To Live and Uplift Underground 11


“You can travel with us, you know,” Younger Talia brazenly told me from where I was currently packing in Aunt Kan’a’s part of our tunnels.


It had been a day since I made the copper axe, since Jarna’t laid with me, and I had judged its binding to be good enough to turn it into my cousin that morning. 


I saw her eyes shine with delight, and those of her minion friends reflect off some envy. I got praise, but no verbal thanks. I got recognition and nothing beyond that. But not because Talia didn’t want to give me more. As it turned out, I had been cutting it much too close.


Much like Aunt Kan’a, Talia was looking at me as if I were a favored pet. But the invitation to curl on her lap never came. 


The gang got in the way.


“Girls, tell the males to start getting their shit, we move tomorrow!” One of Talia’s veterans yelled at the girls in their parts of the home caves. The same thing, said by representatives of the three other crews, echoed around us as the word was finally given.


It was time to go.


No amount of glares from Younger Talia could change that, so whatever “bonuses” that she had in mind died with that announcement. I will admit, the events of the preceding evening were still playing out in my mind, so it's only with hindsight that I noticed how that morning almost went. But perhaps that was for the better.


Regardless, Younger Talia had walked into Aunt Kan’a’s caves to try her luck again.


“Oy, what’s this?” Soli stopped taking stock of the crew’s clothing to glare at the younger girl. We were in a long cave where various packs were being gathered in preparation for the next day. “The fuck does Arione have to do with you?”


“Oh, well, we are very well acquainted, you know,” Talia spread her arms and shrugged, “Just thought he’d appreciate it if we deepened said acquaintance.”


Soli snorted, “Just because you made him stick his tongue up your cunt doesn’t mean he’s yours to toy with. Either come back when he makes your crew useful again, or ask Kan’a how much a roll with him is worth.”


“Either way, get the fuck out of our caves.”


“I see I am not wanted here,” Younger Talia chuckled as she turned around and left.


But not before looking back and making eye contact with me, “But Arione, if you change your mind, you know how to find me.”


Soli frowned as Talia swayed her ass side to side as she went.


The copper axe I made for her was securely tied to her loincloth.


“Where’d she get that axe?” she murmured as I almost immediately took the chance to boast about my work, but hard-earned survival lessons stopped me.


The plan, all along, was for people to know that I made Younger Talia’s axe so that I could get the chance to use the rest of the ore that Aunt Talia had. If nothing else, the city would give the gang more for copper nuggets than it would get from the ore  At that point, it made no sense for everyone involved to NOT use me.


But it occurred to me that HOW that was done mattered.


If Younger Talia was the one to tell others, then I was fairly safe. A female getting something from a male was the standard, as things went, and coercion of some sort was always the assumed norm. Never mind that people had watched me interact with her, me being a male went a long way to excuse a great deal of things. It wasn’t often that low expectations worked for me, but I was banking on it.


But if I were the one to announce it, if I seemed to be declaring a change of my alliance before Aunt Talia had so much as bartered me for it, if everyone knew that my loyalty was in question while I didn’t have any other patron, I’d be fucked.


Aunt Kan’a didn’t need to kick me out of her crew and leave me free to join Aunt Talia’s.


As far as everyone was concerned, she’d be fully within her rights to make an example out of me. Something told me that, this time, it wouldn’t be something as trite as a milking.


So my mouth clicked shut, and I joined Soli in glaring at Younger Talia.


Her telling others that I’d gotten her that axe seemed like a natural part of events, but our deal didn’t, technically, include her giving me any credit. 


I just hoped that it didn’t occur to her that she had some leverage in holding that back.


—--------------------------------


So, of course, she did.


“It doesn’t have to be the whole way, you know,” she told me just before nightfall came.


She caught me just as I had gone out to fetch water for the crew, to fill our waterskins for the morning.


“You just need to keep me company here and there,” she assured me as she had me against a wall, her hands pressing at the stone at each side of my head, “You know, when I call and need someone sweet to make me look good.”


