. 01

Chapter 11: Dumis

Part 1

Many passers-by lingered at decorously furnished shops such as she had never seen in Pirion. Some of them had enlarged windows so that goods could be displayed. There was much life here in such a busy city, which she surveyed in the first flush of her arrival with an open mind. It would have been difficult not to taste the excitement inspired by the beautiful and fanciful goods for sale. She was drawn towards one shop which caught her eye because of the varied colours of the finery it displayed. She pulled Ravelleon behind her. He allowed her to lead him, pleased that she should appreciate the good things his nation could offer. She found it to be a corset makers shop. There were many beautiful Prancirian ladies, with maids and children in attendance, surrounded by many coloured corsets hung from shelves in every stage of production. Her eye was caught by pretty pink stays, smooth as ivory, pearl buttons at the shoulder. She had worn Prancirian costume often for many months now, and she wore it now. The shape of the female body, which it accentuated, still excited her.

She continued along the busy street, almost forgetful of her General in her excitement. It was tempting to peer into each shop front. Shops selling necklaces or little crosses to be worn around the neck or beads. There were shops full of fans, shoes, and dressmakers shops. Amongst the crowds of proud businessmen and humbled clerks, compliant housewives, long suffering workmen, beggars and visitors from far and wide, Danella felt herself to be a simple innocent. She came from a land where there was no money, not the kind which these people traded feverishly over shop counters, betrayed each other for, and flourished about so generously. Pirion seemed such a quiet place by contrast, save for the cries of lovers which could be heard nowhere here. These people filled their lives with other thoughts it seemed. The people on these city streets all seemed to have something urgent to perform, whether they performed duties for employers or sought to purchase some small object which they desired.

They came past a grand railway station, fronted by huge blocks of stone, and roofed by a glass dome. The most important means of locomotion here was the steam train. Trains were so bulky they looked like whole rows of houses on the move. The remarkable railway development in Vanmar was probably due to the immense number of citizens who needed to travel, often on a daily basis and the interconnected, specialised nature of their economies. As she had seen in the shops there was a great demand for produced goods of many kinds, which all needed to be transported. Steam ships were used for marine transport.

Danella's first visit to the metropolis of one of the great empires of Vanmar, the capital of Prancir, Dumis, was an outstanding experience. Everything was at once so strange, and yet slightly familiar, by comparison with the Empire of the Goddess.

There were streets and many windowed stores and offices. In the older parts of the city the streets were narrow, and so congested by carriages, horses and pedestrians. The crowds that streamed along these footpaths were more varied than in her own Empire. The men wore shirts, and jackets, and trousers quite different from the tunics of the Goddess's Empire. Less flesh was visible on the legs and the arms were covered. The women also displayed less flesh although curiously to Danella their fashions accentuated the shape of the female body by often baring the neck and upper chest above the breasts while the stomach was constricted by a corset which made the flesh appear narrower than was really the case. The hips were emphasised by long dresses which were often built wide around the hips, and covered the legs completely. Indeed these dresses tended to trail along the ground. The overall effect was quite pleasing although Danella could not help feeling the women were quite constricted by what they wore. Taking such clothes off and then putting them on again would be quite time consuming tasks. The ladies also wore hats which made them look less than real in Danella's eyes although when she grew used to the appearance of them, she began to like the look of them, being so different from the styles of the Goddess's Empire. The men wore hats, rounded hats with brims for the men who worked in offices, taller flat topped hats with brims for the men who had money or wished to look as if they did. Many of the women wore gloves.

Here then, was a massive host of people who in spite of their oddities, were essentially people much the same as in Shanla or Dalos. They went about their private affairs with assurance, unaware how a spectator from the Goddess's Empire found them strange. They were alive and busy, shopping, staring, talking, working. Children dragged at their mothers' hands. Old men with whitened hair bowed over walking sticks, somehow seeming to be aged earlier in this more competitive society. Young men eyed young women, but that was as far as most of them seemed prepared to go. The prosperous were easily to be distinguished from the unfortunate by their newer and richer clothes, their confident and sometimes arrogant bearing.

Here as in Pirion infants were being born every hour, clamouring for food, and very soon for companionship. They discovered what pain was, and what loneliness, and if they were lucky, love was. They grew up, moulded by the harsh or kindly pressure of their fellows, to be either well nurtured, generous, sound, or mentally crippled, bitter, unwittingly vindictive. One and all they desperately craved the bliss of true community; and very few, fewer here perhaps than in Danella's own society found more than that vanishing flavour of it. They howled with the pack and hounded with the pack. Starved both physically and mentally, they trawled over the quarry and tore one another to pieces, were afflicted with hunger, physical or mental. Sometimes some of them paused and asked what it was all for; and there followed a battle of words, but no clear answer. Suddenly they were old and finished.

