Chinese Justice

by Peter Marriner

  A different type of harnessing was required to that she had worn in the cart and she stooped meekly to allow the wooden oxbow to be laid across her shoulders, arms outstretched and wrists fastened to the ends. The bow was fastened to her chest harness and two strong lines trailed from behind her shoulder blades in long curves to the plough. One of the women approached with more rope and dropped a loop of it over Nicola’s head. She was made to open her jaws and had a stout wooden peg thrust between them, from the ends of which two long cords led rearwards over the yoke-bow. Cords passing under Nicola’s jaws and round the nape of her neck held the peg firmly between her teeth. Helplessly mouthing this wooden bit, the human plough-beast was effectively dumb, yoked and reined.

  “Yee-Uhhh!” The sound, she knew, meant to get moving. So did the jerk of the rope reins and the supplementary crack of the cane across her rear. Grunting plaintively, she bent to her work exactly like a docile beast. Behind her, one woman was steering the plough while the other applied the cane.

  It took great effort upon Nicola’s part to get the implement moving through the glutinous earth that squelched between her bare toes as she thrust. But with the repeated whack of the cane for stimulus, she got it moving, yelping shrilly behind her bit. She bowed her body deeply behind the yoke as she strained, until her upper half was almost horizontal, so that with each heave her round white bottom swung joggling from side to side. The woman with the cane yelled in triumph, thwacking the tempting white cheeks before her and adding another bright red trace to their ample swell.

  Nicola lurched forward with a muffled howl. Somehow she got extra thrust into her efforts. Step by step, she plodded through the mire, straining every sinew to escape the whistling cane, her bottom jigging and tossing under the painful stripes. By the time she reached the far end of the field, it was stinging and throbbing. She was blinded by rain, and sweat, wetly plastered with her own long hair over face shoulders and breasts. Between her legs the tiny G-string was almost transparent. The pale curves of hips and cheeks gleamed wetly. Wet trickles ran down from the ends of her hair, and dribbled from dangling nipples.

  “Haaa-oh! Waaang-Yo-ugwai!”

  Voices harassed her, shouting nothing she understood. The rope tugged insistently and she gathered her wits to obey it before they resorted to the cane. She swung in a half circle the way the reins turned her, nearly coming to a halt as the plough dug in, then yelping as the whistling bamboo across her bottom, speeded her recovery and return down the length of the field. Fortunately the women seemed satisfied that they had created a useful plough beast. Two of them shouldered their canes and departed, leaving her to a single female driver armed with a long whippy ox-goad.

  Up and down, back and forth they went, breaking up the submerged clods of earth and churning the result into soft mud as the soil broke up and absorbed the water. Nicola’s feet made sloshing, glucking noises at every step. Clinging hair almost blinded her but she needed little more than to glimpse the limits of the embanked field to guide her turns. Thighs and calves quivered with effort; breasts swung and bounced; mud splashed high up her smooth white legs and, mixing with rain and sweat, ran down again in muddy trickles.

  All that day she went to and fro and towards the late afternoon both bladder and bowels grew increasingly insistent for relief. She tried to think how to manage. She was unable to make her need evident to her driver and attempts to come to a halt were quickly punished with the goad. She plodded on, unable either to keep her thighs together or her cheeks clenched, and fearing that each long trudge would see her explode. At last she resolved to rebel at the next turn, come what might.

  She had left it too long. Halfway down the long strip of field she realised she wasn’t going to make it. She felt the hot wet trickle soak through the thin cotton of her G-string and run down her thighs. Flushing with embarrassment she came to a halt and inevitably the long goad swept out and smacked her hard across the rump. The straining contents of her bowels burst with a rush hardly impeded by the thin string between her legs. In mingled shame and relief, she spread her legs and thrust out her rump in the middle of the field, making it obvious to her driver and to anyone else who was in sight exactly why. The woman with the whip only giggled at this involuntary addition to the fertilizer. A bucket or two of muddy water thrown over Nicola’s backside and between her thighs was the sole concession that was made before she had to resume her task.

