A glorious vision, a jewel set within the perfumed glitter of her chiming, wafting attendants, she turned from me and the curtains fell back.
* * * *
My parents saw to it that I was provided with tutors to teach me things I was no longer interested in learning, and priests to remind me of the doings of Gods in whom I was certain that I no longer believed. Visits were also arranged from acquaintances and relatives, and reports required of them and me. I was given a pet parrot to keep me entertained—which soon flew out of a window to reappear a few days later as a sprawl of rainbow feathers in the frost. But, more than ever, there was no human company I was prepared to tolerate beyond my own.
It did occasionally strike me that the scene that my progress made through the house and grounds was rather extraordinary, even if it is something that you, reader, will regularly see passing beneath your window if you live in a city. But, with little else to occupy my thoughts, I was intrigued by the complexity and variety of the process by which the hob retinues bore my newly disabled self along. As our house was as rich in mirrors as our garden was in ponds, I was even able to study the strange manner of my progress as if I was watching someone else. There was the simple half-crouch, wherein two or three hobs would position themselves almost as if they were sitting as we humans do. I would recline on the silks and cushions that they had arranged upon their bodies, whilst four or six other hobs beneath that top layer would contort their backs in a variety of postures to provide the necessary motive power and support. For stairs and slopes, there was the position that I called the rolling back, during which a dozen or so hobs, more if necessary, would lay themselves face-upward across the ascent, and push the rolling knot of upper hobs which still actually supported me up or down. Then there was hands over arms for the steeper ascents as the hobs formed something like a stairway of limbs, and, most strange of all, what I thought of as the hob carpet in which, once I had signed that I was weary of being seated and wanted to stretch my still-functioning limbs, my tumbling, ever-changing retinue would briefly contrive to convey me upright as though I were walking, yet still supporting my splinted leg as if it were not broken at all.
Here I was, riding about every day on my writhing throne of hob flesh, and also submitting to the sort of attentions that are otherwise usually reserved for infants, the elderly, the lazy, or the infirm. There is, it has to be admitted, a smoothly addictive quality to reaching toward something that lies beyond the span of your arms, only to find a moment later that you are actually holding it. It does not take much further effort, I can well imagine, to enjoy having your food chewed and every other conceivable outward process of your body performed on your behalf.
My bathroom lay along a corridor adjoining my suite of rooms. Each morning, I was lifted from my bed by the gentle touch of dozens of hands. Still supine and still half-asleep, I had leisure to see aspects of my surroundings that I had never previously noticed. Gazing up, I saw now how the long, high ceiling was marvellously arched, and spangled with fragments of polished stone. The bathroom itself was a larger room, its great heights dripping with candelabra that, in the dark of those winter mornings, glowed with thousands of candles freshly lit by an invisible army of hobs. This light played on tiles and marbles and filigree embrasures; it shone across the dreams of some long-dead architect rendered material by the labors of hobs even longer gone. It's a scene, reader, which I imagine you can probably picture from your own abode. In fact, you may well scoff at the plainness of my description, for if there is one thing we humans are good at creating, it's structures that involve the near-endless labor of hands other than our own. My bath itself was a simple affair, consisting of nothing more than a deep, steaming lake of white marble. The same hands and arms that had borne me from my bed now subtly divested me of my nightclothes and laid me afloat amid islands of rose petals and scented candles. They somehow even managed to support and keep dry my splinted left leg.
All in all, it was an untroublesome way to start the day. Often enough as I drifted back toward easy sleep and the continuation of my dreams, it was barely a start at all. Inevitably, being male and of the age I was, these half-sleeps had a certain effect upon my anatomy. When I fully awoke, I would find that my member was rigid. That solitary winter, cradled by hands and steam, I discovered the means of dealing with this state.
