When I was with her, I felt as though I could be who I truly wanted to be, and I liked that feeling.
The Terrible Sun hadn't yet conquered the courtyard, but there was a beachhead in the grass runners that wove across the ground. Up on the ramparts, men took cover in the shade of the towers where one of Commander Gaedi's men was giving some recruits an orientation. Towards the rear, half-native children laughed while chasing chickens through a patch of vines that covered the ground until an old Na'uhui woman shooed them off.
Inside the medical ward, John's body lay motionless on a cot.
The old doctor slumped over, pulling her fingers through John's hair. She had to be at least eighty. She had a pronounced hunch in her back at her right shoulder, and her joints were swollen. She wore an undyed cotton loincloth around her waist and several sprigs of herbs and talismans around her neck along with one of those necklaces of giant wooden beads like the one Miyani wore when she went out. Her ancient, dark-green hand lifted a bead, turned one face of it to the side, and pulled out a small, brass cylinder with curved glass on each end.
She turned to the girl and addressed her in a gravelly voice. "ʃʊsi zeŋæse mɪʃa."
gædi bi'asʌ stood beside me. Her white hair wrapped around her crown in a single braid. The Commander barely came up to my chest, and she was taller than the venerable woman.
The girl returned with a brass horn-thing with a large ball at one end. She pointed the horn end towards the old woman and held the ball end while turning a crank. What started as a slow, laborious grinding accelerated through the musical scale and brought with it a faint beam of light. She turned the crank faster and faster, and the light grew until a small circle of daylight shone on the side of John's head.
The old woman pulled his hair to the side and peered through her looking glass. At last, she stood and turned.
The girl stopped turning the crank, and the light died down. She breathed in and exhaled hard, shaking her arm and rolling it around in a circle. Her yellow eyes found me and she smiled for a split-second, then left.
"pʊ ʃo'ibisu gʊ'æki."
Gaedi and I leaned in close.
"mewa gʊ'oða ɣemaðavize ʃa ya'uðeði dædaxaze ŋayi. fæ kado ðope ʒʌgʌ ʃa tætæ poyi 'æki."
I shook my head. "How can possible?"
The old woman explained. "'uŋi tætæ kubu weŋo ŋa gʊʒa'e ʃa ba gʊmewa. kʊde ðopexe ʒʌgʌ ʃa xʌgu vida mobodi. vetude puyo."
"No," I switched back to Herali. "That can't be."
The ancient doctor turned to Gaedi, who waved it off and pulled me aside, looking up into my face. "We need to tell Miyani."
"I'll tell her," I said.
Miyani was out shooting at some trainees while Renou and Ta'o observed. God, this was going to hurt. What if it happened again? I didn't want to imagine that round face of hers when I told her how John died.
I couldn't deal with that. Not right now.
I needed to take my mind off that until she got back, so I climbed through the stairs in one of the towers leading up to the rampart, slowly, didn't trip this time, and came out onto a stone walkway six feet wide. The courtyard was below on my right, and on my left, beyond black alligator-infested waters, was the open plain surrounded by Jungle. Ahead, a group of recruits gathered in another stone tower with a shingled roof that ended at a tall pole where a black flag with a white crescent moon lifted slowly in the breeze.
There were about ten men. Nickel, who I'd met at dinner when we switched places, and Rolon's friend Daemon who'd been on shit pit with me were both there; the rest I didn't know their names.
Gaedi's man wore a silk yithi around a leather belt with a sword on one side and a knife on the other, and over his shoulder was a sling carrying a eupin longbow etched with an image of Falcon feeding His infant daughter, Naveris. He stood beside a long brass tube mounted on a metal box with a dazzling array of brass gears with levers and cranks aimed out towards the field.
"This here we call the Threader," he instructed them. "Very simple. We've got those we can shoot at the bad guys," he pointed towards a stack of clusters of iron spikes tied together alongside a large, wooden chest. "Over this way—"
"How does it work?" one of the recruits spoke up. He was Herali, on the shorter side of average with a slight build.
"Huh?" Gaedi's man looked around. "How's it work? Uh… OK, so let me think."
Another man spoke up. "My uncle's got one on his boat; we shoot harpoons with it."
