Moon Love

by Hester St. Jean

  Chapter Two

  A Land of Darkness

  They’d a wagon hitched to fine and restless horses and pulled me toward it, insisting I get in. I resisted. Something had gone terribly wrong, something I did not understand.

  I called again for Old Fishbreath, first by his title, “Mr. Mayor! Mr. Mayor!” But, again, he did not answer. In frustration, I shouted the name I’d spoken aloud only to him and only in the utmost privacy. “Fishbreath, damn you, where are you? Fishbreath! Help me!”

  Instead of a response, my ears filled with the cruel laughter of The Four.

  “We get the pay now,” said the oldest. “Fishbreath, as you call him, has sold you to us, goose, and you will now lay your golden eggs for our benefit. Come now. We don’t want to hurt you.”

  “You have no right,” I protested. “He had no right. No one owns me!” But they only laughed more. A townsman passed by, and I called to him to help me. I knew him as one who had visited me in my tree more than once. “They are taking me against my will!” He looked at The Four then back at me before shrugging apologetically and hurrying on.

  A neighbor woman raised her window to scold, “Keep it down out there! Some of us are still trying to sleep!”

  I looked up in desperation. “Sol,” I cried. Across the expanse that separated us, my brother could see my plight, but, unable to leave his appointed journey across the sky, he could only burn brightly with indignation and concern while he watched helplessly.

  Impatient with my fierce and noisy resistance, the fat one pinned my arms behind me while the sour one forced a scarf between my teeth, gagging me. The tall one threw a cloth over my head. I could only assume it was the youngest who bound my hands. They lifted me and tossed me into the back of their wagon on a pile of straw. It scratched and poked at my back mercilessly.

  Again, I tried kicking. A howl told me I’d connected with a tender spot. The explosive curse that followed was uttered in such indignation and fury, I could not tell which of them I’d managed to so displease.

  A heavy cloth dropped over me. I had to stop struggling in order to breathe. The smell of the fibers so close to my face made me realize that my situation was, for the moment, one I had very little control over. I concentrated on calming myself and paying as much attention as possible to learning my circumstances from just listening. Covered with burlap so none was able to see their dastardly theft, I endured the journey to their town, over hills, through fields, across valleys, past cow herds and sheep paddocks, beyond rivers and rills. As we bounced down the awful road, each of them took his turn with me. I endured it. What else could I do?

  I will tell you right now, Ancient One, and charge you to include in your story of me that there is an impassable gulf between making love for your own pleasure and income, or even pleasuring another in an act of generosity or commerce and enduring sex acts as a slave. I don’t know why it is that Merelings confuse these two so very often. I’ll warrant more than one of the stories in your bag turns on just such confusion.

  You look discomforted. Surely you are not a Mereling yourself. The tattered coat and breeches, the unruly beard, the wrinkles and furrows and bends might fit, but the disproportions, the creature on your shoulder.

  Have I offended you? It is not my intention to disrespect. Perhaps you have simply come from a place with a different clock than this blue-green globe which is my purview.

  Ah, I see. Your discomfort is with what happened to me, not with how I judge the Merelings. What? Yes, I will get on with my story. And, yes, it will get worse before it gets better. There is an abyss ahead. You’ve fair warning, and if you choose to move on and listen to the story of someone who has experienced fewer trials, you are free to do so.

  Very well, then. I will return to my narrative.

  I curled into a wretched ball, or at least tried to, in the back of their cart, under cover, every rut in the road taking a toll on my body and soul. But each of them forced my body to open and admit him.

  The salty one who’d tied me in ropes whispered in my ear. “It’s your fault I can’t control myself,” he growled softly. “You drive me to frenzy.” He pumped. I counted to a hundred then backwards to zero then up again.

  When he finished, the sour one took a turn. “What’s wrong?” he complained. “Why won’t you move with me?” He pulled the burlap cover to the side and took the gag from my mouth. We were in a wooded area, seemingly unpopulated. “Where’s the favor you showed me last week?” I spit in his face. It darkened in anger as he wiped a hand to dry it. “You’ll regret that,” he hissed, and drove himself into me harsh and deep, his eyes closed, his jaw set. I watched his face.

  Then the bitter one. I could tell he was remembering the first time, when I’d taken him by surprise with my command. “I will touch you when I want,” he said. “Where I want. How I want.” I waited. He finished.

  Finally, the youngest one took his turn. “I want to make sure you are all right,” he said, entering me. “Are you all right?” His cloying concern made my stomach churn. It was icing on a most disgusting cake. I refused to make a sound. I refused to move. I occupied my mind with memories of my childhood on Mount Olympus.

  He fell asleep on me, snored in my ear. Merelings, I told myself, were all alike. Fishbreath, who abandoned me. The man who backed away rather than come to my aid. The woman who cared only about a few more minutes of sleep in which to be oblivious to the crime committed under her window. Worst of all, these four. The Four. What did it matter, I told myself. As Merelings, they were destined to die. I am an Immortal. I will survive.