I felt no particular shame as the signs of my morning's activities were washed away by the subtle hands that supported me. But I did feel an odd sense of curiosity. Sexual activity, even of this simplest sort, is peculiar in that way; I found myself wondering if this one thing could be done, why not others. Not, I have to say, that I was particularly experimental, but I soon discovered that I enjoyed the way the hands which supported me touched other aspects of my body as I reached the height of my satisfaction. Soon, I was commanding the hands to do this or that. In truth, once a small moment of initial resistance had passed, they required little encouragement.
The snows came rolling down from the mountains on dense banks of cloud that seemed far too dark to be capable of containing anything so miraculously white. Slowly, my leg healed. My cast was removed at the physician's directions and replaced by a light splint. I was encouraged to bathe. And, in each of those many baths, the contortions that I demanded of my retinue of hob flesh became more elaborate. Soon, the use of my own hand to pleasure myself became redundant, and I made use of a twisting, ever-changing array of hob vaginas, hob breasts, hob mouths, and hob anuses. Then the water itself became an annoyance. By now, I was capable of walking, but I often chose instead to transport myself naked amid a writhing orgy. I tumbled though the echoing corridors and staterooms of my homestead amid a many-limbed,-backed and-buttocked fist of mingled hob and human flesh.
* * * *
The snows abated, the canals brimmed and the Great North Water roared with meltwater beneath the battlements. I was able to walk unaided and without a stick by the time my family retinue returned, but, looking down at the flotilla of craft as it moved and flashed upstream in the bright spring Sun, I saw the flutter of black flags and heard the trumpets of mourning.
My mother greeted me a day or two later in the chapel she had established within her quarters at the house. A dark grotto had been created within one of the great halls, set about with huge stones and ferns and moss to signify the entrance to the underworld. A waterfall hissed, and many diamonds were scattered across the flower-bedecked turf that had been laid across the usual tiles, in echo of tears she was supposed to have shed.
“Well,” she said, looking me up and down as I entered this odd place to greet her. Dappled light played. She looked magnificent in black. “I am pleased to note that at least some of our prayers and sacrifices have been answered in this time of great loss.” She gave a small sigh. Her retinue of hobs wailed and beat their bloodied torsos with flails. “Although I believe that the Gods were right to call your father when they did. In fact, I almost wish they'd done so sooner. He'd become weak and lazy long before the fever that struck him. It's up to you now, my darling, to be the man he once was.”
* * * *
My father's body processed upriver in the great boat of his funerary bed through Dhiol and beyond the forests of Severland toward our family tombs in the Roof of the World once the embalmers had finished their work. We disembarked onto a carved obsidian platform that traversed the polished face of a great glacier on a complex system of ropes. The great mountains were all around us now, and I longed for quiet to contemplate the frailty of life and the vastness of eternity—but I still couldn't help but notice odd and irrelevant things. How, for example, the teams of hobs who worked all these pulleys wore scarcely any more clothing in this frozen land than their compatriots did in the lowlands, while we humans shivered in furs.
Our passage into the final chamber that my father had spent many years constructing was lit by clever arrangements of ice and mirrors. Carved here were scenes from his life reproduced with a scale and a grandeur that alread
y placed him amid the Gods. My mother and I stepped back from his gold sarcophagus. The priests were retreating, and the final doors were already closing off the light. We were not just leaving my father behind, but enough supplies to ensure that he did not go lacking in the afterlife. In fact, a worrying amount of our family possessions lay strewn around us. Great trees under whose shade I had once studied had been uprooted and placed within huge pots. There were whole libraries of scrolls, and paintings and statues and chairs and rugs, not to mention a veritable farmyard of animals, whose soundings and smellings the priests did their best to combat with their clamor and incense. Inevitably, amid all the wealth that my father would bring to the underworld, there were also dozens of hobs. They, though, sat in a quiet huddle. The panic, I supposed, would come later as they began to realize that the labors of others of their kind had not only sealed off all light from this tomb, but also air.
“Well,” my mother sighed as we stood outside again once all the doors had slammed shut and the splendid white of the mountains gleamed around us, “that's half a fortune gone.”