I needed nine men for my team, and here were ten I barely knew. "What's your name, man?"
The Herali who'd asked about the machine answered me. "Kely of Linud."
"Linud?" Another man answered him. "Rattlesnake clan?"
Two other men stood with Kely. One of them stepped forward with an easy smile. "Bazen."
The other stood solemn and nodded. "Jake."
Bazen Spider-Web's Bane then took my shoulder and went around the entire group. "OK, so that's Charis," he pointed to the man whose uncle was a whaler. "The big fat guy is Turic, that's Orel, Kurt, don't ask him where he's from he doesn't like that."
A tallish Herali with a solid build laughed and shook his head.
"That's Daemon, Nickel, and this guy here, he won't say his name."
The man smiled. "Dannie of Eelie."
"Like I said," Bazen lowered his voice. "No one knows his name, he won't say it."
Dannie chuckled lightly.
"Delano of Hyoten," Gaedi's man reached out a fist for me. "OK, so how's this. Let's say we have a target out there, six-hundred yards. Turn this here to level eight, the bolt shoots out about two-seventy-five feet per second. What angle should I use? Discounting for wind?"
All the men looked at one another.
I can probably do this. What we're trying to solve for is θ. Break 275 into component vectors, that gives you 275cos(θ) and 275sin(θ) for horizontal and vertical velocity. Using D = rt gives us 600 = 275tcos(θ), I need some paper—
"Thirty-five degrees." Kely the Rattlesnake blurted out.
Kurt of Nowhere answered. "I got twelve."
"It's thirty-five," Kely assured him. "Sine two-theta times two-seventy-five squared over thirty-two—"
"Two-seventy-five?" Kurt pulled his face back and turned to Gaedi's man.
Delano answered. "Yeah, two-seventy-five. Or, you could use this table right here!"
Half the men chuckled while Delano showed everyone a book of rough pages held together with crude knots of twine. "So basically, we load those things over there, we look up the numbers on the table and anybody we don't like gets too close, we perforate 'em. Any more questions before we move on?"
"Have you ever shot it?" The man was Herali with a long nose and his hair cut short around his ears, and I didn't remember his name.
Delano looked it over. "Nope. Years ago, bossman made a deal with them over that way, so we don't get a lot of customers. I dunno, we been seein' some other tribe on the other side lately, so who knows."
A wicked little idea popped into my head. "What if we set up some practice dummies out there and take a few shots?"
A rush of excited eyes passed around the men, and a mischievous smile curled Delano's lips. Then he settled back down. "I'd probably get in trouble."
"Well," I was definitely getting in trouble, "I am a captain. How much trouble could you get into for following orders?"
Delano grinned. Everyone grinned.
"Alright," I grinned back. "We're going to need a lot of targets, so everyone has to stake at least three dummies. They're in the armory beside the storehouse, and let's keep everything on this side. Um… direct order and all that."
"Make sure to put some right up on the moat," Delano added as we raced out and back down through the spiral staircase. In that tight, sweltering, musty space, someone smelt strongly of happy cabbage. Ahead of me, a man tripped and landed into the guy below him. "Fuck, man! Sorry!"
"Why the hell is it like this, man?"
Kurt of Nowhere's distinct baritone carried through the dark staircase from below. "You live here, you climb these steps every day, you get used to it. Gives you an advantage over the enemy coming after you. It's narrow enough that one man with a shield can block a whole army in these stairs, and if you're on top, you fight right handed."
Outside beside the armory, someone had borrowed a cart from the storeroom, though I wasn't sure if they'd asked permission. The Big Fat Guy carried ten practice dummies at a time and loaded them onto the cart. We loaded every burlap man-on-a-stick we found including some in the back corner covered in cobwebs that had never been used, and Big Man took the tongue of the cart in both hands.
"You got it, Turic?"
"Yeah, man!" Turic the Big Fat Guy gave a wide grin and grunted, and the cart lurched forward.
The man with the cropped hair and long nose walked alongside me. "Not sure if you remember my name. Orel of Ulum." He reached his hand out to me. "You're Falcon, right? Of course you are, with that bow, no question. You probably came through Ulum, didn't you?"
