The Care and Feeding of Griffins (51 page)

If she wished to, of course she should.

She didn’t move.  After a long span of this motionless repose, his hand slipped up and into her hair.  His fingertips were light and gentle, rippling over her skin, no more substantial than the breeze that stirred the plains.  He stopped when he touched the nape of her neck and was still again.  He asked her for nothing and he took nothing more.

The night did not move.  The River flowed, but movement in this place didn’t mean time passed.  This River was eternity and Anu stood in the River.  His was a kind face and he had no expectations.

Taryn closed her eyes.  She moved her own hands slowly from their resting places on his chest and around to his back, so that she embraced him.  It was an invitation.  She didn’t say anything, but the mood between them changed at once, like the thought/memories of the Riverman, because her meaning was at once understood.

They were not gods, the Riverman told her.  And they were not eternal.  But nor were they human, and it had been many millennia since last he’d held a mortal, and those, priestesses trained in the ways of his kind.

But Taryn noted he was not releasing her, and she could feel a subtle tremor in his hands as he passed them down her back to rest on her hips.

“It’s all right,” she said.  She placed her hand over one of his, looking up into the pale moons of his eyes.  She offered him a smile with tears still drying on her face.

Did she know what she was offering?

“Yes.”

And she gave willingly?

“I do.”

He lifted her into his arms, bringing his muzzle against her neck for that first kiss from his strange mouth.  His hand was strong at her thigh, supporting her.  The other traveled up the curve of her spine to press between her shoulder blades, holding her firmly in place for his exploration.  She felt the shivery touch of his tongue, but there was no accompanying puff of breath.  She let her hands rest lightly on his head as he nuzzled her.  He had no fur, for all his canine appearance.  His skin was smooth and perfectly hairless, warm and fluid, as though sculpted of living onyx.

Hesitantly, Taryn let go, trusting him to hold her, which he easily did.  She pulled her shirt away and let it fall behind her on the shore.  He sighed softly and brushed his fingers over her breast, then bent and licked, light and slow, all around the firm curve of her, circling steadily inward until he came to the pink nub at its very center.

The paps of Isis flowed with sweet milk.  Taryn was quite sure the thought did not originate with her, but it kept returning and with greater intensity as the Riverman suckled her.  It was not a mournful thought, not even a little wistful; it was only a memory, one she understood he only recapture through her, and although it was not exactly possible for him to feel love in a way that she could understand, what he could feel of that mortal emotion was there in him, and he expressed it as tenderly as he knew how.  He was savoring, worshipping, as solemn in his task as a priest at prayers.  The touch of his mouth seemed to linger on her skin, outlined in her senses as with fire and leaving a heat that gradually sank and settled deep inside her.  He neglected nothing, pausing often in his venerations to tease his tongue around her full breast or carefully graze his sharp teeth across her nipple before closing fully to suck again. 

He made no sound at all.

Taryn’s breath was a roar in her own ears, underscored by whimpering gasps as she gave in little by little to the fullness of sensation.  Her blood was pounding through her, a hammer in her mind, a bellows to the flame building in her womb.  She could hear even the rasp of her skin on his as she caressed his jackal’s head, pulling him possessively closer to the breast he so tenderly possessed.

There was nothing in Taryn’s experience to compare with what was happening to her body.  There was nothing natural in what he gave to her, nothing natural in how she received it.  She’d been kissed before, touched, caressed, but this was so much deeper.  This was visceral, elemental.  Where the Riverman touched her, his heat lingered.  Where heat lingered, there was open flame.  Her body burned, but couldn’t be consumed.  Theirs was the combustion of god and Man, the binding place of immortal purpose and mortal soul. 

