Seeds of Desire
Summary: An ancient plant is brought into the modern world, with interesting results for one couple.
My thanks to whoever gave me an idea about a plant called Esculantes Caries some time back, and my apologies for forgetting who you are. Clearly your seeds have germinated here.
My everlasting and profound thanks, also to FembotHeather and TeraS, both of whom looked over my story and made me appear to be a much better writer than I am.
It was Seminisi Orexis in some of the more obscure medieval botanical literature: a sweet-smelling purple and red wildflower, flourished on a few islands in the North Sea during several unusually warm years in the early middle ages. It was borne on rather aggressive vines with dark green, pointed leaves which would turn red in late summer, almost resembling devil’s horns. That, combined with the fact that—according to the surviving accounts, at least—the fragrance of the flowers most strongly resembled that of a woman’s arousal, the flowers were popularly known as “Suiteas am Deimhein:” “Satan’s Sweets.”
Legends told of strange effects from the flowers’ pollen. Men became quiet and submissive, their minds slowed and their reason dulled. Women who were exposed to the strange blossoms were sexually voracious, nearly insatiable and incredibly forceful and domineering toward whatever sexual partners they elected. One story asserted that, one midsummer’s week, air inversions and humidity had held the pollen down over the village of Voe in the Shetland Islands. The women, according to the tale, were seized with near madness, their breasts and nether lips actually seemed to swell, and they attacked the male population of the village, fornicating many of them into dehydration, leaving them bruised and bloodied, with some broken bones and, perhaps, even one or two broken necks. Some historians of the period consider this event to be one of the source legends for the myth of the Succubus.
After, several decades—just a blink in meteorological history—the Gulf Current shifted back to more normal patterns, the summer weather season shortened just a bit, and the winters became just a touch harsher. Suiteas am Deimhein began to rapidly die off. Given the limited travel and migratory patterns of the area in that era, the plant had never had a chance to gain a foothold in Britain proper or mainland Europe.
A community of Franciscan monks on the Orkney Islands, however, had made it part of their mission to preserve indigenous plant species. Confident that their all-male society would be immune to the worst affects of the pollen, and taking special precautions, the monks kept a small, isolated plot of the flowering vine alive in a place where it could not spread. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the growth of the Church of Scotland and the dissolution of the monasteries in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland made the continuation of some monastic communities untenable. The last of the Franciscans left, and the monastery fell into ruin.
And so did most accounts of this plant.
Jeremy Planhigion and Annette Blóm were the first people to walk among those crumbling stone walls in over a century. They were there on a grant: Annette was studying the ancient legends of Scotland and the northern islands, and Jeremy was collecting the last of his data for his doctoral dissertation in botany. They had been dating since their undergraduate junior year, but this summer together had brought them much closer. Jeremy was making the turns in their rented car with no more than a look or a sound from Annette. They were finishing each other’s thoughts, anticipating needs, and getting used to their various quirks and foibles, all through the summer.
Now they were tramping among the ancient stones of the long-abandoned cloister, Jeremy’s nose buried in the map that indicated where most scholar’s believed the plant nursery to have been located. Annette giggled as she cast her sparkling baby blue eyes on his lanky six-foot-two frame; he was sweet, but he was too easily lost in his books and data, simply assuming his “Netty” was following along behind. Any outside observer would see instantly that Jeremy was lucky as hell to have this petite, nicely-endowed but not overly large, five-foot-four charmer, her straight red hair scruncheed into a pony tail that brushed the cleft between her shoulder blades, so thoroughly smitten with him.
But the starry-eyed young woman was ready to insist upon breaking for lunch—after all, they just heard echoes of the church bell in the village below chiming twice—when the young scientist let out a yelp. Here, under some smashed building stones, Jeremy had found seeds, and even a couple of small green plant straining for the sun. This was the nursery! Lunch was forgotten as the two of them slipped bits of leaves and handfuls of seeds into cellophane envelopes. Digging up what live plants they found was forbidden; there would be weeks and months of genetic work and grafting back in Cambridge if anything at all was to be discovered.
The sun was sinking low into the sky, which, given the latitude at which they found themselves and the time of year, meant it was close to nine p.m. Since the excited researchers hadn’t even had their lunch sandwiches yet, they were more than ready to stop for the night, when Annette sat back against a wall and her arm brushed a small sprig of a vine poking out between the stone blocks. “Is this anything important, sweetie?” she asked, putting as much delight as she could into her voice.
Jeremy had his glasses in one hand while he rubbed his tired brown eyes with the other, and he slipped the lenses back onto his face. He actually hoped that it was nothing, that he’d be able to glance at the specimen and quickly dismiss it so the two of them could get home. But it was immediately obvious that it was something, something with pointed leaves, something that had three live seed pods! These would not have to be slowly rehydrated, painstakingly regenerated in the vain hope of growth. Some of the simple lab equipment he had back at the inn would give him a great start at germination of ancient plants from fresh seeds, and a chance to see whether more plant stock was needed while he was still near the site.
They ate their ham sandwiches in the front seat of their compact rental car by the light of the overhead map lamp, their grand discoveries piled carefully into the back seat. Annette was snuggled close to Jeremy, some of their favorite R & B was floating out of the CD player, and yet he was babbling on and on about what they had found and what they might do with it. Other women might be impatient or jealous, but she found his myopia and impromptu lecturing somehow endearing. She sighed and snuggled a bit more before they drove back to the inn.
