Feathers

CHAPTER THREE

"Already our child weighs heavy on me and slows my labors, my beloved." My darling wife Alta casually mentioned to me late one evening, just after mid-summer.

"I sure that it does!" I congenially replied. Already her belly was quite swollen and she still had several months left before the child was due to be born.

"Indeed, I'm quite falling behind in my labors! I have the animals to tend to, and most of the spring wool still to be cleaned, carded and spun, not to mention my knitting! To do all that must be done, we really need an additional hand or two... and perhaps also full time cook with kitchen skills better than mine."

"Still, there are no hired men to be found, anywhere in the valley, or perhaps further! This farm once needed many strong men to tend, and now we struggle with just us two. There is no helping it!" I sadly remarked.

"Not so!" She quickly replied, actually a bit much too quickly. "I know of a good worker or two that's looking for a position."

"You know that we have little silver." I cautiously reminded her. Alta had a rather heavy coin purse of her own that she had earned during the war but I had resisted her every offer to help contribute to our finances.

"We have more than you think, but we shall need little of it." She replied. "The helpers that I'm thinking of shall require little other than room and board, which we can well afford. With more hands, our farm can be quite profitable indeed someday."

The smile on her face alone should have warned me. If I had ever really realized how much gold was inside of her purse I never would have worried about our finances ever again. As senior patrol lieutenant for Lord Loren's cavalry, she had joined with his patrol squad from its earliest days and over the course of the long campaign she had earned several coin bonuses from either his hand or from Lord Boyle or Rowan themselves, for her leadership and heroism. Her fortune already rivaled that of our local baron, and her fortune, mostly in factor letters of credit was eventually redeemed for buying land that made her eventually the single greatest largeholder in the entire valley.

Amused, I blithely went on with my work and domestic duties for a few days until I returned home from the fields one evening to meet the first of our new household help.

**********

Cwen was perhaps the prettiest girl in the entire town. She was tall and had long golden cornsilk hair, but she was much prettier and far kinder a person than Melenna had ever been. She was the daughter of the Hayward, the man assigned by Baron Hamworth to tend to all of his many hay fields in the valley. She had been a year behind me in school and she could do accounts and sums with the best of the boys, and certainly better than I ever could. There had been a rumor that my father had suggested her to be the next steward in training, but that the old traditional baron was unwilling to allow a woman to hold that august position.

She quite knew everything there was to know about running a large estate, such as our farm, which was indeed one of the largest in the valley, albeit currently mostly underutilized and fallow. I cheerfully handed over all of the account books and let her handle the administrative details from that day onward.

That night, I also learned about her other, equally important duties. My beloved wife had just selected her first 'sister-wife'!

"Take off your dress, so that our husband and I can better admire your charms!" Alta suggested right after dinner, in voice that wasn't quite an order, but near enough so that it brook little opposition. A few buttons were unfastened and her simple dress fell to the bedroom floor, revealing herself to be naked underneath.

"You're very beautiful." Alta commented, quite entirely accurately, and I murmured my own agreement. "Come to me now, and let us kiss as

geswusletéra

, sister-wives, to share each other's love as we together now share our man!" She whispered as they now embraced. In the old tongue, technically

geswusletéra

literally means 'slut-sister-wife', and it's a rather crude term for women who share each other in love, as well as a husband. Everything sounds nicer in the old-tongue... especially the starting of my new harem!

The two women cuddled and kissed, and with little hesitation. Alta was certain no stranger to the methods that two women used to make love with each other, and Cwen, having lived for over seven years in a land nearly quite without men, had apparently learned a thing or two herself. As Alta's own thin shift joined Cwen's on the floor, the two women kissed naked briefly once more and then joined hands as they walked the few steps together towards the bed. For an hour, I watched them take their pleasure with each other from the large bedside chair, until they at length took a break from eating each other's cunts to beckon me to join them on the bed, which sudden didn't seem quite large enough for the three of us.

