The Jade Pavilion Book II : The Rise of Li Chang

                             Chapter 151  Stripped and Spread-eagled

 

 

          After Tranh had left her alone in the inky blackness of the lightless infirmary, Erika lay on the narrow cot trying to piece together the whispered fragments of the conversation she had overheard.  But Tranh and Lucky had given few clues and her suspicions and theories had no more substance than  a cobweb.  Soon the overwhelming physical fatigue brought on by her morning ordeal lulled her into the healing embrace of Morpheus. 

 

Despite her numerous aches and pains Erika slept for several hours, but the blessedness of repose was disturbed by frightful memories and horrible premonitions.  In her first dream she relived, at the lightning speed of dream-thought, her entire shipboard odyssey.  Her betrayal and sabre-lashing by the baron, her cruel enslavement in the stoking room, her sexual exploitation in the Bird Cage, her desperate attempt at escape, her recapture, and her confinement in the infirmary, during which Froggy, the limping, croaking Chinese sailor had debased her body and crushed her spirit. In her troubled sleep Erika ran her hands across her naked breasts again and again, trying in vain to wipe away the remembered detritus of Froggy's depravity.

 

Her second dream was in some ways even more haunting.  In her second dream Erika relived the psychological torture of being forced to fashion the Thief's Cat, the whip which would soon be used to flog her. In her imagination she was forced to tie and tighten each skin-searing knot of the cat o' nine tails again and again under the watchful eye of Jasper Slegg, until the evil first mate was satisfied that every knotted bead was as tough and hard as her rope-worn fingers could manage.

 

But even Erika's memories, ghastly as they were, were less frightful than her premonitions.  The last hour of her restless sleep was filled by images of pain and punishment yet to come, of nightmarish visions of bloodthirsty sailors pursuing her, catching her, and subjecting her to indescribable bouts of depravity and abuse.

 

When Tranh, carrying a brightly burning oil lamp, re-entered her dingy cell at the appointed hour, Erika's nude body was still thrashing frenziedly from side to side on the cot as she fought off hordes of ghostly mariners whose only appetites were for rape and torture.

 

The scrawny Vietnamese fondled his swollen erection as he watched Erika's erotic writhings for a moment or two.  Licking his dry lips at the sight of Erika's wriggling body, Tranh was sorely tempted to throw himself upon her, to spread her soft, creamy thighs and finish the sexual assault that Lucky's untimely appearance had interrupted hours earlier.

 

He inched closer, holding the lamp so that it would shine brightest on the wispy golden strands of her pubic hair and her impossibly inviting pinkness of her niche d'amour.  But a sudden clatter of footsteps overhead reminded him that time was short.

 

Cursing under his breath, the diminutive cook reached down and let his garlic-seasoned fingertips brush lightly across Erika's right breast before seizing her shoulder and shaking it roughly.

 

"Wake up, Missy!"

 

Erika started up from the bed in wild-eyed terror, certain that her dreadful nightmare and reality had become one.  But upon seeing that Tranh was alone and not armed with tools of torture as her nightmarish pursuers had been, she shook her golden mane sleepily and fell back on the bed, hoping for a few more minutes of rest.

 

The Vietnamese jailer was insistent. "Now, Missy! Everybody on deck waiting!  Hurry up – or I go get Slegg!"

 

Knowing that the summoning of Jasper Slegg would only lead to added suffering, Erika clambered unsteadily to her feet. To her surprise she found that, notwithstanding the mental horrors that had attended her hours of rest, she was much restored physically.

 

  As she rose Tranh gave her shapely body a final visual once-over. He had bathed her earlier, and washed her hair and massaged her, and the healing powers of his Mekong lighting, coupled with a few hours' rest had restored the freshness of youth to her superb body.  Only the faint reddish ropemarks encircling her proud-thrusting breasts and a few well-scattered abrasions and lacerations gave evidence of her matinal ordeal.

 

The cook handed her the robe which had been designated for her appearance on deck and watched a bit glumly as Erika hurriedly knotted its elegant sash around her waist, thus concealing her shapely young body from his view.

 

 

 

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A few minutes later Erika found herself striding across the deck, flanked by her stern sentinels Lucky and Froggy, with Tranh bringing up the rear of the grim cortege.  As she marched toward the reassembled sailors of the Yang-tze Dragon, she was once again a vision of blonde beauty, her eyes bright, her step firm, her flowing tresses gold and glistening in the noonday sun.

