Empire

by Michael R. Hicks

  “Where is Goliath?” he asked.

  She smiled. Reza was forever concerned with his animal friend. “Goliath lies buried next to us in the snow, keeping warm in the way of his kind. He, too, is well; complaining of hunger, but alive.”

  “How long…” he asked. “How long have we been here?”

  “The sun has risen and set twice since I awakened, and now it is night,” she told him. “I do not know how long I was unconscious before that.” She felt Reza’s eyes close, the brushing of his eyelashes a pleasant tickle against the skin of her breast. Thinking he had returned to the quiet of sleep, she said no more.

  But he was not asleep, only thinking. “Esah-Zhurah,” Reza said, breaking the silence, “why are you still here?”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, puzzled.

  “The storm has long since passed, has it not?” Outside, the only thing to be heard was the muted sound of Goliath’s breathing and an occasional groan as the beast voiced its hunger.

  “It is so,” she answered cautiously, unsure where his thoughts would lead.

  “I was as good as dead, drowned in the river,” Reza went on, his voice a gentle but unrelenting probe, exploring her motivations. “You could have left me behind. You could have taken the shelter and Goliath and tried to make it on your own. Why did you not?”

  She shifted uncomfortably beside him. “I shamed my honor with my arrogance by abandoning you,” she said, her voice low and measured, each syllable a self-punishment exacted by her conscience. “I could not abandon you again. You are strange, and not of our Way, but you… are special to me, in a way I do not fully understand.” She paused. “I could not bear the thought of losing you.”

  His hand found hers. There was no need for words. She held him tightly, feeling the warm wetness of his tears upon her breast. In her heart there was a quiet jubilation that they were both alive, and that this day they were something more than they had ever been before.

  As their bodies melded together in the deepening cold, she found herself murmuring softly in a prayer to the Empress, asking if perhaps this human – just this one – might indeed have a soul and a place among Her Children.

  * * *

  When Reza again awoke, it was to a sensation of rampant thirst the likes of which he had never known. Esah-Zhurah had done her best to give him what fluids she could against the fever that had taken him, and had drained all of the shelter’s normal liquid supplies. But it had not made up for what he had lost, and the debt the fever had left in its wake had finally caught up to him. The inside of his mouth felt like it was sewn together from sun-baked leather.

  “Water,” he croaked.

  “Here,” she said, holding a small clump of packed snow to his lips.

  He opened his mouth eagerly, but found the icy snow, taken from a small pile Esah-Zhurah had brought in for the purpose, to be like acid in his mouth. It burned in his throat as it grudgingly metamorphosed into its liquid form. Even so, his thirst was so overpowering that he began to suck on it greedily, and was rewarded with a fit of coughing as water found its way into his trachea, choking him.

  Esah-Zhurah held him steady as his coughing subsided into ragged breathing. He was still terribly weak.

  “Wait,” she told him, gently rolling him onto his back.

  He heard her scoop up some snow from wherever she had it sequestered behind him, and then she was silent for a while.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, staring into the darkness.

  Then he felt one of her hands reach down to cradle the back of his head, lifting it up, while the other gripped his lower jaw and gently forced it open. With shocked surprise he felt her lips press against his, and then cool water was spilling into his mouth from hers. For a moment, he did nothing, disbelieving that she was actually doing such a thing – the rough equivalent among her kind of a human kissing a dog in the world he had once known – and wondering if he should be thankful or repulsed by her touch.

  But then her lips pulled away, and he forced himself to swallow the water she had shared with him, having melted the snow in her mouth with the heat of her body. With a detached, almost shameful sense of curiosity, he found himself analyzing the water for any trace of her own taste that might be there, noting with mixed emotions the lack of anything unpleasant.