This continent had produced a race which looked basically the same as her own, though in culture and attitude quite different. All the characteristics and desires of the spirit manifested in her own Empire's society had their equivalents in the history of Prancir and the other nations of Vanmar. As with the Goddess's Empire there had been dark periods and periods of brilliance, phases of advancement and of retreat. Many of the differences, of course, were superficial, but there was also an underlying difference in culture which Danella took long to understand fully, which came from the different attitudes to the sexual life and to competitive economic life. The animal nature of the Vanmarians was at bottom the same as for the people of the Goddess. They responded with anger, fear, hate, tenderness, and curiosity the same way.

As the races and languages of the Vanmarians were more varied than in the Goddess's land the strife between groups whose appearance or languages were repugnant to one another played a great part in history. Each race or nation tended to believe that its own appearance or language or culture was characteristic of all the finest qualities of appearance or language or culture. In former times the differences between nations and races had been true signs of differences, but in modern times and particularly in the more developed lands, there had been great changes. Not only had the races ceased to be clearly localised, but also industrial civilisation had produced similarities of culture which rendered the old racial distinctions meaningless. The ancient cultural differences, although they may now have no meaning at all, and although the members of one nation might have different cultural attitudes within themselves, they still felt superior to the cultures and peoples of other races or nations despite often having no obvious cultural or appearance differences. In Prancir many of them considered themselves to be the very 'salt of the earth'.

In what was often the first experience of full sexual discovery newly married couples were liable to be disappointed in one another on their wedding night due to ignorance and high expectation. Since in the great majority of unions neither person was perfect in knowledge or performance, both were willing to pretend to the world that all was well. Sometimes there would turn out to be a distressing incompatibility between the two. The whole population was rotten with the neuroses of repressed sexual desire and disappointments, and the effort of keeping secret the tragedies of marriage.

In Vanmar, nearly all the chief means of production, nearly all the mines, factories, railways, ships, were controlled for private profit by a minority of the population. These privileged individuals were able to force the masses to work for them on pain of starvation. The tragic farce inherent in such a system was already approaching. The owners directed the energy of the workers increasingly toward the production of more means of production rather than the fulfilment of the needs of individual life, for machinery might bring profit to the owners; bread or human pleasures and services would not. With the increasing competition of machine with machine, profits declined, and therefore wages and therefore effective demand for goods. Products which could not find their market were destroyed though, in many places bellies were underfed and backs underclad. Unemployment, disorder and stern repression had increased as the economic system disintegrated.

Danella went with Ravelleon everywhere in those two weeks. His duties were not onerous at this moment and he could delegate some of his duller duties to underlings amongst his staff. The war was in a quiet phase as supplies were regenerated and gains consolidated. It seemed that Pirion was unable to mount an effective counterattack. Their armies ran at the approach of the Vanmarians. Life was too precious to them and they would not stand. He kept this knowledge from Danella largely. He knew her sympathies and could understand them to some extent. They were her countrymen. He surprised himself that he could love one of the enemy so much, but she was beautiful and she was a woman. That made her an exception. All men would make allowances for such as her. He could live with her criticisms of his calling, and his opinions. He enjoyed arguing with her when they were not engaged in love. She was intelligent, more so than his wife, who contented herself with the chit chat of women's concerns and had little interest in the war, or in what her husband did when he was away from home for most of the year. She helped him to understand the people of Pirion better, but she remained ignorant of the truth of her nation's sloth, of how it had sunk into thick sand while the free nations of Vanmar cut through the waves, building speed with progress and development while man grew in material wealth and achievement. But he found he could understand more about how the people of Pirion lived and worked. They were not schooled to be soldiers any more than they were to create inventions or raise their children to achieve something in life. Her descriptions of her people confirmed his impressions of their soft weakness. They were susceptible to the laziness of the flesh, all of them. Given a choice between building and making plenty, and the sloth of spending all of time in orgies of self congratulated and shallow introductions to strangers, they chose the easy lazy route, and they never achieved anything with their lives.

