Belonger (An erotic novel): Part One Read online

  “Let’s get it,” she decided. It was the first one they had encountered that might be conveniently acquired.

  Emma stayed with the bedboat as she and Manassa jumped onto the bank, then waded out into its little pond. Approaching it slowly, Ione saw it wasn’t secured in any way, and they hauled it back toward the lead vessel without lingering, baffled by its randomly veering gaze as they wrestled its mass about. Positioned at the prow it threw a useful quantity of light ahead of them, and after fussing with its orientation for a bit they were traveling with modest confidence again.

  Some time later she called a halt and passed out the last of the juice recovered with the boats, but no one wanted to dwell where they had stopped and they were quickly underway again.

  Not long after they were forced to slow where sizable rocks emerged from the current to cast stippled reflections toward them and rippling wakes to the lee. Their boat ground against one, was jarred instantly off-course by its bulk, forcing them to hastily correct their orientation with the oars.

  “Get the slippers to be careful here,” Ione instructed Emma, and the smaller woman waved and shouted to the vessels behind them, doing what she could to convey this imperative.

  The stream became steadily more treacherous, never impossible to pass but consumingly tedious to navigate. They were forced to space the boats widely, allowing each to find its way, visible to one another only as vague shadows. This left everyone more or at less on their own, but there were no exiting channels to confound them and Ione gradually allowed their craft to slip ahead. The light grew brighter, building to a deep blue-green radiance that stunned the eye.

  As a musical roar built before them Emma turned to her half-hopefully. “Do you remember this?”

  Ione nodded, squinting. “Maybe. If the stream turns right…”

  They were shortly accelerating down a waterway sluiced by narrowing borders toward a hard bend, wherefrom several currents flung outward at high speed.

  “We’ve been here!” Emma shouted.

  “Yes.” Ione dropped low to keep her balance. “There should be a bank we can reach on the right side, and we need to drag each boat around as it comes through.” She was excited now, relieved to recognize a waypoint on the migration to the Lap. Looking back, she tried to locate the next boat in the convoy, now long out of view.

  Emma regarded Manassa’s legs, sturdily planted on the mattress under her casually swaying mass. “Maybe we should let her do it…”

  Ione stiffened, abruptly fathoming that her authority might be surrendered to the bigger woman by a series of compromising comparisons rather than a direct confrontation of some kind. But she was too preoccupied with their immediate concerns for the moment to indulge this troubling speculation and nodded brusquely.

  “Alright. Fine. Get ready.”

  As they neared the intersection the water accelerated to a torrent, generating a ceaseless, stuttering hum that refracted about the passage to a din of guttural echoes. Manassa leaped to the pitched shore that loomed suddenly on their right, one massive leg stamping ankle-deep in the mud to anchor her balance. Ione extended the oar and she caught it, swung them hard, hauling the bedboat against a current that would otherwise have dragged it irresistibly off-course.

  Ione and Emma sought handholds among a tangle of roots, staring in exhilaration at the glinting blue figure of a gnome dangling overhead from a short chain, eyes showering them with an aquamarine brilliance.

  “We’re not lost anymore!” Emma exulted to Manassa, barely audible over the noise. “The Lap isn’t too far from here!”

  They waited tensely, then the next boat in their convoy arrived. Manassa swung the oar obligingly into position when the prow hove into view and Ione rose slightly, preparing to shout terse instructions to the women onboard. Timing would be crucial, with little allowance for misunderstanding or hesitation.

  “No!” shouted Manassa an instant later, snatching the oar back from a grasping skulk, who bellowed triumphantly at her, a sentiment echoed by two leering confederates hovering possessively over a trio of terrified slippers.

  Ione screamed, lost her grip on the bank. Manassa’s weight dropped precipitously, securing leverage on the treacherous mud, and the oar rammed the prow away to send the marauding skulks lurching off on a furious tirade of complaint.

  “For it all then has to! Keep get in time ever will!”

