We moved away from the compound on a jungle path soft with leaves underfoot. The drummer beat faster. The men kept passing the jug, their movements became more exaggerated, their voices melodious, mesmerizing. We reached a clearing lit by a ring of seven smouldering fires. They added fresh logs and the sparks ran through the air like red sprites lighting the circle of trees where human skulls appeared like pale lanterns in the branches and the long fronds of creepers hung over me like the stretched hands of ghosts.
My knees weakened. I was about to fall. The naked man steadied me and kept a grip on my arm. I kept going, one step at a time to meet my fate. The trunk of a dead tree with the topside carved flat had been placed at the centre of the clearing. It could have been an altar in church and I recalled when Sister Agnes led prayers I had always thought how silly it was, how if Our Father Who Art in Heaven really cared for his children he would have sent plagues and boils and painful deaths to all the dictators and murderers and evildoers in the world.
I was lifted and laid on the altar. The sticks rattled, the sound like hissing serpents. The voices deepened as if the chant had new significance. I had lost the will to do anything but observe myself from outside myself. They stroked my limbs, as if to calm me. There was no aggression, no violence. I was a precious object, a lamb, a calf, an innocent.
Some of the men had abandoned their voodoo sticks. They continued to stroke me as their witchdoctor poured a pungent smelling oil over my body from my shaved head to my dusty feet. They worked the oil into my skin, turning me over as you baste a plucked chicken. Still the drummer beat louder. The voices turned from a chant to a wail. More logs were heaped on the fires and the flames sent hideous shadows marching through the trees.
The men who had abandoned their sticks held me tightly. The witchdoctor produced a knife with a long thin blade and a carved handle which he gave to the naked man. The witchdoctor took my right hand, the hand holding the St Christopher. He pulled my fingers back. I tried to resist and gasped forlornly when my fingers opened and the medallion slipped to the floor.
The witchdoctor danced up and down, screaming at the moon rising over the trees. He then grabbed the St Christopher and ceremoniously dropped it in the fire blazing at my feet. My journey was over. He looked back at me, the eyes in the bird mask more terrifying. He grabbed my hand and straightened my fingers. The others chanted and rattled their sticks as the naked man leaned over me with the knife and slit my wrist. A spasm ran through my body. I was sweating but felt cold. I wriggled and the blood gushed over my fingers into the calabash one of the men was holding.
I grew weaker as the blood drained from me. I was on the point of passing out when the witchdoctor seared the wound with a burning unction. The man with the earthenware jug added some drops from the brew they had been drinking to the blood and they sipped the concoction, passing the calabash from hand to hand.
The moon’s light had grown brighter, picking out the carvings on their devil masks. The witchdoctor used his fingers to make circles in the oil around my breasts, my heart and the lips of my vagina. I was dazed but could still understand how simple people believed that in these rites they were calling upon some power beyond themselves. I could understand why girls might feel fortunate to have been chosen as offerings and why a virgin gave the ritual a sense of purity and significance.
The chant became a single continuous note. The naked man, his cock erect now, like a knife, raised the blade, it glinted above me, he cupped my left breast and, as he leaned forward, the shadows above went out of shape. I heard the rush of people moving through the bush. As the man began to run the knife below my breast, cutting the skin, marking his line, his arm was jerked away and he screamed in agony as the butt of a rifle struck his jaw.
Samir appeared. I thought it was a hallucination. The witchdoctor grabbed for the knife the naked man had dropped but he, too, was clubbed to the ground, this time by Azar, his eyes like live coals below his filthy red turban. I heard the familiar sound of Umah’s bracelets rattling on his wrists. He scooped me into his arms and with Samir on one side and Azar on the other, they strode through the clearing using their Kalashnikovs as cudgels and clearing the way.
They circled the house. The men in masks followed like demons rattling their voodoo sticks. The twin beams of a vehicle lit the undergrowth as it came towards us. It skidded to a halt. The doors swung open. Umah laid me in the back, Samir climbed in and wrapped me in a blanket. Umah sat in the centre at the front beside Mohammed. Azar let off a volley of shots in the air before climbing in beside him.
