121 – Lifted on the breath of a God

I wanted her so badly I felt like screaming. But the forbiddances in me kept their walls up. She would take the knife for me; she wants me to say the same back. But I cannot; semana kra. What would I say? “You’ll die for me, fine; I can’t say I’d die for you, though, because I have a duty”?

“If I said all I see in you, it would seem like flattery, like what a liar would say,” she said. “If you were not who you are, you wouldn’t argue with me, wanting me as much as you do. You’d just use me, without a thought.”

“You have me dead to rights there,” I said. “I feel as if by saying ‘yes,’ to you, I’d be sending you to death, which makes me less inclined.”

“You see what I mean! she hissed, leaning forward to grab my hands. “In this place where everyone thinks of nothing but themselves, you are thinking of me. How can I not love you?” I sat tongue-tied. Her hands were graceful and long-fingered but full of strength and warmth. I should have pulled mine away, but I didn’t. “Besides, you are semanakraseye, beholden to your people.”

In the bath, we’d spoken just Yeoli, even though she wasn’t quite fluent; despite that, I hadn’t switched to Enchian, wanting it to be least likely that if anyone happened to be overhearing, they’d understand. Now, we spoke a mixture, but this sentence she said in pure Yeoli, to make its point more strongly. So; she’d been studying me. “Another reason for me to take the high leap if we are matched.”

“But don’t you have duties at home, too?” A warm zephyr breathed off her, bringing the fragrance of vanilla oil, and underneath it, the deeper scent of her, sweetly spicy, as if she ate things full of nutmeg and cinnamon. I caught myself breathing it in hungrily, stopped myself.

“My duty was to distract, impede and slow down the rejins in Sria,” she said. “To fight Arko. Warriors die. This is insane, that Kurkas hasn’t lifted you out of here.”

“He likes watching me fight,” I said. “If I die, it’s a victory over Yeola-e; in the meantime, it gives my people reason to pay more and faster, for my ransom.” Ransom; it was shameful that I could speak of it without shame, so casually, having descended so far as to get used to it. “So we are allies, then; captive allies. All the world should be allying against Arko; it’s the only way to stop them.”

“Yes… may I call you Chevenga?” Her Yeoli-wise tongue easily pronounced it properly, but she was thorough and careful with it, too, her voice like fingers handling something precious. To hear it was like a warm hand on your brow when you’re in bed with death-chills.

“Thank you,” I whispered. “Niku.”

“Chevenga,” she said, again, relishing. “Chevenga, Chevenga, Chevenga.” I closed my eyes, and drank it into my soul. “It suits you,” she said.

“You know archaic Yeoli, too?”

“In my tongue it means control—cha—and an imperative, venga. A general’s name.” Her accent was mellifluous, in a city full of people who all spoke spittingly and tight-lipped at once, but in an exotically-different way than my own.

“It’s a warrior’s name, that’s for sure, in Yeoli. But I’m a general, too.” If I don’t want to impress her, why am I boasting? I’d never been a full general in actual war. “What does Niku mean?”

“It means… you know the water-fish that breathe out of the tops of their heads? I don’t know the Yeoli or the Enchian word.”

“Dolphin?”

“Yes, that’s it.”

“They are beautiful, strong and intelligent,” I said. “And even save people who are drowning sometimes.” In your arms, your breasts, your womanhood, is salvation from drowning in this pit… I took a deep breath.

“But, Chevenga…” I felt a spiking of hot joy in my heart every time she said it. “The most important thing: I have another way out other than death. Else I wouldn’t risk this.”

Another way… I bit down on fool’s hope. “Niku, I’ve tried everything. I’ve had twenty-odd of my own try to rescue me, which ended in two of them dying the most bitter of deaths… another time, I got an Arkan to try to smuggle me out, and we were this close, but it ended with him dying the most bitter of deaths. Sheer mischance, but if I think of asking an Arkan to help me again, something in me throws up a wall.”

“No Arkans need, or can, help with this. I can’t tell you how… and it will take some time. It’s a secret of my people.”

“If it involves the Gate… I tried that. The lefaeti… can’t be done from below, only above. Climbing the walls… first thing I tried.”

“No, no, no. None of those things. You’d have to trust me.”

