March in Country (33 page)
Authors: EE Knight
“Our beloved Baron gave up on Captain Coltrane becoming a father, I guess,” she said. “I don’t have my glasses on, stranger, but you’re a finely formed blur. Should I keep my glasses in their drawer, Porter?”
“He’s chewed up, but tasty,” the scarred man answered. He cupped Valentine on the butt cheek.
“Keep it off base, Private,” the other said. “Just because the Baron looks the other way ...”
“My snake’s cold,” she said. “Let’s get going.”
She led them back down the path to the trailers, silent. She had a grace to her, her gait had a rhythm, even on the uneven trail. The singing had stopped and the crying had changed to the sound of a woman telling a story about an ugly duckling.
“First time in the harem?” she asked, over her shoulder.
“Yes,” Valentine said.
She waved the escort off at the door. “When will you pick him up?”
“Morning,” the one in charge said. “Well after dawn, so don’t be afraid to—”
“Give him breakfast?” she said.
They left.
The trailer had more Grog art in it. A tiny corner kitchen at one end, with a bathroom opposite it, and a built-in folding table with a pair of small chairs covered eating and expulsion. At the other end, a long couch hid a bed. She had some bookshelves made of planks and bricks filled with battered books, mostly reference works and fiction. Several of the paperbacks were held together with rubber bands.
“Why do you do your routine in the water?” Valentine asked.
“Good workout for the legs. I had the guys bring up some sand, so the footing’s not too bad, and most of the year enough water is moving to keep it clear from water weed. That and it takes care of the sweat, so I don’t have to wash after.”
“I practice when it’s cool,” she said. “They’re happy to just hug my arms for a few minutes.”
She had three aquariums filling a wall of the trailer, warmed by a space heater. Valentine peeked inside and recognized a diamondback rattlesnake and a cottonmouth, plus something near black he’d never seen before.
“What’s your name?” Valentine asked.
“They call me ‘Snake Arms.’ ”
He wasn’t sure he’d heard the name correctly and asked her to repeat it.
“Snake Arms. They tell me it’s how the Grog name is rendered in English. Tethmot or something like that, with a purse of the lips and a spitting sound before or after to signify that I’m a captive. Hope you don’t mind Grog spittle, every time you get an order you’ll get a sprinkle.”
“I’m guessing they gave you that name.”
“I’m a praise-dancer. I’ve got a way with rattlesnakes and such. Can we get this over with, I need to hunt mice for my creepies and if I go to the grain pits after they close they might think I’m stealing.”
Valentine wondered how much to the hilt he’d end up playing this role.
“They call me Scar. You—fine reward,” he said, keeping to his role as an ignorant Scrubman who was learning fast.
“Your first time in a Grog pit? The Baron’s not interested in your pleasure. He wants strong, healthy babies for his next generation of soldiers. It’s Orders. They want some offspring combining valuable traits.”
Valentine had experience with this sort of thing. Southern Command ran a controversial program for a period before the return of a few Lifeweavers where they tried to breed a new generation of hunters by pairing up likely candidates. As one of the very few male Cats, he was called on. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it made him feel like a prize bull.
“Like dogs,” Valentine said.
“How do you think they ever made Shepherds. They picked two mutts with features they wanted and got a litter. The Baron’s thinking long term.”
“Hey, I’m off all duties but sewing while you’re trying to impregnate me, so I’m happy with it. Under all the wear and rust, you ain’t half bad looking, plus you have that intense Indian thing going, so I’ve got no problem with taking it twice nightly for a while if he wants me knocked up. Thing is, I have to check in at the doc’s dripping spunk, or they’ll take me off procreation and put me to berry picking or beekeeping or cleaning chicken coops and so on, and that’s sticky work. We only get two hot baths a week. Otherwise it’s a basin and rag, or the spring when no one’s drawing water.”
She disrobed as she spoke. She was a little on the fleshy side—Valentine couldn’t help but think of milk-skinned Molly, that summer in Wisconsin—but nicely proportioned. She’d probably been chosen for her hips and breasts.
“I’m kind of looking forward to this,” she said, approaching him. Her eyeline only came to his midchest, he could look down and see the direction of growth in her hair.
“You smell—sweet,” Valentine said.
“I dusted a little lavender in my hair. It’s in bloom now.”
Her body, soft and ripe and smelling of the spring water and salty sweat, suddenly seemed to be touching his, from toe tips to eyeline, as though they were magnets with perfectly aligned poles and curvatures.
His hands started at her shoulder blades and explored south.
She had deceptively strong muscles under that jiggling flesh. He felt one buttock tense under its padding, it might have been an oak banister carefully curved by some woodworker. They fought a brief war, her leg against his hand, and she let him win, bringing her calf up and tight against his own, tucked in between buttock and thigh.
Valentine had experienced all kinds of sex in his travels. Tender and tentative, loving, exhausted, mechanical, professional, enthusiastic, angry . . .
