Chapter 130 Enslaved by the Dragon
"Doon ye gae, Slegg," McMahon barked, as the mate brushed past Erika,
preparing to descend into the innards of the ship. "Be ready tae catch her if
she falls." A moment later, the captain added, "Tak this wi' ye," tossing down
an arm-long length of inch-thick rope. "And if the lassie gies ye any throuble
or tries to run awa', tie her bonnie ankle to the Dragon and give her a guid
skelp or two across that pretty erse."
Erika shuddered, wondering at the nature of this mysterious 'Dragon' below
decks. She drew in a breath as she watched Slegg carefully negotiate the first
few rungs of a grimy metallic ladder that led below. A moment later he called
out, "There's a loose rung, Cap'n. Better have a man see to it."
"Aye, Slegg, that I will."
Half a minute later Erika heard Slegg's raspy voice echoing eerily upward
from below, "All right then, princess," he smirked, "Ye can descend the royal
staircase now," as Erika gingerly took a step downward into the darkness.
Erika's bare feet had no sooner touched the first rung of the stairwell
than she realized that some sort of strange, slippery coating lined its steps.
She took a second tentative step downward, and then a third, and then was
greeted by a strange blast of heat from below.
At first the heat felt good on her bare, wind-chilled legs, but with each
downward step the heat became more and more oppressive. As she cautiously
inched her way further down the ladderwell, rung by unseen rung, she felt as if
she were descending into a dark and lifeless cavern from which she might never
return.
She glanced upward, hoping to catch a last glimpse of sunlight, but could
make out only the looming figure and reddish beard of the Laird of Dornoch.
She took another step downward, and was surprised that she could now begin to
see Slegg's leering face below her, straining to peer between her long lean legs
as she gingerly lowered herself one slippery rung at a time. How, she wondered,
could it now be getting lighter, not darker, with each downward step into the
abyss?
As she continued her descent, the heat became still more intense and the
air more difficult to breathe until finally Erika, scolding herself for not
guessing the truth sooner, realized that she was descending into the stoking
room of the ship. The light that had illumined Slegg's face had come from the
fire raging away in a huge furnace. She slipped on the last step, and fell
into Slegg's waiting arms. She heard the ill-featured little man chuckle under
his foul breath, even as one grasping hand roamed freely over the front of her
body and the other crawled under the hem of the shirt and groped between her
legs.
Erika tore herself free from his lecherous grasp and stared up toward the
top of the stairwell, hardly believing that she found herself hoping to see the
gruff Captain McMahon and the two domineering Chinese following her down, so
that she would not be alone with the filthy-minded Slegg. But there was nothing
but darkness.
"I doubt that those chinks'll be coming down here, dearie." Slegg wheezed,
as he tried to back her against the ladder. "They're a mite too posh for that."
Gliding quickly to her left, Erika eluded him again, and then, hearing the
sound of metal banging on metal, she looked over Slegg's shoulder. Behind him
there was a huge mountain of coal, and two shadowy figures moving to and fro in
the darkness.
"They're the barrow men, blondie; they'll fill the barrows and wheel 'em
over here by the Dragon. It'll be yer job to feed the bloody beast."
"Quit footerin' aboot and put 'er tae work, richt awa', Slegg!" McMahon's
voice boomed down from above, "we've lost too much time already running the
engines sae slow. And there's mair than a bit of a storm brewin' tae boot!"
"Aye, Cap!" Slegg hollered upwards as he rolled his eyes in exasperation.
Turning back toward his comely apprentice, he gave her a crooked grin. "He's a
tight-fisted, kilt-wearin' pain in the arse, the cap'n is, Princess, but he
runs a tight ship and he knows how to keep the chinks in their place. And the
Laird's got a fine eye for what a bloke is lookin' for in a bit of fluff too."
Slegg's eyes brightened as he added confidingly, " Ah, you should've seen the
cargo we took ashore last night - arf a dozen o' them Siamese wenches, none of
'em more'n fifteen, I don't s'pose. But they had bodies that'd rouse the poets
in Westminster Abbey out of their coffins! Beautiful creeturs, they was,
Princess, with skin as golden as clover honey and as soft as the down of a
Peking duck." Slegg pursed his lips thoughtfully. "I wonder how they'll like
spreadin' their pretty legs tricks in a high class chink whorehouse. Oh, well,
it's none of my affair. But enough o' that. Time to face the Dragon, dearie!"
Using a long metal bar, Slegg pried open the mouth of the great furnace.
An explosive blast of heat greeted Erika, who backed away from the gaping
maw of the furnace. She stared at the blazing inferno in awe. Was this how
Brunnhilde had felt, she wondered, at the moment she spurred her stallion into
the towering flames of Siegfried's beckoning pyre? But Erika had not the
mythical heroine's will to die, and, shielding her face with an upraised hand,
she retreated from the man-made inferno, only to feel Slegg's body pressed
against hers once again.
