For the Kea foundation's thirty-first year, it was decided to hold a great festival. The double community was now sound and prosperous. Hernando, now almost sixty years old, sat in his official attire beside Chief Luolani IV, a twenty-six year old woman of the "new generation".
Hernando looked with a sense of affection at Santiago near his Celo, at Zaga with his arm around Hito's waist, at Esteban and Duz, at Gloton with Machizo, at Manso and Dusango... And recalled his Manuel, and Mozuelo, Felipe, Jose and the others that had left them, called by the gods, and who were now resting up there, under the flowers.
His thoughts turned sweetly to Esfean, who at twenty-five didn't want to unite with anybody, because was in love with him, Hernando. And the Chief told himself that after the celebration he would at last give him his assent. He proudly looked at the men, adults and young, and at the boys of the "new generation", their sons, who soon would take their places, and he asked himself who would be the new Hernando, the Hernando II. He looked at Jumando and thought that he would have been a wonderful chief, but the choice was to be made by the others, after his death. Who knows why he, who after Felipe's death was the oldest man amongst the Keas, was still alive? "The Gods are happy with you" the others used to say to him...
He met Esfean's eyes, and understood that the young man was dancing for him. Hernando smiled at him and nodded, and the male face of the young man lightened, and Hernando's heart danced with the man who loved him for years, even before the death of his beloved Manuel. And he felt that he too was in love with Esfean, the strong Esfean.
When the festival was over, the old chief approached the man who loved him and said: "Ola, man! You danced in a wonderful way, thank you. Tonight, instead of sleeping in the communal house, why don't you go to keep company with an old man?"
He saw the young man looking at him intensely, and in those eyes he read a deep love that lowered like a balm inside his soul. The warm and sensual voice of Esfean said: "Also the sun is there for generations, but who says he is old?"
Hernando nodded, thanking without words the young man: "So, then, I'm waiting for you - when the sun has gone to sleep."
Esfean smiled at him and said with a low voice: "But my sun... I feel he will sleep very little, tonight." and rapidly went towards the communal house.
His mates, who heard this short dialog, while Esfean was preparing himself, said to him: "Hernando is granting you a great honour."
"Whoever welcomes his loving man, makes him a great honour." the young man answered. Then added: "In him I love the man, not the chief. I am in love with him from the day he put on me this purple pareo that I will wear again tonight to be in his presence. Because to me, this is the day of my second acceptance."
"And... when will you make the union rite?"
"If and when my man will decide." Esfean proudly answered.
Before going to the man's hut, Esfean went to wash at the fall, to extract from his body the sweat of the dance. Then he went to pick a fresh flower to adorn his hair. He wore the purple pareo and, anxious, approached Hernando's house. The man, when he was again single, and as agreed by all, didn't go back to the communal house like all the widowers. The chief, even if alone, must have a house all for himself.
Hernando understood at once the meaning of the purple pareo: "I made you wait so long time, for this second acceptance didn't I?" he asked him with a smile, stretching towards him his arm.
Esfean grasped his hand, took it to his lips and kissed it: "You put it on me twelve years ago, and in that precise moment I fell in love with you. You can now take it away, and make me yours."
Hernando untied the youth's pareo and looked at him at the sunset's light: "Your body is wonderful, my friend. Mine, on the contrary... What can I give you?"
"Your love?" Esfean asked, splendid in his nakedness, his eyes shining.
"Certainly. I'll give it to you, without reservation." the man said and gently pulled toward himself the young man and guided him to his pallet.
They lied down together and Esfean undid the elder man's pareo and admired him for a long while, then caressed him with tender passion. Hernando's body responded at once, quivering, and his member rose with vigour.
Almost in answer, also Esfean's member stood up, turgid and sound: "Do you see, my loved one, how young you still are and how much you set me on fire? Do you feel how much my body vibrates for yours?"
"Come, my love."
"Yes, but wait. The sky is getting dark and I want to look at you while we unite. I'll light all the lanterns and then... And if, after tonight, you will again unite with me, we will make love always in the full light of day, so that my eyes too can fully enjoy you."
