran as deep, perhaps deeper than mine.
“Did you mind?”
“Mind what?” I said, bewildered.
“That you weren’t the first.”
“Why in Jaen’s name would I care about something like that?”
“I’ve heard it bothers men when they’re not the first, especially with somebody who’s not that old.”
“Of course it doesn’t bother me. Does it bother you that I was a virgin when I met you?” I asked.
“If I had the strength,” Cymea said, “I’d knee you in the balls. Instead, pick me up. I want you to fuck me standing up.”
“Yes, O wizard. What a terrible penalty.”
• • •
We slept most of the next day, woke, bathed, ate, went back to bed, made love a couple more times, then slept.
When we awoke this time, the storm had passed, and the river was flat and cold, and the land around us was empty, smoke still coming from the ruined city to the south.
We used ropes to pull ourselves out of the inlet, and Cymea swung the boat into the current and we let the Latane carry us north toward Kallio.
• • •
The land around was rutted, desolate. We saw wandering bands of Maisir
ian soldiers, deserters now, unlikely to rejoin their formations on the long and dangerous march back through the Sulem Pass and Kait. Bringing down these bandits would be another burden for whoever won this now-civil war, the second in a generation. I’d determined to be the winner and wondered who’d rule after I managed to destroy Tenedos. I certainly didn’t envy him … or them, because for all I knew it might be another Council, though I couldn’t imagine who they might be.
• • •
It was a flat, calm day, and Cymea was teaching me how to steer. We’d seen two small fishing boats that morning, which cheered us — the river wasn’t entirely depopulated. We were reaching the end of the wasteland, getting closer to the Kallian border.
We speculated how long it’d take for news of Bairan’s death and the Maisirian retreat to reach Nicias, and Tenedos, who we assumed was still in winter camp above the Latane Delta, since the heliographs we were so proud of had been torn down in the years of unrest.
I was cutting didos with the wake, flat S-curves in the rippling gray surface under an overcast sky.
A wave, nearly fifteen feet high, rose from the calm waters at our stern, curled, and tossed me overboard like a wood chip. I hit the water flat, hard, and went under, and the current caught me, whirled me away and down, toward the bottom. I managed to swim out of it and kicked up, toward air, toward life.
I broke surface, saw our boat yaw as Cymea tried to turn it against the river, and swam hard. For a moment I thought I’d lost, that it was being carried downstream faster than I could swim, but then I was closing on it, breath rasping, arms starting to weaken, and Cymea tossed me a rope. She missed, threw again, and I had it, pulling myself hand-over-hand to the rail.
I’d exhausted myself and was barely able to pull myself aboard, Cymea grabbing me by my pants and tugging, and then I rolled onto the deck. There were long moments when I could only gasp for air, but finally my breathing slowed, and I staggered to my feet.
I looked up. “Nice try, you bastard!” I shouted.
Cymea was looking at me strangely.
“Now we know word’s gotten to Tenedos,” I said.
“Are you sure that was him?”
“No, I’m not. But that wave was certainly doing his business.” I took off my shirt, wrung it out. “Accident or not, I’ll add it to his account.”
• • •
It was storming again, and once more Cymea had come up with a clever stratagem. A huge tree, over two hundred feet long and wider than our boat, ripped from the land by the winter storms, was speeding silently downriver. Cymea steered us to it, had me moor the boat to its branches.
I told her I didn’t like it; what happened if the tree rolled?
“Then we drown in our sleep and I’ll meet you on the Wheel,” she said. “But nothing like that’s going to happen.”
I was about to protest further, when she added, “Plus I can cast a spell around us, and if that was Tenedos who knocked you overboard, he’ll not be able to find us, just another bit of debris clinging to this log.
“Not to mention we’ll travel a great deal faster tied to it than on our own. At least so long as it holds to the river center.”
She was the one with water knowledge, not I, and so I went below and made dinner.
We finished eating, and she cleaned up, and we went to bed. Instead of making love, as we had done every night, she wanted to talk. About my former wife, about my former lovers. I’d had women do this before and had been uncomfortable. I never had much interest in their previous lives, but it didn’t seem to bother them.
“I never had but one real lover,” she said, after a spell. “And he was only for a month or two.”
“A pity, for that means you don’t have anything for juicy confessions,” I joked, suppressing a yawn.
She made a sound in her throat, bitter, harsh.
“Very well,” I said, “you do have juicy confessions. My apologies.”
She was silent for a very long time, and I had sense enough to dread what would be coming next, for it wouldn’t be anything funny.
“What do you know about my family? About the Amboinas?”
I thought back, to what Kutulu had discovered from a now-dead sage named Hami, long ago in Kallio. “A bit,” I said cautiously.
“You know that our men were wizards, if they had the Talent. And sometimes our women as well.”
“I knew that.”
“If the men showed no signs of ability,” Cymea went on, “they’d become members of the court, always helping the family advance. It was our ultimate aim to rule Kallio, and then all Numantia.”