  Daily, Nicola alternated between shit-cart and plough as her possessors prepared more paddy field for planting rice. The second day the Widow Feng made sure the G-string was removed before she was harnessed up and thereafter she ploughed quite naked, a mere beast that must evacuate as it goes.

  She was passed from one family group to another, enduring a variety of drivers, male and female, old and young, each family in turn having her services to make use of in preparing their particular fields.

  Nicola, towering clumsily over her drivers, naked, pale skinned, red hair spilling wildly about her, almost felt like a different species herself, a kind of sentient draught animal. Trapped and constrained by her harness and with the bit between her jaws, she was effectively compelled to be wordless and obedient and it seemed that her users were content to accept her as a docile beast. So, treating her as they would have any other domestic animal, they worked her as they acquired her, stark naked under the whip. Becoming inured to her condition, Nicola accumulated a whole repertoire of responses to commands almost without realising it, reacting to the sounds without knowing their meaning. Her intelligence was now only useful so far as it allowed her to anticipate her driver’s wishes and escape the whip.

  Trained by hauling heavy coal tubs, her strong thighs and long legs enabled Nicola’s performance almost to rival the buffalo that she followed from field to field, ploughing back and forth where it had broken up the crust, while behind her in the stirred-up fields, stooping lines of blue clad figures moved slowly knee deep through the liquid mud thrusting in the green shoots of rice. Those who now used her assured the dubious village committee that the wild she-devil was now been turned into a tame and useful domestic beast.

  As the year wore on, she saw no hope of being released by her peasant owners and only the faintest of ever being rescued from her fate. With the rice all planted, she became a beast of all work, hauling shit for fertilizer, stones and clay for dyke repair, logs and bamboos for firing and building. Eventually when the harvest began, she drew towering great loads of cut rice straw to the barns.

  These country people, tormented over recent years by changes of policy, now worked equal plots in the fields while their affairs were managed by an elected village council. The village of Goh Lap would have been self-sufficient and self- administering had it not been for the presence of other interest groups, refugees and others, whose interests lay in supporting centralised control over the available resources. The grasping landlord was history and the authoritarian commissar had gone the same way, but there was still a Committee, a Chairman and a rigorous system of tax collection.

  Chapter Nine

  Inside the Hall of Justice Culture and Peace, the council of Goh Lap village sat at a battered deal table facing bowls of long since cooled tea with worried expressions. Drawn from the important business of storing the rice harvest, they were considering the requirements of the tax and the expected shortfall on this year’s tax.

  “Chairman Hwa-” the presiding member said unhappily, “-will come down hard upon us. If we have to meet the tax he has set, we are all likely to have empty bellies before next harvest. There are plenty of candidates eager to take our places too.”

  “The other villages will be short as well,” the old man next to him reminded them all. “Yet there are more fields to be cleared for the refugees to resettle, clerks and such are to be fed and the militia guard to be maintained. Chairman Hwa is not likely to be easy upon any of us! Here, he is like one of those old mandarins of
the old days!” he cackled, sucking noisily at his tea.

  “Could we find some way of pleasing Chairman Hwa then?” The presiding member looked crafty. “We could pick out an assistant for him. Other villages have done that. You know that both his second and third wives were sent by their villages under colour of being assistants.”

  “Three wives should be enough for any man!” the woman secretary snorted disapprovingly.

  “Not for Chairman Hwa!” the old man sniggered. “Many a pretty girl has been thrust into his bed for a night by their village.”

  “That’s only good for a night.” The presiding member was dismissive. “They say his three wives are firm friends and have set their faces against any more rivals. We shall have to cut down consumption. Cut the rations to inessential workers.”

  “Then why not get rid of that great white creature of the Widow Feng?” the secretary suggested. “She eats like a horse and she won’t really be needed after the harvest is in.”

  “We can’t just set the savage free. She will be a danger to our children!” the rest of the women members protested.

