The Destroyer (36 page)

"No. He left a few days ago," she said quickly, before another stream of servants passed us.

I opened the door to my room and invited her inside with a hand gesture. I thought she would object, but she glided in without question and I closed the door behind her.

"Sit down there," I instructed her, pointing to one of the padded chairs next to the sofa in my room. I walked through the room and inspected the rafters in the ceiling. Looked under the bed, opened the dresser, and looked out on the balcony. I hadn't heard any heartbeats in the room, but it was better to be paranoid than dead.

"What are you doing?" she said, puzzled.

"Making sure the room hasn't been disturbed." I walked into the bathroom. I had told the girl that cleaned my room that I liked to bathe around this time; she was eager to please me and always left a dozen large candles burning. "Come in here and let's talk more." I turned on the hot water spout and began to peel the sweaty clothes from my skin.

"Wait, what are you doing now?" she asked from behind me when she walked into the bathroom.

"You said I smell, so I am going to bathe." I threw my sweat drenched clothes on the stone tile and stepped into the tub. The water was scorching hot but that was how I preferred it. I leaned back in the tub and sighed. I didn't remember having hot baths in my memories.

"Tell me what the Elven—I mean Ancient envoy wants with me," I said.

"He wanted to meet you, first of all," she called out from the main room.

"Come in here," I said.

"No! I can't be in there when you are without clothes!" she argued

"I don't understand."

"It is improper for a lady to be around a naked man that is not her husband," she said.

"Just come in here. I don't understand you people. You need to talk to me about the envoy." Her angry boot steps echoed as she walked in the room, she kept her eyes to the ceiling. "You'll need a chair." I remarked and she huffed angrily. Returning with one quickly she slammed it down and sat facing away from me. She crossed her legs and her arms. It was a good thing she had agreed to come in so easily. I didn't have enough energy to argue with her anymore and would have just yelled into the other room from the warm water.

"Why did he want to meet me?" I asked as I grabbed the soap.

"He thinks you are the O'Baarni. He referred to you several times by that name. We didn't correct him. Are you sure you are not the O'Baarni?" she had begun to bounce her crossed leg, and her heart rate was picking up slightly. I didn't answer for a while.

"Kaiyer?" she asked after a dozen seconds. She turned to look over her shoulder at me out of the corner of her eye. When she saw me watching her back she quickly turned around.

"No. I am not the O'Baarni. In my memories no one ever called me by that name. I was in his army. A general. I've told you this already."

"I know. I know. He just insisted that you were
the
O'Baarni. Also . . ." She looked over her shoulder again.

"You can turn around to speak with me. I'm in the bathtub. Haven't you ever seen a man naked?" I asked teasingly.

"Maybe," Nadea sighed in defeat. "I really shouldn't be here," she said as she spun her chair around to face me. Her arms and legs were still crossed and she avoided eye contact with me, looking everywhere but the tub.

"I agree. You should be in the bathtub here with me. It is very pleasant." I swirled my hand in the hot water, watching the surface grow oily as the grime of the day came off of my skin.

"I'm not getting in that bath with you," she said confidently.

"Suit yourself. It feels great." I leaned back into the water with a smile and sighed. I remembered I was supposed to be cleaning myself so I took the bar of soap and lathered it in my hands and over my chest. The army used to bathe in rivers naked in front of one another. Nadea's culture seemed very uptight about hygiene.

I reclined more in the tub and closed my eyes again, thinking about the beautiful woman sitting a few feet from me. I was persuasive. She was uncomfortable being around me, but was in the room with me now. Within a few minutes she would be in this tub with me, then she would be in the bed with me, and then she would be eating breakfast with me tomorrow morning. I shuddered as I imagined devouring her pert breasts with my mouth and running my hands over the smooth skin of her body. It would be a perfect way to end a productive day of exercising. "Please continue,” I said to her with a hungry smile.

