3 #3
“Touching,” he said. “You need to accept my touch, at the very least. Why don’t you pretend I’m a man who hasn’t disappointed you yet, hmm? Someone you liked before he treated you badly.”
She snorted.
He beckoned with a hand. “Sit back down.”
She hesitated. “We don’t need to practice. I’ll be more mindful of the way I am when others are looking. I will—”
“Sit down.”
She sat down.
He crossed his legs and indicated she should do the same and face him. She did so. He held out his hands to her, palms up. “We’ll start like this. Holding hands is an easy way to begin the creation of intimacy.”
She looked into his stupidly handsome face and felt dazzled again by his beauty. She wanted to protest. She wanted to run away. She did not want to do this.
She put her hands into his.
“There,” he said. “Good. But you must not hesitate so much next time. Everyone must think that we touch each other all the time. They must think we art putting our mouths between each other’s legs—”
She drew her hands back, horrified. “What?”
“Well, at the least, you are sucking me,” he said. “I suppose going the other way round is less common, but I know that men do it. I have heard tell of it, at any rate. Personally, I pay all my women, so I have no need to put in so much effort.”
Her nostrils flared. “You’re really quite horrible, are you not?”
“Oh, yes,” he said, laughing. “When I was with the High King just now, I was pondering why it is that I am killing that man. I feel rather sorry for him, you know? I do not have a good reason for doing it, but I have given my word, so I will. I am not the sort of man who is driven by conviction or morality or anything of that nature.”
“What drives you, my lord?” she said, glaring at him.
“Pleasure, I suppose.” He winked at her, and she knew he meant that kind of pleasure.
“At other’s expense,” she said.
“No, no, my expense. I pay all my women quite well. Give me your hands again, warrioress.”
Sighing heavily, she put her hands in his. “Well, I can’t see why any of these women would enjoy your touch if you treat them thus.”
“Listen, just because I am not licking quims does not mean that I am not giving my women pleasure,” he said. “I assure you, they all seem to quite enjoy my cock. I have never had a complaint about that.”
She rolled her eyes. “Men’s cocks bring them far more pleasure than they bring women.”
He considered. “Perhaps.” He ran his thumbs over her hands. “But they do bring women pleasure, and you cannot deny that.”
She didn’t say anything, but he was right, at least to a degree.
Penetration was a pleasurable experience, she supposed.
There were elements of it that felt nice, sometimes even very nice, but the inside of her vagina was hardly the most sensitive part of her body.
The actual sensitive parts, those parts, men tended to only pay a passing amount of attention to.
She was certain that if she had been a feminine sort of woman, men would have wanted to please her, but because she was some warrioress, they thought of her as unimportant and disposable.
She had not thought she had much in common with whores, but she was beginning to realize she might, if Iahir’s treatment of those women was any indication.
“Maybe we should just do it,” he said.
She pulled her hands out of his again. “You don’t mean that.”
“Well, if we were actually sharing a bed, think of how much more convincing we’d be,” he said brightly.
She bared her teeth at him, getting up from the floor. “You may be the worst man I’ve ever met.”
“Because I’m trying to take you to bed?” he said. “That makes me the worst?”
“No, I suppose it’s all very common for your sex,” she muttered.
“You are all quite like dogs gnawing at bones, quite unwilling to let go once you have any inkling of it. Men will not let the subject drop. They will pester and beg and cajole and make awful jokes and keep at you and at you until you simply agree to shut them up.” She went across the room to a window and pressed her fingers into the glass.
She looked out onto a courtyard, full of perfectly groomed bushes and flowers. There were white stone benches and a fountain. It was all very pretty and very fair and very much like everything in this place.
She might go mad if she did not see some dirt or dark sometime soon, she thought.
“I am getting the impression you don’t much like men, warrioress,” came Iahir’s voice. “Which makes it all the odder that you are so intent on being one.”
“I am not trying to be a man,” she said.
She did not think she would like it, being a man.
Too much responsibility, she thought. Being a woman was limiting in a number of ways, but no one expected you to take on an entire farm and a woman and all her children (your children, of course, most likely) and to be the sole person whose back the failure or success of it fell on.
She could hardly imagine such a thing. Men had the illusion of freedom, but it was balanced out by a great deal of responsibility, and it was limiting.
Of course, she didn’t want to take on the traditional role of a woman either, because it would be utterly stifling in its own way as well. Even her mother, who never had a husband, was subject to it.
The farm they lived on belonged to Gathren’s uncle.
He had married at one point and had a child, but his wife had died and the child had died, too, but later, when the little boy was but four years of age.
Anyway, regardless, Gathren and her mother were obligated to the farm and to her uncle.
He made the decisions—though he made them thinking of their survival, of course—and they must follow his lead.
Gathren didn’t want her own farm.
Near as Gathren could tell, a farm was a prison, and having a farm meant only that one worked one’s fingers to the bone in service of it, trying in vain to bend the land to one’s will and force it to give up sustenance to the people who farmed it.
But Gathren would rather be making the decisions about the farm than following orders, she supposed.
However, what had she done with herself?
She’d gotten herself into the army, that was what, and she spent all of her time following orders. Even so, there was some freedom in it.
Women were otherwise expected to get married, to surrender their bodies for their husbands to get children on, and to toil away along with their husbands as co-slaves to the land on their farms.
She owned her body. She could say who could touch it and who could not.
She demanded that the men she did take into her bed did not spill inside her, for she did not want to have a child.
She did not have to wake early in the morning to feed chickens or stay up late at night to try to harvest the tomatoes from the vine before they rotted away, too ripe.
“I am, I suppose, trying to be free,” she said. “I am, I suppose, trying to belong only to myself, not to some man or other.”
“Men don’t own women,” said Iahir.