Chapter 4
Touch and Go
Juliana Mellroot quivered in soft-boweled dismay at the evil implications offered by two broad cakes of ice standing a good forty feet apart on the mottled marble floor.
Mist rolled from them as steaming Gulf air poured through open windows. She couldn't imagine why vast pools hadn't formed around the two junior ice floes. Perhaps freezing coils kept them solid.
Beside each ice cake stood three villainous, contemptuous Arab gentlemen. None wore trousers or anything other than felt slippers below their lean brown waists.
Brigands, she thought dismally. Desert brigands. Sneering faces and ratty mustaches. That's how sheiks really look. Not like Rudy Valentino or Doug Fairbanks (pere or fils) or Sean Connery or . . .
Well, she conceded, maybe Tony Quinn had caught the knavery of the authentic article.
"You will please to use the cloakroom!" An officious thumb brusquely prodded her toward one wall. At least the short, fussy warder wore clothing.
A local woman, heart-stoppingly nude, rose from a turnip-shaped earthenware vessel. She averted her long-lashed eyes.
"Any accidents will be most regrettably punishable!" The warder had bulging eyes to go with his piercing voice. Juliana approached the foul thing, fairly tiptoeing. Its reek carried in the humid air.
"Your Bedwani, madame, is ever your gentleman, Nature's choicest nobleman, forged in that keen furnace, the desert-cleansed of impure behavior by the tempering sands.
"Only in cities, where Greece and Rome piled their rot, have you the sordid decadence that plagues the man torn from his clean, harsh heritage and set to wallow in the putrescence oozed by the great city cultures.
"Be thankful that your husband goes to a county only recently citified. Alexander's your man! He put the Indian sign to the Arab, madame, and don't you be mistaken about it. The Hellenistic hellsbroth had little effect on the greater Arabian peninsula. I envy you your new home and opportunities."
Professor Bastion Creature-Scott had enthralled her by his rhetoric when she'd visited his Oxford digs.
The Englishwoman studied the over-used earthen vessel. Surely they could have emptied it at least once that week Basty, you shit-simpleton, she thought, why didn't you mention this muck and stuff your Alexander and his Indian sign up your own putrescent ooze?
She hiked her skirt inelegantly. Thumbing her panties down to her knees, she strove to squat without perching or that unsavory rim.
Her skills from adolescent summers in Paris rescued her. She wee'd with shameful largesse into the unfragrant vessel.
Black desert eyes, black city eyes-she didn't care whit provenance they claimed, black heathen eyes watched her in negligent cruelty as she ... as she . . .
No. Oh! NO!
Her fluttery colon seized its opportunity. It took swift advantage of her vulnerable posture. The gut tube swelled in unmistakable yearning.
Unwanted, unsought, unstoppable, the first of an unutterable series plashed loudly into the darkly golden pond held by the vessel.
Unspeakable droplets leaped to lave her below.
She held her head rigid, tears forming as the humiliating display continued without pause. The incredulous, amused gazes pierced her to the quick. At length, the indignity concluded.
The shrill-voiced warder approached. He seemed terribly offended. "You will clean yourself! You will cleanse yourself of your dirty business!"
His eyes gave significant attention to her left hand.
"The unfortunate conjugation of a Bedwani's thumb and his bum, dear madame, has given rise to that ceaseless quest for stimulation so notoriously and explicitly detailed by the late Sir Richard Burton in his 'Sodiatic Zone' essay ..." Creature-Scott had looked very, very Old School solemn as he invited her to contemplate "the carnal misguidance provoked by the drive for sanitation."
Juliana began to laugh at the memory. Her eyes dripped shame's salt and her hindquarters dripped . . . Her mind rebelled. Sufficient for her to know that she dripped.
She laughed as she stripped off her underpants, worth a fashionable fortune at Maison Montrachet in Rue Colombard.
She used the pricey satin to muck herself out 'tween the cheeks and she laughed.
She let the sorely-used nethergarment drop into the acrid vessel as she laughed. She saw the jailer's vivid distaste and laughed still. She let her sad skirt drop over her thighs.
She had reduced herself to idiotic chuckles as she paced her way from the earthenware crock to-? Surely some serial buggery while bent over a baby iceberg.
She grinned a crazy, very Upper Class grin as she eyed the cock-proud villains beside each frosty cake.
"You will now pleasantly distress yourself!"
She nodded merrily at the insane order. Surely the poor lunatic needed humoring.
The warder's hand tugged at her crumpled blouse impatiently. "You will be pleased to distress yourself!"
Ah, yes, let's sit and sing sad songs of kings . . . talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs; make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes write sorrow on the bosom of the earth . . . for the first time she felt a real sympathy with Shakespeare's Richard II.
