Author's note: For those of you who have read Astera's stories, let me just say this: I "stole" nothing from her. The names of the Akrennian gods, the Mantrin god, the Gulcrecian god, and the Drej goddess I made up myself. The same with Preed's middle and last name. Astera has already read my story and has used some of it in her stories. Please do not chew my head off for similarities we have in our stories. Thank you, and have a nice day!
Salis is a pleasant little city that is noted particularly for its relatively unspoiled medieval charm. Near the center of this fine city was a restaurant named Tennivich's Palace, home and work of Anse and Aissha Tennivich, both members of the Akrennian race. Anse was asleep in his bed, oblivious to the goings-on just upstairs in the storeroom. Aissha lay cold, frightened, and half-naked on the bare floor of the storeroom, hidden between a huge sack of raw lentils and an even larger sack of flour. She was writhing in terrible pain as illicit motherhood came sweeping down on her like the avenging sword of her angry god.
She had been very late in discovering she was pregnant. She had not expected to be. Aissha wanted to believe that she was still too young for bearing babies, though she was 26 years of age. The first sign had come only about three months before. Her breasts suddenly began to fill out. That had pleased her, at first. She had always been so scrawny; but now it seemed that her body was developing at last. Boys seemed to like breasts. You could see their eyes quickly flicking down to check out your chest, though they seemed to think you didn't notice it when they did.
But now her breasts were growing fuller every week, and they started to ache a little. Her bleeding had not come, either. So Aissha began to feel fear; and when her bleeding still did not come she feared even more. But her bleeding had never come on time. Once last year she had been two months late, and she an absolute pure virgin then.
Still, there were her breasts, and then her hips seemed to be getting wider. Aissha said nothing, went about her business, chatted pleasantly with the customers, and pretended all was well. Again and again at night her hand would slide down her flat boyish belly, anxiously searching for hidden life lurking beneath the gray skin. She felt nothing.
But something was there, all right, and within a couple months it was making the faintest of bulges, only a tiny knot pushing upward below her navel, but a little bigger every day. She began wearing her blouses untucked, to hide the bulging of her belly. She opened the seams of her trousers and punched two new holes in her belt. It became harder for her to do her work, to carry the heavy trays all evening long and to put in the hours afterward washing the dishes, but she forced herself to be strong. There was no one else to do the job.
Anse scarcely glanced at anyone these days; preoccupied with his failing restaurant. That was the reason Aissha was so afraid to tell him she was pregnant. Having a child would mean that the workload would be doubled, and they would have less and less money to spare. Perhaps they would even loose the restaurant. Anse would have killed the child, she knew.
That evening, there were four tables of customers. That was a surprise, because this was a holiday night when most families ate dinner at home. Midway through the evening Aissha thought she would fall down in the middle of the room and send her tray, laden with chicken biriani and mutton vindaloo and boti kebabs and schooners of lager, spewing across the floor. She steadied herself then, but an hour later she did fall, or, rather, sag to her knees in the hallway between the kitchen and the garbage bin where no one could see her. She crouched there, dizzy, sweating, gasping, nauseated, feeling her bowels quaking and strange spasms running down the front of her body and into her thighs; and after a time she rose and continued on with her tray toward the bin.
It will be this very night, she had thought.
And here she was on the floor of the storeroom again, with her trousers off and the shiny swollen hump of her belly sending messages of agony through her body. Her only covering was a threadbare blanket that reeked of spilled cooking oil. Her water had burst around midnight. That was when she had crept up the stairs to wait in terror for the great disaster of her life to finish happening. The contractions were coming closer and closer together, like little earthquakes within her. Now the time had to be two, three, maybe four in the morning. How long would it be? Another hour? Six? Twelve?
Relent and call Anse to help her? No. No. She didn't dare. Aissha's pain was becoming too great for her to give much more thought to anything else except what was happening within her, the flames dancing through her brain, the rippling of her belly, the implacable downward movement of… of… something.
"Praise be to Nihil, Lord of the Universe, the Compassionate, the Merciful," she murmured timidly. "There is no god but Nihil, and Tekkis is His prophet." And again. "Praise be to Nihil, Lord of the Universe." And again. And again. The pain was terrible. She was splitting wide open. That something had begun to move in a spiral through her now, like a corkscrew driving a hot track in her flesh.
