Hammer & Air Read online

  I laughed a little, without humor, and he pulled back, meeting me with his brilliant blue eyes. “Next half-day then. You be here. Blanket, olive oil. You’re mine, Eirn. I’ll make you feel it, ye ken?”

  An old expression. He used them sometimes; mostly, I think, because they meant he didn’t have to use many words at all.

  “I’ll feel it,” I told him earnestly. “Anything. You do anything you want to me.” And then, I gave him something. It were an important something, something he clung to later, when anything I gave him seemed in doubt. “All I’ve wanted my whole life is for you to do anything you want to me.”

  He grinned then, his eyes hooded, and the clutch of his hands on my shoulders promising all sorts of joys. “Right, then. I promise.”

  He kissed me then, his mouth hard and bruising—more a sock in the arm than a kiss—but it were what he had. That were Hammer. Sometimes he’d have to bruise a thing before he learned to stroke it nice. I were no exception.

  Part II

  The Arc of the Swing

  My next half-day were in four days. Nothing seemed to change between us in that time, but it didn’t seem to change at the same time the world rumbled, re-made at our feet.

  He didn’t attack me at night, pin me to the bed by the neck and drive himself into me like a piston in an engine. I’d heard the sobs of some of the boys who lived this, so I were damned grateful. He didn’t place his palm across my stomach and bring me back against him in quiet moments, as I’d seen men do with their women; but then, he hadn’t done that with any of the women I knew he’d fucked, so that didn’t seem to matter. There were no hidden kisses, no whispers in my ear, no surreptitious touch of hands as we reached for sundries in the morning.

  But none of that hurt, and none of that mattered, because at night, the fathom-deep chasm between our sleeping bodies had filled, closed, become nonexistent. What were left were the blissful heaviness of his arm, anchored around my hips or my shoulders or my chest.

  I woke up every morning feeling as though I had been branded by him, the heat of his body having seeped through my skin like the smell of leather and now I wore Hammer as my own personal tattoo.

  It were that invisible mark, the mark of Hammer on my skin if not yet in my flesh, that gave me the courage to put on a blank face the morning we were to meet by the tree.

  Summer were fading now, but that didn’t mean it weren’t hot in the room with the printing press, and the smell of ink were stifling. I didn’t mind so much; today’s job were a newspaper, and the newspaper were running a short piece I had written on why earthworms made for more fertile farmland. I’d run an experiment out where the maple tree stood, and there were two flats of carrots, turnips, and tubers there, one bigger and grander than the other, and all, I were sure, for the extra bucket of earthworms I’d added to the soft soil.

  It were a small thing, but large enough to tell Hammer, in broken sentences, over dinner at the orphanage the day we’d met at the tree.

  He’d given me a gift in return. A smile. He didn’t often smile—his face tended to set itself in surly lines, hiding his eyes behind his high brow and the squint of his cheeks. But he smiled, and his face were transformed into a thing of beauty, and my heart seemed to beat twice as rapidly as before. It were probably a scientific impossibility, but the feeling were enough to stop up my tongue, and I’d had no voice to tell him about the article itself. He’d smiled at me. I’d write volumes for such a smile.

  They were so rare, that I might as well have.

  So I were happy this day, as I set the letters with gentle taps of the hammer, and me and Linus, the other boy in the shop, placed the big sheet of paper and set the rollers over it. Linus glared at me, and I looked innocently back.

  “Yer in a good mood today.” He were a sour boy, for the most part. He’d been sold into apprenticeship by his parents so that his younger siblings would not starve. They visited him on his half-days and brought him baked goods and fresh blankets, and in all, he had the most comfortable pallet at the printers. Of course, I had a bed in an orphanage, until Hammer turned nineteen in two months. Hammer had promised me he’d gain his majority and his mastership at the smithies, and rent a flat above the inn. Before that day at the tree, even, he’d said I could stay with him, and we’d both be quit of the orphanage forever.

  “It’s my half-day,” I told Linus now, wishing I could say something, anything, about Hammer, meeting me at the tree. Such a small thing, but it felt like the sky.

