Skeen's Leap

by Clayton, Jo;

  “Handling is all you’ll have to do, dear friend, unless you find the thought of touching me distasteful.”

  “Not distasteful. Merely rather … frightening. Skeen, listen.…”

  She got to her feet, crossed to the window opening and laced the cover in place, shutting out the moonlight, plunging the cabin into a deeper darkness. “Tell me nothing, my friend, unless it’s to leave you. That I’ll do, if you ask it.” She heard him moving, heard the bed creak, waited for an answer, but he said nothing. “Then I’ll stay.” She stripped, folding her clothing and putting the things on the upper bunk, pulled off her boots and set them beside her belt and holster. He was moving, too. When she sat beside him and took his hands she discovered he’d removed his robe and tossed it away. His arms were stiff; she could feel the tension in him. “We’ll neither of us break,” she murmured, then frowned; for some reason that was the wrong thing to say. He tried to pull away. “Peg, is it that bad? Tell me to go.” She felt him shudder, but still he said nothing. Maybe she should have listened to him before, but if she left now, what would that mean to him? “Let’s take this slow,” she said, keeping her voice soft and easy. “Lie down, my friend, stretch out and relax, on your stomach if that would make you more comfortable.”

  When he was stretched out, she straddled his back and began working on the knots in his shoulder muscles, doing some silent crying because she remembered all too vividly doing this for Tibo and what happened afterward. She began working down his spine. He was plump but not sloppy, without Tibo’s well-defined musculature. She kneaded and smoothed and worked over him until he was deeply relaxed and almost purring, not aroused by her efforts (to her considerable disappointment, she’d had hopes) though she could feel the deep pleasure he got from the handling. Finally she stretched out beside him, put her hand flat on his chest between the spring of his ribs. “Do for me now, my friend, please. When the time comes, I’ll show you what else I need.”

  His fingers dug into her buttocks pulling a grunt out of her. “Skeen!” Her name groaned out of him and he wrenched his hand around hard. She gasped and tried to twist away. His weight came down heavy on her, pinning her to the pad. “I tried …” he whispered, “I tried to tell you.…”

  “You’re bleeding.” A whisper in the darkness. “I tore you.” A whisper filled with remorse and wretched pleasure. The weight moved off her back. She heard him stumbling to the commode, heard the sound of water pouring and a moment later the coolness of that water as he sponged away the blood. His hands shook and he sobbed.

  Skeen lay limp, the pain answering some deep need in her she’d never known was there, easing that other pain she carried with her. She reached out, long arm adequate when she bent a little at the waist, and stroked Pegwai’s smooth flank, drew her hand across his hard belly and down. His short thick penis was standing high and hard again. Without thought or intent, not knowing why she did it, she jabbed her thumbnail into his testicles, hard, pointed nail, weapons Tibo called her claws, thinking of him she raked those claws hard down Pegwai’s flesh. He shrieked and wrenched her hand loose, twisted her arm high up her back until she was fighting him, hissing with pain, then he threw himself on her.…

  She woke pressed up against Pegwai, half on him. Carefully not-thinking, she eased away from him and off the bed. She unwound part of the lacing on the windowcover, letting some of the dawn light into the cabin, then went to stand frowning down at him. He looked like she felt, bruises starting to show, blood crusted on long ragged gashes from her nails, livid tooth marks, some deep enough to draw blood. His mouth hung open, the cheek she could see looked sunken; he lay on his stomach, face turned to the wall. She dressed as quietly as she could, wanting rather desperately to get away from this room before he woke. Carrying her boots, she padded to the door.

  One hand curled about the door’s edge, she looked back. A certain stiffness about the outline of his body suggested that he was awake, that he was pretending to sleep because he wanted her gone as much as she wanted to be gone. The thought depressed her yet more. She pulled the door shut and almost ran the few steps to the cabin she shared with Timka.

