240 - We transcend the walls

Of course Kallijas was not surprised at how the trial turned out. I’d placed him in the second’s room in the barracks, for his safety. We sat there now, and I locked everyone else out except my mother. We’d decided it would be best if she went with him back to Vae Arahi. Appearances and work kept me from being with him much, but not her, and they had become friends.

“Perhaps one day I will be able to challenge them to duel,” he said. “In return for Minakis’s life... since what they did was outside what a warrior would do.” He said it calmly, but I could see the grief-tinged anger in his eyes.

“You know how that would go,” I said. “What would the challenge be? All three of them at once with one arm tied behind your back?”

“I would,” he said, though he need not have said it, since I knew. I was reminded of what I’d done to the guards in the Mezem after they’d beaten me chained. “Minakis was unarmed, and wounded. Aras would be in my hand.”

I thought of apologizing again, a thousand times. He would just say he did not blame me, and it would not be enough. I felt the burn of tears, but mastered them. He would comfort me, the only one whose hands were wet with Minakis’s blood who had not been charged, and that would be wrong. Of course I didn’t have to say anything, for him to know my mind. “Shefen-kas,” he said. “I know you are sorry. I forgive you.”

“I don’t forgive myself,” I said. “Maybe someday. Not yet. We’ve been living in a pleasant dream. It shouldn’t have taken something as severe as Minakis’s death to make reality knock its way through my skull. That was too high a price to pay for my stupidity. I’ll regret it always.”

“Sheng. It just happened.”

We were touching the backs of our hands together, as we had before he’d been cleared for exertion. We both felt it was as much as we could bear, for now. “You make it sound like the rain, or an earthquake. As if no one chose it and no one could have foreseen it. I guess that’s an improvement from blaming yourself, like you were before.”

He cast his gaze downward. “Well… if I had fought harder... moved faster… Aras only knows. And if you were a fool for living in that dream, I was no less a fool.”

“Curse me,” I said, “for mentioning the words ‘blaming yourself’ in your hearing.”

“I should blame no one,” he said. “Aras wanted him home... on the Fields of Valour. I could not stop a God’s will, and neither could you.”

As if these people’s petty act of hate could be a God’s will, I thought. I did not say it. I said only, “Kind words. Thank you.”

“I know one thing that Minakis would have wanted.”

“Anything, Kall.” The short form of his name rolled off my tongue so easily now. It seemed both as if we’d known each other for years, and years had passed since we’d dueled. Were we ever enemies? The time I didn’t care about him, did it really exist?

“For me to drink, and get drunk, to his memory. And…” He looked at me shyly, as if we’d never given each other ecstasy. “To sing to his memory, too.” It’s an Arkan euphemism for sex. Kallijas, young though he was, was like one of those plain-lined old Arkan swords, with just a thread’s width of gold trim here and there, courtly and old-fashioned. He turned his hand over, and wrapped it around mine. I tried to pull it away, and he caught my wrist in his strong grip. “Sheng. Please. You never finished taking me. Who knows how long it will be before we’re together again, if we ever are?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I said anything, didn’t I. I give myself to you.” Those words, I give myself to you, had an echo with an edge on them now, to my own ears, from what Krero had told me about what the guards had overheard.

No one would overhear anything tonight, through these stone walls. I sent for wine. “I am spending this evening with you,” I said. “Everyone else can eat shit.”

“One or more of your guards… died, didn’t they?” he said, as I poured our cups. When it hit his tongue, his acquiline face grimaced as if it were vinegar, but he knocked it all back in one draught anyway.

“All-Spirit, you’re serious,” I said. “About getting drunk, I mean. Not that I blame you.”

“I don’t like the taste,” he said.

“So you have to get it past your tongue as fast as possible, right.”

“Yes. Minakis bought something sweet that wasn’t too bad. Then something he said was the good stuff. It tasted like liquid fire. You didn’t answer my question.”

“That would be the strong stuff. A Haian would say, the tongue recognizes it’s toxic.”

“So how do you get a taste for it?”

“Drink until your tongue gives up in despair and throws up the ivy branch. Like this.” I lifted my cup daintily like an Aitzas, looked down my nose at it, sniffed it delicately, then gulped it back in one as he had.

He laughed so hard he got wine up his nose, and sputtered like a bad swimmer. When he could, he said, “You look like… like…” He pointed at the ceiling with his nose. “A wonnnnnnderful bouquet, solas, such a ssshhaaame that one could never have the palette that such a sophisticate as I have. That one will be the crude bumpkin it was borrrrrn…”

“If you’re saying I look like Abatzas Kallen, I challenge you to another duel,” I said. “Best two out of three.”

“I’ll thumb-wrestle you right here,” he said, peeled off one glove and smacked his forearm onto the table. “Joras taught me this one… sexy whoreson he was.”

“Like arm-wrestling?” I said. “I’ll whip you.” He laughed. It’s a solas drinking game: you clasp the other four fingers, intone the chant, “Four, three, two, one, who has got the stronger thumb,” and try to trap the other’s thumb under your own. Whoever wins may lick the other’s thumb; whoever loses must take a goodly swallow from his drink. There was only one night in his life that he could have learned it, I thought.

“Only an Arkan would think of this as sexy,” I said. I had not noticed he’d thumped down his shield-side elbow, meaning it was his stronger hand against my weaker. Between that and his experience at this, he soon beat me, pinning my thumb under his inescapably, no matter which way I tried to squirm it loose. Insufficient reconnaissance, again, I thought. If he still had any wound-weakness, I couldn’t discern it. I took my swig, and he licked my thumb long and sensuously. He was already drunk—he hadn’t stopped at the first—enough to blush.

