Calliope's Wings

by Guin Archer

  Shopping. It was surreal. It almost felt like going to the mall with Rachel.

  Almost.

  It was an inquisitive and somewhat urging trill from the dowager queen Mahzri that prompted us to make our way out of the market and to the arena. Not that I knew what she was saying. I only knew that Sekhmet was suddenly right behind me, bending forward, and using the palms of her claws to herd me where she wanted me to go. Where she wanted me to go was the arena.

  There was a tight crowd of Zikta, a fair number of Gishtak, and a handful of Pashas orbiting the pit. Just like in the bazaar, as soon as my bells were heard, their levity and boisterousness came to a screeching halt. I flinched – I couldn’t help it – when the warriors’ booted feet stomped and fathomless eyes turned as one to look down at me. Just like in the bazaar.

  A split appeared in their ranks, almost silently, and a cleared path was made right to the dais.

  Ah fuck.

  My hands squeezed Gaddi’s arm through my atrociously long sleeves and she rubbed my fingers in a supportive, sweet way. All the while, Big Mama pushed me forward.

  Kor stood as tall and proud as a mountain – a dark, imposing mountain – at the frontal edge of the dais. His thick arms were crossed over his barrel chest while his booted feet were spread shoulder-width apart. He was wearing, instead of trou, a half-pleated kilt of sapphire blue, black, and silver. It looked an awful lot like something pharaohs wore in ancient Egypt. The rest of him was exposed, arrogantly displaying his glowing skol. His hair was braided long down his back, the weight of it amplified by the addition of silver bangles, crystals, and one lone bell at the tail. His flanks glittered with skol I hadn’t seen before.

  When he turned his eyes to meet mine, I could see that they’d morphed to silver.

  Holy fucking shit.

  They weren’t that color this morning.

  Gaddi gently eased my hands off her arm and leaned over to speak mostly into the top of my head, though I know she meant my ear. Her tone was shaky as she, too, saw the male that refused to look away from me. Even at a distance, his scary glower sucked the air right out of my lungs.

  “You will sit on the Throne of She and oversee the Jiktau. I will stay as long as I am able.” She gestured with a chin lift to empty seating semi-close to the dais. Seating was a loose term, though, since the spots were just a jumble of fat mats and pillows over a cleared slab of stone. “The Jiktau will be long this season, uum Taytani. There are many eager to earn their places in the Udon. I suspect the choosing will extend to lunerise.”

  “I must sit there for so long?”

  “Aichi, Taytani.”

  This’s going to be a long day.

  A scant few feet from the dais and Kor kneeled. The kilt barely fell over his knees when he stood, so his kneeling hiked it up. Before the black leather and silver metal center pleat dropped between his treetrunk legs, I got a direct look at his groin.

  His penis was ‘gone’.

  Shree hadn’t lied. His cock could be ‘sheathed’. That, or it had been removed at some point between our morning together and now. If that was the case, he deserved a medal for being able to disguise the agony he’d feel for losing his dick-of-the-ages.

  How didn’t I know before this that these nonhuman males were capable of sucking their penises up inside them? I mean, I knew they didn’t have ballsacs – at least not visible ones – but it was another thing entirely to one second have an overstuffed sausage that could disappear on command.

  Imagine the magic show a male strip club could put on! See this dick, ladies? Abracadabra! Poof! It vanished…

  I needed a lobotomy. There was something seriously fucked up in my head.

  Kor’s hands slipping under my armpits while I was distracted by his not-there Johnson brought me out of my daydream.

  “Uum kisa-uu,” he murmured once I was on the dais, one hip pressed into his upraised knee. He was still taller than me on one knee. His hands rotated to my front and up under the veil. He trailed his thumbs along my jaw tenderly. His face was a study in resting-bitch-face. He’d perfected the expression. His aura, though, was calm. Sedate. “You are well?”

  I couldn’t speak through the dry lump in my throat, so nodded instead.

  “Brah.” Good.

  More jaw caresses. “You chose nothing from the bazaar.”

  “How did you…?”

