2 comments/ 27541 views/ 5 favorites Feathers Ch. 01 By: Stultus Synopsis: Caught in the undertow of the dreadful great Eorfleode War, a young student finds himself spurred to enlist as the result of being given a white feather, for cowardice, by his ex-girlfriend. Facing death and near disaster at every step, he learns about different colored feathers, such as the blood red arrows of the Boar-Men. Damaged in heart and soul, he returns home to a land nearly without men, to feather her nest in an entirely unexpected way. An interlude, and the second chronological story of Weaver's World. Sex contents: Some Sex Genre: Romantic Fantasy Codes: High Fantasy, MF, FF, Slow, Tears, Harem Originally Posted at SOL: 2010-05-21 Feathers Ch. 01 Tripping over the body of one of our slain countrymen in the dark a little while later, we found that he had a full skin of good wine, and huddled behind a tree we drank it all, without becoming even the slightest bit tipsy. Battle can be a great sobering influence. We had both pissed ourselves at the start of our short little skirmish, and our stock of heroism and courage was empty. The wine didn't seem to help that much either. In the morning, meeting at last back at the formerly besieged town, we lined up for assembly to discover that nearly a full score of our number were already missing. A few trickled in from the forest later that day, lost like Pieter and I had been, but by the time the march began for Lacestone, our company had been permanently reduced in number to two hundred and fifty-one. Of the lost, I remembered the happy ginger-haired lad Osric the best, and I much mourned his loss. I knew him well from my class and the cheerful lad had every talent to become a great gléaman, as he was ever a merry teller of songs and stories. His happy voice would never sing in our town tavern. *************** Of the great epic battle of Lacestone, the mightiest and most terrible fight that any veteran could ever remember being involved in, I will say little. There are a thousand stories of that terrible battle, of the valiant Lord Rowan and his equally indomitable mate Lady Gwenda, of Duke Boyle's heroic charge against the dragon, and how his lover the Duchess heroically smote the foul beast into destruction... but I personally saw none of those courageous and noble things. Pieter and I, and our little company, were at the back of the right wing of our army, held back behind the battle-line in reserve. It is true we saw smoke, fire and death everywhere we looked, but this was all mostly shrouded by steam clouds towards the center of the battle-line, and the heavy downpour of sheets of cold rain so limited our view that we could barely see a few yards in front of our faces. Still, our miserable company served, and we did what we had sailed a thousand leagues to do. We were slightly to the rear of our lines, near the center of the battle-line, waiting in reserve to be called if our regular Oswein soldiers fell back or had their lines breeched. Clouds of Boar-Men blood-red sheathed arrows fell upon us nearly as thick as the pouring rain, and again in a matter of moments, nearly half of our numbers fell never to again arise, but when our call to duty was cried, some of us were indeed left to answer the call! When the center of the main battle-line began to break, our young leader, the son of our baron, ordered us surviving ill-trained men and lads up to help seal the breech and he was the first of us to fall in actual combat but a few moments later. By then we were reduced to about a hundred and fifty men, but as one, we grimly marched forward towards our doom. Like entering a dark cloud of death, we entered the smoke and the fire, and the fury of combat for which we were in no way prepared. In the midst of the steam, smoke and haze of rain, and over the din of crashing metal I clearly remember hearing the voice of the Duchess calling to us from the center of these dark baleful mists, to rally to her and to hold, to hold until death, and I ran towards her voice to reinforce the line... and to hold it. To my memory her voice was loud and clear, calm and confident, without a hint of worry or panic. It cut through the noise and chaos of the slaughter like the calling of an angel, and I knew that I must obey her. I was no longer a frightened boy - now I had a man's job to do and I resolved that I would hold my ground against the endless horde of huge monstrous appearing Boar-Men, and somehow my feet held and I never took a single step backwards despite the horrors that faced me during the terrible slaughter at the front of the battle-line. When the sun set upon our great victory many hours later, the salvation it was said of the entire Southern Duchies, it was with but barely three score survivors of our numbers that we had still left standing, all bearing some physical wounds... and most with emotional ones as well. Pieter remained safe by my side, but Largo, Hamton, Reese, Telmud and another score of my personal school friends remained still, forever to remain buried in that worthless forever bloodstained brown mud. We pulled the blood red feathered arrows from out of our slain friends and companion's bodies, but Pieter, as if in a daze, kept gathering even more of fatal shafts from the fallen, stripping and gathering the feathers and placing them into a small sack. An odd choice for pillow stuffing, I thought, but most of the other survivors of this horrible battle were all quite half-crazy as well, so I let my friend continue his grim collection task until it became too dark to see. Of our wounded that had fallen from the Eorfleode arrows, even the lightly injured surrendered quickly one by one to fever and fell into the Shadowlands. The soulless monsters had poisoned their arrowtips with their own spoor waste and the slightest scratch brought on wound-fever and then blood poisoning that our ill-trained and far too few medicuses were mostly helpless to treat. ************ Sixty-three lads and men we were remaining, and we cheered that our duty was done and that we might now return to our homes. Our Duke, for whom we served at his pleasure, had lost a great many men, just over a third of his original numbers, and we barely blooded recruits and conscripts were now a core and very irreplaceable part of his remaining army. An army, he soon discovered, that he needed to ship off at once back to his frontiers, to defend against the ever encroaching Caestorian legions to the north and east, and two years later, to man the depleted border forts against the raids of the barbaric Hen'kal nomadic tribesmen of the wastes to the west. Being unluckier than most men, our troop of sixty-three was sent in turn to each frontier, losing over the next several years, slowly but surely, yet another two-thirds of our remaining number, one every month or two. Even the wounded were never given their medical release from duty, but we were returned back to our ranks time and time again to risk our lives yet once again, until we all abandoned any hopes of ever regaining our freedom, or even living long enough to see the next season. When at last, the surviving twenty-four of us received our release orders to return to our homes, after nearly five full years of service, with the thanks and praise of our Duke and of our officers, we could scarcely believe our eyes and ears. Even the most optimistic of us thought that we'd never see our green fertile valley ever again! **************** For my best friend Pieter, this wondrous news came about a month too late. On a previous patrol a Hen'kal arrow, fletched with a feather of sandy-gold color, had pierced his hip deeply. Although the arrowhead was not in any way poisoned, it was a bad injury after our camp medicus had painfully dug out the imbedded arrowhead, and the wound soon began to fester. The blood sickness took him slowly and painfully to join our comrades and friends in the Shadowlands. I added this new feather to Pieter's bag, already quite full of other feathers, all taken in combat. In the dullness of fort garrison duty between patrols, he had painted the names of every boy, lad and man who had fallen from our numbers, since the first day we had marched off as innocents to war. Over and over again, each evening his white paintbrush would inscribe the names of our lost friends onto the blood red feathers of the Boar-Men, or the blue feathered shafts of Caestor. Now with a fresh pot of red ink, I added Pieter's name to a bundle of these golden yellow feathers, to complete his collection. For the last few years I had hardly known my very best friend. He hardly ever spoke anymore and when he did, it was just a few quiet short glumly spoken words. His eyes were forever haunted by the things he had seen and done, and he slept ill most nights, if he slept at all. We all had bad nightmares often, but his night terrors seemed to be more frequent and more unpleasant. I think he knew that he'd never return home to his family. I actually think he was relieved and happy to die, to escape the shadowy life of horror that he lived now. He was not afraid of dying, but he was sorely terrified