Taken to Lemora

by Elizabeth Stephens

  Merquin cuts me off before I dig my grave any deeper. She snaps, “You’re right. You didn’t. What did I tell you before? You can’t buy your own mate and you definitely don’t have that to hold over her or me or anyone. You didn’t pay for her. I did. Reyna did. Tana did. Bebette did. And so did all of our clans. And we paid rotations’ worth of work for her.”

  She takes a step forward, her breasts shoving up against my chest as she stares straight at me, gaze nearly eye level. “You are the only male clan chief for a reason. It’s because of how you care.”

  “Pagh! I do not. Despicable. I hate everything…”

  “If it had been Librida we’d discovered with Igmora and Tyto, what would you have done?”

  “Librida! I’d have wrung their bloody necks! I’d have…” I quiet, cheeks smoldering with rage that the lovely Librida would have anything to do with those horrible old croons — but also at the realization that Merquin’s right. She’s always right. My shoulders hunch and slump and I sag half a foot shorter than I was before. “I’d have bought her for you.”

  “I know.” She places her hand on my shoulder and squeezes. “And that is why I think your clan made the right choice. But don’t let them come to regret their choice. She may be your mate, but you can’t own her and right now, you’re thinking only about yourself. Have you given one single thought to what she’s been through? What she needs? You think you’re the kind of mate a female with this level of lifelong emotional trauma needs right now?

  “Nob,” she answers before I can try. “You aren’t. So you’re going to have to wait, be patient and put in the work to get to know her. Because while you’re meeting her, remember, she’s also meeting herself for the first time, too.”

  I flounder for an answer as Merquin turns from me and heads back out into the cold, moss-scented air. It’s wind blows across my bare chest, making the blood crusted across my skin feel tighter than it did. I scratch at it uncomfortably and green flakes off of my chest, like war paint. It is war paint. And in this moment, I’d fight that war again if it meant I could just skip all the parts where I’m supposed to attempt to attract her.

  I’m a rock and she’s more beautiful than a star. How do you attract the sun?

  “You know she’s not all that meek,” I grumble, catching up to Merquin halfway down the ramp. “She hit me with a statue of one of those ugly princes. I think I still have a piece of his foot stuck in my forehead.” At least I hope it was a foot, though it was odd since the statue had three legs.

  Merquin smiles but doesn’t answer me. Instead, we’ve reached the group and she steps between Bebette and Reyna to Essmira’s side. “Are you ready, Essmira? We’ll take pad pads to my home. The stables are right over there.”

  She nods but Reyna pipes up. “Wait! I didn’t get my hug earlier.” She jumps forward and swoops Essmira up in a hug that looks on the border to being painful. Not to mention the fact that she’s bare-chested. What if Essmira likes the feel of Reyna’s rocky breasts pushing against her much softer ones?

  Frowning, I grunt, “Don’t suffocate her, Reyna.”

  But Essmira is smiling when Reyna sets her down on her feet. “You’ll be alright here. And if you need anything — even just a break from boring old Merquin — you can come hang out with me anytime.”

  “Me, too!” Bebette pipes.

  “And me, of course,” Tana says, “I have the best keep, after all. We have an axe throwing competition every eighth lunar. You should come!”

  “She is not throwing axes at one of your bawdy parties,” I groan.

  Merquin gives me a penetrating look then that I can’t make any sense of. Her hand pinches on Essmira’s shoulder, pulling Essmira’s attention away from my face. It’s both a blessing and a torment. “I think she’d be great at it, if she’d like to try. You were the one who said she had quite the arm on her. Apparently, she threw a statue at Raingar’s head.”

  “Oh yeffa, I think I see a little scratch there.” Reyna laughs. The others laugh, too.

  “I’ve always wanted to throw something at Raingar’s head,” Tana. I shake my fist at her. At all of them.

  “You all better not or else I’ll run you through!” I shout, and then I glance at Essmira in horror. “I mean…not you. You can throw whatever you like at me. I mean…not anything. Ideally, not anything sharp. But I guess, if you want…”

  She smiles and the bridge between my brain and my mouth collapses. “I’m so sorry, Raingar. I shouldn’t have. I was…overcome. It won’t ever happen again.”

