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kicked in the door and easily fought them off."
The image bloomed vivid: Sisa silhouetted against the desert sun, dust swirling around her boots, her body armored in nothing but sweat and defiance. She'd come demanding some of Salma's finest silks at ridiculously low prices, her voice a challenge wrapped in honey. Salma had refused. Diplomatically, of course. With numbers. Sisa had countered by vaulting onto her desk and stealing the quill from her fingers. "You count your bundles and your coins each day," she'd purred, tracing the feather down Salma's cheek, "but is it enough. Is your heart filled?"
The memory unfolded further. That first night, after all lamps had run dry, Sisa had pressed her into the cool stone of the warehouse floor. Not to seduce, not yet, but to whisper against her lips: "You sell to the fat and lazy. They feel nothing, only empty pride. Come with me. Bring joy to ones who feel it, who need it, and find what your heart seeks."You know, the North Pole has never been a formal or legalistic organization. All contracts were verbal. But Sisa's hands on her hips had been a contract written in pulse points, her teeth at Salma's throat a seal pressed in blood. Now, Salma felt the contract broken ... by her.
"When did our hearts connect?" Nadine repeated, softer now, her breath warm against Salma's temple. Pete's thumb traced idle circles over her wrist, pulling the answer up like water from a deep well. The day after, at dawn. The desert still holding its nightly chill, they loaded several bundles of silks and wools onto Sisa's odd-looking small camel. Then Sisa dragged Salma onto a beautiful stallion. They raced north. Later, pinned beneath the warrior in a tent smelling of musk and saffron, Salma had bitten Sisa's shoulder to muffle her own cries, only for Sisa to laugh, open-mouthed, and bite back harder. "Say it," she'd demanded between kisses that tasted of shared pomegranate. "Say you want more than ink-stained fingers and fat men's gold."
Pete pressed a fresh glass into Salma's shaking hand, the bourbon's amber catching the lamplight. He said nothing. His silence was a blade's edge: sharp enough to cut pretense, steady enough to let her bleed truth.
Nadine's fingers pressed deeper into Salma's shoulders. "Anything change lately?" The question wasn't casual. Decades of healing had honed Nadine's knack for unearthing rot before the wound festered. Salma exhaled, watching the bourbon's swirl.
"A century ago," she admitted, "the Silk Road Consortium expanded. My ledgers doubled. Sisa said she understood." The words soured on her tongue. Understood, or endured? The difference clenched like a fist in her ribs. Back then, Sisa had kissed her temple and whispered, "Build your empire, Golden Ledger. I'll bring your goods here." But Salma hadn't noticed the fading warmth in that promise, the way Sisa's hands lingered less each time she returned from months bent over accounts in smoky tents.
Nadine made a sound like a rusted hinge giving way. "Ah. The year of the frozen caravans." Pete's fingers tensed around his glass, a healer's recoil. That winter had been legendary even among immortals: storms so vicious they'd flayed skin from bone, routes locked solid for nine months. Sisa had lost seventeen drivers. Salma remembered the night she'd returned to the North Pole. Salma was ink-stained and triumphant, boasting of interest accrued while others slept. Sisa had been silent, oiling her spear by the fire, her face carved in shadows. "You didn't, " Pete began.
Salma's nails bit crescents into her palms. "I sent a compensation ledger." The words curdled in the humid air. Compensation, as if coins could stitch torn flesh back onto the men who'd frozen mid-step, their last breaths frosting the trade road. Sisa had buried them herself, singing their souls into the mountain winds while Salma tallied losses in vermilion ink.
Pete's glass hit the table with a thud. "Jesus wept, woman." Not anger, disbelief, raw as an exposed nerve. Nadine's hand fell away from Salma's shoulders like a severed rope. The silence that followed was the kind that made glaciers calve.
Salma opened her mouth, "nothing has changed," poised on her tongue like a well-rehearsed ledger entry, but the lie crumbled before it could take shape. "Worse," she whispered instead, the word a splintered thing. "Just before this past delivery run." She swallowed, tasting bourbon and shame. The memory rose unbidden: Sisa straddling her hips in their Arctic quarters, fingers tangled in Salma's hair, her breath hot against her ear. "Come with me this time. Just once. Let someone else count the damned coins." A plea disguised as a demand, an olive branch wrapped in a warrior's threat. Salma had laughed, actually laughed, and reached for her abacus. "Next year, love." The way Sisa's body had stilled. The way she'd rolled off without another word.
Her gaze snagged on the single purple orchid arching from a carved wooden box on Pete's bar, a ridiculous detail. The bloom was fresh, petals dewy with island humidity, its stem twisted exactly twice, Sisa's signature when gathering herbs. "No one else bothers to check. The plants tell you how they want to be held," she'd chided Salma once, guiding her fingers around a stubborn root. The memory punched through her ribs like a spear. A choked sound escaped her, half sob, half laugh, and suddenly the room blurred. Hot tears streaked down her cheeks before she could blink them away.
Nadine moved before the first tear hit the floor. She enfolded Salma in arms that smelled of rosemary and salt, pressing her face into the soft swell of her breasts. The embrace was neither gentle nor tentative; it was a healer's grip, the kind that pinned broken wings so they could knit straight. Salma shuddered, her fingers clutching at Nadine's wrap as the scent of lanolin and lemon balm flooded her senses. Somewhere beyond the thunder of her own pulse, she heard Pete's bare feet pad across the bamboo floor, the clink of glass as he set down his drink.
