This story is a work of fiction. It contains references to violent behavior between adults, and expressions of physical affection between consenting adult males. If you find this type of story offensive, or if you are underage and it is illegal for you to read it, please exit now. All characters are fictional and in no way related to any persons living or deceased. Any such similarity is purely coincidental.
This work is copyrighted by the author and may not be reproduced in any form without the specific written consent of the author. It is assigned to the Nifty Archives under the provisions of their submission guidelines but it may not be copied or archived on any other site without the consent of the author.
I can be contacted at Bookwyrm6@yahoo.com
Copyright 2003 Kristopher R. Gibbons All rights reserved by the author.
4 The Galled Jade
Hamlet: Let the galled jade winch;
our withers are unwrung.
Hamlet, Act III, Scene 2, line 248
He opened his eyes to the blurred aenigma of a textured ceiling. For a brief moment he wondered whose ceiling he saw. Daylight reflected off the walls. The air did not have that bitter smell of rust which he realised he had expected - the scent of blood. That perception brought the past back to him solidly, and accented the difference between the carnage he had closed his eyes to and the clean white and gray he had opened them to. No longer sitting, he lay on pillowed bedding. Wearily slow, he turned on his side to see more, and groaned in dismay when he saw.
"How is my love?" Onkira's tone embedded her words in crystallized honey. Just as before, she dressed for the dead. The Dowager had left a black cotton jacket on the chair behind her, and stood beside her son in a gauze-thin sable bedgown, a decollete that was tightly cinched but un-bodiced. The clear lack of undergarments seemed not to chill her in the least. It chilled her son.
Still muddled, Evendal wondered if he had dreamed his bitter debacle with his mother. Her calmly attentive look, the sparkle of caring in her gray eyes, so inarguable, so at odds with his memory. Then he reconsidered. His mother and father had survived together without scandal by a habit of pretending discord had not happened, both in public and in private. Conflicts which roaring rage or false tears had not won never resolved, they were merely stored away in a cease-fire that looked convincingly like peace. Recriminations emerged subtly, with the intensity of long nursed bitterness; obscure slights, timely moments of forgetfulness, indirect cruelties delivered with smiles and genuine, if poisoned, affection.
Just like this moment.
Evendal thought of the dead traitor with nostalgia.
"How are you feeling?" Onkira drew closer. "Have you got a fever?" She settled the back of her hand against his head.
Evendal jerked as if slapped. His heart hammered against his chest, his whole body tensing under threat.
Onkira paused and frowned, but did not back away. She leaned over her son, lifted his head to her cleavage, and breathed. "I only want to help. Don't you love me anymore?"
Immediately, Evendal's eyes unfocused and he screamed in panic. He kicked and jostled himself off the bed, away from a stupefied Onkira. Again she approached, all concern, ready to hug and soothe her son. He began kicking out more carefully, in deadly earnest, and shouting mindlessly. "Stay away! Don't touch me! Don't touch me! Don't touch me!"
Finally she halted altogether, breathing heavily.
For several long moments Onkira tangled and untangled her hands, silent and fretful. She neither advanced nor retreated, merely eyed the man sobbing on the floor with a look of reproach and waited for him to come to his senses, to realise how his behaviour hurt her. Now with Menam no longer around, they could be the loving family that they had not been in so long. She just had to make him see how wrong he had been at the Causeway, how wrong to alienate himself from her. 'You are the light of my life,' she thought fiercely, hungrily.
From where he had fallen, Evendal looked up with weeping eyes and a ghostly pale face. "Do not ever come near me like that again!" His voice trembled like his body, and the words slurred, but his meaning and sincerity spoke clearly. Hearing the edge of hysteria still in his voice, he forced slow, deep breaths and tried to calm himself.
Onkira turned her head aside demurely and gibed. "Oh, forgive me for trying to show my child affection!"
"Affection!" Evendal spat. He paused for a moment, groping for words. "I am not a child, to submit to your.... affections. I remember. You would hold me, my face to your breasts. How you would.... Do not come near me again!"
Onkira glared at Evendal, not blinking until her eyes teared. Her chin trembled dramatically. "You are ill, Evendal. You must be ill or pure evil. I am surprised that my heart has not burst from your cruelty. All I have ever done is...is love you."