of dying alone, somewhere forgotten and lost in the sandy wastes with no marker to remember his bleached bones. I held his hand and comforted him as he passed into shadow and I made sure that Pieter got his grave marker, on the southeast side of a grassy hill near the fort so that he could forever rest looking towards a home that he would never return to. As I buried him, my very last speck of my own hope for ever returning home someday was buried with him. This large pillow sack of feathers was the first item I packed when we made our preparation to leave the fort to our young replacements, to return home. Pieter had never found a long term use for his feathers, other than to repeatedly mark the loss of our friends, but now I had a more proper idea for a good use that they should be put to. ********* Three of our number declined to return, and they all stayed at the fort, perhaps to remain forever, and accepted postings as sergeants, to make a career with the army. Another two, immediately upon reaching the capitol, instead took service with a mercenary company, earning an enlistment bonus pay sack that was quite heavy with silver. Our pay had been irregular, to say the least, especially out in the wastes of the western frontier. Upon our discharge, it took the very real threat of violence for us to receive our final six months of owed back-pay. It wasn't much, but we wouldn't have any other traveling expenses... the cheap army paymasters cut us off high and dry without any travel money with which to make our last journey home. Still, with our packs loaded with army rations and several full ale and wineskins, we had few needs for the week long journey home from the capitol city, where we had been discharged. Ronald, who was my last surviving school friend from my school class, after Pieter had died, began acting increasingly oddly as we traveled the final four days towards home. On the surface he was pleasant and talked of his memories of home, but each night as we stopped at an inn, he would drink with a thirst that both amazed and frightened me. We all drank quite heavily those last years, especially while we were either bored or terrified while out on the western wastes, where there was little to see besides sandy desert outside of our fort, and even less to do for amusement, and not a woman to be found in over a dozen leagues. The look of utter madness grew in his eyes as he drank though, and he started fights at every opportunity, hardly caring when he lost them and he awoke beaten and increasingly sore every morning. On our last night before we reached home, Ronald became especially drunk and was in a mean and sour mood. I left him to his cups and went off to sleep. In the morning, I found that he had hung himself in the barn. He left no note of explanation, but now years later I realized that he could not bear to bring the inner demons he had inside of him back to his old home. Perhaps he too should have stayed in the army, unable like the others to face the quiet life of farming once again back home. He had been a jovial lad, even while facing constant danger on patrol in the frontier. He hadn't done anything particularly heroic on his own, and he had faced the exact same dangers all of those years that the rest of us had. Once he knew that the ordeal was finally over, he now cracked... unable to cope with peace. I worried that I might someday do the same, that all of the terrible memories would now become too much for me to bear as well. While the epic battle of Lacestone had been horrible enough to permanently damage the minds of most of the men who fought there, for me, my own personal worst memory was the night skirmish with Caestor, on top of Belyer's Ridge along the border, about a year and half later. A small troop of their scouts discovered our lines in the middle of the night, and with stealth and long knives they slit a few of our throats before the alarm was given. I'd been one of the ones asleep and I suddenly awoke to find a grinning legion-man about to put a knife into my own throat. I quickly drew my own dagger and we rolled in the rocks and dirt for nearly twenty minutes together before it was my blade that sunk in-between his ribs. Every single night since, I've dreamed of that desperate awakening, unless enough wine or ale was available to numb my sleeping thoughts. Still, with the packs upon our backs, the last eighteen of us walked those last couple of leagues home to Meryton, and to begin our old lives, anew once more. ************* Feathers Ch. 02 CHAPTER TWO It was early afternoon when the veterans returned home. It was still mid autumn, that 17th of Ámyrðria, on Freo-twā, or the second free-day of the middle of the month. The fields were still ripe with grain and the women and the children of Meryton and Jasper Valley were forsaking their day of rest to bring in more of the harvest. Many of the fields appeared to be fallow, as the women alone could not plow, sow or harvest by themselves all of the old fertile valley farmland. Still as the small band of returning men entered the quiet town their arrival was noted, and slowly the understanding that these hollow-eyed 'strangers' were their long lost kin-folk, returned as if from the dead, spread like wildfire through the town and throughout the surrounding valley. Shock and astonishment eventually gave way to joyful welcome, and as we entered our local tavern, the old men of the town arose from their well-worn bar seats to clasp our hands and pat our backs. The ale began to flow as we took our rest, but the noise of our homecoming only became louder as old friends and family gradually arrived to greet us. "How bad was it? The war, was it as terrible as the stories all say?" Everyone asked us, but none of us really had an answer. The truth was just too terrifying and unsettling and no one wanted to even remember it let alone speak of it. "It was pretty bad." Colin eventually muttered on our behalf, and that mostly silenced that question... at least for today. Colin himself had been wounded at least three times that I could remember, including a bad wound to his left upper arm that would never heal entirely. His night terrors were nearly as bad as Pieter's, and like Ronald and myself, he had long ago taken refuge in an alepot, in order to sleep without unsettling dreams. Already, his blackjack full of good Meryton ale had been thrice drained and the refills were coming fast. By tradition, and by Oswein law, women were forbidden inside of the taprooms of alehouses as customers, but since the men had all left town five years ago old Serge the tapmaster had ignored this custom, and now women drank there as freely as men and soon ever growing numbers of women arrived to greet and toast the returnees. Mothers, sisters, wives and old girlfriends now wished to make their own greetings and soon the tavern was quite crowded and merry. The happiness of the reunion was soon tempered by the knowledge that so very few of their men had returned. Tears of joy soon turned to weeping sadness as more and more of the women learned that their own menfolk had not, and would not, ever return. Soon, the party turned into a mournful wake, for our four hundred and sixty four dead friends, companions, brothers, fathers, husbands and lovers. The luck of survival had mostly favored the mature lads who had gone off to war while in their late teens or early twenties. They were stronger and much more fit than us schoolboys, or the older mature soldiers in their thirties and even forties, who were slower with age and with muscle turned mostly to fat. This group of veterans, now in their mid-late twenties, totaled fourteen of our number, and eleven already had either wives or sweethearts waiting for them. This made for a few very pleasant and happy reunions, including the chance to hold youngsters that had been born after their departure. Not all of these reunions were entirely happy, as several babies and children younger than four indicated that a few of the soldiers' wives hadn't been entirely faithful during their husbands' absence. There weren't many men left in the Jasper Valley, but those fortunate souls had been very busy and hadn't lacked at all for female companionship. Of the remaining four of us, one was mature man of just over fifty now that we called 'Pops', and he blithely returned home to his waiting wife and his daughters and grandchildren. He had lost both of his sons in the war, and two of his three daughters had lost their own husbands as well. His surviving son was a teamster whose home was just outside of the valley and he had not been gathered up for conscription, nor did he volunteer. Us three remaining former school kids, now young men, nursed our ales and waited. While the younger women were especially happy to see and greet us, we had one thing still that we wanted and needed to do. For ourselves, and for Pieter, and so we waited... but we didn't have to wait long. Melenna Carlson soon arrived at the tavern and acted as if she was still as much the queen bee of the hive as ever, she pushed her way in to greet us. We in turn, had an entirely different