Chapter 36 #2
At first it was only that doubling of perception I had already learned to dread and crave.
The furs under my cheek seemed also to be bark.
The firelight seemed also to be moving against an impossible brightness.
Then the verticality came, the sense of trunk and ascent and life too vast to fit into a human nervous system without symbolic disguise.
I made a muffled cry around Sven’s cock.
Mary answered with the same sort of sound against my cunt.
I knew at once she was there too.
I came off Sven long enough to gasp, “Herra—”
He did not stop fucking me. “What is it?”
“The tree,” I said, and Mary’s broken little voice echoed from above me.
“We’re there,” she breathed. “Together.”
The men grew stiller, though not still. Sven withdrew enough that I could breathe properly. Henrik’s thrusts slowed but remained deep, holding me in the state I now understood they wanted.
“Then go on,” Sven said. His hand stroked down Mary’s back. “Find what the tree offers. Find refreshment.”
The word struck me oddly—less like an order to investigate than a permission to drink deep of some potion.
Then the chamber of brotherhood receded.
Mary and I stood together, if standing was the word, on a bough so high and broad that it seemed made not merely to support worlds but to connect them.
This time I did not feel the urgent drag toward the Chinese structure, nor the danger of looking too far into hostile lights.
The atmosphere had changed. The tree felt calm, immense, winter-clear.
Mary turned to me with a smile unlike any expression I had yet seen on her face below: not submissive exactly, or frightened, but luminous with certainty.
“Come,” she said, and whether she actually spoke or whether I understood her intention directly I could not have said.
I followed.
The movement upward did not feel like climbing in any physical sense.
It felt like relinquishing weight. Branches widened and simplified.
Leaves became fewer, brighter, almost abstract.
The air thinned into light. Below us I sensed not merely one world but many—systems, histories, roads, cities, rituals, men and women and hidden orders all suspended in one unimaginable architecture.
Above us there seemed to be no above at all, only a widening.
Mary guided me as if she knew the path by instinct.
Perhaps she did. She had the quality there of a girl at home in submission and therefore strangely free in this one dimension where our abasement became access.
I felt no jealousy in that recognition, only relief. I did not have to lead. I could be led.
At the highest point—or the nearest thing my mind could make of such a concept—the whole tree opened.
I could not describe what I saw without betraying it into metaphor, and so metaphor came at once.
It was as if the universe had roots and every root had stars in it.
It was as if every system of meaning human beings had ever built was only a local growth on some larger living order.
It was as if Norse, Roman, Chinese, scientific, and mystical were all partial diagrams of the same impossible body.
And in the middle of seeing that, I felt something in me settle.
Not excitement. Not orgasm. Not fear. Wholeness.
The best word truly was refreshment, just as my master’s chief had told me, though it sounded laughably mild in my mind, when I applied it to what happened.
The riven, overtaxed, used parts of me seemed to drink.
My mind, strained by analysis and shame and wonder, unclenched.
My body, a battlefield of penetration and ritual and revelation, felt bathed from within by a coolness that did not erase soreness but made it meaningful and bearable.
I became aware, somehow, of being not merely broken open but filled rightly.
Mary touched my hand. We stood there and looked outward, and then we turned to each other. Then, as if we constituted one unit, our eyes widened at the very same moment, because back down on Earth, in the chamber of brotherhood, we had all started to come.
The change from refreshment to climax happened with no mercy at all.
One instant Mary and I stood in that high clear place with our fingers linked, full of the tree’s cold nourishment; the next, something surged up through the vast trunk beneath us and through the fact of our bodies below, and I knew with a shock that the men had begun to fuck us into orgasm.
Mary’s hand tightened convulsively in mine. I felt my own answer in it.
In the bed my body arched so hard that the furs bunched up under my shoulders.
Henrik had not withdrawn. He drove into me with long, sovereign strokes that now seemed to come not merely from a man’s body but from something even harder…
the trunk itself, the natural embodiment of some downward, earth-seeking masculine force to which my whole frame had become obedient.
Above me Mary cried out into my convulsing vagina, and when the vision doubled with the chamber again I saw, with unbearable vividness, Sven’s cock thrusting in and out of her bare little cunt while her thighs trembled and her lower belly quivered with the effort of taking him.
The sight undid me afresh.