Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2008 06:43:50 -0800 (PST)
From: Kris Gibbons <bookwyrm6@yahoo.com>
Subject: CatTale

                                          CatTale
                                   by Kristopher Gibbons

Copyright 1996, 2008


This story is a work of fiction. It often contains references to both
sexual and violent behaviour, along with expressions of physical affection
and compassion. 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 and uncanny.

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 onto any other site without the direct
consent of the author.


I can be contacted at Bookwyrm6@yahoo.com

How I pronounce the names: Pwerid - (p-where-id) Shaleton - (Shall-et-tun)
Tuenn - (Tiu-en) Krilwkut - (Krill-e-cut) Ferikgroeln - (fair-ic-gruln)
_________________________________________________________________________

                                        CHAPTER ONE

     Pwerid glanced up from the washbasin. Soiled platters and goblets
surrounded him like demanding children, as they did after every morning and
noontime meal. Morning light poured in through a doorway kept open in
practically all weather. Nikraan gentry, guests of his Nikraan master,
whined that such a custom courted sickness, that it invited evil spirits
and -- the complaint Pwerid thought the most ironic -- that it reeked of
the barbaric. Every day for fifteen years Chief-cook Pwerid commanded the
kitchen for Master Ferikgroeln from his perch by the washbasin. To those
who deigned to speak with him, Pwerid justified the hospitably open kitchen
door as a Hramal tradition, universal in his great-great-grandsire's
day. Since his guests' annoyance and anxiety amused Master Ferikgroeln, the
door stayed open and welcoming while Chief-cook Pwerid worked for the
conquerors of his great-great-grandsire.
     This particular morning he let the sun soak into him as he worked
alone, diligently cleaning the discards from the Master's
fast-breaking. Master Ferikgroeln had claimed two of Pwerid's three drudges
to toil in the horse-stalls, where he planned some demonstration or
sale. Pwerid agreed with the timeworn whisperings of the veteran stable
hands that, when it came to the horses, Master Ferikgroeln needed all the
help he could get.
     An intruding silhouette cast its twisted shadow the kitchener's way. A
flicker of a glance, and Pwerid took in the long-sleeved bed gown, its
milky, translucent corona gilding a well-curved form. He caught the woman's
artful, visibly uncomfortable, pose: Chest jutting, back arched, and legs
widely spaced with knees bent slightly outward. With a smile for her
posturing, half amused and half annoyed, Pwerid kept his gaze on his
plates.
     "I trust that you are well this morning, Shaleton?"
     The glare-edged shadow paused before wistfully answering. "Yes. But
lonely, Pwerid." She stepped inside, pouting, and peered about. "Where is
your pet this morning? Out at the stables?" Her voice lost its casual,
blase tone.
     Pwerid gave no answer, only rubbed more vigourously at a stubborn bit
of waste; so Shaleton stalked up to the basin and around it, with a slow,
practised roll of the hip. She moved behind Pwerid, then leaned on the
table beside him and repeated her question.
     "Where is your pet this morning?" Cloying sweetness washed her words
and Pwerid's nostrils as she ran her fingers gently across his back.
     "Where is your's?"
     To Pwerid's surprise he diverted his visitor, who pouted again before
answering. "He's prettying up his stupid grass-eaters, to show off to yet
another fool. Not that it will do him any good." Pwerid feebly declined his
head at the last comment, his gesture safely ambiguous. "There are times I
wish I were Nikraan, maybe then I would understand him. Oh! What? No look
of horror for my blasphemy? A Hramal slave wishes she were Nikraan!" she
singsonged.
     When Pwerid failed to respond, she resumed her complaint. "If it is
not the horses, its the stables themselves. If it is not the stable yards,
he has to visit with Manorlord Nilsan. Or Manor-bitch Elriohanna!" This
last name she growled.
     Pwerid roused. "Jealous, Shaleton? Reminded that you're a Hramal
slave? Not a landed Nikraan widow?"
     He wanted Shaleton flouncing out of the kitchen, speechless from his
teasing. A pleasant image, if a futile hope. The Master's harlot invaded
Pwerid's kitchen whenever she felt bored or neglected; a frequent
