The Kanshou (Earthkeep) (10 page)

Zude was off the bed in an instant, forestalling any words from Jez.  "A beauty, isn't it?" she enthused, "a museum item, in fact."  She knelt on one knee beside Jezebel.  "Feel it, Jez!  That kind of work was rare even a hundred years ago -- "

"I don't want to feel it, Zude."  Jez sat like a statue, holding the object, looking steadily at her lover.

"Wait, love, wait.  I know what you're thinking -- "
"Oh?"  Jez's voice was without emotion.  "Then help me, Zude.  I'm not quite sure why I'm sitting here holding a . . . a whip.  And I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be thinking.  Perhaps that this is an instrument of punishment?  Originally invented, they say, for the control and abuse of animals?  Made, in fact, of the skin of animals, Zude, yes?  And later adapted, if I'm not mistaken, for the control and abuse of humans . . . of slaves, right?  Is that what I'm thinking?"

Zude let a silence lengthen.  "Mockery doesn't become you, Jez."  She sank onto the wooden stool by Jez's chair. 

"You want me to whip you.  Is that it?"

"You make it sound like an indecency."

"That's what it is."

Zude's arms were on her knees.  "I've clearly miscalculated.  I'd thought we'd reached a special place tonight."  She leaned toward her lover.  "Jez, in all our days together this is the first time I've broached this with you.  It's something I've wanted for a long time."

Jez's eyes became stone.  Zude felt the heat drain from the room.  She shivered in spite of herself. 

"I'm sure you have other friends who would oblige you in this . . . desire.    

"Lots of them," Zude agreed lightly.  "But you are my beloved.  And I've wanted this intimacy to be between us."

Jez held out the whip.  "To me, this means violence and suffering and humiliation and degradation.  To you it means something different, it means making a travesty of those things, just so you can get bigger and better sexual kicks."  She threw the whip into Zude's arms.  "Go find your friends, Zude.  But don't bring their obscenity into my reality, especially not into our lovemaking."

"You're neck-deep in a swamp of ignorance," Zude sighed.  She stood, and tossed the whip onto the stool.  She held out her arms.  "How can I talk to you about this?  How can I get you to listen to me."  When the stiff figure in the rocker did not respond, Zude folded her arms across her chest.  "How courageous are you, Jezebel?" 

Jez's eyebrows raised.  She looked askance at her lover.

"I dare you to test your courage," Zude's words gathered volume.  "I dare you to go to a party with me next Saturday, a party where -- " 

"Where I can watch depraved women play sex games with each other in public?"  Jez sat up straight and her eyes were alive again as she overrode Zude's immediate protest.  "I can't believe you're saying this to me!  Here I am telling you that you've just breached any respect we've had for each other and you want me to come to an orgy and see more of . . . of
this
?"  She picked up the whip and waved it.  "Zude, the parody of pain is unconscionable, particularly the public parody of it!  Pain is
not
erotic!"

"And who are you to say what another woman feels?"  Zude shot back.  "Pain
may
be erotic for her!" 

They glared at each other across the tiny room.  It was Zude who broke the silence, turning to lean on the tall bed poster.  "Jezebel, you could do with a little less heavy judgment on other people's lives," she said tiredly.

Jez slumped back into the chair.  "Begging your most illustrious pardon, Cadet Lieutenant Adverb," she said wryly, "it's not just a few 'other people!'  The mindset of the whole planet suffers from those master-slave set-ups, those dominance games.  That behavior affects us all!"

Zude threw up her hands.  "Jez, Jez," she cried, kneeling again by the rocking chair.  "Bella-Belle-- "

Jez jerked the whip down to her lap in a hard clenching of her hands.  She turned her head away from Zude, her eyes closed tight.  Zude reached out, but Jez shrugged off her touch and shot to her feet.  "You have some strange notions about sex and intimacy, Zude," she said steadily, almost brandishing the whip.  "I've never challenged you about that, and you've never pushed me about it.  I've always assumed that you took it for the adolescent behavior that it clearly is -- "

"Jez!" Zude began.

Jez stopped her with a quick and firm blow of the whip handle to Zude's shoulder.  "Hear me out!" she ordered. 

