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Downstream from the wharf the Abbess's barge tugged at its moorings sullenly, the single eye, paint peeling, stared unblinking in the moonlight as we passed while the water flickered and flashed a thousand facets at us, each and every one as different as the one before.

"Fortune waits alone" the boatman gestured, thumb and middle fingers together index and little fingers raised like horns.

"And good luck seeks her!" I rejoined.

He nodded. "They say the Low Countries takes most of the ale they make, tho' it seems a fare long way to carry one liquid across another"

"They will have their reasons, no doubt!" I said "Reasons enough and little to do with religion. I'll wager"

"Cluniacs!" The boatman spat, his eyes glittering as the water.

"Secretive then?" I suggested.

"Certainly that!" He nodded, squinting his eyes against the gleam of the moon on the water.

"They'll not thrive long, though the land be theirs along both banks, right down beyond Wake's meadow to the bar where the tide rises"

I knew he referred to the Way and the place where it crossed the marshy land between the river's many meanders, for I had observed pilgrims on it several times before that night.

And I thought back, as the boat rocked gently, to a fragmentary tale some oddly shod traveller had related to me, in the shade of the ruined shrine.

He had some dates, by way of proof he said, but they were meaningless to me, being numbers only in my estimation. I was footsore at the time and not a little hungry, as I recall and the single small apple we shared, though bitter and maggoty, verily was the finest ambrosia on Earth just then.

We shared other comforts too, Shelter and warmth, the weather being a few degrees less than clement; and a straw palliasse in a byre with painted walls, scenes of heaven or hell, someone else's, not mine! It had been part of the shrine once, in ages past when travellers still paid due respect to such things and though it's roof now sagged and its floors, a pace deep in old straw became shiveringly alive with……
Well we slept in it anyway there being nowhere else.

"I like your body!" he complimented, cuddling into me generously. Well I liked his too, leastways the effects it lent me momentarily. Sadly, in the early hours my feet got cold and he, not being George and sound asleep anyway, began to snore and fart disgustingly.
………………

"………it was turning round to the stormy season again……." the Wanderer, the narrator recollects. "That time of the year when huge storms of wind and rain swept in across the land from the ocean, a time when our little shack leaked, if not exactly like a sieve then very much like you'd expect a structure made entirely of odds and ends to leak"

"Which meant moving things, bedding mostly, from here to there in an effort to keep them dry. Moving people too, myself mostly; being shy and retiring I liked to keep our of the way"

"Have you ever thought about writing your life story?" George asked me one day. It was the same old question he'd asked me countless times before so I put down the mug of tea I was holding and gave him one of my standard answers.

"Have you ever thought about how annoying you sound when you ask me that again and again and again?"

I don't know whether he was trying it on or whether it was a genuine attempt to get me to do something. I admit I've become lazy and probably a little fatter over the last few years but…… but then I was not the only one. Maybe it was a real attempt to get me to actually write down some of my stories instead of simply relating them verbally. But telling is different to writing, much, in it's pace and it's grammar for one thing.

"I have something I could tell you!" I said. "A story……well a bit of one……"

George paused thoughtfully and I knew how he'd laugh and look at me strangely when he realised that this time, for a change, the hero and heroine in the tale you don't live happily ever after.

"No, this time their ship crashlanded and they were stranded, and yes, it is meant to rhyme like that…..."

"Maaaa!" he'd moan after that, and it really was a moan sometimes, a bleat then, if you want it exactly. Yes a bleat, that'd be about right.

"Maaa!" he'd bleat, for I had on my female persona at the time. "Do you really want me to believe you did all that? In the dark, with only an open ended spanner and your drunken co-pilot to help you?"

I'd annoy him even more after that, leaning back in my chair and smiling knowingly. He'd know what sort of mood I was in and that he'd get no more sense out of me that day. Well not until I'd had a swim or got him to screw me anyway. He was good at that was George! Fantastically wonderful, helpful and loving and……and……and.

