Dig Your Way

“Dig your way to fortune,” swore Concetta for the thousandth time, as yet another makeshift tool shattered in her hands. The words had become her vilest curse. They’d seemed so promising when they’d been the headline of a poster near the docks in Naples.

    The island of opportunity, they called it. Thousands of miles of untouched land, heavily laden with gold and diamonds. In a year of hard work a man could make a fortune beyond imagining, came the promise. She’d been skeptical, but it was hard to doubt the chest after chest of gold and jewels they’d loaded off the ship that autumn. She’d signed up on the spot. Of course, she hadn’t done so as Concetta, but rather as Concentto, the male persona under which she’d ventured forth.

    Concetta’s family had for generations farmed a plot of land a day’s walk from Florence. So it was until the farmstead passed to her father, Ambrogio, who managed somehow to produce six daughters and one crippled son. Then Ambrogio had died when a cart had tipped into a ditch, and Concetta, the strong eldest daughter, immediately stepped up to fill the gap. However, around the same time their landlord, Ser Fulvius, had died of old age, and his heir, Marizo, arrived to inspect his new holdings.

    Concetta shivered with rage at the memory of the way Marizo had lined up her and her sisters to be inspected like livestock. He consulted a ledger and declared that the holding had not been meeting the needed level of production, and pronounced that the family was to move up to the stately manor to work in the household. It was clear to Concetta, as he smirked lecherously at her, the reason that he wanted the six girls close at hand.

    Concetta begged her mother to leave, but she held that the family had no place to go, and if they left any other place would be mere paupers, and likely subjected to far worse abuse than what Marizo might dole out. Enraged, fearful for her sisters, Concetta had cropped her hair, pulled on a pair of her father’s old clothes, and set out in search of a new life for her family.

    Thus Concentto wandered from town to city to frontier, chasing tales of opportunity. A few small jobs availed themselves, but none allowed her to save any large amount of money. She considered herself as capable as any man, and no person had yet found her true identity, even when she had spent eleven weeks in close quarters with nineteen other men on the journey from Naples to the Island of Opportunity.

    When they’d rowed ashore from the ship, they had been greeted by the sight of fifteen haggard-looking men standing in a circle around several small, sturdy-looking wooden chests - the outgoing crew, or apparently the remains of it. The boss of the incoming expedition, Ser Naevius, looked grim but unsurprised.

    “Where is Patrizo?” He asked one of the men quietly.

    “Dead,” the man croaked.

    Naevius nodded grimly. “Are his notes intact? Maps?”

    The man gestured inland. “The fort still stands,” he said.

    The other men were hefting the first of the chests onto the boat. It was obviously extremely heavy.

    “Has it gotten...” started Naevius, before he noticed Concetta listening. “You,” he directed,” help them move that gold. With that he pulled the other man aside. Concetta was concerned, but the weight of the treasure under her hands heartened her. If each of those chests was filled even with impure gold ore, each of those fifteen men could buy a castle on his return to Italy.

    Two at a time the chests were ferried out to the ship, followed then by the outbound miners. All twenty of the new hands watched uncertainly as the last boat receded. Suddenly, Naevius clapped his hands.

    “All right, now is the time for work. I’m sure you’d all like explanations for the condition of those men, and it will be coming, before the sun sets tonight.”

    Naevius led them up a dirt path lined with torches, dozens and dozens of them. Concetta wondered why they would ever need so many. They also passed a row of freshly-dug graves, each topped with a pile of thick stone chunks. Out in the woods they saw dozens of feral pigs, wild sheep, ragged fowl, and skinny wild cattle. Finally they came to an impressively tall stone wall, with a sturdy wooden gate standing open.

    Inside was another, lower wooden wall, and behind that a pair of long, low stone buildings. They walked inside one, and saw that it was a common hall of some sort with crude wooden chairs and a kitchen at the far end. A rack near the door held a dozen crudely wrought iron swords. Each miner settled into a chair as Naevius stood before them.

