Chapter 138 The Night of the Seven Torments (Part II)
Chapter 138 The Night of the Seven Torments Part II
Slegg was distracted from his far-sighted scheming when Deng-shan caught
his eye and signaled that he had finished collecting the money for the Fourth
Torment.
After unshackling their thirsty prisoner, Slegg and Deng-shan hauled Erika
back across the room to the large wooden framework to which they had bound her
for the Second Torment. It would take five strong men several minutes and coils
and coils of rope to prepare Erika's next ordeal.
While the men had been amusing themselves with Erika's luscious breasts
during the Third Torment, Deng-shan had been busy replacing the shoulder-high
side-rails he had removed from the rectangular framework earlier so that the
sailors could erect their pyramid on Erika's bare back. Now, with the
all-too-willing connivance of a trio of well-built sailors they had taken on in
Foochow during the Dragon's last voyage, Slegg and Deng muscled Erika's
pain-wracked body into the shape of an inverted T.
Within moments Erika's long, shapely legs were painfully spread-eagled
against the underside of the shoulder-high rail, with her abdomen, torso, head
and shoulders hanging helplessly downward. The pale garment around her hips
slithered southward, bunching around her waist, leaving her loins shamelessly
exposed. The top of her head hung several inches above the ground, leaving her
golden tresses free to sweep across the sawdust-strewn floor with every twist
and turn of her nearly-nude body.
Although her hands were free, Erika could only claw helplessly at the air,
twisting and turning her down-hanging body from side to side in a way that
hardened the erections of every man in the lamp-lit room. While his helpers
held the blonde's squirming body in place against the rail, Slegg strode across
the room, past one of the piles of bamboo debris, past the long rack piled high
with boards and planks, and toward the rough-hewn cupboard which stood against a
nearby wall.
Thick coils of rope were stacked on the far end of the horizontal cabinet
while an oil lamp atop its nearer end cast an eerie glow on that corner of the
room. Slegg yanked open the top drawer of the cupboard, revealing an assortment
of tight spirals of cord, intermingled with ominous lengths of chain and all
manner of grim-looking shackles. Erika shivered as her blue eyes took in the
array of implements of restraint, each of which had doubtless been used to
confine other rebellious prisoners of the Bird Cage.
From her inverted position, Erika listened to the blood-chilling rattle of
the chains and watched as Slegg selected two of the coils of rope. Leaving the
cupboard door ajar so that Erika could not help but be intimidated by its
gruesome contents, Slegg returned to his helpless captive and placed the rope at
the disposal of his partner. While the other men held the struggling captive in
place, Deng-shan unsheathed a heavy fisherman's knife that hung from his belt.
After pressing the sharp tip of his blade meaningfully against Erika's trembling
triangle of golden fleece in order to still her agitated writhings, he proceeded
to cut the lengths of rope that he and his companions would use to bind Erika to
the railing.
The German beauty groaned in protest as the muscular Chinese proceeded to
lash her legs to the rail, binding her tightly at ankle, knee, and upper thigh.
So cruelly were Erika's legs split, and so widely were they stretched, that
there was scarcely room for a man to slide his hand between her blonde-fringed
pussy and the wooden rail. But as each succeeding winding of cord bound her
naked thighs more tightly to the bar, each of the five men took his chance to
fondle her velvety niche. Erika was powerless to prevent them from exploring her
puffy labia with the eager concentration of botanists probing the petals of an
exotic iris. Rude, questing fingers flicked her moist clitoris, and inserted
themselves into her defenseless vagina, exploring her feminine warmth.
When the ropes around Erika's long legs were at last secure, Slegg gestured
for Tranh to come forward. "Oil 'er up again, cookie!" he barked, gesturing
toward her wide-spread crotch.
The sallow-skinned Vietnamese wasted no time in splashing a liberal
quantity of oil over Erika's love-flower, letting it stream down into the
crevice between her shapely buttocks. Then, chortling delightedly, the wizened
sea cook gripped her with wrinkled hands and began smoothing the oil over her
private parts while his debauched shipmates looked on with approving glances.
Twice Erika made a heroic effort to curl her body at the waist and lift
herself upward so that she could swat at Tranh's probing fingers. The first
time, Jasper Slegg simply mashed her face with the flat of his hand and pushed
her back down. But a minute or two later, when Erika had recovered her strength
and rose up again to slap at the plundering hands, her fingers inadvertently
raked across the bandage above Slegg's injured eye as he stepped forward to
restrain her.