“You’re telling me it’s something I haven’t thought of?”

“Yes.”

“I find that hard to believe. I’ve thought of everything but flying.”

She laughed. It was a fluid giggle, from deep in her throat, making the shine of starlight on her shoulders quiver. “It’s something that only a Niah could think of. Chevenga… I’ll open myself to you in such a way that I cannot lie. So that you feel it in my body.”

So you are not just my imagined salvation, but my true? How could this not be too good to be real? Yet, still, the preposterousness of her story recommended it. She had already done something supposedly impossible: become a ring-fighter despite being a woman.

For once, I thought, my own yearnings align with semana kra. I brought my lips slowly to hers, and just before they touched, breathed “I give myself to you.”

†

We seized each other so hard it hurt, and fled into each other, our souls in our tongues. Joy beyond joy, was the touch of her gracile body, hard as an athlete’s under the sparest layer of softness. Safety, refuge, a pool of sanity to leap into, was her smooth warm skin against mine.

“I’ve been in pain all eight-day,” she gasped, between kisses. “From keeping myself away from you. I love you, Chevenga. I am in agony from fighting it”

I froze, realizing my body was showing me the truth of my heart. “So am I.” Her hands, clasping my hair hard enough to hurt, turned tender on my cheeks, and I saw the glistening of a tear. “Why…” she breathed. “Why now? Why this…”

“I keep wanting to know the same thing; but love can’t always be explained,” I said. I had tears coming too; the tightness in my throat went back, I realized, to the moment I’d first seen her. “Maybe it’s the spirit in us that insists on being bigger than our surroundings.” We communed with wordless tongues for a while again, breathing hard through our noses. “You have your way, that is secret... we’ll have to trust in that.”

She flung off her robe and slid under the blankets beside me, silken hot, sweated here and there already. I wrapped my arms around her, and she buried her face in my neck. “Thank the Gods for this moment,” she whispered. “And this one…”

“And this one…” We stifled giggles like two children.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t stop chasing you,” she said.

“I’m sure you’re very sorry,” I said, which made her laugh. “But I think, in my heart of hearts, I wanted to be caught. It’s as you said, just fear. Something to brush off.” I feathered my lips over the tender fringe of her eyelashes. We went faster than two people who have never touched except a collision in a corridor ever do; it was as if we already knew each other, panting like two runners. She seized my shoulders and pulled me, with ease, on top of her. Beneath her soft thatch of loin-hair, she was dripping wet.

“I didn’t know how alone I was,” she whispered. “They make you alone.”

“Not any more.” She opened her legs; between them she glistened in the faint window-light, like flower-petals soaked in dew. Smelling her fragrance, I yearned to taste, but her hands gripped my hips, wanting me in her. I remembered, distantly, that Skorsas was in the next room, others across the corridor. We’d have to make love in silence, somehow. “I am here.” She wrapped her heels around my back and yanked me into a thrust. Whether my tears were of ecstasy or agony, I was not sure. Her eyes poured with the same.

In wordless rhythm, we fled from the Mezem into each other. When I closed my eyes, I could will it all away—the Ring, being captured, the war, all these things that were too horrific, I suddenly saw, to allow myself to truly feel, lest they drive me mad. When she closed hers, she fled her horrors, too; we were in a world without words, and then even without thought; only with each other, the thrusting of our hips, the clenching of our hands, the teasing of lips and finger-tips, until we melted together like two lava-tongues from a volcano, in the burning flow of ecstasy. Our hands in the real world seized pillows to stifle our cries.

†

“I’m not sorry I chased you so,” she said, breathing through the tiny hairs beside my ear, as we lay twined and boneless afterwards.

“Neither am I.” Her shoulders shook in a giggle. “Thanks for chasing me. Thanks even more for catching me. I’m sorry for running. I was always taught that no harm can ever come of giving oneself. I will have faith in that.”

I turned my nose to her neck and breathed in deep, filling myself with her scent. The vanilla was sweated off, leaving only her natural sweet dark spice.

“I’ve done things before that people thought were impossible,” I said. “This thing you won’t tell me: tell me this much. Is it something impossible?”

“Yes. It is impossible.”

“Then we’re set. Nothing to worry about.”