  Ione was frightened to immobility, couldn’t take her eyes off the commandeered bedboat as it was sucked away by the current along with their women. One of the men wore a bright green shirt, soggily tenting an erection.

  The next vessel arrived without pause, and Manassa dealt with it similarly, sending three more sporadically clothed skulks and four women on their way, but Ione cried sharply when the third craft appeared, teeming with raiders already forewarned by the noise. They had lost.

  “Run!” she cried.

  They abandoned their position, clawing up a muddy incline to where it let onto a low-swept tract of moist scrub running just under the ceiling of the cavern. Behind them skulks were already splashing up the bank, muttering in great excitement, numbers mounting under the blue scintillation of the gnome.

  “This way!”

  Ione led the others to a ragged procession of root-lined passageways, chose one of the tangled openings at random. “In here!” she hissed.

  They scrabbled on, already breathless, moving clumsily enough to beget dire tactical challenges to evasion. A warm current of air fanned across them from the right, and Ione thrust in that direction without thinking, hurtled onto a stony declination as foliage gnarled impenetrably around them.

  They found themselves in a maze of trails leading generally downward, steeped in the thirdhand emanation from behind, and they stumbled on without plan, hoping their pursuers might be similarly confounded by the terrain.

  Ione abruptly slipped.

  “Oh fuck!” she screeched, thrown jaggedly off-balance.

  Manassa reached for her, was dragged along by inertia, just managing to push Emma back from a broad funnel of oily stone masked from view by a treacherous brow of shadow. It was canted at an irresistible angle and Ione was unable to stop, nothing to grab, voiceless with terror, stumbling–

  –to splash down in a tranquil pool.

  She surfaced, spluttering in shock, found Manassa’s drenched countenance staring back. They were in a natural well, the sinister destination of many innocent-seeming passages above.

  Ione couldn’t think, began to shiver despite the warmth of the water. She dimly registered Emma’s horrified wail as skulks muttered into proximity above. There was a squeak, then her voice was abruptly stilled. Ione trod next to Manassa with paranoid delicacy, terrified the men would follow them down. An undecipherable scuffle issued from somewhere farther off, then everything was quiet once again.

  She was stunned, preserved from a totally incapacitating fear only by the requirements of flotation. But Manassa was soon looking around in interest, and Ione was restored a little by the other woman’s infuriating readiness, where nothing else might have served to blunt her panic.

  “Do you remember this from your journey to the Lap?” Manassa whispered.

  Ione shook her head, unable to speak.

  They circled the well slowly, seeking a means of ascent, but the oily texture of the stone—hardly a natural feature of the place as copious drip marks attested—rendered it a hopeless proposition. The trap offered egress in just one direction; an arched fissure at the waterline framing an ominous void.

  Ione stared in resentment as Manassa quietly eased to its lip, listened carefully, then disappeared within. Silence accumulated in the other woman’s absence, a shimmering sound next to nothing.

  She was glad for the obscurity of the dark, which hid her face and its shameful dismay, unable to confront the notion that if Emma had been present she would have been obligated to venture in before the smaller woman, and maybe Manassa too; a feat of courage that seemed unimagina
ble at the moment. She felt the alienation of awakening return, seeping insidiously into her mind to blot away identity.

  “Emma…”

  She called piteously up to her companion, but halted in despair at the croaking reverberation of her plea, a taunting admonishment for weakness balefully orbiting the well.

  Manassa emerged suddenly from the arch, stalling Ione’s pulse for a terrified moment before her silhouette conformed to a cognizable image again, and Ione decided she would always hate her for that tiny but total crisis if nothing else.

  “It’s shallow ahead. And I think we’re safe for the moment, but–

  Ione met the other woman’s glinting gaze. Manassa spoke calmly, delivered the dread message.

  “We’re not alone.”

