by Isoellen
And it was all lovely.
Chapter 17
Finding Her Heart and Her Home
She relaxed into him when he picked her up to carry her this time. Chastened, emotional, and sore, she hummed for lack of the ability to purr. Reduced to jelly, Anna had no will other than to be with him right now.
After meeting Eid, she had a better idea of the advanced technology that the Orki had access to. Smooth and even, the maze of tunnels and halls not natural. Some areas of the wall were self-illuminating, connected to a mysterious power source. Other areas required the endlessly burning torches. One day she would want to know how it all worked together, but not today.
With no windows, light shafts, and no doors, she had no clue where she was. They passed areas where she heard the warm noises of living beings and they also went through silent halls. After many twists and turns, they turned a bend and then another into a hall with several side passages. Doku-ni ducked his head when the smooth dark ceiling lowered then lifted.
The tunnel became a bubble of a room that smelled like him and wet war beast. His home but like no home she'd ever seen. There was no table, no chairs, no cabinets, no fireplace. No kitchen. Hard, boxy caskets shaped from unfamiliar materials were against one curve of the walls. One wall had a high lip. He could sit there, if he wanted, but not comfortably. The room was round, with a high domed ceiling that would enable him to stand upright. One of those endlessly burning torches burned in a stand.
Two steps inside the room, Anna looking everywhere in curiosity, realized they were not alone. In a deep floor depression against the back wall, three war beast heads popped out—like baby birds from a nest. She could tell it was deep because she could only see the black nose of one of the war beasts, and the other two bigger animals gave them happy, yippy greetings. Their heads looked strange, differently shaped, smaller than Zerzer. Anna realized she must be seeing her first male war beasts. They had no ruff of spiky mane around their necks, giving them a thinner appearance As they moved inward, more of the beast’s bodies were revealed in the room’s central feature—the rounded bowl of a bed full of furs, blankets, and soft materials.
These beasts were not Zerzer. They might be related, but she'd never been good at things like that—telling which animal came from which animal. The black nose belonged to a solid black female with a developing ruff around her neck. Doku-ni introduced her first, “Daughter Zerron.”
The dainty creature dipped her head with some high-pitched noises, a canine curtsy and greeting. Anna, set to her feet again, grinned and returned the hello with a bend of her knees.
The biggest of the three had a gray chin with scarred marks and deep, calm eyes. Zerzer’s mate, Rrarg, and the other dark beast like Zerzer that had a white streak down his back, was a brother.
All three of them climbed out of the bowl, surrounding her. Despite being small and delicate by comparison, she didn’t feel any danger from the much-larger beasts. Zerzer and three more appeared from nowhere, adding to the commotion. The room was small; the beasts were big, and Anna saw why there was no table or furniture. The pack would have knocked everything over and crushed it to bits.
Rrarg acted the most civilized, keeping the others in check with a firm growl, going so far as to keep Zerron from licking her all over and chastising the pup for the attempt.
Anna laughed and told him, “Thank you for that. Will you protect me from Zerzer too? She knows I don’t like it but she does it anyway.”
Rrarg made noises at her that Doku-ni interpreted. “He tells Zerzer lots of things, but she rarely listens.”
“That is the same for me!” Anna couldn’t help laughing again as Zerzer nudged her into Doku-ni’s arms. Joy bubbled through her bloodstream. This room, these new friends, her white Orki—a sense of realizing the impossible and stepping into her dreams and adventures. There was warmth here, soft embracing waves of it. Carved and shaped of stone, without a single piece of furniture or recognizable humanity, Doku-ni’s room and family felt like home.
And she knew her parents would be happy for her.
“Anna, come,” Doku-ni led her over to the trunks along the wall, opening three of them.
“Clothing!” Women’s clothing. Fabrics of all kinds, things she recognized and things she did not. Some of it looked so foreign that it must have come from the steel cities or beyond. Everything was clean and well-kept, but having studied planet history Anna identified clothes that looked new but must, in truth, be generations old.
Unable to help herself, she picked an outfit that her great grandmother might have worn. Not skirts, but pants. The first women from the steel cities dressed for labor and work, wearing pants like their husbands, sons, and fathers. At some point in time that fashion changed, became more feminine until women considered the idea of pants as immoral. Anna had made herself a pair when she was a girl, and Benjere burned them.
The trunks held miss-matched colors, sizes, everything. Jewelry and other pretty, feminine odds and ends. She had her head buried deep, chasing colors in the bottom of one when Doku-ni tapped her exposed bottom and told her to grab something to dress into for after their bath.
A bath?
Out the hall, they had used to find his room, and down a longer one, into a room lit with torches with a large swirling pool in the center of it instead of a bowlful of warg. Lit with Orki torches, she saw, thankfully, human-sized benches for sitting and Orki sized ledges recessed in the walls. Bowls of blocky soap and baskets of cloths were in reaching distance of the gently swirling water.