"Tekkis! Tekkis! Tekkis! There is no god but Nihil!" The words burst from her with no timidity at all, now. Let Tekkis and Nihil save her, if they really existed. What good were they, if they would not save her, she so innocent, her life barely begun? And then, as a spear of fire gutted her and her pelvic bones seemed to crack apart, she let loose a torrent of other names. Mat'keth, the Gulcrecian God; Aresi, the Mantrin God; Jesus, the human God, even Tsreaa, the Drej Goddess; anyone at all who would help her through this, anyone, anyone, anyone!
She screamed three times, short, sharp, piercing screams.
She felt a terrible inner wrenching and the baby came spurting out of her with astonishing swiftness, and a gush of blood followed it, a reeking red river that would not stop flowing. Aissha knew at once that she was going to die. Something wrong had happened. Everything would come out of her insides and she would die.
Already, just moments after the birth, an eerie new calmness was enfolding her. She had no energy left now for further screaming, or even to look at the baby. It was somewhere down between her spread thighs, that was all she knew. She lay back, drowning in a rising pool of blood and sweat. She raised her arms toward the ceiling and brought them down again to clutch her throbbing breasts, stiff now with milk. She called now upon no more holy names. She hardly remembered her own.
She sobbed quietly. She trembled. She tried not to move, because that would surely make the bleeding worse. An hour went by, or a week, or a year. Then an anguished voice high above her in the dark: "What? Aissha? Oh, my god, my god, my god!" Anse, it was. Bending to her, engulfing her. The slim arm raising her head, lifting it against his warm chest.
"Can you hear me Aissha? Oh, Aissha! My god, my god!" And then an ululation of grief rising from her husband's throat like some hot volcanic geyser bursting from the ground. "Aissha! Aissha!" "The baby?" Aissha said, in the tiniest of voices. "Yes! Here! Here! Can you see?" Aissha saw nothing but a red haze. "A boy?" she asked, very faintly. "A boy, yes."
In the blur of her dimming vision she thought she saw something small and gray, smeared with scarlet, resting in her husband's hands. Thought she could hear him crying, even. "You won't… kill him, Anse?" Anse's eyes widened in disbelief. "No, no of course not! Why would you think of such a thing?!" Aissha whispered, "There wouldn't be enough money to support him…" Anse gripped Aissha closer to him. "That doesn't matter. We'd manage, you know we would!" He stopped and asked, "Do you want to hold him?"
"No. No." Aissha understood clearly that she was going. The last of her strength had left her. "He is strong and beautiful. A splendid boy," Anse murmured. "Then I am very happy." Aissha fought for one last fragment of energy. "His name… is… Preed. Preed Haleem Tennivich."
Anse could see that she was leaving him. "This is shameful, giving birth by yourself, alone in the dark, in this awful room! Why did you never say anything? Why did you hide it from me? I would have helped. I would…"
But Aissha Tennivich was already dead. The first shaft of morning light now came through the grimy window of the upstairs storeroom. A new day had begun.
* * *
Preed was sixteen years old now. Like any normal Akrennian teenager, he went to school. He attended church twice a week, did his homework, and helped out around the house. But the thing that set him apart from the other Akrennian children was his attitude and upbringing. He hadn't started out that way. He used to be respectable, submissive to his father. He would do as he was told as quickly and efficiently as he could, though no matter how hard he tried, it was never good enough for Anse. Now that Preed was becoming a young adult, he was getting to be snide, sarcastic, and had developed his vocabulary to the point where he sometimes made adults sound like children with the way he elegantly and contemptuously phrased things.
Preed was an outcast in school. He rarely talked to anyone, and when he did, he did with such elegance and disdain that people began to dislike him for it. He had a wolfish grin that wouldn't look right on anyone else, and his tall, lean form and graceful step gave him a rather arrogant look. But the thing that people noticed most were his eyes. They were a wolfish yellow, with yellowish green irises, but that wasn't an unusual color. What set him aside was that he had no spark of life in his eyes. There was only a dull, miserable, suffering look.
Everyone knew why this was so. His mother had died giving birth to him, and his father had blamed Preed for killing her. Anse was gone most of the day. He worked in a nearby city of Wincht, driving back and forth in his silver hovercraft. Preed had never been far from Salis. Sometimes he would wonder what kind of work his father did, but he asked about it only once. The words were barely out of his mouth when his father's long arm came snaking around and struck him across the face, splitting his lower lip and sending a dribble of blood down his chin.
