Duty and Desire

"And thought of doing something to the shore

That water never did to land before."

from "Once by the Pacific " by Robert Frost

Eleni dug her paddle into the turquoise water, furiously propelling herself towards her meeting with Marano, Ocean Master, fighting down her fear and anger with physical effort. She wore a filmy cotton wrap, and her lean brown body glowed through, clinging to her breasts and thighs as she began to sweat from the exertion. The fate of her village depended on how well she pleased Marano. The seers of her village had declared that the signs of the Ocean Master's wrath - black, sticky tides, a school of dead fish lining the shore, destructive tsunami waves, and contrary winds - were a sign that he required a sexual liaison with a young and beautiful woman from the village. Eleni, had "volunteered". That is, after an evening and night and morning of flattery, dire predictions, and emotional manipulation from the Council Elders, her exhausted mother had agreed that Eleni should do what was required to stave off the Ocean Master's wrath.

"And to top it all off, I'm supposed to have a baby by this arrogant monster," Eleni muttered resentfully. The Elders thought that, if Marano's own child were to live in the Whiterock community, then he would be benevolent to its people. Privately, Eleni swore that if she became pregnant as a result of this day's work, the Ocean Master's offspring would never see the light of day.

She glanced back over her shoulder at the shore. Her people watched, anticipating this encounter that might save all their lives. Eleni's mother, however, could not watch. She had secluded herself in her cottage, crying and praying. "Well, I'm doing this for you, Mama, not for those selfish crabguts. Let them row out and fuck the God if they think it's so critical," Eleni murmured. "At least, they'll leave you alone after this. And maybe the dead fish will stop coming in on the tide. " She noticed that none of the village's children were on the shore watching her row. That was a mercy; the little ones would not see her humiliation.

Finally, her little raft reached the spot the Seer had told her to await Marano; at the tip of an equilateral triangle, her village on one corner, the God's island on the other. She drifted and waited.

Nothing happened. The sweat ran down and stung her eyes She stood, and said the words she had been told to say:

"Marano, I am here! For my people, you may take your pleasures on this body!"

Conscious of the watchers on the shore, with some embarrassment and some excitement, she loosened the ties on the sarong, preparing to step out of it, and let her perfect, slim and shapely body free to the sun and wind. But a voice stopped her, a voice composed of salt wind and wave sound, deep and reverberating.

"Leave it."

Eleni looked around for the speaker, but saw no one. Then again, the voice reached her inner hearing.

"Leave it. I will remove it myself. "

This time, she saw a shadow on the ocean, moving towards her. Where it passed, the waves calmed, and became glassy clear. Slowly a man-shape formed, a tall and broad-chested man, turquoise skinned, with green-black hair snaking down his shoulders. He was naked, his amorphous genitals made out of the same thought-stuff, saltwater bound by consciousness. His eyes were ever-changing, from grey to green to blue, and their depths were unfathomable. When she looked in his eyes, she felt herself losing her grounding, becoming lost and adrift, a current pulling her inward without choice. He came near, and his icy touch chilled her arm.

She began to tremble. She had half-feared, half-hoped that the legends were not true, that no one would show up for this liaison. Yet here he was, to collect his tithe from the village. She was duty-bound have to let this embodied spirit take her body in whatever way he was able, and there was no turning back from her promise to her people.

Still, he seemed gentle enough at first. As he had promised, Marano unwound the sarong, its ties parting at his touch, letting it drop to the floor of the raft. The raft itself was now still as if on dry land under the ocean-god's spell, the waves stilled and mirror-smooth in a hundred-meter circle radius. Marano cupped her round young breasts with his salt-smelling hands and bent to kiss her mouth.

Trying not to cry, and to stop shaking, Eleni opened her mouth to Marano's. His probing tongue met hers, caressed it gently. Suddenly, she was no longer cold, as one becomes used to swimming in cold water within moments. She pressed herself against him, feeling his phallus take shape, and rise to press against her groin.

His tongue left her mouth, licked the tears from her cheeks.

"Salt," sighed the voice like a wave booming in a cavern. "Am I so terrifying, then? Is there only duty here, or could you want this, too?"

