Wild Woman

by Peter Marriner

  Half a dozen women had suffered before the white-skinned ringleader was dragged forth and taken forward in her turn for judgement. She was silenced first, gagged with a large cylinder of hollow bamboo held by a cord passed through two small holes in the sides so that the interior part kept her tongue trapped while the outer part protruded an inch or two beyond her encircling lips. Unlike her black sisters she was tied facing outwards and so was able to watch, appalled, her teeth rattling on the hard wooden surface of the gag, as a positive cascade of bright stones tumbled at her feet from amongst the capering masked figures. She was clearly designated as the principal culprit.

  The sound of hammering that she heard earlier had been the erection before the Men’s House of a kind of horse, a horizontal log supported by four shorter logs lashed to it with the ends rammed into the earth. Taken from the pole, Isobel was fastened down to the thick horizontal component, it being just long enough to underpin her torso, her limbs fastened to the supports, leaving her bottom overhanging one end and her breasts at the other with her head free and her hair adrift. The drumming had ceased and the exhausted female dancers were allowed to sink to the ground at last, nursing their stripes in the outer darkness, joined now by some of the men, while the remainder of the population, the older women and the children, crept out of the bush to supplement them as an audience. The masked figures remained within the eerily flickering light of the circle of fires and, maintaining their character as the risen spirits of the Ancestors, began to enact the punishment prescribed for Isobel. She felt the end of the log, roughly hacked by a stone axe, hard against her pubis as she lay with her soft belly pressed against the rough bark, her breasts pressed wide by the round log and her arms clasping the forward supports. She heard the trampling of feet and the rustling of leaves all around her as the masked impersonators crowded about her, trembling in apprehension of what was to happen. Her arms had been secured at the elbows. A set of hard bare toes had kicked her knees insistently apart and more forward until the inside surfaces were pressed against the supports and could be fastened at the knees. Her bottom was thus thrust out rearwards and she imagined the sight she must make, a round white behind glimmering in the darkness, thighs apart so that the whole cleft between was laid open to the eyes behind the mask.

  Wheeeppp-Smackkk! The first masked jogger brought his bamboo down with terrible force, whipping across the out-thrust cheeks of her rear with a crack that echoed across the clearing. For a moment only the force of the impact registered, then the pain came flooding after, a dreadful stinging pain that brought tears into her eyes.

  Wheeeppp-Smackkk! Almost before she had digested that much, a second mask replaced the first and the hard cane bit deep into the soft flesh of her behind again, doubling a pain that was already almost unbearable.

  Wheeeppp-Smackkk! This third stroke landed across the top of her spread thighs just below the curve of her backside, almost cutting into her vulnerable pubis bulge. Isobel dug her nails into the rough bark beneath her, tearing off whole pieces as if seeking to escape.

  Wheeeppp-Smackkk! Wheeeppp-Smackkk! The formerly distinct weals were now beginning to merge into a general throb spreading deeply below the surface. Isobel began to moan and jerk at each stroke and sweat breaking out all over her body began to trickle into intimate cleavages as the masked figures pranced up black arms whirled and successive blows were delivered. Wheeeppp-Smackkk! Wheeeppp-Smackkk! Masked spirit figures only alike in hideousness succeeded one another in laying vigorously into the principal scapegoat. These representations of the Ancestors possessed very corporeal muscles and Isobel gurgled and shrieked shrilly through her gag as the flexible switches cracked repeatedly across her jerking bottom, the tube rendering the sound a hollow quality rather appropriate to a returned ghost. In the background the onlookers kept up a continuous wailing chorus, the women’s voices predominating as if they rejoiced in it not being their flesh that suffered. There was no part of Isobel’s behind that wasn’t burning with pain, the individual weals indistinguishable as the succession of vengeful males added their inexorable punishment. With desperate energy she strained at her bonds with all four limbs, throwing herself forwards as she a slight give in the structure to which she was lashed

  She recalled her punishment on the island so far away, but being repeated now in a more hideous fashion, before the eyes of a whole tribe of savages. Her pride as a learned scientist was lost, alike with her status as a lady, the virginity her world so valued along with it. The idea concentrated her mind upon what must be her only asset, the erotic nature of her position, caused by the repeated strokes of the fiery cane to writhe her naked behind and so flaunt her most feminine attractions before the eyes of a band of male savages in a state of ecstatic possession.

  Wheeeppp-Smackkk! The cane weals were spreading, multiplying, crossing and swelling. Isobel’s frenzied tossing and jerking had weakened the lashings and rocked the foundations of the horse. She was tipped forward and her bottom rose immediately into more prominence as the front end sank. A log collapsed in the nearest fire and the fresh rush of flame illuminated the wide crease between her bottom cheeks, the plump bulge of her mound and between them the inviting dark slot of her vagina bulging beyond the end of the log as she thrust back, widening the spread of her thighs in desperate invitation. The latest long-visaged mask approaching her from behind paused and the male figure it disguised, rather than raising the now ragged switch, cast it aside as redundant. Closing with Isobel’s prominent moon-pale rump and using both black hands to grip its divided halves, the leafy costume then closed the view, parting along both her flanks. In the flat plane of the mask, the dark-slitted white eyes and crooked mouth full of pointed teeth remained woodenly indifferent, only tilting regularly a few inches up and down. Below it, though, the leafy carapace rustled with vibrant urgency, whilst the lower skirts, those obscuring Isobel’s behind, swept ever more vigorously back and forth across her flanks.

