The Silver Sparrow

The Remnants of Pain

Lovemaking was an art he had long perfected. When you were trained that young, had half a brain and enough opportunities for practice, you learned quickly how to make people suffocate by the simplest touch, and then, at your permission, thrash, tremble, and scream. The technique differed with every man or woman. People required different things to be brought that close to madness, to surrender control at your fingertips or a word uttered a certain way. Being able to read clients was the difference between a cheap escort and an expensive one.

Hasheem had, of course, always been quick to read people and, in doing so, to take charge. In his line of profession, one was either the victim or the deliverer. It wasn't a difficult choice. There was power in being able to make people beg and scream.

But there were always clients like Sarasef. There were always men bigger than him in some ways, usually those who were born to lead and conquer. Sarasef had never, not once, surrendered control. He took what was offered, at his own pace, and would stop—yes, stop—the moment he was close to losing it. Unlike most men, the Grand Chief of the Rishi had never allowed himself to come by someone else's doing. He also liked to put his control to the test, to see how much pain and restraint he could stand before allowing himself to climax. The battle could go on all night, sometimes several, before he would allow himself that release. It wasn't the only test Sarasef put himself through. He had walked to see how long he could walk, climbed to see how high he could climb, starved himself to see when he would collapse, and for no other reason but to constantly test and extend his limits.

An evidence of such habit was there for all eyes to see, drawn permanently on almost every inch of his body's canvas. Especially now that he was lying in bed, stripped down to the skin, Hasheem could see, once again, the beauty of those remnants of self-inflicted pain. All five hundred of them.

Legend has it, that Sarasef had started scarring himself for every man he had killed since he was ten. It's a practice his warlord predecessors used to do he'd decided to pick up, was the version told at campfires. The real version, explained to Hasheem by the man himself long ago, had been different.

"Warlords? My predecessors were a bunch of farmers,' he'd said, laughing and shaking his head. 'They wouldn't know how to carve up a fucking deer if you gave it to them whole.'

'Why then?' Hasheem had asked.

Sarasef had replied, his expression uncharacteristically mild as he did, 'My father brought back some captives from a tribe who had these scars when I was twelve. I got curious. Asked them how and why they did it. Thought it was a fun thing to try at the time.' Fun had been what it was, he'd admitted. 'I was just a boy, you know? Didn't know where to point if somebody asked where my brain was supposed to be.'

Those captives had been women, not men, Sarasef had told him. Women who carved themselves because where they came from it was considered a thing of beauty, and to the men, the more scars a woman had, the higher her threshold of pain, and the higher her success rate at delivering and raising a child.

'I started with twenty. It hurt like a bitch and gave me a fever for a week. I didn't know how to clean them back then. Didn't learn it properly until the third time."

The third time was when he'd turned fourteen, Sarasef had explained. He'd carved himself a hundred scars by that time. Then fifty more in one sitting the next year, another hundred in the following year, and when he'd turned seventeen he'd completed the rest of his five hundred over one night. 'I was trying to beat this legendary woman they told me about in the tribe who had four hundred of them and ten children. I could go on for more, but then I might have to carve up my balls,' Sarasef had chuckled saying.