"Get out of here. If I a sick, it is your illness. Get. Out. Of. Here."
Onkira took her jacket and strode to the doorway. No one would intrude so long as the Dowager visited her son, and she herself suddenly had no desire to stay or help him out of the jumble of bedclothes and off the floor. In a stiff-backed pose of dignified suffering, she paused at the door-curtain.
"Maybe some day you will tell me what terrible crimes I must be guilty of. I know of only one - being your mother. If it is a crime for a mother to love her son, then I am guilty."
And she was gone.
Still shaking from reaction, Evendal took more deep breaths, but calm did not come. "I so hoped I was dreaming." He muttered.
A blue-garbed Guardsman appeared in the doorway. "Did you call, lord?"
"No. Yes." Evendal replied, rallying. "Come here, please, and assist me." His outburst had left him drained, and emotional enough to start crying. He felt grateful for the distraction. "You are called?"
"Ierwbae, my lord." Ierwbae untangled the bedclothes and then deftly supported the Prince into the chair near the bed. The sight of the Guard's alacrity diverted Evendal's chain of thought.
"Tell me, Ierwbae. Who was slated to watch the western side of the Palace last night?"
The man blushed and began to stammer, an emotional reaction that Evendal had heard of from storytellers, but had never witnessed before. It annoyed him. "Stop that. Tell me, plainly!"
"He is called Robiliam, my lord."
Evendal shook his head. "I am not such a fool, Ierwbae. Bruddbana assured me that there would be more than one guard. Who else?"
"One called Metthendoen, also, my lord."
"And yourself?"
"Yes, my lord, but not until midnight."
"And you have been on duty since that bell?" Evendal could see by the window that it was midday. "Then go. Summon Bruddbana to me and be discharged for the rest of the day. However, you will tell no one, excepting Bruddbana, that you have given up those names to me. Your word on it."
"I so pledge. I shall tell no one but by your leave, my lord."
"It is well. Now go to Bruddbana, then to whatever home or family awaits you."
Ierwbae bowed and left. Evendal saw the Guard's shoulders sag, and a look of grim intensity on the man's face, as he walked out.
Alone, Evendal settled into the chair and held himself, not even noticing that he again had the use of his right hand. He felt ready to burst. He wanted to scream, to cry, to howl until someone labeled him moon-struck and locked him away. For a moment he wished he were fourteen again, passionately loyal to a loving mother and eager to prove his worth to his father on the Mausna plains. Even at fifteen he had been totally blind, or at least blind enough to be the dutiful son to a mother he now wanted to slap and slap repeatedly.
Indistinct memories of family resentments, and their effects, echoed: A laugh-filled voice, his mother's, recalling how indignant the midwife had been at being called away from a party to assist in his birthing. How Onkira had, dynastic considerations be damned, so wanted a daughter. These matters Evendal had heard his mother avidly relate throughout his childhood to anyone who would listen; a subtle sarcasm that he recognized only when he made himself the shadow of Anlota the midwife, and learned who had really been "called" away from a fete. At one time he felt bold enough to remind Onkira of her lament for a daughter. He was told, with exaggerated surprise and wounded sincerity, how she had always wanted, dreamed for, a son.
He longed desperately to take his life's story and retell it, reshape it. A normal person does not collapse on the ground, sharing the death-throes of some small animal. Normal people do not hear music when a creature dies, or sing songs that could shatter swords. Most people do not act like they are being murdered when a parent comes up to them, or accuse the parent of.... No one else could understand, not when he himself did not.
"Why?" he shouted, rocking himself in his chair. "What am I? Why can't I remember?" Then, more softly, with tears tightening his throat. "I feel like I only pretend to be human, and at any moment someone will find out that I am not. And Onkira! I must be crazed. Nothing I remember would make me act as I did... Would it?" He stopped babbling, knowing it as pointless. Even picturing his mother caused his stomach to knot. The thought of meeting her again was unbearable, yet he could hardly avoid her.
"This is ridiculous!"
"I agree," came the willow-light reply. "What are you doing out of bed and yelling fit to deafen the dead?"