She pulled away, glaring at him through a dimness darker than the
Nibelungs' cave, a darkness which was given an eerie orange cast by the hellish
heat and light given off by the furnace.
"Think that's hot, princess? Wait 'til we bring the engines up to proper
speed. It'll get so hot down here," Slegg added, pointing at her threadbare
shirt, "you'll think that you're wearin' a sweater of Irish wool. But don't pay
me no mind, missie, you just slip it off whenever you 'ave 'arf a mind to."
Slegg guffawed crudely as he glanced downward at the hem of Erika's shirt,
hoping for another glimpse of golden nether-hair. Still unsure of what to make
of her strange overseer, Erika tugged nervously at the bottom of her shirt as
Slegg extended a long-handled shovel in her direction. "See those?" he
bellowed, tried to make himself heard above the roar of the furnace.
Erika took the spade and followed Slegg's finger, which was pointed toward
the wheelbarrows full of coal that the barrow-men had filled and wheeled over
toward the fiery mouth of the furnace. "Them's yer passage, princess. Work
hard and maybe I'll go easy on yer." Slegg gave her ripe figure another long
once-over and then pushed her toward the nearest barrow. "Have at it, blondie!
Those fancy-arsed chinks want to be at the far end of Zhoushan Island by this
time tomorrow!"
Erika turned obliquely away from Slegg and tentatively forced the blade of
the shovel into the barrow, shamefully conscious of how the bending motion
caused the moth-eaten fabric of the long shirt to creep upward over the base of
her buttocks. She paused for a fraction to ponder how best to protect her
modesty only to hear a sickening CRACCCKK!! that was accompanied by a blinding
flash of pain across her back. She turned angrily toward Slegg, who was
leisurely recoiling the length of rope that McMahon had thrown to him as he
started down the shaft. "Step lively now, wench! If we're not making enough
speed, the cap'n 'll have my head." Then the little man's bad teeth widened
into a sickening grin. "But I'll have your sweet arse first!"
Glaring at him furiously, Erika threw the first shovelful of coal into the
furnace, causing it to flare up even hotter, and then turned back toward the
barrow to prepare the next one. Under normal circumstances shoveling coal was
taxing enough; in the oppressive, strength-sapping heat of the stoking room the
work was arduous in the extreme.
After plunging the heavy shovel deep into the heaping coal-cart several
times and then straining to deliver the load to the great furnace, Erika decided
to reduce the depth of her shovel-plunge by a fraction, in order to conserve her
strength. When Slegg merely stood there and watched her intently she thought
she had put one over on him. But as she turned to empty the fifth of the
reduced-load shovelfuls into the furnace, she felt Slegg's rope-whip sear the
flesh of her thighs, just below the hem of the shirt.
"Aaahh!" Erika cried out as she emptied the shovel and turned to face her
tormentor.
"D'ye think I'm a bloody fool, wench? I don't care if you shovel
half-loads at double speed, but if ye think ye're going to shovel half-loads at
a snail's pace, ye've got another think comin'!" Jasper Slegg swung the rope
again, and Erika tried to pivot out of the way, but she was penned in between
the barrows and the furnace and flight was virtually impossible.
CRACCKK!! the lash caught Erika on the left hip, tearing a hole in the
fragile shirt with acidic ferocity.
"All right! All right!" Erika beseeched him, and plunged the shovel into
the coal-mound, and then pressed a bare foot against the blade, to drive it even
deeper. Then she lifted the shovel upwards, feeling its heaviness burn into
the fully-taxed muscles of her arms and shoulders. Grunting from the strain,
she twisted her body sideways, only to lose her balance slightly as the Yangzte
Dragon breasted a particularly large wave. Fighting the queasiness in her
stomach, Erika turned and shoveled the coal into the furnace, and then turned
and began again.
Slegg gave vent to a derisive laugh at her misery. "Haven't quite got yer
sea legs yet, have ye, Princess? No matter. I'll see to it that ye earn them
tonight," he sneered as he fondled his rope-lash lovingly.
Within a few minutes of beginning her back-breaking labor Erika understood
why the absent stoker was called 'Blackie' - and why he was plagued by a
terrible cough. The air, if such the sooty atmosphere around the furnace could
be called, was thick with ash and ember, glowing bits of which occasionally
found their way onto her face, her hair, into her sweat-moistened cleavage and
onto her bare arms and legs.
Erika had only managed a few heavy shovelfuls of coal, before streams of
perspiration were pouring down her face and neck, her limbs and torso. But
knowing that Slegg was watching her like a hawk, she struggled laboriously to
stoke the fire.
