Bo had thirty-one days left, and he counted them as other boys might have counted coins, turning each one over before he let it go.
He counted them in the bath first, in the grey hour when the house was still soft with sleep and the keepers had not yet come with the combs and the oils. The water in the long trough had gone tepid overnight and he lowered himself into it to the chin and lay there and thought: thirty-one. Then thirty. The number got smaller and he got closer, and closer was the only direction that had ever mattered.
Closer to the Opening.
He knew what he was. He had always known, the way you know the color of your own hands. He was a hole, the finest kind of slave there was to be, kept and made and smooth for the bed, and glad of it to the bone. He had the fair skin they prized, the skin that took the oil and held the lamplight, and under it the long clean muscle that had come up on him this last year like something rising through water. The keepers had noticed. He had felt them notice. A keeper would run a thumb down the new hard line of his flank and make a small sound in the throat, and Bo had learned to read that sound as praise, as yes, good, more of this, and he had gone back to the yard bars and pulled himself up until the line got harder still. He was making himself worth the bed. That was the whole of it. That was the work of being twenty and a hole and a month from your Opening: you made yourself into the gift.
Because that was what an Opening was. You turned twenty-one and the keepers came for you in the grey hour, and they took you up through the house, up past all the rooms you had lived your whole life below, and somewhere up there in the high warm dark was the Master, and the Master took what the years had made ready. Every hole-boy knew it. You went up a boy and you came down a made thing, a used thing, kept. You came down Opened.
That was the shape of it, the ceremony. But the word itself Bo held closer than that, and lower. He had been turning it over in the bath that morning as he did most nights, in the dark of the ward with the lamp out and his hand already moving slow under the good linen, because under all the talk of the bed and the gift it meant only this to him: the night he would finally be opened, taken, filled, put at last to the use his skin had been kept smooth and aching for since before he had understood he was aching. He said it to himself more than he said his own name, rolling it on his tongue as he rolled the smooth cool thing in his hand in the dark, the Opening, the Opening, and his skin went full just from the shape of it in his mouth.
Bo had watched them come down.
He had watched Perrin come down two winters back, the prettiest of the older boys, and he had walked into the low hall with a stillness on him like the surface of the trough, and would not talk about it, only sat with his knees drawn up and a small private light in his face, and Bo had thought: I will have that. I will have that light. He had wanted it so badly that year that he had done a shameful thing about it, which he did not think of now, in the bath, in the grey.
Thirty-one days. He got out of the water and let a keeper oil him and did not once stop counting.
There was a thing the keepers did with the pups, and Bo had loved it his whole life.
That was the word for them in the house, the young ones coming up toward their Openings. Pups. A keeper would say it with a hand already reaching, come here, pup, let’s have a look at you, and a good pup came. Bo had always been a good pup. He came at the first word with his chin up and his arms loose and stood to be looked at, because being looked at was better than anything, and he had never understood the boys who flinched from it or went stiff under the hands. What was there to flinch from. You were made and you were smooth and you were theirs and they wanted to see. Bo kept himself for it. He was smooth from the throat down as the holes were kept, and he had built the body they liked through a year of the bars, and when a keeper’s hands went over the new hard work of him and found it good, that low considering sound in the throat went into Bo the way sun goes into a dog stretched flat in it. He would have done anything for more of that sound.
He knew the words for his own body, because they were the only words there were, and they were the handlers’ words. Prime stock. He had heard it said over him since he was small, a keeper’s flat hand laid on his chest, thumbing the nipple that came up bigger and prouder on the fair skin every year, running a palm down the pec he had built hard and full and high at the bars. Prime stock, this one. Look at the make on him. And Bo had learned to see himself the only way anyone ever had, from the outside and from above, the way a hand sees a thing it is pricing. He could not look down at his own chest without weighing it. He loved his body the way a handler loved it, for how well it graded and how high it would go, and it never once occurred to him that this was a strange way for a boy to love himself, because no one had ever offered him another.
The smoothness had been burned into him the year he came of use, at eighteen, the year a pup was reckoned ripe enough to be put to the bed. It was not a gentle making. They took the hair off for good with fine blades and a paste that ate down to the root, slow, over days, and it burned the whole time, a deep steady burn that did not stop when the day’s work stopped. Bo had lain still under all of it and let them, glad, proud even, because a pup who flinched from the making was a pup not worth the bed, and Bo had wanted the bed more than he had wanted to keep his own skin quiet. He came out of it bare from the throat down and stayed bare after, nothing ever growing back, and it was the first true mark of what he was. A hole was kept smooth and clean and oiled for use. The field-stock kept their hair. That was half the line between the two kinds of slave, the smooth and the shaggy, the kept and the worked, and it held them apart as surely as the wall did, the house on its side and the field on its own low country beyond, so that a hole might go years and see the field-stock only at a distance, driven past matted and filthy under the sky, and know at one glance from clear across a yard exactly which kind of slave he was looking at, and which kind he was.
