Mitchell Smith - Moonrise

"Too bad," Nancy said. "A real wound would have been a lesson." She turned to Patience. "And you – he hurt you three times."

"Hurt me lightly, dear," Patience said. "Kitchen cuts, and will clot – though I know a real wound would have been a lesson."

"Ha ha," Nancy said, a very old Warm-time ironism. Baj had read it in copybooks of course, but couldn't recall hearing it used. "And you," she said to him, "- the next time we practice, I'll use Janice." And she walked off into the evergreens.

"Janice…?"

Richard, who'd been smiling, stopped, and spoke softly. "So you don't ask her, Baj… She names her sword in revenge-reminder for her mother. A Thrush, and very young. – After the Faculty had made Nancy in her belly? The next time, they made an occa. Her mind fled away and never came back, and she died."

Baj sat by the fire, his leg stinging where Patience had touched him. His side hardly hurt at all. "What a pleasure it will be – a duty and a pleasure to ruin that city."

"Difficult duty," Patience said. "And time for us to sleep." She shrugged her singed coat on, and lay down beneath her hemlock. "Though they say sleep cannot be stored – still, weariness can be."

"No truer words…" Richard lay down, settling by the fire, drawing his blanket over as Errol came to cuddle beside him.

"I take first watch, apparently," Baj said, and went down through the evergreens to pee… Finished, he laced his buckskins, and was wending back up through foliage to the fire, when he saw Nancy standing in a little space, looking out to the north through a break in the trees.

He stepped beside her, looked out… out past a mountain's low shoulder, and saw in the distance the faintest fine horizontal line, a spider-web thread, shining white under the moon.

"The Wall. And still must be a hundred WT miles away."

Nancy turned, narrow face moon-shadowed and forbidding. "More. – And why are you always… present?" she said. "Isn't it possible for me to be alone?"

"Of course. I don't -"

"So fucking stupid," she lisped the s. "Your 'three cuts' nonsense with that crazy woman."

"Nancy, she – it was a lesson."

"You're always glancing little looks at me, too."

"That's not true."

"It is true, and I'm tired of it."

"I don't -"

"Yes, you do, liar. Always little looks… staring at someone who's so strange – who's so much an animal." She put out a hand and shoved him. "From now on, stay away from me!" She shoved him again, harder, teeth showing in moonlight – Baj took her wrists, and it became a wrestle. Then a fight.

She wrenched a hand free, hit him hard in the face, then came at him biting – a snarling quick snap of white teeth – and Baj, not wanting to hit her, grappled her close, lifted her off her feet, and fell rolling amid evergreen branches as she kicked and struck at him, wiry strong.

Frightened she'd draw her knife or try for her sword, he hugged to pin her arms, saying, "Sorry… I'm sorry," though for what he wasn't certain. She tried to knee him, and he thought of calling to Patience for help, but that seemed so embarrassing…

Then, though she'd fought so fiercely, suddenly she lay still beneath him, so he thought he'd hurt her.

"Nancy, I didn't mean to…"

A cold look from moon-shadowed yellow eyes. "Get off me, Sunriser. – And keep away."

"I can't," Baj said, surprised that was what he couldn't do… And having said it, for no real reason he bent and kissed her. Felt her mouth, the slender bones of her long jaw as she turned her head aside, but he didn't care… felt against his lips a canine's needle point, and didn't care. He kissed her as he'd kissed no girl in his life; there was nothing left of him but kissing… She lay still, but it made no difference to him. He hugged and gripped her as if he might squeeze all pleasure, all sweetness, all good news from her. He wrestled her softly and sliding, licked her throat, found her little ear in the thick soft crest of her hair. "Love," he whispered to her. "And has been love…"

Then, after what seemed a wait of years, a slim arm – as if reluctant – rose to circle and hold him.

"Forgive me," Baj whispered, "- for not saying so sooner."

"You are a fool," Nancy said. "A fool…" She lay back under moon-shadow, unbuttoned her wool shirt, and drew the cloth aside to show six little tender-nippled breasts in two rows of three down her chest. "Look," she said. "Look."

And he kissed them up and down.

When their clothes were off, strewn in evergreens – all but the moccasins, which were too much trouble – he found other differences. Shorter sturdier thighs than a full-human girl's might be – but smooth and white as Map-Alabama marble. Muscular buttocks, a slender drift of russet fur down the small of her back, and thick brush of the same between her legs, so he had to search for a moment to find a soft pout that parted into oiled warmth and slippery entrance – first for a finger as he bent over her, she clutching his cock with a calloused little hand… then for that, when she said, "There," and put him to her.

Then the different smell of their fucking, her slightly harsher odor than a Sunriser girl's… and the different angle of it – so she soon eased him out, turned beneath him for comfort as she went to all fours, hollowed her back to present herself, and moaned as he found her again.

Baj drove into her and into her to the rhythmic soft sound of wet, and on through a time that was no time, until Nancy twisted and thrashed beneath him as he came… then bit his bracing arm, convulsed, and called out to her mother.

… The wind's cold, the forest's discomfort they hadn't felt at all, then slowly returned to them. They found clothes and cloaks to draw over for covers, to tuck under to pad the hemlocks' windfall. Then they lay content, hugging, damp with sweat.

After a while, kissing her, Baj found tears. "What?" he said. "What…?"

"Oh, Baj… Baj, my dear, I come to you not new." She took a breath. "Not new. I have-"

"- Not been with me. But now you are. And I love you."

"Well, you are a fool," Nancy said, and sat up, searching for a bandanna. She found Baj's with his shirt, blew her nose, then lay down again to more kisses.

"… Richard?" Patience spoke softly from beneath her hemlock.

A deep, rumbled "Umm" by the fire.

"Do you know the phrase, 'Babes in the woods'?"

"I do now."

"What will happen to those children?"

"The same, dear, that will happen to us."

Three days later of cold mutton and hard traveling – Patience, the third day, sailing slowly only a bow-shot above them – they'd come down from the mountains to foothills, and then onto an endlessly-wide tundra plain, its mosses and sedge grasses, brown and green, streaked with dotted drifts of tiny white flowers and the little colored blossoms that Baj knew, of bilberry and crow-berry. Small brown-winged butterflies flew among those.

Along the plain's distant northern horizon lay the glittering line of the Wall. Baj had seen it close, once, from a fast ship rigged for wet, and rowed far up the river to North Map-Illinois. The glacier's frozen ramparts had risen two miles high over distant hills of moraine and milk-white lakes fed by great waterfalls of summer melt… Nameless furred tribesmen (tribeswomen, too) had paced the ship through stunted scrub along bitter river-banks, shouting, presenting naked buttocks in insult, and hurling futile javelins. "Ah…" Pedro had said, standing at the rail beside him, "- the free, the natural life."

"… How far would you say, Baj?" Richard standing beside him, smiling down.

"Thirty… forty WT miles. I have seen it, from the River."