The Sorrow Anthology Page 7

  “You know, on Earth there are animals we are descended from, called monkeys. Human’s don’t tend to eat them. And there are others, sacred animals we just don’t eat, and pets, we don’t eat them either.”

  “Your kind call Sin animals,” he growled.

  “Yes, but we, I, know you are not.”

  “What is a pet?” he interjected, interested despite himself.

  “A pet is an animal we have around just for fun, for love. We don’t eat them.”

  “For love?” he said, frowning.

  “Yes, you know, we had small furry creatures called cats, which we like to stroke. Dogs which we play with, walk, throw balls for, that kind of thing. I never had a pet though, I wanted one, but Mum never felt really settled enough for us to get one, just in case we had to leave in a hurry.”

  “And they are meat, but you don’t eat them?” he asked, ignoring her last comment, his face disbelieving.

  “No,” she laughed, at his expression, “we don’t.”

  “We eat everything,” he replied, “meat is meat.”

  “Yes, Mum told me,” Sorrow sighed. “She also told me that the key to having the Sin understand why they shouldn’t eat humans, or Earthborn, is in these caves we are heading to. She told me what the hieroglyphics said.”

  “Yes,” Khalili nodded, “the wisdom of the elders.”

  “Do you think we could get some of these other tribe leaders to head to the caves and read the wisdom?” she asked, her brain suddenly coming up with a range of simultaneous plans.

  “No.”

  “What if we kidnapped one of the tribe leaders and took him there, and then dropped him back, unharmed to spread the word?”

  Khalili stared at her and bared his teeth, they glinted, even in the dim light, lending a menacing look to his face.

  “And how do you plan to kidnap a chief who is likely surrounded by guards?”

  “I was hoping you might have some ideas,” Sorrow grinned.

  Khalili stepped away from her and sheathed his swords. He crossed his arms and took a deep breath through his nose. He stayed that way for what seemed like an interminably long time before making some unseen decision.

  “Perhaps I do,” he said finally.

  She followed Khalili’s sweat-soaked figure through the jungle, watching the unconscious prisoner’s head bounce and sway where it hung upside down over his shoulder.

  They had been lucky. The tribe leader was young, his father having been recently killed by a raid from another tribe around the other side of the mountain. He had run to this area only a few weeks prior with the remainder of those loyal to him, about 200 Sin, a big tribe by most standards, even at half its size, according to Khalili.

  The pair had watched the tribe from a concealed location for several days before finding the opportunity Khalili had known would come. The steaming room.

  Megan had told Sorrow that when she had been ill with the forest fever, the Sin had cured her inside a hut filled with steam. Khalili said the steaming was something most tribe members did at least once a month. Tribe leaders steamed more often, sometimes weekly and always alone – to give them time to cleanse and ponder on decisions they had made or would make in the coming days.

  Kidnapping the new tribe leader, barely an adolescent, had been quite straightforward. Khalili had simply slipped into the steam room and knocked him out. Throwing him over his shoulder he and Sorrow had scarpered. Now, several hours later, she knew she would have to call out soon for a rest. Although she was very fit, the heat of the jungle sapped her energy, and their water bottles had run out the day before. She didn’t want to risk dehydration or kidney infection or heat stroke – they needed water.

  “Khalili,” she called, “we need water.”

  He didn’t answer, just kept up his interminable pace. She was used to his reticence by now, his reluctance to speak to her. During the days they had walked, and the days they had hidden spying on the other tribe they had barely communicated in anything but the sparest of monosyllables, but often she caught him staring at her, his eyes unreadable.

  She licked her lips and swallowed, prepared to call out to him again when, as if by magic, the dense undergrowth gave way to a grassy bank, and the foliage opened up to reveal a crystal-clear pond at the base of a tiny waterfall.

