Loved Him to Death: Haru of Sachoné House

by K. M. Frontain

  Inflexible? I was shivering, I wanted to kiss him back so badly. “Take that light off your skin,” I said.

  “No! Look at me! Love me and look at me!”

  A noise escaped me. It should have been a laugh, but it sounded more like someone had stabbed me in the throat. “Who will you go to when you are at last free, Intana? Your father, or Vaal? Who has your loyalty most, immortal child?”

  He didn’t answer at once, and I thought of commanding the answer out of him, but the light rising out of his skin dimmed and became a memory first.

  “Is this how you mock me for my stupidity of so long ago?” he said. “By questioning my choices if I were to be free?”

  I opened my eyes to the shadows of a cabin in which divinity had been subdued and grabbed the vague head looming over me. I kissed him. I kissed him so hard there was blood. A sound of despair erupted deep in his throat, and he lay full against me, and I loved him, but without looking at him.

  It was glorious, the feel of him, the smell, the taste. The scent of a lightning strike in mid-ocean, the salt of tears and life on my tongue, a power hiding beneath his skin, a low-resonating thrum against my hands, my lips, my body. All of it perfect, until he shifted too far to my right and crunched against my chest the arm that was broken. And then it was just mind-breaking hell.

  “Mmmmph! Aieee! My arm!”

  “Oh! Sorry.”

  His light fired into existence, and I lay there with my eyes squinted tight against him, rigid with pain and still desperate not to see.

  “Dim that down!”

  “But I must get the surgeon.”

  “I don’t need the surgeon! Fuck! Vaal put me in His ass and sit on me! Damn it! Shit! Shit! Shit!”

  “It really hurts, doesn’t it?”

  “Shit! Say the obvious, why don’t you!” I’m not the politest when I’m hurting. I’d broken a leg once, seven years earlier, tumbling off a yard and catching myself upside down in rigging. My own fault. I’d been drunker than a bee in mead. I didn’t remember a thing afterward, only woke up splinted, in agony, and with a temper unfit for company. Much as I was now. “There’s medicine over there!”

  Intana’s weight left the bed and returned again. “Here.”

  I grabbed haphazardly, caught a bottle and put it to my lips. I sprayed the contents over my torso and legs. “Urk! Fuck! You gave me Mother’s oils!”

  “Did I? And yet you kept your eyes shut despite it.”

  “Bastard! You did it on purpose!”

  “I wanted to see just how determined you were.”

  “Very, you despicable white fucker from a dead whale’s anus. I thought we’d already confirmed this.” I opened my eyes looking away from him, and lurched off the bed to fetch the medicine myself. I drank all of what the surgeon had left me for that night and slammed the bottle down on my desk. Glancing back at my bed, I discovered I had spilled Mother’s mix on the mattress. “Damn it! That had down from the southern wood duck!”

  “This made it special?”

  “Very. Get out of my cabin.”

  “I won’t. I came in here to make love to you, and I still want to.” He pressed up against my back. A kiss landed on my shoulder. A prickle of pleasure went down my spine, but I was angry enough to ignore it.

  “Make love? That’s making love? You hurt me just to get my eyes open!”

  “Perhaps I did.”

  “Go to your seal, dig it up, and build a tower of sand twenty cubits tall to set it upon. You may not use divine power, only strength and wit.”

  His arm around my waist all but squeezed the breath from me. “But that’s impossible!”

  “Go!” I wheezed.

  He went, and I stared at my ruined bed and smiled. Damn, but I loved to make him work at menial things. If it weren’t dark, I’d have fetched the spyglass out to watch him from a distance, but it was dark, my arm still hurt, and my legs shook from reaction. I managed to turn over the mattress one-handed, and fell across it in exhaustion. I didn’t awaken until late in the morning. By then, Intana had discovered a way to create his tower of sand.

  Chapter Nine

  My cabin boy came in with my morning tea and breakfast, skirting the godling who stood in his path. The tray settled by my elbow, and I thanked Gari. He answered with a wordless noise and fled.