They weighed the pups. That was the part Bo had liked best and been proudest of. A keeper would cup a pup’s balls in a warm dry palm and take the weight of them, gentle, thoughtful, the way a man weighs fruit he means to buy, and note what he found. Bo had come up heavy. He knew it as he knew he was fair, from the raised brow and the second weighing to be sure and the quiet word passed to the keeper alongside, the word Bo never quite caught and had never tried to, because he could feel what it meant without it, and what it meant was worth, what it meant was that he was the most made of all the pups and the surest to be called up when his year came. He had lain awake proud of the weight of himself. He had also lain awake ashamed of it, the nights with the cloth. He had never seen that it was the same weight, and the same lying-awake, over the same thing.
And once, one time in the whole of his life, the hand had been the Master’s.
He had been eighteen. They lined the pups up in the long room, the whole cohort shoulder to shoulder, scrubbed and oiled and smooth, and word ran down the line in whispers before the door even opened, the Master, the Master himself, and Bo’s heart had gone so hard he swayed with it. And the Master had come. Bo could not now have said one true word about his face, only that a great stillness came into the room with him, and a clean cold smell, and that he went down the line of pups without hurry and put his own hands on each one in turn. Weighed each pup as the keepers did. Cupped, considered, moved on. But at Bo he stopped, and stayed. He took the weight of him in a palm cooler and drier and surer than any keeper’s, and held him a moment, and then did to him what he had done to none of the others. He rubbed a slow thumb across each of Bo’s nipples until they stood up hard, and turned him a little by the hip to see him better, and laid a flat open smack on his haunch the way you do to a young thing whose flesh you like the look of, and made the sound, low, and murmured a word to the keeper at his shoulder. Promising colt. Then he moved on to the next pup, and went out, and never in the years since had come again.
Bo had lived on that sound ever since.
He took it out in the dark as he took the smooth cool thing out from under his pallet, and turned it over, and warmed himself at it. The Master weighed me. The Master stopped at me and no other, and called me promising with his own mouth. He had kept the word promising and let the other word go, colt, the one that had come with it, because a boy keeps the half that praises him and leaves the rest lying where it falls. He never once weighed the whole of it, the promising and the colt together, the thumb on his nipples and the smack on his haunch, the low word passed to the keeper as the keepers passed their words. He did not weigh it now. He only took the sound out, and was glad.
Cael found him at the bars that afternoon, hanging by both hands from the high rung with the winter sun coming flat across the yard, and stood under him and said, “You’ll wear yourself to rope.”
“I’ll wear myself to worth,” Bo said, and dropped, and landed easy.
Cael was the other one. Cael was a hole too, hole all the way through, gold where Bo was fair, with a mouth that turned up at the corner like he already knew the end of every story. He was three months younger than Bo, which meant three months further from his Opening, which meant that for a little while yet Bo had something Cael did not, and they both knew it, and it sat between them like a coin neither would name.
“They say the Master likes them made,” Cael said. He said it lightly, as he said everything, but his eyes went down Bo’s flank as the keepers’ hands did. “Made and ready. You’re the most made boy in the house, Bo. You’ll be up a night and Opened by morning and I’ll still be down here waiting my turn with the babies.”
“You’ll wait pretty,” Bo said, and Cael laughed, and it was good. It was the best kind of afternoon, the kind where the thing you wanted was close enough to taste and a friend was jealous of you in the sun.
Beyond the yard bars, past the far wall, the herd was being moved.
You could always tell when the herd was moving because of the sound, a low broken shuffle of many feet that did not keep time, and the flat calls of the herd-keepers driving them. Bo and Cael turned to watch the way you turn to watch weather. Through the gap in the wall they came, the herd-stock, dark-skinned and heavy and slow, roped wrist to wrist in a long line, the studs and the she-stock together, driven from the wash-pens back toward the low country where the pens were and where the pens smelled and where Bo had never set foot and never would.
“Look at them,” Cael said, and his lip did the thing. “Bred stupid.”
Bo looked. He always looked, and he always felt the same clean lift when he did, the lift of standing where he stood and not down there. He graded them as they passed, because he could not not grade, because it was the only way he had ever been given to look at a body, and they graded low. The studs went heavy and thick through the shoulder and the chest, muscled the way a thing is muscled for work and not for the bed. They hung heavy and long and low between the legs, swinging dark and blunt as they walked, made for the one thing they were kept for. He graded all that low. And he could not have said why his eye held on it a beat past the grading, why the size of them, the hard-worked mass of shoulder and haunch, put a small pull low in him that he had no name for and no wish to name. You were not supposed to want to be an animal. Bo did not know that he did, a little, as all the house-boys did and none of them ever said. The she-stock went among them big and swaying and used. Animals, he thought again, harder, to cover the pull, what he had been taught to think without ever being taught it. That they had their use, and their use was volume and the pens and the getting of more of them, a body kept only for what came out of it. He was glad, watching, in the exact place under the ribs where a boy keeps his gladness. He was a hole. He would go up. They would never go anywhere but around and around the pens until they were spent.
