Wild Woman

by Peter Marriner

  The lashings were cut and Isobel tumbled out into the open. She was one of a row of offerings, the others being trussed pigs, laid out in the centre of an open space trodden bare, a dancing ground or some such ceremonial meeting place. Opposite her the solid mass of squatting warriors were revealed individually as being of different tribe to the Wanganimi, painted and caparisoned differently but like them armed to the teeth, as if ready for war. Behind her, those on her own side not involved in piling up the materials for a feast, were settling themselves into a similar assembly. Isobel knew better than to expect immediate action. Sure enough, the two war parties began to exchange speeches, the male orators strutting before their audience showing off their finery and weapons with vivid gestures, tireless and self-regarding, each prolonged oration being received with deep interest and the appropriate responses from their own side. This time, though, they were unusually quick to the point. Before Isobel had time to sink into a complete state of dazed numbness, a general shout from both sides heralded some denouement and awakened her attention. A single warrior rose and strode forward from the ranks of the strangers, a huge brute swinging his massive club in one hand and a long throwing stone in the other. As he neared Isobel, she was already imagining that club smashing down upon her skull, she felt the lashings of her ankles come apart and one of the Wangamini stepping up alongside her, stooping quickly to slash those on her wrists as well. Responding to his gesture with sudden relief and hope, she began to rise, to face the advancing stranger, then instinctively thinking better of it, remained where she was, crouching in the humble attitude appropriate to a mere woman before a male. She guessed that she was being offered as a gift to the other tribe.

  The ferociously grimacing warrior had his frizzy bush of hair worked into a multitude of thin plaited strands and contained at the base within a broad skin band, spreading out from there in a stiffened fan with a collection of multi-coloured feathers. His face was painted differently and his erect penis sheath decorated otherwise than those of the Wangamini, but Isobel presumed that at least what the latter contained would react the same way. With the menacing weapons still impending in the corners of her vision, her fingers reached upward with a speed born of desperation as he towered over her and going unerringly to the fastenings, undid and unshipped the thing, instantly putting her tongue with the skill born of practise to the rearing black core she had unsheathed.

  From on high she heard a deep “Wa!” of surprise and then sounds of approbation, answered by rumble of propitiatory expressions from the Wanganimi to the rear. This was the lowest she had reached so far, kneeling in the dust in a public gathering with a horde of gaping savages watching her perform fellatio upon one of their fellows, but her heart was pounding from fear and this was the quickest way she could think of to bring such a brute to appreciate her value.

  The warriors of both tribes ranked on opposite sides began to call out with comments and advice throughout her performance, the shouts becoming more collaborative as her target became more interested and both sides relaxed. These primitive creatures believed that having sexual relations with a female reduced a warrior’s capacity for ferocious action and the Big Man’s acceptance of Isobel’s attentions confirmed his desire to make peace. Sure enough, as Isobel brought him to a successful bellowing conclusion, taking care not to spill any of his ejaculate, the women of the stranger tribe began to appear from the bush and began preparing the offering of food for a joint feast to celebrate the end of warfare.

  The Wanganimi had been long subject to raids by this more numerous and more ferocious tribe from the interior, the Kaseraimini, and were being forced to pay them this tribute of food, shell ornaments and pigs. Isobel was one of the objects of value presented as their peace offering. She was passed from one to another warrior during the feast, crawling along the rows of noisily chewing and greasily fingered men and, having proved a satisfactory acquisition to her new owners, was eventually placed back in her basket cage and carried off at the end of the feast, to the nearest settlement of the Kaserai.

  In submitting to her usage by the Wanganimi, Isobel had at first aimed merely to survive uneaten, then to ensure that she would be fed by her captors and thus preserved for that much longer in the hope that she might be rescued. She had only responded sexually with reluctance and in shame. Now that she had been traded further into the interior of the country, rescue seemed farther off than ever. She was no longer kept in a pen, though still kept leashed like an animal, but put to work at female chores. She even had a name, passed on probably from Miaki. However it was clear that so far as the male savages were concerned ‘Missus’ was only useful for one thing. In this new village, there were also black women collared and leashed like her. It seemed that the Kaseraimini were such successful raiders that they kept these women, captured from other tribes, to be fattened up before being eaten at the next major feast. It was a sufficient reminder that Isobel had better put all her efforts into pleasing her captors with her sexual performance lest she join them.

  As before, she was frequently employed about the Men’s House, chewing kava for the use of the males whenever they gathered en masse for one of their long debates. It tasted like chewed dishcloths, but her service in this way led to Isobel herself frequently being half dazed by the effects when she was called upon for sexual services, so that she was liable to be translated from her dreamy cow-like chewing to engaging in energetic rutting, with little time for adjustment. She had fallen into such despair of rescue that she now felt it was pointless to resist any opportunity for physical release that was offered by her mode of life. She found her kava-fuelled fantasies useful in transforming some great brute using her as receptacle for his lust and whose idea of bravery was ambushing and felling a man from behind, into an excitingly desirable warrior hero.