"Yeah."
"That's my town, man. I run that place."
That made me chuckle. "You run it?"
"Yeah, man."
"He's a pickpocket," Charis the whaler's nephew laughed.
Orel shrugged. "You gotta start somewhere, man." Then he turned to me. "Listen, you need anything, I can get it for you, you let me know."
To our left, Bilal had a line of recruits for archery training beneath the imposing wall of the Terbulin mountains in the distance. Across the grass, goatherds grazed their flocks; one of them had three bison bulls.
While the recruits placed target dummies, I had to handle something none of them could: communicate with the goatherds so no one got hurt. I ran about eighty yards across the open plain to the closest one. "We practice here. Please you—"
She was approaching forty with long white hair curtained over her shoulders front and back; my own shoulders were under assault from the Terrible Sun. She leaned in close and reached up to grab my chin, turning my head to inspect the leech scars on the side of my face. "Shanani took good care of you? She's going to be the Chief Mother of Healers one day! You will be able to tell your friends that you knew her!"
I smiled. "I remember. I need say we almost—"
"Yes, yes, I will tell the others. It's about damned time they let you practice with those things; you need to be prepared. We've had three sightings of miwe'ishi scouts in the last five days. They're planning something, I can feel it."
The field was an army of burlap. There were two squads by the edge of the moat where the scrub plants met the reeds. Other lines of men stretched out over a narrow band from the wall four, six, eight-hundred yards out to where the primal jungle claimed the rolling hills beyond. Someone had found a suit of plate armor in the shed and fitted it over one of the practice dummies.
Kurt was in the shade of the tree line staking his target when a brown-orange striped lizard rushed out on her hind legs and sniffed him up and down. He stood like a statue as the creature sniffed the practice dummy, squawked, then ran back into the trees. He still didn't move until after a while his chest lifted, and he blew out through pursed lips.
At the center of the invasion force, Turic grabbed the cart, when I had an even worse idea. "Leave it."
"Huh?" he looked back.
If it caught a few spikes, how bad would it be? A couple holes, nothing that can't be fixed.
Back in the tower, our instructor looked out over the army we'd assembled. "OK, so give me one of those?"
Kely of Linud handed him a cluster of about thirty iron flechettes tied together by a thin string. Each was black with orange rust spots along one side, and was about foot long with a sharpened spike at one end and flattened vanes like an arrow on the other.
"So it goes in this way." Delano opened a brass panel at the top, dropped it in, and turned a lever on the side. "Turn this crank here until the power level is where you want it. Let's see," and he picked up the book.
Bazen of Linud stood beside the low wall looking out. "You gonna call your target, man? What kind of Herali are you?"
Delano laughed. "Going after the king! Who else? Now, you all see this windsock over here? This tells us which page to use. Alright. So… about five-sixty yards, ten feet of elevation? So…" he walked his finger down the page, "let's do eight-point-five at fifty-seven degrees. Turn this crank until this dial hits 8.5. Then use this one to adjust the height. Now pay attention to this part, you see it says shift it to the left according to this table, that's this lever over here."
Metal ground against metal, the machine slowly turned, tilted up, and stopped.
Delano returned to the book. "Let's double check everything… good. Use this rod to set the hair trigger, then when you're ready…"
A loud click, gears whirred in the box below, and in a whoosh, a blur shot out from the end of the tube. A rain of metal spikes rose into the sky and came back down, slicing through six of the men in a cluster around the armored dummy. The king shook and something shot through the bottom and into the ground below. Beside him, another dummy was ripped open with tufts of brown stuffing sticking out.
"Damn!" the men cheered.
"My go!" Turic muscled forward with an excited look on his face. He already had a cluster of spikes in his hand.
"Alright, so pull this up to open, then drop it in."
"I got it," Turic pulled back the bolt to lock it into place and whirred hard at the angle crank.
The machine drifted slowly down towards the horizon.
While we waited, Charis commented. "The one on my uncle's boat doesn't have all these cranks and stuff; you could move it freely."
"It can do that," Delano stepped in. "Push that pedal down right there, and move it to the right to lock it."
Turic did as instructed, and the thing pivoted wherever his meaty hands desired.