"I do... want you," said Eleni, knowing now that it was true. She opened her legs slightly to let Marano's phallus rub her clitoris and vulva. Her knees were weak.

"But I am afraid to lose myself in you. I am afraid..."

On the shore, the Council strained to see. Eleni had disappeared in a grey fog, centered only on the raft. But it was a good sign.

"The God cloaks her", said the Eldest. "Only she can see him."

The rest were disappointed. Already, many were aroused, men and women, eyes bright. The members of the male Elders swelled under their robes, poking out the robe's fabric. The female Elders had unaccustomed wetness moistening the insides of their thighs. The grey knot of mist around Eleni's raft was a screen for all their hopes and fantasies.

"I cannot promise you will still be yourself, after," said the ocean-master. "all life is change, and you will indeed be Changed. But I will calm the waves, and your people will fish in peace. Is this not what you came for?"

Eleni nodded, unable to speak coherently. She could no longer stand. She sank to her knees, and her face at a level with the god's penis-form, opened her mouth and embraced it.

He sighed, and leaned in to her face, holding her head at the back of her skull. He began to move back and forth, Eleni's lips and tongue circling the shaft in the ways her Auntie had taught her.

Eleni's mind went back to her Auntie's sewing room, the old woman's eyes bright as she demonstrated on a gourd. "If you are to give ocean-master pleasure, you must try this. Perhaps then he will be gentler on you."

But then auntie and all her advice left Eleni's mind, as Marano too sank down on his knees, then gently helped her to lie down. His body now seemed warm and comforting as a sleepy lagoon. He kissed her again, and this time she met him without hesitation. Tongues meeting, her legs opened, and she thought, "Now he will take me, now this is it." She waited, braced for the first punishing thrust.

But instead, Marano's hand insinuated itself inside her, and his fingers explored and tickled her inside ridges, and her clit. She began to feel heat building in her loins. She moaned and arched, tried to pull him back on top of her, beyond ready for him to plunge in.

But he laughed, like the shush shush of the receding tide. "Not so fast, little one. It is my wish that you too, feel pleasure, that this be not all horrid duty for you. Let me...."

And now, somehow, his insubstantial hand bent in inhuman ways, for she felt him both inside and outside, and even around her anus, brushing her thighs, all over. She was beyond words now, arching back, head moving side to side. And still he kept on caressing her.

Then he curled and wriggled and bent, and that tongue, like a sea anemone, warm and tingling, passed over her secret places.

"Ahhhhhh... so salty, yet earthy, too. You are of the land, your taste is foreign, the flavor...mmmm."

The voice lost itself exploring all her crevices and crannies. Eleni's knees were open wide and trembling, her hands on the Ocean Master's tangled seawrack hair, her eyes shut. She had never imagined it could be like this. It went on for stretched-out minutes, the waves now rocking the raft gently. Finally, her hands urging him, silently begging him, she managed to pull him back up so she could kiss him again.

"You know that I am not human. I can fashion this body as I please. And so it is my pleasure to pleasure you...thus.. And Marano grew an appendage from his groin, a small, round, flexible finger that curled around Eleni's clitoris and vibrated it intensely. Her cried pierced the dank air as she orgasmed.

Then, finally, with a move like a leaping seal he was inside, the large round smooth phallus probing her cervix, pounding in and out inexorably as the tides, she couldn't stop it, didn't want to, and the extra fingerling still rubbing her clit around and around, vibrating,

Screaming, she took him in, the raft now rocking with the force of his thrusts. The ocean-master, losing control, let the mist evaporate, and the watchers on the shore saw their Eleni, naked and open, her rhythmic cries faint and far like a seagull's, the blue-green figure of their marine deity on top of her, fucking her deeply and continuously as the raft bobbed on the waves.

The watchers began to reach for each other, in sympathy, grabbing the nearest partner without respect for marital bonds or usual sexual preferences. Soon the beach was filled with writhing, fornicating bodies, in pairs and triples, and the occasional watcher, hands on groin, stroking along with the wild coupling on the raft.

