Now see, I have given you this wound, inflicted this precipus blow, so very deep it will never go away. You only learn to close your hand around the scar. And what will you do with this wound? Make it a window to look through. Make a door to your soul, and a door through which souls can enter and exit.
-Ifandell Modet, The Meditations
When Theone was told this she trembled though, as the sun was coming up that morning she could not remember the nature of the tremble. It was fear, but it was a shivering in the groin. Was it possible that she’d wanted this? That on some level they all wanted this? Something had ached in her, between her thighs, when she was told, “Tonight, you shall go to a man.”
“He will not be young,” the Woman continued. “He will be a decade or so older. Not one of the boys. The boys don’t know what they’re doing. I go to the boys. Someone like me, all veiled in black, face covered. I come to a boy and give him his first time, teach him the arts of the rut all night. Tonight a man will teach you.”
“Will he hurt me?” she wanted to know.
“At first. A little. Quite possibly. He knows you are a virgin though. We’ve been sending him women all week so he won’t be one of those deprived men, the ones who’ve done so long without they fuck a girl to death. One day, though, when you are older you will have one. You won’t be able to walk straight for a day. But that’s not for a long time.”
Suddenly Theone could see her whole future stretching before her, years and years of being fucked by a series of different men, the men who had kidnapped her, the men who had whispered, “I’ll give you something to cry about.”
Up until this moment when her hair was being brushed, it had never been real.
When it was over she felt pressed out and sore. She lay on the bed a moment, and then sat up a bit and he said, “There’s a lass,” touching her gently. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
Since the time she had been taken from her father she had always feared these men. Now she remembered her father must have been one of these men. Could he have fathered some of them, perhaps?
“It wasn’t so bad, was it?” he said.
In the dark she could see the Black Star against his wrist as he stroked her shoulder, and she realized she was supposed to say something, so she said, “No.”
“See, there’s a lass. And you’ll even learn to like it. Better and better. You can come to me the night after tomorrow. Not too quick, but then we don’t want too much time to pass. You’ve been opened up now, my girl. We don’t want it to close. We want you to have a taste for it.”
He said all this while he stroked her. “We’ll learn many things together.”
When she had come, he had been in a black robe, not the tight leather pants and vest and hooded cloak she always saw. He was stern, but not unkind, and he had undressed her gently, letting the gown fall from around her shoulders. And then he had guided her hand to his robe and helped her undress him. For the first time she had seen a naked man. Twenty-five or something years old he was, and she didn’t know how she felt about him. Maybe if there had been some choice in it, maybe if she had been like Girl Eleven who had that look in her eyes and wanted to bear sons, then maybe she would have awakened to him.
The feelings she had while he caressed her breasts and licked them, sucked on her nipples, ran a long hand down her body, were conflicting because he kept saying, “Easy, girl. Easy,” as if she was a horse or something, and every time it felt pleasant, she made herself feel nothing. Until the moment she was shocked at his mouth between her legs. It was meant to ease her, but when he realized it didn’t do anything, then he brought her to the bed and silently, gently, but firmly, put his hand between her legs, opened her, lay across her and began to fuck her. It hurt and he said, as he fucked her with the steadiness of a shuttle in a loom, “Breathe in, breathe out, let go, the pain will pass.”
And then he was too into it to teach or have much mercy. And he was just battering her. As he shuddered and came on top of her, Theone realized, “He could be getting me with child. Right now.”
He climaxed, and as he collapsed on top of her she thought, “But that is the point. Not just their pleasure. They want to make more.”
She thought: “Like they made me.”
The man was lazily thumbing one of her nipples, and his hand was between her wet thighs.
“I’ll wipe that up in a bit,” he said, rolling over. Then he said, “You’d better call me something.
“You can call me Gimble.”
“You can call me Theone,” she said with a sudden rush of pride. She sat up, feeling an ache between her legs as he looked at her in surprise, cocking his head. “You can always call me Theone. That is my name.”