* * * *
Although I worked hard as a merchant, I realize now that my heart was always elsewhere, although exactly where still remains in doubt. I certainly enjoyed the sights and the journeyings. I liked meeting people from other lands, and finding out about how they lived their lives. But the stuff of actually doing business with them, of starting at one price and working around to another after many hours or days of mock outrage and subterfuge, left me bored. These were also seasons of unexpected rains, bad harvests and broken bridges, when the rich became cautious, and the merely well off decided they weren't so well off after all.
It came as no surprise when my mother broached the subject of marriage. In every way, it was sensible for us to make alliance with another family of similar means to our own. By any standards, though, Kinbel was a great catch. A daughter of the priesthood, she was so exquisitely educated as to make my own knowledge seem half-made. Her eyes were amber. Her skin was like polished jet. She moved with the grace of a statue come to life. Above all, though, she brought fresh money and influence. In retrospect, I realize that, beneath all her layers of accomplishment, Kinbel was something of an innocent, but, in the few words and glances that she and I were allowed to exchange before the ceremonies of our wedding began, I found it hard to see beyond her outer perfection.
Being a union in which the priests were more than ever involved, the gutters that had been laid for that special purpose in the gardens of our homestead ran red with blood for days. It's a rarely noticed truth that, with the possible exception of whories, priests are alone amongst us humans in doing anything resembling real physical work. There's certainly no doubt that the removal of an entire hob skin in one untorn piece, leaving only the hands and feet remaining on the shuddering carcass like shoes and gloves, is a feat of manual skill so great that one might almost call it hobbish. Granted, though, that the labor of many other hobs was then required to smooth out and stitch this gathering mass, while still warm and dripping, into one vast sheet, which was then folded over and tented in such a way as to create a roof and floor—indeed a carpet—of hob flesh.
The drumming and the ululations reached new heights as Kinbel and I finally descended the offal-strew steps from our separate thrones so that we might complete our tryst inside the weird structure that had been created for us below. A flap, which seemed to be made entirely of eyelessly peering hob faces, was pulled back. Kinbel and I then found ourselves standing together—but, inevitably, not alone—inside a rank cave.
I remember thinking, as Kinbel was finally divested of all her raiments, that, with her upturned breasts and sculpted thighs, she really was too beautiful to be real. I even remember staring at her perfect feet in the bloodied, pinkish light, and admiring the pearly sheen of her toenails. I was naked by now myself, but I had, as so often happens, become over-absorbed in odd abstractions. When I finally tried to meet her gaze, I saw that she was looking down toward my flaccid penis. I imagine that she had been told that such small obstacles were to be expected on a day of such magnitude, and a murmur of anticipation and delight went up amid the watching priests as she stepped forward, twined her arms around me, and pressed her mouth against my own.
What was suddenly the most important part of my body still remained ignorantly unresponsive. Sex had ceased to interest me in the years since my early solitary experiments, and I found it still left me disinterested now. But Kinbel was persistent. She drew me back and down until more and more of my body was in contact with the carpet of flayed flesh, which was inlaid as if by jewels with bits of hob ear, hob nipple, and hob nose. Now, as Kinbel reached out to me and the priests cried out and clattered their bells, my member finally responded, and the necessary work was soon done.
* * * *
It was thus in a spirit of genuine optimism that I entered married life. Kinbel was, I kept telling myself, all and more than I could have hoped for. We took informal solitary walks with no more than a few dozen hobs as our retinue. We even ate in the same room. People commented on how she and I made a fine couple in the statues that were being carved as a prelude to the commencement of work on our tombs. It was hard not to enjoy her presence; how she moved, the dark, sweet sound of her voice. Although my mother was avoiding these colder climes and spending more and more of her time in the warmer south, Kinbel charmed even her.
