"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet..."
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
Nebukhafre painfully squinted his eyes against the rising brightness as the artificial night ended silently. Vague images from the previous evening slowly flashed against his mind's eye: the singer in the heq'akit, steaming alcoholic beverages, looming shield supports, a girl: the girl. A weight against his side, something curled in his arm, her face obfuscated by her hair.
Nebukhafre's head pounded painfully as he tried to look down at the girl in his arms, almost blinding in it's intensity as he tried to summon forth her name. Vague remembrances but nothing definite: so much was said that he couldn't remember. Her gown had been cast aside clumsily in the night- so we did that, he thought, trying to remember- and her undergarments were non-distinct, not revealing. I have nearly no idea what has transpired here, Nebukhafre thought as he shifted his position slightly, stiff and cold despite the artificially-maintained climate. The girl in his arms moaned softly as Nebukhafre moved, hunting for a name: Thaui? Ithaui? Neithuai? Ituai? Ituai! She was a shapeless and indistinct form against him, unusually warm, still with that entrancing foreign smell that he slowly remembered, along with other details of the night, though that smell was mixed with an unwashed, primal odor now.
He nuzzled her softly, deeply inhaling, closing his eyes as the world slowly righted around his hangover, the pulsing in his head simmering softly as Ituai clutched at him, awakening. He suddenly came to grips with the loss of the race. Somehow, though, that didn't hurt as much as the hangover. Nebukhafre opened his eyes and brushed the hair from Ituai's face, trying to remember anything more about the the evening, the apparent result of the evening, seeing the smeared eyeliner and disheveled arrangement of what few clothes she was wearing. She really is thin, Nebukhafre thought as he looked at her arms wrapped around his chest, the curve-less thighs protruding from the undyed folds of her undergarments, her narrow, high-bridged nose perched so precariously over such a small mouth. Her eyelids fluttered tiredly as they struggled to open and she moaned again, muttering something in a dialect unfamiliar to Nebukhafre.
"Ituai?" he whispered in her ear as her eyes finally opened, bloodshot and glazed around the light brown irises.
"Ituai?" she sighed, turning a little in his arms, snuggling against him. "Who's Ituai?" she groaned quietly, sniffing a deep, tired breath. She stretched, carefully disengaging herself from Nebukhafre's arms, straightening into a sitting posture and leaning against the shielding generator pylon behind them.
Nebukhafre looked at her with a kind of shock. What an angular face she has… He looked down at her coltish, curve-free legs, knocky a bit at the knees.
She took a deep breath, opened her eyes fully, then narrowly as she looked around the flat plain of the connecting platform on which they sat, and gathered up the gown around her with a sidelong glance at Nebukhafre. "Look away," she said, with an impetuousness to her voice, but a slight smile on her face.
Nebukhafre turned, gathering his robe and collar from the metal ground, a hollow, sickening feeling growing in his abdomen. She's but a child! he screamed at himself. What have I done?! Wide-eyed, he turned back to her.
Sefekhnebs Mose made no move to intrude as he stood, hidden behind a random outcropping of machinery, seeing the look of horrified dread on the face of Nebukhafre. Now he realizes what he's done, Mose thought. He drew his attention to the girl, who was now replacing her hair into it's traditional wings behind her ears. Where have I seen that custom before? he thought, watching the play of emotions across the face of Nebukhafre Ammunma'atkare: shock, dread, fear… The price of the crime that he has committed here could be much, depending on the family of the girl… With a shock of his own, Sefekhnebs saw the girl tie onto her forearm a small knife, its' red sheath clearly emblazoned with a family crest… But by the time Nebukhafre had swung to face her, half-rising, she had folded her hands within her sleeves, a clerical habit, Mose thought, coming to a realization that left his eyes wide, his jaw slackened.
"My name is not Ituai," the girl said to Nebukhafre, as pleasantly as her hangover would let her, smiling with barely parted lips. "It's Nehisuankhani," she grinned an adolescent grin. She felt very, very… free.
"My.. my…" Nebukhafre stuttered, coming shakily to his feet, a head-and-a-half taller than the girl- Nehisu-ankhani, that name means nothing to me- before him.
Nehisuankhani Horetim Neituini'i a'a Hemet! Sefekhnebs felt his stomach lurch, the name the confirmation that he needed
"You're Nebukhafre," she said, her voice growing stronger. "I remember…" Nehisuankhani closed her eyes, remembering the night, and, sighing deeply, remembered how it ended. Opening them, she looked at Nebukhafre, who was paling visibly. "I remember everything…"
Nauseated, "you remember… everything?" Nebukhafre blurted, placing a hand against the pylon beside him, groaning. He started painfully as she swept herself beside him, throwing her arms around his midsection and rubbing her face against his collar.
