honey on your knees
when you look at me
i'm dressed like a fucking queen
and you're begging "please"
i rule with the velvet tongue
and my dress undone
and i'll get you lost
but i'm having fun
❧ king princess, "holy"
Then came Urfan.
Urfan, Urfan, Urfan.
The trouble didn't start with Urfan, nor did it end with him, but boy did he insert himself smack dab into the middle of it.
To the uninitiated, he was Urfan the Great.
To the potentate, he was Urfan the Indefagitble (until he wasn't).
To Sunkanmi, he was just Urfan.
The Man. The Lover.
So they slept together. In the same tent. For far longer than either of them really had to, being of such high stature and rank within the Misaelse Empire.
Early into their heretical campaign, a fiery cannonball pierced the aid station ceiling and burned everyone and everything in it to a black husk. To negotiate more space for wounded soldiers, Urfan hauled his trinkets into Sunkanmi's tent (or maybe it was the other way around?) and they maintained the arrangement ever since.
Even after the potentate's guard personally delivered a new medical tent two months later, there was no question of packing up and separating.
Urfan and Sunkanmi effectively shared a bedroom for over a decade, their cots laid no more than ten feet away from each other, which understandably only inflamed the rumors about the lurid nature of their relationship.
But Sunkanmi didn't pay it any mind.
Sleeping within a stone's toss of her best friend and commander made sense.
It was only logical, after all.
It was just business.
❦
Regardless, their physical and metaphorical closeness didn't prevent Urfan from inviting various, um, guests into his wooden cot.
Urfan usually scheduled his liaisons while Sunkanmi was out training the troops or managing their war camp's logistics, but sometimes his lust got the better of him or their agendas didn't line up. Whatever the reason, it didn't necessarily matter.
He was a tactical genius, sure, but he couldn't account for every eventuality of Sunkanmi interrupting a hot, sweaty tryst. His mind was simply focused... elsewhere.
Sunkanmi lost count of how many times she returned to their tent to retrieve a leather glove or an extra repair kit, only to find a mass of moaning sexual congress with Urfan centerstage.
"Sunny!" Caught out, Urfan would dart up from a bare thigh, a naked stomach, or an open mouth attached, at times, to their most attractive soldiers or, deeper into the conflict, an eager townsperson hailing from a religious tribe they scorched.
Somehow both beautiful and faceless, Urfan's conquests either shied away from Sunkanmi's imperious gaze or swallowed their nerves just long enough to face it head-on.
But that was how it worked.
Urfan's popularity preceded him. The Charm and Soul of the movement. The golden-eyed golden boy with a platinum smile and a red-blooded heart and an enchanted sword.
Sunkanmi was the Wrath. Standing guard, firm and unsmiling, in the liberator's shadow.
And you did not cross paths with the Wrath without losing a bit of yourself in the process, limping away with the wound-deep reminder that you were lucky to escape relatively unscathed. This time.
And Urfan, smiling at her silhouette in the doorway, dark brown hair plastered to his almost chiseled forehead, sometimes drunk off honey wine, other times stone-cold sober, always in some state of undress, would invite Sunkanmi to join them.
Join us.
No matter what damnable position he was folded up in (a partner perched in his lap, his knees by his ears, wrists tied to the tent poles, bent over a railing, hanging upside down by a scrap of rope) it was all the same to Urfan, and he would repeat his previous offer in that peculiar voice of his.
"Come here," he'd rasp, eyes on fire. Muscles bunched and pliant. Mustache curled at the ends like two flexed arms. "Come over here, Sunny. Come join us."
Join me.
The danger wasn't so much what he said with his mouth as it was his unspoken body language, which promised his full loving attention and care for the duration of... however long such encounters lasted.
Taking his cue, Urfan's original partner(s) would whine and plead as well, eager for the bragging rights of bedding the Fist of the Heretic Army.
"We'll make it good! We won't leave you wanting!"
Spine rigid as a steel lance, Sunkanmi paused for courage. The same courage that faithfully carried her through violent coups, meddling half-sisters, and terminal illness.
She came up empty.
Because she was scared.
Because she was a coward.
And it was never just business, not with Urfan Starglide at the helm.
During each fraught, almost regretful pause Sunkanmi would hedge her bets, calculating how many ways she and Urfan could satisfy each other until they fainted, how neatly she could squash the debilitating tension growing between them like bone cancer, what sort of lasting repercussions sleeping with her first-in-command could have on the revolution, much less their friendship, and each time she would cut his wanting gaze in two, sharp and smooth as a heated knife through white cheese, retrieve whatever she came in for, and snap the tent flaps behind her after she left.
Because although Sunkanmi had the good sense and self-control to not breach that level of intimacy with the man she adored, she could never actually gather the strength to tell him 'no'.