  “More?” Esah-Zhurah asked. She had discovered that actually carrying out the idea that had struck her had been… pleasant. It was not at all like when she had pressed her frozen mouth to his to force air into his lungs. In fact, it had excited her in a way. She wondered what it must have been like before the reign of the First Empress, when male warriors walked among her race, and there were no clawless ones, no sterile mules like herself. Did they perhaps lie quietly next to one another like this on cold winter nights, speaking only with the beating of their hearts and the touch of their bodies? This was the stuff of legend, of fairy tales, or so many peers thought, and undoubtedly it was so. The ancient tales and songs of those times struck a hollow chord among the Empire’s warriors. For they knew that the males of their race were nothing more than instruments for the propagation of their species, and it was hard to imagine they had ever been anything more. Some, like Tesh-Dar, truly believed the ancient legends as historical truth. But many had their doubts. Esah-Zhurah tended to believe that the legends were only stories. But something in her mind, a tiny race memory left in the wake of the long evolution of her people, left her thinking that perhaps the peers, the doubters, were wrong.

  Licking the tiny bit of moisture that had spilled on his lips, Reza nodded in the darkness. “Please,” he begged, his thirst now completely awakened, a ravenous thing trapped in his parched mouth.

  Esah-Zhurah repeated her performance four more times, until her tiny stockpile of snow was gone. She noted with a twinge of alarm that touching Reza this way was beginning to seem more than just pleasant. As she gave him the last of the water, the stream between their joined mouths now spent, she pulled away from him, pausing with her lips a hair’s breadth from his, her heart beating like thunder in her ears.

  “Thank you,” he whispered, his lips brushing hers as he spoke the words, sending a jolt of emotional electricity through her. He reached out, running his fingers across her cheek, through her hair, before drawing her down to him. Like strangers whose destiny was to become fast friends and more, their lips touched in a gentle kiss that left them both breathless. When their lips parted, he only had time to utter her name before she kissed him in her own turn, carefully lowering her body onto his, her breasts pools of heat against his chest.

  Reza felt a stiffening at his groin that he had experienced before only in his sleep. It was something he had never experienced in human company. He moaned softly as his erection pressed against the smooth, taut flesh of her belly, and he felt her shiver as his hands moved down her back to stroke her sides, his fingers tracing invisible patterns against her skin.

  Esah-Zhurah was nearly lost to a power she had never even dreamt of, something that had not been experienced by a member of her race for thousands of generations: physical love. Her mind sought vainly to understand what her body instinctively knew, and she felt the first stirrings of a part of her that – as a mule – normally would have remained dormant her entire life. The fire that had begun in her veins when their lips touched had worked its way downward, and the wetness she felt in the furnace that burned between her thighs both exhilarated and terrified her.

  “Esah-Zhurah,” Reza whispered, reluctantly parting from her kiss, “is this even possible?”

  “Yes,” she answered huskily, gently running her fingers over Reza’s face. “Our bodies… are similar enough to a human female’s, but…” She shook her head and began to pull away from him, but he held her back.

  “What is it?” he said, holding her face in his hands. “Tell me.”

  “I must not do this,” she rasped. “It is forbidden me to mate, and to do so with one not of the Way…” Her whole body trembled sudde
nly, as if she had been taken by a wracking sob, and Reza held her tightly against him, ignoring the pain in his body. “We could be punished by death, Reza. Even for this.”

  The words tore at his heart, but he understood now what was at stake. He would not sacrifice her, or himself, for this desire that threatened to consume them. They had come too far to throw everything away for a single touch that might easily deny them a lifetime together.

  “Listen to my words,” he told her softly. “There will someday come a time when that will not be so. In this I believe. The day shall come when we may be as one, and until that day dawns, I shall wait for you.”

  She kissed him again, softly. “I pray to Her that it shall be as you say.” She kissed his face, her lips and tongue caressing him with a tenderness he had never imagined possible for her. “You must rest now, my tresh,” she said. “Rest, and grow strong again.”

  Esah-Zhurah pulled him close, her arms wrapped around him, her musky scent strong in his mind. He closed his eyes to the bitterness that welled up in his soul at the unbidden remembrance of terrible things now long past, things that had happened to a human boy who was fast becoming a man among an alien race. Shutting out those images and the guilt they threatened, he focused his thoughts on her hand as it ran through his hair, and the tingling sensation that stirred at the passing of her fingers.