When Evendal turned to the doorway, Anlota saw a wide-eyed haunted look, fear and clenched-jawed pain. A look she knew well from tending abused wives and children, from visiting widows and orphans of the Mausna decimation. It was an expression she imagined she herself might have worn in her early years, with her first husband. It was not what she expected on the face of the Heir to the Thronelands.
Anlota took two cautious, almost pantomimed steps into the room. "Lad, what is it? What has happened? Can you tell me?"
Evendal heard concern in the hushed tone, and the loneliness of his anxiety flooded over the shame. As he began to explain, Anlota moved further into the room, to seat herself on the bed. Still shy and unnerved, Evendal focused on Anlota's thin arm as he spoke, rather than on her face. Anlota's arm looked fragile - all bones, tendons, and wrinkly, sagging skin. It reminded him of safe, elderly people; it reminded him of the elder Court attenders, who had wholesomely welcomed the companionship of a lonely child-heir. Soon the frantic feeling so tensing his gut and shoulders diminished.
"So, what is going on inside me? Am I turning lunatic?"
"Before I say, child, I need you to tell me again. Only do not fuss over who did what and when. Tell me what you felt. How did you feel when Onkira touched you? How did you feel when she leaned over you?"
She spoke softly. Evendal, unsure, glanced up once, but saw only a calm attentiveness. He returned to examining her forearm. "Terrified." he began. And for a long moment wrestled to recall what he did not want to. "When she touched me? I felt like I was being surrounded, being pressed down." He closed his eyes. "Terribly.... scared. Confused. I wanted to run, hide, and I did not know why. I didn't want to know why. I wanted to run, but I could not move. If I moved, something terrible would happen. Then she leaned closer. I could not breathe. It was.... All I could see was her breasts and her throat. Very close. Closer than she actually was. And I felt smothered. And nauseous, and scared. Scared? I was terrified!" He cried openly now. Anlota knelt beside him, still a respectable distance, and watched as his body shook with gut-wrenching sobs and sharp gulps for breath.
Bruddbana came to the doorway. He glanced from Evendal to Anlota, twice. Keeping his eyes on the midwife, he hesitantly cleared his throat. Anlota motioned him to silence, then stood and quietly approached him.
"I may need your help here," she whispered. "No questions. Your lord's only need right now is for a man's care. So your attention might be better received than mine."
Bruddbana stiffened and frowned, a look Anlota slapped off his face. "Then go get me a male with more feelings than simple pride and anger. Maybe someone who had never achieved your illusion of what a Guard is. Go!" She turned and hurried back to her charge.
"Evendal. Can you hold my hand? You do not have to. Just a reminder that you are not alone."
"Am I crazy? I know I don't respond as other people do."
"No, child. Someone hurt you very deeply. You ignored the hurt, willing it to go away because you loved and needed the person who hurt you. But these injuries do not really vanish."
"When she said 'Don't you love me... love me anymore.' I thought, felt, that if I did not do something right then I would die. It was... I was afraid I was going to die, like she was going to kill me, I guess. It was horrible. Until, somehow, I screamed. Then, I could move. And I was terrified, and I just wanted to run. From her. From my mother?" Evendal leaned forward and hid his face in his knees. He could not stop the tears. For several moments he wept quietly. Soft tears turned into body-shaking gasps again, then back to gentler sobbing.
During one of the sobbing episodes, a small thin-faced man came to the doorway, followed by Bruddbana. Anlota turned and scowled at them.
"I am called Aldul. Heart-wounds?"
"Yes. A long-buried rape."
"A woman, I suppose."
"I suspect, the mother. Not necessarily a physical assault."
The Guard stepped into the room ready to snipe, but Aldul just waved at him to leave without looking away from Evendal. "It does not have to involve his sexual organs to be a rape. Nor any one event or occasion." He spared a brief frown at Anlota. "Twisted bitch. I saw that when I met her." The midwife blinked her surprise but did not reply.
Bruddbana took another step, his face creased and flushed in indignation. Moving as one, Aldul and Anlota both turned to glare at him, and Anlota pointed back to the doorway.
"Out. Do not say one stupid, boorish word. Do not state the obvious. Merely stand outside and wait on your lord's pleasure. Anything you want to shout is not going to help."
