by Felix Baron
Fatima screamed a question into my ear. I couldn’t make the words out. We could do nothing but cuddle close and wait. I gave the girls reassuring grins even though I suspected that we might be in the path of a tornado that could spin us a mile into the air, if it so decided, or else dump a thousand tons of sand on to our heads.
And then it was quiet.
We waited, and waited. I wanted to be sure that the blessed stillness wasn’t an illusion brought on by our having been deafened. Rhythmic grating prompted me to look outside. Cossacks with shovels were clearing our wheels. I jumped down to help but Igor waved me back.
‘Our work, Richard,’ he called. ‘Where you are going, they don’t want you to arrive with a broken back.’
‘Then this is the second time you’ve protected me from a back-breaking task.’
He laughed. ‘The first is my pleasure,’ he assured me. ‘If you have any similar chores you need help with, Igor is your man.’
‘You’ll be the first I’ll call on,’ I promised.
Back inside, the girls had fetched besom brooms I hadn’t known we’d had, from their private area, no doubt. I put my feet up on a bench and watched them work. Maria’s svelte muscles flexed and rippled. Fatima’s bounty jiggled. I’d never considered housework as worthy of watching, before, but I’d never had housemaids who toiled naked before, either.
The Maiden, of course, did nothing except lift her feet when Maria swept under her.
Our carriage moved about fifty feet and then stopped, no doubt on firmer ground. I spread cotton sheets for the girls and me. We lay, naked, with kerchiefs on hand for moping our brows. They weren’t needed. The air was so dry that as we perspired, the moisture was sucked away. The girls’ health was a concern. I, being English, was more tolerant of extremes of temperature. They, being foreigners, might well be subject to heatstroke.
I tried once more to encourage The Maiden to strip and join us, and was once more ignored. With nothing else to do, I slept.
Supper arrived at dusk – our usual rice and curry, but served cold. By then, the heat was moderate. I left the carriage for a short walk The temperature dropped so quickly that my skin felt it happen – as if I was wading into a cold river. I climbed back inside. Maria and Fatima were making a ‘bed’ from layers of rich furs. Although the aisle was but four and a half feet wide, they’d made space to either side, under the benches, so there was ample room for three very friendly bodies.
We huddled and cuddled, with a little friendly fondling. The day’s heat had drained the lust out of us. At some point I woke to the sound of The Maiden’s teeth chattering. I poked my head out and made what I hoped were enticing noises. Cold nipped my nose. I pulled back under the covers. Fatima patted my thigh, perhaps to reassure herself of my presence. My shaft twitched but with no urgency. I slept until my bladder woke me.
An hour after dawn it was hot again. Maria and I spread ourselves on sheets. Fatima decided to test whether a bench would be cooler to lie on. She chose a spot where, when she let her arm dangle down, her fingers brushed my cock. That was pleasant. Even when there’s no rogering in the offing, a little friendly caress can keep the juices flowing and the spirit elevated. The backs of her fingers nudged my limp shaft away from her. A little tug flopped it back. I put my hands under my head and let her play. A few more wags had me semi-erect. I considered whether to turn over and take my cock out of her reach or to have her stroke me off. If the latter, I’d need a cloth to wipe myself with and getting one seemed like a lot of bother. On the other hand, I could have had her use her mouth on me, but would that be fair, considering the heat?
I was still considering when a sigh, a rustle and a soft thump distracted me. I turned my head to be confronted by the cleft of Maria’s bottom. She was rising to go to The Maiden, who had fallen to the floor.
‘She’s fainted!’ Maria cried.
Fatima, very firmly, said, ‘We’ll have to take her clothes off.’
The Maiden was lying in a heap. Even through her cape, I could see she was panting like a dog. I scooped her up and stretched her out on the bench. She was much lighter than I’d expected. ‘Wet cloths,’ I said.
Fatima was already working on the frogs that fastened the girl’s cape. I unwrapped her head and face. Fatima gasped. The Maiden was totally bald. Little wonder, having lost her crowning glory, that she kept her head covered. Her face was red but dry and her lips were cracked.