  “There is not a moment that I do not know You, uum Taytani. Your every breath is mine to worship and protect.” He ducked to brush the tip of his flat nose against mine briefly. “Your sadness this solrise gutted me.”

  Why did he have to be so sweet and sound so absolutely sincere? The way my determination to see him as a monster crumbled like a deck of cards wasn’t a good sign of things to come. If I couldn’t hate him, I was going to hate myself. Well and truly, I’d despise my weakness and inability to do anything against these tender feelings he was instilling in me.

  I felt like I was suffering some latent form of Stockholm Syndrome and it wasn’t a nice sensation.

  “Sit,” he commanded bluntly, his reverent tone melting back to harsh and uninviting.

  When he stood, I watched his chin as it shot high above me. Standing beside him, I felt too much like a little girl again. Felt like I could be looking up at my Pa while he instructed me on how to nock an arrow onto my recurve. Only, my Pa was my hero and, other than a healthy respect for the man that raised me and supported our family through good times and bad, I didn’t fear him.

  Tohtahk Kor still scared me.

  One of his hands clapped around the back of my neck, silencing some of the bells with his firm grip, and he used that steady hand to lead me over to the throne.

  There were silver and sky-blue stitched cushions on it now. A larger one on the seat and a shallow, tubular one pressed against the backrest. When Kor, again, lifted me up so I could sit, I found them immensely comfortable. A hundred thousand times more enjoyable than sitting on hard stone would’ve been.

  Sekhmet and her mother climbed onto the dais and lay down to either side of the throne, resembling something like alien sphynxes guarding their all-too equally alien queen.

  Strange. Everything was very strange.

  “Innintani, uum Taytani,” Kor intoned as he hit a knee again. I winced, thinking this male was going to end up with groaning, arthritic joints one of these days. His new, silver eyes locked onto mine. As I watched, black swirled in and out of their metallic depths. “I leave You now to see to my Zikta.”

  I felt uncertainty and discomfort pluck at me when I heard those words. I was going to be left here by myself. What if I did something wrong?! I didn’t know what the hell I was doing! And with my helpful, gabby friend too far away to chatterbox me into knowledgeability, I was officially up shit creek without a paddle.

  He didn’t give me an alternative, though. After his strictly delivered pronouncement, he returned to standing and walked off. Just. Walked. Off.

  I watched his back disappear into the crowd that closed ranks around him as soon as he was beyond their reaches. The skol that decorated his front all but swallowed his back. From a distance, it looked like a silvered, glittering mandala that accented the harsh planes of his defined muscles to a ‘t’. Up close it’d been impossible to see the full picture of it.

  By the barest of threads, I kept myself from doing any one of two things that would’ve been monumentally stupid. Two warring instincts, to fly or fight, beat at me like a battering ram. I wrestled both into submission and screwed on the best impression of an aristocratic façade as I could manage. I honed my inner Mary Poppins – pish-posh – and Queen Elizabeth. Two totally different women, but both badass and straight-faced.

  I needed to tap into some of Mary Poppins’ ‘practically perfect in every way’ right quick.

  Luckily, despite my arrival, the Jiktau never let up. It had started without me, so it made sense that it wouldn’t stop just because I was here.

  The two sets of stairs leadin
g into the pit were left open for access of the ‘entrants’. One set was where the prospective Zikta descended, the other being for the herd of Mahzri waiting to the far side of the arena’s raised grounds.

  I had enough height on the dais and distance to be able to see over heads and to the sprawling plains-slash-desert beyond a low, thatched wall. The arena was set, apparently, to the farthest end of Granzee. And there, stuffing up the open-air courtyard and the wilds beyond, were countless male Mahzri. Their feet were stamping and many of them were chuff-barking aggressive noises. All were riderless and all looked positively vicious.

  Peering back down into the pit, I could see a body being dragged out by two Zikta who bore a handful of skol across their shoulders and arms. The fallen male was large, but I realized belatedly that he was only an adolescent of their kind. Most Zikta I’d seen were middling in age, Kor included in those ranks. This one, though?

