When it grew too dark to see, Amber took the first watch and set off to make her noisy patrol around the camp with renewed and entirely undeserved confidence. Meoraq occupied himself as best he could in the hopes that she would tire soon and come back to keep him company, but eventually he ran out of things to do. Alone and restless, he retreated to the edge of camp and tried to meditate, but Amber’s face intruded in the stillness of his mind and her words kept creeping back: Is it sex?
He’d told her it was not and he thought he still believed it, but he didn’t know what else to call the persistent distraction that took him every time he heard her, saw her, thought of her. It wasn’t sex, or at least it wasn’t the way sex had always been in his life, but it was something hot and deep and urgent beneath his skin, something he could not conquer no matter how often or how fervently he prayed. He could not in truth pretend surprise at this; a prayer must be sincerely offered to earn Sheul’s ear and he could not swear that he truly wished to be free of these feelings. The Word told him there was no sin in temptation, only in surrender, but that wasn’t much comfort to him as he fought night after day after night to find peace from his clay’s carnality.
A boy of the warrior’s caste learned the Word long before he felt any urgings of his clay, but learning a thing does not always prepare one to encounter it. Meoraq had known of sex from books, from lectures, from the whispered speculations of older boys, and of course, from that night that he had seen his pregnant mother with his father, but he had been well into his thirteenth year before he ever felt the burn in his own belly.
There had been no cause for it that first time. No woman had ever set foot in Tilev. Boys did all the work normally done by servants. Even those females who met the fires of the training masters did so in the antechambers between Tilev and the eastern garrison. So there had been no spark, only a sparring match no different from hundreds of others he had fought without incident. But this one brought out the fires in him—which had itself been happening more and more frequently that year—and they didn’t go away when the match was won. And it must have been a bad win at that, because Meoraq remembered very vaguely being pulled from the beaten boy and held in half a choke by Master Takktha when it was over. Had there been a certain watchfulness in the old man’s eye as he watched Meoraq struggle his way back to calm? He hadn’t noticed then, but he thought so now. Once released, he had retreated from the ring to lean against the wall, still fighting those fires while they burned and flared needlessly inside him. He knew the Word, yes, and the lectures and the lessons and all of it, but sex was the furthest thing from his mind in that moment. If he’d wanted anything at all, it was to get back in the sparring ring and beat on someone until these fires either went away…or swallowed him. And so it was thinking that and kneading through his breeches at his slit, which had ached worse than a broken tooth but still somehow wanted to be touched, that Meoraq felt himself extrude for the first time.
He remembered screaming, even though he must have known intellectually what was happening to him. He screamed because of the alien thing pushing out of his own body and he screamed because it hurt to touch his breeches or even the swollen edges of his slit, but mostly he screamed because it wasn’t him at all, it was Gann inside of him, and after all his years of training and all his top marks and awards, he was utterly powerless in Gann’s grip.
Master Takktha cleared the arena at once. As Meoraq fell to his knees in mingled shame and shock and that first awful, baffling need, he remembered feeling the training master’s hands on his shoulders and hearing that voice calm in his ear: “Breathe, Uyane. Put your hands on the ground and give me your breathing. A slow count to six, son, deep and even.”
And he’d managed, somehow. His hands had been bruised for days from beating against the tiles to keep from gripping at himself, but gradually Master Takktha’s voice steadied him and he began to count. By his fourth recitation, he could feel himself slowly retracting, but it had been all Meoraq could do in that time not to take that terrible thing in his fist, right there in front of Takktha and Sheul and all the world.
Of the rest of the day, he remembered little, except that he had been released from lessons to pray, and he’d had to get a real metal loin-plate from the commercer before he went back to the barracks. As he’d been undressing in the dark, the weight of his new loin-plate like a stone tied to his belly, some brunt acting as dorm-warden laughingly called out to him, asking if he’d been locked in the closet where he’d run off to rub his cock. Meoraq spent the rest of that night in a holding cell with shackles binding his aching hands. The brunt spent that night and the one following in the infirmary.
Cock-rubber. It was the worst name to call a boy, the worst thing a boy could do. Every other carnal sin spoken of in the Word could be shut out behind the walls of Tilev, but every boy was alone with his clay and the temptation of ‘Gann’s grip’. Some succumbed. More than half the whippings administered in Tilev were in answer to that crime. Meoraq personally knew of three boys who had been locked into their loin-plates and one who had actually been branded and exiled after exhausting all forgiveness.
Endure the flesh, said the Prophet, do not indulge it. What pleasure came with the act of physical union was never to be sought for its own sake, but only as a sincere exaltation of life and as Sheul’s own blessing. To that end, there were no less than forty-four carnal laws written in the Word by which men could be judged, although it could not be said that all men were judged as equals. Most men were permitted none but their wife’s embrace during their lifetime, but the steward of every great House had a husband’s right over every woman who owed him obedience, and all those born under the Blade had liberty when Sheul gave them the fire.
Of course, one still had to see a woman to know His fires, and most of those in the warrior’s caste were men like his cousin Nkosa, who might have a servant now and then to add variety to the drudgery of siring sons on his wife, but who surely could not expect to bend more than six backs beneath him in a lifetime. Meoraq might have that many in a day, if he wanted them, and have each one twice at each encounter without breaking faith.
He had been with many women in his twelve years of Striding (as Master Tsazr had said on that long-ago day, more than he could count), but what of that? He had also gone cheerfully without, not merely for days but for days by the brace. And while there were a few times that he could recall being aware of the lack, for the most part, he seldom thought of women at all if he were not exposed to them. He had felt Gann’s lusts on occasion when traveling but never, never suffered from them. Then again, he had never felt them this way before—dawn to dusk to dawn again, every hour almost unceasing. It was more than temptation; it was torture.
The endless wind dropped to no more than a breeze, catching some human’s low moan in its sudden silence. Maria, he thought, stubbornly refusing to open his eyes and see. Maria and her man, her Eric, shut away in their silly little tube of a tent. Doing whatever it was that humans did when they were mating. He was not listening. He did not care. Someday, long years hence, when he was in some distant city after conquest or (just perhaps) home in Xeqor as steward to his House, he might think of this moment as he gripped at the bent back of a true woman, a normal woman, one obedient and respectful in her manner, who knew to bend her neck to a Sheulek’s whim and show some damned appreciation for it. A pretty woman, while he was at it, or at least not one with flesh like warm putty and hair sprouting everywhere and a face that looked like she’d been using it to beat her way through a brick wall. A proper woman who would never raise her eyes to him, much less her voice. A mewling, bowing, milk-veined woman…but it was Amber he wanted tonight.
