As he struggled to get some semblance of normality back to his breathing and demeanour, Giovanna stood and stalked away. Philip frowned. He hadn’t exactly been expecting a cuddle, but to walk away without a word? His unasked questions were answered as she returned with a tea towel from the kitchen and dropped it into his lap with a smile – the first he’d ever seen from her.
“Clean yourself up,” she said, her eyes twinkling. “It’s month end. You’ve got some more books to balance.”
Hina, the Hawaiian Helen
J. D. Munro
Molokai, twelfth century
Hina combs her short hair as thousands of men breathe their last in the thundering surf below. A red waterfall spills between the steep cliffs. Crashing whitewater at the gorge’s base churns the flowing blood. The ocean’s frothy fingertips grasp the bodies littering the rocks and sand, carrying dead warriors out to sea for the shark god’s feast. Hungry waves dash themselves against the mountain crags, demanding more kills to chew and swallow. Booming breakers echo the dull thuds of war-clubs on flesh and bone. Dying shouts choke and burble into silence, and even the sea rests in quiet for a moment, licking its salty lips.
Hina waits. Eighteen years a prisoner behind these fortress walls, abducted when she had already borne two children to another island’s chief, and still Hina is the most beautiful woman in all of Polynesia. Her fierce lover, Koa, defeats vast battalions in protection of her. Koa will come to her soon, exhausted but inflamed by war. Hina will purify him – she is a trickling brook. Since Koa first gazed upon her bathing in her mountain stream all those years ago, Hina has been as slick as the smooth and slippery rocks clattering in the streambed, chattering as Koa stole her away.
She refused to cover her nude body when he interrupted her bath a lifetime ago, her thighs spread for the water goddess’s cool tongue of current to wash away a desire that the aged chief, her husband, couldn’t arouse nor slake. Resting back on her elbows in the shallow water, head tipped back, she watched Koa splash upstream, upside down. Her black hair, which brushed the ground when she stood, flowed like seaweed. She waited, hair tugging at her scalp like her clamoring thoughts. This stream was taboo, a death curse on anyone other than the royal ali’i rulers who touched its water. Pele, the volcano goddess, would turn this intruder to stone for his sacrilege. But no molten lava scorched and manacled the stranger. He stared down at her, his malo fluttering in the trade wind. Far from being struck dead for breaking sacred law, the scant swatch of loincloth emphasized his continued pulse of life.
Hina stood and faced him, tall and naked, knowing no shame in her expansive beauty. She kicked at her wet hair tangling around her ankles in the swirling water. Gentle ripples trickled around his shark-tooth anklets, their fierce rattle and the pebbles’ clacking the only sound as the pair stared at each other.
He dropped to his knees, skinning them on the rocks, stunned by the truth of her fabled loveliness. Tales of her beauty had teased him for years, but he set out to capture his enemy’s prize property only to provoke war. He, busy rebel with rival lands to attack and conquer, had no time for love.
A scout shouted in the distance, spotting Koa’s infamous red-sailed canoe. Koa seized her. Hina didn’t resist. Her husband could barely balance on these slippery rocks, but Koa ran downstream despite her opulent weight. Draped across his shoulder, her wet breasts pressed to his back, her bare okole nestled against his cheek.
Koa could have taken brutal possession of his stolen property, could have slaked his lust and simultaneously punished her husband, the chief who sailed here from Tahiti with his imported gods and oppressive religion of restrictions and curses. He could have tossed her to his warriors for leftovers, then fed her to the shark god. This was the way of their people; her husband would have done the same with one of Koa’s women. Instead, he set her down in the back of the twin-hulled warship, away from the men’s stares. His godlike body towered over them. He covered her with the soft folds of a kapa cloth blanket and helped his men paddle home.
Untied and unobserved, she sat behind him as they skimmed across the sea. He pulled back against the oars, his shoulder-length hair brushing her lap. His muscles danced under his skin. Like the simple human figures her people carved in rock, his broad shoulders narrowed to a slender waist. His bare haunches gripped the wood plank seat under his malo. The loincloth covered only the seam of his body. Where her husband’s okole spread and jiggled, this man’s dense muscle rippled, square and solid as stone. The sheen of sweat sparkled on fine brown skin as constellations guided their way through darkness.
