The Third Field

Several days later I asked them about the other people they had mentioned lived across the stream. My friends didn’t seem to be on a friendly basis with them.

“They steal our stuff without asking. We would have gladly shared our food, but it was rude to just take it.”

“They don’t care for their field. Look at the mess you can see from here!”

“They don’t care for their offspring. Did they come visit you even once since you were born?”

“Why don’t we take a closer look?” I suggested.

The field was across the stream from a part of my field, on the side away from theirs. The other area beyond the stream was a pine forest, which my friends remarked was poor to live in; it didn’t make good food, there were not good clear locations for our flowers, and sunlight was limited. It was good for obtaining wood, though.

When we got there, we found that whoever had lived there was gone, with only the dead remains of their flowers left, which meant in all likelihood they were dead. They hadn’t eaten the flower remains, and my friends had told me how unlikely a merger was, much less three of them. Not knowing why they died, the group decided we should repopulate this field, and since I had no progeny yet, they decided I should do it, and specifically that I should produce the seeds. Then they started arguing over which of their flowers should be the father of my first child. Petunia claimed first rights for having found my flower first, and Pansy did for finding my girl form first.

“Girls, peace!” I interjected. “You seem to be in agreement I’ll breed with all your flowers eventually. How long does it take after breeding with one of you before I can breed again?”

“Five days,” a couple of them answered.

“And how many days do we have left for planting?”

They clearly did not have the number ready, but responded “many,” and when I pressed for a number, they estimated at least 80.

“Hardly a point worth arguing over, then. Petunia, lead me to your flower and I’ll breed with him, then Pansy next, and the rest of you based on how close you are to my field.”

And that was that. Once I made that decision, they accepted it. But I’d also committed myself to doing the act. When we got there, Petunia’s flower opened just the one petal most directly in front of me. The usually stiff pipe she would have sat on in the flower was bent back, and the stamen, which normally stayed out of the way, was erect in the center of the flower, even taller than the pipe was. I stepped up into the flower and the petal closed up, sealing me inside. In the darkness, I found the anther and guided it into the only orifice I had available.

I guess I can say I was not disappointed. This act was as much sex as any pair of humans ever performed. Unlike when I sat on my pole, which remained still, the anther bucked up and down, as well as writhing to the sides inside me. Not trying to get out, I realized after a few minutes, but trying to open up a deeper cavity within me, the actual reproductive orifice. Once the anther was inside there, it settled down considerably, moving gently deep inside me without pulling out of that inner chamber, which felt really good. After a bit it released its sperm or pollen or whatever. Whatever it was that was released inside me gave me a sense of internal fullness I had not felt before.

The flower rested and slowly withdrew from me, and less than 10 minutes after it started, the single petal opened again to let me out. Four of five of the girls were cheering, Pansy included; she clearly had no hard feelings over not getting to go first with me. Petunia had a glazed look and a goofy grin. Clearly, just as I had felt other sensations from my flower, she felt the sexual act herself. She may have been in a greater state of sexual ecstasy than I was!

We returned to the vacant field and did our usual chores there, and the next day they showed me how big and deep a hole to make to plant my seed. Then I simply had to birth it. Lay it. Or poop it, which is what it felt most like to me, a dry, constipated poop, though I didn’t think that in a way the others would hear, since the people here don’t poop that way. I felt the seed that had grown inside me, in that chamber the anther had entered, and found the right muscles to push it out. In the hole beneath me was a round, brown seed the size of a golf ball. I put all the soil I’d dug out back on top of it.

We spent the next several days improving that field and then I planted my seed with Pansy near Petunia’s, just far enough from it that the petals wouldn’t touch when they both opened up fully. After weeks of caring for all three fields in turn, I had planted a nice circle of five seeds from mating with all my new friends. I had each of them “sign” the location where their child was planted by carving a likeness of their flower in the dirt nearby. At first it was just lines in the dirt, intended only to last until the new people were born, but when Rose’s was planted, she dug it out so she could embed stones in the ground making the shape of a rose, and then all the others decided they had to do the same, and we gathered stones from all along the stream, beside our fields and further upstream into fields I had not visited yet, as well as ones from the edge of the hills on the other side of the fields, all just to make half-reasonable shapes of five flowers. When it was time to harvest the milkweed, we also harvested another patch we found in the new field to make enough paint to paint just the top sides of the stones. It was an ambitious effort, and involved making yellow, brown, red, pink, and green paint.

