The Kanshou (Earthkeep) (15 page)

Still holding Jez's hand, Dicken leaned against the room's makeshift table of crates and boards, then continued, speaking more and more slowly.  "There they were, all those shells, empty of life since the day the big turtles died in them.  We climbed up on top of some that had been stacked together, and the old woman spread out huge red palm leaves for us to sit on.  She taught me how to play the zeze.  It was the holiest place I've ever been in.  I want to take you there."

Jez stared at her lover.  "Dicken," she said, framing the big face with her hands.  "Where is this place?  Is it near?"

"Very near.  It's Aldabra Island.  In the Seychelles."

"Right off the Tanzania coast.  We'll go!" Dicken's face outshone the sun.  "It's practically on our way back from Bombay."

"And," Dicken grinned, "we have a nice out-of-the-way mud hut here, and a bright starry sky.  I think we should stay here for the night.  Fly out early tomorrow for Brandnew Salalah.  We can still make Bombay by next day."

With a deep laugh, Jez kicked her pack aside.  Dicken gave an extinguishing tap to the glolobe
,
plunging the earthen room into blackness.  Starlight from the open doorway gradually made visible the outlines of Jez's naked body.  Dicken shed her caftan and trews, then drew her lover down to the pallet, laughing her own deep anticipation.  

In the affairs of bodily pleasure, Bess Dicken had made a goodly number of women happy; and a goodly number had made her happy as well.  But nothing else ever gave Dicken the sheer joy she got from making love with Jezebel.  In their best times together, they would arrive together at a "Crystal Gate," beyond which their loving was a highly conscious and mutual act, a place of tender and almost unbearable intimacy.  Once entered, the Gate cast Dicken's softself into Jez's body and Jez's softselfinto Dicken's, so that each woman inhabited the extraordinary dual reality of being in every moment both toucher and the touched, both lover and the loved. 

Now, in the chill of a desert night, Dicken began the precious ritual of gliding toward the Gate and the softself exchange, discovering all over again every niche and plane of the bared body before her.  She found a pocket of extra-fine brown hair just behind Jez's ear, noted a starboard list in the tissue of Jez's erect nipple, drew her tongue down an intercostal channel, and calculated in the back of her mind the probable moment of Jez's inevitable burst into full-body sweat.

"Stop, love." 

At first Dicken ignored the whisper.

Then it came again.  "Dicken, stop a minute.  Something's out of kilter."

Bewildered, Dicken muttered, "Out of kilter?"  Then she flared and pulled away from Jez.  "Out of kilter!"  She sat up.

Jez lay looking up at her.  "Clearly," she observed pointedly.  Then she too sat upright.  She rested her hand on Dicken's arm.  "One of us is not all-present."  She closed her eyes. 

All of Dicken's latent uneasiness from the schoolroom encounter rose up out of her pores.  She held her hands over her ears. 

Jez slid behind her, her chin on Dicken's shoulder.  "Let's just back off a minute."  She settled herself against the wall and held out her arms, making a place in them exactly the size of Dicken's throbbing head.

Dicken hesitated, then reluctantly stretched out again.  She felt strong fingers massaging her scalp.  When Jez pushed a stiff thumb into the tiny muscles that connected her skull to her neck, Dicken howled. 

"That's what you're blocking," Jez soothed her lover's brow even as she maintained pressure on the delicate spot.

Dicken stiffened with a gasp.  She felt her resistance ebbing away, and with it, her conscious control.  A scent of bixin assailed her nose and a red crystalline liquid dripped from a bibcock by her pallet, staining her cotton skirt.  The floor was wet and slippery with piles of annatto seed pulp.  Through the half-open door a shaft of candlelight flickered and bounced.

She was in the dye room -- asleep, or so her Momah thought.  How could she sleep with the man yelling, with Momah's cries?  It was Wundu again, back from the cockpits.

Dicken crept to the door.  Momah was lying on the floor among scattered dishes and pots.  She held her arm over her face while Wundu kept hitting her with the flat of his hand. 

"What you gon do, fancy woe-manna?  You gon calla kan-show?  Huh?"  He held her by her hair, jerking her whole body with his shaking of her head.  "You gon make them take me 'way?  What you gon do wi' me, woe-manna?"  He brought his fist down from above, smashing against her temple.

Dicken felt the shriek rise in her throat as she lunged across the room.

"Bess, stay back!" her mother cried, staggering to her feet. "Get back, child!"

