That Damned Blessing Ch. 03

They stood in front of his seat as naked as the day he was born, staring hard at his object of lust. His mother looked absolutely stunning, more beautiful than any woman he'd ever seen except for the Seetsahm of his dreams. Her body couldn't have been more perfect, with broad shoulders that were perfectly suited to carrying her big, full breasts; a tummy that no longer contained an ounce of fat; broad hips perfect for giving birth; a trimmed strip of pubic hair that had already gone fully dark brown nestling above a pussy whose lips were gently parted from lust and that shone in the sunlight; and a pair of legs that were long and strong and shapely. She didn't look forty-four, or thirty-five, or even thirty; from the neck down she was twenty-five years old, and the lines and creases that remained on her face and neck had grown so faint that they only added a few years. How could I ever want another woman after this? How could anyone compare?

Jess was looking back at a swimmer's physique honed to perfection, every muscle standing out in perfect relief, toned and tempered and steely. His chest was broad and powerful, his arms strong without being musclebound. His hips were narrow and his legs were like pillars of steel -- and between them was the most perfectly beautiful thing she had ever seen. And Lord, how she needed that thing inside her! Why did she even care about Paul when she had this young god ready to fuck her and breed her over and over and stay by her side for a century or more? Forty-four years ago she had been born to fuck her son, and eighteen years ago he had been born to fuck her, and nothing else did or could matter.

Neither was aware of the passage of time, but suddenly Jake called, "Please sit down now, and keep looking at each other. This may take a while, so make yourselves as comfortable as you can."

Once more they started from the erotic fog they were sinking into and slipped guiltily onto their seats. Jake said to make themselves comfortable but there was nothing comfortable at all about these stumps, so they ended up perched like nervous birds, shifting frequently as one position or another became painful. They looked at each other as instructed, at least most of the time; once in a while one or the other would study the assembly of shamans sitting on the slope, and they both came to the independent conclusions that the shamans weren't looking at them as all, but rather they were studying the seven open feet that separated them. It was all beginning to seem stupid, and every time one or the other tried to ask a question, Jake or Adouwe shushed them.

Most uncomfortable of all was the Old Woman, whose sat on the hillside like a raven on the bust of Athena. At the best of times she was an ominous and unsettling presence, but now she looked like she wanted to kill them both because they annoyed her. Both Ryan and Jess glanced over at her now and then, but her expression was so malevolent that it somehow became compelling. Not only that, but she also looked so old that any reasonable person would be dead at her age, which only added to her strange menace.

Finally Jess whispered, "How old do you think she is?"

"The Old Woman? She might have been around when they invented fire for all I can tell."

"Something just occurred to me, but it's probably stupid."

"I'm buckass nude in front of my mom with an erection that won't go down. If anyone should feel stupid, it's me. What's your idea?"

"Well...you know how they said that Ratu and Fa'ahotu lived for a long time but died after like a century and a half or something? Well...what if she didn't die? What if that's Fa'ahotu?"

Ryan's jaw dropped, and he slowly turned to look at the Old Woman. "That...that makes sense. It would explain why she was so against us getting the blessing. She didn't want anyone else to have it except her!"

"Right!" Jess said. "Do you think she really could be?"

"I bet she is!"

"Oh for the bloody fuck's sake!" the Old Woman snapped in English thick with the native accent. "You two are a couple of bloody morons! Do you really think I look 800 years old?"

Jess and Ryan exchanged astonished looks -- the Old Woman had given no indication that she spoke anything but the native language -- and then looked back at the woman. Finally Ryan said, "Well...yeah."

"Kinda," Jess admitted.

"You stupid bloody wallies! You idiotic cunts! I can't believe we bestowed the pilaliuta on the stupidest two cunts on planet bloody Earth!"

Before Jess and Ryan could respond, Jake jumped in to speak the native tongue in soothing tones to the Old Woman; the Old Woman, in turn, seemed only to get angrier, unleashing what could only have been a stream of incomprehensible native invective on mother and son (although she did frequently use the English word "cunts" so that they didn't feel completely left out). Finally she jabbed her walking stick in the direction of the Americans, screaming, "I'M NINETY-THREE, NOT EIGHT CENTURIES, YOU STUPID! BLOODY! CUNTS!"

