'Otei,' Miriri said, pointing to the hazy mid-morning sun hanging high above the ridge. Anya didn't see anything unusual about that; the sun appeared there every morning. Then the woman turned her round and pointed the other way, far along the beach to where a second ridge completed the enclosure of the bay beyond the lagoon. This ridge was much sharper than the first and close to its end was a curious hole just below the upper edge, where the waves had caused the rock to break away. Through this hole, the sky was visible. Miriri lifted her finger and drew an arc across the sky from the present position of the sun to the site of the hole in the ridge. Then she threw her arms wide and with her finger; gripping at the air and her eyes staring wildly from side to side, she advanced, grunting, towards Anya. Anya thought she understood now, apart from this last display - she would watch for the sunset through this gap tonight - though she still did not see what the fuss was about. She was more interested in these preparations and in the form the celebrations might take.
'Aniya!'
Looking up the beach, Anya saw Ikahiti coming towards them. Ikahiti's face was painted; her eyebrows looked thicker and darker; her cheeks were streaked with orange and yellow and she wore a bright red plume at the back of a band around her head. But she still wore the single narrow skin belt angled across her belly, so slim above the smoothly flowing muscles of her thighs. And between them was this curious contradiction to the dense dark hair of her head and the bushy black of her underarms - the very youthful, bare yet ink-pricked shield around her sex. It made her look so vulnerable, yet she was far from being that. When Anya's gaze returned to Ikahiti's face, she saw that she was smiling at her; she looked fresh and beautiful and happy and her eyes had that glint - wild, untameable and free. She greeted Miriri and began explaining something to her, while Miriri first nodded, then her eyebrows lifted.
'Irin-ta-shakahini,' said Ikahiti, pointing back towards the cave and making Anya feel mildly apprehensive. 'Shakahini-ta Kalisha.' She must mean to take her to the Princess, Anya thought. Now she felt afraid; her expression must have showed it, for Ikahiti laughed. 'Shi-shirula,' she whispered warmly, and took Anya by the wrist; her slim bronze fingers touched the knotted ropework armband that she had given Anya, then stroked back and forth across Anya's palm, tickling. Anya's hand closed about those fingers and squeezed them gently. Then Ikahiti led her up the beach and into the cave.
They passed the pool in which Anya had been submerged; the winding frame still stood beside it and Anya gave this a very wide berth. Beyond it were women bathing in the lake. She shivered when they came upon the place where the cruel rite of piercing had been performed, but Ikahiti carried on until they passed through a large archway and into a second series of caves - or rooms, perhaps, for the walls and ceilings were so well adorned with tapestries woven with bright feathers that it was unclear which parts of these chambers were wood and which were living rock. Here were several of the women whose naked bodies were entirely covered in patterned inks. They watched Anya with interest; Ikahiti squeezed Anya's hand and returned their gaze with open smiles; it was evident she was proud to be accompanying Anya and this gave Anya reassurance and also food for thought.
In one of the rooms was a pale-skinned man, young and quite handsome. He lay naked on a very large bed - a true bed rather than a bed of leaves and the first such bed that Anya had seen here - and he was being caressed by three of the painted women, who appeared to be working oil into his skin. Ikahiti stopped. Anya watched until she was distracted by a shout and they were ushered into the next room, where the Princess waited.
Anya and Ikahiti bowed before the Princess, who remained standing, despite the presence of several chairs. Once again, Anya was struck by the comparative paleness of this young woman's complexion and the honey-coloured hair, much lighter than anyone else's. The peculiar combination of strength and innocence was still there in her gaze. In place of the red and gold cape, she now wore an extraordinarily elaborate and beautiful high-collared flowing cloak, closely woven with vivid green, blue and yellow feathers, which, when she strode majestically about, almost gave her the appearance of an exotic bird. But round her neck was a jewelled golden amulet shaped like a sword. Its blade was studded with blood-red ruby and its hilt with minute pearls. Anya stared at it because it seemed so different from the usual decoration that the island women wore, which was fashioned mainly from shell and shaped in the form of animals, birds or fish. Perhaps it had been taken from one of the captive sailors, though the owner of an amulet so lavish as this would certainly have been no ordinary sailor.
