The Wisewoman's Young Days

THE STORY SO FAR

Upon reaching adulthood at age 19 (or twenty midsummers, as birthdays don't exist yet), Lawa, the daughter of her tribe's wisewoman, immediately woos an older girl, "Pinky", who she's gone from despising to desiring. Pinky rejects Lawa but her messages are extremely mixed.

Lawa is involved in an embarrassing incident and becomes the subject of gossip. Pinky redeems Lawa's reputation by lying that they're lovers, which only makes Lawa feel more inadequate. Pinky finally reveals the intricate reason for her confusing behavior, and wishes Lawa the best of luck with other girls.

GLOSSARY

criss-curse

: a hex.

Esidwe

: an Artemis-like goddess.

hand

(numeral): five.

Look-Who's-There Hill

: a meeting and trading place for the tribes in the area.

man

(numeral): twenty.

offerling

: a person before their 20th midsummer.

Orog

: a god of winds and the patron god of Lawa's tribe.

the

pine trees

: considered a boundary between worlds.

pinky

: a girl of 21 midsummers. As the narrator, Lawa calls her crush "Pinky" to avoid revealing her name.

times-yet-unlived

: the future.

times-yet-unsung

: the present.

the

whispering-trees

: a public place for private conversations, much like a coffee shop in our age.

___________________

What Young Lawa Could Have and What Good It Did Her

Boys and men were hesitant to pursue me, seeing whose daughter I was. One boy tried, however, and wouldn't relent. He'd been in the fight on Look-Who's-There Hill, and said he could claim me now whether I agreed or not. When I threatened him with a criss-curse he grinned, "You mean a whore's curse?"

I loathed the idea of telling my mother, so I went to his mother. She asked why she'd want to protect me from him. I told her one reason, and it wasn't whose daughter I was.

She was past child-bearing, and not like my idea of a good woman in many other ways, but I knew there was what I wanted and there was what I could have. She never so much as caressed me back, but was patient with my fumbling. When her love-hair got in my nostril and made me sneeze, she said merrily, "Stinky old beast, isn't she? Now you make her sneeze."

I did, many times over many days, till I was myself misty-loined from just her hearty pleasure and my lack of fear.

This is a true story and that's how I recall feeling about it then. My young heart was broken, and now I'd encountered firsthand the reason I couldn't resent Pinky's attitude. I thought I was being clever. I was proud to have seduced someone. The boy did leave me alone, but I had the most unpleasant and outside-all-worlds dreams of that woman for many summers since. This wasn't a good beginning.

In the meantime, there was a girl I'd caught eyeing me more than once. She was a woman-aged girl, with a full hand of double summer-marks and another one on her right thumb, but no children. She had a firm body with a few scars, though she was smaller of stature than even Pinky, let alone a man. Her breasts were about my size. I knew her name; she'd been whispered about as a troublesome older offerling around the time I had my first toe marks.

I didn't feel I needed to bring her a gift; I was the gift. She scoffed at the whispering-trees much like you scoff at them nowadays, but you say "they're for old people" and she said "they're for offerlings". My pride stung, I said, "I'm the wisewoman's daughter; have you ever bathed in the river at night?"

Which of course she hadn't. While I floated the charms and spoke the words that ward off night-murmurers, she built a fire after the hunters' fashion. The chilly water never once made her shiver. She could swim, which I didn't know girls could do. The way my mother told it, if you took just two or three steps too far, the unnameable goddess pulled you under and made you a night-murmurer. Was this girl even afraid of them, or did she just never go to the river at night because nobody did except my mother and I? Would she say "it's for wisewomen" with the same slight contempt?

But she enjoyed her swim, while I waded about keeping my eyes on her in case she needed more otherworldly protection. Afterwards, we lay on the sandy bank wet-haired and naked, the fire crackling between us. I told her I wasn't new to sweetening loins, but would only do it to her if she laid loving hands on my body and taught me the finest caresses.

She laughed at my saying "loins", and made me learn and repeat words of which "woman-snail" was the mildest. The fire was cold when I woke up, but we were warm. The river sparkled. The girl's hands flowed over me like a different river: the one of honey in which Esidwe trapped Orog's fastest wind, turning it into a river of rushing honey. But Esidwe hunts alone and shuns the love of men and women alike. Pinky had been like that goddess in all the hurtful ways. This girl was the opposite.