Bruddbana, stymied, let go the breath he had gathered and meekly obeyed.
"You have authority." Aldul observed, amused.
"Its hard to be this big blustering threat to the person who midwived your birth and knows every one of your adolescent misadventures. But we have a serious matter here." She shifted attention back to a shuddering Evendal.
"You wanted a male, thinking he might feel safer."
"Yes, a woman's touch is definitely not what is needed here. Both his own nature and the source of the wound make you a more calming presence. You are from Kwo-eda, are you not?"
"Yes. Newly called to the Archate."
"Bruddbana brought you, so I take it you know Evendal? Have you the time?"
Aldul nodded. "He is a friend and, though he knows it not, cherished by the Archate."
Satisfied, Anlota knelt beside Evendal. "Evendal, I must go and see how Luom fares. I leave you with Aldul. Is this acceptable?"
Red-faced, Evendal looked up. He had listened to them quietly, feeling ashamed of his hysteria, of being helpless against it. To be talked about rather than talked to only humiliated more.
"Yes. I feel so stupid. I cannot stop crying." He reached for Aldul's hand and clasped it in a hard grip. "Aldul, you keep witnessing my more humbling moments...." His attempt at a chuckle became a cough. "I...I don't remember any... anything really terrible."
Aldul nodded Anlota toward the doorway, then responded gently to Evendal. "First of all, you are not doing anything stupid. You are healing. And you may have needed to cry over this for years, else you would not be doing so."
Anlota herself nodded agreement. "Remember how you reacted to Onkira. Tell Aldul. What you are experiencing is sensible, and too common. Some shadow-scribe within remembers, but the only way that he could convey this memory was in your feelings, not your thoughts. I must go. Do not doubt yourself, child. Not in this." With a worried smile, Anlota bustled out.
Aldul echoed the midwife. "So, can you tell me what happened? What you felt?" And as Aldul sat on the bed, Evendal again went over his confrontation. In telling the Kwo-edan, however, he spoke with more self-control; the gibbering fear for his sanity quieted by the serious regard of these two astute people. His tears stopped gradually, though they continued to dull his voice.
"When I was yelling at her, it felt like I had this huge accusation to place before her. I could hardly speak from having so many loathsome charges I wanted to silence her with. And now... Now I do not remember half of them."
"Is it that you do not recall them? Or that, this moment, what you can think of seems petty?"
Evendal pondered, and answered with shame-faced reluctance. "There were times, usually evenings after Court or the fetes, with her ladies-in-waiting. Times when her ladies would attend to her disrobing or her being re-attired. And she would have me with her. She would insist on it. I remember wondering, often, what she expected of me. Was I supposed to shut my eyes until she dressed? Act like a statue when she rushed up to me, naked, for an embrace? Try to look only at her face? Bolt out of the room? I felt confused. I felt stupid. As if I ought to have known how to act when my mother disrobed completely in front of me."
"How old were you? Do you recall?"
The Prince hiccoughed before replying. "At first, I think I had eight years. Later, I was her captive audience, irregularly, for these past.... for two years before Mausna. My fourteenth and fifteenth year. After I had attained my majority."
"Were the maids always chaperoning?"
In response, Evendal started trembling again.
"Mother would let me read or draw if she got busy." His voice came out in a hoarse whisper. "When she had dismissed her maids she would have me up on the bed to lay beside her, or resting...." The rasp of his voice cracked. "Resting against her, and she would talk to me. Or she would have me tell her of my day, while.... while she played with my hair or undressed me... for sleep."
"Where was your father in all this?"
The Prince looked up at Aldul briefly, confused at the question. "In his own rooms, of course. Isn't that...?" Evendal released Aldul's hand to hug his own chest. "No. Of course that isn't normal for most families. How... How silly of me."
"You had eight years, when this was happening?"
"And after." Evendal choked out, his shadowed face aflame. "I have no knowledge of women aside from my mother. Being the only royal issue, my parents suspected the motives and actions of all who might talk to me. So no one dared." Evendal barked out a laugh. "Around my thirteenth year, Menam would smile at me, occasionally comment on how he thought us very much alike. How he had had all these girls panting after him at my age. How he had 'dipped his quill' at almost every Court event. If I had even thought I could actually act that way, both he and Onkira would have strung me up by my tongue."
