by Stephan Knox
Barters and strong-arms were often gathered at a table that was the central hub for each suspension boardwalk with its own expansion of huts. Most sharing mash or distilled moonshine if they could afford it, waiting for the next clients to come up and haggle over price. Most of the women there were not working by choice, but rather out of necessity. It was the plight of nearly every city, and often the outer villages as well. If a woman did not have the physical strength or bagger skills to hatchet out a living by other means, they often found themselves here or a similar red city block.
Tannin knew these red huts and knew the women within them were at least cared for decently. They even received a cut of their earnings. It was better than some. The forced slaves were the ones Tannin did not spend his credits on, but he could not save them either. There were hundreds of such women and young men. Kill a barter and the women he ran would either die of starvation or exposure. Like the arrangement or not, it was one that existed for a reason.
“Toahk,” Tannin called out to a familiar face, stepping up, and dropped a credit on the table before him. Familiar did not mean friends, and currency was the way to greet someone in Horozoh no matter what the business was.
Toahk was a thin man who’d seen too much sun and too much smoke. He plucked the square coin of metal from the table, licked it then dropped it into a pocket in exchange for a rolled smoke from his tunic pocket and smiled up at him as he took the wick from an oil lantern on the table and lit his smoke. He waved a hand for Tannin to join him at his table. “Warrior says the wind of late.”
“I know nothing of these stories you speak of. All I know is my cock is hard and in need of a woman.”
Toahk let out a hearty laugh, “Do you hear that, Yawwi!” He called out to a man leaning over on a chain-link rail of an adjacent boardwalk. “He says his cock is in need of a woman!”
The man Toahk had called Yawwi brushed a hand in a disgruntled downward wave and stood, turning his back to them.
Toahk laughed again, returning his attention to his client, “Yawwi is still mad he has lost all your credits ever since your favorite blonde ran off with a traveler.”
Tannin only slightly smiled. Now that he was here, he nearly wished he wasn’t. The scent of women that used to welcome him like perfume was making him sick in his gut. However, Sif and his achingly hard organ weren’t deflating their dire needs for service just yet. “Who’s on?”
“For you? All the girls open their blankets in hopes. Who do you want?”
Tannin glanced away, swiping the back of his hand over his lips. He was sweating. The scent of the girls was hitting him like the stench of a cesspool sloop would. He glanced back over his shoulder, piercing his gaze through the throng of moving bodies, window shopping the women lined up along the huts of the red boardwalks and beyond to the market bridges. Below in the canals, long boats floated about, belching chimney smoke laced with the aroma of freshly roasted food. Then somewhere beyond all of that, in a small boarding house of stacked field stone and scrapped aluminum sheeting was a little woman that touched his senses like honeysuckle. A succulent nectar he could drink all day and never grow tired of. He turned and dropped more credits on the table. “Got one who is small with dark hair?”
The corner of Toahk’s mouth curled up into a half smile, “Third one down. Brand new too, maybe she’ll lose some of that melancholy eye after you’ve made her feel good.”
Tannin pushed up, taking one last glance from which, he came, then headed down the plank, his hand dragging along the chain link rail as he passed the doors. One— two— he paused outside the third. Just a small hut thrown together with dried brambles and thatch tied together with whatever cord was available that once inside were usually lined with sack cloth or tarps coated in tar to keep them water proof. Like most of the boardwalk shanties, they were rarely more than ten or twelve rulers wide, the hut’s roofs were little more than a few sheets of lightweight aluminum. Just enough to keep it dry inside, but not so much to add weight. After all, they weren’t for but two things, sleeping and fucking.
Tannin reached out, pushing the flimsy door of aluminum sheeting aside. Its rusty chain hinges creaked as it swung in and he heard the slight gasp come from inside. He ducked his head and stepped in. There on the bed, across from him was a dark-skinned girl, sitting with her knees drawn up to her chest. Eyes wide as saucers blinked up at him, and she slowly relaxed her legs, stretching them out. Her movements were awkward, her gaze shifting about the room as she tried to figure out a proper pose on the bed, then looked back up at him nervously.