The young man lighted three lanterns and hastily went back to the man he loved. And finally, they started making love. Esfean was very skilled in making love, because he had had very good teachers, and also because he had experience, so he was able to give to his man untold pleasure. But also Hernando was equal to him, with his gentleness mixed with strength, with his tenderness mixed with passion. If it was possible, he fascinated even more his young lover. Hernando made him lie on his back, took his ankles and pushed them against his chest, then bent to skilfully lick all the area between his testicles and around his quivering anus. Esfean, shuddering awaited for the imminent penetration and abandoned completely himself to his man of whom he had dreamed for so many long years.
Hernando bent over him and kissed him: "Are you ready to receive me, my love?" he asked.
"Yes, come..."
Hernando stuck his rod and pushed, slipping inside him, strongly and firmly. The young man exhaled a sigh of pleasure. When the man started his vigorous back and forth movement inside him, with a steady rhythm and a light waving of his pelvis, his buttocks muscles darting at each push, Esfean threw his head back closing his eyes, a peaceful smile of pleasure on his beautiful, sensual lips, fully savouring the fantastic and long-dreamed of union. Hernando, continuing to piston inside him with virile ardour, looked at him with pleasure and gratitude - all his lover's body was expressing to him acceptance, desire, pleasure, and the placid joy of one who knows he is loved and desired. Hernando looked at the beautiful, sound member of his young lover, overturned on his belly, lightly moving at each of his pushes, and put there both his hands, massaging, feeling, kneading it with calibrated pressure, now light like the touch of a butterfly wings, and then now firm as if moulding clay to give it a new shape and compactness. And Esfean, fiery only a moment before, was now placid, yielding, passive, but with a passivity full of warm participation.
Hernando recalled how, right through the previous festival, Esfean had danced for him, silently offering him all his splendid virile body with sensuous and passionate movements. Now it was he, who was dancing inside the young man, giving him his virility, his passion and love. When Hernando felt that the pleasure had grown, inside himself and his lover, filling every fibre of both their bodies, and that now was near to overflow, he accelerated slightly his movements, watching Esfean's face for the magic moment when both would spread their seed. And then the moment came and both started to pour their contribution to their reciprocal love.
Hernando continued to gently move forth and back even after the last drop of seed was poured by both of them, so accompanying the pleasurable relaxation that follows the peak of the pleasure. Esfean opened again his eyes and, slightly rising his head, looked, smiling at the sated and happy face of the man whose member, still erect and strong, continued to move inside him in slow and quiet moves.
They united, and united again all the night long, as Esfean promised. They enjoyed each other several times, now with impetuous passion, now in a gentle abandon. They took and gave themselves outdoing each other, and Hernando found again his strength of when he was thirty years. Esfean was in an enraptured admiration for the man's body, still sound and strong, for that rod that even after several orgasm didn't yet bend, and licked it, and kissed it with renewed pleasure.
"Oh, Esfean, do you want me to recover in just one night my three years of loneliness?" the man murmured, so pleased and thrilled, caressing the head of his new lover.
"Are you tired?"
"No, on the contrary, I never felt so strong! But, leave something also for after the rite of our union, please!"
Esfean looked at him, lighting in a smile full of gratitude: "Do you really want to make the union rite with me?"
"Certainly. I know, more than ever, that I am in love with you."
"I too am. But I would be yours even without the rite. I could not make love with anybody else, after having at last made love with you! Do you really want the rite?"
"I want it, for sure. And you?"
"I will always do all you ask me, because I am completely yours."
The first light of dawn saw the two lovers still intertwined in their gentle erotic games.
"Each time we unite is like new, beautiful, different. You make me really feel I am a man. You...."
"Shush!" Hernando said gently while his beloved one was slipping out from him and was bending to kiss him again, "We don't need words. Our bodies spoke, and are speaking for us. Look, the sun is rising..."
"My sun never set down this night. Do you feel ready to face a new day?"
"More than ready. Oh I feel full of vigour, and of joy. Will you come to the beach with me to bathe?"
They went, hand in hand. The first village inhabitants, coming out from their houses, saw the couple going towards the beach and understood at first glance that the two were the incarnation of happiness and of love. And they saw, in the body, gait, and in the light of their chief's eyes, that the man was looking ten, twenty years younger, and they were happy for him.