    “Now, men,” he said, “I had hoped that the previous expedition would have dealt with the creatures, but it seems they have failed. There is some kind of predator out in the woods here, but it only comes out after dark. There is nothing to fear so long as basic precautions are followed.”

    He’d gone on to explain about the things that lurked in the night. They could not outrun a man, and would not appear in well-lit areas. None had ever been observed closely, alive or dead. Then there were the explosions.

    “In our first expedition, we brought a quantity of black powder,” he explained. “It seems the things have stolen some of it, as sometimes there are unexplained explosions. We have brought on no more powder, and surely the things must be nearly out of the stuff.”

    Still, none of this had discouraged the fresh men just then. The work was monotonous and hard, but the mines were dotted with small deposits of gold and fine diamonds. The miners merely had to clear away the common stone to find the stuff. So long as they took the time to keep their working areas well lit, and avoided at all costs entering any of the many caverns that meandered through the stone, they were safe. At the slightest hint of a void in the stone, which might be a cave, a shaft would be capped, no matter how rich it seemed to be.

    At night, they simply kept inside the two buildings, the hall and the dormitory. Sometimes they could hear strange growling noises beyond the walls, but none ever ventured to peer over at what might be beyond.

    One day as they started out to work, one of the miners, Domenico, had come running back to camp calling up the alarm. “Green devil,” he’d sobbed, falling to the ground, “I was chased by a devil, with the face of a man but hideous green and black skin, I ran as fast as I could but the sound came of a fuse and an explosion and dirt flew all around me. Oh, the evil, the evil in that face, oh!”

    In time the party had armed themselves and headed for the spot described, where they’d found a large crater in the dirt just as though a large quantity of powder had been ignited. It was near the mouth of a cave.

    “Domenico has broken the rules and nearly paid the greatest price”, Naevius warned them. “Let us hope he has not angered these devils, whatever they are, for all our sakes.”

    From then on all had kept to the mines. And they’d done well. The strongbox already contained several bricks of gold which had been processed and melted down. Even one of those bricks could readily buy freedom and comfort for Concetta’s family. All she had to do was persist for another nine months, and she would go home a wealthy woman.

But for the time being, she thought, I am nothing but a dirty exhausted man. Most of the men bathed in the nearby creek once a week, but Concetta would soon be found out if she shed her clothes. The only time she dared dress down farther than shirt and pants was the rare occasion when she could sneak away far enough from camp. Of course, she had to seem to shave frequently to avoid a conspicuous lack of facial hair. Underneath her rags, she knew she was still plainly a woman, as tightly as she’d kept her breasts bound. In a moment any man would realize what she was, and those rough men, so long removed from any sight of a woman, would surely have their way with her by any means necessary.

Of course, she herself was not asexual. Back home, she’d been seduced by a merchant’s apprentice named Carlo, who was worldly by her measures. The lovemaking was quite pleasurable, something that came as a surprise to her. Her mother, when the subject had arisen, referred to it as a burden a wife must bear, a chore to be carried out as required for a man’s pleasure and the getting of children. Either her mother was lying to her for the sake of her chastity, or her father was nowhere as skilled as Carlo, who showed her the way to dizzying heights of ecstasy.

She’d originally hoped Carlo might make a good husband, but it was soon plain that he had no such intention. Still, she relished his visits, when he’d always seek her out with a bottle of wine in hand and she’d show the way to some quiet corner or secluded place. Sometimes she found herself dreaming of Carlos appearing there on the island, bottle of wine in hand. Or even of one of those coarse men taking his place.

Thinking of her times with Carlo was giving her flutters low in her stomach. “I’m resting,” she thought, “I must keep working to keep these thoughts away.”

