Life and Times of a Priestess Ch. 05 Pt. 03

Chapter 5: Cultural Exchange

Part 3: Section 1

She tired of the endless succession of soldiers. The Priestesses attempted to make their worship interesting. With the more adventurous soldiers they encouraged them to take part in group rituals of the sorts popular in Pirion. One soldier would be aroused by two, three, four or more Priestesses at the same time. While one took his penis in her mouth the others would kiss and fondle his body, one taking his mouth in a long sensual kiss while the others massaged this torso and stroked and slapped softly beneath his testicles and between his buttocks. They would hold and arouse him thus for a long time, even more than an hour, until he came in whimpering, shattering climax, or they would let him enter each of them in turn, in a variety of different positions until he came wildly inside one of them.

The Priestesses were now better able to choose the conditions of their employment. As the weeks since the surrender of the city passed the soldiers ceased to behave with the same degree of confidence and of violence. They seemed to recognise that after a period of time the normal rules of law returned even to a conquered city. They began to treat the ladies of Dalos as they would their own of Prancir, that is, with more than sexual respect, but with politeness and relative equality. They knew now that they could no longer beat and dominate these ladies, and if they spoke angrily or rudely to them they would not receive the special treatment they so desired. When a Priestess was tired of a certain position it was better for them to withdraw and follow her will. When a Priestess was sore they might perhaps allow her to apply more lubricant or be persuaded to let her finish him off with her hands, against her breasts or her mouth.

The Priestesses began to show the men their tricks. They would pant without modesty as they instructed their 'customers' how to excite them. Sometimes they would arouse each other for the benefit of onlooking soldiers. Danella enjoyed the activities of sex again after the harmful misuses which had nearly destroyed its pleasure at the conquest. Again the Priestesses began to worship not only with their bodies, but with their minds also. They were able to control their activities by pretending they were busy when they wished to rest, and by taking it in turns to be on duty.

Life was beginning to seem, very much as it had done before the Empire was invaded by the Vanmarian armies in some respects. The Priestesses reverted to their role as willing sexual servants for the male population, except that now the male population were foreign soldiers who initially at least treated them as subservient. They organised themselves and their 'customers' until they had as much choice about the frequency and quality of their 'worship' as they had done before. The males of the Empire had always been their equals in every respect. The Vanmarians had a different way. The men were accustomed to respect from women but the Priestesses soon found they had a control over these men which could not have been possible in Pirion.

The Prancirian men were not accustomed to the sexual variety or the tender care the Priestesses offered so they became more humble and grateful in their presence. Very soon many of them showed great respect towards the Priestesses.

Danella was pleased that life for the Priestesses and the other ladies of Dalos was returning to some kind of normality.

Nothing could excuse the needless deaths, the painful injuries, the wasted time, and all the misery of the conquered . The males of the city were treated less well than the Priestesses and other ladies pressed into the service of the new masters. They worked in camps for the conquerors doing the various tasks that their conquerors required of them, or in the city, rebuilding and repairing for the use of the conquerors. They were worked long hours and hard by their captors. The work they performed was not all necessary. Many of the officers assigned to administer them seemed to take enjoyment in treating their prisoners harshly. Many duties were pointless, such as building something which they were then instructed to knock down. Materials would be ordered to be carried from one place to another. Then the officer in charge would shake his head and decide that it should have been taken to another place, and order it done, even if the men were exhausted from moving the original distance. Then it would still not be right and would have to be moved again, and again. They were purposely set tasks which had no logical purpose. It appeared that there was a policy to make them work hard, even if there was no work which needed doing.

Danella began to feel secure gain. Months had passed since the conquest of the city. They were all becoming citizens again. Changes were appearing in the government of the city. The Prancirian armies no longer treated Dalos as an outpost to be held against possible counter attack from the Imperial forces. The front had moved on and the soldiers were leaving the city on a new campaign further south towards the heartland of the Empire. This fact did not make her comfortable. She hated to think that these foreign destroyers were winning the war and steadily carving up the territory of the Empire amongst themselves.

