by Guin Archer
It sounded a bit too much like the start of genocide to me.
My attendants – and Kor – did a good job of running them off me. It probably helped, in some ways, that the Tohtahk had been keeping to his word about familiarizing us to each other. There wasn’t a single night since the one where Kor gave me my yist that I wasn’t kept draped possessively over his lap.
That in and of itself seemed to cheer the Udon up a great deal.
“Uum Taytani!” The frightful shout of Gaddi reached me even over the blustering winds breaking over the cliff and I partially turned on my girl to see her. She was on the ground and staring up at me with abject horror written across her face. “Get down from there! You will fall and break Your neck!”
I laughed hard at that.
“Sekhmet will not let me fall, Gaddi. You know that as well as I!” Still, I didn’t want her worrying herself needlessly, so I slid down to rest on my ass. Her body slumped with relief. I tossed her a sheepish, shaky smile. “How are you, my friend?”
“I am well, uum Taytani.” She padded quickly forward, eager to take my paltry opening. We hadn’t talked since the bazaar and the auction. She fussed with her new bangles. “Will You…will You make time for me? I miss us.”
“I do, too.” I reached a hand down to her in offering up. “Come with me. I wish to go to the lake below.”
“But my Dorai…”
“He will know you are with me.” I nodded to the Zikta rimming the quickly rising camp that served as a small piece of my guard. I didn’t have so many on me, I thought, because the Mahzri took on the protectorate job with keen efficiency. No one was getting through any of the beasts including my guard. Not even if they wished to.
Rohahn bobbed his head once to me in understanding. He would tell Gaddi’s man where she was.
The young bride took my hand and pulled herself up onto Sekhmet beside me. We were both side-saddle and she had to grip me while I gripped the Xxyx. Sekhmet warbled thrice to the male Mahzri around us before the world blew by in a rush. I yipped in thrill as she bounded right off the cliff’s edge. Gaddi’s shout was less excited and more terrified.
My girl hit the ground with a solid thump and my body rattled with it. The serah screamed instead of rang and I was distantly aware of a wall of Lubrei forming above us on the cliff to see what happened before Sekhmet ran into the grass.
Her and the males barked, hissed, and chittered sounds to each other and I snorted with uncontrollable laughter as I thought again about Jurassic Park. I had the absurd urge to shout lines from the film. It grew so great I couldn’t contain myself.
“Stay out of the long grass!” My ‘warning’ was crowed on an obnoxious holler and I fell halfway into Gaddi with my hilarity. She hissed at me, not even remotely enjoying this as much as I was.
“Sit up straight, will you?! We will both fall off!” When Sekhmet jumped over a boulder I couldn’t have seen coming and we both canted dangerously, her arms locked around me like vices. I laughed crazily. I didn’t miss that she dropped the reverence from her tone when she scolded me. “You are mad!”
“Woo-hoo!”
It didn’t take long at all for us to break out at the lake. When we did, my girl waded in deep until the skirts of our dresses became heavy with cold water. I beamed at Gaddi so hard my cheeks hurt.
“Was that not fun?”
“No, Innintani, it was not.” Gaddi actually pouted. “I have had seasons scared off my life.”
“You are Pasha to a Zikta, Gaddi! You have a strong soul. A brave one. Use it to enjoy moments like this. They are fleeting.” I lifted an arm to show her my side and the ties there in my bodice. “Help me out of this dress, my friend. I would like to swim now.”
“You should have been born Zikta,” she reprimanded me lightly before doing as I asked. We were far enough away from the cliff that the Udon wouldn’t be able to see us clearly to pick out details. Not that it mattered. They saw my nipples on a daily basis through my gauzy gowns. They weren’t really getting a peepshow from me any more than normal.
As soon as I shucked the dress, tossing it carelessly across my Xxyx’s back, I slipped into the water. Because she’d waded so deep and her back was taller than my head, I was instantaneously submerged. Flipping underwater, I sluiced under her belly and between her front and rear legs to come out the other side. Gaddi watched me calmly, but she wasn’t undressing.