Preed had staggered back, not understanding what had been so wrong about the question he had asked. "You must never ask that again!" his father had said, looming high above him. His cold eyes were even colder, now, in his fury. "What I do in Wincht is no business of yours, nor anyone else's, do you hear me, boy? It is my own private affair. My own. Private. Affair."
He never asked about his father's work again, no. But he was hit again, more than once, indeed with fair regularity. Hitting was Anse's way of expressing irritation. And it was difficult to predict what sort of thing might irritate him. Any sort of intrusion on his father's privacy, though, seemed to do it.
Once, while talking with his father in his bedroom, telling him about a bloody fight between two boys that he had witnessed in town, Preed unthinkingly put his hand on the musical instrument that Anse always kept leaning against his wall beside his bed, giving it only a single strum, something that he had occasionally wanted to do for months; and instantly, hardly before the twanging note had died away, Anse unleashed his arm and knocked Preed back against the wall. "You keep your filthy fingers off that instrument, boy!" Anse said. And after that Preed did.
Another time Anse struck him for leafing through a book his father had left on the kitchen table that had pictures of naked female Akrennians in it. And another time, for staring too long at Anse as he stood before his mirror in the morning, shaving. So Preed learned to keep his distance from his father, but he still found himself getting slapped for this reason and that, and many times for no reason at all. The blows were hard and sometimes left bruises, and after a time they didn't hurt as much. But they were blows, all the same. He stored them all up in some secret receptacle of his soul.
Occasionally Anse would hit his new wife Kalifa too… When dinner was late, or when she put mutton curry on the table too often, or when it seemed to him that she had contradicted him about something. That was more of a shock to Preed than getting slapped himself, that anyone should dare lift his hand to Kalifa. Preed cared about Kalifa, because she was the only one in the world that was ever kind to him like a mother would be, and she was the only other person who knew what it was like to suffer this way.
The first time it happened, about a month after Kalifa and Anse were wed, occurred while they were eating dinner. A big carving knife was lying on the table near Preed, and he might well have reached for it had Kalifa not, in the midst of her own fury and humiliation and pain, sent Preed a message with her furious blazing eyes that he absolutely was not to do any such thing. And so he controlled himself, then and any time afterward when Anse hit her.
Anse did not seem to have many friends, at least not friends who visited the house. Preed knew of only three, all of which were Akrennians. There was a male named Arch who sometimes came, an older male that always brought a bottle of whiskey, and he and Anse would sit in Anse's room with the door closed, talking in low tones or singing raucous songs. Preed would find the empty whiskey bottle the following morning, lying on the hallway floor. He kept them, setting them up in a row amidst the restaurant debris behind the house, to use as target practice for his homemade slingshot.
The only other male that came was Syd, who had a flatter muzzle than most Akrennians and thicker fingers. He also gave off such a bad smell that Preed was able to detect it in the house four days later. Once, when Syd was there, Anse emerged from his room and called to Kalifa, and she went in there and shut the door behind her and was still in there when Preed went to sleep. He never asked her about that, what had gone on in Anse's room. Some instinct told him that he would rather not know.
There was also a female: Cassadra, her name was, tall and gaunt and very plain, with a long face and very bad skin. She came once in a while for dinner, and Anse always specified that Kalifa was to prepare something nice, and none of those spicy curries tonight, if you please. After they ate, Anse and Cassadra would go into Anse's room and not emerge again that evening, and the sounds of the guitar would be heard, and laughter, and then low cries and moans and grunts.
One time in the middle of the night when Cassadra was there, Preed got up to go to the bathroom just at the same time she did, and encountered her in the hallway, stark naked in the moonlight, a long grayish white ghostly figure. He had never seen a woman naked until this moment, not a real one, only the pictures in Anse's magazine; but he looked up at her calmly, with that deep abiding steadiness in the face of any sort of surprise that he had mastered so well. Coolly he surveyed her, his eyes rising from the long thin legs that went up and up from the floor, and from there his gaze mounted to her chest, and at last to her face, which in the moonlight had unexpectedly taken on a sort of handsomeness if not actual comeliness, though before this Cassadra had always seemed to him tremendously ugly. She didn't seem displeased at being seen like this. She smiled and winked at him, and blew him a kiss as she drifted on past him toward the bathroom. It was the only time anyone associated with Anse had ever been nice to him, or had even appeared to notice him at all.