Mo put his foot down. We bumped and swerved over the track to the highway, over the long bridge, and we reached Samir’s hotel in the Arab quarter in Lagos as the sun rose over the sea, the jungle, the glass buildings and brown brick slums.
Afterword
SO, MY STORY ENDS..
In the coming days I was given a new passport by the chargé d’affaires at the British Consulate. He didn’t doubt who I was. There had been a massive search for the missing diplomat’s daughter. Anyway, he knew Daddy. They all know each other.
I spoke to Mummy on the phone. No, I didn’t want her to come and get me. I would fly home alone.
Samir had escaped the day after his father had sent me to the slave market. With his loyal crew, he followed my route, hiring small planes and cars, always one day behind. They reached Timbuktu the day after the auction and arrived in Lagos a day after me.
It had taken Samir those five days and a king’s ransom to learn through a web of petrified but greedy informers that I had been acquired by aristos; not primitive tribesmen, but men of power, politicians, lawmakers, oil lords. The blood ritual is an initiation into their ranks, a guarantee that, as accomplices in murder, they will protect the other members and themselves be protected. It is a cabal, a mafia. Vote rigging. The way power works behind third-world democracy, primitive and unbreakable.
The aristos take prostitutes from the streets for their human sacrifices. Why exactly I had been brought from Mali to play this role I do not know. But I did learn that the ceremony in the bush beyond the Third Mainland Bridge, the longest bridge in Africa, had taken place on All Soul’s Night; the one time in the year when, they believe, the portals between the living and dead open, the most important date on the Pagan Calendar, the time to give the devil what he really wants.
The scar below my left breast will remind me always that my lover had arrived in the nick of time. He had defied his father. He had taken his treasury in gold bars and it was just too sad that we would not be together. He would return home to the red fort. He would be punished, as would Mo, Azar and Umah; it was the way of the tribe and they would accept it. If I were to return with Samir, his father would have had me killed.
I remembered dreaming once that I was walking through Knightsbridge with Samir and lots of children. It was only a dream. His first loyalty was to the family and the extended family, to Maysoon, his men, to his labour delivering weary boat people to the frontiers of Europe. One day, his father would die and he would become the Emir.
The incredible thing about love is that it happens at all. It appears. It endures. I will wait.
I kissed Mo, Azar and Umah on their cheeks. Fascinating for the people on the airport concourse; a bald, tattooed white girl in a white kaftan kissing these scruffy Arabs she had come to love and had come to believe they loved her, too, each in their own way.
My sheikh came to the gate. He bowed. He touched his heart. Tears coursed over my cheeks.
‘Habibi,’ he said.
‘Come with me,’ I implored.
‘I cannot.’ He clenched his fist and held it against his heart. ‘You are here.’
‘I will wait, Samir.’
We turned away. I didn’t look back and I’m sure Samir didn’t look back, either. We had said our goodbyes in the big bed at the Arab hotel. We had made love as if there were no tomorrow and for some that will be true, for us all, in our own time.
I entered a long tunnel
that whispered and listened as if for a message from the future.
At home in Fulham I swim every day. There were journalists at my door for a few weeks but, with the wisdom of the East, I never said a word and without a word being said the story of my being lost and found went away.
I run the razor over my mount every morning. Slowly a bonnet of baby curls covered my bald head. Bobby wears my clothes and the spider gorges on his pretty pink cock. At Christmas we are going to the famous costume party in Chelsea. I shall dress as an Arab sheikh. Bobby will finally take Roberta out into the world. Progress. Change. I am trying to move on and wonder, just wonder, when summer comes and the sky is blue if I might take my holiday where Columbus restocked his ships before sailing into the unknown.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
One The Island
Two The Boat
Three Escape
Four Arabian Nights
Five South of Nowhere
Six Mauritania
Seven Caravanserai
Eight The Dancer
Nine The Harem
Ten The Emir
Eleven The Sahara
Twelve Scheherazade
Afterword
Backmatter Page
Girl Trade - full length erotic adventure novel (Xcite Erotic Romance Novels) Page 22