Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 23

Without realizing he'd even reached for it, Zhair'lo found his bow in his hands with an arrow knocked to the string. He stepped up beside the nearest woman, in the centre of their line. It was Aloe who gave him a nod, relinquished her spot to him, and slipped away to his left. He understood immediately: the men were spaced out to give the women firing lanes.

'But firing lanes at what?' he wondered.

All he saw on the far side of the road was a single man, his generally pale face scratched with angry red rashes, his arms stretched out wide from his body in what had to be a gesture of surrender.

'It's very quiet,' he thought.

The Fighters weren't only watching the panicked man, but were constantly scanning the forest behind him.

"How many are you?" Sergeant Yung demanded.

The man tried to speak, but only a small squeak came out of him. He caught his breath and spoke slowly, his voice was haggard and worn out, sounding far worse than his clothing and skin looked.

"I am alone, sir."

More silence, as the sensitive ears of the women around him tried to verify this claim.

"I hear nothing," a woman on his right whispered across the line.

"Same here," another answered on his left.

"Identify him," Aloe called forward, her voice low.

"What is your name?" Sergeant Yung asked, Command taking its orders from Authority.

"Berel, sir."

"And why, Berel, do you enter the territory of Gern?"

Berel looked up and down the length of the road.

"By accident. I didn't see any markers. I'm looking for my sister, sir."

'At least,' Zhair'lo thought, 'he's taking care to be polite.'

But five - now six - arrows pointed at a man's heart could derive manners from the rudest of people.

"Have him hold there," Aloe whispered forward. She turned to Zhair'lo and added, "Go back to the stretcher and ask the woman if she knows this Berel."

"Mistress," Zhair'lo relaxed his bow and sprinted back into the forest.

Ji'ann and her male companion had found a flat piece of ground on which to set Merelda, who now cradled her infant in her arms.

"Report," Ji'ann rumbled.

"A man, who appears to be alone, is on the road. He says his name is Berel -"

"My brother?" Merelda exclaimed. She turned to Ji'ann, "Please don't harm him. He's a good man."

How in the nine hells did a woman have a 'brother'? Was this another word with a special meaning outside the city?

"He is an honourable man?" Ji'ann asked.

"Yes, yes!"

"Yet you did not choose his name for this child?"

Merelda blushed fiercely red and looked away.

"Name my son after my brother? What would people say -"

Ji'ann waved her off and turned to Zhair'lo.

"He may come with us back to the Barracks, but unarmed. Let him know we will be watching him."

"Mistress," Zhair'lo sketched a bow before running off again.

When these orders were relayed back to Aloe, she passed them to Sergeant Yung. Berel was quick to agree to these terms and Sergeant Yung took possession of the rusty machete that had been discarded in the dirt the moment Berel had realized what trouble he had found.

"You have Merelda, then? Is she alright?"

"She can't walk," Sergeant Yung explained. "But we can carry her."

"Thank you so much."

This was met with a shrug.

"We're doing it for her, not you," the Sergeant pointed out.

Berel, mystified by this comment, fell in line exactly where he was told to walk - in the midst of the front six. The stretcher, still carried by Ji'ann and one of the male Fighters, stayed in the middle of the group, surrounded by Recruits, with four Fighters guarding the rear.

It was only minutes later however, that heavy footsteps came from the road behind them.

"The clockwise patrol!" one of the rear guard called out.

Twenty more Fighters, including the four who belonged in their current patrol, formed a large escort for the woman in the stretcher, her baby and her brother.

The story of Merelda and Berel came out during the long walk back to the Barracks.

Merelda, who had been taken as the third wife of Chet, had borne him a child. The child, however, had not met Chet's expectations, as the children of his other two wives had in months and years previous. Something about the child's appearance had angered the 'husband' and he had decided that the child was not his.

There began, parenthetically, an explanation from Ji'ann on the mating habits of the barbarian nomads. Their uncivilized practice of monogamy, it was given to the Recruits to understand, naturally led to this sort of jealous guarding of mates, which led to accusations of infidelity and eventually violence.

Zhair'lo couldn't see the connection, but also couldn't see how there was any wisdom in arguing the point in present company.

Merelda told as much of the story as she could, before breaking down, and so Berel told the rest.

Chet had beaten Merelda and had seemed on the verge of killing her. Berel had arrived, drawing Chet outside the tent where he kept his wives, and allowed his sister to make a run for it, taking the baby with her.

"Would she have had a better chance without the baby?" someone wondered aloud.

"But Chet would have killed the child," Berel replied, his tone implying that the answer was so obvious as to make the question stupid.

So Merelda had run, and Chet had become angry. But it had grown dark by then, and the husband hadn't wanted to risk injury to himself in order to fetch an unfaithful wife and the "bastard" (yet another word with a special meaning). A hunt for Merelda was set to start at dawn, but Berel had left earlier, hoping to save his sister.

