Glade and Ivory Ch. 01

"Whatdoyou believe in?" Ivory challenged the shaman.

"That, my dear, is a lesson for another day," she said with a smile. "But first, shall we eat and drink? It must be hard for you. I've heard that you have just lost the last person in your family."

"My mother."

"The hardest loss of all to bear," Glade said sympathetically. She sat next to Ivory and placed a bare arm around her shoulder. A bare nipple brushed against the thick fur of Ivory's coat. "Relax, my dear. Have no fear. I shall treat you well. "

Glade prepared a simple stew, served in a clay pot, accompanied by mead in carved wooden beakers. Ivory savoured the mead and filtered the floating detritus through her teeth. The alcohol made her relax for the first time since her mother died.

"You know why you're here, don't you?" Glade asked.

"Because you need an apprentice?"

"No. I have needs as you shall discover, but an apprentice I don't need. It is the Chief who wants me to have an apprentice. It was he who asked that you should serve me in some capacity, so I invented the role for his benefit. It was a favour from him to your departed mother. She was one of the Chief's mistresses, I believe."

"She was?" said Ivory, who had nonetheless guessed that there was some reason why some nights she slept in the tepee without the sound of her mother's low breathing.

"Chief Cave Lion is an honourable man. He must want to honour your mother's memory after the mauling. But an apprentice is not a need I truly have. He reasons that the village will need a successor for me should I also fall prey to a wild beast. My fame has spread throughout your tribe. Many chiefs and elders come to the village from other villages, bearing gifts and favours, and seek my potions, my wisdom and my parables. If I should die, Chief Cave Lion's status will be much diminished."

"So, I am to replace you?"

"I don't really care whether you do or not. I only hope that you'll at least wait till I'm dead before you become shaman in my stead. However, you are a pretty girl and I am a lonely, childless woman. I have needs, as you know."

"You do?"

"Take off your clothes so I can see you better."

"Sorry?"

"You heard," said the shaman with a broad smile.

"It's cold."

"It's warm by the fire and we are protected from the wind. Do as I say, dear."

Ivory gulped, but she'd been expecting something like this. She was sure the mead had helped to lower her inhibitions. The heart of the shaman's tent was warm enough for her to wear fewer furs than she needed in the chill wind outside. In fact, it was warm enough that she needn't wear any clothes at all.

She unhurriedly unstrapped and unpeeled the hides and furs from her body and soon stood naked by the fire—more naked under Glade's gaze than she'd ever felt before.

Ivory's body was as white as her face, but not as weather-beaten. The freckles that spotted her shoulders were pale in comparison to the darker ones around her nose. Her breasts were small and pert, her arms slim and her legs long. The thick triangle of pubic hair that hid her maidenhood was darker than the hair on her head. It was not yet decorated by threaded bones or plaits.

Glade unclasped her bear skin and let it slip to the floor, so that there were now two naked women where before there was only one. She stepped over to Ivory and took the trembling girl by the shoulders and pressed her, bosom against bosom, to her breast. They were of almost exactly the same height.

"Are you a virgin, my dear?"

"Almost."

"Almost?"

"The boys like to feel what a girl has to offer and I've been tempted, but I only once let a boy enter me and that was for the briefest time. I didn't wish the spirit of motherhood to enter me."

"Indeed not," said Glade approvingly. "But have no fear. No such spirit can be passed from me to you. Shall we lie down together?"

Ivory's first experience of making love with a woman was less terrible or awful than she feared, though she wasn't sure she enjoyed it with nearly the same delight as Glade so obviously did. Never before had anyone licked her so vigorously about her vagina nor had her clitoris ever been so moist with spittle. Despite the older woman's evident animal urgency, she was also very tender. She resisted the temptation to probe with her fingers inside the lips that hid the recesses of Ivory's vagina, although the fingers of at least three, maybe four, boys had already prepared the younger girl for the day when it could be used more thoroughly. On Glade's instruction, Ivory explored the older woman's vagina with her tongue and lips, from which arose odours that were more pungent than she'd ever imagined a woman's should have. It was totally unlike Ivory's brief exploration of Lion Paw's erect penis on the day she allowed herself a moment of unresolved penetration. The smell of his genitals, though memorable, was less potent than Glade's.

Later that evening, the two women's bodies entwined under the pile of woolly rhinoceros hide and bear fur on Glade's enormous bed. Ivory relished the warmth of her older companion's skin against hers. She savoured the smell of her flesh. She wondered at its strange brown complexion.

"Why do you love women rather than men?" Ivory asked as Glade nibbled her ear.

"I haven't always done so. When I was young and lived with my people in the Southern Forests, I always believed, as I think you do, that a man would be my lasting sleeping companion. My tribe was much freer than yours with regards to pleasures of the flesh. Love between women and, indeed, between men was neither proscribed nor frowned upon. Despite this, it never occurred to me that I should ever exchange the lithe, muscular delight of a man's body for the fleshy roundness of a woman's. Some girls thought differently but I didn't share their preference."

"So, why did you change your mind?"

"My mind was changed for me. It changed when my life as I knew it then came to an end."

"It came to an end?"

"The day my mother died. The day my village died. The day when the whole world I had ever known died. And a horrible, violent and bloody death it was, too."

"Worse than being mauled by a lion?"

"I would have preferred to have been mauled by any beast—lion, hyena or bear—than suffer again the fate that befell that day."