  The little Min was curled in a tidy knot, producing her high-pitched, breathy snore. Skeen set her boots down carefully, then stripped again. She poured cold water into the basin, began scrubbing her body, teeth sunk into her lower lip to stifle her groans, yearning for a hot bath but making do with the washcloth and contortions. She was sore all over, her hide in worse shape man Pegwai’s. When it came to washing her pubic area, she took extra care, dabbing at herself, breath snuffing hard through her nostrils. Not going to use those parts until she healed a bit. She hadn’t hurt so much or felt such a nauseating mix of excitement and self-disgust since the time with her uncle. She still couldn’t believe how savage the thing had got, as if each woke in the other a beast that found pleasure in hurting and being hurt. I’m not like that, she told herself. I know plenty who are, but I am not. I never have been. She shuddered, then struggled to stop thinking while she did a few isometrics and some bends to work out the worst of the stiffness, repressing groans and gasps because she did not want to wake Timka and exhibit her battered carcass. She turned to the bed to get out a set of the spare underwear she’d had made by a seamstress in Oruda.

  Timka was awake, staring at her with appalled curiosity. When the little Min met Skeen’s eyes, her own went blank. She yawned and turned onto her side, pretending to sink back into sleep.

  Grateful for the diplomatic pretense, Skeen finished dressing and went out.

  Only the tip of the sun was up, slanting red light across the deck, sailors busy with rigging and wheel, moving through the long shadows like game pieces on a changing board. The deck passengers were wrapped in their blankets asleep, though here and there a man or a woman was crouched over a brazier, coaxing a tiny heap of coals alight. The smells of the countryside were heavy on the wind—fresh mown hay, damp earth, the acrid tang of urine, fugitive sweetness from unseen flowers, a blend of other odors, none of them identifiable. During the night they’d passed out of Tepa Vattak and were gliding down a broad river that looped in elaborate meanders through heavily settled farm country. Funor Ashon. She saw robed figures running the water wheels that dumped river water into irrigation ditches, others driving milk herds toward distant barns, more already at work in the fields, a few on the banks watching the ship move past.

  She was suddenly very hungry and sighed to think it would be another hour at least before breakfast was served. A glance at her ring chron verified that. She leaned against the rail and watched the water slide past. A nice little cuddle to chase away the jimjams, hah! She was appalled by the events of the night, didn’t want to think about them, name them, yet.… The intensity of the experience, the … she couldn’t call it pleasure, but what else was it? She loathed how it made her feel, how it took control of her, but.… It was like the time in her early twenties when she was kicking off the hold of pilpil; she knew what the drug did to her, she knew she was destroying herself by using it, she’d fought against being someone else’s slave, fought for control of her body, her life, and was losing all that to pilpil, yet there was in her a powerful urge to go back under, to regain that numbness when she felt nothing at all except a warm and gentle peace. She rubbed her thumb along a scratch on her neck, dipped her hand inside her tunic to smooth her fingers over the bruised flesh where his teeth had worried her breast. Last night’s pain/sex mix could turn out to be as addicting as pilpil and as debilitating. The warning sighs were there; she knew them too well to be fooled by her rationalizing mind. She closed her eyes and swore to herself never again, then cursed softly, remembering how many times in withdrawal she’d sworn that never again, and how many times she forgot the oath. An unhappy laugh and she went back to watching the water slide past. Not to worry, woman, Pegwai won’t come near you. Shit. If he was feeling anything like her, there went a friendship she was beginning to value. She scowled at the clear green water a
s the sounds of stirring increased behind her. The ship was waking. Have to work out some way of going on. We’re not children, far from it. With a little luck, maybe we can keep the friendship. A little luck, a little time. Smells of cooking drifted to her, her stomach growled. She sighed, glanced at her ring chron, and went below to breakfast.

  Day flowed into day with peaceful memory as the ship moved down the river. For a while Pegwai was uncomfortable when Skeen was around; he would not even look at her, but as the calm days slid past, they began warily working their way back to the friendship they’d shared before. For a while they avoided any circumstances that would present them with the temptation to explore again that kinship in pain at once so lethal and so unbearably intimate, then they began setting tests for each other and smiling at each other in righteous complicity when they withstood those self-imposed trials. One night there was apple brandy with the supper. The ship was tied up at one of the larger rivertowns, the last before they went into the canyon the river had cut through the mountains, and Pegwai bought a skin of homebrew from one of the new deckers and Skeen went with him to his cabin to share it and ended up sharing a good deal more before the night was out. Both woke with the clear knowledge that more of this meant one of them would quite likely kill the other. Pegwai had a broken rib, a deep gouge on his neck uncomfortably close to a carotid, Skeen had fingermarks on her neck and a memory of a black moment when she was sure she was dead. They helped each other clean up and went to sit on the bunk.