I paddled to the surface and blew water at her once I broke it. Her lips twitched.
“You do not want to swim?” I floated onto my back and kicked and stroked languid circles around Sekhmet. She teased my limbs with her long claws whenever I came too close.
“It is cold,” she argued even as she pulled her feet out of the water. I giggled.
“It is wonderful. I enjoy the water, especially when it is cold. It…it…oh, I wish I had the word in the Tongue for it.”
“How many languages do You speak?” Gaddi sprawled over Big Mama’s back and watched me. It was…nice talking with my friend again. I was afraid for so long I’d feel awkward after the auction incident and the gifted slave she so readily took from my this-world husband, but I didn’t. I felt guilty about avoiding her because I thought I wouldn’t feel comfortable around her anymore. Stupid, really. Gaddi was a good Mistress and this world had slaves. There wasn’t anything I could do about it.
Then again, a niggling voice in the back of my head said that as their Innintani, I could possibly change things.
Hmmm.
“With the Tongue and my native one? Six fluently. I know pieces of others, but not enough to have conversations. I only know enough to avoid the tail of a whip.” I flinched when her face crumpled. “I am sorry, my friend. I should not have said that.”
“I still cannot believe any would dare to make You kut.” She teased her chin with an arrowed fingertip.
“The world is full of wrong, Gaddi. Many wrongs.” I sunk down in the water again, re-soaking my hair and momentarily silencing the serah threaded through the braids Tan wove in my hair. She rubbed a sweet-scented cream into it every other day that I compared to dry conditioner. I got spongebaths for my skin, but my hair involved a different treatment. I don’t know how they knew what worked so well in it to make it thicker and healthier, being as their hair was so different from mine, but they did.
When I came back up, Gaddi was chewing on her lower lip. I worried for the muscle. With the sharp teeth a Tauren had, she could easily slice right through the skin if she wasn’t careful.
“Do You hate me? For taking a new kut?”
I sighed, swimming up towards her. I petted the hand she had held down towards me.
“No, I do not hate you. It is the way of this world. I do not agree with it, but it is how it is.” I glanced up beyond her to the sky. “It is very difficult for me here in this place. Everything is different and I am alone. There are no others like me.”
“You are…I hope You will not be angry for me saying so, but You are not alone.” Gaddi leaned closer to me over Sekhmet’s back and her expression was earnest. “You have so many who care for You. You have the Udon’s heart. Your kut are devoted so much to You…You should hear how they go on with the other kut on how proud they are to be Yours! I am blessed to have met You and to have You talk to me so freely.
“Beyond, You have the Tohtahk! He is the strongest, most desired los’kah of the Southlands! Many biis’a have done all they could to sway him to them, but it is known that as a Drake, he was bound to You from his birth. It was unlikely You would come to us, but You did!” Gaddi looked all but ready to swoon. “Uum Taytani, Your Dorai is the greatest of los’kah. Had I not had my Daal, I would be jealous of You. I would be as hot with envy as Rahvashti Uptip is were we not friends.”
“So Uptip does desire Kor.” My mutter was more of a comprehending sigh than anything else. I refused to think that the growl twinging it could be jealousy.
Nope. Not jealous.
Gaddi snorted; a totally un
ladylike sigh she’d never made before. I felt a flutter of pride for corrupting her.
“She desires him above all others. She will never be able to obtain him, though. My Daal tells me the Tohtahk speaks nothing but praise for our Taytani. He makes all other los’kah envious of him more than they already are.” My friend smirked, her dainty tusks blinking at me. “It is well known how eefan our Innintani is. Everyone sees the utakta She left on Her Tohtahk. All see the stud torn from his nipple.”
I felt my cheeks get hot even in the cold water and paddled away from the two. I tread water for a good long while, at least until I heard the echoing shouts of my attendants. I sagged deeper into the water, my nose sinking under the surface. Gaddi laughed at what had to have been the funniest, most despondent, half-faced grimace I’d made this season.
“They have You corralled, dearest friend,” she sniggered as Lubrei began to filter out through the grasses and around or into the lake. A beat of silence. “Is she to Your liking? Your new kut? She…was Your friend before?”