"Nadine, what, what day?" The question tasted absurd even as it left her lips, irrelevant as a misplaced decimal in a kingdom-toppling ledger.
Pete's chuckle rumbled through the hut's thatch walls. He leaned against the bar, polishing a glass with methodical strokes. "February fourteenth, darlin'. Saint Valentine's got his knife out for lovers today." The words dripped with lazy Southern irony, but his eyes, dark as the bourbon he poured, held no mirth.
Salma's fingers spasmed around the glass. The numbers aligned with cruel precision: Sisa asking about the date three mornings prior, her casual tone belied by the way her thumb had worried at a fray in her old sandal strap. The way she'd lingered by the door after sex, watching Salma dress, not with her usual hunger, but with something quieter. Something final.
The ledger went airborne before she'd fully decided to throw it. Pete caught it one-handed without looking up from pouring Nadine's tea, the worn leather slapping into his palm as it had always belonged there.
"I bought tickets," Salma whispered, staring at her empty hands. "For the observatory in Marrakesh. Six lunar cycles ago." The admission tasted like bile. Sisa had murmured something about constellations over breakfast, "the Hyades will be jewel-bright this year", and Salma had smiled absently while calculating cargo insurance rates in the margin of her datebook. "Later," she'd promised. Always "later." "She carved that Incan counting cord, that quipu, for me. Hung it above our bed." The colored cords had dangled there for months, their intricate knots recording what Salma now realized were silent counts, toward solstice, toward the day lovers exchange "milkwort" bracelets in Sisa's homeland. Dates that had come and gone beneath her spreadsheets unnoticed.
Pete's sigh gusted like desert wind through dry canyon walls. He flipped open the ledger Salma had thrown, his calloused finger tracing down a column of figures. "You're overdrawn, darlin'." Not the accounts, her "soul." The realization punched through her ribs: Sisa hadn't been keeping score. She'd been leaving a trail even a blind woman could follow.
Salma stood abruptly, her silk robe pooling at her feet like shed armor. The bourbon glass clinked onto teakwood, its amber remnants catching lamplight, one last liquid flicker before decisive motion. She gripped Nadine's shoulders first, pressing their foreheads together hard enough to feel the older woman's pulse thrum against her skin. Rosemary and sea salt flooded her senses, anchoring her to this moment. "Thank you," she breathed, not for comfort, but for the wound laid bare.
Pete didn't flinch when she turned to him, though his whiskey-dark eyes widened slightly as her fingers dug into the sun-warmed leather of his vest. His heartbeat under her palm was a slow, steady thing, like caravan drums across the dunes. She inhaled the scent of him, sandalwood and hard work, before stepping back. "I know what must be done." Her voice didn't shake. It hadn't shaken when she'd negotiated with Mongol warlords or Venetian loan sharks either.
Salma fled out the door, her bare feet slapping against the bamboo floor with a rhythm that matched the frantic hammering in her chest. The jungle air hit her face like a slap, thick with rotting mangoes and the electric promise of rain. Somewhere beyond the frangipani trees, a nightjar screamed.
"Sisa!" The name tore from her throat raw as a battle cry, scattering a flock of crimson macaws into the bruised twilight. She vaulted over a fallen palm without breaking stride, silk robe flaring behind her like tattered banners. The path split three ways, each winding deeper into shadow, but her body chose before her mind could hesitate. The leftmost trail smelled of crushed ginger and gunpowder. Sisa's trail.
Part 2: Quipus
The yurt loomed suddenly, its rounded silhouette alien among the bamboo grove. Their home. Not the Arctic stronghold with its vaulted ice walls, nor the Baghdadi suites dripping in lapis lazuli, but this, stretched goatskin over bent teak, the same way Sisa's ancestors sheltered between mountain passes. Salma skidded to a halt, chest heaving. The door was lashed shut with a complex webbing of ropes, each knot pulsing with intention. A logistician's lock. A lover's rebuke.
She knocked once, her knuckles barely grazing the taut hide, before collapsing against it, forehead pressed to sun-warmed leather. "I marked the days wrong," she whispered. Not an apology. A confession. The scent of smoked yak wool flooded her nostrils, conjuring winter mornings when Sisa would wrap her in this very hide after lovemaking, murmuring Qechua endearments against her nape. "Not just the milkwort bracelets. The Despacho ceremony. The Night of the Bridges." Each admission flayed her bare as the ledger's empty margins.
The ropes creaked. Not in surrender, in warning, like bowstrings drawn taut. Salma's breath hitched. She could recite pi to the thousandth digit, calculate compound interest in her sleep, yet she'd failed to solve the simplest equation: "love requires presence." Her lips moved soundlessly against the doorframe. "You asked me to come to Cusco. Just once." Sisa had braided the invitation into her hair one night, fingers deft as a weaver's, "when the Southern Cross hangs upside down, that's when the earth whispers secrets." Salma had kissed her fingertips and promised to listen. She never came.
A rustle inside, deliberate, like a trader rearranging wares before closing negotiations. Salma's pulse spiked. This wasn't Baghdad's souk, where debts could be settled with silver and sweet words. The Andes ran on different arithmetic: bartered trust, compounded by time. Her fingers splayed against the hide. "I memorized the quipu." The admission tasted like crushed coca leaves, bitter, vital. "Seven yellow knots for the bridges we didn't cross. Thirteen red for the dawns I missed."
