The Ring of the Giants

Chapter One The Unwanted Life was hard. That Kalesh knew. Sometimes he thought it was the only thing he knew. His father, for example, or his mother, even his true tribe—he knew them not. The gray sky was above, and the birds of the air, those that twittered and sang and those that soared and wheeled and dived without mercy, swift and exulting and fierce, while below was the solid earth. And upon the latter, in the unending wilds of deep forest and jagged mountain, cool rushing streams and secret hidden lakes, lived Kalesh, child of none, friend of none, kinsman of none. Life was hard, and for a strange orphan like the dark-eyed Kalesh it was harder still. Oh, perhaps long ago, in the times of the fathers’ fathers’ fathers that stretched back so far that no one could count, it had been worse. That, so claimed the tales handed down by generation upon generation, had been the Time of Great Ice that followed the even more remote Time of the Giants. In the beginning, of course, things were good. At the very forging of the world, the foundries of the giants glowed and sparked from mountaintops, and the earth was warm and soft, as yielding and fertile as the down-furred belly of a maiden who blushes and bites her coy lip when for the very first time she lies back to spread her smooth fair thighs, and yet smirks secretly, too, as with mock-hesitation she reaches down to pull herself open, slippery and pink and achingly ready. The earth was a garden then, bounteous. Things grew forth, forerunners of all else that was to come. But after the giants’ hammers fell for war rather than making, the furnaces on the peaks just under the clouds went cold, and with them the warmth of the very earth. The frozen, almost-barren world had been stalked then by huge cats with curving dagger teeth that preyed upon enormous-antlered stags whose bellies were head-high, mammoths twice as big as any seen now, and puny man alike. Men had lived in holes in the rock, it was said, and the wind was fierce, and the sun never shone. Nothing grew, or little, and a fire let go out would most likely never be kindled again, with death to those who huddled about it. Yes, so it was said. Apparently some of the old untended peaks smoldered once more, in the still-icy wastes of the craggy far north and in mountains thrust right out of the waves in the north of the great Western Sea, but the world still was not easy. Maybe it never would be again. Gone were the giants and their fabulous works, gone was the magic, gone the mythic times of peace and plenty. Men hunted and fished to stay alive, and even fought one another and stole. They crafted the tools and the weapons, while women plucked and scrabbled and gathered, and scraped skins and wove and pounded pots and fired them. Great beasts still prowled the night, and mysterious gods laughed and shook the heavens and threw down lightning and wind and rain at will. So had it been since little men began to walk the earth, and so always would it be. But at least the others of this tribe had a place, a family, a future. Kalesh had none of these, and he knew it. The knowledge in him was grim, resigned, like that of one of the dogs that snuffles and cringes and whines around the camp, seemingly whipped into submission, yet perhaps with a last feral gleam that still flickers somewhere deep within its rheumy eye. Kalesh was a man, or so the youngster told himself stubbornly—yet while he had the years of manhood, he of course had not the status. To the others, after all, he was but a cur, a hanger-on, sometimes useful, more often not, an object never truly wanted of its own worth. He knew it. Everyone knew it. In a way, things would have been easier if the childless kind-hearted man who had rescued him from his burnt and ransacked village had stayed his hand instead, and left the infant to perish unknowing. Yet instead he had stooped and picked up the tiny lad, but the orphan’s protector died later in a quarrel with the chief even before Kalesh could remember, and his wife was forfeit along with all his goods, so Kalesh could only linger on alone. He tried to help, but usually his help was spurned. Sometimes they beat or whipped him for getting in the way, sometimes just for sport. He could not fight back, of course, for there were too many. And yet he was afraid to leave, for the world was wide, with even worse dangers lurking all around. His hooded gaze, therefore, was as wary as that of the most experienced mammoth-hunter, and he grew fast, so fast, at jumping, running, flinging himself out of the way of the kicks and cuffs and occasional missiles of the casually cruel who needed something to enliven their boredom. His hands were clever, for he had had to learn to make his own clothing and his own meager tools, and he was adept at repairing his humble dwelling, which others at their whim liked to trample and rend. Sometimes one-eyed old Haramop, the chief, crept into the lean-to the black-haired young man constructed at the very edge of the settlement and made him… do things. There was no need for it, for the chief had more than enough wives, some his own and others that he had stolen from good men. It amused him, though, to take his pleasure in other ways, too. Kalesh did not like it, but no one could resist wicked old Haramop, for he was still strong, cunning, and completely ruthless, and whatever he said, many believed. What, after all, was the word of mere Kalesh against the snarl of mighty Haramop? Thus Kalesh could only squat there, screw his eyes shut, and do what the bad man said. He was fiercely ashamed, and yet sometimes he grew confusedly erect, too, at the salty-sweet smell of some young wife’s lower belly that wafted from those hated silver-streaked curls, or the slippery fishy taste of her oozing from the swollen, taut skin the foul, veiny old thing. Oh, if only he could have a wife like that someday! he bewailed inwardly. A wife to look upon him and smile beckoningly, a wife to open up her long white arms and invite him down inside of her, where he would see nothing but her, feel nothing but her, smell nothing but the musky tang of her own excitement… Oh, what bliss it would be! Kalesh, however, could never win a woman, for he was himself lower even than the lowest wife. Haramop often laughed