  We came, at last, to the town they called home. At the house they shared, they designated a room for me. They covered the windows to contain my light and provide my respite. When evening fell, they rubbed fine oils on my body and then took me to the town square where they’d nailed steps to the large oak tree. It resembled the one I’d known but had no sense of familiarity or hominess in it. They bade me climb up. I’d always liked leaning against the branches of my old tree, but the bark of this one dug into my skin. Instead of the green, spicy aroma of leaves, this tree smelled musty to me.

  They called to the townspeople to admire my light and avail themselves—for a price, of course—of my beauty. This, my friend, is the first abyss into which I descended. Forced to serve and service, not because I wanted to, but because I could not see my way out.

  I knew how to please them. The Four and all their customers. I would say “my customers,” except I no longer controlled business for myself. They took everything and then meted out to me just what would sustain me. My life as an Immortal did not truly depend upon doing their bidding, but my day-to-day, moment-to-moment comfort definitely did. Not a night went by I did not regret my fateful decision to hide on Earth to avoid the conflict in the Eternal Heavens.

  You smile, and well you might, observing my naiveté. To think Earth is the place to avoid conflict! My brother and I got stuck—you know the story—on Earth, me lighting the night sky, he providing the daylight. For reasons both logical and beyond my understanding, that’s how it happened. We were able to see each other in passing, as each took a turn at spreading light, but were never able, in this new world, to be together. I’m repeating myself? My apologies.

  I’ve heard there may be worlds where suns and moons are multiple. Sometimes Merelings walk beneath my light and talk of such things. Once one of them told another of a place where there are twelve like me, sister moons. And another time two discussed a place where twin brothers circle the sky.

  Have you seen such? You have? Ah, it must be so fascinating. What can you tell me about these places?

  Yes, yes. Of course. This is my story you are gathering and to hear your others, I must take my place in one of your audiences and pay my coin like all the rest.

  Each of The Four relied upon me to please and serve him. Each asserted his presumed right with me, and each, even the sweet one, had a capacity for quite a temper if he didn’t get what he wa
nted when he wanted it. And because I am Immortal and because I observe but do not judge—at least most of the time—I adapted to this routine. I cannot say I preferred it, but I made the best of it. I’ll not dignify it with detail, though. Suffice it to say I endured.

  When they weren’t keeping me busy pleasing them, they kept me busy making money. They hired me to the humorless men who populated their town, who paid well for a few hours with someone who made them feel pleasure. I perfected my techniques, even while my mind and heart were guarded and stony. I struggled to maintain my smile and my weight.

  No women visited me, not even occasionally. In this town, men and women were discouraged from finding pleasure with their own on pain of disgrace and even death. Their ideas were rigid. Sometimes, from my nighttime vantage point, while I stared over the shoulder of a stranger pounding away at me, I could see a young woman gazing my way with longing in her eyes. Sometimes, a man would enter her chamber and place a hand on her shoulder and she would turn from me, sorrow in her body, and follow him. Not the same young woman, you know, but a succession of them. Sometimes, a young man looked up at me, wistful and worried looking, and a woman came to take his hand and lead him out of my sight.

  The imagination and sense of play that had governed my time in Hedon disappeared altogether in this village. Its inhabitants equated sex more with a burdensome itch to be scratched than a feast of sensual delights. The women, in particular, suffered in this regard. From what I could see, and I could see a great deal through windows into bedrooms, in clearings in the woods, behind sheds—all the places Merelings tended to go to indulge their needs and appetites—the women rarely reached the full promise of pleasure. They dissembled, the better to be done with it quickly.

  I began to engage in the art of pretending myself. Looking back on it, and putting it in the Mereling terms of today, I can see I suffered from chronic depression. One after another, men would buy my time, climb on, climax, and climb down from my tree. I would count stars, listen for night birds, watch bats flick through the air, blocking, for a fleeting instant, the stars beyond.

  Many years passed. During these years I tired of amusing myself by distinguishing between my captors, no longer thinking of the individual flavors of their personalities, but only as The Four. I went through the motions with them, too, and they with me, but I no longer noticed which one told the joke, which one displayed jealousy or muttered bitter recriminations or made himself minimally courteous.

  They built up quite a fortune. Over time, they acquired more land, more houses. More men worked for them in the fields, more women toiled over their laundry and in their kitchens. Whomever they favored became mayor for as long as they favored him. Whomever they disapproved of would eventually leave, hoping to find more opportunity elsewhere. All this because they sold my light, my company.

  It couldn’t keep them from aging, though. Gradually, they had less interest in claiming my time for sexual pleasure or profit making and more interest in having me bring them hot rum and foot rubs.

  “Luna,” they’d call, “my back aches.”

  “Luna, bring me a blanket!”

  “Luna, sit with me till I fall asleep!”

  “Luna, sing me a song.”

  In their approaching dotage, they became like small children. Still, their avarice could only be characterized as the least flattering aspect of adulthood, and they hired me out when they weren’t claiming my time for themselves.