The door didn't move. Sisa's silence was a mountain pass in winter, impenetrable, inevitable. Salma's knees hit packed earth. "I thought..." Her voice frayed. How to explain the labyrinth of her miscalculations? That she'd mistaken Sisa's endurance for infinite patience, her lover's body, always there, always warm, for an account that would never close. The realization gutted her: she'd treated their love like a Fibonacci sequence, assuming it would expand perpetually without tending.
Her forehead pressed against the door's weathered hide. The scent of lanolin and Sisa's sweat seeped through, a visceral reminder of mornings when she'd woken to find her lover already halfway through sun salutations, muscles gleaming with effort. "You asked for so little." The words curdled in her throat. "A single day. A handful of hours when the moon eclipsed Jupiter. And my head, buried in parchment, had dismissed each request as easily as balancing a merchant's petty cash."
The ropes groaned under her weight. Somewhere inside, ceramic clicked against stone, the sound of a mortar grinding maize. Methodical. Unhurried. Each rotation vibrated through Salma's sternum like an abacus bead sliding into place. She pressed her palm flat against the door, fingers spread wide. "I balanced Carthage's debt in three languages before breakfast," she whispered, "but couldn't subtract one afternoon for your mother's death rites." The admission left her hollow. All those zeros in the ledger, and the only sum that mattered now was the empty space between her outstretched fingers and Sisa's spine.
Palm sap seeped between her knuckles where she'd skinned them on the trail. Blood and gold, Baghdad's colors. How many caravans had she dispatched while Sisa mourned alone? The scent of scorched corn wafted through the hide, triggering a memory from their first winter together: Sisa teaching her to roast choclo over coals, laughing when Salma burned her fingertips. "Wealth isn't counted in coins," she'd chided, pressing the steaming cob to Salma's lips, "but in shared breath."
The silence yawned wider than the Pacific Sisa had crossed barefoot in her youth. Salma's thumb found the knotwork, not the crude sailor's hitch she used for cargo manifests, but the precise "chakana" weave Sisa had taught her during feverish nights. Her fingers trembled through the pattern. Three steps left undone. Two bridges burned.
Then, "snick", a blade parted the ropes like a guillotine through silk. The door flew open, revealing Sisa backlit by a single clay lamp, her silhouette carved sharper than the ledger's blackest ink. The knife in her fist still quivered. Salma's breath caught. She'd seen that blade skin llamas, gut fish, trace lazy circles down her inner thigh, never aimed at her.
"You speak of knots," Sisa said, voice low as an avalanche's first rumble. Her free hand snatched Salma's wrist, yanking her inside so fast her knees scraped bamboo. The door-hide slapped shut behind them. "But you never learned to ‘read' them." She flung Salma's hand toward the ceiling, where dozens of severed quipus dangled like execution ropes. Each cord bore the same frayed end.
Salma's stomach dropped. The knots weren't calendar marks; they were "accounts." Every missed promise was meticulously recorded in Sisa's tactile language. She reached for the nearest strand; it disintegrated at her touch, releasing a puff of q'ero tobacco dust, the scent of Sisa's mourning rituals.
The knife clattered between them. Sisa stood breathing hard, her bare feet planted wide like a chasqui runner bracing against mountain winds. Moonlight through the hide walls striped her body with silver, the old scar across her ribs from Cusco's rebellion, the fresh scratches Salma's nails had left three nights prior. Both records of battles fought alone.
"You kept count," Salma whispered. Not accusation, awe. The quipus swayed like hanged men, each knot a verdict. She reached again, this time catching a blue strand between two fingers. It dissolved into indigo powder that stained her skin. The dye Sisa used to mark winter solstice offerings. The ceremony Salma had missed to audit Venetian silk tariffs.
"You taught me well," Sisa said. The words landed like stones in a still pond. Salma flinched because it was true. Hadn't she schooled Sisa in double-entry bookkeeping by candlelight, their thighs sticky with sweat under furs? How many nights had they spent reconciling Incan oral records with Abbasid algebra, foreheads nearly touching over parchment?
Sisa's fingers twitched toward the knife, then stilled. Her breath fogged the charged air between them, short, sharp bursts that hitched at the end. Salma recognized that rhythm. Not anger. "Pain." The kind that had no ledger, no column to absorb the loss.
"I can't undo the bridges," Salma said, her voice scraping raw against her throat. She let the blue powder fall from her fingers like spent coins. "No quipu strong enough to haul back those dawns." The confession tasted of salt and myrrh, the same bitter blend she'd once paid Phoenician smugglers to absolve her father's debts. But this? No currency existed to balance "this" ledger.
Sisa's nostrils flared. She kicked the knife aside, not in surrender, but disdain. "You think I want repayment?" Her bare foot ground the blade into the bamboo mat, the motion viciously precise. "I watched you tally caravans while my mother's spirit starved." The words landed like a lash. Salma's knees buckled, but she caught herself on a post carved with celestial glyphs, Sisa's star maps, etched during the long Arctic nights she'd spent waiting.
"I know." Salma's voice cracked like thin ice. She pressed her stained fingers to her sternum, leaving indigo smudges over the pulse point Sisa used to nip during lovemaking. "No columns for this. No ... compounded interest." The admission cost her, not in pride, but in the visceral understanding that some debts couldn't be settled, only carried.