and told him so as he urged the unwilling boy on. The great chief had many women, he bragged as he gripped his wrinkled old fingers in the younger man’s heavy black hair to pull his wincing head up and down again and again. Grand Haramop had shapely wives for merely touching and toying with, he said, nimble-fingered wives for cooking and mending, big-hipped wives for breeding. And if he did not wish a child, why, he even had wives for that, too! Yes, he had flat-chested little wenches whose pretty faces on command would drop between the heavy thighs of whatever senior wife he had just used and obediently slurp clean her pulled-open pink nest of flesh and hair and fluids so that the lustful old man would not have another mouth to feed. But Kalesh was not even worth that, taunted the scarred, one-eyed swaggerer. He was not fit to be in the tribe at all, let alone touch a woman in those places, even if it was only to lick up some better man’s mess. This was the only thing he was good for, growled the self-satisfied chief as he rolled the boy’s mouth sticky and swirling all about the engorged head of his throbbing upthrust organ. Laughing, Haramop called him bad names and made him truly take his time, for the longer the lean-ribbed mongrel worked, he told the boy sneeringly, the bigger the meal he would get in his hungry belly. Once poor Kalesh had known no better, thinking that the sour gruel for which he strove surely must be food of some kind, else great Haramop would not have said it. Now he knew the truth, though, and no matter how his miserable cheeks bulged, when at last he swallowed, Kalesh knew bitterly that the only thing it benefitted was Haramop’s wicked pride. Really, the only friend poor Kalesh had was the little one between his legs. He did not do anything bad with it, like leering Haramop did with his wrinkled old thing, but still it was a source of much furtive pleasure. More than any other man, or even woman, his life was toil, for he could depend on no one. Now and then he was given secret scraps by someone else who resented Haramop, but more often Kalesh’s days were spent alone in the forest. He dug for grubs, he scavenged for berries and roots and mushrooms, and sometimes he could trap an animal. Always, though, he took a different hidden and devious route, for though no man valued or respected him, of course any would be happy to take what he had gathered. And now and then, on those rare and wondrous occasions when he had actually eaten enough not to feel starving, and then had slaked his thirst from some cool rivulet, Kalesh had lain down in dappled, mossy shade and made himself feel good. Really, it was the perfect complement to the rare meal that truly satisfied—satisfaction piled upon satisfaction. Life was hard. Toil was endless, pain ever-present, and other men evil. For a few brief moments, however, he could make himself forget it all. As his nostrils tingled with the remembered second-hand scent of some unknown girl’s most secret places, he would let his eyes slide closed and try to forget where he had smelled that intimate, fiercely womanly odor of salt and innermost body, and focus instead only on that smell, that smell, that smell… Ah, what it did to him! Shuddering, he rolled the thin, stretchable skin of his thickening organ back and forth across the swelling rim of its bloated purple head, back and forth, as the slippery tip glistened and oozed and dripped with clear fluid. Mm, and sometimes he would scratch and pull at the hairy bags jouncing beneath, swollen heavy with the promise of their seed. How pleasantly he could tease and tantalize his flesh, getting close to that nameless joy he sought, then backing shiveringly away, faster and then slower, on and on, an agony of waiting. With practice he could make himself so fluttery and juicy inside that when at long last his whole body stiffened and his manhood pulsed and throbbed crazily in his fist, he seemed to turn himself inside-out, the tiny slit at the tip of the bloated purple thing feeling like it dilated as wide as his thumb as it flung gout after gout of the cool, clammy goop from navel to neck and beyond, endlessly. Oh, how he wanted a woman of his own, a slender, supple thing pretty and petite and powerless—to leer at and touch whenever he wanted, to have, to keep, to put under him at night and do things to… Kalesh did not really know much of what a girl was like down there, but from things he had heard other men chuckle about, he supposed he had a general idea. It would be hairy like he was, but the thing would stick in somehow rather than out, opening up wet and pink and smelling like what already haunted his dreams. Yes, and once he had some girl in his power, then it would be his turn to do to her anything that amused him, anything—any outrage to pique and goad his own excitement ever higher, and to make his shapely victim writhe and whimper and moan! He was not quite sure exactly all the things he would do, but they would be glorious. And as impossible was the forbidden notion that outcaste Kalesh might ever have a woman all for himself, the poor boy could never forget the sole time he actually had touched one… Whenever he thought of that night, his blood seethed, and he had to touch himself—had to. It was the one thing that kept his foolish daydream alive. Her name was Mara, and she was the youngest daughter of a very low-ranking family that already had too many offspring still living. She was slim and rather boyish, with breasts no one thought to look at. Like Kalesh, and therefore to his secret delight, she had night-black hair and dark eyes, too. Her mouth was red and saucy, and sometimes he pictured that quick, crooked-lipped smile of hers, and he shivered somewhere deep within. Her father was not a favorite of Haramop, so marrying the daughter of such a man would bring favor to none. And the girl herself seemed of very little use in any practical way either, being of no more than average skill, it appeared, at any womanly task. The old crones who oversaw the work of the village cuffed her frequently for her mistakes and always shifted the girl back and forth among themselves, each eager to be rid of her, if only for a little while. She was very quiet, and though sometimes he spied her eyes flash sullenly, she never talked back.