"Owww!! You whore!" Slegg roared in a half-blind rage as he rubbed at his
eye. "I'll see that ye pay for that, wench! Get her arms, Deng!"
The two ringleaders pushed Tranh out of the way for a moment and the old
cook could only look excitedly on while the two men jerked Erika's arms up
behind her so brutally that she cried out in pain. Grunting from his exertions,
Deng-shan cinched her arms together above her elbows with three quick windings
of cord that dug deep into the flesh of her arms. When her arms were
immobilized, Deng and a fuming Jasper Slegg cinched her wrists in the same
fashion. Then, ignoring Erika's agonized moans of protest, they hoisted her
wrists upward, her back to the rail, until she thought her spine was about to
snap, before binding her tethered wrists to the center-point of the bamboo
crossbar.
With her legs stretched out almost horizontally along the underside of the
crosspiece and her fully extended arms bound to it as well, the pressure on
Erika's shoulders was excruciating. Her magnificently arched body was a
symphony of pain, every nerve in her arms and legs and spine was awash in a sea
of agony. Her shoulders had been pulled up so far that her breasts hung from
her chest like low-hanging, late-summer fruit, plump to the point of bursting,
her ripe nipples offering their sweet juice to the mother-earth that had
nourished them.
Meanwhile Tranh had stepped forward and poured some more oil into the sweet
depression formed by her spread-eagled legs.
"Please ... please ..." Erika mumbled almost inaudibly, her delicious body
shuddering in revulsion at Tranh's every touch.
The aroused crewmen watched mesmerized, their eyes slowly gliding from
Erika's glistening genitals to the alluring fullness of her pendulous breasts
and then back again while Tranh finished anointing her pubic area. Then the cook
slid his oily hands downwards, and, while Erika writhed in protest, he gave her
taut-stretched bottom-globes the same squeezing, clutching, kneading action he
had given her delicious breasts a few minutes earlier. In a short time, Erika's
cock-teasing buttocks were as slick with oil as her shimmering breasts.
Still irritated by Erika's attempts to evade Tranh's molesting fingers,
Jasper Slegg dropped to one knee alongside the tortured beauty and grabbed a
handful of blonde hair and jerked her face up to meet his own. 'Ye're still
squirmin' around too much, sweetie. But I'll teach ye to hold still when ye're
told!".
Once again Slegg made his way to the rope cupboard, but this time he pushed
aside a length of coarse rope and retrieved a long, shallow box. The oil lamp
on top of the cabinet cast eerie shadows upon Slegg's craggy face as he removed
a trio of cream-colored candles and returned to his helpless captive, making no
effort to conceal the massive erection in his trousers.
A diabolical leer crossed Slegg's face as he sawed one of the candles
back and forth through Erika's oil-slick crotch, letting her get a sense of its
length and girth. Then, standing at the midpoint of the crossrail, he began
working the base of the lengthy, dildo-thick taper into the pinkness of Erika's
well-oiled, wide-splayed vagina. Ignoring her throaty murmurs of protest, he
slowly screwed nearly two-thirds of its length into her wriggling body, until
only a thumb's-length of the wick end of the candle protruded from between her
spread-eagled thighs.
Grinning evilly, the English mate scraped a lucifer against the heel of his
boot and when it burst into flame he lit the wick of a second candle, before
blowing out the match. Then, making sure that the eyes of his audience were on
him, he touched the still-smoking head of the match to the edge of Erika's
labia. The depraved Londoner nodded his head with satisfaction as Erika's body
jerked convulsively at the touch of the hot match. He touched her with the
match-stick again, drawing a second yelp of pain and another shudder of agony
from his securely bound prisoner. When Erika's nude body finally stopped
twitching, Slegg used the candle in his hand to light the one he had wedged into
her gaping pussy.
"The better to see you with, Princess," Slegg muttered in a mocking voice.
"Now if ye can 'old that pretty arse still, dearie, ye'll have nothing to fear
from your little wax friend. But if you get a little frisky ..." and he paused
to jerk at her tightly bound wrists. The sudden motion caused a drop or two of
wax to drip down the side of the phallus-thick candle between her legs before
slithering along the lips of her delicate love slit. The kiss of the hot wax
caused Erika's body to shudder again, allowing a second mini-cascade of wax to
spill over the candle's edge, seemingly attracted by some occult female
magnetism to her throbbing clitoris. First a desperate groan and then an
agonized "Bitte nicht... bitte ..." fell from her dry, trembling lips.