I didn't need anybody's mother now. Coming openly to this girl's hut was as good as having been claimed by a man. We sweetened each other's loins, sometimes at the same time. She told me to eat less boar lard and more fruit because "it will make your pretty piss-kitten more delicious".

Ever the huntress: even in the way she sprang just the right foul word on you at just the right time to leave you equal parts embarrassed and exhilarated. Yes, yes, it was Natei. Who else? You can't protect the name of someone who was unlike anyone. Nor does hers need protecting.

Sometimes when I was in her arms, or pinned down and sucking on her small breast lowered into my face, I remembered how Pinky had relished being stronger than me. I pictured Natei overpowering Pinky easily while wanting nothing from her. The thought made me bite my lip and cling closer, or bite Natei's teat with a soft moan.

I bit her breasts a lot, contrary both to my false repute as a "fondler" and to what I myself used to imagine I'd enjoy doing. Once I got carried away. My playful teeth were doing nothing to her, while her slippery hand going back and forth held me in complete thrall. A strange wave of loving hate came over me. I stuffed as much of Natei's breast in my mouth as I could, bit down hard, and waggled my head with a stifled cry that sounded like I was receiving pain and not causing it. This only lasted a few brief moments. I let go, frightened and embarrassed. Natei's hand never lost its rhythm.

"Orog! I forget myself," I said, struggling to catch my breath. "Did it hurt?"

"Yes," she said--with such perfect indifference that a kind of shining cramp pressed my thighs together, trapping her hand, and I had a love-letting wilder than any before it.

I lay panting for a while, then stirred, meaning to give her a long apology with my tongue--but Natei got up, stepped over me, and stood staring at the splash of sunset light under the lynx skin that covered her hut's entrance.

I sat up and leaned my head against her taut buttock. "Am I in trouble?"

It sounded a lot like Pinky's lying voice. Can a question be a lie? This one can.

"No," Natei tried to say with the same indifference as before, but I knew her soft spots by then. That little act, that guilty innocence, worked on her just like it would've worked on me. I only ever used the trick for one thing: to bring my huntress back to me when she became mysterious. I never wanted another you-can't-have-them-Lawa situation.

Natei ruffled my hair with her nearer hand, which happened to be the clean one. "This is a little confusing, that's all. I'm a killer of things that bite, and now I'm fucking one."

I ran my fingers up her muscular calf. "What about Fuck-Off? You're not killing him."

Fuck-Off was the name she'd given a tame young jackal who sometimes came to her hut. She'd toss him bones and scratch him behind the ears. I complained about the fleas, and made her drink a rather foul-tasting brew that repelled them.

"I don't know," Natei said. "He's a friend."

"What's a friend?" I tickled the back of her knee. "What does that mean to you?"

She thought for a while.

"Someone you can sit and do nothing together with, I suppose."

May she be forever merry in the world behind the pine trees.

Now was a good time to say it, but she will appear in this story once more. Let's briefly turn to Pinky now.

For a while after our talk in the far meadows, I watched her with every feeling at once: the good kind of annoyance, a more tender kind of longing, a bitter kind of gratitude, and an almost chaste curiosity. Gradually only that curiosity remained. Pinky didn't seem to have gotten a mate, despite being as fond as ever of discussing who did what with whom. Yet there was something else, something very new about her that I couldn't place.

Once a man came up to me and asked what Pinky had meant by saying, "stop breathing on my piglets; only Lawa's allowed to do that!" Wasn't I seeing Natei?

I said, "The pinky just made it up hoping the wisewoman's daughter's name would make you leave her alone. But this isn't the first time she's made things up about me and her, and there's much gossip about it among the young, who like to think me and Natei is the false rumor since it's the less interesting one to them. So if you don't leave the pinky alone, I'll have to criss-curse you for my own sake--lest people of my age, who I most need to look up to me in times-yet-unlived, start already now to question my otherworldly powers."

My confidence grew as I spoke, and I ended up sounding surprisingly like my mother. I was still afraid he, too, would jibe about a whore's curse, but he had the prudence of grown manhood. He only asked why I didn't punish Pinky for spreading falsehoods.

