176 - Losing control

Now and then, Yeoli privateers would touch into the port of Haiuroru, for supplies or healing. It must have been intriguing for the crew of one such ship to be commanded to assemble at the request of Krero and Alchaen on the dock, and told sternly by Krero, “We need two volunteers for a crucial mission of national importance. They must be one man and one woman, healthy, of good character, open-minded and free of commitment to remain chaste.”

Part of what Kurkas had done was have me taught to fear pain out of all pleasure. Once awareness of that returned, my last memory of sex—with Skorsas, the night of my fiftieth fight—seemed too beautiful to be real, like a dream from which I’d been awakened by the touch of a branding iron. When I tested myself on it on Alchaen’s order, that brand burned all the deeper, for fear that that night had been my last.

But Haians have methods of healing even such things, with remedies and exercises and other means, and we’d been working on it for three months when Alchaen made the final prescription: I must practice, with another person. Or two, he corrected himself, after he asked me which way I was inclined, and I told him, “Both.”

He felt they should be Yeoli, but not greatly attached to me, and everyone in the guard either had been a friend already or had become one during our stay here. Krero did not want Yeolis who made Haiu Menshir their residence, in case that let word get out in the town that I was here. That left only the sailors and the warriors of the privateers.

Speaking to the prospects, Krero was looking for level heads and tight lips, Alchaen for level heads and warm hearts. Expert fly on a wall that I now was, I wished I could be there as they told the pair they finally chose what the mission was.

Careful not to overwhelm me, Alchaen decided that it best be one at a time, not both at once. I was terrified, to tell the truth, much more even than when I’d been a boy first seeking to impress. At the very least, I told myself, I can’t have forgotten how to give pleasure, so I still have that.

“It may be that there are some limits you will have to accept, at least for now,” Alchaen told me gently, beforehand. I resolved that very moment that I would regain my ability to do and feel everything I had before. Regaining the ability to come by my own hand had given me confidence, though it had taken a long time, and I’d had to learn many mind tricks to do it. The main mind trick I should remember when making love with others, Alchaen told me, was to hark back to the time before.

Since everything I had suffered had been at the hands of men, and I should try what was easiest first, Ronatora-e Ekaina’s turn came first. I name her in gratitude.

She was about twenty-five, with long hair so tight-curling it was like a cloud around her face, kindly green eyes and an easy smile. She was wider in the hips and thighs than Niku and narrower in the shoulders, but there was nothing not to warm to in those well-muscled curves. “Semanakraseye,” she said, with a smile that was a touch shy, as Alchaen brought her into my house, which was indistinguishable from the one that had been burned, and introduced us. “I am pleased to meet you.”

“And I you,” I said, willing my tongue not to lock up. “Call me Chevenga, please… we’re going to be intimate enough.” She let out a laugh of half-hidden nerves.

“You are both young,” Alchaen said. “Let what happens naturally happen. But do not rush it. Take your time.” He gave her a look full of remember everything I told you. Of course, he’d instructed her carefully.

We went for a walk along the beach, making getting-to-know-you chat as we went. Like all the privateers, she had been a marine originally, but her captain had taken the ship its own way in flight from the sea-battle there at Asinanai, which was her hometown, limping into Brahvniki for repairs. In the heat of Haiu Menshir, her hand was cool in mine at first, but grew warm.

By the sea’s edge, we both stripped to swim. Alchaen had warned her about my scars, I knew by her utterly impassive look when she saw them. But then she was looking at me, not them, and her eyes traced here and there, turning soft, a smile playing around her lips. I hope I can please the rest of you as much as I can your eyes, I thought.

As she pulled off her shirt, I realized I had not seen a pale pair of breasts for two years, and felt a pang for imagining honey-brown ones, with chocolate nipples. Niku… how goes the fight? I saw Rona see the look on my face. “Forgive me,” I said. “Seeing you… puts me in mind of someone else… who I miss.”

“Chevenga…” She laid her hands on my shoulders. “You are going to hesitate, and tremble, and be clumsy, and trip over parts of yourself, with me… so that you won’t with her.” She held my gaze in hers, then a smile quirked, and one finger reached up, and flicked me across the ear, feather soft. “Bet you can’t catch me.” She dashed into the boiling flat whiteness of the wave that had just come in, her buttocks flashing pink and beautiful. I chased after.

Fine to frolic like two children; we had a mission. We went back carrying our clothes over our shoulders, since there was no point in putting them back on, and I showed her the fresh-water stream in which bathers would wash off the salt. Then we were inside, and the fear came up in earnest.

