Tamarind Seed Society Pt 01

"Powerful states sometimes fall suddenly, with a crash. The Mbaran Empire's fall was a long stumble, like a drunken man careening down the road."

-From the historical musings of the scholar Youssouran Badian, City of Keremesu, 3062

City of Jao, Empire of Mbara. Year 3121, Month of Great Harvest

A wives' proverb said, "to know a man's heart, fill his belly". But Mari had never been a wife. As a whore, she was less interested in men's hearts than she was in their minds. Her proverb was more like, "to know a man's mind, drain his plumsack."

Morning filtered through the cracks of the shutters as she crouched over the plump, snoring body of Abias the Broker. She eased aside the thin linen blanket that had covered them during the night. His dusky cock lay swollen and half-hard along his leg, still tacky with the drying fluids of their previous transactions.

The air in Mari's hut was thick with the heady smells of kushleaf and incense that she'd burned the night before. It wasn't typical for her to smoke with a client, but she'd known Abias for years. He always visited when his caravan arrived from across the Sandsea. The stories he brought from the old kingdom of Ummran were entertaining, even if the time she spent listening to them was not always lucrative.

He stirred as she planted kisses in a trail up his thigh. But then, rather than tease him, she slid his whole cock into her mouth, engulfing his shaft like a python swallowing a bush rat. Abias groaned. As if from long practice, his hands swam into her cloud of thick, kinky hair to rest upon her scalp.

"Ancestors bless, Mari," Abias murmured. "This is the favored way to awaken."

Mari hummed in response, digging her fingers into the flesh of his hips. She worked her tongue, tasting salt and seed on his flesh. She felt him swell steadily in her mouth, and squeezed her throat muscles against the spongy head of his cock. When she needed a breath, she drew back, leaving the shaft fully engorged and dripping.

She looked up at him as she fisted his cock with one hand. He beamed with a gold-toothed smile.

"Only a poor host would allow you to leave unsatisfied," Mari said. She swooped down for more. This time, she stroked and sucked his cock with fervor, reveling in the feel of silken steel that filled her mouth. Her breasts pillowed on him, nipples grazing his hairy thighs. The skunk and spice of the bedchamber air resonated with her wet slurps and Abias's increasingly rapid breaths.

Yes, fucking someone could tell you a lot about them. But sucking cock--and licking pussy, both of which Mari enjoyed equally--opened a doorway to the soul. Whether impelled by love or by lust, the act was so intimate and unselfish that it commanded a response. For Mari, the response she elicited was always an opportunity to learn.

Abias groaned and his leg began to tremble. Her drool cascaded over his balls. Abias was getting close.

If Mari guessed right, so was her hired girl Fanta, who would be arriving soon with fresh wellwater and breakfast.

Her cheeks hollowed as she sucked. Abias thrust his hips off the sleeping mat. His seed spurted across the back of her throat and she swallowed it down expertly, massaging his sack as he continued to convulse. When he sighed and stopped shaking, she released him.

He sprawled on the mat with an audible gasp. "On cold desert nights, when I have nothing but a dung-fueled campfire to warm my heart, I will remember this."

Mari wiped the dregs from her lips and licked a finger, detecting the sweetness of palm wine in his seed. She grabbed a folded boubou of plain cotton and slipped it over her head. It slid down, a tight shimmy over her wide hips.

"How long have you known me, Mari?"

Mari went to open the room's shutters. Baobab wouldn't like the kush-leaf smoke. "Seventeen years, I think. There was still an emperor inside the city, then. Keita," she paused. They were practically a married couple. "Or was Suliaman the emperor then?"

"It's been long enough," Abias decided. "Next time I visit Jao, I wish to try one of those." She looked. He nodded to the shelf, where her collection of carven phalluses stood proudly.

"I prefer the clay one," she said as she unfettered the shutters. "It's the thickest. But we will have fun warming me up for it."

She heard the creak of the front door, and the thumps of water-filled urns on the floor of the adjacent room.

"Don't get up. I'll be back with sesame porridge," Fanta called, well aware of the nature of Mari's trade. The door creaked again.

"I don't want to use the phallus on you, Mari" Abias said in a low voice. "I want it in me. That one."

He pointed towards the wooden phallus, polished and slender, ribbed with carven vines, that stood next to the clay one.

The talisman that summoned Olufyx.

