Birth: A Novella (2 page)

Dominic’s mouth encircles the tip of Roger’s
shaft; he draws it deep into his throat, his fingertips tickling
the base and the balls. Roger groans in ecstasy. His hips pump
reflexively as he struggles to hold back, not to spill too soon.
Dominic is steps ahead, his own breeches open, his erection leaping
in his hand.

I feel the contractions in my vagina, the
physical effects of mental union that Dominic and I have always
shared. Strong, almost painful spasms, as if I am experiencing
Roger’s reluctant orgasm, not my husband’s as yet unrealized
expectations.
My love
, I say,
go slow
.

I hear Dominic’s laugh, low and purring, in
my mind.
This is a man I am with, Amalie. I can’t go as slow as
with a woman
. He swallows Roger’s seed, thinking,
This is my
overlord, to whom I have sworn allegiance
. A shift in their
relationship, a new hierarchy, one to command, the other to
submit.

And new for me, too. Dominic knows I don’t
enjoy this part, but he’s keeping me in the communion.
Always
better
, he said,
when I share it with him
. Is it? Does
he want me as a support in his surrender, or is it another
unwelcome development in our marriage, that he would take pleasure
in my discomfort? I swallow convulsively, fighting nausea, hand on
my belly, feeling movement inside, the child’s strong kicks.

***

Dominic had not gone in twenty minutes, or that day.
He had raged at me, shouting that I knew damn well when I married
him I could not travel without him.

“What about the guards?” I asked, forced to
sit up, fully awake, sleep banished by the mental shaking.

“They’re for an emergency,” Dominic said,
“not because a man’s wife is too lazy to—”

“Lazy?
Lazy?
Now the truth comes out.
You wanted a laborer, not a wife. You only married me for my
brawn.” I stood up, naked from last night’s lovemaking—how long ago
that seemed—made a fist and flexed my biceps. “Where should I
start? In the fields or the pasture? You can save the use of two
horses. I can pull the hay wain, or turn the thresher—”

Dominic had laughed then, finally, at my
slight muscles barely visible under fat and skin, the protruding
pregnancy and swelling breasts, and the irate words. And he
apologized, although I wouldn’t listen at first. His anxiety was
still in the front of his mind, that he had forgotten, truly
forgotten, real life, lolling around with his bride and his
companion as if there were nobody else, nothing to do in the world.
Only when he cried, said he was going as mad as his father, did I
take pity on him, kissing his tears away, guiding his hand between
my legs.
Oh, it felt good
, his love instead of his anger. He
was with me much longer than the twenty minutes he had decreed.
Half the morning went in apology.

But we started out at dawn next day, and I
was ready. It never occurred to either of us to follow the
tradition, the wife staying behind to manage her lord’s realm while
the husband conducts men’s business in the city.

Magali the housekeeper bade me a cold
goodbye, too proud to show her hurt feelings, that I would leave
Aranyi for the whole winter and not tell her until the last minute.
“You’ll be back,” she said, hating to part on bad terms, softening
a little as I tried to embrace her. “For the birth.”
Prescient,
as always
.

Katrina packed a few items for us both, just
what would fit in our saddlebags. She had cried on hearing we were
to spend all winter away from home. “I’m pregnant, I think,” she
said, looking to me for confirmation.

“If you are, I can’t tell.”

“I’m three days late.”

Oh gods, spare me young married couples.
Three days
. It would take a sibyl to know, assuming she
cared about such trifling stuff, or a witch. Katrina cheered up
when she saw her first paved road leading into Eclipsia City.
“Marcin won’t believe me when I tell him,” she said.

***

There is a jar of harness grease, for horse tackle
and leather, left casually in a corner, although no one needs such
a thing in a barn. Dominic has taken it from the smithy, put it
here days ago, waiting his chance. He is a planner and a schemer,
my Dominic, for all his recklessness. He has the jar open, is
slathering it on his own bulging cock at the same time that his
lips pull the last drops of seed from Roger’s.

