Moon Love

by Hester St. Jean

  Amaro brought my evening meal and could see immediately something troubled me greatly. “What is it?” he asked.

  I looked at him. “I dreamt I killed you,” I said, “and all that was left for me was sorrow.”

  He put the food tray down and turned, a defeated slump in his shoulders, to go back out of the room.

  I bade him stop. “There is no joy in sorrow,” I said. “There is no joy in killing. I know now there is no true release in revenge.”

  He turned back to me. “With all my heart,” he said, “I wish I could change what we did.”

  I understood something in that instant about Merelings and how they were fundamentally different from Immortals. Immortals never apologize. They never regret. And, consequently, they never change, and they never learn. A great flood of compassion washed over me, and I realized with a start Immortals did not feel compassion. I really was becoming a Mereling, or if not a full Mereling, at least something in between my former self and the fully penitent and emotional man who stood before me.

  “Tonight,” I said to him, “I would like you to come to me in my tree. Tonight, I am ready to forgive you.”

  The same night I learned yet another layer of love in the world of Merelings. There was hesitancy in his touch, for he feared reminding me of the brutal way I’d been treated when he’d been so much younger. For the first time in my life, I understood it was not always a physical union which expressed passion, but sometimes a deliberate separateness. We lay side by side, and though my body blazed with desire for him, he needed space most of all. A chance to grow into his new self. After many minutes, I moved to face him. His cock stirred, swelled, grew hard against me.

  “Luna,” he said. “Luna.”

  I gathered him into my arms. I pulled him into my body.

  I came to love him. Not for what he’d done to me, but for his vulnerabilities. The power of his conscience. The inevitability of his demise. In fact, in time I came to love all of them. I fell in love with them, one by one. And they claimed my soul, one by one. How, you ask? And how is it I tell you my story now, soul intact? Stay another hour, smoke another pipe. I’ll finish the tale and then you can be off to tell it to others by the time my brother takes up the reins of his chariot to announce a new day.

  For a time, Amaro became my constant lover. Each night, he’d climb up with me and spend the nighttime hours in my embrace. But one night, he fell sick, and consequently could not attend me. I waited all night, and in the morning, I went to see him. Alas, I could tell he’d fallen gravely ill, seized by a sudden fever. He called my name over and over, and I sat by his side, holding his hand, putting cool cloths to his brow. As afternoon arrived, he was fading fast into utter delirium. By the time my brother, who had watched throughout the late afternoon through the western window, commenced slipping below the horizon and it was time for me to climb my tree and shine, Amaro had crossed into the afterlife. His death devastated me, left me bereft, and for the third time, I pulled cloud cover to me so I could have at least a bit of privacy in my grief. You have heard the expression, Ancient One, “a piece of me died with him”? It was literally true in this case. When they laid Amaro in his casket, a piece of me leapt in to be buried with him.

  Chapter Five

  Acer

  Acer began, during those tear-filled days and nights, to bring my tray for both his turn and what had been Amaro’s. Acer, you might recall, had always been the most jealous one, with the sour attitude. Since their agreement to release and compensate me, he’d clearly struggled, fearful I would leave them. Now, he seemed to have come to some peaceful resolution of his feelings. He would ask permission to remain in my room while I ate, and sat on the floor by the door, with what could have been a slight wry smile on his lips. When I finished, he’d inquire about whether I wanted more or wanted a sweet treat for dessert or a tisane. He’d bring me whatever I asked for and would ask for nothing in return.

  When it came time for me to climb the oak, he walked with me and bid me a good evening then returned to the house.

  By and by, I found myself looking forward to his room visits. It was said when a Mereling lost a true love, he or she was more likely to find another than when the relationship severed by death had been a contentious and loveless one. I found this to be true for me. My love for the shepherd boy had primed me, in a manner of speaking, to love Amaro. And Amaro had primed me to love Acer. I noticed the ways he was the same—his guilty deference at first, his careful attention to bringing my favorite dishes, his willingness to be critical of himself—and the ways in which he was different—his shorter, more muscular body, the way his lips fell naturally into a pout when he sat in repose.

  Finally one night, I asked him up to my perch and found, to my delight, he still moved slowly and deeply in his thrust. The memory and the motion in me awakened my desire, and I arched to meet him, deliberate, grinding. All those years before, I’d licked him from head to toe and offered myself passively to him. This time was mutual. Our tongues found each other’s lips, necks, and nipples. Our hands grasped, clasped over our heads. Our bodies moved to wring every molecule of space from between us. We finished in guttural utterances and pounding mutual orgasms.

  Afterward, I asked him to tell me a story. I’d become curious, at long last, about all of them. Each individual. It was too late to ply Amaro with questions of his childhood, of who his parents were, of what games he played as a youth, what he loved, and how he came to be the man I knew, but I could ask the others.

  “What story?” he said, looking challenged and confused.

  “The story of who you are,” I said, propping myself up on an elbow to watch his face. To watch the struggle there my question seemed to have awakened. He grimaced, blinked, and sighed deeply.