  “I mean…oh…okay,” I mutter lamely.

  Reyna, Bebette and Tana murmur parting words to Essmira and Merquin and to me, though I wave them off grumpily. They take the short stairs down and head off down the right path, toward the dome in the distance where the pad pads honk and heehaw and squawk all lunar long.

  Essmira is still standing where she was looking up at me, Merquin standing just behind her. I open my mouth, wishing I had something to say. Woo her. I’m supposed to woo her. How does one go about wooing a mate when this one didn’t even want a mate in the first place? How does one go about wooing said mate when that mate happens to be the loveliest creature in the universe?

  “Essmira?” Merquin says from a few paces back. She waits for Essmira to follow her to the stables, but Essmira is only looking at me with a crease between her eyes and her bottom lip stuck between her teeth. I desire to free it. Deeply.

  Essmira flinches and then a sort of hesitant resolve floods her features as she takes that first step towards me and then the next. The moss and soil squish quietly beneath her bare feet and I can’t help but stare at her toes. There are five of them where I only have three thick digits. Digits that wouldn’t break if a rock fell on them, which has happened many times. If so much as a pebble landed on her little toes, it’d break all of them. And Merquin is taking her away from me. Pagh!

  Hysteria makes the world hazy. Is the structure of Merquin’s keep even safe? What if she gets hurt? What if she has bad dreams? What if Egama come for her in the lunar when Merquin isn’t paying attention?

  I’m about to shout at Merquin and beg her to reconsider giving Essmira to me, at least for this first lunar, so I can stay awake and stare at her all lunar long and ward away any manner of foul thing out to harm her, but Essmira kills that impulse when she takes another step towards me, and then another.

  Is she trying to get back onto the ship? Does she regret coming with us so far? I flinch towards the open ramp of the kintarr ship, prepared to block her exit, but Essmira isn’t walking towards the ship. She’s coming towards me, of all the despicable things for her to do on this fine planet.

  Sweat makes my forehead tingle while a soothing balm runs from the tip of my horns down to the base the moment Essmira touches me.

  She touches my chest and my entire being is hinged on the sensation. Ohr. She’s perfect. Perfecter than perfect. And I’m just a beast carved from stone with horns. This will never work. I will never be able to woo her. I’ll… I choke.

  She slides her arms around my waist, making me want to shred the indigo garment she’s wrapped in so I can feel her, skin-to-skin. My fingers twitch. She buries her face in my chest, seemingly unconcerned with the Egama blood or the brittle texture, and I stand there with my arms out staring down at the top of her head like a lunatic. I don’t remember the last time someone tried to touch me, but I do remember that I hated it. But this? Being touched by Essmira? I don’t hate this. Nob, I don’t hate this at all.

  My heart is straining, everything in me pulling towards her. Finally, my hands drop to her shoulders and just lie there, shivering and twitching with the desire to do more, to hold more, to touch more. I need…

  “Thank you,” she says, pulling back before I can even decide how to proceed.

  My mouth is totally dry. All I can do is grunt.

  Her smile wavers and then she gets all sheepish in a way I don’t like. “I’m sorry also for throwing the um…the sta
tue at you. Truly, I am.”

  I grunt again. I should ask her if I can call on her sometime. Or show her my village. I should boast about it, tell her it’s much bigger than Merquin’s, even if that isn’t true. I should tell her about Walrey honey and that she sounds like it and smells like silk even though neither of those things can be real, they’re more of a feeling. I should tell her that she smells like a feeling. A feeling that, before this moment, was home to me. But now that’s changed, because when she steps back, it feels like she’s taking that home with her, too, and I don’t like it. Home is a place, not another creature.

  “Anyway, that was all. Thank you, Raingar. For everything.” She walks away from me under Merquin’s protection and I stand there agape for another three millennia, long enough for time to unwind itself around me and become another beast altogether, this one a snake. It feels suffocating.

  And as I stomp off, electing to walk home instead of taking one of those feral beasts most villagers use for transportation, I realize what the worst part of this whole thing is.

