The Wraiths of Will and Pleasure (2 page)

The shamans began a low rumbling chant in an unintelligible tongue that was reputedly the language Hubisag obeyed. Out of the darkness, as if they’d manifested from the desert sand itself, a troupe of hara clad only in their own thigh-length hair, insinuated themselves lithely between the motionless lesser hara of the tribe. These were Fire Dancers, of the Pyralis level of the Ulani caste. They prowled around the perimeter of the flames, snarling, their fingers curling on the air. Beyond the circle of the congregation, drummers started up a throbbing tribal rhythm.

Ulaume stirred restlessly within the disguise of his cloak. His body yearned to burst free, now, this moment, but he must judge the right time. It was not yet. The Fire Dancers must weave the web of power before he could dance upon it himself.

The whole tribe had begun to sway in time to the hypnotic rhythm and now the dancers’ prowl was punctuated by abrupt leaps and yelping cries. They spun in circles, lunging at members of the tribe, who did not flinch, but who threw back their heads, uttering ecstatic gasps.

Ulaume felt the power building up. He sensed it as smoking blue white light emanating from the hot skins of the dancers. It too was spinning, swirling counter-clockwise around the circle. The drums grew louder and faster, and the hara of the tribe added their voices to that of the shamans. The power was reaching a peak. Ulaume noticed Lianvis throw him a covert glance, as if to indicate that now was the time to join the dance, but Ulaume waited a few more precious seconds. He wanted that power to ache for him, to be taken beyond the point of no return, to demand the release of his body’s energy thrust into it. His eyes were half closed and he fancied that he could perceive a gigantic nebulous figure forming from the smoke and sparks of the fire. ‘Hubisag,’ he said in his mind. ‘Grant me my boon. I will show it to you now.’

With a fierce and guttural cry, Ulaume threw off the cloak and leapt forward, right into the midst of the dancers. The others went for him, growling and lashing out with their clawed hands, but Ulaume spun away from them, around and around the shouting flames. The roar filled his head.
I will show you!
I will show you!
He conjured in his mind a picture of Pellaz, offering it up to the god like a severed head on a silver salver.
Now, my lord of iniquity, do unto this…

Pain. Total. Instant. Consuming. Ulaume screamed and shot several feet into the air, his body twisting in unnatural contortions. The silent petition was stilled in his mind. It was as if a fist of hard air had reached into his head and squeezed his brain. Agonising sensations flooded through his body. Every nerve screamed in torment. Something had punched a hole in his head. His life was running out of it. He collapsed onto the ground as if he’d been thrown there.

Movement, voices, flickering light. Ulaume lay panting, face down, on the sand, his fingers flexing weakly in the sifting grains. He felt like a rare creature that had been shot and awaited the inevitable approach of the hunter for the coup de grace. He was aware of every laboured breath he drew into his body. He could hear his heart slowing down. The drums were fading away. Hara were silent around him. There was only the night and himself. Slower, slower, the heart-beat’s drum. His breath was the roar of the ocean, so hard to draw it. So hard.

A flash of lightning pierced his eyes and his body jerked involuntarily. He was both blinded by the light, but also given the most intense clarity of sight he’d ever known. Pictures came thick and fast upon the mind’s eye. He saw landscapes of unimaginable strangeness and wonder rush past his perception. He saw mighty cities of black stone rearing against an obsidian sky, devoid of stars. He saw the abyss, impenetrable blackness, and heard the lament of lost souls. He saw hara dancing, beautiful free movement, but their limbs were attached to shining strings, and somewhere, invisibly, a puppeteer tweaked and guided them. Now the puppets began to jerk and wriggle in strangely obscene gestures. There was no beauty to their movement, no harmonious rhythm. The puppet master laughed and it was a sound that filled the universe. Ulaume feared it more than he had ever feared anything. Perhaps it was the first thing he’d feared in his life. Was this death? Was he heading this way? No!

‘Hubisag,’ he said in his mind, ‘if I have offended you, I repent me. I am your priest, your child, and I adore you. Show me how I can atone.’

Thinking those words required the most effort he’d ever put into a conscious action. It was as if existence itself fought against his expression and his own life depended upon it.

‘Take yourself to a sacred place…’

It was the words of a prayer he heard in his mind, a small echoing voice.