She hefted another pick and resumed working on the horizontal shaft she was digging. The complaint of her muscles drowned out the need brewing in her loins. The tunnel rang with the pick striking home again and again. Then suddenly it sank through the rock with the tell-tale cruch of a deposit of gravel.

Gravel! She hoped to never again have to see the stuff. She grabbed a shovel and started loading it into the cart behind her, careful not to cause an avalanche if the deposit were large. She lit another torch, the better to see where her shovel was striking. Then her shovel slipped into a void, and as she cleared further she could see that she’d uncovered a cavern.

Now, the protocol was that she would promptly re-seal the end of the shaft and alert Naevius to update the maps. But the way the torchlight fell into the room, she could see it quite clearly. It was a very small hollow in the rock, with a narrow flow of crystal-clear water falling down one side and seeping into the rocks at the other side.

She dared to lean her head in, and looked back and forth. The water looked crisp and clean, and it was quite plain that there were no green monsters to be found. She cast a glance back down the shaft. Nobody would expect her back for at least half an hour. She lit another torch, and stepped cautiously in.

The moment she smelled the clean water, her mind was made up. She quickly pulled her dirt-stained shirt up over her head. Her breasts suddenly ached to be free, and she grabbed the band of cloth she used to hide her womanly proportions. She unwrapped it, around and around, until at last her tender, sweat-drenched skin was open to the cool, wet air.

Her heart pounded as she removed her boots and pants, followed by the two pairs of drawers she wore. The smell of her unwashed body assaulted her. Without further delay she stepped under the falling water.

She exhaled sharply. It was cool, but not cold. She let it cover her from head to toe. She wished dearly for soap, but settled at least for rubbing her skin clean with her hands. As her hands passed over her pale breasts she realized that her nipples had become as hard as the tips of two iron picks. Her touch lingered there a moment, and she felt her toes curl. She sighed. She could tell what her body was telling her, and wasn’t sure she could resist the temptation.

Self-pleasure was something she’d only risked a few times since she’d assumed her male identity. It was rare for her to find enough privacy, even on the rare occasion that she was graced with private quarters. But she felt an urge building that she could not fight. She leaned back against a slick, round spit of rock and let her hand slide down over her wet stomach. She closed her eyes and thought of Carlo’s hands on her. Her hands traced over her. Her finger found the heat between her legs. She buried it inside herself and bit her lip to stifle a moan. She’d never felt so needful in her life.

She thought of the men and how they took care of their own needs. It was easier for them. They just walked out behind the trees and did it, and came back satisfied and serene. For her it was not so simple. Her mind had to be in the right place. Imagining those dirty men pleasuring themselves wasn’t doing the trick.

She tried to focus on Carlos, but the faces and hands of dirty, hardened men refused to stay out of her fantasies. She found herself lying back and letting Carlos thrust himself into her sex, while two of the men stood on either side touching her tender body. She tried to push the two interlopers away, but then she realized that what was getting to her was the hidden power she had. Knowing how badly they’d want her if they knew her identity. In her mind’s eye she saw all twenty men crowding around her, desperate, needful, grabbing her flesh with dirty hands and pressing their erections against any part of her body they could reach.

She heard a sound, soft but close. Her heart lurched; she feared she’d been discovered. She opened her eyes and saw that something even worse had happened: standing in the room was what had to be one of the green devils.

It was as tall as a man, with leathery skin in mottled green and black. It had a long torso with short stubby legs, and no arms at all, with a large round head. Its face was indeed human-like, with long, severe features. However, contrary to Domenico’s description, and that written in the journal of the previous expedition, this one bore an expression that seemed almost more like bemusement.

Concetta wanted to scream, but she forced herself to stay calm. The creature regarded her from its dark eyes without moving. She tried to calm herself, and to gauge the path to the door. But if she left without her clothes, she would be in nearly as much trouble, emerging among those isolated men fully nude and dripping wet.