Shovelful after laborious shovelful followed, each one challenging the
gleaming, straining muscles of her arms and back and shoulders. Though the
shovelfuls were all of nearly equal size, heat and fatigue made each one seem
heavier than the last. Worse, Slegg's oppressive, ogling glance weighed on her
mind and spirit every bit as much as the forced physical labor taxed her body.
From the darkness he squinted at her half-naked body with unbroken concentration
through unblinking reptilian eyes.
Perhaps half an hour after she had begun, the shovel slipped from her
sweat-slick hands and clattered to the floor alongside the furnace. The
exhausted blonde wiped her sopping brow and then bent over to pick it up only to
be greeted with another ferocious CRACCKK!! of the coarse rope-whip as Slegg
ripped into the nicely-curved flesh of her bare buttocks.
"Aaaaiiaahhh!!"
"Back to work, ye lazy slut - and don't let me catch you tryin' a trick
like that again! Yer going to earn yer passage the hard way, blondie."
Struggling to hold back tears of outrage, Erika spun around to face him,
only to find him grinning at her like at a scrawny Buddha. At the audible pop
of hemp on girl-flesh, the two barrow-men abandoned their attack on the great
mound of coal for a moment, and turned to stare at the magnificent blonde who
stood before the belching furnace, the contour of her luscious figure illumined
by its fiery glow. Noticing the unabashed frankness of their stares, Erika
glanced downward to find that the rivers of perspiration that had washed down
her body had made the moth-eaten fabric cling alluringly to her every curve.
The cloth seemed no thicker and no more opaque than a sheet of onionskin paper.
No sooner had she looked down than Slegg lashed out with the rope again,
aiming for and finding the livid mark that the baron's sword had left on her
upper thighs. Erika cried out in pain and tried to pull the shirt down over the
livid weals on her legs, but it was too short, and her efforts only managed to
pull the scoop-necked shirt lower and tighter over her ripe-nippled breasts.
"Hop to it, wench! Jasper Slegg cried out again. "Can't ye mark that
this old can's losing speed?" As she turned back toward the barrow she was
emptying, 'Pigtails', as Erika had dubbed one of the barrow-men, elbowed his
partner, 'Ponytail' and the pair of them exchanged obscene cupping gestures
while Erika plunged her shovel into the mound of gritty black fuel and tried to
suppress the tears that were welling up from her heart.
Pigtails, a wiry little man whose snout-like nose had been bashed sideways
in a long-forgotten brawl in a sweltering waterfront dive, and Ponytail, a
sullen, burly, ape-visaged sailor with a single braided queue and three days
growth of dark whiskers, went back to their dismal drudgery, filling barrow
after barrow with black slag. But from that moment forward they took every
opportunity to steal a glance at the long, bare legs and the ripe, half-revealed
breasts of the scantily clad blonde who labored under the watchful eye and the
diligent lash of Jasper Slegg.
For Slegg, unencumbered with other duties, was free to ogle Erika Weiss to
his heart's content. He watched her for a while from behind, relishing the way
the ratty shirt slid up over the smooth, soft skin of her buttocks each time she
bent down for another shovelful. He wiped at his mouth hungrily as he studied
the deep, inviting groove between Erika's milky-pale bottom-cheeks trying to
hatch a plan that would allow him to batten the hatches of the sweetest piece of
girl-flesh he'd seen since he'd come to the far east seeking his fortune.
********
Jasper Slegg had been sailing under Andrew McMahon for several years
during which time the ruddy Scottish sea captain, besides dealing in more
conventional goods and the extremely lucrative trade in Indian-grown opium, had
scoured flesh markets from the Gulf of Aden to the Sea of Japan to find young
beauties to stock the brothels of the five treaty ports. But the Laird, as,
Slegg sometimes addressed McMahon behind his back, had strict rules about
keeping the men on board away from the future pleasure-girls, properly fearful
that his dissolute crew would despoil the youthful looks and freshness that
brought his 'wares' the high prices that had made the humbly-born captain quite
a wealthy man. Little did the tippling mariner know that below decks, Slegg,
assisted at times by Deng-shan, often ran a sort of female circus in the wee
hours while the Laird was snoring away the effects of a pint or two of Scotch
whisky.
