************************************************************************* SKY-EYES-3 "Sky Eyes" (Part #3 of 4) by Carl Corley ************************************************************************* Chapter Seven ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Canadian geese, in great winged echelons, flew overhead, heralding the approach of winter - true winter, which in but a few short weeks would bring to this country snow and ice, wind and storm. The sumac trees plumed the forests with gold, pinesap burned on the naked slopes, lush persimmon fell for the possum and the Choctaw children, crabapples lay mellow in the hidden leaves, ginseng was uprooted to be boiled for winter sickness, sassafras roots dug and dried for steaming brews, nuts gathered by the Indian women and girls, and the wild scarlet bergamot, the last of the flowering wilds, folded their petals, prepared for the dreadful onslaught to come. In this beautiful, mournful season - Indian summer actually - Vik abided in the tepee of Neshoba, a prisoner yet not a prisoner. Under Neshoba's guidance and wisdom, were passed on to Vik at times, precious bits of information about his people. Vik learned much about the Choctaw nation - the heathens he had once feared more than anything on earth, with the exception of god and the devil. These symbols were gone from him now, in that other world, the civilized world to which he no longer belonged. He no longer needed god, he reasoned, for he knew now that if god dwelled anywhere in eternity it was here in this beautiful primitive land, in the hearts of these beautiful people. He learned that the Choctaw people were semi-sedentary in character, a people gifted with a knack for fishing, hunting, and agriculture. They farmed, tilled the rich loam with crude implements, and at this season busied themselves with their harvest, the fruit of their labors: corn, beans, pumpkins, squash, melons, deertongue leaves for smoking, striped oranges for juices and drying apples for soaking in brine or whipped into sauces and jellies, and a rewarding harvest of wild-rice. In addition to their domestic efforts they were skilled hunters, bagging with bow, lance and crude traps: deer, black bear, squirrel, rabbit, wild cattle and birds of every description. Fish plentifully invested the river and the chattering brooks, and they could be caught by hand, dried in the sun, or baked in sumac leaves for winter's hunger. They never idled their time. From dawn till sunset toiled at something: harvesting, fishing, hunting, working skins into leather, stringing berries and shells into beautiful strands - one of their great delights for adornment... wove split oak baskets and hampers; made winter garments, rebuilt tepees; created drums and shields and whetted their arrowheads into knife sharpness; collected bright feathers for their head-gear; painted pottery; wove baskets; manufactured face and body paint from blood root. They made mats of strung buckeyes; groomed their war ponies religiously; fed their dogs with the watchfulness and eagerness with which they fed their children; checked on their drying skins; fished, cured deermeat venison, collected shells for adornment, created colorful jewelry from silver and semi-precious stones and oiled their bodies with the fruit of the tung trees in preparation for the rituals in the burying grounds of their dead. They were tactful - Vik grew to learn - ambitious, grave, humble on occasion if it were warranted, were clean of body (though he had not considered so at first) even going swimming in the river when it was edged with ice, and adhered, with strict obedience, to the laws of their tribe. Unlike the white man, they did not steal from one another (though they stole with relish from the paleface) did not commit adultry, rape nor incest, and did not kill, except in lust for domination of the tribe; a lust strong in the heart of every brave who longed to become chief of the Hiwannee and the Kewannee. This ambition burned like a votive flame, endless, ceaseless; and made rivalry among the male population, especially the eager, young, beautiful braves. Hardly a day passed that some ambitious and foolish boy did not challenge Neshoba for his rank as chief, or for the privilege of lying with Vik. All of them lusted for his young, smooth, white body, and Neshoba had to stand guard over him like a stallion tending its mare, swearing, making threats, matching skill in the chunky games or with stick ball; outdoing them in wrestling contests, fist fights, knife throwing, bareback riding, and endurance competitions. The squaws in camp completely ignored the males' preoccupation with other males, especially their sexual interest in other males, as though it was a thing so natural they were not concerned (which it was) and it was a common sight to see two young braves pairing off after the community fires