by Jane Kindred
“If it isn’t that, then why?” Merit was crestfallen, his voice disbelieving.
“It’s what you said,” Ahr confessed. “I love him. I love Ra. I love her.”
“Yes?” Merit shrugged as though this were no revelation.
“I can’t resist her any longer. My veins hurt to know she lives and I’m not near her. I must follow her. Please understand.”
Merit smiled sadly. “Of course. I know. It’s why I kissed you, I think, because I knew you were not long for Rhyman. And I beg you, Ahr, forgive me. I can’t bear to have this between us and not see either of you again.”
Ahr wrapped his fingers between Merit’s and squeezed his hand. “I’ve told you before, old man, I will not forgive you for things that aren’t wrong.” He leaned in toward Merit and gave him an answering kiss, and Merit sat still, receiving it with tears trailing his cheeks. “You are not my father,” said Ahr as they parted. “Not after all. I love you, Merit.”
“Not as you love Ra.” It wasn’t an accusation, only a statement of fact.
“No,” said Ahr. “Nor do you. No other as we love Ra.” He pressed Merit’s hand between both of his. “I mean to leave tomorrow.” He looked pointedly at Merit. “But I am here tonight.”
It was Merit’s turn to register shock, and he shook his head emphatically. “I could never—I am sworn to him—you are his!”
Ahr raised an eyebrow. “I am my own. And I can think of no better way to honor his memory, Ra who died, than the sacred rite.”
Merit’s resistance was only halfhearted as they retired later to the bed that had been Ra’s. Ahr lay back against the covers as though he were the maiden, waiting, receptive. Merit hovered over him. He had never desired a man, and didn’t think he truly did now, but Ahr—Ahr was beyond such distinctions.
He’d seen her soft olive skin tenderly exposed, had smelled her perfume mixed with Ra’s, and it was difficult to separate his love of Ahr from the beauty of those moments, and from his love for Ra. Ahr unbuttoned his shirt and Merit drew it off him, astounded that though the petite cups of her breasts were gone, the body was hardly different than it had been. Though his muscles were more developed, Ahr was thin-waisted and fine-boned, and his skin appeared as smooth. Merit found himself aroused, though arousal and Ahr were once again inextricably entwined with memory.
Ahr, himself, wasn’t erect, as Merit discovered when he revealed the gently curving hips, but this didn’t seem to matter to either of them. Ahr unbuckled Merit’s belt and helped him remove his pants, bringing Merit down against his thighs: hard and warm and willing.
Merit at last experienced Ahr’s skin against his as their legs intertwined, as soft as he had always imagined it would feel. Ahr kissed him gently and removed his shirt. They were naked against the Meeric peacock silk. Ahr had been so before, but Merit, never. He trembled.
“It’s sacred,” whispered Ahr into his ear. “It’s for the love of Ra.” He’d removed the tie from his hair, and it tumbled down over his shoulders, not as long as the woman’s had been, but so like her that Merit gasped. “Enter me,” Ahr breathed against him.
Merit shook his head, clinging to Ahr without meeting his eyes. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he protested, kissing the open slope of Ahr’s throat.
“The oil.” Ahr nodded toward the shelf beside the bed.
Ra had left a small collection of belongings, perfumes and rouges she’d conjured. Among them was a bottle of sacred oil Merit had given her before they parted, the same that had been used upon MeerRa’s hair for ritual anointment. Ra had pressed it back into Merit’s hands with her palm against his cheek. “I no longer reign.” It had saddened him. It was all he had to give her. He’d placed it here among her things as though she were only away for a fortnight.
Merit swallowed. “Ai, no.”
“Anoint me with it,” said Ahr against his cheek.
“Meerrá, Ahr!”
“Or hurt me,” Ahr offered. “My virginity, taken again… It wouldn’t matter.”
“Ahr,” protested Merit, silencing him with a kiss. He grasped the bottle and Ahr took it from him, removing the stopper and pouring a golden circle into his hand.
The midnight blue eyes looked into Merit’s. “Vetma ai meneut,” Ahr murmured as he lowered his arm between them and cupped the oil over another kind of head than that to which it was customarily applied. Merit thrust into Ahr’s hand involuntarily, the strong, smooth fingers encircling him, the delicate oil slipping over his skin.