I had seen her face apologetic, angry, pained, resolute, grimly icy (her usual expression when Arkans were looking) desperate, contorted in passion and with a faint flash of a smile. I had never seen her smile fully. I did now. It was big and broad, lighting her whole face, her teeth shining against the darkness of her skin in the faint light.

Then her eyes were hungry again, so I got up onto my hands to kiss downwards. I tongue-flicked one hard-pointing nipple, then the other, then her navel, then the soft fold of her thigh, and my tongue found her womanhood dripping and open and utterly lax, though it clenched at a touch. She danced on my mouth. I’d never known myself to come back so fast, but when she wanted my manhood it was hard for her.

How many times? We lost count, some of them strung together like fire-brands of passion across our souls, other coming in waves. We danced on the points of each other, felt the orgasms coming right from each other’s toes. We learned every nuance of each other’s flesh and preferences, in that one night. We so merged into one that soon, once we had brought each other to the edge, shimmering with it like trembling water, we could each throw ourselves or the other or both over with just the trace of a thought.

†

In between, basking, we talked. “I feel like a flame on you.”

“I needed you like I needed air.”

“Kahara. Niku. I just like saying your name.”

“Chevenga. Chevenga. Chevenga.” She took my head between her hands. “I love you, Ivaen Chevenga.”

“I love you, Niku Wahunai.”

“Now can I talk to you as a friend? Not as a potential enemy?”

“Let me guess, you fikked me stupid just for that?” We both chuckled, warm with the harmony of our souls.

“Nothing can surprise me, here,” she said. “Of course I fall helplessly in love with the missing semanakraseye of Yeola-e.

“And the missing semanakraseye of Yeola-e falls helplessly in love with you. Are you sure it’s not just a dream?”

She laughed, and said, “If so, I’m going to squeeze every drop of advantage out of it… your people are going to have kittens when they realize you love me, too.”

“That’s the least of my problems right now.”

“Once I get to the top of these fakhad-shkavi cliffs I’ll let down a laefetas, and get you and anyone else out that you want!” I told her about Mana. “Three of us, then.”

“When you get to the top of the cliffs... what are you going to do, fly? Never mind, never mind... I know... secret.”

“I’m going to buy the metal to build a great bird, am I? Or grow wings out of these shoulder-blades?”

“Didn’t I just have you flying?”

“You did. And you may anytime. I like flying.”

“So do I.”

“Ahh, good.” She suddenly pushed me over onto my back, and pinned me by her hands on my shoulders. “I’d like to see how high you can fly.”

“Oh, All-Spirit…” She straddled my hips. “I might break and crash to earth. Or spin right off the Earthsphere into the place beyond the sky…”

“Past Aba Tyriah: Father Sky.”

“I love you. It feels so good to say that. I never imagined I would, in Arko.” We are everything to each other, I thought, because neither of us have anything else.

“I needed you like air… like water… like life itself.” She enwrapped the tip of my manhood with her womanhood, a drop of the liquid of her passion rolling hot down the shaft. I thrust before I knew I would; she lowered herself full onto me, then reared up like a lioness, seizing my nipples between her fingers, then pinching both of them and my manhood all at once. I had to grab the pillow and throw it over my face lightning-fast, the cry coming out helpless from my core.

By the strength of rhythm she ruled me, making me thrust to the beat of the clench of her fingers and loins. I ceased to have will, or feeling other than what she made me feel; I lost words again, and then even thoughts, becoming nothing but ecstasy, my spine, my heart, my soul, pulsing to the beat she set.

I am a flame on the wind of a rising I cannot help… in the darkness of the pillow over my face, my eyes were suddenly filled with light, as from a white-hot sun in a brilliant steel-blue sky. I am flying… It was as if had grown wings; I felt them over my shoulders, sensitive to the faintest wisp of wind like an eagle’s or a gull’s, twitching at a zephyr. I fly out… below me, the Mezem stands, curling like claws, could not hold me; they faded, smaller and smaller below, like toys; ahead was the Rim, and I soared over it like a feather lifted on the breath of a God. Arko is below me, gone. I am free.

She told me later that I arched so hard in ecstasy I lifted her right off the bed, and held her there until I was thrust dry.

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