The females’ sense of inviolacy was brought suddenly to an end by the unmistakeable sound of musket shots close at hand. The black women’s savage glee changed instantly to terror. Isobel, by contrast, received the sounds with elation, hearing with deep satisfaction her tormentors’ wails of terror as they bolted for the bush. Believing that rescue must have come at last, she waddled rapidly but blindly in the direction that she thought the shots had come from, catching the waggling vegetable on a low branch in the process with a yelp and snapping off most of its unassimilated length. Guided by a fresh outburst of hysterical female shrieks, she blundered into the newcomers emerging from the dripping bush; no rescuing white men, only more naked black savages, differing from her present owners only in that they brandished muskets as well as axes and clubs. They were dragging with them the woman who made the first piercing, whose eyes rolled in terror as she interrupted her lamentations to point at Isobel’s waddling form, delivering a voluble stream of urgent explanations.
From these victorious raiders, only raucous laughter greeted the ludicrous appearance of this strange female. They easily cut their novel prize free from her bonds, but the deeply embedded yam defeated them for some time. Standing over the groaning and defeated white woman, having casually tipped her upside down on her back and holding her legs in the air, they stared down between her thighs and argued over the problem. Different ones tried to get a firm grip upon the broken-off remnant, but it was slippery with mud. At last, one produced a stone-bladed knife and began vigorously carving out chunks of the interior, scooping it round and finding it being ready cooked, occasionally stopping to chew the results, until finally he had excavated enough to slacken the stiff outer skin of the root and collapse its rigidity.
This unregulated change of ownership by capture now threatened to be Isobel’s final move. The invaders must have had access to traders on the adjacent coast since some of the warriors were proud owners of a musket, but if they identified Isobel as connected with the white visitors, it was only to take her for a more unusual kind of gift sent by the Ancestors for their benefit. She expected to be put to the usual use, but she was now the prize of a tribe whose vegetable gardens extended up onto the slopes of the volcano. It was quite a modest volcano in size, but regularly active and had recently been overflowing, with tongues of fiery lava flowing down into the forest to become destructive to the natives’ yam gardens. The woman of the Namerumini was brought to translate their intentions. Isobel was to be given a message concocted by the sorcerer of the tribe, a message which she was expected to learn. The purpose soon became clear. It had been concluded that Isobel, as a known focus of magic, had been provided as a means of passing on the message to the god of the volcano to which she was shortly to be sacrificed. Between the terror of the translator who expected to be eaten as soon as her usefulness was over and Isobel’s reluctance to be considered intelligent enough to understand the message, this was a painful process entailing frequent thrashings for both.
At last, however, Isabel was adjudged by the sorcerer to be as ready for the fiery meeting as could be expected and considered fit to be delivered to the burning mountain. She was stretched out on her belly, with wrists and ankles bound, arms beyond her head. The pole was merely thrust under these bonds so that her body hung in a deep curve, belly at the lowest point with all the strain that put upon her extremities and the abdominal muscles. Fortunately as they laboured their way up the slopes, she was frequently set down by her panting carriers for a rest, several times feeling the ground shake beneath her trembling breasts and stomach. The belching volcano suddenly began firing out boulders, like bombs from a siege mortar, arching high into the air. She felt her carriers flinch as several landed in succession with a crash of broken branches not far away. Suddenly there was a more resounding crash and the two men dropped the pole and took to their heels with the rest of the party, all except the sorcerer in the lead, who was lying beneath a smoking boulder laced with irregular fiery red cracks, just his legs and arms being visible, the rest obscured by smoke and steam. There was a horrible stink of burning meat.
The abandoned pole slipped easily out and slid away among the burning trees. Suddenly enervated, Isobel in her turn levered herself up and scuttered downhill in her turn with wrists and ankles still bound together, in ungainly fashion on hands and knees like a hopping rabbit. Another smaller molten bomb landed through the vegetation just ahead of her, little more than a sizzling hot coal this one and, with the inspiration of terror, she employed it to burn through her fibre bonds. Then springing to her feet she sought refuge in extended flight, unattended, instinctively making towards the sea.
She came so close to escape and civilisation. Face downwards and captive again, Isobel mewled in voiceless rage and despair, suspended by all four limbs and jogged up and down, dumped unceremoniously on belly and breasts from time to time as the four men who had seized her negotiated the rocky shoreline. The coast was largely steep-to, with cliffs of pale limestone full of caves from which she had seen a vast flock of swallows pouring into the dawn light. She had been starving by the time she reached it, feeling her ribs becoming visible and remembering stories of edible nests, she was making her way towards this goal, when seeing from amid the greenery a white sail just off shore, she had scrambled frantically down towards the margin only to be pounced upon and captured once more by these four near naked brutes. At first she had fought and scratched like an animal, but now her plight had brought equally desperate calculation to the fore. Without the use of her voice, how she could best behave to persuade these strangers of her value?