Wundu turned his soggy face to Dicken as she flung herself on him.  "Hah!"  With one mighty backhand he sent Momah's thin frame sailing through the air, her head thudding into the corner of the stove.  She fell limp.  Then he turned his attention to the wild figure clinging to his neck, and clawing at his eyes.

In a second Dicken was on the floor with his thick bulk holding her motionless, his rank rum breath hot on her face.  She heaved and writhed,trying to find air, pushing at his eyes with her one free hand.  Wundu snagged her fingers between his teeth, twisting his tongue around them, sucking and biting.

Then he pinned her free arm and let his lips drag damply over her face.  "Oh, Miss Prick Teaser, you gotta this coming oh, for so longa long time!"  He shifted his weight to the side, puffing and grunting as he untied his belt with one hand and pulled one leg free of his pants, all the while keeping her immobile with his chest and his other hand, his wet face next to hers.

Dicken closed her eyes and screamed.  She screamed with all the breath she could draw, with one long scream drowning his foul talk, his moist whispers, as he struggled with his clothes. 

"You wanna suck my cock, don you, don you Miss Tease?"  She spat at him.  He guffawed and wiped the spittle across her cheek, adding his own slobber as he reached her mouth and tried to pressure it open with his teeth and tongue.  Dicken twisted her head away, her mouth a tight line.  Wundu fumbled under her skirt, then with an angry jerk he tore her underwraps from her body.  Dicken forced a curse through her raw throat.  He was on her again, rocking and rubbing.  She could feel his hand between their bodies massaging his cock.  He panted, eyes closed, pushing faster and faster.  "Oh, Miss Priss," he moaned, "you gon get oh sucha big meat!  Gon fill you up, hard!"

Dicken felt him spreading her legs with his own, his grunts louder now, his fingers sliding and poking into her vagina as if he were trying to widen the opening.  When Wundu changed his body weight so his cock could fit between her legs, Dicken glimpsed the immensity of what was in store for her young body.  She rebelled again, trying in vain to throw him.  As she felt the blunt weapon at the edge of its intended sheath, she drew a long breath, stifled it, and sent her awareness out of her body, upward and out beyond the hut and the annatto trees, over the coconut groves, the streams, the vally sinks, up past green mountains and the eastern coast of the island.

"Dicken!"  Jez's voice rode the distant cloud cluster.  "Come back to me!"  Jez was rocking her, shaking her gently.  Dicken swallowed; her throat was sore.  Jez held her closer, humming a stilling chant into her ear.  Dicken opened her eyes.  She heard herself panting loudly. 

"Jez!"  She clung to Jezebel, heaving and shaking with her own attempts at calm.

"Dicken, my love."  Jez hummed and held and chanted. 

When Dicken could speak, she gasped, "Wundu."  Then, "Fucker!"  Her rage still shook her. 

"I felt you leave your body," Jez said softly.  "That's your block, when you dissociate."

Dicken staggered up from the pallet.  "So what, I should take my memory back to the place it all happened and fix it!"
"Dicken--"

"Witch-woman, I just been there!  I just been there and seen it all over again!"  She held her belly.  "And this is what it gets me!"  Dicken threw her arms high.  "So what you gonna do for me, Jezebel?  What's your cure?  You go round fixing the whole world, and now you gonna fix your own love-together!"  She paced.  "You gonna tell me like my Hoonah that it's all my doing?  That I brought this sucker into my world with my own negative vibes?  That if only I'd-a been in synch with my Source Self the whole unfortunate incident would never have happened?  That my virginity would-a been intact and Wundu would not-a got away scott-free and my Momah would not-a spent the rest of her days wandering up and down the plateau in a nightshirteating tree bark and singing hymns?"

Jez shook her head.

"Or maybe you're going to tell me to get inside old Wundu's experience and understand why he had to go round raping little girls and why I got to forgive him!"  She laid both hands against the hard-mud wall, then rested her bent forehead between them.  Cunning flashed over her countenance.  "I know what you got up your sleeve!  You gonna say, 'Why Dicken, you got to purely love that poor soul putting it to you with his big dick!  You gotta love him while he tears your insides out, so he can hallelujah see his sin and come on back home, come on back to Jesus!'"

Jez pushed herself up from the pallet.  She put her naked body squarely against Dicken's.  "Look--" she began.

Dicken wasn't finished.  Her mouth was a sneer.  "You never been raped, Jezebel.  It was the most demeaning, humiliating, enraging thing I ever felt!  It was hell, pure burning hell!  That violation is forever!"