And another voice:
‘Father, you have murdered me…
’

What he heard made no sense. He heard a horse scream. He smelled cordite. He saw blood running across sandy soil, dark blood, from somewhere deep inside. The sight of it touched him, moved him and he felt something he’d never felt before. He didn’t know what it was, but it wasn’t fear. He saw the face of Pellaz, as he’d appeared when Ulaume had first met him, his eyes full of curiosity and desire. Ulaume’s essence was drawn towards those eyes. This time their welcome would not turn to ice. But when Ulaume reached them, they were glazed over and dull. They were dead.

‘Ulaume!’ Rough hands shook his body, hauled him to his feet. Someone slapped his face hard. ‘Ulaume! Come out of it! Come back!’

Ulaume blinked, gulped air, sucked it into his body in a powerful rush. Sound and movement hurtled back, his stilled heart raced frantically. The night was confusion and riot around him. He saw Lianvis’ face before him, pinched with concern, and slumped against his body.

‘What happened?’ Lianvis demanded.

Ulaume raised his head, shook it slowly from side to side. The movement filled him with nausea and he had to pull away from Lianvis to vomit copiously onto the ground.

‘Tell me,’ Lianvis said in a low voice. ‘I must know.’

Ulaume wiped his mouth with the back of one hand. ‘He’s dead,’ he said. ‘That’s all you need to know.’

Not all the Kakkahaar were present at the festival that night. Only three did not attend, and they were occupied by what formerly, in the world of humanity, would have been seen as women’s work.

For nineteen hours, Herien, a young har who had been incepted to Wraeththu only a year before, had been pacing, pacing around the pavilion he shared with his chesnari, Rarn. He had spent hours weeping: He couldn’t sit down. He couldn’t lie down. When Rarn had tried to touch him in comfort, he’d pushed him off, his skin too sensitive to bear it. If he just kept moving, it was better, he could just about stand it. The moment he’d stopped, he’d felt as if a captive demon in his gut was trying to push his insides out. Sometimes, he had vomited until his stomach hurt. He couldn’t bear the terrible weight of what pressed down inside him. He was exhausted, yet near hysterical. Eventually, he’d fallen to the floor, groaning in agony, but too tired to keep moving.

Now, the time was near and Herien lay supported on Rarn’s chest, on a low bed in one of the canopied rooms. Rarn, kneeling on the pillows, held Herien beneath the armpits, while a healer of the tribe, a one-eyed har named Chisbet, peered between Herien’s raised knees. The noises that Herien made were like those of a half-slaughtered calf. He was in the process of delivering a pearl, which in human terms had once meant giving birth.

Wraeththu harlings are born in leathery sacs, in which they continue to develop for several weeks. In those days, procreation was a virtually untrodden territory among Wraeththu. They still had too much to learn about their androgynous condition, before embarking upon such an essentially female aspect of their being, and were ill-equipped to deal with it. There were no women to help them, which would certainly have made the transition easier. They were alone with a frightening truth. They were no longer men and this was the most damning proof of it. And they had to cope without much-needed female support, because that was a price they must pay for taking the world from humanity.

Only high-ranking hara were supposed to be capable of inseminating a host, and Rarn was indeed a Nahir Nuri of the tribe, but even he had been aghast at what had happened, one night after too much wine and a desire to take aruna beyond its normal boundaries.

Herien was clearly terrified, perhaps because his memories of being utterly male were too close for comfort. Even in his exhaustion, he writhed and moaned, asking to die, asking for someone to kill him, asking for release. Rarn felt helpless and numb, and willingly surrendered all control of the proceedings to Chisbet, who claimed to have helped deliver a pearl before. Rarn was not convinced of this – the occurrence being so rare among Wraeththukind – but he was prepared to overlook his misgivings. He couldn’t have coped with this on his own. It was dreadful. Hideous. The mess. The stink. Was this truly necessary?

Chisbet told Herien to push, and Rarn’s gorge rose. He was remembering his childhood and his youth, films and documentaries on TV, whispered conversations of female relatives. He was remembering being human and the life and culture he had chosen to forget. He didn’t need this to remind him. At that moment, he would cheerfully have taken a blade to Herien’s throat, even though he was immensely fond of him. Anything to stop the noise, to stop this dreadful process.

‘Do something,’ he said to Chisbet. ‘You do know what to do, don’t you?’ His tone, by this time, was desperate, and not at all haughty as it usually was.

Chisbet had lost an eye in battle, fighting for the Unneah tribe. The Kakkahaar regarded him as somewhat unsavoury, but he was a good healer, so his eccentric and uncivilised ways were tolerated. ‘It’s more up to him,’ he said. ‘This is nature. He’s resisting it. Talk to him.’

