Текст книги "The Last Hour of Gann"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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“Fourteen and didn’t know about fucking,” marveled Iziz. “How was it?”

“It didn’t feel right.”

“Noble Sheulek in training that you were.”

“Piss on that. It felt great, just didn’t feel right. It was that itch all over again, only six times worse. He was screaming and thrashing around worse than he’d done when I was beating on him, and all I could think was that this was close to whatever it was I needed and if I could just get there, everything would stop burning. Fucking helped, so fucking harder ought to help more, and that was what I did, without another thought in my head, until they pulled me off him. I don’t even know who. I fought, but whoever it was got me in a choke and when I woke up, the itch was gone and I was in the cell.”

“Cell? Did you kill him?”

“No. He was even at the tribunal, although he had to sit in a special litter and his face was mashed out of knowing.”

“Tribunal?” Iziz laughed, but quizzically, as if he suspected Zhuqa were having him on. “For throwing a poke into some bullying sprat?”

“No, for throwing a poke into some high-born bullying sprat after I’d beaten him into paste. They had it posted on the gate before the hour was out and they were ringing it to order at sunset.”

“Was that what you…?”

“No.” Zhuqa finished off the root and beckoned Amber back to him. Once she was again uncomfortably straddling his thigh, he went on. “No, that wasn’t what they had me for, although that might have been cause enough if they’d found anything in him. Fortunately, I hadn’t cum yet, so in the end, they let me go. I took a public whipping the next morning and I never heard another word about it, except I know they must have sent a message to my father because when I went home for the cold season, I found the little poke my father kept to scrub the floors waiting in my room without a stitch sewn on her.”

“Pretty?” asked Iziz, perking up.

“If you like the sort.” Zhuqa’s hand drifted over Amber’s belly and lightly rubbed. “A little too grey yet for my taste and her eyes were sloped funny, but Gann knows I could sell her here for more coin than I could easily hold. She put her hand on my slit and out came my cock and before the hour turned, I knew indisputably that God looked down from His heaven and loved me.”

“How many times?” asked Iziz. He was watching Zhuqa rub Amber’s stomach with sleepy, slightly glazed eyes.

“Twice.”

“Twice? You fucking waste of meat! Talk to me about God in His heaven when it’s ten times a poke! I fucked my mother more than twice a night!”

“Three is the sacred number of creation and belongs to God alone, you ignorant heathen.” Zhuqa’s hand dropped, pushing two fingers along her folds once or twice before crooking up inside her. Iziz watched that, too. “Piss like that used to matter to me,” he mused.

“Is that her making that sound?” Iziz asked abruptly. “Is she…oiling up at you?”

“No. I was in her once already tonight. Before you killed the mood and got me too drunk to care.” Zhuqa glanced over at the baby, which now lay quiet and perhaps sleeping at Xzem’s breast. “Got any teat-biters out there, Iziz?”

“Probably,” he said without much interest. “You want the rest of this?”

Zhuqa waved the hand that wasn’t working methodically at Amber’s pussy.

Iziz picked up the cup and drank it off. “I want to fuck now. I’m taking one of your slaves for the night.”

Zhuqa grunted and shut his eyes.

“Thought I’d mention. Manners are important to city-born scuff like you. Up, Xzem. Let Eshiqi give the sprat a tap and let’s go.”

Xzem crept forward and presented the wrapped baby from a servile crouch.

Amber looked at Zhuqa.

He grunted without opening his eyes or interrupting the rhythm of his fingers.

Amber reached out and brushed the back of her knuckles lightly across the baby’s snout. It roused at once, sucking sleepily, but began to drift away again almost immediately.

“And that was all it wanted, all this time,” said Iziz. “A smooth blanket.”

“Doesn’t care about the blanket.” Zhuqa fanned his spines forward with deep, drunken pleasure. “Wanted his mother’s touch. Something you would never understand.”

“Piss on that. My mother touched me plenty!” Iziz declared and, giving Xzem a light smack to the back of the head, herded her out and shut the door behind them.

