Indomitus Oriens (The Fovean Chronicles) (12 page)

In her mind’s eye, she knelt by the stream, and
watched them. They turned their wide eyes up toward her expectantly, fish-eyes oddly sentient in regarding her.

She willed them away, and they scattered, but returned to her again.
She could not nurse them, she could not nourish them—how would she scatter what had never been meant to stay?

Then it occurred to her
—she could not. These thoughts belonged to her, and remained real. Where she had scattered them once before, or nourished and cultivated them, or absorbed them in the greater worry of her song, now she had them here, and they had nowhere to go.

Instead, in her minds eye, she shed her garment, and she leapt into the icy stream.
The strong current, the icy water swept her away, leaving these thoughts and worries to swim behind her.

Immersed in the water, she accepted its cold, its pain, and let it numb her and batter her, accepting that she had no strength to fight it.

She swept down the stream, past rocks and fish and curious things without end, growing ever colder, numbed and battered thoroughly.

As she departed her unreal body this time, leaving it to the water and the rocks, she saw it ruined and broken in the stream.
Her real body remained relatively pristine and perfect. She again identified the tiny imperfection on her real shoulder, and she connected her lifeline to it.

She arose before the city of Outpost IX, this time not as a thin sheet but a fog, a pulsing mass, wet and invisible, radiating thundering power as she had never done before and should not do now, exhausted as she found herself.

In the city, she identified a young tree with no bark, its leaves springing green in the coldest months. She caressed its trunk with her ethereal fingers, feeling ghostly smooth. She pressed her ethereal lips to it, and tasted its woody purity.

When she withdrew from it, she saw herself in its bole, not as a woman but as a jewel, and had to wonder at what that meant.

* * *

The armored guards brought them to their own room in a tower in the palace.
They saw a gigantic bed, thick carpets, another room to sit down in, a table for eating, even a canvas and paints where they could indulge their creative needs if they wanted to, and a gigantic window to look out onto the city, supposedly for inspiration.

From the window they looked out onto a bustling place where people in robes and dresses, pants and armor, on foot and in wagons and on horseback, moved from here to there by torch and lamp light.
A plain white moon hung over the horizon, casting its reflection on the water past the city walls.

“It’s an island,” Melissa commented.

“They seem to be in the Middle Ages,” Bill said.

“Like, King Arthur?” she said.

“Yeah. Those men who came to get you wore armor and had some kind of swords. There are some more like them down there.”

“I see a few on horseback, but I don’t see any cars,” Melissa said.

“I am having serious doubts about their ability to get us back from here,” Bill said.

She walked away from the window and back to the one bed. Apparently, they assumed the two were a package.

Someone had piled the mattresses and quilts up so high that Melissa actually had to jump to get up on it.
When she did, she sank back down another foot into its softness. “Whoa, wow!”

“Is that a feather bed?” Bill asked, following her.

“I dunno,” she said. She lay back, threw back her arms and spread her legs. Her robe flew open and exposed her from stem to stern.

Bill turned away politely.
She didn’t need to look up to know he did it. She sighed.

“You’ve already seen it,” she said.

“I know.”

“You don’t like it?”

“Didn’t say that.”

“You gay?”

“
What
?”

She laughed, pulled her arms out of the sleeves of her robe, and rolled over, raising a leg up.
“There,” she said. “Look at my butt. You like my butt.”

She heard him sigh, then felt the bed shift as he crawled in next to her.

She had had enough of being out of control, of being victim-girl, of being ‘Melly.’ He hadn’t asked what happened to her, and she hadn’t told him. He couldn’t fix it for her, and she didn’t want his sympathy, didn’t want to look in his eyes and see pity.

“Wow, this
is
a goose down mattress,” he said.

He settled in a polite foot from her.
The mattress dipped toward him, and she let herself roll toward him.

“Whoops,” he said, as her breasts rolled over his arm, and she pinned his hand under her belly.

“Deal with it,” she said, wryly.

She hadn’t chosen to be here, she hadn’t chosen to be touched, paralyzed, stripped and dragged around.
This
, she chose.

He looked into her face, then leaned back and closed his eyes.

“You don’t want me?”

“Of course I want you,” he said.
“Its just that—”

“You are sweet,” she said.
She laid her head on his shoulder, and turned so he could get a better look at her.

Sometimes she just enjoyed teasing him.
He was a nice guy. He might be older, but her track record with boys her own age hadn’t been that great. Bill respected women. She could look in his eyes and saw the tenderness there. Those eyes held no harm for her, no cruelty. Bill had love to give to her, she could see it in almost everything he did.