  “Take her out and drown her!”

  “She is public property! The Chairman would find out! You know he has spies everywhere.” The Widow Feng spoke up for the first time. “I have taken a lot of trouble to train the creature to pull a cart. She should be kept to expiate her evil deeds, whatever they were; as an example to the people!”

  “Chairman Hwa could afford to keep a horse if there were any to be had!” the secretary returned relentlessly to her point. “She is female after all, he can add her to his collection.”

  There was a thoughtful silence for a moment.

  “Chairman Hwa has a taste for show,” the presiding member said, looking round. “The She-devil is a trained cart puller. We can please him with a gift and rid ourselves of a mouth to feed at the same time.”

  Next day in the yard behind the Hall of Justice Culture and Peace, Nicola waited for her supervisor to return. She had been left there with her reins looped around the railing that fenced off the hall. There was nothing to prevent her from unhitching herself and running away, except that she had nowhere to go and no means of concealing herself. So she stood there obediently tethered like any other animal.

  Her driver presently returned along with the rest of the committee, from the unexpected direction of the almond grove. They were towing behind them a spindly looking, vintage rickshaw, the sort of thing Nicola knew only from ancient photographs of Shanghai.

  Someone had remembered the old rickshaw lying in the almond grove behind the rice barns. It had been left behind by one of the last of the old travelling agit- prop groups. “Apparently the wicked Imperialists used to harness people to such things and have themselves pulled about the countryside. It will be an appropriate way for Chairman Hwa to use the foreign devil!”

  Self-importantly, the Widow Feng unhitched the creature from her rail and backed her up into the rickshaw’s long shafts using the bamboo cane in her accustomed manner, like one directing a recalcitrant bullock. Respectful of the cane, Nicola moved obediently and then stood grasping the shafts while her busy proprietors with much laughter and argument, fitted her with makeshift harness. She wore the same kind of chest harness she had used to haul her cart and in addition her wrists were secured to the shafts. The widow reached up on her toes to flip Nicola’s long russet mane behind her and then to take the ends of the rope reins back with her to the rickshaw. Through the rickshaw shafts, Nicola felt the sudden lurch of added weight.

  “Yee-uh!” The reins flipped, but Nicola needed no extra admonishment. She had taken a grip on the rope bit as soon as she felt her driver mount up and the now familiar command set her at once in motion. The pressure of the rope reins forced her to hold her head erect, white teeth gripping firmly upon the bit. The harness made her arch her back, thrusting her breasts forward, nipples prickling as they jutted into prominence.

  The rickshaw was lightly built of cane and basketwork with bicycle type wheels designed to be easily drawn by a trotting coolie. To a large bodied Western female, trained as Nicola now was to the hauling of heavy loads, the Widow Feng was only a lightweight. Directed by the shrill commands, sounds that she had painfully learnt to respond to, Nicola wheeled her new vehicle in a wide circle without difficulty and at the sort of brisk jog that had hitherto been her fastest pace. Intimation that more would now be expected of her came when she saw, with quaking flesh, one of the committee passing up a long-lashed carter’s whip to the Widow Feng.

  “Haw! Haw!” Nicola squealed from behind her gagging bit as the whip thong snapped across her naked rump. Accustomed to the cane and goad, she recognised the whip as another thing entirely. She made the response that any work beast would have found advisable, surging forward and spurting hard. The familiar feel of the dead weight of a vehicle responding readily to her effort steadied Nicola, but a noisy crack and a second application of the whip reminded her that this was neither shit cart, nor plough. Speed was what was now required of her!

  The voices following them crying “Haw! Haw, dwindled rapidly behind as Nicola lengthened her stride, fearing the renewed descent of the whip. To really push the rickshaw along she was forced to thrust her backside out and it felt very vulnerable, already decorated as it was with two throbbing wheals. Thankful for the vehicle’s lightness she trotted at a good lick circling round the hall and back into the village street.

