Woolgathering by pandemonium_213

Woolgathering

Read Woolgathering

It started between her legs and spread into her belly. Not a pain like cramps, but a liquid yearning become sensate. She concentrated on pushing the large wheel with her right hand while stepping slowly backward and feeding the fibers with her left. She tried to control the tension of the wool and tried to distract herself from the tension that grew within her.

Soon the spindle was fat with yarn. Her grandfather’s flocks yielded the best wool in all the Mittalmar, and she prided herself in her ability to spin smooth even thread. But here and there, she saw small flaws, the sign that her attention had drifted. She sighed and removed the spindle. The yarn was still useful, but it would not find its way into a fine gown or tunic.

Mistress Zadanî scrutinized the yarn as she unwound a length from the spindle.

“It is not your best work, Lady Gimilizrê…” the master weaver said. The young woman’s face fell. “…but then you are allowed to be less than perfect, you know.” Zadanî looked out the window at the spring morning. “Go now, child. You have been working since dawn. Perhaps a walk will clear your mind.”

Within moments, she had hung up her apron and was out the door, running across the lawn that sloped away from her grandparents’ manor house. She made straight for the path that led to the pastures where the flocks grazed on green grass and where she hoped to find her friend.

The path took her to the crest of a hill covered with swathes of red poppies. Wild roses bloomed along stone outcrops. Across the shallow vale, she saw a figure sitting on a rock. Putting her fingers to her lips, she whistled and was answered by a wave and the yip of one of the small black herd-dogs.

She left the path and ran through the grass and down the slope. A trio of ewes trundled out of her way, and the dogs leapt up to greet her. She stopped before the rock, breathing hard. The shepherdess smiled like the morning sun.

“My lady! Come here,” Nithinzil said, patting the stone with a sun-browned hand. “Sit by me.”

She clambered up the rock and sat down, sidling close to the other.  The warmth of the shepherdess' body radiated into Elerína, overcoming even the sun's heat, and her heartbeat, already quickened by her run down the hill, thumped a little faster still.

“A beautiful morning, isn’t it? The flocks are peaceful,” said her friend whose smile took a sensual turn of invitation.

“Yes, but I am not at peace, dearest Nithinzil.” She said, reaching to place her hand on her friend’s bare knee, and then slid her fingers up along the sun-warmed thigh. Nithinzil's sigh rewarded her.  She moved her hand slowly along silky smooth skin and felt need swelling at the fork of her legs.

“Ah, take care, my lady Elerína!” said the other. “Your grandfather will not be pleased if I do not watch his flocks.”

Elerína smiled, savoring the sound of her given name – her private name -- spoken by her friend. “I think the flocks will be safe for a while yet.”

She leaned over and kissed the shepherdess’ lips, which yielded, convinced of passion’s logic. Elerína snaked her hand under the loose smock and cupped a round breast; she kneaded soft flesh and then rubbed the hardened nipple between thumb and forefinger. The other girl sighed and pulled Elerína tightly against her.  The mingled scents of wool, sweat and flowers filled Elerína’s senses, heightening her arousal.

“Let’s find a more comfortable place,” said Nithinzil. The shepherdess spoke softly to the two dogs, who cocked their heads at her words and resumed their vigilance over the flock.

The young women ran hand in hand to the tall grasses. Elerína helped Nithinzil pull her smock over her head, her sun-kissed honey hair now loose and flowing over naked shoulders. Elerína bent down and took a rose-pink nipple into her mouth. She ringed the nub with her tongue, tasting the sweat of the shepherdess' body. Nithinzil tugged impatiently at Elerína’s clothing. She released Nithinzil’s breast and yanked her own gown off; her hair spilled over her shoulders and down her damp back. She flung the garment aside while Nithinzil kicked off her skirt. The women, both naked, sank into the grass, hidden from all but the birds flying overhead.

