by R. Lee Smith
But his own breaths were coarsening now, his thoughts becoming more difficult to grasp even as they slipped through his mind. He was aware, vaguely, of that curious blankness stealing in while he pondered Shuiv and whatever fate awaited him, replacing words he knew with timeless stretches of empty heat. He stood against it for as long as he could, because the struggle was as glorious as the burning, but his world became a blackness.
He burned.
Fire. He felt it every time, but this time, disturbingly, he saw it. It spilled upwards from the heart of the black, filling his vision and searing at his soul’s flesh, brighter than it had been that night on the rooftop of Xheoth. Not beckoning. Demanding. And in that endless moment between Meoraq the man and Meoraq the Sword, there was only stillness and his heart beating and that tower of fire burning his eyes, and he said or heard or perhaps only imagined the word, “sukaga.”
It caught in him like a fishing hook, almost familiar…
And then the blackness slipped away again. Weight and substance fell back onto his bones; he staggered, catching blindly at a man’s shoulder to steady him until he could see Shuiv’s face through the flames that still coursed through him. He looked down, confused, and saw the black blade of one sabk deep in the younger man’s chest. He had no idea where the other one was.
The high judge’s hammer struck twice, invisible. Meoraq leapt back with a mindless hiss, slashing at the empty air before he could master himself. The fire rose again, but this time, he closed his eyes and made himself breathe until it cooled. Shuiv was dead and Sheul’s judgment, known to all. He was Uyane Meoraq once again; the Sword of Sheul was sheathed.
He closed his eyes, counting his breaths the way every boy born to his caste was taught, with the primary verse for the Six. A slow count, they called that. Slow and calm and even. A Sheulek must be the master of his clay and so, ‘One for the Prophet, the wide open eye…Two for his brunt and the sign of the fist…’
He couldn’t believe he was standing here. His palms ached, but apart from that slight pain, he didn’t think he’d even been scratched, although he felt worn enough that surely the battle had been a long one. Shuiv had started to burn so quickly…but not for the honest man, it seemed. And now House Arug had his widow to care for, at least until her infant had opened and Meoraq could judge it for a son or daughter and see it placed accordingly.
‘Three for Uyane, the unclad sword…Four for Mykrm, the hammer of his law…Five for Oyan of the ash-stained leaf…’
Ashes…Fire…Like the tower he had seen from Xheoth and followed to Tothax. Like the tower he had seen in the blackness of his burning, where he had never seen anything before. And the word, sukaga…a name, perhaps, but not one he immediately knew. Why was it now so maddeningly familiar?
‘Six for Thaliszar and the healing hand…’
It went on from there, but Meoraq started over at one (they only named the low castes to fill out the numbers from seven to ten; the Six were the only verses that mattered) and let his mind wander. By his third slow-count through, he was completely cool and lucid enough to really wonder what he’d done with his other sabk. He cast about for it on the floor while the high judge finished the trial’s closing prayers, then went to see if he’d left it buried in the body anywhere odd. He was careful with his brother’s body as he turned it. Shuiv’s blood was slow, his life gone, but he would not truly be dead until his funeral pyre had been consumed. While he could still feel, he deserved no less than the highest respect.
“Honored one.”
Meoraq looked up to see that the bailiff had lowered the stair and now stood before him, offering his sabk. Bloodied.
Meoraq took it and pinched the blade to clean it. “Where was this?” he asked curiously.
The bailiff bowed. “By Sheul’s judgment, through the throat of Mihuun.”
Meoraq looked up, startled, and saw that the screen wall above him had indeed been battered open. A great deal of blood stained what he could see of the narrow chamber beyond. He looked at his hand, turned it upwards, slowly flexed his fingers. Splinters.
“Having seen that, I think…Ezethu?…will not be quick to bring future disputes to his lord’s attention,” he remarked, sheathing his sabk to pick them out.
