[Fic] "Harvest: Swarm" -- original, Ekanu

[edenfalling]

This is a future piece of Harvest, my longest Ekanu story to date. It doesn't directly follow part 1, but will be part of the finished story -- though probably in an edited form.

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Harvest: Swarm
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Denifar was back at Ikuthula'ech for another sixday.

They'd had sex the night before, being careful since it was near her fertile time. Ekanu knew all about herbal preventatives and teas to bring the lower blood early -- every woman who pledged herself to the University learned that sort of medicine -- but no remedy was infallible. So she'd asked Denifar to use his tongue.

He hadn't reacted well.

At the time, she'd assumed it was simply surprise and unfamiliarity. So she'd shrugged, smiled, and said, "Well, your fingers can touch more places at once. Maybe that's better."

Denifar did have marvelous fingers, strong and deft from years of working with wire and pieces of clockwork. The sex had been wonderful, leaving them to curl around each other, sweaty and tired, until he stumbled out of bed at dawn.

But now as she sat in the flower fields, listening to the bees gathering nectar and pollen, Ekanu wondered. What was wrong with a man using all parts of his body to please a woman? Denifar didn't object when she used her mouth on him. What was different about a man pleasing a woman?

Her people raised sex into a sport, an art -- they didn't have herbs year round, and there wasn't much else to do during the midday dark of winter. She'd heard and seen and smelled sex from the day she was born; they pretended not to notice, out of courtesy, but there was no physical privacy in an ice house. Warmth was shared best in small areas.

In Estaria, they focused on penetration to the point where all the other ways to touch a lover, all the other ways to have fun, show caring, give pleasure, fell to the side and were lost.

At least, Ekanu had always assumed such things were simply lost. She'd thought, when Denifar finally broached the subject of sex, that she could teach him anything he didn't know.

Now she wasn't so sure.

A bee landed on her cheek, and she idly flicked it away, watching it lurch through the air and come to rest on a deep-throated yellow flower that was just a shade lighter than the insect's yellow stripes. The bee rubbed a leg over its bruised antennae, and then reached down to the pollen-coated stamens of the flower, getting back to business.

Bees had a good life, Ekanu thought. They never had to worry about leaving their hive, about fitting into a new place and a new people. Even the queens, when they left, brought their subjects with them and reproduced their old society with painstaking precision.

All she'd brought from the Ice was her memory.

One person couldn't build a people. She was lost in Estaria, in Vinaeo, in Bahur-Semrin, in Gwynorae, in the University. She was a lone bee, trapped in a foreign hive and learning to obey a new queen.

If a bee joined a new hive, Ekanu wondered, would it die of confusion? Would the native bees drive it out? Or would it forget its old home?

Maybe after a time, even its stripes would change.

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Inspired by the 1/9/05 15minuteficlets picture #19

Comments

[redwolfoz.livejournal.com]

Nice comparison of cultural differences to the bees.

[edenfalling]

Eh, I personally think I'm beating the theme into the ground, but I couldn't resist the bees. :-)