What did a few years matter for a man with love to give?

“What do you think?”

“I think I am having a nic’ fit so bad, I could bite the top off of a beer bottle, and I bet they don’t have that here, either.”

She laughed. “I am right behind you,” she said, laying her hand on his chest. “I would dry a butt from a wet ashtray right now.”

“The only butt I’ve seen around here is yours,” he joked.

She looked up at him, a wide grin on her face. “Why Bill, are you flirting?”

He screwed up his face and considered.
“That could be flirting,” he said, nodding.

She reached inside of his robe.
“Well, then, why don’t you come on?” she said. “It isn’t too late for you to have your lucky night?”

“Don’t you want to order lobster first?”

She reached up and kissed him. His beard was rough on her lips. She pushed her tongue into his mouth and opened her eyes to see the surprise on his face. She grinned and pulled back, letting him press her, tasting his mouth on hers. She surprised him again by sucking on his invading tongue, then giving it a gentle bite.

A younger man would have tried to clean her tonsils, drooled all over her and made her jaw sore.
Bill seemed more interested in her enjoying it. The hand beneath her turned and found her breast, the free one found her back, and traveled between her shoulder and her upper thigh. She stood just over five feet tall, he could reach all of her with his long arms.

His fingers reminded her of the old Uman-Chi.
She fought the memory. Bill felt her tense up, and broke the kiss to look in her eyes. She took his beard between her thumb and forefinger, and pulled his lips back to hers. She forced the thought to the edge of her mind, because she hadn’t had enough time to force it away.

The kissing kept on going, until she felt good and ready for the next part.
Again, she took the lead, pushing his shoulders back, getting him ready with her mouth first, then getting up on top of him. He was too big to lay on her, but she found herself athletic enough to make it work from on top. He watched her, wanting to put his hands everywhere at the same time, to squeeze and tickle, to nibble her breasts when she leaned forward, and to gently tug her hair as she leaned back.

Bill counted as her third time, but she knew what she was about.
She made it all happen for herself. It turned out wonderful, just what she hoped for. He didn’t rock her world—but he got the job done. Afterward he held her, safe in his arms, his breath on her, his heart beating under her ear, until she felt safe and she fell asleep. Not since she had been rocked in her daddy’s arms had she known that contentment in her life, and that had happened a long, long time ago.

Chapter Six:

             
The New Kids on the Block

They spent t
heir days trying to learn the language. They spent their nights in each other’s arms. They were cared for and fed, and it all made Melissa feel like a pet—one whose cage was too small.

Human throats just couldn’t utter the sounds made by Uman-Chi, but the others, the servant race that called themselves Uman
—their language could be spoken. Melissa learned that, slowly picking out the nouns and vowels, and the differences between ‘I am hungry’ and ‘I am hunger.’

They found Men who worked within the palace.
Bill greeted them like lost relatives, but they seemed standoffish. He towered over all of them, heavier than the biggest of them and older than any two of them combined. They spoke a language that Bill said sounded a lot like Polish, which his grandmother had taught him as a boy. He picked that up, moving a lot faster than Melissa could.

All of the local humans, who called themselves Men as a race (and didn’t that get Melissa’s feminist dander rising!) were servants, just like the Uman.
That made them hard to engage. If Melissa tried to speak with them, they immediately assumed she wanted something, and then were very focused on how to get it for her. Once they figured out that she wanted to talk, to learn their languages, they usually just gave short answers to questions, pretended not to or actually couldn’t understand anything too deep, and excused themselves as soon as they could.

“You’re too used to being free,” Bill informed her one day, in their rooms, two weeks after coming here.
It was evening and they’d been served their evening meal—steaming platters of meat and roots like potatoes and carrots laid out between them with pitchers of milk and clean water. In Fovea, or at least among the Uman-Chi, you weren’t served directly—food was laid out communally and you grabbed what you wanted from a pile.

Melissa had tried to get the Uman servants to stay and eat with them, and they’d gone wide-eyed when they’d realized what she wanted, and fled.

“Everyone should be free,” Melissa argued, sitting across from him in a padded, wooden chair at a little round table by their one window. Their room faced south, and when the sun went down they were treated to an excellent view of the city, all with lit lanterns and little houses, smoke rising from chimneys here and there, and people walking down immaculate cobblestone streets. There were trees and flower beds here and there and, if you looked long enough, you’d often see men and women walking side-by-side, holding hands or being trailed by their children.

