‘There are women there like that, you know. I’d been told about them by the merchants as we sat drinking and talking. Sometimes a woman gets a taste for Gelewi’s service and she comes back to make the gift of the goddess again to some stranger. She can’t be stopped. It’s an act of piety. That’s what I was looking for; some woman who’d found her husband couldn’t satisfy her and was hoping for something younger to step her way. I thought I would give her some Irolian cock, see if that could fill her properly.
‘I was lucky, I thought. I stopped in front of one who was sitting a little separated from the others. I think some of the young girls were scared about being picked and clustered together, but this one wanted to be seen. She had curves like a cloud. As I stopped over her she pulled the veil a little tighter from within so that I could see how tight her waist was under the jut of her breasts. And I saw her finger crook under the cloth. She was beckoning me. I felt my cock jump at that moment.
‘I had with me the two big silver coins that are the traditional price, and I dropped those in her lap straight away. I didn’t need to look at any more women. The coins go to the temple of course. She folded them in her veil, stood up and led me across the courtyard. We went through a door into the interior of the temple and I had to stop, I couldn’t go any further. It was dark inside, and narrow; a passage full of shadows and perfume, and it had been so bright outside with the marble of the courtyard shining in the sunlight that I was blinded. She took me by the hand and drew me down the corridor. I don’t know how she found the way. By touch, I suppose.
‘She took me into a small room. It was tiny. Just space for a bed and a shelf in one corner. The room smelled of incense and sex; it was a real whore’s room. On the shelf was a little wooden statue of Gelewi the Fertile Earth, with a lamp burning in front of it. And there was a cup.
‘The woman took the cup and gave it to me. The liquid inside was sweet and sticky. I didn’t recognise it. I didn’t like it much, either, but she motioned me to drink it all and I did. I would have done just about anything by that point. She didn’t speak a word. Not ever, all the time I was there.
‘When I had drained the cup she lifted her veil and pushed it back over her shoulders, so that it still covered her face but showed her body. She was wearing a robe underneath that opened down the front, and she parted that and took the robe off. She had a wonderful body. Not a little girl’s body. Great big breasts, big as my head, brown and heavy, and the biggest nipples I have ever seen in my life. And a round, firm belly crossed with silvery stretch marks. She’d been a mother at least once. Her thatch was coarse and dark, almost black. She folded up the robe and laid it at one end of the bed as a pillow, then she climbed up and lay on her back, waiting for me.
‘It was an awesome sight to a young man. In the lamplight her brown body gleamed with oil, but there was no face to be seen, only this splash of crimson, the veil. She began to move her hips, inviting me. It was too much. I dropped those trousers on the floor and just about threw myself down between her legs. My cock was like a spear flying into a target. She wrapped her arms around me and drew her knees right up to my shoulders, so that I was thrusting into this enormous soft cushion of her arse and her gash and her thighs. She was as wet as a swamp and had a grip like a python – I didn’t think she would be tight but she was. Her heels drummed on my back. We fucked, I don’t know for how long. My head was pounding. I remember ripping off the shesh that swaddled my head because I couldn’t breathe. I could hear her singing. Under the veil, as she panted, she was moaning some wordless tune. The sweat from my forehead was dropping on the silk veil and making little dark spots. Her nails were digging into my shoulders. I just kept fucking. There was a roaring in my ears. I lost track of time, I forgot who I was, I couldn’t see or think or stop. I was just one enormous cock eternally fucking into the wet, hot darkness. I forgot to be human.
‘It might have gone on for ever, but it didn’t, because I came back to myself to find that I had spent and finished. I didn’t remember the spasm; I must have blacked out entirely. I lay on the soft cushion of her body and she wrapped her thighs around my hips until I’d stopped gasping for air. I was glad she did that, because I was scared, and I’ve never been scared after sex before. I felt as if I’d been cut adrift from my body. The room was spinning around me.
