The Chronicles of Harold the Healer Ch. 03

"It is definitely toxic, by itself. But when you add it to the mix of these herbs, plus another one," which he named, getting even more surprised looks, "chemicals in them act to neutralize the toxin. And in case you were wondering, it was found completely by accident. But the best part of it is," he added, getting a conspiratorial look, "it works on women too."

"Really? Then why hasn't this become general knowledge a long time ago?" Diana demanded loudly, then winced and said, "Sorry about that."

"Anyone with a garden could make a mint," Charles stated, with some hope in his eyes.

"No, the mint is over there," Harold replied, pointing to a stand of plants in another bed. "Sorry, I couldn't resist," he snickered as they groaned. "Do you have a scale? The ingredients must be dried and measured by weight, very precisely."

"I have all of these dried," said Kim, pointing to the ones at their feet, "and even the other one, but none of the toxic plant, of course." They walked over to where the plant in question was growing. Harold picked a few leaves of it, muttered a spell, the leaves dried up and a few drops of water dripped from his fingers. "Thank you!" she said as he handed them to her.

"Here is the recipe," the Healer said, reciting it and getting them to repeat it back until he was sure they'd gotten it right. "You can go inside and get started on it while I work on the tomatoes, which will take some time." They walked over to the far side of the yard to the large bed that had the tomatoes. He knelt to look at the foot-high seedlings and the presence of blight was obvious, brown and yellow bullseye markings on a lower leaf or two on each of the plants. He grimaced, made a disgusted noise, and stood up, glowering at them.

"I've tried planting them in different parts of the bed, but to no avail. The only solution I've been able to find in the books is to not plant them or potatoes for at least five years to give the spores a chance to die." Kim was annoyed because she did not want to be without tomatoes, which always got a good price at the market and the General Store.

"I assume that you've planted tomatoes only in this bed, and nowhere else?"

"Yes, I keep the vegetables on this side, and only plant marigolds and a few others to deter some of the pests." He nodded.

"Good. Decontaminating the entire yard would be a multi-day and multi-person effort, but I can manage this with the help of a few cheats. So, you can either watch me work or go make yourselves some herbal tea." He was surprised to see that they looked undecided.

"Why don't you two go in. Kim will make it and the test subject will consume it," said Diana. "I'll just get in the way." Kim and Charles needed no further encouragement and they hastened to the back door and entered her house. "I just wanted to thank you for restoring my hearing. I had not realized how deaf I had become, despite years of people telling me that I was." Harold found himself enveloped in a bear hug from the five-foot-nine, two-hundred-pound plus woman. "I'd thank you properly," she whispered in his ear, "but the ground is wet and Kim's kitchen window overlooks the garden." She gave his rear a strong squeeze.

"You can let Charles thank me when he comes for you," the Healer wheezed, extricating himself with difficulty. "And he will come for you. Several times." He waggled his eyebrows and she groaned.

"Enough with the silly puns, Mister Moser," she said severely, her brown eyes twinkling over a straight nose and generous mouth. "I've always had an interest in Magic. We've been treated by the lovely Leila and even a few times by some of your traveling colleagues over the years, and it never fails to amaze me. How will you treat this tomato bed? It's rather large."

"Soil Decontamination is a spell that I learned from an Engineer colleague when we were in the Army together," he replied, moving around and looking at the bed, which was about ten feet wide and thirty long and had a collection of varieties of tomatoes and some unaffected marigolds and marjoram.

"The Army? I didn't know that there were Mages in the Army."

"Not usually, because we're a scarce commodity and rather expensive," he replied. "We were all drafted for the Carcosa Campaign and its aftermath. If there's one thing that an Army needs in an active campaign, it's Healers, and there were half a dozen of us, plus two Engineers and a Warrior. She was one person that you definitely did not want to piss off," he added, remembering an unfortunate occasion that wasn't his doing with a grimace. "Anyway, you have to make up a screen that's calibrated for the offending contaminant and pull it through the soil. We all had time to kill, when we weren't fighting for our lives, and spent a good part of it swapping spells."

He laid his staff on the path and made a series of movements of his fingers, hands and arms while saying some words in a language she didn't understand, but was clearly an invocation. The final gesture was extending his arms ahead of him and lifting them, which caused a thin wall of light that rippled in shades of crimson, brown, and green, to rise from the earth at the east end of the bed, which was the farthest from the house. It extended from the fence to across the pathway, about eleven feet, and rose to about a foot and a half above the ground, more than enough to clear the beleaguered tomato plants.