“I’m sure she did,” Zhuqa murmured. “And I’m sure it felt like love. But you’ll never touch my child like that, will you, Eshiqi? Because you love it. And you just may be the only other person in this camp who knows that when you love someone, sometimes you don’t touch.” He pulled in a deep breath and let it out slow, patting Amber’s thigh. “Put yourself to bed,” he told her, and gave her a nudge off his lap. He made no effort to follow, only sat there with his eyes closed and one hand resting on the table near his empty cup.

He looked like he was sleeping already, but she thought that would change in a hurry if she so much as touched one of the knives he kept strapped to his arms or took even one step toward the door. Amber went over and climbed into the cupboard. Sliding the door shut made the bells jingle; she looked out to see if they’d disturbed him and found him already gazing back at her through slitted, cat-content eyes.

“It’s funny, isn’t it?” he murmured. “The things you find to love in this life…so you don’t hate yourself so much for living it.”

She shut the door on him.

9

There was no real sense of time, but Amber thought three more days passed because she slept three times. Zhuqa fed her when they woke up—whatever they had left over from the night before, cold and greasy. He fed her when he brought her home from the workpit—mostly meat with baked roots, and once, some unknown animal’s head with roasted marrow bones. He had a bath brought on the second night and let her bathe herself, after she’d bathed him, of course. He made her talk to him, sometimes in her language, sometimes in his. He had sex with her every night. For hours.

She worked. Busy hands make a light heart, as Hruuzk was fond of saying. She learned to make bowls, plates and pitchers as well as lamps. She mended shifts, shirts and breeches, using anything beyond repair as patches. She pounded thousands of xuseth stalks through a sieve with a heavy wooden mallet for hour after hour to get one lousy jar of oil. And of course, at the end of each back-breaking day, there was plenty of lifting, packing, sweeping and scrubbing.

Three days.

On the fourth, things changed.

It was subtle at first. Hruuzk had been coming at mid-morning to take the children and some of the older slaves off to work in the gardens, kitchens or canals, but not today. This was just unusual enough that Amber noticed, but she hadn’t been there long enough to know what was routine and what wasn’t, so she thought nothing of it except how much more crowded the workpit was. What she noticed next was activity out in the halls, not the crash and roar of a violent rescue, but merely a clamor of boots and voices that grew steadily louder and more raucous throughout the day—the sound of a stadium crowd…or a mob working up for a riot.

The veteran slaves simply kept their heads down and their hands busy, and if they were at all anxious about what was going on outside, they did not show it. Amber tried to follow their example, but when the unseen crowd began to clap, shout and stomp their feet in unison, she threw whatever wicks she’d cut in the oil to soak and retreated to the back room to sit with Xzem and hold the baby. They were making so much noise it was impossible to be sure, but she thought they were chanting, “Meat.”

She didn’t have long to wonder what it meant. The shouting came to a sudden swell of cheers and then Hruuzk opened the door. The children ran to him at once, infected by the unruly energy out in the halls, but he turned them back after just a few words and clapped his hands to stop work.

“The bidding is about to start,” he called. “All my unstabled ladies, line up. Everyone else, keep working. No fussing,” he added, pointing sternly at Shivers, who had begun to tear up. “Until I have coin in my hand, you all belong to me and my ladies do not what?”

“Piss out of their eyes,” Shivers whispered.

“My ladies do not piss out of their eyes.” He gave her a forgiving pat on the head, using the gesture to put her in the forming line. “Gold-Eyes, Crook-Toe, you go last. They want you, they’ll have to pay for the rest of this lot first.” He glanced through the open door, assessing something in the crowd outside, then beckoned to Amber. “Eshiqi, come.”

She heard her name, saw him looking at her when he said it, and still it made no immediate sense to her. He couldn’t sell her, she was Zhuqa’s!

