Fierce Enchantments

by Janine Ashbless

  When they’ve all had her in every orifice, Hayes directs them to hold her face up, at thigh level. He straddles her chest, presses her aching, burning breasts together, and ruts along the sweat-slippery cleft between, his purplish cockhead aimed at her lips. When he comes he lets fly all over her throat and face and tits.

  The others take their turn after that to ejaculate on her breasts. Fists blur, pumping. Balls clench. Semen spurts and flies and slops. They cover the lammergeier tattoo in their pale cum, until she finds herself kneeling in the center of the circle with jizz running down her breasts and dripping on her pubic mound and spread thighs. Their hairy, muscular legs are like pillars surrounding her. The smell of sweat and sex in this enclosed space is almost suffocating. She runs her fingers through the mess of semen, smearing it over her sore nipples, rubbing it into the lammergeier tattoo, then catching it up and sucking it greedily from her fingers, looking up at them as she does so.

  The mingling taste of them is harsh and salty. She knows it is a taste that will be hers, and hers alone, for the rest of her life.

  —YES YES FUCKING YES EAT IT ME US

  —ALIVE WE LIVE THIS TIME THIS TIME ONE MORE TIME

  —GOOD GIRL OH YOU GOOD GIRL

  —OH YOU BEAUTIFUL BEAUTIFUL DIRTY WHORE NOTHING BETTER NOTHING

  —OURS OURS OURS NOW FOREVER OURS WE OWN YOU WE PROTECT YOU WE LOVE YOU WE NEED YOU OURS OURS

  She is their fuck-doll and their lifeline. Their sex-slave and their guardian angel. She is theirs.

  Their Pslider.

  A Man’s Best Friend

  The dog liked him on sight.

  That in itself was a surprise; Xhai was used to village dogs running out to challenge him aggressively as he walked by, which was why he carried a staff. When he heard the clop of horse hooves on the stony path behind him, he turned to see a girl on one of those thickset ponies they had round there, and two herd dogs trotting alongside with their curled tails arched high over their backs. There was no man with her, but the women of the Dog People were notoriously independent. She was riding, for a start, rather than sitting in a litter as a woman of any pretensions to respectability ought to do.

  But then, Xhai was a long way from the Imperial Court now, and a long way from any aspirations to respectability himself. His garb was faded from months of travel, and his boots worn down at the heels. It was not just village dogs who had taken to eyeing him suspiciously.

  Xhai stepped well off the path, partly to demonstrate that he had no hostile intent, partly so that he’d have a good defensive stance if the hounds decided to go for him. The young woman rode on, one hand on her hip. He was careful not to stare, but he couldn’t help seeing that she was young, and that her blue jacket had slipped to reveal the sweep of one bare shoulder.

  It’d be unthinkable anywhere else in the Empire, he told himself, smiling inwardly as he watched the two hounds run forward. But here in the hinterlands of the Dog People, women breastfed their babes on the street and did their laundry stripped to the waist in the rivers, while men only looked on and grinned.

  One of the dogs looked away from him and trotted on down the path. But the other did something he did not expect: it started to wag its tail furiously, its backside waving too in its enthusiasm, and then it scampered up the bank with tongue lolling and bowed before him, before jumping around as if greeting an old friend. As it dunted his hand with its head, begging for a caress, Xhai glanced up at the woman on the horse.

  He only meant it to be a friendly, reassuring smile that he gave her, but it turned into something else. She was looking down at her hound, lips parted, with an expression of surprise. Her long hair was blue-black in the sunlight and the skin of her shoulder was as soft and golden as a peach. He’d been wrong in his estimate of her age; she had a maiden’s figure but an adult’s face, lively and full of character.

  Xhai’s smile grew warmer, without his meaning it to.

  She met his gaze and instinctively smiled back, before looking away, abashed. The exchange took only a moment—and then she was riding on past, whistling for her dog, her face a little flushed. The animal licked Xhai’s hand furiously, turned after its mistress, stopped to look back, ran in a small circle, and then followed on. As Xhai watched the trio disappear down the path, he saw that dog stop several times and look back up at him, as if in longing.