But now I am getting all silly. Its that time of the month and that time of the year and the shipwrights have found yet another reason to delay the repairs theyre supposed to be doing.
……………

George wandered over again later. I'd been dozing, half reading, half watching the water drip through the ceiling and the sunlight making little rainbows in it.

"'ventually that lot will fall in!" I tell him.

He nods nakedly, not interested in that leak but much more interested in a leaking me.

Funny thing about George, I must tell you this. He hasn't aged one tiny bit. Yes I know we'd all like to say that about those we love but in this instance it is true. Sweethearts, even living with me for a hundred years hasn't given him a single grey hair, nor a single wrinkle, or if it has it isn't anywhere that I can see.

He'd brought me a fresh mug of tea, bless him and news too, something I ought to hear, or so he said, which he thought of the utmost importance.

The only thing I could think of as being of the utmost importance just then would be that our grocer was running short of tea. Anything other than that could probably wait at least until tomorrow or even the day after.……

It was his ruse, and I should have known that, his crafty scheme to get inside my knickers again. In that he was thwarted anyway, there being none in place, though that discovery did not discourage him in the least.

"Ah!" he murmurs when I get hold of him.

He can walk around with a hard on for ages and does so sometimes in order to worry me. I've hung tea towels on him once or twice which made him laugh, and his own Homberg hat only yesterday……"
"Aha!" he mutters when I slide back some skin.

His body gleams, all silvery chocolate, seduction without even trying, curly haired massive so that I have difficulty, greatly, the greatest of difficulties keeping my mouth off him.

I do though, for a little while because I know what he is up to. He is going to antagonise me again.

"If you are going to try and persuade me to write my life story you are wasting your time!" I tell him bluntly.

George smiles. He's heard it all before. Almost as many times as I had probably and I'm the one who keeps saying it. Well in the five and a bit years we've been together the subject must have been brought up at least twice, if not three times every day. That's about four thousand times by my rough reckoning.

"Would I do that?" he asks.

I nod, he shakes his head. I want to bite him.

"You're the story teller so it'll come out eventually……"

Fine words……and a finer body. You'd never……never……

"Oooh……ow, OW!" George says.

Then the boatman leans into his oars again while the Abbess's hull stains the moonlight, fading spectrally shimmering into the mist.

"You have a coin" he asks me lightly after a while "to let down the chain?"

Still dreaming about George's body I nod, thinking spaded guineas gleaming like miniature suns in the bottom of a pedlar's basket instead of the single dull groat which is required and for which I rummage in a corner of my bag.
……………

When the boat bumped the chain it rang a bell and brought the poor scrawny kneed nun scurrying. And though she wished us well it was plain she was sore dismayed at so abrupt a summoning. In truth she might have espied us a good league away upstream had she been awake and thus prepared, for the moon lit the river as bright as day.

Dismayed or not she lets down the chain as soon as our coin is paid and, in the bow of the craft I lean against my bag and the boatman looks down, along at me.
Smoother, the river after that, deeper water and deeper dreaming, until ere long I yearned for a man again. Desire speaks to me in the movement of the river, in the prow of the boat against which I lean steadily cleaving a passage through the water and as the wavelets of our wake beat and break along the banks I draw up my skirts and offer myself to him.

How was he to take it, he asked, his face a mask of uncertainly.

With finger and thumb I show the pink. "I am in need" I tell him unequivocally.

The reeds rustled briskly, stiffly when he turned the boat that way, the mud which anchored them securing us also, in moonlight to that bank that night.

"In need?" he asked "How so and why?"

I pulled at him, tugged at his vest, at his girdle impotently.

"Undress and speak not!" I bade him, "lest your words unnecessarily divert me!"
……………

He was all fingers and thumbs at first, fumbling hurriedly while I, still leaning against my rucsac undid this and that until I was entirely exposed for him.

Deep brown his body loomed, larger when he crouched shirtless at last it seemed. I shivered, wanting, expecting, needing great things from him.

