Chapter 18

There were very few Ocean People who welcomed Demure's presence in their village. But those few included all the elders and older marriageable men. And amongst these few, Demure was respected if not necessarily liked and recognised as someone who made a voluble, perhaps even valuable, contribution to the village's debates.

Glade was sure she wasn't the only one who recognised that much of Demure's patronage by the elderly and influential in the village was directly related to her intimate activities outside these debates, although Glade was also the only who knew the true extent of Demure's promiscuity amongst men flattered by the single-minded attention of such an attractive and determined young woman.

It was easily apparent how Demure was being rewarded for her ardent wooing of the best-connected villagers and this did nothing to bolster her popularity amongst those less favoured. Demure enjoyed privileges most normally enjoyed by those much older than her. She was excused most of the foraging duties expected of the village women although she benefited as much as anyone from its rewards. When the village was blessed by a particularly good kill, such as sea cow, shark or hog, Demure partook of the rather larger share apportioned to the elders amongst whom she usually sat.

"Don't the men mind that you have sex with each and every one of them?" Glade remarked as she sniffed the dry semen on her lover's inside thigh. "What do they think of the fact that you spread your attentions so thinly?"

"Not as thinly as you think, my dearest," said Demure with a smile as she placed a hand on Glade's head while her lover licked off the stains. "My attention is focused almost entirely on the highest ranking men in the village."

"But there is no such ranking amongst the Ocean People," Glade countered. "All villagers are equal."

"Most influential then, my pedantic sweetheart," Demure said. "Every man I make love with thinks that he is the only one, that he is special, and that nobody else is so favoured."

"Is this true of me as it is of the men?" Glade wondered bitterly.

"Of course not," said Demure with a seductive smile. "How can that be? I live with you. I make love with you every day: often more than just once. I love you."

"As you love Cuttlefish. Just as you adore Sea Lion. Just as you are so nearly betrothed to Cormorant."

"Surely not Cormorant," laughed Demure. "He's too old for even me. I should think it would take a miracle to bring Cormorant's cock to life. And, anyway, he's blind and very nearly deaf."

"Why should that present an obstacle to you?"

"Oh my dear!" Demure said with a whimsical smile. "Are you jealous? And you've fucked more men in this village than Cormorant has years. Not one day since I've lived here have you not fucked someone or other. Are you still fucking Dolphin, for instance?"

"Not for nearly a moon," said Glade. "And you? Are you fucking him too?"

"This afternoon," smiled Demure. "It's his seed smeared over my flesh."

"I thought I recognised the taste," said Glade.

Ivory didn't warm to Glade's account of Demure. "Surely you knew she was just using you like she was everyone else?" she asked as they trudged up the hill away from the caves where they'd stayed the night. The detour from the normal route had taken the entire village along a rougher track than they'd have followed otherwise and many villagers had already forgotten the benefits of a day's rest and were bitterly cursing the extra exertion.

"I did know," said Glade as she hauled Ivory up and over a large boulder that stood in their way. "And Demure didn't mind that I knew. She wasn't trying to deceive me. She was open about her skill at manipulating people and often joked about this: above all when she had some extra food or gift from the men she wooed. But nothing was stopping me from leaving Demure at any time. She wasn't holding me captive, although I doubt I'd be truly welcome back into the bosoms of Macaque and Dignity since they so deeply disapproved of my relationship with her."

Nonetheless, Glade tried to maintain her friendship with the couple with whom she'd once been so close and took the opportunity of the announcement of Dignity's pregnancy to visit them. Dignity had only the faintest suggestion of her gravid state and neither she nor Macaque was at all sure who the father could be. There were many plausible candidates and some of those were Ocean People. However, as the prospective father had equal opportunity to impregnate Macaque there was no ground for jealousy between the two women.

"The wonder isn't that Dignity is pregnant," said Macaque as Glade nestled between her arms and Dignity's on the straw-strewn floor of the couple's home. "The wonder is more that you aren't. How can so many men fuck you and you remain childless?"

Glade shook her head sadly. "It's my misfortune and destiny never to be a mother."

"Just it is with your lover also," spat out Dignity. "The world can be grateful that she is one woman who hasn't afflicted it with her offspring. You can also be sure that if she did have a child she'd make certain that its father was one of the elders."

This Glade knew to be true. Demure had frequently remarked on her desire to become pregnant and her greatest concern was just who the father would be. But try as she would, Demure was no more successful in becoming impregnated by one of the natives of the village than she had been by her husband, Lord Valour.

"It's so fucking frustrating!" Demure moaned to Glade as her menstrual cycle once again culminated only in the monthly release of blood. "If I was a mother I'd automatically gain influence and respect. Instead I am treated like a mere child by the elders."

"That's not true," said Glade. "You're the only one not born by the ocean who has any sway in the meetings."

"And what fucking use is that?" asked Demure bitterly. "What this village needs to do is to step forward and take a more prominent role. We need to expand our range along the beach: perhaps build satellite villages. There is so much wealth in the sea and it is criminal that the village exploits so little of it."

"I'm not sure that the Ocean People want to form a kingdom of villages like the Knights," remarked Glade. "And I'm fairly certain that there aren't many in the village who want you to be the one who tells them what they should do."

However, Glade seriously underestimated Demure's powers of persuasion and influence amongst the elders. Although Demure never publicly expressed an opinion at all contrary to the orthodoxy of the tribe's views, Glade noticed that those men who had most recently or most often enjoyed her body were the ones who made proposals that sounded dangerously like Demure's private beliefs.