With her head perforce facing downward, Erika was the only one in the room
who could not see the candle. Nor could she see Jasper Slegg when he lit the
third hand-held candle from the second and gestured for two of the sailors to
come forward.
The dark-skinned Malayans who had teamed up on her breasts earlier strode
forward eagerly and Slegg handed each of them one of the bright-burning candles.
"What d'ye say we give our little princess a pair of 'ot crossed buns, lads?" he
rasped, as he undid the knot of the loincloth that was bunched uselessly around
Erika's waist, and stripped it away, leaving the bare expanse of her buttocks
and back wantonly naked.
The sailors caught on quickly and, holding their candles at shoulder
height, tipped them cautiously so that capillary-thin trickles of hot wax
spilled over the edges and dripped down onto Erika's naked buttocks.
"Aah! Aaaiiaahhh!!" Erika gasped as the scalding wax found its target
and coursed down the shapely curves of her behind.
"Don't be shy, lads!" Slegg boomed. "Give 'er some wax - and then we'll
give her some whacks!" Enjoying his joke, even though none of the Asians could
make any sense of it, Slegg looked on excitedly as the Malayans let the
flesh-searing wax flow more freely.
Each time she felt the kiss of the hot wax on her bottom Erika bucked in
her bonds. And each time her body convulsed in pain, the quivering waxen
volcano between her legs spilled its hot lava onto her naked flesh. Gritting
her teeth in misery, Erika prayed that she could keep from writhing, because
every paroxysm of pain only added to her suffering.
But there were no gods to hear her prayers in the bowels of the hellish
hold. Jasper Slegg, the evil being who ruled over that infernal domain, eyed
her nude body with undisguised lust as he called his lusty retinue forward in
twos. Each pair of men stepped forward in turn, holding their flaming tapers
before them as if they were hellish acolytes intent on celebrating a sadistic
sacrament. Two by two, under the watchful eye of their demon-priest, the
candle-bearers anointed the tempted curves of Erika's buttocks with sizzling
streams of cream-colored wax. The more devout celebrants did their best to let
the molten beads trickle into the beckoning cleft between those whip-ravaged
half-moons, as if dripping the pale droplets into that secret, sensual place
would somehow purify the shameless heretic whose martyrdom they were bent on
carrying out.
As for their voluptuous victim, Erika could only see her tormentors' lower
legs. She did not know when the hot wax would drip down, nor where it would
strike. She only knew that the devil's rain would fall, and that it would burn,
and that if she did not hold perfectly still when the pain came, her suffering
would be doubled when the even hotter wax dripped from the candle between her
legs.
But try though she might, she could not.
********
The ordeal of the scalding wax lasted little more than ten minutes, but for
Erika, each minute was an hour of purgatory. By the time each man had taken
his turn, Erika's oil-slick buttocks were latticed with dozens of meandering
streams of dried wax, a few of which extended well down her lower back. Erika's
only consolation was the fact that the oil with which Tranh had coated her body
had prevented the wax from burning too deeply into her naked flesh.
"Time to clean you up, princess!" Slegg snorted good-naturedly as he
extricated the candle from Erika's vagina, blew it out, and placed it
absent-mindedly on one of the cornerposts of the wooden framework. "Good job,
Tranhie," he boomed as he began to peel pale, glutinous strands of wax away from
Erika's vulva. "You can 'ave the honor of whackin' the wax off 'er pretty
arse."
As the grinning cook squeezed his way past Froggy and the Mongol, the last
two men to torment their captive with the candles, Slegg and Deng-shan undid
the ropes lashing Erika's upstretched wrists to the cross-beam, allowing her
arms to collapse downward, thus easing the horrendous strain on her shoulders.
But her ordeal on the railing had still not reached its end.
Grinning with anticipation, the Vietnamese cook popped out of the crowd and
stepped toward Erika with hands outstretched.
"No - use this," Slegg grunted, returning to the open cupboard and
extricating an unusual-looking device of some two feet in length and resembling
a small broom. Except that instead of broom bristles, some two dozen
noodle-thin strips of tough bamboo had been tightly wound to the butt of the
thick, six-inch handle.
Erika realized then that the only reason Slegg had freed her arms, was so
that Tranh would have easy access to her defenseless backside.
Tranh hefted the unusual flogger, eyed his well-waxed target, and then
whipped the bamboo flail smartly across bottom-cheeks that had already been
sensitized by suffering.
THWAACKKK!!
