Chapter 132 Mutinies and Memories
Yim, stunned by the ghastly fate that had befallen his partner, rushed
forward in a rage even as Deng-shan emerged from behind the rows of coal-carts
and Slegg, still clutching his side, rose from the ground. Erika glanced at the
three of them fearfully and lunged for the shovel Mao had abandoned when he had
tried to keep her from escaping up the ladder.
But just then they all heard a tremendous clatter of feet clanging on metal
accompanied by several voices as a skull-capped Chinese, followed by two
slightly-built Malays, lowered themselves down the ladder-shaft.
"These three stoke the next watch, Slegg," Deng-shan confided as the three
newcomers' nervous gaze traveled from the eye-catching spectacle of Erika
Weiss, wearing nothing more than a nearly frontless shirt and a patina of
coal-dust, to the appalling sight on the floor and then back again.
A moment later everyone in the stoking-room heard the booming sound of a
liquor-lubricated Scottish brogue echoing down the stairwell.
"Shlegg!" roared the blustery voice of Captain Andrew McMahon. "Why are we
losing power? Are ye daft, mon? Dinna ye ken that the wind's in our fache?
At the sound of McMahon's stentorian voice, Erika turned around to face the
ladder. As soon as she did so, Slegg, who had been eying her warily while he
pulled up his pants, leaped toward her from behind and wrapped an arm around her
throat. He grunted in pain as he pulled her bodily into a dingy corner, away
from the illumination given off by the furnace. Once in the shadows, Slegg did
his best to re-arrange the tattered remnants of Erika's shirt, but not before
the three newcomers had gotten a glimpse of a beautiful sweat-slick body smudged
with a thin layer of coal-dust, and criss-crossed by several slender streams of
scarlet. One of the Malays elbowed the other meaningfully as they gawked at
Erika's nudity.
A moment later the burly captain's foul weather mackintosh came into view
as he clumped his way noisily down the ship-ladder. "Losh! It's as cauld and
dreich as a whore's hert up on deck, but it's as het as a bakery in hell down
here. For God's sake, mon, who the devil was screamin' like an Irish bansh...."
As McMahon's black boots hit the floor of the stoking room, he turned toward
Slegg and saw Mao's blackened body shudder convulsively one final time before
lying still. McMahon glared angrily at the grisly scene, his weathered face
beet-red from a combination of the exertion caused by his descent, the eerie
reddish glow given off by the furnace, and a dozen drams of the Dalmore, that
exquisite whisky from the banks of the Cromarty Firth, not far from his Dornoch
home.
Slurring slightly, he roared, "For the love o' all that'sh holy, Shlegg!
Whit's happened to this wee lad, then? And as for ye," he roared to the men who
had come to relieve Mao and Yim, "get busy, the lot 'o ye. And put yer
shoulders into it. We need tae make up for the time these caber-headed galoots
have cost us."
"It was the wench, cap'n," Slegg rasped angrily from the shadows as the
newcomers manned their shovels. The mate tightened his grip on Erika's throat
as he continued, his words coming with difficulty. "She came at me with the
shovel, and knocked me arse over tea kettle, the whore did. Nearly took my
bloody 'ead off." Slegg paused to indicate the blood oozing from his head
wound. "Then when Mao tried to grab her, she pushed the poor little barstard
against the 'Dragon'. After crackin' me bloody rib."
Despite her terrible predicament, Erika felt a faint thrill of triumph. At
least she had gotten in a few blows. Though from the pain and venom in Slegg's
voice it was clear that he would give her cause to regret them soon enough.
McMahon looked down at Mao's body and then at the bloody gash above Slegg's
right eye. In the shadowy gloom of the darkest corner of the stoking-room he
could just make out the ripe curves of Erika's breasts spilling out of the shirt
that Deng-shan had ripped down the middle, but not the crimson streaks and
gashes left by Slegg's rope-whip and Deng's flesh-tearing tools. McMahon moved
toward her unsteadily and ogled Erika's lush, black-smudged body thoughtfully
for a moment while he caught his breath.
