336 - A glove on the hand of her will

The country looks the same; the same trees grow, the same birds sing. The villages are built Arkan-style, with sun-slits in the red-tiled roofs and a small All-Gods temple with a small sun-disc. We’d find them empty down to the house-mice, or else everyone hiding in the temple on their knees, weeping in terror.

Else the mayor would come to us well before we got there with the ivy-branch, fling himself on his face as if my fore-runners were the Imperator, and hold up a swath of gold chains, all the entire village could scrape up, saying in strained Enchian, “For Shefen-kas, and we beg he spares us.”

I’d meant to take what bribes were offered me for the war-chest, but found, on the first, that it wasn’t in my heart, at least not in the amounts they offered. I decided on the fly to take only what they owed if they were in arrears with their taxes to Imperium, and their certificate of allegiance—Krero insisted that we get the mayor to swear under truth-drug—and promise to send me the next instalment.

I’m a conqueror now, I thought, remembering all the old conquerors around the drinking-table in my dream. This is my everyday life. If these things made me itch, the itching would drive me mad; I had to put it out of mind that ceasing to itch from them was madness too.

One thing invading means, Misiali told me, is stiffening the perimeter guard of the camp against casual attacks. Mahid assassins or solas strike forces were no more likely to bother us here than in Yeola-e; the danger was locals on dares, or gone mad, or drunk, or all three. So we did that, and I lay down to sleep cuddled with Niku, telling myself it felt no different, and hearing the snores of two of my children. Tawaen had dug in his heels about staying with me, saying Vriah was doing so, and I could send for tutors and books. With only six and a half more years of me at best, he had me wrapped around his finger, and, like any child with half a brain, he knew it.

I am walking on a field of early wheat, the tassels golden. The shadow of a huge bird flashes over me, making me snap my head up to try to understand why the beating of its wings is utterly silent. It is a pure white owl, brilliant in the sun.

From a cloud of white wings before me, a woman appears, at least two heads taller than me, with white-blond hair that would fall to her ankles if it fell, but instead wreathes thickly all around her in the wind, but slowly, like hair in water. Her body, otherwise naked, is more perfect that those of the Goddesses on the Avenue of Statuary, as if all the sculptors saw her in their minds, but their hands, being only mortal, fell short. Her eyes are bluer than an Imperator’s. They fix on mine.

“Do you know who I am?” she says, in one-down Arkan, and a voice that rings inside my mind and my bones.

“No,” I admit. “I know only that I should be in awe of you.”

“A good start.” Her hair speeds in its flowings, beginning to touch me, stroke me like threads of living air. As if whipped by the wind, though the air is still, a few strands of it, growing softly into a thick swath, wrap around my neck. It tightens, strangling me; I try to grab it to loosen it but now is it as strong as the Zak-wrought wire of a wing. I am choking, dying; more tendrils of her hair seize my wrists and drag them down to my hips, bind my elbows together from behind, slave-tying me Arkan-style; others seize my ankles.

Her cobalt-blue eyes watch my struggles cease, impassively. The hair-garrotte loosens enough to let me breathe, and speak. I gasp in breath, try to seize calm with it. “Do I have you, Shefen-kas?” she says.

“Yes,” I say with a scrap of voice. I slow down my panting by will.

“But only outwardly, yes? Inwardly, I cannot take. You must give to me.” I didn’t notice what I was wearing as I walked in the wheat, but now I am as naked as she. A tendril of hair thick as a slim finger slips between my legs, finding my anus, snakes in and then drives up hard, thickening with more hair as it does, tearing a cry out of me like a wound.

She penetrates beyond where anyone else ever has, and then beyond that, hair creeping up into my entrails, while I stare at her terrified; surely this will harm me? Her eyes do not soften, but narrow with intent, her chin rising a touch, as she forms the cloud of hair wreathing around my face into four appendages. Two of them touch and then slide into my nostrils; the others press into my ears.

I try to twist my head away, straining my neck, clenching my eyes shut, my panicked voice loud in my head for my ears being plugged. The hair just moves with me, hard as muscle inside me but soft as water outside to where it springs from her head, so there is no escaping it; its insertion does not slow at all. From my nose I feel it slide down into my throat and then my lungs; from my ears I feel it enter my brain, spreading out into single strands that trace the paths of the nerves. “If I have you, Shefen-kas,” she says, “stop fighting me.”

