For hours Nicola perched in her refuge, scanning the distant hillsides half hoping, half fearing to see some sign of interest in her plight. Only the line of pylons marked the course of the road where it now emerged from the flood and climbed up through the bamboo forest. Somewhere there, from about where the mine should be, a dark billow of smoke or dust drifted under the cloud base. She guessed that her erstwhile captors would have more to occupy themselves than searching for missing slave labourers. By accident as much as by design she had become an escapee.
Remembering the white waterfalls descending through the green bamboo groves, Nicola realised how thirsty she was. The taste of salt was on her lips and a descent to water level confirmed what she remembered about her earlier plunge.
The water was quite salt! She climbed back up, hungry now as well as thirsty and squatted there, scanning the slowly passing debris with a hopeful eye. With some suitable pieces of wood she might make a raft and swim across to dry land.
There were bodies among the wreckage that floated past, she saw, human as well as animal. Most of it was vegetable matter, though, shredded and splintered, mingled with unidentifiable scraps of cloth, paper and plastic. Nicola managed to secure two small oranges that came swirling about the lower struts. She was eating the second one when a long dark object with something splashing alongside it appeared out of the haze. Watching with a beating heart, she soon identified a small boat rowing slowly towards her, though in a rather zigzag fashion and with occasional pauses.
Nicola’s first instinct was to shout and wave to attract attention. Then, reflecting upon how naked and helpless she was, she shrank back into such concealment as the corner girders afforded. There were only two figures visible aboard the boat, a small sampan of flat-bottomed construction, perhaps a river fisherman’s workboat. As it drifted down closer she realised that they were no more than a pair of children, their erratic progress caused by scavenging among the flotsam. At that moment they were intent upon something in the water on the far side, two heads leaning together, black shocks of hair turned away from her. She kept silent, thinking.
Clearly they were no threat to her at the moment. Equally probably they would take fright and row away if she startled them, perhaps fetch adults to recapture her. She had to take the initiative and keep it. Suddenly determined, she tossed the orange skin aside and, taking a deep breath, slid into the brown water. With as little splash as possible she launched herself in the direction of the drifting boat.
She got almost within touching distance, hearing the light childish voices of the invisible occupants above her head, when the chatter was abruptly ended with a shriek of alarm.
Nicola was spurred as much by the sudden shriek as they. As the nearest oar suddenly stirred splashing into action, she reached the boat’s side with a surge and heaved herself desperately aboard. She had time to take in the sight of two shrieking children, a boy and a girl probably not even teenagers before the boy tried to brain her with his oar. Angrily she fended off the swinging blow, wrestling for possession of the weapon and winning it. Smarting from the hit, she prodded fiercely, driving the boy back into collision with the girl who dropped her own oar, shrieking in fear at the dripping red haired demon.
Wielding the captured oar, Nicola gave them a savage grimace that made them retreat in terror to huddle in the bows and gave her the opportunity to consider what she had won. The sampan was like a glorified punt, squared off at the ends with triangular fixtures to carry the oars with the rower in a standing position. The bottom was heaped with junk, tins bottles sodden cloth and what might have been a drowned chicken.
From the bows the children regarded Nicola with horror as if she were some dangerous animal. She hesitated at first whether to try to win them over, but when she tried to use her few words they flinched as much as if she had roared at them.
She believed that they were simply incapable of believing such a she-devil could be capable of rational speech. With a surge of resentment she reflected that at least she was the one in control this time. Snarling, she deliberately made herself look ferocious; it was going to be easier to overawe this trembling pair into co- operation.
She thought of forcing them to give up their clothing to her. The boy wore a vest and black cotton shorts, the girl a sleeveless top and flowered pants, but of course they were far too small for her. Looking for further sustenance she found that her two captives were provided with a bottle of some sort of orange drink and among the fished out debris were several lengths of sugar cane and a tightly lidded canister half full of noodles, quite dry and unspoiled.
She concentrated upon making the youngsters take up the oars and row. Their stubborn refusal to understand soon exhausted her patience and she resorted to slapping and punching them into compliance. After all, they had tried to drown her. She decided to go with the current, which seemed to be drifting eastward.
She reasoned that if the water was salt the sea couldn’t be as far away as she thought. It must all drain back eventually; meanwhile as her unwilling crew did the rowing, she would keep a lookout for more useful flotsam. No one had known beforehand where and how the comet would strike. Now that it was clear, she was sure a disaster of this magnitude must bring in rescue efforts on an international scale and if she could remain free until then, she would surely be able to make contact with rescuers.
They still hadn’t passed clear of the line of hills by the time darkness fell. Nicola allowed the two children to cease rowing and drew the oars to her end, chasing them into the stern, leaving the sampan to drift gently onwards with the current. She would sleep more securely knowing her captives were weaponless and suitably cowed. Her sleep was fitful, nevertheless, there was neither moon nor stars and the other two were just a huddled shape in the bows. The shape of the unflooded high ground had melted into the night, its presence revealed only by an occasional spark of firelight that indicated the presence of human survivors. It was impossible to judge distances in the darkness and to know whether or not the current was still sweeping them along. In the morning she would dump the pair onto some convenient hillside, She woke with a start to find that it was daylight and sat up, wide eyed with shock, for the land was on the wrong side, a steep hillside looming over the sampan. A wild glance all round, told her what had happened. A trick of the current had carried them into an embayment among the hills and swung the boat round into the bargain.
