The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter - Brent Hayward [65]
“You pieces of shit,” he called, though people were no longer visible. “End of the world! Stay in your fucking shitholes ’cause I’m comin’ up. Make way, make way!”
Scraps piled to overflow in a basket so heavy that several times, on her return trip to the fecund’s cell, Octavia needed to rest, using her knee as a prop while her arms throbbed and spasms twisted her lower back. Warm liquid dripped onto her calf, though from the basket or from her earlier encounter with the chatelaine she could not be certain. Looking down, she saw the globe of her white knee, appearing as she imagined the moon might appear, based on stories she’d heard as a child about this orb lost in the skies.
Directly after fucking, almost asleep on the opulent bed, Octavia had been told about the second visit. The chatelaine, whispering in her ear, ran her finger over Octavia’s belly, and down, between her legs. The news caused Octavia to sit up.
Another visit?
Thinking about possibilities for this encounter, Octavia tried to regulate her breathing, tried to remain calm; not much got her rattled.
Scrawny Cyrus, fellow kholic, rat catcher who worked the kitchens, had given her four dead rats in exchange for a glimpse of her thigh.
“Let’s have a little look, girlie, let’s have a little look?”
Cyrus did not live in the dorms of Jesthe, like she did; he shuffled to and from the ostracon every day with others who tended the sewers, chamberpot chutes, vermin, and general garbage disposal for the palace. The old kholic’s tag was pale, with poor definition, similar to her own. A man of Cyrus’s age had been alive during times when being melancholic meant beatings, even death for many.
But the old man grinned his toothless grin and shook with obvious desire (the way a good deal of men did, and a fair amount of women—kholic or otherwise—when they stood this close to Octavia). Licking his finger, he dragged it along her skin.
Then he laid the rodents lovingly atop the heaped refuse, holding each by the tail, as if this act were a form of physical contact between himself and Octavia. His breathing was audible all the while. He stood so close, trying with his milky eyes to look inside her shift or otherwise get near enough to feel her body’s warmth against his own frame . . .
Octavia hoisted the basket again and continued moving down the hall.
These rats, it seemed, were already beginning to decay, skin pulled back from yellow teeth, hair missing in clumps. The corpses and the refuse they lay on emitted a stench rich and stupefying and wholly nostalgic.
She stopped to catch her breath once more only when she realized that she was very near to the fecund’s cell.
That squeal again, the monster’s high-pitched giggle.
Illuminated by the torch she had earlier jammed into the sconce by the cell door and left burning there, she looked down at the contents of the basket: the four rats; potato peelings; egg shells; numerous bones (with as much gristle and fat attached as possible); rancid offal; four unwashed sanitary towels (from hemo girls who shared the room with her, and who were having their bizarre red flow); three pairs of breeches stolen from the adjacent room, where male staff slept, and which were obviously impregnated with their dried and crusty seed (spilled, no doubt, each night, while imagining her own body, pinned, sweaty beneath their thrusts).
Octavia forced her way through the opening.
Directly on the other side of the portcullis, the slitted nostrils, so close, turned her way and began to work. The fecund was very visible this time, sitting up in her pond, near to the bars. For a second, it seemed that the monster did not recognize Octavia, but suddenly she clapped her huge, scaly hands together.