Glade and Ivory Ch. 28

Glade was more moved by Demure's account of her love than she'd ever been before. She wept tears of genuine sympathy as she unclothed Demure when they had the privacy and saw the extent of her wounds. The worst was the blindness in Demure's left eye from which foul pus occasionally oozed.

Demure's limp resulted from a later accident that happened when she was gathering fruit and vegetables in the forest. Her loss of sight made her prone to fall over or walk into a tree or bush. On this occasion, she caught her foot in a cleft in the rocks as she clambered up the hillside where she and other women would daily forage. Her fibula was only slightly broken and the village shaman had the knowledge to treat the break with a splint made from the femur of a deer, but the wound never fully healed.

It was inevitable that, after not many days, temptation got the better of Glade and the two women once again made love together.

This was very foolish and imprudent in a Cave Dwellers' village. This was even more reckless given that Glade was the shaman's wife and therefore expected to behave even more responsibly than the other woman. She was also the mother of two children. The Cave Dwellers had shown her nothing but kindness and she threw away all the accumulated good will to enjoy the flesh of another woman. And worse: to a woman no longer as beautiful or desirable as she had once been.

But Glade's passion well exceeded the bounds of prudence, common sense, decency or even material self-interest. She loved Demure and, as her lover made so very apparent to her, Demure loved her. They snatched any and every opportunity to make love together in the woods or in the darkest shadows of the caves. Their lips and tongues tangled together. Their nails cut deep into the skin of each other's back. A passionate flow of juice dripped from their vaginas. Their crotches were raw and red from tribadic friction. Glade was drunk on heedless passion and reckless desire.

And of course it all soon came to an end.

Glade and Demure were discovered together making love by three women who'd been gathering mushrooms in the woods. They were troubled by a disconcerting commotion of gasps and moans. They speculated that they would have to minister to a villager who'd been attacked by a wild animal or who was victim to an accident. They didn't expect to see the naked flesh of two women: both dark but one much darker than the other. They were utterly appalled and scampered off before Glade could stop them and try to somehow buy their silence.

The awful truth was out.

The only mystery was that Glade and Demure had managed to conduct their indiscretions for so long. Many villagers came forward with accounts of what they'd seen that had aroused their suspicions. The times the two lovers were more intimate together than two friends from even the heathen southern lands should ever be. The times they were seen walking together hand in hand over the grassy meadows. And the number of times when Glade was nowhere to be found and Demure was also missing.

The Cave Dwellers had no choice in the matter. Glade and Demure had committed an unforgivable sin. Flint couldn't be expected to live any longer with a wife who had so dishonoured him with, of all transgressions, another woman. The two boys would be forever damaged if they remained in the care of a woman who'd forsaken her marital duties for mere carnal desire. The whole village was shamed by this heinous transgression. The two harlots would have to be expelled from the village. And not just from the one village but from any village settled by the Cave Dwellers' tribe.

It wouldn't do for Glade to plead that in many villages in the southern lands behaviour like theirs, even within the institution of marriage, was often not merely condoned but expected. Such further evidence of corruption and perversion would only worsen their case. The villagers would simply conclude that the very act of extending compassion to women from the southern lands had merely let an evil cancer spread within their midst.

Glade and Demure silently hung their heads low while the village chief and his advisors berated them. Flint, the shaman, was inconsolable. He could barely speak through his bitter tears. Glade could see from the expression on his face that he still couldn't believe that his married life was to end so soon. Glade was sure that if the discovery of her infidelity hadn't been declared so publicly in front of the entire village then despite his anger Flint would also have been inclined to forgive her for the sake of the children and her continued companionship.

Glade kept her face as expressionless as she could throughout the ordeal. With Demure by her side this was in a sense no more than a return to the state she and her lover had known before they'd sailed across the Great Sea. She and Demure may be older now (although clearly no wiser), but this wasn't an unfamiliar situation at all. She had no doubt that the lovers had the resourcefulness and wit to survive in the northern lands as they had in the south. The predators may be different, the winter unspeakably harsh and the tribes spoke different languages and worshipped different spirits, but essentially the situation wasn't much different.

Demure was, of course, the more inscrutable of the two women while they were being reprimanded. This was a blessing for both of them as it was she who was most blamed and one most spat on by the villagers. She didn't flinch even though her dark skin dripped with saliva and words had been shouted at her from right beside her cheek. The answers she gave in her heavily accented version of the Cave Dwellers' language couldn't satisfy the anger of the chief or any of the other villagers, but at least they didn't antagonise them further.

And then the two women were banished.

Again.

This was a pattern in Glade's life which could only be blamed on her lover. Demure was a blight on Glade's life. But she was also her nearest and dearest love from the southern savannah, along the southern shores, across the Great Desert, over the Great Sea and now amongst the northern lands of mountains, snow and dark coniferous forest.

The two women were given enough time to gather their possessions under the baleful and reproachful eyes of the villagers who Glade not long before considered her family and friends. Then, with only curses to accompany them, the two women trudged northwards along the paths beaten down between the beach and the forest to a new and far less secure life.