Rousing at the presence of another on the stairs, Merit clutched his sword automatically, his protective duty to his Meer encoded in him from years of service. He looked up at the majestic being, the mother of his liege poised like a marble statue on the step, and was swept into a deafening storm. He stood and opened his mouth, but couldn’t utter the thousand impossible words that had rushed to his tongue. He was snared and trapped in the emerald swamp of MeerShiva’s eyes.
Shiva nodded, cool and polite, as if unaware or unconcerned with the cataclysm ensuing inside him. “MeerHraethe.”
MeerHraethe?
The world threatened to careen into an axis-less spin. A cataract of fluid had burst somewhere deep within, and he gripped the baluster and gasped, a flood of tears engulfing him as though he’d never wept before. Merit looked down. A torrent of blood was streaming over his cheeks.
“Meerrá!” The sword dropped from his fingers with a clatter and tumbled down the steps.
MeerShiva had descended unperturbed, and she stopped before him, holding her hand against the crimson flood and watching it cover her fingers. “You’ve been vagrant.” She uttered the strange term as a cool curiosity. “You haven’t known.”
Merit focused on the ivory fingers before his face, now trickling with a deep red. He’d touched those fingers before. He’d been summoned by them. He had been someone else. It struck him like a blast of sound, assaulting and receding in a cycle of chaos: Rapture. Terror. Power. Desire. A past of a self he’d forgotten.
Merit had been humbly but respectably born, the son of a servant to the House of Ra, who was the son of a servant to the House of Ra—a line of devotion to the Meer receding into the dizziness of history. His childhood had been ordinary, his mother and father and his siblings loving and kind, but not divine. He’d never heard peculiar thoughts not belonging to him, nor spoken idly and found the thing he spoke of resting in his hand. He had never, before today, wept blood. He aged.
But there was his other self, ancient days forgotten wherein he’d lived in a city so distant one had to cross a sea to reach it, in a temple such as this—but was no servant. Long ago, so desperately long ago that it was agony to try to recall, he’d been another. He had been Meer.
Unable to reconcile these two truths, he shook his head at MeerShiva as though she’d made this so. He couldn’t be Meer. These pictures and certainties of himself made no sense, but he could no more send them away than believe. What anchored him wasn’t the bloody outpouring of his tears, nor his ancient name damningly expressed on the lips of this queen, but the lady herself. Shiva. He had touched her. He knew her. He had belonged to her.
He had crossed the ocean, yes. It was a trip of great anticipation and fear. She’d chosen him, divining him from the Meeric flow, to give her his seed. He had no idea what had directed her to him. He’d merely received the summons, and there was no one then who didn’t know her name. Hraethe had gone with a terror that was close to frenzy. What could this mighty MeerShiva want with his seed? The thought of what he went to do was dizzying.
His chariot brought him through the pass at Munt Zelfaal and into the fantastic bronze and green-glazed gates that admitted the fortunate to Soth AhlZel. The knowledge that this savage and erotic architecture had come from his intended’s head made him tremble. He was driven in and presented at the magnificent arch of the great Ludtaht Shiva, a temple that was like no other.
And Shiva had refused him.
Hraethe had returned as he’d come, confounded, spending the entire journey over mountain road, desert, river and sea in a state of pained bewilderment. Had she somehow seen him from a window in the temple before he arrived and found him lacking? He himself had seen nothing of her. He’d waited at the arch on the shoulders of his servants, not permitted to enter another Meer’s house without leave. Hours had passed. The autumn sun had fallen beneath the mountain, and he’d waited in the wavering blue-black. She’d sent her answer out at last in the dead of night without receiving him at all.
A year passed, and he was once again summoned, and Hraethe went, again driven by anxious frenzy. He conjured endless garments in which to make his presentation, dipped his yellow hair in oil of silver and had it twisted down the back of his ruby-encrusted vest like a heavy funnel cloud dipping to the ground. She had called him twice; he could not fail.
Again he waited for her word outside the arch while the curious upper castes gathered less than subtly outside the courtyard to see what their Meer would do. This time there was no long silence from within. A servant came from the temple, almost stumbling over himself in his haste, and brought a piece of gold parchment to MeerHraethe. One word was scrawled in a furious hand in red ink, or perhaps blood: Never!
Hraethe didn’t understand. Why would she command him to come and then refuse him with such vehemence? He began to suspect some templar connivance, a plot to taint him in MeerShiva’s eyes that was costing him these refusals.