Hands, lips and tongues caressed soft skin glistening in the gentle light of the spring sun. Elerína’s fingers sought and found the other set of lips, hidden beneath Nithinzil’s thatch of chestnut-brown hair at the base of her flat belly. She dipped her fingers into Nithinzil to moisten them, gratified by the other girl’s moan. Elerína began to tease her friend’s most sensitive place, feeling it harden under her strokes. Nithinzil trembled and pushed Elerína’s hand away. The shepherdess looked at her with heavy-lidded eyes while her hand traveled to Elerína’s secrets.  

"Nithinzil...oh, yes, do that!  There. Right there." 

The women continued like this, one heightening the desire of the other. At last, Elerína sat up and turned, lowering her face above Nithinzil’s parted legs and opening hers to the shepherdess. She inhaled deeply, filling her nostrils with Nithinzil’s intoxicating scent. She stroked the other woman’s inner thighs, tracing the mark of Rána, the tattoo of the crescent moon indigo against white skin with her tongue. Nithinzil’s tongue also journeyed along her own thigh, finding the same mark of the moon.  She gasped when Nithinzil’s tongue touched her, sending ripples of sensation that mingled with a storm of desire.

"I love you!" Elerína murmured. But do I really love her?  she wondered.  The question remained unanswered when her friend’s fingers entered her body, and all words, all coherent thought fled from her mind. 

Elerína fended off reaching her peak too quickly.  She detached herself by concentrating on the shepherdess’s quivering flesh while her tongue continued to swirl. Soon Elerína felt Nithinzil’s hot breath against her thigh, the sign that the other woman had lost focus and neared the edge of the long plateau. A few more strokes of Elerína’s tongue, and Nithinzil cried out. The shepherdess’ body arched against her, and spasms clasped Elerína’s fingers. She did not stop, but continued until Nithinzil tensed and released three more times. The shepherdess insistently pulled Elerína’s hair.

“Enough. Now you.” Strong hands pushed Elerína onto her back against the cushion of grass. Nithinzil moved to lay between Elerína’s legs where her mouth disappeared behind dark fleece. Nithinzil’s fingers resumed their rhythm inside her.

Elerína’s world became the sensation between her legs.  She neared the precipice, one step closer, and then another, her body shaking as she stood at the brink. But with one, two, three more strokes of her lover's tongue, she tumbled over the edge into waves of pleasure that crashed over her, spread across her thighs, slid up into her belly and ended at the top of her skull. Nithinzil did not retreat but pursued her and returned the gift multifold until Elerína was unable to tolerate more and gently pushed the other's head away. She drew Nithinzil up to kiss her. She tasted her own musk: salt and the sea tinged with the faint astringency of a lemon.

"Nithinzil...my darling Nithinzil," she murmured against the shepherdess' tousled hair that smelled of lavender. "I lo..."

"No!"  The other's fingers, drenched in Elerína's scent, fell upon her lips, silencing her. "No, my lady.  Do not say it."

Confusion muddled the sweet afterglow that had settled upon Elerína's mind and body. "But why?  You know I..." 

"Please don't say it!" Nithinzil pleaded.  "Just hold me."

They lay in one another's arms in silence, the breeze drying the sweat on their skin. The song of finches, the soughing grass, the occasional baaing of a sheep and answering bleat of a lamb, and the gentle clanking of the wether’s bell lulled them to sleep, entangled in a golden embrace.

Elerína woke first and saw that the sun climbed toward its zenith. She kissed Nithinzil’s cheeks and forehead, and then her lips. Nithinzil opened her brown eyes to met Elerína’s sky-blue ones.

“Do you think a man could ever bring you such pleasure?” Nithinzil murmured.

Elerína rolled over on her back, the prickle of grass teasing her skin, and gazed at the cloudless sky.

“Maybe, but it might be different.”

“Do you wish to marry, Elerína?”

Elerína yanked a long stem of grass from its anchor and put its tender stem into her mouth, chewing on it while she thought.

“Yes, I suppose I must.  I do wonder what it would be like with a man. But who? That I do not know.”

“You are of the nobility. Will this not be decided for you?”

“Likely it will. Grandfather says ‘Marry for love,’ but Grandmother is of the line of Indilzar, and she is ambitious. I expect she will seek a good match for me, but knowing her, she will make it seem like happenstance. And you, Nithinzil? What of you?”