  “Stop frightening my cabin boy,” I said to Intana and continued my attempt at writing the ship’s log left-handed. My progress was slow and sloppy, but legible.

  “If he would cease making eyes at you, I would,” Intana replied.

  “You imagine things.”

  “I don’t!”

  “What are you worried about? You know I’d never touch him. Stop frightening my cabin boy with your atrocious glares.”

  “How would you know that I glare when you do not look at me?”

  “I can feel them. You glare and the atmosphere becomes like after a lightning strike. Do you know the sensation?” I continued speaking before he answered. “Oh, but you must, since you create the sensation merely by making furrows with your celestial eyebrows. How potent you must feel, terrifying insignificant mortal boys with this most simple of your weapons.”

  “I really do hate you.”

  “Yes, of course. Would you like some tea?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then pour some.”

  He cursed me and came forward, and cursed me again to see me smiling down at my ship’s log.

  “Do you know how difficult it is to create a twenty cubit tower of sand without divine power?” he asked. “Did you even look to see the result of my efforts?”

  “Did you know the tide came in and ruined it?” I retorted.

  “No!” he cried and left with the teapot in his hand. He came back scowling. I felt it like multiple thunderclaps detonating within the cabin, and I smiled yet wider.

  “You’re detestable,” he said.

  “Did you have fun building it?”

  The teapot plunked down, and a cup shoved in front of my face. I set my pen down and accepted it.

  “After a bit, yes,” Intana admitted, pouring himself a cup. “You really are detestable.”

  He was smiling, reluctantly, and I knew it. When he smiled, a shower of happiness hit my skin, pleasant, bright and fleeting. Much like unexpected snow on too hot skin.

  “What an odd thing you are,” I muttered.

  “You say that of me? I don’t think you have the right, for I find you odder.”

  “Hmm.” The tea was particularly good in his company. “How did you manage the tower, then?”

  “It’s a damned mountain, wider than it is tall.”

  I laughed. “Not much wit involved there. Not much of a tower either.”

  “Yes, but I put a sculpted peak on the top, and so it is.”

  I laughed again. “Fair enough.”

  “What would you have done?”

  “Built a twenty cubit support structure and filled it with sand.”

  “Then it wouldn’t have been just a tower of sand!” he cried.

  “I didn’t say it had to be only sand,” I replied.

  “Ah, you’re a monster!” He slumped down on my bed. I listened to the muffled thump and smiled again.

  “Can you write?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Finish your tea. It’s dictation for you today.” I was sick of scratching baby marks in my logbook. Intana would serve as secretary, if he didn’t choose to annoy me with tricks to make me look his way.

  I finished breakfast, had another cup of tea, contemplated a moth perched upon a navigation atlas on my shelf. Intana never ate. I had no idea what sustained him. But he did seem to appreciate a good cup of tea.

  “The multi-toned paints the people of Verdant trade? Are you responsible for them?”

  “Yes. One of the earlier Oradhé had a son who suggested this thing to his father. I’ve been mixing paint since.”

  “I thought so. I’m not the only one who’s put you to
work at menial things, then.”

  “No, but your reasons are particularly original.”

  Yes. They were that. To keep him out from underfoot. To keep him distant. To keep him from pressing his suit. But today he would take dictation for a purely menial need. I had my ship’s log to keep and was sorely behind with the entries.

  I gave up my seat to him and began to catch up. He wrote quickly and without comment until I mentioned I would be writing letters to my family matriarch, and each of my sisters and my children, in preparation for an intended parting of company with my ship. I could not keep my men in harbour forever. They had families, too, families to which they could return. To mine, I could only bid goodbye.

  “You have children?” Intana said, lifting the nib from the paper.

  “Of course I have children.”

  I stood before a porthole, looking out upon the city climbing the slope of Verdant’s smallest mountain, but I could see him to the side of me. His body had gone stiff.

  “You have a wife?”

  Funny, that impression. I caught from him a feeling of disorientation and dismay, as if he looked at me and realized he’d seen things wrong. What had he seen wrong?

