by R. Lee Smith
“Is Lorchumn all right?”
Kodjunn’s hand on her back moved in a slow circle. “I knew you would say that,” he said. “Lorchumn was kind to them. He told them his name, which seemed to help. And he told them about his first mate. He was beginning to make a bond with the one, with both of them really. They are nearly a single mind; in their fear, they are never parted from each other. Now that they are settled in Dark Mountain, perhaps they will rest easier.”
“What if they don’t?”
“Then Lorchumn will take two mates, I think. I don’t need a mate badly enough to divide them, and I think Lorchumn can help any other male to feel the same way.”
“But then what about you?”
“If Vorgullum would allow it, I would not take another. He won’t,” he said bleakly, “but I have made two young ones for him, and if they live, perhaps I can avoid a mate for a few years.”
“I’m sorry, Kodjunn,” she said after a short pause. “I know this is hard for you, too.”
“It is worse for me,” he insisted, and looked away from her. “Forgive me, Olivia, I don’t mean to belittle your suffering, but at least, for you, it is over. I have allowed my first mate to work unspeakable evils, I have helped to destroy the lives of forty-four new humans, and I am taking you away. And after this journey is done, I’ll have to return to face all those who will surely curse me for your loss. I curse myself.”
Before she could think of an answer to that, he stretched out over the ground and curled on his side to sleep.
3
Olivia woke again to Kodjunn’s sleepily urgent caresses and knew that the Great Spirit was once again in control of the body. They fumbled with each other’s clothes, had sex until night fell, and climbed once more into the sky.
Travel was exhausting for all three of them. The Great Spirit was in constant internal struggle to keep from consuming Kodjunn’s body and soul with the fire of his presence. Olivia was having difficulty convincing him that rest periods should be used for resting, and that even if she was having sex on her back, it wasn’t particularly restful. Kodjunn was being used worst of all—straining his wings to keep aloft for hours at a time, exhausted by the Great Spirit’s relentless use of Olivia’s body, and undergoing constant physical agony every moment the Great Spirit inhabited him.
“How long will it be until we get where we’re going?” Olivia asked, speaking loudly to be heard above the wind of their passage.
“Many days,” the Great Spirit replied.
“Many years, if he keeps stopping to make sex with you,” Kodjunn added crossly.
“I explained this to both of you,” the Great Spirit said. “Olivia will have to battle Bahgree’s spirit, then absorb and translate the essence of the Water-Woman’s power. She must…how did you think of it? Build up a charge.” He spoke the unfamiliar phrase using staccato English.
“Would you even know if she was charged enough?” Kodjunn demanded and the god complacently replied, “There is no ‘charged enough’.”
Olivia sighed.
Kodjunn bared his teeth and it wasn’t a smile. “Well, you’d better start thinking of a different way to charge, because I can’t keep making all these stops. You chose a mortal body, Great Spirit, with mortal wings that are rapidly losing their strength.”
Trying to ward off an argument before it became inevitable, Olivia ground her hips playfully against him. “Well, who says we have to land?”
Kodjunn banked sharply and beat his wings hard to regain altitude, while the Great Spirit caught her mouth in a kiss and tried to edge her travel-breeches down.
Olivia screamed and plastered herself to his body. “You’re going to drop me!”
“I’m not either!” Kodjunn shouted, but he wrapped his arms completely around her to be sure.
“I’m sorry,” she said, when she was certain she wasn’t about to plummet to the ground. “That was a stupid joke and I knew better than to do it.”
“What are you doing here?” Kodjunn exploded furiously. His hands tightened on Olivia, although he was not addressing her. “I understand that you must empower her, but why are you here now? You may not be able to see her anymore, but you can always find me! Don’t you know how exhausting it is to carry you? Leave me alone while I’m flying, at least!”