  His body swiftly gave in to the need for rest. And as sleep quietly crept upon him, he uttered the question that had been floating in his mind, hidden by the alien code of honor that bound him during his waking hours, but which carried no weight in the world of dreams.

  “Do you love me?”

  The answer would have pleased him, had he heard the whispered word before he slipped away into the waiting embrace of sleep.

  “Yes,” came Esah-Zhurah’s soft voice. This warrior, who had once pledged her honor to break this human’s will, now found her soul bound to his by something her race had not known for millennia. She lay silent, cradling him against the cold of night and the unknowns of the future, wondering if her world would still be the same come the dawn.

  * * *

  The First strode through the door, snow fluttering from her fur cape as she shook off the cold. “The sentries report that Esah-Zhurah and the human return,” she announced. She was obviously amazed that it was possible for them to have survived six days in the wilderness in winter, alone.

  “I know,” Tesh-Dar told her from where she sat on the floor, legs curled under her, head bowed. She did not tell her subordinate that she had known their whereabouts since Esah-Zhurah had dived into the water after Reza. Her mind’s eye had watched her pull him from the water and give him life with the touch of her lips upon his. She had kept watch periodically over the following days as she tended to her own business, wondering if they indeed would survive.

  But her wonder had turned to shocked disbelief, as she witnessed from afar the emotional whirlwind that had swept over the two during the following nights. Her hours had been spent in deep meditation since then, with her mind’s eye focused on them as they made their way back to the kazha with the coming of the sun and first light this day. “Have their mount taken care of, and bring the two young warriors to me.”

  “Yes, my priestess.”

  Time, being a very relative thing to one so old as Tesh-Dar, passed quickly. She opened her eyes to find Esah-Zhurah and her human consort before her on their knees, waiting.

  “Greetings, priestess,” Esah-Zhurah ventured quietly, unable to gauge her elder’s mood. Reza remained silent, his eyes fixed to the smooth stone of the floor.

  “You have something for me?” Tesh-Dar asked, as if the two had never been missing at all.

  “Yes, priestess,” Reza said quietly, holding forth the black tube that held Tesh-Dar’s correspondence. Fortunately, it had been strapped to Goliath’s saddle, and not to that of Esah-Zhurah’s ill-fated mount.

  Tesh-Dar leaned forward and took the tube – still cold to the touch – from Reza’s hands, noticing that they did not shake, but were firm, confident.

  “You have done well, young one,” she told him, setting the tube aside. “Go now to the healers and let them tend to your injuries. Then go to the hall to eat. No more do I have for you this day.”

  “Yes, priestess,” Reza told her, bowing his head. He got up from his knees and headed for the door. Esah-Zhurah made to get up to follow him.

  “My business with you,” Tesh-Dar said ominously, “is not yet complete.”

  Esah-Zhurah dropped back to her knees, hearing the door open and close quietly behind her as Reza – much as he hated to leave her alone – carried out Tesh-Dar’s orders.

  “Look at me, child.”

  Trained from birth to show respect by averting the eyes, it was a difficult thing for her to do. That the priestess had asked this of her drove home the seriousness of whatever matter the elder warrior had on her mind. Warily, Esah-Zhurah met Tesh-Dar’s gaze.

  “This I will say only once, for I will forgive it of you only this once,” the great priestess said. “I cannot prohibit the feelings in your heart for the human. But I now remind you that to show those feelings toward one not of the Way with a touch, a caress,” her voice strained as she fought off the shivers of disgust that swept through her at the things she had witnessed, “is forbidden, bestial in Her eyes. No more shall there be, or you will find yourself bound to the Kal’ai-Il, the Stone Place, in punishment.” The Kal’ai-Il was an ancient monument to the discipline of the Way, a stone arena where only the most serious wrongs were punished. It had stood for millennia as a symbol of the price to be paid for the Empress’s honor by a warrior fallen from grace. “You, like the others in this grand experiment, were chosen for this task because of your strength and spirit, your knowledge of their alien tongue and ways. Do not disgrace yourself in Her eyes again.”