sort of greeting prepared for her! ************ During hundreds of discussions during our years of military service, we unhappy soldiers griped about our miserable lot in life; our poor erratic pay, terrible food and living conditions, and the horrific mortality that regularly continued to reduce our numbers. The 'volunteers' had no one to blame but themselves, we all decided. The 'conscripts', taken by the whip and the recruiters drum, we decided had the right to gripe, but the most anger was reserved for us 'white feather boys'. "It was not right!" We grumbled, again and again, that some very stupid and excitable women got their smallclothes moist at the thought of sending every male they could lay eyes on, off to war. For us schoolboys, it was an act of near total murder. We were too young, too small, too innocent for this sort of slaughter, and many good men had died just trying to keep us young kids alive. In our anger and rage, we had found a more than suitable target... one Melenna Carlson. We planned our revenge very carefully, and it most definitely included a use for all of the feathers that Pieter had gathered. Now, she came readily into our grasp. First, the three of us grabbed her and roughly drug her out of the tavern, ignoring her cries and screams, until she was out in the middle of the main street, by the crossroads where everyone in the town could probably now see and hear her. Next, with two of our older soldier friends helping to hold her in place, we tore away at her clothes with our belt knives and fingers, ripping them away until she was exposed naked. Once she was stripped totally nude, we tied her up to a tall wooden post near the water well until she was secure and unable to move. Then at long last came the big bucket of tar, which we had bought previously and had left it here to await our victim. It was cold and fairly thick, but with a little effort it coated her body, slowly and completely. It goes without saying that we at last found a very suitable use for all of Pieter's feathers! Now tarred and feathered, our victim cried and screamed for help, but none was forthcoming. As the entire town of women gathered into the street to observe, we noted very little if any sympathy. Melenna had been too public in her zeal to see every single man and boy in Meryton sent off to fight in the war, and now the vast majority of those men were all dead, lost forever at sea or buried in some distant battlefield. Her 'jingo' had gotten virtually every one of their men all killed, their brothers, fathers, husbands, friends and lovers, and now this terrible loss was finally made real to them. With a great wailing at the slaughter of all of their men-folk, they now joined us in venting their own awful rage. More chicken, duck and goose feathers now found their way to adhere upon Melenna until she soon more resembled a great white bird herself than a tarred person. The hate and vitriol vented was enough to burn anyone's ears and more than once we had to stop the fury of the crowd from tossing burning torches onto the feathery tar, to consign her to flames right there in the town square. When I thought that the orgy of hate was spent, and my own insane fury had now mostly quite subsided, I gave Melenna one last very special feather that I had carefully saved for five years. "Melenna, this is the very same white feather that you gave to me five years ago in school, when you declared me to be a coward. Thus shamed, Pieter and I went to join the regiment and all of us young lads, many not even sixteen, fought and mostly all died for our duchy. There was no glory in this war and precious little honor to be earned. None of which was worth the deaths of over four hundred and sixty men and lads, our fathers, uncles and brothers, your family, friends and lovers. Nearly every single man and boy you once knew instead earned a few feet of hastily dug earth in places that few in this town even know the names to, or could even find on a map. Years later, we pitiful few remain... not nearly enough to comfort the hundreds of young women who shall now never consort, as all of their men have died and there are but few to take their place." Melenna started to cry as I cut away the ropes that bound her. "Go! Leave this town and its unhappy people, for none of us can look upon you now and not see death! May you be cursed to never find a man to accept and love you, so that you may spend your years instead mourning, alone, for the hundreds of men that you sent forth into ruin and slaughter!" Melenna ran away from us then, but many of the women of the town chased her all the way to her home, throwing rocks and sticks at her with every step that she took. I'm told that it took her three days to remove the last of tar from her body, and that her long golden corn-silk hair had to be shaved away to the very skin in order remove the last of the thickly caked black adhesive. She left town a few days later under the cover of darkness and never once returned, nor did she ever later marry, according to village gossip. No one ever criticized us for our punishment of her. As far as the town was concerned, it was justice neatly executed and well deserved. ********** It would be comforting to say that all of us eighteen survivors quickly all readapted to the quiet peaceful life of Jaspar Valley, but that would just be well wishing. Colin joined his old friend Ronald in death about six weeks after we returned. He had also been drinking especially heavy from the time he returned home and his night terrors had been growing even worse. The quiet was too much for him, he said in a short note of apology that he wrote before he hanged himself. His death scared a few of us to become a bit more sober, as we all found the relative silence of the valley to be quite frightening and more than bit soul disturbing. The four older men that had returned home to unfaithful wives, and young bastard children, disavowed the lot of them, and began to service nearly by themselves the nearly five hundred or so young and not so young women that were without lovers or consorts. Eventually, three of them tired of this sport and they eventually left the valley entirely, leaving at least a dozen or two bastards behind in their wake. There were rumors that they went to either reenlist or that they joined one of the growing number of mercenary companies. In any case, none of the three ever returned back home again. We all hoped that they found their happiness somewhere else. Another four also just quietly left us sometime during that next winter, mostly without saying goodbye at the tavern or leaving a note. Back into military service, we assumed, one way or another. Survivor's guilt was eating into each of us like a huge ulcer and a few of the last ten of us remaining weren't handling it too well, especially me. ********* With about five hundred available women without husbands in the Jasper Valley area, there was a great deal of picking and choosing going on, and to our growing amusement it was the women who were now acting like bantam cocks, strutting to attract a mate... and viciously fighting anyone they perceived as a rival. There were assaults, poisonings, stabbings, and even a suspected murder or two, as slowly the surviving men selected wives, or at least a concubine... or three, or four... or more! While polygamy wasn't technically illegal in rather conservative Oswein, it had never been flouted or encouraged. Now, even our rather staid local priest of Yweorfan, the God of Cultivation, was pointedly urging us young men to 'do our part!' and take a goodly number of the unfortunate women to wife, or at least to bed. Hancy certainly did his part! The youngest of us survivors, being barely fourteen when he marched off to war, my school friend was now a tall, handsome and rather virile young man of not quite twenty, and he took to consort eight young and very willing women, each determined to at least be able to share in some happiness and be able to bear children. Tirol and Gaston did nearly as well, each taking six young women to their homes. The rest of us weren't quite as eager to settle down to life on a stud farm. The other six men eventually did select their collection of bedmates and that just left me as the last one to be alone and single. Quite a few of the old men who had not gone to war, now in turn collected a few of the older widows and began to build a few harems of their own. Most of the unselected women, at least two hundred of them, slowly moved away from Jasper Valley, to other towns and villages that had not suffered as many severe casualties as our local regiment had. Still, pickings were acknowledged to be very slim everywhere. That eventually left about a last one hundred or so desperate young women, still hoping somehow to find or share a mate in Meryton, each trying their best to somehow attract my attention... and all failing. Why had I not selected a young pretty woman? Or a dozen? I had no idea. Many of the unmarried women were rather pretty, several even would have been considered the top beauties of the valley, but none of them could pierce through