Slegg, like his master, was an enterprising and avaricious man. A year or
two earlier he had conceived the idea of letting the crewmen take certain
harmless liberties with the lovely and otherwise well-cared-for creatures that
McMahon kept confined in upright bamboo cages in a special hold that Slegg had
dubbed 'the Brig'. For a modest price, the lowest deck-swabber on the Yangtze
Dragon could get a look at beauties he could never have dreamt of possessing on
shore. For a few pennies more, the female cargo, prodded by a wickedly sharp
bamboo stick wielded by Slegg himself, would be coerced into pressing their
soft, shapely bodies against the bamboo bars of their cages so that his
'customers' could fondle their nubile flesh. Another penny or two would entitle
the patron to grope the intimate private parts, fore and aft, of one of the
future courtesans, who, ignorant of the Laird's edict, co-operated, for the
most part, for fear of suffering far worse indignities.
Rubbing his chin thoughtfully, Slegg smiled to himself, remembering the
voyage a year or two ago during which Captain McMahon had brought those two
dusky island goddesses from Ceylon to Shanghai. By the time the men aboard
could make out the lights in the harbor, there was scarcely a coin on the
Yangtze Dragon that hadn't found its way into his own pocket. And the soft
brown eyes and sweet young bodies of the Siamese nymphs he and McMahon had
delivered last night had brought him a nice windfall as well. Even if the
frightening image of a Black Scorpion above the doorway of the bordello where
they had made the delivery had been a bit unnerving.
Slegg had long since convinced himself that he ran something of a public
service, that he performed an invaluable economic function on board ship. The
sailors had money and rarely stayed at any port of call for long. Slegg's
menagerie, he reasoned, gave them an opportunity to spend their hard-earned
wages. When he was in his cups, he had once laughingly told his cronies that he
was fostering international trade by means of his 'open legs' policy toward
China.
Slegg himself had violated the Captain's ban on sexual relations only on
rare occasions, usually when rum or Bombay gin had gotten the better of him.
But never, as he watched Erika's superb body bend and dip in the fire-light, had
he been so sorely tempted as he was this night. And, he reasoned cunningly,
this one did not seem to be the Laird's property, but rather that of the two
well-dressed Chinese. Besides, hadn't McMahon himself said that he was to give
her a smack or two, if she gave him any trouble? He fingered the rope lovingly
as his eyes explored Erika's statuesque body. Yes, the possibilities were quite
intriguing. But how to bring his darkest desires to fruition?...
********
As Slegg pondered his next move, he moved back and forth in a semi-circle
around Erika, occasionally flicking her with the rope-whip, continually changing
his position in order to get a better look at her mouthwatering body while she
slaved away at the barrows drawn from the endless mound of coal.
Erika tried to pretend that the rope-wielding mate wasn't there, but it
was impossible, particularly when he stood directly across from her. Three times
a minute she was forced to bend forward to spear the barrow-mound of coal with
her shovel, and three times a minute her lush orbs, slick with sweat, nearly
spilled out of the low neckline of the sleeveless undershirt. Like the light
given off by the furnace, Slegg's gaze was white hot and intense. His
gray-green eyes seemed to be drawn magnetically to Erika's tempting
breast-buds, which had been chafed to a shameless semi-stiffness by the
constant rubbing of the rough fabric against her sensitive nipples.
As he drank in the delicious sight of the sweating, straining body of his
stunning prisoner, Slegg cast a surreptitious glance over his shoulder to see if
the barrow men were watching. When he saw that they weren't, he slowly rubbed
the side of his hand against the thick erection that formed a large lump in his
trousers.
Doing her best to ignore her reptilian-eyed voyeur, Erika strove to develop
a rhythm, a series of flowing motions, that would ease her back-breaking
drudgery. She drove the shovel deep into the black mound in the barrow, then
lifted it clear, turned toward the hungry mouth of the furnace, overturned the
shovel and then turned back again to drive the shovel's blade once again. Her
ordeal was not made easier by the fact that the Yangtze Dragon seemed to be
tossed at will by the wind and waves, causing her to lose her footing and very
nearly her light lunch on two or three occasions, but the paleness of her pallor
seemed to amuse her rope-wielding nemesis. From time to time she heard a series
of loud clanging noises that seemed, in her exhaustion, to be coming from the
upper reaches of the furnace, as if the gluttonous beast was belching out
demands for more sustenance.
Erika managed to keep up the pace fairly well for the first hour, although
every muscle in her upper body cried out for rest. The heat was hellish,
unbearable, and she was half-blinded by rivulets of sweat that poured down over
her brow from her hair and scalp. But each time she paused at her labor to wipe
the sweat away, Slegg was there with his improvised whip, slashing it across her
shoulders, her back, her buttocks, her thighs.
"Back to work, you lazy wench!" he snarled as he raked the rope across her
bare, sweat-slick shoulders. "There'll be time enough for the likes of you to
rest when your watch is done!"
Erika soon lost all track of how long she had been in the hellish inferno
below decks, although it seemed an eternity. Worse, she had no idea how long
her ordeal would last. Would her watch be two hours? Four hours? Eight
hours?
