Loved Him to Death: Haru of Sachoné House

by K. M. Frontain

  “You are forgiven.” I looked back to discover him kneeling with his grey head bowed. His supposed shame might yet be his salvation. I had a premonition Vaal approached, but His anger would pass over this man. “Where is your family?”

  “Locked in our ancestral house, awaiting their fate for my treason.”

  “What is your name?”

  “Jemoni. Master, truly, we should run.”

  I looked at the pair of gaudy sentinels standing to either side of the doors of the imperial court. Both looked at me, but did not move. I understood. Without orders, they would remain at their posts.

  “Jemoni, you may return to your family and await your fate with them,” I said.

  Up onto his feet he launched and down the long corridor he thudded. I did not know if he would go to his family, but it was of no real consequence to me.

  A scent of ocean breeze preceded Vaal’s arrival. He filtered in from a shadow on the wall, and solidified only four cubits from me. I did not bow. One does not dishonour Vaal lowering oneself like one is not a man.

  To the rear of me, the two sentinels crashed to the floor, prostrate with all their armour on. Their pikestaffs created musical notes against the marble, and one skittered loose past my ankle, but I did not move. They were forfeit, the pair of them, but only because they did not know any better. I hoped Vaal would be lenient.

  Vaal stepped up to me and rubbed a thumb gently across my swollen lips. “I do not like how Intana uses you,” He said.

  “His poor manners have been dealt with.”

  Vaal lowered His head and kissed me. His tongue was a cold touch on my skin, but my lips felt better after. “You are too lenient with him,” He whispered against my mouth.

  I could not help but smile at this gentle mockery. He knew full well my thoughts seconds earlier. “They haven’t had the luxury of a proper education,” I said, meaning the pair of sentinels.

  “They will have their education,” Vaal answered. He straightened, strode to the double doors of the imperial court and threw them wide. I stared unthinking at the sight He revealed. What had seemed the distant roaring of water had been a roaring of water. Imperial court had been inundated, and Little Brother swam inside.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Blood, so much blood. The water was red.

  “Have you made a liar of me, Vaal?” I whispered.

  “Did you lie when you said that you did not speak for Me?”

  “No.”

  “Then you are not a liar. You departed the court with a pair of boots earned fairly. You let His Imperial Majesty live, but I chose to let Little Brother eat him.”

  As if behind a wall of glass, Little Brother glided by the entrance. We looked at each other. He smiled and swam on to the recesses of the flooded court. A leg spun by in his wake. The foot was bare.

  “I don’t think the boots will fit,” Vaal said.

  No doubt. The emperor had seemed a taller man than I. “I’ll give them to my favourite brother when he comes.”

  Vaal laughed and pivoted toward me. He was naked as before and showed His readiness to have me. I didn’t want it to be before an entrance leading into a bath of blood and guts, but His excitement refused my delicate sentiments.

  “Take off your clothes, Haru, or I will rip them from you.”

  I set the red boots on the marble floor and straightened to unbutton my jerkin. “You, there,” I called to the guards. “Stand and face Little Brother, or Vaal will send you in to swim with him.”

  They both rose, but abandoned their weapons on the marble. One lifted to his feet dripping moisture. A yellow puddle glistened on the floor where his body had lain.

  “Face Little Brother,” I repeated.

  They were uncertain and glanced fearfully at Vaal.

  “No. The harbour sharks within Imperial Court. That is Little Brother. One name serves for all manifestations of him.”

  They set their eyes on the entrance and remained motionless after, and I took off my jerkin and my shirt. Vaal came to touch me while I slipped out of my boots. The points of His black nails traced ribs, but didn’t draw blood.

  “This broken arm annoys me,” He murmured. His head lowered. Teeth bit where the break had been. My flesh hurt, but the bone no longer ached.

  Straightening, Vaal tore the sling from my shoulder and tossed it aside. My splint followed. He lifted my bare arm and licked the blood He’d drawn, and then my skin felt better, too.

  “I love the taste of you,” He said. His hands lowered to my trousers, but I grabbed His wrists to stop Him.

  “Let me remove them, Lord. I would rather not lose all my clothes this day.”

