Herein is a presentation of virtually every form of discipline and sadoeroticism known to man. The most traditional acts of the Western World are contrasted with and enhanced by the unique and cruelly clever sex tortures of the East. Though fictional in nature, this novel is based on fact. The author has an intimate knowledge of the various areas of sadism and presents them in precise, throbbing detail. From sexual humiliation and caning to bestiality and mass rape we view each act intimately, as a first hand observer. The era of the Dowager Empress-a time of Imperialistic maneuvers and savage, wanton plundering.
CHAPTER ONE
It was the year 1900, and it was early spring in the China of the Dowager Empress. The foreign consulates along the Street of the Dragon bustled with diplomatic activity, but there were few who suspected what the wily old woman who sat on China's throne was fomenting against them and all their kith and kin.
For she had long chafed under the pressure and the greediness of the "foreign devils," and her ministers and generals had sympathized with her and urged her to bide her time until a potent army could be assembled to drive all the accursed whites from the great land which they had usurped with their treaties and their soldiers.
In the Imperial Palace at Peking, at this very moment, General Wang was being granted an audience with the venerable and indomitable Tsu Hsi, before whom he had prostrated himself as she stared insolently down at him from a golden throne.
This formidable woman had been the consort of the Emperor Hsien-feng, who had died in 1861. She had given birth to his successor T'ung-Chih, who had died as a young child in the year of 1875. Following this, Tsu Hsi had made her nephew Kuang-Hsu emperor.
But because her nephew had consorted with the powers of the West, she had at last forced his abdication two years ago and was now direct ruler of all the land encompassed within the Great Wall. Even the treacherous Japanese had heard of and respected her powers, for the people adored her and her soldiers would willingly die for the honor of China in her service.
"Rise, Wang," she commanded in a shrill, piping voice. The burly general rose at last, his shaved head bowed before her, even his pigtail dangling in obeisance as he stretched out his arms toward her in token of complete submission to her divine will.
"Majesty, we have waited too long to drive these foreign devils from our soil," he declared.
"I know that as well as you do, Wang, but we have been helpless these past years. That weakling of a nephew whom I put upon the throne fawned upon them. And do you not think that I, Dowager Empress of the Ch'ing Dynasty, have not wakened every morning since I ascended the Imperial throne with a sense of shame at my loss of face, at the loss of pride in our nation? Do you not think that I, more than you, detest and hate these white devils who mingle with us so freely and so contemptuously, considering us little more than barbarians? Yes, I agree, we should long ago have driven them back across the oceans whence they came, but my ministers have warned me against aggression before I could be certain of victory."
"That is why I have begged audience with your Imperial Majesty this day," General Wang steadfastly avowed. "For now the time is ripe for revolt against those fat, pampered diplomats and their little armies, who think they have conquered all of China. Have I not told your Imperial Majesty that I was forming battalions of valorous soldiers who know themselves to be protected against the bullets of the white devils?"
"I have heard such rumors, yes, Wang. But I must know the truth before I dare brook open warfare with these hated invaders of our precious land!" the Dowager Empress angrily riposted.
"Then be certain, Majesty, the moment is at hand. It has been my great honor to be chosen by the secret society I Ho Chuan-and you have heard their name before this moment, I know."
"Yes, for these men have taken as their symbol the fists of righteousness and harmony. But are there enough of them to drive away the English, the French, the Italians, the Germans, the Austrians, the Russians and the Japanese, as well as the American troops who station themselves so arrogantly in my own beloved city of Peking?"
"Yes, Majesty. The Boxers-such they are known to one another-number now well over thirty thousand troops, all armed with guns and swords, and they have been trained by two of my best commanders in the field."
"It is a goodly force, Wang. What I would not give to sit upon my throne and know that all the white devils have been driven away forever."
"So shall it be, if you but give the word, Majesty," General Wang fervently declared. ...
At this very moment when Tsu Hsi and her foremost general were plotting the overthrow of the whites in China, Jane Evans was wishing perhaps as desperately that her own malicious and sadistic employers would be banished forever from her life.
Her face crimson with shame, buried in her hands, she lay across the lap of Mathilda Hoskins, the dowdy, peevish wife of Matthew Hoskins, who held the rank of First Secretary to the British Consul. Her long muslin skirt and two petticoats had been fucked up beyond her slim waist, and her oval shaped, provocatively firm buttocks were proffered to the gleaming eyes of her tyrannical mistress, shielded only by a pair of white batiste panties whose legs descended just to the knee hollows and were in vivid contrast with the black cotton stockings of her usual apparel.
Jane Evans was twenty-two, born to an impoverished family in Soho. Her older brother was in the British army, serving in Nepal, and she had run away from home at the age of seventeen when she could no longer stand her stepfather's lustful immodesties. There followed several jobs of meager wages and tyrannical employers, until at last the employment agency with whom she was registered sent her to the elegant house of Matthew Hoskins.
He was about to be appointed First Secretary to the British Consul, William Dougald, in Peking. Jane heard this news with joy, believing that once she had left England, she might begin a new life. . .and so she had, but it was hardly the sort of life for which she had so passionately hoped.
For although Matthew Hoskins was courteous and proper in his demeanor to her, his wife, Mathilda, contrived a venomous spite for the lovely young maid and lost no time in governing Jane Evans as one might govern an errant, naughty child. Two weeks after she had been engaged, Jane learned this when to her consternation Mathilda Hoskins summoned her to her sitting room and there harangued her over her laziness, her slipshod way with domestic chores, and then went so far as to accost the astonished teenager with the false accusation that Jane was "setting your cap for my husband, I'll be bound, and I'll have none of it, d'you hear me, Missy?" When Jane had tried to protest this unjust charge, Mathilda Hoskins had charged her with immediate dismissal and a bad letter of reference, which would have meant virtual starvation for the unfortunate young girl.
In return for permitting her to accompany the family to China, Mathilda Hoskins exacted a fearful price at the cost of Jane's pride and modesty-a sound bare bottom smacking with the open hand, exactly as one might give a naughty child.
Jane had endured this humiliating thrashing, though it was not quite so painful as the strappings which her stepfather had given her, because of her belief that once in China, her lot would be better.
But if anything, it had worsened, and now on this April morning in the year of 1900, Jane Evans, her buttocks flinching with anguished anticipation, her face covered wth her trembling hands, awaited the fatal and dreadful moment when the fat imperatrix would tug down her panties and, after first administering a mortifyingly noisy and stinging handspanking on Jane's naked posterior, oblige the unfortunate young woman to go fetch the white rattan cane out of the closet and then take position over the Chesterfield to receive a half-dozen of the very best.
CHAPTER TWO
Even as Jane Evans agonizedly steeled herself to receive the most mortifying of chastisements from the hand of her sadistic, dowdy employer, there was taking place in the great city of Hanchow another scene of correction which was destined to be linked infrangibly with Jane Evan's relatively innocuous ordeal.
Li Woo, the fat and depraved magistrate of that flourishing Chinese city, had only this morning received an unexpected visitor whom he had not seen for the past twenty years. His majordomo had deferentially entered his bedroom, coughed politely behind his hand and looked away so as not to see Li Woo being diligently attended by one of his young concubines. The girl was Mei Lin, purchased from her parents when she was only four, and pampered and well fed so that she might attain her girlhood in full possession of those feminine charms which the sadistic old mandarin found so irresistible when he had need for feminine companionship and erotic fulfillment.
Wakening, he had found the girl sleeping on a mat on the floor beside his luxurious bed, and, clapping his hands, at once ordered her to draw away the sheets from his august person and then perform the act of fellatio on him.
It did not take long to arouse his savage passions. Only a few moments after Mei Lin had fearfully begun to suck the enormous glans of his prick and to tickle his balls with her delicate fingertips, Li Woo had sat up, leaned forward over the charming, nubile young girl and, clamping her neck with the grip of his pudgy left hand, had begun to smack her upturned, jutting and already sizably plump round bottom-cheeks with the flat of his right hand to encourage her in the libidinous task.
But unhappily, the majordomo's unexpected arrival caused Li Woo to twist about convulsively, and since Mei Lin was still obediently sucking him, it so chanced that her sharp little white teeth nipped the groove of his cockhead somewhat painfully. With an angry bellow, the sadistic old mandarin turned back round to the frightened and whimpering girl, and dealt her a bruising blow on the cheekbone with the back of his hand, toppling her from the bed onto the floor where she lay sobbing.
And thus it was that the charming fifteen year old concubine found herself the piece de resistance in a cruel erotic orgy which would begin with her fustigation and torment, not only for the gratification of Li Woo's old friend of many years but also in a kind of symbol of the ruthless victory over the hated "white devils" whom the fat magistrate yearned to sentence to the most atrocious and inhuman of punishments for their crime against Mother China and the Dowager Empress. . .
So it was, also, that the stooped, frail, beggar-like Guey Wong found himself welcomed like a long-lost brother, taken to the most ornate of guest rooms of the magistrate's palatial dwelling, and there bathed and anointed with sweet-smelling salves by two delicious young concubines and given a brilliant silken robe on which was sewn the symbol of the dragon and of the clutched fist, side by side. Then Guey Wong was obsequiously urged to gratify the household of the master with his worthy presence, and in the huge sitting room of Li Woo, he was made to recline at his ease on a pile of cushions while two pretty young girls fed him sweetmeats and offered him rice wine as the Mandarin of Hanchow, lolling in a wicker throne/chair on a dais, impatiently awaited the news which Guey Wong had come so far to bring him.
They had been students many years ago, and then Guey Wong had become a peddlar, tramping through the farm villages in Northern China, while Li Woo had gone on to become an illustrious mandarin who sat in judgment over criminals brought before him in the province of Henchu and then finally the great city of Hanchow. Guey Wong had come from the far north and he had heard many stories of the gathering wrath against the white devils who must be driven out of China if the land were to' survive. And then remembering how illustrious a success his old student colleague had achieved, he had made his way to Li Woo's dwelling not only to renew old friendship, but also to tell the mighty mandarin that all was in readiness for the uprising against the foreigners.
Li Woo had smiled and clapped his hands. At this summons, a squat young woman in silk jacket and trousers, her feet sandaled, had emerged and prostrated herself before him. "Soo Fa, you and your sister are going to give sport to my worthy friend Guey Wong and to me, your noble master. You will bring the little bitch Mei Lin before us, and you will thrash her as I command."
Soo Fa's dark eyes glittered with a delicious cruelty. She shared her master's penchant for the torment of pretty young girls, since her own tastes were Lesbian-attuned, and very often, after a victim had been well whipped and tortured for the mandarin of Hanchow, Soo Fa and her equally vicious and younger sister, Ma Loo, took their own perverse pleasure with the helpless, pain-wracked victim who did not dare complain of such odious gamahuching and cunt-rubbing lest she endure even more frightful torture at their hands.
"To hear is to obey, Master!" Soo Fa eagerly exclaimed. Then, rising, she bowed her head again to the old peddler and then disappeared from the sitting room. Li Woo chuckled obscenely as he nodded toward his old friend: "I pray your indulgence, my dear comrade. The skin of this wretched concubine has an unhealthy pallor, very much like that of those detested white devils. Well, then, she shall represent for us in a kind of punishment pageant, all the accursed females of those white tyrants who have overrun our beloved country and whom soon we shall make atone for their vile crimes against her glorious Imperial Majesty Tsu Hsi."
"Now that is good, my old friend! Oh, what I would not give to sit on the tribunal with you, lowly though I be, and render prompt and proper justice against those villainous dogs who have come here by stealth and trickery with all their treaties and their diplomats, taking away our land and abusing our people, calling us barbarians when their own culture is not much better than that of the monkeys in the trees outside the village of Kwan-jon!" the old peddler enthusiastically agreed.
The fat mandarin smiled again. "Never fear, it may be that you will sit upon that tribunal after all, if those glorious sons of the clutched fist receive the awaited signal to strike with all their power against the foreign devils!"
"To that I drink with joyous hopes, my good old friend," Guey Wong exclaimed as he lifted the exquisite and priceless jade cup into which the fragrant rice wine had been poured, and downed it with a greedy gulp. Then the cup nearly dropped from his fingers, for through the curtained entry into this great sitting room came the two Chinese women dragging between them the sobbing young Chinese bond slave Mei Lin, who was naked save for her dainty sandals, her thick black hair unbound and floating in a thick swathe down to her chinkbone. In truth, the pallor of her fine-grained bare skin made her seem at first glance a Caucasian, and Guey Wong's eyes glittered with lust. He had been flouted during the past few years by many a white devil, and he shared the mandarin's hatred of all members of their accursed breed.
"Now you shall see, my dear old friend," the fat mandarin chuckled, "how I shall teach this naughty little bitch to be more respectful of my honorable manhood."
"Oh, reverend master, have pity!" the sobbing young girl tearfully entreated as she forced herself down on her knees between the two tormentresses, each of whom grasped a slender wrist to maintain her. "I swear I did not do it on purpose! Do not have me whipped! Oh, I cannot bear the whip!"
"But who spoke of the whip?" the mandarin hypocritically pacified her. "I would not shred your tender skin. But you shall have a flogging with the knotted silken cords, and on the tenderest parts of your body, as a lesson to teach you in future that as you have made me suffer in my private parts, so shall you be made to endure pain in yours." Then, his face hardening with anticipatory cruelty, he clapped his hands brusquely: "Soo Fa and Ma Loo, catch her by the ankles from the pulley ropes, and bind each little finger with fine silken cords to those solid rings set into the middle of the floor."
"As you command, honored master," Soo Fa hissed, her lips curved in a rictus of sadistic joy. She and her sister then abandoned the naked young Chinese girl, who lay on the floor with her arms outstretched toward her master in humble petition, and the women busied themselves lowering the two strong hempen cords from the ceiling till they were at about the level of their own waists. This done, each of the Chinese torturesses now squatted down, grasped one of Mei Lin's ankles, and bound it tightly with one of the cords. Soo Fa then went back to the wall and turned the small windlass which controlled the cords; with a shriek of terror Mei Lin felt herself being lofted from the floor until she hung head downwards, stretching out with her slim young arms in a desperate attempt to touch the floor and thus maintain some security with the earth.
Ma Loo now proceeded to tie a fine but strong silken cord around each of the girl's little fingers and make the other end fast to solid iron rings set into the floor about a yard apart. Then she rose, and moved back to contemplate her handiwork. As for Guey Wong, he uttered a gasp of admiration, for indeed, the tableau was eminently exciting to all his own lustful penchants.