"Disengarb yourself at once! Do you not now comprehend me?"
Abruptly the penny dropped. A gravely voice-the sain Turk Murphy, no doubt, from a jazzman's Paradise-began to intone in her mind: Dis dress don't cover no gamblers, dis dress; dis dress don't cover no gamblers, midnight cowboys, pagan ramblers . . .
Dis-robe, dis-dress . . . she nodded at the foolish pop-eyed man with comprehension as she stripped herself as bare as Mother Eve.
Yet Eve after the fall, she mused, neatly folding her much-abused clothing. Eve under the baneful sentence to toil and to suffer. The bra hooks fought her giddy fingers. Eve expelled from dignity and pride by the angel's lightning-bright sword. She placed the bra tidily on her clothes, breasts free and wobbling.
Eve without a fig's leaf to shield her fig.
Juliana obediently occupied the spot beside that nude Protectorate woman who had employed the pot before her. Quilt lovely, really, with that abundance of curve and cuddle...
A flurry of noise at the door heralded a guard thrusting in a third female, also exposing her brown and fulsomely-proportioned all. She stood on Juliana's left, viewing her with haughty desert scorn.
The fussy little warder began to chatter in machine-gun Arabic. He held a single, plump olive between his thumb and forefinger. It seemed to hold importance; he gestured at it often.
The two Qu'imram women divided, each scurrying to stand by one of the junior icebergs. Fog continued to drift down the unmelting sides.
"This first prisoner will carry from one place to the other." The officious white-clad man all but rammed the dark ovid fruit up her nose in his gesticulations. "The second prisoner will pick it up and carry it to the former place. The third prisoner, who is you, will then pick up and carry..."
Juliana thought it all frightfully obscure. "In the intervals between cartage, you shall occupy the vile mouth which insulted authority by enticing the manhood of that one, there, while you are there." His finger jabbed at the third bandit in line by the farther ice block. "When you are here, you will concentrate the same attention upon this man." He pointed to a dismayingly long-wanged ruffian by the nearer ice cake. "The others each their own man assigned. You will stick to your own man."
Love to, ducks, she giggled inanely to herself, but I know my dear Richards--who is my man, after all, isn't he?--slyboots Richard is plying every wile at his command, weaning himself to the sturdy British bone trying to free me from this horror. He shall probably rescue me before I ever find out what the devil you're trying to tell me. However, the game became clear as she watched. The warder fussily placed the fat olive on the exact mathematical center of the first ice block. The first naked Arab woman swiftly slid her warmly fleshed posterior onto the flat, glacial surface.
The topside proved too broad a plateau for her to simply sit. She had to industriously push her nethercheeks backwards across the misted ice until her feet dangled in the air. Only then could her clenching buttocks grasp the olive.
Juliana began to comprehend.
The brown woman squirmed herself off the cold block. Her goose-pimpled bottom swayed, the dark fruit buried somewhere between the ample twin moons. She made hast toward the far ice cake.
Crouching beside that pearlescent platform, the second Arab woman skillfully sucked and chewed the slowly erecting phallus of the man appointed her. Her glance darted from her task to the prisoner with the olive.
Again the comical wriggling to reach the exact center of the icy seat. This time, the first woman deposited her awkward burden.
Dusky-aureoled breasts rippling, lips and thighs a-ji, she leaped from the block to fall upon her knees before the sullen, circumcised bandit designated for her.
The second woman sprang up the instant the first touched lips to dong. She abandoned fellatio to slide her own wincing rump along the ice to retrieve the olive.
Absolute madness, Juliana concluded from the comforting distance of her own balminess.
"Am I forgetting to tell you?" The agitated little warder stared at her in concern. "The one who first procures summation for each of her men wins the Olive Race. The others receive a sharp fustigation for their tardiness."
"Oh." Oh. Oh!
The protective veil of giddiness fell. Bleak rationality flooded back. Juliana saw her life as a single gleaming bridge, from schoolroom days to this prison room in Qu'imram.
"Ju-Ju Tsk-Tardy!
Ju-Ju Tsk-Tardy!
Late to chapel, Late to class-
Must LOVE to feel a rattan.
Across her laggard arse!"
No, not really, she'd always silently responded to the doggerel taunt. She'd endured the unfeeling jibes of the other girls, her face screwed, eyes red, fingers itching to comfort her hotly wealed sit-upons.
When Aramilla'd been Dorm Monitor she'd forced Juliana to lift her skirt and bare. "Educational for the other girls."
Ju' had hated the probing fingers kneading her sore "tardy stripes."
Even in Qu'imram, far from Miss Maelstrom's trampled green playing fields, the impatient god Haste demanded its sacrifices of bruised girlflesh.