There was no door, and it was not a private bath. But if she came here by herself while one of Doku-ni’s brothers washed, they would be magically invisible to each other. She knew that in theory at least. She vowed to do her best not to test the theory. As comfortable as the Orki were with their bodies, she was excited to wash and finally get to cover hers up.
Doku-ni held her hand into the warm water, and took over the job of washing her. The action felt like care as much as inspection. His fingers pressed gently over her neck, discovering what she thought must be bruises, and he found the raw spots that his dominance had caused on the front of her knees. “There is a tea huumon women can drink for pain, or you can drink the warg milk—and you will use Eid’s ointment.“
“How often am I going to need the tea or the ointment?” she asked, giving him a cheeky smirk as he stood over her shoulder.
With a splash and a lift, Doku-ni set her outside the bath. His hand felt quick and hard on the curve of her bottom in a noisy, painful spank before she could turn around to look at him. He answered her question, “Often.”
Anna gaped at him, mouth open. She’d never been spanked in her entire life. The smack was playful, but not comfortable, and his expression, one side of his brow lifted, pure challenge. Waiting for her reaction. Daring it. She felt her face turn red, stunned to again feel that girlish, giggly flutter in her middle. He made her feel young. Not knowing what to do or say, she just smiled and laughed. This was something they would have to explore and figure out together. She was not about to set boundaries on all the potential of her adventures with him.
Dressing in the old fashion clothes was a delight. She liked the sensation of the pants, the top, and the cincher she found for her full breasts. Finding a comb in one of the baskets but no mirror, she attempted to deal with the mess of her wavy brown hair. It had been a long time since she cared about her appearance or about anything but taking care of the farm and surviving the day. These clothes, their odd cut and strange materials felt fun and pretty.
Doku-ni tugged at her top, pulling it out from how she tucked it. “Huumons wear many clothes,” he said.
“These are wonderful. Thank you for letting me use them. I don't know where you got them. But I love it.”
“For Anna. For Anna long time. Wait for redress. Every Orki collects what his redress woman need.”
“And this whole time, you've been collecting these things for your redress?”<
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“For Anna.”
“This style is very old. I've only seen it in pictures.”
“Wait for Anna. Doku-ni did not know so many layers and bindings.” Reeling her in, his hand slipped over her belly and up to the cincher.
She laughed, “They are as easily taken off as they are to put on. Please don't rip them. Do you know where my boots are? The ones I was wearing?”
“Boots are in trunk. Old clothes not in the trunk. Did not save. Smell like man's sons.”
“Thank you for saving the boots. That pair is important to me. For lots of reasons.”
“Anna has fire in her boots.”
She could hear the amusement in his voice. “I don't have much of my father. I didn't realize how much my brothers, how much Benjere, tried to erase him.”
In her quiet moments in the middle of the night after nightmares sent by the hungries—the memories of the dead—Anna had told Doku-ni the details of all her disturbing visions.
The one with Benjere, as Benjere, left such mixed feelings. Anger, disappointment, and pain, because the memory was his. Completely selfish, yet accidental, his selfish, childish action caused their father’s death. A part of him still lived there making excuses to justify the guilt and the shame, manipulating who might discover what he’d done, hiding from himself. She saw the ways the event shaped and twisted him.
He had been more under the skin than she ever knew. He loved his family but perversely hated them for not feeling good enough. He fell short in all comparisons, leaving him eaten by vicious jealousy.
Benjere had held her when she cried more than once. He had been there in his support when nobody else was around more than once. He had left his own responsibilities to come help with hers at a moment's notice more than once. In his backhanded way, he'd always made her feel terrible about it, but he had been there. Any one of her brothers could have done the same for her—but didn't. Anna didn't think that he wanted to make her miserable, not consciously. All the other things he'd done had been an offshoot of his personality and a need to control her and keep her from telling the world about what he had done.
She put on her boots, with the little match packet, missing two, lacing them up. After, Doku-ni took she and all the warg family went to the community area. Here, around the central fire, she would be allowed to see and speak with others. Their hall opened to a huge, cavernous space. It felt familiar, a vista she had seen before, but filled with more Orki and humans having positive, friendly interactions than she had dreamed possible. Entering at the highest point, the uppermost circle descended in an amphitheater shape to a fire pit at the lowest point in the center. There were several entrances or exits around the highest tunnels—a honeycomb of them going off who knows where. Dancing in the lowest center circle, radiant with clean, brilliant, the community fire burned. Unnaturally white, it was nothing the mundane fire Anna had cooked food over since she was six years old.
This was where the Orki, the wargs, and the humans became a community.
Lurann, her former sister by marriage sat in the lap of an Orki and was surrounded by several others. She looked for all the world like a queen holding court. And she was smiling.