Though only fifteen, Mei Lin already possessed a magnificent maturity of curves, particularly in those of her bottom and titties. The latter were solid and round, widely spaced, and crowned with delicate soft pink hued tips set in the centers of narrow coral aureoles. The fixing of the ceiling ropes was placed a yard apart, and thus she was observed hugely straddled, with every possible access to her sexual parts.
Soft ringlets of black crispy pussy hair fleeced her love mount, framing the delicate pink lips which, thanks to the distension of her naked legs, gaped in a kind of lewd invitation. And she had been placed so that the front of her body was turned toward the Mandarin of Hanchow.
"Watch now, my dear old friend," Li Woo solicitously urged, "to see how expertly my two skilled executioners can administer a thrashing. They will not once break the skin, but I assure that Mei Lin will feel the pangs of the death of a thousand cuts!"
Hearing this ominous threat, the unfortunate naked young girl redoubled her sobs, jerking and squirming frantically in her bonds. Her gyrations provided libidinous for the greedy eyes of Guey Wong, who feasted his gaze on the surging muscles of her velvety, straddled thighs, the convulsive wrigglings of her hips and belly, and the obscene yawning of her pink soft cunt.
"You see," the mandarin explained in a confidential tone, "these two women were brought before me some few years ago as members of a bandit gang which had terrorized the province. I was about to order them scourged and then flayed alive in the marketplace as a warning to all such malefactors, when it was told me that they were cunning in the application of torture and the lash. I thereupon proposed a kind of tourney with their lives as stakes. I commanded that they perform on two prisoners condemned to death, one a man sentenced to the supreme punishment for having knifed a friend in a tavern brawl; the other a woman, magnificently beautiful, but fiendishly wicked, who had been sentenced to die for having poisoned her husband and then her lover so that she might gain their wealth."
"And how did they perform, illustrious one?" the old peddler anxiously demanded, not losing for a moment his view of the lasciviously struggling nakedness of poor little Mei Lin, who continued to wail and lament and to twist and wriggle as she tried desperately to free herself. Hanging upside down as she was, she nonetheless had perceived Soo Fa go to a teakwood chest at the foot of the dais, open it, and return slowly, holding a knotted silken cord in each hand. Ma Loo seized one of them and swished it through the air with a sibilant hiss that sent a shiver of torment through the. naked young body of the imminent victim.
"Well, as you can see for yourself, dear friend," the fat mandarin chuckled, "they serve me here and now, so they must have pleased me. It was Soo Fa who performed on the man, inflicting the death of a thousand cuts with a finesse which amazed me, considering that she had essayed this most difficult feat once before in the mountain camp of the brigands. It is true that she let the culprit die perhaps half an hour before I personally should have seen his spirit freed to join his ancestors, but all things considered, it was a commendable performance. As for Ma Loo, it was she really who delighted me with her task of agonizing the beautiful poisoner. She had the exquisite perception to drive a bamboo shaft into the woman's anus, a three inch piece covered with hard knots and bumps, which naturally caused the patient to experience no little discomfort."
"I should well imagine!" Guey Wong panted, licking his lips as he saw the two Chinese women take their position on each side of the now frantically pleading Mei Lin.
The poisoner had been strapped to a metal triangle, you see, Guey Wong," the mandarin continued, as he lit the opium pipe and savoringly drew in the sickly sweet smoke, exhaling it through his nostrils. "And then Ma Loo skewered her nipples with needles which had been heated in the brazier. By then, our lovely poisoner was begging me for a swift and merciful death. But the odious and shocking barbarity of her crimes warranted no such mercy, so naturally I let Ma Loo proceed."
"Naturally," Guey Wong panted. He could see beads of sweat trickling down the reversed naked body of the weeping young Chinese girl, and his eyes fixed on the thin knotted silken cords which dangled from the hands of the two Chinese torturesses.
"Accordingly," Li Woo continued with another pull on his opium pipe, "I bade Ma Loo proceed to the next phase of chastisement. It consisted of a good thrashing on the insides of the woman's thighs and on her belly with a thin rattan, just enough to exacerbate the tender skin, which as we well know is so sensitive in those regions of the female."
"Ah, yes, indeed, just so!" the gray-haired peddler gasped, again licking his lips and feeling his prick ache with a suggestive bliss which was provided by this vicarious and detailed story of inhuman suffering.
"After that, I had hot towels applied to the cheeks of her behind," the mandarin resumed, "so that she would feel the switch all the more. Then it was that Ma Loo really saved the life of her sister and herself in my eyes, by directing two of the assistants to yawn apart the plump cheeks of the wretched creature's bottom, so that she might apply the switch into the tenderest parts and thus, of course, drive the knotted bamboo wedge deeper into the poisoner's ass-hole."
"Oh, what exquisite and imaginative work!" Guey Wong gloated, fixing his eyes on the gaping pink cunt of poor little Mei Lin, who all this while awaited her torment the congestion of blood from her upside-down posture beginning to make her cries sound dull and raucous.
"By this time," the insatiable mandarin continued, weighing every word as if it were a measure of honey over which his fat mouth delectated, "the poisoner had fainted, so it was necessary to revive her. Ma Loo did this by the simple yet ingenious means of driving splinters under the toenails of the criminal. Then she was given a sort of vinegar and rice wine to swallow, and the torture resumed. Heated bamboo splints were now thrust into each of her big ripe bubbies, transfixing them but without causing fatal hemorrhage. Her cries were deafening and enchanting to hear by the gods of vengeance."
"As the cries shall be of those accursed foreign devils when you, oh mighty Li Woo, sit in judgment upon them all!" cried the enraptured peddler.
"You do me too much honor, my dear old friend," the mandarin deprecatingly countered. "Next, Ma Loo had the poisoner's pubic hair plucked off with wooden tweezers, which took a prolonged time and caused the woman much additional torment, as was proper. Then she applied a red-hot iron all over the lips of that adulterous and wanton cunt. Regrettably, the torture ended there, as the poisoner's heart failed. Yet I had seen enough to grant Ma Loo reprieve from her own death sentence and thus, as you see, she and her sister are here today, reunited as torturesses of my prison."
"Oh, what a marvel! But I am longing to see them both proceed now, even if it is so simple a punishment," the peddler cried.
"And so you shall," the mandarin chuckled. Then, clapping his hands, he called out, "Let the punishment begin, but take care not to break Mei Lin's fine skin. I wish to hear her cry out exquisitely in all the tones of the flute in the forest under the summer wind! I wish the ordeal prolonged to the utmost, do you understand, women?"
"To hear is to obey, oh master," Soo Fa greedily retorted.
Sucking in her breath and stepping back, she lifted the knotted silken cord and applied it with a whistling sweep over Mei Lin's soft belly, while Ma Look, lifting up her right arm, brought it straight down so that the diabolically fat little knots bit horribly into the gaping pink trough of Mei Lin's cunthole.
At once the tethered naked straddled body jerked and quivered, the pulley cords creaking as she flung herself this way and that against the unspeakably burning pain which lodged in her tenderest virgin nook, and a piercing shriek attested to her suffering. "Aiiii! Oh, master, not there, oh do not have them whip me there!"
"It is there you shall feel it most, you clumsy bitch," the mandarin angrily assailed her. "Make her suffer, you women," he hissed, leaning forward, the opium pipe dropping forgotten from his fat fingers as he devoured the exciting scene.
The muscles of Mei Lin's thighs and bottom-cheeks and belly writhed and jerked convulsively under her soft pate skin as both women delivered the stinging lashes across the tender belly and down between the hugely straddled naked legs, and once again the young concubine uttered a feverish shriek as the knotted cords dipped deep into her yawning vulva.
The gray-haired peddler hurriedly gulped his cup of rice wine and Li Woo made a sign to one of the other young concubines to fill the cup at once. And the two Chinese women proceeded with the flagellation of the unfortunate young culprit extended head downward before the dais. What made it even more agonizing for the naked sufferer was the irregularity of the tempo of the lashes; at times both women would strike at the same moment, while again one of the knotted cords would dart down into the folds between the tender round jouncy bottom-cheeks to nip the dainty anus or to sting at the rims of the yawning pink vulva, after which the other torturess might apply her cord several times in succession across the girl's smooth belly and tender sides. And again, to make the ordeal still more pernicious for Mei Lin, both women would amuse themselves by lashing the insides of each thigh either in unison or individually at intervals, only to return with even more accurate aim into the gaping front of that tender pussy. Mei Lin's body was covered with sweat, and jerked fitfully so that the pulley ropes creaked their dismal song to blend with her own hoarse, sobbing, and almost, by now, inarticulate plaints for mercy: "Ahrr, oh not there again, in the name of Our Lady Koo Sung-aiiii, I shall die, I cannot bear it any more, my lord, my master! Have pity, I will not do it ever again-eeoowww, oh ouuuu-ahrrr, have pity, have pity-oohhhhh!! ! "
But it was nearly ten minutes before the fat mandarin lifted his silk-sleeved arm to halt the punishment. Disappointed, the two Chinese women stepped aside to let their master and his guest observe the efficacy of their handiwork. A congestion of blood caused by the unfortunate young girl's reversed position in the air had made her cheeks red as roses and caused her nearly to become unconscious. Her titties heaved wildly now, as she struggled for breath, and her body was shaken by constant, sporadic tremors.
"Now, Mei Lin, do you think you have learned your lesson?" the mandarin demanded as he came down from the dais to contemplate the shuddering nakedness of his favorite young concubine.
"Ohhh, ahhhh, y-y-yes, m-master, I will never offend again, I swear by the Lord Buddha!" the young girl sobbed plaintively.
"I shall pardon you, unless, of course, my honored guest desires to witness how an errant slave and bondservant is chastised," the mandarin callously observed. Turning back to Guey Wong, he blandly inquired, "Are you satisfied, my good old friend?"
Not wishing to show greediness, the gray-haired peddler hesitated a moment, but the shifting of his eyes and the nervous licking of his lips told the mandarin that Guey Wong yearned to witness still more suffering, or perhaps, even better, to participate in it. With a crafty smile creasing his fat mouth, he therefore resumed, "It is true that she is comely, dear old friend. And I should not be worthy of my station in life as your host if I did not offer you pleasure with this little slut. That is to say, if her ugliness does not offend you?"
"Oh, no, Li Woo, she is quite passable, I assure you," the peddler hastily exclaimed. For indeed his prick was monstrously swollen from the lustful excitement roused by witnessing that charming pale yellowish-white skinned body writhing and squirming under the knotted cords.
And even as he spoke, his eyes devoured the sight of those angrily red, inflamed cunt lips which formed the love trough into which his goaded weapon longed to bury itself.
"Ah, I have it!" the mandarin cried. "Since the little bitch has been punished for the clumsiness of her mouth, shall we not see now whether she has profited from the good lesson? Shall I order her to suck your manhood, my old friend, that we may both learn whether she has been able to overcome her clumsiness?"
"That would be a blessing and delight, Li Woo!" Guey Wong gasped feverishly.
"Bring cushions for my friend!" the mandarin commanded the two young concubines, who hastened to obey, and, at his bidding, placed them just in front of the suspended naked sufferer. "There now, Guey Wong, seat yourself at your ease, and you will find those cushions place you on a level with her pretty mouth. As for you, Mei Lin, to remind you of the necessity of deft and servile compliance at all times, Soo Fa and Ma Loo will stimulate you to greater expertness and adroitness with the knotted cords across your bottom, and you shall receive them until you have drained every drop from my old friend's organ!"
The two sisters grinned at each other and nodded, only too happy to resume their sadistic duties, each wishing to surpass the other in the eyes of the distinguished Mandarin of Hanchow. Meanwhile, Guey Wong hastily seated himself upon-the ornate and beautifully decorated silken cushions, filled with duck feathers and lambs' fleece, and tucked up his robe and then furtively loosened and lowered the dirty cloth loin-pouch which housed his swollen weapon.
Shifting himself on the cushions and straddling his lean, hairy thighs, he arched himself forward so that the tip of his ramrod brushed against the trembling mouth of poor little Mei Lin. At that moment, both women raised their arms and set the knotted cords whistling down against the plump round naked buttocks. With a convulsive wriggling of her body, Mei Lin gaped her mouth and accepted the peddler's prick, and began feverishly the suck upon it, drawing from the circumcisional groove down the very meat as she sought by this diligence to prove her right to pardon.
It was a strange tableau, this, a terrible prelude to scenes of incredible barbarity and cruelty, which would take place in this very sitting room a few weeks hence. The mandarin, one hand stealthily plunged under his robe to fondle his own excited ramrod, watching with a greedy smile as the naked, straddled and suspended body of the young concubine swayed and jerked and squirmed under the stinging kisses of the knotted cords which incessantly whisked across her tender naked bottom, while the gray-haired peddler, groaning and panting, his voice hoarse with ecstasy, approached climax from this enforced fellatio.
And then suddenly Guey Wong uttered a bellow of ecstasy, and his fingers clutched the panting titties of Mei Lin as he thrust himself forward, bursting his essence deep into her gullet. The girl sputtered and choked and coughed, but redoubled lashes over now striated bottom warned her of the danger of losing a single drop of that honorable life-essence, as did the mandarin's harsh exhortation: "Take car, Mei Lin, if you do not swallow every drop, I will mate you with the man of the woods!" This threat was so terribly fearful to the weeping young girl (for the "man of the woods" is the Chinese term for the orangutan) that she summoned all her remaining strength and sucked and licked till finally Guey Wong sank back upon his pillows, eyes closed, chest heaving, with a long sigh of depletion.
"It is well," the mandarin declared. "This night she shall share your bed, my old friend. And now, my concubines will lead you to the bath, and you shall have a new silk robe and sit beside me on the dais while we talk of the glorious hour of China's freedom, so soon at hand!"
CHAPTER THREE
Lida Garconniere lay sprawled on her rumpled bed, her face buried in her hands, as her stepmother stood over her. "Perhaps now, petite vicieuse" the latter coldly stated, "you'll be more circumspect. And it will do no good to tell your father that I've just whipped you for your nastiness, Lida! He has given me a free hand with you, do you understand? Even since we came to Peking, you think that because you're in a foreign country you can carry on like a trottoir!"
"I-I shan't complain to Papa," Lida sniffled, without deigning to look at her tormentress. "But I am old enough to do as I wish-aiiii! Ca me brute I Please, don't whip me any more!"
