Blind Man's Bluff

Blind Man’s Bluff
Chapter One: Two Sisters
3 June 2009

It was going to rain. The sky, opalescent when the morning began, had turned dark gray. The clouds were pregnant, and ready to drop anytime. He could smell it, feel it; there was water in the air.

“Kaoru!”

In an instant he sat upright, and craned his head toward the open door. “Yes, Mother?” he called.

“Lord Koremitsu requires a special service of you. The blind slave’s having a time again.”

Poor Yomi, and the rain was going to come with thunder, too. “Right away.” Climbing to his feet, he forced himself back into the kitchen. It was like swimming, but hot too.

His mother, Ogetsu, reached up and seized a lock of his hair, and yanked down. “Yes?!” he yelped, stooping down. Everyone found it amusing that the petite mother gave birth to the tall son, for she was eye-level with the bottom of his ribcage. Clearly, none of them had short mothers of their own, but he for one found it a rather painful experience overall.

“Here.” Ogetsu steered him toward, practically shoved his face into a pot. “I got you started.”

“Right.” He rubbed his head where she let go of his hair. This was the same type of porridge they made for his father, Lord Koremitsu’s Head Cook. He was ill, and Kaoru had taken over most of his duties for the time being. On top of that, Lord Koremitsu seemed to see Kaoru’s youthfulness and mistake it for idleness, and so when the lord’s indentured darling, the blind slave Yomi, was having one of his times, Kaoru was designated the second, unofficial position as nurse.

Kaoru’s family lived and worked in the rear of Lord Koremitsu’s palace. For his secondary obligations, the young cook had to venture behind the kitchens, past a thin copse of birch trees, to the slaves’ quarters. Said quarters, comprising a residential building with two parallel wings, were largely empty when Kaoru entered, moving almost mechanically to the outward-facing room of the south wing.

The humidity was worse in this room: the building had but the one exterior door at the entry, and Yomi hadn’t utilized the window in his room. Blocking out the noise, he knew, so he tried to step lightly. “Day two,” he murmured t the Goat, who sat slumped against the opposite wall, looking rather ill. “How’ re you holding up?”

Yomi had passed the more tolerable parts of yesterday unconscious. Today found him reluctantly returned to the coherent realm. Brow contorted in a series of intricate knots, he quietly (as he could) weathered the constant feverish ache that spread from his head down; bit his lip and bent forward on himself when the bouts of nausea came around.

Such a bout came, grew irritated, spiked, and sent him doubled over with his face between his ankles when the stench of whatever Kaoru brought hit him. “Unless you kindly laced that was something lethal, please, take that away. I’m behind.”

Today he was a cobbler. The slaves typically wore shoes made out of discarded scrap leather; a blind demon didn’t have to do a pretty job sewing up torn footwear, so long as it was adequate. And it usually was when Yomi did it, having passed his phase of misshapen shoes and bleeding fingers learning how to sew in the dark. However, today he’d accomplished repairing a paltry two and a half pairs of shoes, and wasn’t about to guarantee the quality of said repairs. Kaoru sighed, and squatted in front of his charge. The blind demon made a face, and put down the shoe some slave’s bit toe had worn through. “Sorry if my job’s inhibiting yours, but humor mine a little. Please?”

The Goat’s forehead creased, and Kaoru thought he would either retort or relent.

Then he heard what the blind demon already must have: strong, solid footsteps. The door slid open behind him, and a moment later Kaoru looked up into the face of the Lord of the Compound, Koremitsu the Serow. In a word: hairy. Fine black stuff fell to his shoulder blades, melted into a heart that brushed the juncture of his clavicles. Dark eyes gazed out inquisitively under bushy eyebrows. When they rested on the cook and the slave, moustaches and beard parted, and pink lips enunciated:

“I hope that Yomi has been able to ingest something this morning.”

“Working on it, Lord Koremitsu,” Yomi answered, taking the bowl from Kaoru. Blistered fingers picked out a piece of fish, and Yomi chewed it slowly. Kaoru could tell from the look on his face that he wasn’t into it. It was because of being sick: Yomi was nobody’s submissive catamite, and were he not feeling so low right now, there would have been some protest of Koremitsu’s dictation. He glanced up at the lord’s face again, then lowered his focus to Koremitsu’s hooves. Even his hooves were hairy, fringed with black fur very much like the hair on the Seerow’s head.