"That's beautiful!" Diana exclaimed.

"You have to have an inherent ability to do certain types of spells effectively," he added as they walked to the end of the tomato bed. "One can do spells outside one's specialty, but they're harder to learn and usually drain more energy. However, there are ways to cheat," he added with an impish grin that she returned. "If you can draw energy from the environment and hook it into the spell, you can use it instead of your own energy. Wind is the easiest, but sometimes you can use solar energy in a pinch." He cast a 20x20 foot Ward above the shimmering wall, then with a few gestures and movements of his fingers and, oddly, his left foot, she could see the two somehow meld together. "If you stay here, I'll go on the other side and we'll pull this together." He scurried to the outside path of the labyrinth, leaning on his staff to avoid slipping, and they each gripped an edge. "Oh, disclosure required. Magic, when used by non-Mages, tends to make them horny. I was, uh, reminded of this earlier this morning." Diana paused to consider as he waited patiently.

"OK, I will take the risk. It may pay off if your tea is as effective as advertised." They slowly started to pull the filter towards the house. The wind was clearly catching in the "sail" and helping to push it, almost too much. "Uh, I am feeling some tingles in my, uh, womanly region."

"It's the Magic at work. That's the secret behind the potion that your husband and Kim are working very diligently on. It turns out that the extra plant that's toxic is somehow able to absorb some Magic from the environment. It was under our noses the whole time! It's a common weed and nobody pays any attention to it beyond hauling it out of their lawns and gardens. One of my colleagues in the Capital stumbled across it by accident, and now all the Mage Botanists are going nuts looking for any other plants that may do this. It didn't take long for the Chemists, both Mage and non-mage, to work out how to neutralize the toxin, which can be done using the other herbs. When this finally gets out, there are going to be a lot of much happier older men, and their partners." They had just finished sweeping the bed, and the pop and crackle of spores being destroyed was especially audible when they were passing over the tomatoes.

"They'd better be ready soon!" Diana announced as the colourful wall and its attached Ward dissolved into the air. "I haven't felt like this since I was a teenager! And if they aren't ready," she said, and her carnivorous stare made him shiver, "it will be you whom I fuck into the floor." Before they could open the door, it burst open and there stood Charles, wearing nothing but a huge grin.

"Honey, look what I've got!" Beneath his soft, flabby belly was a seven-inch erection, throbbing to his heartbeat.

"It worked!" Diana half-whispered. "Oh, my most wonderful cock!" She grabbed and squeezed it. "I need that cock fucking me right now!" She pushed him into the kitchen while frantically undoing her overcoat and casting it aside. She hiked up her gray dress, pulled down and removed her underwear, laid down in the middle of the floor and spread her legs. "Get on me and fuck me!"

"Happy to oblige, dear," Charles replied, all but leaping on her with a heavy smack and rattling objects on the counter, one of which Kim had to hustle to keep from falling off.

"Oh! That feels so good!" There was a lot of flesh in motion as they frantically humped and bucked for more than a minute. Charles groaned.

"I'm coming already! I can't stop it!"

"I don't care! Fill me with your cum!" He obliged as she moaned loudly and clamped down hard on his rejuvenated cock and he hosed her cervix with several squirts of pent-up passion.

"My job here is done," said Harold cheerfully from the door. He had stayed outside a safe distance from the action. "Your tomatoes will grow blight-free now, and you can invite your favourite neighbourhood gentlemen around for a cup of tea," he concluded with a wink.

"Thank you, Healer Harold," Kim replied, heavy on the irony, and he closed the door and skedaddled. Charles had rolled off Diana and was lying on his back. He tried to sit up, but the room seemed to spin around and he quickly lay down again.

"Diana, my dearest," Charles said, red-faced, "I have been totally ruined in my debut. I think that I will have to get into better shape in order to serve you."

"Me too, my dearest husband," she replied, also flat on her back, with cum and her juices trickling out of her wonderfully abused pussy.

"Diana, would you mind if I fucked your husband? Believe it or not, he's still hard, and it's been a long time since I've had a cock in me."

"Sure, go ahead," Diana groaned, trying to sit up with as much success as her husband. "Charles, are you OK with it?" Charles was watching wide-eyed as Kim hiked up her green dress and shimmied out of her pale-yellow panties, giving him a clear view of her untrimmed gray bush.