Sisa's jaw flexed. She grabbed a fistful of dangling quipus, the cords hissing through her fingers like snakes. "You memorized the knots." A statement, not a question. The lamplight caught the raw skin around her knuckles, stripped from retying these severed threads. "Did you ever feel them?" She yanked a crimson strand taut between her hands. "This one? The eclipse over Machu Picchu. You promised, and this one, the accounting of my mother's spirit over the centuries." The cords snapped. Ochre dust rained onto Salma's bare feet.
Salma flinched as the pigment stained her toes the color of dried blood. "I thought promises were words," she whispered. Her pulse throbbed in her throat where Sisa's teeth had left crescent moons last summer. "You taught me they're knots." She reached for the broken cord. "Tied. Tested. Held." Her fingers skimmed the frayed ends, once part of a whole, now irrevocably split.
Sisa's breath hitched. The sound tore through Salma sharper than the knife had. "I don't want your calculations." She kicked a leather bundle, Salma's abandoned ledger, across the yurt. It hit the wall with a thud, sending loose pages fluttering like wounded birds. "No more clever spreadsheets or... or Marrakesh tickets gathering dust." Her voice cracked on the last word. The raw break in it was worse than any blade.
Salma reached for her, then froze when Sisa recoiled. Her fingers hovered between them, trembling. "There's no equation for this," she admitted. The words tasted like ash. "No algorithm to undo the eclipses I missed. The mourning rites I..." Her throat closed around the rest. The indigo stain on her chest smeared as her fist clenched over her heart. "I balanced kingdoms but couldn't subtract one afternoon for your grief."
Sisa's nostrils flared. She spun away, her braid whipping like a lash. The movement sent quipu strands swinging, one snapped against Salma's cheek, leaving a stinging welt and the scent of crushed maize.
Salma didn't wipe the mark. "I know there's no algorithm for this," she rasped. "No compound interest strong enough to grow back the time I stole." Her fingers traced the indigo stain on her sternum, smearing it into the shape of Cusco's Southern Cross, the constellation Sisa had mapped on her skin their first winter. "I can't undo the eclipses. Can't..." Her voice broke. "Can't thaw the mornings I left you frozen."
Sisa's shoulders hitched. Not a sob, a suppressed tremor, the kind that precedes avalanches. The knife still lay between them, its edge catching lamplight in jagged silver teeth. Salma remembered how Sisa had once used that same blade to peel quince flesh paper-thin, feeding her slices between kisses. Now it reflected only the wreckage of severed cords.
"I don't want sorries." Sisa's voice was raw as stripped bark. She tugged a green quipu loose, the color of highland grasses after monsoon. "This was Qoyllur Riti. You swore you'd dance at the glacier." The fibers snapped with a sound like breaking cartilage. Salma's knees hit the mat as crushed herb scent engulfed her, muna mint and ichu grass from the festival Sisa had described, chattering her teeth through a blizzard. While Salma tallied yak wool profits.
Salma pressed her forehead to the stained bamboo. "No algorithm," she repeated, tasting bile. Her fingers found the knife, not to wield, but to offer hilt-first. Sisa's calluses had worn grooves in the deer antler grip. "Take the interest from my flesh." The blade trembled in her upturned palm. "Cut the tallies."
Sisa's breath came sharp as a shaman's whistle. She seized Salma's braid instead, yanking her head back to expose the pulse point she'd once mapped trade routes against. "You think blood balances books?" Her knuckles pressed white against Salma's scalp. The quipus swayed above them like a jury of nooses.
Salma didn't resist the painful angle. "No," she gasped. "But it's all I have left to give." Her vision blurred as Sisa tightened her grip, not on the knife, but on the tender skin beneath her jaw. The indigo stains smeared between their bodies as Sisa hauled her upright, close enough to taste the salty rage on her breath.
Sisa's lips crashed against hers, not forgiveness, but conquest. The kiss tasted of maize dust and copper, her teeth sharp against Salma's lower lip in a mimicry of every bite she'd failed to land these past frozen months. Salma groaned into it, hands fluttering at Sisa's waist before daring to clutch her hips. Their bodies collided with the violence of opposing storm fronts, the quipus swaying wildly above them as Sisa shoved her backward against the celestial post. Glyphs dug into Salma's spine like accusations.
Then, "rip", Sisa's fingers tore through her own tunic's shoulder seams. The fabric parted like parchment under a banker's knife, revealing slopes of muscle honed by mountain passes and the taut swell of breasts Salma had charted more meticulously than any trade route. Moonlight through the hides painted her in tiger stripes of silver and shadow, the old whip scars across her shoulders from Cusco's revolt, the fresh love marks Salma had abandoned halfway to completion.
"You kept accounts," Sisa snarled against her mouth, wrenching the ruined cloth down to her waist. The movement sent quipus swinging, a yellow cord caught between her breasts, its knot pressing into Salma's chest like a creditor's seal. "Now "read" me." Her hips ground forward, the heat of her burning through Salma's thin robe as effectively as the knife had severed the ropes.
Salma gasped as Sisa's teeth found her jugular, not the playful nips of before, but the calculated pressure of a debt collector claiming collateral. Her fingers convulsed on Sisa's bare hips, feeling the flex of muscle as Sisa marched her backward. The celestial post dug into her spine, its carved constellations punishing reminders of every night she'd chosen ledgers over stargazing.