For the autocratic, handsome, auburn-haired, thirty one year old matron, who last year had become the second wife of Albert Garconniere, the assistant consul for France in the Peking Legation, had just lifted the little three thonged martinet and applied a vicious cut which spread the thongs fantail over Lida's already well-striped naked bottom. With a frantic cry, Lida had plunged her hands to her angrily marked seat and rubbed furiously, as if to drive away the burning anguish which her stepmother's whipping had engendered and which this final stroke had just aggravated.
Claudia Garconniere sniffed her disapproval: "Don't think this will be the last time I give you the whip, Lida," she warned. "When I married your father last summer, I had already observed what a self-willed, insolent little brat you still were and are. But now that he holds so important a post in China, representing the
French government and the-likely successor to old M'sie Picard, it is vital that there be no scandal attached to his illustrious name. Do you understand me, cochonneV
Claudia paused for a thoughtful moment. There was really little room for misunderstanding.
What Claudia did not know was that the young Chinese boy whom Lida had been seen kissing only last night by her vigilant stepmother was hiding in this very closet, waiting to console her.
"I'm sorry," she mumbled, wanting to placate Claudia. "Will Papa dine with us tonight?"
"No. I am going to join him now, and we shall have our dinner at Herr Reimath's house. As for you, the housemaid will prepare something for you. I want you to stay in and not leave this house till your father and I return. Is that completely understood?"
"Yes."
"Yes, what, you little slut?" Claudia Garconniere hissed, as she moved back toward the bed, raising the martinet.
Lida quickly hid her face in her hands so that Claudia would not see the grimace of hatred and contempt which crossed it as she grudgingly added, "Yes, maman."
"Well, that's better. And don't forget to call me that always from now on, Lida. Especially when we're out in public or at one of the special functions which your father and I must attend. Now then, I'm going. Remember, Ma Sue will tell me if you've left the house."
"Don't worry, I shan't, thanks to you, I don't feel like going anywhere," Lida sarcastically rejoined.
"Be careful now, you impertinent, girl! I shouldn't hesitate to give you another thrashing on top. of the one you've already had if you keep on showing your insolence and defiance. Your father is very worried about the way you've tried to reject me, Lida. And that's a warning. All right, I'll leave you to yourself!
With this, she left the bedroom and closed the door, turning the key in the lock as further guarantee of Lida's compliance to her order.-
The honey-haired girl lifted her head and listened carefully until at last she heard the closing of the front door of the house. Then, with a soft, slurred little laugh, she swung her beautiful naked legs off the bed and rose, letting the nightie flutter down and hide the thick dark-blonde bush of her cunt as well as the vividly marked plump bottom globes which her stepmother's martinet had so rudely caressed.
She waited another moment to make certain that her stepmother would not return, and then, breathlessly, moved to the closet and turned the knob. Putting a finger to her lips, she held out her other hand to the Chinese houseboy Kim Sung.
He was tall, with a long pigtail and wearing only a white cotton jacket and coolie trousers and sandals, and his eyes glistened with lubricity. Blushingly, she constated that he had utilized the keyhole to observe her humiliating punishment. But far from irritating her, it inflamed her wanton nature.
"You watched?" she murmured huskily, as her right hand crept toward his loins in search of the bulge which she could at one see thrusting out against the crotch of the cotton garment.
"Oh, yes. Missie Lida get the whip good, but not so hard as Chinese mother would administer it," he chuckled as he drew her into his arms, his hands greedily squeezing the plump round curves of her behind and pressing her tightly up against him so that her crotch could grind against his sturdy man-rod.
With a lascivious whimper of mingled desire and pain, Lida Garconniere flung her arms round Kim Sung, her mouth glued to his, and her tongue nimbly darted between his lips to teach him a new caress. Technically, she still retained her hymen, but she was furiously lustful; the martineting had roused all her latent lust, and the knowledge that her lover had watched her body squirming and weaving and reddening under the thongs, that he had seen the tempting secrets of her pussy and her bumhole in her pain-induced gyrations, was the final kindling wood to her flame of uninhibited lust.
"Take me quickly my dear one, take me! Je ten pris, foutes-moi! (I beg of you, please fuck me!)" she moaned.
His strong fingers squeezed and palpated her buttocks, till she was half mad with desire. Her fingernails raked his shoulders as she rubbed her crotch back and forth over his bulging tool, until he himself could endure this sweet Tantalus no more.
Swiftly, he lifted her up in his arms and bore her to the bed, while Lida's own trembling fingers tugged up the nightie to expose once again the glories of her milky, lusciously rounded thighs, the thick dark golden fleece of her cunthole, and, as she wriggled impatiently on the bed and spread her legs to receive him, the dainty fissure of her bottomhole.
Swiftly divesting himself of the coolie trousers, Kim Sung bared a massive weapon, with elongated glans and the lips already puckering and tensing to prove how near to climax he already was. The gnarled, taut-skinned shaft throbbed with venomous anticipation, and the airy, fully laden balls told the panting young blonde that her lover could provide torrential libation for her hot, thirsting cunt.
He sank down upon her, and instantly her naked legs locked over his buttocks, as her arms pulled him down to flatten down her titties, their mouths fusing together. This time, adeptly learning from his young French mistress, the young Chinaman responded by thrusting his own tongue between Lida's lips, and a groan of pleasure emanated from her.
She felt his prickhead jab between the moistening, twitching lips of her vulva, and she arched herself up, frantic to receive that one supreme and decimating thrust which would make a woman of her.
When it came, her hymen yielded without resistance, for in her many athletic endeavors she had long since diminished its resistance; bicycling, tennis, and croquet back in France, and here in Peking, frequent horseback riding, had served to prepare her easily to cross over the threshold from girlhood to womanhood.
Her eyes half-closed, her face a mask of passion, she clutched him to her with her arms and legs and all her body as he drove deeply and slowly into her. She murmured into his ear a constant, husky entreaty, half in French, half in the pidgin Chinese she had learned since leaving Paris.
But outside the bedroom door, a crouching figure of a woman lurked, and it was the young housemaid, Ma Sue, who had guessed what Lida Garconniere would do once her stepmother had left the house. She had learned the secret, and she would use it when the Boxers rose up in open revolt against the white devils. And Lida Garconniere, she swore, would pay for her wickedness and lust which corrupted a young man of China who should have been impervious to the fleshly lure of this foreign slut!
Yes, her mind was set on this plan, and she would not change it!
CHAPTER FOUR
That same April evening in the elegantly furnished house on Suchow Road, which was the residence of the pompous, bearded, and portly Russian Consul, Piotor Vorshilof, another disciplinary scene was taking place. Yet this was vastly different, and it embodied perverse erotic fulfillment for the two devastatingly attractive women who participated in it.
Piotor Vorshilof would be working late at the consulate this evening, and most of the household personnel had been given the night off. Only Peng Chu, the solemn, tall Chinese steward of the house, and the self-effacing, pockmarked little scullery maid Tsi Keng, both of whom were quartered with their employer, remained in the house.
And knowing that neither would dare disturb them, that was why Madame Katerina Ourosoff, the widowed cousin of the consul, and her lovely niece Nadia Kaplinski, had shut themselves up in the latter's bedroom where they might, each in her own sensual way, console themselves for being so far from their natal land and from the ones they had loved so dearly.
Madame Katerina Ourosoff was thirty-four, possessor of a majestic bosom comprising two succulently rounded, closely spaced, ivory colored love globes and equally opulent hips and thighs. She had been married for three years to a dashing colonel of His Majesty's Imperial Guards, Sergei Ourosoff, who had been assassinated by terrorists just a year ago, while protecting the Czar, the Little Father, against their murderous plot.
Till Sergei Ourosoff had singled her out and taken her before the priest in the great church near Kromy, Katerina had eased her tautly overwrought emotions by the traditional method of fingering her tender pussy in the secretive darkness of her own bed. Once, as a girl of sixteen in a private boarding school-which she had had to leave the next year because of her father's inability to meet the scandalously high tuition fee-she had know the ecstasy of Lesbian love, initiated by her boldly wanton brunette and year older roommate. Elisaveta Kobroff, her skilled and lascivious initiatress, had capriciously found another sweetheart a few months later, and had been discovered by the shameful act of soixant-neuf in the younger girl's chamber. Katerina had watched, weeping disconsolately out of compassion and lost love, as the two attractive girls had been stripped naked except for their fine black silk stockings and dainty garters and high-button shoes, fettered astride two gymnasium leather-padded horses, and given the birch on their aristocratic naked behinds to the very blood in punishment for their indecencies.
As for Nadia Kaplinski, she was slim, golden-haired, and scarcely twenty, but already her life had been shadowed by sorrow in love and she had at last turned to the sanctuary of Lesbos. Consequently, the attachment between the two women grew, each being sorrowed in love and each having tasted the sweet pleasures of the bed. Hence, when Katerina Ourosoff had been assigned to the diplomatic legation at Peking, she had begged him to take her with him as housekeeper, believing that perhaps this change of scene would lessen her despair over the loss of her adored Sergei. When he had consented, she had inveigled him into letting her bring Nadia, too.
And that was why, this unusually warm April evening, with the rumble of thunder in the distance an ominous portent of the storm that was soon to burst upon all Peking and all these foreigners who believed themselves immune by the very sanctity of treaties and of diplomatic representatives at the Imperial Court of the Dowager Empress, winsome Nadia lay upon her aunt's bed, covering her face in her hands, two pillows under her loins to arch up the splendid, appetizingly rounded and sinuously separated cheeks of her satiny pink bottom, clad only in clockwork white silk and lace hose with embroidered and flounced garters and her high button shoes, shivering as her aunt slowly lifted a leather plet over her tensing posterior.
Katerina Ourosoff wore only her tea rose silk dressing gown, fine hose and shoes, and her eyes glistened with libidinous desire as she caressingly let the brown leather implement graze the shivering, still unmarred flesh of that voluptuous young bottom. She had already introduced Nadia to the kisses of the plet, a flagellatory instrument contrived by the Cossacks and the police of Moscow and Petrograd for the flogging of prostitutes and criminals. It had a short wooden handle about six inches in length, to which was attached a flat four inch wide polished brown leather thong. This thong was twenty-two inches in length, and at the end it had been skillfully cut into four finger-like tips, each about four inches in length and an eighth of an inch in thickness overall. The plet could therefore be used for whipping at short range and its tips could consequently attack the most delicate and secret portions of the feminine anatomy, such as the vulva and the anus.
Nadia Kaplinski was endowed with a masochistic temperament to which was added a fervently religious streak; it was her belief that she had lost her parents and her fianc' through some unknown sin of her own commission, and thus, to punish her constantly for this imagined sin as well as for her wantonness in taking pleasure from her aunt's perverse embraces, she longed to taste the whip, usually before her aunt "consoled" her. Thus this night's discipline was by way of prelude to a passionate bout of Lesbian fulfillment; and as for Katerina herself, the sight of her golden-haired niece squirming under the lashes and the sound of Nadia's tears and plaints and sacrificial avowals roused the nuance of sensual sadism which this beautiful buxom widow subconsciously nurtured in her psyche.
"Duschka, little dove," Katerina Ourosoff's voice throbbed with a soothing and cajoling ardor, "are you ready for your flogging? You know you deserve it, don't you, Nadia galupchik?"
"Oh yes, dear Auntie Katerina!" Nadia exclaimed in a low, husky voice, glancing nervously back over her left shoulder, on which an exquisite little black beauty spot appeared. Just to the left of her cheekbone and above the delectably swelling hips which now tensed and contracted in anticipation of the whipping, there was an oval brown birthmark, which Katerina Ourosoff loved to flick with the tips of the plet as well as to caress with her suave fingertips and ambient tongue.
Her dark brown eyes were humid with lubricity and her nostrils fluttered as she continued to let the "fingers" of the instrument dangle just over the upreared and proffered naked posterior of her young niece; she drank in the muscular tensions and contractions, the rippling fluctuations of that finely grained soft satiny pink skin, and the nuances of Nadia's little sighs and nervous squirmings over the pillows added immeasurably to her perverse lust for her beautiful golden-haired niece.
"Little dove, I'm going to be severe with you this evening, though it grieves me deeply, this morning, you were rude to my esteemed cousin, Piotor, when he offered you more marmalade. You admit your fault, don't you, duschkal" Katerina Ourosoff crooned. Slowly she let the strips of the leather end of the plet graze Nadia's hips and buttocks, then the upper thighs and finally between them, till the brown leather glossy implement slithered along the tender shadowy groove which separated the young woman's naked bottom-cheeks. Nadia uttered a heartfelt little sigh, and squirmed impatiently, seeming to offer her naked bottom even more lubriciously up to the kisses of the implement, pressing her hands tightly over her blushing face, her lips parted and her teeth clenched, as she awaited with a feverish anxiety the ecstatic ritual which, through the warmth of pain, would radiate its lascivious urgencies through her voluptuous young body and draw her finally to the crux of Lesbian cohesion.
"Because you have been so naughty, galupchik," her aunt continued, "I shall not tell you the number of strokes your naughty bottom shall receive. I shall whip you until I think you are properly corrected and until I am convinced that your promises to be very humble and grateful to Cousin Piotor are truly sincere."
"Yes, Auntie Katerina, I know, I was very bad. Please whip me hard, don't spare me, don't heed my cries and my pleas for mercy, I beg of you!" the golden-haired beauty panted. Now she caught her lower lip between her small, flawlessly white teeth, and shivered voluptuously, while the tips of the plet continued to graze along the most intimate furrow of her body and brushed the crinkly rosette of her dainty ass-hole.
"Prepare yourself, girl," Katerina Ourosoff sternly announced. Drawing back the instrument, her eyes chose the region she wished to fustigate, and then, hovering the broad, pliant leather band in the air a moment, she descended it swiftly. The broadest part of the lash made noisy impact across both lower summits of that voluptuous pink-sheened bottom, the tips whisking around to bite over the haunch of the golden-haired penitent. Taken by surprise at the ferocity of that first stroke, Nadia Kaplinshi groaned, lifted her face from her hands and stared at the heavy headboard of the bed on which she lay, her eyes widened and shadowed by the discomfort. On the resilient contours of her behind, the angry bright red streak left by the solid band of the plet leaped up at once, attesting to the sensitivity of her delicate skin. And where the tips had stung, tiny darkening splotches appeared. The muscles of her lithe young thighs stiffened, then relaxed, and a kind of rhythmic undulation surged through her naked bottom globes, a spectacle which made Katerina Ourosoff shiver and lick her lips as she moved to the other side of the bed so as to impart a similar stroke which would be counter directional and yet parallel to the blow just inflicted.