  It wasn’t the only one smitten. Xhai stood without moving for some time, rather shocked. Warmth tingled through his whole body, and her smile seemed painted on his memory. Her pleasure, so quickly hidden, at his gaze—it was like a glimpse of something private and precious, more erotic than the exposed shoulder. His stones felt heavy. One look at that passing herdswoman and life had surged into his cock.

  He hadn’t reacted in that way to a woman in months … no: years, he noted ruefully. He wasn’t a youth any longer, to fall in love with a pretty face at a moment’s notice. And he hadn’t felt lust, real lust, since …

  Since the Battle of the Red River. Since Liwan died.

  Xhai shook himself from his stupor. This was no time to fall into reverie; he was nearly at the town of Three Cranes. Nearly there. Soon he could rest, and find something to eat. Soon he would have reached his goal of his three months’ journey.

  He couldn’t imagine what would happen after that. It was like a great black fogbank across his mind.

  ♦♦♦

  He picked his way down off the hill-path into the dusty town by the river ford. You could tell, he thought, that it was a town built by nomads. Half the houses were nothing more than round felt yurts. The rest of the buildings were wooden and ramshackle; it looked as if you might wake up in the morning and find the whole thing gone. But the market was extensive and lively. Dog People in their blue silk jackets predominated, but there were people from every corner of the vast Empire, and even a smattering of yellow-garbed imperial soldiers.

  Xhai turned away from those, not wanting to see. It was not so long since he had worn imperial yellow, and the memories made his stomach clench.

  He bought pork dumplings on a street stall, washed them down with tea that the vendor had adulterated foully with milk, in the local style, and went looking for an old woman. Among the Dog People, he knew, the men were warriors and herders, but all the animals and the tents and everything the family possessed were passed down the female line. A man married into his wife’s family—and then spent the rest of his life trying to keep out of his mother-in-law’s way, Liwan had told him, laughing. It was the women who would know where to find the family he was looking for.

  Xhai went to the food market, and among the women who bustled back and forth buying and selling, found an elder with a twinkly eye who seemed both impressed by his ability to speak her language and much amused by how tall he was. After he had bowed to her and called her Grandmother in the polite manner, and accepted another tiny cup of the rancid tea, he broached the subject of his quest.

  “I’m looking for the tents of the family Ghan. Do you know where they are this season?”

  The old woman squeezed his thigh in an alarmingly familiar manner. “They are out of town, up in the hills. Why are you looking for them, Easterner?”

  “I have a message to deliver, from a friend.”

  “You’ve come a long way to deliver a message.”

  He did not rise to the question. “I have, Grandmother.”

  “Well, you are in luck. See over there, by the crate of ducks? The woman with the blue hairsticks and the red boots? That is Ghan Tsulin. She will be able to show you the way.”

  Oh gods.

  It was the woman from the footpath. Xhai recognized her the moment he looked, and every muscle in his chest seemed to spasm.

  He had no idea what it meant, to have seen her without knowing. To have looked upon her and felt … As if he knew. As if somehow, he knew.

  “Are you feeling well, Eastern
er?” The old woman stared up at him, frowning. “You look terrible.”

  He made his excuses and stumbled through thanks. Then he set off toward Ghan Tsulin, who was haggling over a trio of green apricots. He stopped behind her, well out of reach. He’d been half-a-head taller than Liwan, who was not short by the standards of his tribe, and he positively loomed over women of the Dog People. Scabbarded over his back, too, was a sword. He didn’t want to seem threatening; that could easily start a riot here, where they were surrounded by her tribal kin. And then he’d have to use the sword.

  “Ghan Tsulin.”

  She turned, looked up at him with widening eyes, and then glanced about her sharply. Xhai realized she was looking for her dogs, but they weren’t around.

  “I have a message for you. I …” All his rehearsed words had deserted him. “I’ve walked from the Imperial Capital to tell you.”