Similar to the hair on Kaoru’s own head. He had toes, though.

When Yomi had finished the piece, Koremitsu made a low murmur of approval, and the silvery embroidery of his navy robe shimmered as he bent forward to push a stray piece of hair out of the slave’s “eyes.” Kaoru was perplexed how he wasn’t sweating like Yomi and himself, or worse; both the robe’s material and the embroidery were heavy. “What an ironic interphase you’re subjected to,” he remarked. “These adaptations accommodating your handicap take so much out of you, and you grow so weak after. But I have some news in your favor, Yomi. Harunobu the painter has a pair of sisters entering his service. I’m also employing one of the sisters to oversee your care when these cycles occur. Their arrival is slated for two days from now. Looking to Kaoru, he said, “This will grant you more disposable time outside of the kitchen. I know how your father ails.”

His father. “Many thanks to your grace for your consideration, Lord Koremitsu,” Kaoru murmured.

The lord nodded, and ran a hand through Yomi’s hair, feeling the base of the rear horn. “I just wanted to make certain you were improving. Feel better.” To Kaoru he said, “My regards to your father and to your mother,” and then he rose, and made his way out of the slave quarters.

When he had left, Kaoru let out an ironic breath. “Koremitsu is a demon of impeccable health.” Most likely the product of factors such as an ever warm hearth and plenty of decent food. “I’m not sure he has the exposure to make distinctions between those who aren’t. My father has passed the majority of this year in a sickbed, from which he might not leave. You’re simply enduring a metamorphosis.” Yomi murmured in agreement, mildly relieved to hear from someone else time to time that this hellish state was only temporary, a transition, his physiological purgatory.

A clap of thunder sounded above them, and Yomi groaned sickly. “It’ll pass,” Kaoru told him, watching him cringe and cradle his head. “Just have heart and try to concentrate on those shoes. You spent yesterday bedridden, and Koremitsu only gives you the one day in bed; just like he does with the women for their cycles.”

It came out differently than he’d intended, and he promptly touched his head to the floor, avoiding a shoe that Yomi had seized from the mend pile and chucked at him. “Ah, see!” he cried, regretting the volume when Yomi’s features twisted and another thin leather tatter of a shoe was thrown. “Yesterday you were half-dead, and you’re already choleric again. You’re on the mend!”

***

Kaoru’s exclamation was prophetic, and three days later, when Koremitsu received Harunobu the painter in the shikidai, Yomi, while by no means comfortable, was semi-functional. His nurse took advantage, and on that day part of the nursing included utilizing the charge to receive a delivery. Cook and slave were on the route to the delivery cart when Kaoru stopped, as did Yomi, who heard his footfalls cease. “What is it?” Yomi asked. He heard nothing, smelt nothing, other than flowers.

“Uh.” Kaoru coughed. “Girl.”

“What?” Then Yomi heard the laughter.

Girl. Or young demoness. Whatever the distinction, an individual of female appearance was sitting in front of the delivery cart, perched on one of the taller containers. Kaoru cocked one eyebrow as she tilted her heard, regarding him and Yomi with a sly smile. “Like what you see, boys?” she crooned.

He smirked. “Somehow, I doubt you’re an official visitor. I doubt you’re affiliated with the fellows driving the cart, either. Oh.” As an afterthought, he gestured to Yomi. “And he’s blind, anyway.”

She smirked, in a manner more lascivious than his. “I just thought he found the sight of me too dazzling.”

For the first time since this cycle’s commencement, Yomi snorted. “And what do you call your ‘dazzling’ self?”

More laughter, the low, knowing reverberation that Yomi had learned not to trust coming from females, and some males. “I am Hasu the Fabulous,” she answered. “And one day, I shall live in a palace like this.”

Hasu the Flamboyant, Kaoru thought. Their new acquaintance was a rather golden-looking demoness, with bright yellow-green eyes, and apparel dominated by bright pink shades, that covered but didn’t conceal a form that the cook was sure many demons found fabulous. He knew this type… “You’re not by any chance affiliated with Harunobu, are you?”

