THE GRANCEL HUNTER
By Tommyhawk1@AOL.COM
WWW.TOMMYHAWKSFANTASYWORLD.COM
My mother and I were at our breakfast when the sound of the grancel hunter's horn sounded down the way. My mother breathed a sigh of relief. "He's finally come this way." she said.
My own reaction was less enthusiastic. "We can't pay him very well." I pointed out.
Mom said, "We'll offer him what we can and hope it's enough to have him kill the grancels that have been taking our livestock. Better to feed a few chickens to the grancel hunter than to let the grancels keep taking them."
"He won't want to stay with us just for food." I said.
"We have a small number of coppers. It'll be short times for us until we can finish the harvest next month, but it needs to be done." Mom made a shooing motion to me. "Now go outside and summon him when he gets near. We'll want him to make sure to stop with us."
So I took a piece of bread with me to chew as I waited by the fence in front of our home. We had a small holding and I had been caring for it as best I could since my father's death two years ago. It was more than one man alone was able to handle, and that had kept me from keeping the fields mowed and the fields had turned to lush pastures and that, of course, had led to the grancels choosing our lands to move onto when they ventured down from the hills to attempt establish their colonies in the lowlands.
I had wanted to try to wipe out the colony or colonies of them myself, but Mother would hear nothing of it. She had wanted to wait for this day, the day when a venturing grancel hunter would come, sounding his horn.
We hadn't had to ask the services of a grancel hunter for long as I could remember. When my father and older brother had been alive and me with them, we kept the fields cropped close, our crops spaced too far apart to entice the grancels, our lands too neat to allow the small field creatures to live in them, and feed the grancels to the point where they would reach close enough to raid our barnyard. Yet there had been a plague two years ago, my father and brother had died (I'd been ill for a while but recovered) and I had been unable to tend the fields as well as I would have liked. Combined with the expenses of the illness and the decrease in our monies from lack of a proper harvest two years ago, and my mother and I had been barely keeping things going. Thus, the fallow lands and this year, the grancels.
The hunter rode up on a rather sorry-looking horse, and his clothing looked worn, tattered, dirty and unkempt. His face was badly in need of a shave and his body in need of a wash. His face was lined and hard-looking. His arms, bare to the shoulders, bore many scars, long, sometimes ugly slash-marks. Marks of the grancels, I gathered.
"Grancel hunter!" I called when he rode near. "Come and enter our home that we may speak of things." I used the words you would for a traveling peddler, it was all I knew."
Instead of the near-ritual response, he just nodded, rode inside our fence, I closed it after him, and then up to him as he dismounted. "My horse will need water." he said to me when I got near him. "Will you see to that?"
He thought I was a mere worker on this farm. "This is my land, grancel hunter." I said. "My mother is within. If you will go inside, she will speak to you as I water your horse. But I am who you must deal with for your services."
The grancel hunter looked at me, and I felt myself inadequate in that gaze. But that sharp look ended, he nodded, and handed me the reins. We had a small water trough that had seen little use, but I tethered the horse there where it could drink, and then ferried water to pour into the trough. Five or six trips and the horse had enough to drink and then some, and I walked back into the house.
Mother had the hunter sitting in my seat and was pouring him mead and before him was a plate of food better than my own breakfast. "And we have little money, sir, but what we have is yours, nearly seventy coppers, and food, whatever we have you have only to ask and it is yours, and if you see anything in our house that you would like for your fee, you may take it as well...."
"Mother!" I said sharply, as a man would to a disobedient maidservant. "I will deal with this man."
"We have to have him stay with us." Mother said. "Dinnel, I've told you I think we have more than one colony on our lands...."
"You don't have to give him the entire house!" I cried. "Let him deal with the worst of it only, and I shall take care of the rest myself."
"What have you had gone missing?" the hunter asked.
"A few chickens, and a couple of the sheep." I said.
"And a calf that was nearly grown!" Mom cried out when I stopped. "Son, you know that the calf was with the cows in the east field, and the sheep to the west. And our chickens right here, and we missed them all in the space of three days."