Again Katerina Ourosoff paused, contemplating the vivid striata left by the plet on the smooth naked satin of her young niece's bottom, and surreptitiously unbuttoned her wrapper so that it yawned on either side of her, exposing her deeply dimpled belly, the thick dark brown bush which hid the plump, already moistening and twitching lips of her pussy, and the still sumptuously firm round titties, with their brownish coral aureoles circling ripely developed nipples already firming and pouting with desire. Her left forefinger began to move about in the thick fleece of her love grotto as she slowly raised the plet and kept Nadia waiting and shivering with anticipation. Then, as she touched the lips of her vulva, her body quivered voluptuously, and her right arm descended to inflict a diagonally whistling lash which leaged over the huddling naked hemispheres, the tips of the plet nipping the edge of Nadia's left hip while the broad band of the whip greedily adhered to the up-thrust, succulent ripe curves of Nadia's tender bottom.
A choking groan was wrested from the golden-haired victim, but Katerina heard in it not only the threnody of pain, but also the fluted and mystic overtones of carnal wakening and rapture. It was a mood which ideally shared her own, and to maintain it she now directed another diagonal lash, but this in the opposite direction, to pattern a broad and crimsoning X over the juttingly upreared bare bottom-cheeks of her penitent niece.
Nadia's cry was even louder this time, but she clapped a palm over her mouth and dug the fingernails of her other hand into the sheets, her eyes rolling her nostrils flaring and shrinking as she rubbed her cunt over the pillows, thus tasting a kind of prefatory stimulus before her aunt would console her in the ways she most loved.
Thereafter, the lashes fell irregularly, sometimes with a long minutes between them, or again a quick flurry of four or five swift, light strokes all over the huddling, weaving, squirming, naked bottom. In this way, Nadia was given no opportunity to calculate in advance the severity or the locale of the stroke. Thus, her nervous system was the more exacerbated, her sensuality the more inflamed, until by the twentieth stroke she could no longer restrain her frantic lasciviousness. Palming the sheets, head tilted back, eyes glazed and dilated, she madly rubbed her cunt back and forth over the pillows which hoisted up her two vividly striped and burning naked behind, moaning, "Oh, Auntie, dear Auntie, please forgive me-I'll be good-please, no more-it hurts so, please make it well again, dear Auntie!"
The buxom widow was trembling now, her face flushed, her eyes sparkling as she transferred the handle of the plet to her left hand and lingeringly roamed her right palm over Nadia's inflamed and shuddering bottom globes. A little whimpering gasp from the golden-haired young woman attested to Nadia's readiness for Sapphic consolation, but perversely Katerina Ourosoff had determined to prolong her niece's voluptuous chastisement. Accordingly, in a cold and peremptory voice, she announced, "Nonsense! have not been punished half enough for the slight you gave dear Cousin Piotor! Shift yourself a little over the pillows, so that your wicked bottom is lifted up even more where I may get at if and touch up those places which the plet has not sufficiently heated!"
"Oh yes, Aunt Katerina, I know I've been bad, do punish me hard-but please, please say it won't be too much longer, I'm burning so, I want you to forgive me, take me in your arms, dear Auntie Katerina," Nadia sobbed. Nonetheless, she quickly squirmed forward, so that her thighs rested on. the edges of the pillows, thereby arching up her scarlet posterior in a still lewder posture which exposed not only the pouting pink fruit of her provocative cunt, but also the ambery groove separating her nether globes and leading to that other, furtive channel of passion.
At this revelation, Katerina Ourosoff suck in her breath sharply, and applied a cruel little pinch to the inner curves of her niece's right buttock as if to rebuke the latter for her lubricity. "Stay in position, now, you immodest hussy," she decreed, "and do not think that you will move my by your tears and supplication till I have properly flogged you as you so well deserve, Nadia Kaplinski!"
She had laid the plet down on the bed, but now she placed it straight across her niece's naked, flaming posterior. Then, while Nadia held her breath and contracted her buttocks, the buxom widow tugged off her wrapper and stood naked, her bosom swelling voluminously, her eyes humid and her lips moist and parted as passion swirled in her psyche.
Then, retrieving the plet she dealt the girl a sudden whistling lash straight down the middle of both bottom globes so that the band wedded to the sinuous crease between the hemispheres and the stinging tips smacked wickedly against the small of Nadia's back. Her golden-haired niece clenched her fists, twisted her tearstained face back over her shoulder, her body jerking sporadically under this unexpected and sadistic stroke, while a choking groan exhaled from her panting throat: "Ahhh, oh, Auntie, please, please!"
But in that lamentation, there was still the mystic overtone of masochistic yearning, of an ungovernable passion that yearned for still more pain to augment the present suffering, as much as there was entreaty for reprieve. And comprehending this fully, Katerina Ourosoff pitilessly applied five more downward swipes of the glossy leather band, two along the left buttock, two along the right, and the last again straight down the narrow crease between those shuddering, flaming globes.
Unable to restrain her cries, Nadia Kaplinski kicked her beautiful stockinged legs back and forth in the air, her hips jerking and swerving violently, while she stuffed her fist against her mouth to stifle her cries, the other hand clawing at the sheets.
"There!" her aunt panted, casting aside the plet, "Now perhaps you will act with more humility toward that good man who has paid your passage all the way to China, who keeps you, an orphan, in this magnificent house where we are respected and honored among the other foreign diplomatic families. Do I have your word, Nadia Kaplinski, that you will not again offend him?"
"Oh yes, Auntie, oh, I shan't ever do it again, I swear I shan't! Please say you forgive me now, I hurt so, please do say you forgive your little niece!"
Nadia had rolled over onto her side, off the pillows, holding out her arms, her face wet with tears, and the sight of that dark blonde love fleece between those shuddering pink-sheened thighs completely undid the widow's pretense at stern authority. She flung herself down on the bed, and with an amorous groan, merged her mouth with her niece's, while the young girl's arms clutched round her supple back, straining her to her so that their breasts mashed together in a lascivious cohesion, and so that their cunts merged also as Nadia's squirming thighs yawned widely and then her legs clamped over Katerina's calves to lock her into the tribadistic embrace so dear to both of them.
There was no sound now in the bedroom save that of kisses, and the moist suction of lips and tongues together, and the friction of pubic hair and soft moistening vulvas, the slithering of naked bellies and thighs and breasts in this passionate conclave. But they were both so engrossed in each other, Nadia to reach the orgasm which the exacerbation of the whip had made so essential to her sexual appetites, and Katerina to "console" her adored young niece for having been so cruel with her and also to fulfill her own desperately thwarted lust-desires, that neither of them heard the sibilant gasps out in the hall where Peng Chu crouched, his eye glued to the keyhole, one hand playing with his enormously swollen, elongated, dark-veined prick.
They could not know this, just as they could not know that Peng Chu was secretly a lieutenant in the Society of Clenched Fists, an officer who had taken a blood oath to drive all the foreigners, all the white devils, out of China and to put to the sword all those who conspired against his beloved country, all those sorceresses and adulteresses whose wickedness was an affront to the old gods of Mother China ...
CHAPTER FIVE
Jane Evans had tried her best not to cry out while dowdy, fat, vindictive Mathilda Hoskins, after taking an agonizingly long time in unfastening her panties and dragging them down to mid-thigh, had tightened her arm around Jane's supple waist and then begun to spank her as he might a recalcitrant child with the flat of her right hand.
Gritting her teeth and closing her eyes, Jane Evans had forced herself to remain as impervious as she could to so demeaning and shameful a chastisement, the more mortifying because it was totally undeserved. She understood Mathilda Hoskins' frustrations and peevishness only too well, for the wife of the British Consul's first secretary was only too well aware that her husband had not the slightest sexual interest in her. Thus Jane's own presence in that dour and brooding household had been live tinder to furnish the spark of jealous hatred by which the fat wife had sought to compensate for her husband's neglect. And these accusations that Jane had "her cap" for Matthew Hoskins were simply the pretext by which Mathilda Hoskins furnished herself her only way of "getting back" at her husband's studied though courteous neglect.
Nevertheless, as the slaps continued to rain down upon her milky bare bottom-cheeks, Jane Evans found herself wincing and her eyes stinging with unshed tears from the sheer malevolence and vigor of this humiliating "correction."
Mathilda Hoskins' watery-blue eyes squinted and glinted with an unholy light as they fixed on the young woman's reddening flesh. She saw those magnificent bottom ovals, those shapely long thighs, as Satan's own temptations, the kind to which her still handsome, fifty-year-old husband would certainly succumb if ever given the opportunity. Thus as her hand continued to belabor the resilient, quaking bottom globes (whose spasmodic contractions and quivering poor Jane was quite unable to control as the spanking relentlessly continued), Mathilda Hoskins was at the 'same time "punishing" her husband and wallowing in self-pity because her own gross body could never offer him such carnal allure.
Seeing that her beautiful young victim strove to remain stoic, the viciously sadistic fat woman momentarily halted the spanking, licking her lips at the sight of the flaming, palpitating hindquarters whose milky purity her pudgy hand had so harshly profaned. Jane Evans, falsely lulled by this reprieve, believed that the correction was at last over, which was exactly what Mathilda Hoskins wanted her to think. "You little slut," she hissed, "I ought to flay you alive! Going about the house all the time with those la-di-da airs of yours, as if you were quality, when you are nothing but a common guttersnipe! Hoping that Matthew'll notice you and maybe take you to bed with him, waggling your tail whenever you get the chance to be in the same room with him-I know your kind only too well, Jane Evans!"
"I-I swear I've never-it's not true-I'm a decent girl," Jane Evans said in a shuddering, low voice which fought to control the sobs and tears which the stinging of her bottom had evoked.
"Oh yes, you're a decent one, that you are, I'll be bound!" Mathilda Hoskins tightened the grip of her left arm on Jane's slim milky waist. "Why, if I gave you half a chance, you'd run right out and find yourself one of those heathen Chinamen and smoke his opium pipe and let him put his hands on all of you, wouldn't you?"
As the attractive young brunette remained silent to this infamous accusation, Mathilda Hoskins slyly applied her right thumb and forefinger to the inner curve of Jane Evans' right buttock, along the tender shadowy crease which separated those delectably firm, upstanding ovals, and applied a vicious little pinch. "Well, answer me, girl!" she insisted.
Jane Evans jerked and squirmed over fat Mathilda Hoskins' lap; turning her flushed, contorted face back to face her tormentress, the harassed young woman cried out, "Yes, I would! I'd do anything to get away from a cruel, unjust creature like you!"
"Well now," Mathilda Hoskins beamed, licking her lips again and gloating over this outburst which gave her a new justification for further punishment of her helpless, lovely young victim, "now it all comes out, doesn't it? You dirty little bitch, I'll make that big sluttish tail of yours bleed, so help me! When I've finished smacking you Jane Evans, you're going to go to my closet and bring me the cane, and you're going to get a good dozen, yes, my fine lady, and you're going to count every one of them off nice and loud for me to hear! But wait a bit until I touch up that fat, waggling backside of yours so the cane will bite the way it ought into the flesh of a strumpet! And if you dare say a word to Matthew, I'll tell him what you just said, that you'd like to be the slut of one of those heathen yellow men with their dirty pigtails and their opium pipes!"
With this, her sanctimonious righteousness incited again to sadistic fury, the fat wife of the First Secretary resumed the spanking with broad, energetic sweeps of her right arm in a rapid barrage that left her breathless, while Jane Evans, grinding her teeth, lifting her tortured face to the ceiling, summoned every ounce of strength in her often tried nature to keep from crying out or indicating in any other way to this infernal virago that she was suffering the tortures of the damned in hell.
At last, a coughing spasm made the fat woman choke and pause, and then rudely she shoved the softly sobbing young brunette off her lap. "Get me that flask of laudanum," she wheezed when the spasm has passed. "A drop will help my lungs. Aye, and give me strength to lace your fat wicked backside with that nice yellow cane. Aye, it's the right color for you, my fine lady, isn't it? As yellow as the Chinaman you'd like to go to bed with-you filthy Soho slut! Be quick about the laudanum now, or I'll add a half-dozen to the count!"
Rising unsteadily from the floor, fighting the impulse to rush both hands to her throbbing swollen buttocks, her skirt and petticoats tumbled back down, but her panties still clinging about her knees, Jane Evans moved awkwardly towards the sideboard on which the little silver flask was placed, and brought it back to Mathilda Hoskins.
As the fat woman unscrewed the cap and tilted it to her moist lips, Jane Evans prayed that somehow Fate would make her swallow the entire contents, for there was enough there to put her to sleep forever.
But the three sisters who spun and wove and finally cut the cloth of destiny did not hear her prayers. For they were listening instead to those which rose from an incense-redolent little room in which the Dowager Empress was addressing the ancient gods of China, beseeching them to let her give the signal which would unleash the soldiers of the Clenched Fists upon the detested white devils. ...
About a quarter of a mile away from the house in which Jane Evans was undergoing her unjust martyrdom at the hands of a harpy, a beautiful eighteen-year-old girl was combing out her flaxen tresses before the mirror, clad only in a pink cotton camisole and matching panties, her delightfully plump calves and thighs sheathed in tan-colored silk clockwork stockings. She had a face of a Botticellian Madonna, her name was Erika Hullweg, and she was the only child of Frau Ernestine Hullweg, who had been Frau Kurtzmeyer until a year and a half ago.
Erika's mother was thirty-seven, sensual, as blonde as her daughter, but more buxom. At the moment, she was confined to her bed with a touch of that swamp fever which strikes down so many visitors to China in the rainy spring weather. But Frau Hullweg's chief concern was not for her illness, from which her physician had promised that she would soon speedily recover, but rather the possibility of propinquity between her daughter and her new husband.
Kurt Hullweg was a dynamic man of fifty-two, who, as subaltern at twenty-two years of age, had won the Iron Cross with three palms for heroic valor at Sedan in the rout of the French troops under General von Moltke during the short-lived Franco-Prussian war. He had labored in Africa for five years in behalf of the Fatherland, and later was assigned to a ministerial position in Alsace-Lorraine. Two years ago, however, he had been recalled to Berlin and asked if he would take an assignment to Peking as Vice-Consul of the German diplomatic office being opened there for the protection of German merchants and troops stationed in China. And of course he had willingly consented.