From somewhere above her, Erika once again heard the sound of metal banging
on metal. She continued to slave away, her scantily-clad body silhouetted
against the furnace, her face and arms and shoulders flushed from heat and
exertion. She worked desperately to keep pace with the barrow men, fighting a
losing fight to empty the barrows as fast as they could bring them to her.
Because each time they got more than two barrows ahead of her they were able to
take a brief break, positioning themselves so as to take full advantage of the
light the roaring furnace threw on her statuesque body.
Erika hated their lecherous stares with a passion. 'Pigtails' was a
small, skinny, scrawny man, whose misshapen nose was ill-centered in a homely
face that tapered to a weak, pointed chin. Sporting a malicious grin, he
deliberately placed himself squarely on the opposite side of whichever barrow
Erika was working on, his body swaying ever so slightly from side as he watched
her work. His beady little eyes were furtive, darting nervously from Erika's
bare legs to her opulent breasts as they wobbled enticingly with her every
movement. The pale, sweat-soaked shirt did little to veil the ripeness of her
curves. Her sweat-moistened nipples, chafed to an irksome erectness by the
coarse fabric, were pointed peaks of desire as Erika continued to transfer
shovelfuls of coal from barrow to furnace with limb-aching regularity. But it
was the precise moment that Erika thrust the spade into the barrow that Pigtails
enjoyed most, the moment when Erika was forced to bend low, so that her
ash-tinged mounds spilled almost completely out of the Laird's undershirt.
When Pigtails had first taken his position there, Erika had hesitated,
knowing how brazenly her bending motion would display her charms. But a searing
Slegg-slash to the base of her bottom curves quickly brought her to heel. She
could do nothing more than glare at the horrid little man, before bending down
with the shovel and giving the filthy-minded beast the bird's-eye view of the
nude-almost-to-the nipples breasts that he so obviously craved.
"Nice tits, ain't they Mouse?" Slegg had nicknamed the furtive little runt
well, Erika thought. Ignorant of English, Mouse looked up at Slegg nervously,
but when Slegg greeted his glance with a lecherous grin, and gestured toward
Erika's cleavage, Mouse nodded and rubbed his skinny fingers together gleefully.
"And a fine arse, too, eh, Yim?" Slegg nudged the ape-like man with the
long queue of hair, who stood at his elbow watching streamlets of sweat trickle
down Erika's bare legs. The taciturn Yim said nothing, but grunted
approvingly. The three men watched Erika toil away for another minute or two
until she had emptied the barrow she was working on, indicating that she was
catching up to the barrowmen.
"All right, party's over! Back to work!" Slegg barked to the two Chinese.
Yim reluctantly turned back toward the dense mound of coal slag, but Mouse
pretended to take no notice of him, continuing to feast his eyes on Erika's
luscious breasts.
"Back to work, I said! Chop chop!" Slegg, not used to being ignored,
glared at the diminutive collier.
The little man scowled at Slegg, but Yim, his sullen countryman, muttered
in Chinese, "C'mon, Mao, what's the use?"
Mao, the Mouse, shrugged his shoulders despondently and as the two men
returned to their labors, Slegg turned back toward Erika, who had been watching
the brief exchange.
"What are you looking at, ya lazy wench," he snapped maliciously, lashing
out with the rope-whip and stinging her left thigh. "Get yer pretty arse back
to work!"
In pain, Erika dropped her shovel and reached for her bare thigh, further
infuriating the impatient Englishman. He slashed at her again, this time
aiming the stinging end of the rope at the bare topsides of her glistening
breasts. His aim was true and the moment the rope-scourge seared Erika's
breast-flesh, she cried out in agony and spun around, cradling her burning
globes in her hands, giving Slegg an open shot at her naked buttocks. Grunting
fiercely, the evil-tempered Englishman lashed at her shapely bottom again, and
then again, the tip of the rope scraping painfully at her smooth, rounded
bottomcheeks. "Feed the Dragon, I said!!"
Erika reached for the shovel, only to feel the lash leave another
scorching path across the fronts of her thighs, finding the narrow band of flesh
that was still tender from the baron's saber-whipping. Maddened by pain and
exhaustion, Erika grasped the shovel by the handle and swung it wildly at
Slegg's head, but missed, the end of the blade clanging harmlessly but loudly
against the side of one of the wheelbarrows.
"You'd better put that bloody thing down, Missy," rasped a pale, shaken
Slegg, "or I'll make you wish you had."
"Schwein!" Erika, seething, came at him again, swinging the shovel back in
the other direction, and this time she made contact with the retreating sailor,
the very tip of the shovel catching him just above the right eye.