Erika could smell the whisky fumes as McMahon glared at her through
bleary, blood-shot eyes. He stepped closer and slipped a rough hand inside her
tattered shirt to cup her left breast. "Ye're no end of trauchle, are ye,
lassie? So it's mutiny ye've been up tae, is it, wench? Och! I'll nae hae any
breaches of discipline on board my ship!" A lecherous leer crossed the
Scotsman's ruddy face as he fondled her ripe breast in the darkness. Erika
slapped ineffectually at his hands, unable to escape from Slegg's throat-choking
grip. McMahon squeezed Erika's lust-melon roughly for a moment or two, frowning
when her eyes filled with tears in response to the pressure of his clutching
hand.
Despite her desire not to give him the satisfaction of knowing her misery,
Erika could not help but groan in anguish when the sea captain's callused
fingers found the taut nipple that Mao had gouged with the screwdriver. "We'll
have tae toughen ye up, lassie, if ye've a mind tae sail on the Yang-tze Dragon"
the red-bearded mariner chuckled as he ground Erika's tender love-nugget
between his finger and thumb with punishing force. Erika had to bite her lip to
keep from crying out, but with Slegg maintaining his iron-armed choke-grip on
her neck she was powerless to repel McMahon's assault.
When McMahon finally pulled his hand away and stepped back toward the
better-lit area near the blazing furnace, he noticed that his fingers were dark
with sweaty coal-soot. He looked at his hand distastefully for a moment before
wiping it on his mackintosh and then turning back toward Erika. He
straightened his spine, spread his feet and then clasped his hands behind his
back in what he imagined to be a Nelsonian pose before growling, "Slegg, gi'e
this filthy wench a good washing-up." There was a ribald twinkle in McMahon's
eye as he added. "She'll want tae look her best when we try 'er for mutiny the
morra. Won't ye, lassie?"
********
Erika's heart sank when she heard those words. When she had been a
schoolgirl of thirteen and fourteen she had often been transported to flights of
excited fancy by the brutal accounts of shipboard 'justice' she had occasionally
encountered in books of adventure. As often as not the victims of such
punishments had been gallant young heroes whose valor and steadfastness had
stirred her heart and her fast-maturing body to strange longings. Many nights
she had lain awake in her little bed, reading such stories by candlelight,
occasionally setting the book aside for a few minutes to imagine how the hero's
athletic young body might feel pressed against her own trembling flesh. How his
lips would touch hers, gently at first and then more passionately, leaving her
lips, after a few moments, to kiss her neck, her throat. And then lower still,
after his sure-fingered hands had undone her bodice, to the soft, warm mounds
that, while not yet fully-formed, were surely as sensitive and responsive as
those of the most amorous of adult women.
The thought of the young hero's lips closing on nipples that his masterful
fingers had teased into fleshy spikes of longing would send delicious frissons
of pleasure through her adolescent body. She would slip her frilly nightgown
off of her shoulders and lay back amid her white pillows with her eyes closed,
breathlessly imagining the feel of an expert tongue swirling around the pretty
pink crests that she herself had nursed into aching turrets of desire so many
times before.
One of her hands would inevitably be drawn to her swelling breasts while
the other would slide downward, across her bare belly, through her
sparsely-haired golden triangle, to the sweet, damp place of pleasure between
her legs. How many times had she attended to her strange longings with the
urgent but guilt-ridden fingers of a minister's daughter? How many times had
her gentle probing of her pleasure-bud, and the increasingly insistent circular
caresses of her secret place transported her to the loftiest peaks of pleasure?
How many times had she opened her eyes slightly so that she could watch the
furtive writhing of her girlish torso and her slim, supple thighs in the full-
length mirror she had artfully positioned near her bed?
