Wild Woman

by Peter Marriner

  The girl acrobats petted and talked to Isobel whenever their father was not about or lying comatose after several pipes of opium, adding to her understanding of the language though of course she could not practice the sounds herself. They had been purchased, it seemed, for the express purpose of being trained as acrobats and took this as rather as a piece of good fortune, girl children being little valued. The sons used Isobel in the same manner as the customers. She was smartly discouraged from introducing variations with these latter, having always to be taken from behind and upon all fours like the female animal she was advertised to be, but one day, while his brother was taking a long time over penetrating Isobel’s anus, Ti the younger was inspired to use her mouth. Unlike the customers, of course, they knew that her tusks and blood-smeared mouth were false and her savagery an enforced sham. Finding out in this way that Isobel had acquired a skill unknown to animals, the pair used her that way for preference from then onwards, but she felt that at least this made a start towards winning their support. Like the paying customers, they suffered from the delusion that smoking opium acted as an aphrodisiac, whereas it really merely deluded them as to the effectiveness of their performance. Perhaps it was explained by their religion placing great importance upon not actually coming to an emission, not a difficult thing in an opium daze. The finial fastening her pierced tongue, continually brushed across by the intruding male stiffness, gradually became slack and worked loose. She spat the thing out surreptitiously and thereafter practised in secret what she had learnt of the difficult language, finding new hope in the idea of one day contacting some Western-leaning official or even a sympathetic traveller who might carry the news of her plight beyond the borders of the Empire.

  Takings became poor as the entertainers moved slowly upstream; a bad season had resulted in scant harvests with no money left for amusements and rumours of invasion by ferocious foreign devils alarming the populace. The floating township pressed deeper inland in search of safety, but shrank in numbers and the Flower boats gradually dropped away, choosing to cling to the waterfronts of the larger cities where the rich took refuge. Finally Tsang was forced to command his acrobats and jugglers to lay up their gaudy costumes and seek out employment as field workers amongst the riverside villages.

  Isobel remaining on his hands, she was hired out to a local landowner, touted as a substitute for a draught animal, her owner specifying that due to her untamed nature she should only be driven by his wife. To keep up her character as a wild animal, she was fitted with a cangue, a kind of portable pillory imprisoning her neck and wrists. With her head held fast by this wooden vice her moustache was withdrawn from the hole long since bored through the septum of her nose by a fashion-conscious cannibal owner. One of the boat borne craftsmen skilfully utilized the hole to fit a large brass ring dangling down below her upper lip in the manner of a dangerous bull. It had still to be welded closed and her face was drawn firmly up to the edge of his anvil with the hoop laid flat on the surface under her eyes where she could see the two ends being brazed irremovably together. She arrived in the village in her travelling cage, transported by wheelbarrow and accompanied by her owners, Tsang, his wife and baby. Backing out of her cage and straightening to her full height, held by a rope to her nose ring and gawped at by the diminutive inhabitants, peasants male and female assembling for the day’s labour, Isobel almost felt like a Shire horse at a county show. From the lower edge of the wooden cangue a strap and buckle dangled to below her belly. An admonishing crack of the showman’s whip made her bend hastily forward so that the strap could be drawn short. It ran from the cangue to a link that connected with the ring through her clitoris, making sure that she remained in that posture. Led by Tsang’s wife, with her baby slung upon her back, holding the rope from Isobel’s nose ring and flourishing her husband’s longest whip, Isobel trudged out of the village along the narrow track between the fields. The intrusive link forced her to keep her thighs apart and so her hips rolled a little as she moved, the little bell tinkling merrily. To keep the strap from tautening painfully she had to walk with a careful bobbing action that kept her dangling breasts bouncing liquidly and her bottom cheeks producing a circular motion that added to the effect by her pert little tail being flirted conspicuously. Out among the flooded fields, she was connected up with a makeshift harness of rope to a wooden plough and directed by her female driver with occasional showy cracks of the whip, she went back and forth all day across a succession of paddy fields, wading calf-deep in brown water, the dragging plough stirring up the black mud underfoot to make a seed bed suitable for planting rice shoots. Every disturbing step squeezed the mud between her toes and reminded her ringed nose of the human excrement collected and spread as manure. The clitoris proved from the first a very tender anchorage for the strap and so eventually Isobel was made to take a wooden peg instead, solidly emplaced in the manner of a dildo and pierced through the protruding butt end to take the connection. It was backed up against the possibility of slippage by a similar peg plugging her anus, with a short cord stretched closely between the two. The movement of this pair of tightly connected intrusions kept Isobel in a constant state of half arousal, which she found extremely wearing. She dared not slacken her efforts, however, for the whip cracks soon became less of a token and more compelling of effort. With each acre plodded over, the muck splashed higher and higher up her legs until by the end of the day she had the appearance of wearing black stockings. Only at the end of the day was she permitted to wash by kneeling and rolling in the shallow irrigation ditch watched by staring children while Tsang’s wife sat on the side, holding the end of her nose ring halter.