Her own civilisation which had controlled this continent and most of the world for as long as the memory of her people could remember, was being gradually reduced. If it continued there would come a time when it would collapse. The control of the surviving armies would be lost and the armies would be spread, fighting rearguard actions in the mountains, jungles and deserts. When that time came there would be no purpose in fighting on. There would be no civilisation of the Goddess left. The people would be under the control of the Vanmarian nations and they would be forced to join the strange traditions of the men from across the sea, the full extent of which she did not yet fully appreciate. She had already tasted their ways in these months of warfare, misery, death and servitude. They were barbarians really, with little respect for life and pleasure, driven by heartless leaders who knew only warfare, conquest and competition. Their leaders could only reward their soldiers with conquered populations on which to carry out their neglected lust. She did not want her own people to end up like this, their lives wasted and bitter, but the Vanmarians were inexorably moving towards that goal.

Many of the soldiers stayed in Dalos as many others left to further conquests, but new soldiers came to take their place from Prancir. Dalos was an occupied city and troops still needed to occupy and hold it if only to create unnecessary work for the men in the camps, and to enjoy the pleasures of the exotic captive priestesses.

Part 3: Section 2: 'The Homecoming'

Dalos was also used as a supplies distribution centre. Canned foods for the soldiers were shipped directly from Prancir to the coastal port and brought by smaller boats or by barge up river to Dalos before distribution southwards in muletrains or upstream. All the rail networks around about the city had been destroyed or damaged during the siege and the fighting, and so many of the male prisoners had been put to work, rebuilding the rail links which would enable Prancir to consolidate its new colony and supply its soldiers more swiftly.

Some of the officers stationed in the city began to bring their families, or at least their wives, to live with them, if not their sons or daughters, being educated back in Prancir. Inevitably some did bring their whole family if the felt they were to stay here long. That meant buildings being taken over for these families, usually the largest and best of the empty buildings, but sometimes female citizens, children and old men of Dalos were rehoused. They began their own schools and their children could be seen striving hard to master the many disciplines which the officer class wished their children to learn. Small groups of them walked through the streets to school in the mornings and back in the evenings while most of Dalos' own male citizens lived out in the camps where they worked.

Gradually normality returned. The treatment of the citizens and captured soldiers improved. They behaved well under supervision, carried out the jobs they were told to do and became useful and compliant to their masters. The officers in charge of them began to trust them to do their work and began to allow Pirion officers to oversee the work. Some of the Prancirians became lazy and began to sit around as they let the men of the Empire control their work. It became understood that the prisoners would work, allowing the Prancirian officers to rest if the bullying and unnecessary tasks ceased and they were allowed control of their own working conditions. They worked reasonable hours again, and none of them collapsed from exhaustion any more. The finished work was of a better quality than before.

Danella's desire for a greater goal in life, suspended during the fear and uncertainty of the conflict and its aftermath, returned to her. While she felt respect for the life of the Empire she had felt constrained by its routine to such an extent that the ceremonies had lost their power over her. Her friendship with General Polad had reawakened her interest in the world around her, and given her more to think about. She had learned such a lot from him, and from the books he had leant to her. She had read about the history of the Empire and of the Vanmarian nations. She learned about the war while most of her fellow Priestesses and other citizens of Shanla preferred to remain ignorant. It was this ignorance which disturbed her the most about Pirion. How could it resist the onslaught of the barbarians when millions of its own people knew little about Vanmar and many assumed that everyone in the world lived as they did, in social and sexual harmony.

The science of Pirion, while strong in matters of health, was not as developed in production as that of Vanmar. While the citizens of the Goddess lived their easy lives of routine and plenty they were satisfied, and many of their creative instincts were thus dulled. They did not need to strive for social and sexual advancement as the Vanmarians appeared to. There was little motivation to develop new ideas because there was no great reward to be found. In Vanmar she believed inventors worked not entirely for the pleasure of creation but for monetary gain which would afford them a better lifestyle. They could be rich above their fellows if they worked hard and developed new ideas. Pirion citizens also worked to advance themselves. Soldiers wished to become officers and generals, Priestesses wished to become High Priestesses. The managers wished to become higher managers. But there was little gain in lifestyle by it, only in status. In Vanmar the rewards of success were greater, and the punishments of failure were also far greater. Indeed fear was a motivating factor to rival greed. Fear was not something which had existed in Pirion, in recent times at least. All citizens were secure in their lifestyle. Thus the Vanmarians invented things. Their ships were faster. They had invented the steamship first and the railway and Pirion had copied them slowly some years afterwards. They produced goods and products more efficiently and sold them to other nations which made them rich.

