Acolytes (The Enclaves Book 1)

by Nel Franks

  While I waited until I could write back to him, I spent lots of time mentally composing a long letter. I wanted to describe some of our life in the Enclave, focussing on production and trade, that I thought he would like to know about. I didn’t want to talk about our personal lives, or the shared fertility rites between our two Enclaves. I didn’t want to encourage any false hopes in him.

  But the closer we came to Winter Ceremony the more times sex came up in discussions around the Enclave. I found myself making excuses to get out of conversations with Tomma when she began to speculate about what it would be like to lie with Rove. I kept out of the clerks’ excited discussions about Judine’s pregnancy that had resulted from Summer Festival. I avoided Ellina and all her friends, still mortified by what had happened. But try as I might to avoid it, sex seemed to be everywhere. It was built into the fabric of our lives. And Winter Ceremony was approaching. Rosie was becoming bad tempered again, and her rants about the revolting nature of sex with men were becoming more frequent and more vitriolic. Tomma finally reached her breaking point one evening.

  ‘Rosie! This is the fourth time this week you’ve gone on about it. I’m worried about you. At some time or other, we’re all going to have to decide about having babies. If you feel this bad about sex now, what will you be like then?’

  Rosie looked mutinously at her. ‘I’ve told you, Tomma, I will never lie with a man. It’s disgusting! Anyway, Liane says men will be redundant soon and we will never have to deal with them. It can’t happen soon enough, as far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘Who is Liane? And how will we do without men for making babies?’

  Rosie tossed her hair with an air of self-righteousness.

  ‘I’m not allowed to discuss it with you, Tomma. But you should know how it would happen. You’ve seen it done in Agriculture.’

  Tomma looked confused for a long moment, then she burst out,

  ‘Artificial insemination? Are you mad, Rosie? Who would ever get pregnant like that? That’s for breeding better animals for some trait you want. Do you want to be bred like a cow for more milk?’

  Rosie continued to scowl. ‘I probably shouldn’t have said even that much, Tomma. But there are lots of women like me, who think that sex is horrible and that men should be redundant. We know there have to be babies, and we want a cleaner and better way to get pregnant.’

  ‘Who is this group, Rosie? Who have you been spending time with?’ Tomma was almost hooting with derision.

  Rosie jumped up from her bed and stormed across the room.

  ‘You’re not my keeper, Tommasika! I don’t have to ask your permission to find my own friends who understand me. Just because you’re willing to make a slut of yourself, doesn’t mean I have to approve!’

  Tomma gasped and leapt up, grabbing Rosie’s robe.

  ‘Don’t you dare call me a slut, Rosie! Just because I love Rove and want to lie with him ...’

  The room was suddenly silent. Tomma’s face paled, and Rosie’s eyes widened in shock.

  ‘Who is Rove, Tomma? Have you lain with a boy? What have you done?’ Rosie was reduced to a whisper of horror.

  Tomma took a deep breath and some of her colour returned.

  ‘Of course I have not lain with a boy, Rosie! Do you think I’d be that stupid? I saw that sterilisation punishment, same as you. I’m not taking that kind of risk. But I am looking forward to being able to go to the Festival Field when I’m old enough. I think it’s natural, and probably fun, gauging from how most women talk about it. And yes, I do want to do it with a man, at some stage in my life. It’s part of being a woman, I think. If that makes me a slut in your eyes, it’s you that has the problem with it, not me!’

  She looked much more like her usual self as she finished.

  ‘And who is Rove, Tomma? You haven’t answered my question.’

  ‘I don’t have to answer to you, Rosie. As you said, I am not your keeper and you most certainly are not mine!’

  They stood glaring at each other. Finally, Rosie turned to me.

  ‘Gaia, what do you think about this? Did you know Tomma was doing something illegal? Did you know how corrupt she’s become?’

  Tomma gasped again and flushed.

  I looked up, unhappy at the strain in our lifelong friendships.

  ‘I don’t think Tomma is doing anything illegal, Rosie. Wanting to lie with a man occasionally and have babies is pretty normal, I think. I’m worried for you though, you seem so unhappy. I don’t want us to hate each other. We’ve always been friends and I want us to stay that way. We need each other.’

