Idol of Blood (4 page)

And then Fyn was yanking the blanket off (
oh gods, they saw
), cheeks pink with outrage for some unfathomable reason, slapping Jak and calling Jak a dirty little pervert. Jak had cried, because it was something Jak used to do, and the worst part was (
theworstpart, theworstpart
) not being discovered by Fyn, but that Kol stood watching, invasive, staring unapologetically at Jak's exposed sex.

Jak had gone somewhere else. Ra put a hand on her lover's arm and Jak recoiled. “Jak.” Ra tried to keep her voice soft and unthreatening. “I am Meer. If you don't want me to know your thoughts, don't think so loudly. I think it's fair I warn you.”

Jak sat with knees drawn up, arms wrapped around them, hidden things kept hidden. “You're spying on me?” The dusting of freckles was stark against skin white with shock and anger. “You read my mind?”

“No, not that,
lif
, not exactly.” Ra tried to comfort and was rebuffed. “The Meer…our heads are teeming with pictures.” She had never explained this to anyone. It was beyond explanation. “Most are meaningless. We learn to ignore. But when someone nearby is entranced like that, lost in thought—dreams, reverie—those pictures are loud. Vivid. I wanted you to know you were doing it, because of course you couldn't know. No one but the Meer have ever known.”

Jak was silent, chin against the drawn-up knees. Ra brought one of the hand-woven blankets from the duffel, but Jak ignored it, and Ra slipped it over the cool shoulders. There was a block of lead in Ra's chest—Jak's pain. It was hard to breathe.

“I'm sorry, Jak. I never meant anything to cause you shame. I've been too presumptive with you, of your nature. I didn't mean to.” The lead was squeezing her. She couldn't stand it. Her eyes were filling with red. She would not do this, would not cry. She was older now than the Ra who had first stumbled into Haethfalt with her naked emotions.

Jak was watching her. “‘Meer's tears.' Do you know that saying?”

One shocked tear escaped, and Ra slashed it away, aware of the healing marks on her face from MeerShiva's wrath after she'd made the mistake of thinking Shiva weak. The words were an insult, a cold and terrible one from Jak. Meer's tears: blood conjured for effect, when their tears were just saltwater like everyone else's. But Jak knew that wasn't true. It had been cruel.

“I'll sleep by the window.” She stepped back, her words toneless. “You have the hearth. Meer don't feel the cold like you. We don't feel anything like you.”

Ra climbed beneath a blanket by the window and closed her eyes. Her head hurt so. There was a reason, but she couldn't think of it. Her conjured sweater was torn down the center. She should conjure another. When had she conjured this one? It was too difficult to recall. She was so tired.

Several hours into the night, Ra woke briefly, her head fuzzy. Jak had crept from the hearth, warm with Ra's fire, and climbed under the blanket, slipping hot arms around her and pulling her next to the fervid body.

Jak nuzzled against her neck. “I'm sorry.”

“Jak,” murmured Ra, profoundly comforted, like someone dragged back from the brink of death. They slept, Jak's hands warming her uncovered breasts.

In the morning, awakening with the silk and pearl of Ra's breasts in hand, Jak roused Ra from sleep by anointing them with kisses. Ra was the possessed for a change, and Jak's mouth moved from breasts to ribs to abdomen to belly, nipped at her thighs, buried in the rich curls below her hips. But Ra's hand stopped Jak from kissing the wine-tinted blush between her thighs.

“Why?” Jak looked up into Ra's ebony eyes. “I want to please you.”

Ra shook her head. “If yours is off limits, then mine is too. Don't look like that. I'm not punishing you. It would be unfair. I cannot take from you what you won't take from me. And you have no idea how badly I want it.”

Jak climbed up the length of Ra's smooth body, laid bare in Jak's descent but for the tattered sweater, and lay against her, head on the pillow of her breasts. The room was purple with light diffused through the blanket window. In the kitchen, the pendulum of the clock swung, weights ticking as gravity worked upon them. Jak didn't remember Ahr having a clock.

“We forgot to eat yesterday,” mused Ra after a bit.

Jak sat up in dismay.

“Sooth, Ra. No, lie down. You're going to be fed.” Jak jumped up and surveyed the kitchen fluttering with light through the makeshift windowpane.
Empty
. This was the same kitchen in which they'd been snowbound, picked clean by Jak and Ahr before setting out for Rhyman. There was nothing here to make.

