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Only, if it was a delusion, then it was a delusion shared by more than one man, because Gahn Thaleo turned to me and said, “As champion of this round, you are the one who gets to choose who cleans and heals your wounds. I suppose one of the new women could refuse to go with you, but either way-” he gestured his tail towards Fiona “-it does not have to be her.”
“Yes it does,” I said, my heart beating so fast there was a good chance it would push all my blood out of my body at this rate. “It has to be her.”
“Very well,” Gahn Thaleo said, and he said it rather quickly, as if wanting to agree with me before I changed my mind. Perhaps before I decided to choose Nasrin as my attendant instead of Fiona. Not that I would. But as his sight stars once again went to Nasrin, I was sure that was the direction his thoughts had gone.
I stood motionless, still holding my ruined scrap of a loincloth in front of myself. It was too shredded to tie up again but it also did not seem right to stand in front of all these Deep Sky people and their children without some sort of covering.
Zaria handed Fiona something. It looked like a jar of Vrika’s blood and a pile of clean squares of hide. Then Zaria pointed further down the valley, past a ledge of shimmering blue stone. Fiona moved her head up and down, bundled her jar and hides into the crook of one arm, then raised the other in my direction, flapping her hand in an obvious come here sort of gesture.
Like someone had fastened a cord to my spine and tugged it forward through my guts, my body jerked into motion, following her. She hurried on her flat little feet, almost as if trying to keep ahead of me a few paces as I advanced on her from behind. It did not take long, even in my injured state, to catch up to her. I may have been bloodied but my legs worked just fine.
“Zaria said that there’s a special little clearing over here with a cool spring where the champion goes to have a ceremonial bath and get his wounds cleaned,” she said, her voice slightly squeaky. “I figured you wouldn’t be interested in the bath part, though.”
“Correct,” I grunted. I knew the general direction we were walking. I’d flown this way on the back of the braxilk in the race, but I hadn’t had much of a chance to look down at the landscape during the flight. I’d been too focused on not falling off the cursed thing, watching for signs that it would simply heave me off its back mid-flight. So when Fiona gasped and said, “Oh, wow, this must be it!” and stopped walking, it was not in a place I recognized.
But she was right – this had to be it. If ever a Deep Sky person could have conceived of somewhere for a ceremonial bath, this would have been it, because there was so much foul water flowing through the place it was practically unavoidable.
The clearing was small, largely protected by close walls of mountain stone, much of the area cast into shade. At least the shade I could appreciate, because that would be good for Fiona, and her vulnerable skin would not burn while she tried to heal mine. There was not much stone to sit or walk upon – just enough for two people – and most of the space was dominated by a large, clear pool of cold water. The water was not still. It bubbled and frothed as more of the stuff rolled down the side of one of the mountains in a silvery river, agitating its surface. That side of the clearing, the one with the water rolling down the mountain, was cast in sunlight, and wherever the water crashed into rock or the pool, it misted upwards and turned multi-coloured, shimmering and bright.
All in all, a rather ugly scene.
But there was one beautiful thing in it, and she was walking towards the water with a look of wonder on her human face. She put down her jar and her hides in the shade and pushed back her hood.
“That’s a gorgeous waterfall,” she said, her eyes on the water.
“Is that what it is called?”
“Oh. Yeah. I guess so. That’s what we call them on Earth so I just put the Sea Sand words water and fall together. You don’t have a word for it?”
“There are no waterfalls in the Sea Sands. There are the heated springs you new women seem so fond of, but nothing like this.” I flicked my claws distastefully at the display, feeling dry, sticky blood cracking along my knuckles as I stretched them.
“Alright. Well. Enough admiring the sights. Time to get to work.” Fiona pulled at the tab on her cloak at the base of her throat, peeling the garment away from her body and folding it upon the stone.
“Here,” she said. “You can sit there.”
“I’m not going to sit on your cloak,” I told her, shocked that she’d even suggest such a thing. “I’ll get it filthy.”
“You’re injured! I’m not just going to make you sit on the hard stone!”
I looked at her, looked at her cloak, and then very pointedly sat down on the bare stone beside it.
“Use it yourself,” I told her, still awkwardly holding my loincloth in front of myself. “You’ll need a cushion for your knees.” I leaned back against a jagged incline of glinting stone behind me, watching with slightly confused amusement when she nearly jumped out of her own hide in response.
“Don’t do that!” she gasped. “Your back is all torn up! Don’t go leaning it up against random-ass rocks!”
“Why not? Just start with the wounds at my front,” I suggested. The wounds on my back were pulsing something fierce, but that wasn’t enough to detract from the fact that it actually felt rather good to sit down and lean back. I let go of my loincloth, letting it drape over my cock, then placed my hands behind my head, stretching my legs out in front.
I hadn’t felt any fatigue during the combat round, but now that my fighting instincts had died down, my body was weary. It was not an unpleasant sensation. In fact, it was one I savoured. That buzzing sort of heaviness in the limbs. I’d often thought, while feeling this way after a good hunt or a fight, that the perfect accompaniment to such a sensation would be a soft female curled against me in the quiet.
And here one was.
Though she was not quietly curled against me. No, she was pacing back and forth, pointing and gesticulating, admonishing me about wound care and infections and haven’t I ever heard of a little thing called sepsis? Which, no, I had not heard of that, but I did not interrupt her tirade to tell her so.
She finished speaking and frowned fiercely at me, at least as fiercely as a face as rounded and sweet as hers could manage. When it became clear that I had no plans to remove my back from the stone, at least, not yet, she sighed and got down on her knees on top of her folded cloak beside me, snatching at the jar and fiddling with the dozen or so squares of hide.
She still wore that pokey little frown, and I wondered why she’d volunteered to do this at all if it seemed to give her so much displeasure.
“Why are you here?”