If Kinbel and I had differences, they manifested themselves at first in the way that she would protest about statements I made against things being merely the work of the Gods. I could scarcely credit that someone so obviously intelligent could imagine that the Sun had to be persuaded to rise through a thousand daily sacrifices on the steps of the great temple at Ulan Dor, or that there was meaning to be drawn from a random spill of intestines, or the shapes of the clouds.
But in the background lay a different problem. One which struck me at first as vanishingly small. As small, in fact, as my penis which, since its efforts during our marriage ceremony, had shrunk back into flaccid reticence and stubbornly refused to perform. Our marriage bed was a vast thing, cushioned and canopied on a scale more than large enough to allow both of us to lose each other and a hundred others in untroubled sleep, but Kinbel returned to me night after night across its soft landscapes with small entreaties, then more and more extravagant seductions, all of which, although I was able to appreciate their invention and aesthetic merit, left a crucial part of me cold.
“Why is it...” she asked finally, kneeling before me in the lamplit smog of incense and chimes that she had created on that particular night, her ebony body emblazoned with curlicues of gold, “...why is it that you could do this thing so easily on the evening of our marriage, and yet never since? Would it help, for example, if I summoned your mother to watch again?”
“My mother would scarcely thank you for such an invitation, Kinbel,” I muttered, still feigning half-sleep underneath a landslide of pillows.
“Then perhaps the prayers of the priests of my father's sphere do not reach us as easily here as they might. We could arrange for some acolytes to place themselves in the higher reaches of this bed.”
That was too much. I sat up. “Does it matter so very much? Is this a question of offspring, or pure inheritance—”
“Inheritance!” She barked a laugh so ferocious that I drew back. “Is that what you think this is about? Can't a man and a woman do that for which the Gods made them in their own marriage bed out of nothing more than sheer affection and joy?”
Affection. Joy. Even spoken in her delicious voice, the human words sounded odd. “If it's the mere act you want, Kinbel,” I suggested, “couldn't you visit one of the houses that I believe have discreet doorways in the west of Dhiol?”
Now she was silent. Her eyes were shining. For the first time in my life, it struck me that human females are perhaps more different from the male than the small variations of our anatomy imply.
“Wouldn't that deal wit
h the problem, and perhaps even furnish the heir that you appear to desire?” I continued. “Believe me, Kinbel, no one would rejoice more than I if—”
“You don't understand. All I want to know from you is, is ... what is it that I have to do to persuade you to make love?” A tear joined with the gilded swirls on Kinbel's left breast. “I've tried dressing and undressing,” she muttered. “I've tried dancing and not dancing. Do you want me here? Or in this place instead? Even that, I really would not mind. Nor this. Whatever you want of me I would enjoy. Nothing would bother me as much as ... this nothing at all. Or would you like me to summon some other priestesses to join in our couplings as well? Or priests? Perhaps a pack of the sacred dogs? You even mentioned, I recall, a parrot that you were briefly fond of. I'm not sure how such congress might be arranged, and I've certainly put on and taken off enough feathers, but if you really think—”
“Enough! Enough!” By now I was covering my ears. I was shuddering like a flayed hob.
Instead of turning away from me and shifting across to her own encampment in this land of cushion and silks, Kinbel drew closer. And she did a strange thing. She placed her naked hand across my own. “There must be something of this world that you desire beyond mere ideas. There must be something, and I'd like to help find it, no matter what it is. We could pray. We could call for sacrifices. We could sport ourselves naked in the purest snow. For all I care—and happily I would do this—we could frolic with the rats in the sewers. After all, there was that one time at the ceremonies of our betrothal, when seemingly the task was most difficult. And yet you managed.” She gave a softer laugh. “I'm starting to talk like you, as if this were a terrible task, some difficult matter of enormous work...”
Her voice was trailing off now, and the pressure of her hand was loosening against my own. I knew that if I did not speak now, I never would. “There is something,” I croaked. “Or there was. Once...”
Asimov's SF, June 2008 Page 17