It wasn’t pleasure that he gave her, exactly, but pleasure was the only way in which her mind could comprehend it, so that was what she felt, and in crushing waves that never quite receded before the next rolled in.  Just when she had reached the threshold of endurance, the razor’s edge between ecstasy and agony, he moved his devotions to her other breast and began again, resetting the volume of her rapture back to breathy pants.  Again, he licked his way methodically inward, luxuriating in every inch of her flesh until he came to suckle and when his strange lips closed on her, Taryn shut her eyes and felt the blast of hot wind upon her face, heard the chanting of ancient tongues.  Heat sparked deep in her core, spiraled up through her body and tore from her in a sharp, undulating cry.

The Riverman’s grip tightened at once.  He lifted her higher, pressing his mouth to her sex and sucking through the denim of her jeans as he felt out the fastenings that kept them on.  By the time he had the zipper opened, she was grinding powerlessly against his mouth, almost crying from horribly-confused passion and need.  He drew back just long enough to pull her jeans away, undressing her in the same swooping motion of a child stripping a doll, but careful with her, always gentle.  Then she was bared and he was back, thrusting his long tongue urgently inside her to drink the oils of her pleasure.

Taryn came again in agony, her mind suffused with senses she could not quite share and could not stop feeling.  Her hips writhed of their own volition, trying to escape him as much as to take more.  His tongue pushed so deep, and his smooth hands roved continuously over her, but always returned to grip her hips and pull her even tighter to him.

Gravity spun.  Taryn was falling through space, supported in his strong arms until her back settled on the shore.  He moved slowly, deliberately, holding her legs up to wrap his waist as he knelt so as to keep his feet in the water, to keep hers in the air.  She reached out, pulling at the skirt that wrapped his hips and he stilled to watch her hands bare him.

There was a moment of curious blurring as she pulled the skirt away and then she saw the fullness of him.  His phallus was long and slender, a dark stylus, perfectly formed.  She touched him, caressing him with her fingertips only, mesmerized by the sight of her pale hand against the shadows of his flesh.  She made a careful fist around his base and stroked slowly up, then down again.  He was so smooth.  So smooth.

“Is this really you?” she asked.  Her eyes still tracked the passing of her hand.

He told her no, that like the jackal’s form he had partially assumed, it was an approximation only, his parameters determined by her.

“My desire?”

Her expectation.

He pressed lightly at her thigh, silently warning her to keep it locked around him, and then moved one hand to lay over hers, sharing her caresses of him.

It was not going to be sex in the way that she knew it.

She laughed.  “I wouldn’t know.  I’ve never had sex before.”

He laughed silently, without movement or breath.  Then no other sex that follows will be like this, he told her.  He lowered himself atop her.

Taryn watched the eclipsing of her white body by his black one.  She felt only a faint heat, a ghost of substance, and knew that he had entered.  She rested her hand on his back as he began to move, watching the gentle roll of his body and listening to the lapping of the River at the bank.  His eyes were distant slivers of light that gazed well beyond this reality.  He seemed so much at peace.

“What do you feel?” Taryn asked.

Mortality.

He drew another breath, his third, to release as a blissful sigh, then gazed down at her, wondering what she felt.

“Not much,” she confessed, and because that sounded rude, arched her head up to kiss his chest.

He was not offended.  She couldn’t feel because her flesh was virgin.  Her mind had no means of translation.  In a way, she was fortunate.  This possession could be painful.

“But I could feel your mouth.”  She felt herself blushing.  “Vividly.”

It was complicated.  His body was a manifestation of predetermined form.  His mouth was the portal of his true essence, the place of Speaking, the Fount of What Endures.  When he drank from her, his will and perception dominated, because he was what he was, and she was less than that.  But when he coupled with her, her sensations reigned, because her flesh was true and his, illusion.  In this union, they were at their most enjoined, their most divided. 

But she wanted to feel him.  Taryn adjusted her thighs around his waist to feel him penetrating deeper.  She shivered pleasantly, then reached between them to stroke at the place she was most sensitive.  The delicate sensation that had been feathering at her became flame at once.