The yellow quipu between Sisa's breasts snapped taut as their bodies pressed together. Salma smelled the muna mint crushed beneath their feet, the same herb Sisa had woven into her hair during their first fight, when she'd learned Salma bartered with lives like coins. Now it stained their knees green as Sisa forced her to the mat, the knife's cold blade pressed against her inner thigh in terrible mimicry of their reunion in Marrakesh's spice market.
"You want to settle accounts?" Sisa's breath scorched her collarbone as the knife's tip traced the old scar from the Carthage ambush, the one Salma had sutured with gold thread while Sisa bled silk-red into the sand. "Here's your fucking interest." The blade flicked sideways, parting Salma's robe with a whisper. Cold air rushed across damp skin, raising gooseflesh that Sisa immediately mapped with her tongue, following the trail of indigo fingerprints Salma had left earlier in Pete's recovery room.
Salma arched as Sisa's teeth closed around her nipple, not the tender suction of reconciliation, but the punitive clamp of a merchant seizing defaulted goods. The pain lanced straight to her clit, sparking a wetness that had nothing to do with forgiveness. Above them, severed quipus swayed in the storm of their breathing, raining dust that stuck to their sweat-slicked skin like temporal stains.
"You tally so well?" Sisa growled against her sternum. Her free hand yanked at the remnants of Salma's robe, exposing the soft swell of her belly, usually hidden beneath layers of silk and calculation. The knife's flat side dragged upward, icy metal contrasting with the furnace of Sisa's mouth as it mapped the abacus of Salma's ribs. "Count this."
Salma barely had time to gasp before Sisa twisted in her grasp, not away, but "onto" her. The sudden press of Sisa's thighs bracketing her head stole her breath more effectively than any chokehold. The scent of her, rich as fermented maize and bright as highland springs, flooded Salma's senses. The knife clattered forgotten as Sisa's fingers fisted in her hair, grinding down with the same ruthless precision she used to reroute caravans through blizzards.
Salma's tongue found her without thought, no calculated strokes, no measured rhythm, just the raw, instinctive worship of a woman who'd spent lifetimes counting coins, finally learning to tally pulsebeats. The taste of her was salt and bitter herbs, the same blend Sisa used to cleanse ledger ink from Salma's fingers during late nights in the counting house. Now it filled her mouth as she lapped at the swollen flesh, her nose pressed to the thatch of coarse curls still damp with sweat from their struggle.
Sisa's thighs clamped around her ears, muffling the world to a heartbeat symphony. Salma heard rather than felt the quipu strands breaking overhead, the snap of fibers as Sisa reached up to grip them, her body bowing taut as a strung bow. The cords rained down around them like severed purse strings, their broken knots brushing Salma's cheeks like the worry beads she'd crushed in her palm when Sisa nearly died in Samarkand.
Salma dug her fingers into the muscle-corded backs of Sisa's thighs, tasting the salt-slick heat with reckless abandon. No civilized Baghdad merchant would recognize the woman moaning into her lover's cunt, her lips smeared with indigo stains and arousal. Sisa's hips pistoned against her mouth with the same relentless rhythm she used to drive porters up mountain passes, commanding, exacting, leaving no room for hesitation.
The woven mat beneath them grew damp with mingled sweat and spit, the fibers sticking to Salma's shoulder blades as Sisa dragged her closer by the hair. Every sharp tug sent fresh sparks behind her eyelids, not pain, but the electric clarity of a debt finally being paid in full. She could feel the tremor in Sisa's thighs, the telltale tension preceding collapse that she'd once ignored for three incoming spice shipments. Now she drank it in like a parched ledger-keeper at an oasis, her tongue tracing the swollen contours with none of her usual precision, just hungry, messy devotion.
Sisa's cry fractured the hut's thick air, raw as a cracked whip across the Atacama. Her back arched violently, pressing the sacred peccary tattoo between her shoulder blades flush against the celestial post. The quipus swayed like a storm-lashed marketplace awning as she ground down, her fingers tightening in Salma's braid to the point of pain. Salma welcomed it, the sting of pulled roots, the copper tang of blood where Sisa's nails split skin. These were marks she could understand, wounds that needed no translation between silk road numerals and quipu knots.
Then, collapse. Sisa's thighs spasmed open as she toppled sideways, her sweat-slick back hitting the woven mat with a wet smack. The sudden absence of heat made Salma gasp, her lips still parted mid-devotion. She turned her head to find Sisa's chest heaving, the yellow quipu cord now snapped and tangled around her ribs like a discarded abacus wire. Moonlight caught the silver trails streaking from her temples, not sweat, but tears cutting through the ochre dust coating her skin.
Salma's tongue felt leaden with the weight of words she couldn't shape. She reached out, fingertips hovering above the fresh scratches her nails had left on Sisa's inner thighs, three parallel lines scoring the territory between vengeance and surrender. Sisa's breath hitched when Salma's pinky grazed the darkest one, but she didn't pull away. The quipus above them had stilled, their severed ends dangling like the loose threads of an unfinished tapestry.