occurrence, with the Master fled elsewhere, his chamberlain
undistract-able. And 'courtesan' as a household position held no status. So
the only people she could annoy with impunity were the menials. She did.
     "Who is there to be jealous of? Some black-clad, chalk-faced, greasy,
bloated lump? Hardly. But why spend so much time with the horses, the
stable hands, or that dirty little miller-widow? Her dead husband didn't
fall into his water-wheel, he must have jumped in to escape her." She alone
guffawed at her own insult. "If the Master's not buying horses, he's
planning some bizarre new feed for them, or wasting night after night with
some old cob, doing foal-watch. Maybe if I were Nikraan I might
understand."
     Pwerid smiled lightly at the mention of foal watch. As with every
other male slave, he had spent nights with the horses in-foal, holding the
Master while the man lost his supper over the smells, the effort, and mess
of birthing.
     To divert Shaleton from marking his smirk, Pwerid spoke up quickly. "I
think it has nothing to do with the Master being Nikraan. He simply accepts
his burden of responsibility. It is merely part of being a manorlord."
     Again Shaleton pouted. Intentionally, Pwerid had cut short her
complaint with the same kind of words, in the same 'barely patient' tone,
as he had heard Master Ferikgroeln use. Frustrated, she snarled back. "How
would you know, oaf?"
     The cook only shrugged.
     "Don't tell me, I can guess." Shaleton guffawed. "Because of yet
another tale your paragon of a mother handed down to you. Another fable
from the olden days before the Nikraan." She waved the thought aside.
     Unruffled, Pwerid countered. "Is this all you came to do? Complain?
Claw at me until I bleed sympathy? My sympathy is well hidden. You won't
find any here. The Master does what he must out of an acquired sense of
responsibility. Acquired, Shaleton. A Hramal manorlord would be just as
busy.... Never mind, Shaleton. You know nothing about being responsible."
     At first the woman looked ready to knife the cook. Then her look
turned sly: Her eyelids drooped, she pinched her lips together for colour,
and her chest began to heave more noticeably.
     "No. But I don't have to know. All I need to do is be biddable,
beautiful and beddable. A testimony to the virility of the masterful master
of this place." She moved from the table and nestled herself lightly,
snugly, against the curve of the Cook's back, then settled a hand gently
across the far shoulder and breathed into his ear.
     "And he does find me beautiful, Pwerid. Do you? I'm sure you do,
behind that mask of scorn you always wear. How would you feel, holding me
in your arms each night, having an eager, warm woman like me at your side
instead of some tongueless Nikraan castoff boy?" She touched her own tongue
to the ear she had been murmuring in.
     Pwerid squinted at a grimy ladle, then grimaced.
     "Soiled." he decided.
     Giggling, Shaleton stepped back toward the outside doorway. "You are
hopeless..."
     Even as Shaleton spoke, a stocky, russet-haired man strode from the
inside entrance, carting a pail of warm ash which he placed beside
Pwerid. His ruddy hair and ghostly complexion stood out from the dark locks
and darker, if still fair, skin-tones of the cook and the Master's
concubine. A tattoo zigzagged down the middle of his forehead; a
lightning-bolt, no longer cobalt blue, marking the man for life - and in
death - as Nikraan.
     Pwerid did not need to look up from his work to know that Shaleton
watched the younger helper closely. Her utter stillness and silence bespoke
unease and discomfort, feelings she would never openly confess. The
kitchener had hoped that Tuenn's quiet appearance would send Shaleton
hunting elsewhere. That which regularly drew her blatant interest - a
muscular, work-toned frame and broad chest - when coupled with Tuenn's
interminable silent watchfulness, evoked her fear instead. For his part,
Tuenn maintained a courteous manner toward the woman. But then Shaleton
gave him little chance, now, to act otherwise.
     As he passed on to a chair beside the ovens, the young man smiled at
the cook and spared a cautious, respectful, nod for the woman. He raised
one brow to the kitchener; a silent question. Pwerid watched from the
corner of his eye as Shaleton jerked her gaze away from Tuenn. With a
defiant lift of her head she did a twirl displaying her dress - a clumsy