"We couldn't have...."
"You have two colonies of them." the hunter opined. "Grancels cluster and they hunt voraciously, but then they rest for up to four or five days after a hunt. You would not lose so much so quick if it was one colony. That is why the grancels are so dangerous, they breed during their rests and the males hunt and bring back their kills to the females in their nests. I think it's two colonies, a small one not far from this house, and a larger one in the middle of your fields, between your cows and your sheep."
"Why in the middle?" I asked suspicously.
"Because cows and sheep keep the grass cut low. The grancels prefer to stay in the long grass. I think you'll find the smaller one in the hay fields over there, a group that split off from the first one, most likely, the reason they have limited their hunts to your chickens."
Mother gasped, and I scoffed, "Sir, I know little of grancels, I admit, but even I know they shun the homes of Mankind."
"When their numbers are small, yes." the hunter nodded. But once their colonies get large enough, they venture into populated areas and eventually will attack this house. Once the animals are all gone, there is nothing but humans left for them to feed on. I saw one home that the grancels had taken, a man, wife, three children. All gnawed down to their bones, just bones and rags."
"Show me this little nest of grancels." I said. "And we'll see what we shall see."
The hunter looked at me. "You are young. The grancels will sense that, attack you. Their claws carry venom, I have developed a certain immunity to it, but you, their very scratches will make you very ill. Are you certain of this?"
"I'm sure." I said, and I fetched my father's sword from its trunk, unwrapping the fine velvet that he had kept it wrapped in. The clean steel shone in the light. "Let us go."
"I'll take the copper you have for the small nest." the hunter said. "Pay it when we return. The large nest, we will then talk about."
I followed the hunter through the barnyard and out into our hay field. I didn't believe the grancels had gotten that bold. I followed him, my own sword drawn as he had, and when the grancels attacked, they truly surprised me.
I was behind the hunter, and I first saw him raise his sword and slash. And the head of the grancel he had just killed flew to his right and my eyes followed it stupidly. Another slash of the hunter's sword, and another grancel yowled and snarled in pain and rage. And another landed on the hunter's shoulder, and bounded from it at me!
I got my sword into play, and fought it as it bounded up at me. My tunic was slashed by its claws, and I felt them bite into my flesh twice before I managed to impale it as it landed the third time. More grancels were around me, it was like they were all claws, teeth and reaching, pale arms, a grotesquerie of mankind. There were those who said the grancels used to be Men, once upon a time. I didn't believe it when I'd heard it but seeing them...maybe it was so.
More grancels attacked but my initial fear was gone, or at least replaced by a need to defend myself. I slaughtered them as they attacked, was slashed twice more by their claws before the fight was over. Done, I felt weak. Curiousity caused me to stop and look carefully at them.
"Ugly things, aren't they, lad?" the hunter said as he came to me. I looked down at a body the size and shape of a very young child, with longer than boy arms tipped with long bony fingers ending in claws two or three inches long. The face was humanish, as I said, but the jaws were elongated and the teeth protruded and interlocked/overlapped, long, vicious, pointed and cruel. I looked at that face, and my weakness overtook me and I fell down onto the dead grunkel in a faint.
I awoke to my mother's hands washing me. "You are awake?" she asked me.
"Uh!" I said, my lips dry, my vision blurry and wavering.
"It was the grunkel poison, son. You took a good bit of it but the hunter showed me how to cleanse the wounds and how to treat you. You've been sleeping for two days now. Rest more, son. Are you thirsty, or hungry?"
"Yes." I croaked out. "Both, please."
Mother lifted broth to my lips. Beef broth, she must have killed a cow for this. I winced at that, we had only the three cows now that the calf was dead. But its liquid softened my lips and throat and the strength of it entered my body and refreshed it, and I said, "What of the hunter?" I asked.
"His name is Krister. He is still here. He fought a gang of them attacking Yellowbell." My mother lifted the broth to my lips again. "We were able to salvage most of her, the hunter helping me, and he will take as much of her meat as he can carry to clean out the rest of the grancels for us."