Had it not been for the flogging in the stoking room and the torture of the
candles, the blows of the scrawny Vietnamese might not have had any great
effect. But falling as they did on the raw flesh of Erika's buttocks, they felt
as powerful as the sword-strokes of the baron who had beaten and betrayed her.
"Aah!"
"Didn't I tell ye?"
And indeed, upon close inspection, Tranh could see that there were a number
of worm-like strings of wax adhering to the stiff bamboo bristles, and still
others had been swept to the floor.
THWACKK!! His second stroke, across Erika's left bottom-oval, raked anew
at the waxen residue.
"Aaghhh!" The strips of sharp-edged bamboo seemed to flay the flesh from
her tender buttocks.
"Keep yer hands out of the way, princess," Slegg barked, when Erika tried
to shield her tingling bottom with her hands. "Or it'll take three men with
razors to scrape off all the wax I'll drip on those big tits before the night is
out!"
Dreading the thought of candles dripping their molten lava onto her
sensitive breasts, Erika summoned enough strength to whisper, "No ... please
..." through her dry lips.
THWACKK!!!
"That's it, Cookie! Scour that sweet arse nice and clean!"
Tranh crossed over so that he stood at the right of the blonde beauty who
hung so helplessly in inverted suspension, her hands upreached in a futile
attempt to defend her burning bottom.
But the Vietnamese brushed her hands away easily and unleashed another
powerful THWACCKK!!! Making up in enthusiasm what he lacked in youthful vigor,
the ship's cook blasted Erika's right bottom-cheek so hard that her pendant body
swayed back and forth sensuously even though her legs remained tightly bound to
the crossbar.
THWACKK! "Unngh!"
THWACCKK!! "Anngh!!"
THWACCKKKKK!!! "Aungghh!!"
Tranh slashed the flail at the centers of Erika's burning butt-cheeks three
more times, each stroke harder than its predecessor, each one drawing a new cry
of suffering from the helpless blonde. Then the galley-chief targeted the
remaining strands of wax until Erika's derriere was a nicely polished pink and
only a few slender threads of wax that had dripped into her buttock-cleft
remained.
Tranh paused and looked at Slegg with a puzzled expression. Slegg
answered his inquiring glance by stepping forward and digging his fingertips
into the soft ovals of Erika's bottom-flesh. He proceeded to pull her
ass-cheeks apart so that the Vietnamese could drag the stiff-thonged flogger
through Erika's butt-crease like a whiskbroom, removing the last few particles
of wax.
********
The fifth torment began a short time later, after Deng-shan had taken up
the customary collection from Slegg's eager-eyed audience. Erika found herself
bound to the ominous wooden frame in still another painful position. Slegg and
Deng began by widening her stance and binding her outstretched ankles to
floor-mounted manacles. Then they pressed her upper back against the sturdy,
shoulder-high crossbar formed by the railing behind her. Its height was such
that the two men had to lift the lovely blonde onto her tiptoes in order to
muscle her armpits upward and backward over the rounded bamboo crosspiece.
Once they had done so, they jerked Erika's taut-stretched arms downward and
backward, and then, making good use of the coils of rope from the cabinet,
lashed her wrists to rings in the floor a yard or so behind the railing, thus
making sure that the taut-stretched muscles in her thighs would be granted no
respite during this leg of her odyssey of suffering. Had they done nothing
further, Erika's backward-bent bondage would itself have been an onerous ordeal.
But they had only just begun.
Positioning himself directly behind the taut-stretched body of the
voluptuous blonde, Deng-shan, perhaps envious of his shipmates' earlier
opportunity to manhandle Erika's superb breasts, reached around her and took her
swollen globes in his powerful hands. He pressed them together and squeezed
them roughly, as he had done in the stoking room, shaping them into pink-tipped
torpedoes of titflesh which he proceeded to aim at each of the leering onlookers
in turn. His eager-eyed audience greeted his every move with boisterous shouts
of approval.
Deng's golden earrings sparkled in the lamp-light as he massaged Erika's
tender lust-gourds with painstaking thoroughness for a minute or two before
releasing them. He then took a couple of backward steps and eyed Erika's naked
body thoughtfully, as if re-assessing the dimensions of her predicament with an
architect's practiced eye.
After a moment or two of mental measurement, he nodded to himself, and
pocketed the candle that Slegg had set aside after jamming it into Erika
earlier. Having scooped up the nipple-cords the two men had used during the
First Torment, the evil-eyed handyman took Erika's proud-jutting breasts in his
hands again, and rubbed her aching nubbins until they stabbed upward into the
air like fleshy spikes.