“Which Chardin Sher prevented.”
“Until his death. Then my father saw, in two, perhaps three generations, our way would be clear to the throne, which is why he formed the conspiracy to bring down the emperor.”
“Ah,” I said. “I’d never considered that. I thought the conspiracy was just because he’d been a high-ranking member of Chardin Sher’s retinue and hated us for destroying his lord.”
Cymea laughed humorlessly. “My family cared little for anyone except another Amboina.
“But that’s going too fast. Do you know what the Amboina women were fated for?”
I chose my words carefully. “I was told, by someone who should know, that they would become the wives of other sorcerers if they had no talents at magic themselves.”
“Wives … or mistresses,” Cymea said.
I’d heard that as well and remembered two of Amboina’s daughters, from his first marriage, had supposedly died when the demon destroyed Chardin Sher, his magician Mikael Yanthlus, and the brooding castle atop the mountain.
“Yes,” I said.
“My father had a great vision for the Amboinas, after his first wife died. He then married a village witch, a bit of a scandal, for she brought no dowry, no lands to the Amboinas. He married her for her power. A wizard and a witch … two children.
“My brother Jalon and myself.
“My father had a plan, which he told us about after my mother died, when I was ten and Jalon eighteen. I don’t know what my mother thought of the idea, if she even knew about it.
“He proposed for us to … not marry, but bed each other. First, each of us would have greater powers, at least in the black region, for incest, forbidden sex magic. Then he hoped we’d have children. Our child, our children, would have powers beyond any magician alive, far beyond even the emperor. What I, or anyone else, felt of the matter was meaningless.”
My stomach roiled.
“My brother,” Cymea went on, “thought that was an excellent idea. He tried to … to carry the plan out three times. He almost succeeded once. I felt … feel defiled just thinking about it. He used to talk about that, whisper what he and I would do, the black joys we’d experience, when he was alone with me. My brother was dark, darker even than my father, and his dreams of what he would do with power, of the way he’d use people like they were dolls, were as disgusting as the evil books and grimoires he found those ideas in.
“That’s why I wasn’t able to hate you that much, Damastes, for being responsible for his death. Truthfully, if I consider the balance, we Tovieti did you far greater harm.”
I didn’t know what I should say, if anything.
“Well,” Cymea said harshly, “did that disgust you? Now are you sorry you slept with me? Am I soiled as my family?” She sat up. “Or maybe do you think that’s intriguing, and you’re aroused? The only other person I told this to, my first lover, had to fuck me as soon as I was finished telling him about it. Is that the way men think, Damastes?”
“No,” I said slowly. “I’m not aroused. And I don’t know if other men would be, should be. I don’t think so. All I was thinking was just how evil men can become when they’re powerful, when they’re wizards. I’m very glad I’ve nothing of the Talent, if that’s what it brings.” I sat up, took her gently by the shoulders.
“But I know one thing. What other people wanted, though
t, has nothing to do with you, with what you are. Does it?”
Her shoulders quivered a little. “It shouldn’t.”
“The only thing that would worry me is what you said about the Amboinas caring for no one but themselves.”
“Am I an Amboina anymore?” she asked. “Or am I just Cymea the Tovieti?”
“That’s not a lot better from my perspective.”
“It should be,” she said. “At least the Tovieti give a shit about something, about human freedom.”
“You don’t free people by strangling them,” I said. Nor, my thoughts went on, by killing them when they’re pregnant.
Cymea was silent for a very long time.
“No,” she said finally. “No, you don’t. But I guess, when you’re serving what you think is a greater good, you’re willing to do just about anything.”
I was suddenly angry.
“Fuck this greater good!” I snarled. “That means you can do anything, everything, as long as there’s this gloss that, in the end, everything’ll be just fine and lovely. To hells it is! We’re in the middle of what that kind of thinking produces, a fucking wasteland that used to be the prettiest part of Numantia!”
Somehow Cymea must’ve understood I wasn’t angry at her. “I know,” she said dully. “I know.”
It was still in that room, and I could hear the wind against the portholes, the river washing the planks beside me.
“But it doesn’t have to be that way, does it?” she asked.
“It had better not,” I said, anger gone. “If it is, then everything I’m doing … you’re doing … is like pissing into the wind.”
“Lie back down,” she asked. “Let me put my head on your shoulder.”
I did, and she came close.
“Tell me what Urey was like, before,” she whispered. “What it’ll be like again.”
I forced my wind to wander.
“It was a magical place,” I began. “Very old, a summering place for the kings of Numantia once. Cool, a pleasant breeze blowing down from the mountains and stirring the trees of the many parks in the city. The trees were of a type I’d never seen, sixty feet in circumference, with multicolored leaves big enough to use for umbrellas in the gentle rains that fell occasionally.
“In the center of the city, rather than a palace or a grim fortress, was a garden, where fountains rose and sang among pillars of black marble, worked with gold, and the water ran laughing down cascades into small pools.