  “Who are you?” she asked, one fist moving to her hip, staring up at him boldly with none of the shyness of civilized women. She had tiny freckles all across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose, he saw. Freckles were considered a terrible flaw in Court circles. He didn’t understand why he was noticing this. His eyes seemed to be disconnected from the clenching pain in his gut, as if they belonged to someone else entirely.

  “My name is Lin Xhai.” His voice sounded like sliding shale. “I knew your husband, Ghan Liwan.”

  She understood. She saw it in his face, and he watched the comprehension dawn in her expression in turn. It was like seeing someone fall from a high cliff; down and down and down.

  ♦♦♦

  The yurts of the Ghan family were nestled in the grassy foothills north of Three Cranes. There were dogs roaming loose all round the felt huts and, accompanied by a youth with wispy mustache riding a pony, they ran out to greet the woman on horseback and the walking man. While Tsulin conferred with the boy, Xhai eyed the dogs. Some stood well back, barking at him. Others came close, nosing him eagerly.

  “Strange,” said Tsulin as the youth rode off to the yurts. She hadn’t wept as they traveled home, not a single tear, but her face looked haggard nonetheless.

  “What?”

  “This one, Snowgoose, she knew my husband,” she said, pointing at the bitch that’d accompanied her into town and been so friendly to him. “And this one, this one; all of these. Those”—she pointed at the barking dogs—“are all too young to remember him. It’s like some of them know you.”

  Perhaps they smell Liwan on my clothes, he thought, but didn’t answer.

  By the time they reached the center of the encampment, men were emerging to meet them. Men only. There were no women or children in sight. Xhai thought this an ugly sign, but suddenly an older woman stepped out of a yurt and came forward, shaking her head sadly.

  Tsulin introduced him to her mother, and then to her brothers and brothers-in-law. Everyone looked sombre, but there were no passionate displays of grief. Of course, Liwan would not have been related by blood to any of these people, who were his wife’s kin, and it must have been years since they last saw him.

  Xhai could follow only some of the conversation, which took place in the Dog People language and ran too fast.

  Finally Tsulin turned to him. “You bring news of a death,” she told him. “So you must be cleansed. Follow Felung.” She walked away into a nearby hut, alone.

  Xhai considered it politic to obey.

  The boy with the wispy upper lip took him into a sweat-tent made of skins. The two men spent the next hour or so in the suffocating steamy gloom there, naked around a low fire and a brazier of hot stones, which Felung tended with charcoal and ladles of water. Xhai felt no desire to converse; it was almost too much effort to breathe. He shut his eyes and listened to the hiss of steam and felt the sweat rolling down his skin like tears. Finally, when it felt like his head would burst with heat and that he was close to passing out, the flap was lifted and the two of them were released. Felung led the way. Naked, he walked out onto the trodden grass and knelt. Instantly several men poured water over him.

  Forewarned, Xhai didn’t yell when it was his turn for bucketfuls of what felt like ice-water to drench him from head to toe. It was in fact almost pleasant, once he’d got over the shock, to be relieved of the heat and the stickiness. His skin tingled. He crouched with head bowed as they sluiced him clean, his long hair hanging like a black curtain, watching the water soak into the grass and vanish. The earth eats us all, he thought, sooner or later.

  Then a pair of red boots moved into his field of view. Startled, he looked up. Tsulin stood before him, a heap of folded clothes in her hands, her face masklike. She was wearing coarse white cotton herself now: the color of mourning.

  “Those aren’t my clothes,” Xhai said, grasping for words and coming up with the first thing that seemed safe. He greatly disliked being seen by her like this—naked, kneeling, his scars visible. He had to remind himself that the Dog People had fewer reservations about showing their bodies.

  “We burnt those,” she said, holding out the bundle.

  Xhai bit back a protest. One-handed, he took the clothes from her, while his other hand shielded his crotch. He was ashamed that her presence had given him an awkward, unwieldy erection, and was glad when she walked away. Clumsily, still damp, he managed to drag enough clothes on to make himself decent. Dog People clothes. It was only as he stood up properly and surveyed his ankles—the trousers were loose, to his relief, but too short in the leg—that it occurred to him that they were probably Liwan’s old clothes he’d been loaned. His heart gave a lurch.