  Rosie turned on her heel and began gathering up her bedclothes.

  ‘You can talk, Gaia,’ Rosie said, her voice brittle with spite. ‘You never told us anything about how you broke up with Ellina. I had to hear about it from some of the other acolytes who were there. How do you think that made me feel? You’re supposed to be my friend, aren’t you?’ I blushed. ‘And you never told us about what you’ve been doing on your special tasks in the Most’s Office. You think you’re so much better than we are just because you work there. Well, next year you may be shovelling shit again, just like me! Don’t get so high and mighty about our friendship. You haven’t needed us for most of this year; you’ve grown away from us. So it’s you that’s breaking up this friendship, not me! You can both just stay here with your secrets you won’t share. I’m going to stay with my friends who understand me!’

  With that she scooped up her quilt, grabbed her spare robes and stalked out of the room without looking back. We were speechless for a long moment. Then Tomma flopped down on her bed again.

  ‘What just happened? I wanted to help her and now I hate her. And she’s gone.’ She looked stunned. ‘How will she ever get over this fixation about men if she’s gone to stay with those women? They sound dreadful!’

  ‘I don’t know Tomma. I’ve never seen her be so nasty, and so ... so ...’

  ‘Irrational?’ Tomma supplied.

  ‘Yes exactly. Irrational. She has an irrational fear of men, or of sex really. How is she going to cope at Winter Ceremony next week?’

  We looked at each other fearfully, trying to imagine how Rosie would manage, or what terrible scene she might create.

  PART THREE

  ROSIE

  Third Year of Initiate Acolytes

  Second Winter Ceremony

  Rosie, Winter, Year Three, Initiates

  I HATE WINTER CEREMONY! I hate it, I hate it! It is so disgusting. I’m amazed the Council keeps it going. They have made it into some foul, dirty, public display. Procreation should be a quick, clean, clinical process. Dressing it up with smoke and drums and the enhancing drugs is just pandering to lust – it draws it out too long, and everyone gets aroused, and then they just want to do it themselves.

  And they shouldn’t want to! Disgusting pigs!

  I totally agreed with my inner self. I am never going to lie with a man!

  And Tomma and Gaia - they’re becoming corrupted!

  Tomma saying she loves a boy, what did she say his name was? I bet it’s that boy she danced with at Summer Festival in our first year. He’s the only boy she’s ever met. Fancy thinking you love someone you’ve only met once. And keeping it going for two years. She couldn’t really have found a way to lie with him, could she?

  But she does go for those long walks in the hills... ooohh, I bet that’s it. I bet she’s found a way to meet him.

  Oh, she has done it, I know she has. She must have. She’s always going on about wanting to have babies. She must have done it.

  Evil filthy bitch!

  My inner self can be so judgemental. But so right too.

  But if Tomma had lain with that boy, should I tell the Council? Oh Goddess, what am I going to do?

  But she seemed to Say True when she said she hadn’t. Maybe she hasn’t lain with that boy.

  Oh! How disgusting! She let a revolting man put his thing inside her!

  Oh Goddess, please keep Tomma
safe! Don’t let her do anything disgusting, or get sterilised, or anything terrible.

  I finally got up, sick of tossing and turning. My inner self had been enraged all night, and had allowed me no rest at all. My bed clothes were twisted and damp with sweat. I had been unable to sleep for hours. Staying with Liane was not the simple arrangement I had thought it would be. For one thing, her house was tiny, and dirty. I had never imagined that she could be so unhygienic. At least Tomma and Lenna and Gaia and I had always kept our room clean. Well, except for Tomma who always just dropped her robe on the floor, but at least she helped when we all cleaned.

  To help take my mind off Tomma and men and the disgusting things they did, I decided to clean Liane’s tiny living area. I liked cleaning. It soothed me. Whenever I had my bad thoughts, I tried to keep busy to distract myself. And making something clean was so satisfying. If you were clean, and the area around you was spotless, then nothing bad could happen.

