David Gunn - Death's head

“Maybe it’s their idea of a joke,” I add. “Maybe they were just having a good day. I asked once, but I couldn’t understand the answer.”

“You asked…?”

“The ferox talk…I know the general doesn’t believe me, but it’s true.”

“Who knows what the general believes,” says Horse, and that’s the end of our conversation.

At a small door set into a shiny black wall, he stops. Almost inevitably the door knocker, the handle, the hinges, and the mask embossed into the center of the obsidian door are all death’s heads.

The woman who answers his knock takes one look at me and opens her mouth to object.

“General’s orders,” says Horse.

So she shuts her mouth and moves aside. A narrow corridor leads to a bar. The counter is cut from a single block of black marble, black leather lines the wall, and black tiles cover the floor. Looking around, I wonder if this is irony and realize, as a dozen serious faces turn to greet us, that it is anything but.

“Welcome to the NCO club,” says Horse.

“Is he a noncom?” The question comes from a man with half his face replaced by metal, and eyes that are all ice. Horse slides him a glance before I have time to answer.

The man looks away.

My beer is cold and so far removed from any other I’ve ever tasted that I find it hard to believe it’s the same drink. This is sweet and smooth, where the others were sour and bitter. It bites at the back of my throat and trickles into my stomach, filling my guts with a slow warmth.

Someone laughs.

“Where did you find him?” another asks, his meaning plain. Who is this peasant and why is he in our bar?

“I didn’t,” says Horse. “The general found him.”

They leave us alone after that. When my beer was done, Horse offers me another. But I’ve changed my mind again. One beer is what I’m allowing myself.

“If you’re sure?”

I nod.

“The girls are upstairs,” he tells me, nodding toward a spiral staircase that vanishes through a hole in the ceiling. “I’ll wait for you here.”

“Don’t you want…?”

He smiles. “This is new for you. I’ve been here for thirteen months.” And then he catches himself, shrugs, and obviously remembers my words about the difference between the Death’s Head and the legion. In that moment I almost like the man. Although I know he will kill me at a single word from one of his superiors.

“Enjoy yourself,” he says.

A dozen girls line up according to height. They wear very little apart from smiles and enough body hair to prove that no one worries too much about being like ferox up here. In age they range from late teens to early thirties, and in looks from the acceptably attractive to so beautiful it makes me want to cry.

I ignore the most beautiful. We’ll have nothing to say to each other and she looks delicate, the kind of girl to be scared by the scars she’ll find on my back. I ignore the oldest and youngest as a matter of principle. One will be bitter, the other sullen, and I can do without the fuss.

In the end I choose the one in the middle, quite literally.

In the middle of the line, middling in looks and size and age. Her name is Caliente; at least that’s the one she gives me.

“I’m Sven,” I tell her. “Do we need to find a room?”

She looks embarrassed that I can ask so stupid a question in front of the other girls. “We have rooms,” she says. “Perhaps you’d like to make a choice?”

As she leads the way, I’m happy to follow, not least because Caliente’s hips are wide and her buttocks curved, and I can see enough light between her thighs as she climbs the steps to let me know what I’m getting.

Who knew beds came in so many shapes and sizes?

The room we choose is smaller than the others, less ornate. It is the final one on offer and she seems both surprised and reassured by my choice.

“You can read a man by the room he chooses?”

She shrugs away my question, and when I return to it decides to give me an honest answer. “Most of the time.”

“And this room says what?”

“That you ask too many questions.”

I smile and let the matter drop. Every profession has its secrets. Why should hers be any different? I want to ask how Caliente comes to be in this job, whether it’s from choice, how long she’s been aboard the ship. But my ignorance about not needing to buy a room has made me cautious.

“What do you want?”

“What can I have?”

Caliente smiles sadly. “Anything,” she says, as if that should have been obvious. I guess that answers my question about choice.

“I want a bath,” I tell her. “And time to talk and sleep and do the other stuff in between.”

And so it happens.

She doesn’t bite or howl and we don’t fight each other for scraps of food when it’s all over, and for that I’m grateful. Instead Caliente sits astride me, with her breasts overflowing my fingers and her nipples hard beneath my hands, and she talks about nothing very much, until the slow movement of her hips takes away my need for conversation.

“Take what you want,” she says later.

It’s dark in the room. A single clap of my hands will summon light and a click of my fingers will dim it again. Caliente has a trick that involves flicking her fingers and tapping her index finger against her thumb that somehow microadjusts the lighting so that each change is almost imperceptible.

She has many tricks, although only one to do with adjusting the lights. So many tricks, in fact, that I’m rapidly beginning to discover how much I don’t know about sex and what makes women happy.

“I’m serious.”

A clap of my hands summons lights and she nurses them down to a gentler level, smiling to show she knows I didn’t intend to make them that bright.

“What?” I say, seeing something in her eyes.

Her face goes blank, and remains blank as I sit up on the bed and reach down to stroke her face with my good hand. Despite herself, she looks at me and I recognize pity.

“When’s your mission?” she asks.

What mission?

I fall back on the traditional excuse, and she’s apologizing and I’m trying to wave away her apology before I’ve even finished telling Caliente that it’s confidential and I’m not allowed to talk about it.

We stroke the lights back to near-darkness and I go down on her. Spreading her thighs to bury my face between her legs and force my tongue deep into her. Caliente tastes of salt and soap and something else, which I realize is me.

She breathes deeply and her body begins to tense, her thighs tight around my skull. And then her hand reaches down and grips my head as she forces my mouth hard against her. She has her fingers wrapped into my hair and her sex grinding under my tongue. I can taste blood from my lips where they’re bruising against bone.

“Don’t stop.”

Her demand is urgent.

So I do what I’m told, swallowing blood and salt and myself, and remain that way until her fingers twist in my hair, her hips rise one final time, and she pushes herself against me, whimpering.

It’s a first, both going down and having a woman come for real, but I’m careful not to tell Caliente that. And I was told by my old lieutenant-although I don’t know if it’s true-that in the minutes following release the muscles around a woman’s anus relax. So if a man’s tastes run that way…He told me many things. Not all of them suitable for the twelve-year-old boy I was.

Caliente says nothing when I roll her over and merely smiles in the near-darkness when I tuck a pillow under her hips to raise them slightly. It’s as if she always knew this is how we’d end up. Sweat slicks her spine and beads between her shoulder blades.