Chet and his minions, the Fighters were made to understand, would be coming soon with the intent of capturing and punishing Merelda.

It was at this point that Berel looked around in wonder..

"How many are your former tribe?" Ji'ann rumbled, her voice taking on the peaceful character of a gathering thunderstorm.

"Twenty five grown men, forty women and about the same number of children."

"Do they battle often?" Ji'ann offered. "Other than with their own recently pregnant women?"

"The men fight with each other," Berel said, "But not like -"

He trailed off, gesturing at the crowd around him.

The men of Berel's tribe, Zhair'lo realized, must frequently kill each other. It was the only explanation for the skewed gender ratio. That must be how they managed to take multiple wives to a single husband.

"Twenty five men will not be an issue," Ji'ann pronounced. "Are the women likely to fight on their husbands' side?"

"The women wouldn't know what to do," Berel looked confused. "When there's fighting, they just hide until it's over."

Ji'ann shook her head slowly.

---===================----

At dinner that evening, the talk amongst the Recruits was nothing but their chance encounter with the wild people and their baby. It took a while for Zhair'lo to grasp what the women already knew: that the words 'husband', 'wife', 'bastard', 'brother' and 'sister' had different meanings once one fell off the end of the civilized world.

As they were finishing up dinner that evening, chattering endlessly about the implications, Sergeant Yung called to Zhair'lo and drew him outside the mess.

"Walk with me, boy."

"Yes, sir."

"What happened today?"

Though the question had an air of accusation about it, it wasn't clear to Zhair'lo what specifically was wrong. He assumed that the enquiry was related to the finding of Merelda, so he began describing the entire journey, the discovery of the woman's tracks, right up until they found her and her baby.

"Go on," the Sergeant prodded patiently.

He described the construction of the stretcher, the woman's pain, the naming of the baby.

"And then ..."

There had been the march back to the forest and the Sergeant's call to arms.

"And ..."

He had taken his place, with his bow, in the line of women -

"Yes, that."

Zhair'lo stopped walking at that moment and, consequently, had to jump to catch back up to Sergeant Yung.

"I seem to recall, Recruit," his superior spoke to the air in front of them, "that I gave an order when I handed you your weapon."

"Yes, sir," Zhair'lo gulped.

"You disobeyed that order."

"Yes, sir."

Sergeant Yung's voice was still casual. They were out for a twilight stroll around the Barracks, weren't they?

"What happened today?" he repeated the question that had started the conversation.

"I - I don't know, sir. I came up to the line and my bow was in my hand before I knew it. I knew there was an injured woman behind me."

He shivered, remembering the bruises and cuts on her face.

"I couldn't - I couldn't just do nothing. When I stepped up, Mistress Aloe made a space for me, so I took it."

Sergeant Yung nodded and stopped walking, for they had reached the gate which faced outwards from the city - the same gate through which their patrol had started earlier that day.

"Your intent is laudable," the Sergeant folded his arms. "But I will remind you that you have not trained enough with us. Despite what Mistress Aloe may have felt about your competence when she gave you her firing lane, that lane is between two men with swords. We have signals you have not learned which indicate intentions toward sudden movements you would not foresee."

The Sergeant paused, tilting his head gently.

"I don't fancy an arrow in my back, you see?"

"Yes, sir."

A trace of a smile crossed his lips.

"But I understand your motivation. We absolutely will take care of these barbarians."

The Sergeant gave a jerk of his head toward a small contingent of Fighters, all wearing grey-green, hooded cloaks over their leather armour. Six of these were gathered around Ji'ann near the gate.

"Who are they?" Zhair'lo noticed them suddenly. They had been invisible in the twilight until he'd looked right at them.

"Rangers," he said. "Reporting to us on the location of those we seek. Rest assured. Merelda's pain will not go unavenged."

---===================----

By the time Zhair'lo reached the Barracks, the heavy action had already started. Bree was waiting for him, the only one facing the door, sitting patiently and watching the other couples fucking away with a slightly bemused look on her face. She was naked from the waist down, her skirt already on the floor

"Oh, thanks the gods," she called out when she saw him. "I started dripping just from watching the bunch of them. Get over here."

He walked past Del and Kit on the right, who were going with the traditional Form style: the woman with her feet firmly planted on the floor, her hips bent as far as they would go and the man pounding away from behind. Z'rus and Zia were two beds further down in the same position. Tara, on the left, was on her hands and knees, sideways across two cots that had been pushed together, getting it from Renzi, who was kneeling behind her.

When Zhair'lo reached the back of the room, Bree pulled him in for a kiss.

"You weren't in trouble, were you?"

"Kind of."

She undid his leather shorts impatiently.

