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  Once more Sulitea’s mood had altered. Aisla had expected absolute submission after what she had done to Sulitea in the hut. Instead Sulitea’s attitude became teasing, challenging almost, as if determined to make Aisla take charge and punish her by sheer strength. Aisla began to suspect that this was how Sulitea reacted to her equals, although there was still a certain superiority about her for all her grovelling acceptance of the most lewd and debased acts during sex. Deciding that she would probably never understand the complexities of Sulitea’s character, Aisla contented herself with the pleasures of a less unequal friendship and sexual dominance.

  On the third day they reached a point where a deep gully cut down from the mountains, forcing them to lower ground. Despite her concern, Aisla found herself grateful for the chance of more succulent food than the tiny, bitter mountain olives, and when they came out high above a vineyard it was more than she could resist not to make a raid.

  Leaving Sulitea with the camel, she stole down the mountainside, giving a wide birth to the squat white hut on a nearby outcrop. She reached the vines and sampled a grape, half-ripe, but bliss after days of raw olives and water. Crouched low among the thick green foliage, she began to eat voraciously, stuffing the bunches into her mouth until the juice ran down her chin.

  By the time her initial hunger was satisfied the ground around her was littered with bits of stalk and grape pulp, while her face was a sticky mess. So was the top of her burnouse, with the juice plastering the thin material to her breasts and the nipples showing through. Giggling at her own enthusiasm, she cut a fresh bunch, took two good bits and with a sudden jolt of lust squeezed the remainder onto her chest, feeling the succulent fruit burst against her skin.

  Masturbating had suddenly become irresistible. Pulling her burnouse high, she exposed her naked body to the air, squatting with her knees wide and her breasts pulled out. Squeezing fresh bunches against her now naked breasts, she closed her eyes in bliss as the warm, wet juice trickled down over her skin. Her nipples were hard, her belly wet with runnels of juice.

  For a while she teased herself, holding back from touching her tuppenny as she moulded and fondled her breasts. At last it was too much and she slapped a large bunch between her thighs, sighing as grapes burst against her clitoris and between her bottom cheeks. Several had gone inside her, and as she squeezed her vagina she felt them pop around the sperm vial, then the warm trickle of juice around her hole. Keeping one hand on her breasts, she began to rub at herself, occasionally taking more fruit to squeeze onto her sex or putting a handful into her mouth. Smeared from mouth to anus with the gloriously sticky pulp, she let herself come, slowly, feeling the orgasm build, holding it and then letting it burst with a long sigh of pure ecstasy.

  Giggling happily over what she had done, she skipped quickly to a shallow stream, stripped and washed. Feeling contented and more at ease with herself than she had for a while, Sulitea’s sudden scream from up the slope came as a greater shock. Aisla ran, naked but for her boots, axe clutched in one fist, dripping burnouse in the other. Sulitea screamed again and Aisla heard angry, male shouts. Scrambling over the broken ground and stumbling in her haste, she made for the ridge, then ducked low behind a boulder as she reached it.

  Below her, Sulitea was spread on a rock, a man clutching each of her limbs. She was struggling, but to no effect. Most of her captors wore crude smocks, but two had white robes and carried hammers. Aisla ducked down hastily. Pushing a finger into her vagina, she drew out the vial of troll’s sperm, opened it and swallowed, grimacing at the slimy texture. As she lifted her leg and bit into the tongue of her boot she was praying the effect would work, but knew she would have to try and help her friend in any case.

  The effect came even as she braced herself, confidence, assurance, anger, then blind anger as she got to her feet and saw what was happening. The priest had his hammer to his crotch, making it project like a monstrous phallus, and he was about to enter Sulitea. She was struggling, writhing her hips and screaming abuse at her tormentors, who simply laughed at her. The hammer shaft dipped, touched Sulitea’s vagina and Aisla hit the robed man, sweeping him to the side with one blow. The second hammer wielder lunged at her, only to have his blow caught in her flapping burnouse and to fall to the back swing of the axe. The other men fled as one, screaming of she-demons and earth spirits as Aisla took Sulitea in her arms.

  Later, lying in the exhaustion that followed her use of the elixir, with Sulitea cradled into her arms, Aisla reflected on how her fear had vanished and how slowly others had seemed to move. The sense of confidence and power had also been wonderful, and well worth the price of congress with trolls and the debility that followed.