 

          At the request of General Wang, Tranh had cloaked Erika, for however brief a time, in an exotic sky-blue robe supplied by Hsi Fong, a man of her own height.  The robe, the sea, the sky, and Erika Weiss' beautiful blue eyes, freed now from the blindfold which had veiled them earlier, seemed all to have been painted by the same brush, by a master equally accomplished in portrait and seascape.

 

          But the brightness in Erika's blue eyes could not mask the fear that haunted them.  For behind the imposing figures of General Wang and Hsi Fong, occupying a fair portion of the deck amidships, loomed the product of Deng's late-night labors.

 

 A scaffold-like platform crowned with an evil-looking gibbet was outlined against the azure sky.  Erika shuddered as she saw, for the first time, the Wooden Lady on which she had suffered so terribly while blindfolded – the kneeling-board, the post, the twin phalluses, and the horrible shovel handle which had threaded its way through the opening in the post to violate her mouth, and which, on its retraction, had wreaked such havoc on her rope-ringed breasts.

 

On the other side of the scaffold, opposite the Wooden Lady, a crude iron grating, perhaps a foot taller than herself, had been propped against the hull of the ship.  Erika shivered as she remembered the third part of Captain McMahon's cruel sentence -- "a dizzen with the nine against the grating."

 

But it was neither the nightmarish memory of the Wooden Lady, nor the forbidding aspect of the iron grating which took hold of Erika Weiss' imagination at that moment.  For between those two malevolent objects rose the inverted wooden L of a gibbet, its dark horizontal arm anchored by a diagonal cross-brace which had been hammered into a massive upright, giving the frightful device the aspect of a tall, Gothic 'seven'.  Erika felt her throat constrict as she watched the noose hanging from the end of the grim device toss gently in the morning breeze.

 

"General,"  Captain McMahon's voice boomed across the deck. "As I promised, ye may administer the dizzen yerself.  Slegg! Whaur's the whip, mon?"

 

"Got it right 'ere, Cap'n!" Slegg replied smartly, stepping aside to reveal a sturdy wooden rail which Deng-shan had affixed to the hull of the ship.  Erika Weiss's knees nearly turned to jelly as she stared at the chest-high wooden beam. From its yard-long row of hooks hung a gruesome panoply of instruments of discipline:  an assortment of whips, leather straps of varying length and thickness, a pair of menacingly tapered canes, a rough-surfaced paddle, and one or two implements whose like Erika had never seen before. On the hook nearest Slegg hung a lumpy-looking canvas sack.

 

"Ye may lat the cat oot of the bag!"

 

Slegg reached for the sack, undid its drawstring and removed the menacing-looking Thief's Cat, on which the beautiful young miscreant had labored so long into the night.   'ere it is!" the mate bellowed as the crewmen craned their necks to get a better glimpse of the whip that would be used to flog their ravishing captive.

 

"Was it made by the prisoner's awn hand, as I ordered?"

 

           Slegg cast a lecherous glance at Erika Weiss. "Aye, cap'n.  It took the lazy wench most of the night, but I kept arter 'er 'til she finished the job.

 

          "And the knots – are they weel tied?"

 

"Tight and 'ard as rocks they are, cap'n. Seven knots on each of the nine tails. Altogether that makes…"  Jasper Slegg frowned and began counting on the fingers of his left hand, stopped and started over.  On his second attempt to calculate the number of knots the frustrated first mate made it as far as his other hand before becoming confused and giving up in disgust.   " Altogether 't makes for a narsty whip, it does, cap'n, is what I was meanin' to say."

 

McMahon stared at Slegg unbelievingly for a moment, not quite crediting  his first mate's ignorance of the multiplication tables, but then returned to the matter at hand.  "General," McMahon's baritone rang out again, "are ye ready tae administer the dizzen?"

 

General Wang, his posture as erect as his uniform was crisp, frowned.  "The 'dizzen', captain?  I'm afraid I don’t understand."

 

"The dizzen!" McMahon boomed in an exasperated voice. "The dizzen strokes of the cat," he roared, indicating the nine-thonged whip which Slegg was slapping crisply against the Wooden Lady while he glared meaningfully at his blue-gowned prisoner.

 

 When General Wang continued to stare at him uncomprehendingly, McMahon thundered, "D'ye nae ken the nummer 'twal,' mon? Hae ye nay haurd of a cat o' nine tails?"