Another sly smile. Koremitsu couldn’t be thinking of replacing him with this, Kaoru thought. The Serow loved—no; no need to brush a romantic glaze over what it was—valued Yomi too much to leave him at his most vulnerable, at the mercy of something that Kaoru was sure was more likely to … be a “naughty” nurse.

From a certain, slight crease just above Yomi’s eyebrows, Kaoru could tell similar thoughts were running through his head as well. “And … where is your master right now?” the blind demon asked.

“Meeting with yours, I do believe.”

That slight crease grew slightly more pronounced, and the flesh under Yomi’s “eyes” drew up just a little. Kaoru donned what he knew was an impotent sympathetic look. “And you are one of the two girls he recently acquired?”

“Three,” Hasu trilled. “Harunobu picked up the three of us. Keshi, Bara, and me. We’re like three sisters, even if Bara’s honorary.”

Kaoru laughed his little ironic laugh. “No, that sounds too flowery to be the three sisters.” The culinary three, at least: beibaku, ingen, and nanka.

Hasu didn’t get his joke. “Yes, flowers,” she huffed. “And the hasu is the most admirable, rising up from the mud to glory.”

The Flamboyant One came from commoner origins, like most of Haunobu’s girls, he surmised. “Well, with that attitude, you’re halfway to the aristocracy already, Miss Hasu. Today, though, those of us who serve said aristocracy requite you to vacate the top of that vessel.”

Hasu the Fabulous quickly complied, and Kaoru and Yomi resumed transport. “I’ll bet your attention’s diverted from your head for now,” the cook said slyly.

“I’ll bet your ego’s bruised if she’s the one Koremitsu referred to,” Yomi retorted. “She struck me as phenomenally sanguine.”

“Sanguine? Was she on her cycle too?” Kaoru bent forward as a thinly leather-shod foot collided with his rump. “Here’s to us meeting the other sister, or sisters, or whatever, soon. Really I don’t get why he thinks you need someone more committed than me. It’s like he’s interviewing nurses for one of his children.”

“Are you jealous?” Yomi asked, feeling breeze first, thus able to dodge the fist.

“He’s too oblivious,” Kaoru announced hotly. “Or willingly ignorant. Either way.”

They reached the storehouse by the kitchens, deposited their load, and then rested against the wall for a moment. Feeling hot, Kaoru slid out of his clothes until he was naked from the waist up. Yomi had already dressed down, if he’d been dressed up at all today. Hasu had noticed that quickly enough, Kaoru reflected. Another reason to root for Bara or Keshi or whatever flower.

Sighing, he said to the Goat, “You’ll eat without whining today, right?”

In reply, a vague grunt. “May I whine over the monotony?”

“As long as you eat it. You ‘grow so weak’ after these bouts specifically because you don’t.”

“Try having something protrude from your skull and see how much of anything you’re up for,” the blind slave replied indignantly.

“Alright, fine, I don’t know the feeling.” A thought struck him, which he knew would warrant him being struck more painfully with something else if he articulated it. But Yomi was his charge, and he had his orders. Ergo: “However, my mother has, obviously, given birth, and shares, if not feels, that sentiment.”

Ogetsu was even more persuasive, or forceful, in person; and Yomi and, appeasing the Goat’s sense of spite, Kaoru, both wound up making their meal of the leftover porridge of a pot Ogetsu had cooked for Kaoru’s father. “How is he?” the young cook asked, empathy for his ailing parent strengthening momentarily, due to the knowledge that the meal he ate right now, was the one, virtually sole thing that his father still ate.

“I don’t think this damp weather does him any good,” his mother answered. “Today he’s more white than green.” Kaoru made a face.

When Ogetsu had left them alone, Yomi said, “Your father’s green?”

Having come into Koremitsu’s service already a blind demon, of course Yomi had never actually seen his father. “Not today, apparently,” Kaoru sighed. “But yeah; he’s reptilian, so it’s normal.” He shifted his focus of thought from the blanched demon in the back room to the blind one sitting opposite him, and took some satisfaction in seeing that Yomi had consumed most of his bowl. “That’s right: You like pork better than fish.”