“I do not wish to marry,” she said, her voice sad. She hugged her friend. “I wish...I wish I could always be with you, Elerína, but I know that will never be. Women like me have a hard lot.”

Elerína sat up and pulled her friend alongside her. She pointed north across the hills where, both of them knew, the old white house of Erendis stood.

“It is said that the great queen sought the company of women. She only married to get an heir.”

“Do you think so?”

“So Grandmother says. But you mustn’t tell! We must take care who knows these things.”

“I will not tell. I know we must be careful,” replied Nithinzil.

“Yes, we must, but we’re lucky. Girls and young women who do not bear the mark are expected to remain chaste,” Elerína ran her hand idly along Nithinzil’s inner thigh across the tattoo. “But we can seek pleasure with each other and save ourselves, blushing virgins for our husbands on our wedding night!” She giggled, and Nithinzil joined her.

“If I had to, I could marry.  Maybe even bear a child,” said Nithinzil, “Only if the man is older and more interested in sitting before the hearth and eating my lamb stew than fucking me.”

Elerína laughed and hugged her friend. “There is no shortage of fellows like that in Hyarastorni!” She pushed herself up on her elbow so that she could look into Nithinzil’s face. She placed a tender hand against the shepherdess’s tawny cheek. “You are of the Moon, dear Nithinzil. Surely you will always be able to find a loving woman should you desire.”

“I hope you are right, my lady. But I will always remember you.”

“And I will always remember you, too." Elerína thought how many times she had wanted to tell Nithinzil that she loved her, but was always silenced, either through her own hesitance or her friend's insistence. "Now let us get dressed. It is nearly noon and I will be missed at the manor. I do not wish to risk Grandmother’s displeasure!”

Nithinzil slipped on smock and skirt – the garb of a shepherdess – while Elerína pulled the simple ivory gown over her head and wriggled it over sticky skin, grateful for the fine weave and its lack of sleeves. They kissed and spoke soft promises to one another before Elerína trotted away, scattering a cluster of ewes and lambs as she ran toward the path. She turned and waved goodbye to Nithinzil before the path dipped behind the next hill.

On impulse, she veered off the path, trudging up to the crest of one of the highest hills where she sat upon a rock, a vantage point she often visited for the purpose of “woolgathering,” those times when she gazed over the downs while lost in thought. She remembered when she had first met Nithinzil.

They had been dedicated to Rána at the same ceremony where women of the downs had gathered on the night of a full moon. Under its silver light, the two girls were initiated into the mysteries. The priestess had tattooed the mark of Rána on their inner thighs while Nithinzil’s mother and Elerína’s grandmother, both consecrated to Rána many years before, watched with pride.

Although the servants of Elerína’s grandparents had children, they were either much younger or much older than Elerína. She played with the young ones, but she had no real friend her own age until she met Nithinzil, the daughter of her grandparents’ chief shepherd. They had taken to one another as soon as they met. Elerína would watch the flocks with her friend, visit her in her homestead and had gone to the country dances with her, listening to the shepherds play the pipes while the maidens danced with the lads, both of them giggling at ridiculous romance. But as they grew older, reaching their eighteenth year, something had changed between them. It started with a lingering touch of the hand and a shy kiss with soft lips.

Even though recently sated, heat welled up from Elerína's huch when she recalled their early explorations of each other’s bodies and when they brought each other to climax that first time. Elerína had been so ashamed. She had fled back to the white manor house and had brooded for days. She could not face Nithinzil; yet she also wanted to touch and be touched by the young shepherdess.

Her ill-temper became so bad that she had snapped at her grandmother, the unquestioned matriarch of the great manor of Hyarastorni. Rather than a sharp rebuke, as her grandmother’s usual wont, the older woman commanded in a firm but even tone that they would now go “gather wool,” her term for those times when she spoke to her granddaughter alone.