Rarn uttered a sound of despair, anguish and revulsion. He wanted to say, ‘This is not nature,’ but of course it was. He swallowed sour saliva, trying to keep a hold on the writhing har lying against him. ‘Herien, you must… you must do… you must
expel
it.’ He couldn’t say ‘push’, he just couldn’t.

‘Cut it out! Just cut the thing out of me!’ Herien screamed. ‘It’s killing me!’

At once, Rarn drew the knife from his belt, but Chisbet’s right hand shot out and clasped his wrist. ‘No. We cannot risk damaging the sac. There are fluids inside it.’

Herien’s screams had reached a diabolical pitch. His face was unrecognisable, screwed up into a tortured monkey mask.

‘Do something!’ Rarn cried. ‘He’s dying!’

Chisbet appeared calm. ‘Come on now,’ he said. ‘You can do this. Push, Herien.’

Herien uttered a final roar and his body lunged backwards.

Rarn was almost knocked over, and was sure he felt the muscles in his thighs rip. Something shining and slippery shot out of Herien’s body and landed in Chisbet’s hands, which were held waiting. It was the size of a har’s head. Unspeakable!

Chisbet’s shoulders slumped, apparently in relief.

‘What now?’ Rarn demanded, a tremor in his voice.

Herien had gone worryingly quiet and still. His body was as limp as a corpse as Rarn wriggled out from beneath it.

Chisbet laid the pearl carefully on a cloth and then examined Herien’s body. ‘Looks in order,’ he said, ‘but I’ll need to stitch and pack him to stop the bleeding. Fetch me the hot water. I’ll clean him up.’

Rarn stood shaking beside the bed and couldn’t bring himself to look at anything but the rugs underfoot.

‘Do it, har!’ Chisbet snarled. ‘You made this happen. You help now. You hear me?’

Rarn somehow made his limbs obey Chisbet’s command. He couldn’t think, couldn’t absorb what he’d just witnessed.

Chisbet appeared to read his mind. ‘Get used to it, Rarn. This is the way of things. How else do you think our race will continue?’ He laughed rather cruelly. ‘Be glad. You have a son – or soon will do, at any rate.’

Rarn handed the materials to Chisbet: lengths of linen wadding, suture equipment and the waiting hot water. He glanced at Herien, whose lower parts looked as if a frenzied maniac had attacked them with a dozen weapons. Herien’s eyes were closed and he did not move. Swallowing with difficulty, Rarn looked away. He had touched those precious parts, tasted them. Now they looked like ruined meat.

Humming to himself, Chisbet carefully bathed Herien’s soume-lam, his female organs, and stitched up the tearing. His male parts, the ouana-lim, had withdrawn into the body to prevent damage.

Rarn glanced at the pearl. ‘How long will it take to… to come out?’

Chisbet shrugged. ‘Couple of weeks, that’s all. It’s not too bad. It’s over. Lianvis will be pleased. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Look at this poor creature here. He’s the one who’s suffered, not you.’

‘You must be dead inside,’ Rarn said. ‘Can’t you imagine how I feel? How can you say those things?’

‘Easy. I face reality. This will be common soon – if we’re lucky.’

‘You enjoy it. You’re perverse.’

‘Of course I enjoy it. It’s a miracle and I’m proud to be part of it. It’s you who’s perverse, my friend. Think about it.’

Rarn really didn’t want to. It was not something he’d have chosen to be part of.

‘Go and get a breath of air,’ Chisbet said. ‘I’m going to pack the wound now.’

Rarn left the pavilion, grateful to escape the abattoir stink. He breathed slow and deep the cool night air and gazed at the glow in the sky, which was the festival fire. A son. Could it possibly be real? He had never felt so exhausted in his life. Even althaia, the changing from human to Wraeththu, hadn’t been as bad as this, because then he hadn’t been conscious. He’d gone into a coma a boy and woken up har. This was disgustingly different. It could have been him lying there on that bed with blood and shit running out of him. Hellish injury. Such violation. Too human to contemplate for someone who believed he’d transcended humanity. It could have happened to him anytime. He’d taken aruna with other high-ranking hara. Nohar knew what they were risking. Nohar. How could such a rank visceral event result from the blissful aruna that had caused it? He remembered the night they’d made the pearl, the feeling of having transcended the flesh, of touching Heaven. The closeness of it. The bond. Herien, so trusting, so completely surrendered to love, that a part of himself, deep inside, had opened like a flower: a part that had never opened before. And a previously unused part of Rarn’s ouana-lim had woken up, drawn by the alluring song of that secret inner organ and had ventured forth to enter it. In such a way were Wraeththu harlings conceived.