  While her owner-driver naturally ate with the landlord’s household, Isobel was returned to her travelling cage set out in the muddy yard with her muzzle removed and an earthenware bowl thrust before her. Her drying hair had spread out in a wild red bush, getting in among the sloppy rice and shredded vegetables in the bowl. Unable to use her trapped hands she had to nuzzle and hungrily suck up the food from the bowl with noisy slurps. In between she spared a few moments to growl and snarl at the onlookers in the manner she had been taught, her teeth and tusks most usefully conspicuous. Back in the menagerie sampan, she would have been able at intervals to reach the spouted pot suspended from one corner of the cage and tilt its spout between her lips to yield a brief few sips of cold tea to moisten her throat after all the growling and snarling. Even in the menagerie, if not watched by her owners, she had been subjected to many indecencies at the hands of the kind of evil minded boys, who prodded and poked her indecently, going so far if left uninterrupted for long as to screw large and knobbly vegetables, sweet potato, cucumber or a maize cob into her anus, the only orifice readily available, her vagina being normally too firmly impaled upon the bamboo pole to be tampered with.

  The countryside, however, grew unsafe for strangers, as overtaxed peasants lost faith in the Imperial mandate to rule and armed insurgents, condemned by the representatives of central authority as mere bandits, swarmed in the villages, advocating new and more inspiring leaders. The crew of the circus boat moved on, keeping to the relative safety of the river, to take refuge below the riverside walls of the county town. Here they were all immediately arrested.

  In his judgement hall in the Yamen, the governor sat cross-legged behind a low desk laden with scrolls and writing materials. He was as usual a mandarin in a conical hat with stiff black leather tails sticking up from a gold button of high rank on top, the embroidered square that adorned the chest of his gorgeously multi-coloured silk robe also denoting his superiority. His clerk sat to one side transmitting the questions as his superior directed, while the uniformly clad constables lined up to either side of the court, each armed and ready with a bamboo cane. Tsang lay flat on his face before the magistrate while a constable stood over him, methodically thrashing the showman with his bamboo whenever his answers to the interrogation were judged to require it. Meanwhile behind him, all the
rest of the family were kneeling, heads inclined to the floor, wailing and banging their foreheads on the tiles at intervals, with Isobel quaking in her travelling cage, having been set among them as exhibit A. She noted apprehensively that the magistrate’s thin moustache quivered visibly every time his eyes fell upon her. Under cover of Tsang’s howls and the cracks of the bamboo, Kwai explained sidelong in quick whispers.

  “His excellency says you are a foreign devil. Foreign devils are to be executed as the originators of misfortune!” Then. “Honoured father protests, not so! You are only an animal, such as are found in the islands of the South, and mentioned in the classics as his Excellency knows.”