effort to hide her signing against the evil eye. Pwerid wondered, in
passing, how much of the woman's flirting Tuenn might have seen.
     "Do you like my gown?" she asked, steady again, sighing deeply from
her upper chest. She had once confided, unasked, how this gesture always
drew the Master's delighted attention.
     It failed to draw Pwerid's attention, and the sigh from him came out
genuinely weary. "Your choice is always enticing, Shaleton. And your manner
always glamourous. For someone of the Master's.... tastes. But so what? You
are merely our gentle Master's latest bed warmer. Merely another transient,
although you've lasted longer than others. You came from a different
master, and will probably be sold to yet another." Pwerid paused
deliberately.
     "My family has survived here from before the Nikraan came. I am part
of the manor the Master inherited. Not only that, I do whatever I must to
see that the manor thrives. Because I do, I have been cook here for years
and will be until I die, or until the Master gives me other work. You,
however, may not be warming his bed next year if you fail to be enticing,
or fail to seem mysterious, appreciative or 'adventurous'. If you fail just
once!"
     Pwerid dished out familiar taunts, but never so many at one
time. Though speaking with the nonchalance of repetition, he gave Shaleton
the opportunity for a dramatic exit.
     "You resent me!" she hissed. No Hramal ever shouted, in joy or
distress, where Nikraan might hear. "You resent it that Master Ferikgroeln
raised me up. That I don't struggle and break my back like the others. Like
you. That I am treated almost like Nikraan now." She mirrored the glance
that Pwerid gave his mate just then, yet the fierce emotion that crawled
across her face shared nothing of the affection shining from Pwerid's.
     Pwerid well understood Shaleton's troubled fascination, and deftly
read her worried look: Tuenn drew her attention, her dread, like some mute
omen of her future. If the Nikraan treated their own the way he had been
treated, how might her fate twist?
     "But you are not Nikraan." Pwerid pointed out, answering both her
accusation and her clear, if unvoiced, thought. "You are Hramal. Like
me. Content to serve." His tone stayed bland, without telltale enthusiasm
or sarcasm. "I myself prefer being a quietly angry Hramal cook to being an
affected, wheedling Hramal whore!"
     Usually Shaleton would argue interminably with Pwerid, or any other
servant, and bask in the attention that the banter was an excuse for. But
with the presence of Tuenn, the cook's inscrutable shadow, she looked
flustered, flayed by the simple barbs Pwerid halfheartedly tossed.
     "I am all but Lady of the Manor here. Better that than an aging Hramal
roue. Better that than a pasty-faced, coward Nik... cowardly discard. Who
clings to you as if you were his mother. And who didn't have the courage to
kill himself rather than become the kept harlot of a slave."
     She babbled her venom even as she backed up to the outer doorway. "And
how is it, Pwerid, that you hate Nikraan so much and yet you sleep with
one? Or do you use him to play out your frustrated fantasies? Tell me. Does
he play passive Nikraan to your fierce Hramal invader every night? You can
tell me, Pwerid. We both bed Nikraan, but I get more gifts than just sweat
and seed for doing so. And I don't lie to myself about why. Tell me,
Pwerid. Do you squint your eyes and pretend Tuenn is the Master?"
     Utter silence gripped the room for several heartbeats. When Shaleton
had called Tuenn a coward, the Nikraan had watched for Pwerid's reaction
and had not looked away since. He sat stone-faced, no motion to him but the
pulsing of veins and the rhythmic lurch of shallow breathing. Slowly,
lovingly, Pwerid worked on a greasy knife, one he used to pare beef. When
he spoke, the soft tone in his voice, and its' newfound resonance, briefly
halted the woman's backward creep for the doorway.
     "No. my fancy is that he is Tuenn, but free and untroubled. You cannot
understand either of us, Shaleton. Do not pretend to try. I suggest that
you go cling to your one vain hope for survival. Save your viper's tongue
for the Master's mouth and just leave."
     Though visibly shaken, Shaleton had to toss the last stone. "I am
right then." Her shrill tone cracked. "You resent that the Master is not a
man-lover. That you cannot do for him what Tuenn does for you."
     And she fled.