When she had first been enslaved by George Chan, Erika had naively wondered
if her mistreatment had been some sort of divine retribution for her sinful
explorations of her young body. But during her training in the mountains she
had noted that her cruel but seductive female captor had pleasured herself often
-- especially during Erika's thrice-daily performances of fellatio on her
crop-wielding male counterpart -- without having brought down on herself the
wrath of the heavens.
Despite their unfeeling narcissism, her captors had taught her a great
lesson -- that the pursuit of pleasure was not, in and of itself, a shameful
sin. Cruelty and coercion were the only sexual sins. She regretted now more
than ever the fact that she and Daniel Kauffmann had not consummated their ...
did she dare call it love? For now, it seemed certain, they would never meet
again....
"Mutiny," the captain had said. She would be tried for mutiny tomorrow!
Never in all of Erika's girlhood imaginings had she dreamed that the brutal
methods of discipline inflicted on sea-faring men in her romantic but ultimately
prudish stories could ever be employed on an innocent young woman - much less
herself. But such, it seemed, was to be her fate. And in full view, no doubt,
of the leering, bloodthirsty crew of the Yang-tze Dragon!
********
"Aye, Cap'n," Jasper Slegg wheezed painfully, one hand still pressed
against his lower ribs. "I'll see to it that she gets cleaned up good as new."
Then he gave the red-bearded Laird of Dornoch a conspiratorial wink. "Even if I
have to lick the coal-dust off 'er tits meself!" Slegg released his hammerlock
grip on Erika's left wrist for a moment or two in order to give her left breast
an illustrative squeeze, while a bleary-eyed McMahon looked on approvingly.
Then the roguish ship captain turned his unsteady gaze toward the sad-faced
Yim, and pointed toward Mao's body before giving the pony-tailed coal-loader an
abrupt gesture with his thumb. A disconsolate Yim gave Erika a vengeful glance
and then nodded and then bent down and gently threw the slender, lifeless body
of his partner over his shoulder and started slowly up the ladder-well. "Get to
wark, ye lazy sons of a Singaporean shopkeeper!" McMahon roared at the three
new shovelers. The Malays had replaced Yim and Mao at the coal pile, and the
skull-capped Cantonese had begun to feed the dragon. But all three kept
glancing toward the corner in which Slegg held Erika in tow, in hopes that the
mate and the stunning, half-naked blonde would soon emerge from the dark corner.
"I'm going to go back to my cabin to finish my ... charts, Slegg," said
McMahon, wiping his thirsty mouth on his wrist before putting a huge boot on the
bottom rung of the ladder.
"Watch 'er for 'arf a mo, Deng," Slegg muttered to Deng-shan, as he
released his grip on Erika." As the muscular Chinese watched their cornered
captive, making sure that her rope-wealed body did not stray from the shadows,
Slegg hurried over to the ladder-well. "Cap'n - what about the chinks - the
fancy ones I seen with you in yer cabin. Ain't they goin' to raise a bit of a
bother if we give their wench a taste of ... you know?"
From his position on the second rung, McMahon scowled down at his first
mate. "I'm the master of the Yang-tze Dragon, Slegg. The wench killed one of
my men. She'll pay for that, laddie. It's the law of the sea."
"And besides, laddie", McMahon muttered a moment later after he had
laboriously lifted his bulk up to the second rung. "Those seasick landlubbers
have been puking their guts out for the last hour. They'll still be green at
the gills at dawn."
********
Author's note: Is anyone still reading this story? I mean really
reading it, and not just opening it, skipping ahead to the thrill scenes, racing
through them and moving on to another story?
With the exception of two or three few regular correspondents, I haven't
gotten a breath of feedback on this story in months and months. I spend twenty
or thirty hours, sometimes more, on each installment, and lately I've begun to
ask myself if I'm not wasting a ridiculous amount of my life on this project.
Please, someone - give me a reason why I should carry on.
Thanks, and I really do hope some of you are enjoying the story
Sincerely,
Boccaccio
