Understanding where I developed an addiction to women required enough soul-searching to waste two lifetimes.

  I recall an original dislike for the fairer sex. Like the rest of the young scamps, I had once teased the girls who frolicked beside us. My interest only lay so far in lighting their hair on fire or proudly turning my back as they approached one of our scrape-kneed huddles.

  My mother’s parents had come from the southern fields. When they moved to Pelliul, they brought with them their Chapwyn credenda. That in mind, one night my family carried me off to attend the Garnishing of Spring. Barely old enough to lock in stern memory, the night seems now a fogged dance half-merged in fairy land. Yet, beyond the perfumes and spastic writhing, I remember clearly, under the glow of church lamps, the fair-hair thing watching me.

  She tiptoed, avoiding all the chanting, flailing grown-ups, making her way eventually to the front my family’s pew. I recall a sense of embarrassment when she handed me the nettielium.

  While my family towered above us, roaring their agreements and oaths to the priest at the altar, I twisted the flower by its stalk, absently watching the spin of the petal’s whites and yellow.

  I laugh so hard remembering it that my stomach hurts. With a sudden pounce, I rained down punches on the poor little girl.

  Her squeals became a world away when I was yanked skyward by my collar then marched out by my grandfather. As the rest of my family toppled over themselves apologizing to the girl’s parents, the Zevon patriarch took me to a dark patch under the trees. As he died soon after, I remember little about him, other than the strength in his wood-cutting arms that had remained in his elder years.

  “Arcus!” I’d later heard, screeched for what seemed its own eternity. I sat scolded in a corner, pout-faced and numb from the tirades of relatives, each taking their turn declaring the exact level of disgrace I’d brought on the house of Zevon. I didn’t understand why I’d done what I had. My reaction to the damn flower, the squeamish fluttering of the unfamiliar. But I had done it.

  A peculiar memory to retell, I know, and even now I do so in the vain attempt to persuade myself that my issues didn’t originate from weakness, but sprang up from some form of primeval, manly aggression That singular event, though, I’m afraid, does nothing more than merely point to boyhood itself—just one of the many acts boys conjure up that lead to grey hair atop a parent’s exacerbated brow. No, the first clear sign that my troubles were beginning came when boyish fantasies of dragon slaying gave way to new dreams—dreams of another kind.

  I had a warrior soul from the beginning. The fistfights on the shores of Lake Oraga had once made the name “Arcus Zevon” synonymous with speckling the rich soil red. Days spent tackling cohorts in games of divitch ball and the bruised victories celebrated whilst limping home are fond memories still.

  Lamentably, puberty had a different plan. As my pudgy friends became barrel-chested men, and the boys whose baby teeth I had once knocked out were beginning to sprout the preludes of beards, I remained in appearance that of a child. Before I could truly say why, my place in the hierarchy of maleness steadily diminished.

  Eons later, after I had been forced to hide my hairless endowments from the eyes of my peers, I began to take shape, although not how I had hoped.

  My mother was sure to tell me regularly how I was growing like a weed. In one way, she was right. In a summer I shot two full hands in the air, just without the benefit of a single added pound of flesh.

  And that was my lingering fate: a skinny, twerpish lad. Worse yet, I still thrummed with my fighter’s blood. Although a new anger had formed—that of being the target of jokes and bullies—rage alone is never enough to avoid being pinned and pummeled.

  The school I attended was like many schools in Pelliul. Poorer children, destined to carry the spear and shovel, filtered past polished wagons dropping off their polished brats. I have been told other cities in the Rehleia follow the olden ways. The child of a bank clerk would never mingle with the jeweled child of that bank’s owner. But Pelliul had long ago done away with sound segregations in exchange for a sense of progressive smug.

  I mention school because, while I was supposed to be studying the beads of an abacus, I tortured myself, I suppose, by the relentless study of my shapely classmates. Pleasuring myself would spend my angst before school, and a shameful encore would commence shortly after I’d returned to fling down my books.