  Lowering her head nearly to the floor, Esah-Zhurah cringed in shame, her fears realized. No feeling, no thought, no action was beyond the knowledge of the priestess. Esah-Zhurah felt like a tiny grain of sand, infinitesimal, before her gaze. But deep in her heart she felt the forbidden desire burn even brighter, a flame that she could never escape.

  “It shall be so, my priestess,” she whispered, the words sounding hollow and empty on her lips.

  Tesh-Dar nodded, noting the deep turmoil in the child. She frowned, knowing that the coming cycle, Reza’s last unless his blood was heard to sing, would be terribly difficult for Esah-Zhurah. Tesh-Dar knew that the child would likely wish to take her own life when the human’s came to an end. It was a most unfavorable prospect for such a promising warrior. Worse, Esah-Zhurah was more than just another young warrior to her. Far more. Tesh-Dar would have to watch her carefully. “I will say no more of the matter,” she told Esah-Zhurah gently. “Go now in the footsteps of your tresh and rest, for the sunrise shall again call you to the arena to train.”

  “Yes, my priestess.” Saluting, Esah-Zhurah departed.

  Tesh-Dar stared after her a moment, wondering at the intensity of the feelings she had sensed in the two of them. Was mere punishment, even shaving one’s hair, enough to deter such things?

  Then Tesh-Dar thought of the Ancient Ones who had watched over Esah-Zhurah as she had struggled to free Reza from the clutches of the river’s icy waters. Never had Tesh-Dar known them to be interested in such affairs. What stake could they possibly claim in the matter of a warrior and her animal tresh? Tesh-Dar did not understand their motivations or what precisely they had done that night, but she had clearly felt their presence, guiding the girl through the water to find the human. She knew from the power of their song that they had not been mere bystanders in what had taken place.

  Pondering this thought, Tesh-Dar opened the black tube that had been the catalyst for their tribulations. She began to read the long-delayed correspondence from the Empress, knowing that she must seek an audience with Her to discuss these unforeseen developments.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

&nbs
p; “And there is only the one who remains, priestess of the Desh-Ka?” the Empress asked. The two of them walked side by side in the Imperial Garden. It was a paradise of flora from every one of the Empire’s ten thousand worlds. The number and variety of plants were such that, had Tesh-Dar the luxury of time, she could have expended a complete cycle walking about the great greenhouse, strolling for several hours each day, without ever seeing the same tree or blooming flower twice. The aromas that caressed Tesh-Dar’s sensitive nose were an endless source of delight. The one time she had dared touch one of the plants – only with the permission of one amongst the army of clawless ones tending to their welfare, of course – her fingers had thrilled to a song of life that was unlike anything she had ever felt before. Primal and pure, it was a feeling she deeply cherished.

  But now, walking beside the Empress, even the great garden could not lift her spirits. She felt an acute sense of disappointment at the results of the great experiment that had begun what seemed like only yesterday. But over a dozen years had passed since the raid on the strange human settlement that had been populated almost entirely with their young. Tesh-Dar would have thought that such planets would have been plenty, for that is how their own young were raised. After giving birth at the nurseries, the mothers departed soon after their recovery, leaving the infant children in the care of the Wardresses who would tend to their needs and train them until they were ready to join the kazhas. It was not uncommon for a mother never to see her child again after its birth, and the code of the Way ascribed even the naming of the child to the Wardresses. The only link from generation to generation was the passage of the Ne’er-Se, the ritual verse each mother left the Wardresses to teach her child, an oral trace of the females in the mother’s bloodline. The males, of course, were not included; they were never even given a name, and those born lived, bred, and died at the nurseries. Thus it was a surprise to Tesh-Dar to learn that the human planet they had raided had been an aberration, a purgatory for the human young who had been forced to live there.