“Mm-hm,” the Goat muttered, swallowing another bite. “It has a texture similar to human.”

That was also right: Yomi came from deeper in the Maikai than the other denizens of Koremitsu’s estate. “I wouldn’t know,” Kaoru replied. Koremitsu’s kitchen didn’t serve that type of meat, and having been born in Koremitsu’s house, he would never have tasted it.

If a cook and a slave were allowed anything so refined as politics, both had just ventured into a breach in such. Seeking diversion, Kaoru smirked, and said, “If you’re interested, I have something else you could ingest.”

Yomi returned the smirk. “Back to the storehouse, then?” Of course they couldn’t do it in the same quarters as a sick demon.

***

Koremitsu’s proclivities had not enabled him to discover the skill responsible for the reputation that Yomi had garnered among certain servants and slaves of the compound. The Serow preferred to instigate everything, and had never had Yomi perform oral on him. The blind demon would tell his lord that he was apparently missing out, but Koremitsu didn’t inquire into whom else he might be sleeping with.

Perhaps Kaoru’s father was reptilian, but scaliness had not passed from the one generation to the next. The thighs embracing Yomi’s head were smooth-skinned, and if the hands griping the horns on said head were not smooth, they were only so due to various burns and cuts as a consequence of his living.

The hands gripping the horns on his head, tightly. “Mmf!” he protested, and when it appeared that Kaoru had not heard the muffled protest, he resorted to alternative methods to communicate his point.

“Ah!” the young cook yelped when Yomi applied teeth. Unfortunately as a reaction he gripped the Goat’s horns tighter; and in retaliation the offensive teeth sank deeper; and the process continued…

“Oh—Ow—Uh—Ow, Yomi—OH…” Kaoru tilted his head back and bit his lip, his senses in a confused place as he came, with Yomi still biting. When the latter released him he glanced down, and his gaze went from half-mast to bug-eyed in an instant. “You—You drew blood!”

Yomi swallowed. “I thought you tasted sharp,” he replied.

“Yeah, and am I textured like a human?!”

“Not so loud,” the Goat muttered, rubbing to base of one horn exaggeratedly. “Now, imagine whatever pain you felt down there, in my skull.”

“Forgive me if I don’t feel too sympathetic right now,” Kaoru growled. The sad thing was, he wasn’t sure if he’d entirely hated it. “You’re hurting?” he asked.

Pain throbbed around left horn number two. Yomi prodded it with one timid finger, and grimaced as the throbbing suddenly dispersed into a multitude of pronounced pinpricks. “You’re going to massage my head,” he informed Kaoru, finding, pressing a hand against the other demon’s sternum. “After you tend the other one.” With that he pushed Kaoru’s sternum, sending him backward, and groped his way between the now-flailing legs. Non-scaly knee, creamy thigh, curl of hair—did reptilian demons have body hair? The snake demoness he’d been with before hadn’t—, found it.

Kaoru gasped when Yomi flicked out his tongue. The sharpness here, in smell and taste, was more normal. Languidly he dragged his tongue in a circular motion a few times, then dipped. He felt the muscle in question, and those surrounding it, flex anxiously. No fair to keep Kaoru waiting.

“A-Ah!” Kaoru yelped, twisting to one side while Yomi drove it in. Yomi analyzed the cry, more pleasure than pain, and settled in, and then began to grind. One either side of him a knee dug into his flesh, a hand wandered up his arm. One made its way up to the nape of his neck, and a warning growl rose in his throat. The hand promptly dropped, and rested between his shoulder blades. Fine, they could dig and claw and pull all they wanted, there. Meanwhile, he’d grab Kaoru’s shoulders for dear life, and pray that nothing happened like their chins colliding, a highly painful experience when it occurred before, that need not be repeated.

Under him Kaoru gasped, and arched sharply; Yomi moaned when he felt hipbones grind against him. A faint heat rose against his neck: Kaoru, flushed, an interesting shade of pink, he imagined. Unless all this time Kaoru was green, he couldn’t be sure, and in which case he really wasn’t sure what color Kaoru might be right now…

“K-Kao…ao—!” He hugged himself to the cook tightly, relishing the yowl in his ear, even if it didn’t help with this week’s condition.

