The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [89]
“Mars is a planet, not Heaven. It’s a planet like Earth.”
“Even a pagan woman with your pitiful ignorance can follow the path of jihad!” said Lucky, grunting a little as her oiled fingers readjusted the bones in his neck. “Women can equip a man for righteous battle with their gold and jewelry!”
“I have no gold or jewelry.”
Lucky reached out deftly and seized a thick hank of her hair. “Then cut and sell these golden tresses! Your beauty will buy me guns to punish all of Heaven’s enemies!”
“What a sweet thing to say.”
There was no use her denying it, especially to herself: she had fallen for him. He was a dismal, bloodstained creature from what was surely one of the worst areas on Earth, yet he radiated confidence and a sure sense of manly grace.
This was not another impulsive fling, though Sonja had never lacked for those. This time was one of those serious times.
Maybe she had fallen, somehow, for their quirky machine translation, for Lucky’s native tongue was an obscure pidgin of Chinese, Turkic, and Mongolian dialect, a desert lingo created by the roaming few who still survived in the world’s biggest dust bowl. It was the trouble of reaching him, of touching him, that made their pang of communion so precious to her. Talking to Lucky was like shouting through an ancient crack in the Great Wall of China.
She felt a powerful, deeply spiritual rapport with him, for once she had been so much like him: young, bewildered, foreign, aggressive, and heavily armed. In China, yet not quite of China. For this young war hero to become an honored guest of the Chinese state—he must have waded here through a tide of gore.
Sonja disentangled his callused fingers from her curls. “Lucky, you feel some pain here, don’t you?” She patted him intimately.
“Yes, that is a pain in my ass.”
“I will fix that for you.” He’d fallen—from a horse, most likely—and his cracked fourth lumbar vertebra had a growth on it, a tender, frilly, ligamentous benign tumor like some Chinese wood-ear mushroom. People’s interior organs—and Sonja had spent years studying them—they were subaquatic organisms, basically. They grew in bloody seawater.
“Stop fixing me, Sonja. You fix me too much.”
“Dear Badaulet, that big pain you feel down your leg comes from one small broken bone on your back. It is right … here. Do you feel that? Here it is: that is your pain. Because there is a network of nerves there. The network is pinched, the network has a fault. See how I can touch that network fault? My fingers can feel that.”
“No, no! Stop that! My back is strong! It’s my stupid ass that has the pain.” Lucky twisted his neatly trimmed head, showed her his newly polished teeth and smiled. “Rub me all over, slowly, as you did before. That part is good.”
“Lucky: You are strong and beautiful, but I know your body better than you. I know what you feel.”
“Stop dreaming! You can’t tell me what I feel, woman! Only Heaven knows the secrets hidden in the breasts of men!”
“Oh, I know enough of your secrets to heal you as a man.” She lowered her eyes. “That will hurt at first.”
“Oh woman, why do you always talk so much? I know what you want from that bold, rude way you look at my face! You can’t hurt me! You and your sweet little hands…” Lucky grabbed snakelike at her fingers, and missed them as she instantly snatched them back.
He really didn’t think that she could hurt him. Of the many outlandish things that Lucky had said to her, this one was the most absurd.
The Badaulet was an outcast, although he was entirely sure he was a prince. She had once thought she was a princess, and become an outcast… “Badaulet, this evening I will bathe you, and dress you in your fine new uniform. You will meet the greatest heroes in the whole world.” Grappling his arm, she coaxed him over onto his belly, so that