  “We’ve got no boundaries,” Skeen said.

  “No stopping points.” He reached over and ran his hand down her arm; she shuddered with fear and desire and groaned when he took his hand away. “It’s impossible,” he said. “I want … lifefire, Skeen, look at me, you’d think I’d be drained after.…”

  “I know, I know,” she whispered. “I’m a rag, but I’d start again, do everything again, even if it meant … Djabo, Peg, I don’t understand any of this. I don’t understand me, I’ve never.… I’m not like this. And you—you’re a kind, gentle … don’t shake your head, it’s true.”

  He sat pushing his hands down his thighs, pulling them back, pushing them down. “Skeen.…”

  “Peg?”

  “I … you … I’ve thought about you, I’ve thought … it’s like I wake in you the need to punish yourself for something I don’t … something that makes you feel less … less worthy than … than you should.” He looked past her at the gray light coming through the parchment window-cover. “It’s my fault. I tried to tell you, I should have let you … made you go when you offered to. It’s what I am Skeen. I walked the manfire and became a man in name, in deed was something else. I played the man with a girl or two my cousins, a night or two, much drunk, and with one … I woke on a morning like this, Skeen, gray light around me, gray in heart and soul. It’s the sin we don’t forgive. Hurting.… If my family knew … the girl didn’t guess what I did was … I left the Spray and came to the Tanul Lumat. Except for a few times when I went to Mallat’s women, when I couldn’t push … the need off any longer, I’ve lived a celibate life. It got easier as I got older, wasn’t ever all that hard to abstain. Sex for me, my friend, means a lot less than learning, and as I said, the older I got, the easier it was to …” sudden grin, “handle the urges. They stayed shut inside me. Women were like the reformed drunk’s full bottle of brandy, sealed and intact, a challenge and a reminder. Until you tempted me to drink. Lifefire, no! Forget that. No! You couldn’t know, I could have sent you away, not your fault. Help me, Skeen. Help. Me.”

  She drew her hand down the side of his face, tenderly along his shoulder, down his arm, closed her fingers about his wrist. “I love the feel of you, the taste of you, Mala Fortuna, Mala, Mala, why?” She lifted his arm, let it drop and pushed onto her feet. “Do you want to stop here, go back to the Lumat?”

  “I should … no!”

  “I suppose I shouldn’t be, but I am pleased. I’d miss you, Peg.” She sighed and started pulling on her clothes. “At least we’ve learned how stupid we can be. Maybe that will serve to keep us straight.”

  From the first day the Aggitj tetrad (who had insisted on traveling as deck passengers) made themselves useful about the ship, helping with the myriad small tasks that kept a sailing ship in prime condition, helping to load and off-load cargo when they stopped at open towns along the river. They were friendly, easy-going; they liked to keep busy, were as willing to listen to wild tales as they were to tell their own. And they were the most unaggressive young men Skeen had seen in all her travels. They never quarreled and smoothed over quarrels among other men with a supple skill more instinctive than learned. Not dull-witted or slow in any real sense, they were inclined to drift rather than plan, had little interest in the why or how of things. They were curious about other lives because it amused them to listen, but they seldom bothered probing beneath the surface. In Skeen’s experience such mild and amiable youths would have been victims a hundred times over, but the Balayar sailors gave friendliness in return for friendliness and always treated the boys with respect, even the worst-tempered among them. As did the deck passengers, and the other cabin passengers, one of them a perpetually angry Chalarosh.

  As the ship moved into the canyon, Skeen stood leaning on the rail of the quarterdeck looking down at the swarm on the deck, watching a game of bones and tiles. Hal and Hart were playing a pair of deck passengers, Ders and Domi kneeling behind them. Skeen glanced at the Captain, snapped thumb against finger. “I’ve watched that game a dozen times, a dozen different combinations of players, some bold and fancy cheating, but no one ever cheats the Aggitj.”