‘Oh sure, now you’re Zhuqa’s,’ the ghost of her dead mother said with a caustic laugh. ‘If you wanted to hide behind his skirts, you should have played his game, little girl. You didn’t, so suck it up.’

But Meoraq was coming. He was supposed to find her, kill Zhuqa and get her out of here.

‘Well, he didn’t,’ Bo Peep said simply. ‘And this is exactly what you deserve for sitting on your ass and waiting for someone else to save you.’

Hruuzk, making a last inspection of his ladies before they passed out of his keeping, finally noticed she was still sitting next to Xzem. His head cocked. He turned around to fully face her and hooked his thumb behind the buckle of his belt.

Amber’s mind remained perfectly still, but her body did not want to be whipped before she was sold. She got up.

Watching her as he bounced Rosek roughly on his knee, Dkorm rattled out a laugh. “I believe that is surprise I see on that ugly face,” he remarked. “I told you it would happen, didn’t I? Although I confess I’m a bit surprised myself. Most of Zhuqa’s toy cunts last at least a year.”

“Did I hear my name?” Zhuqa asked, walking suddenly through the door with an expression of polite interest. “Was there something you wanted to say to me? Perhaps on the subject of my women?”

Dkorm snapped to attention, yanking Rosek into the crook of his arm and pinching her squalling snout shut with his hand. “No, sir! I was just…just…”

Zhuqa’s gaze dropped to Rosek and hardened. “What the fuck are you doing?”

Dkorm let go and actually swept his hand behind his back like a kid trying to hide a forbidden candy bar. Rosek gasped in air and shrieked it out. Xzem held Zhuqa’s baby and trembled. “Nothing, sir.”

“Eshiqi,” said Zhuqa. “Take Rosek.”

“Sir—”

Amber lifted the struggling baby and stepped back. In the next instant, Zhuqa was across the room with his hand around Dkorm’s snout, whose explanations became a choked wheeze.

“You,” said Zhuqa, very calmly, “are making me regret giving you this assignment. Do you think—”

Dkorm began to struggle.

“—I would give the care of my child to anyone? Eh? Answer me.”

Dkorm pitched himself back against the wall, slapping and scratching at Zhuqa’s restraining arm.

“I’m beginning to think you don’t want it in your care,” said Zhuqa. “And I’m beginning to feel offended.”

Amber could see Dkorm’s chest heaving, bulging outward with each whistling effort at breath like an alien parasite was about to burst free.

And then Zhuqa’s hand opened. With a howling gasp, Dkorm dropped flat over the crates, bags and barrels that had been his chair all day and just breathed for a while.

Zhuqa watched him until he’d lost the hoarse, shuddery quality on his inhales, and then he sat down beside him. “How are things with my child, Dkorm?”

“…fair…sir.”

“Good to hear. Good appetite, I trust?”

“…better.”

“Yes, it had some trouble early on.” Zhuqa glanced at Amber. “But we seem to have solved it. Cry much?”

“…some.”

“And Rosek, eh? Healthy?”

“…think so.”

“Healthy lungs, it would seem.” Zhuqa gave the baby in Amber’s arms a tolerant smile. “She’s quiet now, though. Do you know why she’s quiet now?”

And before Dkorm could suck in enough of a tortured breath to answer, Zhuqa the Warlord had seized him by the throat and yanked him up. “Because someone is comforting her,” he hissed. “Can you comfort a baby, Dkorm? Can you do that for me? Because babies cry, all babies cry, and when my baby cries, I want to know that the man I have honored with its care is not pinching its fucking mouth shut!” he roared, seizing Dkorm by the snout and shaking him hard.

Rosek, falling asleep in Amber’s arms, jerked and let out a wail. Amber rocked her, rubbing her little back as Xzem whispered and together, they quieted her to sniffles.

“Do you see that?” Zhuqa demanded, pointing. “Do you see how she did that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“There are a lot of restless men waiting for this sale,” Hruuzk called.