At the time of this appointment, Kurt Hullweg had been wooing Ernestine Kurtzmeyer, who had been widowed for just three years when her husband, a major of engineers, had suffered a fatal fall from his horse while riding in the park of their luxurious estate near Baden-Baden. Kurt Hullweg's own fortunes had dissipated by his profligacy in gambling and wenching, and so he had paid assiduous court to the beautiful blonde widow. Because of his amorous skill, and because Ernestine Kurtzmeyer was a vigorous lustful woman who had enjoyed serenely gratifying relations with her late husband, he was successful. She had willingly agreed to accompany him to Peking along with her teenaged daughter.
What had prompted her decision at the time was her discovery that Erika was already something of a flirtatious hoyden and-likely to get into serious trouble with boys if she were not closely supervised. Ernestine Hullweg had found her precocious daughter cuddling with a stable boy, undressed down to her camisole and panties, with her hair unbound, about to commit the supreme sin of the flesh at the moment of her intervention. She had not only roundly lectured the giggling Erika. but also taken a riding crop and thrashed the girl's legs and bottom until Erika had fainted.
But that had been a fatal blunder, as she now disconsolately knew. When Kurt Hullweg had returned from the embassy with his final orders for Peking, he had heard of Erika's "misfortune" and solicitously visited her in her bedroom, to which she had been carried by a footman and a gardener after the violent scene in the stable. He had already noticed her voluptuous, freshly blooming beauty and had begun to lust for it. He had consoled her, commiserated with her over the punishment which he deemed much too severe, and had told her that she was a high-spirited young woman who could not be expected to act like a little child out of a convent.
Naturally the defiant and headstrong young girl had found this attention very flattering. Besides, her stepfather, though in his early fifties, still retained the magnetic charm which had admitted him to so many strange beds during his lengthy and venturesome career. And so a kind of flirtatious rapport had sprung up between Kurt Hullweg and his desirable, provocative young step-daughter, a rapport which Ernestine Hullweg had begun to fear and which she now realized that here alone in Peking might well develop into the terrible crime of incest. Moreover, although China had at first seemed to her a romantic and exciting land, she now feared it and its people, for each new day brought more veiled insults, even from the house-servants, more signs that the people of Peking resented all whites. Besides, her faithful old Chinese nurse Mei Fong, had told her only yesterday that there were bad omens in the heavens: the sign of a falling star and the rumble of thunder, the croaking of a raven above a graveyard. She wished now only to return to Berlin as quickly as possible, and only last night she had begged Kurt Hullweg to let her and Erika turn to their homeland.
But the Assistant Consul had laughingly fused, chided her for her unfounded fears, and Id her that this experience would be priceless for her daughter. Perhaps in a few years, he had said, they might go back for a vacation or, if she was still unhappy, he would seek a new diplomatic assignment. But at the moment, things were going very well. He was going to engage a tutor for Erika so that she could keep up with her studies in French and ancient history.
But even now, this warm April evening with its rumbles of thunder in the distance to announce a coming storm, while Ernestine Hullweg lay in her bed and brooded over what might take place as well as her uneasiness over the increasing hostility of her Chinese neighbors, her husband was watching from Erika's own closet while his stepdaughter combed her hair. He had secreted himself there when she had come in from a walk in the courtyard, because he could no longer put off his feverish desire to see her naked charms. Breathless, crouching with his eye glued to the keyhole, his right hand foraging in the fly of his unbuttoned trousers to caress his throbbing cock, the Assistant Consul stared greedily at his young stepdaughter's ripely curved and scantily clothed body, impatiently hoping that she would soon remove the camisole and panties which alone hid those delicious and as yet unknown treasures from his avid gaze.
CHAPTER SIX
There were disquieting rumors in the little town of T'ung-Su, in the northern province of Kwang Yun, about seventy-five miles from the Imperial City. And these rumours terrified lovely eighteen-year-old Dorothy Trowbridge because she greatly feared for her father, the Reverend Jonathan Trowbridge, who had brought Christianity to this once barbaric place. He had spent ten years of his life here and was pastor of a church which the grateful villagers had built for him about two years ago. Yet on this the first day of May in the Year of Our Lord 1900, a little vegetable-seller, Mo Tung, from whom Dorothy had bought the leeks, turnips, potatoes and bean sprouts which she had learned to turn into culinary miracles for her father's table, had given the beautiful young coppery-haired girl an ominous warning. "Missy, tell holy man, he and she go quick from here. Last night, Boxer men kill French priest in Jo-L'ingli and burn church and take holy women of church to be their slaves! You and holy man your father, Missy, go now, Boxers come here soon!"
It was true that during the past three or four months, Dorothy Trowbridge knew, peddlers had come through the town and had told strange stories of Chinese soldiers who believed themselves immortal, who thought that no bullet from the gun of a white devil could pierce their flesh and end their lives. These men had sworn an oath to the Goddess Kuan Ling that they would drive all the enemies of the Dowager Empress from the Forbidden City and that the streets of Peking should run red with the blood of these hated white devils.
But Dorothy Trowbridge knew hopelessly that her father would not leave even if there were truth to all these terrifying tales which had come to her ears. He believed himself to be dedicated to his work and he would find death as a martyr a pledge of eternal reward, as she knew only too well.
What she did not know was that the fat merchant Chan Koo secretly lusted for her virginal body, and had coveted her ever since he had first seen her bathing in a little stream five years ago. He had been riding upon a mule, and, weary, had dismounted at a bend in the road where heavy thickets and bushes hid the landscape beyond. Then he had heard the splashing of water and the soft laughter of a young girl, and, crouching forward and parting the bushes, he had stared as one bewitched at the sylph-like form, her back to him. Already at thirteen, Dorothy had been beautifully developed, with long slim thighs and calves, the nacreous skin typical of a true redhead, little pointed breasts and saucy oval buttocks. She had unbound her hair which tumbled nearly to her waist, and the old merchant had shuddered with overwhelming rut.
All these past years he had yearned for her, but the thought of abducting her and bringing her to his little villa high in the hills above the village had been unthinkable. Her father was a holy man, and there would be a curse from her gods upon him if he touched her. But now, with news that the Dowager Empress herself was impatient with all these treaties, abominated these accursed and sly scoundrels who came to steal her lands and to debase her people, he began to think that soon the army of the Boxers would come to T'ung-Su and then he could make her his slave.
Even now, consoling himself with a pretty young twelve-year-old black-haired Chinese girl who had been stolen from a nearby village by his henchmen at his orders, making the girl-child crouch between his hairy, fat thighs and suck his cock lovingly while he amused himself by flicking her plump bottom-cheeks with a light bamboo switch, he closed his eyes and pretended it was Dorothy Trowbridge there before him, in all her naked beauty-for he had seen her only a week before giving alms to the beggars, and he had sucked in his breath to realize how five years had made her a desirable woman fit for the bed of Prince Tuan himself...
And in Kachow, some forty miles to the south of Peking, the Dutch pastor Theo van der Groot preached the Christian doctrines with the same impassioned fervor as Reverend Jonathan Trowbridge. In this village, somewhat larger, he had been stationed by his superiors in Amsterdam eight years ago, and he had brought his beautiful young wife Katya to comfort him. Katya had been twenty-two when she had consented to marry the black-bearded, tall pastor who then was only thirty and who had seemed, apart from his faith, as tender as any lover she could have dreamed of. But it had been a sorry revelation for brown-haired, lusciously curvaceous Katya when she had discovered that her adored Theo, who could play the mandolin and discourse on poetry, thought of her only as his spiritual sister and believed that by bringing her to China, the two of them might save heathen souls by leading such pure lives that not even the most barbarous and illiterate villagers could accuse them of hypocrisy and venery.
Katya was of a passionate nature, and on her wedding night, she had given herself eagerly to Pastor van der Groot's embraces, only to be horrorstricken when he had shaken his head and pushed her away and murmured gently, "No, my dear sister Katya, this is wrong. This is not what was intended of us. It may be that when we are settled in our mission in China, we shall procreate and have children who will replace us there to teach the word and the truth of the Lord, but till then we must both put steadfastly behind us all thoughts of fleshly lust. I know you will respect me in this, my sweet sister Katya."
And so, for five agonizing years, the brown-haired young wife of the handsome Dutch pastor had hidden her longings and frustrations behind the mask of a smiling face as she went forth in the village to give alms, to bring food to the needy, to attend the sick. She too had heard the rumours of a rising of a terrible unknown army who meant to drive forth all foreigners from the good land of China. But only last week she had been reborn, and she was a dewy-eyed as a young girl in love for the first time; a young, Dutch soldier Hans Mulder, had stumbled into the village, bleeding, his uniform torn, and she had had him taken to their little house. There he had told her that he and his company had been ambushed by renegade Chinese bandits in Jung-Sieh, some fifteen miles to the west, and all had been killed except himself. He had lain still and played dead until the bandits had gone away, and then he had dragged himself through the forest until he reached this village.
Katya's husband had spent this past week visiting nearby little hamlets, and he had looked on Katya's caring for the young Dutch soldier as an act of benevolent humanity and mercy. He could not have suspected that Katya, her quim burning with desire from five years of sexual abstinence, had already fallen madly in love with Hans Mulder and that the twenty-three-year-old towheaded young Dutchman, recovered from his wounds, lusted for this buxom, brown-haired matron as avidly as he ever had for the whores in his native city of Felft ...
But in the Imperial Palace, the old Empress Tsu Hsi had called a council of her ministers and generals. Their faces were bitter with resentment against the foreigners who had overrun their land, and now had the insolence to threaten that their governments would make war unless retribution was made for all those who had lost their lives in China through acts of rapine, murderous assault and revolt.
France, which had lost several priests in the northern provinces, had sent word only the day before through Albert Garconniere that French warships would be launched against China unless reparation were made by a grant of land in Shanghai. The Portuguese demanded land around Macao as indemnity for the murder of a dozen soldiers and two merchants in Tientsin. Belgium and even Japan-China's age-old enemy-plotted to acquire the rich province of Fukien. And from the Italians, there was the claim for Samoon Bay in the heart of the magnificent province of Chekiang.
The omens of nature itself seemed to be on the side of Tsu Hsi's generals. For it was hot and a sandstorm was blowing from the northwest. The princes and ministers and generals winced as lashes of fine sand stung their eyes and faces, and General Wang said aloud, as he bowed toward the Dragon Throne on which the formidable old woman sat, "Even the gods are angry! Each grain of sand is a voice of terror from one of our humblest citizens, begging that we drive away these foreign devils, just as the wind drives away the sand!"
But her oldest minister, Jung Lu, pleaded that Tsu Hsi protect the foreign ministers and their families and followers, as well as all priests and missionaries who lived in the outer provinces. He spoke gravely of the danger that foreign troops might destroy China and end her glorious independence for all time to come.
But wily Prince Tuan boasted, "Majesty, I could drive the barbarians into the sea before their troops have time to strengthen them, for they are within our land and China is vast." And Duke Lan, the august and intrepid leader of the Boxers, spoke out boldly. "Celestial One, do not fear to call upon the members of the Society of the Harmonious and Clenched Fists, for whatever the sword of the Boxer touches, whether it be on flesh or on wood, flames shall burst forth. And the foreign devils have no weapons that can slay our righteous brethren. Give but the word, Divine One, and we shall rid your land of the accursed white devils!"
Tsu Hsi stared at the members of her council. "I will not bring the blood of my people upon my earth," she said slowly. "I hate these foreign devils, these usurpers, more than you and for better reasons. But if we strike first, then the world will say that China is a land of barbarians and that we assassinate those to whom we have given sanctuary, like these priests and missionaries. Let it be only if they war upon us first, for then I shall have no recourse but to defend the nation entrusted to me by the Lord Buddha!"
The smirking Prince Tuan, a lecher and pederast who sated his carnal urges on the bodies of nubile girls just past puberty, bowed his head and folded his hands in his long silken sleeves. He understood. Tsu Hsi wished for the sake of appearances to escape condemnation by the world as the aggressor; very well, she should have her proofs of acts of malice and usurpation committed by these accursed foreigners. A word to the Boxer troops in the provinces and here and there on the outskirts of the Imperial City, and there would be assassinations, and then there would be reprisals by the white devils, and then Her Celestial Majesty would be forced to declare war ... a war in which all white devils should be put to the sword, their women and daughters captured to be slaves and harlots for the glory of the Boxers!
CHAPTER SEVEN
Two nights after the Dowager Empress had summoned her court to hold council, Prince Tuan and the burly and cunning Duke Lan met in a little herb shop on the Street of a Thousand Ancestors. It was nightfall, and the street had long since been deserted, as if all those who dwelt upon it feared the momentary outburst of bloody revolt and war and wished to hide away from the holocaust.
The Prince, who had the authority of regent and would wield Tsu Hsi's sceptre if she were ailing or dead, was tall, with face cadaverous and haughty. Nearing fifty, he still enjoyed the debauched lusts of his youth, and in the oncoming bloodbath which he wished to bring about, he foresaw untold delights.
Duke Lan, stocky, with a scar on his left cheek, the mark of valorous conduct in earlier battles for the Dowager Empress, was now in his forty-seventh year. Two years ago, when he had been made minister of the provinces by Tsu Hsi, he had begun in secret the recruiting of fighting men for the Boxer ranks, and had helped devise the mystic symbolism which had become their bloody creed, teaching them that they could become invincible by means of incantations wedded to dauntless heroism and a fearlessness that did not even consider death.
These two crafty and powerful overlords of China had come their separate ways to the little shop of Foo Yeng, from whom each had at times bought potions to insure their insatiable virility. They had used ginseng as well as the powdered horn of the rhinoceros, and they had paid Foo Yeng much gold to find for them as well, maidens who would submit their lovely young bodies humbly and gratefully for the honor of mating with these powerful potentates of mighty China.
But on this night, they did not wear their mandarin robes, each having come in disguise so that even the spies of Tsu Hsi would not know their whereabouts. They were at this moment in Foo Yeng's private quarters, and the wizened, bearded old man had just served them tea and candied giner and was preparing opium pipes for their greater ease.
"Do you not see, good friend," Prince Tuan hissed, "that it is left to us to bring about the death of all these foreigners? Her Celestial Majesty is, though as valiant and courageous as any of our soldiers, a woman still; she thinks of the sorrows which blood and death will bring in their wake. But you and I, Duke Lan, must make it seem that the white devils have attacked us and thus force us to defend ourselves. Only then can we unleash the hordes of those great warriors of the Clenched Fist!"
"You but read my mind, great prince," Duke Lan smiled cruelly. "I have already sent out orders to my captains to await my signal. I agree, our glorious Empress must not be blamed for what our Boxers do. Yet if we triumph, her throne will be greater than ever, and we shall earn her undying gratitude and so have greater power for ourselves."
