Chapter 129 ... and his Crew of Cutthroats
Jasper Slegg stepped forward with alacrity, pulling Erika Weiss roughly to
her feet while his eyes feasted on her nude flesh. The heartsick blonde tried
to use her hands to cover herself, but there were too many men in the cabin,
staring at her from too many angles. She had never felt so naked and alone in
her life.
Her panties were still lying on the floor at the foot of the bed and the
rest of her clothes were hanging from the hook on which she had draped them
while Baron Gutmayer had laid the cruel stripes across her thighs, belly and
breasts with the flat of his sword-blade.
"Please ..." Erika asked beseechingly, "May I ... may I have my clothes
before I go ... out there," she said as she gestured toward the door that led
toward the ship's main deck. She remembered the stares, some displaying normal
masculine appreciation, some unbridled salaciousness, that she had received when
she had strolled down the deck fully clothed less than two hours earlier. She
could not begin to imagine the lechery with which the crewmen would ogle her if
she appeared before them in her present state of undress.
The Laird of Dornoch, for that was how an ensign in Her Majesty's Navy had
once jokingly referred to the man who'd grown up as a blacksmith's son not far
from the links on the Dornoch Firth, picked Erika's panties up off the floor and
draped them over the rest of her clothes as he fingered the finery hanging from
the hook thoughtfully. "Nae, lassie, these are a' much tae bonny for the kind
of work ye'll be daeing this nicht. But hae nae fear, I'll gie ye aught to
wear." The red-bearded skipper opened the closet opposite the bed and stooped
down to pick out a piece of clothing from the middle of a pile of clothes that
looked as if it had been strewn on the floor for weeks. Standing upright and
smiling broadly, the burly son of a blacksmith tossed Erika the garment he had
selected.
Erika reached out to catch it, but as she did so she felt the heat of
Jasper Slegg's lecherous gaze on her belly and breasts as soon as her hands had
left their defensive position in front of her body.
Blushing, Erika let the shapeless lump of wrinkled fabric unwind in her
hands, only to find that it was a sleeveless man's shirt on which, judging by
its multitude of perforations large and small, generations of moths had fattened
themselves. She pulled the thin, threadbare garment over her head with
trembling hands, trying to take no notice of its rancid smell. McMahon was a
big man, but she, too, was fairly tall and the shirt fell only to the very tops
of her thighs, playing an exciting game of peek-a-boo with her blonde pubic
hair. Following the amused gaze of her grinning captors, she tugged shyly at
the hem of the shirt, only to find that by doing so, the deeply-rounded neck of
the sleeveless shirt slid tantalizingly southward, revealing the sumptuous upper
slopes of her close-set breasts.
"I always said ye were a well-dressed man, Skipper," Jasper Slegg said with
a sly wink as he slipped his hand under the hem of the faded shirt to give
Erika's naked buttocks a lecherous squeeze. "But I'll be damned for a Portugee
if this shirt don't look a lot better on her than on you."
"Aye, she fills it oot richt nicely, or I'm Old Tom Morris," McMahon
agreed with a lusty grin. "How's that, lassie? Is it no a bonnie tartan?"
McMahon chuckled at Erika's discomfiture as she tried to evade Slegg's grasping
fingers. Then he turned more serious. "Are ye ready to man yer station?"
Nodding her head dejectedly, Erika followed the red-bearded mariner as he
made his way toward the door, with the General and the Commissioner of the
Imperial Seal close behind and Slegg bringing up the rear, his eyes never
leaving Erika's hemline, where the moth-eaten shirt played hide-and-seek with
the sweet, spankable curves of her delicious backside.
********
The ship's deck, normally a-buzz with activity, quieted to a standstill as
the small procession marched past. It seemed to Erika as if an extremely
high-pitched "all hands on deck" whistle, audible only to dogs and sailors, had
sounded, for there were suddenly Chinese and Malay crewmen everywhere, some of
them still-rubbing hammock-sleep from their eyes, eyeing her with silent
appreciation.
