Fierce Enchantments Page 23

  That the Emperor had ordered him released to fulfill his promise. That instead of riding here with a troop of armed guards, a journey which would have taken only a few weeks, he had chosen to leave the Imperial Palace on foot, alone. That he had needed to walk.

  And the most important part of all, that he had left out too.

  All men lie. The unspoken words lay like a stone in his ribcage. Even as his cock angled rampant from his crotch and urged him to her unguarded gate, the real truth crushed against his heart as if to stop it beating.

  Tsulin’s face was open now, flushed and tremulous, her thoughts no longer hidden behind the mask. Tears glistened in her eyes. “Three years,” she said. “Did he love any other woman?”

  “No,” he whispered, closing his eyes. “No woman but you.”

  The darkness swirled around him. His balls ached.

  “Why are you crying?” she asked.

  Xhai opened his eyes, and looked down at the tears splashed upon her stomach. “No woman,” he repeated, tasting salt on his bruised lips, mingled with her honey.

  “Liwan was my husband,” she said, her voice rising. “Only I may weep for him. You are not his widow.”

  “He was my …” Xhai paused. His heart thudded.

  “Your friend.” Her voice was harsh; he could hear the fear in it.

  “More than that.”

  Her mouth made a little “o”. “What are you saying?” she breathed.

  “I think you know.”

  “My husband was a man—a true man of the Dog People—and would not lie with another!”

  He could not look at her directly. He remembered Liwan lolling back in the bathhouse tub, thighs spread wide, a rueful grin on his face as he surveyed the ruddy hard-on so stiff that it was jutting above the surface of the water. Ah, he’d cried, as if at a cheeky pup, look at that, will you? It’s been so long since I had a woman that I could hammer nails into a board with it. His smile had been so inviting that Xhai had barely hesitated before reaching out to grasp that shameless breakwater. He could still remember the overwhelming rush of relief he’d experienced as his hand closed and Liwan grunted with pleasure. He could still picture the quizzical half-grin on his friend’s face as they’d surged in the bathtub, hands sliding and tugging on each other. Still feel the man’s smooth hard body against his, still smell the scent of his skin and the soap and the rice wine on his breath. The first taste of his ejaculate, soapy and sharp, was a ghost in his mouth.

  “We were lovers,” he said. It was the very first time the confession had passed his lips, but the words came out as if they were so heavy, his chest so crammed with their weight, that there was nothing he could do to stop them falling. He was so stunned by the eruption that he didn’t see her hand moving—until the blow cracked across his face.

  “Liar!” she spat. For a moment she glared at him, waiting for him to strike her back. When he did not move, she drew back her arm for another blow. This time he caught it, pinned her wrist back onto the bed, and heaved himself half over her to keep her down. She twisted beneath him, baring her teeth.

  “I … do not lie,” he rasped. The heavy thing in his chest was trying hard to become rage. He knew it would stop hurting him so much if he let that happen.

  “Which of you played the woman’s part then?” she snarled, sounding desperate. “I bet it was you. I bet you knelt to him. He would be the man.”

  Xhai’s lip curled, but he forced himself to speak softly. “That’s not how it works.”

  “Did he fuck your ass, Easterner?”

  His cock wanted him to think about the way she was lithe and soft and helpless beneath him. His cock wanted him to drown his pain in her sex. He had to force himself to attend to her scathing accusation.

  “He did.” Oh yes, he did. Night after glorious night. “And he sucked my cock. And he lay with me in the dark and held me.” He knew he was being cruel now: taunting her. “Just as I did all those things to him.”

  “How is that?” Her eyes shone with distress, and her pain and incomprehension distorted her voice. “He desired women! He desired me!”

  “And me.” Xhai remembered Liwan laughing, saying, A man may enjoy the taste of both fish and pork. He didn’t think it a good idea to report the words to Tsulin. “He wanted me. And now he is gone …” The pain in his chest was unbearable. He wanted her to understand, but without his music he had no way with words. His eyes burned. He felt like he was begging her. “Now he is gone I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.”