my armor of anger and resentment. The polite consensus of my physical and mental condition that first winter was that I was a 'complete mess'. I was still angry at my father, and the women who had forced me into becoming a soldier against my will, and I let everyone know it at the slightest provocation. I was living alone at my father's farm and drinking far more than was either good or healthy for me, and I would still wake up screaming every single night imagining that there was a Caestor legionnaire there in my bedroom that was just inches away from cutting my throat. My night terrors were getting worse rather than better, and I had just enough sense left to know that if I had a woman sharing my bed, the odds were that I'd stab her in my delirium with the dagger that I kept under my pillow every night. The idea of sleeping without my dagger to protect me from the ghostly Caestorian scout was inconceivable; I chose to sleep alone instead. ********** When spring came, I forced myself to cut down the drinking a little bit so that I could start the plowing of the farm fields. I didn't have much money of my own and my father now quite despaired of my ever returning to reason, but he wouldn't subsidize my attempt to drink myself to death. I would have to make the farm productive, or at least enough so to grow enough for my needs. The idea of completing my school education and entering my apprenticeship under my father, as we had planned before the war, was now laughable, particularly as my hands now shook too much to even hold a quill, let alone write with it, even when stone cold sober. I knew I was sick, and not at all right in my head, and I wanted to keep myself as far away from people as I could. Actually I had little trouble getting up before dawn. My nightly nightmare about getting nearly murdered in my sleep usually woke me up well before sunrise, after which any return to sleep was impossible for me anyway. I'd drink a few mugs of ale for breakfast and have the horses in their harness ready to go by the first crack of dawn. Even plowing from dawn until dusk, my father's fields were so large and numerous that I couldn't hope to cover even a third of them and get them all planted. To work this farm before the war, my father had at least a dozen field hands to handle those twenty individual fields, but now I was working all alone. All had left with me to war and none had even survived to see the end of the battle of Lacestone. By the time the spring rains were over, I considered myself lucky to get even six of the twenty fields plowed and seeded. All had been fallow since the start of the war and some livestock took turns grazing on the unused fields, further ripening them with their manure. Someday they would be very fertile, when there were again enough lads and men to work the fields. Working the farm alone was exhausting and nearly backbreaking, but it was also soothing emotionally and slowly but gradually my nerves began to settle down and I once again began to rejoin humanity. ********** The real beginning of my 'cure' was a quiet Freo 'free day' afternoon during the next winter, at the town tavern. Of habit, we remaining survivors met there every Freo afternoon to hoist a few blackjacks in remembrance of our lost friends and companions. Sometimes the townswomen, new lovers or old family kin, would sit nearby quietly, hoping for us to tell a tale of our adventures, but we rarely ever spoke of the bad old days, and never of our ordeal at Lacestone. We all wanted very badly to forget and no one was happy about remembering or reliving old terrors. My nerves were slowly getting better and I could hold my blackjack mostly steady now without spilling half of it on myself or the serving table... until she entered the taproom. In my usual corner of our long table, I hadn't seen her ride into town, alone upon a great brown and white horse. It was a black rainy miserable day and it only became more miserable when the visiting traveling gléaman cheerfully reminded us that tomorrow would be the seventh anniversary of the battle of Lacestone. To make things worse, he started playing and singing some god-awful epic poem about the heroic Rowan and Gwenda, and the seven years of past history fell away from us like leaves blown off of a stone road in a strong wind. Like it was only yesterday, we found ourselves once again back in that battle-line, facing impossible odds and watching our friends and companions falling like scythed wheat everywhere on all sides around us. Lost in our memories, the gléaman sang his heroic but still sad song to the very end, until he took a break to slake his own extreme thirst. My own thirst at this moment was near unquenchable too, and my hands once again shook so heavily that one of my friends, Aeldon. had to help firmly grasp and hold my wrist so that I could drink. "Why did the left flank break? Were the Broadmore soldiers craven and did they turn and run?" One older woman, a widow with little hope of ever again re-consorting asked. To my surprise, the strange young woman now seated at the bar counter answered her. "The soldiers of Broadmore were extremely brave and they only retreated when they had lost about half of their total numbers and their line had been broken in at least two places. They fell back in good calm order to regroup, and when the Duchess sent in her only reserves to help them firm up the flack, they fought even more bravely and they not only held, but they began to advance. This I know, for I was there with Lord Loren's light cavalry, there at his extreme edge and I rode beside their ranks as we circled and cut off this wing of the Boar-Man horde and we slowly carved it into pieces. From what I saw, every man, woman and youth did their duty, and more." We veterans silently nodded, and again we raised our leather blackjacks of ale in toast to our old missing companions. "Where was the Oswein army in the line?" The traveler gently asked us, with a slight cock of her pretty head and subtle toss of her long brunette ponytail to rest again against her back, ontop her. She was about my age, not yet quite in her mid-twenties, and even in her stained and well-seasoned traveling leathers, she was clearly had a very striking beauty. "You must have been on the right flank, with the Draklanders." Feathers Ch. 02 "Aye." Aeldon muttered. "On the center-right, but we were part of the reserve, closer towards the center. We filled in the rightmost gap in the center line when they were pushed back to the hill, and the Duchess made her final heroic charge." "She called for us to hold..." Detmier whispered, "and the few of us that were left did... but I don't know how!" "We had to!" I added sadly. "We held and we died, but still we held, all of that long afternoon... for her. Until the Everdun infantry in their heavy armor arrived and burst through our ranks and swept the field before them in their anger and terrible rage... and somehow we found the strength to follow them." "Aye." She grunted. "I saw men fight on past death with wounds that would have slain wild bears. They fought to the end and beyond, until they knew that their companions were safe and the day had been won, and only then did they fall into Shadow, content. It was a terrible, terrible day, but we won." "But was it worth it?" The widow cried out. "Our town sent nearly five hundred men to that battle and but a few handfuls returned home. We have no companions left to share our simple joys and happiness's with, no men to plow and seed the fields, to give us comfort and children, or even hold our grandchildren with pride and delight. We are undone!" She cried, and she fled from the tavern to drown her tears in the driving cold rain outside. "It has to be worth it!" The strange lovely horsewoman stated in a quiet calm voice. "So many were sacrificed, but the battle and the war was won. Only the smallest handful of Boar-Men lived to return to their remote mountain homes and their race has never again set foot unto the lands of men. May this ever be so!" Now that I could squint at her better, I could see that her words were true, as she had the same dark haunted eyes that we had. Like us, she had seen and done terrible things in order to survive, and also like us, perhaps contentment in peace had not yet found her. "Aye." I muttered. "It all has to have been for something greater than us. Perhaps our companions all died to later save many others that would have been later slaughtered instead. It was indeed a grim sacrifice, and if I could but see a little good come from this, I could go to my rest with my heart much more at ease." "Also, in most of the other duchies, brave young women also shared the sacrifice with their men and they served well. Many fell together. Perhaps it would have been kinder if Oswein shared that custom, or allowed women to serve in its army, as most of the other duchies do." She sadly added. I think she meant it as a reproach to the women who had stayed behind, but it was not unkindly said. The gléaman then played a happier song, and for much of the remainder of the afternoon, our hearts were indeed put much