Elerína had followed her grandmother along the same path. They had come to this very same rock to sit, a place that allowed an expansive view: the downs rolled away to the South where the ocean lay; to the North, the cone of Meneltarma loomed; beyond lay the great city of Armenelos where the old king, Tar-Palantir, ruled. Grandmother had fixed her with eyes blue as the clear sky above the green hills.

“You are as moody as a bitch in heat, child!”

Her grandmother, said to be as beautiful as one of the Eldar, had been as blunt as a farmhand. Even more incongruous, the coarse words flowed in the honeyed elven-tongue, which Grandmother and Grandfather insisted she know yet spoke discreetly among only a few. Elerína loved hearing and speaking the language, and much preferred her given name in that tongue.

The older woman stroked her granddaughter’s dark hair, so much like her own, with her fine-boned hand. “I believe I know what troubles you.”

Elerína met her grandmother’s sky-blue eyes. “I am so sorry, Grandmother! Please forgive my rude tongue. It’s just that…oh, I do not know how to say this.”

“You are in love.”

“How did you know?”

“Do you think that I was not young once? I need not ask who because I know who it is you fancy.”

Panic caught in Elerína's throat. She and Nithinzil had been discovered! Now she would be punished.

She recalled the tomes assigned to her by her tutor, the gentle man who, like her grandparents, was counted among the Faithful. He taught her both elven languages so that she could study the scrolls and books tucked away in the library of the manor house. She had read the doctrine handed down through the generations that outlined how the nobility — the descendants of Elros and thereby the Firstborn — should behave in matters of love and marriage. What she and Nithinzil had done was wrong by those measures. Tears flowed down her face, and she choked back a sob.

A slender arm draped around her shoulders and pulled her close.

“Why do you weep so?” Grandmother’s voice turned to worry.

“You know! You know what Nithinzil and I did! Who told you? Will you send me away now?” Elerína covered her face with her hands.

“Don’t be so dramatic, Elerína! I would never send you away!" Her grandmother squeezed her with vehement affection. "No one told me anything. It may not be apparent to others but the moon-mad looks you two exchange, those dreamy smiles...” Grandmother paused. “I know them because I have experienced the same.”

“But you and Grandfather are...”

“No, I mean when I was around your age. With another girl.”

Elerína gaped at her grandmother. “A girl?”

“Yes. Do you not remember the verses of the mysteries that sang of the many ways of love?”

“I do, yes, but I do not understand.”

“Well, the verses are obscure, and I had intended to talk to you about this within the month, but you and Nithinzil sought one another before I had a chance to speak to you alone. There are many things for you to learn yet, and some of that involves sex.”

“I know how babies are made, Grandmother. I have seen the rams tup the ewes.”

“Ah, but there is much more to it than that! For the Children of Eru, sex can be a most wondrous expression of love or simply a gift of pure pleasure. It can also be perilous, especially for women. Númenor has never been an idyllic land for us. Children are born out of wedlock here just as they are in the dark lands.”

“I thought I was to marry before I had sex. So what Nithinzil and I did was doubly wrong.” She hung her head.

“It is best that you marry if you wish to lie with a man because you might conceive,” Grandmother said. “For us — the devotees of Rána — love between women is a way to find pleasure and to learn how to give it.  To show your love for her."

Elerína mulled over her grandmother’s words, gazing out over the green downs and the fleecy clouds grazing in the blue sky. Then she blurted out a question, an impolite one, but one that she couldn’t contain.

“The girl you loved — who was she?”

“I do not kiss and tell, my dear. I will only say that I loved her deeply, but as we grew older, her heart turned to another woman. I was devastated.  But time passed, and I married your grandfather.  I came to love him. In all ways.” Her grandmother chuckled. “He puts the rams to shame.”

Elerína laughed, terribly embarrassed when she envisioned her grandfather, a burly sunburned man with gold-streaked hair and a bluff, merry manner — so different from her slim, black-haired grandmother with her regal bearing and sharp wit. Yet her grandparents obviously loved and enjoyed one another. Passionate noises sometimes came from their bedchamber at night – and also in the morning and even the afternoon.

“You loved a woman, but you still married?”