In that moment, a look passed over Zude's face.  Jez's eyes  widened and froze on the spectacle of her own gesture and the display of Zude's unequivocal reaction.  At that sight, unbidden blood surged to her cheeks and a fierce burst of satisfaction flamed through her body.  She fingered the whip, her breath rising slowly toward some long-hungered promise.  Then, without warning, brand new eyes embraced the scene.  Her stomach turned to bilge water.

"Forget it!" she cried, flinging the whip at Zude.  She lunged toward the bed.  "Forget it!"  She began gathering her clothes, tugging on her breeks over her naked body. 

Zude stared at her in silence.  When Jez froze in the midst of dressing and met Zude's gaze, her lover said quietly, "Come with me, Jezebel.  Come to the party with me."

They stared at each other, unmoving.  Then Jezebel thrust her chin forward.  "I'll do that," she said.  "I'll go with you to your party."  She sank to the bed.  "But I need some sleep now, Zudie."

Both women sighed.  Then Zude doused the light and settled by Jezebel under the thin sheet.  A breeze swept lightly over their bodies.  "We're okay, love," Zude whispered, "aren't we?" 

Jez put her arm around Zude, turning her onto her own supine body, maneuvering Zude's head onto her shoulder.  "We're fine, Zudie," she whispered back, holding the strong body tight against her.  "We're fine." 

Moments later, tensions eased, they lay in spoon and sang together an incantation, ancient and forever new, for the sleep of loving women: 

"I seek the darkness as of old
With you I trust the Earth to hold
and cradle me in worlds untold,
to dare the death within our slumber.

"I sink, and unencumbered spin.
I swoop the caverns of the wind.
I number those who are my kin
as all who do not cage another.

"Come, woman, partner of my rest
we join our lives in sisterquest
and plunge the hidden learningfest
where all of life will surge before us."

Jez awakened slowly into Hong Kong's pre-dawn hush.  She lay beside Zude, on her back, idly monitoring her lover's soft snores. 

Then she gasped, suddenly aware that her body was rising upward, being lifted by strong hands straight through the ceiling of the room, through the roof.  On her left, a wild-haired old hag held her close to her side; on her right a younger woman clasped her equally close.  They carried her between them, upward in their flight pod, high above the city and toward a rising sun.

"You're too antsy, girl," cracked the voice to her left.  Jez turned to find bright black eyes studying her.  "You got to let up," the old woman snapped, pressing her mouth into a tight line as she squinted at her.

"Who are you?" Jezebel asked.

"You can think of me as a guide," said the younger woman to her right.  Jez turned to see a Jezebel with greying hair, and the same smile that greeted her in every mirror.  "I'm your Future Self," the woman added.

"And I'm her Ganeshananda," rasped the old woman at her other side, "that's a helper, somebody that removes obstacles for you.  Tonight I'm here to help with the transportation," she added with a toothless grin.  Her body banked right to turn the flying spoon southward over the sea.  They soared higher.  "You been getting mighty disconnected lately, girl," the old crone said. "We figured you could do with a little high fresh air."

Jez nodded.  She folded herself closer into the warm embrace of the women, letting the cool dawn clear her head.  "You're just in time," she said to them conversationally, as the flight pod sailed over the sun-drenched sea.  "I need a guide, right now.  Something to help me with these . . . these contradictions!"

The Future Jezebel laughed.  "I remember.  You keep trying to resolve them."  She raised her arm and the flight pod angled westward, trailed by the new day.  "You can't resolve them, you know.  You just live on them."

"Hold them and love them," croaked the crone, "and let them be!"

"But I'm an Amah cadet" Jez protested, "and a hypocrite!  How can I wear that uniform?"

"Wear the uniform as long as you can.  Then you'll no longer wear it," said her Future Self. 

"So I'll just 'know?'"

"You'll know," the Future Jezebel assured her.  "Trust your sacred powers.  They can do no harm.  Only if you disconnect from who you are could you misuse them." 

A loud cackle broke the sound of the wind around the flight pod.  "Hold on," shouted the crone.  Her hand shot upward and the flight pod swooped into a high backward roll.  Jez gasped watching the coastal hills spin below her.  Jez caught the smile of her Older Self and let it mellow into a full-throated laugh.  The three women laughed their way back toward the east again, driving into a blinding sun.  They banked and dipped over shorelines and lush gardens, and when Hong Kong lay below them, they plummeted into its lap.