“Everyone should be,” Bill agreed, “but in fact not everyone is, even where we’re from.
This place is more like the Middle Ages, and these people are vassals to their lords.”

Melissa reached out to a platter with a two-pronged fork and pulled a red strip of beef onto her plate.
Here they
never
used the fork to eat with—that was the purpose of your knife, which had a wide, curved end almost like a flat spoon. You fetched your food with your fork or held it while you cut it with your knife, and then you used your knife to put it into your mouth. That actually made more sense when you considered this fork was going to touch food on a platter that other people might want.

“Vessels?” she asked Bill.
He was dressed in an evening robe—they changed clothes like three times a day here. You had your morning wear and your day way, and then something blousy and comfortable for the evening.

They also went commando
—no underwear. Women in their cycle would wear something almost like a diaper, but they wore such giant, full skirts that it was impossible to tell.

“Vassals,” Bill corrected her.
He spoke around a piece of meat he was chewing. Melissa took some as well, with a smashed piece of potato—it was
amazing
. Bill had called it ‘farm fresh’ but she didn’t know what that meant, other than to say it had more flavor than anything she’d ever had from a restaurant or from a supermarket.

“People who are literally owned by their noble lords, like property,” he continued.
“They exist to serve their so-called betters, people of higher birth. All of the betters here are Uman-Chi.”

Melissa felt her eyebrows knit.
“Like—slaves?” she asked.

Bill shook his head.
“Serfs, not slaves,” he said. He took a big gulp of milk, then continued with a little of it hanging on the end of his moustache. “They can’t be bought or sold—they have some rights, but they live to serve.

“Believe it or not,” he continued, poking at his meat, “that’s been the human experience for most of our history.
People have only started to be born common
and
free for a few hundred years.”

Melissa thought about those old Errol Flynn movies she’d watched as a kid, before cable.
Those times of men with swords and peasants in Sherwood Forrest had seemed very romantic to her at the time.

She had been an enthusiastic student in college, but not on topics like this.
She’d excelled at the physical sciences, chemistry and biology, but found it difficult to connect with the social ones.

P
eople here were more beaten down—they were actually afraid to talk to her. On the other hand, the Uman-Chi had violated her privacy and thought nothing of it. Angron had seemed to apologize, but in fact he was clearly surprised by it bothering her.

In fact they ha
dn’t seen Angron again, but the female, whose name they learned was, ‘Glynn,’ had become their constant companion. She directed Uman servants to make them clothing, a set of dresses with billowy skirts with hems down to her ankles for Melissa. They preferred tight waists and uplifting bodices that flattered her figure. Bill was measured for pants and long robes of red, blue and green, and blousy shirts that opened at the chest.

Glynn
arrived early the following morning, knocking at their door after they’d finished their breakfast. They didn’t have coffee here (this bothered Bill but Melissa could live without it) but they did have a very heady tea with caffeine in it. They were drinking that when the Uman-Chi girl walked in.

“Good morning to you, my lord and lady,” Glynn said, smiling brightly to both of them.
She’d dressed in the single white robe she always wore—Bill had guessed that it marked her station, but they hadn’t asked how.

“And to you, my Lady,” Bill said to her, smiling, in the language of Men.
“May I pour some tea on you?”

Glynn smiled and corrected his grammar.
In the language of Men, you could change the meaning of a sentence just by your inflection, and Bill was having trouble getting it right.

She accepted some tea from him and sipped it, sitting with them.
She gazed out the window for a moment, clearly collecting her thoughts, and then without looking at either of them said, “I received a rather disturbing report that you invited your servants to eat with you.”

Melissa frowned.
“Is that not allowed?” she asked in the Uman language. Bill shot her a warning look but she ignored it, focused on Glynn.

“It isn’t fair to the Uman,” Glynn said, gently chiding her.
“They are not—” and then some word she didn’t understand.

Melissa repeated the word.
Glynn tried again—this could be very frustrating some times, especially in a case like this when there wasn’t something to point to and say, “That thing right there—this is a word for that.”

Glynn
patiently pointed out words to them at every opportunity, both in the languages of Man and Uman. She never became frustrated, she never seemed to mind repeating herself. Melissa couldn’t imagine how a girl who couldn’t be more than fifteen could be so even-tempered and patient, but apparently that was a big part of being an Uman-Chi.