  “Yeah, well, let’s still hope we get them after Master Will takes over. That bugger’ll likely ream us in the closet and call it a lunch break.”

  My fingers fumbled for a bit with the paper, and I had to pick them up right quick or they’d be crushed.

  “Master Will?” The words felt cold as they fell from my numb lips.

  Linus smiled evilly. “Not such a blessing being pretty, now is it?”

  He could talk. He were a thin, sallow looking boy with a scraggly blond beard and stringy hair to match. Master Will, with his preference for boys, had never looked at him twice. But me, well, I looked like Hammer. I weren’t vain, but being told we looked like brothers our whole lives, and knowing he were beautiful, it did tell me that I weren’t tough to look at.

  I remembered the last time the man were here. He were a bluff, red-faced man, with grizzled black hair, a chest like an oxen yoke, and punishing packs of muscle in his shoulders and biceps. I’d seen him break a boy’s arm once, when the boy simply stood and wept after being ordered to go around the back of the building. He’d ended up going to the back of the print shop anyway, but he’d needed his arm wrapped afterwards. The action had been no more difficult for Master Will than snapping a branch in hard fists would be for Hammer, but even then, for as little as I truly fathomed Hammer’s heart, I knew Hammer would never hurt someone by forcing him or hurting him for sport.

  As if to seal my fate, at that moment, a shadow darkened the door, and there were Master Will, along with the current printer, Master Lea. Poor Master Lea—he were a stooped, kind, gray-haired, old man with rheumy eyes, and the things he did not know about the different men who’d come to assess the estate of this print shop were many and profound. He’d been a kind master. I’d be sorry to see him go; but I’d be sorrier to see that it were Master Will who would take over.

  “Here they are, hard at work!” Master Will laughed jovially, and I kept my eyes on my business. The fact that something I’d written, a piece of knowledge I’d painstakingly documented, were being printed out on the press I’d set up, ceased to mean anything. Hammer claimed me, I thought resentfully. I’m Hammer’s. Master Will will not touch me. Not today.

  “Yes, and you mind that young Eirn, now. He’ll be one of your writers and a master printer of his own right, you will see.”

  I smiled weakly at Master Lea. Gods—he only meant to pay me a compliment, to set up my place in the future. He had no ken that he might as well have trussed me to an archery target, with a big red circle around my waiting arse.

  “Thank you, Master Lea,” I said quietly. “I’m proud of the faith you’ve shown in me.”

  I were unprepared for the crack of a fist across my cheek. Master Lea sputtered, but he were small and old, and I think that some of the gold must have already changed hands.

  “I’ll watch this one,” Master Will snarled, and I glared at him through the stars in my vision. “I’ll watch he doesn’t get above himself. Writing? Leave that for the scholars. This one… this one will have to be buggered to know his place.”

  My jaw were swelling rapidly, and the vision in my swollen eye were going red with blood. At that moment, Linus, bless him, squealed pitifully and said, “Oh, help, the roller’s gone skittish!” And I rushed to assist him like any good printer’s lad would.

  We worked in silence then, our eyes grimly met. Master Lea feigned confusion about how much gold had really been paid, so Master Will were obliged to go back to his rooms to find the signe
d contract. As he stumped out of the room, his feet thumping on the bare boards of the floor, Master Lea drew near.

  “Take your half-day, Eirn,” he said quietly. “I’ll not expect you back.”

  “I’ll miss you,” I muttered, and then, bobbing my head in farewell to Linus, fled the place I’d thought to work for most my life.

  I wanted to go get Hammer, but I couldn’t. Running through town would put me in too much proximity with the fucker who’d just broken my face. I had to console myself with the thought that Hammer would come to me.

  I’d packed us a lunch; it were wrapped in a blanket and stashed by the door of the press. All I had to do were grab it, as I’d planned, and run for the tree… for our place, and then sit there, trembling, until Hammer walked up.

