Chapter 4: The Fever Breaks
Ramon's skin burned under Lulusa's trembling fingers. She had spent the whole day stealing moments between her chores to press her palm to his forehead, to check the damp cloth she had laid across his brow, and each time the heat radiated back at her like the mouth of a forge. His breath came in shallow, ragged gasps. The gash on his side had scabbed over, but the flesh around it had gone angry and red. She had seen enough wounds in her life to know what a fever meant, but a warrior like Ramon should have burned through this by now.
She pressed another cloth to his forehead, and he groaned without waking.
Grag had been worse all day. He had hurled his wooden cup across the hut when she brought his evening meal late, and when she had knelt to pick up the pieces, he had slapped her across the face hard enough to send her sprawling. He had called her a useless bitch, a barren mare, had told her she was so worthless she could not even give him a child to carry his name. She had taken it silently, the way she always did, and he had pointed a shaking finger at the door and told her to get out of his sight. Sleep in the barn if she must.
She had not argued. She had not even cried. All she could think about was the burning man lying in the hay, waiting for her.
Now she knelt beside him, her cheek still stinging, and dipped a fresh cloth into the water skin. She wiped the sweat from his chest, his shoulders, the hard ridges of his stomach. His muscles twitched under her touch even in his fevered sleep. He was so strong, so impossibly strong, and yet he lay here helpless because his mother had turned her back on him.
The thought lodged in her throat like a bone.
A warrior needed milk. Every man in the tribe knew it. The milk of a mother was strength itself, and without it, a man withered. Ramon had been drinking his mother's milk his entire life, and the sudden loss of it after his exile had hollowed him out. He had trained every dawn in the jungle, pushing his body, and it had not been enough. His blood had thinned. His flesh had lost its resilience. A wound that would have been a scratch to the old Ramon had turned festering and hot.
If only she could get her hands on Mana's milk. But Mana had cast him out, had banned him from her body for what she believed he had done. There was no reasoning with a mother who had been shamed.
Lulusa wrung out the cloth and began to wipe his arms. In her sack, she had brought a small clay pot of salve, and she applied it gently to the gash. Ramon moaned, his head rolling. She cradled his jaw in her hand, and he turned toward her like a child seeking comfort.
Her own body answered with a sudden, aching fullness.
She had been ignoring it all day, the way her breasts had grown heavy and tight, the way the milk had begun to leak in thin, slow trails that stained the front of her tunic. It happened every day. Her body was made for milk, and her body did not know that there was no child to receive it. Grag had given her nothing. The one time she had conceived, she had lost it in a fall, and after that, nothing. Her mons was dry as a bone for the last six years.
But her breasts did not care. They swelled and wept and ached every single day.
She looked down at them now, full and heavy against her chest, the nipples dark and slick with golden milk already soaking through the worn fabric. She had tried to relieve the pressure with her hands before, squeezing the milk out into the dirt, but it always came back. It was a waste. A sin, almost, to let good milk spill into the ground while her husband grew weaker by the day, not from hunger but from hate.
Ramon needed milk. He needed strength.
But she was not his mother. It was not practiced, a thing that no woman did. A man drank from his mother's own breasts. It was the law of her people. It was the oldest law.
She kept her eyes on his face, his skin flushed, his lips cracked and dry. His chest rattled when he breathed.
The old law will not keep him alive, she thought.
She untied the cord at her throat and pulled her tunic down. Her breasts swung free, heavy with milk, the nipples engorged and eager. There was no shame in it. There was no shame in saving a life, and she had known this man since they were children. She had watched him grow into the strongest warrior the tribe had ever seen. She had loved him from afar when she was a girl, and she loved him still, even if it was a different kind of love now.
She shifted herself into position, lifting his head gently and settling it into her lap. Her thighs spread beneath him, the hay scratching her bare skin, and she brought his mouth to her left breast. His lips parted on their own, searching, instinctual, and when the tip of her nipple touched his mouth, he latched on with a desperate, hungry groan.
The first pull sent a jolt through her entire body, a sudden shudder of sensation that she had not felt in years. Warmth flooded down from her chest into her belly, and she gasped. Milk flowed out of her in a thick, hot stream, and Ramon swallowed, his throat working desperately.
"There," she whispered, stroking his hair. "There, drink. Drink all you need."
He drank and drank, his mouth working against her with the urgency of a starving man. She could feel the milk leaving her body, the pressure easing, and with it she felt his fever raging less. His body relaxed against hers, the tension draining from his shoulders. The color began to come back into his lips.
