I thought quickly. “ Aeyli-ah, do you want to break the bond? I don’t! I want to know you. I already love you! Be my mate and live◦– please, I beg you! Forgive me if I have done something wrong. I was only trying to do what would help us both. You have been so loving to me. I’ll never leave you!”
Then, grasping at straws I said, “As your mate, I say that you must live. I tell you to!”
The girl looked at me and said, “Mark! You don’t say that out of pity, you mean it! If that’s truly how you feel, there is a way. If you would really have me… if you do choose me freely, there is one way.”
I said earnestly, “Tell me! You know that I can’t know anything unless you lead me to the answer! Tell me and I’ll do it immediately! I choose you for my mate, forever, bound together for life! Aeyli-ah, I will love and cherish you forever. Now tell me what to do!”
She said, “Mark, it’s simple, if you mean what you say, and I know that you do. You need to feed me like I fed you.”
Aeyli-ah smiled and rose on her hands and kissed me passionately. Then she slid down my body… and swallowed my penis! She didn’t waste any time. She used what moisture her mouth could still produce and began sucking on me wildly. It was a surprise attack, but if this is what she needed, I’d give it to her as quickly as I possibly could. It seemed that the Martian girl’s throat had no gag reflex and she pushed herself up and down the length of my penis, making swallowing motions as she licked at the underside and base of the shaft.
I gave in as quickly as I could and my juices poured into the eager girl’s mouth and down her throat. Aeyli-ah swallowed every drop, and then put her fingers around my penis and pulled along the length of it, squeezing any remaining drops of the salty juices to the top. She continued sucking until she had taken everything she could get from me. When she was done, she collapsed on top of me and lost consciousness.
I rolled her onto the moss beside me and checked her breathing and pulse. She seemed to be fine, but sleeping. I pulled her onto my back and hurried on toward our destination. The going was more difficult with her unconscious, but it was manageable.
About 10 minutes later, I felt her stir and I stopped and lay her back down on the ground.
I said, “Aeyli-ah, how are you. I will get you to the water, I promise.”
Opening her eyes she said, “I feel stronger now. The protein and salt you gave me is enough to sustain me for a bit longer. We need to get to the ruins and get water, but now I’ll live at least until morning. Our bodies feed each other, but I’m afraid that we’ll both be too weak before long to do this again. We have get to the water soon, and before dark.”
I picked her up again and started moving as quickly as I could toward our destination. I was determined to use my last bits of life to safeguard this beautiful woman who had already saved my life.
Chapter 7
History Lesson and Sheltering
“Aeyli-ah,” I asked as we ran, “How old are you?”
She answered, “I was born just after the great wars and the fall of time, almost 70 years ago. When I was of age, at 20 years, I applied to be a shrine maiden and I have served for almost 50 years. From that day until today.”
I said, “So, is 20 the age when girls take a mate?”
She said, “They may. But now, finding a mate is difficult. I didn’t care. I hoped that my mate would come through the shrine, and you did!”
I was secretly relieved. The girl was actually older than I was and I wasn’t robbing a cradle. She was well past maturity and I had nothing to feel ashamed of. Well, except possibly for my own beginnings of gray hair and declining physical abilities compared with her ageless beauty. 70 years old?
I asked, “Will you teach me the story? What are the great wars and the fall of time? Is John Carter still alive?”
She started to bring me up to speed on what had happened on Barsoom since the time that Carter had written the manuscript that I had acquired. The year on Barsoom is slightly longer than on Earth, but I translated into Earth years because it gave me a better sense of the time-line.
Aeyli-ah said, “The Warlord, John Carter was very active in the past days, before I was born. No one that I know can say if he’s still alive or not. About 10 years before I was born, 80 years ago, the Green Hordes of the Tharks began to get restless and could no longer live among humans. They had been at war for centuries before the Warlord came, and now they had decades of peace. It seemed like a madness came over them. The Warlord and his navies kept them from attacking the human cities at first, and the hordes turned on each other in ferocious civil wars. Their leadership was killed or collapsed and even the traditional tribal structures seemed to fail. They warred against other nations and then against other tribes and finally against families. Before the end, only gangs and mobs remained, but there were multitudes of them.
At the time, the Green Men fought so much that all trust and semblance of order disappeared and they swept over every city they came near. They were no longer hunters; they became scavengers and savages. They say that as they advanced, the armies of John Carter fought to save civilization, but the casualties were enormous and each wave of invaders was destroyed only at the cost of another great city and another great army. Maybe a sickness drove them. The only thing that stopped them from their savagery was their own death.
The face of the planet changed. Where vegetation had once been scarce, it fed on the blood of the multitudes slain in battle and became more verdant than ever. It changed the climate and the weather in many places. There are areas where rainfall is as high as three or four inches per year, and at times, standing water can be found for months at a time far from the great river Iss.
But, settlements are rare and the population is lower than may be sustainable. The planet may die. At least the human population may.
As the Red cities fell to the Green insanity, other races were persuaded by evil men to rebel against the Warlord and the peace that he had forged over the entire planet. Every nation fought its neighbor… or it isolated itself in an attempt to protect itself.
The fall of time took just less than 10 years. Centuries erased in a moment. Each nation lost communication with its neighbor; if it hadn’t already conquered and killed them. Conquered nations were subjugated, and then rose against their oppressors and conquered them in turn, and with each iteration, the population grew smaller. The great white apes were nearly wiped out as well. There are signs, troubling signs, that the ape populations are increasing again, while the birthrate among the humans seems to have declined to almost nothing.
Eventually, the only survivors were those who had enough courage not to fight. Not cowards, but reasonable men and women who banded together, with no regard for racial differences. People who worked hard to survive the wars, not to win them. My own skin is a mixture of a father of one race and a mother of another, though both died while I was very young and I have little memory of either of them.
The settlement that you were heading toward is in ruins now. At the time that John Carter created the shrine, it was thriving and you would have found travelers to help you long before you had traveled this far. But today, you wouldn’t make it.
This is why the shrine maidens exist. After I was born, but while I was still a child, a woman came from Helium. She claimed to be from John Carter’s house and had escaped the wars. She set up a watch for anyone who would come from John Carter’s home world, to help them if any made it through the portal. She said that she had been charged to do so by the Warlord, but that the rest of her companions had all been slaughtered years before she reached my village. This woman, Nathalie, recruited shrine maidens to watch and to keep the shrine safe.