He brought it to bear upon the enemy soldiers trying to cross the moat. Delano stepped in again and flipped down a pair of circles on the underside, each with a crosshair. "Also this lever here, don't use it at long range 'cause they won't fall right, but up-close they'll spread out more."
As for power, Turic turned and turned and turned. Sweat poured down his arms and he moved the dial well past 8, past 9, and some of the men laughed. Eventually, he'd pushed the dial a few hairs beyond ten, and the crank wouldn't move one more click. He maneuvered the machine to aim directly at a cluster of dummies at the water's edge below us.
A loud click, gears whirred, and a rain of iron spikes ripped through three dummies, shredding one to pieces and knocking another one out of the ground entirely.
"Daaaaaaaamn!" some of the men shouted.
Bazen chuckled with a big grin. "So that's how they make Jinati cheese!"
"What's this do?" Behind us, Dannie the Unnamed stood beside the opened wooden chest with a thick bolt in his hand. It was about a foot long with feather vanes at one end, and on the other end was an iron ram surrounded by pebbles held together with thick, black tar.
"Those are different," Delano said. "So you have a wick right here, and you're supposed to also get one of these things."
From the chest he grabbed a small, wire pouch with hairy moss at the end of a stick. He held it against a scratcher, and the moss lit up into a ball of fire. A trail of black smoke rose into the air while the moss burned away, and Delano blew on the ashes, leaving behind a bright red coal inside its metal cage. "Make sure you don't light it until you're ready to fire or you'll damage the machine."
With that, he turned to a different section of the book and showed Dannie how to look up the correct numbers to put in.
"Ready?" Delano said.
Dannie set the rod in place for the hair trigger and answered. "Ready."
Delano touched the coal to an oily string that stuck out one side, and a tuft of smoke crept out from beneath the loading panel.
A loud click, gears whirred, a puff of flame, and black smoke traced a low arc as a ball of fire streaked through the air towards the cart, and, from twenty feet away, sparks fired out leaving trails of smoke through the air. It smashed through the cart.
Suddenly, a burst of sparks blossomed out from the ground sending wood splinters and twisted metal everywhere. A second later, a BOOM thundered across the plain.
"Whoa!" we crooned, while the other half of us were in silent awe.
"Damn!" Nickel exclaimed. The whites of his eyes had a decidedly red color.
The cart was shredded. Twisted remnants of wheels and shattered wood lay strewn thirty yards out. Pockets of smoldering chunks littered the ground around it; one of them had landed on a burlap practice dummy, and the thing was on fire. A trail of gray smoke rose up from the burning man into the sky.
I was in deep shit.
Later that afternoon, I stood beside the gate. The imposing wall of the Terbulin mountains to the left trapped the oppressive heat and baked everything beneath it. Across hundreds of yards of open field and far to the left of where we'd been shooting, Miyani sat atop Blue while the recruits came in from being slaughtered. Cutthroat was still rubbing his neck, Finn had a faint limp he didn't have this morning, and Scree the Kitchen Fighter had two red smudges, one on his thigh, and another on the side of his chest.
Blue cawed and raced across the grass with her on his back smiling wide, took two thumps onto the drawbridge, and jumped up to snag his claws onto the stone archway above the gate only to ricochet down beside me, lowering his legs as a shock.
God, her face was beautiful. Her light-yellow eyes smiled down upon me, and she tagged my chest. "Touch!"
And they darted back across the drawbridge, only to stop at the back of the group of men coming in.
And so I moseyed across the bridge and stepped out onto the grass. By the time I reached them, she sneered. "Why so slow!"
I ran after them. She peeked over her shoulder and they sped up, so I tried to speed up. Then when I was about to pace them again, Blue zipped ahead and vanished into the trees in a heartbeat.
I came to the spot in the trees where they'd disappeared, and I was winded. I took a moment to catch my breath and followed her in.
The trail wasn't clear. I saw a snapped twig on my left, but leaves rustled on my right. I went right. She giggled somewhere in the bushes up ahead, and they crashed through a bush to my left.