The bailiff bowed again. “Ezethu was first to fall beneath Sheul’s judgment, honored one.” He paused, clearly wondering if his next words were in bad taste, then lowered his voice and said, “But I think we have finally seen the last of Lord Arug.”
Pity it took a man’s life to stop a greedy lord from abusing the law, but he was so seldom called to court for good reasons.
Meoraq glanced back, then went and knelt by Shuiv again. He pressed his palm against the still chest and bent his neck in a warrior’s bow. “I will envy you, my brother, when you behold our Father’s face tonight,” he said, and looked up through the high, colored window to the heavens. “Take him, O my Father, and receive him well. He is a good man.”
The bailiff grunted approvingly. Not every victor of the arena gave respect to a fallen Sword, but Meoraq did not do it just because it was the custom. Not this time, anyway. He often felt strange in his own skin after a judgment, but this was different. The vision of the burning tower; the word, sukaga; and Shuiv, falling into God’s fires right in front of him—everything seemed braided, bound to him, impossibly heavy.
He felt a sudden restlessness, an urge to call for his pack and just leave. Never mind the exarch and never mind whoever it was that had been summoning him half the year. He knew what awaited him in the next room and there was a time when he would have been eager to go to it, but not tonight. Sheul was calling him. Meoraq wanted nothing in this world more than to answer.
But he could not answer from the arena and men were surely waiting to bear Shuiv away for his final rites, so Meoraq finished his respects. He found Shuiv’s shining sabks and broke the blades, placing the hilted halves carefully at his feet. He said the Prayer For the Fallen and the first three verses from the Book of the Sword. Then he let the bailiff lead him back into the arena hold.
3
They had cleaned away the bath and his pack, but the room was far from empty. The high judge was there, of course, with another bailiff, the court scribe, and two lesser mediators. At their center stood Lord Arug in his grossly inappropriate finery and baubles, along with the servant he had sent running from the court at the trial’s beginning. And behind them all, bowing, motionless, scarcely visible in the shadows, was a woman.
‘A girl,’ Meoraq thought, trying to be severe, to be scornful even. Not a woman at all, but hardly more than a child, to judge by the narrowness of her build and the grey tint to her immature scales. One of the many curses laid upon House Arug. Nothing but that. Nothing worth noticing at all.
And as restless as he was to be gone, he could not stop staring at her.
“My daughter, honored one,” said Arug, bowing almost as low as the girl. “Tem.”
Meoraq flared his mouth in annoyance, but could not quite pull his gaze from the curve of her bent back. His heart, raised in combat, did not slow. A second pulse began in his belly, building to urgent harmony where his cock was contained. She wasn’t pretty, wasn’t the sort who would ever catch his eye if it were his own will, but there must be something in her that appealed to Sheul, because the fires burned in Meoraq and the urge to take her became as violent and undeniable as the urge to burn in the arena.
“Leave us,” he said, drawing a sabk.
Lord Arug and the mediators made their salutes and withdrew. Tem, well-coached, did not.
She bent lower, her hands trembling on the tiles, as Meoraq came toward her and did not move until he stood over her with blade in hand. “This is the blade of conquest.”
“I am a virgin of my father’s House,” she replied.
He stared at her, frowning.
In a moment, she’d realized her mistake. Her eyes flashed wide and she fumbled at her wrist, stammering out breathy apologies. Soon,
she had her wristlet off—a shiny thing of woven metal wires, perhaps purchased earlier this day for just this moment—and held it out to him in a shaking hand.
He took it, feeling his spines flex and flatten outside of his control. ‘Breathe,’ he told himself, stabbing his sabk through the delicate band at the nearest exposed wooden beam in the wall. ‘She’s young. She’s nervous. She’s probably fragile. Just breathe.’
He turned around, already reaching to unhook the fastens of his loin-plate. “I am Uyane Meoraq,” he said as he swept his belt away and his cock came thrusting furiously past his armor. “House Arug stands in the shadow of my blade. I am a Sword of Sheul and I demand the right of conquest.”