For long moments Concetta stared at the thing, and it didn’t even seem to be breathing. Then, without changing its facial expression in the slightest, it moved closer to her, with single short movement almost like a hop. Then another brought her nearly close enough to touch the thing. She shied back. The eerie quiet made her want to scream.

Then, she spotted movement from the middle of it, a shape pressing forward, as though the thing did have an arm after all, somehow hidden behind a flap of its skin. But it wasn’t an arm at all, Concetta realized. It was a penis, the largest she had ever seen, and not even erect.

The thing nodded ever so slightly downward, and she knew at once what the decidedly male creature wanted. She glanced up at its intractable visage. Its mouth turned up ever so slightly. What would it do if she refused? She doubted she could fight it, as large as it was, and it was between her and the hole in the wall. She could not escape, and she was worried that if she angered it, it would explode like the one chasing Domenico.

    Thus she slid slowly down the rock and settled down face to face with the creature’s long, greenish member. She’d only pleasured Carlo with her mouth a few times, and she wasn’t sure the creature’s penis would even fit through her lips. She raised her hand to it and touched it gently from below. It could have been a rock, completely inanimate, until that moment when she felt it pulse slightly over her fingers. She knew then that it was a living thing, filled with life. She could feel the texture of it, like the skin of the softest part of a snake’s belly, but firmer. She hesitated. The limb twitched impatiently. She glanced up at the chilling dark eyes bearing down on her. She could feel penis in her hand pulsing, growing, reaching towards her mouth. She realized she had been holding her breath. She exhaled softly, and the moment she did so the creature pushed forward and the throbbing green head was thrust to within inches of her face. She tried to lean back but the slick rock made her hand slip and she found her face back under the trickle of water. She sputtered and scrambled upright and gasped for breath and then the massive male appendage was thrust through her open lips.

    Her mouth was full of the thing at once, despite that only a small portion was inside her. The thing thrust its hips again, and she did her best to allow it in. She was surprised to find that the thing tasted slightly sweet on her tongue. Her mouth started to fill with saliva. Or was it some secretion of the beast? She couldn’t tell, but the thing pressed deep into her mouth. She felt she might gag. She brought her hand up to try to hold it back. She pressed against its torso, but its muscles pulsed with irresistible power as it tried to push past the back of her mouth. She brought her hands down, let them rest over the shaft. Even with the thing so deep in her mouth, she was still able to wrap both fists around the thing. The shaft was growing slick, and her hands slid over the leathery skin smoothly. The touch seemed to placate the creature, who ceased his thrusting and let her move her hands over his length.

Concetta knew from her time with Carlo that sometimes the giving of pleasure by mouth was an event in itself, and sometimes it was only a prelude to something else. The thought of the creature’s massive sex pressing between her legs made her shudder. She started to bob her stretched mouth back and forth, hoping that she might please the thing thing enough that it would be satisfied to violate only her mouth. She used every trick and technique she knew from her limited experience. But who knew if the thing was like a man at all? It certainly was not like an animal. Any stallion or bull would have been finished long before. And she knew of no animal which engaged in the act she was then performing.

And if he was a man... her mind reeled at the thought. Her jaw ached so much already, that she couldn’t fathom what the thing would do to the more delicate parts of her body. The shaft had swelled to the thickness of her wrist. She could feel for sure now that the fluid in her mouth was seeping from the head of the thing. It filled her mouth with sickly-sweet wetness. She could feel the stuff pulsing up through the thick cord of flesh as her hands slid back and forth.

She let one hand drop down to feel for the thing’s testicles, but she could feel none. Instead the limb sprouted directly from its lower chest. But she could feel more fluid moving in the soft bump of skin there, like a fat man’s belly after a large meal.