sifted to embers, or two on one horse riding off to some secret glade for a sexual tryst. This same male preoccupation elevated Vik's rank, especially among the males, and nothing could have prevented his being flattered. For the males were all extremely well proportioned in bone and muscle; were golden smooth of complexion, boasted shiny manes of jet black hair, and wore hardly enough to hide their nakedness. Many times, during wrestling games, swimming, at work or play, carelessly threshing legs revealed male organs and pubic hair, constantly proving the Choctaw was burdened with no urge to modesty. Though the females were overly careful to hide their forms beneath layers of doe-skins, the young males could not have cared less. Nudity to them was the mark of their masculine pride, and they exhibited this manly pride in hundreds of little maneuvers as a ruse and to shame other less fortunate males. Sometimes they danced entirely naked, their lithe forms gyating to the rhythm of drum and seeded gourd, huge brilliant stewartia blossoms in their long flowing manes, and one of their favorite pastimes was to exhibit and compare erections. The boys of the tribe were introduced to this male display at an age their loins filled with a man's lust, and it fell to the young braves as their duty to teach these youths in the variety of sexual pleasurings that could be had with a hard organ rubbed in hand, or against another boy's belly, stuck into someone's willing mouth, a butt's entrance, all demonstrated to the youths by the eager braves in masculine contests to teach and to strengthen young bodies into the shapes of men. In an encampment teeming with sex, where morals were unknown, Vik came, in time, to witness some strange sights. Some amusing to him, others a little frightening. But as true winter blew in the killing frosts, turning to scarlet the hills with brilliantly lit foliage of the blueberry bush, the leaves red from the first killing frosts, the encampment automatically moved indoors, practicing its skills by the warmth of tepee fires, drinking hot gourd bowls of sassafras, sleeping, dreaming of spring to come. Neshoba's affection for Vik during that awesome winter made a malady continuous. Nightly he topped Vik's young body with animal groans and sighing moans, pulling the white to him after climax, basking in the glory of Vik's willing, many times too-willing body. Sometimes, when the snow drove so fiercely outside Neshoba dared not venture, except for the feeding and watering of his white stallion "Dove", he lay with Vik's body through the dark hours, pinned to Vik's body by his turgid horn, carrying out his sexual rhythm until the first pink streaks of dawn seeped into the tent from the smoke vent in the roof. At times he did not take him at all, working for hours on a lance, satchels embroidered in bright beads and berries, furbishing the white man's saddle with the silver trappings which he never used, making Vik small, useless gifts, preparing meals. Then, as if some great ecstasy had come over him, he would, at times, drop what he was doing, untie his loincloth, and leap on Vik as a cur will during the mating season. At times, swept up with love and ardor, he would unfold the crimson, sable-trimmed robe of Henry and, laying Vik's naked body within, wrap him carefully, holding him in his huge bronze arms, just sitting looking at him, admiring him, warmly making light love to him. During this interval of sex and love-making, this travail of manly passion and primitive rapture, Vik learned much about this savage lover who took him first like a bound slave, then had beguiled him with something of so immense and so dark a rapture that Vik fully capitulated, moulding his body, his being, his very soul to fit this savage's wishes. As a squaw will learn both her man's strengths and weaknesses, and remain silent and obedient to both, so did Vik accept Neshoba: the things he craved, the things he would and must and did have. He was as helpless as a lamb in the dark lair of a lion when he was in the presence of this primeval god, as powerless to lift a finger as a wren to peck at a hawk, and in this undeclared weakness, this weakness he had never planned, dreamed, he became the implement of Neshoba's joy. He melted under his persistent power, his loving ferocity, the experience of his swift and savage strength, and even Neshoba's most tender reaction was coarse, crude, hard; when, even in his most estatic love-making he threatened him with his unbridled lust - a lust that Vik imagined could turn from the warmth of love into the most lethal of hatreds, of killing rages and wrath, if a savage opponant or rival interfered. As in the attempt to take meat from a lion, Neshoba would have ripped to ribbons anyone who might try to steal Vik from him. And Vik, sensing this, remained a little afraid of him from the first. But, as