  “We were not treated well when we first came to this village,” he said then lapsed into silence.

  After many seconds, I prompted him again. “Then you, too, are not of this place?”

  “Our parents sent us out into the world from the town where we were born. Four boys. Amaro with his first beard fuzz, me with my voice cracking, Sal a tagalong, and Shug who had to be carried half of the time because he had barely turned three. Our parents sent us away so we’d escape the enslavement that would have been our lot in our birth town. Our ancestral village had been overrun and plundered by warring people from the north. They put all the native people of the area to work for them, either building homes and fortification walls or toiling in the fields. We’d once enjoyed our land of abundance. Now, it was our conquerors who enjoyed it, while we worked ourselves to death for their comfort.

  “Our parents were part of a circle of resistance, and the authorities had found them. They knew it would be simply a matter of time until they’d be taken into custody for meeting secretly and planning a rebellion, remanded to the town square, and executed to warn any others foolish enough to think of asserting their wants or needs to be free people. We were sent away so at least we, their children, might have a chance at a normal life. If such a life, with one’s parents slaughtered and everything familiar locked off in the past could be said to be normal.

  “Night was our friend, then. Without your light, we had only stars to guide us. Because Amaro and I had studied the heavens, we were able to find our way. Our captors pursued us once they realized we had all failed to turn up that morning to complete our appointed tasks.”

  He drifted off into his own memories, his eyes closed, and at first I thought he’d fallen asleep. I traced circles around his nipples, and he sighed, so I continued on my way and drew a line directly to his cock, which began to show signs of being awake even if he didn’t. Slowly, I circled it and stroked his balls with the lightest touch. He rose to the occasion, and I straddled him, slipping his ragingly erect member as far into my aching loins as I could. He opened his eyes and smiled at me.

  “You never finished your story,” I chided.

  “We ran,” he said, breathing heavily and thrusting u
pward. “We ran from one village to the next, through the woods by day, on the roads by night, following the stars south.”

  “Never sleeping?” I asked, grinding my hips in a circular pattern. Circles seemed to be the shape of the moment.

  “Rarely.” He matched my motions, holding my hips, pulling me down. “When we dared, we’d stop by a river and sleep under a fallen tree. Amaro and I took turns,” he grunted, the pace of his gyrations quickening, “sitting watch.”

  “You two,” I said, matching his speed, “are heroes. You brought all four of you to safety.”

  “We did,” his voice tightening, he expelled the words as the paroxysm of his orgasm took him over, “what we had to do. Not heroes, just survivors.”

  Over the next few weeks, I teased further details from him of their trek to safety; how they learned to catch fish with their bare hands, and taste the plants and herbs along the way carefully. When they found a new plant, one of the two older ones would taste it first, and they’d wait a day before anyone else dared. How they were almost turned in to the authorities when they made the mistake of telling a woman who gave them dinner in exchange for helping her with chores they were fleeing oppression. Little Shug won them the reprieve, by crawling into her lap and asking, “Will you be my mother?” It brought tears to the woman’s eyes. She told them she’d once had a little boy like him, but he’d died of the whooping cough, then she made them a bundle of bread and goat cheese and told them to hurry off before her husband came home.

  The more he told me of their trials and tribulations, the more tender my foreplay, till I touched him as lightly as a feather. Each time, he responded. Each time, I chose the moment to unite. When we came together, my nerves were shattered crystal—not from distress, but from the pureness of the moment.

  Acer declined gradually but inexorably. He began to tell the same stories over and over. His old anxieties returned, and he started to question me whenever we were together. What had I been doing since the last time? Who had I done it with? How had I done it? Who were the other people I talked to?

  Then his memory dropped down another notch. He seemed delighted always to see me, but forgot my name. He took to peering at me, trying to remember my relationship to him. He remembered our lovemaking, though, and would ask me to do the things I’d done before.

  Finally, he remembered only that I was familiar to him, as were his two remaining friends. Everything else forgotten. And shortly after he’d reached that state of forgetfulness, he forgot to wake up. Another piece of me followed a Mereling into the Underworld.

  Chapter Six

  Sal

  Perhaps it was easier because there had been time to adjust to Acer’s decline, or perhaps I was getting better at falling in love with Merelings, for it took little time at all for me to open my arms, legs, and heart to Sal.

  Sal, with his feisty, salty sense of humor, his off-color jokes, his quick laugh. Sal could bring me out of my half-heartedness and make me smile again. While once, long ago, I’d forbidden him to jest, I now welcomed it.

  “You told me once,” I said to him jokingly, “it is my fault you lacked self-control.”

  He, to his credit, blushed. “I was young and stupid,” he said, “and I took advantage of you. If I could go back in time to make a different choice I would.”

  “You are very attractive when your face turns red,” I said. “I do believe you are changed, and I don’t hold your youthful arrogance against you. Your life is too short to live it with unforgiven crimes weighing you down.”

  “My life?” He cocked his head to look at me quizzically. “What about your life?”