“It’s hard, I know,” she said. “You’re pale. Let me just hold you, at first.” I could bury myself in her, pretending she was my mother, the softness of her breasts shelter and solace, not places to be pleasured. She stroked my hair nurturingly at first, but gradually it changed. That I could bear.

“One thing I ask,” I said. “I can’t know when I might freeze or panic or… otherwise somehow fail… because I am reminded of, you know.” She just signed chalk; Alchaen had taught her well. “But I am as certain as I can be of one thing: purely pleasuring a woman has fewer hidden dangers than anything else. So may we do that first?”

“Well…” She let a helpless smile grow over her face. “If you insist.”

I found myself shy nonetheless, so it was her who moved to bring our lips together. I closed my eyes, then opened them again, trying not to dishonour her by thinking of Niku. As our tongues met, and tenderly twined, I could tell myself that the pounding in my chest and neck were from pleasure, not fear. Heat between my legs burned away the shyness, and I found my hands and mouth had lost none of their knowledge, of the most delicate spots to stroke and flick and let out a hot whisper of breath onto, but it was all more sharply beautiful for how long I’d gone without. All through I had flickerings of memories, not only of Niku, but of Klaimera, Komona, Nyera, even Kagratora-e, ten years ago now. Hark back to before; my mind was doing that of its own accord.

Lying back on my bed, Rona went gorgeously red from her face all the way down to her hips, as I lowered my head between her legs. The terror of anything over my mouth poked, but slightly enough that I could beat it back. She was a feast of writhing, first, then a deliciously spurting draught, her ecstasy-cry ringing out and setting the four guards around and the two on the roof to chuckling and whooping.

There—can we leave it at that? Knowing in the back of my mind what should happen next, I found myself wanting just to lie snuggled beside her, and perhaps doze off. It was fear talking, I knew. “You want me, but fear chills it,” she said, trying for the healer’s evenness, but husky, sitting up. “Any chance the mouth of a woman took you in when they were torturing you?”

“Less chance than the sun rising in the w—aaaaiiiiigggh!”

She’d curled in quickly to do it, giggling, but then she went very gentle and delicate, as if I had a wound there that might open if she were too rough. “Take the healing,” she pulled away for a moment to say. I lay back and closed my eyes and willed myself to relax entirely. She tongued me carefully, as if knitting me back together, and taking that tenderness into myself put me in tears of relief before it turned into pure pleasure, and so became more frightening.

Here, where what I had to do was hard, was where the healing lay, here in the practice of walking the knife-edge between allowing the pleasure to take me, and succumbing to the fear. It was the same struggle, so hard it hurt, that I’d had with my own hand until I’d mastered it, but ten times as hard, just as being made love to is ten times as intense. Rona could not speak to me, but she could grip my hands, and in her fingers I felt the meaning, ‘It’s all right, you’re with me, you’re safe, everything is good.’

I clung to that, bringing my mind back to her hands every now and then, as pleasure and terror as one rose in me like flames in a gust of wind, a feeling too horribly close to being dragged to the pit I’d last been dragged to, not so long ago. It’s losing control that terrifies me, I thought. And that I must do.

“Rona.” Saying her name was a reminder to myself that I was not in Arko, that I was safe, that I need fear nothing. “Rona… Rona, Rona, Rona…” A beautiful name, to make me smile in the midst of this. “Rona… Rona… Rona…” I said it with each thrust, willing myself to allow that inward letting-go that fully frees pleasure, to let myself fall into it so it would not be tight and ugly and edged, as it had been the first times by myself, orgasms hardly worth having for the bitter miserliness of them.

It had been a trial even learning to cry out in ecstasy again, with Alchaen reminding me, “Yell! Set your voice free, Chivinga—yell!” I had my teeth set in silence now, I realized; by will I opened my mouth and threw my head further back and forced out one scraping cry, then another.

Rona had the one thing that I could never have for myself, though; the advantage of surprise. Just as I was at the peak of the struggle, driving it with waves of will for as long as I could stand against the urge to numbness, considering giving up and asking her to stop in despair, she slid her hands up my chest, with my hands still gripped in the outer three fingers of hers, and pinched my nipples between her thumbs and forefingers. I came before I knew it, a come like leaping off a cliff, with an scream as involuntary as a falling-to-your-death scream must be, that lasted a long, long time. The guards stayed silent.

Afterwards I lay with the image of a stone cliff etched in my mind—it was far too much like the Rim of Arko—with Rona cradling my head. “Let it out,” she said; Alchaen had taught her so well. “The next time will be better.” So I wept, and found they were the tears that wash clean. I could not say it had been purely pleasurable. But I had done it.

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