“In my mind, Mari’et is not my kut. She is still Gishtak and my very special friend. We have a bond.” I smiled a little wistfully and a tad shamefully when Gaddi slumped. I swam over to her again, this time pulling myself back up onto Sekhmet’s back and out of the water. My naked back and ass flashed at the Horde.
A familiar, two-toned, volcanic growl bounced over the water to us. Three unnecessary guesses who…
I lifted my middle finger in the air and flipped Kor the bird.
“We have a bond, too, Gaddi,” I told the woman who was young enough to be my daughter. I bussed a chaste kiss to her cheek even as I lifted my dress’s skirts to hide my breasts from onlookers. “I liked you instantly. We have a different bond than the one between me and Mari’et, but it is no less important. Remember that.”
“I will.”
The gentle sway of Sekhmet walking back out of the lake and the slosh of water against her rough hide was drowned out by the aggravated grumbles of my ‘loving’ Tohtahk. The Xyxx wasn’t phased by his pissy attitude – she never was – but she did stop to allow him to take me away. Again, she was a traitor to me. I scowled and sneered back at her as he bundled me up in my discarded dress, a half-assed affair on his part, and carried me off into the grass.
I leaned back and looked up at the underside of his taut jaw. He was chiding me in that nonsense language of his. I didn’t need to understand the double-toned growls to know he wasn’t happy with me.
It seemed like he never was.
“You do know I cannot understand you, do you not?” I bumped the side of a closed fist against one of his hard pectorals. He didn’t twitch even when he hit the zig-zagging ‘stairs’ set into the side of the cliff I hadn’t seen in our mad dash through the grass. “It is rude to speak with words others cannot understand.”
“You would not be capable of such speech, uum kisa-uu.”
“I did not say I could speak it, you baboon,” the insult was in English before I switched back, “but I still think you are a bad los’kah to speak it around me when you know I cannot understand it.”
The big male blew out a rough breath, but I knew it wasn’t from my weight in his arms or the climb he was making with his burden – i.e. me. He was frustrated with me. Aggravated or angry were his modus operandi whenever I was involved. I rarely made him truly mad at me, but he wasn’t exactly a ray of sunshine.
Unless – usually if – he was horny.
Sleeping over his lap nightly, I knew that now more than ever. His dick, the RMS Ishmael, threatened to harpoon me every time he got his hands anywhere on my fattening body. The guy delighted in every pound of flesh he felt under his callused fingers. It only seemed to metastasize when he squeezed my ass cheeks or palmed where I was putting on some much-needed weight in my tummy.
I wasn’t pressed against his groin now, but I was sure he wasn’t hard for me like he was when I was either quiet or fighting him. Those two manners from me tickled his pickle more than anything.
Huh. Now that I thought about it, maybe his pent-up frustrations were the reason why he was always so crabby? If he got laid more often – and no, I was volunteering to do the deed – he might not’ve been such a cranky bitch. He probably had a serious case of blue balls.
“Would You like me to try to teach You?”
“What do I look like to you? A beast? I will not waste my hearing on all those growls.” Okay, I was being a bitch, but he brought out the worst in me. Besides, I’d rather learn his speak on the sly so I could use my knowledge against him – or others – if the situation called for it.
Kor actually chuckled. “You are a cohcrahk, little Pasha.”
“What is that word? Cohcrahk. Are you insulting me?”
“I would never do such, uum Taytani.” He jostled me so he could muzzle his flat nose and his studded tusks against my temple. “Cohcrahk is…two-minded. You say one thing but mean another. You duel with me for the sake of dueling.”
Contrary. He was saying I was being contrary. He wasn’t wrong.
“Why are you always mad at me?” This was another point of contention with me and I figured now would be a good a time as any to confront him about it. Since he was opening up and all. “You are never happy with me.”
“I am always overjoyed with You.”
Pinocchio. His nose grew at least six inches with that lie.