  But when Liane came out of her sleeping room, rubbing her greasy hair, she wasn’t appreciative. ‘What do you think you’re doing, Rosie? This is my place, not yours. Leave everything where it was.’

  ‘But I thought you’d like it Liane, if you didn’t have to clean it yourself. I was trying to make it saf ... I was trying to make it say thank you for having me here.’

  ‘Well, don’t thank me by messing up my house. I like it the way it is.’

  She turned away but then faced me again. ‘I think you better find somewhere else to stay, Rosie. This house really isn’t big enough for three.’

  ‘Three? Who else is ...?’

  ‘That’s none of your business, Rosie. Just find yourself somewhere else to stay today. I’ll see you at our meetings, but I can’t have you staying here all the time.’

  I was bereft. I had been sure Liane really liked me. She had been so supportive when I joined her group. She was really welcoming, she told me they didn’t have many new members, or young ones either. Mostly they were older women who had some experience lying with men and hadn’t liked it. And when I told her I had left the Acolytes Hall, she said I could stay with her as long as I needed to. Two nights didn’t seem like a long time to need to stay.

  She wasn’t as nice at home as she was at meetings. She was bossy, and bad-tempered a lot of the time. I thought we would become really close, and she would tell me more about her plans to make men redundant, but she didn’t. She just put an old mattress on the floor in the tiny storeroom and said I could stay there. And she shut the door on me. It was really rude, and hurtful.

  She is a mean, self-centred, domineering sow!

  I will never be nice to her again. I will never go to her meet ...

  I’m going to put her in my ledger of wrongs. That’ll fix her.

  I had to stop this negative thinking, it made me really upset. After our first Winter Ceremony was so awful, my tutor made me see a Mistress Counsellor in the Healing House. She told me I had to stop my bad thoughts going round in circles. But it wasn’t easy to do. I could distract myself for a little while, but your mind just goes on thinking, doesn’t it, even when you’re working.

  When I asked at the Office later in the day about other accommodation, they didn’t have anything except a single room in the Acolytes Hall, so I had to go back there until I could find somewhere else. But I was not going to stay, especially where Tomma and Gaia could get at me again. They were so closed-minded those two, they’d never listen to a radical new idea like using artificial insemination for people. If I had been on the Council, I’d have made it mandatory for everyone who wanted to have babies.

  That way we would never have to lie with men.

  See, it happened again; whenever I didn’t have to concentrate on a task, my thoughts went back to this whole awful business and I couldn’t stop them. Sometimes I was so tired of feeling like this. I just wanted to go back to the old days when I didn’t know how procreation happened. And now Winter Ceremony was only a week or so away and I’d have to go. I couldn’t get out of it.

  Unless I could get sick?

  What a good idea. Only sick women got excused. But I wasn’t sick, and the Healers would know that. Perhaps I could go and see that Mistress Counsellor and see if she could get me out of it.

  It took two days to get an appointment to see Mistress Sarrak, the counsellor. The woman who made the bookings was really rude, she kept asking why I needed to see her. As if it was any of her business. I wasn’t going to tell her why I was there. I just said it was my right to see the counsellor, who had said I could come back whenever I needed to. So eventually the nosy old biddy gave me an appointment. I arrived quite early; I didn’t want anything to stop me from seeing her.

  Mistress Sarrak was seated in a comfortable chair away from her desk, in her office in the Healing House. She waved me to another equally low and soft armchair on the other side of the small table, where there were glasses and a carafe of water set out. There was also a small box, in which I knew she kept fresh handkerchiefs. I’d used plenty of them the last time I’d been to see her. I took a deep breath and launched into my problem.

  ‘Mistress Sarrak, I can’t go to Winter Ceremony.’

  ‘Why is it you feel you can’t go?’

  ‘Don’t you remember what happened last year? I told you about it before. It’s so disgusting, I just can’t go through it again.’

  ‘Did anything physical happen to you, Rosie?’

  ‘Yes! The boy grabbed me, last year. He nearly made me the Sacred Hind. I was terrified!’

  ‘But did he hurt you, Rosie?’

  ‘Not physically,’ I mumbled, feeling a bit deflated.