He wandered his own temple with wariness on his return, probing the thoughts of all who surrounded him. Finding nothing, he dismissed them anyway and appointed strangers with no connection to the temple to their posts.
Another year passed, and Hraethe once again received a summons. He brought it before a divining fire and held it in trance, trying to ferret out the deception. The words were Shiva’s. He stormed through Ludtaht Hraethe in a rage, destroying things he’d spent years in making, raving aloud in a mad spray of denial that he would not go. But they were MeerShiva’s words, and he couldn’t repudiate them. Inevitably, he went.
This time, he stood scowling on the deck as his ship made the crossing and gave no thought to his presentation, only watching the waves. He was tiring of this game and resented being at this mysterious Meer’s bidding. Who was she, anyway, to command such unquestioned obedience? She was old, he knew, and probably desperately insane. Her time was over. Surely even the Meer couldn’t live forever? It was merely her decrepit age that inspired such awe, when it probably meant feebleness, in all truth. He was youthful still, and had yet to demonstrate his power. How did she know he wasn’t a greater Meer than she?
He made no attempt to impress her this time or show her favor in his dress. He arrived in a plain black kaftan, without jewels, without metal, his hair tied behind his head unadorned. Only his face was embellished in any way, unconsciously reflecting his antipathy with a darkened hue to his lips and a rim of angry black around his eyes that boded warning.
He dismissed the upright litter offered by his servants as he stepped from his chariot. If this arrogant woman meant to make them stand here once more like fools, she could go without ceremony in the doing of it. He waited with arms folded, all fear of her gone, and only irritation at the mad queen in its place. He would give her an hour, no more.
At the end of the fruitless hour, Hraethe turned to descend the steps, satisfied that this pompous MeerShiva was nothing but stories. This was the last time he would jump at her orders.
A tap on his shoulder gave him pause, and he turned to see a girl-child above him on the steps. She bowed before him, trembling, a white diaphanous gown her only covering and her feet bare. It seemed she was a waiting-slave, direct from her mistress’s attentions. Hraethe paused, one eyebrow lifted at her in question.
“Vetmaaimeerhraethe,” she quavered. “The MeerShiva summons you.”
The MeerShiva. What egotism. Hraethe considered refusing. Let her have a taste of it. But this child would likely bear the brunt of her mistress’s fury, and he didn’t care to be responsible for that. He gave her a curt nod and followed her into the House, his own servants waiting on the steps as was demanded of Meer to Meer.
The child led him through a dark maze of passageways. All candles had been extinguished, and there were no windows in the places she led him. More games. Hraethe felt his mouth curling into a snarl. The waiting-slave stopped, bowed once more before an indeterminate arch and left him.
So “the” MeerShiva was here, in this cold, unlit room. He nearly laughed at her histrionics.
“Come.”
Despite himself, the voice from within made Hraethe’s blood run cold.
He stepped into the darkness and paused a moment to let his eyes adjust. The shape of a woman rose before him, and Hraethe felt himself quicken at the bare suggestion of her beauty the gloom allowed. She stood motionless and tall, her eyes bright green darts in the darkness. They narrowed on him. She lifted her chin, exquisitely chiseled from the dark, and bent to the hem of her dress, which appeared to be white and covered with tiny pearls. As she straightened, she drew up the many layers of the skirt and held it above her waist, exposing the dusk of her genitals.
Hraethe laughed involuntarily and immediately regretted it. A palpable rage flowed toward him. He tried to ignore it. “Like this?” he asked, disbelieving.
“You are not here to play at domestic bliss.” The snarled words made her sound like a dangerous great cat. “Give me what you came for, or get out.”
“And if I refuse?”
“Do not try my patience.” Her voice was a low warning.
Hraethe was dumbfounded. “Your patience?” He closed his mouth, speechless with ire, and tore open his kaftan to release his undeniable erection. “I’ll give you what you ask for,” he promised, and gripping her by the strong rope of enmeshed hair behind her head, he thrust his livid cock toward the part in her thighs. He drove himself up and into her, intentionally harsh, and was startled to meet a ridge of resistance. It couldn’t have been what it seemed to be.
He had no time to dwell on this, for it was as though his skin was covered in an intoxicant that seeped in past the delicate membrane and went straight to the core. He groaned in reluctant pleasure and moved in a series of sudden thrusts. With each rough movement he repeated the irrepressible sound, lost for a moment in the bliss of this unprecedented sensation.