“Come back to bed,” Ra said with a laugh, arms outstretched. “Let me eat
you.
”

“It's not funny,” Jak protested. “You need to eat. I'll go to RemPeta. They'll lend me something.”

Ra laughed again. “A Meer is in your bed, and still you worry about lack. You want to feed me? What,
lif
, oranges? Berries? Flat cakes? Ham?” They were tumbling from her words and into reality, appearing on a generous mother-of-pearl tray in Ra's lap. “Come back to bed. I'll be good. I'll eat what you tell me.”

They slept again after they'd eaten their fill, drifting off by the fire and not waking until after dark. Both were uncomfortable from having forgotten to relieve themselves, and Ahr had no indoor privy, only a wooden outhouse behind the mound, unless they wanted to use the piss-pot. They raced outside in the chilly dark, naked and laughing, and Ra nearly wet herself when Jak beat her to the outhouse.

Leaning back against the closed door, Ra waited outside, noting Ahr had chosen to carve the feminine moon rather than the masculine sun for the door's ventilation. Stars soared overhead as well, with a real moon to pale the cutout—full tonight and lighting the glen below Mound Ahr over a cluster of silver-etched trees.

Her mind was full again too. Were those pieces of diamond pressed into the dome at
Ludtaht
Ra? That piece like a moon-cake—she must put them in the oven for the Heart of Winter. But was it winter?

Someone's coming.
There was someone coming through the darkness she didn't want to know—perhaps her mother, Shiva, remote and gliding through the jade glass of her temple like a ruby swan on a pearl lake, while Ra learned the lessons of stillness, waiting. Waiting…

Yes, she was waiting. Standing without moving. Waiting for something to happen. Something terrible. Trying not to be heard. Oh god, would he come in here? Would he find her?
Please don't let him come in.

This was not one of her unanchored memories; it belonged to someone else. She was dimly aware of that, had never been in this room, this indoor privy chamber where she now pressed flat against the cold wall, heart beating too loudly.
Kol will hear, and Fyn isn't home.

The memory belonged to a child.

The door to the privy opens, blinding light from the passageway flooding the room—a lamp held in Kol's hand. He brings it in and closes the door, and she's exposed again: a rabbit under the white glare of a bright owl's eye. The owl comes closer, saying nothing, staring intently with the raptor's split attention, an ear out for Fyn's return. She tries to press deeper into the wall, but there's nowhere to go.

Where only his gaze exposed her before, he takes it further, exposing her body without consent while she stands helpless, staring into the light, trying not to be there, trying not to feel.

Satisfied at last with his exploration, Kol washes up in the basin and goes out, taking his owl-eye light with him. Too terrified to move, she wets herself without making it to the pot two feet away. Warmth spills down to the floor.

Jak opened the door and nearly tripped over Ra, huddled trembling against the cold ground. When the dark sapphire eyes looked up into Jak's, it was obvious what had happened. Jak's unbidden thoughts—the memories Jak had managed to suppress for almost twenty years until tonight—had been more than loud. They'd been deafening. Ra knew everything.

Edging back into the outhouse, Jak tried to hide once more, slinking low on the floor. Ra fumbled to her knees and reached for the door, but Jak slammed it shut and held it from the inside so Ra couldn't get in.
Don't let him come in
. Ra banged on the door, higher up now.

“No!” Jak shouted. “Go away!” But the door was too hard to hold against Ra. Ra had torn iron bars from the jail cells at the temple in Rhyman like arms from their sockets. She wanted in, and she was in, and Jak cowered.

Ra said nothing, lifting Jak to an unwilling slump, and took Jak from the outhouse, back across the frosty ground to the yellow band of light that was the door of Mound Ahr. Inside, she let Jak sag against the pile of their bed.

Jak pressed into the blankets, hot with shame, wanting to be dead. “I don't want you to know. I don't want anyone to know.”

Ra stretched her body over Jak's, arms protecting against anything that desired harm to Jak, except for Jak alone. “I am not anyone.” Ra began to sing a strange melody, high and foreign—a Rhymanic lullaby, perhaps, sung only to children of the Meer—and Jak slept.

It was morning again. Time seemed to have grown capricious. Jak had slept without dreams, empty, a coma, and that had been good. There had been no thoughts at all, just respite. There was something Jak wanted to forget.