  She spat no answer to that. She stared at him like he was something beyond understanding: a man risen from the grave, or some bizarre creature of legend. Xhai knew that if he pressed against her any longer, he would lose control. His cock was demanding entrance, while his heart pounded with anguish. It felt like he was being mangled between two great stones. It took all his strength to make himself push back off her, kneeling up. His skin was slicked with sour sweat and his erection stood like the pole of an imperial banner, but he dared not touch it.

  Tsulin undid all his good intentions by sitting up abruptly, face-to-face with him. Her eyes narrowed to dark slivers and she panted between her bared teeth. They stared and stared, as if somehow, if they did it long enough, understanding would pass between them.

  “Show me,” she growled.

  “What?” For a moment he was utterly at a loss.

  “Show me what you did to my husband.” Her fingers bit into his thigh. “Do it to me.”

  It was Xhai’s turn to be wrong-footed. “You mean …”

  “If I was him, here, now, what would you do to him? I want to know.”

  I would kiss him. And then I would mount his ass and ride him until his legs gave way. “It’d hurt you,” he warned, his cock throbbing with the surge of his pulse.

  She sat up straighter. “Good.”

  Now that he understood. Sometimes there is no ease for inner anguish except the pain of the flesh. Yes, he said to himself: Yes, yes.

  He nodded, then heaved himself to his feet. His cock was like an iron bar, but he was not afraid of it now. He put his hand on the crown of her head, pressing her face to his crotch, rolling her cheeks across the rigid beam of his shaft. For a moment her breath was hot on his balls. Then he pushed her away. “Lie down, he ordered her. “On your belly.”

  He still thought she might refuse, but she obeyed. While she turned away he moved swiftly to find an unlit lamp. It was full of greasy brown butter that would do, he thought, very well. When he turned back she was lying on the bed, her forearms tucked beneath her breasts to hold her up, her toes digging into the quilt with tension. He knelt over her and laid a heavy hand on her head. “Put your hand down and touch your bud,” he told her. “You will need that when I start.”

  “I want it to hurt,” she said in a ragged voice.

  “Is this your first time?”

  “Yes.”

  “It will hurt plenty. Touch it. Open your legs. And let the tension go. You must be as water to my stone.” As she wriggled her hand beneath her to the juncture of her legs, he pressed her head down gently but firmly to the bed, so that she was lying flat. Then he turned where he knelt and surveyed the territory he was about to invade: the twin mounds, gently curved as the hills of the Dog People; and the deep valley between. Under the lamplight she was golden-amber, and the whorl of her hole a duskier hue, a whirlpool of luscious temptation.

  Oh, it had been too long, Xhai thought dizzily. His mouth watered as he stroked that pucker and felt it flex fearfully, sensitive to the lightest touch. The swollen teardrop of her sex below was still glistening from their earlier congress, so he took that wet on his fingers and stoked it up her cleft, up and down, up and down.

  Tsulin whimpered, perhaps involuntarily. The sound made his cock jerk.

  Oh, but she was beautiful. There was no doubt abou
t that; no denying. He wanted to spread her bottom with both hands and plunge in, sucked down into that tight maelstrom; he longed to fill her with his fire. He could feel the seed simmering in his pouch, ready to boil over. If this was Liwan lying naked and open before him, he would breech that narrow gate like a battering ram.

  But she was not Liwan. He had to be gentler.

  The butter was a start, at least. He slathered his cock with it, and then he greased her crack from fore to aft, and then he moved over her, kissing between her shoulder blades as he slid a single slippery finger into her clench.

  There was momentary resistance, a reflexive tightening of muscle, but he overbore that easily, inveigling his way up to his second knuckle—so hot, so tight—and beginning to stroke. Tsulin held out for a while, and then began to groan. Well he knew that sound, which went straight to his soul via his straining balls—there was nothing in the world so intimate, so frightening, so shaming and yet so freeing as the feel of one’s anal passage being entered. He didn’t know what it was like to have a cunt, but he could not believe that even that orifice held as much mystery or pleasure. He’d seen whores lying distracted or bored as men rutted in their female parts; he’d never seen anyone react with indifference to being sodomized.