With the silence stretching taut between them, Sisa rolled upright with the fluid grace of a puma rising from a kill. Moonlight traced the sweat-damp valleys of her spine as she crossed to their carved cedar cabinet, the one salvaged from a Venetian merchant ship, its hidden compartments holding treasures Salma had bartered across continents. Sisa's fingers didn't hesitate on the mother-of-pearl inlay as she released the secret latch. The hidden drawer slid open with a whisper of sandalwood oil and anticipation.
Salma's breath caught when Sisa lifted the strap, not their usual gold-chased harness from Marrakesh, but the brutal simplicity of obsidian-dark leather she'd commissioned after the Cairo incident. Unadorned except for the Quechua prayer-knots tooled along the inner belt, its phallus was carved from black jade in the exact dimensions that had once made Salma weep into silk pillows. Sisa turned it slowly, letting moonlight slither down the polished shaft like liquid mercury, her thumb testing the edge where Salma's teeth had left microscopic scars last winter solstice.
"You'll wear this," Sisa said, voice stripped of its earlier fury, leaving only the terrible quiet of an avalanche before it buries a valley. She tossed it onto the mat between them, not gently, but with the controlled precision of a merchant dropping a final counterweight onto the scales. The leather landed with a thud that vibrated through Salma's knees. "Every meeting. Every caravan inspection." Sisa's fingers tapped the hidden drawer's geometric inlay, a perfect Fibonacci spiral. "Until you can look at our ledgers without seeing her ghost between the numbers."
Salma's throat tightened around the realization. This wasn't punishment; it was Sisa's brutal mercy. The black jade glimmered like ice under the moonlight, its smooth curve mocking her usual defenses. She reached for it, her hand trembling not from fear but from the visceral memory of how its girth had split her open last winter, how Sisa had pinned her wrists to the frozen window while merchants whispered in the courtyard below. Her fingers closed around the base, the leather still warm from Sisa's grip.
Sisa knelt before her, knees cracking against the reed mat. Their breaths mingled, one ragged, one measured, as she threaded the straps through Salma's belt loops with the same focus she gave to knotting suspension bridges. The buckle clicked like an abacus bead settling into place.
Salma gasped as Sisa tightened the harness with a sharp tug, the leather biting into her hips. The jade weight swung heavily between her thighs, an unignorable pendulum counting the seconds she'd wasted. Sisa's fingers lingered at the inner strap, adjusting until the prayer-knots pressed flush against Salma's pubic bone, ancient geometry meeting modern shame.
"You'll feel me," Sisa murmured, her breath hot against Salma's ear, "whenever you tally those fucking numbers." She punctuated it with a slap to the jade shaft, sending vibrations ricocheting through Salma's pelvis. The sensation jolted her upright, a live wire of memory connecting to their first night in Constantinople, when Sisa had fucked her against the spice ledger while camels groaned outside.
Salma's knees pressed together instinctively, the leather straps creaking. Sisa caught the movement with a predator's grin, pressing two fingers beneath the harness where Salma was already growing damp. "No," she tutted, withdrawing her touch to wipe her fingers on Salma's parted lips. "This stays dry until you can tell me how many knots are in the blue quipu over your left shoulder."
The scent of crushed muna mint rose between them as Salma twisted to count, twenty-three, one for each lunar cycle she'd spent reviewing ledgers while Sisa slept alone. When she turned back, Sisa stood silhouetted against the moonlit doorway, her body a living tally of every scar and bite Salma had neglected to cherish.
"Now the green one," Sisa commanded, voice low as an avalanche's rumble. Salma's pulse stuttered when she saw which cord Sisa meant, their marriage quipu, its knots dyed with the same indigo that stained her fingers. Sixty-four knots, one for each stolen morning they should have spent tangled in furs instead of trade routes.
The jade pressed relentlessly against her clit as she turned, its unforgiving surface amplifying every shift of fabric. Her thighs trembled where the harness straps chafed against skin still tender from Sisa's teeth. Salma's fingers hovered over the quipu, counted twice, before whispering the number like a prayer. She didn't hear Sisa move, only felt the sudden heat at her back as calloused palms slid beneath her robe to grip the straps.
"You forgot the knots along the spine," Sisa murmured against her nape, fingers tracing the hidden row like a merchant inspecting smuggled silk. Sixty-four indigo beads slid between Sisa's knuckles with the whisper of abacus wires. Salma arched when Sisa's other hand found the harness's central strap and pulled, tightening until the jade notch ground against her in perfect counterpoint to the fingers counting her failures along her ribs.
The first thrust came without warning, Sisa's hips driving the slicked jade home with the same ruthless efficiency she'd once used to breach Carthage's gates. Salma's forehead struck the cedar post, her cry muffled by the quipu strands whipping against her lips. Sisa's grip on the straps became her only tether as each punishing stroke carved space inside her where profit margins had lived, black jade erasing numerals like a flood wiping ledger lines from papyrus.
Sisa's teeth found the merchant's shoulder, biting down where Salma's silk robe had slipped. The pain crystallized into something purer, gold transmuted under pressure, as the harness straps pulled tight with each snap of Sisa's hips. Salma's fingers scrabbled against glyphs of forgotten star paths as the jade's flared base struck her clit with mathematical precision, the prayer-knots branding her pubis with every retreat.
The quipu strands above them began snapping again, not from tension, but from the violent sway of Salma's body being driven against them. She choked on indigo dust when Sisa wrenched her head back by the braid, exposing her throat to the moonlight. "Count," Sisa growled against her ear, hips never slowing. Salma's vision fractured; twenty-three lunar cycles became sixty-four indigo beads, which became the infinite decimal of Sisa's pulse around her fingers.
