by R. Lee Smith
She was still shivering with tiny quakes of afterglow intense enough to almost qualify as orgasms. “Where,” she panted, “did you learn to do that?”
“A man spends most of his life in a tree waiting for a deer to walk by, he gets to thinking.” He met her mouth, kissing her gently and thoroughly.
“No,” she said, smiling against his lips. “Someone taught you how to kiss.”
“Nope. Heard about them, though.” He entered her mouth with his tongue, explored her meticulously. “They are fun, aren’t they?” Then he leaned back, put his hands on his thighs and quirked a smile at her. “You could have chosen a more romantic setting than the bath, you know.”
“You make it sound like I planned it.” She sat up, still pleasantly flushed and relaxed.
“No. I’m not sure how that happened, but I know it wasn’t planned.” He grew serious. “I know panic when I see it. It wasn’t the noblest way I could have comforted you, but I couldn’t help myself. Go home to your metal-maker, Olivia.” He cupped her chin with his claws, drew her to him for a final kiss. “And thank you.”
Then he stood and found his clothing, fastening it as he left.
3
Olivia came to the forge, afraid to find Sudjummar still lying broken beside the anvil. He was seated on it instead, chewing something while holding a food-matted Somurg. He glanced up, saw her, held up one finger and bent over the baby. When he looked up again, he said, “Are you all right?”
“Are you?”
He quirked a smile at her. “Crippled, not killed. Did I scare you?”
“Yes,” she said honestly.
His smiled faded slightly. “Sorry.” He looked down at Somurg again. “I’m very sorry,” he said. “Because now I’m going to upset you, as well.”
She tensed as Sudjummar slipped off the anvil and put Somurg in a metal basin. Without speaking, the smith mixed hot water from the forge with cold water from a pail and then set it down and knelt to bathe the baby.
“I took Hodrub his new pick,” he said. “He says you look ill. I took Torumm two knives and a new buckle. He says you’ve lost weight. I took Unnamman his spear. He says Somurg looks ill.”
“They’re all wrong,” she said.
“That’s beside the point. And the point is, there’s three of them. I am releasing you, Olivia.” Before she could speak, he said tensely, “Right now, right this minute, you are still my mate and so I am still leader of this tribe. A leader must do what is necessary to keep his tribe together. I know that if I refuse to release you, there will be blood. There might be killing. I won’t have that over a female, Olivia, not even if that female is you. I am putting you aside.” He poured a dipperful of water over the shrieking, splashing baby.
“It isn’t fair,” she protested. “You’ve done everything a mate is expected to do.”
“I’m flightless and crippled.”
“Half the males here are crippled!”
“And how many have mates?”
She stared at him bleakly.
He lifted Somurg from the basin and wrapped him in a towel. “What would you have me do? Stand back and wait for someone to die?”
“I just wish…This isn’t fair! Why is everyone being so damn mean?”
Sudjummar sighed and came to put his arm around her. “I don’t know,” he said. “The child that strikes his finger with a rock may warn his younger siblings to beware of rocks, he may do that…but he’s a lot more likely to hit one with a rock. It’s no different from your kind to mine. There’s just something in the nature of pain that can only be eased by being inflicted.” He pulled back, searching her eyes. “And we are in pain here, Olivia. We are in terrible pain.”
“Sudjummar!” she pleaded. She wanted to beg him not to throw her to the tribe like a bone, wanted to find some way to convince him to keep her, but she could see a hardness in his eyes that made him look so much like Vorgullum, that her words dried in her throat.
“I will release you,” he said quietly. “But I…” He looked down at the squirming baby twining his claws through his pelt and her hair. His voice, when he spoke again, tremored with a despair her leave-taking had not been able to induce. “I beg you, let me keep my brother’s son.”
She flung her arms around them both, making a tiny sound of negation, and he stood rigid beneath her embrace.
“Please,” he whispered. “I will never have one of my own.”
“I have to feed him,” she said, and it wasn’t until she heard her shaking voice that she knew she was crying. “I have to, Sudjummar! I have to!”