"Aaarrghhh!! You cunt!!"
Erika felt a thrill of triumph as she watched blood pour out of the gash
she had opened and begin to stream down the side of Slegg's face. His features
contorted in pain, as he wiped at the blood disbelievingly. Erika drew back
the shovel to club him again, while the Mouse and the Ape looked on from across
the room, momentarily frozen into immobility.
But just as Erika took the shovel back over her shoulder, it seemed to
catch on something, and though her arms tried to swing down, the shovel- handle
was not forthcoming, and a moment later she felt it slipping from her
sweat-drenched fingers.
"Whaa ..." she began, half turning, just in time to feel the handle of the
shovel being driven into her solar plexus with gut-wrenching force. As she
doubled up in pain she found herself staring at the scowling face of Deng-shan,
the muscular handyman. She suddenly realized that the clanging sounds she had
heard earlier must have been Deng-shan repairing the rung that Slegg had
complained about. He had evidently heard their scuffle and rushed down the
ladder to lend a hand.
As she circled away from Deng, the shovel-wielding Chinese, Erika felt
Slegg's rope-whip scald the backs of her thighs again. She cried out in pain
and tried to thread her way between a row of barrows toward the unguarded
staircase, but Deng-shan reached out and grabbed her awkwardly by the front of
the shirt in order to swing her back toward Slegg.
Erika tore free from his grip, but not before Deng-shan's violent wrench
had torn the moth-eaten fabric of her shirt from neck to navel. As she pulled
away from him, Erika's luscious breasts sprang free, just in time to receive a
vicious diagonal slash from the cursing, bloody-faced Englishman. Meanwhile
Deng's effort had caused him to lose his balance on the dust-covered floor, and
his feet went out from under him. As he fell, he struck his head squarely
against the sturdy iron rim of one of the coal-carts. He sat on the floor
half-stunned, staring stupidly at the piece of Erika's shirt in his right hand.
"You fucking whore!" a half-blinded Slegg raged, as he stumbled after the
fleeing beauty, lashing wildly at her again. The tip of the rope-whip snaked
around Erika's back and bit at her naked breasts again. In a frenzy of pain
Erika's flight instinct took over, and she lurched toward the ladder, even as
Slegg's follow-through caused him to trip heavily over the fallen Deng-Shan.
Erika's heart was pounding furiously as she managed to claw her way up three
slippery rungs before she felt a pair of hands clawing at her ankles.
"Get her, Mouse!" she heard Slegg yell. Erika kicked downward viciously
at the clutching hands, her bare foot connecting squarely with Mao's angular
chin.
His pigtails flying, Mao cried out in pain and fell back, releasing his
grip. Erika tried to surge up the ladder, little knowing what she would find
above, but with the idea that the heavy weather might well have driven most of
the crew from the main deck. Even a dash to the rail and a dive to a quick,
watery death was preferable to the unspeakable horrors she might face if the men
clawing at her heels succeeding in keeping her imprisoned in the bowels of the
ship.
Despite her fatigue Erika hoisted her body up one rung and then clambered
desperately to find her footing on the next, before she felt another hand, a
stronger hand, on the ankle which had found no purchase. She kicked downward
again, but missed, and while she was off balance from that attempt, a second
hand closed on her other ankle.
"Don't let her get away, Yim!" Mao shrieked in high-pitched Chinese.
Erika felt Yim's brawny arms tugging at her slippery foot, but she fought
desperately to maintain her grip on the rung above her head, so that she would
be able to pull herself upward if the Ape relaxed his pressure. But the
powerful hands of the pony-tailed barrowman were relentless, twisting and
wrenching Erika's imprisoned ankles, until with a vicious downward jerk, he tore
her fingers loose from her grim handhold. Erika's heart sank along with her
body, as she felt her breasts scrape painfully against the rungs of the ladder
she had managed to climb before Yim pulled her back down into the hellinsh
depths of the stoking room.
Erika's bare feet had no sooner touched the ashy floor of the stoking room
again, when Yim, an evil smile beginning to form on his impassive face, spun her
around and pinned her back against the ladder. The pony-tailed man's meaty paws
quickly found their way inside the gaping rent in her shirt. Erika punched
wildly at the side of his head as his simian fingers mauled her tender breasts,
but the big man merely laughed and caught the wrist of his blonde prisoner,
whose strength had been inexorably sapped by the countless back-breaking
shovelfuls of coal.
"Out of the way, Yim! She's mine!" she heard a freshly-risen Deng-shan
growl. Erika heard Ponytail mutter something angrily under his breath, but he
deferred to the more senior crewman and slid around behind her and wrestled her
arms back over one of the rungs of the foot-ladder, pinning them behind her and
leaving her defenseless.
