The Magister (Earthkeep) (14 page)

In her fatigue at the end of the day, Jez declined any dinner and in fact found satisfaction in emptying her insides of every trace of food or water.  She sank onto the cushion-covered stones in the old woman's living area, resting her head against the wall.  She reached out toward Dicken again, sending forth another glolobe of reassurance. 

Lazily, she watched as the conjure woman went about her preparations for bed.  Old Becky moved in silence, and apparently with some new sense of purpose, adjusting the glow of crystal candles, cleaning food bowls, heating bathwater, arranging quilts and pillows over flat stones.  Jez became uneasily aware that their comfortable visiting together had come to an end, that it had been only a preparation for a more important enterprise upon which they would embark the following day. 

"Becky," she began.

The old woman silenced her with a gesture.

"Time for sleep, girl," she said, motioning her to the washtub.  She bathed Jezebel, then enfolded her in a heavy quilt and eased her to her bed.  Jez was asleep before her head touched the pallet.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *

Hours later she burst into wakefulness.  She threw off the quilt, careful not to disturb the figure that sprawled face down just beyond her.  Her flesh was sore and her bones ached, but sleep had rejuvenated her spirits.  In the low light of warmth-making quartz filings, old Becky's bare body lay under a sheen of sweat.  The skinny brown back rose and fell with soft snores. 

Jez watched the movements, lulled by the sounds.  In the crystal glow, the crone's scrawny arms and legs had a lean vibrancy, and her skin stretched wrinkleless over rounded ribs and joints.  Barely perceptibly, the flat buttocks were rising and falling with the rhythm of her long breathings. 

Jez surveyed the movement of those twin mounds of flesh, increasingly aware of how her own hips could exactly cover them.  In a lazy slow motion, she began to shed her nightgown, breathing in time to Becky's gentle noises.  She sat for a moment, free of her clothes and absorbing the motions of Becky's lanky body.

Jez edged closer to the sleeping figure and with quiet movements suspended herself above it, leaning upon her carefully placed hands and feet.  She braced herself there in a rising anticipation, her breath moving now in its own cadences, her blood vibrant against her skin.  Smiling, she closed her eyes and began her slow descent toward old Becky's body.

Inches away from contact, the snores ceased and the body beneath her came alive.  It grew rigid, softened suddenly into an invitation, and then into desire.  Jez stopped her progress and held herself in prolonged expectancy.  Below her, Becky strained upward toward the canopy of Jez's body.  A low cry was being born in the old woman's throat.

Jez took in one last breath and lowered her torso onto the woman beneath her.  As she fitted her hips to Becky's backside, she felt her pubic bone lock into the cleft beneath the crone's buttocks.  Becky gave birth to her cry and pressed herself hard against Jez's weight.  They rolled, Old Becky hooting with pleasure.

Jezebel laughed her own pleasure as she plunged her hand into the prodigal gray curls that tossed beside her.  Becky turned upward into the embrace so that Jez could stroke and knead the dark, finely wrinkled skin of her breasts.  Becky crooned.  Both women grazed over their face-to-face bodies, Jez's hands and her lips purposefully seeking every fold and crevice of the mountain woman's skin.  They plunged and tumbled amid exclamations of desire and delight.

Jez hovered over Becky's mouth, and her eyes began to dance with the prospect of delicious discovery.  She found a wild tenderness in those extraordinary lips.  As her own tongue fell through the toothless hollow, she yielded to the welcome of that mouth and its ardent greeting of her every attention.  Jez lingered there in long luxurious exploration. 

She tamed her teeth into a gentleness they had rarely known, the better to entrap Becky's eager nipples, the better to conspire with her own lips and tongue below the hairless mound where Becky's thighs converged, there delicately to tease a tiny button to a long and breath-halted burst of joy.  To her astonishment, the old woman rose to a second climax.  And with very little encouragement from Jez, to another, and still another and another, dancing and driving to the touch of Jez's hands, her fingers, her tongue.

At last Jezebel put her arms around the conjure woman, kissing and stroking her head and hair, while Becky moved her own wise fingers in an act of self-love that was the artful acme of all previous climaxes.  Awed and incredulous, Jezebel Stronglaces held Rebecca Tsunami while the old woman came, and came, and came.