“One thing at a time,” Zhuqa told him, and put his face very close to Dkorm’s. “My patience with you is right down to its last grains. So. Get up. Fetch little Rosek and if she cries and you can’t comfort her, I’m going to kill you. Do you mark me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Go.” Zhuqa released him and unclipped the hooked sword from his belt.

Dkorm stood up, understandably shaky on his feet. He took a few steps toward Amber, hesitated when Rosek began to tear up, then very carefully took her and pressed her to his shoulder. He patted her back, mimicking Amber’s swaying motions, and did not appear to breathe at all until Rosek sniffled herself quiet.

“This has been,” said Zhuqa, “your final forgiveness.” He hung his sword back on his belt. “I suggest you go someplace private and meditate on that until you come to some lasting conclusion. Go.”

Dkorm went. Xzem twitched as if to rise and follow, but Zhuqa’s pointing hand defeated her. She settled back down, staring after Rosek with haunted eyes.

“Are you coming to watch the sale?” asked Hruuzk.

“No. My Eshiqi is upset and wants to go home.”

Hruuzk grunted and patted Amber on the head when she came close enough. “You know I’d never presume to give you advice—”

“Never,” Zhuqa agreed thinly, watching Dkorm disappear in the crowd.

“—but why haven’t you just given the sprat to Eshiqi to raise up?”

“For the same reason I haven’t given it to you.”

Hruuzk’s broken spines flared. “I could do it,” he said, sounding wounded. “Half the bodies under my hand are sprats, you think I don’t know how to raise one?”

“I think,” said Zhuqa, softening enough now that Dkorm was out of the room to give his slave-master a friendly tap to the arm. “I think you have enough to do. My Eshiqi has too much to learn right now. A child would be a distraction. Perhaps when it’s weaned and not so needful, eh?” He glanced back at Xzem, smiling. “It will need a mother when Xzem is gone.”

Xzem ducked her head and nuzzled at the infant that suckled her.

“I’ve never seen a slave so quick to take to a sprat,” Hruuzk agreed. “Must have lost one of her own. Sure you won’t come? I expect good coin for Gold-Eyes here.”

“I can trust you, can’t I?”

Hruuzk widened his good eye and pushed his broken spines forward. “Yes,” he said gravely. “Trustworthy as the wind and tides, sir. Why, my sire was turned out from Fol Mgesh for an excess of trustiness and to his great pride it was a trait I took on.”

“To it, then,” said Zhuqa, hunkering down to watch his child at Xzem’s breast. “We’ll settle tomorrow.”

“To his trust, men say of me,” Hruuzk loudly muttered, leading his slaves out into the packed hall. “And they’ll sing it at my pyre, I’m sure. All right then. Quiet up, you pack of animals! Quiet up and clear a path! If I can’t reach the bidding block, I’ll buy these dips myself and you can all poke each other!”

The door shut behind the last lizardlady, muting much of the noise, which then slowly receded as the men making it followed Hruuzk to wherever it was they went to auction slaves. At length, there was quiet. Even the children, as keyed up as they were, stayed in the back room and did their work without their usual chatter while Zhuqa was there.

“How is it, Xzem?” Zhuqa asked finally, gazing grimly down at the drowsing infant. “Say truth. Is it strong?”

Xzem hesitated.

“Truth,” he said again, his voice hard.

“It is not ill, my lord,” she told him.

“But…?”

“But it was a difficult birth and the mother…suffered. What weakens the womb, weakens the child.”

Zhuqa grunted, expressionless.

“It has a good appetite and a strong grip. If it can be kept warm and dry and allowed to rest, it can grow strong.”

“Do you say it will live?”

Xzem bent her head even lower. “I say it can live, my lord.”

Zhuqa grunted again and stood. “There is a difference, isn’t there? All right. I’m pleased. Is there anything you require?”

“No, my lord.”

“You have enough to eat? And Rosek? She’s comfortable?”

“We are both kept very well, my lord.”

“Good. Eshiqi, come.”