I do. There is no point. I relax, and the hair, like Shininao’s hand reaching down my mouth for my heart, increases in the speed of its invasion, slithering along bones, interspersing itself in the fibres of muscles, wrapping around organs and taking control of their function. I open my eyes; she is looking at me more tenderly now, as if at something fragile. I relax more deeply, closing my eyes again and letting my head fall back, and I feel my feet leaving the ground. I am floating on her strength, on the intent of her hair within me as it was floating as if in water before. I am filled with her through her hair, as if there is nothing of me left; her hair is me, I am her hair and like her hair, I move only by her will. She tests that, cocking her head slightly; I feel my legs and arms move at her thought, like those of a corpse in the hands of the Workfast Funerary.

With the trace of a nod—I do not see it, but I feel even her slightest motion all through me—she releases her bonds on my wrists and elbows and ankles entirely, so that none of her hair touches me except internally. I breathe to a rhythm she commands in her mind, and can no longer speak by my own will. She wishes my eyes open and looking at her, and so they do, blurred at first, clarifying slowly. She takes my face between her hands, whose palms are warm and silken-smooth, then strokes my hair back from my brow. I move to her movement like a boat in water.

“You retain your thoughts, Shefen-kas,” she said. “Surrender them, too.” I still my mind, as in meditation, but she deepens it by her own will, so much greater than mine, sent through the hair in my mind, like a drug into my veins. I drift into a deeper, whiter place, the rustle of words through my mind slowing and distancing, then stilling altogether. Free of their din, I can be a thousand times more aware, feel everything a thousand times much more clearly and vividly, like Jinai Oru, who can see the future as through a crystal because he is free of the burden of memory.

She draws me towards her by my head, opening my mouth, and joins her mouth to mine, reaching her tongue deep to caress mine. Her taste is indescribable, except to say that if perfection has a taste, it is this. My eyes close again; my neck arches back to her hands; I feel the fire between my legs.

“You retain only your feelings, now,” she says. “You will give them too, feel only what I have you feel.” A will to give and a giving at once roar up inside me, from every cell, so strongly I go light-headed. Take me, take everything I am, take all I have in me to give you, I lay it all at your feet… Her fingers close on my nipples and hold them steadily almost to pain; I writhe, moaning, heaving, my life and being centred around them, my throes sending watery reverberations through the shining hair that joins me to her.

When I am thrusting helplessly into air, she lets go to take my throat in one hand and my manhood in the other. Her strokes are gentle but full of requirement; as I move more intensely to them, they grow harder, the requirement more intense. I am so loose that every thrust sends a ripple through my body and and my wordless voice and my mindless consciousness all at once. “Good,” she says, her own breaths coming more quickly now. “Good.”

Her hands seize my shoulders and I feel my hips wrapped around by her legs, drawing me violently into her. Ecstasy sizzles along every nerve, through every vein, reflected back into her through her hair, reflecting again back into me, like sun and lightning at once inside us. I arch like a bow at each thrust now, my arms flung wide; my ecstasy cry goes on unbroken. It rises in me as huge as the endless expansion of the universe, that can never find its final size because it has no limits, that grows forever because it reaches out to where there is no time.

We come, because we cannot come any way but together, like the ultimate shattering, like an earthquake in the fabric of being, like dying. It lasts longer than I have ever had strength for before, on and on and on and on like the course of the river of history. When it is finally done, ebbing slowly, I am limp as I have never been, not only physically, and mentally, and emotionally, but in that deep way that comes only after sexual ecstasy, but much deeper than I have ever known.

She moves me like a glove on the hand of her will.

I am performing a series of complex steps and positions, my feet on a floor smooth and cool as polished marble, my body sometimes almost contorted, moving rapidly like a dance, as if I have such consummate skill in it I can perform it effortlessly. “This is what is most important, Shefen-kas,” she says as she moves me. “This is what you must learn, what we will train you for.” Limp as the dead, I breathe hard now from exertion, not passion. “You will not hurt my people.”