Pleasure Island [The Chronicles of Lidir] (20 page)
When she was lifted, the creatures fell away from her, yet Anya hardly knew; the drowsiness had overtaken her. Her limp body was laid in the centre of a large soft white cloth which then was wrapped around her legs and beneath her arms and she was carried up some steps and into a small room. The women's feet made rustling sounds, for the floor was strewn with leaves. She was placed upon the only furnishing in this room, a raised and cushioned stone altar with four narrow pedestals spaced round it. While she was left alone, her awareness gradually returned. Her hands moved nervously over the cloth that wrapped around her; it formed a soft cocoon of protection as she stared up at the ceiling, adorned in strong relief with garishly coloured carvings of depraved and twisted grinning faces with bright orange tongues pushed out and curling repellently down in her direction. She knew then that her ordeal could not be over.
The heavy curtain at the door was drawn aside and the painted women - the Princess's attendants - entered, though the Princess did not follow. Anya's fingertips froze about the fold of cloth above her belly. She looked up at the women standing one to each side of the altar where she lay; they were beautiful but strange. She could see only the upper half of their bodies, yet only their faces were free of the swirling painted lines and patterns which licked up their arms and bellies, round their breasts and up to their necks. Beneath the cheeks, each chin was framed as if by hands. A brown and purple snake slid round the belly of the woman to the right; its tongue curled round her ringed and painted nipple as if to pluck it like a fruit. Anya could not see below their bellies, yet she knew those bellies to be bare; she shivered when she remembered what she had seen there - the tightly woven double pouch of gold and the small white projection that looked like polished bone.
One of the women moved round the altar, carrying a tiny cage in which a light flickered; she used it to light the four small lamps which stood on the pedestals. These lamps flared strongly at first, then guttered as they were opened again and sprinkled with a powder. A heavy acrid smoke billowed out and across the surface of the altar, making the back of Anya's throat tighten. She had to gasp to be able to breathe and with each gasp she inhaled more smoke. The women, standing above the level of the cloud, watched her. The smoke gradually dispersed and Anya then felt a cool numbness moving through her body, through her limbs and to her toes. Her fingertips no longer gripped the cloth. Her whole body felt soft; it seemed to sink into the cushioned surface, which supported her as if she were still floating in the water. Around the bed the small lamps burned more gently with the fragrance of the spice. Anya breathed it more freely now; it did not smell so pungent as before. The numbness in her flesh had turned to awareness; her skin tingled and the places that the fish had sucked throbbed with an itchy pleasure.
The painted women now attended to Anya herself. They dried her hair, sprinkled it with aromatic oils and combed it out until it shone. When they unwrapped the cloth and removed it, her body felt dry and cool. But she saw that the whiteness of the cloth was besmirched here and there with red. And again she felt a twinge of anxiety at the thought of what the fish might have done. The women placed the cloth carefully aside and examined her body. Each place that the fish had sucked upon had a small welling drop of blood.
Those places were quickly treated with a cool clear lotion which stemmed the flow but did not take away the swelling itching feeling. When they touched her nipples and rubbed the lotion into her skin, the feeling tickled to her throat; the nipples stayed soft and thick and pliant to their touch but to Anya they felt as hard and painfully pleasured as if those fingers were demanding lips which had drawn each nipple to a bursting ball, necked by the lips sealed round it, while a rasping tongue stroked back and forth over the skin of that hard ball on its stalk. As one woman continued to treat her nipples, she was turned on to her side and her leg was lifted. The place at the tip of her spine was wiped and stroked and it seemed her spine was turned to a tingling thread which the fingertip, as it rubbed the ticklish skin upon that itching knob of pleasure, was slowly clawing from her body. And with that tickling in her spine, her breasts, lying heavily, their weight swaying forwards, pushed pressure to the tips which the other fingers smeared with lotion and gently kneaded, though in vain, if they meant to take the itch away.
