A note from the author:
In Leslie Feinberg's novel, "Stone Butch Blues" (Firebrand Books, 1993) she talks about growing up in pre-Stonewall days, as a transgendered other, and the titillation and transgression of wearing men's BVDs at a time when hetero-gender roles were brutally enforced, especially by the NYC police. Writing amorous stories about female samurai, the Onna bugeisha, one starts to think about all the ways these Japanese women were breaking their own social codes. And, this being an erotic story, one has to wonder, "just what did they wear under their armor while riding into battle?" This is where me not being a historian becomes problematic. I am very much a Westerner (the unwashed, hairy barbarian sort) and while I know that my own culture has lots of hang-ups about men and women mix-and-matching each other's clothing, I don't know if that translates into Japanese taboos all that well. We're still laboring under that cockamamie Deuteronomy 22:5, "a woman must not wear men's clothing, nor a man wear women's clothing, for God detests anyone who does this," (New International Version, 1984) which is why I love the cojones of drag queens so much, you go, sistas, fight the power! But what about feudal Japan, say, around 1860? Sometimes I like to think the Onna bugeisha went commando, but I like transgression, so perhaps we can try something a bit more risque. If you've seen any historical samurai movies you might have seen male villagers running around in what appears to be 19th century thongs, the fundoshi, which, while I have tried, I found them a bit chaffing. For this story, though, set during the Mito Rebellion (May 1864 through January 1865), I'm assuming that these goddesses of war not only wore male fundoshi into battle but also wore them to bed as well. It was, after all, a revolutionary time; the Tokugawa Shogunate, which ruled for 268 years, was about to fall (you won't see that in this story, the rebels who supported the Emperor are crushed at Mito), but what this will do is usher in both the Meiji Restoration as well as the birth of Prime Minister Hideki Tojo (born December 30th, 1884) who, 57 years later, thought that bombing Pearl Harbor was a bloody good idea. Cheers!
* * *
It's still the same old story, a fight for love and glory,
a case of do or die. The world will always welcome lovers
as time goes by.
-- Dooley Wilson in "Casablanca" (1942)
June 17th, 1864
I.
"Do you like my breasts?"
She asked the younger woman this, quietly, not exactly cupping them as an offering, rather out of shyness. It was a move that made her lover's heart melt. After all that the older woman had been through, to be this open, this vulnerable, it made the most proud of hearts humble.
"You are more beautiful than anyone I have ever known," came the honest reply, to which she responded with a hungry kiss, the sort that did not stop at the lips but exploded into a series of tongue-lapping snogs, bites, nips, a multitude of succulent candy kisses all the way down the older woman's throat, across her muscled chest, between the round, scarred, tattooed glories of her breasts, climaxing in a hard, stiff suckling upon her erect bloody-brown nipple.
The younger woman ran her face down the curved, muscled legs offered to her, to where her damp, cotton thong, a fundoshi, made a wicked pale Y in the dark. She drew away from the older woman just a little then, kneeling, breathing her hot breath all over the fabric; causing the other to shudder, open her legs just a little at first, then much wider. Her eyes shone as she watched her lover nuzzle the now sodden cotton that guarded her cunt, her dark earth yoni.
"You have such beautiful legs," she said, running her warm hands up from her knees, along her thighs to trace her fingers along the lover's pubic bone, starting to kiss her there, lightly, to the delighted groans of deep anticipation.
"Please," and she mumbled the girl's name, not out of forgetfulness but lust, "please, suck my nipples again."
Her lover obliged, tonguing, nibbling. They kissed again, licking, sucking now, while her young fingers sought the inside her cunt, in eagerness the older woman stretched her thighs wider to allow her better access.
Boldly -- because how else could one love such a spirit? -- the younger woman returned her affection then to proffered cunt, nuzzling it gently with her nose, teased by her smell, that overpowering odor all equestrians bring to the bed, of horse-meat and muscles and blood; then, probing further, she entered her with her long, long tongue.