  Isobel received this assault with nothing but relief. She could service the randy males of the tribe equally as well in the character of their Ancestors. That the sprits should enjoy her by proxy was preferable to thrashing her. The succession of masks resumed taking turns, looming out of the growing darkness, great shell trimmed eyes, scooped out thin noses, grimacing great mouths with glinting teeth, taking longer about it now, for this time around, their lower parts had grown quite human erections, fucking Isobel from behind with all the fervour they could muster, as if to contribute to the disembodied enjoyment of the tribal guardian spirits. Regular hollow grunts emanated from behind each enigmatic mask. Isobel’s tubular gag meantime emitted an accompaniment of low owl-like hoots and flute-like wails. The almost invisible audience moaned almost continuously in expression of awe, greeting each time with a particular shriek, the hollow roar that signified the successful embodiment of an Ancestor into Isobel’s body. In the background on the Men’s House, the skulls of former tribal victims, glimmering apparently unsupported in the darkness, looked down with eyeless sockets on this scene of triumphant lust.

  It was almost entire darkness when the last impersonator considered his forbearer to have been satisfied. Isobel lay flogged, raped raw and exhausted. The Ancestors had made clear their attitude to, and the proper use for, female revenants. In the darkness one further adjustment was made. The bamboo cylinder in Isobel’s jaws gave convenient access to a length of vine, the severed end of which slowly dropped a cold and bitter liquid onto the back of Isobel’s tongue. She felt it irritating the inside of her throat as it trickled slowly down, but by then her body throbbed and ached to such a degree that this was merely a minor addition.

  It was not until well on into the following day, when her tongue was finally freed from the restricting presence of the gag, that she discovered she had lost her voice completely and could not produce a meaningful sound in any language.

  Not long after, with her dumb state still continuing, she was tr
aded again, this time carried by her owners to be presented at an intertribal conference to a Big Man from a more distant tribe. Unsheathing this warrior before the interested assembly, Isobel found that his penis had undergone some fearsome initiation; deep grooves sliced horribly along its length, a new growth of skin raising their edges with gnarled ribbing. Fortunately the brute had been told what to expect from her, and took Isobel’s startled check for admiration of this manly embellishment. She let him continue to think so, stroking the knobbly thing with her fingers for the moment it took to summon up her resolution and apply her lips to it.

  To this place, Isobel had been carried slung on a pole again. This time she had been laid on her back so that when the pole was thrust through under her lashings and she was lifted, her back and bottom were the lowest parts and her dangling head gave her an upside down view of the rear bearer’s wagging penis sheath. She was carried bottom foremost so that any extruded vegetation whacked her backside first. The trail passed across an extensive and apparently uninhabited plateau by narrow ways through dense growths of wild sugar cane and reed swamps. The inland volcano which had been a landmark from all her places of captivity, puffing white smoke like a stationary railway engine by day and its glow reflecting on the clouds by night, had become much closer and it seemed that her new owners lived nearly on its slopes. A faint line of sea occasionally appeared far ahead and this renewed Isobel’s hopes. She must have crossed the island and be nearing the opposite side of the island from the coast upon which she had been wrecked.

  This particular Big Man, Namatua, had acquired Isobel in order to donate her as a kind of prestigious ornament to the men’s meeting house in his village, to which she was immediately taken upon arrival. It was a huge structure as big as an English tithe barn though only wooden frame with walls of plaited leaves and a steeply pitched leaf thatched roof. Here she was established, at first in another pig pen beneath the floor from which she could only make short excursions to relieve herself over the edge of a small ravine behind the house. She was to be accessible not only to those of Namatua’s followers who were bachelors, but also to any married men who wanted a change from their wives, performing this function up on the floor above among the collection of slit gongs, human skulls and weird masks, these latter being made of basket-work, not wooden ones carved from trees, so round rather than long with the features moulded in white clay and enhanced with red and black paint with protruding tongues. The extraordinarily ribbed and gnarled male members of these tribesmen lent Isobel’s duties an extra dimension of feeling that aided her obligatory expressions of enthusiasm and inspired renewed vigour in her performances.