That aside, she wasn’t beautiful or even pretty in the usual sense. Any woman would have envied her enormous lustrous eyes and sweeping lashes but her face was too feral to be conventionally attractive. She had prominent cheekbones, a narrow pointed chin and a thin-lipped mouth that was generous to a fault. Her face was a tad overlong between her eyes and her mouth.
All this was overshadowed by the nakedness of her skull, which was finely sculpted and almost Coptic in its elegant proportions.
‘Here!’ Maria told me, handing me a wet cloth blindly. Her eyes were big and focused on The Maiden’s hairless head. ‘Is – is it from some sickness?’
‘I see no signs of that,’ I reassured her. ‘I think she’s either bald from choice or that someone has imposed baldness on her.’
‘How cruel,’ Fatima said.
I squeezed a few drops of water between The Maiden’s lips. Her poor swollen tongue touched them. I gave her more moisture. Fatima pulled the girl’s cape from under her.
It was little wonder she’d swooned. She wore three layers of embroidered chambray tunics. The top sleeve came just past her elbows. The one under that reached her wrists. The last one just covered the tips of her fingers.
Maria and Fatima busied themselves with The Maiden’s bows and buttons while I bathed her face and head. One by one, the garments were tugged away, and finally the matching trousers.
Her bald head had surprised us. Her body was no less striking. Her skin was the colour of what we used to call ‘nursery tea’ – half tea, half milk. She was long-waisted and sleek as an otter. The girl had virtually no breasts but her aureoles were so puffy they were hemispheres and her nipples were one-inch spikes, jutting from their centres.
But it was her tattoo that drew our attention. It was of a green snake. Her left nipple had been coloured jade, with the narrow line continued to cross and circle her halo before vanishing under her left arm. From there, it circled her body. It crossed her right hip from behind and dangled its head. Her labia formed its parted jaws. The long prominent ridge of her clit’s sheath had felt the artist’s cruel needles. It had been tinted to serve as the serpent’s carmine tongue.
Maria and Fatima stared. ‘That must have hurt,’ Fatima observed.
Maria licked her lips. ‘Unbearably.’
Fatima nudged her. ‘Are you going to get yours done, your clit?’
‘Of course not! Well, I’d have to think about it. Perhaps. Who’d …’
I interrupted. ‘Fetch me a ladle of water. Both of you, dampen cloths. Bathe her gently, mark you.’ I remembered a medical lecture I’d attended in Calcutta. ‘Concentrate on her wrists, her underarms and her groin – where the blood is closest to the skin.’
There was a little friendly spat over who got to sponge the girl’s groin. I reminded them, ‘She’ll be with us for a long time. Now we’ve seen her naked, she shouldn’t feel compelled to cover herself all the time.’
As if to make a liar of me, The Maiden stirred. As she realised she was bare, she wrapped her arms around herself in the manner of Aphrodite Rising, which has always struck me as more coy than modest.
‘My clothes,’ she croaked, in English.
‘Your clothes were killing you.’
‘You’ve – you’ve seen me.’
‘We’ve had that pleasure.’
‘Please don’t make fun of me. Maria and Fatima are both lovely. I’m – not.’
I used my ‘avuncular’ voice. ‘Maria is a slender nymph. Fatima is as voluptuous as a houri from Paradise. You, you are exotic. Better, I
believe you to be unique. There are other nymphs and other houris but I can’t imagine there’s another girl, anywhere, who is beautiful in the special way in which you are beautiful.’
I noticed that the wet cloth Fatima was cooling the girl’s privates with was being pushed between the snake’s jaws. ‘Fatima!’
‘You said to apply it where her blood is closest to the surface.’
I repeated, ‘Fatima!’
Reluctantly, she recovered her cloth.
I let water from the ladle dribble between the girl’s lips, restraining her from taking too much too quickly. ‘Well, now that you’re talking to us, tell us your name.’
‘Asp.’
‘Your tattoo, is it a religious symbol?’
‘No – it was given me for the sake of the exhibition.’
‘What’s she saying?’ Fatima asked.
I translated. Of Asp, I asked, ‘Exhibition?’