One of them looked up.
A stud near the back of the line, young, near Bo’s own age by the look of him, dark as wet bark, with a face still firm where the older ones had gone slack. He looked up and across the yard and found Bo at the bars, and for a moment he simply held Bo’s eyes, without heat, without asking, the way you look at a thing on a shelf. Then a herd-keeper’s stick came down across his shoulders and he put his eyes back on the ground and shuffled on.
“Kell,” Cael said, with the small contempt of a boy who knows the names of animals. “That one’s Kell. My keeper says he throws thick. They breed him twice a day now.”
“Twice a day,” Bo said, and made his lip do what Cael’s did, and did not know why his skin had gone warm at the place the stud had looked at him, and did not look at it, and counted his days instead. Thirty days now. The sun went flat and gold across the both of them, the made boy and the gold one, and past the wall the pens took Kell back down into the low country where the smell was.
The shameful thing was this, and Bo did it that night, as he did most nights.
He waited for the long ward to go dark and for the breathing around him to go even, all the hole-boys in their row of low beds with the good linen, and then he waited longer, because a keeper walked the ward twice after the lamp and you had to let the second pass. He counted the second pass by its footsteps. When it had gone he turned onto his side with his face to the wall and drew his knees up and reached under the pallet where the linen was loose and took out the thing he kept there.
It was smooth and it was cool from the floor and it was shaped like what he wanted.
He was ashamed of it. That was the truth he never said in the daylight, not to Cael, not to anyone. He was ashamed not because it was forbidden, because it was not forbidden, no one had ever said a word, the keepers surely knew every hole-boy did some version of this in the dark. He was ashamed because of what it meant. A boy who had been Opened did not need to do this. A boy who had been Opened had the real thing, the true thing, a Master’s hands and a Master’s weight, and did not have to lie in the dark and see to himself like a thing no one had come for. To do this was to say, with your own hand, in the dark, where you thought no one could hear you say it: no one has come for me yet. I am still only waiting. I am still only mine.
And he could not stop.
His skin was too full. That was how he thought of it, too full, a fullness that came up in him worse this last year than ever, that woke him and would not let him be, that had to be let down or he could not lie still. So he let it down. He wet the smooth thing in his mouth first, quietly, and then reached back and worked it into himself slow, as he had taught himself, past the first ache to the place where the ache turned over and became the other thing, and he held it there and pressed and thought about the bed.
He always thought about the bed. He built it the same way every time because the building was the best part. He was up in the high warm dark and there were lamps and there were eyes on him, that was the center of it, the eyes, he was laid out where they could all see, oiled and made and shown, the most made boy in the house, and the Master’s hands went down his flank as the keepers’ did but slower, owning, and a voice above him said the word he wanted more than the touch, said look at this one, said look what they made me, and then the weight came down and he was filled the way the smooth thing filled him only real, only true, only enough, and the eyes watched him take it and he was worth it, he was worth every one of their eyes, he was the gift and they were glad of him.
He worked the smooth thing and pressed his face to the wall so the sound stayed in and his skin went fuller and fuller and then it broke, and it broke hard, harder than it should, more than it should, so much that he had to keep the cloth ready now, had kept it ready for months, and he pressed the cloth to himself and shook and rode it out with his teeth in the linen.
When it was over he lay still and the shame came in behind it as it always did, quiet, on schedule. So much. It was always so much lately, more than the other boys by the evidence of the wash, he was nearly sure, and he did not know why the amount should shame him but it did, it felt like a loudness in him he could not make quiet, a greed. He rinsed the cloth in the basin by feel and wrung it and hid it and hid the smooth thing back under the loose linen and told himself what he told himself every night, which was: the last time. Thirty days. After the Opening you will never have to do this again.
He did not know he was counted.
He could not have known. He did not see, because he had his face to the wall, the keeper who did not walk on after the second pass, the one who stood in the dark at the end of the ward where the shadow was thickest and waited, patient, the way you wait on a thing you are measuring. He did not know that the loudness in him, the greed, the so much, was exactly the thing being written down. That in a low room he had never seen there was a tally with his name at the head of it and a mark set against him for every cloth, for the smooth thing worn nearly through, for the fullness that could not be stilled. That the keepers had a word for a hole-boy whose skin went too full too young, whose flank came up too hard, who threw too much into the dark. He did not know the word. He would learn it.
He slept well. He always slept well after. He dreamed of eyes.
The days went small. Twenty. Twelve. Seven.
