I was in Haru’s bottom bunk, with his smell all around me, but when I grabbed the frame of the upper one and lifted up to look high, he wasn’t above me. I at once slipped from the blankets, snatched new clothes from my satchel, dressed, and shot up the stairs to find him.
He wasn’t at the wheel when I looked, nor was he in the galley. And he wasn’t on deck. Stepping back to see the rigging better, I discovered him seated upon a yard high on the foremast. I climbed up to meet him.
He was only in trousers and sandals this day, seeming oblivious to the chill coming from the ocean. But he was Vaal’s paramour and must be immune to chills worse than the ocean breeze.
“Morning!” he called down when he caught sight of me.
“Morning,” I answered.
“Did you eat yet?”
“No.”
“Damn it, dragon! Can’t you hear your stomach growling?”
It was true, my stomach was growling, my dragon stomach, but I didn’t care about it just then. I think he knew, for he grinned at me, a bright moment of devilment that surprised me; then he raised the spyglass he’d been using and looked landward again.
“We’ve found an island that survived your disaster. Can you believe it?”
“Oh, good.” I clung to the mast next to his yard. He perched there with only one arm hooked about the mast to keep him steady. My chest pressed against his forearm, and the warmth of him went right through me, just as it had yesterday. “Why are you up here?” I asked.
“To see over the cliffs,” he answered.
“I thought you said this island wasn’t part of my disaster.”
“These are old cliffs, and that’s a big island, but I doubt anyone will stay there for long, not with the fishing banks gone.” He handed me the spyglass and pointed with his free arm the moment I had taken the instrument. “There. A village. If I’m not mistaken, there’ll be a beach somewhere about, with boats and a dock, if they weren’t destroyed by that wave. This is the mainland side, so perhaps a beach survived.”
“And what use is that? A beach, boats, a dock?” I didn’t bother looking at the village or the cliffs. I didn’t care. I just wanted to look at him, only at him, at the series of raised, diagonal scars that made Vaal’s mark, and the silver noose that was my son’s promise of eternal obligation.
“Potable water,” Haru said in answer to my question.
“Oh.” I realized only then that many of the red sails were furled. The ship was making a lazy course along the island coast. “Haru?”
“Hmm?”
“Why must you look for Intana? It is obvious to me that he spurned you. Why bother?”
He said nothing for a moment, just continued to look landward while I waited with a feeling that my heart would turn to stone if he did not answer soon, but at last he gave me a reason. I didn’t like it.
“He may not offer me love, as you came up to offer it now, but I will help him,” he said.
I didn’t deny the truth of his statement, but I protested his earnestness. “He doesn’t deserve you. I don’t know how you got his mark, but he doesn’t deserve you.”
“Omos, don’t you love him at all?” he asked and still he would not look at me. The devil’s mirth had vanished. His beautiful face was set, distant, unreadable. I wanted so much to see the softness of last night when he’d mastered me with gentleness and few words. But I knew I wouldn’t have it. A question had been asked, and he expected an answer.
Did I love my son? The truth? I didn’t. I hated my son. He’d done his worst to me a millennium ago, and I’d done my worst to see he’d never forget his error in judgement.
“No,” I said. “I don’t love him.”
“You were never a child,” Haru murmured. “How can I expect you to understand him.”
“What is there to understand? He’s a worthless offspring I should never have permitted to exist.”
“How harsh you are. Are you happy I’m not the same?”
I stared in incomprehension for a second. Meaning splashed over me like a deluge of glacial water. If he had been at all like me last night, I’d be in Vaal’s belly right now.
“Haru—”
“I am under no illusion that Intana holds me in high esteem,” he interrupted, “but I will look out for him, and let him become, as he should be allowed to become. As you should permit him to become. I am a father many times over, Omos of the Ether. In this, I surpass you. Now go down to the deck and let your dragon self feed.”
“Haru—”
“Go!”