  Tsulin’s hard ring of muscle clenched and then dilated. Xhai rewarded that by biting gently at her shoulder, and her noises became a low throbbing thread of sound that made him smile. He worked his finger in and out of her, round and round, circling and caressing, until she was soft and pliant. Then he pulled out and did it all over again—with two fingers.

  And so, slowly, he opened her.

  He was happy to take his time. Now that his focus was on his hand, the urgency of his own need was reined back. Her reactions filled him with delight; the trembling and the crying out and the delicious yielding of her tightly guarded places, the opening up that was as much a surrender of her rage and resentment as of her body. The muscles of his forearm grew hot, but it was the good ache a warrior knew well. He found that the nape of her neck was pleasingly sensitive and that it only took the lap of his tongue there to make her pant.

  When he had three fingers slipping easily in and out of her hole, right to the root, it took only a momentary withdrawal and a small shift of his weight to bring his cock into play, taking the place of his hand. He pressed in and began to push, feeling her envelop him, and it was like entering the gates of the Western Paradise. Waves of pleasure rippled through his whole being. She was deliciously tight, yet completely yielding. And as he worked his hips, slow and shallow, trying not to crow with delight, she shocked him to the core by jerking desperately beneath him and spasming in uncontrollable waves of orgasm.

  That’s … not what I expected. He went still as she did, watching as she slackened her tearing grip upon the quilt and gasped wetly into the cotton.

  As Heaven was his witness, he was barely within the outer rings of her portal. The twin globes of her bottom had proved surprisingly muscular when tensed … and women have more ass to get in the way than do men. Xhai wiped the sweat from his forehead onto the bed and decided to change angle.

  Easing from her twitching iris, he rolled her onto one hip and pushed her upper thigh up toward her chest. Tsulin looked up sideways at him looming over her; she was flushed and wide-eyed, but her hand was still tucked down at the front of her sex and that was what he wanted to see. Kneeling up, he scissored up between her thighs. Her hole was still soft and open and accommodating; he took advantage of the welcome by pushing his cock in past the flexing portal and right into her depths.

  From that position, he could sheathe himself all the way to the root in a few firm motions. And now that he was in, he found he could thrust good and hard without damaging her. He gripped her hip and shut his eyes and surrendered to his own need, shafting the widow’s ass straight and true and deep.

  He wanted to imagine that this was Liwan he was balling; Liwan’s hard body beneath his own. I came to you because you are all I have left of him. Be him for me, now. Be …

  And for a moment he did see Liwan—the cavalryman lying on his side on the battlefield, unmoving. Xhai was running over to him, and at first he thought his friend was only unconscious because there were no great wounds, no hewn limbs or hacked flesh, just a man lying quietly as if in sleep, and not even any blood visible. Until he rolled the Dog Man over and saw that the ground beneath him had drunk all the blood, the dry earth too thirsty to even let it pool out from the deep puncture wound beneath his arm.

  Xhai’s eyes shot open. He looked down at the woman—and she was a woman, not Liwan at all, and his cock was still pounding her ass—and as he watched she came again, crying out Oh in fear of the pleasure that washed over her, tears running down her face. He passed his hand from her shoulder to her hip, leaning low, drops of sweat running down his hair and falling on her. He was very close to his own climax; it gathered like a storm behind the first heralding drops of rain. In the rush of his ecstasy he thought, She is not Liwan that I have come to find: I am Liwan come home to her. Come home to lie with the wife that I have longed for. He could feel Liwan in him, looking out through his eyes; a husband borne home thousands of miles, on foot, by a man who was far more than a friend, so that he might love his wife again.

  She called his name, over and over.

  He has not left us, Xhai thought, as the storm broke.