That pleasant task accomplished, Deng knotted the nipple-cords around
Erika's lust-nuggets just as he had done earlier. When the nooses were once
again securely in place, he expertly looped the ends of the lengths of twine
that dangled from her left breast around one end of the candle, and the strings
that dangled from her right breast around the other. The candle was slightly
shorter than the distance between Erika's nipples, so that when he slowly
lowered the hand which held the candle, the loops of twine gave an eye-pleasing
inward tug to Erika's beleaguered breast-tips. Deng's hand was at navel height
when he released the candle, letting it rest freely against Erika's
backward-bowed belly for a moment or two while Slegg, enjoying this latest
demonstration of nipple bondage, gave him a nod of encouragement.
Deng shot back a roguish, "You ain't seen nothing yet," wink and proceeded
to cinch a rope painfully tight around Erika's trim waist. Then he took the
candle he'd tied to Erika's inflamed nipples and slowly lifted it, up over her
rib cage, until it was even with her deliciously out-thrust breasts themselves.
He pulled outward on the candle, slowly distending his prisoner's pinkish
nipple-buds, and then, as Erika looked on uncomprehendingly, he began lifting it
again, tugging her nipples painfully upwards, as Erika began to divine his cruel
purpose.
"No ... bitte nicht ...please ..."
But Deng stifled Erika's murmurs of protest by jamming the candle crossways
into her mouth, not only gagging her effectively, but eliminating most of the
slack in the nipple-cords.
"Bite down on it, Princess! Nice and easy-like." Slegg admonished her.
"Cause if ye let that candle fall, I'll ram it so far up yer arse ye'll still be
able to taste the wax in yer throat!"
Having little choice, Erika reluctantly closed her teeth gently on the
waxen gag, tasting the musky secretions of her own body for the second time that
night. Once Deng had satisfied himself that her mouth-grip on the candle was
secure, he reached behind her and formed her golden, sweat-dampened hair into a
tight pony tail, looped a thin cord around it twice and knotted it carefully.
Then he tugged the pony tail down over the shoulder-rail with such force that
Erika felt that her neck would surely snap, before passing the hair-rope through
the waist-cincher, tugging at it firmly to eliminate any hint of slack, and then
tying it off.
The first downward tug at her hair had pulled Erika's nipple-strings taut.
But Deng continued pulling her hair downward knowing that each ounce of pressure
he applied increased the tension on Erika's updrawn breasts. By the time he
finished lashing her hair to the waist-cinch, there were bolts of lightning
shooting through the tips of Erika's tortured lust-mounds.
"Nnnnggg!! Nnggggghhh!!" she groaned into her waxen bit, hoping that Deng
would loosen the hair-knot, but to no avail.
"By God, that should keep the little tart on her toes, eh lads?" Slegg
smirked to his eager-eyed audience who looked on spellbound at the well-defined
muscles in Erika's distended thighs, the flatness of her sweat-gleaming belly,
and the cock-stiffening bondage of her upthrust breasts.
Erika had no way of knowing how long her tormentors subjected her body to
the agonizing torture of that position. She only knew that every second that
her arms and shoulders were stretched painfully backward over the cross-rail,
every second that the muscles in her calves and thighs burned from the strain of
her tip-toed posture, every second that her scalp and neck were awash with pain,
every second that her breasts were subjected to the diabolical discipline
imposed by the nipple-cords, seemed like an hour in the ghastly time-scheme of
the Yang-tze Dragon.
But it was not only physical suffering that she felt. Her discomfort was
doubled by the knowledge that it was the wickedness of men, not the sweltering
heat of a stoking room, or the icy fury of a typhoon, that were the source of
her pain. That every moan that escaped her lips, every grimace of her lovely
face, and every writhing of her tortured body provided her voyeurs with a fresh
source of erotic pleasure.
********
Just when she was certain that she could endure no more, Slegg stepped
forward and ordered her to spit the candle-gag from her mouth. Erika quickly
rid herself of the foul-tasting gag, but came to regret her haste when the
candle's swift plummet took its inevitable toll on the pouting nipples to which
it remained bound. Slegg grinned with triumph at the sound of her groan and
proceeded to remove the fiendishly tight nipple cords. A moment later he undid
the hair-knot, lessening Erika's discomfort substantially before he and Deng set
about freeing her wrists and ankles. When they were done, Erika slumped to the
floor, exhausted, wishing only to die and to be spared any further abuse. But
even that surcease was denied her when Jasper Slegg seized a handful of her
blonde hair and jerked her back up into a sitting position.