  Sorrow gasped at the beauty of the shimmering water and smiled at Khalili as he shrugged off the body of the, now conscious, but still well-tied and blindfolded prisoner, and nodded to her. Turning his back to her, he unbuckled his sword belt, stripped off his leather pants, and waded naked into the water.

  Sorrow, shaking her head, shrugged her pack off her shoulders and sat down heavily on the grass, smiling as she took in the beautiful surroundings.

  “Do you think it will be OK to light a fire?” she asked Khalili as he rose from the water, spitting a stream out between his teeth and pushing his long, dark hair back from his face.

  “No,” he said, turning and diving back under the water.

  She massaged her stiff neck muscles with her fingers and looked longingly at the water.

  “Get in, get clean,” Khalili ordered her as he rose next, “we keep walking when we are dry.”

  Sorrow sighed and, standing, slipped off her shirt and jeans, leaving on just knickers and bra. Her body had always been slender, and she had always been fit. The months of labour on the town walls had toned every part of her into rock-hard muscle.

  As she walked toward the water’s edge, Khalili watched her, shaking his head.

  “You will get fungus,” he said, nodding towards her underwear, “if you walk in this jungle in damp clothes.”

  She frowned and, turning, walked behind some bushes to disrobe completely. When he turned from her, she made a running leap into the water. She was not, by nature, a prude; as a doctor, she had seen many naked bodies. But personally, she had little interaction with anyone while naked, apart from her husband, and, truth be told, she was embarrassed. She also didn’t want to have Khalili consider her as anything other than an equal. She worried that being naked might, to him, cause a disconnect between her mind and her body and make her seem more like a potential carcass than a person. She knew he had butchered many, many humans in the past. She preferred to stay clothed and armed around him.

  Making it into the water, she swam to the opposite end of the wide pond and revelled in the luxury of being clean. She knew what he meant about fungus. The very air in this part of the forest seemed wet with spores and mould. She changed her clothes each day but noticed even those protected in her backpack were slightly damp.

  “Can’t we stay for tonight, dry out our clothes, rest?” she asked, swimming closer to Khalili, but still far enough away that he could not see her body beneath the clear water.

  “No,” he said, swimming away and leaving the water.

  She watched as he went back to their gear, his body glistening, his hard muscles drawing her eyes like a magnet.

  He turned to her and threw their water bottles.

  “Fill them up,” he said, nodding towards the waterfall.

  “Yes master,” she huffed, collecting the bottles where they floated on the surface and making her way to the waterfall. She smiled as she drew closer and ducked beneath the bulk of the flow. Behind the waterfall, there was a gap of about two metres where light mist fell, and the rocks gleamed iridescent green with algae; little ferns grew out of the crevices here and there. Sorrow pulled herself onto the rock shelf and stood behind the curtain of water, feeling as though she had wandered into a fairy grotto. Leaning out she put her head under the full force of the flow, revelling for a minute in the cold water thundering down on her hair, running down her back, cooling her overheated skin, before remembering her purpose and holding the water bottles under the streaming flow.

  The sound of the rushing water hid Khalili’s approach, and Sorrow gasped as she turned and saw him standing close beside her. His eyes were dark as they left hers and roamed her body, from
her firm, high breasts with their hard nipples to her sex, hairless, revealed. Like all Earthborn, the only hair she had was on her head, the rest of her skin was as smooth as a newborn’s.

  Sorrow frowned. She was unsure what his expression meant. He looked angry, hungry.

  “I am not your food,” she said, dropping the water bottles and standing ready to defend herself.

  As he continued to stand silently, looking at her, she returned his stare, taking in his body. The water ran down his tattoos and made his muscles gleam. Looking lower she gasped, he had an erection as large as she remembered the first time she had seen it – that brief glance in the tent.

  Watching her study him, he took a step towards her and, striking like a snake, grabbed her neck with one huge hand so fast she had no chance to stop him. Before she could cry out, he spun her around, pressing her hard against the wet rock, his body against her back. His hand held her firmly by the back of the neck as the water thundered down around them, hiding them behind a sheet of white.