“If I…If I bring him to you to nurse, it will look as though I hold a claim. Olivia, please. A baby can eat anything a grown man can eat, as long as it’s chewed—”
“Amy, then! Take him to Amy! Promise me, Sudjummar! Don’t let him wean!”
He drew back and looked at her for a long time. “I promise,” he said slowly. He looked down at Somurg and a frown grew. “I want to ask you why…but I am honestly afraid to know the answer.”
She touched the baby’s cheek with her trembling hand and felt his fur—still damp from his bath—as soft as otter under her fingers. Somurg opened his eyes to frown his father’s frown at her, then closed them again.
“This isn’t fair!” she said again, and even she didn’t what she meant: being forced from Sudjummar’s side, Vorgullum being shot, the endless threat of challenges, Logarr, the Great Spirit, Bahgree, any or all of it. It just wasn’t fair.
“I know.” Sudjummar cupped her chin to make her look at him, then kissed the corner of her mouth. “I’ll send your belongings to the tunnels…until you claim another mate. Leave me, Olivia. Leave me now, while I can still let you go.”
He backed up against the brace of her arms until she fell away from him, and then he turned his back and took her son away.
4
Olivia isolated herself from the tribe for days and saw no one, but she did not bother to hide from Logarr; when he called for her, she went. They met in a different chamber, and as before, there were candles and a warm fire, but no bedding in the pit. She did not speak to him, but went to the bench, hiked up her skirt, and lay down.
Logarr did not comment on her change of attitude. He simply did what he intended to do, came to the same gut-jarring climax, and got up again, picking up the threads of his story.
“I came to a river, as I have said. An old river, powerful. There, I encountered what I can only describe as the shade of the woman that was once Bahgree. Our legends are false, Olivia. She is not powerless at all, she’s merely unable to work her power in a world of substance and form.”
“Shouldn’t that have made it impossible for her to change you?” Olivia tried to rise, but couldn’t quite manage that yet. She settled for another weak protest. “You’re not even human, how could she touch you at all?”
He helped her sit up. “The first time was a dream,” he told her, sitting beside her on the bench. “Looking back, I think that if I had left after that, I would have been safe. It was only a dream. But I was young and I was stupid, and the sex had seemed very vivid,” he finished bitterly. “So for the sake of that so-vivid sex, I went to the water just as I had done in my dream and performed the rites I’d dreamed. I let her in, Olivia. And once she had me, she kept me.”
She started to reach a sympathetic hand towards his knee, then remembered that he was doing something awful to her, that he was, in fact, the enemy. Logarr watched her hand tremble in the air and then drop back to her own lap. He looked away.
“She had me a long time,” he said. “All day. Many days, maybe. She changed me. And then she let me go, warning me first that the power she had put in me would demand release. I had strength enough to stagger out of the water, and then I fell and was unconscious for some time. When I woke, I tried to convince myself that I had dreamed the whole thing. I was young and such dreams…well, they weren’t entirely uncommon. After a moment or two, I began to think I had, in fact, been visited
. I leapt into the air, circling wildly in search of some life. In my crazed mind, I was expecting a gulla female. In a matter of moments, I was willing to take a cow.
“Well, as luck would have it, just as the most unbelievable pains began to wrack my body, I spied a road. Roads always lead to humans. I rushed along and found a house. It never occurred to me to wonder what would happen if there was only a male inside. As it happened, I crawled around the house, looking in windows, and found a female, sleeping alone.
“In retrospect, I realize she was young. She had a woman’s shape, but there is something about age that weighs on a body, and it had not weighed on her. I think she must have been in her own adolescence. Certainly, she welcomed me with all the unquestioning passion of one who has had her share of hot, young dreams.”
“Welcomed you?” Olivia echoed.