  ‘And you know that no harm would be allowed to happen to you. The Protectors and the Mistresses are there to keep you safe and make sure he only chooses from the girls who are willing to be chosen. Nothing harmful could have happened to you, and nothing hurtful did happen. So, what was it you experienced?

  ‘I was so scared! I told you, I was terrified. It was awful.’

  ‘You experienced great fear, and that is always unpleasant.’

  I snorted; unpleasant didn’t come close to how dreadful it had been.

  ‘How did the fear begin?’ she said.

  ‘I told you this! Weren’t you listening?’ She gave me a small deprecating smile. ‘Alright, I’ll tell you again. There was smoke everywhere, and it was dark, and all the girls were running around, and all of a sudden, he came out of the smoke, all wild and sweaty, and he grabbed me. It was terrifying, and disgusting: he was naked. And his... his...’

  ‘Go on, Rosie, say it, the word can’t hurt you,’ she said gently.

  ‘His... thing... pounded against me.’ I blurted.

  ‘Say its name, Rosie. It’s not taboo. It has many labels, most of which we think of as rude, but they are all names. Names have power. If you can name it, you can begin to control its influence in your mind.’

  ‘Very well, then. His ...’ I still had to swallow several times to get the word past the pain in my throat. ‘His disgusting penis touched me. He kept pushing it up against me. It was huge, and red ... and revolting.’ Somehow it seemed less serious when I said it out loud. And it came out much less intensely than I felt.

  ‘Yes, penis. What other names do you know for it?’

  I stared at her, taken aback. Why did she want to know how many names I knew for the repellent thing?

  ‘Go on Rosie, tell me all the names we use for a penis.’

  I frowned. But she was the counsellor, so maybe there was a point to this stupidity. ‘Cock, prick, rod, sausage ... I can’t think of any more right now.’

  ‘We use a name for an animal—and it is like a cockerel, standing up proud and crowing about how self-important it is. Are you scared of roosters now? You have worked in Agriculture all this year, do the cocks there scare you?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘No, of course they don’t. This big red scary penis is no more than a crowing cock. And a name from plant
s, a prick—a thorn. Are you scared of thorns, Rosie?’

  ‘No, I’m not. But they can hurt you.’ I needed some justification for how I felt.

  ‘Yes, they can; it’s true. But what do you do when a thorn pricks you?’

  ‘I pull it out,’ I said more quietly. I could see what she was doing, making the penis prick cock an ordinary thing, something I could manage.

  ‘And a name from tools: a rod. Why do we call it that?’

  ‘Because it gets hard and long, like a wooden rod.’ My voice was trembling. This was very close to something I didn’t want to talk about. ‘And they can hurt you too.’ I was shaking hard at that one. She didn’t know about rods and me. And I wasn’t going to tell her. Not her; not anyone. Not ever.

  ‘Yes, a wooden rod could be used to beat you. But does a penis beat you?’

  I gulped. She was so close to my secret. I had never told anyone except Gaia, when I was very small, before I realised how shameful I was. I was determined not to reveal anything about it.

  ‘No, not like a wooden rod. But ...’ She looked encouraging so I plunged on. ‘But they... they push it in and out, hard, really forcefully. That must hurt.’

  The pain in my throat made it difficult to speak. But she smiled a bit. Good, she seemed not to have picked up any hint of what I wanted to keep hidden.

  ‘Did you see the girl at the Winter Ceremony? Did she appear to be in pain? Or hating the penetration?’

  ‘No,’ I said, reluctantly. ‘She seemed to like it.’

  ‘Yes,’ Sister Sarrak was gentle. ‘She did welcome it. She wasn’t in pain, it didn’t hurt because she was ready for it, aroused and wanting it. Her body, like yours could be, was lubricated to ease the passage of the penis, swollen to help guide it and hold it firmly in the proper place, and she was in a position where her body could absorb the power of the thrust. Our bodies are built to be able to do this, they have all the necessary capacities, when we are ready and willing. We are very strong, Rosie. We can bear the weight of a growing baby inside us, and the enormous effort of pushing it out when it’s fully grown, so we can easily bear the thrusts of a much smaller penis.’