I went. I was under no obligation to obey him in this instance, but I went all the same. He had given me more to think about, ripped more veils from my eyes, veils of which I had been ignorant.
Become. My son. He was to become. But what? Of a certainty, I didn’t want him to be Haru’s lover again, but that mark on Haru’s chest predicted otherwise.
On the deck again, I passed to a sailor the spyglass I’d inadvertently kept, and walked to the rail to look down at the water. Breakfast waited for me. A massive whale shark coasted along only cubits away. Delicious.
Odd, but I didn’t feel all that hungry this morning, though I should have. I decided to eat the shark in any case. Better to do so. I didn’t want to be famished later.
I sat with my human legs dangling out from the deck and watched from two sets of eyes as I ate shark. My dragon self swam in the water, making the waves go choppy and weird to the sight of the sailors looking on, but I saw my greater self clearly, and my greater self saw me and the ship. I found the expressions of the Brellin men to my rear amusing. They were amazed over the bits of shark disappearing from the main body, piece by piece, until nothing seemed left in the water but blood and a few stray bits that pilot fish darted in to eat.
Funny how the men could not perceive my dragon form, but the pilot fish had no trouble whatsoever.
Haru came up to my side. I looked up and saw him smiling again. He had a beautiful smile, with lips created to do it. Shapely, lush, kissable.
“Ah! My little cousins!” he said. He chucked me on the shoulder, and still smiling, undid his trousers to piss in the ocean. Downwind.
“What do you mean ‘little cousins’?” I asked, looking at his spray and his shaft. This was the first I had seen his meat, but it wasn’t a proud thing at the moment. Just a typical leaker that made no boast of anything. I had to get him back into the cabin to see it properly, working as more than a pissing rod.
He answered my question, and my mind shot away from pleasure and sank back into a mire of jealousy. “The pilot fish. Your son likened me to them,” he said.
I didn’t want to know anything about my son and Haru, but I supposed it was best to be informed. Knowledge can be a weapon, and perhaps Haru would inadvertently give me an edge with which to cut my son.
“Omos,” Haru said warningly.
“Are my thoughts so very transparent?” I cried in irritation.
“To me. Yes.” He tucked in his shaft and did up his front.
Damn.
“Why?” I asked.
“I don’t know. It’s just me, I suppose.”
“Is it that seal my son put on you?” Somehow, I had to rip that thing off and put my own there.
“No. I don’t believe so. It’s me. It’s something I’ve grown into.” He sat and dangled his legs over the side with me. “I’m one hundred and fifty-one years old,” he told me.
I hadn’t really put the facts together until then, and so I was still surprised. A little. I pretended not to be. “That old? Well…I knew you had to have been older than I thought.”
“Because?” he prodded, a hint of mirth forming at the corners of his lips.
“Because of your power.”
“No,” he denied.
“Fine. Because you said Intana disappeared from Verdant one hundred and eleven years ago. If that was the case, you couldn’t possibly have met him unless you were older than you appeared.”
“Exact
ly.”
“That and you’re just too good at face fucking to be a rank novice of a few decades.” I surprised a laugh out of him. The sound made my bones all warm and tingly. “Come back into the cabin with me,” I murmured, leaning toward him.
“Mmm. No. Ship’s business first,” he said and lifted up to converse with his first mate.
“Damn it,” I spat at the ocean. Another little stipulation in our contract: I could not deter him from ship’s business for the purpose of having sex. Ship’s business first. Sex after.
Ship’s business took all morning and some of the afternoon, because the predicted beach with boats and a dock had been sighted and we anchored. Down went the dinghy and off went Haru, fully dressed with shirt, jerkin and fancy blue boots, to see about water and supplies.
I went with him. If I couldn’t have my fill fucking him, I’d have my fill just being with him.