Had he asked me earlier--before I bargained with Natei on the riverbank, before I learned her moods and her soft spots, before I began to pick up the of-this-world skill of saying things that are just true enough, or are as good as the truth--I might've honestly, stupidly told the man about the unnameable god and the wrong-colored mouse. Instead, I said: "Not punish her? Have you heard her complain on her moon-days? Now I'm learning how to give a man moon-days without making him bleed all power from his loins."

That was the first time I almost knew what I was doing when it came to Pinky; the first time I no longer felt that in every little thing that still connected us, I was at the mercy of her whims with only myself to blame for it.

The hot moons ended. One day I was out where the oo-bird oo's, collecting the black mushroom for my mother, when it began to drizzle and before I knew it, I was caught under a downpour. The soft ground quickly turned to mud that my feet were sinking in up to the ankles. So rather than drag myself all the way to our day-hut, dirty-footed and miserable in front of any who might be peeking outside, or hopping about in the rain as some children do in any weather, I thought I'd stop by Natei's hut. She'd surely have her hearth lit.

When I moved apart the halves of the lynx-skin, my first thought was that I'd got lost and had come to the wrong hut. But there was no mistaking the scar on Natei's left side. She was on her knees, her head buried between the plump thighs of another first-summer girl.

Which one? Ah, you probably don't remember her, if you're old enough to have known her at all. It was Daba. Daba with the dimpled cheeks. What happened to her and did I have a hand in it? You'll find out soon.

Back when we were offerlings, I liked to kiss her dimples. We all did. Looking at her made you think of wholesome things. She was never as prim as I tried my best to avoid being, but there was a calm and good-natured seriousness about her that made us feel we already had a woman among us, without all the talking-down.

And here was Daba, leaning awkwardly against the wall with her knees slightly bent, her smooth, gently rounded belly going up and down above my girl's head. Orog! Daba had the single small fold across her navel that was so prized by boys and men. Her breasts, slightly heavier than Pinky's, had seemed too cozy to me to spare a second glance at, but it was breasts like these that were crassly said to suck in much man-spill before they gave any milk. I'd thought, therefore, that Daba would likely be the first of our summer's lot to bear a child; and she had to do this to me instead. Worse, her wholesome beauty didn't save her from looking and sounding daft while doing it.

I never took my eyes off Natei when she was sweetening my loins, so that I could meet her gaze anytime she decided to look up. I found it rude to speak while I was myself a word on a loving tongue. Daba's eyes were closed, and she was babbling something about a spider.

"--and it turns out you were the spider, Natei--the big spider was you--ah--it feels so good to be eaten--it's yours--ah--it's just yours, Natei--it hasn't been loved--the boy from the Hill put it in my backside--but you--aah--you were the spider in my dream--it's all yours--if you suck my womb out I won't--ah!--I won't mind, I'm afraid to give birth anyway--"

"SHUT UP!"

Daba opened her eyes and screamed. For all she knew, I might have popped up beside the hot hearth by otherworldly means. I swear to you, her squeaking almost infuriated me more than the situation itself--though of course I also knew this was just what Natei enjoyed, and what I'd only deigned to give her a poor imitation of when it suited me.

"Are you gonna fuck an offerling next?" I growled at Natei when she turned her wet face to my wet face. A hair was stuck to her upper lip. I hated the thought that Daba's loins had made her forget everything in this world including the pouring rain outside, so she might think I was crying.

"Never heard me get in, did you?" I said with deliberate calm. "Some huntress."

"I thought you were Fuck-Off," she said in a voice I now realized wasn't indifferent, just immovable, like our ears compared to a jackal's. "Wondered why I didn't smell him from afar in this weather, but... you know." She wiped her mouth.

"Go outside, Natei," I said. "You don't fear cold water and you need a cooling-down, while I need the fire."

I only said it to be more outrageous than outraged. Daring to throw Natei out of her own hut gave me some momentary relief. Yet she obeyed and stepped out into the rain. That panicked Daba, but I turned to her and said, with genuine indifference, "She'll keep an eye out. Natei can do that from where you can't see her."

That, and the tone I said it in, must've given Daba a false hope that she wasn't in terrible trouble. She reached with her foot for her bottomwrap, which Natei had had her knees on.

"Wait for your cunt to dry first, Daba dear," I said very sweetly. "You don't want a stinky bottomwrap."

She pulled her foot away and stood there, covering her groin.