  Chapter Three

  A Mereling Love

  He was shy at first. A shepherd, given to night-sky gazing. Deliciously handsome. Beautiful, in fact. His uncles bought me for him. A birthday present the year he turned twenty. Entrusted with their nephew’s upbringing when his father perished in one of the vainglorious battles the Empire constantly waged somewhere, they worried about his gentle nature. They wanted me for the entire night, sundown to sunup. They wanted evidence he could “act like a man.”

  The Four charged a lot for my time that night. They weren’t used to taking care of themselves anymore and had generally begun to limit my hours for others to enable me to help them to their chambers, minister to their midnight aches and pains, calm them when they woke from nightmares, and have their herbs ready when they woke before dawn. And, I suppose it goes without saying, indulging their sexual appetites when they still had them.

  The uncles of the boy were insistent, though, and had provided their nephew, in addition to my sundown-to-sunup company, a tree house in my old oak, complete with fine food, ales, wines, and a luxurious feather bed.

  Quite a squabble developed over payment. The Four wanted it all up front. The uncles wanted to withhold it until they were satisfied their nephew had been convinced to prove himself.

  “Why should we pay before we know she can do what you promise?”

  The Four were stubborn. “If you don’t like our offer,” one said, “go home.” He sneered. “Your nephew needs what we can provide. We, on the other hand, can do well without your money.” Finally, they settled on half at dusk, the other half to be paid on the completion of my assignment.

  “We’ll wait here,” the uncle doing the negotiating pronounced. He gestured to the others, and they brought chairs to sit at the base of the tree underneath the cottage. “We know what success should sound like.” They snickered and settled in for vicarious thrills. The Four tottered off to bed.

  What’s that? Yes, I suppose you do detect a note of sarcasm, and no, they did not literally totter. Nor were they impotent, which I fear I may have seemed to imply a moment ago. Rather, their material avarice had grown to supplant their erotic appetites. They exhausted themselves counting their money.

  And you are correct again, old man. I do digress. I am afraid it is my predilection. It is the lad I am intending to tell you about.

  At first, he sulked, an uncommunicative sort. I tried to work the tension from his shoulders, but my touch made him tense. I poured ale, put out plates of sweetmeats and cheeses. For a long time, we simply sat across from one another, sipping and nibbling.

  I welcomed it as a well-deserved break. Just because one is Immortal does not mean one is incapable of fatigue—especially when it is more emotional than physical. It had been decades of dreariness compared to the basically happy years I’d spent in my oak tree in the land where Merelings focused more on their own pleasures and less on taking advantage of one another. This young man was the first I’d met since The Four had abducted me—they would have said, bought me fair and square from Fishbreath, as if a Mereling could ever own me—who was neither rough nor demanding, not urgent, not presumptuous.

  Oh, there’d been, once in a while, a man who clearly did not keep step with this aggressive culture and, like the youngest of The Four, took time to ask me what gave me pleasure while telling me what he expected me to do for him. But this fellow neither listed for me what he wanted nor inquired to know my tastes. He seemed determinedly, stonily indifferent to me.

  Finally, I spoke to him, “You don’t seem to be of this place.”

  Silence. Sullen silence. He stared at the table between us, refusing to meet my eye. Did I mention his physical beauty? I couldn’t take my eyes off him: his curly hair, his muscled arms and shoulders, the long eyelashes, and bee-stung lips.

  “Nor am I,” I told him.

  I’d gotten his attention. He finally looked at me and asked, “What is your place? The place you are of?”

  Initially, I told him only the details from this world. I said I’d lived in a town of pleasure-lovers. I told him my business partner, and presumed protector, had betrayed me. I recounted how The Four had forced me to come with them to this village in which they further required me to ply my trade entirely for their benefit. “And you?” I asked gently. “What is your place?”

  “I have no place,” he said, looking wretchedly morose.

  “But if you were to have a place,” I pressed on, “what would it be like?”

  “It would be without judgment,”
he said. “It would be a place where I could be without the people around me always telling me how I ought to be more this, less that. A world where I would be left alone, allowed to be who I am.”

  Little by little, he continued to loosen his tongue. Or perhaps the ale accomplished this. Or my listening. Or the combination. He finally confessed to me his confusion, and his grief. There lived in his village a young man he loved, but he’d never known stirrings for a woman. They’d explored as boys the pleasures of their bodies, but once their voices changed and their balls descended, the fellow would have nothing to do with him. He tried to forget his friend, but could not. He tortured himself with desire to touch, to hold, to be able to look into his beloved’s eyes and speak of his feelings. All his efforts to forget had failed. All his efforts to find himself drawn to young women were equally for naught. Comfortable in their presence, he never wanted more.

  He risked his life even telling me this story. His uncles would kill him if they ever found out. They were of the peculiar opinion that it was more honorable to be a cold-blooded killer than to acknowledge the range of love available to both Merelings and Immortals.

  I took a risk, too. I told him—because he asked and no one had ever asked before—how I endured my captivity. I confessed my Immortal status, trapped in the Earth world. He wondered why The Four had never questioned my lack of wrinkles. It was, I told him, a testament to their blindness and self-centeredness. I did not like my present circumstances, but I could outwit them and I would outwait them.