❦
The next morning they acted as if it never happened, too consumed with battle and normalcy to mention the Offer.
'Offer' was almost too simple a word for that frankly weird and repeated power exchange, briefer than an introductory handshake between two strangers.
In a way, Urfan's Offers were normal, at least they were becoming so, to the point where it would've been worse for her, somehow, if he suddenly stopped asking. Offering. Whatever.
The evidence of Sunkanmi's rejection manifested in the best and worst ways: Urfan strolling through the camp rosy-cheeked and glowing with satisfaction, a lazy poise to his gait as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. Radiant.
His beaming was downright unbearable during mealtimes, their dining table situated right alongside their admittedly curious and bothersome soldiers.
As a matter of survival, Urfan and Sunkanmi spooned stew into each other's bowls. A habit they agreed upon after proving they forgot to eat unless the other fixed their dinner.
"You look well," she opened.
Urfan's eyes wrinkled to slits, making way for his massive, toothy smile.
"And you look even better!"
Leaning on her intuition, Sunkanmi could tell if a session was especially fruitful based on Urfan's appetite the next day. Despite his reputation as a hardened warfighter, Urfan only enjoyed the finest spread of meat, fruit, creams, and seasonings, provided the fare wasn't too spicy.
It didn't take a wizard to realize Urfan especially balked at the simple dishes provided by the camp cooks after a 'hard night in', treating himself with the gourmet whitefish and ancient grains the potentate delivered through expedited post.
In an effort to appear relatable and down-to-earth to her underlings, Sunkanmi ate anything she could get her hands on.
Increasingly, at the rate of his inhuman fucking, Urfan wouldn't put his hands on anything the rich didn't eat.
As a result, Sunkanmi thinned out, lean and tough, not an ounce of fat out of place, while Urfan compounded weight commensurate with his sexual desires.
One an inverse of the other.
Not to belabor the point, but Sunkanmi's rangy figure didn't escape Urfan's notice and Urfan, being Urfan, had to share his opinion while they bathed in a local pond.
Sunkanmi's waist beads sagged low around her hipbones, almost loose enough to slip down her backside entirely, and commenting during their weekly baths was, in Urfan's addled mind, the only way to express his concern about her health without admitting how closely he observed and cataloged changes in her body like some sort of creep.
"This is the lightest you've ever been, Sunny."
"Is it?" Sunkanmi braced herself on a flat rock and lathered up. "I hadn't noticed."
"If you train any harder your strings will fall right off you!"
"I hardly see how that's any of your concern."
"Can't have my better half blowing away during a storm. What would the potentate say?"
"My previous statement stands," her eyes flickered with warmth.
"Fair enough," Urfan waded to the shore, shaking his hair dry. "If one of us should become a monk or starmaid, better it be you. Just know if you should like extra rations, no one will fault you for taking them. As hard as you work and suffer for our cause."
"I know," Sunkanmi glanced at Urfan's healthy beer belly, encasing a carton of solid muscle. "Though between the two of us, you are far more of a monkish shape. It compensates for your profane behavior."
"Hilarious. But if you're seriously content with gruel and slop, then so am I. No matter how I personally feel about it, you've earned a good meal, Sunny. You have nothing left to prove."
Suddenly, Urfan couldn't meet her gaze. As if he'd somehow embarrassed himself. Violated some well-established custom and couldn't answer for his poor etiquette.
[If it's good enough for our warriors, it's good enough for me.]
Sunkanmi thought this but did not say it, surprised at her conviction.
"Why do you still wear those, anyway?" Urfan tugged at her attention once more.
"Wear what?" She nearly asked 'my scars?' but was certain that's not what he meant.
"Your beads!" Urfan's bushy head popped through his tunic, freeing his tree-trunk arms. "We're trying to liberate the masses from those old superstitions. How can we claim religion is a relic of the past when we, its executioners, cling to its comforts?"
Blue-grey thunder clouds gathered overhead, more of a hint at rain than an actual threat. Still, not unlike a well-stocked bookshelf, their looming inspired a nervousness in Urfan he couldn't shake, not even in middle age.
"We should head back."
Sunkanmi carefully watched her best friend's face, reading its stolen lines and stories. The subtext written there was both lyrical and primitive, whole yet unfinished, brown calligraphy in a dialect she'd memorized the rules of but could not repeat fluently.
"...I don't see how my beads are any different than you praying before meals."
"You're absolutely right. Forgive me, Sunny. Old habits are hard to break."
Urfan offered his hand to her, the hairs on the back of his neck charged with the electricity thrumming in the air, underground. Between them.
Only once he was long dead, food for worms and ash for crops, would she allow herself to wonder what else he was offering.