The hall outside the workpit was empty now, but Amber could still hear the crowd somewhere in the labyrinth of the ruins, jeering and hooting as Hruuzk called out bids. Zhuqa tipped his head to listen, but took her to the stair and down into the dark.

“You’re very quiet,” he said, when they’d passed the last set of guards and were alone in the long corridor leading to his private room.

“I don’t have anything to say to you.”

“Again?”

She glanced at him, but he just kept walking with the same distracted look about him. “I don’t have anything to say.”

He grunted thoughtfully.

They walked.

“You’re quiet too,” she said.

“I’m a quiet man.”

Her feet rooted so suddenly that she stumbled. He caught her—he was so damned fast—and waited for her to steady herself before he continued on. He was smiling, just a little.

Lucky guess. It had to be. Meoraq had picked up English fast, but not that fast. All the same, she was glad she’d kept the bitchy out of her mouth for a change.

He unlocked his door and held it for her. His lamp was already lit inside. There was food on the table—tachuqi and roots and what looked like a short stack of pancakes. Zhuqa had to tap her shoulder to get her attention again. “Take off your clothes.”

She did and he took them, feeling out every fold before tossing the robe carelessly over a crate.

“Now you,” he said, and put his hands on her.

She waited, staring fixedly at the wall while he satisfied himself that she had no weapons socketed away, and when he was done, before he could give an order, she moved in close and touched her cheek briefly to his chest.

His spines flared. “My Eshiqi,” he said, rubbing her back. “When Hruuzk called to you, you didn’t know he saw me coming, did you? You thought he meant to put you on the block with the other slaves.” And he smiled, like it was funny.

Amber didn’t smile. She didn’t swear at him either, or call him names or make any of the sarcastic comments she might have made if it wasn’t for the little matter of how much English he might or might not understand…and if he wasn’t right.

“Come to my table,” he ordered, moving ahead of her to take his seat—still the only seat—and giving his thigh an inviting pat. When she sat, he pinched off a large bite of tachuqi meat and offered it up. “Hruuzk tells me you’ve been a good worker. You may think Hruuzk praises all the women who have played Zhuqa’s House with me, but he doesn’t. You have been my loyal woman…and a good mother to my child.” He watched her eat. “Did you lose one?”

“No,” she said, but thought of Nicci. “Never had one.”

“I’ve lost five so far. I try not to see omens in piss anymore, but…this is my sixth.” He took a bite for himself and chewed, gazing up at the ceiling as if he could see through it to Xzem and the baby, far above them. When he swallowed, he looked at her again. “A child needs a mother.”

“A child needs not to grow up in a place like this even more.”

“As the Word says, a father is God upon the living world,” said Zhuqa, giving her another bite of meat. “The only God my son is likely to know. I can train a son. I can take him on hunts and raids. I can teach him blades and spears and grappling. I can be proud of him. I can even be fond of him, from a distance. But even a warlord’s son needs a mother to hold him.”

“I guess you’re not always a dirty girl, are you? Sometimes you’re a real sweetie. A prince among thieves. Or a princess.”

He grunted, rubbed her thigh, fed her another bite.

“What if it’s a girl?” asked Amber. “What happens to all your fatherly affection and pride then? Do you sell her?”

“Eh?”

She put her hands together in the teardrop-shape, but he continued to look blank. Amber made rocking motions with her arms, then realized she’d never seen Xzem rock a baby that way. For that matter, she’d never seen a human rock a baby that way, either. Awkwardly, she cupped her arms as if holding a baby upright at her breast and rocked back and forth instead. This put unpleasant pressure on her sex, but after she’d again made a teardrop-shape and repeated the baby-rocking, his light bulb finally came on.

“You think it will open up female?”

“You’ve got a fifty-fifty chance, don’t you?”

Zhuqa grunted and stroked his throat, studying her through narrow eyes. “Zhuqa the Warlord has only one use for daughters,” he said after a long silence. “But in Zhuqa’s House, all children are prized. If I gave her to you, would you be grateful?”

