“A river!” Keeper exclaimed. “This is a river, flowing into the sea. The ice walls follow its shore.”
“It must flow from land,” Crenelle said. “Maybe we should follow it to find that land.”
Keeper was pleased to agree. The ice seemed determined to wall off the entire sea, but the river might rise above it, and they might reach the land beyond by following it.
They paddled up the river. Soon it narrowed, with the walls of ice closing in. There was more of a current, so they had to paddle harder to make progress.
The walls on either side came closer, until there seemed hardly to be room for the river. They leaned out over the water. Then they touched, forming a tall cave with the river in the bottom. Keeper was not the only one who stared, finding this fascinating. Ice covering over a river, not by freezing its surface, but by arching above it.
Still, the river had to flow from somewhere. So they continued to follow it, entering its huge cave. The wind died down, and the surface of the water became calm. This, too, was strange; the sea was always restless, with waves constantly going somewhere. This river was relaxed.
The arched ceiling thickened, cutting off more of the light from above. But some still came through, making the ceiling seem to glow. They had reed torches, but those were for emergency use. If it got too dark, they would have to turn back. That would be too bad; Keeper was enchanted, and wanted to follow this quiet river to its source.
Whitepaw woofed. They looked where she was looking, and saw a seal swimming past the boat. It went to the edge, where the ice wall rose, and climbed out onto land.
Land?
They steered the boat there. Sure enough, there was a sliver of land. The ice had retreated just enough to expose some of the river’s natural bank. This was the first actual land they had seen since rounding the sea corner.
The seal was gone, but it had done them its favor by showing them the land. They paddled up along it, and saw an opening in the ice. A trickle of water flowed from it. A tributary stream, making its own cave in the monstrous mass of ice.
Whitepaw sniffed the air, then scrambled to get out of the boat. “No!” Keeper said sharply, and the dog paused.
“Don’t be silly,” Crenelle said. “Do you want her to poop in the boat?”
Oh. “But she might get lost,” Hero said.
“Then I’ll go with her. I have to poop too.”
This was a detail Keeper hadn’t thought of. How could they spend days in the boats, caught between ice and water, without any trench to bury their dung? So he kept his mouth shut as dog and woman climbed from the boat and disappeared into the tributary cave.
Soon Crenelle returned. “This is interesting,” she said. “You’ll want to see, Keeper.”
So he climbed out, leaving the boat to Hero, and followed her into the little cave. “This winds around like a regular cave,” Crenelle said. “Only it’s all ice. And Whitepaw smells a breeze.”
“That means it connects to the surface,” Keeper said.
“Yes. So maybe we don’t have to follow the big river all the way up. Maybe this little one will take us to the other side of the wall.” She followed the dog into the farther reaches of the cave.
Keeper, excited, returned to let Hero know. “Maybe it leads out,” he said. “We’ll check.”
Hero nodded. The other two boats were pulling up to join him. They could all uncramp here for a while.
Keeper turned and went back after Crenelle. There was no question of losing track of her; there was only the one winding cave.
He walked along it, setting his feet on the narrow banks beside the trickle flow. At spots the cave became tight, as the sculptured ice closed in from the sides, but then it opened out again. He was exhilarated; this was exactly the kind of exploration he had craved, without knowing the precise form it would take. A cave of ice!
He squeezed through another bind, and came to Crenelle and the dog. “This is as far as I can go,” the woman said. “Whitepaw can go farther, but I’m afraid to let her. If she fell in a freezing hole, how could we rescue her?”
Keeper nodded. “I love this, but we mustn’t take bad risks.”
She didn’t move. She just stood there, leaning against the ice, gazing at him.
Oh. She could not get out until he did, clearing the way. The passage was now too narrow for anything but single file. He began to back out.
“You could ravish me here, and I would not be able to escape,” she remarked. “No one would hear my screams.”
He paused, startled by her thought. “Whitepaw would protect you.”
“Not from you.”
He wasn’t entirely sure of that; she had befriended the dog with the same energy she befriended men. But it didn’t matter, for he would never attack her. “You will never be in danger from me.”
“You could pin me against the ice and wedge my legs apart.”
She was so suggestive! Merely arguing the case got him sexually excited. “I couldn’t get past your thick clothing.” For she wore stout fur leggings under her cloak, as they all did, and a warm loinskin. It was all protection from the cold, as were her gloves, hood, and foot bindings, but effective against other kinds of intrusions too.
“Yes you could. Come here.”
Bemused, he reversed course again and approached her. There was just room for them, both standing, their fronts touching, with the dog in the smaller continuation of the cave.
She opened his cloak, and her own. She adjusted her loinskin. “Bring it out.”
She really was ready to do it! The air was cold, but their merging cloaks provided warmth between them. He drew his own loinskin aside, freeing his erect member.
She took it and guided it. Sure enough, she had made an access there. He felt the warmth of her groin.
“Are you sure you don’t want to do this by force?” she inquired.
“I wish I could.”