Toahk had always seen to it his clients didn’t beat the girls, bruised skin meant fewer credits, so any trepidation was simply from being new or perhaps because Tannin himself was still bigger than even the biggest of men. Normally he would have said something to reassure her he wasn’t going to be rough with her. But he couldn’t speak. The smell of her body, though he was sure it was in truth sweet, seemed sour to him, and he couldn’t bear opening his mouth to taste it either.
He stood rigid, just inside the door, looking at her. She soaked him in, then scooted over to make room for him next to her on the bed-mat. And then he smelled it. Her arousal warming up inside her body, and she glided her hand down her breasts, licking her lips then tucking slender fingers between her legs. “I could make myself ready for you, if you like?” her soft voice asked.
Tannin took a step then another, closing the gap between him and the cot. She sat up on her knees to greet him, her hands going to the cords of his trousers.
“Would you like me to kiss you? I have good teeth,” she reaffirmed she kept good hygiene. “Toahk gives us some kind of tea that helps calm us and makes our tongues taste sweet.” She leaned in and kissed his chest through his tunic.
He knew the tea and he knew it did as she said. He leaned down, but the closer he came to her lips, the worse it got. He felt the cold sweat breakout over his shoulders and back. He saw her lips part, but he moved beyond them. Telling himself he could just bury his face in the soft skin of her neck and pull her long slender legs up to wrap around his waist while he sank inside her. He could hold her in his arms, control the lift and drop of her body with little effort of his arms to sate his need right where he stood.
He felt her thin arms wrap around his neck and shoulders— felt the prickling sensation it caused, and then— he kissed her neck.
Tannin couldn’t get out of the hut fast enough; even the stale air of the city was a balmy welcome for his senses. He had wanted only to relieve his body of some tension before the sexual prowess of his sym drove him to take Aari after he’d promised he would not force her. Therefore, he had to come here, to dampen the need. But the very evocative scent of the woman inside assaulted his senses like razor blades. And her skin tasted like bile on his tongue. It would have been of some help if the unpleasantries had robbed him of his awakened cock, but they did not. And he hurried away from the red boardwalks, back out across the floating city of Horozoh— back to Aari.
He was almost there when he just happened to glance about, spotting a familiar figure that was out of place. He stalled at the sight of Aari. There she was, huddled over on a bench across the canal way on the main built berm that held one of the larger market streets; not in their room where he’d left her, and farther away than he wanted. But her dreary eyes explained why. He intended to take her into union yet here he was trying to fuck another, and she must have figured it out somehow.
He crossed over the canal and approached cautiously, not wanting her to bolt from him in a tantrum. “Aari, it’s not safe for you to be wandering around without me.”
“I woke up and you were gone. I looked for you, but you were nowhere to be seen. I thought you left me.”
Tannin squatted down in front of her. He reached for her chin, tilting her face up to look at him. Eyes that stared back void of emotions. Whatever she felt, she hid it, and hid it well, just as she had before. She didn’t know what h
e had gone to do, but he had left her, and she knew that much. It had been enough. After everything that had happened in the time since he’d stolen her away, she didn’t trust him any more now than she did the first day he took her from her life. He let his head fall, not sure what to say and then he saw her pack. The one she always kept with her, tucked between her feet. She thought he’d left her completely.
Drenn, he was hating these guilt trips. “Aari, it’s not going to happen that way. I am not going to abandon you like that. I will find someplace safe and with trusted people to look out for you, but now—” he took her pack and threw it over his shoulder then took her hand and stood, guiding her up with him, “—for now I need your company. So, you’re stuck with me.”