If she had only been venting at him, Ryan could have stood it, even laughed at it. But the Old Woman was including his mother in the insults, and he had had enough. He leaped to his feet, pointing an accusing finger at the Old Woman and shouting, "SHUT THE FUCK UP, YOU NASTY OLD BITCH! I've had all of you I'm willing to take!"

The Old Woman's eyes went wide and she snarled, "Who the fuck do you think you are, you stupid bloody American boy-diddler?"

Ryan took two long steps toward her and said in a low, deadly tone, "I'll tell you who I am: I'm the biggest magic any of you have ever seen. I've got powers in me your vicious old mind can't even imagine. And you? You're useless."

Jake stepped forward to intervene, but Ryan put him back in his place with a hard glare before turning back to the woman. "You speak English and that means you understood everything that was said before and during the ceremony. You could have stopped it if you wanted to -- Adouwe wouldn't have listened to you if you'd have put your foot down. But no, you're either too stupid or too feeble to understand what you were looking at -- either that, or you wanted to let it continue so you'd have something more to whine about!

"But here's the thing: we've had it with you. If you say one more word that's not helpful and pleasant -- man, if I even think you said one word -- I will hit you with a curse stronger than anything you've ever seen. It will be a curse of...of constipation! You'll never crap again. It will build up and build up until you explode and die the way you lived: full of shit. Understand?"

Of course Ryan had no ability to do any of that, but the shamans all seemed to think he did. More to the point, the Old Woman looked terrified, and she cowered back from him like her anus was already stitching shut. After a moment Jake went over to her and quietly said something in the native language, and the Old Woman nodded jerkily. She tried to stand but Jake had to help her up -- once standing, though, she made good time down the hill and toward the surrounding forest, moving much quicker than anyone who walked at a ninety-degree angle had any right to. She paused at the forest edge to throw a last fearful glance over her shoulder before disappearing into the bush.

Jake watched her leave and then turned to Ryan. "Um...I really hope you won't do what you said. We value our elders on this island, even when nobody can quite figure out why."

"Nah," Ryan said breezily as he sat back down. "I just wanted to get her attention."

"You know," Adouwe mused, "I thought she was Fa'ahotu as well. Learn something new every day."

Ryan looked over at Jess, who was obviously trying to keep from laughing. Soundlessly she mouthed the words "Thank you," to which he responded with a smile and a wink. It was nice to be able to exert control of something for a change.

After that there was nothing to do but sit and wait. The sun got higher and started to creep into the clearing, where two very naked white people sat on pieces of wood. Jess, who didn't want her pussy sunburned, mentioned it to Jake, and in a few minutes several of the shamans had erected some poles and stretched a tarpaulin over it to make a kind of awning. And then there was nothing to do but sit and wait again as she shamans talked with growing intensity. After a while, for something to do and to keep the horniness at bay, they started making ridiculous faces at each other, and soon they were laughing.

Suddenly they became aware that the shamans had ceased their discussions, and they looked over to see Jake asking Adouwe, "So those are our options?"

"Yes," the old man nodded. "We've narrowed it to those."

"And we're sure those will work?"

"One definitely will. The others, well, we're as sure as we can be of anything in this situation."

"Right," Jake nodded. He took a deep breath and turned to Ryan and Jess. "Alright, we're ready to tell you what we've come up with."

Jess and Ryan mimicked his deep breath and gave each other a long look before turning their attention to the apprentice shaman. With a nod, Ryan said, "Let's hear it then."

"Alright, first of all, we all wanted to fix this completely and set things back the way they were before our...error in judgment. Unfortunately, that's not possible."

Mother and son both sagged, but it was Jessica who asked, "Why not?"

"Remember when I told you before about your spirits being like two rugs that were being knitted together into a third thing? That's gone way, way too far now to turn it back. We were actually watching it happen before our eyes just now. In fact, we doubt it could have been reversed even if we'd have known what to try immediately after the pilaliuta was finished -- it's the strongest spiritual force any of us have ever seen, just blinding."

"So it's hopeless," Jess muttered.

"Not so fast," Jake said. "We've figured out that there are three things we could do -- I mean, we can only do one of them because they're mutually exclusive, but you have three options."

"Options, OK," Ryan said with a note of hope in his voice. "Tells us those."

