by Mick Farren
Cordelia raised an eyebrow. “‘Bonding in the old manner’? Where did you hear that?”
“Something T’saya said to Slide. ‘The two girls bonded last night in the old, old manner. They may not have known it at first, and they may be having trouble accepting it right now, but they’re in the Place.’”
“That’s what T’saya said?”
“As best I recall it. Then she asked Slide how he could expect better than that.”
“And what did Slide say?”
“He seemed to agree.”
Glances were exchanged between all four. They had been assigned two adjoining bedrooms in the manor house, in addition to use of the kitchen, and right there and then they were in the room shared by the two girls, which had almost immediately become more homely and inviting than the boys’ room. Jesamine and Cordelia sat on their respective twin beds, and the boys sat cross-legged on the floor between them. Somewhere else in the building, amid all the rumblings of battle, someone was making a bad attempt to play the piano, murdering a song that Jesamine did not recognize. They all knew what T’saya had meant by “bonding in the old, old manner.” Indeed, they had already laughed and joked about when the orgy was going to take place, but with Albany under full attack, it was no longer any laughing matter. “We have to face the blunt fact that the bonding required for us to make full use of our power may well be based in the four of us having some kind of sex together.”
There, she had said it. It was out in the open. The matter could no longer be avoided. Argo shrugged. “Would that be so terrible?”
Raphael looked uncomfortable. “It does seem rather like sex as a means to an end. I mean, as people, we hardly know each other.”
Cordelia smiled at him. “That’s a quaintly old-fashioned attitude for a soldier. It’s been my observation that sex is almost always a means to one end or another. Of course, it did help that Jesamine and I were extremely drunk when we bonded in the old, old way.”
Jesamine smiled, part coy, part cunning, as she warmed to the idea. “T’saya has already covered that, after a fashion.”
Cordelia looked surprised. “She left booze for us?”
Jesamine nodded. “In a manner of speaking.” She stood up and opened a drawer in her and Cordelia’s communal dressing table. She took out a bottle and a jar. “Herbs marinated in alcohol, and a kind of cream.”
Cordelia blinked. “Damn.”
Jesamine then moved around the room lighting candles with a box of lucifers. It was now twilight outside, although the guns still thundered, and the room was filled with a shadowy, dusty golden light. Argo had a little trouble finding his voice. “So what do we do?”
Jesamine sat down on the bed, smiling but with a set to her jaw. “We make a move, don’t we? Isn’t that how the game is played?”
With the decisive swiftness of enough is enough, Cordelia stood up and slipped out of her RWA tunic. After only a slight pause, she pulled her light cotton undershirt over her head, so she was naked to the waist. ““I’ve done a lot of things for a lot of reasons, and I guess king and country’s maybe a better excuse than most.”
Argo half smiled. “Do we need an excuse?”
“No, but I need a drink. I’m not a total slut.” Cordelia held out a hand, and Jesamine uncorked the bottle of green-brown liquid and passed it to her. Cordelia took a drink and grimaced, but quickly recovered and gave the bottle back to Jesamine. “Whew.”
“You feel more of a slut now, my dear?”
Cordelia let out a slow sigh, let her head fall back, and her eyes lost their focus. “Wow.” Deliberately and very carefully, she touched her own breasts. “Oh, wow.” Then she grinned at the others. “I would suggest you see for yourself. In fact”—she sighed again—“you should all take a drink of that stuff before you start passing judgment.”
Jesamine drank, and the brew was about as foul as Cordelia had indicated. She then handed the bottle to the boys, and Cordelia nodded. “Take a good swig each, my dears, and then get out of those damned uniforms.”
Raphael was uncertain. “Isn’t this all going a little fast?”
“Take a drink and find out.”
Jesamine watched as the boys drank. Argo seemed to know what to expect, but Raphael was still hesitant. Right then, he seemed to be the weakest link in the forming conspiracy to orgy, and she wondered how much a Mosul boot camp might have messed up his head. Argo stood up, dropped his tunic, and then, with a considerable lack of shame, dropped his pants. Cordelia nodded. “Very good, Argo Weaver. Now come over here and take these britches off me.”