In the last week they changed his food and the keepers came more often with the oils and worked him longer, and Bo took it all as the house making him ready, polishing the gift, and it made him so glad he could hardly hold it. Cael went quiet with him that week, quieter than jealousy, and once Bo caught him looking with something on his face that was not the coin between them, something that in another boy Bo might have called worry, but Cael was gold all through and did not worry, so Bo let it go.
“When you come down,” Cael said, the last night, low across the dark between their beds, “you’ll tell me. What it’s like. You won’t go still like Perrin and keep it. You’ll tell me.”
“I’ll tell you everything,” Bo promised. “Every part.”
“Everything,” Cael said, and did not say goodnight, and turned to his wall.
Bo did not use the smooth thing that last night. It felt wrong to, so close, like eating before a feast. He lay full and aching and glad and let the fullness stay, saving himself, and thought: tomorrow they come in the grey. Tomorrow I go up. He held the ache like a lamp and the last he thought before sleep was look at this one, in a voice he had never heard, that he was so sure he was about to.
They came in the grey.
Two keepers, and a third he did not know, older, with a flat unhurried way of moving, and they did not speak to him. That was the first of it that was not like the story, that they did not speak, but Bo did not let himself feel it, because the rest was right, the rest was exactly the story. They took him up out of the ward. They took him along the cold passage and up, and his heart went so hard he thought they must hear it, up was right, up was the bed, and the fullness he had saved sat in him heavy and ready and good.
Then there was the rope.
They took his wrists behind him and roped them, and Bo’s breath caught, and he told himself: this is part of it. Of course this is part of it. You go up bound because you go up as the gift and a gift is bound with a ribbon, and he made the rope into a ribbon in his mind and let them cinch it. Then the sack, coarse cloth, down over his head and drawn at the throat, and the grey went black, and Bo stood blind and bound and breathing his own breath hot off the cloth and made that part of the story too. That was why they put the sack on you, he told himself, so that the first thing you saw when it lifted was the Master and the lamps, so it all came at once, the whole of it breaking over you in a single flood. He built it fast, in the dark, as he built the bed at night, because building it was how he kept the other thing out, the cold thing that had started very small and low in him at the word up and had not gone right as the story said.
They led him by the arm. He went blind and willing, counting his own steps as he counted days.
The air changed.
It went from the close warm stone-smell of the house to something open, cold, wide, air with a sky in it, and under the sky a smell that Bo’s whole body knew before his mind would let it, a low thick smell of dung and animal and the pens, and Bo stopped, and a keeper’s hand pushed him on. Not up. Out. He had gone out. The cold thing in him got bigger. It was a yard, he told himself, fast, a high yard, a bathing yard, the Master took them out under the sky sometimes, he had heard that somewhere. He had not heard it. He had never heard any such thing. He was building with nothing now.
They stopped him. They turned him. They set him and held him.
A hand found him at the front, took him in a warm oiled grip, and Bo made a sound into the sack, glad, because this was right, this was the story arriving on him exactly where it was meant to, the hand and the touch and the start of everything, and the fullness he had saved leapt up so hard and glad it hurt. He came up under the hand at once, as he always did, more than always, and the hand felt it, and Bo felt it be felt, and something opened in him wide and proud that he had never had a name for. This was the showing. The eyes were on him now, he was sure of it even blind under the cloth, the lamps and the Master and all of them ranged round to see what the years had made ready, and here it was, here he was, high and hard and eager in a stranger’s grip. He wanted them to see how much. He wanted the Master most of all to see. Look how ready I am. Look how I will love it.
He could not use his hands, roped behind him, so he used what he had. He arched. He drew up the long new muscle of his belly that he had made at the bars through a whole year of afternoons and held it hard and showed it. And he made himself jump. There was a muscle for it, deep, low, the one he had found on his own in the dark and worked at until he could take it at will, and he clenched it now so that the eager stand of him kicked and nodded in the stranger’s grip, flexed and bobbed and showed itself off, his one good trick, put on for the Master he was so sure was watching. Look. Look what I can do. He rolled his hips up so the whole length of him stood out plain, offered, and made it jump again, and again, his mouth too full of sacking to say the thing so he said it this way instead, which was use me, I was made for it, no one down here will take it better than me. He laid his readiness out in the air for them the way a boy lays his best thing on a table and steps back to let it be admired.
Past the sack, a keeper looked at the proud jut of him and made a mark on a board. Good vigor. Heavy, and young. Note the throw when it came. Bo heard the small dry scratch of it and did not know it for what it was, and took it, blind, for the sound of being seen at last, and it lit him from the inside, and he showed them more.
And behind, where no hand was, he was not still either. He had only ever climbed this high with the smooth thing worked up into him, a hundred nights of it, and nothing in him had learned the difference yet between that pitch and this one. So he clenched on nothing. He felt himself empty and wet and working, drawing tight round the air as he drew tight round the shape from under his pallet, certain the fill was coming, certain this was the moment the cool lie turned true and warm at last. He took the ache for readiness. It was the nearest he came to knowing, and he had taught it long ago to answer to the name of want.