  The focus of the interrogation then shifted and two constables carried Isobel’s cage forward to replace the groaning Tsang, setting her to face the mandarin behind his desk who looked away with an expression of distaste on his long countenance. A brief fumble by the constable undid the rear gate behind Isobel, fully exposing her naked rear to his cane. What else could she do under the dangerous line of questioning, but abandon all remaining hope, and maintain the pretence that she was merely a wild animal incapable of human understanding? The constable’s bamboo instrument swung and cracked in meaty repetition across the plump rounds of her naked behind, smacking alternately beneath and above her wobbling false tail, her dangling bell ringing every time. The bamboo had been split at the end so that it sprang wider upon impact somewhat like the multiple striations of an English birch and Isobel howled and shrieked with vigour and energy, her hair drifting over her face sufficiently to conceal any close scrutiny of her expression. Fortunately, since the mandarin evidently did not understand the local dialect, the resulting delay while his questions were being transmitted through the secretary gave Isobel time to collect herself after each stroke and remember to restrict her responses to such whimpers and whines as any whipped animal might give. Consequently the mandarin lost interest in the interrogation after no more than a dozen strokes had left broad red slashes across the white rounds of Isobel’s behind and, the false tail remaining fortunately intact, he dismissed the case as unproven.

  That evening in a red-pillared hall in his official residence, the officer of the law held a wine drinking party for a select band of his associates in the community. The men lolled upon low beds with servant girls to serve the wine and the long bamboo pipes and little table lamps used for opium smoking close at hand for those who felt the need. Late on in the session, Isobel was produced in her travelling cage for the now drunken guests to inspect the strange female ape. At the mandarin’s command a captured bandit had been brought from the gaol, carried in by two gaolers trussed up in a large wicker basket, expecting execution. He was told that his only hope of escaping death by slow mutilation was to perform a successful coupling with Isobel for the amusement and edification of the guests.

  The supposed bandit was not a large man even by local standards and fear made him clumsy and almost impotent. Isobel fully accepted that it was necessary for her own safety that she must continue to behave as if she were an animal. Restrained by this and the restrictions of her cage, she was unable to resort to the obvious means of assisting the criminal’s efforts and she feared that she might equally share his fate if the mandarin’s expectations were unfulfilled. She did her best accordingly, by wriggling against his thighs and rubbing her bottom up and down, flipping her tail against his soft penis, painful to her but surely exciting to him. She reflected that even if he were condemned at last, he should at least be grateful for her efforts to encourage this opportunity for pleasure. He clutched at her hips and made an effort, but groaned desperately. The onlookers, meanwhile, were laying bets upon his eventual success and the precise time it would take, while agreeing that judging by her eager behaviour, the she-creature was obviously in heat, Isobel being forced to maintain her character as an animal by whimpering and whining for their benefit. At last the sweating convict was sufficiently encouraged to become stiff enough to enter her and, having got that far, she tried all she knew to clasp his penis tight and establish a rhythm. Several times they had to pause to gather energy before the condemned man seemed able to forget his nervous situation. His fingers dug harder into Isobel’s flanks and he began to drive more steadily. Inspired by similar necessity, they encouraged one another, Isobel making little gasping noises and the man responding with brief chirping sounds like a man urging on a speeding mare, an irregular tinkling of the bell and the cage creaking in rhythmic tribute to their intensity of motion. The guests broke into spontaneous applause as they came to an eventually successful conclusion. After they had broken apart, Isobel was securely leashed and muzzled, then her cage was taken round upon a tour of the guests’ couches, so that those who had lost their bets might verify the evidence of ejaculation for themselves. Two of them took full advantage of the offer by pushing their fingers into her still sopping vagina and inspecting the result, before wiping their fingers clean on her tail. Isobel kept her bottom cheeks closely clenched throughout this latter operation, but fortunately neither of the drunks was in any state to make precise investigation, being more interested in flicking the bell. Isobel’s relieved partner, on his knees all this while and banging his forehead repeatedly upon the floor in abject obeisance, was finally removed. Safely fastened back in her cage, Isobel was rolled away by wheelbarrow, but not until her profusely bowing owner had humbly invited any of honourable guest who wished to try out the she-beast for himself, to pay the circus sampan a visit.