With plenty of kisses all around, I was bidden to take my pleasure with Cwen, as Alta kissed her sister-wife and my oath-wife lovingly grasped and placed my cock at the entrance to Cwen's cunt, giving it a lick and kiss before she parted the well-licked cuntlips for my cockhead to enter her sister-wife.

"Fuck her hard!" She whispered into my ear as I thrust into her. "Fill her belly with child, like mine!" She demanded, and I gave it my best try, soon filling her cunt and hopefully her fertile womb with my seed. With Alta's encouragement, she bade her slut-sister to also take my seed into her mouth and later once more into her tightly clinched ass, so that our traditional consorting could be complete. She did not enjoy this rear entry nearly as much as Alta had, and she rarely requested that sort of overly snug attention in the future.

We slept that night as a husband and pair of wives in contented bliss. Little did I know that my darling Alta was just now getting started!

**********

Our next new addition to our household, and our increasingly crowded bedroom was Burwynne, daughter of our town baker. She too was accounted to be a top beauty of the town, with rusty-brunet hair that nearly reached her pert ass. She knew her trade well and she possessed culinary skills far beyond Alta's meager ones. From the start, she took over the care of our hearth and home, up at first light with us to cook and bake for her new sister-wives and husband until the last dishes from supper were cleaned. Her talents in the bedroom nearly equaled Alta's and she was of a frisky and energetic disposition in bed, loving her slut sister-wives and her man with equal enthusiasm. Her pert heart shaped ass loved sodomy, especially after her petite trim belly began to show her own swift pregnancy.

If I thought for a moment that Alta would be satisfied with having only two other sister-wives, I was soon corrected otherwise. Once the challenges of getting the autumn harvest in from our eight planted fields began to overwhelm me, suddenly two extra field-hands appeared to assist me in my labors... and ensure that I fell into sleep each night completely exhausted.

Eadgife & Eadgyva were twins, equally beautiful young women just a bit older than I was, and elated to find a good happy home away from their forlorn parents, who had despaired of ever consorting them. I laughingly accepted their parent's earnest gifts of silver, and we even we gifted another adjoining field of good farmland which I had no means of plowing anytime soon. They worked with me tirelessly in the fields, and both were insatiable in bed, showing no reluctance to even make love to each other when they had worn out the rest of their sister-wives. Both loved oral sex, in all of its forms, and if I felt two dueling tongues stroking my cock in the middle of the night, I could be certain without even cracking an eye that it was the twins trying to coax another load of cum out of me.

Already it was necessary for a new much larger bed, and I made this my first task after getting our eight fields harvested. The grain from one field alone was enough to serve our needs for the year, and after storing much of another field's grain for seed for the spring, we had a great deal of surplus crops to sell at market, earning us more silver than I had ever handled in my life. Fortunately, I let Cwen handle all of the details, but I could tell that she was already making us wealthy, even without Alta's treasure. When two nearby fallow fields came up for sale that winter, she bought them both, quickly and shrewdly.

Someday, I joked, our children were going to be the largest farmers of the Jasper Valley, and Cwen took it as a compliment.

***********

With five consorts, under a peaceable and loving roof, we spent a happy winter intertwined together in bed. Somehow the important winter tasks of the farm managed to get done, but by the start of spring Alta made sure that each of my wives was pregnant. She had delivered our first child, a son, and from that moment onwards she began to lovingly, but firmly, manage our bedroom schedules. In her idealized world, her sister-wife's would be placed on a staggered but regular schedule for impregnation, with a month or two in-between each wife's childbirth. Thus in turn, each wife would receive particular attention when fertile, on a fixed rotating schedule.

Alta privately admitted that she had a fetish for seeing every woman around her pregnant, preferably by me, and she went about her appointed task with a zeal that both amazed and amused me. She loved to watch me having sex, and she enjoyed caressing or licking my balls when I came inside of one of my wives while she loudly urged me to fuck them harder, and fill their wombs with my seed. Once my juice filled my wife to overflowing, Atla would then kiss and caress her breasts and slowly move her tongue downwards to lick out her cunt and slowly savor with her tongue the cream that flowed from the well-fucked cunt, until I was aroused enough to remount her and fill her yet again.