At first, Mari had been terrified to leave such a powerful artifact in the open, in her modest hut. But then she realized it was safest in plain sight. It looked like just another well-worn toy to fuck people with. If anyone recognized it for it was--a tool crafted for capturing and releasing one specific demon--theft would be the least of her worries.

"What?" he asked.

She realized she had been lost in her own thoughts, paused in the act of pushing open the shutters. She finished opening them and knelt down next to him.

"I've always wanted to know what it felt like to be fucked," he smiled. "You seem to enjoy it." He groped through his clothes, retrieving a small pouch that jingled. "You're the only one I trust with that secret. The only one I would trust to make it happen."

Tentatively, he handed her the pouch.

"By the ancestors, you honor me. Of course," she said, taking it without comment. "That cock has... many memories attached to it, and a long history. But if that's the one you choose, I would be happy to fuck you with it." She smiled. He kissed her on the forehead and gathered his clothing.

Like her, Abias wasn't young anymore. A paunch clung to his middle. Unlike the taut-bodied sellswords and common servants who made up the bulk of a Sandsea caravan, Abias the Broker rode a camel across the desert wastes.

While her client dressed, Mari took up the calabash gourd they had smoked with. She dumped the ash out the window and swept through the curtained doorway into the main room. The round chamber, dark and stale smelling, greeted her, so she opened the front and rear doors, allowing a breeze to flow. She filled a bowl with Fanta's water jugs to take to Abias for his ablutions.

Later, after he left, she counted the copper cowries he'd paid. Mari was sweeping dust into the yard when Fanta returned with a tray balanced on her head.

"Thank you for giving me a few extra minutes," Mari said. "It was a late night."

The tall girl shrugged. She set the tray down on a squat table, revealing a steaming bowl of porridge and some pink slices of melon. Almost on cue, Baobab flew in the window, leaving stormy gray feathers where Mari had just swept.

"Hallow!" the parrot squawked, finding a perch in the rafters of the hut.

"Ancestors bless, Bab," Mari said.

"Bless Bab!" replied the bird.

Mari opened the pouch the merchant left her and counted out twenty stamped coins. It was only then that she realized she didn't have enough. Not to pay everyone.

Fanta didn't need coin just for herself. The girl had younger brothers and sisters, and a sick father. At eighteen, she was well into her marriageable years. If she ever wedded, she would leave home, and her family would lose that income.

Mari chewed on her lip as she watched Fanta reach up to feed Baobab a piece of melon. Decided, Mari handed the coins to the girl. It wouldn't leave enough to pay the kala's District guards and the Bama Boys.

But she'd just have to figure something else out.

Once Fanta left, Mari ate and bathed while she chatted with Baobab. She listened to the lively song of pounding millet grain, of bleating goats, and morning folk in the street outside.

Mari found Baobab in the River Market two years ago. He'd been captured and caged in the southern forests to be taken across the Sandsea in a caravan. Forlorn, the last of his flock to be sold, the trader was doubtful the bird would survive the journey. So she'd bought him and nurtured him at home.

One day he flew off on his own. But there weren't any wild parrots in the city of Jao. So he returned to her almost every morning.

"Did you make new friends yesterday, Bab?" Mari asked, as she always did, stepping out of her tub.

The parrot bobbed his head slowly. "Pretty bird Bab! Make new friends!"

"Did you say 'hallow' to the weaver birds?" Mari asked, as she let the morning breeze dry her. She began applying shea butter from a small jar to her skin.

"Weaver! Hallow!"

Coin had been a nagging problem ever since the Bama Boys moved into the city's Pleasure District. The gang was a presence on the streets, and the Boys offered more actual protection to the entertainers, whores, and brothels than the handful of mercenaries the kala--the imperial magistrate--employed.

But there was only so much coin to go around. Bone Cat would come by her house before sundown, and she didn't have enough to pay him for the gang.

She kneaded the pale, grassy smelling shea butter into her flesh, until her legs took on a healthy sheen. Mari had found Olufyx much the same way she'd found Baobab. Almost twenty years ago, she had ventured into the swamps along the river delta in search of an herb-witch, and encountered a demon instead--a

yumbo

, Olufyx would specify.

In that first encounter, Mari and Olufyx had only spoken. She had always been taught that demons were vile and dangerous. But the yumbo showed her a magical phallus that had been crafted and enchanted centuries ago by sorceresses from a distant kingdom.

Well, that story was too intriguing to pass up. So Mari made more journeys into the swamp, until she'd heard the whole story.