Tannin led her back into the hub of the city where he sought out an old man running a trinket booth high up on one of the swinging scaffolding boardwalks so large it was a market place to its own. There, Tannin once again traded information he’d lifted off the data crystals in Sub-Terrain Station Epic-9 in exchange for currency, then used the credits to purchase a replenishment of supplies for them. Ammo, charger packs, dehydrated food rations, a new whetstone, and a flint stone that came with a bag of dry kindling.
Aari peered into the bag of cottony stuffing along with curly shavings of some metal, questioning whether Tannin had lost his mind to allow the merchants to sell him aluminum shavings as fire kindling. She looked over the bag then to Tannin while he picked through assortments of first aid, rope, and a new water skin to replace the one he had given to Jima, until their packs were stuffed to the brim with what he could cram into them. She spotted a large framed map hanging from the rafters of the hut and she stepped in to take a closer look. It looked familiar but— she titled her head— looking some more— then tilting farther until—
She snapped her head back up and gawked at the plump man who’d stopped in his ramblings to Tannin and was watching her with an amused expression. “It’s wrong. You have this upside down.”
“Ahhh, one would think that if you’d seen Terra’s surface painted out as she is now, but it is us who are upside down,” he corrected her with a chuckle.
Aari dropped her eyes, sucking in a slow deep breath, not really sure what she was accomplishing, but she remembered the priest always saying truth is in the stillness. She twitched and glanced back at the merchant, “I don’t feel upside down.”
The man merely beamed at her rather than laugh, as if her ignorance was the cutest thing he’d seen in some time.”
“No, of course you do not. Your feet are still standing on the surface in the same way they would before Terra flipped over.”
She glanced back at the framed image. Seeing there were far more differences, some more noticeable than others, but all irrelevant. But she could see why he liked having it. It was all in the knowing, like having witnessed a secret no other had.
Tannin waited, but she gave him a nod she was ready, and they headed along the walkways to their next rendezvous.
They came to a market booth filled with clothing swaying in the breeze and tables piled high with leather hides, which had been tanned to butter-soft textures, stretched out in display alongside loose yards of fabric. A man within waved them in. Tannin led Aari into the swaying confines of the booth, accepting the invite to join them, finding some coffee and news greeted them.
Tannin and the merchant host sat round a small table along the balcony that edged the side of his shop as they sipped black coffee and exchanged current events.
Aari listened quietly, but her fingers were more enthralled with the soft touch of velvet that hung in the form of a skirt at the front of the booth. The woman at the booth said something but Aari wasn’t even paying attention, still too far away in her own thoughts. It wasn’t until the shadow came over her, the strong arm reaching over her head, and pulling the skirt down and offered it to her arms to snuggle in.
“Do you have any other women’s clothes?” Tannin asked openly.
But she was fully focused on the soft pile of cloth now in her hands. The next thing she knew she was being whisked to the back of the shop by the woman and her two daughters, giggling in a chorus of girly innocence Aari had seldom witnessed, and soon became the object of their giggling.
Tannin had splurged a heavy coin to the shop keep’s matron to pamper Aari. As well as purchase a gourde of mead then turned around and shared it with the merchant in place of the coffee. Turned out the merchant’s wife and daughters put most of their purchased time into brushing out Aari’s hair until it had a shine that only women knew the secret to doing. A task that took the span of three storytelling. One of which was about a warrior sent by the Mother of Destiny herself to avenge the death of her greatest gift, the Symbiotai. The warrior stood as tall as the ancient gods— taller even than Tannin himself— and this warrior wielded a fiery sword carved from Terra’s gleaming copper and steel veins.
The tale went on to tell how Maegrethe’s Symbiote union grieved with the burden of such shame that she had bestowed so wretched a form with her gift, she blessed the warrior’s arrival with her own sacrifice. The tale closed with a rendition of how the City of Maegray had never seen a sky of blue or ever felt the sun until the dawn that followed the blood moon rising. Whatever else the merchant said was lost to the evening breeze when Aari stepped out from the curtain that partitioned off the back of the shop.