❦
They ate in silence, Sunkanmi's scars aching under the impending storm, Urfan's leg bouncing beneath the table in time with his prayer.
Their soldiers had long since cleared the dining hall, leaving behind a few stragglers and a couple of guards preparing for the nightshift.
In this way, they were more naked to each other fully clothed than they were back at the pond. Scrubbed raw and barely civilized.
"You know I'm thankful we haven't laid together," Urfan began, apropos of nothing.
Sunkanmi's ears perked up, through her focus remained fixed on her bowl.
"I couldn't bear to ruin this-... what we share. Crossing that line would change more than I'm ready to lose. I would never forgive myself if your opinion of me worsened."
[Worsened? How?]
Sunkanmi's elbows formed two angular pillars behind the dim oil lamp. Holding fast to nothing.
"Are you saying you don't respect your lovers?"
"Of course I do!" The bench creaked under Urfan's indignation. "Respect is not even in question. You might even say I adore my partners. I adore them enough to leave them completely satisfied, without complaint, and appreciated in a way no man has appreciated them before. It's a personal mission of mine."
"I can hear that very clearly," she said to her bowl.
Sunkanmi wasn't exactly sure why she took Urfan's Offer so personally.
She'd been propositioned by every breed of freak and scar fetishist before and never hesitated to dismiss them, not once, and maybe if she was a kinder, wiser woman she could've Let It Go, let it go as she let all confounding outliers go, except, well, Urfan's attempt to broach the subject was so heavy-handed, so clumsy, so obvious it would've killed her, literally killed her, to let. This. One. Go.
"Hah! I'll be more discreet next time. Ask them to tie my gag a bit tighter."
Ignorant of the destruction he caused, Urfan leveled her with a dopey grin, heart full in his eyes, and Sunkanmi accepted death even as she dreaded the inevitable Next Time.
What acre of flesh would she discover Next Time?
What name would he be purring Next Time?
If Samsxal collapsed in on itself before the Next Time, swallowing modern civilization and every record of its existence into a fiery pit, Sunkanmi would've cheered all the way down.
The creation of humankind proved far more troublesome than its ruination. Sunkanmi understood the processes by which mortals like herself reproduced and made each other, what her mother and father had to do to make everything she was, but...
But intimacy was simply a fact of nature, a byproduct of loving relationships and animal instinct, and any consideration beyond that was superfluous.
Right.
Right...
Right?
Clearing his throat, Urfan deftly switched to easier topics like the darkening weather, their withering cattle stock, and the unmarked mass graves dug about a mile South of their war camp, gaping open like a wound in the Earth.
❦
A year hence, at night, finally alone.
They laid awake, ten feet apart, discussing their battleplans as was tradition. The torches of roving guards floated outside their tent walls as they chatted about their wives and husbands back home, the first meals they would eat once they won the war, their parents' jams and elixirs, boxing and wrestling with their brothers until their ears blossomed into cauliflower.
Nocturnal beasts stirred from their burrows and the moon rose as if it might fly right out of the blue-black sky.
"You are a funny woman, Sunny."
Urfan, more grey around the temples than the year before, rolled onto his side when the conversation lulled.
Sunkanmi's head lifted from her feather-stuffed pillow before she remembered how heavy it was. "What makes you say that?"
"Well, you never fail to put a smile on my face."
She didn't know what to say to that.
'Of course'?
'Shut up?'
'Likewise'?
Instead, she settled for, "Most of our soldiers would disagree with you, Commander Starglide."
"Ah! But the truest comedian does not need a captive audience to coddle their fragile egos. Anyone who claims otherwise is probably tragically unfunny. The funniest women I know refused to laugh at anything beneath them."
"This position would be far simpler if I were a man. Then I'd be certain if they were laughing with me or at me."
Urfan refused to let her pity herself.
"Perhaps. But let me clarify. Most men judge a woman's sense of humor based on how readily she laughs at his jokes. If she does not entertain their foolishness, she's immediately cast off as a bore and a spoilsport. These men demand applause. They require praise to function. 'Laugh,' comes the unspoken threat. 'Or else I shall trade you for someone who will.'"
Sunkanmi closed her eyes and fought a smile.
"What, in Empire's sake, is your point?"
"My point is that this philosophy is fundamentally backwards, Sunny! A woman's humor is relative to her own understanding of comedy. What matters is how much and with what methods she makes others piss themselves laughing."
Urfan sat up in his excitement, blanket pooled around his waist. Lower stomach dusted with coarse brown hair.
"Comedy is, at its core, a selfless service. It necessitates humanity. Humility. I imagine this is why women are, on average, funnier than men. Men generally serve their own interests first. We struggle to think outside of ourselves. To feel as others feel."
"So you're complimenting my ability to empathize? Is that what this is?"