Erika tried to ignore the lustful stares, and looked out over the bay at
the outline of the harbor in the distance, its waterfront wharves and buildings
growing fainter with each passing second, and with them her last faint hopes for
freedom. Somewhere on the great continent beyond, Daniel Kauffmann was en route
to the meeting that Baron Hans von Gutmayer had arranged to decoy him out of the
way. She raised her eyes toward the darkening sky and implored the deity to
keep the good doctor and Ju, her kindly maid, safe from the treachery of the
German vice-consul.
The piety of her silent prayer was interrupted by a profane whistle of
admiration, followed by a deep baritone voice bellowing loudly in Chinese,
"Didn't I tell you, mate? You show me a nicer pair of tits than those between
here and Singapore, and I'll buy your rum every night for a year! Look at 'em,
boys!"
Erika turned toward the voice angrily. It was Deng-shan, the
fierce-looking sailor the baron had dubbed Gwang-zhou, standing among a group of
three men who had been working on a section of the ship's hull. The
well-stocked leather tool-bag around his waist and the hammer in his hand
indicated that he was the ship's handyman. Deng-shan's licentious gaze locked
onto her body as if he were a sea-hawk and she were the plumpest, juiciest fish
in the China Sea. He pressed the business end of the hammer against his crotch
and pointed the thick wooden handle toward her, while his companions snickered
salaciously.
Erika shivered noticeably, and not just from fear. The sun-bright skies of
two hours earlier had given way to a blustery late afternoon breeze that whipped
her long blonde tresses in the gusty wind, even as the chill in the air caused
her thinly-clad nipples to stiffen so that they poked shamelessly against the
moth-eaten fabric of her only garment. Erika crossed her arms over her
half-exposed breasts defensively when McMahon paused and gestured toward the
threatening clouds and said something to Wang and Fong that she could not quite
make out. But the concerned expressions on the faces of the three men made it
clear that McMahon was apprehensive about the worsening weather. In the few
short moments that she had been on deck, the wind had picked up and the sea had
grown heavier. The Yangtze Dragon, a smallish ship, had begun to pitch
noticeably on the increasingly choppy seas.
The procession had only taken another step or two toward the three gawking
workmen when a fresh gust of wind forced Erika to lower her hands from her chest
in order to tug protectively at the hem of her shirt, which the freshening wind
had caused to swirl around her hips, giving the ogling crewmen a good look at
her blonde-fringed treasure.
As soon as she dropped her hands, of course, the mariners' marauding eyes
reverted to her mouth-watering cleavage and the wind-chiseled tips of her
breasts that stabbed the flimsy fabric of her threadbare shirt.
"I'm not takin' that bet," the taller of the handyman's companions
rejoined, rubbing his hands together as his lecherous eyes fastened on Erika's
bold-thrusting pleasure-mounds.
"Hey, Deng!" The speaker was a short, sturdily built Malayan. He chuckled
obscenely and wiped a few pearls of spittle from the corner of his mouth. "D'ye
think there might be a man or two on board the Dragon that would care to have a
go at those big beauties?"
Deng nodded silently as he stared at Erika's luscious cleavage, intrigued
by the freshly discolored blotch just below the uppermost of the two dark bands
he had seen earlier -- the stripes that the baron's sword had left on her
majestic breasts. He looked at her four escorts in turn, wondering which of
them had had the pleasure of punishing the beautiful blonde's pleasure-globes
with his bare hands.
When their grim faces gave him no clue, he pictured himself stripping
Erika's flimsy garment from her body, leaving her as naked as he had seen her in
the captain's cabin. In his mind's eye he pressed her naked belly against the
waist-high rail and took her brutally from behind while he mauled her sensitive,
sword-lashed lust-melons with his powerful hands. He gave Erika Weiss a lewd
wink and then turned to answer the Malayan. "Aye. Just a few, pal, just a
few. And I wouldn't mind sailing a true course between those pretty legs
neither. My foremast is getting hard just thinkin' about it."
Erika felt successive waves of fear and shame wash over her, as the
disreputable threesome and those around them erupted into coarse laughter. But
it was not just that one handful of men. She felt the eyes of every man on deck
crawling over her scantily-clad body.
But she had no chance to voice her displeasure because just then Jasper
Slegg planted a bony-knuckled hand between her shoulder blades and pushed her
toward a dark opening in the deck that seemed to lead downward into the bowels
of the ship.
