Down in the village, the same first light awakened Alice as she lay dreaming. Usually, she slept until the rays of the sun were high enough to strike the wall opposite her bed, but she had slept fitfully that night, and now lay listening to the sound of her brother breathing, and the first twittering of the birds in the tree outside the window.
She had been looking forward to this day for much of her life, with a mixture of excitement and apprehension. Her birthday, September the 15th, was barely a week before the Feast, which was always held on the second of the two dates in the year when night and day were the same length: once in March, when the village was emerging from winter; and again now, at the time of harvest and preparation for the cold months to come.
As soon as she was old enough to enjoy the festivities, her mother had told her that one day she would be the village’s Harvest Queen. It was an honour bestowed on the girl whose sixteenth birthday fell closest before the day of the Feast, so it had been easy to work out that one day it would be her. Every year since then she had watched and enjoyed the rituals of the day, knowing that in a decreasing number of years it would be her turn to take that special role.
And now the day had come. She felt her body tingling with excitement, and hitched up her rough gown to place her hand between her legs, burrowing through the dark mass of rough hairs, using her fingers to touch and dip into the wet little entrance to her cunny. Her maidenhead was still intact, but that didn’t stop her playing with the little folds of flesh, stimulating the wetness that dribbled out onto the rough straw mattress on which she slept.
She watched as the room slowly became lighter as the sun rose on that special day. Her older brother began to stir in his bed, and she saw him push off the blanket and sit up, letting out a loud fart as he did so. His tunic was bunched around his waist and she could see the curve of his half-erect prick between his legs as he yawned and idly scratched his balls. Ignoring her as usual, he went out and she heard him muttering to his parents in the other room.
Alice knew it would soon be time for her to get up, and shortly she heard the sound of whispering and giggling outside. The other village girls were waiting for her, ready for the day’s events to begin.
Her mother stepped into the doorway.
“Come, Alice, they’re ready for you now,” she said with a smile.
Alice pushed off the rough blanket and got up from her bed. Her two best friends, Margery and Agnes, came inside, giggling, and took hold of her rough gown. She bent over and stuck out her arms to help them pull it off over her head. This left her naked, and her friends now escorted her to the door and took her outside to where the other girls were waiting. Others of her neighbours had risen early to see this first part of the day’s festivities, and they looked approvingly at her bare body; her large breasts and firm thighs and arse the signs of a strong, healthy woman.
Surrounded by giggling girls, the naked Alice was harried down the path past the small village church to the stream. When they reached the pool under the old willow, she made the traditional attempts to resist, before they pushed her into the cold water with a splash. As she emerged gasping and dripping, water running in rivulets off her bare breasts, her friends waded out into the stream and with scraps of cloth washed the worst of the accumulated grime from her body. She enjoyed the feeling of their hands on her breasts, and was happy to allow her friend Margery take special care when washing the area of her cunny. Margery’s fingers felt even better than her own when they rubbed against the hard little bud between her legs.
Once they judged her to be sufficiently clean, the girls dragged Alice back to the stream bank. She stood there, water dripping off her and pooling around her feet, while they produced the traditional Harvest Queen’s robe, preserved carefully from year to year for this one special day. Decorated with patterns of flowers and fruit, together with strange swirling shapes and symbols that non-one really understood, it was rather a tight fit for Alice. Margery had problems trying to lace the front across Alice’s chest, and in the end it didn’t meet in the middle at all, with only the laces themselves stopping her copious breasts from spilling out. The girls giggled at the sight.
Finally, one of the girls held out a circlet of wild flowers, freshly picked that morning. Alice bent down while this was placed on her head, and adjusted so it sat firmly over her hair.
By the time they got back to the village, more of the villagers had gathered outside the small church. The young priest, Father Hugh, was there in his best robes, holding the church’s aspergillum of holy water. He had been in the parish for fewer than nine months (his elderly predecessor having succumbed to the cold during the previous bitter winter), so this would be his first Harvest celebration, but he had been well briefed by the churchwardens regarding his specific duties.
He smiled at Alice, shy but welcoming, and took his place behind her in line. And so the villagers set out, up the single dirty village street between the rows of cottages and along the rough hedgerows towards the Top Field. At last they reached the highest point of the village lands, up against the edge of the wood. There they gathered round the Big Stone, where Father Hugh sprinkled it with holy water from the aspergillum and spoke a few words of Latin. The villagers crossed themselves and muttered their own equally unintelligible invocations.
Alice then stepped forward, and one of the girls unlaced the front of her robe, pulling it away from her breasts so they hung free and bare. The warm sun felt good on them, and her pink nipples were already hard. She stepped up to the stone and pressed her breasts against it, putting her arms as far around it as she was able. The stone was almost unnaturally warm, and its rough surface felt good against her bare skin. After a few moments, she stood back and her dress was laced back across her breasts.
As the procession moved on, the villagers surreptitiously laid their own offerings around the Big Stone; wild flowers, hedgerow fruits, scraps of rabbit fur and even small pieces of meat.
The procession progressed around the boundary of the village, getting more and more raucous as it went. Although it was still before midday, some of the men and women had brought jugs of strong rough cider and home-made beer for refreshment, and there was much rowdy laughter as one of the younger men, unable to hold his cider, spewed copiously into the hedge.
Several more times during the procession, they paused at smaller boundary stones and there was more sprinkling of water, stone-hugging by a bare-breasted Alice, and deposition of harvest offerings. Any little boy who ventured too close to one of the boundary stones to peep at Alice’s breasts had his head ceremoniously knocked against it, the knocks getting harder as the day went on.
