Love & Intervention

originally posted June 6, 2005

She was a tower slave in our small apartment; a young girl not much older than myself. My mother despised her. Not because my father used her. He, in fact, did not. The girl was utterly thrilled to serve us and never complained a word about the gruel or the mat beneath the drafty window she was given. In retrospect, the girl, Sa’na made my mother look like a shrew. And yes, I am aware of the similarity between her name and a certain well-endowed, eager raven haired slave currently on my ever-lengthening chain. The difference in pronunciation is not only emphasis on a certain syllable but inflection. Also, Sa’na was a willowy, dishwater blonde. Too, she was my first love. Perhaps that is overstating things. I was young and enjoyed having her. As I discovered my masculinity, she was constantly cornered and put to the task of my choosing. After a time, to my pleasure, she sought me out and begged attention. Circumstance intervened. The details do not matter. Tragedy is a way of life. It is the trials that make you stronger. Suffice it to say, my first of many vagabond adventures began at a young age.
Taking the Northern Silk Road south, crossing the Southern Prairie, I was a young Poet with a pack slung to his shoulder reaching the Plains of Turia. A fool, I was run down by a rider on the back of a Southern Kaiila. The sun was in my eyes, glaring. The rider’s lance propped my chin up. I demanded to hear the name of my killer, bold youth that I was. The laughter was decidedly feminine and caught me completely unaware. That was how I met Maya; a brash Tuchuk female almost twice my age. No matter what level of disdain she had for the ‘vermin’ she purported me and those of my city to be, I could not keep my eyes from her. Unkempt and untamed, allowed by the men of her wagons to be so, I was fascinated. How was she so raw, so sexual, and not slave? She made all manner of threats to my person if I but thought about touching her. It did not deter me.
“My brothers will kill you,” she warned me.
I was not killed, obviously. Close to half my life was spent on the Plains of Turia. I fell in love. I fathered a Son. I shared grass and earth. I lost all of it. Circumstances, again, intervened. It is, as a noble Tuchuk Warrior called Kublai marked it, ‘The Year We Do Not Talk About’. I was a vagabond with a heavy heart. For several years I wandered, village to village, peasant hut to riverside camp, until I again reached the gates of Ar.
“I will never take a companion,” I told the slave, Joy, holding her in my arms, having allowed her to ascend my couch.
Joy was my brother’s girl. She was devoted to him. What I did, breaking his heart, is not something I am proud of. It is not something I take lightly, but it is not something I am apologetic about either. I made her love me. I brought her to me by being something my brother could not; uncompromising, strong, and relentless. I was no longer a boy chasing the skirt of an eager kitchen girl, nor was I interested in equality with a woman. I chose to be a man, with the full implication of what that was, with her. It is not completely true that I am unapologetic about the situation entirely. I am sorry that it has created a rift between brothers that will, likely, never be repaired. I am just not sorry I did it. For the first time in my life, dominating Joy, pinning her beneath my will, I defined myself. I assumed the mantle of manhood that I had yet, conquest after conquest, to grasp. Any woman thereafter, thrilled by my touch, finding herself eager to please me, enamored by my brutality, owes her a debt. What I ignited in her, stoked, allowed to burn hotter than it ever had before opened my eyes. When I bent her to my will, she did not, would not, break.
She simply said breathlessly, “Yes, Master”.