Damn, I was such a sorry excuse for a god, standing on a beach in a mortal’s train, practically sticking my nose in his ass, I was so desperate. How had I come to this? I couldn’t calculate the many stupid paths I’d taken, and so listened to Haru barter with the village head and tried to ignore the stench of rotting fish, old man sweat, rancid oils and whatever else the elderly fisherman had on his body. It was easier not to think, not to suffer self-recrimination. It was just easier. Like starting over.
“Yes. Do that,” Haru whispered, turning my way as if he looked toward a sound that had caught his notice. “Start over.”
Start over? Was it really that simple?
“What was that, Captain Haru?” the village head asked.
“What? Nothing. Thought I heard something. I must apologize. I had a rough night and not much rest. I’ve forgotten what you said. Shall we start over?”
“You’ve forgotten? Oh. Well. Yes, of course.”
Yes, of course. I’d had a rough night, more than a thousand years of rough night. And now it was time to start over. It was that simple.
After that, I relaxed, followed Haru about when he went to visit the village up on the cliffs, ate too salty fish stew in a hovel with him, and smiled and laughed when he did. It was refreshing not to have to worry about anything at all. Somehow, it was a lot like last night, the first night of my new beginning.
* * *
Sulphur tasting water. Fuck. I spat a mouthful overboard. “We stopped for this?” I said.
Next to me, Valerys laughed. She had a dipper as well, but didn’t throw the insult of its contents over the side as I had done. She kept on drinking until the last drop had gone from the metal. “It’s good. Minerals are good.”
“We’ll all end up with diarrhoea.”
She laughed again. “No, we won’t. But if your guts are so sensitive, I’ll boil water for you to drink.”
I grimaced at the land past which we sailed. Haru was somewhere behind us, working along with his men to load the last of the water casks into the hold. Odd captain. He laboured like the lowliest and left his first mate to manage the sailing. I was curious enough about his method of command that I asked Valerys about it.
“He’s training Remi. But after this long at sea without returning home, Remi doesn’t need much more training.”
Remi was the first mate, a man of about twenty-five years. He had a vague resemblance to both Valerys and Haru. “Is he another cousin?”
“My uncle, actually.”
“Uncle? Isn’t he young for it?”
“My grandmother had him really late. Not his fault.”
She was laughing at me, but I didn’t mind. She’d learned her understated humour from Haru, obviously.
“Exactly how are you cousin to Haru?” I asked.
“He is my father’s father’s father,” she said.
I blinked, stared at her, said nothing. She looked at me and laughed at my perturbed expression.
“What?”
“Doesn’t that make him your great grandfather?” I said.
“No. Not for a Brellin. There are siblings only through the mothers of a particular Brellin house. There are only cousins through the relations men have with women of a different house.”
“Are you saying a father doesn’t view his sons and daughters as his offspring?”
“No! We accept the relation of sons and daughters to a man, but after sons and daughters, if we are speaking of anyone born of another house, there are only cousins.”
She was his great granddaughter, plain and simple. “All right. Cousin. So does this mean that women can have relations with cousins of other houses that may share blood ties with them?”
In other words, did she fuck her great grandfather?
“Depends. There are close cousins and distant ones.”
“Which is Haru?”
“Distant.” She made a face. “But he keeps insisting the relation is close.”
She wanted to fuck her great grandfather. Creation, the thought made me hot.
Something hit me in the back of the head, and I yelped. I looked down and discovered a ratty sandal on the deck behind me. Haru. Damn him.
“Omos! In the cabin!” he snapped, and in the cabin I went. Smirking. He had the other sandal in his hand when he arrived in my wake.
“Your great granddaughter wants to fuck you!” I chortled, and he slammed the footwear at me again. I ducked aside, and the sandal hit the desk and sent papers flying.
“Omos! Shut your damned mouth, you unholy pig!”
“But she does!”
He launched toward me, and we wrestled in the centre of the cabin for a bit. I acquitted myself better this time, but only because I knew a few tricks he didn’t. I was stronger than yesterday, and also better prepared. I managed to lock him down, one arm tight on his neck, the other between his legs and hooked along his back.