Their destination turned out to be a rocky shelf splattered with bird droppings at the very mouth of one of the sea caves where a small fire smouldered. She had already submitted to being raped by one and a second was halfway through having his will with her, when it occurred to Isobel that these were not the usual kind of resident savages. She thought perhaps they were of Malay stock but by then the conjecture was of no avail to her. Incapable of speech as she was, they had given her no chance to express her intelligence by signs, or even to demonstrate a willingness to cooperate. They had tied her wrists together and two of them at a time held her legs apart for the convenience of their comrades. They laughed and joked between them, but they were evidently very wary of her deceptively impressive teeth and nails. Isobel could only do her best to ease her rape, endeavouring to show she was human by giving the impression that she responded to their manliness, even when the third one took her painfully in the anus. At last she became resigned to their stupidity and resolved merely to endure. She knew very well by now that a woman could outlast a man at this business, even if there were four of them. Sure enough by dawn, the brutes were snoring round the ashes of the fire, heads wrapped in their waist cloths, the rest of their bodies exposed naked. She used the same trick of burning through her bonds, then got cautiously up onto hands and knees and had got within a yard of the entrance, when against the light appeared a short squat figure in a sailor’s cap, clutching a large revolver. Hissing furiously he rushed forward, knocking Isobel head over heels backwards into the middle of the startled bodies with a swipe of the revolver and set about with evidently violent curses kicking the groaning men into action.
He questioned his followers furiously and then the dazed prisoner, using several languages of which she only vaguely identified a couple and to which she could only gesture to her throat and croak mournfully. Having had no access to such things as a comb or soap, or even a mirror, she was hardly aware of how weird her appearance was. It had been the Nusamba who had propped open her jaws with a hardwood baton while they filed her front teeth to the sharp points they regarded as alluring and the widows of Baberaga village who had dyed her face and much of her upper half blue-black as a mark of respect for her dead owner. The Big Man of the Namerunimi had her nose pierced and the women of his tribe added her bone pierced nipples and the ornament through her clitoris, whil
e her betel-stained mouth was a memorial of the Bulutu. In the course of her escape and recent capture her hair had become a frizzy red bush again, covering her head and shoulders and entangled with dirt and bits of vegetation.
There followed a noisy argument, Isobel’s four sleepy captors sulkily repeated their original identification of Orang Utan, exhibiting the scratches she had left and the little captain furiously upbraided them and grumbled about Orang Blanda which Isobel thought meant the Dutch. At last he came to a decision. At his direction, two of the men grabbed Isobel by two naked limbs apiece and hoisted her bodily, carrying her off between them one to each side, while their leader and the other men picking up the ropes, poles and baskets, followed behind. Their new goal was just the other side of the headland anchored in a convenient bay, a small white schooner carrying at its stern the red and yellow sunburst flag of the Japanese Empire.
The same vessel next came to anchor, many days and two thousand miles away, lying offshore from a walled town in a roadstead sheltered by little wooded islands, one crowned by a little red and white pagoda. The Japanese skipper had reasoned that to deliver his chance find with her tale of abuse to the nearest port under European control would invite searching questions from the Dutch as to his dealings in close proximity to their jealously guarded colonial possessions and no doubt provide an excuse to ruin his trade by imprisoning his crew on charges of rape. He was bound for the coast of China to deliver his cargo of rare luxuries to smugglers who paid bribes to a local mandarin to wink at this contravention of the Imperial embargo on foreign trade and he was accustomed to turning any opportune discovery to his profit. Lying alongside the schooner were two smaller crescent-shaped vessels, one with a dark brown slatted sail and long sweeps, flying like the schooner a private recognition signal of a large red flag at the masthead. The other vessel was an armed guard boat of the kind normally charged with coastguard duties, flying the elaborate ensign of a provincial mandarin. The schooner’s main hatch was uncovered and from it a swarm of men in conical straw hats with long black pigtails, bare legged and bare footed, but armed to the teeth with swords and daggers, were busy moving baskets of bird’s nests, dried sea slugs and slabs of sandalwood overside into the attending vessel.
At a small table the skipper, the captain of the junk and an accountant in a plain brown gown, his head shaven except for the pigtail, were tallying over a little heap of bright silver in coins and little bars. They were being surveyed in lordly fashion by a massively brilliant figure in a long, multi-coloured silk gown, ornamented on the breast with the depiction of some fabulous beast, wearing a black conical brimless cap with a blue button at its centre indicating an official rank, but one that might be discreetly purchased by bribes in the right places.
“Honoured sir!” the skipper addressed the mandarin, bowing and hissing politely. “In a small and unworthy recognition of your benevolence and good will towards our humble trade, there is yet one gift to give you pleasure, as an addition to your widely famed collection!” The grinning sailors were hauling on a rope and drawing out of the depths of the hold, a small bamboo cage.
“Behold! A female of the animal called by the natives of the Southern seas, Orang Utang, a Woman of the Forest!” During her incarceration in the hold, Isobel had lost all trace of any tan and her skin-stain, newly enhanced at the skipper’s orders, made her breasts and bottom cheeks conspicuous by their contrasting whiteness, both gleaming from a coating of oil against sunburn. Noting the places where the dye had run down from her head and shoulders, he had added stripes to her upper half, the only dye he had found to hand, giving her blue skin a greenish finish. Head protruding from the bars, her blue-green face stared wildly about her framed by a huge mane of frizzed-out russet hair. Within a betel-juice induced scarlet mouth, with a blood-red drool from the corners, sharply pointed carnivorous white teeth gleamed conspicuously, apparently warded from use by a restricting muzzle of leather straps. To complement the coloured and striped skin and carnivorous mouth, her pierced nose now sprouted a prominent bush of red hair in the manner of a drooping moustache that contrasted curiously with her huge white breasts.