"When you speak about your past, when you told us today about what happened with the humans, you spoke of the army as if it were yours. ‘My troops,’ and so on. And you mentioned them looking to you for advice. You made important decisions. If you were not the leader, you must have at least been very high-ranking and powerful. Do you remember meeting the O’Baarni?”

“I will have to wait until I remember more before I can answer that.” She huffed a little, not happy with the answer. I understood her frustration, but I didn’t know how to bring my memories back, they seemed to be triggered at random during the day or when I slept. I was confident that in time I would recall more, and while I wanted to be able to help them, to know more about myself, another part of me did not wish to remember everything. While it was maddening living between my past and my present, unsure who I was or what I had been, I feared there were memories I had submerged in my subconscious for a reason.

“The king and the duke thought it would be a bad idea to have you meet him, considering what happened to the last Ancients you met." She was looking at me now, at my face alone. Hers was serious, her eyes firm and hard, warning me not to persist in my attempts at seduction. The soft light of the candles in the room made her skin glow with a coppery sheen. Her heart was still beating faster than normal.

"They were probably right," I nodded in agreement.

I washed my face and my hair with the soap and then worked on my feet. She was trying not to watch but I saw her eyes drift toward me. I didn't understand why she was having such a problem being in the same room as me.

"Nadea?" I asked softly.

"What?" she snapped back.

"What else did the envoy say?" she was hiding something.

"He talked to the king about negotiating a truce." She looked at me and quickly looked away. Her heart fluttered again. She was stalling. For some reason she didn't want to talk to me about the envoy. Yet here she was, alone in my room with me.

"If you aren't going to talk to me about the envoy I can think of other things we can be doing to occupy ourselves," I said with an eyebrow raised. She looked at me and flushed.

"I bet you can. I should really be going." She looked into the other room and continued to bounce her crossed leg and booted foot. But she didn’t get up from her chair. She was definitely going to be making love to me tonight. I was surprised at how little I seemed to care about the Ancient envoy.

"Take off those clothes and get in here with me. I need someone to wash my back," I said as I pointed behind me.

"No! I already told you that I am not getting in there with you. Are you daft?" She frowned at me disapprovingly but she wasn't looking away anymore.

"I think you are daft for not coming in here with me. You want to." I spun one of the handles on the side of the bath and more hot water began to trickle into the tub.

"Oh? What makes you think so?" She raised her eyebrow. She had uncrossed her arms and was stroking her ponytail absently. The foot of her crossed leg did slow circles.

"Because you keep stalling instead of speaking about this envoy. You could have just said what you were going to say about him and then departed." She knitted her brows and scowled at me. It made her look even more beautiful as I imagined the look she would have on her face tonight when I first entered her.

"I am getting to it!" She crossed her arms again and tossed her thick dark mane back behind her. "Are you always so presumptuous? It makes it very difficult to be around you."

"I don't understand what that word means. Does it mean that you should come into the bathtub with me? Because it should," I said to her with a smile. She looked so flabbergasted that I almost laughed.

"No! It means that you have no regard for appropriate behavior and you lack any sort of modesty!"

Then I did laugh lightly, which made her angrier.

"I don't understand what I am doing wrong. You seem to believe that it is inappropriate for me to want us to be lovers."

"It isn't just that. You want to fuck anything that has breasts." She looked away with her nose upturned a bit.

"If this really was a problem would you still be in this room with me?”

"The problem is that I don't want to be a notch on your bedpost. I'm not your whore, whose sole purpose is to please you until you find another bitch that you want more. I will make love when I choose, to someone I love, not some horny bastard who feels entitled to using women for his own pleasure." She was glaring at me now. Her brown eyes flashed dangerously in the candle light. The water was almost to the top of the tub, I pulled the stopper on the drain so some of the soapy lake in which I was immersed could escape.

"I know I have upset you and I don't mean to do so. I really don't understand. Please be patient with me. What is a notch on a bedpost? What is a whore?"

"You don't know what a whore is?" I shook my head. "Paug probably didn't translate the word for you. It is someone who takes money in exchange for sex." I frowned. "Notch on a bed post means I don't want to be one of your many sexual conquests."