  While the Namerumini were sufficiently pleased by their new acquisition, for even the married men to return regularly to use her services, their wives were less so. The Namerumini women, as with Isobel’s first tribal captors, did all the hardest work and had no status at all. They had to walk long distances from the defensive position of the village to the river to fetch water, carrying it uphill in long bamboo tubes plugged at one end with clay and longer than the women were tall. But although their husbands treated them little better than slaves, they nevertheless lusted desperately for opportunities to have sex with these lords and masters. They were not allowed to enter, let alone be present at the mysteries of the Men’s House, but they could easily guess the nature of the strange dumb female’s attraction for their husbands. After a time, Isobel was promoted to serve as general dogsbody to the Men’s House, in addition to her more intimate employment. At first, men going in search of food or drink took her with them at the end of a leash to do the carrying, too proud to do such menial tasks themselves. Then finding that she understood their words for water, fruit and the various foods they simply grunted an order or pointed and sent her to fetch like a well-trained retriever. Since she resided in the Men’s House, Isobel was not subject to the power of the females, but they made their resentment evident. Though forced to grovel submissively before the males, Isobel found that she had to bully the females unpleasantly in her turn, before they would deliver up promptly whatever it was she required.

  Their opportunity for retaliation came after the ceremonial and subsequent feast that marked the initiation of a year’s production of youthful recruits to warrior status. As a result, the adult men and the newly-initiated boys lay about in the darkness in a comatose state, with bellies distended and minds stupefied by kava. Seeing the chance of taking revenge for her unwelcome competition, the women fell upon Isobel. They used one of their bamboo water carriers to put across her shoulders, tying her wrists to it with arms outstretched and drove her with flexible switches far into the bush, where lay the small fenced-about clearing to which menstruating women retired and no man would dream of venturing for fear of dreadful contamination. Here they set her up for their own version of an initiation. They thrust two more of the thick bamboos down between her shoulders and inside her knees to make an A-shape with the cross-piece and fastened her ankles to their lower ends, leaving her helplessly spread-eagled with her upper half thrust forward, breasts prominent and her bottom thrust backwards, projecting beyond the bamboo shafts. The bottom ends were lodged in the soft earth and the upper-V was trapped amid the branches of a tree, leaving Isobel tilted slightly. Clustering round her helpless body, the savages began by pulling out the bone skewers that she had made with great labour to hold together her coils of hair, laboriously smoothed and rounded by patient rubbing on a stone. The Big Man’s senior wife, an elderly female whose breasts hung almost to her waist like half-filled leather sacks, nipped one of Isobel’s well used nipples and pulled it outwards, stretching it like rubber. Isobel felt the sharp tip of the skewer against the tender nodule and closed her eyes tight. The puncture brought shooting pain and she let out a wild shriek, opening her tear-filled eyes to see with horror the white bone piercing right through the fat red teat, blood, rain and milk trickling round under the breast. The skewer was left in place projecting horizontally several inches on either side at the base of her nipple and the woman secured another, turning her attention to the other breast and taking her time about it. This time Isobel watched the penetration aghast and redoubling the volume of her cries at the appearance of the mutilation.

  The other females warmed to the game. Isobel’s nose was already holed, for the Big Man Namatua had caused it to be pierced through the septum to take his enforced morning-after present of a decorative crescent cut from white shell, an unwelcome reward for having introduced him to the novel pleasure of being ridden by a female, so they focused their attention lower upon the sensitive lips that lay between her thighs. Despite the pitiful noises she produced, they pierced Isobel’s blood-suffused clitoris, pressing back the hood to expose it to the long skewer, which pressed back the lips to reveal the dark depths. Probing her vagina with stretching fingers and testing its spread with much giggling and shrieking, they then produced a very large yam and introduced it to that gaping orifice. Fortunately the tuber’s size was more a matter of length than girth, being fully a yard long but no more than a handspan in thickness. Its rough and earthy skin had a knobbly fibrous surface as unsuited to its present use as anything that might have been imagined, more brutal than the sharpness of the skewer. It was fortunate that the vegetable had been cooked, freshly steamed and still warm and wet, but Isobel expressed her desperate reaction to its bulging and scraping progress by shrieking as loudly as her numbed vocal chords would permit. Though her tormentors were sure of their inviolable sanctuary, they spared the time to use another fragment of root vegetable, ramming it between her aching jaws as a gag.

  Released at last from the torture of the frame, Isobel tried to get at the yam but the women defeated that by tying her wrists behind her. She was forced to bend over, while the still oozing holes they had made, had their projecting white skewers connected together with cord, her tender nipples tied one to the other and both together to her nose and to her throbbing clitoris in opposit
e directions, so tight that Isobel couldn’t straighten up again and was forced to remain bent double while her tormentors amused themselves by thrashing her soundly. Her naked body was running with sweat and rain together, so that the rough switches the savages used made a wet smack as they landed and shook off showers of droplets as they lifted. Isobel was restrained in her vulnerable posture, head down, tethered by her skewered nose to her painfully pierced pubis. She was half blinded too by her hair, which clung damply about her head and shoulders and tumbled in wet dark tangles dripping at the ends. She could drive her teeth into the vegetable gag, mashing and spluttering bits in all directions, but no such response was possible with the huge vegetable between her thighs, keeping her legs even more awkwardly apart than the sharp ends of the transverse skewer, as she was driven to and fro in response to their blows. The pain of piercing subsided mostly to a dull ache, but her heavy breasts swung not quite in unison with every waddling step, their heavy jolting reawakening the pain by tweaking their pierced nipples and tugging jointly or separately upon nose and pubis by turns.