Womb of the New World
Chapter 4
I sit next to my father who is heartily shaking hands with Balwar’s father. Balwar is pretty enough but not particularly interesting. He likes to weave, an odd profession for a male, and some of our clanspeople have commented that he might not be meant for women.
I don’t care either way – I hope to avoid the actual promising for as long as I can, and if I’m brave enough …
Where had my mother gone? Should I try to find her, and disappear like all the rest? There were stories of enslaved clansmen, of women torn apart. Did I want to risk that?
As Balwar smiles awkwardly and takes my hand, I stare down at it between us, then look away. I am now betrothed. Both sets of parents smile at us, eager to plan a future for us that I don’t want to see.
“You’re mad, Immy, you can’t come!”
Rolley shoves his fingers through his hair in frustration and I give him a grim smile, attaching a thin breastplate of leather armor around my chest.
“I’ve been trained along with the rest of you.”
“Preparation for invasion and an expedition are two different things, Immy. I am not going to lose you to—“
“To what?” I spin to him, baring my teeth, and see the flash of anger and resentment in his eyes. He is still angry that I am betrothed to someone else, even if he will still be able to bed me whenever I feel the urge.
“It’s dangerous up there,” he finally says, voice low and tense.
“I am my own person, Rolley. No one will stop me.”
“Be careful, little Imogenne,” came a sly whisper from a group of women passing us near the racks where we keep our weapons. I whirl and see Luna rubbing her cheek with her dirty fingers, a decided leer on her lips.
“I can still smell you,” she adds, and she shuffles off into the crowd of older women carrying baskets to their next destination.
We trek up through the damo, the men’s grumbles evident as we march. My father is not in the group, but he yelled at me before we departed. I closed my ears to everything coming out of his mouth, thinking of only one thing – my mother. The mother he never went after, never rescued or followed.
As we near the top, the head scout whispers and signals back. Rolley, in charge of me and at risk of attack from my father if I don’t survive, turns to murmur in my ear.
“Two hours after nightfall. Clear, plants are thick. We will sweep right behind the trees, then down into the valley. We’re gathering no more than five livestock, and if you hear anyone kinut, run.”
Kinut is our tribe’s way of whistling, a mix of low throaty trills so deep you can barely hear them, and the mask of bird sounds. They imply that birds are in the trees sleeping, and potentially being disturbed. The sound means danger, and to escape as quickly as you can to the nearest meeting point. If you don’t know where that is or how to get there, you do your best to make your way back to the entrance you came from.
I have had my share of the viable women. They do, as Avgar described, have seemingly never-ending wombs, their insides spreading wide in an unnatural way to milk at your sex organ with an insatiable hunger.
While I have found a blind, limited pleasure in taking them occasionally, I have not made regular rounds of it like the others. I do not know if it’s due to my position, or a strange detachment. I never felt much passion when taking my own kind, whom you have to fight for a fuck in the corridors, their acidic snarls making it clear they do not want you. They surrender partly out of duty and partly out of guilt, their now-wild minds perhaps remembering something of what they used to be.
Sex is apparently unpleasant to them, though very few of them have deigned to converse with us. Many roam, attacking random humans at will, killing them or beating them and leaving them for dead. They seem to have gone mad, and we don’t know why.
My body is also different. We are all different, in so many ways, but when I sought to merge with our captive human women, I did not feel … matched. My parts did not fit as completely as Avgar had promised, and the women responded minimally, bodies willing but not raving as I had seen some do in response to individual Wrok lieutenants. I can find no answer to explain it. Perhaps there is something wrong with me.
Sometimes I remember Avgar’s words, and his pitying voice as he hoped I would find one as he had.
We are on a hunt. The clans in the warrens below have to emerge from their burrows for fresh plant buds and wild animal stock occasionally. There is only so long they can survive on their stores down below. Everything must be replenished, eventually.
Our guards noted activity in the southwestern sector, so it is there I lead my men, soaring high over the fields and shadows of valleys until I spot dark shadows moving hurriedly toward a stream.
