S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Southern Comfort (51 page)

I am here
.

Tarasov gives a start. Looking around, he realizes he is in the Beghum’s house, in the Tribe’s stronghold, somewhere in the new Zone that had been once
Afghanistan
. He relaxes with odd, unexpected relief.

“I am here,” the female voice insists. “Wake up!”

Now he sees the girl, a lamp and a jug in her hands, and his heart starts beating fast.

“What is your name?” he asks.

“I not tell… yet. Stand up.”

Her words are authoritative but she speaks with a softness in her voice that Tarasov wouldn’t have expected. Getting up, he sees that she barely reaches up to his chest. As she removes the tattered camouflage shirt from his shoulders, her fingers touch his skin, stirring excitement throughout his body. She stands close enough to let him detect the sweet aroma of female sweat, mixed with a strange scent that reminds him of pomegranates with a hint of wood smoke. She takes a small sponge from the jug and pours a balm-like liquid over his shoulders and chest. The salve emanates a spicy scent, pungent and pleasant in equal measure.

“What is this?” he whispers.

“An ointment,” she replies, moistening his skin with gentle strokes. “I prepared it myself from herbal oil and powder of glowing stone.”

“Glowing stone? You mean, an artifact? A swag?”

“No… it is from stones of Samal.”

“Samal?”

“Guardian of lost valley.”

“Tell me more…”

“No.”

As his coarse skin absorbs the salve, Tarasov is aware of a relaxed sensation in his muscles, as if they are thawing from inner warmth. It is pleasing but strangely unnatural. He feels her touch becoming more and more sensual with every stroke of her hand.

“Have you done this to men… before?” he asks, swallowing hard.

“No.” It seems to him as if her voice carries a barely concealed note of shame. “Men are scared of my scar. English is funny language. Men are scared because I am scarred. Is that right word?”

Now it’s his time to reply with a
no
. “No. I think beautiful would be a better word.”

“You lie,” she replies, with the nuance of a smile on her lips.

“Are you with me because your mother ordered you to… do this with me?”

“Why?”

“Uhm… actually, because I wish you were doing this because you wanted to.”

Now a smile runs across her face, like the smooth oil streaming down on Tarasov’s body. “Before Colonel and his Marines took us in, girls could not refuse if parents chose a man. But now I could have… and did not. I was watching you when I was healing him. You had respect of him.”

“Honestly? He was frightening.”

“He is. But you remained proud. You didn’t beg him for mercy like many men did before you. You are a brave man, soldier. Besides…” She moves her index finger along Tarasov’s eyebrows. “…you have beautiful eyes. And besides…” Her hand slides down over his neck and shoulders to his chest. “…you are strong. I like you. Do you have a woman, soldier?”

“No… and does all this mean that I will be your man?”

“Maybe,” she replies with an enigmatic smile.

“And after we do this, and I find whatever I have to find, what then? Will I be free to leave?”

“You will be free…” She kneels down at his feet, applying the soothing balm everywhere except his loins. She looks up to his face. Their eyes meet. Her hands, softened and warmed up by the balm, now touch his body where no woman has touched him for a long time. “…but you will not want to leave.”

What is that thing you’re pouring over me,
Tarasov wants to ask, in fear of being bewitched by some supernatural act of sorcery, but all he can do is to emit a soft moan. Looking at the girl’s face on which the last evidence of shame has vanished, making way for a barely withheld, wild desire that yet has something pure and honest about it, he moves to caress her. She gently pushes his hand away.

“Lay down now,” she tells him.

Looking up from the mat, Tarasov watches the girl remove her scarf. A rain of dark brown hair falls over her shoulders, streaming down to her delicate hips. She loosens the buttons on her apparel, letting it slide to the ground, then takes the jug and pours the balm slowly all over herself, standing motionless with her eyes closed, letting the viscous liquid flow down on her sinewy body.

Now he sees that her scar doesn’t only cover half her face. It runs down through her neck to her breast, making the untouched, inch-width space between her nipple and the scar look like divine intervention or at least mere luck.

His glance glides below, to where a woman is supposed to be touched in the most gentle way and where her skin, from where even the thinnest of hair had been plucked, reveals scars left by long claws or knifes.

     
The orange light from the lamp glimmers on her small breasts and hardened nipples. Her lips move in an inaudible whisper, as if praying. The warm oil flows down her body. Mesmerized, Tarasov’s eye follows a drop of oil run down from her aroused breast to her scarred belly, then to her inner limbs and drop down, as if it were the moisture of her flesh.

Then she looks down at him. The reflection of the flame dances in her eyes.

““Will you give yourself to me?”, she says solemnly, as if concluding a mating ritual.

“Even if I had a choice – I could only say yes.”