Danger!

The new flowers the group had planted in my field before I first emerged from my flower sprouted and grew, even through the winter. There were no more berries and other such delicious food items to eat then, but there was still water to drink, even on days when we had to break ice to get it, and the fallen leaves from the trees turned out to make serviceable, though disgusting food. However, there was not much to do, so we conserved energy by staying in our flowers most of the time. It snowed twice, and the others made clear to me I should remove the snow where it had blown up against one side of my flower, which made sense. I’m not sure it really mattered, since all the snow melted within a day after each snowfall, but I guess it was possible to stay cold longer here.

Spring came, and the new flowers reached full size and we knew their girl bodies were growing inside. The six of us started going out for longer periods, collecting dead plant matter and for the most part eating it, as there was little else to eat yet. One day, we were in the field of my five friends when Pansy sent out an urgent cry.

“Bear! Bear!”

At least, the image she sent looked like a bear to me. The urgency also seemed right for a bear.

“Up the trees! Climb the nearest tree!” Petunia instructed.

Soon we were all up in the cherry trees: Myself and Rose in one, Petunia in the one nearest it, Lily in the next one, and Pansy and Begonia in the one farthest from us in that direction. Pansy was the last one to get up a tree, and the bear chased her to it and stopped at the base, looking up.

“Can bears climb trees?” I asked.

“They can, but they are not very good at it. If he climbs up after us, whoever is in that tree will climb out to the edge, jump off, and run to another tree.”

This indeed happened, several times, before the bear got tired of it. But he got the better of us, running over and trampling through the group’s five flowers. He didn’t get anything from that, but then he went over into my field, trampling the new flowers the group had planted in my field shortly before I first emerged, and ate the still-developing bodies inside those flowers.

I watched, using the vision of my flower, and reported to the group when I saw the bear appear to pass out lying next to the remains of the group of new flowers. Fortunately, he had not gotten to my flower a small distance away. My friends were all munching down on the remains of their own flowers, but Begonia stopped to reply.

“Jonquil, just wait here. Our flowers are the first priority, but we have weapons. The bear ate too much. We can kill it while it is passed out with its too-full meal.”

I was worried, and watched the bear warily. They had said it would take a while to eat one’s flower, but so much of each flower had been destroyed by the bear that it was only about 15 minutes, and the bear was still sleeping. During this time, all kinds of thoughts were running through my mind. Did they make weapons, or did they have contact with somebody elsewhere who made them? Were they talking firearms, spears and blades, or what? The concept for weapons was a generic one that didn't convey an image of a specific weapon.

Rose finished her flower first and ran to the cave where they kept the seeds, and came back with a bundle of spears and ropes, and Petunia followed her in and came out carrying two clubs. But Begonia was obviously the weapons expert here, and explained the plan.

“Four of us are each going to loop one of these ropes around one of the bear’s paws, pull it tight, and step back and drive this stake hard into the ground, angled toward the bear, so he can’t pull them out. Then as many of us as can get our hands around it will drive this spear through its snout and into the ground. That will trap it. Then we take turns beating it over the head with these clubs until we are sure it is dead.”

This plan sounded incredibly brutal, but then, the bear had just killed five of my friends’ children and destroyed their flowers, forcing them to replant, so I didn’t feel any mercy toward the bear. The ropes she had were clearly nooses. They were going to pull them tight enough over the bear’s paws to keep them from slipping out, and when the bear tugged at them the nooses would only get tighter. The spear had a two-foot-long stone head, maybe two inches wide at the top, and it was somehow affixed to an eight-foot wooden pole. And the clubs were solid rock, bigger than any one of our legs.