“Give up!” I said. He was thoroughly incapacitated, but even then, he wouldn’t relinquish the battle. He heaved up beneath me, but I kept him down. “Oh, give up! You can’t break free!”
“Are you going to insult me with repulsive thoughts about my great granddaughter again?” he demanded.
“So you don’t consider her a cousin?”
“Fuck, Omos! I’m not stupid! Some traditions are just ridiculous!”
Laughing, I let him go. He lifted up onto his seat and leant back onto a bunk, panting. I did the same to the other side of the cabin and regarded him with more than simple amusement to see him frustrated by something at last. I gloated to see him frustrated.
“It’s stupid,” he said, knowing well that I wallowed in his discomfort. He directed angry eyes toward me, and his skin flushed redder, and somehow that made him more beautiful. How the blush lit his dark colouration. I ached to taste his heat. “Chief Grandmother forced me to take her,” he continued, “said I had to have at least one Brellin woman with me for such a long journey.”
“Couldn’t you have demanded a different one?”
“Ah! She insisted the ties between our Houses should be further strengthened, the old lizard.” He smiled suddenly, tried to cover it up with a hand over his face, but gave up. “Chief Grandmother is my daughter,” he said, his arm lowering, his skin yet more red. Amazing on a man with dark colouration. “I couldn’t easily say no. It’s almost impossible to say no to an aging child when you look this young still.”
I laughed and laughed, and he set free a sheepish grin and laughed with me. “Damn, but you Brellin men let the women pick on you too much,” I said.
“I know it,” he admitted. “Adelle took it into her head that it was a sign Valerys looked so much like me, and that I should beget a son on her.”
Adelle had to be his daughter’s name. “What could she possibly hope for in a brother that comes out of such a union?” I asked.
He wiped sweat off his forehead, and I wanted to go over there and taste the moisture on his skin. “There was talk once, of a marriage between our house and a coastal power,” he said.
“Marriage? Send a daughter.”
“Brellin daughters do not leave their houses,” he reminded me. “Nor would Brellin mothers submit them to such slavery. It would have to be a son. I suppose Adelle thought a son with my face would be an indication of respect, should she present the idea to the ambassador of this nation.”
“And so she hopes you will come back with the sacrifice bundled in Valerys’s arms.”
“I’m going to disappoint her.”
“You shouldn’t.”
“Shut up, Omos!” he cried, and I laughed at him again.
“Well, now I know why Valerys was so very irritated with me yesterday,” I said. “I got in her way.”
“And I thank you for it.” He grinned and then scooted over to straddle my lap. Oh, that was hot, his easy assurance, his lips, his hands on my face. Creation. I’d wanted this all day and I took it. He gave me his tongue, and I wouldn’t let him have it back. I sucked on it, and he moaned a helpless noise into my mouth. Heat shot into my groin like a bolt from the sky.
Fuck! Fuck! The sounds he made! I endeavoured to draw more out of him.
After a few more seconds, we struggled out of our clothes, still kissing, still trying to keep him over top, but when his trousers had to come off, I pushed him backward and dragged them off his legs.
He was beautiful, every muscle, every line: smooth flow of dark skin over limbs, strong but youthful; the crease of his navel, the tight drawing in of his abdomen with each impassioned breath, and the brown shaft that rose in a mild arc from his groin, pointing hard north. His excitement had left moisture on his belly. Perfect, the sight of him, the smell. I’d never smelled a man so desirable.
“Get back on me,” I whispered and hauled him back up. We had no patience to fetch oil. I spit onto my palm and rubbed the moisture on my shaft, and was still slicking myself down when he grabbed me and aimed. I jerked my hand free, and he had me. Or I had him. It felt like he had me.
“Fucking damn! Unh!” He was tight like a virgin. I couldn’t think how he managed it.
Loved Him to Death: Omos of the Ether Page 6