* * *
A couple of years later, things took a turn for the worse in the Tennivich restaurant. Anse had always treated Kalifa badly all along, of course. He treated everyone badly. He regarded her as his servant, not his wife, there purely to do his bidding, and woe betide her if she failed to meet his expectations. She cooked, she cleaned the house; Preed understood now that sometimes, at his whim, Anse would make her come into his bedroom to amuse him or his friend Syd or both of them together. And there was never a word of complaint out of her. She did as he wished; she showed no sign of anger or even resentment; she had given herself entirely over to the will of Nihil.
Preed, who had found no convincing evidence of Nihil's existence, had not. But he had learned the art of accepting the unacceptable from Kalifa. He knew better than to try to change the unchangeable. So he lived with his hatred for Anse, and that was merely a fact of daily existence, like the fact that rain did not fall upward. Now, though, Anse had gone too far.
Coming home plainly drunk, red-faced, enraged over something, muttering to himself. Greeting Kalifa with a growling curse, Preed with a stinging slap. No apparent reason for either. Demanding his dinner early. Getting it, not liking what he got. Kalifa offering mild explanations of why beef had not been available today. Anse shouting that beef bloody well should have been available to the household of Anse Tennivich.
So far, just normal Anse behavior when Anse was having a bad day. Even sweeping the serving bowl of curried mutton off the table, sending it shattering, thick oily brown sauce splattering everywhere, fell within the normal Anse range.
But then, Kalifa was saying softly, despondently, looking down at what had been her prettiest remaining sari now spotted in twenty places, "You have stained my clothing." And Anse going over the top. Erupting. Berserk. Wrath out of all measure to the offense, if offense there had been.
Leaping at her, bellowing, shaking her, slapping her, punching her, even, in the face. In the chest. Seizing the sari at her midriff, ripping it away, tearing it in shreds, crumpling them and hurling them at her. Kalifa backing away from him, trembling, eyes wide with fear, dabbing at the blood that seeped from her cut lower lip with one hand, spreading the other one out to cover herself at the thighs.
Preed staring, not knowing what to do, horrified, furious. Anse yelling, "I'll stain you, I will! I'll give you a sodding stain!" Grabbing her by the wrist, pulling away what remained of her clothing, stripping her all but naked right there in the dining room. Preed covered his face. His own stepmother, forty years old, decent, respectable, naked before him. How could he look?
And yet, how could he tolerate what was happening? Anse dragging her out of the room, now, toward his bedroom, not troubling even to close the door. Hurling her down on his bed, falling on top of her, grunting like a pig.
I must not permit this.
Preed's chest surged with hatred. A cold hatred, almost dispassionate. The man was a demon. His father. An evil demon. But what did that make him?
Preed found himself going into the room after them, against all prohibitions, despite all risks. Seeing Anse plunked between Kalifa's legs. Kalifa, staring upward past Anse's shoulder at the frozen Preed in the doorway, her face a rigid mask of horror and shame, gesturing to him, a repeated brushing movement of her hand through the air, telling him to go away, get out of the room, not to watch, not to intervene in any way.
Preed ran from the house and crouched cowering amid the rubble in the rear yard, the old stewpots and broken jugs and his own collection of Arch's empty whiskey bottles. When he returned, an hour later, Anse was back at the table complaining in a boozy voice how awful the food was. Kalifa was dressed again, moving about in a slow, downcast way, cleaning up the mess in the dining room. Sobbing softly. Saying nothing, not even looking at Preed as he entered.
Her cheeks looked puffy and bruised. There seemed to be a wall around her. She was sealed away inside herself, sealed from all the world, even from him. "I will kill him," Preed said quietly to her. "No. That you will not do." Her voice was deep and remote, a voice from the bottom of the sea. "Then… I will leave. There is no point in my staying here, there never was. Come with me, Kalifa. We will be free from Anse's reign of terror." But Kalifa slowly shook her head. She had accepted that this was how she was to live her life, because it was the will of Nihil.