From where she stood, Anna could see Lurann’s golden hair and her brilliant smile. She was radiant. Anna had seen that smile on her wedding day and anytime she shared a room with Kejere. Kejere and Vejere may have competed for her hand and fought because of it, but Lurann had only ever shared that smile with one of them. Younger and bitter with her own losses, at the time Anna had thought Lurann a tease, but Anna could see now how wrong she'd been in so many ways.
“Kejere told me to take care of you.” Anna remembered Lurann saying. That was engraved in all the horror of those days as something precious. The women trapped together in the cold cellar beneath the bakehouse had to choose who to sacrifice to the ugly maw of raider avarice. Offered up to save their daughters, Benjere’s wife Bess went screaming to a horrific death. Her face swollen and blooded, Anna escaped the same, and later, Lurann’s determination to honor her brother’s last words placed Anna at the bottom of the list of those in line to be terrorized. Her brother’s love. And Lurann’s risk to deliver it.
Anna had known the other woman most of her life. And yet, she hadn't known her at all.
“Is Lurann a redress bride too?” she asked Doku-ni as they approached the group.
Did she remember Lurann naked on her knees with an Orki behind her? A differently colored Orki? The male whose lap she sat in was distinct among the others, with decorative metal piercings in his ears, his nose, even his lip. Doku-ni behaved in such a possessive manner she couldn't imagine being surrounded by so many of his brothers at one time. Watching, Anna saw one of them reach out and stroke Lurann’s cheek. Another curled a lock of her hair around his finger as if fascinated.
No, Anna could not imagine Doku-ni allowing that.
And she didn’t want him to.
“Lurann is succor.”
“Succor?”
“Comfort, ease, sweetness, welcome, succor for Orki community. When she wishes.”
Had she heard him wrong? “Community?”
“Unique, rare, will care for many Orki. Brothers care for succor. She is home for the lost.”
Anna had to process what he meant without adding the judgments of her upbringing. Righteous Way was among the most proper of towns. There were expectations of every person there with weighty social repercussions, and Lurann had always had a questionable reputation, simply because she was pretty and laughed out loud when men talked to her. She murmured, “Home for the lost?”
Doku-ni held none of the same judgments. His voice was pleased and proud when he described Lurann, as if his people were blessed to have discovered her. “Succor to those who will never find redress. Warg die. Some Orki alone, always. No end to their death. Lurann will not drink the milk of the sister, but she can embrace the Orki. Rare. Respected. Many will honor her with their trunks of treasures as I have honored my redress.”
“Warg die?”
“We share beginning, we share ending. We share a heart. The warg smell the universe. Bodies are short-lived but share heart. Not all warg lines survived the making of Orki.”
“Short-lived. I am short-lived. The warg are short-lived but the Orki are not.
“The Orki are not. And no longer my Anna so-humonn-ror'si-ess. Anna will share Doku-ni heart.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Some questions Anna live.” With curving lips, he hugged her close, giving her one of those affectionately dangerous caresses with his sharpened tusk.
He led her to where the human size steps wound down to the community fire, to tables and benches of rough wood, clearly accommodations for women and children. He sat on a sturdier ledge made of stone. Food waited on the tables, in baskets, bowls, and platters. The Orki she saw eating ignored the cutlery, another concession to the humans within their world.
Anna felt shy now that she was here, able to look around and talk to people. But she did not know where to begin or who to begin with. Around the fire, she saw war beasts and what looked like war beast kits. Amazingly she spied many Orki. There was also a young woman, and a girl sitting very close to a large Orki who watched over her as if the very idea of community made him nervous.
And there was the brown-haired woman—the one who she thought she failed—fully dressed clean and watching the Orki children play with bemusement. Anna almost burst into tears looking at her.
She turned to Doku-ni. “You knew, didn't you? You knew she was alive, that she survived. Why didn't you tell me?”
He didn’t flinch. No guilt, no regret. “Who do you see?”
Anna took a breath. This was their culture. But it was hard for her. It did not make complete sense to her human mind. She wanted to argue. But arguing would not change this aspect of how the Orki interacted with their world. Mutual respect for individuality was important for them because in the beginning, as Eid showed
her in those visuals, they had no individuality at all.
And their right to be individuals and to protect their own redress woman was a sacred rite. “I see Doku-ni.”
She leaned into him, wrapping her hands around his waist to give him a hug. She had wanted adventure, wanted to be a bride, and had always known it would not be easy. “I see you, but may I go and talk to her?”
The question pleased him.
She liked that look on his face. The soft expression in his eyes. The small smile. He was hard and strong in every way, even that first day when he took care of her, his eyes burning with concern and worry as she wept in his arms, when she tried to drink too much of the fermented milk in the red bladder, and when he rescued her from the hungries. But she saw something different there now. Since that afternoon. Some of his intensity had become less desperate.