  This new willingness was to be put to great strain. Amongst the Kaseraimini the ceremonial of initiation of grown boys was carried out in a secret clearing far out into the bush where the initiates went through rituals of abuse and endurance under the guidance of older mentors. Included in this later was a test of the successful passage of puberty for which Isobel was commandeered to serve in place of the more usual sow. Under the wet trees, before a few rudimentary shelters, a twitching ring of boys squatted in the warm rain watching her nervously reluctant arrival. Naked and painted, their bodies showing the incisions of manhood still new and bloody, their unsheathed penises demonstrated their half-crazed excitement at their introduction to men’s secrets. Upon all fours in the centre of the muddy clearing, Isobel was tethered to a post by her front limbs just as the sow would have been, plump white bottom presented, with raindrops glistening upon smooth curves thoroughly well greased, ready for the initiates to show their mettle. Competing with one another to be the first to tackle her, the youths watched raptly throughout and cheered each successive eventual success, wiry young male bodies smacking wetly on plump slippery female curves, black penetrating into white, warm rain trickling down Isobel’s bottom cleft to provide lubrication, the boys’ knees and toes scrabbling in the mud, their mentors, under cover, nodding gravely and puffing tobacco smoke.

  By the time their own turn came with Isobel, the final two had been so excited by watching her performance with their fellows that they had ejaculated prematurely, the evidence leaking in milky dribbles down their wet black thighs. Isobel was nervous of leaving them disgruntled for she could clearly expect to be used by them sooner or later for a second try, so that she resolved that it might be better to get it over with right now. Their mentor grunted, then nodded in approbation when, lifting her bound wrists clear over the top of the post, she turned, slithering on muddy knees, to face the crestfallen pair, curling her fingers shamelessly to beckon them and brushing her wet hair invitingly away from her lips. She shortened the process of re-stiffening the candidates by having them move in together, almost belly-to-belly so that she could take both limp cocks into her mouth simultaneo
usly, cupping their balls in her hands. When she returned to her function as a human sow, however, presenting herself again ready for their rear entry, the two youths still kept together and she was surprised into a breathless yelp by having to take two stiffened cocks into her vagina at once. Both cramming in tightly stretched her astonishingly and proving satisfactorily exciting to the twin penetrations, where sloppy emissions and prolonged usage might have been expected to render her a little slack had they used her one at a time.

  Chapter Four

  Lying a mile or so off the remains of the wreck on the reef, the captain of His Teutonic Majesty’s gunboat ‘Falke’ was receiving the report of his executive officer. Having been identified the wreck as a European vessel and seeing a tell-tale wisp of smoke among the greenery, an armed party had been landed on the wooded shore to search for possible survivors. Meeting with a few flickering arrows they had marched uphill as far as the native village, finding in it horrible traces of human sacrifice and a rack full of human skulls, several of them distinctly European. They had dispersed the inhabitants, set fire to the village, cut down fruit trees and taken all that they could carry from the native gardens as a punishment. Coming under vengeful attack as they retreated, they had killed numbers of unwarily charging native warriors before regaining their boats. The officer confidently assured his commander that they had taught the savages to treat Europeans with respect.

  Below decks, meanwhile, a petty officer was regaling his shipmates with an account of how he had shot down the tribe’s witch doctor in the doorway of his heathen temple, displaying to them the armband he had taken from the body, woven out of red human hair. “There you see! The devil must have taken that from the head of some poor white fellow they had killed and eaten!”

  Chapter Five

  Far inland, Isobel was being treated as an item of trade in tribal interchanges. Each tribe inhabited its own deep valley formed by cataract-interrupted streams between steeply forested mountains to the sides of which the villages and their garden patches clung. Their only peaceful contact with their neighbours, alternating with spells of fierce feuding, was by ceremonial exchanges of objects of value such as bird of paradise feathers, mother of pearl shell, pigs, or women. Isobel’s reputation as a magical object had qualified her as one of these valuable items. At such a neutral meeting place she would be carefully presented for the inspection of yet another array of be-plumed savages, her latest recipients, as the principal item in a great mound of food, earthy yams stacked around her, trussed pigs either side of her, alternating with piles of carrot-shaped taro, huge green plantains and hairy coconuts. Proffered by her donors as an interesting novelty and accepted as gift, she was carried away again to a new habitation and a new fear-impelled demonstration of her sexual repertoire.

  The Kaseraimini had laid her with her face to the earth, tied at the ankles and knees, with her wrists and elbows fastened behind her. A pole was then thrust between the lashings so that she could be lifted and transported between two men as part of a procession of gift-laden warriors. Her view of the trip had been confined at first to the muddy trail passing beneath, but her hair being found to be a nuisance, catching upon the thorny bush, one of her escort took up two handfuls of it dividing it into two great hanks, which he then knotted above the pole, keeping Isobel head up and facing the muscular back and buttocks of the leading bearer instead. She breasted the vegetation like that, her dangling globes striking such upstanding vegetation first and parting it for the passage of the rest of her body, down-curved belly swinging lowest of all.