"Bella-Belle!"  Zude was shaking her.  Jez opened her eyes.  "You were laughing!  Are you all right?  You were almost hysterical.  Jez!"

Jez smiled, and wiped her cheeks.  "Zudie," she said.  Then, as noises of a waking city wafted through the window, she wrapped herself in her lover's arms and drew her once more into a sweet sleep. 

* * * * * * * *

In a three-storied warehouse crammed with women representing  all stages of dress and undress, all varieties and periods of costume, all shapes and sizes of props and accessories, all levels of technology and imagination, the women of Hong Kong gathered for a party.  It was a sex party.  And it was a party where, among other modes of interaction, dominance/submission opportunities filled the menu.  Amahs, cadets, non-military citizens, and visitors from coastal caravansaries mingled -- and performed -- in a provocative coction of street-fair celebration and intensified interpersonal drama. 

Ardis the Banjar hung at a face-down angle, suspended thirty feet from the floor at the center of an intricate webbing of hempen lines.  She held court there with floor-level admirers who marvelled at the warp and weft that sustained her. 

"Ardis," Cadet Jezebel Dolalicia called up to her, "there's a lot of nothing between you and the ground!"

"Jezebel!" Ardis beamed.  "It's true.  But it's so easy when you know how!"

Jez's eyes played over the stalls and vendors that lined the lower level, the piercing and tattoo artists, the ranks of sex toys and exotic fabrics, the banquet of edible ice sculpted into female forms, the raucous parlor games.  She walked through the crowds in the company of her Future Self, a palpable Presence who held her hand in assurance of serenity and openness.

Occasionally that Self whispered, "
Breathe, Jezebel."

On one of the darkened upper levels she wandered as a welcome voyeur through lume-pockets of sexual activity.  There, typically, she could watch a single woman's expression of sexual desire and the excited gratification of other women who bent their every effort toward the full satisfaction of that desire.  The hand of the Future Jezebel held her steady, gifting her with tolerance and even, at times, appreciation.

At one moment when she stood with other voyeurs observing such a scene, her eyes fell on her lover far across the room.  Zude was the center of a group of cadets, exploding with them in rowdy laughter at some oft-told tale of academy life.  Deliberately, she turned back to the lume-scene and imagined her lover, splayed naked in thralldom, like the woman there.  Zude in bondage, and hungry. 

It rose again, that thrill of mastery and flame, summoned from such unfamiliar wellsprings.  And hard on its heels, the horror and the sickening self-loathing.  Jez flailed backward to the support of an upright girder.  Wildly, she flung out her arm again, reaching for the Presence, for the woman she knew she would become.  Instantly her Future Self responded with the handclasp of support.  In that moment Jez gained her internal victory.  Her body eased.

"How can I," she said aloud, "how-- "

"Rejoice,"
said her guide. 

"But I'm not-- "
"You are both.  You are all.  Rejoice."  The figure beside her moved.  "Come.  There is more."

In the company of her new-found guide, Jez weathered the evening's intermingling of sex and violence.  The explicit and abhorrent message seemed clear.  "Women," it said, "can be  violators, too, and this is the way we shall treat each other: with men's weapons, men's uniforms, men's power, men's arrogance, men's titillations.  We play here in this domain of men, and we enjoy it.  We are masters of it."  Her control served her to the last dregs of the party.

It was close to the witching hour of three when she and Zude emerged from the darkened pier building where the party had taken place.  Through the trees they could see small boats bobbing at their moorings.  In their accustomed walking posture, elbows bent with forearms locked and fingers intertwined, they wound their way through the bowers of wisteria that marked a path by the harbor. 

Zude broke the silence.  "Bella-Belle, I need to hear from you."  When Jez did not respond, she continued.  "You see, love, it's not violence.  It's about consent.  Nothing is done against another's will."

Jez shook her head, disrupting the evenness of their walking.  "I'm breathing," she sent to her inner guide.  "I'm breathing and I'm in control."  Aloud she said calmly, "Zude, it's not enough to say that violence is what's done against our will.  That's a hollow definition for me.  Consent isn't the key."