"How can I refuse?" he mumbled as she straddled him, facing his feet, positioned his cock at the entrance to her vagina, and slowly sank down on it, moaning quietly as he pushed open her passage that had not experienced a real cock since Greg had died unexpectedly almost a year and a half ago. Greg, who had brazenly pounded her senseless several times on the plush carpet of the Mayor's office. Greg, whose six-and-a-half-inch length had sheathed itself in every hole in every room in her house. Charles was almost the same size, and when she closed her eyes, she could imagine it was Greg groaning his way towards orgasm as she rose, fell, and gently twisted and squeezed. Hers was coming like a charging warhorse and she felt herself squeezing harder and harder, feeling every bump and vein and contour of his sensitive head as he got harder and harder and started to pulse.

"Oh, Greg, Greg, why did you have to leave me?" she cried as Charles pumped more cum into her and wave after wave of pleasure surged through her body, leaving her gasping and weeping on his softening cock and heaving body.

"You poor thing," said Diana sadly. She had managed to sit up and watch most of the action, and caught her neighbour as she toppled off her husband and held her slight frame in her arms.

"He was a good man," said Charles, still lying prone as his deflating cock dribbled cum. "I think that he and Healer Harold would have gotten along."

"Leila is going to marry Healer Harold in the Park this evening," Kim said between sobs. "Perhaps we should clean ourselves up and make something to bring. We can thank him personally."

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

"Damn it! Why does it have to hurt so much to give birth to a baby?" Brenda Jaggers shouted after her latest contraction had passed. Leila and Marcie had managed to transfer her from the front room in Leila's house into the spare bedroom, whose bed was far more comfortable and safer for her than the examination couch. "What idiot designed our anatomy to make us bleed every month, then when we finally do get knocked up just to make it stop, we get huge and fat and ugly and then nearly tear ourselves apart to get it out! Aaahh!" Another contraction started.

"If Nancy doesn't get here soon, the baby will come without her," Leila said, looking at the Window she was using to monitor progress. "Brenda, my dear, you have progressed more in an hour than some women do in a day."

"Really, Mama?" asked Marcie, wide-eyed. Her mother nodded.

"Long births are brutal. Nancy and I haven't lost one yet, but many women have died in childbirth. It's the most dangerous thing we have to do." They heard the sound of the front door bursting open and stuff being dropped in the small foyer.

"I'm here!" announced Nancy Martin, the midwife. "Where's the patient?"

"In here, Mrs. Martin!" said Marcie, popping out into the hallway and waving. "Hi, Mr. Jaggers," she added to a nervous-looking Fred.

"You've done your duty, Fred. Now scram! No men in the birthing room!"

"How are you doing, sweetheart?" he called out tentatively. He was much bigger than the five-foot-five midwife in both height and width, but didn't make an effort to get past her.

"I'm fine, honey," Brenda crooned back. "Why don't you come in here so I can... rip off that lovely cock of yours and feed it to the geese! You did this to me! You and your sweet talk and your wonderful massages and loving kisses! Why do I have to... ahh, aaahhh! You awful, horrible, loving man!"

She had returned home to the farm after a more annoying day than usual in the Town Hall. They had been in the final stages of an acrimonious debate about paving Main St with flagstones instead of the dirt-pressed gravel that did the job, but was bumpy and rough on people, horses, and wagons, but the cost was high and the disruption that it would cause was also a factor. She was all for it because it would definitely improve the look of the commercial district, but penny-pinchers were fighting tooth and nail against it. It had been a warm day in mid-August and Fred had come in from the fields after inspecting the fences, bringing the smell of fresh hay on him. After removing his hat and boots and putting them on a hook and a tray by the kitchen door, he had come over and massaged the knots out of her shoulders with his strong, capable hands.

"It feels like you've had a tough day," he had said, working his way up the side of her neck to the base of her skull. She had closed her eyes and moaned softly as the muscles relaxed under his ministrations. Then she'd felt his lips on hers, kissing her gently as he had worked his way up.

"If it weren't for having you to come home to," she had replied after their lips had parted, "I don't know how I'd stand it. I don't even know how I got elected Mayor in the first place. What are you doing, you awful man?" He had pushed her hair back over her ears and was gently stroking her earlobes. "Oh, that feels strangely good," she had murmured, starting to feel warmth from more than the kitchen stove. As the gentle kisses had continued, his hands had moved down her back, squeezing and kneading muscles that she hadn't even known were stiff and in so doing pressing her body against his.