At first, the Princess seemed pleased to see Anya. 'Aniya - si shiniki,' Ikahiti said. The Princess gave a very slight nod of her head and suddenly Anya was afraid of something she had seen momentarily in that glance - the way the eyelids had half closed. The Princess advanced and Anya looked down, aware that she was being studied closely. She closed her eyes, expecting something to happen. She heard them talking - about her, she knew - then she heard the heavy rustle of the quilted feather cloak. The small fingers touched her skin. She quaked in fear as she felt them take the cord and tease it out, turning it into a shivering line, then trace it down between her legs, hesitating at the hood, touching its drawn back inner skin, then investigating the gold ring. When she heard voices behind her, she automatically tried to pull away. 'Tika, shiniki,' said the Princess. Anya opened her eyes; she swallowed. The Princess's face was close. The eyes seemed so wide and innocent as the fingertip, pressing now against the underside of the nub, rotated very gently. Then it withdrew and the tip of a small tongue slipped out deliberately to wet the tip of that finger, which returned to that same place, to rotate beneath the nubbin as it swelled. The Princess's calm and innocent gaze moved down; she watched the pale legs begin to tremble; she instructed that they be moved apart; Ikahiti opened them. And she kept rewetting and reapplying her fingertip to that one spot, the underside of the nub, which she could feel engorging, swallowing by degrees the ring that pierced it, while her slave was delivered from the next room and prepared by having a gold chain fastened through the rather heavier ring that pierced the underside of his cockstem at the place where it joined his bag.
When the trembles in the thighs extended upwards through the belly to the breasts, the Princess took away her fingertip and looked into the girl's now pleading eyes while the trembles in the out-bowed thighs continued unabated. Then she pointed the finger at Ikahiti and delivered this one instruction, 'Nisha!' - meaning 'denial' - with the force of a decree. Ikahiti nodded gravely though Anya, not having encountered the word before, understood the weight of its delivery but could not know its meaning. Neither could she know that the Princess had offered the word from spite - to a girl with skin paler yet and hair more brightly golden than her own, for even her favourite slave was eyeing this girl with a desire that was plain to see. She therefore added to the pointing finger another, wetted both quite liberally and applied them this time to the slave, only at the place where the cockstem joined the bag, that is, at the place where the thick tube below his fully erect stem finally disappeared into his person. She did it with the heavy ring turned downwards, rather than up, as it had been upon the girl, so that it pressed against the delicate twin tubes in the bag and made the balls protrude below, through brightly polished skin. The two wet fingertips massaged through to the part of the ring that was inside him, looped through the thin layer of skin, rubbing the ring against the soft under-tube which would, after long stimulation throughout that day, finally be permitted to carry his ripened and copious miltings upwards and deliver them on to the Princess's tongue that night, in the privacy of her chamber.
For the Princess felt very powerful womanly desires for men - particularly pale-skinned men, despite the fact that these were the very men who kept coming in their giant boats to take the island women. One of her own forebears had been pale-skinned; he too had come from far away, but it was said that he was very different. Strong and true and kind, he had won a princess's heart. And that princess had been her mother's mother's mother. Such men then, were few and far between. Her own sister had been carried away and she had never seen her since. Kalisha had therefore been forced to decree that pale-skinned men, whenever they were taken, whatever their apparent worth, must unceasingly be punished. Pleasure could be delivered to them only as an adjunct to pain. As regards pale-skinned women, whom she had never seen before, her feelings were unresolved. But if they were all as beautiful as this one, they could certainly prove a threat to her self-esteem.
'Achira,' declared the Princess. A heavy curtain was drawn aside to reveal the outdoors and the forest green. With her slave closely tethered on his gold chain and her painted attendants following, the Princess then walked out. Ikahiti quickly took Anya's hand and they followed at a deferential distance.
