Skeen's Leap (24 page)

She glanced at the wharf. The young Virgin stood on the wharf watching the ship leave, her strong features cut out of darkness by the torch burning above her. She wants me to see her, she wants me to be a little afraid. Skeen pushed her hip onto the rail and watched the slice of water widen between the ship and the wharf. Idiot, doesn't she see that she's showing me I've got nothing to worry about. No one believes her suspicions or she'd be standing beside me now. Skeen wriggled about until she was comfortable, sucked in a breath, and let it out in a silent whoomph of relief. She went back to feeling good.

The Meyeberri passed across Tepa Hapak at an easy ten stads an hour, speaking several other ships on the way, reaching the locks by mid-afternoon. Computer driven, finely machined, the locks were built and operated by Funor who'd lost the least in their leap through the Gate. Despite their smooth operation, the day was finished by the time Meyeberri emerged from them into Tepa Vattak. The Captain hung lamps with red horn sides to the bow and stern and the top of the mainmast and kept on going. They met more ships, red lamps showing, who meant to heave to by the locks so they could get an early start on the passage through them. Terwel Mo also kept close watch for lake barges; these were low in the water and tricky to spot.

Skeen stayed on deck for a long time, watching the rise of the diminished moon, thinking about the two-score days she'd been stranded on Mistommerk, watching the lurid glow from the mast lamp drip like blood down the taut canvas, listening to the web of sound. She had imagined that anything powered by wind alone would glide silently and magically through the water, but there were the shouts of the watch, snores and groans from the deck passengers, and all the body noises of the ship—hums, creaks, long groans, a mix of smaller sounds. The ship flexed and complained and muttered like a live thing. Picarefy, who had her own sweet voice, her subliminal sounds that Skeen knew like the throb of her heart, Picarefy rode thunder up and down the gravity wells of a thousand worlds, but inside her walls her voice was a gossamer whisper alongside the cries of the Meyeberri. Skeen sat with her back against the rail trying to deal with the things stirring in her. Not knowing, that was the worst irritation. Tibo, Tibo … Djabo's claws, thinking of him reminded her of the hurt and rage she kept suppressing, but it also brought an aching itch to her groin. She told herself it was as much habit as need. She was always hot on journeys and usually had company to help cool her down. There were the Aggitj; no, she didn't want them—thinking of them turned her off. Almost. They were too young. Too what? Dumb? No, not dumb exactly, but tracked, yes, they were already what they'd be if they lived to die of old age. Put them back in Aggitj lands and they'd be what their fathers were, everything acquired outside Boot and Backland sloughed off like an old dead skin. They'd never betray her like Tibo had, they'd never delight her like Tibo had. Twisty as they came, he was capable of immense generosity—she'd seen it a thousand times. Never mean. She'd owned a part of him, at least that's what she thought, but never the whole and that was the way she liked it. Always the edge of danger, of uncertainty, the possibility of pain that made pleasure so much greater. She expected him to run out on her some day, but steal from his kind? She rubbed at her breasts again, glanced at the Captain standing on the quarterdeck still, looking out over the ship with a pride in his stance she could read from where she sat. No. Like the Aggitj, he was too damn young. Besides, the way he looked at Timka, Skeen was too old, too angular, too assertive for him. He'd shy like a startled horse if she propositioned him. He'd be polite and tell her how honored he was and turn her down gently and carefully, even tactfully, but oh so definitely. In her mind's ear she could hear him when he was home on his island and relaxed and maybe a little drunk, telling friends and cousins how he was hit on once by this gaunt crow of a woman, old enough to be—a wink and a poke of the elbow—his auntee-in-law, do yourself a mischief on the potong's hip bones. That wasn't anything she wanted to think about. What she needed now was sleep, what she
really
needed was sex and sleep, and if not sex some cuddling. She shook her head and went below.

She stopped, her hand on the latch to her cabin door, stood staring at the panels, Why not, what can he do but turn me down. She moved to the next door over, hesitated a moment, then knocked lightly at a panel. Maybe he's already asleep, she thought, but she waited without moving, her stomach in knots.

The door opened. Pegwai looked up at her. “Skeen?”

“Peg, could I talk to you?”

He looked uncertain, then stepped back, pulling the door open wider. “Shall I light a lamp?”