It was later, in the crystals' dim light, after Becky's intimate loving of Jez's body, that Jezebel noticed a difference in the cave room's ambience, as if solid objects were becoming unstable, subtly straining to hold their form in place.  At first she assumed it was simply an effect of their afterglow, but as she changed her position, the stone floor beneath her felt soft and unsteady. 

"Becky," she whispered.

"Pay no mind, it's just surface tensions relaxin' a little.  You've seen it before."

"It feels like. . ."

"That's what it is.  A shapeshift tide, just passin' through."  She draped her arm around Jez's shoulders.  "Come here to me, Jezzybell."

Instantly the words reawakened Jez's blood.  She stretched toward Mad Becky, and felt herself pulled into the embrace of a younger woman, a stronger woman, a woman whose hands lay both heavy and gentle on her back and thighs, a woman who pressed upon her the warm weight of smooth muscles.  This woman's lips covered a full complement of teeth, and her short-cropped hair was dark, almost black.

Jez opened to the probings of the woman's powerful fingers, spreading her legs to them in a rush of longing.  She gasped at the first touch of the silver tongue on her nipple and encouraged the rhythmic rasp of the rough cheek on her breast.  She raised her legs and bent them into an embrace of his buttocks.  With her hands she maneuvered his torso to its proper place, drawing his head near her own, and urging him toward her open thighs.

He made deep easy love to Jezebel, moving in and out of her with gradually increasing intent.  At the top of the highest wave, he held the moment so that both of them crested, plunged and rode down together.  Jez was crying, holding him close, when suddenly she wanted him again, wanted him more ferociously, more profoundly.  They rose another time, her cries driving them high with a keen desperation utterly strange to Jezebel Stronglaces.  They blazed together in a passion all the wilder for the precision and balance of their mutual husbanding of its power.

Her cry filled the West Virginia mountain and sang its way back to the pallet where her partner lay, withdrawing from her body but pushing his hand gently against her crotch, sealing a sacred doorway.

Jez narrowed her eyes and peered at him.  Another figure roved the terrain under his muscles and smooth skin, the shadow of a crone, almost emerging, then subsiding once more into his solid physique.

He kissed her lightly, then slipped down her body to spread her legs apart and set his mouth into her dense thatch of brown hair.  His tongue and lips caressed the dark rosy flesh there, as if to open again that avenue of delight.  He focused his attention upon the tiny rod, massaging it with his tongue, lightly then insistently.  Jez felt a deep change overtake her blood and tissues, animating his efforts.  His hands slid under her, lifting her hips.  His tongue and lips stroked on.

She embedded her fingers in his short-cropped hair, pushing and kneading, savoring her phallus's tantalizing engorgement as it filled his mouth.  The knowings of her every cell centered in that newborn agency and the vessel that it probed.  She was cast into an unparalleled world of bright intensity.

She matched her rocking hips to the sliding suction of his tongue and palate as they drew her into him, expelled her and encompassed her again and again.  He took her to the edge of release, denied her the fulfillment, took her there once more and again retreated.  When at last he brought her exploding into freedom, her long scream shook the caverns of her consciousness.

She hardly felt him turning her body to its prone position, his hands separating the cheeks of her buttocks.  Unthinkable hunger flooded her haunches.  She arched her back, her hips rising to an entreaty.

His fingers made ready the passage, easing the flesh and sinking deep to awaken in her an unaccustomed core of craving.  Jez caught her breath as his phallus played at the entrance, pushing gently against her sudden tautness.  He reached under her and clasped her testicles.  Jez's own penis stiffened and her buttocks relaxed.  She opened herself and engulfed his phallus, drawing it smoothly in again and again, until it reached into the center of her strange, her huge new appetite.  There his steady thrusts brought her to a deep fulfillment, totally new, totally unlooked for. 

And when he held her in the long embrace of their afterlove, Jez placed her rough-shaven face alongside his as they marveled at their maleness and their muscled beauty.

The circles of their loving spun on through the night.  Buoyed by a tireless energy, Jezebel Stronglaces and Rebecca Tsunami moved in and out of the shapeshifting tides, generating countless combinations of bodily love.

