Chapter 22

The voyage north that Glade would make across the Great Sea wasn't one she'd planned and most definitely not one she would have chosen, although it was true that she and Demure had often sat together on the shore and looked over a sea that stretched towards the North rather than the West. And they'd often speculated whether this water stretched to the very end of the world or whether there might be land beyond.

"The further North we go," observed Glade, "the further we are from the Sun. And the further away the Sun, the cooler it is. If we travelled across the sea it would just get colder and colder."

"No one would want to live where it's colder than even here," said Demure, shivering under the deer-skin that covered her shoulders even though it was now Spring. "Perhaps the sea has no other shore. Perhaps it goes on forever."

"So where do the ice floes come from?"

Demure shook her head. "Perhaps it's so cold that the sea turns to ice," she ventured.

The lovers were now living together with a tribe of Raft People who tolerated the women's presence in their village for as long as they were willing to provide sexual services whenever requested. This was a tribe with a fairly relaxed attitude towards life. They were generally communal in all that they consumed, whether it was food, drink or sex. Like Glade's own tribe, it was a community of mutual sharing. There was no concept of private property, private life or even privacy.

This openness and generosity was possible because the tribe lived in a region of great bounty. There was fruit from the tree; flesh from the migrating herds of deer and antelope; and, as a result of the tribe's expertise at fishing from rafts, no shortage of food from the sea.

Initially Demure found life amongst this tribe rather disconcerting. All her life she was accustomed to taking advantage of other people's weaknesses and here were people whose weaknesses she didn't know how to exploit. They had no understanding of status. They had no concept of ownership or privilege. Her attempts to gain advantage over other people were met with incomprehension. But eventually even she relaxed. If her talent at manipulation wasn't going to get her anywhere then perhaps it was better if she didn't even try.

Glade was more at home although she still missed the warmth of the South and the shelter of the Forest. She revelled in the license to fuck and the generosity of a people who had plenty to eat and plenty to spare. She became skilled at using the rafts the tribe employed to such advantage and passed on as much of her knowledge as she could to Demure for whom laziness was her chief obstacle to learning. Glade's lover was naturally intelligent, even if her aptitude was most often manifest as deviousness and cunning. Soon enough she also had sufficient skill at handling the rafts to make a useful contribution to food-gathering which in turn ensured that the lovers' presence could continue to be tolerated.

Glade soon discovered that rafting wasn't as simple as just pushing the raft onto the sea's surface. There was skill involved in making a raft behave. One could use sticks with flattened ends that could steer the raft in any direction. There was a variety of sticks to use. Some were employed to spear fish, some to paddle the raft and others to navigate shallow waters. It was also advisable to carry aboard a thin canvass of deer or antelope hide which, supported on a framework of sticks tied together by sinews, could catch the breeze and manoeuvre the raft out to sea where there was a greater haul of fish.

There were many other skills associated with using a raft at which the Raft People were expert, such as how the raft was constructed and how fish were caught. This last employed the art of weaving together intricate nets from sinews and reeds which could be used to catch many fish at once. The Raft People were ingenious in many other ways. They came up with novel and sometimes surprising solutions to the problem of how to capture the fruit of the sea. Sometimes they followed flocks of sea-birds to where they congregated above a great harvest of small fish. Sometimes they left woven baskets on the shore to capture lobsters and crabs when the tide was high. There was always plenty of game and fruits to harvest on the days when the sea was too rough for even the hardiest fisherman.

Glade and Demure became almost complacent. Perchance now, at last, they wouldn't one day need to set off again in pursuit of a new home when the goodwill of their hosts was exhausted. Perhaps the two women could simply settle together as a couple unusual more for their intimate closeness than for their sexual predilection.

Perhaps they could grow old together.

But, inevitably, this was not to be.

Ivory also had to adjust to unwelcome change. Although she missed Glade terribly, she was kept too occupied during the day to fall victim to depression. At night she was distracted by Ptarmigan's relatively innocuous fondling. Although she'd expected Glade and the chief to be away for more than a couple of days, it was now a quarter the way through the moon's cycle and the expedition had still not returned. With most senior tribesmen accompanying Chief Cave Lion, Ivory felt distinctly vulnerable when she heard that the Mammoth Hunters were no longer alone in the valley.

"What shall we do?" Ptarmigan asked anxiously when this news was brought to them by Leopard, a young man whose voice had barely broken.

"We should chase the invaders away!" gruffly insisted Grey Wolf, the most senior hunter left behind.

Ivory wondered what Glade would say on this occasion. "How many of these strangers are there?" she asked.

"I saw only five or six," said Leopard. "I don't think there are more."

"Even so, few can be a danger," insisted Grey Wolf. "Perhaps we should kill them."

"That's not right," said Ivory with alarm. "Only if the strangers mean us harm should we kill them. If we were to kill them for other reasons, their spirits will curse us. It is imperative that we don't bring evil onto our tribe."

"So what do we do?" said Grey Wolf who huffily accepted the received wisdom of the shaman's apprentice. "We can't have two tribes living together in this valley. There's barely enough space for us."