Dominic straightens from his crouch, leans
over Roger’s recumbent body and turns him on his stomach, tenderly,
like putting an infant to bed. Roger sighs with repletion after his
pleasuring from Dominic’s mouth. Dominic straddles him, kneeling in
the hay. The penetration is slow, easy, slick with the grease.
Barebacking
, they call it, the Terran meaning forgotten in a
world free of serious sexual diseases, where condoms are an insult
between lovers. With harness grease. Most appropriate.

It hurts me, though, a pain deep inside.
Never have I felt this with Stefan, and yet Dominic is being even
gentler now. Perhaps I’m still sensing Roger’s guilt, or perhaps
I’ve never known a young man’s first time. Anyway, I haven’t
enjoyed physical sex for weeks. Once I reached my eighth month it
was difficult for me with Dominic, or would have been, I assume. We
had given up trying by then. Our fights in Eclipsia City were
always real, unlike our shouting matches at Aranyi, which were more
often the prelude to love.

Now, with Dominic and Roger, I feel such a
mix of pleasure and pain, joy and loss, hope and dread, it’s
sickening, like the sexual advances of the ungifted I had attracted
on Terra and couldn’t accept or respond to. Dominic is oblivious—or
is he? Never has he shut me out of his lovemaking with a man if I
wanted to share it; never has he done anything deliberately to
cause me distress.
My lord husband
, I say, pleading as in
our own lovemaking.
Please, my lord husband.
I don’t know
what to ask, and there is no response from him. I’m panting and
heaving, caught up in passion despite the discomfort, locked in a
communion that I can’t sever, even if I wanted to.

***

Our journey to the city was slow and torturous.
Dominic fretted at the pace, pushing ahead, waiting impatiently for
me to catch up, only remembering to worry about the child when I
tried to trot or canter. Not that I could. I bounced around in the
saddle until I was sore and exhausted, and when we were forced to
stop for the night at the same travelers’ shelter we had been
trapped in during the spring thaw, where the child had been
conceived, I thought I would rather die than set foot in it. “Can’t
we—”

“What, Amalie?” Dominic broke in, furious at
the distasteful situation that he could neither change nor control.
“Freeze to death because of your delicate sensibilities? Sleep in
the stable? Ride all night? Even if we could do it the horses
can’t.”

“Oh, the horses!” I said. “The precious
horses. The gods forbid we should inconvenience the horses.”
Dominic turned away—I could hear him thinking,
No point in
arguing with her when she gets like that
—and he and Ranulf led
the horses into the stable. Katrina was already inside the hut, her
hand over nose and mouth, but she tried to smile when I entered.
“It’s not so bad, my lady,” she said. “We won’t notice the smell in
a little while. You’ll see.”

At least she didn’t know the story of the
shelter. The same fetid blanket was lying neatly folded on the same
stained mattress that was no doubt stuffed with the same moldy
straw. The same dented kettle and cauldron hung by the hearth, and
the same wooden trenchers, a trail of ants leading to and from
their greasy edges, were stacked on the rough wooden table.

Dominic and Ranulf and the guards ducked in
at the low door. Stefan followed reluctantly.
He knew,
I
could tell, was looking warily from me to Dominic, wondering,
despite his own experience with the telepathic weapon, if the
setting itself were enough to make us reenact the wild scene he
must have picked up from Dominic’s uncensored memories. Dominic
caught Stefan’s wrist, yanked him close and kissed his mouth.
Don’t worry,
he thought to him.
I’m all yours
tonight
.

Katrina and I shared the bed, the men on the
floor, as we had arranged it last time. Dominic wrapped himself and
Stefan in one blanket and they giggled and whispered much of the
night, trying to make love silently, fooling nobody. Not that
anyone cared. It was too cold to sleep, and bedbugs swarmed all
over Katrina and me; someone else had stayed here in the
intervening months after all. I brought out my prism-handled
dagger, cursing the original settlers who had recreated Terra’s
entire insect biodiversity all too faithfully, and tried to use the
heat from the embers of the dying fire to electrocute the bugs,
succeeding only in setting the bedding ablaze. After we had poured
water on it, most of the men gave up pretending to sleep and lit a
new fire in the hearth.

“Almost cock crow,” one of the guards
said.

“My cock may never crow again unless he’s
thawed out,” his friend replied, rubbing himself hopefully.