“I am safeguarding my interests,” the Great Spirit said coldly. “And I am doing it as gently as possible. Doubt you that it is far easier for me to simply blast your mind free of thought, your body free of life, and use you as an empty vehicle to carriage myself and my Olivia to our shared destination?”
‘My Olivia.’
For one irrational instant, Olivia was certain she was going to bite him. All that prevented her was the thought of dropping six hundred feet into the jagged line of deadwood below. When she was in control again, she softly said, “Kodjunn, put us down.”
Kodjunn’s temper put in a rare appearance. “What in hell for, woman?” he bellowed, now enraged at both of them.
“We can’t go on until we settle this. Put us down.”
“You want to settle,” Kodjunn snarled, banking roughly towards a clearing. “He wants to rut with you like an animal, and I just want to go back to sleep! Rats bite both your eyes, I am through with both of you!” He dropped her from a height of six feet and soared off without slowing down.
Olivia landed clumsily—her hip on a jutting stone, her left leg in slick mud, and her head on a half-hidden ant’s nest. She jumped up, pulling her foot free of the sucking mud, but lost the shoe and stumbled away, slapping dazed insects from her hair.
The Great Spirit appeared as soon as Kodjunn was gone from sight, blazing with the force of his rage. “Speak whatever words you will, Olivia, but I mean to have that mortal humbled and I will tolerate none of your indignation. It is not for the host to object at the burden he carries, nor to question my work and will.”
She tore what she hoped was the last ant away, along with several hairs, and limped across to a sloping hillock that seemed dry. “My indignation,” she echoed, and made herself smile at him. “My little mortal fits of pique.”
His expression was at once tense and watchful. He did not move from his place, did not alter his position.
She sat down, favoring her throbbing hip, and stretched out her muddied leg. “You’re right to call it that,” she said. “Being offended…It’s something of a luxury, isn’t it?”
The Great Spirit folded his arms and scowled at her, waiting.
“I used to think I was being harassed when one of my co-workers asked me the color of my underwear, and now I don’t even remember the last time I wore underwear. You don’t care about any of this, do you?” she asked.
“Should I?”
“I guess not. I swore an oath, so I belong to you. Kodjunn swore an oath, so you can use him, too. Neither of us have a right to complain about the way that you do it.”
“And yet you do.”
“I do,” she agreed. “But I understand something that Kodjunn hasn’t quite realized yet. It could be a lot worse.”
“Indeed it could.”
“I’m pretty sure I could hurt you if I tried,” Olivia mused, and looked thoughtfully away when the god bared his fangs at her. “Unfortunately, I’m also sure, very sure, that you could kill me if you tried. May I ask you something?”
He glared at her for a long time, but at last nodded stiffly.
“Did you ever think of asking one of the other humans that Vorgullum took? You said you were watching, you must have seen your options. I know what you said about my heart and all that,” she added with a dismissive wave. “But I also know that I didn’t make it easy for you, so why didn’t you ask someone else? Why didn’t you ask, oh, Amy? She’d do this, I’m sure of it. She’s smart and she’s brave. She loves Kurlun and her daughter…hell, she was the first person to ever say that we captives had an obligation to help our captors breed with us because of your biological imperative to prevent extinction.”
/> The Great Spirit frowned, but anger was not the only emotion burning in his eyes now. Uncertainty had joined it, uncertainty and shame.
Olivia studied him in his tight-mouthed silence and finally said, gently, “It’s because she didn’t have someone like Murgull you could show her being tortured, isn’t it?”
He did not answer.
“And as willing as Amy might have been to hop up and save your children, you’d rather have a person that you could hurt, if you had to. Well, that’s all right,” she said, and stood up to square off against him. “That’s just fine. I’m glad you understand the concept of manipulation because I intend to use it against you.”
“Do you indeed?” he snarled, advancing on her.
“Why else would I bother to help you cum? Why, when it’s more work, more risk and a lot more painful for me! Why? Because I wanted to give you something you could only get from me, something you’d want so much that you’d want to make me happy. I want you to think about that: You had to dangle a suffering soul in front of me to get what I got out of you for a good fuck.”
