Khama-Srim

She was running across the lily fields to greet the coming caravan. Memories are hazy, like watching through dirty glass. But the smell of the lilies crosses the illusions of time much swifter. It was heavy, ripe, intoxicating. The sweetness of it overpowered by the swarming dizziness of spring, when all of nature is fucking itself. On the northern grasslands of Aquilonia, the virility was most charged. Oh—the camels! The shagged wagon haulers she remembered well. They stank of withered rope and Khama wondered at the time if everything from Stygia smelled like that.

Khasantos ran behind her, a victim of her spring friskiness…Reaching the wagons, her father greeted her. Pot bellied, short, and hairy as a bear, he was like most Zingarans. Also like most Zingarans, he was a hard bargainer with a keen eye for value. On seeing his daughter he smiled and helped her up to the wagon he was driving, Khasantos ran next to them.

“Khamasrim, you have become a woman! Almost too old to marry! 12 is it?”

“16, father”

He stroked his long thick moustache, slicked with spiced Vendhyan oils. “It has been too many winters…I will find you a husband, a good man with many hides and riches. A strong man with grey haired wisdoms” he said with a tainted eye towards the young man running next to them, tongue lollygagging like a heated dog.

Next came the dread. Like the touch of a necromancer. Before she saw the black horse on the horizon she felt it. The air felt it, the ground felt it, the birds felt it. This cursed and dark continent always thirsts for blood on its soil, and it wanted some…now. Her father felt it too. Before the messenger reached them he turned to Khama with a brazen cowl.
“Take this!” He produced a container the size of a thumbnail from one of his many pockets. It was the kind used to hold expensive pastes. “If you cannot bear the burdens the Gods have given, take a smidgen to the tip of your tongue and Mitra will take you into her arms!”

* * *

Fire and Smoke. Blood and Steel. Cries of Lamentation.

The barbarians groped her. Tore her. Bled her. Beat her.

“Leave her! That one is mine!” It was a voice like the rolling thunder, words like flashing lightning.

* * *

Now she was tethered to a stake. She sat at the side of the largest and richest tent. It rained. The ground was barren and evil. Around her the barbarians rejoiced in the night. A fell mix of guttural Vanir and the chanting archaic speak of the Picts. A grim and large war party indeed. The screams of her kin could be heard in the distance. Women raped. Young slain or subdued into slavery.

The venom, she thought. She fondled as best she could for it’s hidden location and reached it. Unscrewed, she was close to her goal when she was kicked in the ribs sharply. Sucking for air, she looked up at the offender. A Pict with one blind eye, the skinny jowel of missing teeth, and a crown of stringy auburn hair surrounding the large balding skull.

“What have we here?”, he covered her mouth as he groped her blouse, not wishing to be noticed defiling the Vanir Chief’s prize. Then his eye caught the glass jar. “Ahhh.” His attention turned to it, and holding it to his nose he carefully took a brief whiff. A slight gleeful shriek parted his shredded lips as he recognized the treasure he held.

“Bring me the wench!” came the growl from within the tent. The Pict fled silently into the night with his prize poison. All hope left her.

* * *

He was a brute in the truest sense. He ripped her remaining garments with one quick and violent swipe. With another he knocked her to the floor, jarring loose the teeth in the back of her mouth. He mounted her as an animal. He would break her for sure. She would not survive this, and perhaps that was best.

But then an instinct swept her. Animal like in it’s own sense. The feral mode of survival bred through the ages into the mettle of Hyboreans. She stopped her weeping. She arched her back and swayed her hips as best she could. She moaned with a feigned pleasure. He gurgled, his grasp laxed. He grunted with lost control. He shivered like an earthquake and quenched like a watered bonfire.

He lay next to her heaving. After a paused moment she spoke coldly, “The Picts mean to betray you.” His heavy breathing stopped abruptly.

“Bite your tongue whore, I will smash your skull!”

She swallowed hard, and spoke again, “The one eyed one has a potent poison from the south, not even your hardy stamina can survive it.”

He sat up suddenly. “Someone will die slowly tonight! A traitor or a liar!” and with that he dressed his armor and greataxe and left the tent, rounding his Vanir to him. As she lay on the bearskin, she thought to herself, I will live.

* * *
Khama peers into her flagon. It is drained as are the memories that now creep back into the murky dark of forgetfulness. She looks at her shoulders, and the Vanir tattoos they bear. She touches the scar on her forehead and feels the hair of her under arms. Not the pretty Aquilonian wife I was supposed to be, she chuckles to herself. She looks across the Stygian tavern short table at the leacherous fool she has been drinking with. She no longer desires his company.

With a bellow she stands. She starts walking to her room only to receive a quick grope from the lustful man. A flash of steel and her dagger presses forcefully to his throat, her other hand squeezes his manliness until it almost bursts. She does not let go until he falls unconscious on the clay tiled floor.

Her eyes flash with the stormy temper that never sinks far below the skin. Then she burps, slumps her shoulders, and turns to her nightly fitful sleep.