The Dog Said Bow-Wow (27 page)

He could not have explained why this bothered him — he would not have treated a whore any better himself — but it did.

Deep in the sunless winter, when it was peril to attempt the railroad trestle and yet the river beneath the ice was so swift and treacherous that no sane man would try to cross the Porpentine afoot, Ned trudged that well-worn path to the World, and found Gilbrig anxiously awaiting him.

“Oh, why does it have to be a
lerppu
like you?” the imp fretted. “You’re docile enough, granted, but… Sweet fucking Freya, why couldn’t it have been somebody with a
brain?
” Gilbrig kept opening and closing his eyes, pair by pair, as if trying and failing to find a perspective from which he might like what he was seeing. “Listen up,
uskumru
. Tonight’s client is important. You’ve never served anyone like her before, nor will you ever again. Understand? She might ask you to do something you don’t want to. Do it! Or, by Lemminkainen’s rosy anus, I’ll rip off your balls and feed them to you.”

“
Póg mo thón.
” Ned had picked up a few useful phrases in the fairy tongue. He repeated this one in English. “Kiss my ass.”

Abruptly, Gilbrig changed tack. Climbing up on top of the desk so he could stand at eye level with Ned, he said, “Look, lad, I’ve always been good to you, eh? Given you a nice clean room and all the twat you could eat… I’ve said a few harsh things, maybe, but what are words? Air! Farts! Nothing!” He tugged worriedly at his goatee. “Give me this one thing in return. Treat this bitch as if she were Venus Coelestis herself, okay? You won’t be that far wrong if you do.”

“Why are you so worked up?” Ned demanded. “What’s the big deal?”

“This one has power, boy. Power enough to burn down the World and everyone in it.”

Warily, Ned climbed the stairs and entered the room.

The woman within was clad in a burka so that every least trace of her body was hidden. Veil and hood were all one piece, with a heavy mesh between. Not so much as a strand of hair showed. Her head turned toward him when he entered. “Lock the door,” she said, “and make certain the window is securely shuttered. When that is done, you may strip yourself naked.”

Item by item, he obeyed. Though he felt her gaze upon him constantly, she did not move at all. “Will you take off your clothing as well, Lady?”

“Douse the lights first.”

One by one he blew out the lantern candles, until all was darkness.
What monster is this
, he wondered,
who dares not expose herself to the light?
For an instant he was filled with dread. Almost anything could lie hidden beneath that shapeless cloth. All he knew of this joan was her voice, dulcet and mild. She could be ugly as a toad, slimy as a frog, foul-smelling as a shift supervisor. She might well have tentacles, claws, unfortunate appetites… It was the appetites that worried him most.

There was a rustle of cloth, and then soft light blossomed into the room.

It came from the woman’s body.

There was no describing that body, for it was Beauty incarnate. Had her breasts been a gram heavier or her hips a hair slimmer or had her stomach not swelled exactly so, she would have been merely ravishing. As it was, her loveliness was such that it hurt Ned’s eyes simply to gaze upon her. Yet he could not look away. Her hair streamed down behind her, bright as comet tails. The burka lay at her feet like a spurned lover. A swath of black silk was wrapped around her head in a blindfold.

Involuntarily, Ned fell to his knees. “Lady,” he whispered, “what
are
you?”

“I am perfection and power and gentle light,” she replied. “I come from a distant land in the sky. Barefoot I trod the airy places and by forbidden ways descended to this house.” Then, as if confessing to something shameful, “I am a star.”

The goddess approached him on naked feet, until the fearful power of her body was but a single pace from his mouth. He inhaled. Her privities were hairless, and smelled of clean, distant lands, of winter air on midnight mountaintops, of the purity of the sky. “Worship me.”

It was a delight to do so. The mere presence of the star-woman filled him with strength. Though he was still nothing before her greatness, briefly Ned became more than human. He lifted his voice and, in a clear high tenor he had not suspected he might possess, sang:

Where the words and tune came from he did not know. Perhaps they’d been pulled down out of the sky. Bathed in the radiance of the star-lady, he felt the power of the music flow through and from him, as if he were one of the wizards who, at the dawn of time, had sung the universe into being.