He glanced only once over his shoulder at her during the long voyage away from the only land she had known, towards what she knew not. As he paused, his oar dripped. The quiet splash sang to her over crashing waves and grunts of the men. That plink of water began to wear down her heart, as a waterfall erodes crevasses out of cliffs, carving a gaping chasm of desire.
The steep cliffs of Molokai stabbed the skyline of her new home. Koa carried Hina up a narrow ravine, root-brambled and rocky, the only oceanfront access to his impenetrable fortress, hidden above on a high plateau. He slung her over his shoulder again. She rested her hands at the small of his back to steady herself, and felt his shifting muscle and bone. He wrapped his arm around her thighs, his hand gripping her hip. His opposite hand rested at the back of her knees. Her hair whipped his face in the wind that chased them up the mountainside, but he knew the secret path’s twists and turns like the crooks of his own body – like he would soon know hers. A sheer drop-off fell behind them, but his footing was sure, his breath even, his hold strong despite her significant weight. The ocean receded far below them. No one would be able to rescue her from this place.
He entered the smooth-floored compound, placing her gently on her feet when he crossed the threshold of a private room. They stood facing each other, alone. His chest rose and fell after the exertion of carrying her.
Hina stood poised and regal. She’d seen what happened to the women her clan captured and enslaved. Because of the blood afterwards, the new slaves were banished to the menstrual hut, where the tribe’s women must wait out their monthly flow out of men’s sight. As if a woman’s blood would contaminate them, Hina thought, these men who made the shedding of blood their daily business. It wasn’t a monthly flow that trickled down the prisoners’ thighs but battle wounds, man’s war carved out on the bodies of women.
Knowing this, Hina wondered that she felt so little, not even fear. She had felt nothing as they paddled away from her husband, children, mother. She didn’t look back over her shoulder at the island of her birth, didn’t regret the lack of pursuing boats. This nothing wasn’t so different from the nothing that was her life – no choices, given to an old man at her first blood. The ageing chief had chafed during her adolescence, waiting for proof of her womanhood, salivating for the rupturing of her virginity, more blood so soon after her first blood, then no blood, then the blood of childbirth. Then war. It all came back to blood. Though why the old chief had been so anxious to heave and grunt over her she couldn’t say; it seemed more toil to him than satisfaction. As his bulk loomed over her, his rapidity was the only thing that saved her from crushing suffocation. Sometimes he didn’t even make it inside her. He thrust at the magnificent fullness of her thighs before she could open them, flooding her legs and the kapa mat.
She dropped the blanket and turned her back to Koa. Let him take her like the dog that she was to these men who leashed her. She lowered herself to the floor, graceful within her glorious size. She waited on her haunches, her hair spread on the floor around her. After pain and fury would come the relief of death, not so different from the boredom that defined her life
Koa sat behind her, his legs spread to scissor her girth. His inner thighs pressed against her outer calves. The flap of his malo tickled the bottoms of her upturned feet, curled under her okole. He gathered her hair at the nape of her neck. Even his large fist couldn’t encompass it all. He tug
ged, needling her scalp, then let go.
Then – he combed her hair. This mammoth task took her slaves hours every morning. Now the muddy tangles would grow worse when matted with her blood. He started at the ends, using his fingers. Hina tensed. This soft subservience was beneath the dignity of royal ali’i such as himself. As he worked, he hummed. Though they’d been together for hours now, she hadn’t yet heard his voice. He commanded his army through actions, not words. He had not sent a soldier for her capture but had kidnapped her himself. His rich-timbred voice was as smooth as polished calabash bowls. Her toes, tucked up between his legs, now and then wriggled – his answering, insistent pressure against them never faltered.
He switched to a whalebone comb. She relaxed as he combed this hair that shackled her – a chain made of her own body. She passed her days lying down to take the oppressive weight off her scalp. The chief refused her request to cut the black mantle to the waist-length of the common girls.
She dozed while Koa combed. She awoke to a dry kiss on her shoulder and the rustle of his leaving.