Argo moved towards Cordelia. He still had the bottle in his hand, and he tried to kiss her, but she shook her head. “First you give the bottle back to Jesamine.” Argo did as he was told. “Now you finish undressing me.” He reached for the buckle on her belt, but again she shook her head. “No, no, no. Do it on your knees. Then, when you’re finished, you can rub that cream all over my thighs.”
Argo started to kneel, but Jesamine held up a hand. “Wait a moment.”
“What?”
“Are we dividing ourselves according to skin tone here?”
Both Argo and Cordelia looked at Jesamine as though the idea had never occurred to them. Now Jesamine had become the instructress, and she gestured to Raphael. “Go to Cordelia.”
Raphael’s head dropped, and he looked at the floor. Then he reached for the bottle and took a long and somewhat desperate drink. The boy was all too obviously gripped by a sudden and inexplicable panic. Jesamine was instantly aware that some fairly profound problem had surfaced. How messed up was this young and plainly gorgeous Hispanian? Had the Mosul done things to him that he could not admit even to himself? Jesamine silently motioned for Argo to move away from Cordelia and come to her, and the Virginia farm boy was sharp enough to sense what was happening and comply without any fuss or comment. He left Cordelia and came and sat on Jesamine’s bed, and Cordelia turned and looked at Raphael. Her voice changed from cocky and commanding to a tone of genuine concern. “What is it, Raphael? Is something wrong?”
“I…”
“Yes?”
Raphael avoided looking at three sets of eyes. “I’ve … never been with a woman. The Provincial Levies took me for a conscript before I ever…”
Cordelia almost ran to him and knelt down beside him. “Oh, baby, there’s nothing to be afraid of. Your virginity is so easily remedied.”
“I could make a complete fool of myself.”
“We all make fools of ourselves. Some of us make fools of ourselves most of the time.”
“It’s not like this was just my first time. I mean, the Four … They brought us here because we were important, and I could so easily screw it all up.”
Cordelia lowered her eyelids. “You leave the screwing to me, boy. I’ll see you don’t go wrong.”
“I…”
“Stop agonizing and start both trusting and kissing me.”
Right then, Jesamine grasped Argo by the hair. “Kiss me, too, Argo. Let’s give them a little privacy by becoming totally involved in each other.”
RAPHAEL
Raphael could not believe that the red-haired woman of his dreams was really naked in his arms and doing what she was doing. He had pretended and imagined for so long that the reality of passion was hard to accept now that it was upon him. His life had been so twisted out of shape by the Mosul and their rules of ugliness, he still saw beauty as an apparition from another world. As his earlier panic had mounted, he had started to believe that his callow ignorance would be the downfall of the Four. The fear had come at him as hard as any fear he had ever experienced, even perhaps the terror he had felt when he had walked into the Bunker with hardly a clue as to how he might free Jesamine and Cordelia. The options of failure—too fast, too soon, not at all—had danced all over whatever ragged self-respect and self-esteem had been left to him after the ministrations of Gunnery Instructor Y’assir, Underofficer Beg, not to mention all the spies and agents
of the always-watching Zhaithan. The seeds they had planted had suddenly flourished to conspire against him, and his mind had been overtaken and choked by an all-too-vivid delineation of the other three standing over him and laughing at his inability, and then of Slide and T’saya and all those Albany officers staring with contempt at his failure. The anxiety had almost been self-fulfilling, but then the Lady Cordelia had taken him in her hands and led him gently and easily into her personal garden of delight, and now that she was making soft kitten sounds in his ear, he knew that he was neither unable nor a failure.
“Oh, Goddess, yes, fuck, Raph-ael, you are really sooo … oooh. I was trying … oh, yes, dooo that, and harder. Oh … I was trying to make you … make you feel good about … yourself. Yeees. Oh, please. But … now … yes, now … Now! Now! I don’t have to, because you are soo good. Come … into … my … mind, and feel … what … I’m feeling.”