There was the issue of the maintenance of the beacons used to communicate with other villages. The proposal was raised that since the pyre had to be much higher than that of neighbouring villages because of the local geography that an extra tithe should be demanded from the neighbours as compensation. Then there was the debate whether the huts should be allocated not by the fortunes of circumstance but by reference to the individual's status. There was also the question of the share from the kills, where it was proposed that the elders should be allocated larger portions in recognition of all they had done for the village.

In all these discussions, Demure was careful to only express decidedly conservative opinions with a democratic bias. The fervour with which she defended the doctrine of liberty and equality was uncompromising, but she would eventually concede in the interests of fraternity that it might well be necessary to dilute the purity of these principles.

Although attendance at the village debates was far from mandatory, almost everyone came along. This was mostly because there was little alternative entertainment, but despite the high turnout only a few people such as Demure ever spoke whilst most other people were happy just to enjoy the company. It was towards the end of such meetings when everyone was most tired and the general consensus was that nothing of real importance remained to be debated that one of Demure's lovers would make a proposal that in some small way would change how the village functioned. And this proposal would eventually be resolved by a compromise whose actual implication no one really understood.

"Are you sure we need a small militia, Dugong?" Demure asked towards the end of one debate. "Because isn't that what you're proposing: that we have a body of hunters trained to act as guardians to the elders."

Dugong was confused. "I most certainly am not proposing that the village employs soldiers. That's the way of the petty tyrants of old. But we must have the ability to defend ourselves against aggressors."

"And who are these aggressors?" asked Demure. "I don't see any of them at this meeting. And we have good relations with our neighbours..."

" ... although the village of the Sea Otters refused to offer an extra tithe towards the upkeep of the beacon," reminded one of the elders.

"We have mostly good relations with our neighbours," Demure corrected herself. "What then, Dugong, is the need for a defensive corps?"

At the end of the meeting, however, the village once again agreed to reform its practices. This time it was to assign some of the younger hunters to guard duty despite it being Demure's stated view that such an institution was the thin end of a wedge towards militarising the Ocean People's culture. "But if it's necessary to protect the elders from hot-headed fools and vicious outsiders, then it has to be so," Demure eventually conceded.

"Why are you doing this?" Glade asked Demure when they retired to their hut after the debate. "I'm not taken in and I don't think everyone else is. It was you who persuaded Dugong to propose that the village should have some kind of armed guard. Just as you were the one who got Sea Gull to propose that a fence be built around the elders' huts. Just as you were the one behind the memorial to the ancestors in the village square and the unnecessarily provocative tithe on the beacons. Why are you trying to subvert the village?"

"It's not me who makes these proposals," Demure protested.

"That's because you want to be seen as the great defender of the village's traditions and so you get others to make these proposals in your stead," Glade said. "You'd never get away with it if you weren't fucking every man in the village with even the smallest influence. And what are you trying to do? Make the culture of the Ocean People like that of the Knights?"

"Although the Knights were undoubtedly cruel," said Demure, "they were much more prosperous than the Ocean People."

"Only for those who had titles and slaves," said Glade. "What do you want the Ocean People to do next? Enslave tribes such as yours and mine rather than welcome them into the village?"

It was obvious that Glade wasn't the only villager troubled by Demure's machinations. There were others from Glade's original company just as apprehensive about Demure's increasingly prominent role in the village and remembered her only too well as the woman who'd once been Lord Valour's wife. Demure wasn't the only former Knight who had close relations with the Ocean People. Audacity was the last surviving male Knight, but he was so utterly converted to the ways of the Ocean People that only his skin's charcoal darkness gave evidence that he was originally from another tribe. Although Glade, Demure and the others dressed in the style of the Ocean People and for the most part spoke in their language, Audacity had gone as far as to take a wife from the Ocean People who was now the mother of a child partway in hue between a Knight and a native. The Ocean People now mostly treated him as one of their own. However, he very rarely spoke in the meetings. He'd come from a very lowly caste in the Knights' village and remained reluctant to speak up for himself.

But he was not to remain silent forever, although it was with a tremulous voice that betrayed his nervousness however much he spoke the language of the Ocean People with more fluency than Demure and nearly as competently as Glade.

"Your opinions have changed a great deal since when you lived with the Knights of the Savannah," he said after Demure had just spoken to modify a motion put forward by Dugong to enhance the quality of the elders' housing, having reluctantly conceded that they deserved such privilege.

Demure affected not to have heard Audacity. "The value of the elders must not be understated..." she began, but was interrupted by Audacity's wife, Sea Urchin, who held their son to her bosom.

"Why do we always listen to this woman?" Sea Urchin pleaded in a shrill voice. "What good has she done our village? Was she not exiled from the village of the Oyster Beds? And why was she exiled?"

"That is scarcely the issue," said Dolphin in a stern voice. "This debate is not about our dark guest from the savannah whose tribe as we all know was slaughtered in acts of vile and unspeakable cruelty. Our concern is the proposal made by Dugong to improve the housing of the elders..."

"Elders who deserve respect," said Demure firmly.

"Respect maybe," said Audacity more forcefully, "but not the status of a lord or lady." He stood up and strode dramatically around the fire that blazed in the centre of the encircling company. "I respect the elders. It is only right to do so. But what Demure wishes to do is raise the elders to the level of lords and ladies. For it is only by marriage to a lord that Demure can once again be a lady."