"Cheap at the price." I said, as I stood up.
"But there's more." Mother said. "He wants you to go with him to clear out the other nest."
"It's still there?" I was surprised. I'd figured he would have tackled it by now.
"He found it yesterday. It's bigger than he expected. Very big." Mother said. "He's going to want your help."
"That I will." the hunter stood in the doorway. He had changed in the two days I'd been unconscious from the grancel poison. His clothes were clean, his face shaved and beard and mustache now cleanly trimmed, hair washed and brushed and tied back. The clothes...they used to be my father's, I realized. I found this didn't bother me. I'd been out for two days, and this hunter had been here, protecting my mother and my own life. A hundred or so pounds of beef and a few old clothes...not a high price to pay for that. "You're over the worst of it, lad. Two more days and we'll go clean out that large nest once and for all."
For those two days, the hunter...Krister...tended the farm for us, keeping the grass cut short around the house and reaping a good portion of the hay. Help to keep the grancels away, he said. They didn't like to leave the long grasses, through which they could run quickly, and then bound out and up and at their prey, then hide again if they needed to.
When he wasn't working our farm for us, Krister was with me, talking. I gathered my own fighting the grancels had been worthy in his own eyes. He spent the time telling me of grancels, how they fought, how they lived, how they nested and how to tell they were about. I listened raptly after I got over the initial surprise of his friendly behavior. How he had traveled. He'd been born near Sandigo and traveled north from there, through Anhime and the enormous ruins of Lisanjly, and gone as far north as above Sacmento, and now was traveling south again.
The second afternoon, I was sitting up in bed, and mother and Krister both agreed that I would be good as new by the next morning at latest. He wanted to go to the larger nest, check it out, try to estimate its numbers more accurately and see if they had moved any, or if a group had split off from it like the smaller one we can cleaned out had done. For myself, I felt more than ready to resume my life, and if Krister was late coming back from his check, I was going to feed the animals myself.
I did feed the animals myself. Waited for him to return, at first confidently, but when supper came and went without him, I got worried. "Mom?" I said as the dusk came on. "I'd better go look for him."
Mom hesitated only a moment. "We'll both go, I'll carry the torch while you carry your sword."
And that was when Krister hit the door. Just a thud, and then when Mom opened it, he fell forward onto hands and knees. His clothing was ripped and shredded, he bore the marks of a dozen or more grancels on his body. I didn't have to ask what had happened. He'd been attacked by the grancels; they'd gotten the better of him!
Mother and I carried him to my bed. We cut and tore the clothing from him, so that Mother could swab out the wounds with our supply of brandy. The alcohol, the grancel hunter said, helped to neutralize the poison. But how long had it already had to get into his body?
He was filthy under the clothing. He was unconscious. There was nothing else to do for him, but I wanted to do something. "I'm going to give him a bath." I said to Mother. Mother only nodded and brought me the bathing bowl.
Krister's chest was broad and strong, but anyone who wielded a sword for a living had that development, that and the arms that were wide and round and firm. The water seemed to help him beyond cleaning him, he stirred, moaned as I washed him. His chest hair was marred by a long scar of grancel-cut, an old one, thank the gods, and my fingers trailed over it in wonder. This one must have made him incredibly ill, such a deep mark. And he would have been about my age when he'd gotten it. That may have explained his tenderness to me after the grancel attack.
I bathed his entire body, removing his loin wrap when I came to it (the sole item of clothing we'd left on him before) and there was his manhood, a deep whiff of maleness hit my nostrils. A thick, deep-brown sausage of a man-tool, I felt the sudden urge to see it hard and erect and my hands went to it, felt it. The hunter stirred and I looked up to see his eyes looking into mine. I let go of his penis quickly, blushed. But his eyes closed again and he was asleep in earnest. I finished washing his body and covered him. The next three days, Mother and I spent time feeding him careful portions of water or broth when he seemed to rouse enough to swallow instead of choke, cleansing his body as he voided, washing him clean each time.
By the evening of the third day, he was nearly conscious, and we fed him a soft mush he could swallow without chewing.