‘As my panting slowed she slipped out from under me, retrieved her robe and left the room. I lay face down on that stained sheet and felt the bed throbbing to my pulse. I remembered, then, the drink she had given me. It was the drink that was doing this. I tried to sit up but my muscles had no strength left in them and it took several goes. In the end I more or less slid off the bed onto my knees.
‘And just as the room had stopped swinging back and forth beneath me, the door flew open again and in marched the priestesses of Gelewi. I knew they were priestesses because they wore yellow robes and no veils. I wasn’t up to any further mental leaps, and I was certainly in no shape to resist them. They put a rope around my neck and dragged me forward to the feet of the eldest. She crouched down to face me, lifted my head by the hair and propped my chin up on the point of her dagger. Well, it wasn’t a dagger; it had three points and the handle wrapped around her knuckles, but I couldn’t remember the right word for it just then. I knew that one push would send that tip up through my jaw and into my skull.
‘ “I will kill you now, Irolian shit,” she snarled at me, “and no one will ever know what happened to you. You can’t be here – this is the temple of Gelewi. So where will they look for your body?”
‘I think I stammered that I hadn’t done anything wrong. She laughed and spat in my face. “Listen to him talking in Yamani!” she cried. “You speak a few words of our language and you dress up and you think this means you can come into our holy temple! You pollute this shrine, Irolian shit. You think you can come here and fuck Yamani women like it was some brothel?”
‘As that was in fact exactly what I had thought I could not answer her except to shake my head.
‘ “You think these women are whores, Irolian shit? You think they do it for gain? They’re the vessels of the great goddess; they’re givers and receivers of life. Now you are going to give your life to her, and when we feed your corpse to the pigs perhaps you’ll have made reparation for your blasphemy.”
‘She stood up and kicked me in the face. Luckily for me her feet were bare and I only lost one tooth. I put my bleeding lips down on her other foot and kissed it. I don’t know why I did that. It just happened. She froze, but she didn’t recoil from me.
‘ “Every man who comes into this temple,” she said, “no matter how base his motive, is Yamani born. He has known the goddess since his soul was hatched at the dawn of time. He has bowed his head to her lifetime after lifetime. But you’re an Irolian. You spit upon the goddess. Your soul is so unclean that you haven’t even begun the journey to the divine.”
‘I protested then that I didn’t spit upon their goddess, that I would learn. I have never been so scared in my life as I was in that room. I’ve never been so close to death. I’m not a warrior and courage is not my virtue, I don’t need to pretend that. I would’ve said anything to save my life at that moment.
‘But it was in vain. She took up the rope around my neck like it was a dog’s leash. “Bring him,” she told the others and they fastened other ropes to my wrists. The ropes were made of plaited leather. They hauled me out and down the corridor, my knees and feet scraping along the floor. I crashed to my elbows when they slowed and they yanked me upright again. I felt the darkness throbbing around me like a heart. And I saw that, despite everything, the pain and the fear and the helplessness, that I still had a hard-on. It must’ve been that drink the woman gave me.
‘They took me into a great hall. I have no idea how large it was; it was in darkness except for islands of glimmering votive lamps. The hall was full of wooden pillars painted red. I could hear the chiming of gongs.
‘They dragged me up in
front of the great idol of Gelewi and, you know, it’s strange: she was beautiful – so beautiful that she struck me with a kind of horror. She was painted green, and she was far bigger than any human, so big that I might have comfortably rested in the crook of her reused arm. In the dancing light those arms, one holding a sheaf of wheat and one with palm open in blessing, looked as if they were moving. Her face, almost in shadow at the edge of the golden haze of lamplight, was serene. She had wide eyes, and features more perfect than any human woman’s. Her breasts were as round as moons, the nipples painted scarlet, and they hovered over a waist so pliant and lithe that my arms begged to encircle it, though they would have been completely inadequate to span such a round. That divine waist flared to hips that promised richness beyond my dreams. She kneeled on her left leg, the right knee drawn up. Because she was raised upon an arched pedestal (and that itself was almost smothered in banks of marigolds), I found that I was gazing up between her parted thighs into the depths of her yoni.