Her sound mind restored, Juliana saw the naked woman slide from the ice platform and rush to crouch before her protuberant lovefeast.
The dark ovid fruit waited in the curling mists. The Englishwoman knew with stabbing mental clarity that this grotesque charade could not be madness. Nothing so comforting-no, this was true reality, this was life. This was school.
Her insides knotted in their well-remembered fear of a licking as she strode naked to the icy pedestal.
She bent her legs, reaching out with her gently bred, strawberries-in-cream bum. For a moment, the chill felt welcome. Then a prickly burning bit at her lower buttocks and thighs. COLD!
She winced, scrunching farther back. Her skin stuck to the ice. She had to put her weight on the block, since the damned olive lay so far in.
She used her knuckles to lift herself. Her undercheeks skimmed along the clutching ice. She felt the fugitive tickle of the ovoid fruit.
Settling down for an instant, she tried to clutch with her cleft. An icicle pang shot through her vitals. She couldn't feel the olive at all-then she realized the icy finger diddling her anus had to be the chilled fruit itself.
She hoped her numbed muscles gripped it as she struggled forward. Oops! She kicked foolishly as she almost rumbled.
Landing in an arse-low crouch, she peered fearfully at the stone floor. No. She glanced back at the ice shelf. The olive wobbled peacefully toward the edge.
She backed herself over it and closed her bottom cheeks around it.
"Very good!" The warder encouraged. "You must use absolutely no hands."
At least he shouted less. She tried to trot-then to walk. Thighs pressed close, she minced in a particularly theatrical parody of feminine carriage toward the second block, forty feet distant.
The cold lump thawed slowly between her pressed nates. She tried to deposit the tiny cargo on the second frozen perch.
"The center, the very center," the warder coaxed.
The ice shocked her rump as she skimmed along. Feeling drained as blood retreated from her skin. She couldn't be sure the blasted little thing had dropped loose until she saw it behind her.
The Arab woman almost bashed her to the floor with her driving, desert lips as she rushed to leap on the block.
Juliana confronted the raw maleness on display. Two upcurving sceptres shone with saliva. The third in line had yet to begin erection. Already stylishly stout, the thing would be fearful in its upright arrogance.
"No, thank you, no sausage tonight, please." How her brittle quip had nettled Richard. His own fault, really, for not agreeing to respond in kind.
"It's not the fish I mind dear, it's the sauce." He had found wit for some repartee. "Can't we compromise? Just tongue my willy now and when it's a drier season of the month, I'll be pleased to offer Mistress Puss a nice mouth-to-mouth."
Charmingly put, but selfish of him to deny her the treat she craved at the time she truly needed it. She archly informed him he could just climb on for a conventional jogging unless he preferred the telly and Starsky and Hutch.
"Damn squishy work," he'd complained, but he'd performed the missionary labor with his customary thoroughness.
She sank to her knees before the Arab prick, dappled in fawn and olive shades. Miss Maelstrom's had included pointed lectures for potential Foreign Officers' wives. The exhortations on Englishwoman's Burden had explicitly discussed Lady Mountbatten's libido and its role in the graceful transfer of power over India.
Yet . . . vast areas had been overlooked in the curriculum. How naked, how strange the circumcised cockhead appeared. She ventured her tongue tip along the old, adolescent scar. How peculiarly newly born the dark engine seemed as it throbbed, butting up at her lips, rather like a calf seeking nurture.
Suckling in reverse. She felt almost maternal as she circled the blind thing with her open mouth. The cosy sensation vanished as it leaped against her soft palate. Her gorge threatened to rise and spill. Fingers knotted, she applied herself to the task. Unless she made the demanding thing spurt its freight first, her lily-soft bum would be on the griddle. So like school . . .
A drum of waddling feet announced salvation. The olive returned to its chill throne, born by unbashful Bedwani buttocks.
In a certain dismay, Juliana realized she'd hardly begun to coax the blunt instrument along toward the spitting point. The desert woman sank to her hams and went gobblingly at it.
The enthusiasm nettled Juliana's soul as she probed backwards on the freezing seat for the olive. So . . . these heathen believe they can out-fellate the Anglo-Saxon race, do they?
Resolve steeled her as she waggled between the ice blocks, olive nuzzling her sphincter. She'd give the next paynim peggo a tussling it'd remember for star-filled desert nights to come!
"Rather a nasty cat, that." Richard Mellroot appraised the nine-tailed whip the executioner swung loosely in the simmering heat.
Her ale-colored nudity fully displayed, the well-bred Arab woman had been stretched and trussed to the triangle. Her wrists hung from its peak; her legs spread at its base, opening the paired Babylonian moons of her posterior.
The soft skin had been oiled, as a courtesy, and she shimmered with enchanting lights before the slowly weaving whip.