  “No. I don’t have a wife. That’s not how it works for the people of Brellin,” I responded.

  He said nothing for a moment, then set the pen down. “I forgot how old you were.”

  I blinked in surprise. My age? It had been that? “How could you forget my age?”

  “You don’t look forty.”

  “No, I look like a piece of dried kelp. Go ahead. Chop me up and eat me.”

  He made an impatient motion with his hand. “Don’t tempt me.”

  “Pfft!” I blew at him. “Take your chances. If you eat me, you can hope to find another Oradhé before the priests escape with your seal. You can give it to the next incumbent directly. Go ahead! Find someone who wants to set you free!”

  “I can’t go out of my way to murder you!” he shouted at me.

  “Well, isn’t that inconvenient.”

  He slapped a palm over his eyes. The nearest leg shook with frustration. I frowned with my gaze arrested halfway between him and the porthole.

  “Why are you getting angry at me now?” he said presently, lowering his hand.

  Yes. Why?

  “I’m not certain. Perhaps I feel you’re about to be angry with me again.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Hmm.” Back to dictation. “Take up the pen, if you pl—”

  “You have children, but no wife,” he interrupted. “How does it work for the people of Brellin?”

  Well, it seemed a fair question. No reason not to answer. “Our society is matriarchal. We sons, brothers and uncles support our mothers, sisters and nieces. If we want children, and through them alliances with other houses, we contract for paternity with a woman of good family.”

  “Contract for paternity?”

  I turned my head more in his direction, but fixed on the corner of the desk. A knee rested close by, a shimmering silver curve leading down to a perfect shin, the colour of which was entirely immortal. My gaze shifted slightly, to look upon a thigh, where silver, pink and lustrous blue mixed.

  Ah, mercy. He was beautiful, and I hadn’t come near to touching all of him last night. He’d ruined it coercing me to see.

  “Basically the woman must remain with her partner until she is with child,” I said, “and must never leave his sight for even an instant until then.”

  “And so you only live with an unrelated woman until she becomes pregnant and that is all.”

  He had made a statement, but it wasn’t true.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  He lurched to a stand, and the chair went crashing back. “Then what did you say?”

  I blinked at his torso. Though I’d sensed the anger building, his vehemence still surprised me. “I gave you the barest meaning of how parentage is determined in my society,” I answered. “That is all. I did not say that I have not lived with an unrelated woman for other reasons, or never enjoyed the company of one except to have a child.”

  “Are you saying you love a woman?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yes!”

  “Why?”

  He stared at me, and I stared at my desk where his fingers had crushed an edge. He truly was bad for my property. The sooner I sent this ship on its way, the better.

  “But—!”

  “You were to be married, were you not?” I said. “When you are free, won’t you want a wife to bear your children?”

  “Not after hearing this!” he cried.

  I couldn’t help laughing. “Well, yes, but that doesn’t seem to be how your family does it.”

  “I don’t care! I won’t be caught for all eternity to some petty girl that will demand my fidelity every instant of my life!”

  Was it so? All eternity bound to one person, and never a right to look elsewhere? It seemed harsh.

  “Do you love a woman of Brellin?” Intana demanded.

  My eyes shot up to his, caught sight of angry silver pupils gone so large the black irises were all but invisible. What he had for blood, it was not red like mine. That which lay in the back of his eyes was silver fire, godly.

  My gaze veered sharply to the right. “Why should this be of concern to you? You’ve surely chosen, before me, men who have had relations with women. You have already mentioned an Oradhé who had a son.”

  He stepped forward and caught me by the upper arms, and I winced from the pain that lanced through my right one. “I thought I had only this phantasmal Jumi to contend with, but now I discover you might prefer women. You have no idea how much I’d like to break you in half.”

  “Is that it? You are concerned there is another obstacle in your path? You think you’ll have a more difficult time seducing me because what you have between your legs might not suit?”

  His answer was bitter, the name at the end said like a curse. “I could have sworn there was only this Jumi.”