  She merely nodded, unable to speak, forced herself to move, to get on with whatever was going to happen and swam into the rift after the other woman. Together they rose into a small, sandy grotto lined with alcoves. Within each a skulk stood imprisoned behind a curtain of thick roots. Their motionless forms were limned by a faint greenish hue.

  Manassa stepped up onto a dry prominence at the center of the tiny cave. The ceiling overhead was low, unbroken stone and there was no obvious means of leaving. Ione stared in quiet misery at the eyes peering back at them and issued a single, unhappy word.

  “Peckermen.”

  Manassa turned to her. “What?”

  These men were not captives, Ione knew, but rather conspirators in a game that secured sexual gratification for them. Women trapped by peckermen had just one, tortured path to liberty; Ione bleakly regarded the jaunty erections offered out to the lair.

  “You’re familiar with this situation?” Manassa prompted.

  “Yes,” she answered heavily. “They’ll keep us here till we play their game. And win.”

  “How?”

  “You can’t guess? It’ll be more obvious when it’s time,” she promised, propped up a little by the other woman’s ignorance. Manassa chewed her lip thoughtfully.

  The peckermen were quiescent, watched them with a faintly expectant air, and after a careful examination of their prison Ione finally decided to rest. There was nothing to do, no evidence that Emma was around. She lay for a while listening to Manassa’s untroubled respiration, waiting for unconsciousness to blanket the awful proposition of her life.

  But sleep would not come. The peckermen stared patiently back, biding their time for now. And Ione, who had known the lure of skulk company before, surrendered to memory instead…

  In the deepest subterranean places lurked men that practiced fringe rites of sexuality, things only whispered about in the societies of hidden women who shared their lonely realm.

  Ione was not a woman of anyone’s society, hidden or otherwise. Denied the company and safety of her sex for reasons beyond understanding, she was almost always alone; a long, agile form seen only in passing by the other women.

  But if she didn’t have friendship or love there were diversions at least…

  Her first encounter with a skulk of the blue waters was a gentle one. She spied him floating with placid unconcern near a maze of little pools she had recently explored. When he noticed her, his reaction was curiously mild. He watched her for a while, then left to find stimulation elsewhere. Handsome and lithely built, he moved with sublime ease, a swimmer of skill comparable to her own. Ione warily followed him the third time they met.

  When she touched his body for the first time he was startled, but after a little he reached for her tentatively and they drifted on a slow, radial current, exploring each other in silent fascination. Smiling, he turned away from her finally, drawing her arms around him to clasp at his chest. Then he dove, taking them down, effecting their travel with a steady sweep of his limbs as she grinned helplessly behind him.

  They surfaced from time to time as needed to breathe. And when he was tired they retreated to a romantic little pool warmed by the water of a deep-ranging flue, kissing by the delicate emanation of a blue-eyed gnome gazing sentimentally down.

  Her new friend had developed an erection in the intimacy of their swim, and Ione could only stare at it in longing, uncertain how to proceed. A simple reciprocality of action suggested itself after a little, and with a shy look she turned her back, pulling his arms around to cross under her breasts, felt his hands wonderingly enfold them. Then she dove.

  Ione took him on a leisurely excursion about places she had come to know in her loneliness, stirred by the warmth at her back and the inadvertent foreplay of his manhood as it teased her flexing rump.

  She almost swallowed water when he parted her buttocks, delicately widening her anus, cock lubricated by oily pre-emissions, then his head was inside her; a fat knob lodged in her rectum. His fingers gathered at her nipples, establishing a deliberate grip, and her lips widened in pleasure at the connection, showering bubbles as her legs flared to a more submissive breadth. She lunged away in exhilaration as he worked his way farther into her body, opportunistically claiming a new interval of flesh from time to time as her buttocks gathered for another adductive sweep.

