Pleasure Island [The Chronicles of Lidir] (19 page)

When she opened her eyes again, the smacking had stopped. The hard, purple stem had been fitted through a polished loop of wood on a long stick and the man was kneeling. One of the women was sliding this loop slowly up and down the stem. The second woman was forcing the man's shoulders back, which made his belly curve and seemed to push the stem out further. The stick was pushed until the loop slipped down to press against the bag and the plum swelled deeper purple. The next time the loop was withdrawn it locked against the plum. The man was whimpering as this tight wooden band was forced up a fraction further against the resistance of his distended plum. Then it was massaged against it, very slightly back and forth, so the skin was drawn with it. The Princess, now mildly interested again, issued a command and the woman's foot pressed against the belly. The toes expanded, dug into the flesh and the foot pushed. Accompanied by a groan, the wooden ring came free. But the respite was short. The man was lifted, pushed forwards on all fours and the ring was now refitted from behind, between his legs, so the stick could be used to pull the ring until it slipped past the resistance of the plum then quickly slid down again and jammed against the base, leaving the skin about the cock drawn very taut indeed. The stick, when pulled and lifted, pressed between and separated the ballocks and the cockstem pointed down. The man was turned sideways, that the Princess might now see the dense, tight, purple plum perform.

While one woman reined it back within its skin, the other smacked the buttocks and the victim sobbed into his folded arms; he tried to bury his face in the sand, but each time his hips rotated forwards and away from the smacks, the tightness of the pulled-back skin made him cry out with the pain. When he gasped on the verge of cruel deliverance by this means, the Princess shouted something to the women and immediately, they desisted. The ring was unsweated from his stem and a small support was brought. He was made to bend across this while the Princess examined him. She touched him only briefly, pressing her hands against the angry red bands across his bottom and closing her fingers round the bright red stem, with its ballocks clinging to it tightly, seeming small now against its thickness. To the man, the Princess said but one word, 'Abaata,' and nodded with satisfaction at this lesson learnt well as she tried again to make her fingertips close around his turgid stem.

The woman with the catskin cape was looking at Anya, who, already pale in the face of such cruelty, had paled further beneath this gaze. The woman stepped towards her, raised the ball on its stick and shook it in her face, enveloping her in a cloud of pungent spice. Anya cried out and tripped as she shied away. With her eyes watering, she was hauled up and pinned by the women, who were shouting at her, making her cry for real now as Ikahiti tried to calm her and the woman advanced again. The Princess, turning, held her hand up. The women released Anya and the cat-woman reluctantly stepped aside as the Princess returned. An argument now ensued between Ikahiti and the cat-woman. The Princess held her hand up again. She pointed to Ikahiti, whose cheeks turned deeper bronze, then she pointed to the entrance to the cave. The cat-woman folded her arms in satisfaction. Ikahiti, downcast, was forced to leave in disgrace before the weight of all the eyes and the muttered disapprovals. But as she passed Anya, her hand brushed tenderly down Anya's side and their eyes met briefly. Ikahiti shook her head and though Ikahiti had tried to smile at Anya, Anya's heart sank at that shake of head and the foreboding in those eyes.

The captured man was given over to the dozen or more young girls already armed with sticks and paddles. They began by making him stand while a thin skin belt was wrapped for two turns around the plum of his cock and pulled tightly. One girl held each end of the belt taut while two others smacked his buttocks with the paddle until his milt was ejected in three thick arcs on to the sand. Then he was made to kneel while the handle of the paddle was introduced into his body to render him hard again. Finally he was driven out by the delighted horde of nubile bodies to join the others in the clearing where the framework structures were kept. Throughout that long afternoon and even into the evening, Anya could hear many cries of delight, many sounds of punishment, interruptions of pleasure with pain. Yet these noises were but brief interludes of distraction from her own protracted torments as the rites of her initiation were begun.