“They hunt meat,” says one of our footmen, a strong fighter who is not the smartest of our group. His skill at speaking even our own language is limited. This is what we have degraded to, and it is a sad thing to see.
I nod, and we descend swiftly and silently through the night, dropping between the moving party and the hill they’ve crossed over.
We can be killed – while we can live for generations, we can still die. It makes no sense to enter their warrens, which they know best. They can barricade and suffocate us, and continue living in some other portion of the underground. Our best hunting ground is out here in the open, where we have the upper hand.
I walk low and quickly with Rolley and the men, short sword hilt squeezed tightly in the palm of my damp right hand. It juts out at my waist and I hold it close, gliding through the rushes near the spring as we surround the sheep.
The wind changes direction and I smell something so frightening it stops me in my tracks, but Rolley does not see me. He keeps moving, and I drop to my hands and knees, looking around. The scent that haunts my dreams is here, that same sour, organic scent that is not natural and which triggers both revulsion and wet tension in my whole body.
Rolley is several yards ahead of me, down behind a tree before he realizes I am not following him. I see his eyes glittering, trying to find me, but I can’t move. The night is quiet, and I know that danger has finally come.
There is a sweet, hot scent in the air I have never smelled before. It ricochets through the valley as we move forward, relentless in the pursuit of our humans. We can enslave some, potentially put down others who fight. If there are women, we will attempt to turn them. If any livestock survives, we’ll take that, too.
But the sweet scent, cloying and musky, drives me to distraction. I look at my lieutenants, but they do not seem at all disturbed. We press on, and then I hear it.
A tiny inhalation of breath, less than 15 yards from me, buried in the tall grasses to my right. The sound is female. There is a female above ground, rare in and of itself.
I do not waste any time. The smell must be hers, and I must have her, no matter the cost.
“Take them!” I roar, and my fighters shoot out in multiple directions, waylaying the running men.
“Leave the female to me,” I shout, and I lift my wings and flap, hard, aiming straight for her.
She pops up from the tall grasses, a tall, thick-fleshed brunette with unnaturally yellow hazel eyes.
“Leave me!” She shouts back, but her tan face is pale with fear. She turns to run, and I watch her haunches tighten and elongate as she vaults off into the night, hurtling across the stream.
I rise, and descend upon her. She smells like something I have never smelled before, and the scent is driving me mad.
“Run, run, run,” I pant, driving myself onward, onward, my boots slamming down hard onto pebbles and water, and I slip, then catch myself, scrambling up to run.
I should have tied my hair back more carefully, but it is too late now, and it begins unraveling from my haphazard braid as I dart down hills, behind boulders, around trees, and as far away as I can get from my scattering clansmen. I hear the sound of kinut whispering through the grasses as useless as my feet tearing one in front of the other in hopes of escape.
I fall hard, slipping on wet grass, and cry out, immediately clamping my mouth shut, but it is too late, I can hear the great winged monster coming.
“Don’t die, don’t die,” I tell myself, but how can I prevent that? It’s coming to kill me or eat me, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
The wild, raw smell that had filled the air when the wind changed grows more intense, and I gasp, trying to breathe as it fills my lungs. There is no escaping it, and I feel my mind stutter and blank. Where am I running to? Why am I running?
“Stop, woman,” says a dark, heavy voice, and it is above me. I look up, and trip as I run, falling hard on my belly and elbows, and give a hoarse shout of frustration. The stinging, throbbing pain of my scraped hands and elbows snaps me out of the strange fog. I have to stop running and face my enemy.
Furiously knocking the dirt and pebbles from my palms and torn breeches, I stare up at the monster and scream.
“Kill me or leave me be!”
Her face lights up the night like a beacon, and before I dive to take her I take in a deep breath that smells of nothing but her flesh, her heartbeat, her taste. This scent is hers, and mine. It is like a drug.
I shoot down, reach out with a black arm and yank her away from the sighing earth, ignoring her curses and thrashing as we leave her world behind.