  “You have more in your sea chest.”

  “None this fine.”

  “Very well.” He had a wry smile on His face, put there by my temerity.

  I released His wrists, and He harried my lips while I fumbled with my clasps and struggled to lower my trousers without tripping. I managed to shove them off my ankles using my feet, despite that He kissed me and bent me backward with His ardour. The scent of blood, and sea, and urine clouded the air, so many fluids in their nature similar. Water, iron, salts.

  “Don’t take me here,” I whispered. “Please don’t take me here.”

  Such a vain hope to think a shark might have pity. We crashed through water. Into the depths of Imperial Court we plunged, straight to the throne where a mountain of men had died fighting to stay on top. I saw them clearly in my mind, witnessed them struggling and screaming, His Imperial Majesty all but crushed beneath. And the water rising from out of the walls. The sharks coming in from shadows. The feeding.

  Nothing remained on Imperial Throne now. Even the upholstery on the seat had been torn away during the struggle to live.

  Vain attempt. Imperial Court was submerged to its ceiling.

  I don’t know how I breathed, but I did. And Vaal had me, there on the emperor’s seat. He did not bend me or thrust me beneath, but sat on Calaru’s chair and positioned me facing toward Him, crouched over His lap. His black hair floated all about His head. He shoved away a strand to free His face, and we kissed. I didn’t want to put my tongue in His mouth, but He sucked on it until I did, and then I groaned into Him. Not from fear. I wanted Him, despite the place, the chill, the red of bloodied water, the multitude of souls telling me their last story.

  Vaal with Jumi’s adult face and body. I used this as my reason, but when the head of His shaft at last broke the boundary Jumi had never claimed, I no longer thought of my lover dead so long ago. There was only Vaal, filling me to the root of my manhood, filling me beyond. My tongue in His mouth, His hands on my hips, and the cold of the water cradling the heat of my engorged sex. All the victims, all their sorrow and fear gripped my shaft and squeezed it. It was exquisite torment, made all the worse when Vaal lifted me and thrust me down.

  He set my mouth free. I arched back in the water, exposed my front to more of the anguish, and felt fingers feather the length of my shaft.

  Look, Haru, He whispered.

  I looked. My mouth opened, and a long wail came out. The water swallowed it. He had set a nail at the opening of my shaft. I watched the blackness lengthen and plunge inward.

  Claimed. Claimed where no man or woman had ever thought to claim me. From front and from back, impaled. The feel of Vaal’s nail in my urethra at once chilled and burned. It was insupportable, the pleasure. I stopped thinking. I lost the thread of time. My universe collapsed to include only His intrusive shaft inside me and His nail lengthening until it touched where He pounded my insides. And then there was the little mental death.

  I discovered myself in bed in the apartment in Yrrylos’s establishment when I recovered, and Vaal stood on the balcony laughing at Intana, who held a clump of melting snow in a sloppy basket fashioned of moss and fern.

  “This was where you went?” Vaal said.

  “He made me!” Intana replied, resentful and refusing to look at me, but I knew his attention lay hard on
me and that he was aware Vaal had taken me perhaps only minutes earlier. I wasn’t wet, but this didn’t matter. For a god to let me breathe underwater, it was no matter to remove me from the water dry.

  Other than feeling tired, I suffered no aches or irritations in any part of my body. It seemed Vaal had seen to my health after using me hard. I had a vague memory, like a dream, of a dark shape lowering me down, of my body turning onto my stomach, of licking where I had been hurt.

  Creation. The images, the sensations… They had been real.

  Intana’s head canted a little more in my direction, and the sun fired the movement of his silver hair. I hadn’t combed it yet. I wanted so badly to do so, but I was just so exhausted.

  “Where did you go, after I last saw you in the harbour?” Intana asked Vaal.

  “Back to the temple. There was food left to eat. You should have come with me, instead of going off to sulk.”

  Intana’s features twisted with disgust. “What lay within my father’s temple wasn’t food. It was revolting carrion.”

  “There are nuances of flavour to carrion.”