She closed her eyes and let him feed, and for the first time in days, she felt useful. She felt needed. She felt like she was doing what her body had been made to do.
She switched him to her right breast without thinking, easing the nipple between his lips as his mouth searched. He latched again, hungrier this time, and she felt the milk flow from the other side, hot and thick, and the ache that had been building all day finally drained away in slow, rhythmic pulls. She stroked his hair, his brow, felt the heat of his skin against her fingertips, and something loosened in her chest.
She did not remember falling asleep. She only remembered the weight of him in her lap, the pull of his mouth, and the strange peace that settled over her like a blanket.
Ramon woke to warmth and the soft pressure of a nipple against his tongue. His eyes flew open. The first light of dawn was filtering through the thatched walls of the barn, and his head was cradled in Lulusa's lap. Her tunic was pulled down, her breast bare and full, and his mouth was wrapped around her nipple like a nursing babe.
He jerked back, shock ripping through him. "Lulu, what the hell are you doing?"
She woke with a start, blinking down at him. Her cheeks flushed, but her hands came up to steady him before he could scramble away. "Easy. Easy, Ramon. It's all right."
"It's not all right! You're not my mother. You of all people should know the law. If anyone sees, if anyone finds out, they'll... they'll brand you. They'll cast you out like they did me."
She held his gaze, steady and calm. "And what do you think they'll do if you die in my barn? You think they'll thank me for letting a criminal live in my barn?"
He stared at her. His lips were still slick with her milk, and even in his shame, he could taste it. The flavor sat on his tongue, rich and sweet and warm, unlike anything he had ever known. He had drunk his mother's milk all his life, knew the taste of it better than his own heartbeat. But this was different. Lulusa's milk had a depth to it, a golden sweetness that made his mouth water even now, made his throat ache with a hunger he could not name.
"Forget that. You need strength," she said softly. "You told me yourself. A warrior without milk is a man with hollow bones. I saw you collapse in the jungle. I saw the fever take you. You would have died, Ramon. You would have died in that hay, and I could not let that happen." She looked at Ramon with wet eyes. "I have no one to drink my milk. Honour me having my milk, Ramon."
He swallowed. His throat was dry, his body weak, the fever still clinging to him like a shroud. He looked down at her breast, at the milk beading on the nipple, and his mouth opened of its own accord. He hated himself for it. He hated the weakness, the shame of it, the way his body betrayed his pride the moment hunger clawed through him.
But he was starving. Starving for milk, starving for strength, starving for the taste of something that made him feel whole again.
She guided his head back down to her breast, and this time he did not resist. He closed his eyes and let her nipple slip between his lips, and he drank.
The milk flooded his mouth, hot and thick and impossibly good. It coated his tongue, slid down his throat like honey, and for a moment he forgot everything, the injustice, the exile, his mother's turned back. He only knew the pull of his mouth, the flow of milk, the way his body drank it in like rain on parched earth.
His mother's milk had been his strength his whole life, but this was something else. It settled in his bones like a forge-fire banked for the night, warming him from the inside out. He drank until the pressure in his belly demanded he stop, until the last of the ache drained from his limbs, and then he lay back against her lap, spent and gasping.
Lulusa smoothed the hair from his forehead. Her fingers were cool, gentle. "Better?"
He nodded, unable to speak. His eyes burned. He had not cried in years, not since his father had fallen in battle, but something in him cracked open now and he did not know how to close it.
"Don't you dare thank me," she said, her voice fierce. "Don't you dare shame yourself for me. This is not a law I broke lightly. This is a life I saved."
He stayed in her lap until the sun rose fully, until the birds began to sing in the jungle canopy, and when he finally sat up, the fever had receded like a tide pulling back from shore.
By the end of that day, his flesh had cooled. His wound had turned pink instead of angry red. By the second week, he was standing, and by the third, he was lifting the wooden training post he had carved in the jungle, moving through the forms that had once been as easy as breathing.
And every night, when the village was dark and Grag's snores rattled the walls of the main hut, Lulusa came to the barn. She would untie her tunic without a word and settle beside him in the hay, and he would drink from her until he was full.
The first time he tried to stop, tried to tell her it was too much, she had silenced him with a hand on his cheek.
"Your fever is gone. You are strong again. But you are not strong enough." She looked at him with something fierce and tender in her eyes. "And I will not lose you, Ramon. Not to fever, not to Kaelen, not to anyone. Drink."
He drank.
And the tribe's law, the oldest law of all, began to bend.