That spring, with each sister-wife now with child, Alta decided it was time to add a few more new wives into the schedule, before she placed herself back at the top of the list!

*************

Leofleda, Gode and Sexburhe each entered into our lives that spring and by late summer, they all were ripening with child. Like in the case of the twins, each new wife earned me sincere thanks from their parents, and more wife-geld; more granted lands, and even good coin. Parents were increasingly desperate to make any consorting arrangements that could be found for the hundred or so remaining young women without consorts, and the notion that their daughter was sharing their husband with a flock of other sister-wives offended no one. More than anything, the valley yearned for children to replace those lost by the war, and each birth was a blessing according to our priests.

Leofleda was the daughter of a shepherd from the southern hills and mountains near the borders of Everdun and Aldaria, and at once she assumed control over our previously ill-tended flock of sheep. Her father, who was quite advanced in years and had no other children to tend his own flocks, gifted us much of his own flocks, and plenty of good pastureland in the hills at the north of our valley for them to graze. She was dark of complexion, with a strong nose that more than suggested that some raiding Caestorian had been very familiar with either her mother or grandmother. Her hair was long and raven black. In bed she was quiet, a follower rather than a leader. Truth be told, in bed she preferred the soft touch of a woman to the penetration of a man, but it never became an issue with us. She bore me three strong children and loved each of them, and her sister-wives well.

Gode was a neighboring girlfriend of Leofleda's, also from the hills, but her expertise was with dairy cattle, and she carefully managed and grew our once small cattle herd wisely and well. Barely a grown woman of nineteen, she was an orphan, with her father and two brothers lost during the war. Still, this tragedy had never dampened her spirits, and no one ever heard a dispirited word from her. As her lands were merged with Leofleda's next door, we had more than ample good grazing ground for the cattle, and she added her inheritance for Cwen's wise management without complaint or concern. We didn't really need the coins, but Cwen wisely used them to buy out other farms and pasture lands nearby, so that someday our growing lands would connect and merge together seamlessly. In bed, unlike her girlfriend, she was adventurous and inventive, and constantly schemed to get as much bedtime with me as possible. She loved vaginal sex, and if she could have managed it, would have placed herself at the top of Alta's breeding listing the moment after giving birth. She loved everything about being pregnant, and she delivered to us a full ten healthy children before the Weavers decided that she had done her part in repopulating the valley.

Sexburhe was a rather strange and mysterious sort of woman a little older than the rest of us, but more than willing to share in our lives. Her father was the reeve of the town, administrating it for the baron, and she had attended school several years before me. She lacked Cwen's ambition, and was much contented to just help others wherever she could. For the most part she helped Burwynne with the household, and took over much of the nearby barnyard duties, tending to the pigs and the various fowl. She was the most thoughtful and perhaps the wisest of my wives, and she was the one everyone turned to for help with their private problems. It is hard for a group of women to all live together in peace, constantly without even minor disruptions, and Sexburhe became the arbitrator and peace-maker, the soother of all trifling and major wounds, and we all came to adore her. After two difficult pregnancies in which she miscarried both children, we dared not tempt fate by risking her life with another one. She instead became the second mother for much of our brood, and she loved all of the children in turn as if they were her own. Sex itself wasn't particularly important to her happiness, but she loved to cuddle with her sister-wives.

*********

Already, with eight wives, I had as much bedroom attention as I could handle. The next winter I spent enlarging our house to add a large nursery for the babies and rooms for the later use of our growing boys and girls, not to mention bedrooms for wives not listed on the posted bedroom schedule for the night who actually wanted to sleep that night, instead of playing in the master bedroom. Every night, Alta managed the list to make sure that one wife stayed with me until we were certain she was pregnant, or two terms of her fertile cycles had past, along with herself and another wife that rotated nightly. Somehow, I knew the extra bedrooms still wouldn't be enough, and I had to enlarge the wives' bedroom again the next winter, and add yet another one for the children. Actually, I seemed to need to add more rooms each and every winter.