Eleni, her physical boundaries blending with Marano's, knew the deep violet silence at the bottom of the offshore trenches, the flickering gleams of the light-making fish, the bottom dwellers. She knew the rhythms of the tide, not the usual monthly tug at her ovaries, but the ceaseless flexing of the world like a slow-beating heart. She knew the wild joy of the leaping dolphins, and appreciated the complex operatic sagas of the Blue Whales.

Marano felt the glow of a hearth fire, hands kneading dough, the feel of rich earth dug deep in the fingers, and the warmth of a friend's greeting at the end of the day's work. He understood finally the love of the people for their land, and their rootedness in it, burying their dead and their placentas in it generation after generation. It was this he had wanted, envious of stability when his nature was fluid, for this he had tormented the village with dead fish and monsoons. . He understood finally and bleakly that none of it could ever be his.

Marano sobbed aloud with regret and longing, and groaning, climaxed in a riptide wave, that built, overbalanced, and came down, frothing on the sand, its force spent. His physical body splashed out and evaporated. For Eleni, the warm weight was gone from her, the pulsing force from inside her leaving her drenched, aching, and chilled as the sun sank into dusk.

Only the voice remained, and a shadow in the trembling air.

"Farewell, lovely one. You have done your...duty...well. "

The bitterness and loneliness in Marano's voice would haunt her forever. But Eleni mechanically gathered her sarong around herself, aware but uncaring of the watching eyes, and rowed back to shore, her loins aching, her throat swollen with sympathetic sobs that she would never allow to voice. It was done. Her duty. The rest....was none of their business.

Eleni indeed was Changed. She was honored and envied in the community, much in demand as a maid of honor and midwife. She married late in life, after having had brief romances with a few of the young men in town. She had found that, as soon as she became attached to a youth, he was likely to have an accident on the sea. One was crushed when the mast of his schooner inexplicably broke on a calm day. Another was dragged away by a shark while trawling his nets. And so on.

The rumors began, that Eleni was Marano's Chosen, that no man would ever replace him in her heart, and that the god jealously put aside any who would try. There was no child from her union with the ocean-master. There were rumors about that, too, but Eleni confided in no one, not even her mother.

And Eleni resented the rumors, even as she knew that they were true, for many nights, she lay half-awake, hands stroking and probing her own body, reliving that afternoon on the raft. Sometimes, too, she would rise from her bed, after, and walk to the cliffs overlooking the ocean, and stand watching the moon's wavering path on the waves, the surf breaking far below. But if she called to him, he never answered in words; only the ceaseless pounding of the waves on the rocks echoed the throbbing in her groin, reminding her how it had felt to make love with the sea itself.

Yet Marano kept his word; and the little village was not troubled by floods, or tsunami, or hurricanes, or shark attacks, for almost a decade. Eleni's attention to duty had achieved that much.

She tried once to leave, to travel far inland, to a town where no one had ever heard her name. During the year of her absence, the little village of Whiterock experienced minor storms and ravages from the deep. Houses and boats were destroyed, the fish found other spawning grounds.

Marano knew that neither spite nor requesting another youth would soothe his spirit; for his lust was the loneliness of the ocean for the shore. Bitterly he knew the truth - that one does not absorb the qualities one wants by fucking the person who has them. And so he contented himself with petty mischief against the landbound, while ceaselessly roaming and managing his own watery domain.

One sunrise when a thousand dead herring lined the beaches, staring up at the dull sun with their silver eyes, Eleni returned. She made polite chit-chat with the neighbors, then retired to her old cabin on the cliffs.

The next morning, when a neighbor came for gossip and tea, Eleni was gone. The morning dew glistened on her damp footprints walking to the rocks of the cliff. There they disappeared.

Only old Katchi noticed another set of footprints, with unusual webbed toes, and her report was put down to senility. When the constable had been rousted from his bed to take a report, all traces of footprints had evaporated.

The years passed, and Whiterock prospered. Mishaps from the sea were few and minor. Its fishing liveihood became an industry; a factory was built. Quaint olde shops appeared to lure the tourists in. Eleni's cottage became a historical landmark, and her story (edited for children's ears) was told to the sore footed, camera-toting travelers. And the question was sometimes asked, but never answered:

Why did Eleni rejoin her watery consort? Was it duty....or was it desire?