into ease. I never did catch the horsewoman's name that first afternoon, but our fates were arranged so that our paths would cross again the very next day. ************ It had rained all that night long and my night terrors were even worse than usual. I was pretty much exhausted, having had little or no sleep in weeks. With the fields all fallow for the winter, I decided to spend the day working with the livestock and I took a large wineskin with me to fend of the wet cold and help calm my trembling hands. As usual, drink did little to help. By noon, the skies were unloading rain by the bucket load, freezing cold and wet, and as the world around me grew darker and more sinister, I became certain that I was once again back on that muddy abattoir of a battlefield, reliving Lacestone once again, exactly seven years later. I was battling unseen Boar-Men and shouting out orders to my companions around to hold the line, when I felt hands grasp me, to pull me back from the battle-line. A warm dry blanket was wrapped around me and I was led back home, to my lonely farmhouse and to my soft bed, and thus comforted I slept but for once I had no dreams that disturbed my rest. When I later awoke in darkness, a mug full of something warm was put to my mouth and a soft voice directed me to drink it down. When I had finished the soup I was softly directed to return back to sleep, and somehow I did. I ended up spending the better part of two days in bed, mostly asleep in my exhaustion, and when I awoke early the next morning I found that my guest had made herself quite at home, and had even prepared a breakfast porridge for us. I was feeling much better, and more or less my usual self again now, but I knew that I had had some sort of a breakdown and I was too ashamed to discuss it. She also pretended that the incident had never occurred and merely asked if I was feeling a bit better with some sleep. I nodded, and the entire matter was declared closed. "I'm just passing through town." She casually declared. "I heard an interesting rumor about your town when I was passing through Palista and thought I'd stop by an visit. I'm not sure how long I'll stay or where I'm even heading to next, but would you mind if I shared your hospitality for a few days?" She enquired. How could I possibly say no? Her name was Alta and already she had taken over the other bedroom, which I had used as a boy when my father and I visited the farm, and she quickly settled her few belongings into the shelves and cupboards. She knew more than a little about farm work herself, and unasked she took over tending to our one milk cow, the chickens, geese, pigs and the small herd of rather wild sheep. In the afternoons she began to tackle the pile of untreated wool that had been sheared last spring, but left abandoned in a barn. She started to clean and card the wool and spent her evenings in front of the fire in my mother's old rocking chair, spinning it into yarn and then knitting, which she did with a great deal of pleasure. My father had never let anyone ever sit in that chair since my mother had died shortly after giving birth to me. I thought about asking her to get up from it but the look of pure pleasure on her face as she slowly rocked deterred me. To my eyes, she now belonged there... the one place left in this world where she indeed truly felt 'at home'. With her help that winter, this gave me more time to tackle the hundreds of other ignored things that I hadn't found time to do in the last year or more. The farm tools finally were repaired and the dung was even gathered and spread into the closer fields that I soon hoped to get plowed and sown in the spring. Long before the first warm sunny day of spring, I had quite forgotten that my guest was a temporary one, and more and more I began to depend upon her as an equal partner in our shared enterprise. Never once though had she made an effort to share my bed, although during my more restless nights I more than once thought I felt her soft hands caressing my hair, soothing me, bidding the terrible bad dreams inside to depart, if but for just one more night. When I sometimes awoke screaming, I'd find her there at my bedside. She'd never utter a word, but with a smile, or a caress of her hand, my night terrors would vanish, and often now I could return to sleep. One spring morning I noticed that the knife beneath my pillow was now missing, and I asked her where it might have gone to. She merely replied that I didn't need it anymore, but that she had moved it into a drawer in the barn with my other tools, if I ever did someday need it again. I said, "Oh", and pretty much forgot about it. She was quite right, with her by my side at night, I didn't need it anymore. My spectral Caestorian scout became increasing more afraid of my guardian Alta than he had ever been of my knife! Slowly, the night-terrors were becoming an increasingly occasional thing, instead of a nightly ordeal. I was sleeping better and my nerves steadily now improved so that my hands hardly ever now shook. Slowly I began to enjoy life and I even began to smile occasionally. ************ Late the next winter, just before I was preparing to start plowing the usual six fields for spring planting, we made our usual Freo visit into town to shop for a few necessities and to visit our friends at the tavern later in the afternoon. As we left one store, Alta suddenly found herself nearly surrounded by a group of rather unhappy young ladies who much blamed the foreign girl for their own consortless misfortunes. "Bitch! When are you going to get back on your horse and ride on back home, and leave our few remaining men alone?" One angrily demanded. Alta laughed. "The day a single one of you whiney little sluts can offer any of them something that they really need, like comfort and understanding. I fought in that awful war... nearly every single bit of it. I was with Rowan, Gwenda, Ayleth and Loren at Ruromel! I've seen the elephant, as the expression goes, so nothing can ever frighten me again. I like it here, and I think I'd like to stay! I've found a wounded, frighten colt and someday soon it will be ready enough for the saddle, but not yet. When that day comes, I might be willing to accept a sister-wife or three, but first you'll need to prove that you're worthy enough of me, let alone him! Now, get your asses out of my way!" Some poor foolish misguided woman then attempted to grab Alta, which was mistake number one. Their next mistake was to try and gang rush her, to collectively try and beat her up. Instead, in a matter of moments, Alta had the lot of them on the ground, tripping them with various leg sweeps, blocks, kicks, and shoulder throws, so that she could now take on her attackers' one or two at a time. It wasn't even remotely a fair or even fight. Women are said to fight rather dirty, with kicks and scratches of their nails, but Alta expertly fought both viciously and dirty until each of the five women were howling for mercy on the ground. Still, Alta put in her hard leather riding boots a few more times into their unprotected ribs until she was sure that the jealous women had all learned a lesson or two. By then, I had learned a lesson or two myself. Alta very much considered me to be her sole property, and the decision of if I was to be 'shared' was very much hers and hers alone. She knew that I was still damaged by the wars, but I was now on the mend, slowly. She understood what I needed and she wasn't going to rush things. In fact, I could tell that she was still damaged too, just like me. She had done and seen terrible things during the war as well, and it was only since she had settled down with me that she had begun her own desperately needed healing, especially each afternoon and evening after supper in her rocking chair. We had both been broken, but now, together, we were slowly healing and becoming human again. We smiled at each other, and took the other's hand as we walked into the tavern to visit our friends. Lovely in her dress I had no doubt that she was the most beautiful woman in the entire valley, and I was proud to display her, arm-in-arm at my side. ************ She didn't sleep in her bed that night, but she had slept as she sometimes did in a large oversized chair in my bedroom, watching over my sleep. That night was peaceful but the next night I had my night-terrors once more and she lay down on the bed next to me to soothe me back to sleep and when I awoke at dawn she was still lying next to me with her arm around me, whimpering to some nightmare of her own. Now it was my turn to soothe her. From the next night onwards, we shared the same bed, with increasing tenderness. The next Freo morning, I awoke with the light of dawn to find that Alta had also just woken up as well. I heard her go outside to visit the outhouse and assumed that she'd return to the kitchen to start breakfast for us, as usual. Instead, I was surprised to see her return into our bedroom, and in the early morning light I watched her watch me, and smile. Then slowly she unbuttoned her long woolen sleep-shirt and let it fell to the floor, thus displaying herself