  I had set my gaze upon his chest, but now I dared look him full in the eyes again. “There is my entire family. You’ve torn me from everyone that I love, you selfish bastard.” Turning my face away, I jerked from his grasp and clamped my teeth against the pain it caused me.

  “You’ve only to look at me with clarity to go back to them.”

  I felt nauseous. I stumbled to the porthole and leant my head on a section of wall. “Yes, I’ve only to open my heart to you, let you scrape out everything until it’s hollow, and then return to my family. I’ll get over having known you. I’m just an insignificant mortal. Why should you care how I feel?”

  “What do you want from me?” he cried. “Tell me what you want to make this easier! You should be happy that you free me! You should feel honoured!”

  “Yes, let’s just bribe the mortal. Mortals are so stupid and fickle anyway. Give them some gold or some diamonds, some pretty bauble or two, and they’re like little monkeys. Happy to scamper away after a god has petted them for being particularly entertaining.”

  “You’re vile.”

  “You’re a nuisance. Fetch your seal and feed it to Vaal. Tell Him I give it with my compliments.”

  A strangled noise issued from him. He departed, and I laughed, because if he felt an obligation to obey me, then Vaal must be hiding somewhere in the harbour. The thought of it made Little Brother’s mark become ice on my chest. I put my right hand over the raised scars and winced from the motion.

  “Vaal, are You going to let me go to Jumi if I see Your lover as he truly is?” I whispered.

  My fingers touched the small gap of skin Little Brother’s mark had not swallowed. I felt as if the remains of my damaged heart leaked through it. If only Chief Grandmother had let Little Brother bite his own tail, I’d be safe. No one could have put a finger on the door of my soul again.

  I leant against the wall of my cabin for minutes, the breeze from the porthole washing over me, cooling skin th
at had cooled too much already. I wore only trousers, nothing else, not even sandals. Clothing bothered my peeling skin. I suffered the silk on my legs out of necessity, to keep Intana from seeing how easily he distressed me.

  Did I love a woman of Brellin? What a thing to ask me. As if loving a woman were the same as loving a man. At least, when I looked upon the mothers of my children, I did not see chunks of flesh and huge stains of blood in water. Women were not required to swim in Blood Bay.

  “We are few, we men of Brellin,” I whispered, “but those few are worthy in Vaal’s eyes.”

  It’s an old saying, but I wasn’t convinced of its truth. I only knew the rite of passage would continue, year after year, century after century, because the one time my culture had resisted the will of Vaal, He’d sent Little Brother’s Uncle to ram the ships of my people, and had decimated most of the male population in one season.

  Mine is a culture of fishermen, merchants, shipbuilders and pearl divers. Only women farm. It is very easy for Vaal to destroy the men of my nation.

  Little Brother’s Uncle can swallow a ship whole. I had only seen the smallest manifestation of Uncle in the waters of the ocean, and he had been large enough that I’d shrunk back from the rail of my ship, terrified. His skin scraping the hull had left scars down the length. We still had the marks, painted bright red to show everyone his approval.

  Such lies I told my men to keep them from fearing, and yet I’d been the biggest coward amongst them. Uncle’s liquid black gaze had punctured straight through my mind, lodged in it a sense of awareness, of attention, cold and brooding. The sensation had never left me. From that point, I had felt as if every shark I encountered regarded me with more than the simple need of a hungry predator.

  Uncle’s visit, the shark teeth on my bracelet, the scarification on my chest, had combined to create me into a living legend amongst my people. The one remaining longest in the water on the day of manhood always received a symbol for his courage, but few are given Little Brother’s image. Perhaps one man in a generation had it, and I happened to be the one in mine.

  And even in this, I was unusual. Those rare men with Little Brother’s symbol did not generally have it as I do. Theirs is always a shark swimming beneath the heart, but mine, as I have described, is a shark forming a near circle around my left nipple. This difference fostered the belief that I am a man of valour with an innate understanding of Vaal’s favoured children.