The next morning, I came back in the room with the bathing bowl and a clean cloth to see Krister sitting up in the bed. Awake and alert. "Good morn, Dinnel." he said to me.
"Good morn." I returned. "How are you feeling?"
"Better. I'm glad I made it back here. Or did you have to come find me?"
"You made it to our door." I said. "What happened?" I knelt by his bed, put the bowl and towel down.
"They must have sensed me coming." the grancel hunter moved, and winced. I knew that pain, the wounds hurt when you moved, mine still twinged slightly when I stretched certain ways.
"They lay in wait for me. One landed on my shoulder before I knew he was there." Two wounds on his shoulders. "And the others jumped at me from three sides at once. I was slashed a half dozen times before I could get them all away from me."
"What did you do?"
Krister shrugged, winced again. "I slashed about me as best I could, turned and ran. Two came after me and got on my back, but I got them off after they clawed me some more, and they ran off, and I kept heading here, because I knew my injuries, the poison, would be more than I could handle, I could feel it working on me, the world started spinning and I didn't know if I'd make it. I saw the lights from your house and...and that's all I remember."
Krister looked up at me and I felt my lips quivering and I sort of lunged at him, held him tight, shivering. So close, it had been so close! His arms went around me and held me, warm and strong and comforting. "You have to be more careful." I said to him.
"I will be." he said, a soft whisper in my ear. "I promise. I won't go back without you being with me. And anyone else we can find to help us with that nest. It's a big one."
"Okay."
"You were about to give me a bath?" he said. "I could use one."
It wasn't like the other baths I'd given him, where his body was unresponsive and pliant, where I'd had to lift up his arms, for example, to wash them. He cooperated with the bath, lifting his own arms and watching me move my hands over him, washing him, cleaning him. His face, his shoulders, his arms, his chest, his back.
Then it was time to wash his lower body. I pulled down the covers, he was still nude from my stripping him days before, no reason to re-dress him until he was better. So when I removed the covering, his manhood was there, big and thick and, as I watched, it rose up to stand firm and tall.
I looked at it, back up at him. "That'll make it easier to clean." I told him, just to hear him laugh. When he did, it was warm and deep and liquid in his throat. I used the rag and grasped his pillar of virility and it was throbbing eagerly. I moved the rag up and down his shaft, and he moaned softly, purring almost in his pleasure. "Ah, ah, Dinnel, Dinnel." he sighed.
"Have to get you clean." I said. I let go of his prod, with some regret, and moved down to his balls, fondled them as I washed them and then below them, scrubbing the nexus of his legs and he spread them wide to let me run the rag through the hairy line of fur. I wanted to dig deeper, but it wouldn't have been practical; I stopped, soaked the rag in the water to cleanse it, and wrung it dry and started working on his legs. He let me do it, though his hand kept coming down to his prong and stroking it every time it started softening. I finished and said, "Well, now you're clean again. Anything else I can do for you before I go out and help Mother work in the garden?" As I said that, I took hold of his cock again, this time with my hand only. Stroked it gently up and down.
"Well, now that you mention it, there is one small problem." Krister's smile was broad and knowing. "If you would be kind enough to take care of it before you go, I'll get some more rest and may be able to fend for myself by this evening."
"Then I should take care of it." I said as I leaned over and sucked his cock into my mouth. Krister sighed and his hand, his big, callous-horned, brawny hand, touched me with a tenderness that nearly made me faint. This big man, this huge, rough fighter and grancel hunter, he was touching me tenderly. This hand touched my head, threaded the fingers through my hair and held me, just held me, as I bobbed up and down on his manhood. Long, hard, throbbing and hot, the cock fitted my hungry mouth as though it had been shaped for just this purpose. I could take most of the length of it without struggling or straining.
"Ah, Dinnel, at last, at last!" Krister sighed. "I have wanted you since that day when you fought the grancels in the field, and I saw in you the kindred spirit that I have always sought and never before you found. I knew in that moment that I could not leave you, now or ever, if you will but permit me to stay."
