The Hero King (29 page)

“You do look remarkably like Vara,” the Great Earth Mother said after we had been eating for about ninety minutes.

I told her about the three mirrors that the Elflord of Xayber had.

“I killed Vara finally,” the Great Earth Mother said-flat, conversational tones.

“So I hear. But not for nearly two hundred years after you had sex with him.”

“I don’t act rashly.”

It was time for the White Rabbit to run through the room looking at an oversized pocket watch and screaming, “I’m late, I’m late.” I would have greeted him like a long-lost brother.

“Vara was more my size than yours, wasn’t he?” I asked a few minutes later, after I had given up hope of seeing the White Rabbit.

“A little more than you, a lot less than me.”

“Wasn’t that a little awkward?” I was worried about the logistics of the situation.

“I am
always
capable of ensuring my own pleasure.” That sentence had haughtiness dripping from every word.

“And those who give you pleasure?” I asked.

She stared at me for a long time then. Under the pressures of the moment, I met her stare rather then turn my. attention to her other attributes again. She got a look of concentration on her face. I wondered why that question took so much time for her to answer.

“Would you get sentimentally attached to a warm fire in winter?” she asked.

I started to flip back a quick answer but decided that a question that took so much time and thought to ask needed at least that much time to answer. I thought about it. I repeated the question silently, watching her eyes while I did, and searching for the trick in the words.

“I might if I had been cold for several thousand years,” I said finally.

“When you could build a new fire whenever you wanted it?”

“I might worry that I wouldn’t have the materials handy to build that next fire,” I said. “There might not be any wood left, or a match to strike a spark.”

We did some more staring at each other. The eating seemed to be over. Neither one of us paid much attention to the food.

“You’re not Vara,” the Great Earth Mother said next.

“No, but I have something Vara didn’t have, no matter how good he might have been.”

“Oh?” A raised eyebrow, a hint of interest.

“A
couple
of things Vara didn’t have. I have his balls, and I have my own.”

“The dominoes are falling,” she said, a pointless reminder. Even though I couldn’t hear them clunking into each other while I was inside the temple, I was very aware of them, especially since she had said that the last one would launch the seventh moon.

“How many dominoes were there?” I asked.

“Who counts? There were as many as were needed. What more matters?”

“How many of these cycles have there been?” I asked next. “Do you really want the one that is ending now to be the last?”

“How many?” She smiled. “Who counts?” she repeated.

“And were they all the same?”

“Enough alike to get monotonous.”

“Then you might welcome a diversion that offered the chance for something different. Four balls might introduce some novelty,” I suggested. “Who knows, you might even produce twins—two cycles running at once, parallel, maybe even running in different directions. That would ease the monotony.”

She considered it for a moment. “It might at that.”

More silence. In my mind I could hear those damn dominoes clunking toward oblivion.

“Ah, if we’re going to conceive a new world, don’t you think we should get about it? This would be a poor time for coitus interruptus.”

“How quaint,” she said, wrinkling her nose.

“And what’s the gestation period for a universe?”

“Have courtship rituals fallen so far?”

“A, it’s better than offering you twenty bucks for a trip around the world. B, who know’s what’s proper here; I’ve never made love to a goddess before. And C, we just don’t have time for chocolates and roses.”

She shook her head. “Is it really worth it then?”

My smile was forced. I had gone into the close too soon. I could almost feel every muscle in my face to get the smile in place.

“You’ll never know unless you try.” I was feeling decidedly perverted by then, like a dirty old man offering a little girl candy to show him what was under her panties. Which was really a ridiculous way to feel with this naked giant sitting across the table from me.

“Very well, little man, show me that it’s worth it.” The way she said that, I wondered if I would even be able to get it up. I felt little enough compared to her size; I didn’t need the sarcasm. I had heard about psychic impotence. I figured this would be a bad time to have my first personal experience of it.