"We should speak to them," said Ivory. She thought back to Glade's own way of reasoning. Was there some advantage that an act of kindness could bring to the tribe? "Maybe they can help us find a way out of this valley. After all, they may know this area better than we do."

Alas, Ivory's hopes were unfounded. The six strangers consisted of only one adult man and the others were women and children. Like Ivory's tribe they were also lost and, judging by how gaunt they were, no more expert at finding food and sustenance. However, it was difficult to be sure of anything about them beyond their pathetic gratitude at not being killed by Ivory's more numerous kindred. They didn't speak a language that resembled hers. They looked distinctly alien. Their skin was darker than Ivory's but nowhere near as dark as Glade's. Their noses were flat and broad, their hair was light brown and curly, their ears were small, and they were relatively short. And about their shoulders they wore relatively thin ibex-skin furs.

Nevertheless, after the strangers prostrated themselves abjectly on the ground and begged tearfully for their safety in a language that combined clicks, growls and a phlegmy grunt, it was impossible for Ivory not to feel some responsibility for their welfare. Ptarmigan who was more used than anyone to being an outsider in the community instantly petitioned for the strangers to stay. Grey Wolf immediately offered a voice of caution.

"We have to look after our own first," he said bluntly. "We have no need for more mouths to feed. The chief wouldn't allow our meagre resources to be so casually shared."

"We should wait until my husband arrives and see what he says," said Ptarmigan with uncharacteristic firmness.

"As you wish," Grey Wolf conceded reluctantly.

Ivory sighed. She wasn't convinced that her generosity towards these harmless foreigners was such a good idea. She may have spared the tribe the wrath of unjustly slaughtered souls, but she had burdened them with more mouths to feed that could well prove to be a liability as resources became increasingly scarce.

At first, the Raft People had only one alien visitor to contend with. He was a swarthy, stocky man dressed in stitched-together rabbit skin, his genitals and upper thigh obscured by a short skirt, and he wore a headdress fashioned from the skull of a baboon onto which antelope horns were attached. It was difficult to interpret the expression on his face as it was heavily tattooed with an abstract swirling figure and his words, spoken in a language that even Glade didn't recognise, was more or less incomprehensible.

However, he seemed harmless. He stayed for a couple of days as a guest in the village where he fucked a few women and consented to being fucked by one of the men, though it wasn't apparent that this was his normal preference. He learned a few words of greeting and departed the village on relatively amenable terms. In fact, the Raft People were almost sad to see him go. He had an easy laugh and his cock was of good length and thickness.

Less than a moon later, he returned and this time he was in the company of several other men and an equal number of women. This time he wasn't so welcome. Although he and his companions were happy to share in the village's generosity, they didn't participate in the duty of providing the village with the food they so obviously enjoyed eating. The easy humour and laughter that had made the baboon man such pleasant company was less attractive when it came from a group of people who sat and joked together and made little attempt to communicate with their hosts.

The other men were of the same stocky, swarthy build as the baboon man and were mostly identifiable by the skulls they wore on their heads, such as quagga, hyena and antelope. Their faces were also heavily tattooed. The women covered their heads with stitched-together rabbit-skins as was the rest of their dress, but this was arranged such that the bosom and crotch were displayed at the front, but the buttocks covered at the rear.

The men and women kept themselves apart from each other, although Glade noted that this sexual apartheid was not as extreme as that practised by Demure's tribe. All the same, there was a curious double standard whereby the men were at license to fuck the women and sometimes the men of the host village when the opportunity occurred, but no such license was allowed the women. In fact, they showed no public display of affection to anyone, including their own menfolk, and were aggressively distrustful of even the most innocent intimacy. The men watched the women jealously even though they passed hardly a word with them and were especially alert when their hosts approached the women. Glade was sure that the men and women did fuck together, but this was a practice they kept notably private.

The Raft People generally expressed their feelings and desires by subtle allusion and were very tolerant of each other's quirks. As a result, they were extraordinarily ill-equipped for the task of explaining to their guests that they had outstayed their welcome. Glade and Demure were women with much greater experience of the world than their fellow villagers and it was clear to them, Demure especially, that the baboon man and his compatriots didn't really care whether the villagers were any longer enamoured by their presence. Indeed, they appeared to wilfully misunderstand the Raft People's feeble attempts at protest.

This became more vocal when the Skull People started moving into the huts and shelters of their hosts. Naturally, the abodes they chose belonged to those women and men who had been most open to fucking new exotic flesh, but who were now regretting their earlier intimacy. Glade hadn't been one of these women although she'd been tempted. Uncharacteristically, it had been Demure who advised her lover against her natural urges.

"I don't think this situation is going to be tolerated for much longer," said Demure, as the couple floated together on a raft and speared fish in the Great Sea. "Our hosts may be almost as free with their personal space and their affections as your tribe once were..."

" ... before it was exterminated..." said Glade, who could never forgive the Knights for their crimes.

"Yes indeed," Demure agreed, as if she had nothing to do with it. "Our hosts may have levels of tolerance and understanding beyond almost all compare, but they will soon reach their limits. Enough will be enough. They may not have a tradition for making their feelings known, but they outnumber the invaders and will soon forcefully evict them."