naked to me in the early morning light. Slowly, she walked the few steps back to the bed and she slid under the covers to rejoin me, with her bare breasts now pressed against my chest. Quickly, my own sleep-shirt was unbuttoned and removed; each button unfastened with a hundred kisses upon my bare chest, as hers now increasingly pressed against me. We hungered for each other lips, and while we deeply kissed each other I felt my cock being released and being placed at the entrance to her hidden inner sex, her soft lips both gently caressing and urging me to enter her, but also teasing and ever so slightly resisting casual entrance and penetration. Her eyes and her lips said 'yes', but she now wanted me to make this final decision for us. Now upon her back, her legs spread widely for me, and while her right hand once again placed my cock at the entrance to her cunt, she wanted me to make that first move, to boldly thrust into her, to take possession of her, and for me to claim her as my concubine, my common-wife at long last. As I entered slowly, ever deeper into her, her legs slid around my back to hold me there in place, as if this was where I had always belonged, inside of her, and together we kissed deeply for a very long time, thusly intertwined. As this was my first time having intercourse with a women, my sexual experience was negligible, my technique even more minimal, and my endurance was virtually nonexistent. Quite overly excited, I all too soon exploded my seed inside of her. I was a bit apologetic, but quickly discovered that my partner was much more experienced in these matters, and 'once and done' was by no means in her vocabulary. She had a lot to teach me, but she wasn't in any particular hurry. Again and again that long morning, she found new ways to keep me stimulated and to once again get my cock to rise up to her attention. She gave me a very long blowjob, teasing me whenever I got too excited and ready to cum, until she finally took pity on me and gave me a long overdue release into her waiting mouth. Both my duchy Oswein and her own, Broadmore, had the social custom that if an unconsorted couple engaged in all three forms of intercourse together, oral, vaginal and anal, then by the common law they could be considered as consorted. That night, after a cheerful afternoon at the tavern with our veteran friends, we completed this one last necessary act of love to bind our lives together forever. It was different, and not at all unpleasurable for either of us, and I found it amusing that she enjoyed sex in her ass rather roughly at times. She had no objections to this rather undignified type of penetration and indeed enjoyed this sort of pleasure, and often in the future would even request it. A few weeks later we made more formal vows before our town priest and officially took our consort-oath together, but for purposes of determining our 'wedding anniversary', we marked the date of our first coupling together in bed. Well fucked every morning, I first plowed my beloved geféra and then plowed my other domestic fields with equal delight and pleasure. That spring, I somehow managed to get eight of the twenty fields plowed and sown, despite being kept up nearly half of most nights once again making sure my other domestic plowing was getting done, night and morning, both. Soon Alta began to swell with child and we couldn't have been any happier, but already my scheming consort had additional plans for me! ************* Feathers Ch. 03 CHAPTER THREE "Already our child weighs heavy on me and slows my labors, my beloved." My darling wife Alta casually mentioned to me late one evening, just after mid-summer. "I sure that it does!" I congenially replied. Already her belly was quite swollen and she still had several months left before the child was due to be born. "Indeed, I'm quite falling behind in my labors! I have the animals to tend to, and most of the spring wool still to be cleaned, carded and spun, not to mention my knitting! To do all that must be done, we really need an additional hand or two... and perhaps also full time cook with kitchen skills better than mine." "Still, there are no hired men to be found, anywhere in the valley, or perhaps further! This farm once needed many strong men to tend, and now we struggle with just us two. There is no helping it!" I sadly remarked. "Not so!" She quickly replied, actually a bit much too quickly. "I know of a good worker or two that's looking for a position." "You know that we have little silver." I cautiously reminded her. Alta had a rather heavy coin purse of her own that she had earned during the war but I had resisted her every offer to help contribute to our finances. "We have more than you think, but we shall need little of it." She replied. "The helpers that I'm thinking of shall require little other than room and board, which we can well afford. With more hands, our farm can be quite profitable indeed someday." The smile on her face alone should have warned me. If I had ever really realized how much gold was inside of her purse I never would have worried about our finances ever again. As senior patrol lieutenant for Lord Loren's cavalry, she had joined with his patrol squad from its earliest days and over the course of the long campaign she had earned several coin bonuses from either his hand or from Lord Boyle or Rowan themselves, for her leadership and heroism. Her fortune already rivaled that of our local baron, and her fortune, mostly in factor letters of credit was eventually redeemed for buying land that made her eventually the single greatest largeholder in the entire valley. Amused, I blithely went on with my work and domestic duties for a few days until I returned home from the fields one evening to meet the first of our new household help. ********** Cwen was perhaps the prettiest girl in the entire town. She was tall and had long golden cornsilk hair, but she was much prettier and far kinder a person than Melenna had ever been. She was the daughter of the Hayward, the man assigned by Baron Hamworth to tend to all of his many hay fields in the valley. She had been a year behind me in school and she could do accounts and sums with the best of the boys, and certainly better than I ever could. There had been a rumor that my father had suggested her to be the next steward in training, but that the old traditional baron was unwilling to allow a woman to hold that august position. She quite knew everything there was to know about running a large estate, such as our farm, which was indeed one of the largest in the valley, albeit currently mostly underutilized and fallow. I cheerfully handed over all of the account books and let her handle the administrative details from that day onward. That night, I also learned about her other, equally important duties. My beloved wife had just selected her first 'sister-wife'! "Take off your dress, so that our husband and I can better admire your charms!" Alta suggested right after dinner, in voice that wasn't quite an order, but near enough so that it brook little opposition. A few buttons were unfastened and her simple dress fell to the bedroom floor, revealing herself to be naked underneath. "You're very beautiful." Alta commented, quite entirely accurately, and I murmured my own agreement. "Come to me now, and let us kiss as geswusletéra, sister-wives, to share each other's love as we together now share our man!" She whispered as they now embraced. In the old tongue, technically geswusletéra literally means 'slut-sister-wife', and it's a rather crude term for women who share each other in love, as well as a husband. Everything sounds nicer in the old-tongue... especially the starting of my new harem! The two women cuddled and kissed, and with little hesitation. Alta was certain no stranger to the methods that two women used to make love with each other, and Cwen, having lived for over seven years in a land nearly quite without men, had apparently learned a thing or two herself. As Alta's own thin shift joined Cwen's on the floor, the two women kissed naked briefly once more and then joined hands as they walked the few steps together towards the bed. For an hour, I watched them take their pleasure with each other from the large bedside chair, until they at length took a break from eating each other's cunts to beckon me to join them on the bed, which sudden didn't seem quite large enough for the three of us. With plenty of kisses all around, I was bidden to take my pleasure with Cwen, as Alta kissed her sister-wife and my oath-wife lovingly grasped and placed my cock at the entrance to Cwen's cunt, giving it a lick and kiss before she parted the well-licked cuntlips for my cockhead to enter her sister-wife. "Fuck her hard!" She whispered into my ear as I thrust into her. "Fill her belly with child, like mine!" She demanded, and I gave it my best try, soon filling her cunt and hopefully her fertile womb with my seed. With Alta's encouragement, she bade her slut-sister to also take my seed into her mouth and later once more into her tightly clinched ass, so that our traditional consorting could be complete. She did not