The hand worked him, sure and skilled and not unkind, and brought him up to the shaking edge and held him there. Then it stopped, and stepped him forward, and set his front against something.
Not a hand now. Not the smooth cool thing from under his pallet. Warm, and giving, and alive, a body bent and held below him, skin against the head of him where he stood so hard it ached, and the sack came off.
The light came in all at once, exactly as the story promised, and it was the wrong light. It was flat cold morning over an open ground of trampled mud and a rail fence and the low pens beyond, and there were eyes on him, exactly as he had dreamed, eyes all around, and they were the flat unhurried eyes of herd-keepers with tally-boards, watching him the way you watch a thing you are grading. And below him, bent over the rail, roped at the wrists the way he was roped, was a she-stock of the herd, dark and heavy and broad in the hip, her face turned to the side and empty, waiting, opened and ready and for this, and it was her he was set against, it was her he stood pressed to the entrance of, quivering, on the very edge he had been walked to, and his hips were already moving.
“No,” Bo said. His own voice came out of him strange and high. “No, wait, there’s a wrong here, I’m a hole, I’m a hole, holes don’t breed, holes go up, I’m to go up to the Master, please, someone ask, please, there’s a wrong here.”
No one moved to ask. A keeper by the rail made a mark.
And his own body, greedy, saved, walked to the edge by a skilled cold hand and held there shaking for a year of wanting, surged before his mind could stop it. He slid into the warm giving heat below him in one long helpless motion his own hips finished, deep, and the pleasure of it broke over the horror like scalding water over ice, both at once, unbearable. Then his mind came up under it and he tried to climb back out of her, to wrench himself up and off, and could not. A handler’s hand had come flat and heavy to the small of his back and pressed him in and held him to it. His wrists were roped behind him, so there was nothing to brace against, nothing to push, no way to make himself do the thing his whole mind was screaming. He heaved back and the hand only rode him down and seated him deeper. And he understood it then, deep in, with his cock buried to the root in a bred animal and the keepers marking their boards, what an Opening was. What some Openings were. That he was not the gift and had never been going up. The word had been true the whole time, and he had only ever heard the half of it that flattered him. He had heard opened and thought of the bed and the lamps and the filling he ached for. It had meant this. Opened like a seam, opened downward, his life split and the pens showing through. He had kept the promising and let the colt fall, and never once seen it was the same half he always kept.
“Work it,” the handler said over him, low, not unkind, the way you gentle a beast that has never pulled before. “Go on. The Master’ll want good pups off you.”
The Master. Even here, even now, it came back to that, and the shape of the rest of his life stood up in front of Bo all at once. The Master would still be given something off him. It would be pups, and Bo would never once be in the room. His face was wet before he felt it start. The sob came up the same throat as the taken-sound, the two of them braided together with no wall left between, grief and the pleasure climbing at once through the one body, and he could stop neither. He spent himself like that, pinned and pumping and weeping, his hips traitor to the last and working with the hand instead of against it, please still in his mouth for no one to answer. The taken-sound he had built a hundred nights in the dark for the bed came out of him here instead, over the rail and into the herd, and went on and on because there was so much of it, because there was always so much of it, because that was the whole of what he was and he had never once understood the word for it.
A keeper turned his board so the other could see it. There was a line on it with Bo’s name at the head, the same name that had stood at the head of a tally in a room Bo had never seen, and under the name the keeper set the word now, in a small sure hand, the way you write down a thing that is settled.
“Stud-grade,” he said aloud, to the other keeper and not to Bo, because you did not say things to the herd. “Overripe. Look at the throw on it. Wasted a year of oil on this one up in the house. Should’ve read the cloths sooner.” He tipped his head at the pens. “Take it down.”
Down.
The rope stayed on. That was how Bo knew it was true, past all the saying-inside, past the there’s a wrong here that still went round and round in him with nowhere to land. They did not take the rope off. You took the ribbon off the gift. You did not take the rope off the herd. They unhooked him from the she-stock, who was led away without a look, already forgotten, a receptacle set back on its shelf, and they walked Bo down off the grading-ground toward the low country on his own two shaking legs, down where the smell was, down where he had never set foot, and set foot now, in the mud, fair among the churned dark of it, and the gate of the pens took him in.
At the gate a keeper said a number to the boy who kept the roll, and the boy wrote it, and that was all his entering came to. No one asked his name. The pens did not keep names. Up in the house he had been Bo. Here he was the new one, and then the stud in the far corner, and then only the stud, and the name wore off him as his fair skin was wearing off, slower than he would have thought and then all at once.
He learned the pens the way you learn cold water, all at once and then forever.