The night rushed in then, uncouthly, and the pit of Jak's stomach tightened against a stab of shame. Ra knew. Jak was exposed.

Ra eased onto her side next to Jak on the blankets and brushed back the fine hair that hid Jak's face, but Jak shrugged her away.

“You brought this into my head,” Jak accused. “You made me think of it.”

“No,
midtlif
. No.”

“How else? I'd forgotten about…Kol.” Jak nearly gagged on the word. It had been deeply forgotten. It hadn't existed. The man Jak could only bear to call Kol, and never “Father”, had died, mercifully, when Jak was fourteen, and Jak had been liberated. By the time Jak seduced Geffn, it had already disappeared. Now Ra had found it and dragged it into the white, naked light.

“Perhaps by my presence,” Ra acknowledged. “By my speaking of the fear and hesitation you weren't consciously aware of when I touched you. Because a Meer's words create, your memories couldn't remain buried. But never by my intention. I would never willingly inflict pain on you.”

“But you knew.” Jak spoke into the blankets. “You were making love to me, and then you stopped. I didn't know, but you did. You knew.”

Ra propped herself on one elbow, respectfully distanced. “I only knew you were frightened,
lif
. I couldn't touch you like that, as something to be endured. And I had been so forceful with you. It was the wrong thing.”

Jak reached back and groped for Ra, and Ra offered her hand. “No,” said Jak earnestly, pulling Ra's hand in front, clasped between both breasts. “I loved that.”

Ra hugged Jak to her fiercely. “Won't you look at me again, Jak?” She laid her cheek against Jak's shoulder. “Will you never look at me?”

To look at Ra would mean seeing Jak's own abasement. Jak would see Kol there, humiliation and nakedness—and pity. Jak pressed Ra's captive hand. “It wasn't the only thing,” said Jak in a small voice. “It was the first thing.”

Ra was assaulted then with what Jak couldn't keep hidden: Kol would find Jak; there was no hiding from him either. When Fyn went out, and sometimes at night when Fyn was sleeping just a room away, Jak was the rabbit again. There were never any words, just the intent concentration, the owl eyes, as Kol dissected,
vivisected
, reduced Jak to parts. Neither did Jak make a sound; perhaps it wasn't happening if it didn't touch the atmosphere.

In this complicity of silence, he manipulated Jak's parts like Deltan clockworks, as though it were merely an experiment. Nothing escaped Kol's expedition.

When Jak and Geffn had first been intimate, Jak hadn't been a virgin—taking Geffn had been easy. Jak had known it, but hadn't known why. It hadn't seemed important to know. When had Jak's virginity disappeared? Jak couldn't remember even now. Perhaps it was only that first invasive touch that mattered. How could the rest matter, when Jak wasn't there?

From eight to fourteen, Kol had been Jak's shame. And then Kol had fallen from a height—exploring again—on the mountain with Fyn.

Fyn had done it. Jak knew this, though it had occurred to no one else. Fyn had somehow, finally, known. It hadn't made them friends. Jak had wanted that from her, wanted to be forgiven, but Fyn, succumbing to consumption, had followed Kol to the grave a miser with the precious forgiveness. The dark rooms and the white where Kol had excavated Jak, the invasion of his explorations, were gone from Jak's conscious mind by then, and Jak only knew Fyn's abandonment, more total in death than it had ever been in life.

Shame, like swallowed nightshade, battered Jak from within. It was an inflamed organ that had at last ruptured, and its poison was spreading. Jak had done something to deserve it, to provoke it. Jak's silence, perhaps, had been implicit consent.

“You're not to blame,” Ra insisted, and Jak let out a weak, derisive laugh from the blanket. But Ra compelled Jak to look at her, and when she spoke again, her voice held the incontrovertible authority of the Meer. “You must trust me. You must let me do what I will to you.”

Jak shrank beneath her, silent once more, paralyzed by Ra's eyes. Ra held Jak's head immobile and descended, a bird of prey from above. She stormed Jak's mouth in a kiss, but not a lover's kiss, bruising and constricting. Jak howled into the void she created between them, an unbidden issuance of sound that surged up from Jak's feet, through the violated places and through the stomach where the agony lodged. It streamed out of Jak, demented, an audible throe, and Jak convulsed, trying to escape, but Ra was unopposable. Ra stiffened, her skin a bloodless white, eyes always on Jak's, keeping Jak's gaze as though it were vital.