  Chapter 7 – The Merchants’ Sluts

  Two days later they crossed a high ridge and came out over a town, which Aisla, after consulting the map, declared to be An-Jhorai. The scene was as placid as it was possible to imagine, the townsfolk unhurried at their business, smoke drifting lazily up from the chimneys, children playing in the streets, the calm blue surface of the Ergan Deep stretching away to the horizon. Closer, among an area of cultivated land an elderly man was tending a patch of vineyard, cutting away excess growth with a knife that glinted in the sunlight.

  ‘We met a merchant of An-Jhorai across the Deep at Port Ergan,’ Aisla said after a pause. ‘He was calm and sensible, indeed, one of the few good people we came across.’

  ‘Perhaps the madness has come since?’ Sulitea suggested.

  ‘Maybe,’ Aisla answered doubtfully, ‘they appear sane enough, yet so did those who attacked you. Still, let us approach that old peasant. Even if he leaps at us on sight we can retreat in good time.’

  Sulitea nodded agreement and they started down the slope, cautiously at first, ready to mount and ride at the first sign of trouble. Coarse grass and sequacia gave way to olive and chestnut, then to vineyard as they descended the slope, until at last the old man noticed them. Rising to his feet, he gave a pleasant nod, showing no signs of aggression whatever.

  ‘Travellers?’ he queried as they drew close. ‘And not Hai, though little more than girls.’

  ‘Is this An-Jhorai, good peasant?’ Aisla asked.

  ‘And where else would it be?’ he answered with such good humour that Aisla felt the tension immediately began to drain away.

  She found herself smiling, to which he responded in kind, favouring her with a toothless leer.

  ‘Do you know Yarath, the shipmaster?’ she continued.

  ‘I do,’ he answered, pointing down to the harbour. ‘He captains the Amaratine. Look, you can see her masts and stern castle there, beyond the harbour wall.’

  ‘Will he be aboard?’

  ‘More likely in his house, that of yellow wash, beside the grey.’

  She thanked him and they walked past, his eyes following Aisla’s bare legs and the rotation of their bottoms beneath their burnouses until they passed behind a building and out of sight. Aisla’s worry fled entirely as the people of Ah-Jhorai failed to attack her or react to her with more than an interested glance. They reached the yellow washed house the peasant had indicated and knocked at the door, which was opened by Yarath himself.

  ‘Aisla?’ Yarath exclaimed, ‘and Talithea? You were taken by Bormontal the halfling! By rumour you have been in his breeding pens for the last two years!’

  ‘We escaped,’ Aisla answered, ‘and this is not Talithea but her cousin Sulitea.’

  ‘My apologies,’ Yarath answered, bowing towards Sulitea. ‘but what are you doing in An-Jhorai? Did you get back to Mund?’

  ‘We did,’ Aisla responded, ‘and I will gladly tell you the saga, but for now we have nothing…’

  ‘I will help,’ he assured them, ‘and for nothing save to assuage my guilt at introducing you to Kenion the Pimp. I should have known Bormontal’s intentions, he is a man without scruple!’

  ‘Yo
u are kind,’ Sulitea answered. ‘We have seen little kindness while in Cypraea.’

  ‘How so?’ Yarath demanded. ‘We are an easy enough people, are we not? Especially to pretty girls who, as I recall, so well understand the benefits afforded them by their bottoms.’

  Aisla giggled, tried to restrain herself from simpering, only to give in at the pleasure of being complimented after the raw aggression that had been shown to them in the mountains. Yarath smiled, then once more became effusive, calling for a servant to take the camel and making a sweeping bow towards the door of his house. They followed him inside and he busied himself with vessels of exquisite Hai glass, a bottle of a rich, dark purple-red wine and a dish of pastries. After their diet of water and olives both Aisla and Sulitea ate with as much hurry as Yarath’s questions would allow. Aisla let Sulitea speak, and alter their story somewhat, saying that they had been with a group attempting to open a direct trade route between Mund and the Aprinia States. Yarath accepted it, and nodded sagely when Sulitea’s tale began to merge with the truth in relating the incident at the border.

  ‘A supercilious lot, the Aprinians,’ he stated. ‘They guard their secrets with great care and regard all other nations as uncouth. Still, I confess I had no idea they refused admission to all from Kora. So what did you do?’