"Feeling better now?" he had murmured in his warm, deep, voice.

"Mmm, yes," she had replied, "except for one small thing."

"What would that be? Did I miss a spot?" She looked him straight in his eyes.

"My pussy, you seducing bastard. Your loving kisses and excellent massaging have somehow turned it into a raging inferno. I need something to put it out."

"A cold bath will do that. I'll go pump some water for you." His feeble attempt to escape her suddenly strong arms around him had gotten him nowhere.

"Only this," she had said, squeezing the hard lump in his pants that had been pressing into her, "can put out the fire that you so carefully stoked." She had unbuttoned his summer-weight jeans and pulled them and his underwear down, exposing his large, thick cock in all its glory. Her slacks and very damp underwear had quickly found their way to the floor. She licked the underside from its base to its tip, swirled her tongue around the foreskin, and then had put as much of it into her mouth as she could fit, pumping it in and out twice as he had moaned and shaken from her attention. "Now put this cock into my pussy and put out my fire!" She had laid down on the floor, and its cool stones provided some relief from the summer heat. He had rolled up their pants and put them under her head as an improvised pillow. "Such a considerate seducer," she had purred as he had positioned himself and then had sunk his wonderful cock in as far as it would go in one thrust.

"I enjoy seducing the love of my life," he had said with a wicked twinkle in his eye, gently thrusting in and out. "Am I putting out your fire yet?"

"You are making it worse! Unnghh!" She had squeezed him as he was thrusting and his beautiful brown eyes had lost focus and he had moaned. "You are so hard. You're going to cum and there's nothing you can do to stop it," she had whispered, her lips brushing his. "Aaahh!" He had suddenly started thrusting hard and fast and her clitoris had overloaded. High-pressure squirts filled her to overflowing as she had lost all power of rational thought, and all she could feel was the cool flagstones beneath her and his warm weight on top of her and his softening cock still hot inside her.

"I love you Brenda," he had managed to say, looking into her blue eyes. "You're my only one."

"I love you Fred," she had managed to reply, somehow knowing that this time their attempt to conceive had been successful. Now it was finally time to get the baby out, and he was a lot larger than the cock that had gotten him started. Oh, fuck, but it hurt!

"Come to think of it," Fred rumbled hastily, "all this excitement has made me forget about all the stuff that has to be done on the farm! I'd better go make sure it's still OK!" He quickly ran out the door and closed it behind him with a thump.

"Well, that's him taken care of," said Nancy briskly, removing her boots and hanging her coat on one of the four hooks on the wall that's behind the door when it's open. "How's she doing, Leila?" She marched down the hall into a quick hug from Marcie, before entering the room. Brenda was naked on the bed, her sandy-blonde hair plastered to her head with sweat, and in the noisy throes of yet another contraction. Her feet were on the mattress and her legs opened wide.

"She's fully dilated and the baby's on his way," said Leila, checking her Window.

"You don't waste any time, do you dearie?" Nancy was a matronly type, with salt-and-pepper hair tied up in a bun, a round, cheerful face, sparkling blue eyes, a long, straight nose, and small mouth with generous lips over a strong chin. "We'll get him out of there in no time."

"Is he, is he OK?" Brenda asked, tears on her cheeks. "I want my baby in my arms!"

"You'll have to get him out if you want him in your arms, Brenda," said the midwife in a no-nonsense tone. "Have you got a couple of big pushes left in you?" She nodded weakly. "When the next contraction comes, give it all you've got!"

"You can do it, Mrs. Jaggers!" encouraged Marcie from the doorway. "We're all here for you!" Brenda's eyes went wide and she cried out again in pain.

"He's crowning," said Leila, slapping a Clean and a Sterilize spell on both the bed where the baby's head was beginning to emerge from Brenda's vagina, and also on Nancy's hands. With one final scream, the baby was pushed out and Brenda flopped back onto the pillow, sobbing and with tears flowing freely. "Marcie, would you like to cut the umbilical cord?" Marcie nodded uncertainly and came over as the baby took his first breath and began to cry. Her hands got Cleaned and Sterilized, and she took the offered surgical scissors and made the cut in the indicated place.