"Not so, Dicken!" Jez levelled at her.  "It's only for as long as you want to carry it!"  Jez whirled away from her.  "Dicken, you've got to
stop
carrying it.  You've got to dump it out!"

Dicken's words came in a steely monotone.  "Don't you go therapeutic on me, girlfriend!"  As she jerked away in frustration, Dicken struck her hand against the wall.  She howled, cradling the injury with her other arm and her bent body.  Suddenly, her face contorted and she began sobbing. 

Jez watched the big body heave and gasp.  Without moving, she extended a broad carecurl.  It enveloped the awkward figure, shaping its contours to receive pain and offer ease.  Slowly Jez reached out and drew Dicken down to the pallet. 

The stars shifted another inch in the doorway.  Still Jez massaged and chanted.  Closing her eyes, she breathed in a measured tempo, trying to feel herself into separate parts of her lover's body, making a scan of the organs and systems. 

Immediately she was assailed by heat, heaviness, and unthinkable pain.  Her softself was inside her lover, inside the empty shell of the child that Dicken's softself had abandoned.  And Wundu was on her, grunting and puffing as his hardness drove into every sacred corner of her body, retreated and drove in again, deeper and rougher, a relentless ravaging of her softest tissues, her most cloistered secrets, her most shrouded altars. 

On the rough pallet in the starlight, Jezebel Stronglaces screamed as she had never done before, a scream of rage and revelation.  She hushed it only when she reined in her softselfand regained her identity. 

Still Wundu assaulted her.  Jez knew now what was happening, knew that she was feeling the cells of Dicken's child-body, living Dicken's memory while at the same time she had removed herself from from the experience.  Unlike the departed Dicken, Jez was still able to feel the pain and rage of the rape.  She rode with the feelings, and Wundu's defilement, amazed and incredulous. 

Beside her, Dicken's uninhabited body lay rigid.  Inside Dicken's body, Jez's softself lay rigid.  Nowhere could she find a hint that Dicken's softself, too, had made the switch.  This was not their usual exchange.

In a haze of disbelief, Jezebel began moving her softself back and forth between Dicken's body and her own.  In Dicken's body, she urged the return of Dicken's softself from its detachment.  Even as Wundu's plungings continued, she implored Dicken's spirit to come back to her own body -- or to Jez's body.  "Just come back, Dicken," she sent, "come back!"

Then her softselfwas again in her own body, as she held and soothed the forsaken form beside her.  When Dicken slowly unclenched her jaw, hope stirred in Jezebel.  She kissed the softening countenance even as it drew itself into an acknowledgement of pain.  "Dicken!" she whispered from her hardself.  "Dicken, switch to me, switch to my body!"  She shifted her softselfback into Dicken's body and implored the returning spirit, "Dicken, find the Crystal Gate!  Find it!  Come to me, to your Jezebel!" 

There!  Dicken was there!  Miraculously, the exchange had happened.  With her softself still in Dicken's child body, Jez continued to endure Wundu's thrusts.  But now Dicken's softself, barely awake and aware, inhabited Jez's body.  It spoke through Jez's lips.  "Jez!  What gives?  What--"

"Love me, Dicken!" Dicken's lips pronounced.  "Love me now!"

* * * * * * * *

"I didn't forgive him!"  Dicken was adamant. 

"What, then?" Jez countered.

"I didn't forgive him," she repeated.  "It's just . . . I just feel okay."  She grinned feebly under a stream of water.

The two women stood in the Single Bucket, Asir-By-The-Sea's version of a shower.  Jez alternately dried herself and poured stingy dollops of rinse water into the sieve over Dicken's head.

Dicken opened her mouth to capture and spit out a few drops.  She shook herself and reached for the towel.  She dried her arms, then collapsed on the wooden bench.  "That whole scene's got no charge for me anymore," she said, through streaming tears and a soft smile.  "It's like I'll never have to remember all that again.  Never." 

Jez sank beside her.  She wiped beads of water from Dicken's back.  "Lover, we changed it.  We changed the energy."  She towelled the dark face. 

Dicken stared at her.

Jez continued, "From rape into something else."

"No."  Dicken was suddenly vehement.  "No.  No!  My body did not come to sexual climax from rape!"

"I said we
changed
it, love, changed the energy of that memory within you!  Your body, even with my softselfin it, was healed by the loving of my body, which had your softselfin it--and the physical actions of Wundu."