enjoy this rear entry nearly as much as Alta had, and she rarely requested that sort of overly snug attention in the future. We slept that night as a husband and pair of wives in contented bliss. Little did I know that my darling Alta was just now getting started! ********** Our next new addition to our household, and our increasingly crowded bedroom was Burwynne, daughter of our town baker. She too was accounted to be a top beauty of the town, with rusty-brunet hair that nearly reached her pert ass. She knew her trade well and she possessed culinary skills far beyond Alta's meager ones. From the start, she took over the care of our hearth and home, up at first light with us to cook and bake for her new sister-wives and husband until the last dishes from supper were cleaned. Her talents in the bedroom nearly equaled Alta's and she was of a frisky and energetic disposition in bed, loving her slut sister-wives and her man with equal enthusiasm. Her pert heart shaped ass loved sodomy, especially after her petite trim belly began to show her own swift pregnancy. If I thought for a moment that Alta would be satisfied with having only two other sister-wives, I was soon corrected otherwise. Once the challenges of getting the autumn harvest in from our eight planted fields began to overwhelm me, suddenly two extra field-hands appeared to assist me in my labors... and ensure that I fell into sleep each night completely exhausted. Eadgife & Eadgyva were twins, equally beautiful young women just a bit older than I was, and elated to find a good happy home away from their forlorn parents, who had despaired of ever consorting them. I laughingly accepted their parent's earnest gifts of silver, and we even we gifted another adjoining field of good farmland which I had no means of plowing anytime soon. They worked with me tirelessly in the fields, and both were insatiable in bed, showing no reluctance to even make love to each other when they had worn out the rest of their sister-wives. Both loved oral sex, in all of its forms, and if I felt two dueling tongues stroking my cock in the middle of the night, I could be certain without even cracking an eye that it was the twins trying to coax another load of cum out of me. Already it was necessary for a new much larger bed, and I made this my first task after getting our eight fields harvested. The grain from one field alone was enough to serve our needs for the year, and after storing much of another field's grain for seed for the spring, we had a great deal of surplus crops to sell at market, earning us more silver than I had ever handled in my life. Fortunately, I let Cwen handle all of the details, but I could tell that she was already making us wealthy, even without Alta's treasure. When two nearby fallow fields came up for sale that winter, she bought them both, quickly and shrewdly. Someday, I joked, our children were going to be the largest farmers of the Jasper Valley, and Cwen took it as a compliment. *********** With five consorts, under a peaceable and loving roof, we spent a happy winter intertwined together in bed. Somehow the important winter tasks of the farm managed to get done, but by the start of spring Alta made sure that each of my wives was pregnant. She had delivered our first child, a son, and from that moment onwards she began to lovingly, but firmly, manage our bedroom schedules. In her idealized world, her sister-wife's would be placed on a staggered but regular schedule for impregnation, with a month or two in-between each wife's childbirth. Thus in turn, each wife would receive particular attention when fertile, on a fixed rotating schedule. Alta privately admitted that she had a fetish for seeing every woman around her pregnant, preferably by me, and she went about her appointed task with a zeal that both amazed and amused me. She loved to watch me having sex, and she enjoyed caressing or licking my balls when I came inside of one of my wives while she loudly urged me to fuck them harder, and fill their wombs with my seed. Once my juice filled my wife to overflowing, Atla would then kiss and caress her breasts and slowly move her tongue downwards to lick out her cunt and slowly savor with her tongue the cream that flowed from the well-fucked cunt, until I was aroused enough to remount her and fill her yet again. That spring, with each sister-wife now with child, Alta decided it was time to add a few more new wives into the schedule, before she placed herself back at the top of the list! ************* Leofleda, Gode and Sexburhe each entered into our lives that spring and by late summer, they all were ripening with child. Like in the case of the twins, each new wife earned me sincere thanks from their parents, and more wife-geld; more granted lands, and even good coin. Parents were increasingly desperate to make any consorting arrangements that could be found for the hundred or so remaining young women without consorts, and the notion that their daughter was sharing their husband with a flock of other sister-wives offended no one. More than anything, the valley yearned for children to replace those lost by the war, and each birth was a blessing according to our priests. Leofleda was the daughter of a shepherd from the southern hills and mountains near the borders of Everdun and Aldaria, and at once she assumed control over our previously ill-tended flock of sheep. Her father, who was quite advanced in years and had no other children to tend his own flocks, gifted us much of his own flocks, and plenty of good pastureland in the hills at the north of our valley for them to graze. She was dark of complexion, with a strong nose that more than suggested that some raiding Caestorian had been very familiar with either her mother or grandmother. Her hair was long and raven black. In bed she was quiet, a follower rather than a leader. Truth be told, in bed she preferred the soft touch of a woman to the penetration of a man, but it never became an issue with us. She bore me three strong children and loved each of them, and her sister-wives well. Gode was a neighboring girlfriend of Leofleda's, also from the hills, but her expertise was with dairy cattle, and she carefully managed and grew our once small cattle herd wisely and well. Barely a grown woman of nineteen, she was an orphan, with her father and two brothers lost during the war. Still, this tragedy had never dampened her spirits, and no one ever heard a dispirited word from her. As her lands were merged with Leofleda's next door, we had more than ample good grazing ground for the cattle, and she added her inheritance for Cwen's wise management without complaint or concern. We didn't really need the coins, but Cwen wisely used them to buy out other farms and pasture lands nearby, so that someday our growing lands would connect and merge together seamlessly. In bed, unlike her girlfriend, she was adventurous and inventive, and constantly schemed to get as much bedtime with me as possible. She loved vaginal sex, and if she could have managed it, would have placed herself at the top of Alta's breeding listing the moment after giving birth. She loved everything about being pregnant, and she delivered to us a full ten healthy children before the Weavers decided that she had done her part in repopulating the valley. Sexburhe was a rather strange and mysterious sort of woman a little older than the rest of us, but more than willing to share in our lives. Her father was the reeve of the town, administrating it for the baron, and she had attended school several years before me. She lacked Cwen's ambition, and was much contented to just help others wherever she could. For the most part she helped Burwynne with the household, and took over much of the nearby barnyard duties, tending to the pigs and the various fowl. She was the most thoughtful and perhaps the wisest of my wives, and she was the one everyone turned to for help with their private problems. It is hard for a group of women to all live together in peace, constantly without even minor disruptions, and Sexburhe became the arbitrator and peace-maker, the soother of all trifling and major wounds, and we all came to adore her. After two difficult pregnancies in which she miscarried both children, we dared not tempt fate by risking her life with another one. She instead became the second mother for much of our brood, and she loved all of the children in turn as if they were her own. Sex itself wasn't particularly important to her happiness, but she loved to cuddle with her sister-wives. ********* Already, with eight wives, I had as much bedroom attention as I could handle. The next winter I spent enlarging our house to add a large nursery for the babies and rooms for the later use of our growing boys and girls, not to mention bedrooms for wives not listed on the posted bedroom schedule for the night who actually wanted to sleep that night, instead of playing in the master bedroom. Every night, Alta managed the list to make sure that one wife stayed with me until we were certain she was pregnant, or two terms of her fertile cycles had past, along with herself and another