  I couldn’t do that, though. The tree were not far off from a stream, and with the stream came a blackberry bush. After I’d trembled out my nerves and run flat into a blank sheet when I tried to write up a plan, I went to pick a shirt’s worth of berries. Hammer savored them. For some reason, it were all I could think about as I pulled the ones waiting for me as purple and juicy as a ripe girl off their spear-guarded clusters. When I were done, I rinsed out my shirt and used it to soothe the right big bruise the side of my face had become.

  By the time Hammer walked up, looking like a god with the sun at his back, I’d made a parchment bowl from a page of my notebook, and set up a farewell picnic I hoped he’d never forget.

  I found I couldn’t look at him as he neared. If we were just there to fuck and be done with, I probably could have managed, even shirtless and vulnerable. But it had come to mean summat more in the past days—his hand on my hip, our promises that it be only us—this would have meant something.

  His shadow fell over me, and I fidgeted with the blanket. “You don’t look happy.” It were a question, sure as any.

  “I have to leave,” I mumbled to my fidgeting hands. “A new master at the printers. He wants me. I can’t….” Desperation made me look at him. “I won’t be his.”

  Those strong, blunt fingers came to grasp my chin, and he thumped abruptly to his knees. “He did this?” His voice sounded like flint tumblers, being struck in a lock.

  I swallowed and nodded. “I won’t stay there,” I rasped. “And the orphanage won’t keep me, if I don’t have a place. I know it’s only two months ’til your majority, Hammer, but I can’t….” I looked away. “I’m sorry. I wish I could stay for you, but I can’t be in the same town…not with him.”

  A growl then. “You’re mine. I’ll go back after dark. Get your things. We’ll leave together.”

  I were shocked. Thrilled, but shocked. “Hammer, you’re two months from freedom. You’ll have a share in the smithy. You’ll have your own flat! Why would you want to leave that?”

  He scowled. “You want to go off alone?”

  I ducked my head and looked at my bare arms. I had two changes of clothes back at the orphanage, and some blankets at the very least, but that weren’t what I were thinking about when I answered. “No.”

  He grunted in return, because that were all we needed to say on the matter I guess.

  “Did you ice your eye?”

  I nodded, and held up my sodden shirt. He took it up and folded it into a pad, and pushed it up against the worst of the swelling, then pressed my hand against it. Our eyes caught. I’m sure my left one were filled with blood, but that’s not what he seemed to see.

  Me neither.

  “Are the berries for me?” he asked quietly, his hand not leaving mine.

  “They’re your favorite.”

  He nodded, and the corners of his mouth turned up in what may have been a smile. “Thank you. I’ll eat them then.”

  He ate them, and then gave me the soft portion of the bread and cheese I’d brought. We ate quietly, concentrating on little things. The way he needed to taste his fingers after every berry drew my explicit attention. He seemed fascinated by the crumbs I left on my lips. More than once his thumb came out to brush them off.

  The food were gone eventually, and that thumb came out again and rubbed softly against my lower lip, the side not swollen. For once, he managed to not touch the painful thing, and I accepted his caress without having to pretend he hadn’t hurt me with misplaced tenderness.

  “You’re still mine, Eirn,” he said into the westering gold of the afternoon. “You want to be made mine before I go round up our gear?”

  Oh gods. “More than anything.”

  His lips on mine were soft. I would find later that they were not always so. Mostly he were a hard kisser, as he had been four days ago, but he didn’t want to hurt me this night. Not the only reason, but the only one I knew at the time.

  I were not wearing a shirt, so it were an easy thing for him to push me back against the blanket and assert himself over my body. He were very tactile. My skin had to be palmed, or explored with questing, rubbing fingers. His mouth went everywhere, and he learned the taste of my neck as different from my clavicle, as different from the dip in flesh down the center of my chest. As he tasted, I ran my hands through his hair and tried to hold still so he could explore.

  I failed.

  His mouth, hot and urgent, closed over my nipple, pale as sand, and he suckled on the thing, flat as it were. It were like a taut string attached to my cock were plucked, and my back arched, and I moaned under him.

  “Hurt?”