[9]

Initiation

Were she to have looked down between her feet now, Anya would have seen the narrow cylindrical pool which appeared cut into the rock floor of this part of the cave. The water welled over the lip and felt cool against her toes, not cold enough to make her shiver, yet she shivered all the same. In the depths of this small pool was an eerie glow. When she had first stepped up to its edge, she had seen something down there, swirling round, a dark living garland, a predatorial turbulence in the water. The women had had to hold her to prevent her running away. The second time she had looked, with her heart in her throat now, she had seen nothing but the dappled glow of pale green light and a faint disturbance, as of a distant landscape seen through shimmering heat. Once her hands had been tied to a thick ropy tendril that was slung over the wooden frame above her head and she knew for certain what would happen, she would not look again. She stared across to the lake until that vision disappeared too, behind the young girls crowding round, and her apprehension drew sustenance from the expressions - each bright young face at once excited and vicariously afraid. For though Anya did not know it, the things being done to her were part of the ritual of the island, done to every island woman. Yet without this foreknowledge, she was as unprotected as if she were being drawn blindfold through an endless passage with many bumps and turns, by a guide who was oblivious of her state.

The cat-woman walked as far round Anya as she could, showering her breasts, her underarms, her squeezed-together buttocks and thighs with the spice. A young girl pushed a wreath of bright red flowers out into the pool. With a shudder, Anya watched it sink. Then the women, one to each side of the frame, wound the handle click by click and Anya's body stretched until her breasts were lifted high, her belly tautened and her legs seemed very long indeed as her toes gripped fecklessly at the smooth wet stone where countless antecedent toes had surely gripped in vain before. Once those toes were finally lifted from the floor and the body, seen from behind, formed a perfect streamlined shape - hands pinned wrist to wrist; fingers pressed together as if in supplication; hair straight down the shoulders and smoothed by brushing to a shining tongue with a pointed tip; delicious swell of hips, smoothness of bottom, delicate split; and a tapering flow from thighs to calves to feet that formed twin arrows pointing downwards - the frame on its hard wooden rollers was trundled over the pool and that perfect nubile pendulum swung. It was steadied by sure hands, positioned above the centre of the pool and lowered smoothly, so it cut then slid into the water, which took it like a slowly slipping glove.

Anya was too frightened to move; she was too afraid even to lift her knees and press them to her belly for protection. But she squeezed her thighs together hard enough to make them behave as one. As the water touched her coldly then began sliding up her legs, she bit her lip and looked up at the human ceiling closing in above her - arched forms capped by enthralled faces - and then she closed her eyes. Trapped bubbles tickled up her legs; the water wet her curly bush and seeped between her buttocks. When it touched her belly, she began to shudder with the cold. When it began to lap beneath her breasts and the clicking wheel stopped - jammed perhaps, for the women above had begun to mutter urgently - she suddenly became very aware of this separation; her lower body was below the water and vulnerable and it somehow made it worse than if she had been totally submerged. She began to panic silently, inside. It was as if she were drowning, yet her head was far above the water. She was trying not to move her body, trying hardly to breathe, yet her body needed giant gulps of air in order to survive.

Suddenly, the rope jerked and she began to slide again. And now she thought she would truly drown, for the sliding did not stop even when her chin was lifted high, with her head held back and her hair floating and the water lapping round her ears. She took one last gulp as she was lowered into the blackness - for she kept her eyes shut tight. Then she felt it touch her. Something smooth slid like a snake around her legs. She bucked. The snake moved up, curled round and began to search blindly against her belly. The head of this thing was round and tapered. It had lips; she felt them pull against the fine hairs on the skin of her belly, reach into her navel and press against her like a sucker. Then it tightened round her like a belt, making her thrash her body, shake her head and cry out under water, gulping and gasping. Suddenly she was breathing air, the creature fell away from her and she was racked up from the pool. The water streamed down her body; her hair was heavy and wrapped around her face like a spider's web. The bubbles in her ears burst and she could hear the excited chatter all around her. The frame was rolled slowly across and the tendril was lowered until her feet rested on the floor.