Grinning maniacally, Deng approached her and grabbed the hem of her shirt
and pulled what was left of her sweat-sodden garment up over her rounded hips.
He smiled wickedly at the sight of her blonde pubic hair and inviting labia and
then he rolled the shirt up some more, up over her deep-notched belly and then
over her bold-thrusting breasts, until it was little more than a pale rope
framing the upper curves of her magnificent melons.
"Keep her quiet, you fools!" Slegg rasped, taking a hand away from his
blood-gushing wound in order to cup a hand over his mouth to make his meaning
clear. "The cap'n 'll skin us alive if they hear us down here!"
His words were no sooner spoken than Erika felt the man with the queue wrap
a big hand over her mouth, stifling her cries of anguish. For by now there were
grasping, sweaty hands attacking her body from three sides. Yim's free hand
was fondling her buttocks with obscene delight, cupping and squeezing her
nether-globes. One of the Mouse's hands raced furtively up and down her thighs,
while the prying, spider-like fingers of his other hand tried to insinuate
themselves into the soft folds of flesh between her legs.
Meanwhile, Deng-shan's hands had closed on the ripe-nippled breast-mounds
that he had longed to get his hands on since the moment he had seen them in the
captain's' cabin. Although the upper slopes of her breasts were sprinkled with
ash and soot, the red bands the baron's saber had left around Erika's nipples
still stood out plainly on her creamy flesh. Ignoring her whimpers of pain,
Deng manhandled her lust-globes with punishing thoroughness, his strong,
masculine fingers kneaded her yielding tit-flesh, wiping the coal-smudge from
her sweaty mounds even as he crushed her soft, firm melons together and worked
her thickening nipples between his thumb and forefinger.
After a couple of minutes of such breast abuse, Deng-shan stepped back, and
slapped each of Erika's pleasure-mounds twice with his coal-tinged hands,
despite her futile efforts to twist away. Smiling wickedly at her abject
helplessness, Deng undid first his tool belt, which he proceeded to cast on top
of a nearby barrow of coal, and then his trousers, peeling them down his legs
proudly, enjoying the horrified expression on Erika's face. His surging cock
jutted upward and outward from a dark nest of pubic hair, hard and thick, its
blue-red veins almost bursting with man-lust.
During Deng-shan's momentary retreat, Mao buried his burrowing snout
against the side of Erika's left breast, sucking noisily at the sweaty globe.
Deng roughly pushed the Mouse's head out of the away and stepped forward until
his flat, hairy belly and his muscular thighs were hard against Erika's body.
Erika felt his virile erection, liberated from his dark, loose-fitting trousers,
pressing against her sweat-moist pubic hair and she screamed, or tried to, into
Yim's silencing paw.
"Don't think I didn't see the way you looked at me topside," Deng-shan
snarled in Chinese as he gouged his fingers under the backs of her thighs and
lifted upwards, wrapping Erika's bare legs around his waist. "The way you look
at all of us." He gave the fallen Slegg a surreptitious glance. "Round-eyed
bastards! You all think that you're better than us," he grunted under his
breath as he positioned his cock at the inviting portals of Erika's womanhood.
Erika only had time to mouth a plaintive, unheard, "No," into Queue's thick
hand before Deng rammed his body forward, slamming her back against the ladder,
even as his rutting cock slid into the warmth of her pussy. "Don't you? Don't
you?" he growled in a gravelly voice as he tightened his grip on her hips and
drove his body into hers again.
Jasper Slegg, for whom the three Chinese bore little affection, was still
crouching on one knee, unleashing a litany of vile obscenities as he used his
sleeve to staunch the blood flowing from the gruesome gash over his right eye.
Mouse, having been chased away from his mouth-hold on Erika's juicy breast,
rubbed at his sore chin until a new inspiration struck him. He scurried across
the room and reached down and grabbed the Englishman's rope, and then took up a
position alongside Yim, whose thick middle finger was by now probing deep into
Erika's buttock crease.
The big man watched as his diminutive comrade, his mouth contorted in a
diabolical grin, flipped the rope over Erika's head from behind. Then, being
careful to avoid Deng's head, he let it slide down over the German beauty's
proud-thrusting breasts before snapping it back viciously tight, jerking Erika's
upper body backward against the ladder. Erika felt as if her breasts had been
encircled by a band of steel fitting tightly around her sensitive areolae. And
then the band of steel began to move, as the mouse-faced-little man began to saw
the rough-fibered cord back and forth across her tender breast-flesh, just
beneath the pinkish-brown nipple-buds that Deng's cruel fingers had coerced into
unwilling erection.