wife that rotated nightly. Somehow, I knew the extra bedrooms still wouldn't be enough, and I had to enlarge the wives' bedroom again the next winter, and add yet another one for the children. Actually, I seemed to need to add more rooms each and every winter. Each season I acquired yet another new wife, until I nearly lost count. Next Wulfwyne, Wilflede, Ælfwenne and Hilda joined our happy family, giving me a full dozen sister-wives, and then another two, Luffa and Mildrede, joined us the following winter to give me a full fourteen wives, one for each month of the year. I suspected this was done so that Alta could better manage the bedroom schedule, giving each sister-wife a full month of preference. I politely let my beloved Alta know that fourteen wives was quite all that I could handle and she agreed to call it quits adding formal sister-wives, but still, over the next few years, a great number of other assorted lonely unconsorted women constantly came and left the harem, once they had been inseminated with child. At least twice a month, I could count on a new, utterly unfamiliar woman appearing naked in my bed, eager to play... and hopefully have their womb fertilized with my child. By the time of the twentieth anniversary of the battle of Lacestone, my fourteen wives had given birth to seventy-six children, not to mention the additional temporary playthings that my darling Alta had admitted to my bed in-between, with alarming regularity. If I had fathered a full hundred offspring, or more, it would not at all surprise me! My old comrades, Hancy, Tirol and Gaston were nearly as fruitful, and I suspected that their sister-wives had admitted a few more fertile and rather neglected women into their beds as well. In a generation, the great catastrophe of our valley without men had been mostly corrected, much to the satisfaction of everyone. ************ At the start of winter of the year of the fiftieth anniversary of the battle, Alta and I decided that we should attend it, the final ceremony marking that great battle in which we had both taken part in. We had been some of the youngest warriors in that battle, but already age was quite catching up with the surviving veterans who were all now in their mid-sixties, at a minimum. Several of my companions had died even before the fortieth anniversary, and a few more had passed since. Now there were just four of us left in total, including Alta, and none of us were as frisky as we used to be. Three of my wives had already passed as well, and our horde of children were already mostly now in charge of managing and farming our extensive lands with families of their own. Indeed, Alta and I were by far the largest landowners in the entire valley, in fact now holding a vast majority of all the farmlands. Ten years ago, we had attended the forty year reunion, and I had taken a few of my younger sons and a few select grandchildren along with us, as had a few of my old mates. Alfrid, my youngest son by Alta, met and fell quite head over heals in love with Earl Rowan and Gwenda's youngest daughter Cwengyth, and in a sudden courtship that astonished everyone, they declared their troth for each other. In the spirit of their martial mothers, both offspring had been born for battle, and together they served as officers for a small mercenary company that was keeping the piece in the western Barbur Valley of Oswein, where a narrow river valley cut into the Brittle Mountains and created a strategic pass into the Great Yarmouth Pass. Before the Great War, this valley was home to hordes of Boar-Men, but now men claimed this fertile pass, and my son and daughter scouted and patrolled this critical and still dangerous river valley. There are apparently still fouler creatures in the world than the Boar-Men. *********** Arriving at Lacestone, were not surprised that we old veterans were still the youngest of the survivors present. In truth we had almost no old friends left to speak to, as Lord Loren had passed a few years earlier, much to Alta's sadness. My son's parents, Earl Rowan and Gwenda, both seemed to be especially frail, with the noble lady Gwenda appearing to be terribly pale and quite ill. We made our affectionate greetings to her and left her to her sickbed. Lord Rowan appeared little better, fraught with worry for his obviously failing wife. Still, I managed one all too brief conversation with him before he in turn took his leave for the evening. "My Lord, and somewhat father," I confessed, "just how scared were you upon your very first great battle? I was a lad of still not yet quite sixteen on the day of this battle and I pissed my pants completely the moment that first boarman jumped out in front of me in the darkness outside of Haldyne." "So did I!" He admitted also, "At the start of my first big fight on Dead Tree Island, the first time the Boar-Men rushed up to me, before I found and rescued Gwenda! They seemed as tall as the trees and I thought they'd cut me down like they were swatting an insect. Fortunately, I killed them first and won my confidence to face the rest. Their spilled blood covered the dampness on my front, fortunately, and then I had a long swim, so that my shame was well disguised. Being scared is just human, and admitting it." Feathers Ch. 03 I had to agree. ********** I heard that both Rowan and Gwenda both passed to shadow not long after our meeting at the reunion, and indeed Alta passed herself later that next spring. I somehow willed myself to continue, for the happiness of the rest of my wives, but a huge part of me was now missing. Each season, another of my life companions passes and I become more alone, but each day I resolve to live on, to live in happiness and joy with my remaining hours or months of life. Once I was dead inside, living in shadow in a world of pain and loss, but those days are long since gone, buried in the good soil of my lands, and in the smiles of my wives, children and grandchildren. I haven't once had a dream of the night-terrors since I held my first grandchild in my arms. My soul is comforted with feathers, the warm feathers of our bed filled with joy and happiness, and I sleep, soon perhaps for forever, but with contentment. ************** Author's Afterward This story was originally written into my note files about four years ago, and concerned a British soldier, a veteran of the Pal's Battalions of 1915. These so called Pal's or 'Chums' units allowed men and young lads from the same community to join up and serve together in the same unit together in combat, next to each other. The intention was that the camaraderie of fighting next to ones friends, neighbors, and even relatives would increase morale and bravery, not to mention the peer pressure of being the only lad in your village or town that didn't volunteer to serve, with the rest of the men of the community. Instead, in many cases, a hard battle with often disproportionate and excessive losses in combat could, and did, annihilate most of the young men from an entire neighborhood or district, leaving their widows, sweethearts and sisters in areas that came to be called 'lands without men'. After the horrific casualties of the Somme, the survivors of the Pal's Battalions were distributed amongst other regular army units, and also the introduction of mass conscription in early 1916 also did away with the need for using peer pressure to enlist volunteers for military service. The white feather itself was a brand of cowardice, and of one of the very worst sort. For an apparently healthy young man to receive such a feather from a woman was considered a severe insult to his bravery and manhood, and abhorrent to everything he was taught in school, either public or private. Entire hordes of patriotic and excitable women, especially Pankhurst supporters and lesbian organizations, encouraged the giving of the white feather to every single man they saw not in uniform. Eager to see every single man on the island in khaki and possibly slaughtered in battle, the white feather movement was everywhere and relentless. The harassment became so violent in late 1915 that war industry workers and men who had failed the army physical demanded a pin or badge that they could wear to prove to these 'Jingo-Women' that they were not dodging the war! As a whole, the elder generation of British men quietly condoned and approved of the white feather movement. After all, duty, honor and country came before all else! More sensible young women, seeing all of their male lovers, friends, relations and casual acquaintances slowly being ground up in the war of attrition, were less approving, despite the increasing propaganda which hinted otherwise, such as this recruiting poster below. ************** For many survivors of the Pal's battalions, as a rather belated and unexpected reward, if one would dare to call it that, they returned home to discover that there were often many young women available for each returning soldier, and potential husband. Competition, in economics is a very good thing. In romance, it's sometimes even better! This is just that sort of perverse and oddly weird romance! *****************