And of course, she fucked Olufyx each time.

After they'd known each other for a while and began to build trust, Olufyx made a request of her. Once captured within the phallus, the yumbo would be able to pass through the ancestral wards that ringed Jao and protected the city from demons. All Olufyx needed was a human to carry the phallus into the city. So Mari did, eventually releasing the yumbo into the center of the city's Pleasure District where she lived.

Mari, it seems, had a soft spot for lonely strangers from faraway lands.

Baobab swooped down from his perch to devour the last of the melon. The answer to her coin problem had been right in front of her.

She needed to visit the Crystal Cavern.

She put on a flowing, cobalt dress of cotton damask with a saffron flower pattern embroidered on the front. It was a little tighter on her hips and belly than it had been eighteen years ago, but she knew Olufyx liked it. She combed her hair out and slipped on her copper bangles and sandals.

"Mari make new friends!" Baobab advised in a squawk, as she closed the front door behind her.

*

The Pleasure District had been one of the richest sectors in the greatest city in the Mbaran Empire. That, at least, was what the grandmothers said. Back then, fluffy seeds of silk cotton trees lined the streets like carpet. The towers of a hundred temples shaded citizens in the hot seasons.

Now the streets were narrow and muddy, overgrown with sycamore figs and bushes. They careened between circular huts, much like Mari's, made of mud brick and cone-shaped thatch. Dogs and monkeys scavenged along the rutted pathways. Many of the towers had collapsed, or were overgrown with vines.

A crumbling wall of about five cubits in height separated the District from districts where craftsmen and their families lived, and from the River Market District, down down the hill, where colorful stalls and tents crowded the wide banks of the Nongi.

The Pleasure District had once been the home of great artists--famous jali from the Kolor Coast, and bearded scholars from Keremesu, pale-skinned dancers from across the sea in Alusia, and troupes of masked actors from the southern forests of Dagbo. All of them came to ply their trade for caravanners and wealthy merchants from distant lands.

Now the District was the home of whores, and poor families like Fanta's. Independents like Mari lived in a maze of little streets on the outer rim of the District. Near the center were open-air cookhouses, and squares, and adobe-plastered brothels, like the Crystal Cavern.

The streets here were wider, but fairly empty. Loincloth-clad porters carried sacks of grain and baskets of fish up from the river. A pair of Bama Boys armed with clubs leaned in the shade of a date palm, wearing the gang's crocodile-skin sashes over one shoulder. Brown headdresses draped their ears. They were intended to look like the nemes that the ancient Ummran kings wore. Mari thought the headresses looked more like monkeys sleeping on the Boys' heads. The two young gangsters nodded, picking their teeth with twigs as they watched her pass.

The Crystal Cavern was a blocky, low structure on the edge of a dusty square. Above the wooden double doors hung a painted mask shaped like a narrow oval and fringed with pink crystals that glistened like dew in the morning light. Two camels were tied to a hitchpost near the front corner. Noticing that the front doors were ajar, Mari slipped inside.

The dim interior stank of palm wine. The entry corridor led past a public room laid out with low tables and woven rugs. A young woman wearing a headwrap, halter top, and a very short wrap skirt knelt, scrubbing the tables. She looked up, revealing an impressive amount of cleavage.

"What do you want, eh? Looking for your husband?" She peered more closely at Mari, judging. "Or maybe your son? He is not here. Unless he is one of those two." She jabbed a thumb at a pair who lay passed out, arm in arm, in the corner. Neither was wearing anything below the waist.

The woman mimed spitting in their direction. "I sent for the Bamas to throw these drunkards out, so where are they?"

Mari swallowed down Olufyx's name. It had been years since she'd been here to see the demon. "I'm looking for Karimou."

The woman screwed her face in irritated confusion. "Eh? There's no Karimou here."

Mari glared, putting a hand on her hip. "Go find Auntie Soumba and tell her Mari is here to see Karimou."

The young woman narrowed her eyes, judging whether Mari knew the Cavern's owner. Slowly she got up. "Stay here," she muttered. She went further down the candlelit corridor and turned a corner.

Mari leaned against the wall in the entryway to the common room, alone except for the snores of the half-naked drunks. The walls and low ceiling were speckled with colorful stones.