The union between Esfean and Hernando was celebrated and the entire village was cheerful. While the rite was going on, Himanal was explaining to his novice all symbols of the ceremony:
"Do you see, Ray, their pareos are red, because red is the colour of burning embers and therefore the symbol of the love that warms their hearts. As you see, the dancing young men are miming a love intercourse. And now, after the engagement declaration, one puts on the other a garland of white flowers, to say that his love is pure and bright.
See, now they drink the coconut milk from the same half nut - the coconut milk represents the male's seed, and to use the same nut means that there is no difference between them, no one of them is superior to the other. Now, offering to the other a banana, is the symbol of the intimate union of their bodies - each one receives the other in himself with pleasure. And now they drink again, but each one gives the drink to the other, because this is the union's fruit. And all this they perform in front of the whole village so that everybody becomes a witness of their will to unite.
See now, they are going to their hut where they will really donate their bodies to each other, while all the village celebrates in joy because two of our brothers declared their love to each other. Do you understand everything, Ray?"
"Yes, Master Himanal. But why also the women have the same rite? They don't have a peter and they don't pour the white male's milk!"
"It is true. But for the women the same symbols have slightly different meanings, even if they bring to the same result - the union."
"But men make love amongst themselves even without the union rite. They enter each other with pleasure, and drink each other milk. I too am learning how to do it."
"Certainly. But, you see, when you unite just for the sake of pleasure, to amuse yourself, it is beautiful, but it is not complete like when you unite for love. This is exactly what the rite means - we will do the same things we always did, but just between us two. And from now on, those things will have a new taste and a new meaning. And all the tribe is witness, and will celebrate the new couple and their love."
"But, and what if one falls in love with two different men?"
"It can happen, Ray. But then he has to understand inside himself to know who of the two men returns the same love and which of them is the right man for him. It is somewhat like when you go fishing with the pirogue - if you have two friends, both very dear to you, and each of them invites you to go fishing on his pirogue, can you go putting a foot in each of their pirogues just because you don't feel able to make a choice?"
The novice laughed aloud, amused at this image: "Of course I could not! I would fall in the sea, and instead of going to fish I will be the one fished out!"
"Exactly. In love, it is the same."
Ray seemed satisfied. Then, taking a hand of the young man, the boy asked him, very seriously: "Master Himanal, will you wait until I am eighteen, to unite with me with the rite?"
The young man ruffled his hair with an affectionate gesture, and answered: "It is still six years away! It's a lot of time! Now, care just to grow up and to become a man. And then, when you'll be eighteen I will be thirty one! At that time you will have found somebody younger than me, and more handsome, you'll see."
"But you are young and so beautiful!" the novice said on the door of the preparation house.
So, Himanal, very seriously, said to the boy: "Beware, I am looking for a lover who is perfect and skilled in making love. So, you have to learn perfectly to write and read, to fish and hunt, to recognise all the edible plants, to carve the wood and all the other things they are teaching to you. You will have to know very well all the laws and rites of the Kea tribe, its history and its traditions. And you have to train, making love with several boys, so that you can become a skilled lover. Do you see that I ask so much?"
Ray lightened up: "I'll do everything as you said to me, and you'll see that you will not able to find in all Kea anybody more skilled and better than me!" he said and ran happily inside the preparation house.
Himanal went back to the menís common house. He entered one of the rooms of the new wing and saw that there were three of his friends intertwined and engaged in a passionate love game.
He was about leaving but one of them called him: "Come with us, Himanal!"
The young man smiled, made his pareo slip down from his loins and said: "Yes, it will be better, before I fall in love for a certain novice." and slipped into the tangle of bodies.
He was at once welcomed by skilled hands, sensual mouths, and turgid members.
And Himanal recalled when he was a novice, and how much he was fascinated by Hito's rod, by the expert and gentle mouth of Manuel and by the warm sensuality of Alvaro, from whom he made his own name. And, while he was feeling Zadusan penetrating in him, he recalled the time of his first penetration. It was Master Hito. He did feel a slight pain, but he succeeded in hiding it, because he didn't want his master to stop; he didn't want the other novices to mock him or for the other masters to be disappointed in him, but more than all, he didn't want the other masters to scold Master Hito. And at times he still dreamed of Hito's beautiful rod roaming inside him.