"Kind of?"

"When they were capturing Berel, I took a place in the line of bows."

"Oh, dear," Bree frowned, more at his lack of erection than his report of action. "So were you in trouble or not?"

Bree pushed him onto the bed just past Tara, who was conveniently positioned to stare at him.

"Zhai," Tara remarked in a helpful tone. "She's going to need you a bit harder than that ..."

Renzi took this as cue to slap her on the ass. Tara shrieked in approval as Bree began applying her mouth.

"There wasn't any trouble, really," Zhair'lo told the room at large. "It was almost like he approved, but couldn't say so. I didn't really understand it. He was more worried that I might have shot him by accident."

Absentmindedly, he was getting harder.

"Well, think about it," Tara shuddered and let her shoulders and face go down to the mattress as Renzi's thrusts caused her body to lurch. "You were protecting an injured woman."

"So?" Zhair'lo asked. "We still had orders."

"Think, Zhai," Bree said as he straddled him. "If you were the kind of person who could ignore an injured woman, would you even be here?"

Just as the implications of this hit Zhair'lo, Bree impaled her very wet self on his erection.

...

This was strange.

Bree wasn't in a hurry.

She was ... thoughtful.

Aroused, yes, but the normal breathless build up to orgasm was absent.

It still felt good, but odd.

"You're troubled?"

"Ah, nothing."

"Seriously. What?"

Zhair'lo nudged her a little with his mind and he felt her relent.

"That baby," she shook her head. "That woman."

"Awful," Zhair'lo agreed.

Bree nodded, softly rotating her hips.

"I just saw a few Rangers by the gate," Zhair'lo added. "They said they've found the camp Merelda came from."

The mesh lit up, then. He felt it right in his gut.

"Really?" Tara asked, still getting thumped from behind. She lifted herself up on her elbows to stare at Zhair'lo. "Are you sure? Do you think we'll get to go along?"

There was a thought Zhair'lo hadn't considered: would he actually get to meet some of the Temple's enemies? That was, after all, why he'd come here.

"Ooh," Bree remarked, feeling a surge in his loins. "Finally got you going?"

"Guess so."

"It'd be nice to see that, eh?" Zia called to them from across the aisle. "Fighters going in and taking that guy down, swords and bows and all that."

This was, for Zhair'lo, a rather excessive amount of inter-couple banter, even by the very low standards of decency in these parts. He tried to shrug it off. They'd been fucking each other so often in this room that it barely bothered him anymore.

"I just can't get over it, though," Bree said, sullenness returning to their mess. "How could any man do that to a woman?"

He didn't know what to say to that.

On the one hand, he couldn't imagine hurting a woman like that either.

On the other hand, Zhair'lo had seen what the Temple did to its own women. And that was intermixed with his own guilt over what he'd been forced to do to Talla.

"I'm glad I was born here," Bree frowned. "And not out there."

"Amen to that, sister," Tara put in.

Somehow, that exchange appeared to settle the matter in Bree's mind, and she began to set to work grinding against Zhair'lo.

"You were really ready," he pointed out.

"Yeah, playing with myself while I was waiting."

"We were all watching," Tara put in helpfully, goading Zhair'lo. "It was very, very exciting."

That, Zhair'lo realized, was why they'd all been facing away from the door and why Bree's skirt had already been off.

"I missed that?" he complained, only half ironically.

"Don't worry," Tara promised. "Del promised to go next."

"I did not!"

"Focus," Bree called out, grinding him insistently. "I need to come."

"Sorry," Zhair'lo laughed.

There ensued some further hip rotation, which didn't appear to be working.

"You need me on top?"

"No," she said quickly. "Almost there, just spank me."

There was a hiccup in the mesh.

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah," Bree seemed bewildered.

"After today, though," Zhair'lo shuddered.

"Completely different!" Tara put in.

"That's not this," Bree clarified. "This is what I want for me, and it's mine to give to you."

"Oh."

"Now, hurry up!"

"Okay."

Her eagerness flowed through the mesh to him, pushing his reluctance aside. His right hand snaked around behind her and slapped her cheek.

"Harder!"

Again, he struck her cheek.

"Attaboy," Tara prodded him.

"Butt out," Bree told her. "Again!"

He spanked her over and over.

When he got to five, she shrieked, "Nine gods!"

At that point, the orgasm she'd been masturbating for finally arrived, wrapping itself tightly around his erection and forcing him to release himself deep inside her.

"Oh, gods," Bree murmured. "I haven't done it this way in months. I didn't know it could feel so good."

She slipped off him and laid herself down by his side.

"I'll bet we get that bastard tomorrow," she whispered in his ear. "I hope we get to see it."

It was very clear to Zhair'lo, the exact sense in which she meant to use the word 'bastard'.