Salma's hand fumbled between their bodies, her once-precise fingers now trembling against the harness's buckles. The jade slipped free with a wet pop, its surface gleaming darker where Salma's need had polished it. Sisa's teeth sank into her trapezius as Salma reversed their positions with a strength that surprised them both, pinning Sisa against the cedar post where Carthaginian numerals blurred into Quechua constellations. The leather straps hissed against sweat-slicked skin as Salma guided the jade to Sisa's entrance, her other hand twisting in moon-bright hair.
"Show me," Sisa panted, spine arching to press her scarred back against Salma's chest, "how Baghdad fucks." Her laugh broke into a guttural cry as Salma sheathed the jade to the prayer-knots in one brutal thrust, no merchant's hesitation now, only the reckoning of caravan masters at a mountain pass. Sisa's thighs shook around the harness straps, her heels digging into Salma's calves as if bracing against an avalanche's downward rush.
Salma's fingers mapped the Fibonacci spiral tattooed between Sisa's shoulder blades with her tongue, tasting salt and crushed muna leaves as she withdrew almost completely, letting the flared head catch, before slamming home again. The wet slap of skin echoed like a goldsmith's hammer shaping raw ore. Sisa's choked profanity was swallowed by the quipu strands whipping her lips, the snapped threads sticking to her cheekbones like ritual scars.
"Not Baghdad," Salma snarled against Sisa's nape, her grip tightening on the harness straps until the leather groaned. She twisted her wrist mid-thrust, angling the jade to drag against that spot that made Sisa's thighs convulse. "This is how you fuck." The jade glistened under torchlight when she pulled back, streaked with Sisa's arousal, before plunging quickly, deep enough to make the prayer-knots press flush against flesh. Sisa's scream vibrated through the cedar post as her fingers clawed at glyphs older than empires, her spine bowing like a bridge under siege.
Salma's hips moved with the same rhythmic precision that had once calculated interest rates, only now her ledger was Sisa's body, her abacus the choked cries spilling from lips she'd ignored for sixty-four dawns. The harness straps bit into her palms as she adjusted her stance, driving upward to meet Sisa's backward grind, an ancient dance of debt and repayment where every angle mattered. She mapped the topography of Sisa's pleasure by memory: the way her breath hitched when the jade's flared base caught her clit just so, the involuntary jerk of her hips when Salma changed tempo without warning.
Sisa's fingers scraped along the cedar post, nails finding grooves where Carthaginian numerals blurred into Quechua star charts. Her thighs trembled, not from exhaustion but from the brutal mercy of Salma's restraint, the way she'd slow to a torturous crawl whenever Sisa's moans grew too coherent. The black jade glistened with each withdrawal, moonlight catching the way Sisa's body clung to it like silk clinging to a merchant's fingers. Salma watched, transfixed, as a bead of sweat traced the Fibonacci spiral between Sisa's shoulder blades, a golden ratio disrupted by the violent undulation of muscles beneath skin.
The second wave built differently than the first, not an avalanche but a bridge's collapse, each stone giving way in precise, catastrophic sequence. Sisa's breath came in jagged bursts that hitched whenever Salma's free hand found the marriage quipu still tangled around her ribs. Sixty-four knots pressed into flushed flesh like a merchant's seal into wax. Salma's teeth replaced her fingers at Sisa's nape, biting down just as she twisted the jade shaft clockwise, an ancient spice trader's trick to test for adulterated goods. The resulting scream tore through the yurt's hide walls, raw as a freshly split pelt.
"O, one," Sisa gasped, her spine bowing backward against Salma's chest. The motion drove the jade deeper, its flared base grinding against her clit with the same relentless pressure she'd once used to sharpen obsidian blades. Salma counted the tremor in Sisa's thighs. "Two", she cried as her hips stuttered against the harness straps. Moonlight caught the sweat beading along Sisa's collarbones when she arched violently, "three", her throat working around another shattered cry. The fourth pulse came as Salma dragged the prayer-knots against Sisa's entrance in a slow, cruel withdrawal, watching the way her body clenched around nothing like a fist around a missing coin.
"Five," Salma whispered against the shell of Sisa's ear, just as the orgasm ripped through her with the force of a mountain avalanche. Sisa's scream was raw silk tearing, her fingers scrabbling against the cedar post hard enough to draw blood beneath her nails. The black jade slipped free with a wet sound, dangling from the harness straps like a pendulum, counting stolen moments.
Sisa collapsed forward, her forearms braced against the post as her spine arched in violent tremors. The quipu strands stuck to her sweat-slicked back, indigo dye bleeding into ochre dust. Her breathing came in jagged, punched-out gasps, each exhale ruffling the loose knots still tangled around her ribs. Salma stood motionless behind her, the harness straps slack in her hands, watching the way moonlight pooled in the hollow of Sisa's shuddering throat.
A full minute passed before Sisa's breathing settled into something resembling rhythm. She lifted her head slowly, strands of hair plastered to her temples with sweat. When she turned, her eyes were raw, not from tears, but from the sheer physical toll of release. Salma saw her own reflection in those black depths: disheveled, lips swollen from bites, the neckline of her silk robe torn where Sisa's teeth had found purchase.