Hraethe had closed his eyes against her, and he opened them at the curious impression of something wet flowing over him. A copious amount of blood was baptizing Shiva’s thighs. He had, after all, deflowered her, and this was the Meeric result. It was impossible. Her reign went back before recorded time. She’d lived centuries, perhaps millennia. He couldn’t have been the first man to penetrate her.
He stared at her, astonished, pulling away, but Shiva, her eyes dark, closed her thighs and held him tight. She would have what Hraethe had come to give her. Her face, except for the ferocious eyes, was expressionless, no sign betraying that she felt him at all. Infuriated by her coldness, he resumed his motion.
Her face dared him to elicit a response from her, and he threw his whole body into the act, becoming once more distractedly intoxicated. He’d known many women through his privilege—though it was proscribed by Meeric law, his templars had looked the other way—but never another of his kind. And this—this was astounding. Shiva’s eyes derided him as though she were not even present in the act, standing motionless with the skirt held in each hand while he rocked and groaned and thrust, her mouth curiously passive.
He lunged into a convulsive climax, ejaculating with another startled explosion of sound. He could feel his semen shooting against her, perhaps at her doing propelled with a violent intensity. She gave no sign of acknowledgment. Her body hadn’t moved at all during this dubious copulation except the brief contraction to prevent his escape.
Hraethe, appalled, pulled out at last and staggered back, letting go of the rope of hair. She had his seed now. She’d taken what she wanted. Despite the apparent contradiction, he felt almost as though he’d been assaulted.
Shiva was regarding him as before, the dress still held high. His gaze fell once more to the red strokes that covered her legs, and he felt a twinge of dismay.
“Have you never—?” He faltered.
Shiva breathed in as though she hadn’t since he’d entered her, her lip curled with disdain. “Why should I?”
She was impossible, a statue of ice. He straightened his clothes and turned to leave her. She wouldn’t want him to linger, and he had no desire to.
As he stepped into the dimness of the corridor, he heard a slight murmur behind him. She had spoken, so low that he couldn’t hear. He paused, and the word came again: “Stay.”
Hraethe looked back into the room, disbelieving. MeerShiva still stood motionless, a statue he’d fucked. Surely she didn’t expect him to service her in the same fashion twice. Even if it weren’t preposterous, there was no need. She was Meer. If she wished to conceive, she had already done so.
Hraethe frowned. “What did you say?” His mind had to be playing tricks on him.
Shiva breathed sharply, the moon-like curves of her breasts rising above the bodice of the dress. He’d been deceived by her bewitchment of indifference. Her hands were whiter than the gown where they still held it, containing the tremendous restraint of her response in their single gesture. She had been affected. Perhaps he’d even hurt her in his spite. She wouldn’t say again what he was certain now he’d heard.
Hraethe took a tentative step toward her, and saw her truly for the first time. She was breathtaking, a series of elucidative lines that couldn’t have been rendered by even the greatest of sculptors. The idea that he might have caused her pain destroyed him, and he dared to approach her and touch her tight-fisted hands. She made no move to stop him, allowing him to pry the iron fingers from the gown. The ivory fabric tumbled over the bloodstained limbs, and Hraethe, the curled fingers held in his hands, lowered his head to the slopes of her breasts and kissed the breach between them.
The sharp, thunderous breath came again. Hraethe moved his lips to the colorless throat and caressed it, wondering at the contradictions of this mighty woman. Shiva gave a small sign that he affected her, a subtle turn of her head to open up the slope beneath her jaw to his attention. He pressed his mouth there and tasted the transcendent skin, then turned her head in his hands and took her mouth. Shiva made no further attempt to deceive him.
They were lost in a mere kiss, each mouth ecstatic at the touch of the other, a kind of symbiotic drinking of the Meer within. Time meant nothing against this communion.
When Hraethe released her at last, she pulled him toward a bed of cushions he hadn’t noticed behind her on the floor. He felt a fool. She hadn’t meant to take him standing after all. They reclined against the silken threads, and Shiva sought his mouth once more, snaking her arms into his hair and removing the clasp that held it. She seemed intoxicated by the touch of it, and her caresses made him ache with desire.
Still, Shiva made no sound, though she was embracing him and exploring him passionately.
“Don’t be silent,” Hraethe moaned at her touch on his erection. “I want to hear you. Be with me.”
She pressed her body against him and gripped him, heart throbbing against his chest through the heaving breasts, not moving for a long moment. Her lips parted against his neck and a soft breath escaped. “MeerHraethe,” she said finally, and the words were almost a lament, as though she was unused to desire.
