REPOST:Beside the Wells (TOS,K/S) NC-17!!! 2/2

[jess]

Once I tried to take his mind, for those who sold him said their
minds were weak. They lied. His mind with raw untutored force
held on to mine and would not let it go and I was strangled in
his grip. He would have taken both of us and forced us down as
drowning men will drown their rescuers. It took the utmost limit
of my strength to wrest myself away and after that I left his mind
alone, knowing that anything I took like that would leave me with
an empty husk, a shadow of the thing which I desired.

I let him move about the camp, the storms still blew and he could
not escape. I know that many times he visited the cages where the
others were still held. Once someone overheard their talk and told
me as he came towards them one cried out, "Komandr!" but when
I called him so, he laughed. The sound was bitter in my ears and
spoke of secret things he knew and would not share.

He never smiled for me but only for the children of the place, the
offspring of the Keeper of the Wells. He met them in the tents that
housed the beasts and gave them sugared things he took from me
and, when he had the words, he told them halting tales of ships that
sailed the stars, of rocks that moved and clouds that lived on love.
Once I saw them play a game, a thing of string and fingers, and the
child with whom he played, accomplishing some little feat, smiled up
at him and he smiled back. A smile at which a man might warm
himself and light the long, dark evenings in his tent.

The children shared their little books with him, brightly-coloured,
simple tales I saw him sit and try to read. Once I caught him
with a children's text and one of my books open on his knees
and smiled as I had smiled to see my sister's child, sitting in he
father's chair, aping an adult art whose outward form she saw
but to whose substance she could not aspire. And though the
picture that he made reminded me of childhood things, beneath
my laughter lay desire as it lay beneath my every waking thought.

I write "desire" and yet the word is but a shadow of the driving
need which gripped my mind and flesh and would not let me go.
I thirsted for him as I have seen men thirst for water in the desert
or for shade in noon day heat, I craved him as men crave for
drugs or wine and, like such thirsts, it grew and fed upon the little
that I had of him, that little creating of itself a desperate, abject
need to have him, all of him, all mine.

And still he would not love me! I would have given anything for
that. For gratitude. For willing, wanting flesh. For welcome and
desire returned. He could have lived as high and sweet as any
favourite ever has but nothing that I did could wear him down to
my desire. I owned *him* yet was powerless before my need to
have what *he* withheld. So who was master here and who was
man?

I could not make him see that he was favoured far above the
ranks of those I owned. He could expect a life of ease, no
labour in the fields for him, but peace and plenty all his life
until the day he died. No need to fret or think or strive, I would
take care of everything and it would be my duty and my pride.

One night as we lay in my bed (I eager, wanting, he aloof and
still) I tried once more to make this plain and failed and in my
anger and my weariness I asked him, "What wouldst *thou* do
with such a one, who offers neither gratitude nor love for favours
given with an open hand?"

He turned and I could see him struggle with our tongue to say
his thoughts until he said, "I never want to own another's life. In
my place none is master, none is slave and each man takes his
life in his own hands, and some men lead and others walk behind
but always by their choice."

I laughed and then I laughed again to see the anger in his face.
"A foolish thought, for always there are simple folk who need a
master's care, a master's hand upon the reins before they
overset their lives and run astray. We are as fathers to them
and we give a father's care, protecting them from wars and
other shocks, taking their labour as our recompense."

"And did a father's care take Temek's wife and sell her and their
child that was not born?"

"Temek was never married to the girl, he had no leave from me to
take a wife." His steady gaze met mine, he did not speak and
suddenly my words seemed strangely hollow and so I said,
"Thou needst not be concerned, their memories are short - their
passions thin." Meaning to show that, what amongst my own would
be a bitter blow, would be to them a momentary grief, forgotten
quickly in the daily round.

But he replied, "How do you know? And even if you asked them,
who would tell?"

And all at once I saw that he would never be content to live the
life that I intended for him. He saw himself as free and always would,
forever longing to return to that forever lost estate and there I saw
a chance to wrest from him what he would never willingly concede.