"To be sure," the dissolute Prince Tuan chuckled. "But let us not forget that when the white devils are driven forth, we must see to it that their young daughters and attractive wives are not put to death, but rather captured and held as hostages. Thus, if the gods do not favor us and our war should go badly, we shall have them to barter for a more just and honorable peace."
"Now I know why you are regent beside Her Glorious Majesty on the Great Dragon Throne, my prince!" the burly leader of the Boxers smiled and nodded. "There remains, then, only for us to plan some incident which will make it seem as if the accursed foreigners have thrown down the gauntlet of war to us. We shall be the aggrieved, not the aggressors, in all this. We are of a mind, Prince Tuan".
"Surely we are, my Lord Duke," Prince Tuan agreed. "And I already have a plan that will bring about the pretext whereby Tsu Hsi will, for her nation's honor, be forced to call upon your glorious Boxers! The pompous, insolent dog who is the German Consul, this man, Fritz Reimath, is known to look upon our young maidens with the eyes of lust. Though he is almost sixty, his wife is infirm and he has not known the pleasures of the bed since he has come to Peking, of this I know, for my spies have told me."
"And so?"
"And so," the unscrupulous regent smilingly went on, "I will put temptation in his path tomorrow night. His wife has been taken to the doctors who dwell in the fortress near the Celestial Palace. He will be alone except for his manservant and an old amah. A girl will come to him, a courageous girl who is willing to sacrifice herself for the glory of our beloved country. She will tell him that she sought out his dwelling as she tried to escape from outlaws who would do her great harm and sell her into bondage to some brothel in the provinces. She will be young and desirable, and her garments will be torn to display the comeliness of her body. He will fall prey to her lure, I am certain."
"And when he does?" Duke Lan nodded to old Foo Yeng as the latter handed him a lighted opium pipe.
"And when he does," Prince Tuan finished, "another valiant volunteer to our cause will demand entrance into his house, claiming that the maiden is his betrothed, and that the German Consul has sought to debauch her. He will attack this German dog, but will let his dagger be wrested away. I have no doubt that this lecherous and priggish German will try to return the blow, perhaps even kill him. So much the better, then!"
"I follow you, Prince Tuan!" Duke Lan eagerly nodded. "And the girl will be witness that this white devil, who is high in favor as a councilor of his usurping and hated nation did without provocation strike down this good and brave countryman of ours only because he strove to protect her honor!"
"Precisely, my Lord Duke. Then we have but to get word to the ears of Tsu Hsi, and she will demand vengeance. Blood for blood, death for death, and the Boxers shall do their work. We are agreed?"
"By the Goddess of Justice, Kuan Yin, we are agreed! And now, Prince Tuan, now that we have done our work well for the glory of our land, now that we have turned it towards its destiny, let us think of ourselves this night. Foo Yeng, you old dog, can you not find us a pair of willing maidens to comfort us with rice wine and their sweet caresses?"
* * *
And thus it was that the next evening, as portly, bearded Fritz Reimath entered the house on the Street of the Bent Bamboos, he found that his houseboy and the old amah who had attended his ailing wife were absent and that there was no soul but himself within this charmingly picturesque house he had rended for a paltry sum from an elderly shopkeeper.
He grumbled a little, aware that he would have to prepare his own supper. He lit a cigar and breathed in its fragrance with a sensual smile. Still robust and, of late years, irked by his rapidly aging wife's infirmities, he still delectated over physical pleasures. True, in his important role as consul for the Fatherland, he had had to conduct these little affairs with the utmost discretion. Perhaps about six weeks apart, he dressed in Chinese robes and had a coolie rickshaw man take him to the south district of the Imperial City, where there was an exquisite little teahouse in whose private rooms, for a not extortionate fee, a man of parts and virility could be entertained by comely young girls from Hong Kong, Macao, and even Singapore. He would have liked to visit this house much more often, but there was too much danger. And of late, observing the mood of the commoners in the streets, Fritz Reimath knew that it would not be wise to tempt fate too often.
As to Gretchen, his wife, who had once been a sturdy, buxom ash-haired woman as eager for bed as himself in the. olden days, he suspected also that she guessed the reasons for his occasional absences from the house. But she was the daughter of a mere merchant, and he himself was descended from Junker nobility; a German wife might not like what her husband did, but unless he involved her in scandal, she was wise enough to keep her mouth shut and not to censure him for the peccadilloes which any normal man would exercise in seeking occasional relief from boredom. And Gretchen certainly must understand that with a man of his vigor, abstinence from bed was unthinkable.
He pursed his lips. Since she was now under the care of doctors in the improvised hospital inside the fortress near the Imperial Palace, tonight might be as good a time as any to pay a visit to that little house. He would eat some of the cold chicken that was left from the night before and heat a little rice and tea, because it was not food he longed for so much as it was kootzele.
Beaming at his own cunning, he advanced down the hallway towards the kitchen, when suddenly out of the doorway of his wife's bedroom there emerged an exquisite young girl, clad in the long flowing robe, made of ornate silk with embroidered patterns of flowers and dragons and birds, of a teahouse entertainer. The sleeves were slashed, as was one side of the skirt, like a kind of cheongsam.
She could not have been more than fifteen, and her black hair was closely cropped like a boy's, but her face was round, her eyes large and black, her mouth full and painted and soft. Moreover, as she held up a little lantern in one hand, to illumine her visage for him, he could see that the bodice of her robe clung snugly against two superbly wound, widely spaced titties ... a Butzen of really remarkable quality! And her hips were delightfully ample for so young a girl, while her skin had the pale ivory-yellowish tint of the aristocratically bred Chinese girl who has been brought up as a pampered and isolated creature of pleasure intended ultimately for the amusement of men who can afford her. This was no coolie slut, no poor monkey-like girl out of the farm provinces whose parents sold her to the crude brothels. This was a little enchantress, who might have plied her trade in the finest salon in Berlin or again in Paris.
In a sweet singsong voice, the young girl inquired, "Are you the lord to whom I was sent-this night as servant?"
Fritz Reimath chuckled, then guffawed heartily as he approached the pretty young Chinese girl. His left arm familiarly circled her slim waist, and he chucked her chin with his right hand and studied her features while, accommodatingly, the girl lifted the little lantern higher so that he might see her more clearly. "Liebchen, I'm not sure of that, but if you are here to do what I wish, it would indeed please me. I am-well, it does not matter."
She had extraordinarily long thick eyelashes, so very expressive of a sensual temperament, he had always believed. And the delicate wings of her nostrils flickered like the wings of the humming bird in flight, while her mouth was small but wonderfully ripe and red. He felt his prick harden with a feverish longing, the more so since it had been a good six weeks since his last visit to that secret little house on the outskirts of Peking.
"But I am told that you are the most important lord of a great country, and that your poor wife is ill and so cannot give you pleasure," she murmured softly.
"Then you have come to the right house, meine Schoneste!" he muttered as his arm tightened around her waist. "What is your name?"
"It is Lo Ling, master. I am yours to do with as you will."
"Herr Gott!" he muttered thickly, the blood rushing to his face as he felt savage lust take hold of him. "Then let us go quickly to my room where we can have our enjoyment of each other in more comfort. There is a great wide bed, and I wish to see you upon it and with this pretty robe removed."
"I will do as you command, my lord," the sweet, soft voice of the young girl bemused him in the half-darkness of the deserted house.
He led her, his hip brushing against hers as they walked, towards his own bedroom. Once inside, Fritz Reimath lit the lanterns and blew out hers, chuckling at the poetic touch of that gesture. She had kindled his fires, and he would put hers out ... Jawohl, a really good joke, and one that he must tell his cronies back in Berlin one day when he would be called home with honor and glory for having served the Fatherland so well.
Reaching for the door and pushing it open, he kept his arm around her supple waist to urge her forward so that she could not mistake the huge low bed just beyond which dominated the room. He grinned at her lecherously, and she glanced up at him with a soft, submissive smile. He felt his pulses quicken already at this unexpected diversion. He did not know who had sent her here, but that could be discovered later. The immediate thing was to summon all his powers to enjoy her to the very fullest, for she was a tasty morsel indeed. And the fact that he would miss his frugal supper by succumbing to this more elemental hunger did not in the least disturb Fritz Reimath as he began to unbutton his vest and watched the pretty young Chinese girl begin to remove her robe. Then he swore aloud in stupefaction and delight: she was naked under that and as it fluttered to the floor, the lanterns hanging from the ceiling cast down a kind of pearly luster on her finely grained soft skin. And what magnificent titties she had, with their pouting little buds set in narrow soft pink aurolae! The tiny navel, almost hidden in that suave smooth belly, and almost no privy hair around the soft palpitating pink lips of her krotzele!
Impetuous lust overrode his initial desire to dally and taste her slowly and lingeringly. Unbuttoning the fly of his trousers, he liberated his swollen prick, glanced proudly at it to make certain that it was still as vigorous as ever, and then moved towards her while she held out her arms to him.
His mouth crushed hers pitilessly, his hands greedily seized her bottom-cheeks and squeezed them rapaciously as he thrust her back against the edge of the bed. He heard her whimper, but it only fanned the flames of his inordinate rut. Herr Gott, he was still as capable as he had been twenty years ago-no, thirty! This sweet young bitch would call him more than lord when he was done with her; she would know she had been to bed with a man who knew how to thrust vigorously and furiously into her soft krotzele.
Her arms wound around him, and she rested her cheek against his chest as he arched himself, his prickhead prying against the soft portals of her quim. And just as he uttered a loud groan of delight, feeling himself slip just inside the lobbyway of her warm citadel, the angry shout of a man made his blood run cold, made him look back over his shoulder while his hands dropped from the young girl's naked bottom.
He stood there foolishly, his jaw dropping, his prick still thrust obscenely out of his fly, as he saw that a stern-faced young Chinaman stood on the threshold, head shaven except for a long pigtail, in the blue silk robes of a student, but with a dragon in white embroidered on his chest. And at the head of the dragon, a circle of clenched fists.
"Who are you to break into my house? What do you do here, what do you want?" He recovered his savoir-faire, lifting his head insolently, his lips curling in an arrogant Prussian sneer which had never failed to win him respect among his fellows, and certainly among such lowly racial inferiors as these barbarous Chinese.
"Foreign dog, you wish to lie with my sister, and I will kill you for it!" the young man shouted. From one sleeve he drew a dagger with a bamboo handle, and, lifting it high up in the air, lunged at Fritz Reimath. But the German consul twisted aside at the last moment, and the knife only grazed his side, tore his under linen and nicked the bare flesh just enough for a few drops of blood to ooze from the tiny wound.
Now really furious and at the same time frightened, the German consul-who, for all his other faults, was not a physical coward-seized his adversary, wrested the knife away from him. The young Chinaman tried to kick at him, then to strike him in the abdomen with his fist. But Fritz Reimath, glancing at the naked young Chinese girl, felt a sudden primal jealousy, an atavistic fury, take hold of him. It was as if time had been swept back to the dawn of mankind where two men fought a duel to the death over the body of a mate. And with a snarl, he struck downwards with the dagger and buried it in the Chinaman's heart.
The youth clutched the bamboo handle, his eyes rolling, half turned towards the terrified naked girl who cowered against the edge of the bed, hands to her mouth, and then toppled forward onto the floor and lay still.
"Liebchen, you saw, I had to do it to save myself," Fritz Reimath hoarsely explained. "Don't be afraid-is it true that you're his sister? You know I didn't mean to-but he struck me, here, you can see the blood yourself..."
But the girl had caught up her robe and with a cry eluded him. Then, on the threshold, she turned back and spat at him, uttering a curse in Chinese which he only partly understood. And then she disappeared into the night, the front door of the house slamming behind her.
Fritz Reimath mopped his brow, and sat down heavily. This would be a dreadful scandal, especially if the Imperial Court were to learn that he had murdered one of their countrymen in the diplomatic immunity of his own house. He would carry the body out into the garden and down the little alleyway and leave it there.
Thrusting his now deflated cock back into his fly, he bent down and lifted the lifeless body. The youth could not have been more than twenty, and his teeth were clenched, and his eyes stared unseeingly, and Fritz Reimath shuddered. Steadfastly, he carried the inert body out to the kitchen and then into the garden and down the alleyway, glancing around furtively. But the night was still. The crickets chirped comfortably, and he breathed a sigh of relief as he laid the body carefully down, then crept back whence he had come.
He strode to his study, and opening a decanter of schnapps, poured out a full glass and downed it almost at a gulp.
He did not see in the darkness of the night several shadowy figures disengage themselves from the clump of bushes which screened the alleyway from the garden, pick up the lifeless body of their comrade, stand a moment staring back at the house, brandishing their clenched fists in symbol of vengeance to come, and then disappear into the foreboding gloom and silence.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It was the night of the sixteenth of May, a night murky and overcast with dark clouds that hid the moon. The streets of Peking were silent and deserted, and the shops were shuttered. Although lights still burned in some of the offices of the foreign legations, it was as if the whole city were waiting for the signal to fall upon these hated bastions of the usurping white devils.
And in the Imperial palace, Tsu Hsi stood on the balcony, surrounded by her courtiers, with Prince Tuan and Duke Lan beside her. These two arch-conspirators smiled knowingly at each other, for only an hour ago a young captain in the Imperial Chinese Army had brought the dreadful news that the body of a young Chinaman had been found in the alleyway near the house of the German Consul. And a sobbing young Chinese girl had sworn on the tombs of her ancestors that she had seen Herr Fritz Reimath drive the fatal dagger into his heart, all because he had valiantly tried to save her from dishonor at the hands of the brutal German ravisher.
"Majesty," Prince Tuan hissed, "how long will you withhold the order to loose our valiant soldiers upon these murderers, these rapists and these thieves who take our land as insolently as they take the virginity of our innocent maidens?"
"This news fills me with sorrow, Prince Tuan," the old woman muttered dully, as she stared out at her beloved city. "But total war might well destroy our own nation, nor can we be sure that we should achieve our dream of freeing Mother China from the yoke of these accursed foreigners."
'We who serve Your Celestial Majesty," Prince Tuan wheedlingly averred, "Long with all our hearts for the restoration of the land stolen away from us by these devils. Nor would Duke Lan and I counsel war, were we not certain of victory."