winter kept them in the smoke hazed tepee, Neshoba calmed out of him any terrors he might harbor, charmed him with his crude personality - a personality so forceful that his hard, primitive entity pulled at Vik's, stealing his strength through his will, his carnal purposes. That he was loyal was unmistakable. The most loyal and dedicated of lovers. And he demonstrated that loyalty with his rich outpourings of passionate ardor; by his merest touch, a silver glance, a hum while he worked, the security of his great, dominant presence, the safety from all the brutalities of the world Vik feared, sensed, felt, even when Neshoba sat beside him, lay down beside him naked at night, took him both calmly and fiercely, loved him and caressed him. Neshoba told him ancient legends, sang to him in the Choctaw tongue, learned to kiss him in time (Indians do not kiss), probing the darkess recesses of his soul with his searching tongue, bending, sliding his tongue to his organ, gripping it with tongue and teeth, then back again to his lips, holding his chin firm with hard, blood-stained hands fresh from a winter's snare, covering him with the dark curtains of his rancid mane. Never had Vik known anyone so physically strong, so mentally dominant. A dark and mysterious phantom hovering over his world, anarchic, devouring, both with his body and his eyes, lapping with burning tongue, chafing with hairy, burning limbs, a dark and wondrous god in this pelt-covered fastness. And, strangely, Vik became as content as if he lived in the castle of Coca in Segovia, one of the most beautiful in the world. He was being given the richness of passion and love. His small body was worshipped by a god whose body was for more ardent, more fearsomely beautiful than Vik's could ever be, loved by a man who was born to love women, impregnated with a flesh-horn made to procreate, to give to the world tiny beautiful images of himself. All this richness was his - Vik Alta's - an exile from the cobbles of Katrineholm, Sweden, a blond and starry-eyed boy whose ambition, once, was to stand under the stage-light and listen to (to him) the angelic sounds of applause. Now, all he wanted, longed for, had, was the mysterious darkness of Neshoba's body, the essence of his sex, all of him, his bone and muscle, in mind, his heart, his thoughts. Everything else in the world to which he had aspired, everything toward which his ambitions had led him, were to his Neshoba, and the awe-inspiring, overwhelming power of his love. Vik wanted, longed for nothing else. This had become his world, his glory, his ambition, his life. Nothing else existed. Neither time nor substance - life or death - yesterday nor tomorrow. Just this one dark moment in his life, this secret hideaway from civilized madness, this heaven fashioned from pelts of dead beasts, warmed by the fires of a miniature hell, fed by love, a dark, naked body grimed with pigfat and goose grease. This was a heaven where he could see and touch his god, feel him, render unto him his own body - not an invisible god he could not see nor touch nor name, a shadow on the wall compared to the god who lay down beside him at night, who cradled him with utmost protection, who sang him to sleep, and awoke him again with his turgid loins digging into the darkest recesses of his soul. This was heaven. Far away, in the civilized world lay hell. "Kiss me, Neshoba," he cried out longingly in his half-sleep. "Hold me, never let me go - never!" Once, in panic, he had become terrified at the thought of entering this anarchic, primeval world. Now he trembled in fear of leaving it, losing it. "I will never let you wander again in the land of the white man," Neshoba assured him, rolling over on his belly to penetrate Vik with all the glory rigidly vested in his productive horn. "I will follow you to the end of eternity. I will kill whoever tries to take you away from me. I will die fighting that you might live, torture my body with sores until I become a bleeding wound, until I drown in my own blood. I will never leave you, Sky Eyes, nor will I let you leave me." Vik lay and listened to this sad and haunting song, his small body crushed against the etherealized giant beside him, listened to the witch hazel flinging its dried seeds in the snow, and he thought with a sharp pain in his heart: "If god is mightier than this, than mighty he must be indeed." And he wondered, as Neshoba - like the seeds of the witch hazel - spurted into him, how could a thing so glorious as this, this love for Neshoba, be so despicable in the world of which he had been a part, while it remained a thing so natural to this wild being the world demeaned as a heathen... and his soul cried: "Who is the less civilized?" ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Chapter Eight ------------------------------------------------------------------------- There came a great murmuring in the land, a stirring of life, like the child in its mother's womb as spring, in all her gorgeous profusion, hung out her festoons of beauty. Redbuds splashed the tall tree limbs with lavender. Emerald leaves of the dogwood and catalpa lipped each other like the tongues of elves, with that of Ponderosa pine and larches. Indian pinks bordered the limestones, camellias lay burning carpets along the lower regions, pickerel weed made purple-headed reeds in the crystal shallows, pussy willow catkins waved furry plumes, and dog-toothed violets dared peek their thick-petaled blossoms up from the yellow moss and dead leaves. The Choctaws came out of soot-blackened tepees, breathed the fresh spring air into their lungs and set about working the land for planting. Children romped and played, filling the air with wild shouts as they took up the game of stick ball, each player using two rackets and a rawhide ball. Dogs mated in the open, stallions sniffed the mares, bass and bluegill and pike gathered in the shallows, beneath the water lillies, and the limbs of the trees were swarming with noisy yellow- throats, orioles, doves, sparrows and wrens. Through the underbrush, wild turkey ventured, picking up choice worms and seeds, the whippoorwils sang their mating calls by night, and the raucous jays sunned their wings at the edge of streams, the painted bunting of white clouds made decorous notes in the limpid sky; while the ibis and heron and sandpipers stalked the moss laden trails like tiptoeing phantoms. Vik and Neshoba, from their winter happiness, became as the others - drugged on the beauty of spring, the rustling of the tender leaves, the corsages of blossoms in the splotches of sunlight, the singing of the birds, the sighing of the pines in the fresh breeze. In the fine warm weather, under the smiling sky, the activity of small life lending its energy to others, Neshoba took Vik on a woodland outing. The rode "Dove", Vik up front, Neshoba's bronze arms protectively around him, his naked thighs rubbing Vik's buttocks, skirting, as they went, the boundary of the Choctaw nation, passing through several villages who greeted them with humble esteem. They forded lakes and streams and ate Neshoba's kill when they became hungry. Each day was filled with new glories, as Neshoba planned things for them to do, swim in a nearby lake sunning their naked bodies on a protruding limestone, hunting, riding, sleeping in the shade of pines, on the carpets of pine needles, flower hunting, petting a lame deer, hiking, racing, making love in the open, out under the clean, cloudless sky. Vik being taken in the Sosebee cave, laughed, sang, loved again. It was heaven to Vik, a balmy heaven interlaced with blossom and perfume, of singing birds and falling water and Neshoba's hot lips and burning, gendering thighs. No thought of yesterday, no concern for tomorrow, for he realized that tomorrow would bring to Neshoba and him the identical happiness today had brought. They lived by darkness and by light, by their thrist and their hungers, by their sleeping and their waking, by their love and by their sex. One occurrence was timed by another, and watch and calendar were useless. The sun was Neshoba's clock, and Vik's gold pocket watch was useless as a sundial in the rain. Its ticking only faascinated Neshoba and a curiosity to the children. One day Vik gave it to Neshoba, who hung it about his neck, along with his other necklaces of glass and tooth and shell. With the change in the seasons, the bright warm weather and clear skies Neshoba decided to build another tepee, in memory of his father, Escatawpa - build it for Vik, his new god. The entire encampment, much to the disapproval of the young braves, who lusted for Vik, were called upon to help with the construction. The timbers were hewn from cypress, only the best pelts were selected, and hundreds of tiny animals gave their lives to line the inner walls of Vik's love temple. The down of flocks of Canadian geese were used to line the enormous bed, the fluffy tails of a hundred squirrels were used to trim it, the plumage of a hundred bluejays to overlay the soft pillow on which Vik would rest his head. Turkey claws trimmed the entrance flap, the most beautiful stones and shell collected by the children paved the walk, and only the white pelts of virgin deer could be used to floor the interior. Vik utilized his own talents, drawing on the white man's world, when it came time to erect the hearth. He showed the young braves how to mix mud and moss for mortar, and the hearth was built up from the center, huge enough, like a well, so that he and Neshoba could sit on it while they warmed themselves by the flames. He showed them, too, how to form a huge cone from sycamore bark, which was hung directly above the round hearth to catch and steer the smoke to the vent and out. He schooled them in making