Well past midnight, the young botanist could hear his girlfriend’s gentle, deep breathing as he set up a portable grow lamp and spread some planting medium in three petri dishes. Each of them received one of the seeds he had carefully extracted from the vine. They had a couple more days of exploring around the ruin—less intense than this first day had been, he hoped—and, with any luck, there would be some small bit of germination under way by the time they returned home.
The researcher fell into bed, exhausted. The seeds, with the best food and most direct light they had received in a millennium, didn’t rest for a moment. So things were very different when the couple rose in the morning.
Annette squealed when she looked at the impromptu nursery on the corner of the desk, startling Jeremy out of his groggy somnambulance so quickly that he almost spilled his tea. A few quick steps across the small room, and he saw what his lover did: three small but well-defined root systems, three vines with the beginnings of leaves. “This is extraordinary, honey!” He squeezed the vivacious redhead, and she could tell that he was, in his mind, already presenting his paper to the Royal Horticultural Society. She smiled, listening to him babble on through the morning as he tried to identify the seedlings. Something this obscure wasn’t in his downloaded database, however, and he was having trouble getting a decent 3G link from such a remote spot. Just before noon, the two of them finally left for the day. Small flower buds were beginning to form on the seedlings.
For whatever reason, Netty made the suggestion that maybe they could spend a little bit of time together without the research, and, for whatever reason, her ever-so-focused beau agreed with her suggestions. They had a leisurely lunch at a local pub, and it was three o’clock before they were walking, slowly, hand-in-hand amidst the breathtakingly old monastic wreckage. No samples were found that afternoon, nor even seriously sought.
After the biggest, most sumptuous dinner the two of them had enjoyed in months, they wandered back to their room, ever so slightly tipsy. Upon opening the door, the couple caught a whiff of what seemed to resemble female arousal. Annette smiled broadly at her man, who looked adoringly into her eyes and almost failed to notice the four small red-and-purple blossoms under the grow lamp. “Isn’t that just wonderful?” she gushed, and he nodded, squirming with pleasure as she rubbed and kissed his neck. At his beloved’s suggestion, he filled three seedling pots with local soil they had collected, planted the nascent vines, and fed them again before setting them in a shallow dish of water. The smiling woman led him to bed, encouraged him to erection, then mounted and rode him into sleep.
She woke her boyfriend again in the wee hours with the sound of his undershirt being ripped open. Annette herself had been awake for some time, goaded out of her sleep by something on the tip of her memory, something about a legend she had studied, something about flowers and aroused women. It nagged at her so that she had gotten out of bed and began checking her own computer database of legends, source material for her dissertation. But the more she sat there at the desk, inches away from the dozen fragrant blooms, the more she thought it a waste of time to stare at the shimmering screen when there was a quite serviceable hunk of beefcake a few scant feet away from her.
She grinned, her blue-green eyes flashing in the moonlight, her long, dark nails raking the chest of her prey, rustling the curls, tweaking the nipples. Dark lips pulled back from gleaming white teeth as she broke into a laugh, her head shaking the mane of crimson ringlets that cascaded down her back and over her shoulders until they tickled her full areolas and her diamond hard nipples. As her consort blinked his eyes awake, she slid herself up his torso, until her cunt began to drip on his lips.
“Lick,” she commanded, already running fingers through his chestnut hair.
The word was barely off her tongue before his tongue was darting up, dancing along her swollen pussy. She had to spend a fair amount of time pulling his hair and smacking his cheeks and ears before he met her movements and his tongue snaked to her g-spot. Once her had found the place, though, he was insatiable, and brought her, moaning and screaming, to three climaxes. She allowed him to pass out again with her juices smeared from his hairline to his collarbone.
Annette was one of the first customers in the inn’s café for breakfast that morning. She downed two bowls of porridge and five large sausages, reached up the skirt of a waitress, fondled a busboy’s backside, and clearly ensorcelled several customers of both genders as her 36-DD cups threatened to demolish the buttons on her blouse.
Her boy-toy was awakened when Mistress yanked his face to her crotch, then pulled him onto her. He was hardly conscious, but erect enough as she pulled him into and out of her, then threw him against a wall, soon jumping on top of him. He was silent, and most of her vocalizations were grunts as she jumped atop him, her vaginal muscles tearing the semen from him, leaving him bruised, dried out, a grinning idiot.
Every inch of his body screamed out in pain as he silently pushed the cart full of luggage, complete with a box on top labeled “Live Plants,” through the Orkney airport. The plants were well-fed, small pointed leaves trying to poke out the edges. While the tickets she held weren’t good for four more days, Annette had no trouble convincing the nice gentleman at the gate counter to give her and her boy boarding passes.
Back at the inn, the manager was more than a bit confused about how and why he decided not to charge that redhead and her mousey young man for their stay. By noon, however, he’d forgotten all about that: half the guests had gone running to a recently vacated room, drawn by mad screams, only to find both housekeepers naked and in flagrante delicto, the bed, desk chair, and a mirror all smashed.
On board the plane, a well-placed blanket meant that nobody noticed what was causing Annette to smile so. Her servant’s fingers, reaching through her open fly, kept her pleasantly stimulated as she explained to him how he would complete his degree and go to work for one of several possible nursery chains, whichever one gave her the best deal for these plants and their seeds. Now that they had been properly nurtured she was sure she would have everything she desired.