The keepers did not speak to him, because you did not speak to the herd. He learned that his fair skin, the skin they had prized, meant nothing here but that he was new, and that the herd looked at it without heat, measuring, how long will that last down here. And he learned what he was for now, which was the one use he had spent his whole life certain he was too fine to be put to.
They brought him to the she-stock on a rope, morning and evening, and made him mount, and his body did it. That was the part he had not braced for, that his body did it without him, the same greedy body from the rail, that it rose and worked and threw the so much they prized whether he was in it or not. So he learned to not be in it. He shut his eyes over the wrong warmth and let his hips do their old trick and thought, to get through, of the thing he was not doing, of being the one bent and held, of a weight coming down on him and a real cock where his own was, and he spent himself into her that way, into a body he did not want, with his whole mind turned backward on the body he would never have. He emptied and emptied and was never once filled. That was breeding. It drew out of him the one thing they wanted and left the one thing he wanted untouched, and all the while his own hole clenched behind him on nothing, wet and drawn tight and empty, wanting the weight that was never coming, the wrong part of him working and the right part starving in the very same push. A keeper stood by with a board and marked his throw and nodded, pleased, as no one had ever been pleased with the true part of him until now, when the true part was the only part left.
On the second day one of the studs spoke to him. Not a keeper. The keepers did not speak to the herd and never would, but the studs talked flat among themselves when the keepers were gone, and one of them, a big spent one gone grey at the temple, looked at Bo’s fair arm lying in the muck and said, without much in it at all, “They don’t send your kind down.”
Bo did not answer. He had not learned yet that he could.
“The fair go up,” the stud said. “The bed, the house, kept soft. A fair hole does not come down here, not for good. So something’s wrong with you, something they saw and you couldn’t.” He said hole the way Bo had once said animal, a flat word for a flat thing, and it landed strangely, coming from below and pointed up at him for once. “Us, he breeds. That’s all we’re for, down to the bone. And here’s the joke of it. You still work for Him. Everything you throw goes up the hill, up to the house, and they raise it soft and smooth for the bed you were thrown out of. You make what climbs. You stay in the mud and make more of it, and you never go up after it.” He lay back in the straw. “Breeder now. That’s the low thing here. Get used to the sound of it.”
It was the truest word anyone had said to Bo since the grey morning, and a spent breeder in the muck had said it, and Bo lay and took it as he took everything now.
He had always known the word for what he was. Everyone in the house knew it. He was a slave, and he had never minded the word, because his was the fine kind. The kept kind. The good pup they groomed, the promising colt, the made thing they oiled and weighed and cherished for the bed, going up and not down into the mud. Slave was for the herd too, slave was the dark line beyond the wall you watched shuffle past and were glad you were not walking in, but that had been a different thing, a lower thing, and he had loved the distance of it. He learned down in the pens, the way he learned the rest, all at once and then forever, that there had never been a distance. Hole and gift and stud and breeder were only the paint, and the wood under all of them was the one word he had worn so lightly and so proudly all his life, and it had never meant a thing finer for him than it meant for the lowest body in the mud. Slave was slave. He had only been kept too pretty to feel it.
His body was becoming a breeder’s body, and he watched it go with the only eye he had, the grading one. The fair skin went first, greying and coarsening in the muck as they had said it would. Then the rest of him followed it down. His hang grew heavier and lower month on month, the balls that had come up heavy in the house going heavier still, swinging when he walked the way the studs’ had swung across the yard on the day he stood at the bars and thanked his gladness he was not them. The muscle he had built for the bed thickened into the muscle a thing is given for work. Only the bareness stayed. The one thing the house had done to him for good, the smoothness they had burned into him the year he came of use, did not wash off in the mud as the rest of him was washing off, so that he lay among the shaggy stock still bare as a bed-boy, a smooth thing going dark and heavy and low, the mark of the kind he had been left on the body of the kind he now was, belonging in the end to neither. He graded himself, as he graded everything, and he graded lower every week, and low was the only direction that had ever truly been open to him, though he had spent his whole life sure the way was up.
And he learned about the nights, which were the worst of it, though not for the reason he would once have guessed.
The nights were when the want came for him. All day he gave, emptied into the stock, and it did nothing for the thing under his ribs, and by dark the thing under his ribs was all there was. He had spent his whole life certain that down here, if nowhere else, a body got used. He had watched the herd go by and thought, without the words for it, at least they are used. He had been wrong about that as he had been wrong about all of it. The stock bred and were bred and that was the whole of it. No one down here was taken, not as he meant it, not held and opened and filled for the wanting of it. That was a thing they did up the hill. To the fair. To the kept. To the ones the Master and the guards wanted. It was the one thing his fall had put out of his reach forever, because a breeder does not get taken. A breeder gives.