Preed went to pack up what few belongings he had and was about to walk out of the house when Kalifa gently touched his shoulder and whispered, "Good luck." Preed nodded, flashing her a small smile as he walked out. Anse didn't even notice, he was still complaining about the quality of the food. He wouldn't notice Preed was gone until a week later, but he didn't seem to care.
To Be Continued...
Salis is a pleasant little city that is noted particularly for its relatively unspoiled medieval charm. Near the center of this fine city was a restaurant named Tennivich's Palace, home and work of Anse and Aissha Tennivich, both members of the Akrennian race. Anse was asleep in his bed, oblivious to the goings-on just upstairs in the storeroom. Aissha lay cold, frightened, and half-naked on the bare floor of the storeroom, hidden between a huge sack of raw lentils and an even larger sack of flour. She was writhing in terrible pain as illicit motherhood came sweeping down on her like the avenging sword of her angry god.
She had been very late in discovering she was pregnant. She had not expected to be. Aissha wanted to believe that she was still too young for bearing babies, though she was 26 years of age. The first sign had come only about three months before. Her breasts suddenly began to fill out. That had pleased her, at first. She had always been so scrawny; but now it seemed that her body was developing at last. Boys seemed to like breasts. You could see their eyes quickly flicking down to check out your chest, though they seemed to think you didn't notice it when they did.
But now her breasts were growing fuller every week, and they started to ache a little. Her bleeding had not come, either. So Aissha began to feel fear; and when her bleeding still did not come she feared even more. But her bleeding had never come on time. Once last year she had been two months late, and she an absolute pure virgin then.
Still, there were her breasts, and then her hips seemed to be getting wider. Aissha said nothing, went about her business, chatted pleasantly with the customers, and pretended all was well. Again and again at night her hand would slide down her flat boyish belly, anxiously searching for hidden life lurking beneath the gray skin. She felt nothing.
But something was there, all right, and within a couple months it was making the faintest of bulges, only a tiny knot pushing upward below her navel, but a little bigger every day. She began wearing her blouses untucked, to hide the bulging of her belly. She opened the seams of her trousers and punched two new holes in her belt. It became harder for her to do her work, to carry the heavy trays all evening long and to put in the hours afterward washing the dishes, but she forced herself to be strong. There was no one else to do the job.
Anse scarcely glanced at anyone these days; preoccupied with his failing restaurant. That was the reason Aissha was so afraid to tell him she was pregnant. Having a child would mean that the workload would be doubled, and they would have less and less money to spare. Perhaps they would even loose the restaurant. Anse would have killed the child, she knew.
That evening, there were four tables of customers. That was a surprise, because this was a holiday night when most families ate dinner at home. Midway through the evening Aissha thought she would fall down in the middle of the room and send her tray, laden with chicken biriani and mutton vindaloo and boti kebabs and schooners of lager, spewing across the floor. She steadied herself then, but an hour later she did fall, or, rather, sag to her knees in the hallway between the kitchen and the garbage bin where no one could see her. She crouched there, dizzy, sweating, gasping, nauseated, feeling her bowels quaking and strange spasms running down the front of her body and into her thighs; and after a time she rose and continued on with her tray toward the bin.
It will be this very night, she had thought.
And here she was on the floor of the storeroom again, with her trousers off and the shiny swollen hump of her belly sending messages of agony through her body. Her only covering was a threadbare blanket that reeked of spilled cooking oil. Her water had burst around midnight. That was when she had crept up the stairs to wait in terror for the great disaster of her life to finish happening. The contractions were coming closer and closer together, like little earthquakes within her. Now the time had to be two, three, maybe four in the morning. How long would it be? Another hour? Six? Twelve?
Relent and call Anse to help her? No. No. She didn't dare. Aissha's pain was becoming too great for her to give much more thought to anything else except what was happening within her, the flames dancing through her brain, the rippling of her belly, the implacable downward movement of… of… something.
"Praise be to Nihil, Lord of the Universe, the Compassionate, the Merciful," she murmured timidly. "There is no god but Nihil, and Tekkis is His prophet." And again. "Praise be to Nihil, Lord of the Universe." And again. And again. The pain was terrible. She was splitting wide open. That something had begun to move in a spiral through her now, like a corkscrew driving a hot track in her flesh.