  Sorrow stook frozen, she could feel his erection against her back, but he held her so tightly, breathing into her ear, his body still, she was unable to move. Part of her wanted to scream at him, to struggle and fight, but another, more primitive side of her, one she had barely acknowledged, wanted him to take her, to show her what it would be like to have those muscles pressed against her, inside her. His breath on her neck sent tingles down her spine, and as her brain warred with itself over how she should respond, he pressed his lips to her ear and growled.

  “And I am not your pet.”

  Before she could respond he used his free hand to force her legs apart and just as she began to tense and decided she would fight, he bit her hard on the neck, his fangs sinking into her skin and drawing blood instantly. The pain was excruciating, unexpected, and worked, as she suspected he intended it, to distract her as he thrust his huge, full length into her body. She cried out and gasped as he rammed into her again and again, but her cries were not now in pain, they were in sheer unadulterated pleasure. His hands slid off her neck, pressed into the rock each side of her, and she reached up and covered them with her own, digging her nails into him as he grunted and swept her away on a tide of pure animal lust. As he came to a shuddering, groaning climax, he pulled away from her and turned, lunging through the waterfall and into the pond beyond without a word.

  Sorrow stood for some time, silent, her face pressed against the wet rock face. Her breath came in ragged bursts as she leant, thinking through what had just happened, the water spray tickling her back. Slowly, collecting the water bottles that bobbed around her legs, she made her way to the bank. The prisoner was still tied and blindfolded, but Khalili was nowhere to be seen.

  Sighing she dressed and put disinfectant and band-aids on the bite on her neck. It occurred to her as she winced at the sting of the treatment, that Khalili having his mouth on her, holding her in place with his teeth while he had sex with her, was just what tomcats did. She recalled seeing a tom mate with a female cat near their house one day on her way back from school. The male cat had bit the female hard on the back of the neck as it mounted her, and her screams had shocked Sorrow. She had picked up a stick, ready to bat the tom away when she realised the female was not struggling, and her screams were not in pain. Just like me, she thought now as she sat down beside the prisoner.

  Leaving him tied, but undoing his blindfold, she offered him a drink and began to speak to him quietly, gently in his own language, about the history of his planet.

  They made it to the caves two days later.

  During the march they had untied their prisoner, who had agreed, albeit reluctantly, to follow them and see what they wanted him to see, on the understanding he would be released unharmed.

  Sorrow spent the time walking answering his questions about humans and the Earthborn and trying to persuade him to join their cause, to travel with his tribe to the castle, and to eat goat instead of human flesh. But the boy, who in many respects reminded her of Han, was inflexible in this last matter. Humans, he reiterated, were just meat, unintelligent, slow, delicious, meat.

  Khalili had said little to try and persuade him otherwise but had advised he keep an open mind until he had seen the sacred texts.

  Now, camped inside the entrance to the caves, Sorrow sat inside the pod and called her mother, keeping an eye through the hatch on Khalili and the boy as they sat by the fire. Khalili was heating dried meat in a pot ready for stew, and the boy was watching him with great interest. All three of them were hungry from their forest trek, but Sorrow, less so. She was a vegetarian and had found it easy to survive on a meagre ration of dried nuts, fruit and boiled grain. Khalili and the boy, however, were used to a high protein and high-fat diet, and both were feeling the effects of the long march and lack of fresh meat. On more than one occasion Sorrow had been absolutely sure the boy was considering her and drooling.

  She shivered thinking of this as she peeled off her damp clothes and slipped into one of the light, white gowns favoured by the Earthborn women in the Capital. The cloth was a fine fabric, silk-like, and the gown, while long-sleeved, had a low neckline, just revealing the swell of her pale breasts. Since she didn’t have any spare underwear that didn’t feel damp, she decided to go commando and sighed at the luxurious feel of the fabric after days and days of damp jeans and sweat-shirts. She knew her mother thought it strange that she enjoyed the long dresses and silk veils preferred by the Earthborn women, but she had always considered them feminine and beautiful, harking back to what she imagined women had worn in medieval times on Earth. Wearing the dresses had never been a hardship during her time at the Capital, unlike some of the other customs.