“Ru,” he gasped, settling down in his stomach beside the other demon. Kaoru was breathing deeply; Yomi tilted his head, trying to hear the lungs below him inflating, but everything was drowned out by Kaoru’s heartbeat—rapid, loud.

Deafening. He crooked his arm and made a pillow for his head, and then let out a deep breath. “Remember,” he sighed, “you owe me.” Kaoru mumbled something most likely unintelligible, and a moment later he felt fingertips gently push against the upset flesh around his horns. He heaved a deeper sigh, and ay perfectly still, content, right now.

And then…

Knock-knock-knock.

A vague and atrocious sound.

“Kaoru?” Ogetsu called up the ladder. Neither jumped: her voice had a knowing inflection, which was why she hadn’t come up to the loft of the storehouse.

Yomi heaved another, different kind of sigh when Kaoru gingerly pulled free. “Yes?” he called down.

“Finish what you’re doing up there and come down. Lord Koremitsu needs both of you in the kuroshoin.”

Yes, if she didn’t know for certain, she drew a sufficient inference. “Right away,” he told Ogetsu, reaching for his clothes. Either Koremitsu was insightful, or wasn’t and it was purely fortunate that he called them to a private rather than formal audience; even disregarding their immediate activities prior, neither was especially well-kempt. Nonetheless, as the sighted one, Kaoru did his best to make both of them presentable before appearing in the kuroshoin.

“Good afternoon, Lord Koremitsu,” he said in his soft, speaking-in-the-palace voice. “You summoned us?”

“I did,” the Serow replied. He was seated in the center of the room, outfitted today in dominant hues of purple, with the glimmering silver and gold embroidery that he favored. Seated adjacent to him, on his right, was Harunobu the painter, a faintly blue oni with a single small horn in the middle of his forehead, who frequently wore rich gray hues with darker trimming, a scheme that Kaoru suspected might be employed to disguise any spilled ink. Koremitsu gestured to the painter now, and then to Kaoru. “Kaoru is the son of my head cook. As I’ve said, circumstances in the kitchens have compelled me to consider employing someone else to take over his secondary duties, looking after this slave.” The Serow now gestured to Yomi.

Harunobu considered Yomi for a moment. His eyes had burnt orange irises, and while they were not as deep or as reflective as Koremitsu’s, true to his profession his gaze was studious. “When did he lose his sight?” he asked Koremitsu.

“A short while before I happened upon him, a long time ago, among the Steppes of the Makai.”

Yomi heard Harunobu make an “Ah” noise, and remark, “I see the immature horns you referred to. Adaptations to accommodate such a profound handicap take much time, as I see.” Tell me about it, thought the Goat. “I for one cannot fathom the loss of my eyesight, and the growth of one horn was enough of an ordeal, personally. You may have my girl, Lord Koremitsu. I only ask that she return to me in the evenings, unless circumstances are extenuating.”

At mention of the girl Kaoru glanced sideways, appraising the figure seated to the right and slightly behind Harunobu. “Not Hasu,” he said in a low murmur, and beside him Yomi made the slightest tilt of his head to indicate that he had heard.

“Very well.” Koremitsu regarded Kaoru again. “Then Kaoru, in light of both your increased responsibilities to this household and your own familial affairs, I am relieving you of your secondary duties as Yomi’s caretaker.” Turning his gaze, albeit purely ornamentally, on the blind slave, he said, “Yomi, for the remainder of what I know for you is a painful process, I would like you to trust yourself with Harunobu’s girl, Keshi.”

Not Hasu the Fabulous and Flamboyant at all, but her sister. If Koremitsu had to choose, then cook and slave thanked the Serow for a choice well made.

End Chapter One.

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A/N: For the non-über-nerds, an elaboration of some esoteric terms:

shikidai – a formal room for receiving guests.

kuroshoin – a room for private audiences.

beibaku, ingen, and nanka – corn, beans, and squash. The “three sisters” is actually a product of American Indian belief, but as I said before, I’m taking some liberties with the construction of this story.