“Ai, Ahr,” he gasped, his head against Ahr’s shoulder.
“Vetma ai meneut,” Ahr said again, pronouncing the words deliberately, and moved the anointed icon beneath his thighs.
Merit pressed against him gently, afraid, but the sacred oil had served its purpose and his entry was quick. He pulled back, but Ahr grabbed him and shook his head. “That hurts more. Don’t be afraid.” He pressed up against Merit and gasped, his mouth against Merit’s cheek.
Merit groaned, unable to hold back. He was within Ahr now, and Ahr was astonishingly strong, pressed around him. Ahr cried out at Merit’s thrusts, but they were low, throaty cries, punctuated by consonant moans, and Merit recognized that Ahr didn’t mean for him to stop. Ahr’s cock rose stiff between them, and Merit grabbed his mouth and kissed him with the same force as his other penetration. He was inside the exquisite Ahr, and there was nothing to compare to it.
“Meerrá, but you’re beautiful,” he gasped.
It seemed a kind of completion, consummation of the day Merit had borne Ahr through Rhyman while his lord deflowered her. They had shared what no one ought to share after Ra’s death. If she hadn’t been a collaborator in it, they might have come together then, comforting one another with desire as they did now, so long overdue.
Merit gasped with the unexpected force of his climax, and Ahr gave an answering gasp, thrusting up against him as Merit’s heat surged into him. He cried out with his own climax as Merit’s subsided, and they were once more anointed.
“Merit,” whispered Ahr as their bodies stilled. “Servant of my love.”
Merit kissed him. “Ahr,” he returned. “My lord’s joy.”
“Do you think I am still?” Ahr’s cheek was wet against Merit’s.
“I know it,” said Merit.
Ahr left Merit before dawn. He was terrible at good-byes, and he preferred to leave Merit with the memory of their bodies entwined in sleep. He penned a parting note and left it on the ebony desk with the leather-bound treatise he’d written on Merit’s new government, taking only what he’d brought with him from Haethfalt—and two bags of gold and silver coin.
Merit woke to find the pillow beside him cool and without impression. He’d never known such loneliness. When Ra had been taken from him and Ahr had disappeared, he’d still been in his prime. He’d returned to his wife, and she was comfort to him, as he was nurse to her in her increasingly invalid state. Only that companionship had kept him from the dark hollows of despair. Nalise had understood his loss, and they’d become as close in those ten years that remained to her as they had ever been. But he was past fifty now, and not so resilient. The only comfort was that Ra lived, and Ahr had gone to him.
He didn’t intrude upon the space that still held the scent and sense of Ahr until sunset, when he felt he couldn’t bear the coming dark without some inkling of her. Of him, he amended. It was only then, as the dark room Ahr had preferred was braced with bands of mellow gold and patches of beet and orange where the falling sun was translated through the stained gemstone glass decorating the top of the arch in the window—it was only then Merit discovered Ahr’s folded note and sat down on the bed to read.
Mené ut. Never question the purity or the beauty of our mutual anointing, Ahr’s fine, thin handwriting read. I will cherish it always. If I could ignore the perfume of Ra’s blood, it would satisfy my heart to stay with you as
Second, friend…or lover, if you were desirous. But I might just as well spill out my own blood in its entirety upon the floor of Temple Ra as try to resist. Of course, you know it. I have no cause to think that Ra will have me after all I’ve done. She has found Jak, and I could never injure Jak. It may be enough for me to be near her, as it has always been for you; I cannot tell. If Ra will have none of me, I will come to you in Rhyman, and we will worship her from the solace of distance. Without Ra, there is only you.
I will send your love to Ra. Pray Ra I can send my own to her as well.
Your daughter, your lover, your friend,
Ahr Naiahn
Out of kindness, Ahr hadn’t added “without Jak” as a condition of his love, though it had been transparent in the tenderness with which Jak had first been introduced—“mene midt,” Ahr had said, but midtlif had been undeniably evident. It was enough that Merit occupied a place in Ahr’s affection that came close to these. No, it was an honor. Merit stretched against the dusk-grayed cover of Ahr’s bed and wept.