“Then you are my man now,” she whispers, lying down at his side. She closes her eyes and stretches out her arms, offering herself to him. “And I am your woman. Take me.”

Her voice is barely more than warm breath in his ear. Feeling her lips touch his skin, he closes his eyes, succumbing to the waves of heat engulfing his body.

6 October 2014, 06:08:51 AFT

Tarasov awakes to a loud knock on the door. From under half-opened eyelids, still heavy from sleep, he sees light falling in through the window. It must be morning.

Damn it, let me sleep. If this is a dream, I don’t want to wake up.

The knocking gets impertinent. Tarasov stretches his arms and, feeling that the girl is not lying beside him, buries his face into the mattress to detect the smells of sex, oil and sweat again.

“You don’t have to look for me like that. I am here.”

Tarasov opens his eyes and sees the girl standing at the door. What he took for knocking was actually her nailing his father’s photograph to the wooden door.

“It is my surprise to you,” she says. “Because this is your home now.”

“Hey,” he exclaims, jumping up from the mat, “where did you get that photograph from?”

“Driscoll was here. He brought your things.”

She points to the corner where Tarasov’s Vintorez stands propped against the wall, a neatly rolled bundle sitting beside it. His watch lies on top. The exoskeleton stands there too – cleaned, and to his surprise, now bearing the desert pattern camouflage of the Tribe warriors. Moreover, in a much smaller bundle he recognizes a few things that had once belonged to his guide. Even the Heartstone is there. The sight of it, and that of Squirrel’s battered little harmonica, saddens him, but this soon makes way for appreciation. In hindsight, he now fully understands the girl’s words about the difference between Stalkers and the Tribe.

Men like or the Colonel might be brutally cruel, but they seem to have more respect towards certain things than the Stalkers… and Stalkers could be nice, but they’re not called scavengers without reason.

“Hey… that’s great!” Tarasov joyfully exclaims as he straps on his watch. “But out of all this, you are my best surprise.”

The girl giggles. “You don’t have to call me ’best surprise’. My name is Nooria.”

“Nooria,” Tarasov slowly repeats. “At last you tell me. You have a beautiful name.”

“It means:
light
. And your name is Mikhailo. What does it mean?”

“
Archangel
, leader of Heaven’s armies, things like that,” Tarasov replies with a shrug. “My mother was very religious at that time. But how do you know?”

“I have been looking through your things.”

He gets up and steps to the door. For a moment he feels like taking the photograph down, but as he looks at the girl called Nooria and her – or by now,
their
– mattress, which is still in a mess from the intense night before, he leaves it in its new place.

“Thank you, Nooria,” he says. “Thank you for everything.”

“For what?” Nooria replies with a smile. “Say thanks to my mother.”

Tarasov doesn’t know how to reply. Clearly, it was the Beghum who saved his life and who eventually put him up with her daughter, but it was Nooria who had accepted him and, although it feels difficult for him to admit, made him happy. Now, as he looks into her pure, green eyes and sees the happy smile on her scarred face, his suspicions about being used as a buck or being bewitched seem utterly ridiculous – even unfair.

“You don’t have to thank me,” she says, repeating her meaning. “Today you will go away, but you will return to me.”

Her words sound neither like a request nor an order but a statement about something that needs not to be asked, because there is no way for it to happen otherwise.

“Yes, I will,” Tarasov softly replies, and looks at the photograph fixed to the door with four rusty nails. “You got me nailed, Nooria… nailed for good.”

“Tora dost daram,”
Nooria replies.

“What does that mean?”

“I think you know already,” she says and turns her gaze away from Tarasov’s eyes.

The Ghosts and the Traitors

Road to
Shibar
Pass
, 10:15:47 AFT

“You are one lucky son of a bitch, you know that?” the Tribe warrior shouts to Tarasov as he drives the Humvee along the bumpy, curving road at reckless speed. When they’d set out on their way to the pass in the vehicle bearing the name MULLAH MOWER, the driver had introduced himself as Lance Corporal Bockman. His face is red from the strong sun. “I’ve only seen this once – it was a rag-head with long blond hair. He came all the way from
Germany
to join the Taliban. The women admired his looks for a while, but then tore him to pieces anyway. But you… not only did she save your ass, defying the big man’s will, but she even picked you for Nooria!”

“The Beghum must be a very important woman.”

“You can say that about the Colonel’s ex, yes!”

“What?”

“What
what
? I thought you got that already, partner. She was the Colonel’s woman. Still is, to some extent. The Bhegum’s the only one among us who can take him on. Okay, the Top too, but in different matters...”

“But this makes me –”

“Yes, you can consider yourself the chosen man of the big man’s stepdaughter, whatever degree of kinship that is!” The warrior shakes his head as if he were talking about something that’s hard to believe.