“Today we do something good,” Glynn informed them, abandoning the word she’d been trying to teach Melissa.
“I have horses for us to ride.”

The grin that split Bill’s face took thirty years off of him, Melissa thought.
She’d seen him staring longingly after the horses they’d seen from their window. He hadn’t said anything to her, but she’d have to be blind to miss it.

“Where we ride?” he asked her.

“Where
do
we ride?” she corrected him. “There is a in the palace where we can .”

Normally Bill would be all over learning the word he didn’t know
—now he clearly didn’t care. Glynn stood and asked them to dress, and Bill was already tearing his clothes off.

That was
another
thing about the Fovean—they had about zero modesty. Glynn would stand right there while they changed, and she wouldn’t think twice about shucking her robe and squatting over a chamber pot if she needed to. Melissa hailed from New England, where it was unheard of to wear jeans to work.

They kept their clothes in an armoire
—a big, wooden container with intricately-carved doors that opened out into the room. She pulled those open and stepped within their confines, dropping her robes and her simple dress and looking for something more appropriate for riding.

They’d made her high-topped boots as soft as leather could be, but no pants at all.
She thought to ask Glynn but felt she knew what the answer would be: ladies do
not
wear pants here. She sighed and pulled out the lightest dress she could find.

Bill was already dressed out in chocolate brown leather pants, boots and a white pull-over cotton shirt that was open at his neck, with a wide black belt around his middle, by the time Melissa was ready.
Glynn approached her and turned her around, cinched up the laces in the dress’ back and then turned her around, smiling.

Melissa painted on a smile.
It could sometimes suck to be a girl.

* * *

Melissa hadn’t sat on horseback for ten years. Bill had apparently ridden for a big part of his life but hadn’t done so recently. They put him up on a big bay gelding, and found her a gentle palfrey with a sidesaddle.

She’d never seen a side-saddle before
—it bore two stirrups on the left, one shorter than the other, on an otherwise normal saddle with a saddle horn and a high back. The Uman servant in the stable, dressed in brown pants and a white shirt buttoned to his collarbone and a red ascot, his green hair loose around his shoulders, walked the gentle mare to a mounting block—three steps that would take her almost to the horse’s height.

She guessed she was supposed to plant her butt on that.

“Can I get…” she began, but she didn’t know how to say, ‘normal’ or ‘saddle.’

Glynn frowned.
“Afraid?” she asked.

Melissa shook her head.
She climbed to the top of the mounting block and tapped the saddle, and asked ‘What is the word for this?’ in Uman.

“Shedell,” Glynn informed her.

She pointed at the saddle on Bill’s horse. Bill was still playing around with the cinch that held the saddle to the horse’s back—he’d already adjusted the stirrups. The Uman who attended him, dressed the same but older and with white hair, was speaking to him in the language of Men.

“What is the word for this?” she asked.

Glynn gave her the word for horse, but she shook her head. She pointed at the saddle, said, “Shedell,” and then she pointed at Bill’s saddle and said “Shedell-na.”

‘Different saddle.’

Glynn nodded, and pointed to hers. “Agla-def,” she said.

“For women.”

Melissa pointed to Bill’s saddle and said, “Melissa-def.”

“For Melissa.”

Glynn frowned more deeply, and pointed at Melissa’s saddle.
“A woman must protect her—” and then a word she didn’t know but could easily guess at.

Glynn knew they slept together, so it couldn’t be virginity.
Waddaya think, sister?
she couldn’t help thinking, “
It’s gonna rub off?”

She
sighed and planted her butt gently on the saddle. Her feet found the two stirrups and she would have pushed herself off backwards on the other side if she hadn’t been able to grab the saddle horn. The Uman raised a hand and lowered the stirrups for her, and that made balancing easier.

She
wanted a cigarette so bad she was ready to bite someone’s head off. Still, she smiled at the Uman, who smiled back up at her and led her horse out of the stables into the bright, sunny day outside.

Bill trotted out behind her on the gelding.
The air was brisk but not too horribly cold—it must be near the start of spring here, she thought. Another Uman opened a gate outside of the stable entryway and the two of them rode into a covered arena lined by a wooden fence. There were other Uman in there, working other horses, some with ropes and long-handled whips teaching the horses to walk or trot properly, others riding on soft sand that seemed a good four inches deep. Before the Uman at the gate could close it, Glynn charged out of the stable on a little white mare with pink, flaring nostrils and blue eyes, also riding a side-saddle.