He roared at her without words, blasting her face with the heat of his godly breath.
She closed her eyes against the worst of it, opened them only after she felt her flying hair resettle. She looked past the raised hooks of his claws, wet her chapped lips, and calmly said, “But Kodjunn is here because he loves you.”
The Great Spirit drew back, his blazing eyes dimming.
“His oath was yours at the asking, remember? He’s here because he wants to be. He’s here because you are his father and his god. And you’re hurting him.”
He retreated another step, his hands falling to his sides. After a moment, his fists unclenched. He looked back over his shoulder into the dark, at Kodjunn, perhaps, unseen in the distance. Finally, the Great Spirit bent his head. “So be it,” he said. “It is my nature to give in to heated fury, but I concede to your cool wisdom. What do you offer as solution?”
“How do you define the problem?”
He shrugged. “Kodjunn objects to my possession of his body.”
“Wrong,” she said firmly. “He objects to your abuse of it. You can’t force him to carry me for hours at a time when the only rest he has is to stop and have sex. Sex is not restful.”
The Great Spirit looked troubled. “The argument I gave before is still the truth. I am an archetype of male energies, most of which cannot be shared out to a female. I can only give you the raw seed of my essence. It is your feminine nature that gives you the ability to receive that power and change it within your body. What you think of as building up a charge is the act of conceiving a living body of magic of my divine seed.” He released her hand and stared up at the moon, his face inscrutable. “The process of such reproduction baffles me. It always has.”
She interrupted gently, saying, “I’m familiar with the process here, Great Spirit, but one of us is going to end up killing Kodjunn if we keep using him like this, and then where will we be?”
He bared his sharp teeth, but at last the snarl was not directed at her. “We have precious little time before we come to the Place of Binding, woman. If you go as you are now, you will be at once consumed. Do you think I enjoy the act of sex from within the unfeeling clay of my son’s mortal husk? I use him only to arm you against the inevitable battle with the River Woman!”
“If you really want to help empower me against Bahgree, you’ll let Kodjunn rest during his rest periods, sleep during the day, and eat whenever he can. If you really feel like you have to be there to protect me when he’s carrying me, then leave him alone the rest of the time. Stop using him to have sex with me.” She reached out to take his hand; he started and looked down at it. “One hour with you is worth ten nights with him, anyway.”
He dropped his eyes to her hand, then sighed and looked away again. “At least when Kodjunn couples with you, my aura is sufficiently constrained that I do not hurt you.”
“We’ll work on that, but you have got to give us some space.”
He scowled at her. “You say this,” he said dismissively, “but you do not appreciate how my presence protects you. You think that because you have not seen an enemy that you are safe? This world belongs to Bahgree. There are a thousand rivers, a million drops of rain. She knows you are coming, she sees you even as I do not, and she will have you if she is able.”
“You’re doing it again,” she sighed.
He looked startled, and then frowned. “I am not threatening,” he snapped. “I am stating the facts.”
“To scare me.”
“To impress you. You stand in altogether too much need of impressing.” The Great Spirit lowered his display of horns and scowled at the ground. “Very well,” he growled. “I will not mention it again.”
“I think it’s sweet when you humor me.”
“Indeed, woman, you have no idea how I humor you.” He glowered at her. “But as you say, we manipulate one another. I, to spare the lives of countless innocents. You, for whatever trivial reason you think you have.”
She raised an eyebrow and looked at him. “Trivial.”
He folded his arms and tossed his horns at her defiantly. “It is not for my pleasure that you work your will on me. You admit this.”
“And you admitted it was worth my effort, so you shouldn’t be moaning on about how pointless it is now. Unless you don’t want me to do it again,” she added. “Now come on. Are you really this determined to have a fight?”