‘There was Jacko, the dog-boy, Ormossa, the fat lady, and we had a mermaid in a jar, and …’
‘You were tattooed to be put on display?’
‘And my hair was removed.’
‘You were shaved?’
‘A potion was rubbed on me. That’s how The Child heard of me, through the witch who made the potion.’
As I translated Asp’s words, Fatima and Maria became more and more sympathetic but, as was their nature, also pruriently curious. I was asked to ask Asp if she’d been forced to perform perverted acts for the public’s amusement. I refused to translate those queries. Asp wasn’t used to us seeing her body, yet, and she was still weak from her heatstroke.
‘You must rest,’ I told her. ‘When the heat abates, we can talk more.’
She reached for her clothes.
‘No. If you wish, Maria will find a sheet for you to cover yourself with.’
When the growing coolth woke me, Maria’s arm was extended and her hand was beneath Asp’s sheet, holding the girl’s ankle. I was pleased. We four were forced to be companions. It was better if we were companionable ones. To be honest, I shared the girls’ prurient interest. Asp was a true exotic. Curiosities and secrets have always fascinated me, especially living ones.
Asp sat up wrapped in her sheet while we supped. After, I entertained the three by reciting The Tale of a Bull and an Ass, from A Thousand Nights and a Night. It was slow telling, for I had to recite it in French, for Fatima and Maria, and repeat it in English, for Asp. It transpired that her only other tongue was Uzbekistani, which I did not and still do not, to my shame, speak.
In the tale, fifty fair concubines embrace a like number of lowly white slaves while their mistress takes her pleasure of a gigantic and ugly black man. My story progressed no further. Fatima and Maria insisted that I elaborate on each and every of the fifty-one couplings, providing details of ‘where his tongue was’ and ‘what her fingers were doing’. Before my imagination was exhausted, the cold fell upon us. I arranged our order of lying with a mind to abating any fears Asp might have entertained. She took the extreme left, with Maria beside her, then Fatima and finally me.
No sooner were we all cosy under our pile of furs than Fatima snuggled her head back against my chest and wriggled her bare bottom in my lap. ‘You told me that by night, we would futter,’ she whispered.
‘Asp …’ I started.
‘You promised.’
I surrendered to the lure of her squirming bum. ‘Slowly and gently, so as not to disturb the others?’
She agreed, ‘Slowly and gently. We have all night.’
I wrapped her curvaceous little body in my arms. My fingers found her nipples. I nuzzled and licked into the crook of her neck, a caress I’d discovered she particularly enjoyed. Fatima was less patient. Her fingers curled around my shaft. Her back hollowed, hitching her bottom higher. She steered my cock up between her thighs to the lush warm wetness of her cunny and rubbed its dome between her nether lips and against the hard little button at their juncture. Her gasps were subdued and breathless but within a few moments she gave a delicate shudder and sighed.
‘You said “slowly and gently”,’ I reminded her.
‘That was to give me the patience for “slowly and gently”. Now, tease me, please?’
‘And what manner of teasing does my little harlot have a taste for tonight?’
‘This manner.’ Once more she guided my shaft, this time presenting it to the pucker between her bum’s cheeks. Her grip was just behind my cock’s head. She rubbed my dome against her opening with increasing pressure until the tight portal to her rear passage relaxed and the head of my cock, just the head, entered her.
Holding me there, she twisted her neck to get her tongue to my mouth. As we kissed, I pressed, gently, but her grip tightened, holding me still.
With a last lascivious lick of my lips, she murmured, ‘Just that deep, no deeper. That’s the best part – when the thickest part of you passes through the narrowest part of me.’
I rocked. My cock’s head plopped through the stricture, and plopped out of it. Each stroke was held in check by her clutching fist. I felt Fatima shiver in my arms in time with my entrances and with my exits. The urge to plunge deep came to me but I resisted. From her swallowed moans and tiny quivers, I was sure that she too was fighting her desire to be totally impaled. My lust stretched and sang, like the string of a violin that was being played even as it was tightened. It became more extreme when I felt that although Fatima’s left hand was restraining me, her right was busy at her cunny.