"Tekkis! Tekkis! Tekkis! There is no god but Nihil!" The words burst from her with no timidity at all, now. Let Tekkis and Nihil save her, if they really existed. What good were they, if they would not save her, she so innocent, her life barely begun? And then, as a spear of fire gutted her and her pelvic bones seemed to crack apart, she let loose a torrent of other names. Mat'keth, the Gulcrecian God; Aresi, the Mantrin God; Jesus, the human God, even Tsreaa, the Drej Goddess; anyone at all who would help her through this, anyone, anyone, anyone!
She screamed three times, short, sharp, piercing screams.
She felt a terrible inner wrenching and the baby came spurting out of her with astonishing swiftness, and a gush of blood followed it, a reeking red river that would not stop flowing. Aissha knew at once that she was going to die. Something wrong had happened. Everything would come out of her insides and she would die.
Already, just moments after the birth, an eerie new calmness was enfolding her. She had no energy left now for further screaming, or even to look at the baby. It was somewhere down between her spread thighs, that was all she knew. She lay back, drowning in a rising pool of blood and sweat. She raised her arms toward the ceiling and brought them down again to clutch her throbbing breasts, stiff now with milk. She called now upon no more holy names. She hardly remembered her own.
She sobbed quietly. She trembled. She tried not to move, because that would surely make the bleeding worse. An hour went by, or a week, or a year. Then an anguished voice high above her in the dark: "What? Aissha? Oh, my god, my god, my god!" Anse, it was. Bending to her, engulfing her. The slim arm raising her head, lifting it against his warm chest.
"Can you hear me Aissha? Oh, Aissha! My god, my god!" And then an ululation of grief rising from her husband's throat like some hot volcanic geyser bursting from the ground. "Aissha! Aissha!" "The baby?" Aissha said, in the tiniest of voices. "Yes! Here! Here! Can you see?" Aissha saw nothing but a red haze. "A boy?" she asked, very faintly. "A boy, yes."
In the blur of her dimming vision she thought she saw something small and gray, smeared with scarlet, resting in her husband's hands. Thought she could hear him crying, even. "You won't… kill him, Anse?" Anse's eyes widened in disbelief. "No, no of course not! Why would you think of such a thing?!" Aissha whispered, "There wouldn't be enough money to support him…" Anse gripped Aissha closer to him. "That doesn't matter. We'd manage, you know we would!" He stopped and asked, "Do you want to hold him?"
"No. No." Aissha understood clearly that she was going. The last of her strength had left her. "He is strong and beautiful. A splendid boy," Anse murmured. "Then I am very happy." Aissha fought for one last fragment of energy. "His name… is… Preed. Preed Haleem Tennivich."
Anse could see that she was leaving him. "This is shameful, giving birth by yourself, alone in the dark, in this awful room! Why did you never say anything? Why did you hide it from me? I would have helped. I would…"
But Aissha Tennivich was already dead. The first shaft of morning light now came through the grimy window of the upstairs storeroom. A new day had begun.
* * *
Preed was sixteen years old now. Like any normal Akrennian teenager, he went to school. He attended church twice a week, did his homework, and helped out around the house. But the thing that set him apart from the other Akrennian children was his attitude and upbringing. He hadn't started out that way. He used to be respectable, submissive to his father. He would do as he was told as quickly and efficiently as he could, though no matter how hard he tried, it was never good enough for Anse. Now that Preed was becoming a young adult, he was getting to be snide, sarcastic, and had developed his vocabulary to the point where he sometimes made adults sound like children with the way he elegantly and contemptuously phrased things.
Preed was an outcast in school. He rarely talked to anyone, and when he did, he did with such elegance and disdain that people began to dislike him for it. He had a wolfish grin that wouldn't look right on anyone else, and his tall, lean form and graceful step gave him a rather arrogant look. But the thing that people noticed most were his eyes. They were a wolfish yellow, with yellowish green irises, but that wasn't an unusual color. What set him aside was that he had no spark of life in his eyes. There was only a dull, miserable, suffering look.
Everyone knew why this was so. His mother had died giving birth to him, and his father had blamed Preed for killing her. Anse was gone most of the day. He worked in a nearby city of Wincht, driving back and forth in his silver hovercraft. Preed had never been far from Salis. Sometimes he would wonder what kind of work his father did, but he asked about it only once. The words were barely out of his mouth when his father's long arm came snaking around and struck him across the face, splitting his lower lip and sending a dribble of blood down his chin.