  “My life, my dear Mereling, is one tethered to a different calendar than yours. Have you not noticed I never seem to age?”

  His eyes widened, and as if it had struck him for the first time—which, indeed, was what it seemed to have done—he gasped. “I never....”

  “What?”

  “I never thought about it. You were always just you. Just the way I’d first known you.”

  The look on his face and his stammering confusion struck me as funny. I began to laugh then suppressed it. Something dark had flitted across his countenance, and I feared it had been caused by my amusement.

  “What is it?” I asked. “What is the matter?”

  “I don’t like feeling stupid,” he confessed.

  “You aren’t stupid,” I assured him. “No more than any. Your friends also failed to notice, did they not? Did anyone in this village ever take heed? No. My agelessness, at least relative to your life span, failed to capture the attention of anyone at all.”

  He looked at me with such a tender combination of frank curiosity and wonderment, it stirred in me my own combination of affection and lust. I took his head in my hands and kissed him, first lightly then again and again, until our lips were searching each other, our tongues flitting in and out, our teeth nibbling gently but urgently on one another’s earlobes, necks, fingertips.

  He clasped me to him, and I felt his rising excitement as he grew hard in such nearness. We fumbled and fussed to disrobe while not losing contact between our bodies. Soon, I sat astride him, rising and falling on his magnificent cock, lifting almost to the point of losing the connection then sliding back down again to take him into my body, deep, deep, deep.

  Up and down I rode him, and when it seemed like neither of us could hold back a moment longer I paused so we could savor the sensations just a bit more until, at last, I could not restrain myself. We burst into glorious orgasm together, finally releasing the exquisite tension.

  Days, or rather nights, went by, and our lovemaking alternated with storytelling, the way it had with Acer. Curious to know how the third of these friends had interpreted the adventures of his childhood, I began to coax the tale from him with flattery.

  “What does it feel like,” I asked one night under the stars, “to be the richest man in this village?”

  “Now?” he questioned. “Now, it hardly matters. I have realized, since Amaro and Acer have gone to the Underworld and since you, dear Luna, have allowed me to love you in spite of my transgressions, there are more important things in life than money. Why it took me such a long time to understand this, I don’t know, except I’ve always been a slow learner.” He laughed.

  I pulled an oak leaf from its branch and tickled his neck. “And before?” I prompted him.

  “At first, I felt a great deal of satisfaction. I could rub our wealth and power in the faces of those who taunted me when we were children.”

  “Why would anyone taunt you?”

  “We were not permitted in our birth village to attend school because we were never expected to do anything more or less than the bidding of the masters. Amaro and Acer had learned to read, nonetheless, secretly, of course, and Shug was too young to be aware of such things as school or to be expected to know, in this new village, anything of school.

  “For me, expectations were different. By the time we arrived here, I’d already fallen two years behind. Teachers and students alike saw me as stupid and a hopeless student. The boys who did befriend me were the rough ones, so I learned our new language from the coarsest of its speakers. The teachers were not pleased, nor were the parents of the other children in school, who picked up some of my salty sayings.

  “I found I could make people laugh by being rude at the right time.”

  I see you signaling, Ancient One, for a pause in my narrative. I see your long ring-bedecked fingers splayed in the light, the jewels reflecting it, waving to me. Yes, please. Put your smoking pipe down, take up your metal walking pipe. You move your hands with a grace which contradicts your wrinkles and odd body proportions. I hope you don’t mind my saying it. And your tunic, which looks quite ragged by sunlight, sparkles from the gold and silver threads woven into its fabric.

  Take what time you need behind the dunes and shrubs, and when you’ve returned and retraced your steps, settle again on this patch of sand near the ebbing tide, and I
shall finish my tale.

  My eyes have filled and spilled a few tears remembering Sal. I’ll wipe them with a wisp of passing cloud while I wait.

  You are back now. Good. I must hurry to finish my story. Sal, as I was saying, learned to play the buffoon, turning his feelings of inferiority into survival strategy.

  This, old man, is another thing I have learned about Merelings. We Immortals have simple emotions. This comes, I believe, from our very clear and unyielding sense of self. We do not doubt ourselves, and if Merelings disrespect us, we dispatch them or curse them and never look back.

  Merelings are always looking back.

  With regret, with pleasure, with anger, with bitterness, irony, bliss. Being haunted by time, they are taunted by it. I believe it is why, finally, they lost sight of those of us who gave them the gifts of civilization—fire and whatnot—and have come to prefer a narrative which promises Immortality in a better place.

  Can you blame them? Until my own journey to the Underworld, I certainly thought it to be a boring place. Not, in fact, unlike what some parts of the Earth were like before my light reached to all corners.

  What’s that? Why yes, I am very philosophical. Did you think just because I enjoy delights of a physical kind and have come to be quite emotional, too, I don’t think?

  You see, that’s how I know I will one day die, one day my brother will die, one day even you, Ancient One, will die—and this is why it is so important I tell you my story and so important you spread it as far and wide as all the stars in all the skies.