The wrinkled face of the Dowager Empress was gloomy with foreboding as she stared out into the darkness. And then to the west there came the bright light of the sky, crimson with flames. "The sign!" she superstitiously gasped. 'The sign of blood and of death and of war. Must I then bend to the heavens? Majesty, it is a French church that burns, a fire set by the Boxers," Duke Lan now stepped forward. "But it was done in retaliation, because there were soldiers hidden in the church and they fired their guns upon the people who stood at the gate asking those white-devil gods to protect them. We have taken our revenge, Majesty. It is the first step. Let us take the next and all the others, with your blessing!"
Tsu Hsi turned to her favorite, General Wang, whose face was grave, his eyes downcast. "My dear old friend, what words of wisdom have you for me in this hour of our peril?" she demanded.
T but speak what I have said before so often, Celestial One," the old General replied, straightening and his eyes burning with anger. "But since you ask me now before all your courtiers and before the Lord Prince Tuan, it is my duty to tell you that foreign soldiers march overland from the coast to avenge the deaths of their countrymen who were torn to pieces by our angry people in the province of Kansu. And even now my lieutenants bring me word that the foreign soldiers of all the legations are on their way to your Forbidden City. If we wait too long, they will overthrow us, they will invade this very palace and profane your glory and that of your ancestors."
Tsu Hsi shuddered and then she turned to the exquisite black-haired, brocade-robed Mah Sung, her adopted daughter and the Imperial Princess of all China. "My beloved daughter," she murmured. "I have listened to these men of war who would plunge us all into bloodshed. You, a woman like myself, young and at the age of childbearing, must speak for all the women of China. Tell me then what is in your heart, Mah Sung!"
"I would be traitress indeed if I did not tell you, Glorious Mother of all China as of me," the lovely young Princess replied, deferentially bowing her head, "but for long months I have given gold and food and my royal favor to these men of the Clenched Fists, knowing that their strength and courage would one day save your throne, oh my mother. Yes, my heart will sorrow at the death of our countrymen, for those must always die when the honor of the nation is at stake. But I would rather have them die in battle than to live as slaves! Loose the Boxer armies against your enemies, I say to you, beloved mother!"
And from the courtiers rose an echoing cry, "yes, loose the Boxer armies against your enemies, Celestial One!"
Tsu Hsi stared once more at the crimson sky. Then she turned to face them, haughty, majestic, more a deity at this moment than a woman. And she raised her arms as the moon slowly emerged from behind the dark clouds. "The hour has come," she pronounced. "We must destroy the white devils at their legations and in their homes. Let not one brick be left upon another, nor one human being allowed to live!"
"You have spoken like the greatest of all of China's Generals, Imperial One," Prince Tuan cried as he knelt and kissed the hem of her golden-brocaded robe. "Amend that edict only by a little, Exalted Empress! Give word that the soldiers of the Boxers shall take prisoner the women and the girls of these foreign devils, that they may be kept as hostages to protect us if need be, and, when victory is assured, as the gods will it to be, I know! to become the slaves and the concubines of those warrior leaders of ours who shall have earned them as the spoils of war!"
Tsu Hsi inclined her head. "So be it. Now leave me while I pray to the Goddess Kuan Yin and to the Lord Buddha," she murmured.
And they crowded out of the balcony, the Duke and the Prince clasping hands in token of purposeful comradeship. For now the die was cast. Now nothing could stay the fury of the Boxers, nothing could save all those unsuspecting white women and girls from the rape, the tortures, the atrocious degradations to be imposed on their tender flesh in this dire and unholy vengeance...
It was Saturday morning, May the seventeenth, and Fritz Reimath was in his office at the German Consulate, from whose roof there hung limply the flag of his Fatherland. He was in the act of dictating a letter addressed to the Dowager Empress, to explain the circumstances of his having taken arms against one of her countrymen, explaining that the young man had attempted to assassinate him and that he suspected that the girl and his assailant were both party to a plot aimed at bringing disrepute upon the Consulate.
He had news a short time ago that his ailing wife was dying in a little hospital inside the fortress. His secretary, Wilhelmina Preusser, had come from Berlin a year ago to serve her Fatherland as secretary to this important dignitary. She was thirty, her black hair piled in an imposing bun at the top of her head, with a white batiste shirtwaist and long black skirt, and high-buttoned shoes. She wore spectacles, though she did not need them, so as to give her a more studious and efficient appearance. But though still a spinster and a virgin, she was secretly enamored of her office employer. She grieved with him when his wife was taken ill, and she told herself that Herr Reimath had far too heavy a cross to bear, that what he needed was the inspiration and the affection of a younger woman, a woman such as herself.
Fritz Reimath stared at the buxom brunette as if seeing her for the first time, and indeed he was. The harrowing adventure which had almost cost him his life and the lascivious excitement of the unknown young Chinese girl who had offered herself to him had had their emotional reaction: how he had begun to feel like a hero at Sedan, a man worthy of the Iron Cross from the Chancellor himself. Herr Gott, what man of his age could disarm one of those strong young yellow fiends and stab him to death! And with his wife certain to die, it was high time he had some pleasure. Not the pleasure derived from paying a Chinese slut to lend her body to his desires, but the reciprocal love of a handsome young woman, a woman like Fraulein Preusser.
He cleared his throat and forced his most congenial smile to his sensual mouth as he approached her desk. "Excuse me, Fraulein," his words were halting, chosen. "That letter can wait. After all, Saturday should surely be a day of rest, nicht wahr? Would you do me the honor of having luncheon with me? There is a little restaurant in the next block with very commendable shrimp wonton, and I know they have ripe cherries for dessert."
"Why, Herr Konsul, I I'd be delighted!" she beamed. She rose and, catching her skirt against the legs of the chair swayed a little. Fritz Reimath had already moved towards her, and this decided him as an opportunist. His hands on her shoulders, he put his mouth to hers and gave her a long lustful kiss. For the sake of form, she had at first struggled; but then, ecstatic at being approached by so exalted a personage, uttered a long rhapsodic sigh: "Ohhh, dear Herr Reimath!"
At that very moment the door of the Consulate was flung open by a tall young grimfaced captain of the Boxers, followed by six grinning soldiers who brandished knives and revolvers.
"See, my brothers?" the young captain turned back to his men. "These accursed white devils flaunt their filthy lusts within a stone's throw of the Imperial Palace. Let us avenge this dishonor!" And then, leveling his old Mauser, he pulled the trigger twice. Fritz Reimath uttered a choking cry, twisted around, his eyes huge with astonishment and pain, and then fell heavily onto the floor and lay still. Wilhelmina Preusser, hand at her mouth, stood as if petrified. The captain holstered his smoking revolver and stepped towards her. Then, with a contemptuous sneer, he put his hands to the bodice of her shirtwaist and ripped it from her body, and then the camisole to expose the magnificent rondures of her heaving titties.
Only then did she find voice, but it availed her nothing. At his sign, two of his men leaped forward with obscene threats, seized the unfortunate woman by the wrists and forced her down to her knees. A third soldier squatted behind her and ripped off her skirt, then the petticoat, and finally the black cotton bloomers which sheathed the sumptuous, plump, sinuously separated cheeks of her ivory-skinned behind.
"Dirty foreign whore," the young captain addressed her in pidgin English, "you deserve to die, but I spare your life if you do to me what you would have done for that pigdog of a foreign devil!"
He made a sign, and a fourth soldier stepped forward and pressed the muzzle of his revolver against Wilhelmina Preusser's temple, while the other two men, kneeling on either side of her, tightened their hold on her wrists and maintained her on her knees before her interlocutor.
The young captain, smirking down at the horrified and nearly fainting victim, unbuttoned the fly of his trousers and bared his elongated, violently swollen prick. "Now, sorceress," he urged in a hoarse voice, "do to it what you did to the mouth of that assassin of my countryman, that despoiler of an innocent Chinese girl, or you die!"
Wilhelmina Preusser's eyes goggled at the sight of that pulsating spear with its dark veins standing out against the taut skin. Then a furious crimson blush burned her cheeks and forehead as she closed her eyes and whimpered, "Ach, nein. Ich-ich kann nicht. Bitte, nicht das, bitte!"
At the captain's sign, the soldier holding the gun to her temple cocked the trigger, and she uttered a shriek of terror. "If you will not, then you die." the captain snarled. "Quick, sorceress! Fa Jung, take your belt and encourage her. It will be her first training as a whore for our brothels!"
A fifth soldier, squat and bald, his little eyes beady and furtive, chuckled lewdly as he drew his heavy black leather belt out of the trouser loops. Stationing himself behind her, he lifted it and applied a slashing cut across the ripest curves of her ivory bottom cheeks. Wilhelmina Preusser uttered a shriek, writhed on her knees, tried to jerk free, but the soldier with the gun pressed it hard against her temple and hissed, "You obey Captain Cheng Fu, or I kill now!"
A second lash, a third, and then a fourth, left blazing red streaks over the sumptuous globes of the victim's naked, shuddering bottom globes. Overcome by pain and terror, the buxom brunette at last opened her mouth, and Captain Cheng Fu, chuckling with gloating joy, pressed his swollen cockhead between her lips. "Now you suck good," he ordered, signing for the soldier with the belt to lay it on without mercy.
Thus Wilhelmina Preusser, shrieking out under the searing cuts of the belt on her naked behind, and with a gun at her head, performed the first sexual act of her thirty years ... but it was, alas, not to be the last!
CHAPTER NINE
With the assassination of Fritz Reimath, several platoons of Boxers rushed into the Street of the Dragon, intent on butchering all the other foreign diplomats and their aides who might be found in that row of stately offices within the white and red brick, two story building which was so near to the Imperial Palace as to be in itself an affront to Tsu Hsi.
But they found only a few of the diplomats, who having heard the outcry from the German Consulate, fled into the rear of their offices and hid in closets or waited, cowering or standing proudly erect-according to their own individual temperament-to await their destiny. Among these was Albert Garconniere, assistant consul for France, and Matthew Hoskins, the first secretary to the British Consul, and several lesser dignitaries from the Belgian, Dutch and Russian legations.
Matthew Hoskins stood facing his assassins, arms at his sides, making no attempt to defend himself rom the brutal slashes of half a dozen knives. He slumped to the floor, his blood staining the green carpet, and a young Boxer kicked his dead body as a sign of final contempt. Albert Garconniere, however, tried valiantly to defend himself, for he wanted to live. And so when the yelling soldiers smashed down the door of the French Consular office, Albert Garconniere drew a pistol from his waistcoat, leveled it and killed the first man to cross the threshold. He fired again, wounding a second soldier, but the gun jammed. Reversing it, he used it as a club and brained a burly, bald Chinaman who came at him with a heavy cudgel. But as he dodged the blow and struck his assailant on his back and he died at once ...
But the orders of Prince Tuan to his wily accomplice, Duke Lan, the now active commander of all Boxer troops, where being swiftly carried out. Prince Tuan had secured the names and addresses of the families of those diplomats who had come to China to despoil her, and Duke Lan at once dispatched platoons of soldiers to those condemned dwellings, with orders not to slay the women and young girls, but to take them captive. Meanwhile, the Russian Consul Piotor Vorshilof and the elderly French Consul Jacques Picard, as well as the gray-haired and dignified British Consul William Dougald, had already made their way to the fortress early that morning, perhaps having a terrible presentiment of what was to befall all whites in the city of Peking this dreadful day. They had told their faithful houseboys to pack only the most valuable possessions and to bring the women of the household and these valuables to the fortress as quickly as possible.
This fortress, near the Street of the Dragon, had originally been built by the French, and now quartered some 300 French, English and German officers. There were quarters for the enlisted men and sumptuously furnished rooms for the officer on the second floor at the left wing. The walls were made of stone and as tall as the Imperial Palace itself. There were cannons inside the fortress, too. Besides a little hospital where Fritz Reimath's ailing wife lay dying, there were smaller billets for some of the Chinese servants. And since many of these had already deserted to go over to the Boxer cause, there would be room for the civilians who might here to take refuge against the terrible wave of bloodshed, torture and savagery which pitted the yellow race against the white in a duel for survival which the whole world would be watching. . .
Not only the coolie workers in the fortress had traitorously renounced the white overlords whom till now they had fawned upon, eager for the gold and the extra measures of rice which their duties procured; but many a trusted houseboy or amah, responding to the viciously patriotic cry of the Boxer soldiers in the streets of Peking, trembled with pride at the thought that now they could cast aside the shackles of their servitude to these accursed white devils and help deliver them to the glorious armies of Lord Duke Lan ...
Old Lin Moi, housekeeper to the dowdy wife of the murdered First Secretary, had long felt compassion for the lovely Jane Evans and loathing for the cruelty of her fat and vindictive mistress. She could have told Mathilda Hoskins that the young Englishwoman was certainly not guilty of attempting to seduce Matthew Hoskins, and perhaps, though illiterate, she understood why the woman lost no opportunity to shame and thrash poor Jane Evans like the lowliest of scullery maids. And so, when she heard the shrill cries of the Boxer soldiers down the alleyway behind the Hoskins house, she hurried into the living room toward where Mathilda Hoskins was again berating the pale faced, trembling, silent young brunette. "Mistress," she cried. "The Boxers come! We must leave the house quickly or they will kill us all!"
"Nonsense, you yellow heathen," Mathilda Hoskins sneered, "what's this story of yours about Boxers? My husband would certainly have told me if there were any danger. I see what you're trying to do. I was just about to give Miss
Evans, Miss High-and-Mighty Evans, if you please, the cane on her bare butt for having stolen my favorite brooch!"
"It's not true! I haven't seen it in a week, and that's the truth, Mrs. Hoskins!" Jane passionately protested.
"You lying little thieving slut, I know your kind, I've told you that before!" the fat woman jeered, slapping Jane's face with her pudgy hand. "Get out of here, you old yellow fool, unless you'd like to stay and watch Miss Jane Evans prepare her noble butt for a dozen of the best bent right down over the Chesterfield!"
Then, a vicious grin making her fat face even more ugly, she brandished the rattan and snarled, "Strip, Miss! Maybe after you've had a good dozen as a start, you'll remember where you hid the brooch!"
"I swear to you-"
"Do you want me to have this skinny old Chinese heathen hold you down while I attend to your clothes, my girl?" Mathilda Hoskins hissed.
With a sob of desperate frustration and despair, Jane Evans slowly hoisted skirt and petticoat and took her place over the Chesterfield's end. "That's more like it," Mathilda Hoskins sniggered as she moved forward to tug down the young woman's drawers, licking her lips in anticipation at seeing the angry red weals of the rattan leap upon Jane Evans' milky flesh. But even as she fumbled with the waistband of the drawers, there was a crash of pots and pans being overturned in the kitchen, the excited voices of Chinamen, and then five men, with rifles and knives, burst into the living room.