The fingertip at Anya's spine was replaced now by a stroking thumb while the forefinger itself examined the puckered ring about the entrance to her bottom, which had been sucked in many places as the fish had searched. Each time one of these tiny points of suction was touched, Anya tried to move away, for the softer that the finger was applied, the more unbearable the itch became, but the finger persevered, wiping each tiny lesion, stroking it and coating with the lotion before moving to the front. The edges of her flesh lips were found to be chapleted with ruby droplets of crystallised blood. Anya felt tiny pricks as the tips of the fingernails, pinched together, picked those jewelled spangles one by one. She whimpered with the torture of that itchy pricklishness; she wanted to bring her legs together as the slowly tweaking pick proceeded, the twitch-inducing ticklish pick of ruby blisters from those lips, as the fingertips worked systematically closer to their joining before massaging them with a generous measure of lotion, rendering them supple indeed and turning that itch delicious, so Anya's tongue slid against the back of her tightly clenched teeth in a sure sign of arousal. To Anya, once again, her flesh down there felt hard, yet to the fingers that tasted, the lips felt like wedges of soft warm dough sealed within very thin rubber, unlike the painted women's own flesh lips which were individually sealed within precisely sewn threads of gold.
A fingernail slipped beneath the hooded flesh and Anya felt it catch against the carapace of dried blood around her nubbin and peel it very gently away, then smear the lotion underneath to make that nubflesh, already yearning, quite irretrievably erect.
She was turned on to her back and she felt something being done to her between the legs, something very intimate indeed. Something cold and metallic and very small had touched her and she squirmed, afraid of that small intruder which was lifting her fleshy hood and touching against her nubbin. She tried to lift her head to see what was being done. One of the women pushed her shoulders down while the other climbed up and knelt astride her, pinning her body and preventing it from jerking while they worked. She faced away from Anya with her knees about Anya's belly and her feet pressed into the hollows beneath her arms. Then Anya felt the hands spread and hold open her inner thighs. When the standing woman moved round between Anya's legs, disappearing from sight altogether behind the woman kneeling over her, Anya was completely defenceless. Her head turned sideways; her wide eyes looked askance. As the small sharp piece of metal touched her and her belly tried to lift yet one woman held her pinned down at the creases and the other opened her flesh and worked this thing beneath her hood, then took it out again, Anya had to be there imagining terrible things and watch the open hips above her gently rocking as the painted woman held her and whispered to her friend. And despite her fear and the sensation between her legs - whether pain or pleasure she did not know - as the metal was tested against her, then taken away again, she watched in fascination the changing shapes on that slowly rocking form. Apart from the soles of her feet, this woman's whole body was covered in patterned inks, depicting trees and flowers, fruit and fish and curling abstract shapes. Anya shuddered; the metal had been slipped beneath her hood again and this time it held.
The first woman returned to Anya's side. She bent her head and kissed her. The woman's lips felt very soft. Then she stood back and placed one hand upon the back of the one who knelt astride Anya while the other hand explored the patterns on the woman's leg. Around each leg and curled in opposing directions was a snake; the one around the right leg was figured sliding over the cheek of her buttocks. Its head could not be seen. As she moved, the painted scales of its skin appeared to ripple and it seemed to bed itself deeper into the crease. And Anya saw again the pouch, each lip sleeved in glinting threads of gold. The skin around the sex was bare and now there could be no doubt - the edge of each lip had been hemmed, pierced repeatedly by a needle and sewn with the gold thread, but sewn so closely, thread to thread, that for the full depth of the lip none of the skin was visible. Her sex lips formed a small split shield of woven gold. But between them, at their joining, was a small projecting bone, like a cockstem, only as long as the first joint of Anya's little finger, but shaped like a cockstem nonetheless. And like a cockstem, it was now erect as the woman's fingers touched Anya between the legs. When Anya murmured, she saw the cockstem move, pushing out a tiny fraction from between the gold-sleeved lips and she realised for the first time that this woman was excited by what she did to Anya. And though Anya still did not know quite what it was the woman did, she found that this visible signal of the woman's state excited her too.