Each season I acquired yet another new wife, until I nearly lost count. Next Wulfwyne, Wilflede, Ælfwenne and Hilda joined our happy family, giving me a full dozen sister-wives, and then another two, Luffa and Mildrede, joined us the following winter to give me a full fourteen wives, one for each month of the year. I suspected this was done so that Alta could better manage the bedroom schedule, giving each sister-wife a full month of preference.

I politely let my beloved Alta know that fourteen wives was quite all that I could handle and she agreed to call it quits adding formal sister-wives, but still, over the next few years, a great number of other assorted lonely unconsorted women constantly came and left the harem, once they had been inseminated with child. At least twice a month, I could count on a new, utterly unfamiliar woman appearing naked in my bed, eager to play... and hopefully have their womb fertilized with my child.

By the time of the twentieth anniversary of the battle of Lacestone, my fourteen wives had given birth to seventy-six children, not to mention the additional temporary playthings that my darling Alta had admitted to my bed in-between, with alarming regularity. If I had fathered a full hundred offspring, or more, it would not at all surprise me!

My old comrades, Hancy, Tirol and Gaston were nearly as fruitful, and I suspected that their sister-wives had admitted a few more fertile and rather neglected women into their beds as well. In a generation, the great catastrophe of our valley without men had been mostly corrected, much to the satisfaction of everyone.

************

At the start of winter of the year of the fiftieth anniversary of the battle, Alta and I decided that we should attend it, the final ceremony marking that great battle in which we had both taken part in. We had been some of the youngest warriors in that battle, but already age was quite catching up with the surviving veterans who were all now in their mid-sixties, at a minimum. Several of my companions had died even before the fortieth anniversary, and a few more had passed since. Now there were just four of us left in total, including Alta, and none of us were as frisky as we used to be. Three of my wives had already passed as well, and our horde of children were already mostly now in charge of managing and farming our extensive lands with families of their own. Indeed, Alta and I were by far the largest landowners in the entire valley, in fact now holding a vast majority of all the farmlands.

Ten years ago, we had attended the forty year reunion, and I had taken a few of my younger sons and a few select grandchildren along with us, as had a few of my old mates. Alfrid, my youngest son by Alta, met and fell quite head over heals in love with Earl Rowan and Gwenda's youngest daughter Cwengyth, and in a sudden courtship that astonished everyone, they declared their troth for each other. In the spirit of their martial mothers, both offspring had been born for battle, and together they served as officers for a small mercenary company that was keeping the piece in the western Barbur Valley of Oswein, where a narrow river valley cut into the Brittle Mountains and created a strategic pass into the Great Yarmouth Pass. Before the Great War, this valley was home to hordes of Boar-Men, but now men claimed this fertile pass, and my son and daughter-in-law scouted and patrolled this critical and still dangerous river valley. There are apparently still fouler creatures in the world than the Boar-Men.

***********

Arriving at Lacestone, were not surprised that we old veterans were still the youngest of the survivors present. In truth we had almost no old friends left to speak to, as Lord Loren had passed a few years earlier, much to Alta's sadness. My son's parents-in-law, Earl Rowan and Gwenda, both seemed to be especially frail, with the noble lady Gwenda appearing to be terribly pale and quite ill. We made our affectionate greetings to her and left her to her sickbed. Lord Rowan appeared little better, fraught with worry for his obviously failing wife. Still, I managed one all too brief conversation with him before he in turn took his leave for the evening.

"My Lord, and somewhat father-in-law," I confessed, "just how scared were you upon your very first great battle? I was a lad of still not yet quite sixteen on the day of this battle and I pissed my pants completely the moment that first boarman jumped out in front of me in the darkness outside of Haldyne."

"So did I!" He admitted also, "At the start of my first big fight on Dead Tree Island, the first time the Boar-Men rushed up to me, before I found and rescued Gwenda! They seemed as tall as the trees and I thought they'd cut me down like they were swatting an insect. Fortunately, I killed them first and won my confidence to face the rest. Their spilled blood covered the dampness on my front, fortunately, and then I had a long swim, so that my shame was well disguised. Being scared is just human, and admitting it."