“I slid open the window and crawled into her room. She slept on a…like a platform, but soft and high and…flexible. There was much bedding. I pulled it off. She wore pants of filmy fabric. She woke as I was removing them, but I don’t think she really woke. I think she thought she was still sleeping, because she put her arms around my neck and drew me down. The pain stopped, pouring out of me like water off a mountain. When it was over, I realized that I had been pounding the platform, or whatever it was, into the wall with a terrible noise and this poor girl was simply screaming with pleasure. So out I went through the window.
“Every three days, Bahgree came and used my body. Every three nights, I flew off to my human lover and used her the same way. At the end of the fourth visitation, Bahgree pulled me down into the river’s depths and kept me.” His jaw tightened. He looked away. “She kept me a very long time. But eventually, I was released and sent back to await you.”
“But all this happened years ago,” Olivia protested. “How did you know to expect me?”
“I wasn’t told your name, if that’s what you mean. But Bahgree knew that the Great Spirit wanted a new vessel for her essence. She knew that one like you would be coming someday. She told me to watch for a woman, that I would know which it was by the spark of power inside her. The Great Spirit would put it there so that he could rut with her, she told me. And it was you.” He looked at her; his eyes were deep and filled with pain. “It was you.”
“So you have me now.” Olivia stood up. “What will you do with me?”
“Tomorrow, you will know more.” He looked away, bent and tired. “It’s nearly dawn. Go and get rid of the stuff inside you. You have more time to find a mate, but I warn you, it will be much more dangerous than it was before.”
Without further delay, Olivia left him. If it was nearly dawn, the tunnels would be empty as the gullan retired to their chambers. Most of them would be sleeping already.
Olivia didn’t think Doru would mind waking up for her.
She hurried down the passage as the first stirrings of need began to turn to pain. She arrived at the correct passage, climbed raggedly up his entry chute, and started groping her way through his chambers.
There was a gust of manly laughter and Olivia stopped just outside his sleeping room, dismayed. He was awake, but he was not alone. She shivered, completely derailed.
“So where is she now?” Doru asked. “Still in the women’s tunnels?”
“You can’t be serious. No, I see that you’re not.” Bodual’s voice, and Bodual’s deeply depressed sigh. “The cry of severance was still hanging in the air when Warnn went and got her.”
“Warnn?”
“It could have been worse,” Bodual muttered sourly. “She could have gone back to Augurr. You know, I more than half expected her to.”
The sound of their voices fuzzed out beneath a wave of carnal agony. Olivia crumpled against the wall and tried to think of what to do as she rubbed futilely at herself through her clothing.
“—through her grief,” Doru was saying.
“I know what he means to work her through. You know, I could count the number of times I coupled with her on both hands, and she could count the men who haven’t on one of hers! She’s had them crippled, flightless…hell, castrated! Damn me, I try not to let it anger me, but there’s nothing worse than knowing your mate would rather have any man but you.”
“Sure there is,” Doru said with a kind of bitter cheerfulness. “There’s knowing that coupling with you drove your mate off men entirely.”
“Yeah, that would suck,” Bodual said, speaking the last word in clumsy English. “I mean, imagine how bad that male would have to be at sex.”
“You can shut up now,” Doru said mildly.
“He would have to be just terrible!”
“Right now.”
“I mean, where was he putting it? In her ear?”
Hardly aware that she was moving, Olivia stepped into the doorway and let herself be seen just as Doru, taking the last sip from a pop can, reached absently across and walloped Bodual in the side of the head.
Bodual fell to the floor at her feet, looked up and smiled. “Olivia!”
She was amazed at how easily her next words came out. “I couldn’t sleep. I heard voices and thought…”
Doru had half-risen from his seat near the fire, and now he settled back and reached down to offer her a soda. “Welcome to my lair,” he said. “I’m all out of thumperjuice, but there’s plenty of this stuff. There’s no bam to it, but it’s not bad.”
It was ginger ale, and Olivia popped the tab and took several deep swallows, resisting with every last shred of her will the urge to drop to her knees and masturbate furiously in front of them.
“So,” Doru began, crushing the can in his fist. “How do you fare at the closing of this fine night?”
“Not well,” she said with a ragged laugh. “You know that…that Sudjummar has put me aside. To stop the fighting.”