  “You don’t know much about Extras.”

  “True.”

  “Obviously you haven’t hurt or cheated an Aggitj.”

  “What? They’re nice boys. I like them.”

  “Oh I agree. Speaks well of you.” He smiled at her, his teeth very white in his handsome sunburnt face. “This is how it goes. Anyone can cheat an Aggitj once; like you said, they’re nice boys, they’re all nice boys, slow to believe someone is doing what it seems obvious he is doing. Try it twice, his heart is roasting over a fire, the Aggitj have themselves a feast. That’s when they stop being nice. You might have noticed, they don’t have much imagination. Got just the one penalty—two coppers, twenty gold, all the same. Not so nice.”

  Skeen looked at the animated faces below, shook her head. “No, I don’t know much about Extras.”

  Timka was a center of disturbance among the male passengers and the crew for the first two days on the river, then she moved her body and bags into the Captain’s quarters. She took the bag of gold with her; she couldn’t be as casual about it as Skeen. The Captain’s cabin had a door that locked.

  Day flowed into day, the river meandered eventually into a winding canyon that took them through a mountain range and out into another broad plain. They left Funor Ashon cities behind as they left the Ashon savannahs and the river wandered now among the Skirrik domes, great gray humps like wasps’ nests surrounded by gardens and fields that merged into complex growths of vegetable and flower, some of the blooms larger than a man’s head. Skeen stood at the rail and enjoyed the living tapestry spread out before her. Impossible to tell which plants were ornaments and which were food, or where the thready streams ended and the land began. The chitinous forms of the Skirrik swarmed through these fields and like the exotic plants they grew, seemed to have pushed all native life far from the river. No Min about, at least, none she could identify. She thought of asking Timka but the Min spent most of her time in the Captain’s quarters, especially since Skirrik started coming on board. The Meyeberri slipped along, stopping at the domed settlements, loading, off-loading, staying a few hours, starting on again, until they came to a collection of domes a dozen times larger than the others. When they were tied to the wharf, the Captain came out and announced they were staying for three days. The deck passengers would have to go ashore and find accommodation there, but s
hould be back on board by dawn three days hence.

  “As cabin passengers you and Pegwai are free to stay aboard,” the Captain told Skeen, “but you might be more comfortable in one of the Wayfarer’s Domes. Timka will stay with me.”

  Pegwai and Skeen wandered through the crowded spaces between the Nests. Small black Skirrik darted everywhere, the size of large dogs; their constant chatter made an ache in Skeen’s head though she could hear very little of it.

  “Neuters,” Pegwai said. “Do most of the scut work. Not very intelligent, but lots of energy.”

  A huge old male, his carapace glittering with jet, its greenish brown darkened to old bronze, sat in one of the larger commons, playing an intricate stringed instrument, using three of his forelimbs to produce a strong rhythmic music that served as background to the words he declaimed. Off to one side four young females were ignoring his words but dancing to the music. A fifth was tapping against her chitin and improvising a pattersong that had the dancers and the youngsters (a mix of male and female) gathered about them giggling and clicking their grippers in appreciation. Pegwai led Skeen through a market where a thin scatter of Balayar and Chalarosh mixed with the Skirrik and did their bargaining in Trade-Min. He ambled along at Skeen’s side, amused by her fascination with everything around her, particularly some free-form wood sculptures whose tight grain had been rubbed and waxed until it had a wonderful luster. “They grow those,” he said, “not a touch of a chisel anywhere.”

  “I know two men and a sinalure, any one of them would pay the price of Terwel’s ship for that. Djabo! To see all this and take nothing away.…”

  “Dissarahnet is a Skirrik scholar at the Lumat. A good friend. I talked to her about finding Ykx. No, no, she won’t chatter. Not outside the Lumat, and what’s so secret about a Scholar hunting Ykx? Her bodymother is one of the High Mothers in the Nests here at Istryamozhe. If Ramanarrahnet chooses to listen to her daughter, she can give us an introduction into Atsila Vana that will make a large difference in how we are received.”