  Now, when I say I hate everything, it will no longer be true.

  4

  Raingar

  “Ouh.” I make the sound again, louder this time because no one is paying me a lick of attention. My halls are full, but the foul creatures who occupy so much of my space are all busy working. “Ouhhhhhhhhh.”

  I’m lying on the stone floor in the center of the great hall, my arms and legs spread out to the sides as I stare up at the stone ceiling, wishing that a comet would fall through the overhead skylight and end my suffering. The comet would have to be very small though, because I wouldn’t want it to take out any of the ceiling and hurt anybody else. Or rebuild my keep. It’s a nice hall. A good home. And right now, it’s overflowing with too many beings of all kinds and none of them are the one I want to see.

  “OUUHHHHHHHH!”

  Gorman’s face appears above mine, hanging there all round like a moon. Gorman is Hypha and has bright orange skin, fins sticking out of either side of his head and large black eyes that take up most of his face. His nose is two slits and his mouth is a small thing full of short, square teeth. He doesn’t smile — he rarely lets me get away with my tantrums — but says in a flat voice, “Can I help you, Raingar?”

  “Ouhhhhh…”

  He cuts me off. “Yeffa, we heard you the last hundred thousand times. If you’d take this tirade to your private quarters, the Rekkaru could get along with their business.” The Rekkaru make up the bulk of the foul miscreants littering my great hall at the moment. Small, dainty little creatures with wings, they make the best couriers and right now, my hall is packed with merchandise as deliveries continue trickling in from all the Eight Quadrants.

  It’s Gorman’s job to coordinate where things go. It’s my job to meet the dignitaries making the deliveries and instill a fear of the afterlife into them when they land so that no one ever tries to cheat, lie to or steal from Lemoran. And no one ever does. Except for pirates. Bloody stinking pirates.

  But I’ve been here since sunrise — before sunrise, because do you think I ohring slept? Nob! — refusing to meet anyone or do anything but lay here contemplating how well my life had been going and how things went so wrong so quickly. Gorman, the clever idiot, decided to bring the dignitaries into my ohring keep. I thought it was punishment but it’s even worse.

  He’s using my current mood to help further last minute negotiations. He says that I’m actually doing a better job than normal and was particularly pleased with how things went with the Oroshi. Rather than linger and languish, eating all of our finest food stores, the Oroshi dignitary moved tentacle over tentacle to get back to his ship when I moaned at him. Apparently, he thought I was diseased and didn’t want to catch it. He also paid full price for everything.

  I hated that Oroshi for it. I hate Gorman for this. I hate everyone!

  Almost everyone.

  Everyone but the one I can’t figure out how to claim…

  “OUHHHHHHHHHHHH!” My horns burn. I croak in Gorman’s face.

  His flat expression twists down at the corners, turning his small mouth to a near perfect arch. “Raingar, get up. I signed on to be your second, not your mother. Now that the dignitaries are all gone, you can take your tantrum to your private chambers. Or, better yet, get on your feet and help me with this.”

  He shakes a log book at me, the pages worn and dog eared but immutable. Not like all of this fancy shmancy Voraxian and Niahhorru technology that’s known to be fallible and corrupted, we Lemoran rely on our own brains! Our hands and blocky feet! The occasional pad pad and holo screen are unfortunate consequences of having achieved inter-Quadrant flight. I wish we never had…

  But then I’d never have found Essmira.

  I start to moan again and he kicks me in the side. “Ouch! That hurt,” I lie, jerking up so quickly he starts back. I’m quicker than he is though, and snatch his book from him. Lying back down, I flip through the pages only to realize I’m holding it upside down. “What’s the issue?” I snarl.

  He seems surprised by my answer because his orb eyes get bigger and his little mouth twitches in a small smile. “Here.” He flips to a page in the book, turns it right side up and hands it back to me. “You ordered seven crates of this liquid but no one knows what it’s for.”

  I keep one eye open, but let the other stay closed — for effect — as I read over the pages. “That’s fire essence.”

  His fins twitch, a sign that he’s really irritated with me and not just pretending. That makes me feel worse. “What?”