  ‘Our caravan was scattered by bandits as we returned north through the Red Parch,’ Sulitea went on. ‘We escaped but became lost. Heading west, we came to the great volcanoes that mark the Rieve strait and so north. We came to a hut and took shelter. In the morning men came and attacked us with insensate violence, for nothing!’

  ‘Most strange,’ Yarath admitted, then paused. ‘This hut, was it on a hilltop? Was there a raised slab at the centre?’

  ‘Yes, to both questions,’ Aisla answered, ‘although it was on the outlier of a mountain rather than a hill. We slept on the slab, which seemed to be its purpose.’

  ‘Ah, ha, the mystery is resolved,’ Yarath declared. ‘You entered a Gannite shrine, the men were priests. Superb! They arrive for their morning devotions to find two girls asleep on their altar! Their outrage! Their fury!’

  ‘Why?’ Sulitea queried.

  ‘They are worshippers of the God Gan,’ Yarath answered. ‘Gan, the Maker, the Hammer of Nature, the Invisible Blacksmith, the Boon of Man and Bane of Woman, the One who Toils for Us, the One, or something of the sort, I forget the precise chant. Oh that is truly superb! Their creed states that man and woman exist not in an amicable balance, but as opposed forces. Womanhood, to them, expresses all that they deem bad, chaos, base urges, the soil, plants and beasts, all things that need to be bent to man’s will, also the number two, but I forget why. Manhood, by contrast, expresses the good, order, philosophy, made things, the soul, which they deny women possess. Nonsense, I know, but to them you are evil creatures, soulless, unclean things, utterly subordinate to the earth mother Aea and inherently antagonistic to men, needing to be forced to obedience.

  ‘Their creed states that Gan struck the earth with a great hammer in order to subdue Aea to his will. This created the Ergan Deep, which for a fact resembles the impression caused by a hammer struck into the earth. On the other hand, I have travelled to Opina, where the savants at the collegiat reckon the sea either the crater of a gigantic volcano, or a mark akin to those rings visible on the moons and caused by the impact of a great rock. The second idea is perhaps not mutually exclusive with the Gannite doctrine.’

  ‘They had hammers,’ Aisla said.

  ‘A ritual device, but lethal nonetheless,’ Yarath answered. ‘I am amazed you survived the encounter. How did you escape?’

  ‘I killed two, the third fled,’ Aisla admitted as it was clear that Yarath had no sympathy with the priests. ‘On a second occasion I also killed two, who were intent on the rape of Sulitea. Again, she did nothing to warrant such an action.’

  Yarath nodded, cast a glance at Aisla’s axe, took a hurried gulp of wine and went on.

  ‘They deny that women have the right of choice and thus would claim her unable to resent the action, which they think no worse than, say, branding a heifer or shoeing a horse. It has always struck me as an overly convenient philosophy. I detest them, they cause nothing but difficulty. The cult is ancient but was never of any great importance, being restricted to the mountains and the hard, desert land to the south and east. Lately, however, it has been adopted by the King and a priest of Gan now sits in Zihai. Mogath is bitter against his first wife, making him fertile soil for Gannite doctrines. In turn, the priest, Ghirais, is said to have been instrumental in persuading Mogath to disinherit Prince Ythor, thus sparking the rebellion, of which you may have heard.’

  ‘We know something of it,’ Sulitea admitted.

  ‘As much as many, I dare say,’ Yarath continued. ‘There was a great battle, close on Rai-Uhruhai, following which the shattered rebel army fled south, into the Red Parch. Kroth, the King’s champion and a great hero, followed them with a detachment of cavalry, swearing to bring back Ythor’s head on a lance.’

  ‘Kroth, I have heard that name,’ Aisla said cautiously.

  ‘As well you might!’ Yarath boomed. ‘He is the greatest of heroes! No man can stand against him, nor any five! Woman fall at his feet, begging to be got with child and their husbands look on, hoping he will oblige! Ah, Kroth, there is a hero indeed!’

  ‘There is no knowledge of how he fared in the Red Parch then?’

  ‘No, or not that I know. Still, a hero such as he hurries for no man, and doubtless he has been delayed by some fine wench.’

  ‘Something of the kind, I imagine,’ Sulitea said as Aisla pretended an interest in the coloured glass of the windows.

