But it is a time to walk, and not just to the workshops or the market-place. Outside the houses the air is beautiful, cutting, but sharp as wine. We finished here yesterday: sealed the roof, set the threshold step, burnt the incense sticks. I gave the workcrew the rest of the day off, and on impulse told my household, “Let’s spend tomorrow in the hills.”
A cold, austere beauty they have now, the shedding trees stripped, skeletal between the viridian or snow-silver of pine and hellien, the grass a tawny silk that plays like cat fur under the slicing winds. Their eddies sketch out the range front, contour after contour, crest, valley, spur beyond. Drawing your eyes to the horizon, where already the peaks are blanched with snow.
By now troublecrew know the mountain like their hands. Zuri and Azo and Verrith and Desis, they all came; and Hanni, and Shia, and her sisters, and Iatha, and her mother, and the house’s children. And the men. And Tez.
I will never know what Sarth said to her; but from the early sunlight as we climbed, crystal-sharp under that pale autumn sky, to the stride back in twilight, the vast bowl of River plain darkening eastward under the jewel-drop of a rising star, in a day clear-cut as a fine intaglio, their commerce has been the purest line. Walking, talking, just sitting together; sometimes with no more than a smile. Until she swatted his rump, as we separated to our sleeping quarters, and called, “Night, Father!” before she whistled off down the passageway.
Alkhes grinned. Zuri gave her an eye. Sarth . . .
Indubitably, unmistakably. Sarth smirked.
Blessings on the Mother. Alkhes was right. Whatever else falls, wherever else we fail, I, we, have given him his daughter. At last.
* * *
Settling. Week 9.
Meditations. Alkhes-Assandar
If there was just some warning of these things!
I knew damn well Tellurith would try it again. With the sickness, we’ve been too blind tired to think, let alone sleep at the same time in the same bed. But I should have thought, when yesterday was so easy—so different—
We shave and clean up every night we’re home. How else, sleeping with Tellurith? And at any chance Sarth will wash that hair of his. Thick as a rope, sheeny as burnished bronze, halfway down his back. If there’s rosemary, he rinses with it. I even helped comb it, before supper, I never thought anything different.
Until Tellurith rolled over. And started kissing him.
What could I do? Climb out and run? I knew how far I’d get. Lie there like a brothel spy?
Join in?
I’ve been in battles and less terrified. Probably I twitched—who could help it? She let him go, and rolled back over to me.
And I nearly tore the furs clean off the bed.
“Caissyl . . .”
So soft. So quiet. I almost choked. I did manage, “I can’t, Tel! You know I can’t!”
“No demands, caissyl.” Her fingers in my hair, running up behind my ear. She knows what that does to me. “Nothing you don’t want. But you could at least hold me—touch me—”
While he . . . I practically squawked, “I can’t!”
She kept quiet. Of course that was worse. What could I do? What could I say? I swear, they’ll never understand!
I was still trying to find words when the lamp took light.
He had found the flint, rekindled the wick, before I felt him move. When it caught he leant up over her. A statue moving, all those gilded muscle curves, the hair a bronze flood across his shoulder, the light dark as distilled amber on his eyes.
“Touch me, then.” It was weird to hear Sarth talk through his teeth. “If she’s too much for you, touch me. Or is your manhood too fragile? Does it rub off like face-paint? Can you only say, I’m a man because I do what a man’s supposed to? Do you dare say, Being a man is whatever I do?”
I never . . . never thought he could sound like that. But even before breath returned, I understood.
It wasn’t anger. Or jealousy. It was a challenge.
And if I ran out, I’d never look him in the face again.
I got out of bed. Tellurith never moved. I stamped round the bed foot, and yanked the covers back, and said through my own teeth, “Move over and see.”
He slid across without a word. That hair was everywhere. All over the pillows, mixed in the furs, tawny, gold-streaked, skeins of black-bronze silk. I leant over and dug both hands full of it.
* * *
It has taken a long time to write this.
I’m still not sure I can write it. How in the gods’ name can you think—can you admit—can you feel something like this and still be a man?
Hang him. That’s just where he challenged me. Are you a man because you only do what’s allowed for a man? Or can you say, Being a man is whatever I do?
Before I came to Amberlight, I never thought about it. I was a man, and being a man was what I did, and what I did was right; because that was what men did.
Only, which men?
Is Sarth less of a man, because he was raised a woman’s plaything? Because he spent his life in a tower, and lost his sons, and never killed?
When he can carry water till I drop, and coax a child I’d strangle, and read Tellurith ten times better than I. When he has manners, and control, and endurance—
When he doesn’t need a weapon. Beyond his tongue.
When he can dare me to—that—and probably feel, know, face already what I still can’t bear to write.
That when I took hold of his hair—it was because I wanted to.
Had long wanted to.
How does a man cope with that?
It was so thick. And soft. And warm. Finer than silk. Smoother than Tellurith’s. Hers is full of kinks. I wanted to fill my hands with it and smell it and wallow in it. I wanted—
So I put both elbows on it. And slid right down on top of him. And kissed the bastard. Full on the mouth.
That was—something else.
To start with, a man’s skin is different. Smoother than a woman’s and harder, both at once. But so is the—the bone, the musculature. Harder, more pronounced, more . . . the only word is, masculine. Not in size, even shape. Proportions, perhaps. The shaping under the flesh.
And his response . . . Women—some women wait for your lead. Some women open their mouths like a trap. Some women sit like a lump of meat. Men—I don’t know about any other men. Sarth left me the lead and hardly moved his lips, and it was a dozen nuances of reply. Aware. Alive. Answering.
Does he kiss a woman like that?
It was something to wonder while I was asking: What in the River-lord’s hell do I do next?
Till he put his free arm round my neck and slid his fingers up into my hair.
With Tellurith, that’s one thing. With Sarth . . .
The weight, the heft of well-developed man’s muscle in that position almost panicked me. Too much unarmed combat, I was too vulnerable. I half pulled back. He laughed into my mouth. Just the slightest breath.