Belonger (An erotic novel): Part One (12 page)

“
Either we wait or we go,”
said Emma, putting a
simple
face to their deliberations.

She peered skeptically about
the
cavern, steeped in the soft scarlet
gaze of the gnome hung above
. It was
chillier than when they had arrived, and the ceiling dripped in
places, sprinkling them
from time to time
as the boat meandered
. She wondered what
the weather might be like on the surface,
conjurable in this forgotten place only as a hazy impression
of green and blue
. Was it
raining?

“
If we have to
hide
somewhere,
we won’t do much better than
this
,”
Ione
considered. “
There’s
plenty of space and the water is clean, for the time being anyway.”
This option hung solemnly in their midst till a slipper giggled in
the distance.

“
Why don’t we stay then?”
Manassa suggested, somehow managing to sound
lighthearted.

“
We have almost no juice
left, for one thing,” Emma sighed. “We’re down to that apricot
swill.”

Ione knew this was not an immediate problem
as pure water was technically all they needed to survive. But
access to a variety of fruits and vegetables or their captured
juices was one of the fundamental pleasures of appetite—and there
weren’t many others in their current circumstances. Just sex and
conversation really, mostly with slippers that could barely
talk.

“
Plus, the
women
will pick up on our
confusion
soon
, and
it will get harder to
manage
them
,” Emma dragged on.
“Especially without any men around for–

Ione looked bluntly
away,
implicitly censuring her
partner,
and the exchange lapsed to
silence
. Their activities prior to sleeping
still vexed her and she had no desire to discuss anything even
tangentially related to sex with Manassa listening.

“
Men around for what?” the
big woman wondered. Emma
did not respond
and she
turned
to
Ione
.

“
I thought you said we had
to avoid them
.”

“
Yes. But sometimes under
very specific circumstances…” Ione shrugged suggestively, but Emma
was more articulate.

“
It’s hard to go without a
few guys for sex when there are this many slippers involved. We
usually kept a skulk or two for pleasure in the past.”

Manassa was interested. “Did they like it? Or
try to get away? Was it fun?”

“
It was only possible
because we were careful and well prepared,” Ione sniffed. “And
we
never
got
greedy. Never kept more than two.” Skulk behavior changed radically
when three of them lurked in the same place.

She rose to her feet and
Emma
followed her to the headboard, staring
at the various
currents
exiting
the cavern.

“
So which one leads to the
Lap?”
Manassa yawned
,
joining them. T
he bedboat pitched at their concentrated weight, and
Ione could feel the heat of her great body at
close range. She found herself reflexively glancing down to the
other woman’s nude vulva, but averted her gaze before anyone
noticed.

Most of the outgoing
channels were broad enough to accommodate their
bedboats
, but several
looked shallow, raising the grim prospect of grounding out far
down some futile tributary.

“
I’d go with the second
from the left,”
Emma
pointed, indicating the widest but worst illuminated of the
alternatives.

“
Me too,” Manassa
decided.

Ione
nodded. She had already decided on that route but was
gratified by their concurrence
.
“L
et’s get the boats
packed, then. We
might as well leave
now.”

Not long after they were in
convoy formation, and the cavern was left to a
wistful
silence.

The
ir
journey
was
unchallenging
at first, negotiated
without
trouble
through a tunnel of
black, ivy-draped
stone
that rose
to either side
in
blurred increments.
Soft brown
roots wandered furtively at the
waterline, some wrist-thick
. It was a
little warmer
here
,
and they were
all
glad to be
moving
.
The women were
generally quiet, respectful of Ione’s stated desire for
discretion and Manassa’s brisk enforcement of the
policy.

They were confronted with
their first navigational exigency when a sharp delta loomed
suddenly
before them to
bisect the channel.
Staring intently
into the murky possibilities beyond,
Ione
dimly discerned
that the left
tributary
washed down to a
spiraling
sinkhole cloaked by a shivering
effluvial mist; a fate
they were
just
able to
avoid
, though she was
forced to stop the convoy to rescue its last, lagging craft when it
failed to bear right as required. A stout length of rope and a trix
of heaving women retrieved it against the current amidst much
cursing and questioning, and Ione installed two of the most
sensible slippers on the craft to serve as a kind of
rearguard.
She signaled to the boats for
closer spacing and they continued in a more tentative posture for a
while.

Ione took advantage of the time available to
begin educating the slippers. This was mostly a matter of
establishing stronger contexts of function and communication, but
she directed Emma and Manassa to work on discrete forms of
knowledge, too. Her lover was engaged for a while by the
instruction of numbers, moving from boat to boat when convenient,
holding up fingers in illustration as she drilled the women.