The little cage the sailors had constructed to the skipper’s orders, of lengths of stout bamboo, was lashed together with strips of rattan. It had seemed too small for Isobel to fit into, when she was first made to get down upon hands and knees to crawl inside. At first it left her hind end sticking out but a couple of smart cracks with a rattan cane made her resolve that difficulty. Before her, a circle of bamboo formed an aperture in the end of the cage just big enough to get her head through and then by pressing her shoulders tight up to the front bars and curving her spine up against the roof she could pull her bottom in sufficiently for the door to be crammed shut behind her. Even with her elbows bent and her knees drawn up beneath her close to her breasts, it made a tight fit, with knees, shoulders, hips and bottom pressed against the bamboo bars, leaving her head protruding at one end and her two bare feet at the other.
As she swung in her cage, manipulated by a long bamboo pole, there came into view the ingenious skipper’s final inspiration, which had been to pinch and then pierce a lump of the skin between Isobel’s anus and the end of her tailbone, sufficient to take a brass D-ring, through which his sailors had plaited a thick pig-tail made of her own red hair, which with its base nestling solidly between her plump white bottom cheeks, created the appearance of a little projecting natural tail. Within the cage as it swung to face the new audience, Isobel gave a curious animal-like shriek, grimacing and shaking her head and clawing at the bars vigorously enough to make the lashings creak. Behind her the skipper had surreptitiously used his knee upon the inwardly inserted bamboo pole fixed to the rear frame, to drive it an inch or so deeper into her vagina, a gesture she had learned it was best to respond to.
“Despite her natural ferocity,” her supposed discoverer declared, “when she is in heat as now, she will readily present herself to be mounted, even displaying to my crew for lack of her own kind!” He leered. “The unenlightened savages who had captured her no doubt found a use for her!”
“Disgusting primitives!” The mandarin waved hands with their long fingernails in fastidious fashion. “Nevertheless, your gift is much appreciated! I have heard of these strange creatures of the forest indeed! Extraordinary! I will certainly be pleased to add your wondrous animal to my menagerie!”
Chapter Six
The walls of the coastal city of which the mandarin Wang Tzu had purchased the governorship formed an extensive rectangle containing much empty space in these days when trade beyond the sea-coast was forbidden. Wang Tzu who had achieved his riches by creaming off the profits of the local smugglers had built a palace within one of these areas. Standing within an extensive garden, with a pillared façade painted in red and gold, it was set upon an elevated platform, the roof red-tiled with curved decorated eaves and elaborated corners, rising to a second storey in the central part, similarly roofed above a balcony with an elaborate balustrade all round. The self-made mandarin’s fortune might have bought his rank and built a palace, but it failed to protect him when a new Governor General was appointed to the province with a remit to search out reported illicit contacts with foreign devils who had come by sea with their filthy opium mud and their child-stealing missionaries to disturb the peace of the Celestial kingdom.
In consequence not long after, the sound of wailing women filled the succession of enclosed courtyards and the rooms that formed the living quarters, painted halls through which gaudily uniformed soldiers in slatted armour and horned helmets with elaborately bladed weapons or almost equally antique matchlock muskets were herding the disgraced Mandarin’s family. They were destined for eventual execution in the capital along with their progenitor and former protector. From tall double doors painted with writhing grimacing dragons in red and blue and framed by long vertical strips of ideograms in black on red, down a flight of steps guarded by carve
d beast figures, there presently emerged into the garden an official in mandarin robes and elaborately festooned hat showing the red button of a high rank, accompanied by an escort of an officer and a couple of stolid soldiers. He was accompanied by a secretary with pen and tablets ready to make an inventory of the disgraced owner’s confiscated possessions. He was followed by two constables carrying punitive rods and one carrying a large cylinder full of spills which, when shaken out, would signify the number of strokes to be administered. The group was preceded by the obsequiously bowing servants of the unfortunate delinquent, conscious of the fate that might well await them too and fearful of the instant floggings that such a magistrate could deal out on the spot.
The garden was walled and set in correct fashion with elaborate artificial hills and crags of vari-coloured and artfully shaped stone with carefully selected flowering trees and feathery bamboos among which paths wound to discover trickling rills and cascades and fishponds. In small red and gold painted pavilions along the paths, small cramped cages held the former owner’s collection of grotesque or fearsome animals; a tiger, several varieties of large snake, a crocodile a pangolin and a huge leathery tortoise.
“A barbaric effect!” the new mandarin judged sniffily.
“No doubt the butchers will be pleased to bid for them, sir!” the secretary commented deferentially. One cage held a sad gingery-red hairy gangly-limbed figure.
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