Anya soon realised that this was the place she had noticed on the first day, the clearing with its timber frameworks and poles. There was much more activity today. She could hear shouting and laughter. Congregating there were all the women, their bodies decorated with feathers and paints; some of them even wore masks. Dozens of men were being chivvied into the clearing. Anya watched carefully to see if there might be any native, bronze-skinned men, but, without exception, these men had skin almost as pale as her own. The area into which they were being driven was a hollow, filled with complicated and curious-looking timber and rope framework devices and cages of differing sizes. There were poles arranged singly and in groups at a variety of angles, and ladders, swings and wheels; some of these things made her shudder, for they resembled the frame that had been used to dangle her over the snake pool. There were also many fetters and harnesses attached to the surrounding trees. Lying about on the ground were whips and sticks, which some of the women were collecting up as others began to attach the men to the various instruments of abuse. At this point, Anya became very afraid indeed - and not only for the men, for she was reminded by Ikahiti's constant presence and the Princess's close attention, that she too was a captive in this land.
Very soon, there were sounds of whipping and smacking, then sudden gasps between the spanks. As they approached the scene more closely, it became clear that the punishments were being prolonged and made crueller by the use of pleasure. The men would be pleasured for a while, then whipped, sometimes in the very places that had only just been pleasured. They would be collared around their intimate parts, often very tightly indeed, and would then be thrashed. Polished sticks would be introduced into their persons while they were played with, smacked or whipped. The women seemed to be vying with one another to stimulate their slaves in ever more degrading ways. Anya did not want to witness it; the men had surely done nothing so wicked as to deserve such cruel treatment.
Near the centre of the clearing, the Princess stopped to watch. One of the men had been led to a point where a wooden bar was supported about three feet above his head. He was strung up unceremoniously by his wrists, so his feet, kicking down, hung above the floor. One of the women standing behind him drew his ankles back and apart, then snapped them shut again, which forced his erect stem and his ballocks out in front of him from between his squeezed-together thighs. A second woman now tied his knees together but left his ankles free to wave helplessly above the sand while a young girl lifted a short-handled flat stick and the women collected a sturdy wooden beam, the centre of which had been carved and shaped into what looked like a small heart-shaped shield or cup containing an oval hole near its top. With one woman at each end, the beam was lifted and tilted, the women angling until the cap of his stem was captured through the hole. Then the beam was pushed back and down against his weight until his stem was forced completely through this constriction, the arms of the beam pressed across his lower belly and the heart-shaped cup of the shield formed an envelope round his bag. With the skin thus drawn back, the cock swelled harder. Pushing the beam back until his body was supported at an angle, the women held him while the girl, standing on a block, smacked him. No stimulation was given other than the smacking across his bottom, with his cock jammed tightly through this narrow oval hole. The girl was forced to use two hands to lift the stick - so large was it - and she smacked it across his buttocks as hard as she was worth. Each smack induced a jerk which bedded the cockstem deeper.
The Princess now stood closely beside her slave. She allowed his gold chain to dangle to the ground and gloved his cockstem with her bare hand, simply holding it close to the base, with her third finger slipped through the ring. She whispered to him and he uneasily edged his legs apart. Then Anya was distracted as the stick above cracked down again, then again, smacking the buttocks cruelly, propelling the base of the cockstem hard into the narrow hole in the beam, making the veins stand out, making it throb and jerk, making the ankles sway wildly below the secured-together knees. While this was taking place, the Princess's fingers, attending to her own slave in a rather gentler fashion, urged the skin down against the base of his stem. However, the ringed finger controlled his progress more cruelly by lifting, pressing and rotating, while splitting his bag into two distinct and slowly moving bulging parts.
The smacking now grew louder, harder, ascending to a crescendo; the girl was frenzied in her efforts to make the pleasure spill. Suddenly, the victim screamed and tried to thrust his cockstem through the hole; the girl waited. The Princess waited, holding her slave quite steady; then the fingers of her free hand slipped behind him and into the groove. She nodded. While the Princess's fingers now performed this deep massage, the girl delivered a powerful upwards smack to the man whose belly was pressed against the beam and the pleasure seemed to shoot as if propelled. The girl quickly threw the stick to the ground, walked round, stretched her small and delicate fingers out and bathed them in the spurts of milt, which kept coming while the women rocked the bar rhythmically against his belly. The girl then held out her fingers, dripping white. The Princess approved. The beam was pulled away but the man was left suspended, his body shuddering as the last drops of this very full pleasure continued to be expelled. Then the Princess took her slave by his chain and the entourage moved on. Anya was obliged to follow.