Something dark and viscous was in his blood. Pearl felt it curling through his veins. It wanted out, wanted to be drawn, and so Pearl took to making his charcoal drawings once more, as he had all his life in the glass room.
Through the glittering surfaces of the furnishings of the Meeric suite, where everything had been done in platinum to match his hair, Pearl saw into a different river of images. These were not pictures as he’d known them before, but impulses. Impulses of cruelty, paranoia, malice, spite and loathing—every dark desire seeking to manifest from the poisoned spring that fed this river. He expressed these in thick strokes of charcoal, and in its absence. His drawings were unnerving amorphous shapes that boiled and bled across the white plain of his canvas.
He sensed something coalescing from the impulses, something sharper and more angular than the thick blotches and smoky layers that lay like a haze upon the surface of the paper. He added these in graphite, and soon the spires and flourishes of a mad, foreign architecture began to rise from among his primer of impulses like stones erecting themselves out of dust.
In the past, when he’d drawn a picture, it told a story, documenting a moment in time, but this was empty of narrative. Pearl found himself glad he could hear no voices attached to these structures, for they seemed to him like reanimated corpses, dark revenants that ought not to have been raised. But someone was raising them.
Twenty: Inundation
Ume arrived in Soth Szofl thoroughly tired of being Cillian Rede. It had been the right decision, though, to travel in his guise. Ironically, there had turned out to be no other women aboard The Lady’s Bounty. The only ship that sailed to the continent this time of year, The Lady’s Bounty was a working cargo ship rather than a passenger conveyance, and Cillian had signed on as a cabin boy—a position granted only after “softening up” the captain with Ume’s unique skills.
The arrangement with the captain meant he was Cillian’s only patron, which made the trip somewhat more bearable than it might otherwise have been, but this had also resulted in daily harassment from the rest of the crew, who knew precisely what services Cillian was providing. Verbal taunting and the occasional “accidental” tripping and shoving, however, was nothing new to Cillian, and no one had dared do any actual harm to the captain’s “boy”.
The captain himself had been a bit of a guilty pleasure. Except for brief transactions of necessity—including the unpleasant interlude with Nesre—Ume hadn’t been intimate with a man since the Expurgation. Captain Paravar was an excellent specimen of his sex. And best of all, despite his commanding demeanor on deck and his taste for young men of Cillian’s type, Arvati Paravar was a bottom.
Ume had discovered the captain’s inclinations just after the conclusion of her “interview” for the cabin-boy post. Sitting back on her heels as she wiped a stray bit of the captain’s enthusiasm from beneath her cheek and onto her tongue with the back of her hand, she glanced up to see Paravar observing her with interest while he buttoned up.
“Haven’t known many boys as skilled as you.”
“I’m not exactly a boy,” said Ume without going so far as to disavow being a man.
Paravar mistook the statement for a declaration of masculine prowess, his eyes drawn to the prominence between her legs. She couldn’t deny that servicing him had piqued her own interest. “Indeed.” He raised his eyebrow with a guardedly hopeful look. “I’m not averse to a bit of turnabout.”
Ume pushed herself to her feet, setting them well apart, hands on her hips as she looked him over. “What sort of turnabout?” The captain seemed to lose his nerve under her direct gaze, and Ume decided to act on her hunch, grabbing Paravar’s hair at the nape and spinning him forcefully toward his desk so that he had to catch himself with both palms against the desktop. “Is this the turnabout you mean?” she murmured at his ear, pressing close behind him so he couldn’t fail to read her body language.
Though he made no move to extricate himself from Ume’s grasp or from the subservient position into which she’d placed him, Paravar attempted to maintain a semblance of control. “I must insist upon complete discretion.” The forceful statement lost a bit of its impact when his voice wavered on the last word at the sudden jerk of Ume’s fingers against the buttons at his fly.
“I am nothing if not discreet,” Ume assured him. “Now be quiet if you mean to give me your quid pro quo.” She kept a supply of linen sheaths in her pocket in the event she acquired a patron who might insist on penetrating her—though in general it wasn’t a service she cared to provide—but she hadn’t imagined she’d end up using one herself. In her days as a courtesan, she’d rarely been called upon to perform such an act. Just slipping the sheath on and tying the lace was inordinately thrilling.