He had found, since Danella had enmeshed him in the web of her charms, that his own life had achieved a greater balance. He had been missing something when he had only his wife to give him the relief he needed. They had a good marriage. He had chosen well, and she served him and raised the children well. She had been a virgin at their marriage as all good women were in Prancir and it had been up to him to teach her the joys of love. Even to this day she would not suck his penis, even though since his affair with Danella had begun he had once again tried to persuade her, when he visited her in the country, that it was acceptable and pleasurable between a man and a wife. She had refused as he knew she would. "That is disgusting, where have you gained the idea that that is normal?" she had asked. He had not liked the suspicion in her eyes when she asked that, but afterwards he sensed a sort of pity of him in her, as if it was he that had been at fault for imagining that such practices might be normal.

It was a woman's superiority which she had displayed. Even though he was the master of the house and the breadwinner there were some things in which women seemed to regard themselves as having special knowledge. The province of love and marriage, and all sexual matters which came within that, were deemed to be theirs. When men transgressed from the rules women had declared they were to be admonished, deprived of sex or pitied. His wife had chosen the latter, so it seemed. There was a certain humour in her attitude as if it were the suggestion of a child, and not of a mighty General who had seen far more of the world than she had. He had wondered why she felt no excitement for such variation of sex. Surely she must be curious to find out what it was like to take the thick erect penis of the man who was her husband into her mouth for the first time. It gave him excitement with Danella and it would have with his wife, but in her there was no sign of curiosity, only condemnation and pity. Maybe she wanted only those techniques of love which would serve her more directly. Otherwise she was an enthusiastic lover. She knew she had a good man, a strong man. They had always liked to kiss and cuddle and the act of love was often prolonged and mutually satisfying.

Since he had met Danella he had tried to introduce other techniques of the priestesses to his wife. She would not let him lick her private parts but he had begun to stroke her privates far more than ever before. He had always tried to satisfy his wife but his experiences with Danella made him realise that he had rarely satisfied her fully. A woman required a full and long stimulation for the fulfilment of her pleasure. They had always held each other and stroked each other but now he spent long periods massaging his wife and had been able to persuade her to massage him all over. She had taken to these new practices with much enthusiasm as if it had been something she had desired in the past but been too polite to ask. He wondered if she ever wondered at the changes he had brought to their lovemaking. She had commented that she liked it and asked where he had got the ideas. He said he had heard about these techniques from other soldiers. When they were alone without female company at the front men talked more openly about the pleasures they had left behind them, it was only natural. "That's disgusting," she had said, referring to the idea that men should talk about private things between themselves, "Even women do not do that. You know you will create a bad impression among your fellow soldiers if you participate in such conversations."

By comparison with his wife, Danella was so refreshing. She would do anything in bed and was always willing to serve his every need. She seemed to take pleasure from making him happy or excited. It felt like real love should be although he knew that, as a priestess and as a prostitute in Dalos, she was like that with all her customers. The idea bothered him. He knew now that he did feel love towards her and although her actions were like real love he did not trust her entirely. Yes, she obviously liked him sufficiently to want to be with him. She had given up her life in Dalos to be with him as his mistress in Prancir, but she had been one of the conquered in Dalos, a second class citizen, forced into a life of prostitution, which few Vanmarian women would have accepted. She had every reason to have accepted his offer just to get away from that sordid life - and yet he had to remind himself, the Pirionite Priestesses did not consider it sordid, they did what they were used to and had no thought of complaining. Incredible, he thought to himself. Sometimes he even accepted that it would be a pity if the women of Pirion became more like the women of Prancir, cold, calculating, greedy and opinionated so often. He had to remind himself that Danella had chosen to leave her friends and compatriots behind in Dalos. She had done that for him. What other reason could there be than that she must love him. She had told him that she wanted to travel the world to see the places she had never seen as a Priestess of Pirion, but there was no reason why she should not have that desire. She wanted to see Prancir with him.

And so for two weeks he had taken her out to see the city Dumis - operas, plays at the theatres, restaurants serving the best and the most varied foods in the world. They had together seen the buildings, the ruins of the ancient temples, the monasteries and abbeys still functioning, the brightest and best of the newer buildings on wide tree lined avenues which had befitted a new Empire, the towers built to the glory of Prancir and progress. In the early evenings or the late afternoons, and often the mornings as well, they had lain in Ravelleon's huge four post bed making love vigorously and gently, in turns, for hours and hours. It had been the best two weeks of his life. He had never realised that a person could have so much pleasure. Until now his life had been one of duty and of the competition to succeed. He had enjoyed good times with his wife, many times over the years, and even with previous girlfriends in the old days, but the good times were always bound by the need to show an acceptable face, or by the requirement to return to duty, or by his wife's judgements of what was right and wrong, and of course by the children also. The last two weeks were a great pleasure, but even so he must return to duty and he would be away from his new love for most of the time.