I whispered, "Treat me well and I may set you free." It was a lie and
now I know he knew as much, but then I thought that I had found a
key that would unlock the door to his response for suddenly it seemed
to my poor madly-beating heart that his so-longed-for body came alive.

He took me in his arms and forced the kiss. And ah his mouth was
sweet as honeyed fruit and he was wet and I was dry as Summer
winds on Vulcan's Forge and so I drank him in; as once when I
was young I caught a fever from the marsh and those who tended
to me wrapped my burning flesh in bonds of wetted silk, blissful
and imprisoning.

I had thought him virgin-shy but I was wrong for I or someone
else had taught him well and I was potters' clay between his
hands, his cool, insistent, knowing hands that stripped me of
my will and moulded me into a man I did not recognise. My skin
was flame beneath his touch, my breath a burning wind, his mouth
a brand of ice that scored my flesh with wounds invisible but deep.

Cruelly gentle, gently cruel, he took me in his mouth and gave
me what I craved and had done since the day when first we met.
But he was slow and gentle when both were torment to me and
after a timeless time I heard my own voice beg for more and
could not help myself. He was not kind but his unkindness
brought a pleasure I had never known. Impaled upon his hand and
swallowed deep, I writhed and came and came and came and
still he was not done.

He rolled me on my belly and he drove himself inside me - dry - and
pleasure was a whetted knife that flayed me to the bone and left
me shaking in the darkness, fearing what I wanted, wanting what I
feared and it was terrible and glorious and my so-vaunted greater
strength all slipped away, like sand through open fingers, unnoticed
and unmourned until, exhausted by ecstatic pleasure/pain, I fought
with sleep and lost.

And in the night the storm winds died and in the morning he was
gone with all the others of his kind and Temek with him.

Men set out to follow and recapture but I did not. I knew,
and never knew the reason why I knew, that they would not be
found and they were not. It was not anger that I felt, or even pain,
rather I saw that this or death were all that there could ever be for
us. He would go or he would die, for nothing else would fit the
man he was.

At first I tried to tell myself that night had been a gift, a lover's
last farewell but in my heart I knew it was a blow that told
me, "This is what we could have been had you been other than
you are."

I did not need the words but in a book, inside the cover, there they
were. "My freedom is not yours to give as it was never yours to take."
And underneath. "Remember that I gave you neither love nor
gratitude nor absolution nor my name."

These were not the words of some poor savage man, scrawling
unlettered insults on the wall. This was in my own hand, for he
had seen no other, acquired in this little span of days by him, a man
of subtlety and learning, a traveller and scholar. A man who knew
me well enough to know his words would hurt and chose them carefully.

I had called him thus and thus and thus and every thing I called
him had been wrong. I who was neither fool nor blind, had only
seen the slave and not the man. I had known his body but had
never seen his mind.

How often had I made the same mistake with those whom I
had claimed to own? Beneath the stranger's words was written
thus, "I called you Little Father but I lied." And next to that was
written Temek's name. I had not even know that he could write.

For many years I thought my shame came thus, from knowing
that the man that I had forced into my bed was such a man as I.
I told myself he was not born a slave, he was a freeman and as
such no proof of anything, no proof that those I owned were
such as he.

But on a whim I sought and purchased Temek's child, an infant girl
with Temek's nose and brow. Her mother being dead, I set her free
and gave her to a family where the wife was skilled with roots and
herbs and had no child to teach that female art. I think that she was
happy.

I tried to live as I had lived before but the seed of thought once
planted is a hardy thing and over many years I could not help but
see the things that I had seen before but never understood. The
effort that obedience sometimes took, the hatred in the downcast
eyes, the pain of separation and of love where any day a sale
might break a home.

I am an old man now and my children's children lead the caravans,
stopping as once I stopped beside the wells. They do not trade in
flesh and those who work for me and mine do so now for wages
or for land. In younger days I hardly thought of him but now I sit
before the fire and things that happened long ago are clearer in my
mind than yesterday.

For many years I wondered if he ever thought of me and hoped he
would remember.

But I am older now and wiser far and pray that he did not.