  Felung had vanished. The old woman was nowhere in sight. Tsulin was waiting, sitting by the round wall of her yurt. He had nowhere else to go to, so he strode across the dusty grass toward her. All around, men were taking down walls of felt and loading struts onto carts.

  “What’s happening?” he asked Tsulin, as he reached her. The only structures that weren’t being dismantled were, it seemed, the sweat-tent he’d come out of and this yurt where Tsulin waited.

  “They are moving camp down the valley. They won’t go far … but I am a widow now. I cannot live with them. For a year.”

  “What?”

  “I’m unclean. I must not come into contact with any child, or any woman of childbearing age. I cannot go into the city.” She tilted her head, sounded resigned. “Don’t worry. The men will bring me food.”

  He was appalled. How could she be safe, living on her own without her family around her? For a moment he wanted to express his anger, but then he reprimanded himself. Dog People ways weren’t like the ways of the rest of men. Liwan had taught him that.

  “I … have something to give you,” he said, discomfort making him gruff. “Did you burn my backpack too?”

  She shook her head, pulling a shape with her mouth that might in better days have been a smile. Rising, she led him round to the door of the yurt. Snowgoose padded along behind them.

  Inside, the room was dim and a little stuffy. The floor was heaped with carpets, the walls a lattice of wooden struts supporting the felt. There were heaps of belongings piled randomly about the room, as if someone had just moved in. One of those heaps was Xhai’s backpack, his sword laid on top. He unsheathed it just to check that no fool herder had used the watered steel to chop logs while he wasn’t looking, but it was undamaged.

  He emptied the pack slowly. After three months, most of his spare clothes were so rank that he wanted to burn them himself. But worth preserving were three separately-wrapped bundles. One was flat and hard, and he laid it aside. It twanged faintly.

  “What is that?” asked Tsulin, standing at his shoulder.

  “My guqin,” he said, uneasily. Just the sight of that shape made him queasy. He wondered, for the hundredth time, why he hadn’t left it behind at the Imperial Palace. “A lap-harp.”

  “You are a musician?”

  “I’m �
� I’m the Emperor’s own bard.” The words sounded awkward in his mouth. “It’s my task to write songs about His Imperial Majesty’s victories in the field of battle.”

  She snorted, very faintly. “And how did such an important man come to know a soldier of the Dog People?”

  He chose not to take offence. “I heard him singing, while we were encamped. I stopped to listen, and I asked him to teach me more Dog People songs, and then your language.”

  She shook her head, eyes flashing mild disbelief. “He was no great singer!”

  “It wasn’t the purity of his voice that mattered.” Xhai chewed his lip. “When the Emperor saw us together, he appointed Liwan to be my bodyguard.” And I thought that he would be safer in the royal entourage than as a lowly cavalryman. That had turned out to be a vain hope.

  “So. Did you write a song for my husband, when he fell?”

  The words cut. Xhai felt his mouth fill with blood. He shook his head, not looking at her.

  “Why not?”

  “The words would not come. This … this is for you.”

  The second bundle was spherical, wrapped in several layers of cloth and tied with string. She knew what it was: she took it from his hands reverently and knelt on the rugs, setting it before her. Xhai moved to kneel facing her, across the bundle, and instantly Snowgoose came over and lay at his side, dropping her nose on her paws with a sigh.

  Tsulin’s hands were deft and tender, loosening the knots.

  Inside the outer burlap nested layer upon layer of silk, brightly colored and embroidered. The quality of the needlework was extraordinary; the best the Imperial Palace could furnish. Red for a warrior, green for the Earth, blue for Heaven, yellow for the Emperor. The innermost layer was white for death, embroidered with the symbols of immortality. Inside that was a small cremation jar, about the size of Xhai’s two fists.

  “Oh,” said Tsulin softly. Xhai watched her narrow hands cup the blue ceramic, and had a sudden overwhelming desire to see those hands on his bare thighs. The dissonance made him shudder. He looked away, blinking; when he looked back she had the jar open.