She set about rousing the sleeping youngsters and setting them to work at the oars. She found them just as exasperating as before. It was if she had never gone through it at all. In the end she resorted to violence, hitting then with a length of bamboo she had fished out the day before until they reluctantly complied.
At last she sank back, still irate, as the oars groaned slowly in the locks, the recalcitrant children eyeing her viciously. Now she had time to look round properly. At the head of the deep embayment into which the current had drifted them a wide valley ran inland between the hills only partly flooded. Terraced rice fields lined the lower slopes and on the valley floor, only partly flooded the red roofs of house showed a village still standing clear of the flood. Nicola let her eyes linger hungrily upon this scene of peace amid desolation until, warned by some change of mood among her press-ganged crew, she glanced round and saw to her horror a large black sail looming almost on top of them.
It was a large river boat with its slatted sail fully set, driving down upon her stolen craft with a froth of brownish-white under its stem. She realised that it must have rounded the projecting end of the nearby hillside and that it now cut her off from the open water.
She sprang up, brandishing the cane as the two children stopped rowing simultaneously as if by concerted action. Nicola leapt upon them, dealing out blows right and left but the children, shrieking wildly, merely scrambled away.
She grabbed the oars herself in an attempt to turn the sampan but came under a bombardm
ent from the youngsters, who pelted her with anything that came to hand in an effort to hinder her.
On the oncoming vessel the sail came down with a rush and clatter of slats, but its impetus carried it on with little slackening and it hit Nicola’s swinging craft a solid blow that rolled it right over. She let go the oars as the outer edge of the sampan went under water. She had a quick glimpse of the yelling kids leaping like monkeys for the other boat and instinctively followed their example. Poised momentarily wide-legged on the deck edge, all teeth and nails and endeavouring to look fierce, she took in the not very formidable opposition at a glance. Two old men seemed to comprise the crew with a younger woman at the tiller, goggling in evident fright at the wild red-haired giantess who had invaded their craft.
Nicola lashed out as the nearest man made a tentative advance, kicking him in the belly. A violent chorus of shrieks and yells of panic was the gratifying result, but someone, perhaps the steerswoman, kept their head. In the moment of Nicola’s triumph there was a rush of blocks and a crash of timber. Her position was instantly overturned in every sense. Ropes and nets fell upon her from aloft, bore her from her perch and capsized her backwards over the side, arms and legs flailing.
She came to the surface, swimming strongly and still ready to be defiant, but the netting promptly closed around her and she was bundled together and hoist straight up into the air before she could work out a way of escape. She went high into the air, helplessly upside-down in the net. From there she glimpsed a row of faces looking up at her, mouths agape, then excited shrieks rang in her ears as she fell again like a stone back into the depths. She was hoist and dunked again and again, her struggles becoming progressively weaker. By the time her captors got a noose about her ankles and made her fast, Nicola hung quite limply from the bowed fishing pole, just above the water. Satisfied that their catch had been suitably subdued, they swung her back inboard, dangling like some champion game fish, her fingertips just clear of the deck.
As the water drained from her and she regained some of her senses, Nicola could see from her upside down position that the fishing boat was already well inshore. It was headed towards dry land where a field embankment formed a kind of pier thrust out into the flood. A crowd of people lined its top to watch their approach and the red roofs of a village showing amid a grove of trees indicated where they had come from.
The fishers made the most of Nicola. Having given them such a fright they took it out upon her helpless body. Shouting to the crowd awaiting them onshore they displayed their prize, no doubt boasting of her size and savagery. The two children in particular poked and prodded her unmercifully and every reaction she made to their prodding was magnified by the flexible pole from which she was suspended, so that she bobbed and bounced, nakedly revealed from every angle. Long tendrils of red hair hung dripping through the meshes of the net, a strange colour in the eyes of the crowd. Her wet skin seemed almost translucent white, the traditional colour for them of evil creatures. Her dangling elongated posture emphasised what seemed to the short-of-stature locals, a monstrous length of body.
Then as she swung slowly naked before the crowd, there was a general hiss of exhaled breath. All eyes read the telltale brand on the curve of her naked buttock compressed within a diamond rim of rope netting. Loudly they read the characters, “Property of the People”!
Bruised and smarting, Nicola spent the remainder of the day crouched in a wooden cage in the village street while the boy and girl from the sampan recounted again and again the epic tale of their struggle against the she-devil. Their graphic gestures and vivid re-enactments improved with the repetition and the villagers clapped or cheered at the proper points, afterwards congratulating the youthful hero and heroine.
Nicola had been well thrashed by the fisher folk for the fright she had given them and then again when she reached the village by the indignant peasants who heard the story of her brutal attack upon helpless children. They had driven her back to the village securely bound with rope, led by the neck. Her ignorance of what was required of her made her seem a dumb creature and the instant obedience that their blows achieved, re-enforced them in their treatment of her like a captive animal.