  It was a fucking kid. Younger even than Gaddi.

  Once to the wall, the two warriors dropped the fallen one carelessly onto a woven stretcher of a sort which was pulled up to the surface by a pulley system controlled by another two warriors. Like a chain gang, the fallen one was moved from one set of warriors to another until the last set beyond the pulley-handlers shoved the unconscious male either to the ground or into arms of a Gishtak. There wasn’t a care shown to the newly-ranked Gishtak.

  The Mahzri that was in the pit with the male bugled a call, an irate sounding thing, looked up towards the dais, then bowed deeply. The two Mamas bobbed their heads back to him. Then, with no more fanfare, the male leapt from the pit to the upper ledge as though it was only a single step and not fifteen feet of straight up.

  The bronze male stalked back off into the throng of excited Mahzri awaiting their turns.

  While I sat in rapt fascination, another young man – though his body was obviously well-honed and he moved with the lethal grace of a born predator – was chosen. There was a queue of hopeful-warriors, standing ramrod straight, garbed in only a tight pair of dingy tan trou, with their bare feet spread and hands behind their backs. There were dozens of them.

  The youth was chosen by the next Mahzri to leave the throng. The male prowled before the queue, his head low and his crest fanned. One by one, he looked the prospects over with inhuman intensity. I don’t know how he picked the one he did, but once he’d chosen, his mouthplates opened, his tendrils lashed, and then he barked shortly and sharply. The one he picked immediately moved to the other set of stairs so the two could meet pseudo ceremoniously in the pit.

  From there, it was a bloodbath.

  The warrior attempted, bare-handed and without aid of any sort of saddle, rein, or lead, to mount the Mahzri.

  The Mahzri beat the shit out of him.

  The crowd surged with energy and life. They cheered every time the bronze male made a painful hit against the Lubrei. I watched with mute horror as the Mahzri cracked his tail against the youth, the sound of breaking bones audible even over the roaring of the crowd. The kid never gave up in trying to reach the Mahzri’s back. He did in fact land there once, but the bronze bucked him off hard enough that his body catapulted into the air many feet before he landed on his back on the hard ground.

  Blood flowed on the half-stone, half-sand floor of the pit behind his skull where it cracked against it.

  The watchers went wild.

  This youngster, too, was finished by a backhand of the Mahzri. It sent him careening into the red-glass wall, injured face first. He wilted like a flower, his legs giving out beneath his not insubstantial weight. The Mahzri didn’t even wait for the two Zikta to take the body away before he bowed to the dais, earned his head-nod back, and then leapt over the fallen one like he hadn’t just broken half the bones in his body.

  I was going to be sick.

  I was expected to watch this all day?!

  I pressed my hand flat over my mouth and controlled my breathing deliberately, struggling with everything I had not to heave up all over the sandstone.

  On and on this process went.

  A Mahzri stalked. A youth was chosen. The two entered the pit, and more than half the time, the would-be became a could-not, saturating the pit with ichor.

  I noticed that those that did prevail, the ‘lucky’ ones to be welcomed by their chest-beating new brothers, had a common thread. While they were being thrashed on, either of the Mamas would be watching without turning their attentions away. As though they shared one mind with the bronze males in the pit, they would emit a clipped chirrup. Then, after a few more punishing strikes – so violent I know I’d have been turned to mashed Calliope with a side of steaming ‘she shit herself’ – the young Zikta would be allowed to mount the Mahzri and stay there.

  These instances were always followed by the loudest roars and trumpets from the Lubrei and Mahzri alike.

  The new pair would leap from the pit as one unit and both, no matter the heinous condition of the new Zikta, would affect a deep bow for the dais.

  Food and drink was flowing all around me, but my appetite was soured. All I could taste was the acrid sting of bile in the back of my throat and even the thought of drinking water made me want to hurl. I’d had violence shoveled onto myself aplenty on Intau. I’d seen just as awful things happen to other slaves. I’d reaped my own vengeance in ways that would’ve made the old me, the Earth me, shudder and cringe.