‘My poor knob rose up in salutation to her awesome beauty and slapped against my belly. My head swam with delight and despair. I could anticipate no pity in such perfection. The priestesses took my hands and roped them to two pillars, then tied my straining legs to two more columns behind me. I had to clench my toes to keep a purchase on the marble floor. It was slippery under my skin. They cut the remains of my clothes off my back so that I was exposed to the smoke-laden air. I was hung spreadeagled, my weight pulling down through my bound wrists and pressing down through the balls of my feet. The priestess, my chief prosecutor and tormentor, stood in front of me and showed me two objects, though I had to strain my neck up to look at her. The first was a small copper cup, which she slipped over the swollen head of my cock. The weight wasn’t great but it felt cold on my feverish skin. It bobbed to my movements.
‘ “Let that fall, and we will beat you to death,” she murmured, displaying to me the length of split cane she held in her other hand. It was the heavy kind used for executions and I knew it would be as sharp as a knife-edge. Sweat was standing out on my shoulders already, and I could feel it starting to trickle down my spine.
‘She stepped to one side then and nodded to one of the women behind me. I heard something hiss through the air before I felt the blow, but when it landed I think I was struck momentarily deaf and blind. The pain was so intense that I did not even scream. The lash had branded itself across the top of my arse and it felt like it was burning. I was sure I could feel blood running from the wound. My whole body became a rigid board tensed for the next blow, and when that landed, a hand-span further down, that was worse. I started to scream then, yelling my lungs ragged, but as strike after strike came down on my shoulders and back and arse, and then down the back of my legs, too, I found I couldn’t both scream and breathe and I had to alternate. Gods, I have never been through anything like that before or since. There was nowhere to run from the pain, that was the worst of it. I couldn’t struggle or flee or fight or hide. Clenching made it worse. In the end I had to give way to it and let it carry me. My vision blurred with the sweat running into my eyes, but I fixed my gaze on that beautiful implacable goddess, on her face, then her breasts, and finally on her yawning cunt. That pit, filled with shadows deeper than any other in the hall, seemed to gape and pulse under my glazed stare. I felt as if the whipping was thrusting me closer and closer to its carmine lips. Maybe it was the drugs I’d taken, maybe just the pain. All I know is that for me the rest of the world vanished and I was left only with the agony and that cunt, wide enough to crawl into, insatiable as a shark’s maw, that seemed to be opening wider and wider until I could fall into it. I felt that Gelewi was the whole universe, and that I loved her with the last rag of my tattered soul.
‘Eventually I realised that the blows had ceased. I don’t know what signal was given; maybe the whip broke, maybe the priestess just got too tired to strike any more. I hung limply in my bonds. It felt like my back was on fire, except that I could see the sweat that was pouring out of every pore on my body was dripping off my balls onto the floor. But my cock was still as erect as a club, and the cup dangled lazily from the knob-end. My whole back was throbbing with pain, like another blow stinging me at every beat of my heart, and my cock was jerking with that same rhythm.
‘The priestess came in close to me, close enough to breathe in the stink of my sweat and fear. She took hold of my balls and then she rolled my stiff dick between her finger and thumb. I came at once. It was as if that was what I had been waiting for. My jism splashed into the cup and she rescued it quickly as I juddered in my traces.
‘ “Maybe even an Irolian can learn a lesson,” she sneered. She took the cup up to the altar plinth directly beneath the goddess and placed it carefully there, like an offering.
‘They kicked me out of the temple gate after nightfall, and I wasn’t so badly hurt that I couldn’t walk back to my lodgings. They were welts, not wounds. No blood. They’d switched to a lighter cane behind my back, I guess. I’ve still got some of the scars, though.’
Rumayn looked around him as his story concluded, wondering drunkenly what response the others would make. But Arioc had long since sidled out to prepare the general’s quarters, Loy sat with his chin sunk on his chest, snores rumbling softly down his nose, and Veraine was laid out flat on his back, eyes closed, his breathing as deep and regular and insensible as the sigh of the sea.