She was wearing the velvet skirt now slung around her hips, spilling down her legs to the boardwalk like liquid cream. It’d been paired with a navy colored tunic adorned with handstitched white thread to resemble a budding vine tracing the edged scooped front. For the first time, Tannin could see the small woman inside the clothes and as she emerged farther into the bronze lighting of the setting sun, her glossy black hair catching the light, she took his breath away.
So simple, yet she stirred more response in him than any woman ever had.
Aari stood there, fidgeting, as Tannin sat like he’d been zapped with a stun gun and his chin down in his lap. She glanced over her shoulder to the matron and her two giggling daughters; all three of them smiling at her as if she were one of the family about to be handed over as a bride. She felt a strange warm welcoming feeling from the oddity of the situation that Tannin still hadn’t moved, and she finally grew uncomfortable. Not to mention when the matron had passed the small handheld mirror to her, Aari saw in her own reflection the deceptive color that masked her one blue eye was fading. She gave the mirror back and took a timid step towards Tannin, then leaned in to whisper in his ear. But he only turned to keep his eyes locked with hers. His hand floated up and cupped her face gently, then tugged a strand of her hair to fall over her exposed eye.
“It’s beautiful,” he whispered to her and Aari felt a rush of heat spread out over her face and down over her chest, way ahead of anything her sym sent out. Because never in her life had anyone ever called her beautiful.
“Thank you for your service.” Tannin broke away from his staring and thanked the merchant and his family. Then he gathered their bags and threw them over his shoulder. The merchant’s eyes rose up following as Tannin came to his feet, then even further as he took notice of the helm of Tannin’s sword that towered beyond his shoulders.
The merchant suddenly barked a word unknown to either of them. It was nothing even remotely close to the languages used by the surviving colonies Tannin had ever heard used. His wife was startled by it, but quickly rushed to the back and disappeared behind the colorful drapes.
Tannin tensed and quickly pulled Aari to stand behind him, while cautiously holding a guarded hand over his gun holster. When the matron reappeared, in her hand, she held a small leather-bound book tied up with a bit of cord. She stopped, almost frozen, realizing Tannin’s stance was one of warning.
“Please. I believe this should go to you.” Her words nearly a plea, then slowly held the book out towards him.
Tannin looked around, skimming over the milling citizens
of the city that still bustled about, now gathering at the various hotspots where meals were cooked and sold. He glanced to Aari then back at the family. He took a deep inhale but nothing in their scent gave off any warnings of deception and he took a step closer, then cautiously took the book from her hands. She nodded like it was a good thing, but her expression made no demands from him, and Tannin slipped the small book down inside his shirt, taking Aari’s arm, and led her away without another exchange of words.
After securing their things back in their room, Tannin paused her attempts at remedying her exposed eye color. He looked at her as if mesmerized. The same way someone might admire a treasured item or spring.
Aari liked spring, it meant fresh rain and everything around them turned green for a season. It was beautiful.
Back at the Skaddary Base, she’d sit up on that ledge looking over the derelict aero planes farther out into the lush savannahs of tall grasses. They made the air smell so sweet. She’d stay there until the sunset and cry because, by Destiny, it was the most glorious thing she’d ever laid eyes on. And while it made her hurt all the more that she was alone, she watched as many of them as she could.
Soon her stomach was growling, and she nearly laughed when she heard Tannin’s growl right after hers and he finally let her go so she could restore her hidden identity.
Tannin took her to one of the taverns down in the lower sections of the city near the hydro dam where they ate well. Fresh roasted red meat, dripping from the bone was served up with a mix of steamed vegetables and poached fruits. And despite a few warning emotions from Sif, he shared a decanter of fermented sour mash with her.
Candied flora blossoms of orchids, ginger lily, and lotus petals dipped in sugary ginger root were served in abundance to counter the burning taste of the fermented drink. A sugary favorite amongst both guests and the tavern who served them because it kept the guests drinking— and spending.