Now the cat-woman lifted the weight of clinging hair away from Anya's face. She studied that face closely, then looked down at the heaving bosom traversed by rivulets of water. Assessing her, she turned her round, then back again, then nodded slowly to the women. A heavy stick with a loop at each end was brought. It was laid at Anya's feet. 'No ... Oh, no. Please ...' she begged. And though they did not know her language, it seemed they understood her, for one of the women touched Anya's cheek, trying to calm her while others shackled her feet apart. Next, a wooden comb was used to draw the curls back from her fleshy lips, which were then nipped until they plumped up hard. A bowl was brought containing a paste, which was stirred. It smelled strongly of overripe meat. It was smeared thickly about her nipples. Between her legs, the lips were separated and it was smeared about the nubbin, then down the edges of the lips. The cheeks of her buttocks were separated fully and the paste was buttered against the mouth. Prepared and terrified further, she was wound up into the air and the frame was again dragged over the pool. She made the mistake of looking down. The water boiled with swarming, coiling shapes, drawn by the previous bait - her body. She tried to move her legs together but her feet were shackled apart. The rope was lowered very quickly. Her right foot touched the lip of the pool and held, but the wheel kept clicking; her body tipped, then splashed into the water. Her left foot jarred against the stone and the feeling came again, the crushing tightness in her chest and now the terrible open feeling, the open bareness of her belly and the split cheeks of her buttocks and the tender tops of her thighs. The clicking wheel stopped when the water reached her neck and her uplifted terror-stricken face began to gulp for air. But this time the wheel had not jammed; it had been locked by means of wooden pegs. And now the women gathered closely round to watch the shadowy shapes spiralling slowly upwards round the slender body struggling so ineffectually in the pale green light.

The muscles of Anya's upper thighs were cramping as she kept trying to bring her legs together. The snakes swirled between her thighs; they wrapped around her waist; soft cool slithering scales caressed the warm reluctance of a skin which tried to crawl away from the horror of this intimacy. Her breasts, lifted by the water, floating upwards, proffered tight projecting sustenance coated thickly with the paste. Thick soft lips suckered coldly about them, sucking awful, shivering pleasure from deep within, drawing their terror-haunted tips to bellied bulbils, then gorging on those glutted teats while the pale green bodies, gently pumping, flailed softly in the water like willow branchlets tugged by a sluggish stream. Then the cold soft lips began searching between her open legs, nipping the hairs by suction, then sliding along her sex lips. A gelatinous slipping clamp moved up them, extracting every trace of paste, then drawing again - a horrible drawing feeling as her sex lips swelled with blood - while a second sucker searched inside, its soft head pressing against her until she opened, then bedding until its suction pulled deep within. And while this head was bedded in her body, the other sucker, edging up, had found the hard tip of her nubbin and closed upon it, sucking very deeply. The head emerged from Anya's sex, moved back and found the entrance to her bottom.

The women on the poolside waited. Anya's mouth, fishlike too now, opening and closing with no sound emerging, finally closed completely. Deep shuddering breaths were suddenly taken through her nose. Thereafter, her mouth opened only intermittently, for little gasps, soft moans, but her eyes told all of what was happening beneath the wavelets, which became more subdued too as the five snakes settled to their soft rhythmic suction, green garlands wafting gently, feeding, pumping the velvet feeling into the nipples, the nubbin, the bottom, the base of the spine, then drawing the rich red blood back out.

Anya felt so warm, so heavy-lidded now. Each breath she took was a cooling, heavy blanket lying upon her, then dissolving, its weight soaking deep into her body. Only the places that the fish sucked seemed alive with a softly pulsing pleasure. Her nipples had swelled to fit precisely to each mouth, her nubbin pushed to feed and an ice-cold vein of pleasure threaded her spine. The entrance to her bottom throbbed, sending a deep swelling sensation within her. She drifted, barely awake, with these pleasure points pulsing softly. Between her legs, it was as if a lover were sucking her, keeping her swollen, on the brink; the pleasure surged, then waned. Each wave left her feeling more deliciously weak, until she felt her body would dissolve completely and merge with the very water that lapped between the bronze-skinned toes that crowded round.