So he began to beg for it. He did it slowly, without deciding to, as the counting had stopped and the last time had stopped. He put himself on show for the whole pen. He kept near the handlers when they came through and turned so the lamp caught him and worked himself hard where they could see and held it, look how ready, look how much, the old showing with no one who wanted the show. When that did nothing he got lower. He backed his fair spoiled flank up against the boards and bared his hole to the pen and every boot that passed and worked it open and let it drip and pushed it at them, a wench in heat past caring who watched, a breeding-thing presenting to be covered, and the handlers stepped over him and the studs went by spent and the want went nowhere. He had thought there was a bottom to how far he would show himself. There was not.
In his first week down he made himself a shape, a length of wood worked off the pen-boards and rubbed smooth on a stone until it was near enough to the thing he had left behind in the ward, and he rode it those nights harder than he had ever ridden that one. It came closer than anything. There was no shame left in it now, only need, and he worked it into himself in the open where anyone could see and rode it with his teeth shut and his eyes closed, building the bed that never came, and it was the shape of the thing and not the thing, and it had never been enough, but it was all he had, and he took it, and took it, and took it.
He envied them now, the used. On a wash-day he would see the fair boys driven along the high path toward somewhere clean, soft and gilded and whole, and once he thought he saw a gold head that might have been Cael, kept and glowing on a keeper’s arm, and he did not know whether what went through him was grief or hunger or whether those had ever been two things. He envied the guards’ boys, the pretty stock the handlers kept back for themselves and took in the store-sheds with the doors left half open on purpose. He envied anyone the Master or the guards had ever reached for. Being wanted was the country he had been born to and thrown out of, and every night he put himself against its wall, and every night it stayed shut.
Once, through a shed door left half open, he watched two of them compare what the Master had left them. They stood with their backs arched and their holes bared to each other in the lamp, easy and unhurried and proud, and he heard every word.
“He held me open with both his thumbs,” the one said. “Look at it. Not a wrinkle left in it. Smooth as the day they made me. That’s why he keeps sending down for me and not for you.”
“That’s the oil talking,” the other said. “Yours only lies smooth wet. Let it dry and it puckers up like any hole in the mud. Mine he took dry, twice, and it still falls open on its own. Ask him which he’d sooner have back.”
They went on like that, low and unhurried, turning to show each other, weighing whose the Master had used truer and deeper, whose lay smoother, whose he would send for again, the way he and Cael had once argued who was the most made. Then, to settle it, the one got down and put his mouth to the other and licked slow at the smooth used hole he had been bragging on, and the other let him, easy, arching into it, and Bo went tight against the dark of the door.
Because there might still be something of the Master in there. The thought came cold and greedy at once. The Master had spent himself in that boy two, three nights back, and maybe a trace of him was still deep in it, and the other had his tongue in it now, tasting what Bo would never taste, the Master himself, the best there could ever be, secondhand off the inside of a slave who did not even know what he held. Bo would have crawled through the muck to put his own mouth where that tongue was, and licked a trace of the Master out of the lowest hole in the pens, and called it the finest that ever happened to him.
And under that, quieter, a smaller starving. No one had ever once done it to him. Not a tongue, not a finger, not one living thing that was not his own hand, ever. He watched the boy arch under the licking and could not even build the feeling in his head, and then he could not help himself. Pressed to the dark of the door he worked one of his own fingers up into himself and put his other hand to his nipple, rubbing it the way a cool dry thumb had rubbed it once, years back, in the long room, and he moaned with no sound at all, teeth shut, as he had learned in the ward. It was his own finger. It was always his own finger, his own hand in his own emptiness pretending to be somebody come for him, and he did it anyway, because the pretending was the nearest to being wanted the night would hand him.
A hole the right man had used was a thing to wear down here, and the mark of him left in it was a thing to hold over another boy. He would have given what was left of his life to be in that shed, losing that argument.
A boy came down to the pens once, sent on some errand. Dark as any of the stock, dark as Kell, but clean and oiled and unroped, soft where the breeders were hard, and Bo knew what he was looking at before the boy said a word. One of the ones that went up. A dark boy the Master had taken for a season, who would be tired of and sent back down in time, but who had for now been up in the high warm rooms, been had, been wanted. It went through Bo like cold water, the old clean lift turned all the way over. He had stood at the bars once and pitied the dark and thanked his gladness he was not them. And here was one of them, oiled and fresh from the Master’s own hands, and here was Bo, fair, made, the promising colt, presented in the muck with his hole bare to the boots. Even a dark one. Even a dark one had been good enough for Him, and Bo, who was better, who had been raised to be the best of all of them, never once had.
The boy found him in the straw and stood over him and laughed. Not cruelly. Easily, the way you laugh at a thing beneath the trouble of cruelty. “You want it that bad,” he said. It was not a question. “They said you were gild once. Up in the house.” He crouched, and Bo’s eyes went to the soft clean cock lying heavy against the boy’s thigh, the thing Bo would have crawled the length of the pens on his belly for, and the boy saw where Bo was looking and let him look. “Not that. I can’t fuck you. I’m a hole, same as you were.” He let it hang there, because letting Bo look and letting Bo starve was sweeter than any cruelty he was above. “But the Master had me two nights back. Held my jaw and spat in my mouth while he did it, and I kept it in. You want it?” He worked his mouth slow. “Closest to Him you will ever get. His spit, in your hole. That is the whole of what is left for you down here.”