"I don't have a word in my language for whore," I said plainly. "We were slaves, often women would be taken by their male Elven masters because it pleased them to torture and rape. I think that was what happened with my mother. My father never spoke of how she died. He had only said that she was beautiful, and that he wished she was alive to see my brother and I grow up."

"I'm sorry," Nadea said with sympathy. "What about when you were in the O'Baarni's army? They normally have women that the soldiers can use."

"No. Half of the troops were women. If two people wanted to be together they could find comfort in each other. There was no shame in it, just as people were not ashamed of their need to eat or sleep. We never knew when we were going to live or die, so release and pleasure were high on our list of priorities. After we trained and took care of our duties of course." I recalled Shlara.

"Did people ever become married? Were you? Sorry, I don't mean to pry. It is very interesting." Her eyes met mine.

"No. No one married. We didn't have a word for it. People would have multiple lovers. Even ones of the same sex if they felt like it. How could you commit to someone when you or they might be killed in battle the next day?" Her face looked horrified.

"What about children?"

"Some women bore children. Sometimes their lovers would help raise them. Sometimes they wouldn't. It was decided between the parents. Other women chose to use herbs to prevent pregnancy. A few warriors only chose lovers of their own sex, maybe so they wouldn't have to worry about it. We had systems in place so that the young would be assimilated into the army. They would be trained, taught, and put into the war machine where they would have the best purpose."

"That's awful! Children in the O'Baarni's army? This man sounds like a monster." Nadea's voice cracked.

"What else could they do? We were all born as either slaves in bondage or slaves fighting for our freedom. There was nowhere else for the children to go, no other way to live. You have this whole world here outside the pending war. You send soldiers to fight while your people wait and live their lives. There was no other world for us. There was only the war. There was no home to return to or defend. We were building a new world for ourselves, and the children had no choice but to join the fight, it was for them, for their future, so they would be free from slavery. The O'Baarni didn't do this to our children. The Elvens did." I slid back into the tub and closed my eyes.

She was quiet for a few minutes.

"Did you . . . have many lovers?" she asked. Her heart thumped in her chest and indicated to me how important the question was.

"I don't remember any besides one. My position made it difficult to take lovers."

"Your position as a general?" I nodded without opening my eyes. A few more minutes passed. My muscles were completely relaxed now. "Your . . . lover. Was she beautiful? What did she do in the O'Baarni's army?" I opened my eyes and met Nadea's. She was biting her lower lip. I remembered Iolarathe's deadly smile, the sounds of her moans when I was inside of her, the sharp, surprising but pleasurable sensation of her claw-like nails ripping the skin from my back.

"Yes she was beautiful, almost as beautiful as you. It was a long time ago, and it does not matter." She nodded and I could hear her breathe out carefully. It was the answer that she wanted and it was true. No one was more beautiful to me than her, especially not a faded memory. "The point is that I think of sex a little differently than you. I don't mean to upset you. I don't have any need to conquer or possess you. I just want to please you and be pleased by you. If you don't want to, I understand, but you are in the room right now and you aren't talking about the envoy.” My eyes met hers again and I could see her look down into the tub and back up to my eyes, then my lips. Her hands began to stroke her hair and her crossed foot started to do quick, small circles.

Our eyes stayed locked for what seemed like a few minutes. Her heart began to beat faster and I watched her chest rise and fall with quickened breath. Finally, she spoke softly.

"The envoy said that if we surrender you, or if you surrendered to them, they would form a truce with Nia and our allies. They have sent envoys to all the other countries to tell them about the proposed offer. The king is getting tremendous pressure to hand you over to these Ancients. It's completely ridiculous." She sighed.

I sat back into the tub again and considered.

"It is a good move for the Ancients to make. Maybe they have convinced the other leaders that they will truly be left alone if I am surrendered. The Ancients will kill me and they will be free to destroy the rest of you."