  I chuckled, and Vaal looked in at me, smiling. Ah, Creation. He was beautiful. Black predator next to Intana’s bright presence. If a star had come down to shine on a midnight sea, they were Intana and Vaal together.

  “Why did you bring him back here?” Intana demanded. “This place? A house filled with whores! Have you no sense?”

  Vaal struck him for his impertinence, and Intana went spinning off the balcony. I blinked in the following silence, and then listened to Intana shouting from below. Such a very erratic star, he was, full of fire that shot off in all the wrong directions. And at the wrong times, too.

  “You should house him in my father’s temple! You disgusting shark! Don’t you care that he surrounds himself with mortal distractions?”

  Ah, that fool Intana. It seemed he would doom himself through rudeness. But no. Vaal only laughed down at him.

  “It is you that cares if he surrounds himself with mortal distractions,” He said. “I see nothing wrong with this place, where women of pleasant disposition will care for him and make him happy when I am elsewhere. It is in his nature to swim with his kind.”

  “I am the one to make him happy!” Intana roared. “I am! Not these importunate females!”

  “And have you?” Vaal shouted. “What have I seen of your attempts to bring happiness? Teeth marks on his lips! An arm that breaks further rather than heals! Hurt him again and you’ll feel his pain before he does!”

  Intana didn’t answer at once, but when he did, a request to return to our company sailed up to the balcony. “Can I come back up without you sending me flying again?”

  “Can you curb your short temper, boy?”

  Boy. How long did a god need to age before he became a man, I wondered?

  “It takes practically forever,” Vaal answered.

  With a discontented grimace, He quit the balcony. To His back, Intana appeared at the stone rail and climbed over. Vaal continued onward and lay down at my side.

  I rested on a bed created of a dais built in the floor, with many cushions scattered over the wide mattress. Vaal pulled me partly out of my nest, a soft bundle of man and silk sheets.

  “It’s easier to start with something already half made,” He murmured, dipping into my neck, where He nuzzled sensitive skin.

  Half made? Too muzzy, I couldn’t fathom his meaning, and Intana distracted me before I could haul the net of my thoughts up.

  Intana slipped down onto the bed to my other side, but he stayed seated and glared resentment at me. “What are you thinking?” he said to Vaal. “To adopt this gazelle of a man! He’d never make a decent shark. Better to just eat him.”

  Eat? Adopt? And gazelle! I began to think of another task for Intana, one more difficult and annoying. He had no call to name me a gazelle. I did not shirk from the duties of a man and hunted and fished and killed as need made necessary.

  “A shark?” Vaal repeated. His lips teased the nipple His image besieged. “No. He wouldn’t make a good shark.” His head dipped further south, and my cocoon of sheets began to fall away.

  “A pilot fish, then? To pick your teeth clean?” Intana spat.

  A muffled laugh came from my navel. “He has the markings, though he seems as reluctant as you to partake of carrion.”

  Markings? Oh. The yellow strands in my hair. “I always thought my stripes were a curse.”

  “They’re beautiful. The mother of your race had them,” Vaal murmured.

  “She did? Why isn’t this in the legends?” I asked.

  “She thought they made her look old and dyed her hair black. I could never get that woman to leave her hair alone. Stubborn female.”

  I smiled. “She birthed a race of stubborn females,” I said. “Chief Grandmother still dyes her hair black, and she’s a wrinkled raisin beneath her dark crown, not to mention all her chin hairs are white.”

  Vaal laughed. Then his tongue touched the tip of my shaft, and I lost the soft feel of sleepiness and became as tense as a towline pulling a whale from the sea.

  “Do you want to fuck him, Intana?”

  “Yes,” Intana said, and the resentment still radiated from him, but lust had almost eclipsed it. He wanted to hurt me again—I knew it—but would he dare with Vaal present?

  Did it matter that, in my own disturbed way, I wanted to be hurt?

  Vaal reached across to tug Intana’s grey cloth to the side. Intana’s shaft had swollen such that the veins pulsed fiery silver beneath his skin. “Put that in him, son of Omos. He wants it as badly as you need to give it.”

  Intana looked me in the eyes for the briefest moment, and it was enough to start the fade. He loomed so much larger, so much less human, and then he put his palm over my eyes to stop my sight. A small sound erupted from my throat.