There was no sudden rush to climax. One second I was slowly sodomising her and enjoying the incredible tension. The next, I spent. My jism had simply flowed out of me.
I was still trying to decide whether I was disappointed or not when Fatima whispered, ‘Now go deep,’ and released me.
My erection hadn’t softened. I was easily able to slide gradually into her very depths. There I probed, still with slow easy strokes, while Fatima fingered herself through three climaxes and I enjoyed my second.
As I fell asleep I heard a giggle and the subtle susurrus of fur on fur. The giggle was Maria’s. Had she and Asp, while I was concentrating on Fatima, also been practising their own ‘slowly and gently’?
Twenty-one
THE FOLLOWING NIGHT, after supper, Fatima asked me for another story. I said, ‘We should take turns amusing each other. Maria, what can you do to entertain us?’
She jumped to her feet and went to her baggage, from which she retrieved her neat little boots. With those on, she wrapped one square of fringed satin around her shoulders and knotted another about her hips. ‘Cante Jondo,’ she announced.
I translated into French and English for the others, ‘A slow song.’
Maria’s right foot stamped. Her arms uncurled upwards like a pair of swans extending their necks. Her fingers snapped. Her voice – wasn’t very good. I enjoyed her performance more when she sang a Duende, which was faster and involved a lot more stamping. It didn’t take her long to stamp her shawl right off. By the time she was done, her improvised skirt had also fallen and she was performing in nothing but her boots.
How strange it is, that a man can live in a woman’s company and enjoy the sight of her womanly charms several times a day but when she is dressed and then slowly removes her clothing, his eyes are delighted afresh and with more intensity.
Her performance done and applauded, Maria threw herself on to a pile of furs. Fatima leaped atop her, tickling her mercilessly. I watched sheet-wrapped Asp. She made a move as if to join in the romp but drew back before completing it.
‘They’d welcome you,’ I told her. She shook her head.
Maria and Fatima ground their pubes together and kissed deeply but the cold fell and put an end to their sport.
For our night’s snuggling, I allotted Maria the far left position, with Asp between her and Fatima. There were giggles and once a deep chuckle. I could feel furtive movements but couldn’t tell who was caressing who, or who was being caressed. Not wishing to interfere
with Asp’s adjustment to our situation, I turned my back and slept.
The following evening Fatima volunteered to provide our distraction. As soon as the oppressive heat lifted she vanished behind the curtain to prepare. When she emerged, her face was painted, her eyes kohled and her lips vivid. There were jingling bangles of coins at her wrists and ankles and chiming cymbals on her fingers. She’d resumed the costume I’d first seen her in, a minute bolero jacket and a slit gauzy skirt, worn so low that had her mound not been pumiced bare, she’d have displayed at least a hint of pubic curls.
Like Maria, her dance commenced with her arms rising above her head and poised there like the frame of a lyre. The pose lifted and parted her jacket in such a way as to expose the inner and under curves of her full young breasts while intermittently concealing her nipples.
Fatima’s cymbals tinkled. Her hips moved, describing a small tight circle, then a wider one, and wider, until the diameter of her sway exceeded that of her hips. Her torso undulated. Her tummy hollowed and swelled. It was as if Fatima’s flesh had become liquid. She rippled and flowed.
Her left breast quivered deliciously. Her right joined in. She spread her feet and thrust her pubes sharply forward. The muscles in her tapered thighs flexed and trembled. It seemed as if not a single one of her muscles was still. Her body as a whole swayed to a slow rhythm while her softer parts obeyed another, more urgent, beat.
Very slowly, she leaned backwards. Her knees bent towards us, for balance. She tilted and tilted until her long hair brushed her bottom and her breasts were pointing straight upwards. Holding that position, she shivered all over for three long beats before she convulsed, tossing herself into the air, and landed with her legs spread wide, one foot pointing to her left and the other to her right.
We applauded until our hands stung.
‘The way you bent your back, Fatima!’ Maria exclaimed. ‘Your spine must be made of India rubber.’
I noticed a gleam in Asp’s eyes and remarked, ‘Snakes have flexible backbones.’