Pirion merely looked after its own needs, each locality producing the food and products it needed. Its people did not need so much.They had the ceremonies of the Goddess and the ways of love to occupy and entertain them so they had little need for the products and 'gimmicks' which occupied the houses of the wealthy in Vanmar.

Danella was reading the book 'The Homecoming' which the officer Paul had lent to her. As the script of Vanmar and of Pirion was the same and the language of Prancir sounded something similar to the way it was written she had found she was able to recognise many of the words she had picked up in talking to the soldiers. She found she had been able to guess at the meaning of other words from the sentences. Her first paragraphs had been slow and she had sometimes asked the more sensitive and friendly soldiers for help on certain words after she had given them what they came for. Those who returned to her, or to the Priestesses as a whole, regularly were often happy to help and pleased to see her making an effort to understand and become more like the Prancirians. They perhaps liked to assume that her interest in Prancir was a repudiation of her own homeland and national identity, although that was not at all her reason for learning about Prancir and its culture. She wanted to understand it, partly because she was bored by the sameness of the culture of Pirion, but also because she wished to understand what drove the Prancirians to this madness of conquest and control.

Some of the soldiers recognised the book. They explained that it was a well known book in their country, telling as it did about the years of revolution and civil war and the invasion of their country by the Vanmandrians and others which had occurred perhaps a hundred years before. There had been many other wars since apparently, but this period was one to which the Prancirians seemed to look back with pride, the period when they had again become an Empire, perhaps unconsciously copying Pirion as well as their own glorious Empire of ancient times, when the great Emperor Charlendane had ruled over lands twice the size of present day Prancir including half of Vanmandria. It was for this reason that the Prancirians were proud of their first Empire and that pride extended to their second Empire when for a time Prancir had freed the people of most of Vanmar from the tyrannies of ancient feudal lords before those ancient families and those ungrateful nations had undone the work of that great Emperor Chameleon.

"The Homecoming" itself was written many years after those wars but it portrayed, with realism, the glory and the suffering of the lead character Grimond and his wife Eleanor, and their eternal love and loyalty was a symbol of Prancirians' devotion to the national cause.

Danella was pleased to have borrowed this particular book. She wanted to see if the novels of Prancir were at all like the ones of Pirion. There were a few in Pirion today who wrote Fiction stories. but rarely stories of realism and power. Doubtless the Prancirian fiction exaggerated the reality, but it gave her understanding of the past of the Prancirians which she craved. She could not imagine that anyone could survive the dangers and crises which Grimond and Eleanor faced, but it was just plausible enough to represent the past. She was aware that this was the author's creation. It represented his ideas and his interpretation of the past. Also his attitudes to life, towards war, and towards sexual relations were represented.

As a Priestess of Pirion Danella could little understand the attitudes towards warfare, towards foreigners and towards the new Emperor of the time, Chameleon. She worked through the book sometimes asking questions to the soldiers, sometimes asking Paul when she visited him again. The most difficult parts to understand were the passages where Grimond spent lonely days and nights on battlefields and in foreign places, thinking only of his love for Eleanor and wishing to return to her.

There was never any mention of any visits to the dormitories or rooms where conquered female prisoners might await Grimond's demands, or of opportunities to become friendly with the other women. Grimond kept himself 'pure' and Eleanor, by implication, waited for him in loyalty without any thought for other men except to chastise the soldier and old friend of Grimond's who, once believing him to be dead, asked for her hand in marriage. "No I cannot give it, for I do not know he is Dead. Until I see his body with my own eyes I cannot believe it", she had said. Danella realised that under Prancirian customs Eleanor could not marry until death was proved, but she had not even given the suitor the answer that she might marry him when the body was found. Danella could not understand that she would not wish to take comfort from this man who so forthrightly desired her, instead she reviled him, as if he were some rude, impious child, for his inappropriate lust. The culture of the Prancirians baffled Danella all the more, but she began at least to have some idea of how their culture worked. Monogamy appeared to be their guiding light. The other was a belief in the importance and supremacy of their own nation over all others. These were both philosophies she found quite distasteful although they both contained a certain charm which she began to appreciate as she read.