an enormous chair from cowhorns, much in style of the Roman field chair, and how to make camel seats from split oak and leather. He showed them how to dye the leather with bloodroot, and many cushions were stitched of the ox-blood, colored leather when they were made and scattered throughout the tepee. Enormous urns were made from clay, painted in Choctaw designs, and set about the floors. In these Vik planted marsh fern and thatch palm, adding something growing in the primitive decor. Racks made of high polished cedar were made so that Neshoba's knives and whips and lances could be racked neatly. Pegs were carved for his war bonnets, and a rack was made in saw-horse fashion for his saddle. The inner walls were decorated with the finest in war-shields and lances. One was brought from each village, bearing on it the tribe's insigna, bestowed upon Neshoba by the village leader, and each village contributed its finest blanket. Every virgin contributed a pair of beads, which cascaded from the roof to the floor in a colorful maze of glass and shell and berry, and the fairest virgin in all the tribes in the Hiwannee and Kewanne nations was escorted to pay the honor of laying the bluejay pillow on the marital bed, by Neshoba's singular request. Neshoba intended to marry Vik, by Choctaw law, and he aimed, as chief, to have all the essential trimmings. The honeymoon lodge would be a thing of perfect creation, in keeping with his great love for the yellow-haired Viking; and appropriate to the smooth blond beauty of his male bride. Too, an old regret pained him. The more he knew Vik the more he considered the words of his father. Into his mind and heart was summoned the notion that he was mating with a god. Vik, to him now, had become completely Abba Inca, the celestial diety of his ancestory, the god of Montazuma and, as chief, he must love him, but with awe. Vik was speechless over the proceedings. But he accepted this decision with silence. He knew now that Neshoba loved him above and beyond all things. That evening before the wedding ceremony Neshoba gave him "Dove" as a wedding gift, his most prized and most valuable possession. Vik was at the stream bathing in the shallow turn where the clear water bubbled about the shiny stones. Neshoba came down the flower sprinkled path leading the white stallion by a tether made from the white-belly-hide of a young doe. A scarlet feather, to mark the end of his ownership, was thrust in the bridle, turned toward earth and not heaven. "Dove is yours to keep always," Neshoba said to him, taking one of Vik's wet nipples between two fingers and pressing fondly. "He came to me from the wild herd of Natchez, on the banks of the Mississippi. Only to look at him burns my heart with love. But now I have you, Sky Eyes, and I need no other symbol of beauty." A white dove flew between Vik and Neshoba. It was a good sigh, in Neshoba's eyes. "It will be for both of us," Vik said, taking the reins. "Yours and mine, Neshoba. We will ride him together, as we did at the beginning of spring. Always together, the three of us, for I know you live with a pure heart, and love him dearly." Neshoba blinked back a tear. "No, Sky Eyes," he said, sadly, but with a noble heart. "It is forbidden for a brave to ride the pony of his squaw." Vik felt annoyance. Could it be that Neshoba held him that much indeed as a woman? Then he asked him a question he had longed to ask him since the beginning of the building of the honeymoon lodge. "Now that you want me in marriage, Neshoba, will - will this ritual change anything between us?" A trace of a smile rented Neshoba's swarthy face. "You are truly the god of Abba Inca," Neshoba answered, as the shrill call of a dove in a high green limb filled the air with silver. "But because I want your body, your love so much, I do not have the strength, the courage to resist you. In my want for you I am become a coward. In the white tepee you must be the same to me, as from that first night, the moon of our mating, but beyond the tepee in the golden light of the sun you must be only to me Abba Inca, the true god of Montazuma." He paused, ran his nimble fingers through the stallion's white mane. "Tonight, when the marriage ceremony is over, go directly to my tepee, wait. In the meantime I will prepare myself, and tonight you must suck at my loins, to drink my mortal self so that I too will feel your godliness and become as a god myself." And that night, when the moon hung high in the tops of the willows, and the ceremony was over and done, the monotonous drum beatings, the dancing, the smoking, the mournful rhythms, Vik guided "Dove" to the entrance of the Tepee, tied him to a cypress railing and entered. He stripped himself of the red robes of Henry, his wedding gown, and lay back on the cloud of white goose feathers, waited, anxiously, his naked body gleaming in the luminous glow