The other woman was intent upon her kneeling companion. She opened the cheeks and touched the place where the painted snake's head buried, then she touched the gold. Each gold-hemmed lip was lifted and gently squeezed; when the lip was released it remained moulded to the curve to which the fingertips had shaped it. The golden lips now formed an open purse which the forefinger freely slipped within then came out moist. This moistened finger stroked the small bone stem, then tapped it, then gently pulled it. The woman murmured softly and the mouth of her bottom pulsed. The moistened finger moved there, stroked it too, then the small polished bone was rubbed; it somehow pushed out harder from beneath its hood. The flexible gold lips were closed about it, to seal it in its pushed-out state. This tiny artificial cockstem poked out and downwards from the hood while the fingernail kept lifting it and picking at it as if it were an itching thorn in the swollen ball of flesh beneath, but the picking was insufficient to pluck that thorn out; it could only disturb its bedding in her flesh, stimulate the irritation and make it throb up harder. And Anya felt a strangeness in her belly to witness this - that these women would have these tiny thorns of pleasure somehow bedded in their nubbins, and constantly projecting, available to be touched, to be stimulated, twisted, plucked and pulled until their flesh was driven to distraction. The woman who did the touching left the other with her belly arching down and this small bone cock projecting betwixt her sealed-together lips and took up a position between Anya's feet, to arouse her too and to keep her erect with the metal device, a tiny saddle-shaped polished instrument of gold, and also now with a small flat polished stick that had a straight edge like a knife.
The hair was brushed back from the lips once more, the hood of flesh was lifted and the saddle, its shape having been modified yet again, was once more slipped beneath. This time the fit was good; the painted woman could tell so by the depth of the pale girl's murmur. The nubbin was sheathed no longer by its living hood but by the less yielding underfold in the gold, and the upper surface of this saddle was moulded to the sensitive flesh that formed the underside of the hood. These two delicate surfaces - the nubbin and the hood - were precisely separated by this rigid interleaf of gold, which therefore made its presence felt in duplicate while the lips were smeared with lotion; then with the knife edge of the stick, the paste was scraped away from the creases and towards the lips, gathering up the wax secretion from the pores and leaving them soft and fresh and sensitised. The small pulling movements of the flesh, accompanied by light tappings at the hood, kept the gold-sheathed peeping nubbin both stiff and under control. Each time the nubbin swelled harder, the tip of the stick was used to press the saddle a little further beneath the hood. The lotion was reapplied and scraped away until every skin pore could be seen and everything about that flesh was hard - the lips themselves, like projecting open fins of rubber, the hood stretched astride its saddle and the swollen bud of pleasure that was captured by the gold. So clean, so fresh was the outer skin of those lips that it would cling to the finger when it was touched. Once this freshness and this state of pure erection had been achieved, then the ceremony of the piercing could begin. This was accomplished with the saddle still in place, for the saddle had on each side of it a small opposing hole.
The women moved aside and the cat-woman entered. Anya was afraid, for the woman's expression was cruel. She turned her quickly on her side, one knee crooked and her breasts pressed to the cushion so that she would not see. But Anya could imagine; she could feel the long bony fingers touching her between the legs, pulling back the thickened lips, searching out the gold-sleeved nubbin and squeezing very hard, so it was nipped. She caught her breath with the sudden pain, but tried not to cry out. When she tried to lift her hips away from that hand, the woman growled at her and in that brief moment, she thought it was indeed the growl of a giant cat. She lay half crouched now, afraid to move at all but knowing that something dreadful would be done. She looked towards the painted women but they stood like statues, watching. The tears welled down her cheeks while the fingers nipped her, pushed inside her body, explored her tenderness freely while her belly quavered as if it had been slit then filled with ice. She felt the bony fingers lift her sex up from inside, so her bottom lifted in the air; she tried to close her legs but the woman forced them open as Anya knelt with her bottom in the air and her breasts pressed against the cushions. She was too afraid to close her thighs though they trembled uncontrollably as the fingers, like hard, angled twigs, penetrated her sex, upturned as it was, pushed out behind her, its hair brushed back, its lips bare and swollen and defenceless. While this hand remained inside her, its nails scraping, the bony fingers of the other hand pushed the hood back until the sleeve of gold was exposed. The first hand withdrew and the long nails closed about the sleeve and pulled. Anya's knees jerked. The cat-woman waited, still holding that gold sleeve, until Anya drew her knees back, until she angled them forward so far they touched the sides of her breasts, then the woman grunted and slowly tugged again. Anya felt that tugging up into her belly. When the gold began to move against the flesh that clung to it, she experienced the sliding feeling to her throat, for it felt as if the sleeve were attached to her and in that pulling, a thin ribbon of her inner flesh would follow.