 

This time the general was able to wade through the boggy patches of McMahon's Caledonian brogue. "Ah!  A 'dizzen' of the cat. Of course. I am at your service, captain," Wang bowed to McMahon before striding toward Jasper Slegg and taking the whip from his hands.

 

Slegg had wrapped the ten-inch whip handle, which was nothing more than one end of the length of inch-thick rope from which the tails of the cat had been unbraided, in sailcloth so that its wielder would be at no risk from blisters.  The general turned the whip over in his hands, inspecting with an expert eye the thickness and coarseness of the nine tails and the toughness of the many knots.  As he fingered the wicked beads he grudgingly nodded his approval; Europeans, too,  had studied the dark arts of cruelty.

 

"It appears to be an excellent instrument, captain," Wang conceded with a bow to the blue-jacketed mariner.  "My compliments."

 

Then the General removed his stiff service-dress cap, baring his shaven skull. He handed his cap to Hsi Fong and turned toward Erika Weiss, his piercing eyes black with menace, while he waited for Captain McMahon to formally initiate the punishment for the third count of her sentence.

 

As the red-bearded mariner removed a sheet of parchment from the pocket of his jacket and proceed to read from it, every gruff syllable added to Erika's mounting panic. "The accused, haeing been justly convicted o' mutiny agin this ship, its officers and men, shall be bound tae the grating and given… "  Here he paused to glance at General Wang who was clenching and unclenching the handle of the vicious looking whip impatiently,  "twal strokes o' the cat."  McMahon carefully folded up the paper and returned it to his pocket and then turned his blood-shot eyes toward the trembling figure of Erika Weiss.

 

"Strip the preesoner!"

 

The malice in the captain's voice was no less daunting than the bloodthirsty roar of approval from the crewmen which greeted it. Icy fingers of panic clawed at Erika's courage as she tried to break free from her captors, but to no avail.  Lucky had little difficulty pinioning her flailing arms to her sides, while Froggy, with a growl of lustful pleasure,  undid the colorful sash around her waist, allowing the shimmering blue robe to fall open in front.  The arc of sailors arranged around the deck cheered the sight of the inner curves of Erika's opulent  breasts and the exquisite golden triangle whose nether apex pointed toward her prominent labia.

 

Being careful not to damage the magnificent robe, Froggy spread the panels of the blue gown further apart, exposing Erika's tumultuous, proud-tipped breasts to the amorous gaze of his cronies.  Greeting her sneer of disdain with one of his own, he pushed the robe back over Erika's rounded shoulders. The fabric clung there momentarily, as if reluctant to part company with such alluring female flesh, before beginning its slow descent and slithering silently to her waist.  At that point Lucky released his grip on Erika's arms, so that the sleeves could slip easily down her wrists.  When the sleeves fell free, Lucky caught the gown and set it safely to one side, leaving Erika's luscious body naked to the noonday sun.

 

Her nakedness, made even more humiliating by the chorus of lewd and threatening catcalls that greeted it, sent Erika's rising sense of panic spiraling to new heights.  Seeing an unguarded expanse of the ship's rail, she took two quick strides toward a gap in the semi-circle of sailors.  But Orang quickly blocked her path to the rail and a speedy, nearly painless death.  Grinning wickedly, the muscular Malayan pressed his meaty paws against her full breasts and shoved her unceremoniously back into Lucky's waiting arms. Erika fought valiantly to free herself from Lucky's grasp, but her frantic side-to-side gyrations accomplished little more than to send her splendid breast-mounds into a shameless shimmy and to give the randy onlookers brief glimpses of the golden-fringed grotto between her legs. 

 

"Seize her up!"  The assembled seamen buzzed with excitement as Erika's warders responded to Captain's McMahon's stark command with alacrity.  Erika felt the heat of  thirty-odd pairs of avaricious eyes on her bobbling breasts and sleek thighs as Lucky and Froggy gripped her arms more tightly than before.  She tried again to pull free and when her nails drew blood from Froggy's wrist, he cursed in pained disbelief.

 

"Well, you're a defiant little bitch, ain't you?"  Froggy snarled.  He waited until Lucky had pinned Erika's arms behind her and then he backhanded Erika across both nipples with a vicious sweep of his arm.

 

"'Aurrgghhh!!  Oohh, mein Gott!!"

 

The ferocious force of the blow drove Erika to one knee.  She knelt on the deck half-dazed, waiting for the pain coursing through her young breasts to ease.