  “No.” My voice were thin, and my hips were undulating against the dark wool blanket. He put the flat of his hand against my stomach and pressed until I held my hips still, but I could not stop the trembling in my body, or the way my hands jerked as I put them on his shoulders, his neck, anywhere, as long as I were touching him some more. He hadn’t taken his shirt off yet, and I wanted him to… yearned to see his chest, powerful and glistening in the late afternoon sun, but he wouldn’t let me pull at it when I tried.

  He looked up and caught my eyes, and then took my hand in his. “Easy.”

  “Hammer… Hammer, I want… oh gods… I don’t….”

  His lean mouth curved a little. “Easy.”

  It were enough. Some of the urgency, the twitchy pain of arousal, faded and were replaced by trust. He pulled my trousers down around my hips, and for a moment, my thighs tightened. In the dorm, while Hammer had ignored the other boys, simply taking his nudity for granted in a group of growing young men, I had perfected the art of leaving my shirt on until my trousers were changed and vice versa. He were going to expose my body completely to the sunlight, and I were… were….

  He pulled the trousers down to my feet and pulled my short boots off, then took the whole works down. I crossed my thighs to try to cover myself, but his warm palm against the soft flesh of my inner thigh put a stop to that.

  “Can’t taste like that,” he explained.

  “But I’m… I’m naked.” And pale. And not as beautiful as you.

  “Shh.” He scooted up to my middle then and propped himself up on his elbow. His flat palm skated on my thighs again, and then my lower stomach, and he lowered his mouth to lick the crease of my thigh.

  My cock jumped against my stomach and my hands sought out the silk of his hair. I clenched it and then massaged his scalp, and he moved under my touch like an animal seeking pets, so I kept it up.

  The third time he kissed my stomach when I thought he’d been going to touch my cock, I whimpered, and he grinned wickedly up at me.

  “I’m dying to taste it,” he confessed, nuzzling it with his nose.

  “Then why…?”

  “Are you crazy with wanting?”

  “Yes!”

  “Good.”

  With that he opened his mouth and engulfed me, all the way down to the root, and I shook with the force of absolute desire that swept me.

  “Auuughhh!”

  He kept me in his mouth, though, and sucked in, hard, and my hands flailed, finally finding purchase on his wide, hard shoulders as he wrapped his forearm around my backside and
clenched me to him.

  “Oh gods… Hammer… Hammer… oh… gods… it feels….” That were me, always trying to put words to something for which there were no words.

  His fist came to stroke my base and his mouth kept working on the head, paying special attention to the place the foreskin attached to the underside. My eyes went blind, and the little part of my brain that always seemed set to record an experience in careful notes turned to gray scale and fireworks. I thrashed helplessly under his hands and his tongue, and he stayed, solid as iron, pleasuring me with a systematic and immutable single-mindedness that rendered me brainless and shouting with arousal.

  He simply let me thrash, holding my hips solidly in place until the wind roared in my ears, and my cock erupted and I screamed into the emptiness of a summer meadow.

  He held my spend in his mouth for a minute and then spat it into the hand he’d held under my hips. Cupping the liquid in the one hand, he let go of my cock and used the other to spread my thighs. I were still panting and dazed, and I must have made a sound of protest as he spread my arse cheeks and probed my entrance with all the absorption I’d shown to my two flats of earth in the months prior.

  “Listen,” he said gruffly, and even in the haze that still set my limbs trembling, I could hear the strain in his voice. “I want you. I want to fuck you. If you’re not ready it will hurt. I’m not patient, ken?”

  I nodded, wanting to reach out and hold him, even wanting to pleasure him as he’d pleasured me. But he were Hammer, and he were powerful, and once he’d swung, it would take a force of the gods to stop him. I were liquid from sex and come; I were hardly a force of the gods.

  I spread my thighs and put my own palms on my stomach to force myself to keep my hips still. He probed my entrance gently, and then poured the spend over it, probing and stretching all the while. My cock started to fill, but only part way, and I had to fight to hold myself, exposed and open like this, while he made me ready. His finger burned inside me, and then I loosened a little, and then the burning felt good.