Cordelia had made him lie face down. Her instructions had been strict. He was to do nothing while she straddled him and kneaded the cream that T’saya had given them into his back and buttocks and down the insides of his thighs. The hallucinations and physical sensations had started almost immediately, and when she had rolled him over onto his back, she had suddenly grinned at him. “You really had nothing to worry about, now, did you?”
He had been so pleased both with her and himself that he had wanted to take her right then and there, but she had held him back. “My turn now. My turn.”
He had taken the psychedelic cream from her, and with her flesh making rainbow undulations under his hands, he had massaged it into the muscles of her shoulders, the softness of her breasts, across the slight curve of her stomach and then down onto the smoothness of her thighs.
“What is this stuff? It is so…” Cordelia searched for the word. “Extreme.”
And as the active ingredients took hold, it became impossible to tell which words were spoken and which were the gasping thoughts of their rapidly melding minds as they overlaid the cries, whispers, and whimpers of their first coupling. A brief return to reality had occurred when Jesamine had come to take the cream for herself and Argo. “Our turn now. Our turn.”
They had clearly been overheard, but a minute or so later, all became equal as, on the other side of the room, Raphael and Cordelia heard Argo groan and Jesamine make a musical keening from deep in her throat. At the sound, Cordelia had giggled and pulled Raphael close to her and wrapped her legs tightly around him. “Fuck me, my darling. Fuck me very slowly, very surely, and then very hard, because you have nothing to worry about anymore.”
Outside, the barrage still thundered, and the flashes of guns lit up the night.
They were linked pairs on a single axis, separate but joined, ecstatically revolving on the helix of infinity through a universe of vibrant color and sensation that came close at times to being unbearable. Hands, mouths, lips, eyes, spread legs, enfolding arms, flowing hair, cocks and cunts, all ceased to have logical form and were blending in the same spinning continuum of warmth and light, and fervor was transformed into a mutual circuit of golden electricity in sky blue space arcing through a shared nervous system. Two and two, and four and three, and all soon to be one, their wildly rising spirits were transported by rolling waves of pleasure. The ringed moons and double and triple stars that Cordelia and Jesamine had seen before again left trails of light in their wake, and the same conical towers, the spheres and the cylinders, rose from the undergrowth of up-pointing crystal fingers. The complexity of time distortion had also returned, and they were both a fraction of a second ahead, and an equal fraction behind, the world as they knew it, and insubstantial impressions of what might be the future or the present were being superimposed on afterimages and echoes of the past. The primary difference from the time when Cordelia and Jesamine had bonded was that no third parties intruded on their joy and searing elation. This time no blue-black clouds roiled and reared, and no hunchbacked djinn-figures rode them down on vortices of dust. With nothing to threaten them, the supreme temptation was to want to remain forever, to never stop, never stop, but even in total exultation, entropy had ultimately to ground them.
“Oh, my lady!” Raphael pushed his hair out of his eyes and lay gasping for breath.
Cordelia hugged him tightly to her. “Oh, my Raphael.”
“I did it, didn’t I?”
“Indeed you did. We both did it. Simultaneously and together. Do you see what a fool you were to be afraid?”
Raphael sighed and nodded. “I was a fool.”
“We are all fools sometimes, one way or another.”
For a long time they lay in silence, listening to each other inhale and exhale, until they noticed that Jesamine and Argo were also silent. Thoughts of the other two came to Raphael as a complete intrusion. Beyond all doubt he was still recovering from the most profound experience of his life, and he did not want to share it with anyone but Cordelia. He wanted to hug the warm embers of the excitement just past and warm away a lifetime of cold. He wanted to laugh with her and cry with her and pretend that he was in love with her. Argo and Jesamine only served to remind Raphael that he was not in this room, or even this country, to be in love. He was here to fight a war, to cement the bonds that would make the Four into what everyone who knew hoped they would be: a formidable weapon on the side of Albany. He was more comfortable in Albany than among the Mosul, but the compulsion to relinquish his free will to what was perceived as the greater good still troubled him. Less than an hour ago, he was a virgin, and now he was about to swap partners like some degenerate libertine, and all in the name of the war effort and defeating Hassan IX and Quadaron-Ahrach.
