Free The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart by Jesse Bullington Page B

got that you want?”
    “Oh, nothing special, nothing unique. Just that thing all men got, the tail we feeble women lack.”
    It took a moment for her meaning to sink in, but when it did Hegel recoiled. “I couldn’t give you that even if I was a mind
     to.”
    “No? Even for your brother?”
    Hegel chewed his lip, considered slaying the woman, thought better of it, spit twice and said, “See, I’s chaste—”
    “Even better!”
    “I wouldn’t know how—”
    “I can teach you, it’s simply done.”
    “I—”
    “You?”
    “After you fix’em up.”
    She brayed again. “Think I trust you, Grossbart? Think I don’t know what you’re thinking? Don’t worry, it’ll be done soon,
     and might not be as bad as you think.”
    “I doubt that. What guarantee I got you can even heal’em?”
    “Guarantee’s my oath, just like yours. I can sweeten his wounds, same as I can make it sweet for you.” She lasciviously hiked
     her rags up around her thighs, revealing complicated networks of veins bulging under the pruned skin. Hegel smelled a stronger,
     acidic scent overpowering the burning wood and felt his horse meat rise in his throat but choked it down.
    “Like I said,” he managed through his disgust, “I would if I could, but I can’t, and that’s all there is to it.”
    She had turned and rooted through an array of jars on a shelf, her backside thrown out toward him. She turned back triumphantly
     with a dusty vessel, its rag stopper half-rotten. Withdrawing the rag she offered it to Hegel.
    “Knock this into that gut of yours.” Her eyes glittered.
    “Give me your word it ain’t poison.”
    “Given, given,” she replied dismissively.
    “What is it?”
    “Something good. Something that’ll make you able. Hell, it’ll make you eager.”
    He stared hard into the bottle, his intuition goading him to cast it in the fire and run her through regardless of Manfried’s
     condition. He had no doubt his brother’s soul would make it to Heaven, it was his own body he felt concern for. In the end
     his pride would not allow him to walk a coward’s road, and so with a prayer to Mary he downed the contents, the stuff filling
     his mouth with the taste of putrid mushrooms.
    The room spun and the bottle broke on the stones, a yellow mist clouding his vision. Hegel turned to his hostess to inform
     her that no way no how would a little fungus water make him willing when his breath caught in his throat and tremors radiated
     outward from his groin. She reclined in the chair but had set one foot on an upended bucket, the firelight illuminating a
     thigh the color of goat cream. The pouty turn of her thin lips, the vulnerable want in her milky eyes, the gnarly fingers
     now snaking between her legs, the reedy sigh as she pushed her bottom forward on the chair to meet her digits—Hegel felt an
     almost-pain in his breeches, and his hands dropped to his waist to relieve the source of his discomfort.
    The crone appeared no different from before Hegel had taken the draught, but he no longer remembered such simple things as
     his faith’s prohibition of carnal pleasures or his society’s scorn and disgust for women more than a decade into puberty.
     He simply saw her for the beauty she was, albeit a beauty of remarkably advanced years. Dropping to his knees in a show of
     contrition, Hegel crawled toward his host, who spread her legs farther on the chair to accommodate her guest. A pleasant chevre
     odor wafting from between her curd-textured, indigo-marbled thighs tickled the bulbous nose that soon tickled her mound, and
     his left hand hoisted her rags out of the way while its twin fumbled with his belt.
    Cold as her outer skin felt, Hegel’s tongue nearly stuck to her frigid folds and the white wisps drifting from his full mouth
     mingled with the pale cloud itching his nostrils. She patiently coached him until he set off a trembling gush, refreshing,
     brisk wetness cooling his hot throat even as she squirmed