“That depends. So far, all of your promises have only been good for a year.”

He grunted, but in a thoughtful way that made her wonder again how much of what she said he was starting to understand. It didn’t help when he said, “This place will never be better than a raider’s nest to anyone who has ever known a true home, but you might be surprised how long a child can be happy here, if it’s cared for.”

“That’s a horrible thought,” said Amber, taking the piece of tachuqi he offered her.

“To a child who is not…well, you get Iziz.” Zhuqa gestured broadly and helped himself to a root. “Who, I think, would never imagine that he has been mistreated in his life, but who was surely bought and buggered six times for every finger and toe on his body before the last of his scales went black. Raider-sprats like Iziz or Xzem…they’re not unhappy just because they take a poke ten years too early. That’s only hell to people who know better. So I ask you again—” He held up another piece of meat and cocked his head. “If I gave her to you, if I let you be the God in her living world, if I let you decide how much hurt is normal and how much is never visited…will you be grateful?”

“How grateful do you need me to be?”

“I’m giving you a chance to have a family,” he said quietly. “But I won’t let you raise my child to hate me. If you want it, you will have to decide whether you want to be my loyal woman or my fierce little slave.”

She didn’t answer, not out of defiance, but simply because, for one terrible moment, she wasn’t entirely sure what her answer would be.

Zhuqa’s eyes stabbed into her, deeper and deeper. At last, he leaned back in his chair and gave her another bite of meat. “But I won’t ask you to choose tonight. For now, I am content as long as you play the game, Eshiqi. You don’t have to mean it, but you have to play the game.”

She closed her eyes, took a few breaths, then looked at him and forced a smile.

“I suppose you think it’s silly,” Zhuqa mused, tracing the shape of her lips with his fingertips. “And I suppose you would be right. But what else do I have here, eh? They taught us about evil when I was a boy, and about God’s love and the promise of His forgiveness. I believed it. I believed that I knew where I fit in the world. I believed that I would serve Him someday and if it was His will, I would return with honor to be steward of my father’s House. I believed I would have children in a place where it was not expected and acceptable for the first one to die. Now these things, the very idea of them, are nothing but pieces in a silly game.” His eyes sparked. “Why shouldn’t I want to play it?”

Amber did not answer. After a few seconds, he grunted and shifted her off his knee. “It’s dark in here,” he said.

Amber looked around, then went to the nearest lamp and pulled the wick up a little. The flame lengthened, but guttered. The pitcher of xuseth oil he kept in his room was nowhere obvious. While she looked for it, he went to the wall where he kept his awful drink in a new waterskin, poured himself half a cup, thought about it, then poured the other half. By the time she’d found the oil (on the shelf where it belonged, and God alone knew what it was doing there), he was back in his chair with his feet propped up on the table, drinking.

“Do you want to know what I did?” Zhuqa asked suddenly. His voice was mild; his scales, dark. His eyes, half in and out of shadow, had all the expression of cigarette burns. “Would you like to know what great unforgivable act cut me from my father’s name and put me here? Would you like to know why I am so unfit to keep his House, why my children, if any of them survive, will never have the name I was born under? Eh? Do you?”

She ducked her head and fussed with the lamp, hoping that if she stayed quiet, he’d change the subject.

He took his boots off the table and brought his chair crashing back onto all four feet. She jumped; he watched her, calmly picking through the bowl of roots for one to eat. “Two years before my ascension, the training master I was brunt to broke his leg. They replaced him with someone new, someone from outside. He took an interest in me. Used to keep me extra hours, teaching me advanced fighting forms, but didn’t work me too bad afterwards. We spent a lot of nights just sitting up together, chatting while I cleaned his boots or put an edge on his blades. I liked him,” Zhuqa said, twisting the words like a knife. He laughed once, shortly, and drank again.