“No.” She sat down on one end of the lower bunk and watched as he pushed the door shut and settled at the other end of the bunk, his face in shadows. “Peg,” she said softly, “I know … I know you don't want me.” She saw his hands move on his thighs, then go still; she spoke again, more hastily than she'd planned. “What I'm saying so clumsily is … is this, I suppose. Where you love and where you desire is no business of mine and has nothing to do with this moment. At this moment I am driven by urgencies that have … that don't require either from you. What I'm saying is will you please, my friend, will you hold me and caress me and help quiet the heat in me?” She looked at his hands, they clenched, opened. She thought of saying more, but did not.

A tense silence. A long sigh. Pegwai pulled his face deeper into shadow, lifted a hand, let it fall. “Why me, Skeen? The Aggitj, a deck passenger, any of the sailors could give you what … what I more than likely cannot.” Before she could say anything, his voice came again, squeezed and filled with pain. “Should not. Must not.”

She made a brushing gesture with a hand. “I don't want them.”

He abandoned the shadow, leaning forward to stare at her. “Me, but I'm.…”

“Ah well, I didn't ask you where your fancies flew, don't ask me to explain mine.”

“You don't understand. I don't want to start something I can't handle. I.…”

“Handling is all you'll have to do, dear friend, unless you find the thought of touching me distasteful.”

“Not distasteful. Merely rather … frightening. Skeen, listen.…”

She got to her feet, crossed to the window opening and laced the cover in place, shutting out the moonlight, plunging the cabin into a deeper darkness. “Tell me nothing, my friend, unless it's to leave you. That I'll do, if you ask it.” She heard him moving, heard the bed creak, waited for an answer, but he said nothing. “Then I'll stay.” She stripped, folding her clothing and putting the things on the upper bunk, pulled off her boots and set them beside her belt and holster. He was moving, too. When she sat beside him and took his hands she discovered he'd removed his robe and tossed it away. His arms were stiff; she could feel the tension in him. “We'll neither of us break,” she murmured, then frowned; for some reason that was the wrong thing to say. He tried to pull away. “Peg, is it that bad? Tell me to go.” She felt him shudder, but still he said nothing. Maybe she should have listened to him before, but if she left now, what would that mean to him? “Let's take this slow,” she said, keeping her voice soft and easy. “Lie down, my friend, stretch out and relax, on your stomach if that would make you more comfortable.”

When he was stretched out, she straddled his back and began working on the knots in his shoulder muscles, doing some silent crying because she remembered all too vividly doing this for Tibo and what happened afterward. She began working down his spine. He was plump but not sloppy, without Tibo's well-defined musculature. She kneaded and smoothed and worked over him until he was deeply relaxed and almost purring, not aroused by her efforts (to her considerable disappointment, she'd had hopes) though she could feel the deep pleasure he got from the handling. Finally she stretched out beside him, put her hand flat on his chest between the spring of his ribs. “Do for me now, my friend, please. When the time comes, I'll show you what else I need.”

His fingers dug into her buttocks pulling a grunt out of her. “Skeen!” Her name groaned out of him and he wrenched his hand around hard. She gasped and tried to twist away. His weight came down heavy on her, pinning her to the pad. “I tried …” he whispered, “I tried to tell you.…”

“You're bleeding.” A whisper in the darkness. “I tore you.” A whisper filled with remorse and wretched pleasure. The weight moved off her back. She heard him stumbling to the commode, heard the sound of water pouring and a moment later the coolness of that water as he sponged away the blood. His hands shook and he sobbed.

Skeen lay limp, the pain answering some deep need in her she'd never known was there, easing that other pain she carried with her. She reached out, long arm adequate when she bent a little at the waist, and stroked Pegwai's smooth flank, drew her hand across his hard belly and down. His short thick penis was standing high and hard again. Without thought or intent, not knowing why she did it, she jabbed her thumbnail into his testicles, hard, pointed nail, weapons Tibo called her claws, thinking of him she raked those claws hard down Pegwai's flesh. He shrieked and wrenched her hand loose, twisted her arm high up her back until she was fighting him, hissing with pain, then he threw himself on her.…

She woke pressed up against Pegwai, half on him. Carefully not-thinking, she eased away from him and off the bed. She unwound part of the lacing on the windowcover, letting some of the dawn light into the cabin, then went to stand frowning down at him. He looked like she felt, bruises starting to show, blood crusted on long ragged gashes from her nails, livid tooth marks, some deep enough to draw blood. His mouth hung open, the cheek she could see looked sunken; he lay on his stomach, face turned to the wall. She dressed as quietly as she could, wanting rather desperately to get away from this room before he woke. Carrying her boots, she padded to the door.