“Truthfully, if you did, I think I’d feel confident in the axe you made me. Enough, even, to tell others that you made it,” she smiled a confident, arrogant smirk.


I expected people to give me speculative looks, for males to turn their gaze on me with intensified jealousy, for females to finally come and ask about the possibility of me making things for them.


Instead, all that people talked about, when the axe came up, was how Younger Talia had it and the mystery of where she got it.


My name, in this instance, did not come up even once.


And now here she was, confirming that she was holding the credit hostage against me.


I will admit that it aroused anger in me, a dangerous thing for a male to have for a female. But, at the same time, FEELING the unfairness of power being leveraged against me because of what I could do, because of what I could make, also appealed to that part of myself that had just awakened.


To that part of myself that was only getting stronger.


“I’d work with you in the future,” I grunted, trying to keep the blush away from my face. Such blatant abuse was lovely, but it ran squarely against my continued ambitions. “There is no need for this.”


“Oh, I know you can’t stay away from me,” Talia caressed my cheek, “But I rather think that we would both be happier if you joined Grandma’s crew under me.”


A pet. 


Younger Talia wanted me directly under her, similar to the way I was under Jarn’at before I betrayed her.


As a pet.


The power dynamics would be very different: Younger Talia would almost certainly use and abuse the power that she had over me to use me in every which way.


Both physically.


And, from the arousal in her eyes, yes, sexually.


Just the notion had my loins getting hard.


However-


“I can make metal weapons,” I breathed out, “There is no way someone won’t try to take me from you if you are all that’s holding me.”


“Let me-” she rolled her tongue, “Let me worry about that.”


It was cute how she said it.


So it was hard for me to shake my head, “The only way that works is if you don’t ever tell anyone about my skill and then find ways to downplay it afterwards. Your control is only iron-tight if you keep my value hidden.”


She only needed to forever dangle the credit for my ability to make copper out of my reach. She only needed to do so until I was in a situation where I had no choice but to keep being in her control. Where I had no choice but to keep being her pet.


I didn’t know if she had the ability to actually engineer such a scenario but, all the same, the one thing she could not let go of was the principal leverage she had over me.


The only question, then, was whether I was happy embracing such a thing.


And, before you say anything, I want you to realize how tempting it was from my point of view.


I was new to this hunger of mine, you know, and the memory of Jarn’at had blown it wide. I did not know if such a loving rape would ever be in the cards again, so the notion of being in a situation where I had to do NOTHING for my partner to believe she was coercing me every time we bed was incredible.


I would only need to act in the fiction that my cousin would make and, for possibly the rest of my life, she would put all her efforts to dominate me.


It was a tantalizing thing.


But two things stopped me.


If I did…I would never realize where things led with Jarn’at.


The cousin I betrayed had not said anything since I came back with the copper axe. She had given no reason as to why she didn’t just take it, and left me holding the bag.


That explosion of passion still made my hands tremble and my legs quiver. It seemed like a beautiful obsession.


An obsession that she had for me and me alone.


I had to see where it led.


But, secondly? I could be more than a coppersmith. As tantalizing as the future that Younger Talia offered me was, I knew that it was doubtful that she’d be able to keep me under wraps if I moved on to more ambitious projects. So, the answer to that debility was to quite simply keep me from being anything more than a coppersmith. It was, unfortunately, a trap.


Younger Talia frowned at me, “No girl likes being doubted, Arione.”


I couldn’t help it.


I smiled,  “You are a strong, ambitious girl, cousin.”


“Flattering?” she raised an eyebrow, “But I am still not hearing a ‘yes’.”


“I am a male, cousin,” I said, “but I still have things that I want to do. Things that I need the freedom to do.”


Talia snorted, “Freedom?”


She traced a finger down my chest, “Such a useless thing wasted on a male.”


“I still need it,” I shuddered.


“I’ll prove it,” she promised, “I’ll prove it to you that you don’t need it.”


—-------------


That meeting aside, things were moving fairly quickly in our home caves.


Soli emptied her cave of all the effects that she had been entrusted with and, already, like all the other Keepers, she had the gang males ready to carry them.


