47 - My own pleasure crushed me

She could have been from Erealanai or Selina, with long pale red hair of a tight woolly curl, so that it hung in two woollen clouds beside her face in the light of the lamp. She was not beautiful.

As if she were doing an everyday chore, she pulled off her shift, showing a tanned and callused body, the belly stretched and worn with childbirth. She looked only at my privates, not at my face, as she sat beside me on the pallet, pushing my leg over roughly with her hip to give herself space, and grabbed my manhood with her hand.

I lay stunned, thinking of Nyera, of Komona, of marrying, of my anaraseye, as she stroked, with just enough gentleness that it didn’t hurt and therefore must be pleasurable, but utterly impersonal, and with a sense of “Let’s get this over with.”

Get your hand off me, I wanted to shout, don’t touch me, go away! Surely she must know, or see it in my face? But she had her orders, too; who could know what she had been threatened with if she refused? Tears burned in my eyes. She went on milking me, like a cow.

I tried to tell myself that this was nothing, like a happy one-time roll in the woods with some fellow soldier; but it wasn’t. A child would come of it, must come of it. To be raised a slave with no language but Lakan and no conception of any life but endless toil under the whips of Lakans, my child, my anaraseye… no! My body would never let it happen; it would rebel, refuse, go impotent, and I’d have to explain to Akdan, “Sorry, you know how it goes, sometimes it just doesn’t happen.” If I did not harden it could not be, and how could anyone, here?

But I saw Akdan’s blade loosened in the scabbard again in my mind, and imagined the edge coming down. My anaraseye... Maybe he was lying; maybe Klajen was dealing for my ransom, unharmed; but I could not know that. And Akdan had known I could not. Her hand, loveless and passionless though it was, still pressed and squeezed, and my flesh still had to feel, and then, impatient, she pinched one of my nipples, hard enough to be just shy of pain and thus the most intense pleasure, drawing a gasping yelp out of me.

Seeing I was sensitive there, she kept up the pinch. My body answered as it always does to that; a fiery streak of passion spread up me, and I felt myself go like rock in her hand. She put one leg over me and lowered herself, taking me into her slack, birth-loosened womanhood, and began pumping her hips and clenching me.

No! This cannot be… my anaraseye… I cannot let this be… I stared at her; surely she knew what I felt, or could see it on my face? She still did not look at my face, though. I clenched my eyes shut and tried to turn away, as if I could, straining against the ropes. She just rode me like a bucking horse, putting a tight pinch on the other nipple as well, and started speaking to me in Lakan, with a tone of reasoning. “Let it happen, don’t fight it, and it’ll be over with soon,” I’m sure she was saying, or the like. She did it as if she’d done it many times before.

My own pleasure crushed me with its inevitability, unstoppable as an avalanche. There was nothing to do but pretend I was not there, split myself in two again as when Klajen had dropped quicklime onto me, and make time pass by sheer will. When I came, I screamed; why not? What would I be hiding?

She clenched and pulled until she had everything in me, then when my manhood went soft, got up quickly as if with distaste, threw on her shift again and went out, holding herself between her legs as if I’d hurt her; I realized afterwards it was to keep all the semen in until she could lie down alone somewhere with her feet raised to let it flow down into her womb. She had not looked me in the eyes once. I screamed until it burned itself out, then just wept.

While I did, Mangk came back in and bound me to the pallet, ankles and elbows, threw a blanket over me, gave me a long drink of water and left. There’d be no cutting the ropes by rubbing them against the stone-edges of the sill tonight. After a long time thinking terrible thoughts, I fell into a bitter broken sleep, in which I could not even toss or turn.

She and I were coupled three times, every other night, as is the custom in Laka. During the day when I was not tied down, Mangk or one of these other husks of Yeolis—I had to start telling myself not to hate them—watched me like a hawk. Whether because I was dispirited, or there truly were no chances, I saw no way to escape, and tried none. The ropes chafed, but they didn’t care. During the day when I did nothing but sit, my mind flew everywhere, from boredom. Mostly it tried to fly, like a bird, back to Yeola-e.