  ♦♦♦

  In the morning, Xhai woke first. He was lying on his back, Tsulin snuggled up under his right arm, and it took him a few moments to recognize the radiating roof-poles of the yurt, and remember where he was.

  He’d slept without dreaming. For the first time in five months.

  His bladder was full and nagging at him. Gently, he disengaged himself from the sleeping woman, but as he slid out from under the quilt she opened her eyes sleepily and caught at his thigh, holding him.

  “Shush,” he murmured, wondering if she remembered him, or took him for another man. He bent and kissed her temple, filling his lungs with the sex-heavy scent of her. “Go back to sleep.”

  Her eyes were dark pools under the disorder of her hair. She looked straight into his face, but he couldn’t be sure whether she was awake or not. Especially when she shut them, sighed, and went limp once more.

  He wondered what they would have to say to each other later, yet that thought gave him no pain. The weight in his chest hadn’t gone, but it was so much smaller that he felt like he was floating. He slipped quietly across the yurt, not bothering to put on his clothes, but taking up a different cloth-wrapped bundle. The four dogs sleeping in a heap just inside the tent flap rose and stretched and preceded him out into the cool dawn.

  He made water at a decent distance from the yurt, the only man in the whole wide landscape, while the dogs trotted around sniffing the night’s scent trails. The hills where the ancestors’ graves nestled looked very green under the pale sun, and an eagle was flying wide circles over it. When he returned to the hut he had his guqin unwrapped. Sitting down cross-legged before the entrance, he took his time tuning the strings.

  Then, slowly at first, he began to play.

  The Merry Maid

  Once upon a time there were three brothers, who resolved to set out into the world together to seek their fortune. They went to their father to bid him farewell. To the first he gave a small purse.

  “Here, my eldest child. You have always been the one to look after your brothers, so I give to you this magical purse, my greatest possession. Every morning you will find in this purse a silver coin, neither more nor less. With caution, there is enough here to keep you all from starvation as you seek your way in the wide world.”

  To the second brother he gave a wooden spoon.

  “Here, my second child. You have always been the one with the quickest wits and the most cunning. I give to you this magical porridge spoon. I know not that it has any great value, but i
f you place it in a pot and cry “Stir, spoon, stir,” it will do so of its own accord, and never stop until you say “Stop, spoon, stop.”

  To the third he said, “Alas, my youngest son! Though you have always been the kindest and most open-hearted of my children, I have nothing left to gift you but my blessing, which I bestow now.” And he did this, with a kiss upon the youth’s forehead.

  Then the three went out into the wide world, and they traveled many leagues through forests and fields, and they crossed rivers and passed through towns. Wherever they went they stayed together. They found work where they could, and when there was none they relied upon the magical purse to buy their food. Once or twice, when they had no money, they begged shelter or a bowl of soup in exchange for demonstrating the magical porridge spoon, for it was a rare and comical sight to see it stirring a cooking pot all on its own, with no hand to guide it.

  One day they came to a land of green fields and fat cows, where the people were contented and peaceful.

  “Have you ever seen such a land as this, my brothers?” asked the Middle Brother. “The women are the comeliest I have ever seen—tall and well-built, with plump and rosy cheeks and dresses of bright new cloth. The men walk everywhere with smiles upon their faces, and I haven’t heard a cross word from anyone since we entered this kingdom. Every the beggars seem happy. Surely this is the place to find our fortune.”

  They carried on until evening, when there came to small farm and saw there a young woman driving her cows home for the night, singing to herself. While they watched this happy sight, one of the bull-calves broke free of the herd and skipped away across the meadow, so the three brothers ran down and rounded it up, ushering it back to the byre where its owner waited. She was a merry-looking maiden, with a broad smile and knowing eyes. She thanked the three brothers and, looking them up and down boldly, said “For helping me with the stray beast, you have earned yourselves supper. If you chop the wood and feed the beasts and wash the pots, then you will earn a roof for the night too. Come into my house.”