     Releasing another sigh, Pwerid set the knife aside. Much as he
expected, Shaleton left more than a few meal-plates to clean in her
wake. Every time she strayed, however briefly, into Tuenn's vicinity, the
same infuriating memory repeated in Pwerid's head. Two years before, when
she had first arrived as a gift from Manorlord Pielriark, Shaleton had
pursued every Nikraan male in the household. Initially, she excluded Tuenn
from her campaign, perhaps uncertain of his status. One day, however, she
decided not to overlook him.
     Tuenn had come to Pwerid sweating and flushed, totally unmanned and
inconsolable, unable to bear anyone's touch or proximity but not daring to
be alone. Fortunately Pwerid had all but completed the preparation for the
Master's supper, so he left his other helpers to finish what work
remained. He took the overwrought Tuenn to their room, sat him down and let
him tremble and cry in private while Pwerid quietly moved about the room;
straightening up here, cleaning there, being a constant but undemanding
presence.
     Eventually Tuenn related how Shaleton had come upon him in a storage
room, had tried to seduce him and, when that failed, had threatened to tell
the Master he had raped her if he did not comply. Shaleton's proximity and
imperious manner provoked dread memories for Tuenn, who could only stand
paralysed while she undressed him and tried, with increasingly vigourous
efforts, to arouse him. She succeeded, but Tuenn otherwise remained
immobile and insensible - a statue. Tuenn communicated to Pwerid how he had
watched Shaleton's efforts from the ceiling of the room, unconnected to
what she did with his body. He had watched her turn angry and abusive at
what she saw as reluctance, and then frightened and hysterical at his
corpse-like stillness.
     After Shaleton had fled, Tuenn 'woke up' alone, nauseated, half-naked,
and terrified. A week passed before he could allow anyone's touch, and then
only Pwerid's. Whenever he and Pwerid endured one of Shaleton's visits, the
memory of Tuenn's anguish and humiliation arose, visibly straining Pwerid's
calm.
     Pwerid thought how his grandmother, a haunted but feisty old woman,
had spent nearly all of her declining years tending and chattering to the
nis-ralurh; those forearm-long cats that claim the manor garbage piles for
their banquet-hall. As the indifferent Nikraan would live surrounded by
their filth and the remnants of their meals stinking up their homes, the
Hramal of the manor allocated an area of the grounds within which they
burned the unusable leavings of each day's accumulation. There the
nis-ralurh hunted, and Pwerid's grandmother invariably wandered.
     She confessed all her woes to them, believing in old lore that their
kin, the man-sized ralurh, would hear and give her the justice she
craved. Once Pwerid boldly pointed out that her own stories placed the
ralurh's home in the Far East, beyond the realms of Hramal or
Nikraan. Grandmother simply spat, "So?" She fixed him with a frighteningly
lucid eye. "I would rather rely on the justice and mercy of a huge ralur I
have never seen than on any Hramal or Nikraan whom I have."
     Annoyed and frustrated by Shaleton's attentions, Pwerid appreciated
his grandmother's perspective as he never had before, and considered the
talk he might have with the stableyard's grimalkin.
     Cat-quiet, Tuenn moved from the ovens to stand beside the
kitchener. Pwerid looked up, his gray eyes sharing both sadness and humour
with troubled brown ones. "Just imagine if Shaleton had inherited this
manor."
     Tuenn smiled back woodenly, nodded, and began to speak.
     The young slave spoke in a series of vowel-like noises; throaty
sounds, without the definition or readily recognized variety of regular
speech. Tuenn's speaking was not in clear distinct words, yet neither was
it some creaturely, prolonged howling. His effort held a deliberate cadence
provided by his breath and lips. Anyone with a patience for repetition - or
anyone with sufficient familiarity - could recognize a skillful varying of
sounds, along with some craftily rendered consonants that ordinarily
demanded the tongue that Tuenn lacked.
     Pwerid shook his head vigourously. "No, Tuenn. You do not shame me
with my own people. Politics among Hramal is no less complicated than among
Nikraan. The only difference, it seems, is what we fight over. And Shaleton
is hardly a weathercock for Hramal - as any other slave will quickly tell
you. The way I see her, she simply cannot bear competition. That any man
should not want her, even me, frightens her. So I provoke her, we provoke
her. She would treat you just as she does me, were she not so scared of
you."
     With another forced smile, Tuenn shook his head and waved his hands
about, warding off the woman's imagined advances. In the blink of an eye,
the smile fled. As an old survival tactic turned habit, his face betrayed
nothing; it sat atop his shoulders like a mask of indifference and changed
only through Tuenn's deliberate effort, which added to the difficulty most