"Also, I just remembered.... One season she kept telling this humourous story to any of her maidens. About a woman who had an impotent husband, and bought a philter from some wanderer to render the husband virile. The woman was at her wit's end. She secretly administered the aphrodisiac, and mounted him that night. Nothing happened. Furious, the woman thought to suffocate her husband and pinched his nose shut. And found that every time she pinched, the man's member grew...."
"Onkira, my mother, demonstrated the woman's pinching on my nose. She told the story even to those who had heard it, every time I was near. I remember that first time I was merely startled. But now...."
"Now it scares you." Aldul finished for him.
"Yes, and I have a question. It may sound like a stupid question, but.... Did your mother or father... Did they ever describe their sexual habits to you? I mean criticise each other's erotic talents or lacks to you?"
"Why do I have the suspicion that by 'describe' you mean describe in detail?" Aldul mused.
The Prince's question merely confirmed how isolated Evendal's upbringing had been. That, and his surprise at Aldul's question about Menam, displayed a frightening degree of ignorance in basic proprieties. The look of apprehension, of dismay on Evendal's face said that, for him, the lack truly did frighten. He had braved a simple question, knowing it underscored a gaping ineptitude.
Evendal nodded, deliberately looking away. "She would tell me regularly whether Menam had driven her to orgasm or not. Sometimes she would tell me, and the maids, just how he had done so."
"Evendal. Parents do not treat their children like spouses and amorous confidantes. From what you describe, Onkira was either flirting with you or emasculating you. Neither is the action of a mother."
"I feel so stupid. All I wanted and hoped for was for my parents to love me.... But like parents! I just want to hide. I feel filthy, a grotesque... and still scared, like I was attacked and am going to be attacked again at any moment." He started coughing on his tears.
"The word you dance around is 'rape'."
Evendal winced. "But I don't remember anything like that! Nothing painful."
"The isolating. The blatantly erotic embraces. The disrobing. Making you her mannikin, the subject and object of her errogenous fantasies. Putting you in the bed reserved for her and her spouse. All that was enacted with your active and adult cooperation?"
Head lowered and clasping his own arms, Evendal rocked himself in a silent fugue before answering. "No. None of it was. And yes, I avoid the word, the truth. It dizzies me! Thunders! I'm shaking inside. Dying must be easier than this. I keep seeing Onkira standing over me with this fierce, hungry, look on her face. And I just want to hide."
"I need to talk with her...."
"With who? Onkira?"
Aldul nodded, solemn-faced. "Yes. I need her to show me her writ of ownership."
Evendal's head flew up. "She doesn't own me!"
Aldul simply stared at him, gray eye to golden. "Remember that! Always remember that, Evendal. You are safe right now. Bruddbana is at the door and if Onkira managed to get around him, then I myself would cheerfully toss her out. You are safe. Do you hear me?"
The Prince nodded.
Aldul shifted from his seat on the cot and crouched beside Evendal. Tentatively, he draped an arm around Evendal's shoulder, ready to move away if the touch proved unendurable. The tortured prince dropped all pretense of control and leaned his head against Aldul's chest to tremble in earnest. Aldul was hardly surprised. As Evendal continued to vent a childhood of humiliation, tension and anxiety, Aldul reached out with his free hand and snagged one of the bedsheets. Wretched, Evendal took it to wipe his face. Otherwise, he clung to Aldul as to a safety-line and tried to apologise for it.
"Stop that!" Aldul chastised once he understood what Evendal tried to say. "You are not the leper-king! You are a man, one of great courage and strength. You are not evil. You did not seduce your mother, she seduced you. I know some of what you harbour in your mind right now, and I tell you you are nothing to be ashamed of. And I will neither leave nor hurt you. If I scare you through any word or action, let me know immediately."
"But I feel like.... I am being silly, or melodramatic."
"Evendal, if a child gets bullied, usually he does his best to conceal from the attacker just how much he is hurt. And only when that child feels safe will he shiver and cry and retch like he dared not when the threat hovered. You are no different."