Each few days that passed between my times with him, I’d think the trouble I was getting for loving him would chill my passion, at least slightly. Then with a look, or a touch, the full-body flaming roar of it would hit me again, just the same. That had happened the moment I’d walked into the room, and it flared hotter again now. “Other hand,” I said. “It’s only fair.”

“We all laughed,” he said, as we curled our sword-hand fingers together, and poised our thumbs. “All of us, that night. Joras… Harlas… Minakis… and… that girl. It was Minakis who brought her. We played this same game, but with hands under a scarf… Gloriala was her name. The scarf was silk.”

“Enough delaying the inevitable,” I said. “Four, three, two, one…” This time I got him, and held his thumb hard, cackling evilly. I teased him for a while, bringing my lips close, pulling them away again, licking them, until he was squirming in his chair. “You’re drinking much too fast,” I said. “I’m just trying to slow you down for health reasons. As well as making sure you’ll be capable, a little later.”

“Gloriala…” he said. “The only woman I’ve ever… Sheng, should we go out in front of your people and I serve you? For their dead.”

“Kallijas Itrean solas!” I tightened my thumb on his so hard I felt bone on bone. “Don’t you get it? Your abasing yourself does no one any good.”

“Ow,” he said, vaguely.

“Quit!! As you’re my prisoner, that’s a fikken order.”

“Yes, Durakis,” he said, obsequiously. I let go his thumb and gave it a slow, flicking lick that made him writhe all over. “I should drink,” he added, sheepishly.

“I think you should not.” Shield-hands again, and he beat me easily. “I can see how this is going to go. I guess there is no way to do it mirror-hands, is there? Oh—aiiigggh!” He’d turned over my hand and flicked his tongue in the palm. So sensitive; was I turning into an Arkan? “I thought it was supposed to be just the thumb!”

“I’m drunk,” he said. “I missed. Gloriala… she was a pretty drunk. Wisps of hair falling over flushed pink cheeks… That was not her real name, of course. I’ll never know her real name. Min found her. I’d say only Harlas is still alive… but I doubt even that, now. Curse you, you have not answered my question, whether I killed any of your guards.”

I smacked down my sword-side forearm. “Prepare to taste the dust of defeat, shieldy-hand.” Perhaps by the strength of indignation for the insult, or perhaps because I let him, not wanting him to drink more, he caught my thumb under his, to his surprise. I drank, but he didn’t let go.

“So how many of your guards, Sheng?”

“I think I’ve caught up, and passed you,” I said. “Killed many more of yours than you have of mine.”

“You keep ducking the question. What do I have to do to you?” He twisted my wrist backwards, just enough to be on the edge of pain.

“My guards shouldn’t count. What they did was backstabbing, in effect.”

“I still want to know. Not to blame myself. Just to know. I am thinking it was one—the girl. I thought I heard bone crack. Aras… where but Yeola-e does a warrior end up killing girls? But maybe the other one I got with a head-blow, too.”

He still had my thumb pinned and my wrist twisted. I drank again. “That was for the pain. You killed her, yes. You did not kill him. Yes, I knew her, I know all of them. Not closely, or this would be harder. Don’t say sorry; you were defending yourself. Will you give me the lick of mercy now?”

“Yes, Shefen-kas,” he said. “If you can wrestle your hand free.”

That was the end of words for a while. I could imagine no more perfect joy than feeling his strength, the skill of his body, his grace, his heat and flush against mine. Can this go on forever? Can it never end? Can I forget everything else? We were soon on the bed, naked, trying to pin each other. He had the advantage of size, and weight, a little; I had the advantage of greater sobriety. He smelled of the clean sweat of an athlete, meaty with his Arkanness. We mixed wrestling with caresses, to try to best each other by causing weakness. His hair was like silk, thick and soft, in my hands, his hands one moment steely-hard and the next soft as air on me.

He won that way. I lost the will to prevail in favour of the will to surrender, and so surrendered, and he seized me in his mouth as hungrily as I had first seized him. I came in a moment, like a boy, just as he had, though I hadn’t thought I still could, after all that had happened to me. There was no controlling myself, either naturally or by design, with him; it was too overwhelming.

“I’ll bet... I’l bet... they’re up on Aras’s field right now, laughing their bloody guts out at me,” he said, as we rested.

“At you? They’ll be laughing with you in a moment, when I start begging you to take me,” I said.

“Take you… Take… you? But I shouldn’t…”

“Kallijas… ‘shouldn’t’ defines everything we’re doing. It has almost since I put you on that litter. If Arko has forsaken you, then you’ll have to be Yeoli, or at least live by our ways, and there’s no ‘shouldn’t’ about that for us.”

“At me. They are laughing at me. Curse you.” I turned over, and he seized my hips, his hands full of the feeling of helplessness to stop himself. I let it wash over me, so as to reflect his own pleasure, and then ecstasy, back to him. We transcend not only the war and our nations, I thought, but the walls that being tortured had raised in me, that had seemed as indestructible as mountainsides. An Arkan took me, and I felt no pain or fear or blackness at all, only the unmixed pleasure of being pierced by the greatness that he was, of having his goldenness inside me, like living light. I broke down walls in him too, I knew. We each made the other transcend himself, just as in the duel.