  As often the case, in time most families sharing our neighborhood prospered or horrendously failed. The result: my cohorts were moved into shanties or homes of polished pink ivory, disappearing from my eyes as if they’d been zapped by a wizard into the ether.

  One friend remained. Worse to my plight than any wizard, his sanctimonious parents, he eventually learned—and I was immediately told—practiced sexual liberties by way of some secret gathering. Although he said this gathering touted a “rule-free” existence, I abandoned my pleas to join when his interrogated father sheepishly confessed to their furtive joys and rolled out the cult’s rigid requirements. A petitioner had to have not one but four sponsors. The only people I knew were the types who chanted hymns and tithed on the appointed day.

  If my work in military reconnaissance had a telling prequel, surely then it was this night. After exhausting every ploy imaginable, after trailing behind their hastening pace to the flower-streamed doorway of the lair, I could only stare at a sullen wall, enviously fantasizing from the shadows what loin-frothed ecstasy transpired on the other side.

  At one gathering, wouldn’t you know, my friend was eventually inducted. This didn’t help my jealousy any, making it so great in fact it soon blotted out all conscious thought.

  Later I experienced a sigh of relief, then guilt for the joy that I had not been him. An eager member of Ansul’s True had sabotaged the sex cult; the Chapwynite purposefully contracted Thina’s Poxy, the street name of our province’s most insidious venereal disease. After letting the pustules fade and the discharge ripen to prime lethality, in the company of duped sponsors, the bright-smiling zealot walked the same route I had, then through the flower-streamed doorway he penetrated into enemy grounds and shucked off his robe. Half a year later, most members had withered to gaunt mimics of their former selves. My friend being no exception.

  Such tragedies are forgotten when the moral compelling them is one we are too young or too weak to embrace. The last of my school days left me still yearning for the touch of women like the thirst of a marooned sailor.

  At perhaps the most thirst-ridden, I was in route from one class to another when there appeared in front of me a girl whom I’d known from our days as children. Fate had transformed her lank, boyish frame into strutting eloquence. I walked behind this creature, one who long ago forgotten I’d existed. Dressed for fairer lads, her heels supported lean, long, muscular legs, olive from her deliberate appointments with the sun. Her skirt was cruelly short, her undergarments fit snug as shadows. I learned this latter torment as I walked straight into a wall.

  My ego bruised, my nose bleeding, my soul crumpled, she sailed around the bend without so much as a glance at what dunce had just caused the mirthful riot. Looking around at those who clapped my back or roared in my face, I knew right then that what I desired most was to be gorged on by these other men.

  Left me, the hope to learn the pleasures of women, but happiness, peace, fulfillment—all worthless when in the mind’s eye of the smirking, hopeless addict. This, I must submit, is the chief similarity I’ve witnessed when braving talks with pipe-heads or an alley drunkard. For us, the addict, our need isn’t merely like life itself, but is life itself; we who were made cosmically unwhole.

  After too many memories of longing, after years had passed, my emptiness had grown teeth. In some dark place deep inside, an always open mouth screamed its hunger, its insatiability, and its demand to be fed.

  No, I did not become a rapist, blast you, if that’s where you thought I was going. No, chalk one up for Chapwyn upbringing—if nothing else, I feared hellfire in my moments of unspeakable contemplation. Religion, I am even prouder to say, was not what saved me, but my aforementioned fighter’s blood. This I was soon to learn.

  I was terrible with women.

  I was a virgin.

  But if I would die one, which was a likelihood, I was going to die in a blaze of glorious fire.

  Desire to know women became desire to kill men—not odd if, all things considered, you give the metamorphosis its proper amount of scrutiny.

  Unfortunately, the Pelati conflicts were over and the Conqueror’s quest to unite our lands had successed into parleys projected to linger well into adulthood. But as my studies were ending, by the grace of Tersiona herself, flare-ups erupted with Azad. The desert people had marched over the Red Isthmus, and the Conqueror needed men.

  I quickly found a replacement for all those lustful, futile daydreams. I even found purpose herself. I didn’t know why we had originally started fighting them, but I soon knew recruiters who’d soldiered under the Conqueror during our provincial warring, in the mangroves of Pelat, and in the sweltering heat of Azad during the first clash. These hard faces didn’t scoff at my ambition the way my father had.