Preed had staggered back, not understanding what had been so wrong about the question he had asked. "You must never ask that again!" his father had said, looming high above him. His cold eyes were even colder, now, in his fury. "What I do in Wincht is no business of yours, nor anyone else's, do you hear me, boy? It is my own private affair. My own. Private. Affair."
He never asked about his father's work again, no. But he was hit again, more than once, indeed with fair regularity. Hitting was Anse's way of expressing irritation. And it was difficult to predict what sort of thing might irritate him. Any sort of intrusion on his father's privacy, though, seemed to do it.
Once, while talking with his father in his bedroom, telling him about a bloody fight between two boys that he had witnessed in town, Preed unthinkingly put his hand on the musical instrument that Anse always kept leaning against his wall beside his bed, giving it only a single strum, something that he had occasionally wanted to do for months; and instantly, hardly before the twanging note had died away, Anse unleashed his arm and knocked Preed back against the wall. "You keep your filthy fingers off that instrument, boy!" Anse said. And after that Preed did.
Another time Anse struck him for leafing through a book his father had left on the kitchen table that had pictures of naked female Akrennians in it. And another time, for staring too long at Anse as he stood before his mirror in the morning, shaving. So Preed learned to keep his distance from his father, but he still found himself getting slapped for this reason and that, and many times for no reason at all. The blows were hard and sometimes left bruises, and after a time they didn't hurt as much. But they were blows, all the same. He stored them all up in some secret receptacle of his soul.
Occasionally Anse would hit his new wife Kalifa too… When dinner was late, or when she put mutton curry on the table too often, or when it seemed to him that she had contradicted him about something. That was more of a shock to Preed than getting slapped himself, that anyone should dare lift his hand to Kalifa. Preed cared about Kalifa, because she was the only one in the world that was ever kind to him like a mother would be, and she was the only other person who knew what it was like to suffer this way.
The first time it happened, about a month after Kalifa and Anse were wed, occurred while they were eating dinner. A big carving knife was lying on the table near Preed, and he might well have reached for it had Kalifa not, in the midst of her own fury and humiliation and pain, sent Preed a message with her furious blazing eyes that he absolutely was not to do any such thing. And so he controlled himself, then and any time afterward when Anse hit her.
Anse did not seem to have many friends, at least not friends who visited the house. Preed knew of only three, all of which were Akrennians. There was a male named Arch who sometimes came, an older male that always brought a bottle of whiskey, and he and Anse would sit in Anse's room with the door closed, talking in low tones or singing raucous songs. Preed would find the empty whiskey bottle the following morning, lying on the hallway floor. He kept them, setting them up in a row amidst the restaurant debris behind the house, to use as target practice for his homemade slingshot.
The only other male that came was Syd, who had a flatter muzzle than most Akrennians and thicker fingers. He also gave off such a bad smell that Preed was able to detect it in the house four days later. Once, when Syd was there, Anse emerged from his room and called to Kalifa, and she went in there and shut the door behind her and was still in there when Preed went to sleep. He never asked her about that, what had gone on in Anse's room. Some instinct told him that he would rather not know.
There was also a female: Cassadra, her name was, tall and gaunt and very plain, with a long face and very bad skin. She came once in a while for dinner, and Anse always specified that Kalifa was to prepare something nice, and none of those spicy curries tonight, if you please. After they ate, Anse and Cassadra would go into Anse's room and not emerge again that evening, and the sounds of the guitar would be heard, and laughter, and then low cries and moans and grunts.
One time in the middle of the night when Cassadra was there, Preed got up to go to the bathroom just at the same time she did, and encountered her in the hallway, stark naked in the moonlight, a long grayish white ghostly figure. He had never seen a woman naked until this moment, not a real one, only the pictures in Anse's magazine; but he looked up at her calmly, with that deep abiding steadiness in the face of any sort of surprise that he had mastered so well. Coolly he surveyed her, his eyes rising from the long thin legs that went up and up from the floor, and from there his gaze mounted to her chest, and at last to her face, which in the moonlight had unexpectedly taken on a sort of handsomeness if not actual comeliness, though before this Cassadra had always seemed to him tremendously ugly. She didn't seem displeased at being seen like this. She smiled and winked at him, and blew him a kiss as she drifted on past him toward the bathroom. It was the only time anyone associated with Anse had ever been nice to him, or had even appeared to notice him at all.