"Remove it." Sisa's voice was hoarse, but the command rang clear as a merchant's scale tipping. She didn't gesture toward the harness; she didn't need to. The obsidian leather gleamed against Salma's hips like a dark river cutting through pale sand.
Salma's fingers trembled on the prayer-knot buckle. The act felt ceremonial now, undoing what Sisa had fastened with such deliberate precision. The strap fell with a muffled thud against woven rugs, its jade sheen catching torchlight in viscous streaks. Sisa's eyes tracked the motion like a puma watching prey, then flicked upward. "All of it."
The command hit Salma's skin like monsoon rain. Silk whispered against her thighs as she peeled away the Cairo-made robe, its embroidery snagging on fresh scratches. Gooseflesh rippled where sweat cooled between her breasts. Sisa's nostrils flared at the scent, muna oil mingling with salt and cedar, as she stepped closer. Her calloused palm scraped down Salma's sternum, pausing where the Fibonacci tattoo pulsed.
"Down," Sisa growled, fingers tightening around a braid. When Salma resisted, just for the electric sting, Sisa twisted sharply. The world tilted violently. Torchlight streaked across Salma's vision as her shoulder blades struck woven alpaca fibers, breath knocked loose. Sisa's knee pinned her wrist before she could rise, the weight deliciously inescapable. Gold bangles clinked as Sisa leaned forward, her free hand tracing the underside of Salma's breast with mocking delicacy.
"You still breathe like a ledger-keeper," Sisa murmured, then pinched the dusky nipple between knuckles calloused from hauling suspension bridges. Salma arched off the mat with a bitten-off cry, pain and pleasure indistinguishable as Sisa rolled the peak mercilessly. "But your skin sings for me now." The kiss that followed tasted of salt and pomegranate, Sisa's teeth catching Salma's lower lip to hold her still as fingers intensified their cruel rhythm.
Sisa's fingers curled inside her, two probing deep where silk had once barred entry, another circling the tight furl of muscle that made Salma's thighs jerk. The stretch burned glorious and bright, like ink drying on a freshly signed contract. Sisa scissored her fingers with logistical precision, twisting just enough to drag a moan from Salma's throat. The slick squelch between them grew louder with each thrust, mingling with the wet suck of Sisa's mouth on her breast. Salma's hips canted uselessly, Sisa's knee still pinned her wrist, denying leverage, leaving her split open between pleasure and frustration.
Sisa's fingers curled inside her, two probing deep where silk had once barred entry, another circling the tight furl of muscle that made Salma's thighs jerk. The stretch burned glorious and bright, like ink drying on a freshly signed contract. Sisa scissored her fingers with logistical precision, twisting just enough to drag a moan from Salma's throat. The slick squelch between them grew louder with each thrust, mingling with the wet suck of Sisa's mouth on her breast. Salma's hips canted uselessly, Sisa's knee still pinned her wrist, denying leverage, leaving her split open between pleasure and frustration.
"You counted sixty-four mornings," Sisa murmured against the sweat-slick hollow of her throat. Her teeth scraped the tendon there as fingers crooked upward. "Now count how many times I make you come before dawn." The threat pulsed between Salma's legs hotter than the jade had. She tried to speak, to bargain, but Sisa's thumb pressed down on her clit like a merchant stamping wax, and her vision whited out. One. The orgasm crashed through her like a flash flood through a dry riverbed, muscles clamping around Sisa's fingers in rhythmic spasms.
Sisa didn't relent. Her free hand slid beneath Salma's hips, lifting her with terrifying ease onto her lap. The new angle drove those relentless fingers deeper. Two. Salma's cry choked off as Sisa's teeth sank into her shoulder, not enough to break skin, but sufficient to brand. Her thighs trembled violently, toes curling against Sisa's calves as pleasure crested again without pause. Three. Some distant, analytical part of her mind noted they'd surpassed Carthaginian interest rates.
Sisa withdrew with a cruel twist, leaving Salma gasping around emptiness. She dragged slick fingers down Salma's heaving sternum, not wiping, but painting. The Fibonacci spiral emerged in glistening strokes, each loop tightening over breasts still flushed from use. Salma's breath hitched as Sisa's fingertip circled her navel like a merchant sealing a flask of precious oil. The symbol hummed against her skin, some ancient vibration between mathematical truth and sacred claim.
Then the weight shifted, Sisa collapsing beside her with the sudden grace of a bridge letting go its final stone. Warmth pressed along Salma's side as Sisa buried her face between sweat-damp breasts, nose nudging the still-thrumming tattoo. The violence had bled out of her muscles; now she lay like snowfall settling on a mountain pass, all that furious energy dissolved into quiet. Salma felt the exact moment Sisa's eyelashes fluttered against her skin, felt the hot exhale that wasn't quite a sigh, and understood this was the real reckoning.
"Tomorrow," Sisa mumbled against her ribs, the word mangled by exhaustion and affection. Her fingers traced the smeared Fibonacci spiral absently, smudging the lines beyond recognition. "Let us go get your ledger."
"Then, after we lock it in the vault, would you help me gather orchids?" Salma asked shyly.
The offers hung between them, fragile as a spiderweb after rain. Not reconciliation, not yet, but the first knot tied in whatever bridge they'd build across this chasm. Salma turned her head just enough to catch the torchlight dancing in Sisa's dark eyes and saw what she thought was an almost imperceptible smile on her lips.
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