"Come and dry it by the fireside," I said, my voice still sweet. "There's no need to be ashamed. No one can see you but Natei, me, and Orog, and we all enjoy the sight of an unwrapped girl without being crass about it. Come on, Daba, we've known each other all our lives, I'm curious. Don't be stuck-up. A bare cunt is so much better than muddy feet." I wiggled my toes, on which not one mark could be seen.

She sat down on her knees, hands folded in her lap. So much worse for her, I thought. Just a small bit of the rapt submission she's shown Natei might have softened my heart. All I got was her usual patient, modest self. She found a way to look wholesome even now.. And after her initial scare, it seemed she was taking all this as a new turn in her exciting adventure, and no more than that.

"You look wonderful when you've just been loved, Daba. I'd have covered your face with kisses if you weren't naked." I stretched myself. "Now what shall I do with you for stealing my mate?"

Her unease was instant. "I didn't know--I--Natei never told me--"

"The dream told you. How can you be eaten by a giant spider in a dream and think it foretold a good thing? It's one thing to not listen to our parents--none of us do, and we're right more often than wrong--but what the gods reveal to us is another matter."

This was just the tone I used to catch myself taking as an offerling, and be embarrassed. Now it made me feel powerful. I was being a little hypocritical; I could never make much sense out of my own dreams, even the urgently foreboding ones. When I recounted them to my mother, they seemed robbed of some important but indescribable details, and my mother's interpretations sounded like they were about someone else's dreams entirely.

"It was a blind spider," Daba muttered, blinking slowly. "Somebody led it to me--a woman, I think--"

"See?" I pointed a finger at her, and rummaged in my waist-sack with my other hand. "Now, I have nothing on me that any unnameable god would want"--I relished another glimmer of false hope in her eyes--"but there are still the funny gods, and the smallest of them are the fastest to stop being funny."

I took a black mushroom out of the sack, and cut off its cap with my mother's charmed green cutting-rock. Daba looked on intently. I clasped the mushroom's stalk in my hand and chanted, "O great Telili, mighty as a sparrow, fearsome as a sneeze, here I swear on the carved fang that I saw your foe, the cowardly Yaruru, asleep in a cavern between the legs of one Daba, of Orog's tribe! Save her before he awakes, I beseech you!" I tossed the mushroom's cap into the hearth.

I wished I'd picked her love-hair off Natei's lip and used a more serious criss-curse. Daba seemed more amused than worried. This was like our games from before we had toe marks, where the silliest objects became the carved fang and were pretend-sworn on. I was pleading for her to be saved. Surely that boded well so far?

Then I took out another black mushroom and cut it. "O great Yaruru, thunderous as a butterfly, wise as a boulder, here I swear on the carved fang that I saw your foe, the ignoble Telili, asleep in a cavern between the legs of one Daba, of Orog's tribe! Save her before he awakes, I beseech you!"

The second mushroom's cap went into the fire. Now she understood.

"Those two really hate each other, but their burning little fists miss every punch, so wherever they fight the surrounding things take the blows. And the longer they fight, the bigger and hotter they grow." I grinned; I smirked; I was beaming. "Do you feel them yet?"

Daba shifted in place, and put her hands under herself.

"No use," I said. "They're so tiny, they'll slip through your fingers. But they're worse than any tiny thing with a terrible bite. Over there, O great one!" I shouted, and pointed with my dirty big toe towards what Daba was guarding. "That was Yaruru, I think."

She sat unmoving, her mouth slightly open. "Nothing," she muttered, and then said, "Oh."

"Oh?"

"I don't know what I'm supposed to feel--you know--after Natei--oh--that felt strange--a kind of tingle--oh!--how long are they--how long until they--is it worse than moon-days? are they afraid of the moon? when I said I didn't care if my womb--oh! oh!--I just wanted some love, Lawa! it wasn't my fault--now they're definitely in there--please, Lawa--I'll never go near Natei again--please tell them to fight somewhere else--you have more of those--oh!--it's worse now--more of those mushrooms and I--I'll do anything you--I'll wash the mud off your feet--I'll--" She looked pleadingly into my eyes, and wet herself.

"Clever!" I laughed. "That might flush them out."

She tried to stop it and couldn't. A puddle was growing on the bottomwrap spread underneath her. She gave up and took her hands off the flooded cavern where Telili had fought Yaruru. I looked away; how unfair that out of the three pairs of parted thighs I'd seen thus far, two had been revolting in one way or another.