“Here?” I asked, and I tried to make the single word sound sarcastic all by itself, a sort of “how gauche” expression. The Great Earth Mother laughed in my face, a loud, raucous bass rumble. I could feel myself shrinking even more.

“There’s not
that
much hurry,” she said. “We have more time left than
you’ll
be able to manage.”

Forget “Fire and Ice.” The world was going to come to an end without a replacement because the Great Earth Mother liked to indulge in sexual put-downs.

“We’ll go to my bedroom,” she said, uncoiling herself from the stack of pillows on the floor. I took one last pull at my wine and got up.

    I’m tempted to say that the bed of the Great Earth Mother was the size of a football field, but that would be a gross, and obvious, exaggeration.
But
, if you put one corner of the bed at home plate on a baseball diamond and lined up the adjacent sides along the foul lines, the pitcher’s mound would cause the bed to wobble. The bed and bedroom looked like something from a Hollywood art director’s idea of a fantasy harem in some
Arabian Nights
picture. The bed was immense but low, only about a foot off the floor. The coverings looked like satin. The wall hangings were of the same material. There were piles of pillows and cushions everywhere, on the bed and on the floor. The colors were pastels with a few dark accents. There were neither torches nor candles in the room, but it was well lit. The lighting was indirect with a vengeance. I couldn’t spot where any of the illumination was coming from. There was simply light where it was needed, in just the proper amount.

“This is my playroom,” the Great Earth Mother said. She went to the bed and crawled out toward the middle of it, her butt moving provocatively as she moved directly away from me. She got near the center and flopped over on her back, spreading her legs wide.

“Are you just going to stand there with your clothes on?” she asked. “I thought you were worried about the time.”

I started the process of undressing, taking off my swords, mail shirt, and so forth. The Great Earth Mother reached down between her legs. What started as a casual

scratch turned into something more specifically erotic. Then she held out her hand, thumb sticking up.

“This is what you have to compete with,” she said. A
big
thumb. It was going to be close. I finished undressing. “Come to Mama,” she said.

18
The Big Bang

I looked out at the Great Earth Mother lying in the middle of that huge bed. Her breasts jutted up yet, very little flattened because she was on her back—two volcanoes waiting for my attention. There was still a problem of scale. If I got my head up to her breasts, my feet would be dangling over her genitals. —Okay, that was a bit of an exaggeration, but the working parts still wouldn’t have connected. As I started crawling out on the bed toward her, I thought, I’m still sixteen and this is just the wildest wet dream ever. Somewhere inside me, another voice said,
Go with the flow
. If I had been just a little less frightened, I might have considered singing a chorus of “Climb Every Mountain.”

But that long crawl did give me time to get aroused. It was a unique point of view, a unique pilgrimage.

Her thighs were as thick as my waist, but on her frame, it looked right. I wondered how much
Playboy
or
Penthouse
might pay for an eight-page centerfold spread on the Great Earth Mother—if either magazine was left after World War Three and the current dive into chaos … and if the Great Earth Mother could be bought.

That crawl seemed to take an hour. I passed the level of her feet and moved on toward the other end of that special box canyon. Yeah, a lot of bad puns came to mind. I managed to cram several hours’ worth of them into the few odd minutes that actually passed. I crawled to her and up over her. I homed in on her breasts and face, not worrying too much about trying to keep my weight off of her.

Her breasts were firm. The nipples rose to hard peaks under my hands. I slid between her breasts and moved farther north until our faces were level.

“This is going to be even more awkward than I imagined,” I said. Then, taking my boldest move yet, I lowered my mouth to her, ready to kiss—ready to risk having her bite off half my face if she got a little carried away.

The Great Earth Mother laughed again, but this time it was a more friendly sound. “I told you I always make sure of my own pleasure,” she whispered.

Then I felt her skin crawling against mine, her whole body seemingly involved in some strange migration. My first thought was that she was changing into some hideous monster to do me, and with her arms wrapped tightly around me, I didn’t have a prayer of escaping. I needed a few seconds to realize what was really happening. She was shrinking herself down to my size.