"Bengal tiger gut." The CIA man coughed in the silent, muggy air. "Excuse. Tiger gut, pressed and rolled, knotted all down the last two feet of each tail. The do-dads fastened to the tips of the lashes aren't really barbs. They're tiny silver crescents."
"I'd gather they hurt a bit," Richard nodded. While sands, white stone, white prison walls seared under the stabbing sun. The silvery charms sent piercing flashes in: his eyes as they swayed.
The nine-tailed cat reared and clawed, backed by a powerful arm. The woman screamed through her gag. The tiger's gut raked her back. Hot marks reached across her spine as her hindquarters rotated.
Something drooled from her chin.
"The gag is thick felt," the American explained. "Soaked in fresh stallion semen. The harder she bites the more she swallows."
He shook his head. "Must be a hell of a job, masturbating a horse. I understand they've got boys who're pretty good at it."
Raw ruby showed along the woman's ribs where the crescents had clipped in on the right. Her whole body rippled at the next cut. The knotted tails splayed cleanly overlapping prior welts.
Ivory droplets fountained from her lips. Her lustrously bare, oiled buttocks vibrated in torment. The British consul's manly creature bounded in heady empathy against his trouser fly.
Jolly good the patrol wasn't going to be mucking about with him. In Qu'imram's parochial vision, diplomatic immunity covered the males of each legation.
He'd warned Ju', given her the standard Foreign Office bumf outlining the reasons for discouraging female dependents ... at least he imagined he had. Hadn't he? Be found a curious lapse of exact memory of showing her the document. Doubtless an early sign of brain fag.
She had insisted on inviting her friend, the backwoods girl, for a holiday. No one could fault him for graciously acceding to her wishes, as with that whim concerning Dillingham Eastern. The addition to their living stipend had been a grateful bonus to his husbandly indulgence, too.
A third stroke scored the pretty ale-brown back. The woman moved like a pendulum, suspended by her wrists.
The flogger aimed next at her netherglobes. The nine fiery crescents and knotted gut-ends flayed the far right flank. Scarlet ribboned the satiny hinds.
The hummocks spread helplessly for the fifth lick of the nine rough tongues. Her loins agitated themselves in a frenzy against the cross beam boss.
"I dare say she'll feel that when she sits."
The CIA man opined, "She'll feel it when she dreams. Oh-oh."
The prison medical examiner stepped forward. He studied the lacerated skin. His urgent hand summoned a shriveled, ratty-mustached man with an enamel bucket. The functionary dipped a small brush deep within and slathered something smeary over the raw ridges on the right.
"Oooo." The American frowned. "Nasty medicine. In the old days they disinfected wounds with horse's urine and salt. Primitive stuff, but acid and saline do make a pretty good antibacterial. This goo is much more sophisticated."
"I would have to imagine. What's in it?"
"The same rock salt and horse piss with a pepper oil base to make it cling better. It really scours out those germs."
The sixth stroke curled across already-flaming weal traces, the bitter ends driving the searing ointment deeper. The woman's rasping howl evoked a horse's exultant neighing from somewhere near.
"I think they're milking another stallion for Miss Merydith." The American watched the aristocratic woman writhe like a scotched snake as the cat peeled skin from her thighs.
"Mighty decent of you to stand by when they're ready for her," he thanked Richard. "I appreciate having a second witness. Looks better on the record. "I know your schedule must be tight, with your wife flying out and all."
Nonsense, old man." The consul rocked on his heels as the eighth tiger-gut stroke whistled into her legs. "Thank you for doing the same while they hide Ju'."
The Persian Gulf sun burned unflinchingly on the undulating stripes. The flogger let his whip carve the thighs a final time.
The doctor's assistant tottered forward to paint crimson-dewed marks. The woman's sobs seemed less boistrous than Mademoiselle l'Orange's, but no whit less sincere.
The executioner stepped directly behind the wide, inverted V of her legs. The assistant scurried away with his hellbucket.
The nine tails flew and spread in a practice swing as the flogger got his distance.
"I don't ever want to know what that's going to feel like." The CIA man kept his eyes glued to the triangle.
"I don't think chaps can, old seed."
Hardened muscles sent the greedy cat scooping up and in. Bunched gut-cord smacked against flesh.
Silence. The thongs held tight, then fell, one knotted strand at a time.
Silence. Then an expulsive retch shot the sodden gag free into empty air.
They heard a torn, fluttery wail as muezzins make at the last hour from burning minarets overlooking mighty cities' fall.
A tearing inhalation sounded as she forced in breath.
Finally, a full-throated lament echoed from the stolid prison walls, the roar of a desert creature in mortal pain.
Tingling to the marrow, the consul focused on her pain-wracked bottom and remembered England.