The long-legged blonde thrashed her head from side to side in agony, as
Deng-shan thrust into her again, her misery compounded by the sensation of
Queue's thick, slobbery tongue working its way deep into her earlobe.
Deng-shan tightened his grip on Erika's thighs and lunged yet again,
delighting in his victim's desperate but futile struggles. When her left nipple
popped slipped free from the abrasive grasp of Mao's bondage rope, Deng-shan
sucked the tender morsel into his mouth and attacked it with tongue and teeth
until it stood out from her breast as hard and brown as a knot of leather.
All the while he pumped into her viciously, their sweaty bodies united into
one obscene, eight-limbed beast. Grunting like a beast of burden, Deng-shan's
used his powerful thighs to slam Erika against the ladder again and again and
again, as his thrusting cock plumbed the innermost depths of her womanhood. As
his towering arousal neared its climax, he trapped Erika's nipple-nugget between
his jagged teeth and his jaws clamped down on it with wolf-like ferocity.
Erika screamed as his fangs snapped shut on her tender love-bud, but her
anguished cries were smothered by Yim's brawny hand. Desperately she managed to
free one arm from its painful prison behind the rung of the metal ladder, and
she pushed against Deng-shan's chest just as his orgasm began. Mercifully the
intensity of the dreadful breast-bite receded as a prolonged climax caused the
powerfully-built sailor's body to generate a final series of staccato thrusts.
He exploded inside her, drenching the walls of her vagina with wave after wave
of man-semen.
Deng fell away from her, panting and breathless, as Erika exhaled for what
seemed to be the first time in minutes. But her respite was to prove
short-lived. Pigtails had thrown the breast-rope aside and worked his way in
front of her, one hand wrestling with Erika's newly free arm, while the other
grabbed at her blonde-tufted crotch.
"After ME, you Chinese scum!" Jasper Slegg had risen to his feet and there
was a deranged look in his good eye as he grabbed the rope and waved Mao out of
the way. The skinny Chinese looked up angrily but stepped back, giving Slegg
room to whip the thick rope-lash into the soft flesh of Erika's defenseless
breasts.
"Aaagghmmfpfh!!" she screamed into Yim's mouth-cupping hand.
"Over there! Bring 'er over there!" Slegg gestured wildly, and Queue and
Pigtails took hold of Erika. During their brief, one-sided struggle, the
tattered shirt that Deng-shan had rolled up over breasts slowly slid back into
place. But the front of the shirt was in ruins; it was now little more than a
flimsy vest-like rag that had been ripped open down to below her navel. Only a
few belt-like inches of fabric across Erika's nymph-slender waist held the
narrow vertical panels of the vest in place, but they did little more than frame
the luscious, pink-tipped lust-mounds that spilled out from between them.
The two Chinese dragged a kicking, clawing Erika bodily toward a heaping
barrowful of coal slag which Queue had wheeled in front of the great, black,
fire-breathing beast just before the melee broke out.
"Throw her across it! And be quick about it!" Responding to Slegg's
gestures, the two Chinese, one on each arm, threw Erika face down across the
front of the barrowful of coal, crushing Erika's full breasts into the jagged
ebony lumps. Her L-shaped, stretched-out position caused the raggedy shirt to
slide back up over the under-curves of her tempting buttocks which were now
posed deliciously high in the air.
"My turn now, whore!" Slegg roared, as he slashed the rope across the backs
of Erika's supple thighs, enjoying the way her long legs writhed in response.
Then, seeing that Deng-shan was standing there watching him, he turned and
growled, "You've had your fun. Now feed the Dragon for a bit while the rest of
us have a go at her. If the blarsted engines run slow for too long, the Laird
'll have our heads. Don't look at me like I'm daft, man, hop to it - do a good
job and I'll see to it ye get another crack at her -- after we're done."
Hearing those ominous words, and seeing the malevolent smirk on Slegg's
face, Erika redoubled her efforts to escape, but the more she struggled the
harder Mao and Yim pressed her belly and breasts into the flesh-scraping pile of
coal. .
Deng-shan considered Slegg's offer for a moment, and then reluctantly
reached for Erika's bloody-bladed shovel. "Not that one," Slegg snarled. "Hand
me that one and grab one of the others; I've got a score to settle with this
one!"
Stuffing the rope in his belt, Slegg took the shovel from Deng Shan and
held it out in front of him at chest height, parallel to the ground. "Lift up
her arms!" he rasped, raising the shovel slightly to convey his meaning to Queue
and Pigtails. When they jerked the prostrate blonde's arms painfully up behind
her, Slegg brutally rammed the shovel handle into her armpits cross-wise,
effectively imprisoning Erika's arms behind the thick wooden staff.
Erika groaned in misery, but the revenge of Jasper Slegg had only begun....