Abruptly the creature pulled back. She looked up at it uncertainly as she rubbed her aching jaw. It gave no human hint of intent or emotion in its dark, impeccable visage. And yet she knew at once what it wanted. She couldn’t bring herself to respond. It pushed with its hips again, and she fell back against the slick rocks. She slid to her side, tried to stabilize herself, smarted her arm on the floor. She felt the thing brush past her ankles. She tried to close her legs but it was too late. The thing was there, it was pressing against her. Its penis was sliding over her thighs. She could feel slick skin sliding over her pubic hair, feel the thick knob pressing inward, probing for her opening. She knew she couldn’t escape it, so instead she reached down and guided it to its destination.

She was ashamed at how wet she was as it slid inside her, at the shiver of pleasure she felt at having her inner self violated. And yet that pleasure was sharply tempered by the sharp pressure she felt from the width of the thing. She imagined herself torn asunder, imagined the thing not even caring as it continued to violate her. But the thing didn’t press on. It stopped with two bare inches of itself inside her and seemed to wait. Was it waiting for her benefit? Was it trying to be gentle and spare her the pain? She doubted any level of patience would spare her irrevocable harm. She closed her eyes.

But then she realized that, ever so slowly, the thing was sinking into her. The pressure was firm, even sharp at times, but not quite painful. In fact, the pressure of the fullness started to warm her belly. Just then the thing pulled back, and the sudden absence of it turned into a yearning. She could feel her insides practically sloshing with the thing’s excretions. The stuff was so slippery that somehow her body had opened farther than she knew possible. The thing pushed back into her, and she felt a moan slip past her lips.

Slowly, impeccably, the thing sawed in and out of her. She could almost imagine that the thing was a man, warm and strong and clean. She felt the beginnings of climax stirring inside her. She kept her eyes tightly closed. She needed a release so badly that she felt herself coming to accept what was happening as a blessing.

The creature stopped, pressed apparently against the very deepest part of her sex. She could feel her pulse around the thing planted deep inside her. She was aware for the first time that the monster did not breathe. She filled her mind’s eye with the vision of her mystery lover, and lifted her lips ever so slightly, hoping to beckon the creature to continue its work.

But then, suddenly, horribly, she heard the unmistakable sound of a lit fuse, just as Domenico had described. Her eyes shot open. The thing stared at her, the distinctive hissing sound came from its mouth, which was now turned upward in something like a cruel smile. She cringed, suddenly comprehending that she was destined to be blasted into nothingness on the cave floor. And, she reflected in that short moment, before she even had a chance to climax.

Then, instead of exploding, the thing pulled back, withdrawing itself from her sex with a loud “plop”. Her eye dropped down from its head to the penis, which glistened in the torchlight. It was throbbing, twitching. Then from the tip of it burst forth a thick rope of thick white semen. She watched, enthralled, as the stuff jetted out towards her with an incredible velocity. The point of it passed over head, but the rest landed on her body, tracing a neat line from the top of her head down her right leg. Another jet pulsed free, crossing her heart, left breast, and right hip. Another and another landed on her, each line burning against her chilled skin. One landed squarely between her eyes, and she forced them shut, and then there was a pause, and she thought the creature might be done. But it was still hissing, or burning, and she felt another jet land on her, and another. The stuff was sliding down between her legs over her sex. She felt each remaining bare patch of skin squirted, right down to each of her toes. There had to be buckets of stuff on her, but it kept coming, back to her face, making her gasp and sputter and spit.

The stuff was hot, scaldingly hot on her skin. She tried to wipe it from her face. She could no longer tell whether the stuff was falling on her. The stuff was sticky and slick and wouldn’t come free from her skin when she tried to wipe her eyes. She tried to sit up, but she slid on the rocks, which were just as slicked from the excretion as she was. She managed to wiggle into a sitting position. She blinked her eyes open, and could see at once that not only was the creature done, but he was gone, vanished, no longer present in the room.

Then, in the distance, she heard the sound of voices. Human voices. Male voices, approaching. She knew she couldn’t clean herself up in time. A dirty voice popped through the door, and a hoarse voice grumbled, “well, look what we have here...”