Tem started to bow again, of all things, only to straighten up fast with both hands raised in frantic supplication. “No, I—Wait! I was meant to run!”
Meoraq managed not to hiss at her, but it was a near thing. Yes, she was nervous, but he was Sheulek and the fires were upon him. He had little patience for these female rituals under the best of circumstances and now that patience was all but gone.
“Run, then,” he said tersely. His toes flexed, ready for the chase, and he had to remind himself that she was no true opponent, only a girl, and easily hurt. He must be the master of his flesh even now, with his cock aching in the open air and every thought his mind could make coated in Sheul’s flame, and he must not harm her.
She rose, sending anxious glances in all directions, as if the empty arena hold were a thicket filled with obstacles that needed navigation. Her roving eye came to him, touching his cock with the weight of a living hand, and she seemed to shrink within herself. She did not run. She did not even appear to be breathing.
So be it. Meoraq strode forward and caught her by the girdle.
She screamed in his face, then clapped both hands over her snout and looked properly appalled with herself. “F-Forgive!”
He was beyond forgiving, beyond offense, beyond caring. Meoraq swung her around and put her firmly against the wall beside the beam where his sabk impaled her wristlet.
“I am a virgin of my father’s House!” she babbled, clutching at the bricks.
“You are permitted to fight me,” he told her, raising her skirt in a fist-hold and pinning it at her back.
She didn’t, either because she feared another insult to the ritual or because she didn’t know how. It made no difference in the end. Conquest, such as it was, was over.
Meoraq wedged her legs apart and fit himself to her opening. She was sealed fear-tight, but arousal made him slick and he pierced her as easily as his sabk had pierced Shuiv.
She screamed again, this time with pain. She did not struggle, but her body, his enemy, tightened at once, working to push him out. He knew by many conquests that speed was the key now, or this muscular sleeve would clench too tightly to penetrate at all without tearing her. Meoraq put a steadying hand on her belly, rocked onto the balls of his feet, and thrust hard.
The girl’s cry swept up into a shriek and then broke into sobbing, incoherent pleas that were only partly directed at him. The rest, as so often was the case, were hysterical cries for her mother. But he was in, his oiled shaft fighting past the constriction of her sleeve until he pushed free into her soft well. There, the grip of her body became a seal at his narrowed base, holding him in even tighter with every futile effort to expel him.
Now that the initial difficulty of sex had been overcome, Meoraq made some deference to the girl, slowing to give the hurts of this first invasion time to ease. She was struggling now, but she was trapped and as he continued to move inside her, the ferocious grip of her body was made to relax by the slow knead of his. Her tears became sniffles and then soft panting. Soon she bent her neck to press her sloping brow to the bricks, arching her back in such innocently lascivious pleasure that he almost forgot himself, that just for a moment, it was almost fun.
Meoraq savored it as long as he dared, then reluctantly brought his mind to focus and began his prayers: “Sheul, O great Father, make this woman worthy.”
The girl interrupted with a moan, her hips bucking back in unskilled, spastic motions. He was briefly overcome by his clay’s carnality, and lost several minutes to mindless, fiery fucking before he regained a hold on his conscious thoughts. Somewhat dazed, he forced himself to a stop, which was not easy to do with the girl thrashing back at him. She was fully open now, and each movement of her hips made the sleeve of her female sex slide along his full length as she rocked back and forth—still a squeeze, but certainly not an unpleasant one—begging him in a largely incoherent way for more. Her hand reached back to catch at his hip; his first instinctive response to this fetching gesture was a fighting hiss, but he shook out of it almost at once. He knew where he was now, and he began again with strong, purposeful thrusts.