The two exchanged troubled glances. “We’ve heard,” Doru said.
“I’m…afraid to be alone,” she said, and did not have to affect the very real quaver that shook her voice at these words. “And I’m afraid that if I return to Sudjummar, someone will kill him. It’s stupid, but there it is.”
“There it is,” agreed Doru darkly. “And it is stupid. I’m sorry, Olivia. I had hoped it would go better for you.”
Bodual made a quiet sound of concurrence.
Olivia set down her drink before she could start shaking hard enough to spill it. “I’m afraid to be alone,” she said again. “And I don’t want to be alone.” She began to unfasten the catches of her vest. “I want to be with you.”
Both their ears came forward at the same time. Doru sat up a little straighter, his brows climbing; Bodual’s jaw dropped open and he spilled his soda.
“Can I stay?” Olivia asked, looking from one to the other of them with desperation that was all too real.
The only thing moving on Bodual was the frothy trickle of ginger ale onto the floor, but Doru’s eyes softened. “Come here, Olivia,” he said, holding out his hand. “Of course you can stay. And you don’t have to—”
She caught his wrist and put his hand on her breast, ending his sympathetic words with a deep kiss. She hummed against his lips, prompting an immediate response in kind. When she took her hand away, his remained, cupping and gently kneading at her breast as he bent to tongue her nipple. Olivia glanced over her shoulder at Bodual, who was uttering a ragged harmony to Doru’s mating thrumm. “Come here,” she whispered. “I need you both.”
He obeyed, taking slow, dazed steps. “What do I do?”
“Take off my skirt.”
He reached around her waist, fumbling with the buckle. A moment later, the fabric was pooled around her ankles and Bodual’s hands were on her hips, his mouth on her back and shoulders.
“Doru,” Olivia murmured. “Lie down in the pit. On your back.”
He nodded, unfastening his loincloth as he turned from them.
Olivia turned into Bodual’s arms, smiling at the anxious uncertainty she saw there. “It’s all right,” she sai
d, as though he’d asked her a question. “I’m willing, but I need to make you ready.” Her hands were busy, freeing him from his confinements, and when she had him naked, she lowered herself to her knees and touched her lips to the head of Bodual’s jutting member. She stroked him with her hand, taking as much as she could into her mouth and running her tongue along the rest until he was hard and slick and groaning.
Doru lay on his back, his wings folded into wedges on either side, watching them and thrumming as he stroked himself in his fist. Olivia glanced from him to Bodual, standing rigid and panting over her. The power was screaming at her for release, washing out of her in waves, and they were ready.
Olivia stepped into the pit, and knelt astride Doru to lower herself slowly, reaching between them to take his cock and guide him into her. She leaned forward, her hands resting lightly on his chest as he cupped and suckled her breasts. She ground her hips in two tiny circles, and then bent over him, their tongues entwining. She felt the bedding shift as Bodual entered the pit.
Her legs were folded along Doru’s flanks. Bodual knelt beside them, between Doru’s thighs. A second later, his hands spread her nether cheeks. The slick head of his shaft pressed against her anus. He pushed and she cried out as brittle bolts of pain crackled through the storm of pleasure. He went slow, letting her push back at him as she rode Doru, and when she had him fully enveloped, he drew back and thrust all the way inside her again.
Olivia unleashed the power.
Logarr had warned her, but she couldn’t have prepared herself for this. Moaning, rocking, the two males thrust at her in different speeds and different strengths; the power Logarr had put inside her poured out in two directions, circled and drove at her again in a cycle of pure ecstasy. They ceased to be individuals, became a machine of sexual energy. Bodual would push her forward, pinning her arms while Doru devoured her mouth. Doru would hold her hips while Bodual brought her against his chest, cupping and kneading at her breasts. Long after the flood of pent-up powers had ended, Olivia struggled to find a way to bring them all in sync, manipulating the others to her will, building them towards a final explosion. The moment came on her demand, and then Bodual collapsed and she was crushed pleasantly between them.
