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= FAR WARS =

a novel in the Empire of Time series

by John Argo

14.

One delight was the youngest sister, Artemi. She was at that awkward phase between being a girl and a woman. Artemi was a tall, willowy girl like Zara, with crystal blue eyes and long, straight hair the color of a sunset, when the last golden yellow is driven out by a growing forest-brown duskiness. Women on Tellerine grow their hair long. It is beaten and blanched and discolored by the sun like old clothes faded in streaks and patches, and yet that makes it all the more beautiful. Zara says it gives them character. I came to understand that, like many other strange and musky and potent things about their culture.

Artemi was somehow encrushed (as they say) with the intoxicating anticipation of Zara's upcoming marriage with me. Like a flash of light in an afternoon window, Artemi attached herself to us. I could swear she was pretending to be Zara, and playing at being wedded. Often she came and held my hand as if we were engaged. She loved to sit with me when three or four of us went to the Blue Sea, to the Bay of Lue, to threevees in the city, to musical shows, or just to eat iced meloncolion on the showy balconies of the corniche. Zara would spend much leisurely time combing Artemi's long hair with a tortoise shell comb while the girl made teenage eyes at me.

We would tease her (not too cruelly): "So, Artemi, when are you getting married? Are you engaged yet? Is there a Sender at your door?" She would wrinkle her lip up in disgust at the name of Caliste's husband. "Is there a Charger or a Disdainer or a Victor calling on you? Some handsome young man with sunny eyes and a surfy smile?"

"Stop it!" she blurted once, with tears springing to her eyes, and Zara and I hugged her before she ran off to die in an emotional thunderstorm someplace, only to be reborn an hour later, running in the surf barefoot with two or three other beautiful wealthy young girls.

Zara whispered to me that night: "Artemi is planning to be my bridesmaid. That is what all the serious study and obsession with detail is all about. That's the meaning behind all the little rituals like serving tea and cake, or braiding my unbraidable hair, or looking through a thousand videx catalogs of wedding ensembles."

"My two young sisters are a lot like that," I said as Zara and I lay together, nude, with the Blue Sea breeze wafting across our patio and through the double doors into our hideaway on the estate.

Zara added with a sad little smile: "I think Caliste wishes you would marry her."

"I would," I teased, "but Tellerine is monogamous."

Zara shoved me gently. "You could not handle more than one Tellerine woman."

"I can't handle even one." I buried my mouth in her neck and blew, making a farting noise on her skin.

She rolled over, pulled me down on her with both firm hands on the small of my back, and cupped my naked rear cheeks. It was dark, and I could only make out her long, pale slender form. Moonlight faintly illumined the wet glints of her eyes and lips. "Do that again," she said in a low, dangerous voice: "Down here." I felt her knees move apart.

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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.