  ‘Still, he will be back, have no fear,’ Yarath went on, ‘and then there will be feasting indeed, for there is no more popular man in Hai than Kroth!’

  ‘Explain to me,’ Sulitea put in, ‘what you mean by hero. In Mund, a hero is one who has fallen in battle, and so gone to an eternity of feasting and drink. No living man may claim the title. How could this Kroth be a hero before his death… that is to say, while he is still alive?’

  ‘Customs differ,’ Yarath answered. ‘In Hai it is a title earned by only the greatest of warriors. It brings great prestige, but must ever be kept at the point of a sword, for to slay a hero in combat is to gain his title. At present only three men may fairly claim the title. These are Arrasir, who is engaged in an expedition against the Merim pirates, Mailor, who is somewhere in Apraya, and Kroth himself.’

  ‘And to slay a hero is to win his title?’ Aisla queried.

  ‘Indeed, although few dare such an attempt, as it must be in open combat. A new hero faces many challenges, an established one few.’

  ‘What then,’ Aisla asked,’ for the sake of argument, if a hero were to be slain in a melee, perhaps by a blow from behind?’

  ‘A fine point,’ Yarath admitted, ‘but a moot one. In theory the hero’s slayer would be the new hero, but such as Kroth are too fast, too wary, to fall in such a way. Besides, the slayer would immediately face challenges from powerful warriors wishing to claim the title for themselves.’

  ‘I see,’ Aisla answered, recalling the way the rebel soldiers had held back from attacking Kroth in full force.

  ‘So what now?’ Yarath asked.

  ‘We need to return to Aegmund,’ Aisla explained. ‘Ateron to be exact, but as I recall few if any ships sail north.’

  ‘Things have changed somewhat,’ Yarath replied. ‘As I mentioned, the hero Arrasir had been fighting the Merim pirates who previously made the journey impractical. Once they are clear it will be possible to trade effectively among the Dwarven kingdoms on the north coast of Apraya, where previously only the most heavily armed ships dared venture. The first merchants to establish links should benefit greatly as the halfling middlemen who control Port Ergan will be cut out. My nephe
w Gerris, who you will meet if you sail with me, has been trying to persuade me to let him go to Aponan to secure exclusive contracts. Maybe I should let him go. You might travel with him and with luck find a ship with a pass for Ateron.’

  ‘Perfect!’ Aisla answered happily.

  ‘What will you charge?’ Sulitea asked. ‘We have some trinkets and coin, but much was lost when we were attacked by the Gannites.’

  ‘For the presence of two beautiful girls on the Amaratine?’ Yarath responded. ‘I charge nothing whatever.’

  ‘We must in all honour offer you something,’ Sulitea said.

  ‘Then make it the pleasure of your bodies,’ Yarath answered. ‘Ah, I recall last time, Aisla, how your bottom danced as I beat you, then you came on my cock after the girls had sucked me so well. That was wonderful!’

  ‘The girls?’ Sulitea asked. ‘Elethrine and Talithea?’

  ‘Er… yes,’ Aisla admitted.

  ‘Princess Talithea Mund, my cousin, sucked a merchant’s cock?’ Sulitea demanded in disbelief, ‘and Elethrine too?’

  ‘And with great skill,’ Yarath put in.

  ‘It was a detail we omitted from the saga,’ Aisla admitted, blushing slightly.

  ‘So I should imagine!’ Sulitea responded.

  ‘We had nothing,’ Aisla explained in defense. ‘Yarath helped us, and as you well know, honour demands repayment.’

  ‘Indeed so,’ Sulitea responded, ‘payment which you, as maid, should have given.’

  ‘I did, largely,’ Aisla answered as her temper began to rise. ‘If you imagine the cock sucking you made me do among…’

  She stopped abruptly, realising that she had been about to give away their involvement with the rebels.

  ‘But no matter,’ she went on sweetly. ‘So, Yarath, how may we oblige?’

  ‘How may you oblige,’ Sulitea pointed out.

  ‘A number of possible pleasures come to mind,’ Yarath put in. ‘One of my many regrets on learning that you had been taken by Bormontal was that it deprived me of your pleasures on the journey. I had particularly wanted to whip and bugger you, side by side. A line of beaten, bottoms with the holes used I always feel is a fine spectacle. Still, if Sulitea wishes to be precious, perhaps you alone Aisla?’