"Always." I promised him. "But you are still faint from the poison, I know." I realized that the hand on my head was beginning to tremble. The image of strength was to some extent a pretense, he was strong but the poison had sapped that strength more than he wished to show me. "So if you will but let me take control of this, I shall give you as much pleasure as you can handle in your condition."
"I leave myself and my pleasure in your hands and your hands alone."
I returned my attentions to his prong, this time working to make it as slick and coated as I could with my saliva. When I had it a gleaming tower of silvered spit, I said, "Now let me do all the work here." My pants and tunic were easy to remove, I left my foot and leg bindings in place, undoing them would have taken too long. My loin wrap followed and I was nude as Krister was, and stood so I could straddle him. He lay under me, his chest and abs showing in sharp relief, further enhanced by his chest hair, his nipples were a pair of brown buttons at the peak of his breasts, his beard was lush and shiny still from the water I had plied upon them, his smile was soft and accommodating.
I lowered myself and, with a few awkward movements to guide myself in, got the glans in position. From that point, it was only a matter of forcing it into me. My sphincter had not taken a penis within it since my adolescent sexual explorations nearly four years before. My partner had moved away soon after and I had been alone, only my hand for company, until now. I knew what to do, but doing it...that was rougher.
But I had lubricated Krister well and my ass knew in principle what to do, though never with such a huge prick, with some pain and a bit of squirming on my part, the glans popped inside and after that, it was simply a matter of worming the rest of it into me. Krister's eyes closed blissfully and then he opened them and smiled at me, watching me fit myself onto his dong. I smiled back and him and for some reason, that smile-exchange was all my body needed to surrender to this joining.
My body slipped and slid down and I was fully impaled upon him.
I eased myself down onto my knees and with that added stability, I began to move upon him. Krister's hands went onto my thighs and gripped me, as if he wanted to take charge of this but was holding himself back, letting me be in control as I had asked. His deep brown eyes bored into my own with an intensity that spoke to me more clearly than words ever could. His whole demeanor, which had changed from coldly businesslike before our joint battle of the grancels to one of a kindly friend after, this was part of it, he wanted this to be the start of a full relationship. Like he had said, he had felt a kindred spirit in me. Did I feel the same? All I knew is that this man, this fighter, this grancel hunter, excited me in a way that I hadn't felt before, but that I wanted to go on and on. It might not be that of feeling a kindred spirit...but it was close enough for me, for now.
Krister's right hand left my thigh and grasped my prod, he began pumping my prick in time to my own thrusts up and down upon his body. The combination of the pleasure from my anus now filled with Krister's turgid dong and his hand pummeling my pud was more than enough to catch my pleasure up to his and surpass it even. I groaned, scrunched my eyes tight and exploded, blasting my load all over Krister's chest and stomach. Krister let out a brief laugh at that explosion, then his breath caught, guttered, turned into a groan and that groan choked off in its turn as he climaxed, spraying his hot jizz up into my bowels and he writhed under me as my own ecstasy concluded, and I slumped onto him and his chest still heaving as he gasped, his spunk dribbled out and onto my balls and he was done himself, the two of us hot and sweaty and exhausted. Krister took much longer than me to recover from that, of course the poison in his body had diminished his ability to recover from this ultimate excitation and expression of joy.
"I think I shall need another bath." Krister said finally. By then, I had pulled myself off of him, and was dressing again. Only my tunic remained to be put back on.
"I shouldn't mind one myself." I agreed. "But my mother will be wondering what is taking us so long as it is. I should get to her."
"Then I shall bear the smell and stickiness of your juices upon my body until my next washing." Krister said. "I think in fact that I shall enjoy it, for it will remind me of you and the joy you bring to me."
"As shall I." I agreed.
"I should be out of this bed by the morrow." Krister said. "And the day after that, we shall return to the grancel's nest and clean it out completely, you and I. And after that...." He let it drop.
"Yes." I said. "After that, we shall see."
And I went out to join my mother in the garden. Mother had told the grancel hunter that he could stay with us as long as he wanted, and I felt sure the grancel hunter would be staying with us for a long time.
THE END
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