"You have several years of assault for which you need such release. The midwife and I both see this. And, from my own experience, the safest measure is to have some kind of witness. Both to assure you that what you think or feel is reliable. And to see that you are not provoked to regrettable actions."
For a time Evendal shook in silence, accepting, uncertainly, the comfort offered. The warm support in Aldul's embrace conveyed to Evendal a solid, undemanding solace he was sure he had never known as a child. With Onkira, every embrace had been a fierce clutching. His father had been more a man of words, and very few of them. Touch from his father meant a brief nightly ritual of filial devotion, usually in front of those courtiers who danced nightly attendance on the King. The difference of then and now hurt, and fed his anger. Every-so-often, uncertain what to do with his hands, Evendal would pat Aldul on the shoulder, as if consoling him. Gradually, the crisis passed, along with the urge for self-flagellation, and he moved reluctantly from Aldul's loose hold.
Still trembling and timid, Evendal tried to look Aldul in the face and on the third attempt, through sheer stubbornness, he succeeded. To see tears.
"What? Why?"
Aldul huffed. "If you were still m'Alismogh, I would say it was because you are my friend, and in pain."
"Aldul, I am still m'Alismogh." He swiped at his nose. "What did you mean just now by 'from your own experience'?"
Aldul shrugged. "When the troops moved through Kwo-eda, on their way to Mausna, some felt they had a right to whatever they fancied. I... was something that a few of them fancied."
"Oh, Aldul. No!"
The Kwo-edan forced in a breath and nodded. "Without warning or gentleness. My mouth stuffed with cloth. Abducted. My hands bound. Hours of waiting blindfolded and confused. Then my feet spread and staked, inside some tent. No spit and no preparation. Just pain and curses. Until it did not hurt anymore, because my blood made my passage slick. Voices whispering in my ear repeatedly, warning me how my father was an easy target on the battlefield, unless I kept silent. How my sister might be as much fun as I was, unless... I welcomed them on their return through."
Evendal listened in growing horror.
"Whoever they were, they had delayed kidnapping me until the night before they pulled out. When morning came, I was found by some of the camp followers. They proceeded to stuff my bloody clothes with towels and bustle me away from where the troops had been, and further away from town, where they abandoned me."
"Why?"
"They were afraid they would be blamed, or the fighters they whored for would be." Aldul's face remained impassive, but the dullness in his eyes spoke volumes.
"Who found you?"
The lean-faced man huffed a sour laugh. "No one. When I awoke, I crawled in the direction I thought home was in. And kept on crawling. I had to get home, so that scum would not molest my sister. I made it. Not to my home, but into town. I was nearly dead, though, from infection, exposure, and blood loss. Those healers that were still in town sweated over me for some time. Fevered and doped, I knew nothing of this, but kept reliving my violation."
Aldul paused, took a steadying breath, and continued, gazing fixedly into Evendal's lambent eyes. "And after they succeeded in restoring me, and after the earth quaking, they had to do it all again. When I tried to kill myself." He pulled up the sleeves of his tunic and pointed to the light ridge going up each forearm. Evendal had seen them before, but had respected Aldul's right to privacy and had asked no questions.
Aldul's words came out a whisper, an indictment of the last innocence, the last hope for justice, that his youth had harboured. "You see, my sister died anyway. Crushed by a weakened wall. My father died anyway, at Mausna. I went a little insane. I thought that if I had fought, if I had not let those brutes violate me, my family would still be alive. It did not matter that I never had a chance to fight. That I had no control over circumstance at all."
"Evendal, I would not be alive if it were not for one old man who stayed with me. He would pat me, and later held me, until I no longer shied from touch. He made sure there was a full lamp by my bed each night, until I felt ready to brave darkness again. And made his cot beside me, for when I relived the assault. He babbled nonsense at me for months. Until I began to hope his nonsense was true. Then I began to believe it was true. And now I know it as true."
Awed, aching for his companion's pain, Evendal murmured. "What nonsense?"
"Four things: First, it was not your doing, not your fault! Second, you could not have done anything to stop it. If you could have, you would have. Third, there are safe people you can trust."
"The fourth, is the first all over again: It was not your doing, not your fault!"