Chapter Eight
About dawn in Goh Lap village, with the inhabitants already astir, Nicola and the widow Feng emerged at one end of the village street, a straggle of white washed red tiled mud cottages set about with fruit trees and poplars. Nicola shivered in the dawn chill goose pimpled, nipples pricking, for she was still more or less naked, wearing only a skimpy g-string, a scanty piece of white cotton covering only the triangle of her pubis and held in place by three strings. Its thin cotton failed entirely to conceal her dark hairiness, evidence of animal affiliations to her captors. From behind, it left her rear quite bare and displayed the thin red traces of Widow Feng’s cane as well as her deeply impressed designation.
She had been turned into a draught beast by her captors to supplement the village labour force and assigned to be kept and driven by the widow, who was too crippled by arthritis to work in the fields herself.
Fitted with a harness of plaited straw rope, Nicola was drawing a small flat cart with rubber tyres loaded with two large wooden tubs. She bent to her task aided by a crack of the cane, padding barefoot towards the first of the houses. Two chattering children, a boy and a girl, clad alike in blue cotton, daringly shied a clod of earth at Nicola and then sped off down the street without a backward glance when Widow Feng threatened to feed them to the she-devil. A young woman, their mother, followed them from the house with a shouldered hoe. She examined Nicola equally warily as if she were a beast of uncertain docility, with a comment to the Widow Feng about the similarity in size between the white devil and the buffalo cow for which she had been substituted.
Securely fastened to her cart, Nicola drew it round to the rear of the house where each family had its brick built privy, the contents of which had to be ladled out into one of the tubs on the cart. From house to house the shit collection proceeded, while peasants passed by going to the fields and their younger offspring to the schoolhouse. As the tubs grew full so Nicola had to bend deeper, long hair straying and heavy breasts swinging. Then Widow Feng’s cane whacked harder and Nicola, groaning, plodded off towards the fields.
A waste of naked mud and stagnant lagoons, sparkling with salt deposits that had buried the former cultivated plain, had slowly become visible from the village as the flood ebbed. The range of hills that had escaped the inundation still possessed the isolated quality of an inhabited island, for the soft, unconsolidated mud was un-negotiable and, somewhere far out beyond it, the great river, now shrinking back to its former size, ran free of all restraint, far adrift of its historic course and rapidly cutting a new one into the soft salt coated deposits of mud and debris.
A few dozen villages like Goh Lap had survived the inundation among the hills, with fields above the water level or not buried too deeply to be rescued. Survivors had swollen their population some fortunate enough to be afloat when the waters came, or to find driftwood to save them. The harvest recently stored and, for lack of transport, not yet exported, permitted these numbers to survive the sunless months. Fishing and fowling in the flood supplemented the stores.
With the returning sun, in places where the mud was firm enough and could be freed of salt water, new paddy fields could be created, but it was clear that much labour would be required.
Even before the Catastrophe, plague had struck down most of the villagers’ animals. It was blamed on biological weapons unleashed by wicked enemies in the developed nations to cripple attempts of poor people to compete for a share of their wealth. This shortage of animal labour and the lack of fuel for the mechanical meant that most of the work had now to be done by hand, by the peasants their wives and older children. As public property, it was clear that the proper and appropriate use of the captured red-haired female creature was to be as a replacement w
ork beast.
Rain had arrived a little earlier than usual. No one could be certain whether these were the proper monsoon rains or not, so tempers were frayed. Rice is a crop that requires more attention than most. The manure cart was emptied at the seed beds where the young shoots of rice were prepared and heavily manured, waiting to be transplanted as seedlings when the monsoon flooded the paddy fields.
Nicola’s naked skin was bedewed by warm, light drizzle as, obedient to the Widow Feng’s cane, she was re-directed down towards the paddy fields now in preparation. The low earth bunds collected the fresh rain and the weak sun gleamed upon a series of watery surfaces in the enclosures as if the flood had come again. With Feng perched easily upon the empty cart, they entered the fields, Nicola trotting along one of the dykes. An irregular network of these divided up the paddy fields as far as a higher dyke beyond which lay the wasteland created by the great flood. There, on a high watchtower, a militiaman was identifiable by the point of a spear projecting above his waterproof cape, keeping lookout against straggling refugees or thieving boat people.
In one of the nearest fields a man was beginning the first ploughing behind a surviving buffalo. The widow drove Nicola on to the next plot in which the ploughing had been completed. It lay awaiting the next stage, a long curving strip of flooded field, placid and pale chocolate in colour. Widow Feng unhitched the cart and pointing with the cane, urged her charge down the bank, giving Nicola a whack and shouting shrilly. Two more women who had followed them along the bund echoed her cries. Though they knew Nicola understood none of it, it gave them an excuse to whack her too.
Against the side of the dyke lay a wooden plough and its oxbow harness. Their victim had to guess quickly what was required of her. She was to take up the position of plough beast and supplement the work of the ox by churning up the newly ploughed soil into a seedbed of rich mud.
Chinese Justice Page 9