George would have saved me, I know he would, held me off until the very last minute. But then we knew each other very well, so well, too well perhaps, George and me.

The boatman peeled down his trousers, struggling awkwardly as his craft swayed. Moonlight lit us, shone on my pale skin and his brown hide.

Deeply aroused now I began to touch myself, right hand down there, left up, across my tits. George would have exploited the unexpected, the little joke or clever remark. With the boatman I wanted nothing like so fine a thing.

He said nothing when he knelt but his hands collided with mine in the very same places and that first touch so excited me.

George would have licked me first, taking great delight in my taste however stale. Not so the boatman. His was a more straightforward, down to earth dig. Rough fingers probed and pried, pushing aside my own hand, bringing a great surge of heat to my crotch immediately. When I gasped he echoed me, surprised perhaps by my liquidity.

George would have massaged me a little, spreading lubricants, bringing sensitivities button to the fore. The boatman, for all his navigational skills seemed unaware of the direction of it.

And so, rudderless in effect, for a while we drifted until, growing restless I seized and held firm his exploring hand.

"Come!" I said and he shifted, moving near enough for me to get my other hand on the best of him.

Clumsy and inexperienced he might have been but his cock felt full firm and engorged pleasingly. A gentle squeeze brought forth a gasp which further excited me, but still he hesitated, hands unmoving, penis poised uselessly.

George would have had drawn at least one orgasm out of me by now, especially the way I currently feeling. As for the boatman, all the while I tugged at him hopefully, he resisted.
………………

Two paces deep into the reedbed our craft rocked gently while I grew apace ever more frustrated. What was I to do I wondered, masturbate or fellate him? Neither would do much for me.

In the moonlight I stared at him, his body as muscular as the roots of a willow tree and in that same moonlight he gazed back.

Then, as tenderly as he might have touched a delicate flower he pressed his middle fingers against Her cowrie lying mute on it's cord between my breasts.

"The Lady does not submit!" he said clearly "Therefore I must await my command from thee!"

I realised his predicament in a flash. As my servant he must of course obey my wishes. There were words and signs, but thinking only of myself I had not made them. Base desire had smothered their niceties in the same way as they were now smothering me.
……………

There was room enough, thankfully, in the bottom of the boat once he'd lifted the central thwart out of the way. He lay lengthwise, on his back with a bundle of clothing under his head. For moments eternal, while want surged and seethed and battered at me I stood stock still astride his waist and allowed him to feast his eyes on me. Then for a lesser time I squatted, reaching back and down for him.

He yelped when I took it, hungrily, deeply, full length straight in, groaned and clutched at me when I pressed my full weight on him.

"Lady, you are beautiful!" he said, paying me due homage and as I rode I paid equal homage to him, leaning and making him kiss Her shell every time he kissed my breasts. Selfishly I made him wait to cum, which was not difficult, for, as I learned later, he'd been properly trained in the arte, holding him there, on the brink while I crushed and quelled my own burgeoning stored up needs. Until finally, aching and growing loose and dizzy I allowed him to inject his seed into me.

George would have kept going for longer after that but for once I didn't need it. And once again, wish as I might, Old George wasn't there.
………………

It was cold and damp when I awoke, awkwardly stiff as I lay along him.

"Pride has it's place" the boatman whispered.

"As does prowess!" I replied.

"And so surely dismissed" he laughed.

I laughed with him, recalling the codes and signs of Her artes as if I'd learned them, and forgotten them, only yesterday. I would have apologised but he wouldn't hear of it. We were equally to blame was all he'd say.

"And so surely dismissed" I quoted "Means you have had enough does it?"

The boatman nodded.

"For now" he said "But who knows. We are I think, fated to journey some leagues further yet"

In the moonlight we kissed like lovers, clinging, fondling, parting breathlessly. Sometime after that we found our clothes and, eventually got dressed again.

"Fated we are indeed!" I said as with a heave and a grunt the boatman shoved his craft backwards out of the reedbed.

© Aahlu. 250910