He must’ve thought I made a funny face and not a disgruntled one – or he was an asshole and thought my upset was cute – because he laughed again, though it wasn’t a raucous sound. More subdued in deference to all the Lubrei lingering about.
Orla and Shree had been down at the lake filling buckets when Sekhmet brought me out of the water. There was a daisy chain being formed of Lubrei and Mahzri to ferry the buckets back up to the camp. I felt a little bad about just going in for a swim when I spied Ruune at the top with a bucket going down.
…at least I didn’t pee in the water….
“Ido,” he growled to Ruune. My pretty Xerbai instantly left his buckets to another slave so he could follow. I arched my neck back and around to watch his smooth, confident stride. Watching him now, you’d be hard-pressed to see him as the slave he was. He’d gained so much vitality in the weeks since I’d come into the Udon and brought him under my wing. I was like a proud momma when I looked at him. I could feel myself preening like a cocky little peacock.
Ruune caught my eye – not hard since I wasn’t hiding my smirking face – and offered his own crooked smile for me. I had a thought that his tusks would look good with jeweled studs like in Kor’s. I wondered if they’d hurt being put in like fillings hurt humans if they weren’t numbed up. If it did, I wouldn’t press for decorating him.
But I really wanted to.
The Udonak was already more than halfway to being fully set up. Our-slash-my pillau certainly was. Mari’et, Tan, and Tok were busy at the front of their much smaller, shared pillau next to ours. They were preparing the oils that would go into the hanging bowls that both provided light in our pillau as well as released a pleasant aromatic I’d grown familiar and fond of since waking after Blackburhn’s attack.
Kor set me onto my feet beside the pallet of our bed before ducking off to open one of the studded, leather-lined trunks. Ruune rounded the big male’s feet to beeline to me. His hands were immediately pulling at my shield-dress.
“No. I am good.” Pointless to argue with the monolith, but hey…I never said I was a pushover. I liked to beat against the limiting walls that hemmed me in saying I couldn’t or shouldn’t.
Ruune peeled my fingers off the skirts.
Kor appeared behind and over Ruune’s shoulder just as he successfully extracted my dress from me. I stood naked in front of them both, my nipples beading naturally from the cooler air kissing against my unguarded chest. Neither of them looked at them, but Ruune did circle behind to cup them and me before I could blink. I gasped and jolted, not expecting the move.
A whiff
of familiar and unwanted-by-me musk peppered the pillau. I stiffened in the smaller male’s hold while glaring daggers up at Kor.
“We will not fuck,” I told him firmly, my jaw clenched. His silvered eyes flared, but he bobbed his head stiffly in agreement.
“We will not fuck,” he repeated me.
Ruune flicked my nipples and I hissed, lashing my own hands back to claw into his lean hips.
“Ruune and I will not fuck,” I added in for good measure. My Xerbai’s chest bounced against my back and I could hear his silent laughter behind me. Even Kor grinned in his unique way at my pronouncement. He didn’t say anything to that point, though.
Why did I have a feeling they knew something I didn’t?
“It is Leishai this lune,” he informed me as he crouched at my feet. He held open a stretch of cloth at the level of my shins. “Step.”
I did as he asked, a good little biis’a for him. The fabric was as smooth as silk as he pulled it up my legs, but it felt heavier. It didn’t cling to me, but it wasn’t outrageously loose, either. By the time he’d shimmied it up and over my ass, I knew what the outfit was and practically dove into the wrap-style top.
It was a romper!
…and, oh-ehm-gee…it had fucking pockets! Pockets! Like, what woman from Earth didn’t lose her shit over one of her bangin’ outfits having pockets?
Us as women; ‘oh, you like my dress? It’s great, right?! And look! It’s got pockets!’ Then we’ll strut around all damn night showing them off to all the other equally pocket-obsessed women who are squealing about how great our pockets are.
Guys, take note of this. Pockets win wars with women. They’re the female equivalent of comparing trucks or dick sizes.
“I like it,” I gushed openly as Kor and Ruune worked together to maneuver me how they needed to to get the outfit snug. My excited bouncing wasn’t helping them an ounce, but they still chuckled indulgently at me.