The third time, I tried to speak to her, in Enchian. “What’s your name; what’s your owner’s name?” When there is peace, and I am free and semanakraseye, however that comes about, I was thinking, I will find my children here, and buy, shame, or carve them free. What the precedents were for this, I had no idea; I was the only anaraseye in recorded history who’d been a slave, though that might only be because such a tale was deemed unfit for recording.

She still would not look at me, though, showing no sign at all she even knew I’d spoken. The mother of my anaraseye, she might be, but when she left me the last time, which I didn’t yet know was the last time, she didn’t even glance back.

The second night after that, it was a different woman, dark-haired this time, and a little younger. She at least looked me in the eyes, smiled at me and stroked me, in a motherly sort of way, and came up with a pet name for me, “Kripo,” which, I learned later, means “spicy one.” This all made it a touch easier, somehow.

I’d never imagined I could yearn for gentleness from such a person in such a place, but when you’re a slave, you learn to take it where you find it. When I was alone after the first time, I marveled in admiration. How could she have the spirit to smile, and to be kind to someone else, living her life? I had not yet learned how miraculous the human capacity is, to inure itself to suffering. By signs I got her to tell me her name, Loka, and her owner’s, Babengkt.

The last woman I was set to stud with—yes, they use the same Enchian word as with horses—knew a little Enchian, and Mangk had taught me a little Lakan to pass the time. Her name was Tanazha, her owner Menzangk; she was thirty-two, and had borne and nursed five children so far, all sold away from her on weaning, and yet she could smile too.

I took a chance. “Tanasha”—I couldn’t say it properly Lakan, of course—“do you know, have you heard, who I belong to?”

“I hear you new-caught, and you look, so it true,” she said in her halting way. She fingered my earrings. “Look warrior-Akdan’s.” Akdan was not a name, I’d learned, but the Lakan word for “master.”

“Klajen, son of Kla-something else?

“Yes. I hear that.” It seemed I still belonged to him. “Keep you for something,” she said. “While wait, rent you.” Then he does still mean to ransom me; they’re dickering. Fresh hope surged in me, giving me strength against the weakness of having my seed stolen night upon night, which felt like my soul. I’d gathered he was monetary-minded.

Now I knew the third time with her would be the last. Afterwards, sitting beside me, she said, “I miss you, Rao. Name child after you, if boy.”

It was out before I knew it. “Then call it Chevenga.”

She gazed at me puzzled, and I felt sweat break out cold. “Well, all right, you wouldn’t be naming it after me,” I said, trying not to say it too fast. “But… I always liked that name, Chevenga. It means ‘lion’s heart,’ and there were semanakraseyel named that… kings, I guess you’d say. I know it sounds very Yeoli; how would a Lakan say it?”

“J’vengka,” she said, looking at me, with a fond smile, but quizzically. “But I said, if it boy.”

Lakan names are strictly designated male or female; none can be both. Mine happens to have an ending just like the common Lakan feminine, “-inka.” I said, “No matter. All lions have hearts, male or female. Boy or girl.” She looked at me very strangely, but said, “I beg my Akdan that. For you.”

The day after that, a warrior I knew as one of Klajen’s came riding in, leading a spare horse. The man who’d made me call him Akdan took me out, they signed some papers and exchanged some coins, and he untied my ankles. “No tricks now, quicklime boy,” the warrior said in Enchian, as he boosted me up onto the second mount. “You don’t want to be killed on the way to freedom, hai?” Saint Mother accept me, I’m ransomed, I thought.

The Yeoli camp was near Tenningao now; we held where the valley narrows. By the size of the camp, some half of the thirty-thousand Tyeraha had promised us had arrived.

It was not even Klajen who took me to the parley, but one of his lieutenants; on the other side, strange to face them as if against them, was not even Hurai, but his aide Perha, though I noticed my shadow-parents in his escort.

“Did they mistreat you, Rao?” he called across. “No, kras’,” I answered dutifully. They’d already made half-payment; now the rest was delivered in a sack. The Lakans took the earrings out of my ears, cut my bonds and sent me running by a foot-shove in the back. I kept running until I was in Esora-e’s and Denaina’s arms.