‘These are the two places where we can hold them,’ Veraine said, putting his finger onto the charcoal lines of the map. ‘The city gate and the temple gate.’
‘The temple is better in many ways, sir,’ Loy said. ‘The gate into the Citadel is bronze, not wood, and they could only come at it a few at a time up that steep path.’
They were seated by the pool in the courtyard that separated the Outer and Inner Temples, partly because it was cool and shaded from the late afternoon glare, mostly because this was as far as their walking inspection of the Citadel had taken them.
‘No. I want to use the temple gate as a fall-back position, not the first line of defence,’ said Veraine, shaking his head. ‘If we let the Horse-eaters into the lower city then they have access to food and water. We don’t give them that.’ He drummed his fingers on the map. ‘What about the city gate? What state is that in?’
‘Well, it’s not the gate itself so much, sir,’ Loy said. ‘The city was built as a fortress by the looks of things, so the gate is easily defensible. The trouble is that over the years people have got used to being secure and they’ve knocked windows in the outer walls.’
‘Then we get them walled up again, as a priority. Get the engineers on it. You’ve got as much stone as you could want; we can make mortar. Give them as many men as they need.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And we need quicker access up on to the top of the Citadel wall from this side. Stairs there and there. Mud-bricks will do. We can use Yamani labour.’
Loy scratched his stubble and made a squiggle on the wax tablet he was carrying, as he acknowledged the order.
‘How far have your teams got in locating water sources? There are wells in the lowest levels, aren’t there?’
‘Apparently, sir. I’ve got men trying to find them all. The locals aren’t co-operating fully – I gather a lot of the wells dug into the bedrock are family secrets. Water is precious here. Every drop of water that falls in the wet season is collected off the roofs – I’ve never seen gutters like they have here! The engineering beggars belief.’
‘You’re starting to sound like Rumayn,’ the General observed.
Loy recovered his poise. ‘There’s a covered cistern in the lower city here, sir,’ he pointed out, ‘that’s the main supply for the population. It’s used for drinking and washing and livestock so at the moment it’s low. It may not last until the Rains even without a siege. Up here in the Citadel is the temple tank. That’s uncovered, and the water is sacred, for what that’s worth. Pilgrims use it to wash away their sins. It’s the bigge
st remaining source of water in the city – a good job it’s up here with us. Most of the drinking water for the priests comes from catchment cisterns on the roof and in the walls, but those are very nearly empty. And then there’s the smaller pool here.’ He indicated the water they sat next to.
Veraine sucked his teeth as he studied the map. ‘We need those wells.’
‘You’ll have them, sir.’
‘What about other ways into the city?’
‘As far as we know, sir, there aren’t any. The Citadel wall goes right around the temple complex. And behind that building-’ he pointed to the Inner Temple over Veraine’s shoulder ‘-the cliff drops away sheer. It’s unscaleable. The whole place is the perfect bolt hole. The problem is that there are too many rats in this particular bolt hole. That’s our weakness, sir. Too many people.’
‘Well we certainly can’t keep them all in the Citadel, not for more than a few days. On the other hand,’ Veraine said, making a small gesture with his wrist as if flicking an insect off the back of his hand, ‘I was not sent here to protect the population; just the temple and the Malia Shai. Which is why we need that second line of defence. If it comes down to it, we make our stand with the Eighth Host behind it and every other poor bastard outside.’
Loy nodded curtly. His eyes slipped to the water beside them.
‘There’re fish in that pool, sir,’ he said. ‘I’d have them caught if I were you. Nothing taints water faster than a dead fish.’
‘Good point,’ Veraine agreed, then he saw his officer’s eyes fix on something beyond him. He twisted round in time to see the Malia Shai descend the last steps from the Inner Temple and walk towards their pool. Both men watched her without speaking or moving. Veraine had no intention of genuflecting to any Yamani.
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