streaming in through the opened vent. He did not have long to wait. Soon Neshoba appeared, bearing a flaming pineknot torch. He thrust it into the coals at the hearth, so the white-feathered tepee sprang into spectacular detail in the brilliant saffron light. As he approached the bed on which Vik lay, Neshoba unhitched his scarlet loincloth. His stalwart nakedness jumped at Vik. He had observed Neshoba's form hundreds of times during the long glorious winter, had marveled at his swarthy beauty each time he had gazed, but he had never seen him so radiant, so beaming with masculine beauty, so grave and so harmoniously sculpturesque. He had freshly bathed, his long hair still damp, his muscles toned with the freshness of cleansing water and scented oils. Neshoba fairly gleamed in the flaring torchlight. He smelled of wetness and freshness, of the oils of the passion flower, of the crushed petals of jasmine. And as he came ever nearer, Vik caught, as if by some half-forgotten memory, the wild scents of trilliums, recalling the time Neshoba had made a garland for his hair out of these delicate petals of spring. Neshoba thrust one leg over Vik, straddling him, both dark knees on the bluejay pillow, his crotch at Vik's trembling chin. His huge organ hung like a serpent from the moss laden depths of a tree, sliding down from the dark pubic nest, a gleaming tube of flesh, its great head lifting as if by summons, a silent call for some tremendous deed, alerting its heavily veined contours to rise to the darkness of some premediated evil, a sulking, blind being of immense rapture, feeling out its victim, glowing with an inner life of its own, pulsing from a focus of mind and thought, upon only the doing. Its dark body, coiled with cords and veins, tightening of its own flesh as it swelled within, turgid with passion, rode above Vik's curious eyes like a beautiful monster, a monster without sense of anything but touch, the opening in the tip of its head spreading and closing, a mouth without teeth, without tongue, red as the mouth of a fox. At the sight of its enormity, of the two gourds riding in their sling, Vik reached up and drew it into his mouth. He saw Neshoba's body stiffen, noticed the belly muscles bulge in hard contours, above the black patch of hair from which all this ecstasy came. As if he was dying from hunger Vik mouthed it unceasingly, rolling his tongue over the enormous head, thought how much it resembled the reeds of the pickerel, dark and stiff and crowned with a jubilant head of purple, bone hard yet spongy soft, warm to his hunger, shaping itself to the cave of his mouth, filling him, enticing him to suck with greater abandon. He was wrapped in the full-fledged glory of masculinity, engulfing its cingulum of creation, devouring it with his eyes, his lips, his every emotion. He was taking now, rather than giving, sucking at the great phallic spring of life, his victim the most elemental of humans, a male from the very dark heart of earth, a savage throw back to the glories of Abba Inca, the first and only god of the new continent. He had gone into the past to find his token of copulation, to rendezvous with a being so primeval, so primitive - so savage in origin and sense, that he might as well be copulating with a cave man. And how glorious this animality of the human world, a male so purely physical that his every move, his every gesture cried the word sex. Neshoba was sex personified. He was the essence of sperm, of black groin hair, of swinging seeds, of a serpent for an organ, a gleaming hair fringed serpent that choked him until saliva ran in shimmering streams down his chin, into the hollow of his neck. So much male it drowned his eyes with burning tears and bent his small body in unison with every thing that was savage, ferocious. As the hot sperm gorged the channel of the sobbing Neshoba's pulsating organ and flooded into him, Vik spermed also, the seed of life spilling in the hard sterility of human striving. Now Vik had tasted of the most beautiful savage on earth, had smacked his lips on the tasting, had fed on the froth of semen, had drunk his fill, had gloried in the spawn-syrup of Neshoba's love. And because of the act he was the less mortal for the tasting and Neshoba more god-like. Now they were one, the god - and man. Dully he considered his change, as the thighs of Neshoba rested on his limp shoulders. This was his honeymoon, married by Indian law to a savage, and he loved it, was a part of it, a major part, in fact he was it, body and soul. Neshoba, in his swarthy, carnal desperation, in his dark ferocity, had tapped Vik's mind, his heart, more than Vik had tapped Neshoba's body. Neshoba had changed him to the Indian way, and he found irresistible ecstasy in the change. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- {End of file: SKY-EYES-3 Story continues in: SKY-EYES-4 (chapters 9-11}