Nebukhafre shuddered. The implications of what has happened here will bury me, he thought. Grabbing Nehisuankhani's shoulders, he pushed the girl away from him. "Look," he started, but stopped: Nehisuankhani was looking at him with a half-bemused expression, lips slightly agape in an almost-crooked smile, eyes narrowed but not in anger. What was it that I saw? Nebukhafre thought as he looked into her face, examining the lines and plains, like the facets of a jewel… The fans of hair extending above and beyond her ears were like black gossamer wings of some disheveled, primal insect, a priceless bead in a small comb showing in each- so unusual, he thought. Almost against his will his eyes traveled down her body and up again, noting a threatening, impending womanhood about her that was in advance of her years. No! he shouted at himself, and, red-faced, looked away.
"Well?" Nehisuankhani broke the silence. "You are Nebukhafre, and from what I can gather you're some kind of pilot or mechanic, but I won't hold that against you," again the sideways grin. She took his hands from her shoulders, feeling how cold they were, and clasped her own around his. "I am, myself, Nehisuankhani Horetim Neituini'i a'a He-" but he cut her off before that fatal last syllable could be spoken.
Shaking his head roughly, he gently separated her hands from his own trembling ones and stood back. "Itu- Nehisuankhani, you must understand that what happened was a consequence of alcohol; both on my part and your own, that I must surely regret." He bowed low before her, squinting his eyes tightly shut. Nehisuankhani, on her part, looked at him in confusion.
Have I done something wrong? she thought, feeling the shame that poured off Nebukhafre like the rain off an old roof. He has done nothing wrong. He did what I needed him to do, he told me what I needed to hear. She touched his chin with the tips of her fingers, raising him from his desperate inspection of the floor, and placed her lips on his own, lingering, inhaling deeply until he began to kiss her back.
Sefekhnebs, several cubits away behind an obstacle, straightened himself, preparing to move. He does not know who she is and I need to keep it that way! he thought. Bedding the girl is bad enough for him- bedding the sister of the one who cost him his race will be more humiliation than he can bear.
Foot traffic had begun to flow around them as the Meh awoke from it's artificially-induced slumber, and more than one curious passerby had spared the pair an inquisitive glance and, Nebukhafre, sensing a need to somehow fix what had happened with this girl, needed more privacy than this open space permitted- what if they know? How can this be happening?!- took Nehisuankhani by the hand and turned: "We need to talk," he whispered back at her.
Nehisuankhani let herself be led down the rest of the extending arm of the Meh and onto that other platform that had loomed over the pair like a glittering mountain in the night, through a crushing mass of humanity congregating in an open area just inside the structure, within ten cubits of Aufankh and a dozen Family guards (no doubt searching for me, she thought) and down a less-crowded corridor that opened into the mall like an insect hole in the bank of a creek. They passed through a warren of doors, open chambers and a shopping district, the colors and smells of which Nebukhafre ignored in his bewilderment and Nehisuankhani delighted in.
Sefekhnebs, trying in vain to pursue the couple, was damning Nebukhafre: damn boy, I cannot help you if you refuse to think! he screamed mentally as the pair shot through a gap in the crowd that coalesced around them like dew on a window, obfuscating them from further chase. Unlike Nebukhafre, however, Mose had, in his years of affiliation and employment by House Ammunma'atkare, studied his Houses' potential enemies. Sefekhnebs saw Aufankh well before Aufankh could see either Nebukhafre or Nehisuankhani, and Mose made a decision there: I cannot help you now, Ammunma'atkare, but I can keep them from helping her.
Mose was a veteran of warfare of many kinds, many causes and many ideologies and knew the fine art of subterfuge: There were regulations placed not only on what armament a ship could bring into port, but on what arms and armor a Family guard could bring into public areas of a Meh. Seeing a normal patrol of Sau'ii en Ma'at approaching the Hemetine guard and Chief-of-Staff, Sefekhnebs faded behind them, concentrating on one red-and-black armored guard and the rear of the troop. I should have known, Mose thought as he covertly examined the guards' equipment, unarmed as regulation dictates. He reached into a concealed pocket of his goat-leather robe and removed a metal mace, about the length of his forearm. Pressing the button on this end will cause the handle to lengthen to more than two cubits, he thought as he unobtrusively attached the weapon to a stud on the guards' equipment belt and faded into the crowd: undetected, the maneuver had taken less than four seconds to complete and would have taken even a competent inquisitor to detect more than one time in twenty. I may have lost Nebukhafre and his surprise, but that Hemetine pet won't find them either.
Mose pattered through the crowd and into the corridor that he thought was most likely for the pair to have taken and concealed himself in an alcove beside a series of exposed conduit, leaving no trace other than a fading smell of unwashed flesh. Aufankh, on the other hand, found that trying to explain anything to the Sau'ii en Ma'at to be damn near impossible as more than twenty of them descended on his party within seconds of the discovery of an illegal, collapsing mace on the person of a very confused guard.
KFL by Allen P Gresham is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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