  Miss Isobel Monro, late of Edinburgh, had almost forgotten what it was to wear clothing. She had become almost habituated to grovelling before native males in a state even more naked than their own women, feeling the merest twinge of shame; there were advantages in this climate, warm and overcast with incessant rain showers, in being stark naked except for a coating of grease. But passed in this fashion from one savage tribe to another, each time that she entered a village for the first time, the goggling interest of the assembled population in her pale nakedness reawakened her sense of humiliation and reminded her of how far astray from civilisation she had gone. The women and children clustered around her, fingering body and hair and pinching every private part as if they could hardly believe this white creature to be a human female. The language of each new group of owners was often incomprehensible, but as often, a woman could be found, having been either stolen in a raid or given to the tribe in settlement of a deadly feud, who could teach Isobel the rudiments of the new one.

  Her breasts continued milk-heavy and, in addition to her main task of satisfying the male savages, she was still commonly used to suckle the community’s much-valued piglets. Watching Isobel perform this function in the pigpen below their house in the village of the Abasai, the two wives of an elderly sorcerer hit upon using her to feed their ailing husband. He lay upon a low wooden bed in the spacious house, burbling and drooling. Clearly he was in his second childhood. He was as toothless as a baby too, Isobel was glad to see. She was made to kneel by the bed and lean over him. He clasped her plump breast feebly with withered claws as it was pressed down to his wrinkled mouth, forming his wet lips about her nipple and suckling weakly, saliva and milk leaking round his withered cheeks and chin.

  It had clearly been his wives’ hope to prolong his life in this childish condition, but it proved unavailing. The wailing widows then seized upon the idea of substituting Isobel as the sacrificial female to accompany the old sorcerer into the spirit world. They painted her in customary fashion with the sign of mourning, normally a paste of mud and charcoal but since she was a different colour of skin, they prepared a special coating, using soot from burning a kind of chestnut and a pounded rare earth taken from the sorcerer’s stock in trade. Fortunately for Isobel, the idea of a substitute was rejected by his male peers and the two wives were dragged off into the bush to be knocked on the head as custom dictated. The effects of the dye, however, refused to wash off, leaving Isobel’s face, neck and shoulders seemingly permanently blue-black in colour.

  It was with the Bulutu that she tried to win over the females. Their language was closely related to that of her first captors, very different from most of the inland tribes. Her first captors had been sophisticates, however, compared with these inland savages. She was assumed by the Bulutu to be a kind of ghost forced by the Ancestors to return to life for the convenience of the living. Their women were, more so than those of other tribes, shy and ignorant, in awe of one who, though female, treated magic and forbidden things so insouciantly, coming to believe Isobel to possess some of the magical powers of a man. Eventually the time came when the tribal chief had the conch shells sounded for war. All day Isobel could hear them sounding wildly in the distance. A howling mob of excited heavily armed natives blowing horns and beating drums in the bush the whole night long heralded the muster of his warriors against the enemy. The village braves all marched out in full array in the usual fashion, only to come straggling back a couple of days later bloodied, wounded and much howling from the women, especially from those whose husbands were the most desperately wounded. Isobel now knew that this was because women whose husbands, instead of being eaten by the enemy on the battlefield, died after their return, could expect to be slaughtered in order to accompany their men into the hereafter. Her views upon this had been heard by these downtrodden females with more respect than those she had promulgated on the island, but only aroused the ire of their menfolk.

  The tribal Ancestors were summoned to give their opinion on this dissension of women in a dramatic ceremony that took place in the dead of night before the Men’s House. The Ancestors duly appeared, the long masks never seen in full number by female eyes until now. Lit by the flaring red flames of several fires a circle of naked wailing women, dragged out from the huts and shorn of even their scanty finery of leaf and bone, shuffled in a circle, all stamping with mechanical frenzy in time to a bedlam
of wooden drumming from the surrounding darkness. The centre of their circling was a tall pole, roughly carved into human features its head decorated with a bundle of variegated leaves. Beyond their circle the Ancestors, anonymous in costumes of leaves and straw, loomed and retreated, capering on the edge of darkness, the details of their big wooden masks, long, narrow-eyed lugubrious faces outlined in shell, reflected the firelight, bobbing like disembodied spirits. The children and the rest of the women had all hidden in terror at the first sounding of the bull-roarers and the long wooden flutes which heralded the appearance of these figures, but the circle of stamping women, having been singled out, continued to prance round however terrified. After a while a little group of the masked figures began to rush upon them, breaking through their ring with hollow-sounding howls, each time selecting an individual female and dragging her out to the central pole. On the bare ground at her feet then appeared as if by unseen means a tumble of rounded stones, polished pebbles, just such as would attract the attention of a child on an English beach, but magical objects to the savages. The successive victims howled miserably as their backs and bottoms were given vigorously laid on stripes, more or less in proportion to the number of the stones. The other women still frenetically stamping and prancing, wept and wailed in sympathy until their thrashed sister was returned to their circle. Cowering in her little pen looking out from between the supporting piles of the Men’s House, Isobel almost joined their chorus, being in no doubt that her turn would come.