* * *
A couple of years later, things took a turn for the worse in the Tennivich restaurant. Anse had always treated Kalifa badly all along, of course. He treated everyone badly. He regarded her as his servant, not his wife, there purely to do his bidding, and woe betide her if she failed to meet his expectations. She cooked, she cleaned the house; Preed understood now that sometimes, at his whim, Anse would make her come into his bedroom to amuse him or his friend Syd or both of them together. And there was never a word of complaint out of her. She did as he wished; she showed no sign of anger or even resentment; she had given herself entirely over to the will of Nihil.
Preed, who had found no convincing evidence of Nihil's existence, had not. But he had learned the art of accepting the unacceptable from Kalifa. He knew better than to try to change the unchangeable. So he lived with his hatred for Anse, and that was merely a fact of daily existence, like the fact that rain did not fall upward. Now, though, Anse had gone too far.
Coming home plainly drunk, red-faced, enraged over something, muttering to himself. Greeting Kalifa with a growling curse, Preed with a stinging slap. No apparent reason for either. Demanding his dinner early. Getting it, not liking what he got. Kalifa offering mild explanations of why beef had not been available today. Anse shouting that beef bloody well should have been available to the household of Anse Tennivich.
So far, just normal Anse behavior when Anse was having a bad day. Even sweeping the serving bowl of curried mutton off the table, sending it shattering, thick oily brown sauce splattering everywhere, fell within the normal Anse range.
But then, Kalifa was saying softly, despondently, looking down at what had been her prettiest remaining sari now spotted in twenty places, "You have stained my clothing." And Anse going over the top. Erupting. Berserk. Wrath out of all measure to the offense, if offense there had been.
Leaping at her, bellowing, shaking her, slapping her, punching her, even, in the face. In the chest. Seizing the sari at her midriff, ripping it away, tearing it in shreds, crumpling them and hurling them at her. Kalifa backing away from him, trembling, eyes wide with fear, dabbing at the blood that seeped from her cut lower lip with one hand, spreading the other one out to cover herself at the thighs.
Preed staring, not knowing what to do, horrified, furious. Anse yelling, "I'll stain you, I will! I'll give you a sodding stain!" Grabbing her by the wrist, pulling away what remained of her clothing, stripping her all but naked right there in the dining room. Preed covered his face. His own stepmother, forty years old, decent, respectable, naked before him. How could he look?
And yet, how could he tolerate what was happening? Anse dragging her out of the room, now, toward his bedroom, not troubling even to close the door. Hurling her down on his bed, falling on top of her, grunting like a pig.
I must not permit this.
Preed's chest surged with hatred. A cold hatred, almost dispassionate. The man was a demon. His father. An evil demon. But what did that make him?
Preed found himself going into the room after them, against all prohibitions, despite all risks. Seeing Anse plunked between Kalifa's legs. Kalifa, staring upward past Anse's shoulder at the frozen Preed in the doorway, her face a rigid mask of horror and shame, gesturing to him, a repeated brushing movement of her hand through the air, telling him to go away, get out of the room, not to watch, not to intervene in any way.
Preed ran from the house and crouched cowering amid the rubble in the rear yard, the old stewpots and broken jugs and his own collection of Arch's empty whiskey bottles. When he returned, an hour later, Anse was back at the table complaining in a boozy voice how awful the food was. Kalifa was dressed again, moving about in a slow, downcast way, cleaning up the mess in the dining room. Sobbing softly. Saying nothing, not even looking at Preed as he entered.
Her cheeks looked puffy and bruised. There seemed to be a wall around her. She was sealed away inside herself, sealed from all the world, even from him. "I will kill him," Preed said quietly to her. "No. That you will not do." Her voice was deep and remote, a voice from the bottom of the sea. "Then… I will leave. There is no point in my staying here, there never was. Come with me, Kalifa. We will be free from Anse's reign of terror." But Kalifa slowly shook her head. She had accepted that this was how she was to live her life, because it was the will of Nihil.
Preed went to pack up what few belongings he had and was about to walk out of the house when Kalifa gently touched his shoulder and whispered, "Good luck." Preed nodded, flashing her a small smile as he walked out. Anse didn't even notice, he was still complaining about the quality of the food. He wouldn't notice Preed was gone until a week later, but he didn't seem to care.
To Be Continued...