He deluged her with kisses on every part of her face, but evading her mouth, and she lay back against the pillows with her eyes closed. He kissed the crimson mouth once more, his need for her now nearly desperate.
“I hurt you,” he said when he let go, lowering his head against her breasts.
“No,” breathed Shiva. “Not much.”
It was a dreadful admission. Hraethe knew he’d been unforgivable. He moved down her body and drew up the dress, exposing the blood. “I hurt you,” he insisted, and began to clean the blood from her skin with a penitent tongue. He worked upward from her feet, and was thorough, leaving not a stain of red, arriving at last at her sex.
Shiva’s voice was finally unleashed, rising from a quiet moan to an ecstatic melody of sound beneath his touch. Her orgasm, when he brought her to it at last, was deafening.
“Come to me.” She held her hand out to him when her violent quaking slowed. Hraethe crawled up to meet her lips once more and tried to loosen the clasp of her dress behind her neck. The fine work of her conjuring was difficult to undo, and he abandoned the effort at last and grabbed the sloping bodice in his hands, tearing it from her breasts like some marauding barbarian. Shiva moaned and arched up to him, demanding his mouth. He obliged, finding with astonishment that the stroke of her nipples against his tongue was enough to make him climax.
“You had best have more to give me,” Shiva whispered with an attempt to scold.
“My Meer.” He gave her a sly smile. “I don’t think I will ever be recumbent again.” He pressed hard and hot against her in demonstration, and they came together once more, their mutual pleasure rattling the columns of Ludtaht Shiva. He was careful this time, but Shiva demonstrated that care was no longer necessary or desired by throwing him onto his back and taking him as she pleased.
Hraethe had arrived at Soth AhlZel at midmorning, and though they were unaware of it deep within the temple, it grew dark before they’d attained even transitory satisfaction. Shiva lay in the wreckage of her dress, her hair in wild disarray beside her head, and Hraethe reclined against her bosom.
He marveled now that he’d been so free with her. “Why did you keep sending me away?”
Shiva looked up toward the ceiling and the twisting shapes of darkness. “Because I do not want this child.”
Hraethe turned his head toward her, puzzled. “What do you mean? It was your summons.”
“It is a vetma. Soth AhlZel asked it of me, and I gave.” Hraethe had never heard of such a request. “He will replace me.”
“Replace you?” Hraethe’s brow wrinkled. “Why would your son not reign beside you? Those in the greatest of houses have done so.”
“Not the greatest,” she corrected with a tone of reproach. “And it is not what they want. I am despised.”
Hraethe traced the tense lines of her face. This was everything to her: Soth AhlZel. She had raised it, given herself to it, and legend said that Shiva had been the first, her city spawning all of modern civilization.
“How could anyone despise you?” He whispered the words against her skin, eliciting a laugh that bordered on the obscene. Hraethe silenced her with a worshipful kiss. No one had ever been this close to her. He knew it. He’d been granted a divine and unspeakable privilege.
“How long time is, and how uncompanionable,” he murmured against her. “Why have you been so solitary?” Shiva said nothing. Hraethe covered her with his Meeric length of hair and hovered over her, the two of them cocooned within her dark tresses and his light.
She gave a cool shrug of one shoulder. “Perhaps I should simply have let them eat me and had done with it.”
Hraethe laughed as he looked down at her. “I will eat you. Your vetma will burst into my mouth.” He held himself aloft a moment longer, tormenting himself with anticipation, his next words a sensuous murmur of appreciation as he drank her visually. “Such tales they tell of us.”
Without warning, Shiva’s cat-green eyes flashed like fire, and she grabbed the hair at the sides of his head with a sharp and painful jerk and held him at her mercy. “They are not tales,” she hissed. “I have seen a thousand Meer picked off one by one and carelessly devoured for an insidious trinket! That is our destiny, MeerHraethe.” She spat the name. “To be the fodder for their insignificant greed. To line their bellies and pass through them as shit.”
He was stunned, frightened of her and horrified by her words, and wounded by the cruelty of her pun. “Hraethe” meant “swift” but could also imply “premature”. His skin had begun to crawl with a feral dread he’d never felt before, a black worm that traveled through his veins and would grow there as his heart cycled blood.
Shiva softened her grip and stroked his cheek with one hand. “Don’t be afraid, young god.” Just as suddenly, her voice had shifted to a gentle whisper. “It robs you of your power. You are Meer, but the time is coming.” Her lips curved up in fondness and longing. “You are but an infant, Hraethe.” She shook her head in wonder at him. “Let me have you again so that I may drink your youth.”