  It was empty at this time of day and, as she feared, invited a long hard run. Sure enough the reins flipped and the whip flicked the moment she attempted to ease off. She sped on at a steady trot, beginning to breathe hard. They passed the little group of committee members again, who had emerged to applaud the success of their device. The rickshaw bounced along at a good pace and another sharp flick warned her not to falter as they passed the nursery school from which the fat little children tumbled out to giggle and point.

  The reins, quite cleverly handled and, upon Nicola’s part, anxiously heeded, guided the equipage out of the main street and into a side lane where feathery bamboo cast a cool shade. The whip cracked with more purpose now, drawing yet another line of fire across Nicola’s innocently bobbing rear. Responding with a shrill whinny from between gritted teeth and drawn lips, she accelerated. With nostrils flared and lungs heaving, breasts bouncing wildly, nipples prodding at wide angles, red gold hair streaming behind her, she broke into a full gallop. Leaning hard into the harness, her knees rising high and long white legs pumping, she clung to the shafts like grim death feeling the body of the rickshaw behind her bouncing wildly over the ruts.

  Only a few hundred yards and they emerged into the fields. Nicola felt the tug of the reins with gratitude, being almost on the point of foundering. Head up and leaning back, she brought the wild career of the rickshaw to a halt, sobbing with relief. Breathless and panting she was allowed to proceed at a sedate walk, sweat pouring off her despite her nakedness.

  With Nicola alternately trotting and walking they wound a tortuous course following the earth bunds out among the harvest fields where busy peasants stopped to call after the widow. Frequently when accosted by friends, she would rein Nicola to a stop, allowing the curious to inspect the white she-devil in her new role. Near the outer dyke before they turned back, the cool breeze off the mud banks came as a relief to Nicola’s heated skin.

  Here there were refugees’ shacks, huts of sticks and mud, where the inhabitants lived by fishing in the lagoons and fossicking for useful debris in the mud. As Nicola trotted past, their pot-bellied children ran out to gape and shout, daring the Widow Feng’s flourished whip to fling a pebble or two at the strange white she- devil who ate children. Passing over a plank bridge, Nicola glimpsed beneath her flying feet a family of boat dwellers gaping up at the passing show.

  By the time that Goh Lap’s strange beast of burden drew up, exhausted and drooping, a
t the door of the Hall of Justice Culture and Peace, her fate was sealed. Nicola’s performance had settled her usefulness as a present to appeal to the Chairman’s vanity while retaining the appearance of practicality.

  A week later, a large crowd of all ages and both sexes filled the roadway before the hall in Goh Lap attired in their best with the small children carrying red paper flags and streamers. Within the hall, Chairman Hwa was making his long expected visit to discuss with the council the level of tax assessment for the recent harvest. Outside the crowd formed a half circle around the foot of the steps to the front door. There waited the cleverly designed appeal to the Chairman’s taste for the bizarre.

  The rickshaw had been spruced up, re-painted bright red and provided with a canopy of fringed white cotton. Standing between its slender shafts, Nicola had been scrubbed and combed like a prize filly, her red hair tied back to spill down her back almost to her waist. Her wrists were fastened to the shafts by metal cuffs and short chains, but a new leather harness allowed her to bend forward and take the weight upon its shoulder straps to get maximum pull. The bit, held between her teeth by the bridle was now a piece of hollow bamboo perforated for easier breathing, to which the scarlet ribbon reins were attached.

  The harness ended with the waist belt and below it she was wholly naked. Long legs, well muscled, were unhindered in their action, her bare feet, comically large to the audience’s eyes, were efficiently hard-soled. Between her strong thighs a densely luxuriant pubic bush formed a curly V, a shade darker than her russet tresses.

  The comments of the villagers came to Nicola as unintelligible gabble but she couldn’t be indifferent to the attentions of some of the bored children who enlivened the wait by poking her, like persistent insects, with spears of grass. She was forced to react with a jerky stamp and kick, showing her teeth in a grimace, creating to the general amusement, a good impression of a horse bothered by flies.