In one of her female bodies, Jez lay long and languorously  with a man of delicate touch, weaving together rainbow webs which bound, unbound and bound them again into a single tapestry.  At the center of this Oneness, a phallus lifted and a softness rose to meet it, and Jez understood at last the male and female yearning for each other, their organs fine-tuned by nature for simultaneous excitation. 

And there was no trace of violence in either — not in him, not in herself. 

It was in that same body that her mind beheld a wondrous parade.  Its participants were all the bodies and personalities that she had ever inhabited over the millennia: the female ones, the male ones, the ambiguously sexed ones, each unique in its attraction to another individual body or personality.  Those who suffered or themselves brought hurt — all, all were herself.

And it was in that particular man-loving body that Jezebel Stronglaces at last set aside the rock.

In this finale, her lover was a short man, a little over five feet in height, corpulent in body yet with long elegant fingers and a smooth hairless head.  He rode her high, driving her short breaths into tiny taut vocalizations.  Together they filled a seed pod that every second promised to explode into lush flowers.  On the thin edge of its breaking open, Jez sensed the familiar and unmistakable rush of the icy wind sweeping through her chest, bound toward freezing any life to come.  Instantly, she intercepted its progress, consigned it to the conflagration in her groin and swam into full-body throes of rapture and release.  Bright blossoms covered them both.

They slept.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *

The Earth had moved more than a quarter turn on Her axis when Jezebel awoke.  She lay still and spoke to each of her bones and organs, each of her body's intricate systems: blood, nerves, air, lymph, electromagnetics, digestion, elimination.  The ardors and ardures of the long night had entirely subsided, and she felt washed by a joyous yet unfamiliar peace.  With a deep certainty, she knew that she would never endure seizures again, that her cells had realigned into health.  She felt brand new.

Becky was already up and brewing something over a glowing mound of quartz filings.

"Pokeweed tea," she said, squatting beside Jez with a battered tin cup.  "Starch you right up." 

Becky wore fresh white long-johns.  Her black eyes were shining. Jez took the cup, set it aside, and held out her arms.  Becky grinned. 

"Jezzybell, I don't aim to jump back in bed with you.  Else we get nothin' done all day." 

She took one of Jez's hands in her own.

Jez searched the old woman's face and for a dizzying moment watched the sensuous passage of all the faces she had worn so recently in their loving.  Reluctantly curbing the wanting that rose within her, she settled her eyes again upon the woman before her.  She saw warmth there, and happiness.  And a firm resolve.  She nodded, then spoke with her own determination. 

"So.  What do we do today?"

"Lots.  You ready?"

Jez braced herself with a sip of tea. 

"Yes.  I am."

Becky nodded as well.  She dropped Jez's hand and settled cross-legged by the pallet.  "Watch close," she admonished, as Jez obediently blinked her eyes into full alertness.

The conjure woman sat before her, framed against the gray stone of the wall behind her, her eyes closed, her hands folded over her belly, her face a picture of snaggletoothed joy.  She began breathing, full and deep.  As Jez watched, the old woman's energy rupa expanded and then brightened; her hands shook with tiny vibrations.  Suddenly, Jez saw through her to the gray wall behind her.

The mountain crone had disappeared, long-johns and all.

Jez cried out, reaching to touch the emptiness.  At that moment Becky bounced back again into full visibility, her body a very present entity. 

"That," she said through another tooth-gapped display of satisfaction, "is how you go shy."

"Go shy?  You just. . .your clothes. . ."

"Everythin' that's vibratin' goes right with you."  She picked up the battered cup and disappeared again, with the cup.  Seconds later she was back. 

Jez was agog.  "Beck, where do you go?"  She hung onto the old woman's leg lest she escape again.

"I don't go nowhere," Becky grinned, "cept'n maybe into a faster place where your eyes can't fasten on me."  She sobered.  "You can do it too, girl."

Jez swallowed.  "But I. . ."

The conjure woman was on her feet. 

"Nothin' to it.  You get quiet, you focus, you get happy, you're gone.  Refocus and you're back."  She set her fists to her hips.  "That's it," she beamed.  Gently, she eased Jez's torso back against the cave wall.  "Now close your eyes."

Jez obeyed, flattening her diaphragm to take in long breaths, wrapping herself in composure.