There were about twenty whores who lived in the back rooms, women and a few men. At night, when clients were here, they would look up from a haze of sweet palm wine and kush-leaf and see a gem-studded grotto. It had been that way when Mari and Soumba were young, before Mari had collected enough regulars like Abias that she could survive on her own. Perhaps now, with caravans fewer and farther between, there was a little less magic. Perhaps it was never more than a room with painted stones.

The young whore appeared again, and beckoned Mari down the corridor. She followed, careful on the rutted earthen floor, while her eyes adjusted to the gloom. They passed through a second empty common room. The brothel was a riot of smells--of the floral perfume the whores wore, the pungent scent of kush-leaf smoke, and the subtle earthy tones of sex.

"I'm Isha," the young woman said, not looking behind. "I didn't know you were a honey too." She picked up a candle to bring into a corridor that would have otherwise been pitch black. "You must have worked with Auntie way back then." Keys jangled as she went down a curving set of stairs to a wooden door.

Before you were born, no doubt.

Here the scent was different. Stronger and sharper, like burning metal. Familiar.

The young whore unlocked the door and opened it for Mari. Mari passed into the dark corridor beyond, but her escort didn't move. She glanced past Mari nervously.

"I hope you have been faithful to your ancestors," she said. "Sounds like troubled spirits down there." She swung the door closed, leaving Mari in darkness. Mari heard the slap of sandals as the woman quickly ascended the steps.

Cold sweat trickled down Mari's back. It hadn't been like this the last time she visited. Olufyx had been in Auntie Soumba's chambers, though the demon was tended to mainly by a younger whore, Karimou.

Mari turned, hoping her eyes would adjust to the gloom. There was a light, though it looked distant. And the harp-like sound of someone plucking kora strings. Mari sighed with relief, and headed towards the light. The tunnel was so long, she was certain after she'd walked a distance that she was no longer under the Cavern.

The corridor ended at a well-lit nook laid thickly with raffia and crowded with a jumble of woven baskets and wooden casks. In the center of it, Olufyx sat on a massive pile of cushions, playing idle music. A nude, hairless man lay across the cushions, face-down in Olufyx's lap, just under the long neck of the kora. He bobbed his head slowly to each soft twang.

Olufyx smiled at Mari, flashing brilliant white teeth against dark skin, and winked.

"The whores have been good to you," Mari said, looking around the room. In the back, a table was laid out with the remains of a roasted bird, and peels from green oranges. Olufyx loved human dishes. In fact, Mari once believed it was food, rather than sex, that had lured the demon into Jao.

Olufyx stopped playing, and gently caressed the man's smooth scalp. "They are honeys, Mari. That's what they call themselves these days. Not 'whores'. No one cares for a whore unless they need one. Everyone loves the taste of honey." Olufyx sighed, narrow hips thrusting slightly.

Mari shifted uncomfortably at the scene before her. Locks of Olufyx's silver hair draped like rays of moonlight over their bodies--the yumbo charcoal black, the human brown. Acacia was almost as short as the demon, slender but toned. The delta of his back muscles played as he moved, legs and one arm splayed loosely over the cushions. He hadn't even bothered to look up at her from his ministrations. The two of them seemed so relaxed, so intent upon their lovemaking, Mari felt almost embarrassed. Jealous, for sure. And quite warm.

Olufyx spoke in a lower voice that still resonated in the little room. "Yes, Acacia, that feels wonderful. You're so good at this now."

She cleared her throat. "Ancestors' grace, but... could we speak privately, Olufyx?"

Olufyx moued with disgust at the invocation to the ancestors. "This is private. I trust Acacia completely."

Mari paused. In the shadows, it was possible to mistake Olufyx for a human. A small human with near-black skin and dyed hair, small teardrop shaped breasts with nipples that were at present as hard as pebbles. Pupils the color of night and sclera a shade of amber rather than white. In a dimly lit brothel like the Cavern, Olufyx could pose as an exotic, androgynous whore.

Clearly, Acacia knew Olufyx's infernal nature. But did he know about the talisman? Surely no one but Mari knew that.

"Even about the talisman? And your name?"

"I trust him completely," Olufyx insisted. Acacia continued to bob his head. The tight muscles of his ass hunched. Mari blinked. She realized her mouth was hanging slightly open.

"Yes... well... I don't know if you are aware, but we whores--we honeys--are all taxed double now. Once by the Bama Boys and once by the District kala in the name of a non-existent emperor. And neither the Boys or the Empire does much for us in return. It's getting harder for us to survive. I could barely pay the girl this morning for food and water."