 

"Get up, wench!" Froggy croaked, and as further punishment for her fractiousness he gave Erika's offending arm an extra twist as Lucky helped him jerk her upright.

 

Then, suddenly remembering that Erika was the property of General Wang, and wondering whether he had overstepped his authority, Froggy turned toward the glaring officer. "You saw what the accursed whore did! The wildcat tried to claw my arm off!"

 

The shaven-skulled general inclined his head forward slightly, indicating with a wordless gesture of approval that rebelliousness, particularly rebelliousness in beautiful young women, should invariably be met with harsh discipline.

 

Meanwhile Lucky and Froggy were turning Erika in a slow pirouette so that every deckhand could get a good look at the lurid imprint that Froggy's blow had left on Erika's pale breasts. When every man had a chance to savor the livid marks on Erika's tempting pleasure-globes, they muscled their stunning prisoner toward the massive iron grating and  forced her to stand facing it. 

 

As Erika stood naked and trembling before the ominous framework, Andrew McMahon signaled Yim, the hulking ape-like sailor who had toiled alongside Mao in the stoking room, to join the men at the grating. His grief and rage at his friend's death still etched in his face, the Malayan giant skillfully entwined Erika's slender wrists in a sturdy leather thong.  A moment later, as Lucky and Froggy lifted her slightly, Yim tugged at the other end of the thong, stretching Erika's nude body taut against the metal framework.  Then, with a mighty grunt, he wrapped the leather strap around the top of the grating several times before tying it off.

 

And so it was that Erika found herself suspended, hanging from the sturdy toprail of the grating, her bare feet dangling some six inches from the deck. The moment her naked body had touched the grating, Erika had gasped out a plaintive, "Aaaah!"  Because hours earlier Jasper Slegg had cleverly positioned the iron trellis where it would capture the brightest rays of the morning sun, and now, at mid-day, its metal bars were palpably hot to the touch.

 

 Erika twisted and turned feverishly in an effort to keep her gently swinging body an inch or two away from the hot iron, but Froggy would have none of it.  Emboldened by the general's earlier nod of approval, Froggy grunted  with obscene pleasure and slammed the heel of his hand into the valley between Erika's shoulder blades, forcing her quivering pleasure-globes against the sun-heated metal.

 

"Aaaahhhh!" Erika moaned through gritted teeth as the teakettle-hot framework transferred its heat to her breasts, belly, and thighs.  Again she tried to pull away, and for a moment with some success as Froggy seemed to ease the pressure on her back. Once again she squirmed invitingly as she tried to keep her naked body away from the hot metal. Finally, when Froggy removed his hand from her back altogether and retreated a step or two, apparently to give his comrades an unobstructed view of hers nakedness, Erika managed to press her bare feet against the grating, and used that bit of leverage to pull her upper body away from the framework.

 

 Erika hung from the leather thong helplessly. Already, after only half a minute or so, she could feel the muscles in her rounded shoulders beginning to burn from the strain of her suspension.  She tried to ignore the ache by focusing on her relief that her breasts and belly were no longer pressing against the hot metal. But no sooner had she relaxed her guard than Froggy limped forward again and with a long sweep of his arm swatted her feet away from their tenuous foothold and an instant later Erika's sensitive nipples once again felt the hot kiss of the metal.

 

"Aaaah!" she gasped again, her body flailing helplessly against the iron bars until her feet were able to regain their precarious purchase. She hung there, panting heavily from her exertions, until Froggy struck again.  "Time to snuggle up nice and close, Missy!" he croaked. Favoring his bad leg, he limped closer and then pounded his ham-fist into the middle of Erika's spine, crushing her heaving breasts against the hot iron latticework. 

 

"AAGHHH!!!!!" This time Erika's cry of suffering was audible from the bow of the ship to the stern as Froggy maintained the pressure  for second after hellish second.  Erika's misery was compounded by the fact that not only was the grating painfully hot, but that its latticework of bars had never known the smoothing touch of  file or grinding wheel. The metal was encrusted with a hundred minute imperfections, some merely rough, others painfully jagged. The burrs gouged and tore at her bare breastflesh like  hundreds of angry hornets..

 

"Attaboy, Froggy!  Warm those big tits up!"  rang out a voice in heavily accented Chinese as Erika's struggles to free her ripe-nippled breasts from the cruel embrace of the iron bars stirred the ardor of every man on deck.