"You misunderstand me, Sunny. This is not mere admiration. It is envy. I envy you. When the potentate cracked that awful joke at the last state dinner we attended, yours was the only blank face around the great room, including mine. In a hall filled to the brim of folk heroes, warriors, maliibs, and politicians, we were all too nervous to object to his injustice, but you merely sat there in silence and ate his pudding as if this man was of no concern to you."
"He could've beheaded me for that."
"But he didn't. You refused to honor a joke about forcing stablehands to their knees for sport and in doing so shamed every man who forced a chuckle. And because of that shame, that masculine envy, you earned the reputation of a self-righteous careerist."
"Sure," she gave a one-shoulder shrug. "Though I doubt they'd ever admit it aloud."
"And they don't need to! It hardly seems fair."
Swept up in his vehemence, it was easy to forget Urfan's experiences on matters of fairness.
Urfan, who was born and raised as a girlchild only to assume the name, status, and duties of a grown man when he reached marriageable age.
Urfan, second in a family ripe with eight daughters whom Hollander Starglide considered a step below a male heir no matter their accomplishments, each their own individual joy and disappointment, who discarded his feminine pursuits and stepped into his role as the firstborn son as if he was born to it. No one stopped him.
Any ruler would tell you becoming a man was no overnight feat, no easy undertaking, but witnessing Urfan's passage would force them to reconsider. His masculinity sprung forth as if diverted from a spring, coating his voice and body in deep armor, thickening his legs and arms and chest into tools. Weapons.
There would never be another man like Urfan. He simply thought himself to be, and he was, even with his hair curling down to his corset and his cheeks smudged with rouge. He was born to lead, whether he knew it or not, how other boys seldom knew their left foot from their right.
Urfan could not pinpoint the exact moment he became a man, when he was done Becoming (if there was such a thing), except when he awoke one morning, peered into his sister's looking glass, and found a stately lord smoldering back at him.
And so it was.
The Starglide family adjusted accordingly. Urfan's mother served him a second helping at supper to build his muscles. She doted and favored him by a large margin, dolled out fewer punishments, and awarded far more liberties.
The local storekeeper brewed a salve to encourage a mustache and, eventually, a beard.
His father confided in him, man-to-man, with equal accord, as if he were speaking to himself.
Bizarrely, for the first time in Urfan's memory, Hollander actually cared what he had to say.
"Everyone wants sons," Urfan sighed and flopped back onto his mattress, in a musing mood. "But no one ever wonders who will, one day, marry these sons. Other sons?"
Bored in the dark, Sunkanmi held her hand in front of her face and realized she couldn't see it.
"Urfan, please go to bed."
"But how will they produce snot-nosed heirs? Adopt? But that child will not carry on the sacred bloodline they fought so hard to maintain. Without daughters, the world ends. Am I a hypocrite for deciding to live otherwise?"
"No," she said. "Men are lucky to call you one of their own. With you among them, you elevate them from animals."
"You think me a virtuous man, but I should warn you I am but a whore with a strict code of conduct."
"I think you a hedonist who knows his limits," Sunkanmi measured her next words very carefully. Sifting sand from the sugar. "And I should like to call you a friend."
Friend. So much power carried in a single word. Friend.
She could count her friends on one hand. Maybe not even that.
The boys at her school tolerated her just fine, and she was on historically good terms with the local butcher, baker, and candlestick maker back home, and her teachers appreciated her candid nature dearly, but they certainly weren't friends.
Friendships with her soldiers were expressly forbidden, provided they forgot her rank and began treating her as a peer, which would prove fatal on the battlefield.
Her relationship with her mother was too exquisite to be relegated to the title of "buddy" or "pal." Mothers and daughters, Sunkanmi decided early on, could never be friends. They could be confidants and secret-keepers and hell-raisers, but mothers could not cross the border of friendship without first relinquishing the banner of motherhood for lesser citizenship.
But what of Xosa?
What of the beast presently handcuffed to her wrist? Was he a friend? Did the God of Death, the divinity who ordained humanity's demise, have her best interests at heart?
Breaking from her story in a fog, partially returned to her body, Sunkanmi watched as Xosa sleepily snapped the neck of an errant squirrel, popping one of the milky eyeballs into his mouth like a jellybean.
No, Sunkanmi shuddered, sinking back into her best memories. Definitely not a friend.
"We are well past that formality, Sunny." Urfan Starglide, alive and untouched in her head, murmured into his pillow. An admission she would never forget as long as she lived.
Later, when she thought him fast asleep, Sunkanmi whispered: "...I find you funny, Urfan."
And Urfan, the man, the friend, the lover who was just as unfortunate at love as she, whispered back:
"I find you funnier, still."
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