She guided him farther, and adjusted her body to accommodate him. “One day I will lead you to this point, then deny you. Then you will be unable to stop yourself.”
“But don’t you see,” he said, frantic with desire for her. “To make me do that would be to violate my belief. I would be—be less of a man.”
“I do see,” she said. “That’s why I haven’t made you do it. But maybe someday, maybe as a seeming game, you will be able to.” Then she moved onto him, taking him inside her.
“Oh, Crenelle,” he breathed as his body plunged deep into that ecstatic warmth. “I love you.”
“All three of you love me. But I can marry only one, unfortunately.”
And that one could be him—if only he could make himself take her by force, one time. And he could not.
He realized that he had told her that he loved her, but she had not spoken love in return. She had expressed interest in all three brothers. She was honest about that: she would marry the one who raped her, and surely be true to him thereafter. Within that framework, she was taking turns with them, trying to achieve that rape. She had given him several chances, and he had failed each time.
It was such a stupid thing to bar his prospective lifetime of happiness with her. All he had to do was take her without her given permission, one time.
“Why do I suspect that your mind is elsewhere?” she inquired.
It was time to disengage. “I want so much to do. . . what you want. I wish I had done it this time.”
“When this trip ends, and we return to the plain, your turn will be over.”
“I know it,” he said, ashamed.
She kissed him. “I do like you, Keeper. You saved me from getting trampled by the mammoth. But you must win me.” She drew back, and they came apart, that small necessary amount.
They put themselves back together, and then made their way back through the winding tunnel to the main river. Whitepaw scrambled past them and went ahead to let the others know.
“It narrowed until we could go no farther,” Keeper reported when they a
rrived. “Maybe a larger river will take us all the way through.”
“It is getting late,” Hero said. “We need to camp.”
“We can anchor the boats here,” Haven said. “And use the cave for refuge.”
They did so. There were several small tributary caves, and what they deposited there quickly froze. Craft hammered a wood spike into hard ice, and tied a fiber rope to it to anchor the lead boat. The second boat was tied to the first, and the third to the second, so that none could become separated. Haven made a small fire in a stone bowl set on top of a section of mammoth meat, and the heat from that bowl thawed and cooked the meat below it. They ate well.
They slept stretched out in the boats, with blanket furs below and above them. Crenelle slept between Keeper and Hero, drawing heat from their bodies but favoring neither. That was one reason she had given him sex in the tunnel, Keeper realized: so that there would be no question of it at night in the boat, where there was no possibility of rape. She was very practical about her imperatives.
He dreamed of following a tunnel through the ice until it emerged on the far side of the wall, where there was a beautiful, warm bright land. Crenelle stepped out of her furs and ran naked in the sunlight. “Catch me!” she cried invitingly. So he stepped out of his own clothing and ran after her, and caught her. This time he knew he could do it! But as he turned her around to face him, he saw her face. It was Rebel.
He woke, appalled. He had no hankering for his sister! Yet the two women were the same age, and similar in form. It would be easy to mistake one for the other, from behind, even naked. He wondered whether his brothers suffered similar confusion. Rebel, in her quest to prove her fertility, had seduced every man she found except her brothers, and sometimes, playfully, she had seemed almost to want to try it with them. Maybe she was just practicing her technique, assuming provocative exposures, asking them whether this was more tempting than that, sometimes shielding her face so that her body became nameless. Sometimes he had wondered just how far such a game might go, if followed up. But they had known it was forbidden, and Keeper had been ashamed of the reaction such sights and conjectures had stirred in him. Just as they knew rape was forbidden. Maybe that was the connection: the equation between the forbidden sister and the forbidden act. Barred not because the woman objected, but because it was simply wrong.
The dream shook him, but perhaps it had brought him to a better understanding of his problem. Still, he saw no solution. Unless—this might be nonsensical, but maybe not—Rebel herself would have an answer. He resolved to tell her about the dream, when he had a chance to talk to her alone.
But as it happened, he had no chance to talk to his sister alone. She was in a different boat, and had different chores to do. He was unable to find a pretext. Frustrated, he realized he would just have to wait.
They paddled upstream. Keeper had the front paddle, and Hero the rear one. Crenelle, in the middle, was idle, so she brought out her little bone flute and played. The sound echoed around the huge ice cave, amplifying and modifying itself before fading. The effect was weird and alluring.
They came to another offshoot cave, this one larger. There was a fair flow of water from it, confirming a larger stream, though tiny compared to the main flow. Maybe this one would lead them to the other side of the wall.
They stopped, and Keeper, Crenelle, and Whitepaw set out to follow it. The stream coursed along the base, uncovering sand and rock, while the ice formed a twisting niche beside and above it. Whitepaw was thrilled; she definitely smelled a trail.
The trail was rising, at times steeply. That was the way they needed to go, to get out of it. The stream twisted back and forth, as if seeking a better route, and sometimes formed small rapids or even waterfalls.
As they went, the wan light from above gradually brightened. They were definitely approaching the surface, and the size of the tunnel remained large enough so that it seemed unlikely to close.