 

 The voice, Erika knew, was that of Khasar the Mongol, who had edged forward so that he stood at right angles to her.

 

She could feel the heat of the Gobi-dweller's barbaric gaze on her breasts as she tried desperately to lift the heat-stung tips of her breasts so that her tender aureoles and nipples were positioned opposite one of the openings in the metal latticework. But she could only do so by inching her body upward on the rough grating with a heroic effort.  The relief she felt when she finally managed to lift her nipple-nuggets clear of the hot iron bar was nearly offset by the sting of the abrasions she had sustained in doing so.

 

"Excellent work, sailor!" General Wang purred to Froggy in a voice tinged with honey and malice, as his thin-slit eyes drank in the sight of Erika dangling in the breeze.  "Now, if you would be so good as to spread her legs."

 

"Bitte … nein … " Erika murmured, retreating to the German of her youth, the still small voice of girlish modesty not having quite been stifled by all of the abuse she had undergone.

 

But her words, if understood at all,  went unheeded.  Lucky and Froggy made short work of pulling her ankles toward the sides of the grating, and encircling them with rope.  That done, it was only moments before they had looped her ankle-cords through openings in the grating  and wrapped them tightly around the bars of the lattice-like framework before tying them off.  While they bound her ankles, Yim amused himself by reaching toward the gaps in the grating, pinching Erika's puckering nipples between his thumb and forefinger and tugging on them so that, try as she might, the soft flesh of Erika's breasts could not escape the hot, abrasive touch of the iron bars.
         

With Erika now securely spread-eagled for the next phase of her punishment, Froggy backed away, pumping his big fist triumphantly in response to the raucous cheers of the crewmen.  Yim, too, finally relaxed his punishing grip on Erika's nipples and retreated toward a small group of his countrymen who pounded him enthusiastically on his broad back, congratulating him on his good luck and good service.

 

 But Lucky lingered for a moment at Erika's side.  He gave Jasper Slegg a furtive glance and then, after receiving a subtle nod from Tranh, leaned against Erika from behind, his erection thick and hard against her buttock cleft. He reached up, pretending to test the fastness of the binding which secured her wrists.  As he did so, he whispered softly into her ear.  "Missy! Slegg has gone around among the men and bet all of last night's profits.  He's giving heavy odds that you'll scream your lungs out under the lash. Thought you might like to know."

          A wave of realization swept through Erika – at last she understood the purpose of Lucky's visit to the infirmary and the meaning of his muffled conversation with Tranh.  She inclined her head slightly, indicating that she had heard and understood him. Partly in pursuit of pleasure and partly in order to disguise the purpose for his lingering stay at the grating, Lucky fondled Erika's squirming buttocks for a moment or two and then slid his questing fingers between her spread-eagled thighs There was nothing feigned about Erika's wriggling attempts to elude his prying fingers, however, and after a few seconds Lucky was confident that his attempt at misdirection had been successful.  He stepped back and gave Slegg a final nervous glance before retreating toward the larboard rail.

 

          While a taut-stretched Erika Weiss considered the implications of Lucky's whispered intelligence, the lust-crazed crewmen of the Yang-tze Dragon buzzed with with ill-suppressed excitement.   What a spectacle awaited them!  Erika Weiss's nude body was suspended from the iron bolt in a shameless inverted 'Y', her creamy flesh naked for the lash, glistening deliciously in the noonday sun.

 

 A few feet behind her the menacing figure of General Wang surveyed Erika's  voluptuous body with the expert eye of a connoisseur of cruelty.  As he gripped and re-gripped the handle of the whip, he considered his uniformly attractive options.  To which part of Erika's perfect body should he deliver the first searing stroke of the whip?  Should he attack her soft, rounded shoulders?  The smooth-skinned planes and hollows of her tapering back?  Her long, lithe thighs, temptingly taut-stretched by her bondage?  Or perhaps that sumptuous deep-cleft backside whose fear-wracked muscles twitched more invitingly with each passing second? 

 

A sneer of malicious pleasure crossed the general's face. The divers attractions of the tantalizing young body so cruelly bound to the grating reminded him of a Chinese banquet of many courses.

 

And he, General Wang, the most feared warlord in China,  was going to sample them all.

 

 But not with chopsticks, the grim-faced general chuckled sadistically to himself. This magnificent banquet of female flesh would be attacked with other, sterner implements, he mused, as he tightened his grip on the whip….