"Alright. The first one would absolutely put a stop to your spirits being joined, but there are...severe side effects."

"What side effects?" Jessica asked. "What would you do?"

"Um, well, we would kill you," Jake said.

"WHAT?" Ryan shouted, throwing his hands in the air. "Why would you even bring that up?"

"Because if you were desperate enough to avoid the alternative, you might choose it. It would be painless for you -- we'd give you something to drink here and you'd just go to sleep and not wake up. Then we'd put you in your Jeep and send it over a cliff. Your family would think it was a tragic accident, but they'd be spared what would come if the spirit-joining were allowed to continue. Some folks might go for this option."

"We we definitely will not," Jess said decisively.

"Damned straight," Ryan nodded.

"Right, can't say I blame you," Jake nodded. "It's a bit extreme. The second thing we can do is another ceremony -- "

"Right, because the last one turned out so well," Ryan grumped.

"This would be a ceremony to slow the spirit-joining down as much as we can. Not permanently, probably, but it might roll it back a little in the short term, make these urges and dreams and feelings a little easier to face. Eventually that part would wear off and it would resume, but slower -- again, for a while."

"What sort of time frame are we looking at here?" Jess asked.

"Ah, that's the sticky part: we don't know. We're sailing uncharted waters here, nobody has ever tried anything remotely like this before so we just don't have hard data."

Ryan nodded. "OK, best guess then."

"Best guess would be the rollback would last maybe three or four months," Jake said, "and the slowdown would maybe hold for six months, maybe a year. Some think less, and that fellah at the end there in the yellow shirt thinks that between the ceremony and the distance you'll put between you and this island, it might last for ten years or more. I think he's overly optimistic about that part."

"Six months or a year," Jessica said quietly and in a hollow voice that was almost frightening. "And after that?"

"Well, then the joining would continue. It may even pick up the pace to make up for lost time. Regardless, you'll end up together for a long, long time and make a lot of healthy babies, just like the blessing was meant to do."

"That's insane," Ryan muttered. "That's just...unacceptable."

"You can't demand to see the manager, unfortunately," Jake said. "You've seen them all already, and this is the best they can offer."

"Wait," Jess said. "You told us there were three options. What's the third?"

"Right, the third," Jake said. "This is going to sound a bit...counter-intuitive. Maybe even mad. But personally I think it's the best option, and I'd encourage you to think about it long and hard before turning it down."

"OK, so that's ominous as fuck," Ryan said. "Just tell us."

"There's another ceremony we could do. You see, if you don't do anything at all, we reckon you've got three weeks or a month before your spirits are completely joined and all the changes are finished. And those three or four weeks will be hard if you fight them-- you'll be miserable every single day, and the harder you fight, the worse it will be. That's true of the other blessing as well, only the misery will be drawn out over months. And in the end it won't matter. You'll be joined anyway."

"Quit sugar-coating it," Ryan sighed. "Tell us how badly we're really fucked."

"That's just it: you don't have to be. The blessing we gave you will make you young, strong, vigorous, madly in love with each other, happy every day, prosperous as Croesus, as many kids as you want, the whole thing. It's a blessing meant to give you the best lives anyone could ask for. When it finally happens, when it's done and over, you'll never have any doubts or any questions, you'll know it's the best thing that could ever have happened to you. So we can do another ceremony to make it easier on you, easier to accept without stress, faster, everything. Within five days you'll be starting your lives together as the happiest people on the planet."

"Aghast" didn't begin to describe how Jess and Ryan took that suggestion. They were so dismayed that they couldn't even speak.

"I know it's the opposite of what you wanted," Jake went on. "But what you wanted isn't possible. Your spirits will become one, and no force short of death can stop it. You can move to opposite sides of the planet and you'll still be pulled back together as fast as if you stayed together. But this way, it doesn't need to be traumatic. It doesn't need to be hard. You just embrace it and be happier than you ever could be otherwise."

Jess leaned back so far she almost fell off her stool. Ryan put his elbows on his knees and covered his face in his hands. Neither spoke for a long time. Finally Jake said, "This is the biggest decision either of you will ever make. Take some time. Get dressed and go inside that house there. Have something to eat, maybe some whiskey. Figure out what's best for you and we'll take it from there."

Like automatons, the mother and only son stood and began to pull their clothes back on.