“
Let’s start over. It goes
one, two, three, four, five, then a
six
. Stay with me! Next it’s sixone,
sixtwo, sixthree, sixfour, sixfive, then a
dox
, or double six. Then it’s doxone,
doxtwo, doxthree, doxfour, doxfive, then a
trix
, or triple six. Then trixone,
trixtwo, trixthree and so forth. Pay attention, you two by the
prow… yes, you! Now, a quadruple six is a
quax
, and a quintuple six is a
quix
. A sextuple six is
a
sex
. And a six
of sexes is a
sen
,
the largest number with a name. We’ll start from the beginning
again…”

After a long while
t
he channel merged into a rounding current
that swept by a series of jagged vertical rents in the stone. Some
of them were no wider than a body, but others were broad enough to
permit the passage of a bedboat. All promised dangerously
unilluminated maneuvering that seemed lunacy to
pursue
, yet there was no way to know
if one of them
led somewhere they might
recognize
. After a brief consultation with
Emma Ione fretfully let them slip
by
unexamined.

The
stream
brought them along a
broad
arc
to
a low chamber suffused with a booming resonance
from the confluence of several heavy currents.
The ceiling was pocked with
twisting
fissures and
chimneys that leaked a steady
rain onto them
, markedly warmer
in places
.
There was almost no light.
The women were fearfully silent, roused by a subliminal menace
to occupy defensive postures about the bedboats. Two great arched
tunnels led onward.

“
Let’s decide quickly,” Emma
whispered
, peering warily
ahead
. “Left, maybe?”

“
Wait!” said Ione,
scanning
the
shadows
to that
side.
She reached out with the oar
to
snag a
muddy
article from a spar of rock at
the waterline, lofting it for the others to see; a jacket of
clearly masculine dimensions—skulk clothing.

“
Other way!” she ordered.
Manassa and Emma furiously waved everyone to the right and they
passed through the archway into a root-strewn series of caverns,
each offering a spectacle of mirror-still pools to one side or
both, some of them large enough to cup tiny islands. A dim-eyed
glow gnome sat cross-legged on one of these, source of a scant blue
radiance that had guided them through their recent interval of
travel. Ione wondered who had brought them to the subterranean
world. The cavern was disturbingly quiet, but no
threat had obviously
materialized as yet
.

“
Let’s get it,” she decided.
It was the first one they had encountered that might be
conveniently acquired.

Emma stayed with the bedboat as she and
Manassa jumped onto the bank, then waded out into its little pond.
Approaching it slowly, Ione saw it wasn’t secured in any way, and
they hauled it back toward the lead vessel without lingering,
baffled by its randomly veering gaze as they wrestled its mass
about. Positioned at the prow it threw a useful quantity of light
ahead of them, and after fussing with its orientation for a bit
they were traveling with modest confidence again.

Some time later she called a halt and passed
out the last of the juice recovered with the boats, but no one
wanted to dwell where they had stopped and they were quickly
underway again.

Not long after they were
forced to slow where sizable rocks emerged from the current
to
cast
stippled
reflections toward them and rippling wakes to the lee. Their boat
ground against one, was jarred instantly
off-course
by its bulk, forcing them
to hastily correct their orientation with the oars.

“
Get the slippers to be
careful here,” Ione instructed Emma, and the smaller woman waved
and shouted to the vessels behind them, doing what she could to
convey this imperative.

The stream
became
steadily more
treacherous,
never
impossible to pass but
consumingly
tedious
to navigate. They
were
forced to space the boats widely,
allowing each to find its way
,
visible to one another only as vague
shadows.
This left everyone more or at less
on their own, but there were no exiting channels to confound them
and
Ione gradually
allowed
their craft
to slip
ahead
. The light grew brighter,
building to a deep blue-green radiance that stunned the
eye.

A
s
a musical roar
built before them Emma turned to her half-hopefully.
“Do you remember
this?”

Ione
nodded
, squinting.
“Maybe. If the stream turns right…”

They were
shortly
accelerating
down a
waterway
sluiced
by narrowing borders toward a hard bend, wherefrom
several
currents
flung outward at high
speed
.

“
We’ve been
here!
”
Emma
shouted.

“
Yes.” Ione dropped low to
keep her balance.
“There should be a bank
we can
reach
on the
right side, and we need to drag each boat
around
as it comes through.” She was
excited now, relieved to recognize a waypoint on the migration to
the Lap. Looking back, she tried to locate the next boat in the
convoy, now long out of view.

Emma regarded Manassa’s
legs, sturdily planted on the mattress under her casually swaying
mass. “Maybe
we
should
let her
do it…”

Ione stiffened, abruptly fathoming that her
authority might be surrendered to the bigger woman by a series of
compromising comparisons rather than a direct confrontation of some
kind. But she was too preoccupied with their immediate concerns for
the moment to indulge this troubling speculation and nodded
brusquely.