  But I’d never seen such blatant and desired violence like the Jiktau showcased. The psychopaths seemed to celebrate it! It curdled my blood a little to see how into it everyone was.

  I realized after some hours, too, that these Tauren were not the same as the ones in Blackburhn. Not by far. Everyone in this place, Zikta and Gishtak alike, were a different caliber altogether. It was like the Lubrei left in the northern reaches of Luintak were the domesticated versions of these feral people. These souls in Granzee were at the top of the Lubrei societal structure in every way, shape, and form.

  I wanted to go back to my hut. My pillau, as Gaddi called it.

  When one of the guard that’d escorted us into the settlement – and he looked and felt familiar to me – approached the dais to inquire if I required a rest and tending (i.e. a visit to the loo), I readily agreed. I sprung from my throne like my ass was on fire.

  Instead of Sekhmet playing watchdog as I expected, it was Meemaw. She handed me down to the ground before gracefully following me. One of her big claws wrapped around my upper back and shoulders, the touch somehow maternal despite the alienness of it.

  Gaddi was gone, taken away by her Dorai, and so I was as close to alone as I’d been all day.

  I followed a few steps behind the slow-walking Zikta. With his greater height and longer legs, he had to slow his speed drastically so I didn’t have to run to keep up.

  He led me to a communal bathhouse.

  This one wasn’t like any of the others I’d ever been to.

  For the first, this bathhouse was clean. It smelled of incense and fresh-water steam, not of sulfur or the filth of Tauren bodies. There weren’t dirt-caked clothes strewn across the sandstone floors and the windows were opened strategically to allow for optimal airflow.

  For the second, the communal bath was larger than an Olympic pool and the entirety of it was made from carved red glass just like the arena’s walls. The sheer opulence of having an entire pool carved from glass that, from my understanding of Intau’s currency, would have amounted to the down payment on a fucking town…it made my jaw fix itself to drop.

  As soon as the house’s attendants sighted us, a bevy of females were rushing towards me amidst a flurry of head bobs and stilted curtsies. I was ushered into a private washroom where, without pausing, they began to situate me and my skirts over the stationary basin.

  “Hey! Wait! Ack!”

  They wisely ignored my English exclamations. Instead, they held up my skirts, washed my hands, and brushed my face with a cool, damp cloth even while I peed. And I peed because my body gave me no other choice o
nce I was over that basin.

  When I was done, one of the unnamed females cleaned me there, too.

  I burned a mortified, rosy red all but to my toes by the time I was returned to the elder Mama and my guard by the twittering, giggling ladies. They fanned my skirts out behind me, unconcerned with my reaction to their practiced treatment moments before.

  The matron Mahzri chittered at me, opening her mouthplates and caressing me with her tendrils even as she reeled me into her chest. Her claws petted and stroked me as familiarly as Sekhmet did and she smelled the same. Like leather and mulled cider. I braced myself against her, looking far up, and summoned a smile for her through my embarrassment.

  The Zikta guard remained silent, his eyes analyzing the room instead of training on me. It gave me the chance to look him over.

  The sense of familiarity, like I’d seen him before, was wrong. I’d never seen him. At least not consciously. I felt him, though. His aura was one I remembered from recently. It was lethal, but protective. A memory of his voice, too, struck.

  “You are the one from Blackburhn,” I realized finally. The male didn’t so much as lift a brow to acknowledge me. “One of them. You found me being dragged by that Lorun.”

  No response.

  “What is your name?”

  “I am Rohahn.”

  “Then you are one of them. I…dashka.” I pulled away from the dowager queen and stepped up to Rohahn. He was several inches shorter than Kor, but almost as broad. He was older in appearance, maybe middle-aged for a Tauren, but none of his body showed it. It was only a couple crinkles in the corners of his eyes that gave it away.

  “There is no need to thank me, uum Taytani. Are You ready to return?”

  No, but I knew I wouldn’t be given enough slack on my tight leash to remain gone. My queenly dress and bakal were just very pretty chains of imprisonment in my gilded cage. I’d never been in a prison like this before and it was almost worse than the openly vile ones I knew.