And Bo said yes. He heard himself say it, yes, please, because it was the Master, even at two removes, even as a joke, even as spit, it was the nearest the Master would ever come to any part of him. And then he did the thing he had taught himself across all his nights in the dark, the thing no hand had ever once asked him to do, the thing his whole gift had been built around. He opened. He breathed out and let the ring of himself go soft and slack and wide as he had drilled it a thousand times on the smooth cool shape, worked it loose on nothing but air and wanting until it lay bare and gaping open in the lamp, an offered thing, a trained thing, the best of him, the part he had perfected for a Master’s cock and shown to no one in his life. He presented it now, at last, for this. The boy looked down at the open of him and made an easy sound, half a laugh, and worked his mouth, gathering, and Bo heard it, the thick wet pull of it behind the boy’s teeth, and held himself open and waited with his eyes shut and his whole body gone to listening. It came warm. It struck the bare pit of him and slid, and Bo clenched down after it, greedy, chasing it up into himself before it could run back out, and held it there deep and shaking, wet at last, wet from what a living mouth had given him, the first wet in him in all this time that had not come off his own hand or the cold shape under the straw. The boy wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist and stood and went back up the hill where the wanted things lived, and left Bo clenched tight in the straw so it would not run out of him, holding it, holding it, the happiest he had been since the grey morning.
That night he rode the shape with the spit still in him, and it was the best it had ever been, wet from the inside with what had come out of a mouth the Master had used, and he rode it until it hurt and past hurting and told himself, as he had once told himself the last time, that this counted, that this was something, that he had been given something at last.
He went to Kell once. The one who had looked at him across the yard on a gold afternoon, the animal he had stood at the bars and pitied, whose look had warmed him without his understanding why. Kell was only a breeder like him now, the same low thing, and one night Bo did not show himself and did not beg. He crawled. He went to Kell on his belly through the straw and put his face down and lifted himself, wordless, and waited to be used by the one creature in the world he had once thought beneath him. Kell looked at him. The same flat look, without heat, the measure of a thing on a shelf. Then he turned his face into the straw and slept. He had stock to cover in the morning and no use for a breeder’s hole, no more than Bo had once had for his. Not even Kell. Bo lay a long time in the cold with himself still lifted and no one to take it, and understood that he had come all the way down to the bottom and found a floor beneath the floor, and that he was on it, alone, offered to no one.
Much later, from the flat talk of the keepers who spoke over the herd as if it could not hear, he learned that they had watched him in the ward. All of it. The smooth thing, the cloths, the so much. That there had been a tally with his name on it before the sack ever went over him, that his skin had told them what he was a year before it told him, that the shame he had rinsed in the basin by feel where he thought no one could hear him say no one has come for me yet had been read, and counted, and had been the very thing that walked him out to the rail. That the one place he had thought was his had never once been his. There had never been a night he was alone.
It should have been the worst of it. It was not. It landed and it had nowhere to fall. There was so little of him left by then that was his to lose.
The handler did it on an ordinary evening, meaning nothing by it. He was going down the line checking the stock, running a flat hand over each of them in turn, and Bo did what Bo did now, pushed back into the touch and offered and made the small sound, and the handler, idle, half looking at something across the pen, pushed a thumb into him. Just that. A thumb, dry and then wet, working in to the knuckle the way you test how ripe a thing has got, and he left it there a moment while his eyes wandered off to whatever it is handlers think about.
And Bo came apart around it. Not from his cock, though that spent itself into the straw untouched. From the other place. The starved place. The place that had wanted as long as he had been alive and been fed shape and spit and never once a living thing that reached for it. A finger. A bored man’s finger, meaning nothing, gone in a breath. It was inside him and it was warm and it was real and it moved, and Bo’s whole body closed around it and shook, and he heard himself make the sound, the taken sound, the one he had built a hundred nights for the bed and the lamps and the voice that was going to say look at this one, and it came out of him here for a thumb, and he did not care. He would have died on that thumb. He pressed himself back onto it and wept and was happy, happy, happier than the grey morning, happier than the weighing, happier than all his days in the high clean house counting toward a thing that was never going to be his, because a living hand was inside him at last, and for that one moment it did not matter that it meant nothing to the hand.
The handler took his thumb back and wiped it on Bo’s flank and went on to the next of the stock.
Bo stayed down in the straw, open and emptying and cold again where the warmth had been, and waited, in the exact place under the ribs where a boy keeps his gladness, for it to come again.