“So. So one night, after hours, as we were chatting, he brought out a flask of wine and offered me a swallow. The Word forbids all things which cloud the mind and corrupt clay, but this man, my master, my friend, told me that only applied if you did it to excess. And he would know, wouldn’t he? He had been a Sheulteb once. He was a Sword and a true son of God. He gave me a swallow and he gave me a few more, and when I was warmed up nicely, he brought out a few leaves of phesok and gave me some of that. I don’t remember falling asleep. I just remember waking up…when he was in me.”

Amber ran out of things to do to the lamp. She got up, feeling his stare on her like a physical weight, and went over to the cupboard. She straightened the pillows, shook out the furs, brushed grit off the mattress.

“To this day, that baffles me,” said Zhuqa. “Just outside the masters’ gate, not a hundred walking strides from where he stood when he fucked me, slept one or two hundred women desperate for the healing fires of a son of Sheul. He didn’t need to make a boy drunk to get a poke in unless he wanted to. Suppose I should feel flattered.” He drank, eyed the empty cup, then got up to pour the last of the wine. “I don’t. Come and take this, Eshiqi.”

She went, but she took the empty flask, not the cup he tried to give her. There was a moment when he thought about forcing it on her—she could see it glittering in his eye as he watched her hang the flask upside down to dry—but in the end, he let it go and sipped at it himself.

“In the morning, I told my blademaster. They called a tribunal. I had to tell the story to a room filled with men and boys I knew. The man, my master, denied everything. He went on to say that he had caught me rubbing my cock and this was the act of a boy who feared to have it made known. And since neither of us would recant, it went to trial. He stood for himself. My father sent a Sheulteb. He wouldn’t…He wouldn’t stand for me himself. And this man, this lying man, this man who gave me drink and gave me phesok and bent my sleeping body over the back of a bench, this man won that trial.”

In spite of everything, Amber turned around. “And they threw you out?”

“No,” said Zhuqa. He was looking right at her with his face now full in the light, but his eyes were still cigarette burns. “It’s not unforgivable to fuck your fist or to tell lies to a tribunal. They held me in a cell and whipped me at fourth– and tenth-bell for a full brace in the public courtyard and then they gave me back to him. I went to lessons every morning. He had me every night. Without drink or phesok.” He shrugged his spines stiffly. “Too hard to come by in the city. Anyway, I managed with the help of the one boy I still trusted to send a message to my father. He came in person the next day.”

Zhuqa was quiet for a time, just holding his cup and staring at some point in space between the two of them. At last, he shrugged again and drank off the last of it. “He dragged me out of lessons to the first empty room and beat me until I went black. Then he went home. My master took me out of the infirmary a few days later and fucked me three times. Making up for time lost, he said. He couldn’t manage the last go, so he used the hilt of a practice sword. It was bigger than he was. I bled. He told me to clean it. I killed him with it,” said Zhuqa, tossing the empty cup on the table. “He wasn’t sleeping. His back wasn’t turned. I took him on in the full sight of the God that let him fuck me and let him lie about it and let me be whipped for the lie and I killed him with a wooden toy of a sword. Then I gave myself over and they turned me out. Not for the murder, although they did call it that. No, they turned me out for blasphemous and malicious lies, because I said that he had fucked me when God had proven that he had not. There I stood, with my own blood and his stinking grease still inside me…”

He trailed off, then gave the empty cup on the table a morose flick with two fingers and stood up. “A man named Chuaan hunted me down later that year and fed me to his men for a catch-cock. Shouldn’t have bothered me—not much did by that time—but I saw fire as soon as the first hand was on me. I killed six of them, they tell me, and so the legend of the mighty Zhuqa who has never been poked was born. I let them think so. I am—” He smiled, thin and hard as razors. “—such a liar. Come here, Eshiqi.”

She went. He slung his arm around her shoulders and she held him steady all the way to the cupboard. She took his boots off, helped him out of his harness and picked his legs up for him when he dropped back onto the mattress. “Say something,” he said, staring at the top of the cupboard.