One hand curled about the door's edge, she looked back. A certain stiffness about the outline of his body suggested that he was awake, that he was pretending to sleep because he wanted her gone as much as she wanted to be gone. The thought depressed her yet more. She pulled the door shut and almost ran the few steps to the cabin she shared with Timka.

The little Min was curled in a tidy knot, producing her high-pitched, breathy snore. Skeen set her boots down carefully, then stripped again. She poured cold water into the basin, began scrubbing her body, teeth sunk into her lower lip to stifle her groans, yearning for a hot bath but making do with the washcloth and contortions. She was sore all over, her hide in worse shape man Pegwai's. When it came to washing her pubic area, she took extra care, dabbing at herself, breath snuffing hard through her nostrils. Not going to use those parts until she healed a bit. She hadn't hurt so much or felt such a nauseating mix of excitement and self-disgust since the time with her uncle. She still couldn't believe how savage the thing had got, as if each woke in the other a beast that found pleasure in hurting and being hurt. I'm not like that, she told herself. I know plenty who are, but I am not. I never have been. She shuddered, then struggled to stop thinking while she did a few isometrics and some bends to work out the worst of the stiffness, repressing groans and gasps because she did not want to wake Timka and exhibit her battered carcass. She turned to the bed to get out a set of the spare underwear she'd had made by a seamstress in Oruda.

Timka was awake, staring at her with appalled curiosity. When the little Min met Skeen's eyes, her own went blank. She yawned and turned onto her side, pretending to sink back into sleep.

Grateful for the diplomatic pretense, Skeen finished dressing and went out.

Only the tip of the sun was up, slanting red light across the deck, sailors busy with rigging and wheel, moving through the long shadows like game pieces on a changing board. The deck passengers were wrapped in their blankets asleep, though here and there a man or a woman was crouched over a brazier, coaxing a tiny heap of coals alight. The smells of the countryside were heavy on the wind—fresh mown hay, damp earth, the acrid tang of urine, fugitive sweetness from unseen flowers, a blend of other odors, none of them identifiable. During the night they'd passed out of Tepa Vattak and were gliding down a broad river that looped in elaborate meanders through heavily settled farm country. Funor Ashon. She saw robed figures running the water wheels that dumped river water into irrigation ditches, others driving milk herds toward distant barns, more already at work in the fields, a few on the banks watching the ship move past.

She was suddenly very hungry and sighed to think it would be another hour at least before breakfast was served. A glance at her ring chron verified that. She leaned against the rail and watched the water slide past. A nice little cuddle to chase away the jimjams, hah! She was appalled by the events of the night, didn't want to think about them, name them, yet.… The intensity of the experience, the … she couldn't call it pleasure, but what else was it? She loathed how it made her feel, how it took control of her, but.… It was like the time in her early twenties when she was kicking off the hold of pilpil; she knew what the drug did to her, she knew she was destroying herself by using it, she'd fought against being someone else's slave, fought for control of her body, her life, and was losing all that to pilpil, yet there was in her a powerful urge to go back under, to regain that numbness when she felt nothing at all except a warm and gentle peace. She rubbed her thumb along a scratch on her neck, dipped her hand inside her tunic to smooth her fingers over the bruised flesh where his teeth had worried her breast. Last night's pain/sex mix could turn out to be as addicting as pilpil and as debilitating. The warning sighs were there; she knew them too well to be fooled by her rationalizing mind. She closed her eyes and swore to herself
never again
, then cursed softly, remembering how many times in withdrawal she'd sworn that never again, and how many times she forgot the oath. An unhappy laugh and she went back to watching the water slide past. Not to worry, woman, Pegwai won't come near you. Shit. If he was feeling anything like her, there went a friendship she was beginning to value. She scowled at the clear green water as the sounds of stirring increased behind her. The ship was waking. Have to work out some way of going on. We're not children, far from it. With a little luck, maybe we can keep the friendship. A little luck, a little time. Smells of cooking drifted to her, her stomach growled. She sighed, glanced at her ring chron, and went below to breakfast.