On he sang, until finally the song rose to a triumphant crescendo:

The goddess took one small, sure step closer. Now her body was all but touching him. Naked, numinous, perfect, she said, “Stick your tongue in my cunt.”

Hesitantly, Ned did, and from her throat escaped a small, shrill cry, like that of a night-bird flying low over a lake. She clutched his head, pushing it into her crotch for a minute or two, while he fervidly sought to please her, and then shoved him away.

Slowly as the evening star sinking below the horizon did she then recline onto the bed. Crooking a beckoning finger, she said, “Abuse me. Degrade me. Make me feel like filth.”

“How shall I do that?” he asked fearfully. He did not think he could bring himself to use her harshly. He did not believe it possible.

“Be as kind and gentle and loving to me as you know how. That will suffice.”

As she commanded, so did Ned pleasure her. It was an experience and an evening unlike anything he had ever known. He was as worshipfully respectful of the sky-woman as he could be. Never was any man more considerate of a woman nor so attentive to her desires. Yet she shuddered when he touched her, gasped with horror when he delicately kissed her shoulder, and cried out with humiliation when he entered her. Then, when he reflexively drew back, she grasped his shoulders and yanked her to him.

Her body was a delight beyond measure, yet possessing it gave him no real pleasure. He felt like a snail crawling across a marble statue of a goddess and leaving a trail of slime behind him. His every caress defiled her, his every kiss was a lecherous foulness. Had he broken into a cathedral and crapped on the high altar, he could have felt no more vile.

At last his client said, “Enough!” and he sprang away from her. She rose from the bed, went straight to her burka, and put it on. Darkness poured back into the room.

“Lady,” Ned said humbly, “why do you wear a blindfold? And how, blindfolded, can you find your way about?”

“I cannot bear the sight of the Lower Realms,” she replied. “Yet so repulsive are they to me that I can sense their every detail, even with my eyes shut and swaddled.” She walked to the door, and with every step the sole of her foot briefly filled the room with light.

Ned followed her outside where, for the first time, he saw other clients of the bordello than his own, and other whores than he himself. Faces stared from all the windows. Elven warriors, courtiers, merchants, and craftswomen thronged the oak grove outside, stamping their feet in the snow and exhaling small puffs of white into the winter air. Of the women’s varying heights, snail horns, hooves, extra limbs, high or low estates, he paid no mind. All his attention was on the star as she walked steadily up the path through the trees and then, by an unseen trail, into the sky.

The star’s naked feet traced a dotted line high into the dark. There was a flare of light as she threw away the burka, to float forever in the interstellar aether. Briefly, the errant star wandered. Then she found her place and was still.

“She is one of the Pleiades,” murmured somebody nearby (Ned looked down and saw Gilbrig by his knee), “and of high estate indeed.”

Silently, then, all went home.

Ned came away from that night convinced that he would never look at another woman again so long as he lived, for they could not stand the comparison. But memories that are born in Faerie are frail and fickle things, quick to fade and quicker to lose their meaning. By early spring, Ned was eager to visit the bordello again.

“D’y’think you can pleasure two women?” Gilbrig jeered. “Well, hold on to your pizzle, boyo, because I’m giving you three! They’re sailors, raftswomen from the upper reaches of the Porpentine, where it flows out of Ultima Thule. They’ve been weeks without a rogering, and their
vittujen
need a good workout.”

“You’re a tiresome little turd, Gilbrig,” Ned wearily said from the stairway.

“At least I’m not a
kikkeli
like you.”

The raftswomen were passing a bottle around when he entered. They were all of a racial subtype, superficially identical, blond and braided. One had already unbloused herself. They cheered when Ned entered the room. “It’s the slut!” cried one. “Come here, slut, and let’s see what you’ve got.”

She thrust a hand down the front of his pants and seized his crank.

The semiclad elf pulled his head back by his hair and slapped his face with her breasts. “Do you like these, slut? Do you?”

Then he was wrenched away by the first elf or the third, he could not tell, who yanked his shirt out of his trousers and shouting, “Show us your chest, slut!” ripped it open. Buttons flew through the air.

The raftswomen howled with laughter. One of them shoved the bottle in his mouth, almost chipping a tooth. “Drink up, slut!” Ned tasted blood; she’d made him bite through his lip.