The sudden tenderness of her touch persuaded him, though despite the interruption of fear, he needed little persuasion. They came together once more, and the sounds of Shiva’s delight again filled the quiet temple. Shiva returned the vetma he’d conferred on her, devouring and conquering with his cock between her teeth. With a sharp, delightful pain, Hraethe discovered that her words had been more than metaphorical. She’d pierced him at the base of his scrotum and drank indeed from him, a surge of blood rising up the length of his erection more powerfully than any ejaculation of semen. He wondered fleetingly if he would bleed to death, but the indescribable sensation was worth death. Even a touch from Shiva was worth death, and he surrendered.
Surprised to find he’d slept—an unforgivable waste of time with this goddess beside him—Hraethe roused and turned to gather her to him and serve her once more. The bed was empty.
Hraethe sat up in distress. The room had changed, and at first he couldn’t understand what had happened, thinking he’d been transported somewhere else in sleep, but it was only the opening of a covered window that had transformed their bower into a more ordinary room. It was day—which one, he didn’t know—and his clothes were laid out beside him.
He dressed and wandered into the corridor, strolling beneath the arches as they crossed and vaulted one another. Ludtaht Shiva was a brilliant maze that fascinated so that one might wander without concern for destination, attentive to the vast and awe-inspiring details. It was like being inside Shiva, exploring her, enchanted, and Hraethe was content to follow the course of her conduit.
The waiting-maid who’d conducted him to Shiva on his arrival appeared before him from an unlit room. Hraethe smiled quizzically.
She bowed before him. “You will leave. The MeerShiva has spoken.”
Hraethe’s gut lunged as though he’d been kicked, and his mouth opened on a pointless stammer. “Is she—what has—where—?” He moved toward the dark room, and the child bowed down before him once more in his path. “Where is your mistress?” he demanded.
“The MeerShiva has spoken,” she said again, her voice trembling. “I would rather die at your hands than at hers, meneut, if you must destroy me. The MeerShiva has spoken. Her words cannot be taken back.”
Hraethe wrestled with fury and desolation. He knew too well what the delicate messenger said was true. Shiva had said he was to leave, and he would leave. A Meer’s words were irrefutable.
He returned to Soth Szofl, despondent. He was a fool. What, after all, had he expected? She’d said it herself: “You are not here to play at domestic bliss.” He’d come to give her his seed, and he had done so and more. Shiva had given of herself in so profound a manner in return that it still stunned him to know what he’d done. No agreement had been breached.
This logic, however, couldn’t soothe the terrible hole in his core. The black worm of Shiva’s chilling talk of “Meercatching”, as it was known, began to fill the hole, and he nursed a dark obsession with the fate of Meer who’d gone before him. His prior mistrust of his templars and servants became a raging paranoia, and he looked for assassins at every turn. His head felt sick, and he knew something had gone wrong within it, but the knowledge of his loss, the memory of the divine body melding with his, drove him in agony and fear toward this more welcome preoccupation.
He determined after a time that he’d divined the knowledge of a plot against him, conspired by every citizen of Szofl. They waited for him to sleep so they could take him—he had a vision of a crushing blow to the skull and a body tumbled, twisted, on temple steps—but he wouldn’t sleep. He would confound them.
In the end, he suffered a continual burning in his lungs, and the muscles around his eyes stung from keeping watch as though pins kept them open. Assassins came at him from every corner of the temple, lunging to overtake him, but somehow escaping from him before he could execute his vengeful defense. He locked himself in his tower and filled the small chamber with an inferno of divining flame, calling upon the quicksilver threads of life to sever before their time. He took them all. None could be trusted. He was gleeful with victory when he emerged.
A sickness had come over every one of his servants, and a dying messenger had come to cry alarm from the plague-ridden city. Hraethe found himself in the midst of the smell of death, his frenzied thoughts suddenly still. A silence stole over the temple that wasn’t only in his brain. He left the messenger convulsing at the arch of the court and raced back up the steps to the height of the tower. Below, he could see all of Szofl, and all he’d wrought. A terrible pall lay over the lifeless city, an ugly fog that had threaded in from the coast. MeerHraethe saw no signs of life. There were only the dim sounds of the dying and a terrible stench.
Shiva, he thought desperately as he climbed to the top of the buttress. The beauty of her skin, her smell, her sound and taste tormented him despite the despicable distraction of the plague below. “I will never see you again,” he said to her, and was inconsolably sad. He let go of the latticed stone and found himself soaring into the devouring granite fog.