Hybrid
A novel by
R. P. Veraa
The Boy looked nonchalant on the other side of the smooth stone fighting floor beside the vise in which the blade of his knife was locked. The floor was wet and slippery with dark red blood; the last fight had been a messy one. Both Boys had been wounded early on, and they bled and bled as they stalked each other with very little contact. Finally they were too weak to do more than slash ineffectually at each other until one succumbed as much from blood loss as from the final wound. Aldric was sure the winner wouldn't survive either, and tried to put the image of him out of his mind. He tugged at his knife, but it was still locked tight in the vise. He could tell by the murmur of voices that the Men dimly visible beyond the ring of torch flames were still making bets. The odds would be heavily against him, he knew.
Aldric glanced again at the other Boy, who was casually peeing on the floor, spattering the bloody stones with a stream of yellow urine. He was shaking the last drops off his cock when he saw Aldric's eyes on him. Leering, he pantomimed masturbation. There was a burst of staccato laughter from the judge, a gaunt and toothless ancient oaf whose body was a patchwork of sparse gray hair on dirty gray skin. He clapped the older Boy on the shoulder and his laugh was taken up by the Men's voices behind the torchlight. Then the voices settled into an expectant hush. It wouldn't be long now. Easily, the bigger Boy's hand moved to his knife hilt.
Aldric gripped his own knife tighter, testing its fastness in the vise jaws. His hand was damp, and he tried to review all that he'd learned in years of practice with wooden knives. Keep low, he thought, make a small target. But how to do that? He remembered nothing from his lessons. He rubbed his hand through his hair to dry it, but his hair was damp too.
The two vises snapped open with a sharp bang and the big Boy turned to Aldric, his blade glinting in the torchlight, as unready Aldric's blade fell from the vice and clattered on the stone floor. In a panic, he fell to his knees and scrabbled for the knife as the other Boy ran the few swift strides across the floor. He grinned and uttered incoherent little grunts of victory.
Masrjyk cursed his luck. He saw now the wisdom of the saying, "Seed planted in a Whore's belly yields hungry fruit." What made it worse, though, is that he'd known it all along. As a young Man he'd seen many Whoreowners, and they were all poor and unhappy. And he'd seen hundreds of families of happy married Men like his parents raising healthy children. But Masrjyk had been young. He'd grown up with Krjynn, and it had always been assumed that she was the female that he would mate with and raise a conventional Mannish family with. He even had his first sex with her on his thirteenth birthday.
But then, even as his mother and Krjynn's mother were planning the mating feast, an itinerant Whoremaster had brought Alcya to the village. Masrjyk's friends had rented her for him with much leering and sniggering. "You've got to do it with a Whore once before settling down," they taunted. "Whores have no hair," they said, "so you can see what you're doing. Then you'll know what Krjynn's really like under the fur. You'll be able to serve her better after you've known a Whore."
And so, bashfully, he had gone with Alcya. It's not true that Whores have no hair. They just don't have much. It grows long on their heads, where it's softer than the hair of Men, and they've got little patches of short curly fur on their bodies, on the most pungent and delicious smelling places. Alcya had been a very young Whore then. She had only recently been captured on the marches, and her speech could hardly be understood.
Her large round eyes were red and brimmed with tears as she cringed, huddled at the end of her chain. Masrjyk was charmed by her fear, by the way she gasped and made her body rigid when he touched her. She had an adorable way of pressing her knees tightly together, and he had to strike her several times to make her relax and let him have his way with her. He knew he could never behave thus with Krjynn or any other wife. Masrjyk went back to the Whoremaster again and again, and enjoyed Alcya until not an inch of her pale skin was without his dark discolored bruises.
"You should buy the girl," the Whoremaster said. "You would have her always."
"Is she for sale?"
"Alas, yes. I'm getting too old to travel from village to village. And far too old to lust after her myself. But for a young Man like yourself, she would be worth the cost just for your own use. And the money you made providing her to the other Men in the village would mean you'd never have to work again."
"Yes, I suppose that's true," said Masrjyk.
"And she's wild caught. She can have offspring. You could raise a whole brothel of her daughters. And raise the Boys to be great fighters."
Masrjyk was sold. It took most of the animals he owned to purchase Alcya, and all of the rest to build her a little brothel on the edge of the village. He made her plant the adjacent land with corn and greens and beans and the other plants that Whores need to eat. And then Krjynn, declaring she'd never wed a Whoremaster, spurned him. At first Masrjyk didn't care. He didn't want a Mannish female anyway. He wanted an animal he could dominate; he declared he preferred Alcya to Krjynn.
He procured small wedding clothes that fit the Whore and held an obscene parody of a mating feast for her. Only a few of his young cronies were sufficiently debased to attend the ceremony, and even they declared -- when they awoke the next day suffering the distress of their indulgence -- that they'd been disgusted by the obscene consummation Masrjyk made to his wedding.
After that, he'd lived as an outcast in the little brothel. Occasionally one of the villagers came to avail himself of Alcya's services, but few found her satisfying. Even Masrjyk tired of her reluctance, for Alcya never gentled as Whores generally do. She never learned to have sex without tears and every indication of aversion and pain. Often she was vicious, biting and scratching painfully, and she required punishment so often that her face lost its youthful beauty; repeated breaking had deformed her nose, and one eye was smashed. Her arms and legs too were crooked from many fractures -- and still she had to be chained at all times to curb her attempts to escape.
She never bore the generation of young Whores that Masrjyk had hoped for. Her only offspring was a Boy she called Aldric, and he never grew big enough to be an adequate fighter. When Aldric was big enough to run, Alcya's attempts to escape with him grew more frequent and more irksome to Masrjyk, until, just weeks before his first fight had been scheduled, she tried to soften the links of her chain in the fire, and set the brothel ablaze. She perished in the flames and Masrjyk had to hold the Boy to prevent him from running into the burning building. The Boy was strangely affected by the sound of his mother's screams, and had been melancholy ever since. Now he had dropped his knife on the fighting floor. Masrjyk cursed his abominable luck.