  “Creation. I love the noises he makes,” Vaal whispered. “Do you?”

  “Yes. I heard them in his dreams, and you were grinding your teeth in frustration, listening from the water. Why did you leave him for so long?”

  “To trap you,” Vaal answered.

  The palm left my eyes, and I recoiled into the mattress. They struggled overtop of me, arms locked with arms, fingers gripping flesh, until Vaal lurched up and sent Intana arcing in the air with a violent swing overhead. Intana slammed hard into the dais. Cracks in the stone formed all around his body.

  “Yes! To trap you!” Vaal repeated, crouched overtop of Intana. “Beautiful Haru! My perfect bait! A man of inordinate spiritual strength, with the depths to love and love endlessly, and yet so broken inside he is afraid to love again. You could take him, but still not win him quickly enough before I breached your father’s barriers.”

  I don’t know what I was thinking, but a pillow slammed into the side of Vaal’s head. “I have loved women for years, you great monstrosity of a god! And I would have loved Kima had you not frightened him off! Come back here and tell me I’m afraid to love!”

  Vaal released Intana and slumped back on the mattress, His chest heaving. Intana remained on his bed of shattered stone, panting as well and looking at me upside down. His shaft was still a beautiful hardness between his thighs.

  “It isn’t the same, Haru,” Vaal said, watching Intana mistrustfully. “I know you’ve loved women and loved them deeply, but it’s not the same, and it wouldn’t have been the same with Kima either. You only looked to him for friendly comfort, and you were happy enough with that, or you would have tried harder to tempt him. For you, loving a man is surrendering all that you are, and after Jumi, you could not risk scattering the remains of your soul.”

  The final statement provoked me to speak without wisdom. “If I’m an emotional cripple, then you made me one,” I said.

  Vaal’s expression hardened. He looked at me, and I barely refrained from flinching. His umbrage scraped my spirit as if He’d swum past in His shark aspect. “You’re not a cripple, Haru. You’re mine. Do you understan
d? No male touches you without my leave, and Jumi did!”

  “And, therefore, Vaal crippled you,” Intana interposed. Vaal kicked at him. Intana scrabbled aside before the foot connected.

  “Do you still want this stupid godling to fuck you?” Vaal said.

  I swallowed fear, managed to get a word out. “Yes.”

  “Then shut your eyes.”

  I shut them, and there was movement, but no words. Silk slid on flesh and more silk. Lips touched my skin, one set cold and burning, the other burning and tingling. It was, in its way, painful but good.

  I made my little noises. I couldn’t stop them. They became a deep groan in my throat when Intana raised my legs and dipped his face into the crease of my bottom. Vaal’s colder hands lifted my head and placed my face against His groin, and I groaned instead with Him deep in my throat. I opened my eyes again, to look at His hips rocking back and forth, to spy a veil of netting from the ceiling billow up in the breeze from the balcony and then settle on Vaal’s calf. To have the sight blocked by His groin, then return again, this time the veil lofting off the bed.

  Intana speared me with his tongue, sharp the sensation of angry energy. A jolt went straight up my spine. I nearly climaxed, but an icy, strong grip squeezed the base of my shaft until I settled with my seed still inside.

  The little noises again. Vaal’s ice and heat banking the passion. Intana’s tongue a rude invader that provoked it to grow. Deep. He went in unbelievably deep. Only Vaal’s grip on my shaft kept me from exploding into unconsciousness.

  “Are you going to eat him alive?” Vaal asked, His voice husky.

  Intana’s tingling warmth receded. Vaal laughed.

  “I’ve never seen a tongue so long. Can you make it thin enough to go down his shaft?”

  I jerked violently, remembering Vaal’s black nail burrowing inward. How He hadn’t sliced me wide, I had no idea. Evil how the thought of Him doing so had me ready to die the little mental death again.

  There’s a saying of my people’s: only madness lies in loving a god. And I had two in my bed with me. But I knew the madness had set in long before this. I’d only seemed a sane man, for years pretending normalcy, but always heading for this moment. For them, my all. I would surrender the entirety of my being.