  I grunt and shove up onto my elbows, forcing Gorman back a few feet. He stands up to his full height and tucks the book against his chest when I return it. He holds his ink pen down and to the right like a warrior might a sword at the ready.

  “That’s what the Niahhorru called it.”

  “You bought from pirates.” He raises the indented skin above his eye that’s sort of like a brow, but not. I nod. “At a fair price?”

  “Yeffa!”

  His slitted nostrils flared wide and I scrunch mine — well, as much as Lemoran skin can scrunch. A little embarrassed, I admit, “Well, I bought it at a price.” Gorman looks ready to read me my final rites. I continue quickly. “It’s oil for the Eshmiri dome lamps. The floating ones. You know the ones we use for…”

  “I know what Eshmiri dome lamps are,” Gorman huffs. “But I also know that they’re built for single use. That’s why the Niahhorru switched to yeeyar.”

  “That’s how the Eshmiri built them, but the Oroshi use them, too. They made a small modification using ioni excretions to produce this oil that can be used to refill the Eshmiri lights. We can reuse them now, too.”

  He blinks, eyelids closing from the sides. “Oh. This will save us a fortune on future costs for the lights?”

  “Is that a question?” I growl.

  “Nob. Just surprised.” He makes a note in his book. “Do you know how much we’ll be saving with this?”

  “Seventeen pouches of kintarr’s worth every rotation.”

  “Good. Very good.” He shrugs his shoulders back like he doesn’t mind his silk tunic at all. The ohring male has the gall to have another silk robe draped over the top of it. Pagh! Then, Gorman whistles loud enough to win a startled yelp from me.

  “Would you knock it off!”

  He ignores me and shouts loud enough that his voice carries throughout the crowded hall. “Mino and Closette! You can use that liquid to restore power to domes. Bring one here and Raingar will show you how. Raingar.” He kicks the side of my foot. “Won’t you?”

  I grumble noncommittally but my legs still curl beneath me as I prepare to stand.

  “And then you’ll help identify the three other shipments I can’t.”

  I grumble again.

  “And then you’ll get your heavy rear up to the pad pad stables and you’ll take a cart down to Merquin’s keep and you’ll respond to the three queries she’s sent. She even sent
a messenger for you, for ohr’s sakes.” His fins twitch and his fingers curl tighter around his log book. “What does she want from us, Raingar?”

  I burn, mortified at having to reveal what it is that I’m going to have to reveal, and grateful that the other loud mouthed clan chiefs haven’t disclosed her presence on our planet yet. They’ll have to — we’ll all have to account for how fourteen tuns of kintarr just…disappeared. I’m just not ready to tell them…yet.

  “She doesn’t want anything from us, Gorman. She just wants to meet with me about something.” My voice is so rough I’m hardly sure he can understand me. And then I’m sure he can’t when he asks me to repeat myself.

  “It’s not anything serious, Gorman. Don’t look at me like that.” I feel heat in my face and pain in my horns. I reach up and touch them and Gorman’s eyes narrow. He looks frightening when they narrow. “Stop that! I don’t like it!”

  Gorman blinks, sucks in a breath and revs up to say something…then just shakes his head. “Fine, Raingar. You know I trust you with my life. I can trust you with this small thing, too.”

  Gorman has been my advisor since I was first nominated and then elected clan chief. He was a contender for clan chief as well — I even voted for him. I worry that his not being of the Lemoran species had something to do with his electability. It makes me feel like pad pad dung, that thought, because I trust him more than anyone. I may look like a rock, but he is mine and I don’t like keeping things from him. Even small things.

  I open my mouth to just ohring tell him what happened on Quadrant One, but he’s already ushering a small cluster of creatures towards me and ordering me to demonstrate to all of them how to relight the Eshmiri domes using the fire essence I bought off of the Niahhorru who themselves procured it from the Oroshi.

  That lasts an eternity. Another eon spans the time it takes for me to explain to a group of Lemoran how to power the wind propellers I purchased from a Voraxian delegation. It’ll help us keep the kintarr mines cool in my clan.