The next day, she watched from her hut as the fortress came to life. Women pounded poi in the courtyard, breasts swaying as they beat the taro root. Men sharpened their weapons and practiced for battle. Hina made out the hut of the slave girls – some would be from her own clan.
Laughter at ribald jokes rippled through the compound. She found the camaraderie between men and women unusual. Still, unease ran through the camp, on account of her. Koa should never have brought such precious cargo here. Alert sentries paced at the walls. The wars would never cease now. Her husband would never stop looking for her. Many warring chiefs divided the island chain, but her loss would unite separate factions against Koa’s rebel forces – who fought in defense of his people’s old ways against these foreign usurpers, who had sailed here from a different island chain with their tyrannical gods in tow.
She didn’t see Koa. His people numbered in the thousands, a great responsibility.
In the evening, a magnificent luau feast celebrated the successful raid. Hina refused to attend, though the roasting kalua pig tempted her. Nobody forced her. She watched from the shadows. The men and women ate together, and the women ate everything the men did, even ate out of the same calabash bowls. More broken taboos. Her gods forbade the two sexes from eating together, and women couldn’t eat the fruits and meats reserved for men – not bananas, coconuts, pig, shark, turtles, fowl . . . just about everything but taro, kapu even to her, the queen.
Like Koa standing in the kapu stream, nothing happened to the blasphemous infidels. Hina paced inside her hut. Her hair irritated her, heavy on her scalp, hot on her neck. Koa took no precautions against her. Amidst the rare, colored skirts and finery he provided for her lay several weapons, decorative but still functional. Hina picked up a coral knife. Foolish man, she could murder him in the night.
So, this barbaric invader loved her hair. She sawed at her thick locks with the knife, cutting at the nape of her neck. Let the gods strike her dead on the spot. Anything was better than living death under the weight of this shroud. The hair coiled at her ankles.
Koa, carrying a tray laden with food, kicked back the kapa cloth that covered her doorway and stepped inside. The kukui nut oil lamp illuminated her dark room, filling it with warm fragrance. Dressed in his royal finery, a red and yellow feather cape was draped across his broad shoulders, tied at the hollow of his throat. A helmet of the same color fit his head, arching over his face like a curved beak. His malo, again of rare yellow feathers plucked from thousands of birds, rode low on his hips. The golden garments accentuated his brown skin. The soft plumage caressed his hard, punished body.
She tossed the knife on the floor between them. She shook her head, bobbed hair brushing her bare shoulders.
Koa set the tray down and circled her. He stepped close. She flinched, expecting the beating that she incited, but he bent down, to his knees before her, again. He gathered up the shorn hair until he held one long, thick strand in his triumphant fist. As he worked, he brushed against her, his breath hot on her calf. She refused to step away. Koa tied off the ends.
Koa sat cross-legged before the dinner tray. He motioned for her to sit. Confused, she sank down. What did he want of her? To humiliate her by flaunting her religious laws? To laugh at her weakness when she broke down and broke them? She’d never eaten in front of a man, never seen a man eat. He smiled at her as he chewed, eyes crinkling, motioning for her to eat the kapu foods denied her, like bananas and coconut cake. How fitting that her first sight of him was upside down, because he turned her world over. He held a slice of haupia to her lips. The thick white cake jiggled like her breasts. He eased it into her mouth, fearless of her teeth so near to his fingers. She closed her eyes, savoring every second of this bite that would be her last before the gods blasted her into oblivion. Serve him right to go through all this trouble to kidnap her and be left with nothing but a smoking heap of ash. The firm pudding melted on her tongue, sweet ambrosia of gods and men.
Nothing happened. She swallowed. Opened her eyes. Koa watched her, his eyebrows a question mark. She didn’t wait for him to feed her again, but devoured another slice, adding a banana for good measure. He brushed a crumb from the corner of her lips and tucked her hair behind her ears. He leaned back on the floor, hands behind his neck. Satiated, she, too, lay back. Again, he left her half asleep, the rope of her hair draped across his shoulders. Intending to deliver the ominous present to Hina’s husband the next day, he found he couldn’t part with it. Nearly two decades later, he would be buried with Hina’s long braid.