Eventually, they arrived back at the Big Stone, everyone a bit tired and many of them already drunk. One last time, Alice bared her breasts and hugged the stone, even warmer now. The procession then descended back to the village, where the more drunk participants lay down to sleep it off before the evening’s main celebrations began.
Alice took the opportunity to take a short rest; fortunately, her key role allowed her to escape the jobs of preparation that would otherwise have come her way. She was well aware that every time she had bared her large breasts the men had craned forward to get a good look, and this had only served to arouse her further. She felt underneath her robe to see how wet she already was.
While the procession had been doing its rounds, those who had not followed it had been preparing the recently-built tithe barn for the evening feast, dragging rough wooden chairs and tables from the nearest cottages to provide seating for the more prominent villagers, and piling up sheaves of straw for the rest.
As the sun began to go down, the villagers assembled at the barn. By the time Alice arrived, led in by the girls who had acted as attendants all day, the food and drink had been brought in and placed ready on the tables. Prominent among the arrangements was a kind of throne of straw at the head of the table, which was to be Alice’s place during the feast. Sheaves of what had been bound together roughly to form a kind of seat, and her attendants led her to it and sat her down. Father Hugh, now wearing just a plain black robe, then stepped forward and pronounced a benediction over the food.
The feast then began. There was freshly-baked bread and cheese, with pies of rabbit and game. A pig had been slaughtered and roasted, so there was plenty for everyone, as well as ample cider and ale. Alice was served with the choicest morsels, and her earthenware mug of cider was kept well filled. Even so, she ate and drank a lot less than most of those present, wanting to keep a clear head for the later part of the evening. She knew that some Harvest Queens had drunk so much that they could recall very little of the later parts of the evening, but Alice was keen to keep a clear head so she could enjoy it all.
There must have been almost a hundred people in the barn, adults and children. The Harvest Feast was probably the best meal many of them would get all year, and some people seemed to be trying to eat and drink enough to last them all winter. But at last the pace of consumption began to slow down. The mothers started to gather up the younger children and shepherd them off to bed, where they were told to remain with the threat of severe punishment if they moved before their parents returned.
Now it was time for the most sacred part of the day’s rituals to begin.
Alice wiped her mouth and got up from her throne of straw. She walked over to the centre of the barn floor, where Johanna, who had been the Harvest Queen the year before, was standing waiting for her. Johanna embraced her with a smile, before starting to unlace the front of the gown that was doing an increasingly poor job of keeping Alice’s breasts under control. Alice signed with relief as she felt the pressure released from them, no longer held in place by the laced bodice. Once the laces had been loosed enough, Johanna slipped the gown off Alice’s shoulders, letting it drop to the ground. Again, Alice was naked, apart from the now slightly drooping wreath of flowers round her forehead. A murmur of appreciation went round the villagers; admiring the sight of her fresh young body.
The chairs and tables had been dragged away from the roughly-bound seat of straw, and Johanna led Alice back and placed her on it. The straw pricked and tickled her bare arse. With a whisper, Johanna showed her how she was expected to sit – parting her legs, exposing the pink folds. Johanna then leant over and parted Alice’s soft lips, making sure that those closest to her could see the thin fold of skin that guarded the entrance, showing that no man had yet had her. Alice’s pink flesh was glistening with the juices that seemed so naturally to form there.
“Why Alice, your cunt is wet already,” whispered Johanna. “I hardly need to prepare you.”
Carefully, she removed the circlet of flowers from Alice’s head. Dismantling it carefully, she placed the flowers one by one in Alice’s cunny hair, pushing the stalks into the wiry bush. Then, with her fingers she caressed the little hard bud at the top of Alice’s slit, making Alice’s heart beat faster as she felt the liquid inside her cunny well up even more than before. At last, Johanna stepped back, admiring her handiwork, and casually stroked one of Alice’s large breasts, making the dark pink nipple dimple slightly. She then took her place in the crowd next to her husband, her role in the ritual complete.
There was one more part of the preparations yet to make. The villagers respectfully cleared a path for Father Hugh, who was now holding a plain earthenware bowl full of holy water, into which he dipped his fingers as he stood over Alice’s naked body. He flicked the water three times over Alice: once on her face, once on her breasts, and finally once on the pink wet flesh between her open legs. Muttering some unintelligible words in Latin as he did so, he crossed himself before stepping back into the crowd.
For what seemed like a long while, Alice lay there, exposed and naked, her legs still stretched apart, the only movement the gentle heaving of her breasts as she breathed steadily, waiting.
All of a sudden, the doors of the barn crashed open. Although everyone had been expecting it, they jumped even so. In the doorway stood a strange and somewhat sinister figure; human legs sticking out the bottom, but a body and head constructed mostly of straw. The head was a strange combination of pig and cockerel, with a round snout but a green crest of branches, while the body was fat and apparently blessed with two bulbous straw breasts. It most definitely was not female, however, as its most striking feature was a huge phallus that projected from the body, beautifully constructed from straw and interlaced with flowers similar to those in Alice’s bush.
The audience laughed as the creature cavorted around, shaking its monstrous phallus and trying to push it against the older ladies, who protested (but not very hard). The other men kept trying to direct it towards where Alice lay, but it seemed intent on assaulting all the other women first.
But, almost by accident, it found its way over to her. Alice couldn’t help smiling as it pranced around her, its straw phallus bobbing around wildly. Then it turned its attention directly to her, and began to nudge at her naked body, rubbing its head against her legs. She winced slightly as a sharp piece of straw left a thin scratch up her thigh, which started to well with blood, but otherwise she was getting quite excited.