“Don’t look at me,” the first one said. “I’m
so cold I’m shitting brown icicles.”

I caught the men ogling Katrina and glared
at them, holding up my dagger’s prism in a significant way. They
lowered their eyes and their voices at that, but we were none of us
in a good mood when we resumed our journey an hour later. Except
Stefan. For some reason he was singing all the way to Eclipsia
City, a silly riddle-ballad full of double entendres, until Dominic
told him to put a lid on it. He was smiling when he said it, and
Stefan smiled back, still singing, but softer, more of a hum.

***

Dominic is riding Roger, not so gentle anymore,
really barebacking, the long strokes, in and out, the pace
accelerating. I feel no pain from the men. They’re in the deep
communion of sex between the gifted: fulfillment of longing on
Dominic’s part; curiosity satisfied on Roger’s, realization of what
has been only imagined before. Roger is sobbing, or perhaps he’s
whimpering with pleasure. Funny how you can’t tell by the sound.
From Dominic a rhythmic grunting, a desire so intense it had
obsessed him. With the object attained at last, he is more excited
by the idea than by the body and flesh he’s possessing at this
moment.

No, Amalie, he says, do not think I am
ungrateful. This body and this flesh are most satisfying. Thank
you, my love, for your offering.

He has not lost his rhythm while he
converses with me; he comes, wild and violent, pounding roughly
into Roger until the young man moans, and the two of them topple
over into the hay. Roger is crying now, no mistake, and Dominic
holds him, kissing, murmuring words into his face, petting and
soothing him, all the time that his hand moves lower, toward
Roger’s cock.

Roger pushes him away. “You’re insatiable!”
he says. “It’s not enough to rape me—you want to make me like
it.”

“Yes,” Dominic says, “I do. It’s better when
we both have pleasure. And I don’t recall any rape.”

“No,” Roger says. “You wouldn’t.”

***

When we arrived at ‘Graven Fortress after three days
of hell, it was to find the Aranyi apartments closed and locked,
the furniture covered, the servants dispersed to their homes.
Dominic had taken out his dagger, bending the light from a torch in
a wall sconce into his eyes, retracting the large bolt with a
disdainful flick of the wrist. He shrugged, turning to me. “You
didn’t tell them we were coming, did you, Amalie?”

“Why would I?” I said, shrugging in return.
“You’re the one who decided.”

Dominic sighed. “It’s the wife who makes the
domestic arrangements.”

“However did you manage,” I said, “all the
time you were unmarried?”

“A hell of a lot better than this.”

“Fine,” I said. “Then manage now.” I turned
around and marched out, my heart pounding, tears in my eyes. I
could barely find the stairs, much less the entrance, but I figured
once I was away from Dominic’s dispiriting influence and I could
gather my wits I would be able to orient myself through my gift, my
crypta
.
I would make my way to the Terran Sector,
I
decided
. Get supper at a take-out place, a bed for the night
near the airport. In the morning, I would—what would I do in the
morning?

“In the morning,” Dominic said, “you can
think of a suitable punishment for a brute of a husband. But
please, spend the night with me.”

It was simple enough, after all, to have
supper sent in from the communal kitchen—we were not the first
unexpected visitors to arrive hungry and tired at this central
accommodation for ‘Graven. Katrina and Stefan made up the beds in
the Margrave’s bedroom and the wife’s room. In the morning, Ranulf
promised, he’d track down the major domo and the cook. Footmen and
maids, he added, were easy to come by, if it was Aranyi that wanted
them.

Dominic was eager to spend that first night
apologizing, but the journey had exhausted me, and my moment of
extreme anger and subsequent despair had taken what little energy
was left. I fell asleep as Dominic was kissing me, and woke alone,
late in the morning, to be greeted by Katrina. “I really am
pregnant,” she said, tears in her eyes but a bright smile on her
face. “I just threw up my breakfast.”

***

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Dominic says.

Roger rolls on his side, stares into
Dominic’s glowering face. “Sex and rape are the same to you,” he
says. “If there’s no force involved you can’t get it up.”

“Helios give me patience,” Dominic says.
“Spare me the Terran bullshit. And how exactly did I force you in
here and compel you to allow your precious Zichmni cock to be
sucked?”