Ume tugged Paravar’s pants down to his thighs. “I assume you keep some kind of oil handy?”
His legs were trembling as he jerked his head toward the credenza opposite the desk. “Liquor cabinet.”
Ume left him where he was and found a bottle of olive oil among the hard alcohol. Wax still sealed the stopper.
“You don’t do this often, do you?” Ume studied him as she worked out the cork. “Don’t worry, Captain, I won’t be rough.” After having kept his head low during the exchange thus far, Paravar dared a glance up at last, and his expression said he’d been hoping otherwise. “Unless you’d prefer it,” she added with a bit of her signature purr. He ducked his head again and she smiled, rubbing the oil into the sheath. “As you wish, Captain.”
Without further ado, she set the bottle aside and pushed Paravar forward onto the desk with her hand roughly gripping his hair. Clutching the dark, thick curls, she pulled back his head until he gasped, entering him at the same moment. The captain groaned, hanging on to the edge of the desk with white knuckles as she worked herself in. Though he clearly hadn’t indulged in this desire often, once she was fully inside him, it was also clear he was no novice to it.
Ume held nothing back, and Paravar shook beneath her pounding hips with obvious pleasure, though he was already spent. She’d once had a patron with a fetish for a cock emerging from a skirt, whom she’d topped in a similar manner, but she’d had to be very careful with him as he found it difficult to relax fully. There was no such inhibition with Paravar. The captain fairly melted into the desktop, moaning and grunting under her aggressive thrusts and letting her yank hard on his hair, until Ume spilled into the linen with a groan of relief.
Paravar recovered his poise swiftly when she’d pulled out and discreetly pocketed the sheath, turning around as he buttoned up once more with a gruff expression. “Very good, cabin boy. You’ll do quite well.” He placed a gold piece in Ume’s hand and dismissed her.
It hadn’t exactly been a chore to bend the hard-muscled sea captain over his desk and give him what he asked for after a long day of performing menial tasks on the ship, or to stand over him and g
rip his hair by the forelock while he took Ume deep into his throat with enthusiasm. It was only the guilt over enjoying it while Cree might be at that very moment discovering Ume’s note that took a bit of the shine off the adventure. That and knowing the end of the journey meant the possibility of finding out Pearl had come to harm.
In any event, as refreshing a change as it was, Ume was a bit bored with always being in control and missed Cree more with every encounter. And after a month of it, Ume was definitely bored of wearing shapeless pants and tunics in dull hues and rough fabric, keeping her hair stuffed under a cap, and not having access to her usual toiletries or the luxury of a bath.
The latter was the first thing she indulged in after stepping off the boat. She’d earned a generous purse from Paravar, who’d been a bit sad to see Cillian go, and she used it straightaway to buy a couple of conservative Szofelian gowns—a bit dowdier than the Deltan or northern styles, but finely made—and a soak in the public bath. Szofelian bathhouses were wonderfully steamy affairs in beautifully tiled rooms, with every luxury a man could want. That, of course, was the privilege of traveling as Cillian instead of Ume a bit longer, but she meant to take her few privileges in life where she could get them.
Clean and soft and smelling of lovely herbs and spices, with her muscles relaxed after an obligatory vigorous massage, Ume took her purchases to a modest room-for-let and put herself back together as she pleased. She’d planned to start her search for Pearl as soon as she’d dressed, but there was no longer any need for that. The talk at the bathhouse had been all about the latest marvel in Soth Szofl. Ume was relieved to know Pearl wasn’t in grave danger, but unnerved at the idea of him being on display and serving the public as Meer.
According to the talk, there were specific hours every day wherein the Meer received petitioners, and her next opportunity to be one of them would be first thing in the morning. Ume dressed in her new empire-waisted frock in a warm-gold raw silk that complemented her hair and eyes, with a contrasting headscarf in summer-sky blue. The headscarf wasn’t an essential piece of women’s wear in Szofl, but it was reminiscent of the ritual of the veil that Ume preferred.