I rushed after them, following a trail of shifting leaves and broken branches until I heard the siren bird high in the trees to my right. I looked left. The ground dipped beneath large, dark-green leaves with yellow streaks thick enough to block everything below. I carefully pulled some leaves to the side and followed fresh footprints down a steep slope, beyond the leaves and into the darkness below.
Miyani crouched naked on a blanket with a basket beside her. Her tiny silhouette in the darkness sent a flutter of goosebumps over my skin.
The air was damp and cool, and the ground gave off an earthy scent. Before I could settle down, she leaned into me and wrapped her hands around my neck to pull me close. I leaned my lips down into hers, and her whole body pressed into mine.
Kissing her, smelling the coconut blossom in her hair, feeling her body next to mine, I was excited. Her fingers worked beneath my belt and slid down, splaying over my butt and worked my clothes down to my knees. I sat upright and pulled my bow sling from my shoulder, setting it on the ground beside us.
Dressed the same, my hands meandered over her body, pausing to wrap my fingers over her taut nipples. I tried to sit lower to bring my lips over them, but she came with me, wrapping her fingers over my swollen shaft and squeezing tight. I dragged my fingers slowly down across her waist, pulling my thumbs over her belly until I could take in her hips in my palms, only to reach behind and soak my hands in her round arse and pull her tight to me, squishing my erection between us.
She broke from kissing me and exhaled sharply, wrapping her arm around my back to press our hips tight into one another, further squeezing my excited cock between us and brushing her nipples across my chest. She moaned lightly, and I kissed her lips again.
She felt like heaven.
Another moment of our lips dancing, and she pulled away. She rested her head on my chest and breathed out heavily, brushing her fingers over my crown and wrapping over, sliding down across my shaft until her hand pressed into my pelvic bone, then squeezed tight. She swallowed.
I swallowed and traced the muscles over her back, basking in the sensation of her fondling me.
Then she shifted. She turned her hips to the side and twisted further, holding my cock with one hand against her body until her whole back side was turned to me. My thundering heartbeat filled my ears as she arched her back and pressed her butt into my thighs, allowing me to rest in her crack. She rolled her hips around in me, only to twist her neck up to kiss my lips again and whispered, "you want?"
My body quivered so hard I couldn't find a word to answer her with.
She giggled again. My hands rested on her hips as she leaned forward, planting her hands on the ground, and pulled forward allowing my dick to slide down across her pussy. I had to angle it all the way down to maneuver the tip into her folds, and pushed.
She took a sharp breath in and held it while I slid into her, saturating my skin across her skin. Her wet walls sliding across my shaft sent flutters from my toes to my fingers. It was so dark I could barely see my shadow penetrating her against the lighter blanket below. A delicious moan escaped her lips and she eased herself back, pulling me deeper inside her.
"'ayi mama!" she whispered and held her breath. I pushed a little, but the angle allowed only so much. She inched herself forward, planting her elbows on the ground. I spread my knees apart to lower myself into her, and thrust in hard.
"Oh!" she moaned between rapid breaths, and I slammed. I pushed dry inches of dick deep into her, smashing my full force into her behind, and her cries grew louder. "mama! 'ayi mama!"
I kept thrusting. She took in a sharp breath and held it there, pushing back into me and grasping desperately with her hand to my leg. "Wait wait."
We held that position for a moment. Her breath lifted up and down and she exhaled hard. Exhaustion crept into my arms and legs, and in my stomach, and everywhere else. Sweat gathered over my skin.
She giggled lightly and lowered herself onto the blanket completely, resting her hips on the ground with that glorious arse filling up my hips. I came down on one elbow and groped her body with my other hand, allowing my full weight to rest on her butt.
There, I pushed gently, slowly, allowing my skin to linger on the grip of her pussy as I slid into her. Shivers flew over my body, and I rocked back and forth over her arse, sliding in and out of her, and I was overwhelmed.
I cried out and nearly collapsed while waves of pleasure rippled through my body.
She whispered. "You like?"
"Yeah. You like?"
"I like," her voice giggled.
Lying together with Miyani in the dense shade of the leaves above, her head rested on my shoulder with my arm around her and her leg crossed over my hip. Her eyes were closed, and a smile stretched her lips all the way across her round face.
I would tell her about John, but this wasn't the right moment.