“Let her soul be pierced and made open. Let her womb be warmed to receive my spirit and Yours.” His head swam. He closed his eyes to concentrate. Through the fires of Sheul, each word seemed alive with significance and nuance, like the girl herself. He could feel her hands pulling at him, lost in her own fires, and his heart swelled with sudden affection for her. “If it be Your will, raise her up with Your blessing and give her the gift of new life,” said Meoraq, and found that he meant it, which he very rarely did these days, a subject of much meditation when he was at his prayers.
Sheul heard, and perhaps His mortal son’s sincerity pleased him, for He blessed her. She flung her head back in a silent, eerily graceful arc, the top of her head slapping home against his chest and pressing hard, outwardly motionless in the grip of Sheul’s blessing while her small body bloomed with exquisite heat. Meoraq cupped her jaw and breathed into her gasping mouth just as his own fires overwhelmed him. He came, offering his seed and spirit for Sheul to do as He willed.
The moment could not last, and when it ended, Meoraq nuzzled her head aside and made his mark upon her. She flinched, which made the bite quite a bit deeper than he otherwise would have wanted, but the marks of his teeth were distinct and that was what mattered.
“Now you are mine,” said Meoraq formally and licked the wound to stop its bleeding.
Her answer was a wordless mewl—the sort of soft, feminine sound that girls are coached early to make when their man requires no special reply, and which Meoraq had always found personally to be repulsive, a cringing animal sound that did not belong in any person’s mouth, much less the mouth of a person he had just been joined to sexually.
Meoraq resheathed himself and stepped back, holding her arm until she steadied and seeing to it that her skirts fell properly. He’d had more than one conquest wander out into the hall with her skirts tucked into her girdle and her freshly-opened slit exposed and glistening for all the world and her own father to see.
“Thank you, honored one,” said the girl, bowing. “May the House of Arug be strengthened by the blood of conquest.”
‘That is a flat head,’ thought Meoraq, studying it with a weary eye as he dressed. A churlish thought, unworthy of a Sheulek. Oh, she was polite and earnest—not that earnestness was a particularly desirable trait in a woman—and pretty enough from the brows down. If she struck him as a bit vapid, that could be just her youth and the sheltered life of any high-born girl (and if not, well, most men found a streak of stupidity a charming quality in a woman. Many women actually feigned it whenever circumstance forced them into a man’s company, often to such a degree that Meoraq couldn’t stand to be around them at all).
They were waiting in the hall and all made the appropriate sounds of subdued respect to see the mark upon the girl’s shoulder. Her father took her back with pride and perhaps even a gleam of avarice, and why not? If she did nothing else in her life, still she had received Sheul’s fires and her womb would be strengthened immeasurably. In fact, it was not impossible that she might conceive of Meoraq, even from just this one encounter. And if the child opened up male and Meoraq had no wife, Arug had every reason to expect his daughter to be taken in,
flat head and all, and installed in House Uyane where she would give glorious birth to the sons of one who would be that bloodline’s steward in his own time. If the father of such a woman were the doting sort, he certainly had the right to visit her in her husband’s House…where he could expect rooms and servants and other such amenities…for however long he chose to stay…for years, if the lord of the House were not so vulgar as to throw him out.
Meoraq was not a vulgar man, but he did have every intention of dying long before he was made to assume his father’s place. Ha. Let Arug call on his House all he pleased. Rasozul would throw him out on his snout without a moment’s regret.
“House Arug thanks you for your service, honored one. Let me extend the humblest and most sincere invitation of hospitality. Please, come to my House tonight,” said the steward, actually patting at his daughter’s bent back as he made the offer. Meoraq thought it very likely that if he accepted, he would find Tem tucked away in his cupboard like a spare cushion. Perhaps she had been a virgin—maidenly panic could be contrived and he was experienced enough in the ways of women to know that he had surely been deceived before—but her virginity had served its purpose and now it seemed Lord Arug was eager to see it well and truly rubbed away.
“I understand Ni’ichok Shuiv leaves his woman and a child to your House,” Meoraq said bluntly. “You will keep them.”