For him, it was a form of oblivion. He could wipe away everything when between a woman’s thighs the way some lost themselves in drink or drugs.
But this woman, a gift to him in his labor pit, was outside his experiences. She reminded him of one of those Old World robotic toys, where once plugged in or batteried up, lights roamed across it and noises sounded from hidden speakers and it began to buck and jump.
The first few strokes of penetration seemed to trip a hidden “on” switch within Snake Arms. She suddenly came alive and apparently grew another set of legs and arms, like some Indian idol. Were those hands or legs on his buttocks, and if they were hands, what on earth was clasping at his latissimus muscles.
Still, he stayed gentle. She seemed like a bird in a cage, tucked under the arc of his limbs.
“Faster and harder, Scar. I can take it ... All of it, now.”
“I much bigger than you,” Valentine said.
“Tougher than I look.” She made a face, as though trying to remember a foreign expression. Valentine felt her inner muscles work him, pulling at him.
“Jesus,” he said.
“It’s the dancing. Works your core.”
She’d gone impossibly wet, running like the spring where he’d seen her dance in the moonlight. He gave her his all.
“Fuck yeah,” she squeaked.
He had to agree.
Now they were both moving, grinding together, a steady meeting of hips like some obscene musical instrument.
The lavender must have been mostly pollen. Valentine gave a soft sneeze.
He pulled her off him, for some reason needing to taste her. He hugged her salty mount with his mouth, savoring her.
Suddenly she bucked and scooted away from his tongue. When her eyes opened again, he reentered her, aroused by her climax, and in a few brief strokes it was his turn.
His mind cleared in the afterglow.
“Work, work, work,” she said into his arm. “Dawn to midnight.” Then she seemed to relax into sleep.
Now he could think. A rough count of the armed Grogs made him wonder if an uprising by the Golden Ones could even be successful, given the forces the Baron had. A force two or three times that of the Baron’s would be required to smash this feudal Grog-human war machine.
The Baron would have plenty of warning and the advantage of rail-fed interior lines of communication on that arc he patrolled between the Mississippi and Oklahoma. No such army existed north of the Missouri, even if he could somehow unite the Gray Ones running wild north of the Missouri valley.
No, the destruction would have to come from within. The Kurians had managed the trick any number of times. Could he manage it here?
Not on his brown sugar.
After a day’s work in the fields that no longer seemed quite so delightfully mindless, he was rinsed and brought to the little trailer park enclave again. This time, he thought he saw a shadow watching him from the woods sheltering the trailers from prying eyes.
It was laundry day. There were bedsheets drying on every line. She showed him a tub of iced beer. “Present from the med staff. Doctor says it’s the right time in my cycle, so you’ve got me for the next two nights. Let’s enjoy ourselves.”
“Sure. But later, let’s talk. Alone. Quiet,” Valentine said, still not sure of her.
“If your tongue’s not too tired. And don’t go getting lovelorn. You’re here because the Baron wants it so. Don’t be surprised if when you’re done with me, they move you on to another, or get you jacking off into a cup. They’ll make use of those balls while you still have ’em. Soon as you knock a couple of us up, you’re getting snipped high and sewn up tight. Washtub gossip says you’re going to be guarding the officers’ harem.”
CHAPTER TEN
The Grog Auxiliaries: the Kurian Order keeps its place through its Church, police forces, riot squads, troops, and of course the Reapers. Some might say the paperwork and permits of existence in the Kurian Zone is a form of control, a little less obvious and more debilitating than the policeman on the street or the riot cop at his fire hose. Fear has its role too.
Of course, the Kurians sometimes have difficulty getting men to shoot down other men, especially in the early days of their advent. They brought the Grogs over through the Interworld Tree, telling them that a rich planet was theirs for the taking if they’d evict an indolent and degenerate infestation of scrawny humans.
So the Grogs came, though where they expected to frighten and herd away the humans (as their scouts who’d gone among the confused, starving multitudes in a few devastated areas had reported) they found resistance. But Grogs take to new modalities of warfare like ducks to different-sized bodies of water, and soon modified human weapons for their own use.
The Gray Baron’s “Missouri Division” is a recent construct. The Grogs in central Missouri now recognize no law but their own, and are quite happy to raid north, south, east, or west—and the rich lands of Iowa have valuable cattle and swine worth stealing. Starting with nothing but a starving, co-opted Western Missouri clan of Grogs known as the Wrist-Rings, he built them up into a formidable fighting band over the course of a decade, absorbing bands of Grogs along the Missouri Valley with promises of easy duty—when not fighting.
He kept that promise. His warriors enjoy an enviable lifestyle, only chieftains south of the river live in the manner of his lowliest fighter. As for the clan chiefs, some believe they’ve died and returned to Earth as demigods, so much wealth and wives and slaves do they have at their command.
The next generation of fighting Grogs and their human masters is training even now, while a third is being selected and bred. What plans the Gray Baron has for them perhaps not even his human lieutenants may say.
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