Her cleft was warm, salty from a life time of riding, she slid her hands around her muscled thighs to grasp her huge buttocks, hold firmly her cunt against her open mouth. The younger woman grasped her lover's lips, slid her tongue across the rude clitoris, circling first one way, then with a godlike slurp, the other. She pulled back again to see that the purple lips, rouged with red, were parted, gaping, her lover's eyes closed in something far better than blood lust, the globe of her right scarred, tattooed breast, heaving, tipped by a hard, erect nipple. The other, equally scarred and tattooed, was a barren hill, the nipple having been lost in battle many years ago.
The younger woman kneaded those massive cheeks again as she buried herself between her thighs, working her tongue deeper within, sucking her marrow, burrowing, circling her pulsating clit in between many, many wet-wet salt licks. The nub swelled in response and she, like with all candy, sucked a bit stronger. In our dreams all cunts taste like slick velvet in a night sky. Her lover was no exception; she tasted blood of a lifetime of war on her clitoris, girl-cum and desire. She pushed her mouth firmer against her pubic bone, as if she could suck, not only her entire hips into her mouth, but her soul.
There was a smell in the air, the sulfur of a slow burning gun, the hot wet slickness of purpose. The tramp of ten thousand feet through mud. The rage of an ocean storm against salt-incrusted rocks.
Now her lover was licking her in wide swathes and the two women fell into a hip-rubbing, cunt grinding, belly-gut rhythm. The warrior who was to lead her soldiers into battle held her girl-lips open so that her lover, a mere unwed woman of twenty-two years from the city of Edo, could nibble at her cum-bloated clit, as if everything in her body would simply melt like a red, hot wax, until her lover could suck it all down, gagging on the river of cum that flowed out of her. Her juices, a waterfall, ran into her mouth, over her face, drowning the world. The young woman lapped them up as she probed her ass deeply with three fingers. She found the spot, both deep in her anus and deep in her cunt, rubbed them together, sex magic, hero-worship at its most rude form, they were locked together in divine unison, both rocking, both gasping in rapture when the first shot of the rebellion were fired.
The worst of cunnilingus interruptus.
The older woman sprang to the window, her hair undone, her cum-splattered legs, staring out into the darkness.
Out from the great ancient forests clouds of gun smoke swept up; dense, sinister, the uproar of hundreds of rifles and cannons, a din that grew louder still. She could hear the voices, screams, the rough male sound of commands being given. She could see figures in the smoke, distorted, surreal, reappearing against a fiery background.
"Those cock suckers!" she cried. "They're here!"
II.
Sayomi, whose name means the one who is night born, saw the sun rise in a shower of cherry and orange against a sky of sapphire. It even touched the gloomy shades of forest; shy little flowers of periwinkle, nestled in the grass, holding up their heads at the touch. From the window in the room in which she had nursed her grievously wounded sister, Ankoku, Sayomi looked out at the sunrise, saw only the leaves of summer moving gently in the warm breeze.
The young woman's mind was not at rest, though. She had heard the rumbling of cart wheels, the tread of feet, the movement of a great celestial host with many queer and muffled sounds mixed underneath, all passing by in the dead of the night. Now that the morning was here, the old house seemed desolate, abandoned. Sayomi was lonely. She looked outside, saw nothing living among the bushes. Only signs that something vast and terrible had paused there long enough ago to feed an entire army. Here and there smouldered the dregs of camp fires, she could make out the spot where the tent of the Commander had stood; yet that too was now gone. Not a sound came to her ears save those that the forest made. The oppressive silence of a summer day felt like an omen.
Her older sister lay under her bedclothes, asleep; her armor piled in the corner of the room, her slashed coat covering her many crudely drawn bandages. Lady Anei was in the next room, having refused to return to Edo. She would remain near her lover, she said. Nevertheless, Sayomi felt absolutely alone, deserted by the rest of the world.
Then, coming out of the forest, Sayomi saw a single rider come near; the most fantastic figure that she had ever beheld; a woman in full battle dress, erect in the saddle, her head crowned with magnificent bushy iron-gray hair like a night demon's, though her eyes gleamed silver as the moon behind a pair of spectacles. The rider came straight toward the window of the house, the feet of her horse making no sound at all as it tromped upon the sward.
"Bliss, bliss and heaven," the younger woman thought. "Here is gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh."
Sayomi tried not to cry, for Chiyo, her soul mate, whose name translated roughly as "She the Eternal," had come to bid her desire goodbye, perhaps forever.