  I will never forget the look in his eyes. Pure disbelief, holding my sister like the filling war wagons would sing her too to certain death. My grandmother, riddled with age, with help and demonstration, waved along at my departure. Finally there was Mother herself, who through a life of domesticated piety was left incapable of understanding why some men wish to spill other’s blood. As our convoy to boot camp summited the first of many hills, she prayed, lamenting the death of my innocence.

  It had been dead a long time.

  I wasn’t the only lad who jumped at the recruiter’s trumpet. What is so damned laughable, though, is the finer details, the details I’m sure they, those other lads, omit from their barroom tellings. A boy from school who had the reputation of a fearsome brawler failed the entry-level crucibles. Another—an athlete cheered on by friends and family alike for being the future nemesis of all Azad—that coward scurried off to the first non-combat role available. Yet I, Arcus Zevon, rose like an iron sun.

  Much of boot camp was like a stick in the stream that collects all the muck and the garbage. I could hardly believe my senses; able young men wailing their lament for faraway beds, intimidated by corporal punishment, or missing a girl. It was in this period I began to see a strength that had silently developed from my perceived inferiorities. I missed no one—no woman, no endearing touch, nothing. Pain was easy. No sleep, a dream. Being told I was nothing and that I was worthless—an average day in the looking glass. I was filled with pure glee, watching the same types of young men who’d once paraded and peacocked fail so miserably at military life while I so maniacally succeeded.

  At the end of basic training, I was the target of much grovel and envy when I was awarded a say in which banner I was to bleed and die under.

  I’d always been curious how units got their identifiers. This was true for their names and especially their symbols. All sorts of fierce creatures decorated the Conqueror’s shields and guidons: wolves, bears, and the like. Dragons, rumored to still exist in the Other Lands, were a personal favorite.

  I’d seen a goblin once in a performer’s square when I was a boy. The rugged hill-men who’d captured the little abomination would use prodding sticks, whenever the crowd coughed up a coin, to make fangs clamp or claws rattle the bars of its cage. It was a hideous, smelly creature, leaving me terrified of the mountains for years. It made sense then, I suppose, for one of our larger infantry units to display such a face on their standard.

  Like every recruit, I’d heard the clamor while tending my wounds in the barracks. An elite group had ceased the sharpening of their arrowheads to announce a tryout. I was told their name had come from the maritime raiders who’d once fought on the beaches of Suela. The White Sand, their snapping standard brandished an hourglass with its bone-colored sand waiting ominously all on the bottom: Times up! This unit, caked in blood and medals and the dirt of foreign wastes, had evolved from beach-stormers to covert spies and the deadliest of archers. Although trained extensively in the sword, and more arrogant than kings, their greatest source of pride was in their ability to remain unseen. Such was necessary for their greatest derivation of pleasure. A sudden arrow in an unsuspecting enemy heart was rumored to be the highest achievement attainable in their godlike ranks.

  And to these ranks I auditioned.

  It was sheer hate that got me through it all. From the first day in that beaten courtyard within the Martial Fortress to the indoctrination runs that began while the world slept and ended when the merchant sat for his lunch, hate got me through. And eventually, after I’d sweat and puked until my soul itself felt it had been beaten, I was a member, given sword, bow, and quiver after drinking the ceremonial quotient of pig’s blood lit ablaze in liquor.

  The vindicating misanthropy that came from watching men break ceased the moment I entered the White Sand. There, my cohorts were ferocious farm boys from the south, mountain children who’d buried their parents, Nilghorde-street types who’d killed long before military service.

  Trumpet the heavens, my nights were not only filled with grueling hours at the archery range, but my obsessed unfamiliarity with the lithe female body was quickly ripped of its veil! My brothers understood my animal plight. Most, fairer-faced and well versed in subsequent charm, escorted many a maiden into our bay to be ravaged by a pack of hungry, hooting hounds.