people had in understanding him. To compensate, Pwerid included the gist of
what he heard within his own responses, for Tuenn to confirm or
correct. For Pwerid this effort had become habit as well.
     Tuenn addressed Pwerid again, who listened and shook his head but
glared only at the remaining dishes and utensils. When speaking on
difficult topics, Pwerid maintained a carefully inoffensive manner. Like
all Hramal, all who survived with some sanity or stubbornness, he knew his
eyes could betray him. From a deeply buried pyre of anger, a sheer
undistillable rage only Hramal knew, glints and sparks flared on occasion
and could be misunderstood, or worse, perfectly understood. This quiet fury
of the enslaved lent a ferocity to his gaze that Pwerid never inflicted on
Tuenn. They looked each other in the eye, often. But in emotionally taxing
conversations, Pwerid kept the gestures that signaled attentiveness to a
minimum, lest he render Tuenn self-conscious with the burden of his gaze.
     "No, I think I know why you had not suicided, before Master
Ferikgroeln bought you. Though I used to wonder. I always thought 'Death
before dishonour' and 'Death rather than submission' were the unspoken rule
for Nikraan. But then, you not only found your mother when she suicided,
you had to clean up the blood and dross yourself, I'd be surprised if you
ever saw anything noble in suicide after that!"
     Haltingly, Tuenn responded, his eyes intent on Pwerid. By the time the
young man finished, the kitchener had completed his cleansing, and peered
at Tuenn with a frown. "Yes. You make light of the turmoil you
survived. But you belittle yourself when you do. You endured so much!" He
shrugged. "Maybe you want to forget it...But I will not. And you..."
Gently, his hands aching with tenderness, Pwerid reached out and traced a
faint pattern of whitened scar surrounding the young man's lips. Otherwise
motionless, Tuenn kissed the fingertips.
     Like a ritual, Pwerid tallied in his own head the horrors of his
beloved's durance before arriving in his kitchen. 'Witnessing your father's
death, in a fool's duel with Master Krilwkut. Krilwkut claiming your family
as spoils. The years...the times he gave you, or your mother or sister, to
guests for their private fun. Your mother killing herself over conceiving a
bastard slave-child. Your sister, made a brood mare too young, dying in her
second miscarriage.'
     His composure as shaky as his hands, Pwerid continued aloud. "To
satisfy some disgusting sexual whim, and his fear of reprisal should you
confess his cruelty, Master Krilwkut had your tongue sliced. If you had not
sickened so abruptly after, he would have had your teeth pulled as
well. And rather than be burdened with yet another corpse, he tossed you in
with some other slaves he had sold to Master Ferikgroeln."
     "The weasel-faced dung-eater!"
     Tuenn shook his head and replied. He took Pwerid's hand and kissed the
palm. His face, as always, betrayed nothing.
     "That is when Fortune's Wheel turned for you? For me also, though I
did not know it till a long time after... I had resigned myself to my
solitude. Then you came, and I haven't had a wink of sleep ever since." He
smiled to let Tuenn know that he teased. Tuenn nodded.
     Pwerid ambled over to the wood crate. "We are going to need some more
faggots. Tonight's meal is simple enough, but if the Master is late we will
need to keep it hot."
     Cradling the remaining logs and splinters in one arm, he stopped and
turned to his helper. "Tuenn. What Shaleton said, just now, about my
bedding a Nikraan..." He stared into warm brown eyes, and saw calm
certainty. For once, Shaleton had not left devastation behind her. Relief
thickened his voice. "I cannot understand why you stay with me. Gratitude
wears thin quickly, and you outgrew any need of me long ago." Pwerid glared
down at an empty basin, his face reddening and tight-muscled with
tension. "I know at least two men in this manor, younger and more virile
than I, who look at you every chance, eager for some sign of interest from
you."
     Tuenn laughed and dismissed them. "Children." But the look he made for
Pwerid shone angry, intense and humourless; vulnerability unleashed with
the ferocity of a weapon. "It is you I love. I choose you. Every
day. Without remorse." Unspoken, yet somehow clear, the question reflected
back from his tense, expressionless face: "Do you regret your own choice?"
     And Pwerid answered in a voice rough with emotion, the habit of
repetition forgotten, ignored. "Forgive me, Tuenn. At times...At times I
still fear that I will lose you."
     Deliberately, Tuenn laughed again, hugging the suddenly goosefleshed
and shivering kitchener. "Am I such a rare gift, then. Your tongueless
stone-face?"
     Pwerid refused to release him, or lighten the mood, but glared up at
his helper. Anxiety, desire, affection and sadness; an ineffable whorl of
emotion communicated itself to Tuenn in the sudden deepening of Pwerid's
voice as he answered simply.
     "Yes. You are."