"Ye know what they say, princess. 'The show must go on.' Ye wouldn't
want to be disappointin' yer legion of admirers now, would ye?" Slegg scolded
her.
"Wasser ... for the love of God ... wasser," Erika moaned. The candle-gag
had caused her to salivate furiously but her mouth and throat were as dry as the
desiccated bamboo shavings and sawdust that littered the floor of the Bird Cage.
"Tranhie, did ye bring a water-bottle down with ye like I asked? Our
little princess wants a drink!"
"Aye, boss," replied the cook, as he rummaged into his bag and withdrew an
ancient green bottle, stopped by a cork plug.
Slegg took the bottle from his hands and pulled the stopper out with his
teeth. "Ye want water, wench? Get on yer knees and beg for it!"
Groaning, Erika pulled herself up to her knees, holding one arm
protectively over her breasts. "Bitte ... please..." she begged, reaching for
the bottle.
"I'll do the pouring, dearie!" Slegg taunted her, pulling the bottle away
from her outstretched hand. "Now, kneel up nice and straight, clasp your hands
behind your neck and tilt yer head up for me pretty-like, and I'll wet your
whistle."
Erika licked her dry lips and stared at the water bottle with longing.
What could she do?
She tentatively raised her elbows and touched her fingertips to the side of
her neck, conscious of how that movement lifted her breasts into wanton
prominence.
"I said 'Behind your neck', sweetie," Slegg snarled roughly as he took a
long pull at the water. "And hop to it, if ye want any of this." He raised the
bottle to his lips again and drank greedily, allowing water to leak out of the
corners of his mouth and spill uselessly to the dusty floor.
Having no choice, Erika touched her fingers together behind her head, while
Deng-shan's dark eyes blazed at the sight of her tempting, close-set globes
coming together to form a mouthwatering canyon of breast-flesh that his swollen
manhood ached to explore.
" 'Clasp 'em together', I said!" Slegg barked. "Tighter!"
Blushing furiously, Erika interlaced her fingers, knowing that seventeen
pairs of eyes were feasting on the creamy, pink-nippled breasts she was being
been compelled to exhibit so shamelessly.
"That's better, princess. Wasn't so bad was it? You should be used to
'avin male admirers by now, I should think. "Lovely," Slegg mumbled as he
devoured Erika's succulent lust-melons with his eyes, their peaches-and-cream
perfection only slightly marred by the ruddy marks left by grasping hands and
nipple-choking cords. "Just lovely. Now, wench, tilt your pretty head back
and open yer mouth and I'll give ye that drink."
Erika did as she was bid. With her head tipped back, she watched as a
smirking Jasper Slegg upended the water-bottle. A rush of relief swept over her
and she closed her eyes as she felt the first few drops of water trickling down
to her lips. She opened her mouth wide to take in more of the falling liquid
and did so, for a moment, but then she felt the water splashing uselessly off of
her chin and upturned throat.
She tried to move her mouth forward to catch the water that was just out of
reach, but Slegg was too quick for her, pulling the bottle back hastily so that
the rest of its contents spilled onto her naked breasts.
"No!" Erika cried, as she lowered her hands to catch what water she could.
"No!!" She slurped hastily at the tiny pools of water she had managed to trap
in her cupped palms, and then, heedless of her surroundings, she scooped her
luscious, dripping breasts into her anxious hands, and tried to transfer the
remnants of moisture to her mouth.
But the coating of oil that Tranh had applied so lovingly to her breasts
earlier had repelled the water like the slope of a swan's back. When Erika
lifted her hands to her mouth, they tasted of sesame. She bent her head to the
floor, hoping to find a tiny pool to dip her tongue into, but the refreshing
coolness of the water had been absorbed by the desert-dry sawdust of the deck.
Erika stared at the floor in disbelief, her despair deeper than the
heartless sea which permitted the Yang-tze Dragon to ply its boundless depths.
Out of the corner of her eye she could see Deng-shan making his rounds of the
hard-eyed crewmen again. As she listened, trembling, to the menacing, metallic
clink of the coins that promised yet another bout of suffering, she felt the
licentious gaze of Slegg and his cutthroats washing over her naked body. It
struck her that not a single crewman had left since her ordeal had begun. Her
harrowing sexual subjugation had stoked their primitive lusts, not sated them.
"That's it, lads!" crowed Jasper Slegg, as he watch the coins mount up.
"The best is yet to come!"
