The Wasters’ lives were made tolerable and even amusing through the constant use of drugs, preferably one called Dingle, or Nosmell, an extract of the ubiquitous Dingleberry that grew anywhere a square inch of soil received one drop of rain. It could be smoked or drunk or eaten or even bathed in if one had enough of the leaves to steep a tubful. It had a long lasting euphoric effect and only a few minor side effects, one being a temporary loss of libido and fertility and another being the permanent loss of the sense of smell and taste, which, considering the way the Wasters lived, could be considered an asset.
By the time she was fifteen, Rooly existed in a state of permanent Dingle-float interrupted by occasional and transitory rages. Her happiest times were when she was torturing someone or when she and her colleagues threw a bale of Dingle into a hot springs and soaked in it until the solution was too diluted to maintain the feeling of disembodied joy. Once in a while Marool thought about her parents and her intention to kill them. The Goddess had promised her their deaths, but the time didn’t yet seem ripe.
When Rooly was something over seventeen and well versed in massacre, a new man introduced himself into the group. He was older than most of them, larger, certainly, with a thick, powerful body. He did not dress as the rest of them did, preferring tight trousers and a well-made cloak of some water resistant fabric. He was also different in some way that Marool could not define, as though he had come from some other place or had, perhaps, once spoken some other language.
“Who is he?” Rooly asked her companion, Dirt, casually, not caring much.
“Ashes, his name is,” said Dirt. “Blue Shit knows him.”
“He’s fat. He’s got a bulge around his middle.”
“He’s not fat. He just carries a money belt or something.”
“Well, if he’s one of us, he’ll get no fatter.”
Which was true. Ashes got no fatter. He got no thinner, either, which might have been enough to create some suspicion if anyone in the group had been capable of rational and connected thought. Ashes came and went and came and went. The others commented that Ashes had something odd about him, his eyes, maybe, or the whip he kept wrapped around his waist under his coat. Ashes seemed uninterested in Dingle, but greatly interested in sex.
All this Rooly noticed without caring one way or the other, and she was completely surprised when Ashes caught her by the arm one day and dragged her away into the woods where he had made a rough camp and where they might be, so he said, private. What happened next was astonishing, for Ashes gave her something other than Dingle to keep her happy, and he did not let her go back to the others. He kept her with him for a day, then another, and never during the course of those days did he cease stroking her and touching her, and putting his mouth on this part of her and that, and giving her more of the stuff he had, until she was in a frenzy she had never felt before.
“Oh, don’t, don’t,” she pled. “Oh, stop, stop.”
“Never,” he said. “No. Now we’ll do this. Now we’ll do that,” which he did, endlessly. Whenever she objected more strenuously, he merely fed her a bit of the stuff which was not Dingle and went on turning her tighter and tighter. Every breath became a game with what his fingers did, what his tongue did, what he did with that strange whip. Every time her body flamed, he quenched it only a little, then set about stoking it again.
He did nothing to release her from it. He built her lust into a fire that burned hotter and hotter, never letting it come to culmination. Two full days of it, she had, until she begged him, at last, not to let her go but to get on with it, and only then he gave her what she pled for in a way she could not afterwards quite remember. The whip was a great part of it, but she could not recollect how, and there were no scars.