  Ione devoted herself to the sensual regime of the breaststroke when his penis was fully admitted, a rigid guide pointing the way. He tugged her nipples with a steadily developing assumption as the muscular undulation of her rump sucked at his erection, a heated funnel of torsion and pressure…

  Her body felt utterly open, sublimely submitted, gliding without plan about the lake bed. Warm water coursed along the keen protrusion of her clitoris, swished through the gyring oval of her labia as her limbs snapped outward from the locus of his pinioning member, hauled back again, cheeks wrapped tight around his cock to obtain a rubbed rush of pleasure at her sphincter. He rode her until she was out of breath and they surfaced for a long inhalation, dove again.

  His fingers signaled a growing urgency, bidding her to more speed with a decisive pressure at the nipples, and she worked harder for him, consuming her energies at a careless, then hectic rate to sustain their frolic.

  Breath expended ever more rapidly, she lunged above the surface for a gulped resuscitation, was borne under again by his weight almost immediately. He screwed her breasts to a blissful agony, goading her, and Ione kicked on with a great effort, pulse hammering, extremities flung and recalled on ragged arcs. Her buttocks were aching, motivated by his hungry penis to a frenzied exercise.

  The blue-tinged forms of sluggishly waving plants slid by as her consciousness narrowed to a single input; the remorseless ambition of his sexuality lodged deep within her, reaching and reaching… to finally touch her most private, delicate zone. Her labia fluttered in the sluicing delta of her thighs as the pleasure mounted…

  Then he was rocking against her, flooding her with hot jizz, gripping her unshakably as he rode out a strenuous climax.

  When she surfaced, gulping air deliriously, Ione saw that he had been guiding her to a private place all along, manipulating her with skillful innocence. A dox of his friends lounged in view, erections rearing to hail her furiously developed arousal.

  They rode her for mastery over many dalliances, jailing her with their weight, driving her again and again to the limit of endurance. She was repeatedly brought to the verge of climax without consummation, preserving her lust, a necessary sacrifice to keep their association she knew, but Ione eventually accepted this denial without regret, even cultivated it…

  They loved their toys, sometimes had new things to amuse her. She came to rely on slipstick—a waxy substance employed for comfortable copulation underwater. She could use up a tube in a single encounter with her friends, loved its finger-like, oily penetration into her anus as periodically required for a fresh partner.

  It became their custom to fit her with a set of wags before taking her out, nipple clamps with teeth that were rhythmically cranked by little hinged sweepers. She would raise her arms and they would be ceremonially fixed to her by a circle of lusty skulks to stiffly project from her bosom, twitching expectan
tly. Her favorite pair were red, sensuously tapered and elegantly bejeweled. They required a stiff velocity to work well but fit her just right. Once she was up to speed they would nag her tits with an exquisite, rancorous insistency, wagging fitfully in her peripheral vision as she kneaded one skulk after another to oily climax in her hindquarters.

  Finally, the last time, as she was ridden hard on a deepwater jaunt, she lost the will between one breath and the next to deny herself satisfaction, couldn’t resist the savage craving any longer.

  She abandoned swimming before the skulk had climaxed, masturbating euphorically as they sank together. Her fingers quickened to a berserk oscillation when darkness solidified about them, stole over her senses like a dream. Bliss swelled to imminence, impossibly potent, a pleasure stolen from the bulging manhood inside her, magnified by a drastically prolonged anticipation. But the price, she saw, was her identity, almost vanished with her breath. If she drowned and they revived her they could present anything as truth, controlling her by context. She wouldn’t remember anything definite, would have no way to know what was real. Ione felt the welling exultation of the skulk, prepared to reap her being.

  Only a desperate comprehension as to what was being done—had been done to many women before by these perilous men—catalyzed her will to escape. Her sphincter went slack and she slid free, stroking madly away as he raged after her, summoning his allies.

  And they might have taken her. She escaped her jilted lovers in fact only by the chance meeting of another lonely soul. A woman named Emma.

  Now she was trapped once more. What would it take to reduce her to a state of slavery among the peckermen? The slippers of their new society were scattered. She was lost. Ione stared at Manassa’s slumbering form.