  Odd perhaps, perhaps not, but I’d felt an initial disappointment; the theatre I’d longed for wasn’t so merry. The following day my eagerness was restored, heightened in some ways as I felt I needed now desperately to attain some sense of satisfaction. Luckily, one generous wench had yet to shake off the night’s drink and wobble home, allowing me a dozen more attempts from the confines of a latrine.

  Having temporarily gluttoned my thirst for women, war was the next siren’s call. The White Sand would again occupy pale dunes, this time in the Far East. Trained to live in concealment, we heavily laden ghosts haunted the desert kingdom.

  What allowed me to remain an equal was not horse-like legs, nor a woodsman’s shoulders; it wasn’t innate leadership, and it damn sure wasn’t my ability to enchant friends by the sheer voracity of my wit and charm. It was the irrefutable fact that every triumph, every brother I knocked out of the brawl pen back in the rear, every rock face I climbed with a combat load to find our enemy, every Azadi I shot to watch die, was another deathblow to the miserable wretch I’d once been.

  Then, to my misfortune, the war had to end.

  *

  The church well behind me, Adaline Ouvarnia’s art studio graced the north block of Lirelet. A boisterous rally point for many of Pelliul’s elite, by day the mirror black glass out front was an amusing opposite to where I’d been instructed to wait. At the studio’s back entrance I was staring at the bland chestnut door.

  I almost knocked a second time, but her habit of leaving me banging until sunrise if I violated our rules persuaded me. I was to knock but once. I settled for pulling out her note and reading it again.

  As always, my summons came not by call or by pigeon or by a courier whose face I might recognize. The note I’d found slipped under my door this morning was like all the rest, lustful caricatures of either the sun or the stars to indicate “when” and a whiff of her perfume indicating “why.”

  For all I knew, she lived in a mansion and crawled up each night to her abode on the grinning moon. These five years that I’d worked for her, she’d maintained an unpiercable wall of mystery, revealing little more than her effortless ability to transform into the very traits of her tribe, majestic and cruel, every time I was summoned to where she’d have me.

  It was ironically appropriate, then, that the back of her studio was covered in generations of Leaves of Luka. The crawling vines, if indelicately touched, would afflict their victim with a terrible itch. Awaiting the sounds of her descent, a casual observer might have watched me pace and jostle as if I’d wallowed in each and every one of them.

  High heels struck stairs beyond the chestnut. The rhythmic gait against the wood drummed visions of an executioner, taunting their appointed victim while strutting to an ax. Or it would suggest my heart racing, as it now did, feeling for but an instant that it too stopped when the sound of her march ended at the other side of the door.

  Those locks—three, five, maybe twenty…I couldn’t know. The moment I heard the first, it was as if I was being lifted onto a cloud. The last deadbolt slammed back. The door finally opened. Eyes were on me.

  Her courtly obligations were one reason our encounters were infrequent, making me howl in the lulls. However, her timing, as all else, was impeccable to the point you could easily believe she was able to read minds. Or at least mine. Though she was approaching the age when once-reckless girls become grandmothers, I gazed upon her toned equestrian body.

  Other than heels, heavy and angular and black enough to win a bar fight, she wore nothing more than a Quinnarian ribbon pressing her breasts.

  I was not human; I was meat. I followed her up her stairway, positioned to watch the sway of her hips and everything between them. When she turned to delight at my ogling, her hair more than shimmered. The stairwell was adorned in an alternating cadence of lamplight, transforming the silk blackness which hung to her shoulders into their red and blues as we continued.

  By the time we emerged into her loft, I’d already been instructed to “lose the clothes.” The same position was assumed, always: her in her red oval chair, me on my knees, face between her legs. Then I waited.

  We stilled as candles burned and my knees ached against the wood of the floor. She then bit her bottom lip and seized me.

  I swear to you—in all my experiences with women, nothing satisfied my appetite like attacking Adaline’s own with flicks of my tongue and the soft rehearsed movements of my unworthy mouth. Not a row of wiggling bar whores could compare to such bliss, for I surely tried.