He threw back his head, preparing for a full assault, perhaps just on principle, when he heard this, but then stopped and tilted his head to the side as if listening intently to something beyond her range. His expression darkened slightly, and then smoothed out with mild surprise and faint chagrin. “Kodjunn,” he said reluctantly. “Kodjunn is asking my forgiveness.”
Olivia said nothing.
The Great Spirit bared his teeth and glared down at the ground. At long last, he looked up at her and growled. “You are right,” he said finally. “About a great many things. I will go to my host and we will come for you. We will carry you. I will permit him to sleep at times, if you will promise to meet with me apart from him and give me pleasure when we couple.”
She hesitated. This was a victory of sorts; her argument all along had been intended to get the Great Spirit out of Kodjunn’s body. If she took the god in his own flesh, so to speak, the raw stuff of his seed would empower her far more, and she thought the temptation of touching her with his own hands would be incentive enough. But no, she had to put the idea of orgasm in his mind, and giving him one meant enduring the painful backwash of his divine power.
But she could heal, and Kodjunn had been carrying him for days, suffering the dual agonies of the Great Spirit’s possession and Olivia’s sexual vampirism without complaint.
“Agreed,” she said.
He showed his teeth again, this time in an unwilling smile. “Compromise,” he said, mouthing the word as if it tasted bitter. “I am in danger of growing accustomed to this.”
“But you are getting just awfully good at it,” she said.
“Hm. Indeed.” He vanished.
4
On the third day, Kodjunn banked clumsily for an emergency landing, struck the ground, and dropped like a stone atop Olivia. “Sorry,” he gasped. “Hurt?”
“Get out,” Olivia said.
The Great Spirit looked wounded, but not insulted. “So soon? I should never have selected such a fragile male as host to me.”
“Everybody’s sorry for something,” Olivia retorted. “You’re killing him. Let him sleep.”
“Please,” Kodjunn added wearily.
“Every moment we spend out in the open is one more moment that Bahgree can plot against us,” the Great Spirit warned. He paused before saying more, perhaps exploring the extent of Kodjunn’s exhaustion. “But there must be risk. Olivia, we will couple while Kodjunn sleeps. Meet me there.” He lifted Kodjunn’s shaking hand and pointed it at a very d
istant outcrop of rock.
Quite suddenly, the Great Spirit was gone, and Kodjunn slumped again atop her, instantly asleep.
Olivia pushed him to one side long enough to slither out from under him. She wondered if she should cover him with something, decided there probably wouldn’t meet too many people in the middle of the night this far in the wilderness, and set off for the meeting place.
She reached the correct spot after an arduous three-hour hike. The Great Spirit was perched on a dead log, contemplating the sly, winking eye of the moon.
“She will be in season in tomorrow,” he murmured, his face a study in innocent lust. He dropped his gaze to Olivia, and gave her a huge smile. “I have fashioned for you a spear,” he said, producing one from its resting place against his flanks. “So that you might hunt for yourself and my son.”
“Why didn’t you hunt while you were waiting for me to get here?” Olivia asked, irritated.
“I require no food.”
“So you just didn’t bother?”
His head cocked. “And so I have never learned how.”
That couldn’t have been an easy admission. Olivia turned the spear in her hands, studying it while she tried not to be so annoyed with him. It was lighter than it ought to be, judging from its size, but didn’t appear to be either wood, stone or metal. Whatever it was, it was all one piece, perfectly straight and smooth, the blade very thin and sharp along its entire edge, the haft molded perfectly for her hands. “Thank you,” she said at last. “For someone who doesn’t hunt, you make a great spear.”
He shrugged that off. “There is no skill in it. Only a mere shred of whim, of will. I do not need to understand a thing in order to duplicate its form and function.”
“You don’t find it odd that you can magic up a perfect spear but not use it?”
“I do not dwell on such matters. It serves no useful purpose. Now,” he said briskly, folding his arms. “You will hunt for yourself and my host. I will accompany you.”
“That isn’t necessary.”