On his third night of wooing, Koa taught Hina to dance. Hula was man’s dance, serious invocation to the gods in preparation for war. They chanted meles and stomped ritual steps. Women merely watched. But today Hina observed Koa’s women dancing in the courtyard. That they weren’t turned to stone no longer shocked her. She turned in unison. She felt light. Koa came to her that night dressed in a ti leaf skirt. He wore a crown of maile leaves low on his forehead, with matching bracelets and anklets. A simple shark-tooth necklace dangled on his bare chest. He sang and danced for her. The skirt rustled as he crouched low on his thighs. His bare feet murmured a susurrus across the woven kapa mat, like trade winds whispering through the sandalwood trees. Koa sang of the creation of his land, of his gods, and of the mythological beauty of Hina who called to him across the seas. His pure voice flowed smooth as water, touching a chord deep within her just as the rippling brook had. Koa motioned her to join him. She took tentative steps, copying him, graceful hands mimicking the movement of breezes, of waves, of the blooming of rainbows, of the birth of love.
Silent loneliness descended when he left, the door curtain falling closed behind him.
On the fourth night of Hina’s captivity, Koa fell asleep. He lay down upon her mat and closed his eyes. His breathing shifted to the deep slumber of an exhausted man. His malo’s waistband shifted as he slept, revealing a lighter shade of untanned skin across his hips and belly. Light mahogany striped a deeper bronze, like the varying hues of brown on a polished tortoise shell, like the light flecks in his dark eyes. So, too, was his belly carved like the turtle’s back, the interlocking muscles hard and square. She knelt beside him and fingered the scabbed knees where he fell when he first saw her, insignificant additions to his many scars. His pelvic bones and ribcage reminded her that he was breakable, a mortal shell for a superhuman spirit. His weapons rested alongside him, so easy to kill him. Instead, he awoke to find her sleeping beside him, the spear tucked between them like the eternal war that would someday, finally, tear them apart.
Hina awoke. Once more, this strange king knelt before her – crouching, his mouth between her legs, finishing what he had interrupted at the brook. She thought this, her first climax, was her death, punishment for the broken kapus. At the cresting of this bursting pleasure, she expected to see her toes turning to rock. She had swallowed Pele whole, her body heaving like Mauna Kea eruptin
g. She’d seen men sucked out to sea by the riptides, becoming specks in the distance. Like the merciless undertow, Koa’s mouth sucked the soul out of her, leaving her limp and empty.
He looked up over her soft belly and spoke his first words to her: “I’ll take you back to your home.”
“You don’t want me?”
“If you leave, I’ll let your husband kill me. But I won’t keep you here against your will. The choice is yours.”
Hina didn’t pause. “I’ll stay. For a while.”
Koa rose up from his knees and kissed her, smelling of the sandalwood forest. He shed his malo, straddling her. A slow trickle between her legs started, and she wondered if she had wet herself in fear. But she wasn’t afraid, and this moisture wasn’t urine or her menses. Perhaps this humiliation was part of the curse, of her punishment. She would disgust this new conqueror, this handsome warrior, and he would toss her out like rancid meat. But Koa only smiled at her body’s invitation. Her understanding blossomed. Like her climax, this was a gift the goddess had withheld from her up until now, like so much else her people’s religion falsely denied her. This smoothing of the way for him was like soft flower petals between her fingers as she strung them together. When he joined with her, at last, it wasn’t like her husband chafing her brittle dryness, but a slow and gentle fullness. Not a scorched friction as with the old chief’s thrashing, but a blending of heat – not like the rubbing of dry wood together to create a fire, but like the kukui lamp, flame and oil burning slick and hot together, and one died if the other ran out.
And so it’s been every night for eighteen years. Until finding her, he’d been like the rare driftwood timber that kind gods spit onto the beach. Enormous pines that traveled from distant, unknown lands, these prized logs lay unused until another matching tree beached itself, perhaps years later, so they could be lashed together to traverse the seas as true mates.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 12: Over 40 outstanding pieces of short erotic fiction (Mammoth Books) Page 46