She felt the vibration of a hum or perhaps a jackal’s growl, but the vibration only.  He still made no sound and he used no breath.  He turned his head into the curve of her neck, adjusting the pace of his movements to match the slow circling rubs of her hand.  She could sense his dreaming, otherworldly thoughts tasting at the spaces in her mind that humanity hadn’t yet figured out how to access.  He was drowsing in her, the act a thousand times more intimate than this dance of flesh.  She could feel a new radiance of unknown color and sound every time he sipped from her mind and memories, and like the heat of his touches, the radiance remained to become the foundation for the next flare.  Soon, she felt herself start the upwards rush of climax, and she reached to touch his cheek.  “I’m cumming,” she whispered.

He stirred, then reared back and withdrew from her.  He found her legs and held them for her, again pressing between her thighs to drink just as she came.  She kept her hand at her clit, prolonging it as long as she could, and the touch of his tongue lapping up inside her brought her to another and then a third, although like the receding waves of the tide, they each crested a little less high and rolled out again a little sooner than the one before.  At last, the Riverman raised his head, licking at his shiny jaws, to thank her.

“You’re welcome.”  Taryn watched as he leaned back on his knees, his hand at his erection and his eyes sliding nearly shut.  He stroked himself in silence, his face upturned to the sky, at peace.  He gave no sign at all of rejoining her.  “Would you…would you like to cum in me?”

He paused.  His eyes opened, regarding her uncertainly.  He squeezed at his shaft as though testing its stability.  He wasn’t sure what that would do to her, back in the waking world.

“You said you’d done this before.”

He had, but sometimes there were consequences.

“Like what?” Taryn asked.

In her mind, unknowable impressions of cosmic scale unwound in limitless layers.  Memories, not her own, showed her brown-skinned women she knew as priestesses, their eyes vacant, blinded by understanding, the awful apperception of all things.

Taryn sat up and scooted toward him.  The edge of the River flowed between them.  Their knees almost touched.  She touched his member and he let go his hands to watch her move on him.  “Do you want to cum?”

He did.

“Do you want to cum in me?”

He did, but that desire did not retract the risk.  What she defined as orgasm was a far greater release for his kind.  A certain amount of control was given, a greater portion lost.  She was no priestess.  She’d had no training at all, not even of the earthly act.

“Does it show?” she asked, teasing.

His pale eyes flicked to her, sharing her humor.  Then he asked, hesitantly, if she wanted him to cum in her (the term was approximate; the thought/memory he used, far more complicated: to hold the amaranthine seed of his flying soul in the ephemeral heart of hers).

The question was conservatively formed, his emotion withheld, but Taryn could sense his need, much as he tried to mask it.  She nodded, smiling to encourage him.

He would try to be careful.

“I know you will.”

Again, he came to her, this time arranging her legs so that her ankles were braced on his broad shoulders, well away from the water.  He entered her with fluid ease, all his indefinable weight balanced atop her.  He wanted to know if this hurt.

“No.”  Every thrust of his hips sent deep echoes through the whole of her body and she could feel the full length of him in exquisite detail even if there was no true sensation.  Although she was in no danger of making this her new favorite position to say, fall asleep or compose poetry in, nothing hurt.  She reached up to brush her fingers along the strange contours of his face and he leaned into her hand.

He was close.

She knew it.  There was a heaviness to the air, an oppression, like a storm gathering to form a funnel.  She had been sure enough at the start, but sensing that explosive pressure building, she began to be nervous.  She touched his chest, trying to steady herself.  “Breathe for me,” she said.  “Please?”

He apologized, began to breathe in slow, steady pulls to match the rhythm of his deep thrusts.  The heat of his air against her shoulder was comforting.  Taryn hugged him a little closer, letting her eyes slide shut, trying to protect herself against the drift of his alien thought.  She felt it start.  A terrible coiling that drew in all the swirling storm-gathers around them—drew it in from miles away, it seemed—into a tight point inside him.  Tighter and tighter, until she could physically feel its constrained energy pulsing in him.