“Yes, because I had to.  It was expected of me, just as it is expected of you. It is not so uncommon, child, that we must marry even if..."Grandmother paused and looked away toward the rolling downs before turning back to Elerína, who thought she seemed sad. "Some of the greatest women of our people have loved other women. But it is not something widely discussed.”

“Who?”

“The most famous shepherdess of these hills.”

Elerína could scarcely believe it. “Emerwen Aranel?”

“The same. You hear the tales of Hallacar courting her, and all those swooning songs about their early love, which turned sour later. But there is more to the story so I will tell it to you now, but you must guard this knowledge. It is a family secret of sorts.  Do you promise?”

“Yes, I promise, Grandmother.”

“Very well. When Ancalimë retreated to Emerië, she indeed took to the hills with old Zamin as the stories go. And she did meet Hallacar just like you have heard and read. We are told that Ancalimë did not wish to marry because of the bitter union of Erendis and Aldarion. The pressures of state required that she marry and provide an heir.”

“That is why she married Hallacar. I know that from lore, Grandmother. That she married him and gave birth to Anárion to spite Soronto, her cousin.”

“Yes, that is so, and theirs was an unfortunate pairing. What is not written is that when Ancalimë took refuge in these hills as a young woman, she also met Ilmarien, Hallacar’s cousin and the daughter of the Lady Irildë, Lord Hallatan’s sister.

“The truth of the matter is that Ancalimë preferred the company of women in all ways so marriage to Hallacar must have gone against her inclinations. The same was true for Ilmarien who also compelled to marry and give birth to children, including a son from whom we are descended. But it was Ilmarien – your foremother — whom Ancalimë found here in the downs and loved. They remained lovers throughout their lives.”

Elerína could not speak. Tar-Ancalimë! She had known that her family had connections to the famous queen but not like this.

“How did you come to know this, Grandmother?”

“The great families of Númenor have all sorts of unwritten history,” the older woman said, "and love has many refrains in Eru’s Great Song.”

“This is an amazing story!” Elerína had exclaimed. “There must be more to tell of Ancalimë’s love for Ilmarien.”

“There is, dear heart,” her grandmother had said. “But I believe you have some wool to card so we had best return. We will speak about this and matters of love at another time.”

The day after “gathering wool” with her grandmother, Elerína had found Nithinzil watching the sheep and had begging her forgiveness for her absence and her behavior. Sweet kisses had assured her that she was forgiven. Nonetheless, her grandmother's other words had nagged at her, even while Nithinzil's embrace had soothed her anxiety.

"Your seeking pleasure with this girl is less of a concern to me," Grandmother had said, "than the possibility that she is starry-eyed because of your favor. You are of the nobility, Elerína. Nithinzil's father and mother are good people, but you must remember that they are our servants."

Elerína shook herself out of her reverie, half-expecting to find her grandmother sitting by her. She felt a little guilty for telling Nithinzil about Tar-Ancalimë. After all, she had promised her grandmother she would keep it to herself. Yet, she wondered, if more were open about their love, perhaps tolerance would grow. 

Then she heard the bell ring in the distance, summoning all to the manor house for the boisterous mid-day meal. She rose and stretched, inhaling deeply. She paused. She took another deep breath, and the haunting scent of the sea tickled her nose. Sometimes she imagined that she could smell the sea, a faint memory from her childhood. She sniffed again to inhale Nithinzil’s musky scent, which reminded her to wash her face and scrub her hands thoroughly before she joined the others at the great table in the dining hall. Before she left the hilltop, she looked again toward the rise beyond which Nithinzil watched over the flocks and took her peasant’s luncheon and where, many years ago, her foremother had lain back on the grass and loved one of the greatest rulers of Númenor.

---

Chapter End Notes

Gimilizrê – gimil, the stars; izrê, beloved. Elerina’s Adûnaic name.
Nithinzil – from nithil, girl and inzil, flower.
Indilzar- Elros
Huch (from Parma Eldalamberon 13): cunnus (see Twenty-two Words You Never Thought Tolkien Would Provide by Darth Fingon.