Waterborn

both laughing and crying. Instead he talked on, until Win's little eyes, fluttering closed and frantically opening again, finally drooped still and stayed that way. Ghaj carried him up to his loft bedroom.

'Let me show you where you will stay,' Ghaj said when she returned. She led him inside the house and motioned to a quilted pallet on the floor. Perkar glanced around, puzzled.

'Where will you sleep?'

Ghaj grinned crookedly with her wide mouth. 'The reason people say those things about widows,' she confided, 'is because they are true.' He stood dumbly as she reached to her hem and shucked her dress up over her head. 'Besides,' she added. 'It's not likely I'll meet another one like you anytime soon, and I can't resist seeing how you're put together.'

'I…' He felt a familiar shame, one almost forgotten in the past months. How could he explain to her, about the goddess, about his problems?

He was still searching for a way to tell her when she stepped closer, reached out, and touched his cheek. 'What's wrong?' she asked. 'I may not be as beautiful as you might like, I know…'

Her hand was warm, smelled of garlic and crawfish. Her eyes were kind and just a little hungry, with disappointment already threatening at the edges. Despite himself, despite what he knew, he looked at her, took in her naked body with his eyes. Indeed, she was like no woman he had ever dreamed of having. Her features were broad and thick, lips everted, cheekbones flat, angular. Her body was thick, too, in every dimension, and she was not young. The slightly swelling belly and the curve of her hips were stippled with pale stretch marks, as were her breasts, otherwise generous, enormous nipples charcoal in the moonlight. She was as much a Human woman as anyone could be, nothing like a goddess at all. He gasped aloud, closed his eyes at the sudden rush of blood in his body, at the fierce urge that overtook him then. Ghaj sighed with delight (and perhaps relief) as he sagged forward, embraced her, buried his head in the juncture of her neck and clavicle. She was salty, hot, her skin was a luxury like none he had imagined. He nearly sobbed with ecstasy as her lips closed around the lobe of his ear, as she pushed her hands up under his kilt.

'I…' he gasped as she took control of the situation, gently pushed him back onto the pallet.

'I know,' she whispered. 'It's been a long time since you were with a woman. It's been a long time for me, too. We have to try and be quiet, though. If we wake Win, we'll have less time for each other.'

That made good sense to Perkar, but there were many times that night when he wondered how anyone in the entire world could still be asleep.

Later, when they were both exhausted, they held one another until limbs began to go numb and then settled for nestling. Perkar felt his quickening sense of wonder rise above him like a halo. Ghaj was now a beautiful woman, and he gazed at her through the night, noticed that her thick features had become sensual, her stubby hard fingers tender and evocative. The moon was set, sight replaced by touch and memory, when exhaustion drew up over his joy and hope like a warm comforter and settled him into dreams.

 

 

At Ghaj's earnest urging, he stayed another day and night, recovering his strength and enjoying Human company. He spent the day doing more chores and making Win a little bow and arrow so he could be like the great Ngangata of Perkar's stories.

That night, he and Ghaj made love again, and it was even nicer without the weirdness and uncertainty of the first time. He had never imagined that passion and comfort could be combined. After all, one could not be comfortable around a goddess.

He awoke to Ghaj's steady gaze, her dark skin buttered gold by the morning, her hair hanging mussed in her face. She was tracing her finger lightly over his chest, brushing the white mass of scar tissue where the lion had cut him open, the stiff ridge of it where the Huntress' spear had driven through him. When she noticed him awake, she smiled faintly. 'So young, to have all these,' she said, and lightly kissed the spear wound.

'Thank you,' he said a bit later, as they were getting dressed.

'For what?'

'Everything. I know you don't understand, but this has been important for me. I've never…'

'You aren't going to tell me you were a virgin,' she teased. 'You were clumsy now and then, but not that clumsy.'

'No,' Perkar admitted, embarrassed. 'No, not exactly. But it was important.'

Ghaj walked over, gathered him in for a hug. 'It was very nice,' she said. 'I enjoyed our time together. Come back through and if I'm not remarried, we'll enjoy each other again.' She took his chin in her fingers, kissed him lightly. 'You do know I could never ask you to stay? I like you, despite your foreign weirdness, but as a husband you wouldn't do me much good around here. Despite what I said, I do care what people say.'

'I know. I'm flattered that it even crossed your mind, Ghaj.'

'A sweet boy, despite your scars,' she said, kissing him again.

Later, Win and Ghaj helped him get his things together. Ghaj replaced his dilapidated saddle pack with a woven shoulder-net, and after a bit of cobbling reduced some of her husband's too-large shoes to fit Perkar. Win was delighted with his bow. To Ghaj Perkar had nothing to give, save the little charm his mother had made him. He gave her that. 'I wish I had better,' he told her. 'You've been very kind to me.'

Ghaj's eyes twinkled. 'Come back this way and I'll be 'kind' to you some more.' She gave him another hug and a kiss that lingered just a little, and pointed him down the road.

'You'll be to the outskirts of Nhol by nightfall, if you walk briskly. You don't want to enter Nhol at night, so I suggest you go a little more than briskly. I also suggest you find one of the dockside taverns—they're used to strangers there and always have rooms. Take this.' She handed him a little pouch. He shook it and it jingled.

'A Royal and a few soldiers,' she informed him. 'I can spare just that for you.'

'It's more than I need. I can't…'

'Hush. In Nhol, without money, you'll be sleeping in an alley and have your throat slit before the first half a night. Take the coins, consider it pay for the work you've done around here, if you insist. And I suggest if you're going to stay long in the city that you find some way to pick up a few more soldiers. What I gave you won't go far at all.'

He nodded. 'Again, I'm grateful.'

Ghaj called out to him once more as he was about to turn a bend in the trail. 'Don't trust anyone in Nhol, Perkar.'

He waved and called back that he wouldn't. Win followed him a little way, but not much beyond the edge of the bottomlands, where the trail climbed up out of the floodplain and onto the drier land around. He watched as the little boy's stubby legs took him quickly back away.

The sun was hot, but it did nothing to spoil Perkar's mood. Though the hard dirt trail was taking him to an unknown destiny, he felt ready to meet it now, hopeful even. The doom hanging over him like a thundercloud, if not departed, was at least letting a bit of light in.

In that light the day was beautiful, the strange scenery fascinating. It was a landscape of fields, and what fields they were! Grander than most pastures, they rolled out flat on both sides of the road, broken only by an occasional line of trees, the distant levee on his left, and strange streams as straight as arrow shafts.

It was only after he crossed a score of these streams, wondering at their perfect regularity, that he was struck with the idea that someone had dug them. The notion dumbfounded him, for though he could see the use of such unthinkably extensive ditches for watering crops, the labor involved was more than he could imagine. And yet the result was as staggering as the effort, for beyond the fields nothing grew but scrub, while the fields were green with strange plants.

And there were no cattle at all. What did these people do for milk, cheese—more important, Piraku? And yet the fields and their artificial rivers spoke eloquently of determination, ingenuity, and strength. Perhaps that, itself, was their Piraku.

Taking Ghaj's advice, he traveled as briskly as he could, but more than two score days with his butt in the bottom of a boat had not prepared him for a long walk. Near noon he stopped to rest, to eat the leaf-wrapped parcels of smoked catfish Ghaj had given him. In the shade of a cottonwood, he took Harka out to clean his blade.