Raphael let Cordelia slip from his arms, reached for the bottle, and look a long and grimly resigned drink. Jesamine was already disengaging and disentangling herself from Argo. He could not deny that she was beautiful and that, under more reasonable circumstances, he would have actively desired her, but it was too soon. It was all coming at him too fast. His only refuge was in the alcohol and the herbs that floated in and turned the liquor green. Already the hallucinations were starting to flicker in the periphery of his vision. Ideas of love and comfort were moved to one side, and a perverse, almost cruel desire for Jesamine replaced them. Cordelia must have sensed what was happening, because she rolled away from him and also sat up. “Give me the bottle and then go to her.”
Her thoughts, previously open, were suddenly masked as he moved to leave her.
CORDELIA
“Just call me the whore of destiny.”
Argo blinked. “Call you what?”
Cordelia petulantly rolled over. “A small and depressingly normal part of me refuses to believe any of this.”
Argo put a hand on her arm. “It’s a little strange for all of us.”
Cordelia ignored his attempt to be comforting. “The small and depressingly normal part of me doesn’t what to contemplate the fact that I have just fucked two men in quick succession, fast as any Grafton Street dollymop, and the bed on which I find myself is sticky.”
The piano had started up again in another part of the manor house, or maybe it had been going all the time and they had not noticed. Cordelia snarled. “Why does that inept and tone-deaf moron insist on murdering Peter Townshend’s best songs? How hard can it be to play ‘The Good Has Gone’?”
She looked round at the others, but their blank faces showed that these refugees from the Mosul knew nothing of Albany popular songs.
The truth was that the experience had been intense, and all four of them were, each in his or her own way, still seeking a way to deal with the intensity. Cordelia reached for the bottle. She wanted a drink. In fact, she would have been more than happy to be mindlessly drunk, but she did not think she could handle any more hallucinations. “I wish we had some normal booze.”
Argo was practical. “We could probably get some.”
“Are you volunteering? You’re ready for just about anything, aren’t you?”
She knew
it was wrong to be angry with Argo, but Cordelia was sick of doing what was right. She had felt a spark of jealous resentment when Raphael had gone from her to Jesamine. With Raphael there had been a sad tenderness, but circumstances had dictated that tenderness had no place in the ritual. As she had taken Argo in her arms and inside her, aware that he was still hot and damp from Jesamine’s embrace, she had sought to lose herself in a cultivated deliciousness, a sense of wanton and lascivious wickedness, and not ask herself how could it be so wicked if it was what everyone wanted and it served the just cause. And in this she had been very successful. The drugged and hallucinatory sex with Argo had been spectacular, more spectacular even than with poor and strangely innocent Raphael, but perhaps it had been too spectacular. Although it had achieved the arcing and dizzy altitude of fireworks bursting in the dark of night, it had also seemed ritualist and transactional, a means to an end with a seething edge of violence and anger, a sense of sacrifice and jagged, breathless competition, that left her feeling soiled and used.
They had risen to the place of strangeness again, the power had come upon them, but somehow it had not been right. Instead of being passively carried by the vision, Cordelia had attempted to pilot and consciously manage their collective actions. It had seemed to be the most logical thing that she could do. According to everything that first Jesamine and then Yancey Slide and T’saya had told her, the Four were supposed to battle the paranormal forces of Quadaron-Ahrach and his velvet-gloved sister. The weird Other Place, where time seemed bent out of shape, and the stars warped in their courses, was not supposed to be some hallucinatory fairground ride over which they drifted as acquiescent spectators. The intention was surely that they should be able to navigate their way through the glowing, energy-generated landscape of cones and spheres, crystalline contortions, purple seas, and rolling, djinn-ridden dust clouds and ultimately engage their enemies in mortal combat. Instead of being able to steer a course, however, her efforts had sent her spinning out of all control, forced by what she could only describe as a blood red, flashing and all-consuming vortex, back to where Argo’s bright energy thrust into hers.