And when Himanal swallowed Dudo's seed, remembered the first time he tasted the "male's milk". It happened with master Vilo, and he thought that, if that was the male's taste, he wanted to drink of it every day! He recalled also how, making love with the novice girls or the women masters was boring, doing it with the novice boys was amusing, but doing it with the masters was sublime!
And Himanal understood that it was logic that Ray fell in love with him, as often happened to the novices towards one of their masters. Growing up, the boy would loose that infatuation, like it passed to him or to his companions.
While Himanal was unloading himself with passionate strokes in the welcoming ass of Glomochi, he thought that Esfean did wait for twelve years for the man he fell in love when he was a novice and, while Dudo's mouth skil
fully took again his member to full hardness, he thought that all was possible!
But he stopped thinking when the newcomer Sanmama offered to his mouth his hard rod while somebody else, at his back, entered inside his hot and slippery channel, pinching his nipples.
From the near rooms come the low pleasure moans of the other friends who were giving themselves to each other, in that sweet evening that concluded the union's rite of their beloved chief with the gorgeous Esfean.
They, in their hut, after a passionate intercourse, were lying side by side, Embracing and tenderly caressing each other bodies and members now languidly relaxed, waiting to recover and to unite again, later. They were looking at the sky, now filling with stars.
"Hernando?"
"Yes, love?"
"You weren't brought up in the arts of love like us of the new generations, right?"
"No, certainly. In the people from whom I came, they never talked about such subjects. Or, if they talked, it was just to tell us that they were dirty things..."
"How stupid! But then, how did you discover that, on the contrary, they are beautiful things? How was your first time, if you didn't have masters?"
"See, I was living in a great house all in stone, with so many rooms. So, I had a personal servant, that is a man whose work was to do for me all I could need. This young man, one morning that I didn't feel like getting out of the bed, pulled away the sheet under which I was sleeping and saw that my member was straight up and hard. I was till a boy, I was fourteen. I was terribly ashamed, in fact in my old people they told us that it was a shame to be seen naked. And even more with your member hard! But he smiled and told me that, before working for me, he had been ship boy, then sailor, on a ship, and that sailors did know how to calm down that hardness... I asked him how. So, he at first caressed it, and when he saw that I was not opposing and that on the contrary I was enjoying his touch, he bent down and took it in his mouth, until he gave me an orgasm. It was my first time and I thought that it was really beautiful. So, after that day, I often asked him to do it again. And he taught me to do also the other things and he taught me to take his ass, and he was the first man to take my virginity. He told me all about his life on the ship, and I desired to be able to live on a ship with other sailors like him..."
"Well, then he was your first master, in a way."
"Yes, that's right. So, when I was eighteen, I started to work in a ship as assistant officer, and I had the possibility to make love with several sailors. But there also you had to do it secretly."
"What a strange tribe you come from! Why did you have to hide one of the most beautiful things in life?"
"Yes, a strange people indeed, you are right. They said that you have to have sex only with a woman, but this also was to be hidden, nobody had to see it. In Kawaai it was somewhat different, but there they say that amongst males it is allowed just before the marriage, but that then you have to do it just with a woman. That's why we had to abandon Kawaai, or rather, we were chased away."
"Did you ever do it with a woman, besides in the conception house, I mean?"
"Yes, I was seventeen. I did it for some months with a distant cousin of mine. She wasn't bad, but she couldn't give me all a man can give to me. I don't mean just physically, and yet it is important, but as vigour, strength, soundness..."
"Moreover, the man's body is more beautiful, I think! Women have two holes, one in excess. And there between their legs they are so... empty and smooth! They miss something essential. And then they have too big hips, and a breast too swollen, with those two cumbersome globes... But above all, they are too soft, to limp and weak body. Man, on the contrary, is strong, smooth, firm. And to be able to hold or to receive the member of a man, makes you feel more of a man, donít you agree?"
"Yes, I agree with you. And being able to make love without hiding, as we Keas do, is really great."
"Yes, it's really great luck to be born in the Kea tribe!"
THE END
(See also next file, "Publisher's Note")