Crenelle paused, and turned back to face him. “I think this is going to make it through,” she said. “I wonder if we should tell the others, so they can come too?”
He realized that she was right. If this led out of the ice, it might still take long enough to be a long trip. It would be better to tell the others now, instead of going all the way and having to come all the way back. “Yes. But you don’t have to go; you can go ahead with Whitepaw, and I will go back.”
“No, this is your exploration. You must be first through. I can go back.”
“We can both go back,” he said. “I—I may have something to say to you.” Actually it was Rebel he wanted to talk to, but it concerned Crenelle.
She opened her cloak partway. “You do have me alone here, and helpless. Are you finally ready?”
He averted his gaze. “Not exactly. Actually I wanted to talk to my sister about it.”
“Rebel? She can’t do anything for you I can’t.”
“I—I think she might. This time.”
She made a decision. “We will both go back, and you can tell me what Rebel can do that I can’t.” It was a challenge.
He hesitated to agree, but she and Whitepaw squeezed by him and started down the winding passage. He had to follow, speaking to her back. “It—she—I wanted to tell her my dream.”
“You dreamed of her?”
“Not exactly.”
“Tell me.”
“I—I don’t know whether that would be smart.”
“Now I definitely want to hear it.”
“But it might make you embarrassed, or angry.”
She glanced back at him. “Not as much so as denying it to me.”
He was in for it now. He should have kept his mouth shut. He would alienate her either way. “I suppose—if you insist.”
There was a pause. “I promise I won’t be angry,” she said.
That might be worth something. “I dreamed last night that we followed a tunnel, as we are doing now. You were leading. It came to the end of the ice, which stopped, just as the wall stops on the near side, suddenly, and there was a wonderful open land, with trees growing.”
“I like this dream so far.”
“You got out of your clothes, because it was so warm, and you ran out across the land. I saw your bare bottom, and I wanted you. You called ‘Catch me!’ to me.”
“I definitely like this dream. Was my bottom pretty?”
“Oh, yes!” He looked at Crenelle’s real backside as he spoke, trying to picture it bare. “I got out of my clothes, and wasn’t cold at all, and I chased after you. You ran fast, but I ran faster, catching up.”
“I was letting you catch up.”
“Yes. I knew that this time I could. . . could. . .”
“If you can’t say it, how can you do it?”
He forced himself. “Rape you. Because I knew you wanted it. And you were so beautiful. I was. . . my. . .”
“Your penis was hard.”
“Yes. But when I caught you, and turned you around, you. . . I. . .” He couldn’t say it.
“You still couldn’t do it?”
“Not exactly. You. . . you weren’t—”
“I was willing. You know that. But of course I said I wasn’t.”
“You weren’t Crenelle,” he said doggedly.
She stopped abruptly. “What?”
“You were Rebel.”
“Suddenly I don’t like your dream.”
“I know,” he said, dejected. “I think I know what it meant. I wanted to talk to Rebel, and get her. . . her advice.”
She resumed walking. “What do you think it meant?”
“That you were forbidden.”
“How could I be forbidden?”
“Because I have to rape you to take you, and rape is forbidden.”
“Why should I turn into Rebel?”
“That’s complicated.”
“Tell me anyway.”
He explained about Rebel’s sexuality, and his occasional interest in it, especially when she bared her
body and hid her face. And his shame in being so tempted, when he knew that she was his sister, and therefore forbidden.
“Now I see!” Crenelle said. “Sex with Rebel would be like rape, even if she wanted it.”
“Yes.” It was a relief to have her understand.
“So raping me would be like sex with her.”
“Yes. Like raping her, and she would slit my belly open and cut out my penis and throw it in the fire.”
Crenelle laughed without humor. “I begin to understand your reticence better. It’s not just decency; it’s fear. But how could you not recognize her before you caught up? Maybe I ran behind a tree, and she ran out instead, playing a game.”
“No, I saw you all the time. You became her. From behind I couldn’t tell.”
“We looked that similar?”
“Yes, when I couldn’t see your face.”
She paused again, but this time didn’t turn. “You couldn’t tell me from Rebel, if you didn’t see my face or hear my voice?”
“If you wore her clothing. . . or were naked, I think.”
“You think?”
“I haven’t ever seen you naked.”
“But we have had sex!”
“In clothing, or under covers in darkness. I have never seen you naked in the open, as you were in my dream.”
“Have you seen Rebel that way?”
“Yes. Mostly when we were children. But she didn’t always cover up when she got breasts.”
“I think you filled in her body for mine, in your dream, because you had seen hers and not mine.”
Keeper’s mouth dropped open. “That must be what I did.”
“It’s too cold here, or I would show you my body. We’re not the same.”
“You look very similar in clothes.”
“Similar, yes. But she is leaner and firmer than I am. In fact she has a better figure, if you like the athletic type. I am softer, with more on my bottom. My breasts are lower.”
“I wish I could see,” he said sadly.
“I wish you could too. Then you would know that we are not the same, and that you could rape me without raping her. But why would you have told this dream to her?”