  As the rebel army closed in about the town, the population grew frantic from hearing tales of the ferocity and magical invulnerability of the enemy. Isobel was remembered and requisitioned. With her carrying cage slung from a pole between the shoulders of two soldiers, followed by her owner valiantly brandishing his demonstration sword, she was carried through the deserted alleys followed from behind the shutters, by the peeping eyes of women and children. She was taken up onto the town walls above the main gate upon which, the rebels were expected to launch their main attack. She had been forced to drink copious quantities of water before they left, so that she was feeling uncomfortably in need of relief even before she reached the top, where a stout pair of sheer legs had been erected, reareing above the battlements. The wall walk was manned by a rag-bag collection of townsmen brandishing a variety of weapons, all howling and beating upon anything that would make an impressive noise. Tsang supervised as Isobel’s cage was hooked onto a chain depending from a block at the head of the sheer legs. She was hoisted up facing inwards towards the town and, with much shouting, the whole apparatus was dipped to swing her outwards. As soon as the cage had risen above the level of the parapet the noise redoubled, gongs, drums and blaring horns, the roar of men’s voices coming now from behind her as well as from the wall in front. Tsang had dropped the rear gate at the last moment, completely exposing her unmistakeable female bottom towards the enemy as the cage descended. Isobel clutched desperately at the front-end bars as the cage stopped its descent with a jerk, spreading her thighs wide and pressing her knees against the cage sides, terrified that she might slide out backwards and be decanted to the foot of the walls before the raging horde of besiegers. She felt the cage bob and swing, but fortunately the straps held and she slid out no further than usual, emerging only as far as her hips. With her bare backside projected towards the enemy her view was mainly of the rough stone face of the wall, inches before her nose, though by turning her head, a stretch to either side came into view, one which had already been embellished with numerous bedroom utensils lowered upon cords. Above the parapet a row of hairless yellow faces bobbed, all distorted into paroxysms of fury and ferocity, open mouthed, roaring and shrieking, as if hoping to intimidate their opponents.

  Out of the corner of Isobel’s eye as she hung suspended, she saw something flicker past, smacking against the stones of the wall and then falling away. It was an arrow! In an instinctive reaction, her bottom cheeks contracted as small and tight as po
ssible, suddenly conscious of the target she was presenting. More arrows followed. Had they firearms out there? In the spasm of terror that the thought evoked, her straining bladder burst through its restraint, sending a jerky stream downwards, just missing the dangling cage door and glistening in the sun as it spread out into a thin spray below, watched by hundreds, perhaps thousands of male eyes. After a long while dangling there on view, she was hauled slowly back up to battlement level, facing a row of excited male faces yelling as if they had won a victory. The arrows seemed to have stopped, at any rate. Her owner was the nearest of the defenders, grabbing a handful of her drifting sheet of hair and using it to steady the swing of the cage. A funnel was produced and strong fingers pinching her nose forced Isobel to accept it into her mouth. They were filling her up again like defenders recharging a cannon. Water was poured into her at a rate and quantity she could barely sustain, but when she tried to rebel, the cage was swung sideways and she was given a couple of sharp admonitory thwacks. She managed a few more swallows until she could feel her belly swelling in protest.

  It was some time before she became aware that the sounds of impending battle had receded from her immediate vicinity and had shifted elsewhere around the walls; the rebels as superstitious as the defenders had recognised the deployment of potent counter-magic. Isobel was carried along and dangled before the city walls all that that day, in various places as the need dictated, the fear increasing with each exposure and with one near miss making her loosen more than her bladder. All night, dangling in her cage, illuminated by the flames of a torch held over the wall above her, she strained to listen for possible assailants who, by creeping up in the darkness, might get close enough to be more accurate. With dawn, however, it became clear the disheartened besiegers had fallen back upon a mere blockade. It seemed that such was the belief in the unbinding power of female waste products that even the rebels had lost confidence in the efficacy of their own weapons-magic.