Chapter 60: The Ilima Wives' Grief
The path to the Ilima compound was a ribbon of darker earth worn through choking undergrowth. Aidan walked it slowly, each step a conscious effort. The ache in his thighs was a deep, dull burn. A more peculiar emptiness sat behind his navel, a hollowed-out feeling that wasn’t just physical. He remembered Makena’s words: You give a good blessing. But a blessing is also a burden.
The boundary stone appeared through the trees like a broken tooth. It was taller than the Ulanga stone, the carvings more aggressive—sharp, spiraling patterns that seemed to writhe in the grey dawn light. Three figures stood before it, wrapped in cloth the color of dried mud. Mourning wraps. They didn’t move as he approached. They just watched.
He stopped a few paces away. The air here was still, silent. No birdsong, no distant chatter. Just the weight of their staring.
The tallest of the three pushed back her hood. Her face was all stark planes, eyes sunken in shadows. “You are the blessing?” Her voice was scraped raw.
“Aidan,” he said, the name feeling absurdly small.
A faint, bitter twist touched her mouth. “I am Nalia. First wife.” She gestured to the others. “Sera. The young one is Elara.” The other two lowered their hoods. Sera had a round, soft face now gaunt with strain. Elara couldn’t have been twenty, her eyes wide and red-rimmed, chewing on her lower lip.
Nalia’s gaze swept over him, clinical and cold. “You look used.”
“I’ve been… busy.”
“Good. Grief is not gentle. It is a hungry animal. Come.”
They turned and walked without checking if he followed. The Ilima compound was laid out similarly to Ulanga, but the energy was wrong. Huts seemed to hunch in on themselves. The few people moving outside averted their eyes. The place felt septic with silence.
They led him not to a birthing hut or a widows’ lodge, but to a larger dwelling at the compound’s heart. The smell hit him first: dense, sweet herbs attempting and failing to mask the coppery scent of blood and the slow, sickly sweetness of decay.
Inside, on a low bier, a man’s body lay wrapped in linen. His face was uncovered, waxy and pale. The headman.
“He choked on a fish bone,” Sera whispered, her voice trembling. “Two days ago. No warning. No sons.”
Nalia stood by the corpse’s head, her hand resting not with affection, but with a kind of stark ownership. “Our wailing has scared the game from the forests. Our tears have salted the garden plots. The goddess of this place demands balance. Life for death.” Her burnt-out eyes found Aidan’s. “You are the life. We are the vessels. Quiet our grief.”
It wasn’t a request. It was a transaction, stated with the bleak clarity of ledgers he used to keep. Debit: Death. Credit: Seed.
Elara was the first to move. Her hands, when they went to the knot of his loincloth, were shaking. Not with desire, but with a frantic, jittery need. The other two joined, their movements rough, efficient. They pushed him onto a woven mat not far from the dead man’s feet. The incense smoke coiled above them all.
Nalia mounted him first. There was no ceremony, no preparation. She was dry and tight, and she forced herself down onto him with a gritted gasp that sounded like pain. Her hips began to piston immediately, a brutal, driving rhythm. She stared over his shoulder at her dead husband’s face as she rode him, her own expression a mask of furious concentration. Her inner muscles clenched around him in sharp, spasmodic grabs. It was less lovemaking than exorcism. When she came, it was with a muted, guttural cry she smothered into her own forearm. She rolled off him, turning onto her side facing the bier, her body curling in on itself.
Sera was next. She was softer, wetter, her grief manifesting as a drowning need. She clung to him, wrapping her limbs around him, burying her face in his neck. “Please, please, please,” she chanted against his skin, her hips making small, desperate circles. She sought comfort, a temporary forgetting in the friction. He moved in her, trying to find a rhythm to soothe her, but her need was too vast, a bottomless pit. She sobbed when she climaxed, great heaving cries that shook them both, her tears salting his shoulder.
By the time Elara crawled over to him, Aidan was barely present. The hollow feeling was now a cavern. The smells of sex and death mixed nauseatingly in the close air. The young wife looked at him with a terrifying hope.
“I don’t want to just stop crying,” she whispered, her voice girlish and broken. “I want to feel something else. Make me feel something else.”
Her body was slight, almost fragile. He entered her with more care than the others had allowed. She gasped, her eyes flying open, but she hooked her legs around his back, pulling him deeper. “Yes,” she hissed. “That. Just that.”
He moved, and she met each thrust with a frantic urgency, her nails scoring his back. She was chasing a feeling, using him as a battering ram against her own despair. Her cries were higher, sharper, punctuated by little broken words. It was intense, overwhelming. He felt his own climax building, a last, dredged-up response from his exhausted body.
He spilled into her with a shuddering groan, collapsing his weight onto her slight frame. She held him there, locked tightly with her limbs, her face pressed into his hair. “Thank you,” she breathed, over and over. “Thank you, thank you.”
For a long time, there was only the sound of their ragged breathing and the silent presence of the dead man. Aidan felt emptied, scoured clean.
Then Elara’s grip tightened. Her voice was a tiny, desperate scrape in the dim hut. “Again.”
He couldn’t. Every muscle was liquid lead. He shook his head minutely against the mat.
“Please.” One hand slipped between their sweat-slick bodies, her small fingers tracing him. “It’s fading. The feeling is fading. I need it again.” There was a raw panic in her touch.
Nalia’s voice came from the shadows, flat and exhausted. “Finish it, blessing. The goddess drank, but she is still thirsty. We all are.”
Aidan closed his eyes. He thought of his old desk, the neat columns of numbers, the predictable quiet. This was the antithesis of all that. This was raw, messy, human demand. And a twisted part of him, the part that had grown in the dark of the Ulanga huts, understood it. He was the resource. This was his function.
With a grunt of sheer will, he pushed himself up onto his arms. He looked down at Elara’s tear-streaked face, her pleading eyes. He was still inside her, soft. He focused on the heat of her, the frantic beat of her heart against his chest. He thought of the sharp pleasure Lela had found for him, the efficient use Kioni had made of him, the comfort Makena had offered.
Slowly, miraculously, his body began to respond. It was a weak, half-hearted swelling at first, but it was enough. Her eyes widened with a hope so fierce it was painful to see.
He began to move again, a slow, deep, grinding resurgence. It wasn’t passionate. It was determined. A fulfillment of a contract. She clutched at him, her breath coming in hitched gasps, urging him on until, with a final, trembling thrust, he spent the last of himself inside her.
This time, when he rolled away, true darkness nibbled at the edges of his vision. He lay on his back, staring at the smoke-blackened thatch.
Nalia stood, rearranging her mourning wrap. She looked at the body on the bier, then at Aidan. The frantic hunger had left her eyes, replaced by a hollow, spent calm. “The wailing will stop now,” she said. It was a statement of fact.
Elara curled against his side, her hand resting on his chest, already falling into a deep, dreamless sleep.
Sera brought him a gourd of water and helped him sip it. “The path back is clear,” she murmured. “When you can walk.”
Aidan lay there, the taste of water and incense and death on his tongue. The burden was given. The hunger, for now, was sated. He was a tool that had been used, bluntly and thoroughly. And in the profound stillness that followed, a strange, quiet pride settled into that hollow place inside him. He had quieted the storm. He closed his eyes, and for the first time, a faint, unsteady smile touched his lips before sleep took him.