“Ow! Stop that, damn you! I don’t like being treated like that!”

One of the raftswomen pinched his thigh, hard enough to bruise. “Shut up, slut.
We’ll
tell you what you like and what you don’t.” Another pinched his butt. “But you like this, now, don’t you, slut?” The third slammed her elbow into his stomach and said, “But even if you don’t, you’ll put up with it.” She smiled. “Because we want you to.”

So began the most terrifying and humiliating night of Ned’s life to date. He was stronger than any one of the elven women, weaker than any two, and helpless before all three. With slaps and pinches and the occasional hard punch, they bullied him through their pleasures, unheeding of his miseries. The bed was shoved aside and Ned forced to the floor where one squatted astride his yard, humping up and down, and a second impaled her orchid and anus upon his thumb and forefinger, while the third straddled his face and almost smothered him with her yoni. Every now and anon, they changed places. Always, they kissed and caressed each other in the empyrean above his contested body in a manner suggesting they greatly preferred each others’ affections to his own.

When the three were done, they left a single silver coin on the dresser — though that were an ungenerous guerdon for even a lone woman — and lurched drunkenly down the stairs, singing a river-chanty and waving Ned’s undershorts in the air like a flag.

Raging, Ned clattered down the stairs to confront Gilbrig. “You six-eyed little piece of shit! You set me up.”

Gilbrig made an impudent face. “So?”

“So I don’t cost you a copper, nor do I get anything out of this but an evening’s entertainment. Which means I don’t have to put up with being mistreated.”

“You didn’t mind the birch dryad, and the little games she liked to play with switches.”

“That’s not the same thing.”

“Or the wench who stuck her tongue a good six inches up your —”

“
Not the same!
” Ned stuck his fist under the imp’s nose. “If you do this to me again, I’m gone! I’m out of here!”

“Why wait? Go away now, little girl! If you can’t take it, just get up on your high horse and fuck off into the sunset! But don’t pretend you didn’t like it. Your
mulkku
did, didn’t you, little fella?” Gilbrig grabbed Ned’s crotch and squeezed, then laughed when Ned knocked his hand away. “Oh, yes, you did! You loved it! You loved it! You know you did!”

The next day, bruised and sore, Ned could barely hobble to work. His supervisor chewed him out three times that morning and sent him home at noon. “You’ve been drinking,” the supervisor said, “Or worse. Whatever it is, if you don’t stop soon, you’re going to be out of a job.”

To Ned’s astonishment, he didn’t much care. All he could think of was the bordello called the World, and what had happened to him there last night. He was certain that Gilbrig had said he’d enjoyed it only to offend him. But he wasn’t at all sure the creature was entirely wrong.

Two days later, he was back in Faerie. “Green door, asshole,” Gilbrig growled.

“Yeah, yeah,” Ned replied. “And the same to you.” Without paying much attention, he went into the room at the top of the stairs.

Something was wrong.

The room smelled of decay and the window had been smashed to flinders, along with half the furniture. The only light came from outside and, with but one moon above the horizon, it was faint indeed. “Hello?” Ned called uncertainly. “Is anybody here?”

Then there was a scraping noise, and a low, throaty, not entirely sane laugh. Something pulled itself out of the shadows into the half-light. It had curling horns, like a ram, an apish form, and two cold pinpricks of light for eyes.

“Who are you?” Ned cried.

“Have you forgotten me so soon, little Ned?” The creature was short, bandy-legged, big-butted, and had one dead hoof that dragged on the floor after it. Its clothes were all rags and mud and could not hide the fact that its teats were covered with fur. “I have many names. Some call me the Mother of Goats.” A chill breeze from the window blew from her to him. The stench of her body was astonishing. There was stale piss in there for a foundation, strongly accented by fresher ordure and enhanced by grace notes of sweat, spent seed, carrion maggots, and other, less identifiable things as well.

“I… I don’t know you!”

That dark shape bent over almost double, squinting. “I see,” she said. “You’ve wandered here from out of the past, have you? Gone through the wrong door and here you are?” That laugh again. “Well, can I do less than meet you halfway?”