Of course, in an immigration, every single female carried all that she could with her if for no other reason than it wasn’t rare for things to get “lost” on the way; Keepers would, of course, try to take care of things entrusted to them, but they did not, quite pointedly, offer their usual insurance during immigrations. It just wasn’t worth it.


So girls entrusted to them either what they felt they could afford to lose or what they quite simply just couldn’t carry with them.


The night before our travel, everyone took out a fur pack, if they had one, or whatever containers that they felt they could carry with them. Foodstuffs filled many, as did what spare clothing and tools people owned.


Rarely, spare weapons went in them. Since we were immigrating, and immigrations were dangerous, most girls would rather carry their weapons on their person rather than on any pack. That meant that what weapons they actually packed would be the least valued weapons that they had. Usually, that meant the “standard” throwing stick.


To my amazement, a bunch of them this time around were knife-clubs.


In retrospect, it made sense. The women who would have many weapons to spare would mainly be the veterans. Successful youngblood like Jarn’at aside, who got most of her clubs from the battlefield, the veterans of the gang would be prioritized enough that they might rarely need a knife-club, let alone a “wooden” stick. But it was precisely because they were veterans that made them such a good target for them.


There were only 4 crew leaders, and 4 Keepers. It was worth it for my plagiarizing male cousins to seek favor from other influential females instead of competing for a small pool of favor. And Veterans could do a lot for you if they liked you.


All the same, the more I looked around, the more stone weapons I began to see.


A lot of them were made only with the same type of animal sinew that I had used for my first knife-club. A lot of them use the glue that the gang procured from fungus to join stone blade to “wooden” haft. A few had even gone as far as to…making throwing darts. Using what would normally be small “broken” pieces of fungus wood, normally fit only for a fire, as the shaft they had given new life to what would normally be just garbage.


I was impressed. In such a small time frame, my cousins had taken the ideas and technology I had introduced and run away with it.


I now saw what Soli was trying to warn me about.


I looked forlornly at the axe I made for Younger Talia, just as she was parading around with it.


She was ignoring all questions about where she got it from.


It wasn’t hopeless for me as I still had my share of copper nuggets, but now I would have to make something from them before I could even begin to make inroads into getting the rest of the copper ore. Not only would I need to wait until we properly settled into our new caves, but I would also need to wait for our crews to properly “clear” their surroundings before I felt safe enough to venture out to forge again.


The expectant looks O’villia gave me let me know that I still had pending “debts” to fill my time, but there was no way Aunt Kan’a would allow me the freedom that I had unknowingly been benefiting from all this time. I had no doubts that my work would be superior to my cousins but, out of favor as I was, I also had no illusions that she would make me compete against them all the same.


It was going to take a while before I could make waves with my copperwares.


And, by then, the copper ore might just be gone.


Well, I’d just have to bear it, I suppose.


“I don’t know if anyone ever got you your clubbing stick back,” I happened to hear Rozz say as I also hussled about getting ready for the trip, “So I made this for you!”


You know how most everyone ignores the conversation going around them, yet can hone in when someone says something about them? That happened to me in that moment. There was no way that he wasn’t talking about me.


So when I turned around, Rozz, still the little shit that he’d always been in our childhood, was handing something over to Jarn’at.


It was a stone knife-club.


From the angle that I was looking, I couldn’t tell what sort of quality it had, but that hardly mattered. Rozz saw a chance to ingratiate himself and took it.


As Jarn’at wordlessly accepted it, it appeared as though I wasn’t circumspect enough in my eavesdropping because Rozz noticed me looking.


The smug smirk that he shot at me was, I admit, quite infuriating.


However, Jarn’at did not follow where Rozz was looking.


Something else had her attention.


“Say, Talia,” she said loud enough to make people take notice.


It certainly made Younger Talia look at her, “Yes?”


“That’s a nice axe you have,” Jarn’at said, her face unscrutable.


“Isn’t it?” Talia preened.


Jarn’at turned her head and deliberately, for a single second, caught my eyes.


And smile savagely.


“When are you going to tell people that Arione made it?”