I knew that she was making herself smaller and not making me larger because more of the pattern on the pillow under her head became visible.

“Is that better?” she asked when the shrinking act ended. She had matched my size quite closely.

“Much better,” I said. “I don’t have to worry that I’m making love to a movie screen now.”
Now
, I adjusted my position to take some of my weight off of her. It was probably still not necessary for her comfort, but it was for mine.

Patterns, textures, sequences.

I guess that we all fall into habits in lovemaking as in everything else. The first time with a new lover, two sets of habits can clash, making the session less than satisfactory, or they can mesh, leading to something that can be quite extraordinary. Who does what, and when, and how? Once the Great Earth Mother and I got cooking, habits took over, saving some of the wear and tear on my overloaded brain. I had done this before, often enough that I didn’t have to think about what came next.

The Great Earth Mother was every man’s dream in bed, responding, anticipating, encouraging, driving me to a frenzy that went on and on. The hero with four balls was making love to a real sex goddess. Time seemed to rest on the sidelines to watch. Our foreplay was more extended than I had ever managed before as the big mama bared all my nerve endings and kept me just short of ejaculation. I didn’t even have a chance to worry about the End of Everything coming before I did.

“Okay, Hero,” she said at last, her mouth all over my ear. “Fuck me.” Well, that’s what heroes are supposed to do best, isn’t it?
All in a day’s work, ma ‘am. Just part of the job. Service with a smile
. Service as a verb.

I entered her slowly, cautiously, more for my own comfort than to try to tease her. The Great Earth Mother had strung me out to such a pitch that the gentlest touch against the head of my penis was a ragged shock, threatening to tip me over the edge into premature orgasm and painful release. Maybe all I
needed
to do was make sure that the release was into her, but I had to hold out for a while at least, show
some
staying power, a touch of class, a hint of style. She had a poor enough opinion of Heroes without my giving her additional reasons.

I also had to avoid thinking too much about all of that to keep from triggering what I was trying to hold.

But it started very nicely even with all of the screaming tension of my extended arousal. The Great Earth Mother got me so crazed that I had trouble remembering just who she was and why I was screwing her. There was magic in the air, in the bed, the way it’s always supposed to be according to the trash—an air of conquest.
Me Tarzan, you Jane
. She might be Mother Goddess to the world, the creator of everything with the help of
any
appropriate stud, but she writhed around under me like any woman caught up in the moment, apparently as strung out by our match as I was. What a letter it would make to one of the skin mags! It was an Olympic performance, a level I had never reached before and never expect to duplicate. I’m not sure that I could even survive a rematch of that intensity. I’m only human.

The theme from
Rocky
would have been appropriate background to this affair.

Sweat-slicked skin, the aromas of active sex, the sounds of heavy breathing, garbled nothings, grunts, and gasps, it went on and on. I felt the Great Earth Mother scratching my back, felt the sting of flayed skin, and that finally brought some measure of awareness back to me.

She wrapped her arms and legs around me and said, “Let’s see what you’re made of, Hero.”

Then she pulled me tightly against her, her arms and legs overpowering in their strength, crushing the breath from me, forcing my orgasm to match hers: bucking and yawing, a scream that sounded as one even though it was drawn from two throats.

And then I felt her skin crawling against mine again. There was a swelling sound like the “ocean’s roar” from a seashell.

And then I fell in.

    Alice fell down a rabbit hole into her strange adventures, but Alice was just a little girl, facing a little girl’s dream fears. Me, I was a Hero, full-grown, tested in battle and in bed. While the Great Earth Mother grew beneath me, I slid out of her arms. I was still anchored to her at the groin. I slipped between her breasts and across her smooth belly without a belly button. I tried to grab hold of the cascades of pubic hair that were suddenly as thick as tangles of heavy rope, but my hands kept sliding off and I tumbled down into the dark well I had been pumping so vigorously not long before.