  Now more comfortable than she had been in days, she sat in the command seat and put the call into her mother on Earth.

  “Mum?”

  “Sorrow, honey, you retrieved the pod.”

  “No, uh, not yet. We are in the caves,” Sorrow said, smiling at the image of her mother on the screen. Megan still wore the heavy make-up of the ancient Egyptians.

  “You are all dolled up today,” she laughed.

  “Yes,” Megan frowned, “I’ve been back in time. I had an idea I wanted to explore, and some research to do.”

  “Did you find out anything about Anhur? Anything you want to share?”

  “Not yet,” Megan looked down and chewed her lip, “but we did find out some information from Amaunet before Ceda lopped her head off again.”

  Sorrow breathed out a huge sigh of relief.

  “Oh Mum, I’m so glad you followed through on that. I’ve been worried sick that she would somehow get on the loose and join forces with Seth.”

  “No chance of that,” Megan laughed, “she hates Seth, blames him for the death of Amun and the loss of this world as much as she blames us. Which brings me to what she told us. Seth has access to an army, an army of strange lizard-like people, aliens, that inhabit a planet Shu and Tefnut rule. The pair of maniacal twins, as you rightly said after your forced memories from the regeneration tank, had been populating a world with their own half-human children they spawned before Nephthys escaped with Osiris, stealing their scarab. After they lost the scarab, they concentrated on other types of inter-species breeding programs. They also have other planets they control. Amaunet said the twins could lend armies to Seth to help him destroy the Earthborn on Heaven.”

  “How could she possibly know this Mum?”

  “I have no idea, but it doesn’t sound too far-fetched.”

  “No, it doesn’t, but I wonder if this is why Anhur hasn’t come looking for me. Do you think he could know this army is imminent? Could he know it is definitely coming when the gates open next year?”

  “He does,” Megan said firmly, “I’ve been in touch with a friend on Heaven, a friend who will soon make contact with you too, and he has confirmed this. But honey, he also said Anhur has not given up his search for you. His mother, Nephthys, was no fan of Amun, but her grandfather was the
only thing standing in the way of Seth, who she fears and hates. Anhur told my informant that once the threat of Seth is overcome, bringing you to true justice is his top priority.”

  “True justice,” Sorrow murmured, “that means death.”

  “Yes,” Megan growled, “but you can trust my friend to do what he can to help you from inside the Capital, he is your friend too, or soon will be.”

  “What about Nephthys? Is she here somewhere? On Heaven?”

  “No. She has gone to one of the other planets; she apparently leads some insurrection of her own on the planet where some of her children were sent. But as to exactly where, and what she is doing, I don’t know. Anhur would have known though, does know I imagine.”

  “Who is this friend you have made contact with, Mum?”

  “Love, I can’t tell you that, this line is not secure, it is very possible Anhur has heard every word we have said already. You will know his name soon.”

  “Oh shit, yeah, sorry Mum, I should have thought of that.”

  “You have a lot on your mind. How was it travelling with Khalili? And what happened to your neck?”

  Sorrow blushed, nothing escaped her mother’s attention. She put her hand to her neck and felt the teeth marks Khalili had left there. She had not put another band-aid on it, preferring to let it air out and dry now they were out of the jungle, although the bite was not overly deep, she didn’t want to chance an infection.

  “Oh, it’s just a scratch Mum. And yeah, he is fine, the journey was quite easy. We kidnapped another tribe leader on the way, and we brought him with us to the caves, to try and spread the gospel so to speak. Khalili’s with him now.”

  “Just be careful love, promise me you will watch your back.”