I was worried we were going to wake the bear trying to tie up its paws, but somehow it didn’t wake until four of them simultaneously rammed the stakes into the ground, and then it only stirred a bit. Begonia, Rose, and Petunia together shoved the spear through its snout, at which point it was very much awake and in pain, flailing, the nooses pulling its limbs tight so that soon it was stretched out so tight it could barely move.

Then we all took turns with the clubs. They were really heavy; rather than swinging them, it was more that we were raising the clubs and then steering them as they fell so they would land on top of the bear’s head. When I was handed one, I gladly passed it on after a couple hits, but I got two more chances later. The bear seemed to be knocked out after only a few hits, but they were not satisfied until they had broken open the animal’s skull and smashed its brain.

What happened next surprised me. Lily and Rose went back to the cave. They returned each carrying a bundle. After they laid them down and started opening them, I saw that Lily’s bundle had some knives made of bone and a dozen long, narrow wooden rods which were pointed at one end. Rose’s bundle had chunks of wood and flint and tinder for making a fire. Rose and Petunia cleared the grass from a space near the bear and prepared a fire, while Lily worked on carving the bear’s flesh into chunks which could go on one of the wooden rods and be cooked over the fire. Pretty soon we each had two of the meat-covered skewers held over the fire, Lily last as she finished slicing the beast into chunks. Each skewer had approximately as much meat on it as one of our arms.

Once the outermost meat was well cooked, they started munching bits off of their skewers and putting them back over the fire to cook the inner meat more. Pansy paused at one point to say, “Jonquil, you don’t have to eat all this now. Just make sure it’s well cooked. We do, though, because we’re going to plant ourselves and make new flowers, and we only got a portion of what we would get out of full flowers. The extra food will help us to come back strong.”

Petunia asked the group, “Do you all want to replant where we were?”

Lily answered, “I like the place. That’s the only bear we have ever seen anywhere around. There probably won’t be another. And Jonquil and her kids will still be nearby.”

In turn, each other one agreed.

Petunia then said, “I’m going to stay up, I’m guessing two nights, in order to pass all the rest of the important lore on to Jonquil, who is going to have to go until fall without us and train her five kids across the creek.”

Rose said, “I should stay up with you, just in case. The rest of you can go plant yourselves tonight if you wish.”

Lily said, “There’s enough usable meat left to fill two more skewers for each of you, to cook tonight and eat tomorrow, but we were out of skewers. Once I’m done eating I’ll carve it for you.”

“Thanks, Lily,” both Petunia and Rose replied.

They did that. Lily found there was even more meat left, and I got an extra skewer as well. I ate most of one of my skewers and put the remaining bit along with the meat from two other full skewers, cooked until they were black on the outside, into my flower. Once we were done with all the meat we intended to eat, they put the viscera directly into the fire to burn up completely. Two of them tended the fire, while I helped the others carry the weapons, carving and cooking tools, and the flint back to where they kept them, which they showed me as one bit of teaching me the lore. It was getting dark, so while those Petunia and Rose stayed up, I went back to my flower to sleep.

I then had two solid days of “school.” Some of it I had learned already, but they went over basically every bit of knowledge about this world they knew:

• Everything about plants known to grow in the area: When best to plant them, how to plant them, how to nurture them as they grew, how and when to prune them, when to expect them to bloom
• Survival wisdom, in particular things I could eat, when food was scarce, that I might not think of
• The five other kinds of wild animals I might find nearby (only two of which were dangerous, but all could be eaten if necessary)
• How to make fire and how to be safe with it, and how to cut bits of wood and tinder to refill the fire-making kit
• How to weave the reeds that grew by the stream into flat fabric for making containers like bags, or into ropes like those used for the nooses
• The path to the nearest city, which was a place I could acquire more tools - my friends did carve the stone themselves, but they used steel tools they got from others. The path was simple: Follow the stream downstream until it flows into a large river, taking note of the location where they merged to find my way back, and then upstream along the river. Also, I should carry fresh fruit. They didn’t have enough of it in the city and I would be able to trade it for any goods I was likely to need. One large basket of fruit got them the steel tools they have now.
• How to travel to the city. It was a full day’s travel each way, but if I ate double for three days before the trip, and normally while I traveled, I could make a three day trip - one day going there, one doing what I needed to do there, and one day coming back, and both me and my flower would survive that, assuming no predators showed up to mess with my flower.
• And on that subject, developing girl bodies that aren’t yet conscious are the favorite food of bears. If the bear had found the other flowers before it found us, it would have just eaten one or two of them and gone back to the forest. But they’ll eat already the live ones too, if they can catch them. Normally, they can sniff out when a flower is occupied and only attack occupied flowers, and only eat a safe amount, but we’d enraged that bear with the keep-away game. That is what led him to just attack any flower he saw, and to eat until he passed out.
• Something in our bodies acts as a mild sedative to bears. If he’d eaten only one or two of the unborn ones, he could have escaped, but after eating five nearly fully developed girl bodies, he was out cold for a while. That was what had saved my flower as well; he was so full of girl-meat that he passed out before attacking my flower.

At the end of the second day of my schooling, Petunia and Rose planted themselves next to the other three, which still looked like decayed lumps of flesh rather than flowers, though they had taken root. I was left alone. Well, save for the five flowers across the stream which would probably hatch new people starting in about 15-20 days, and the remains of my five friends’ bodies which by the same time would have sunk almost entirely into the ground and formed the buds of new flowers.

It wasn’t like I didn’t have work to do. The six of us had been trying to clean up what winter had done to our fields, and now I had to finish that work by myself. At least I only had one mouth to feed for a bit, though there was no good food ready yet and I was eating some of the dead plants and weeds I removed. But I saved everything edible in piles near the flowers which would soon open, so they’d have something to eat when they first emerged into the world.

Yes, everything edible, which meant everything I removed from the field, as I did not find any of the poisonous plants. My teachers did not know everything about how our bodies worked, but they knew some of it, undoubtedly passed down over generations. We could eat practically everything that grew from the ground, even the somewhat woody parts of trees, if they were soft enough that we could chew them. My girl body would not make much from the woody parts, but they would pass through into my flower, which could digest them, or pass them through as fertilizer into the soil the flower grew in. My girl body could digest leaves, grass, flowers, and thin stems which were not woody, but as long as I had also eaten better food, such things I ate would go to my flower. When I ate meat, my girl body did the primary digestion, but any fat, except as needed to power the body, was passed through into the flower and stored for when either of my bodies needed it. And whatever amazing processes that went on inside the body to separate girl-body-food from flower-food were sure to fully digest any sort of seed within the girl body, which avoided any possibility of seeds I ate germinating and growing directly under or inside my flower.

It was the 16th day after Petunia and Rose planted themselves that the first of the new flowers hatched. It happened late in the afternoon, and I’m confident that I saw her the day she hatched, if not the hour. I hadn’t been singing songs about flowers or any such thing, and as a result she didn’t have any ideas for what to name herself, so I named her Violet. The others hatched on 5 day intervals give or take a day, just like I had planted them, and I named them Carnation, Lilac, and Rhododendron, and the last one named herself Cherry Blossom, an obvious name considering those flowers were out by that point. In my mind, Cherry Blossom was also called Sakura, as I knew the Japanese name for the flower was actually a common name in Japan. But in the language spoken here, her name was really just the concept of the flower, and not any particular word.

I led my new brood through all three fields, explaining various concepts as they came up. I explained reincarnation as it applied to our people, and that the five flowers growing in the other field were my friends whose flowers had been destroyed by a bear. And then I had to explain what a bear was. And I tried to, when there wasn’t any other pressing need, go through the other important information that had been passed down to me. My friends had had five people to remember all the things, and still barely managed to pass some of the information on to me. I only had myself; if something happened to me, they had nobody until the reincarnated girls hatched.