Mathilda Hoskins blanched, the rattan dropping from her nerveless hand. Lin Moi called out in Chinese, "Spare the girl, she is a slave to this cursed sorceress. But kill the sorceress, she is fat and ugly and old and cannot give you pleasure."
"At you wish, venerable old woman," a tall sergeant of the Boxers, heading the platoon, agreed. Raising his pistol, he shot Mathilda Hoskins in the belly. She gave a gurgling cry, clapped both fat hands over the bleeding wound at which she stared with horrified, exorbitant eyes. Then she crumpled onto the sofa and began to shriek as the waves of hideous pain wrenched her vitals.
Jane Evans straightened, tugging down skirt and petticoat, pale with terror at this greater danger. "Spare her!" Lin Moi repeated, "she is good, she has done you no harm!"
"By the order of the Lord Duk Lan, old mother," the sergeant grinned as he jerked his thumb obscenely toward the shuddering young brunette, "she is to be taken prisoner and thence to the city of Hanchow, where it is ordained that all young white sorceresses shall stand trial for their crimes against China! Seize her and bind her and gag her, and then let us go, for we have other business that must be done swiftly before all these accursed foreigners escape!"
In a trice, Jane Evans found herself with her wrists and ankles tightly thonged, a piece of her dying employer's own shirtwaist stuffed into her mouth as a gag with a strip of heavy burlap bound over it and knotted at the back of her neck to gag her. Hoisted like a sack of potatoes, she was taken from the house out of the servitude which had seemed hell but toward another from which, before another forty-eight hours had elapsed, she would pray for her death as a deliverance and mercy ... The handsome nineteen year old houseboy Kim Sung, Lida Garconniere's lover, was aiding Lida and Claudia in packing the jewels. Then they all hid in the cellar.
Soon Corporal Weng Chu arrived with his men. When they entered the cellar, Claudia Garconniere could not suppress a sneeze, and the Boxers quickly discovered her.
"This little vixen accuses you of having lain with the young sorceress, "Corporal Weng Chu sniggered as he moved forward to face the handsome young houseboy. "You will speak at once or I will have my men cut out your intestines. It will be a slow death and much pain. Well, speak! You, a young man of your strength and intelligence, to be serving these foreign devils! You deserve death as it is, but I will spare you if you tell the truth!"
One of the soldiers put his knife to Kim Sung's Adam's apple, pricking it with the sharp point. "Yes-yes-but I had to do it-she seduced me-forgive me, noble Boxers!" Kim Sung cravenly sobbed.
"Cochonl Sacre chien," Lida Garconniere hissed, turning scarlet as she saw the eyes of the Chinese soldiers fix upon her, appraising her, mentally disrobing her and imagining her and Kim Sung naked and fucking together.
Handsome, auburn-haired Claudia Garconniere uttered a cry of horrified consternation at this confession: "Lida-monDieu-tell them that he lies, quickly! It isn't possible-you and the Chinaman-c'est trop degoutante!"
"Yes, sorceress, tell her," Corporal Weng Chu sauntered over to the trembling honey-haired girl and, with a smirk of familiarity, cupped her chin in his left hand while he pointed his pistol at her heart.
"Don't hurt me-oh please-yes, yes, he was my lover!" Lida hysterically cried out.
Claudia Garconniere closed her eyes and shuddered. "You filthy, contemptible little slut! You're no better than a ten franc Parisian whore!" she panted, putting her hand to her eyes and bowing her head as she thought of the shame this disclosure would bring Lida's father, her beloved Albert.
"How very interesting!" Corporal Weng Chu sniggered. "I have never seen one of our people mate with one of these accursed sorceresses. Kim Sung, if you do not wish your intestines to spill out on the floor, you will lie with this young sorceress before us all to teach us how it is done!"
"Oh no-don't let him-Maman, I don't want to!" Lida hysterically cried, turning toward her stepmother. But Claudia turned her back on the honey-haired girl, and muttered, "I should have whipped you to the blood, you filthy little bitch! Oh, if only I'd known! And that wretched Chinese boy-how could you stoop so low?"
Alas, Claudia Garconniere thought only of the disgrace and the shame brought upon herself and her husband. She had not yet learned the true meaning of shame, but she would in the court of Li Woo in Hanchow.
The two soldiers guarding Kim Sung pushed him toward the sobbing Lida with obscene exhortations. The handsome young Chinese houseboy stammered, "Missy, forgive-I must, to save our lives. But I love you, Missy, I do it in love!"
She backed away as she saw him reach for her, but two soldiers suddenly behind her shoved her forward into his arms, guffawing obscenely. One of them called to her in pidgin English, "If Missy not like houseboy, me Bo Kan, show you what good Chinese prick can do between your white
"Quickly now, we have little time to waste on all of you," the corporal growled. "Strip her naked and fuck her before all of us, or you die at once!"
At this terrible threat, Kim Sung shuddered and, seizing the struggling, shrieking, honey-haired girl, ripped off her dress and camisole, then her drawers, and flung her down upon her back on the cold earthen floor, while he fumbled with his silken robe to bare his prick. Three Boxer soldiers seized Claudia Garconniere and dragged her forward, while one of them stood behind her, his right hand atop her head, his left thumb and forefinger pressing her eyelids upward so that she was forced to look as the corporal commanded.
The exquisite naked body of the struggling young French girl excited Kim Sung even in this terrible aura of danger and death. His prick hardened, he gouged himself into her cunt, and began to fuck her. But hardly had he begun when Corporal Weng Chu leaned down, seized the youth's pigtail in his left hand and with his right slashed his knife over the youth's throat. Lida shrieked and then fainted as her young Chinese lover's blood splashed down to stain her titties and throat and belly, even to blotch her face with the warm, sticky liquid of death.
And then she shrieked again, for two of the soldiers had dragged her away from the bleeding body, flung her down on her belly and held her by the wrists while another squatted on the small of her back and the corporal, kneeling between her flailing legs, yawned open the cheeks of her behind and viciously buggered her. "There," he panted after he had discharged his essence into her bowels, "is all you deserve of Chinese seed! Now then, you others, bind the other woman and gag her and blindfold her, so that she may be taken to the Mandarin of Hanchow without delay. You, Bo Kan, and you, Tsien Fu, if you wish to amuse yourselves with this young sorceress as I have just done, I give you leave. And then we shall take her with the older on to Hanchow."
Lieutenant Peng Chu had slipped out of the Vorshilof house and told the little scullery maid Tsi Keng to go quickly to the house of her parents near the west gate. Then he hurried down the alley way to the secret headquarters of the Boxers, where he donned the white robe with the yellow circle over his heart and assumed his rightful insignia as lieutenant. From his captain, he respectfully commandeered six men to accompany him back to the residence of the Russian Consul. And there, in the bedroom of Katerina Ourosoff, he found the beautiful buxom widow and her niece Nadia Kaplinski in each other's arms, naked but for their camisoles and silken hose and garters, fondling and kissing and pussy rubbing, their carnal bliss obliterating all thoughts of their own personal safety before the Boxer hordes.
He had both women stretched on their bellies on the bed, and while his men held the wrists and ankles of the two naked captives, he seized a thin flexible bamboo switch and began to flog them till they howled for mercy. "I have seen you often thus, you filthy sorceresses," he snarled as he brought the bamboo switch whistling down on poor young Nadia's streaked and shuddering bottom globes. "And you, the fat sow, who pretends to give her the whip for her wickedness, when you do it to inflame your own filthy and depraved lusts, you I know even better!" And the bamboo whistled down on Katerina Ourosoff's spacious writhing and vividly streaked posterior.
But because he was well disciplined and because he was avidly a Boxer who wished the sublime punishment and degradation for all foreigners, Peng Chu halted his men in their urge to bugger and fuck the two weeping, well-thrashed naked women when at last he had flung the switch away. And so they too were bound and gagged and trundled off to a secret place on the edge of the city where at nightfall they would be taken to the court of the Mandarin of Hanchow, there to expiate the evil they had done ...
But there were a few who were loyal to their employers, like faithful old Mei Fong, the nurse of Ernestine Hullweg. It was she who swore to the Boxer soldiers who invaded the house of Kurt Hullweg that all in this house had committed no crime and respected the honor of the Dowager Empress. "Make them prisoners, then, and let them be tried by an honorable mandarin," she urged, "but do not slaughter the innocent until you know they have wronged our nation."
To such extent did her words prevail that the sergeant commanding the platoon reluctantly agreed. And thus it was that Erika and her stepfather and his mature wife Ernestine were taken to Hanchow unharmed but as prisoners to stand before the tribunal of Li Woo ...
And finally, since the Boxers unleashed their pillaging and murder in the provinces of little villages surrounding Peking, Dorothy Trowbridge and Katya van der Groot were made prisoners and they too began the long journey to that gilded court where fat, depraved Li Woo avidly waited to pronounce sentence upon them. Katya's pastor-husband was killed before her eyes, as was the young Dutch soldier Hans Mulder who had been convalescing from his wounds in the van der Groot house.
And thus as poor Katya was driven along, lying in the bottom of a wooden cart drawn by an ox, bound and gagged, she could think mournfully of how she had been widowed of a husband who had not one fucked her in the five years of their marriage, and widowed at the same time from the handsome young man who she had longed to fuck her.
CHAPTER TEN
The serious assault of the Boxers in the city of Peking had left many foreigners dead or dying. But, contrary to the hopes of Duke Lan, the surprise attack had not succeeded in annihilating the entire foreign contingent and especially the troops who were already quartered in the garrison near the Imperial Palace. Although he had given orders to cut the telegraph lines out of Peking, a number of embassy officials had already managed to get word out of the hostile city to their nation's troops stationed not only in other parts of China but also in Macao, as well as to some of the warships lying at anchor in the harbor of Hong Kong.
Nevertheless, the Boxer chief was exultant when the news was brought to him over this first weekend of bloody yet patriotic warfare that numerous white women and young girls not only in Peking but also in the provinces had been captured and were on their way to Hanchow, there to stand trial for their "crimes" against China and the Dowager Empress herself. He had given orders to Li Woo, the mandarin who would preside at these trials, that none was to be put to death, but that they were to be dealt with-and the verbatim terms of his message to Li Woo so decreed-"with justice and yet severity, with understanding and yet with the benign punishments a father might use upon willful and disobedient children. It is the men of these cursed foreign invaders who are truly the guilty ones, and they shall meet death by the most insidious tortures. Yet perhaps if they understand that their women are in our hands and being chastised and degraded so they can no longer feel themselves so superior to us, whose history is far more ancient and honorable than theirs ever will be, they will begin to understand the magnitude of our illustrious Hsu Hsi's regime."
Yet, to add to the terror of the captives whom we have already seen seized by the Boxers and sent on to Hanchow, there was to be agonizing delay and long weeks spent in the dungeons of the mandarin's palace. For on the Monday following the capture of such beauties as Lida Garconniere and Jane Evans, further word came from Duke Lan urging Li Woo to suspend judgment for some weeks. For at first the battle had gone well for the Boxers, and it seems that they would carry all before them, except of course for the fortress which was still under siege. Yet the shrewd warlord understood that if, by some unfortunate whim of the gods, the cause of the Boxers should diminish in glory and be threatened with disaster, it would be wiser to have these hostages still unharmed so that he might treat with the diplomats of the accursed foreigners and obtain better terms for his own captured soldiers.
And thus it was that a full month went by while these unfortunate women from Peking and the provinces languished in the dark cells beneath the floor of the palace of Li Woo. Their pleas to their jailers for news, for at least some word as to when they would be brought before the mandarin, were ignored. Stolidly, the matrons attached to Li Woo's household, together with several soldiers from the Imperial Army stationed in Hanchow, brought them their meager food and often blackish water, their faces cold and hostile, without a word. And as Jane Evans herself said during the fourth week of her captivity to the weeping Lida with whom she had been quartered in the same narrow, dark and fetid cell, "At least if they'd only tell us what's going to happen, or when, we could endure it. But this waiting will drive us mad."
On the morning of the eighteenth day of the sixth month in the Year of the Fox, the news from Peking and Kansu was hardly joyous to the Boxers and to the illustrious mandarin of Hanchow. The soldiers of the foreign nations still held fast in their fortress against the Boxers. Soldiers from the German and French military camps at Lo Chin, at the very entry of the province of Kansu, had already crushed the attackers there and controlled almost the entire region.
And what was worst of all, the fabulous legend that the Boxers were invincible was beginning to be questioned by the lowliest of peasants who had been crying out for vengeance against the foreign oppressors. On the street facing the fortress in Peking, many men with shaven heads and white robes lay sprawled, their deaths caused by bullets from the guns of the white devils. Had the mighty Duke Lan lied then, the superstitious peasants asked one another.
Yet Hanchow was still safe from attack, for it was accessible to the enemy only after climbing a range of tortuously steep hills, and the soldiers of the Imperial Army as well as the Boxer troops stationed under Li Woo's command were ready to repel any invader. And so the great power of the Dowager Empress could still flourish as in olden times. Thus it was that on this June morning when the sun shone, the darkest hours of all were to begin for the luckless females incarcerated beneath the floor of Li Woo's palace...
His courtroom was even larger than his enormous banquet chamber. And the intricately tiled floor was fabricated on two levels, so that one end formed the dais. On it, Li Woo sat tailor-fashion at the tribunal table, seated majestically upon brocaded cushions. To his left was the venerable Jong Ma, a colonel in the Boxer army, who commanded the main garrison of the citadel of Hanchow. To his right was the old peddler Guey Wong, and beside the latter,' a long-time friend of the mandarin, the lean, wealthy merchant from Wosan, Fa Joe.
At the back of this enormous chamber and on its lower level, uniformed guards were posted, armed with spears or curved swords. But these guards were regulars in the Chinese Army, whose presence was part of the elaborate protocol which the mandarin had set forth to surround this "trial" with an official status. In this way, the shrewd and sadistic Li Woo assured himself that the representatives of these accursed foreign devils would have no reason to decry total lawlessness or barbarism in the disposition he would make of those brought before him "to seek true justice according to their just due." And those soldiers were there also at the cunning suggestion of crafty Prince Tuan, for they would act as official observers for Tsu Hsi and thus enforce her edict, which had been given to Duke Lan himself, that no hostage was to incur the death penalty...
Beyond the low table of the tribunal over which Li Woo presided, a smoking brazier stood, with several branding irons thrust into it. Just beyond, was a rectangular wooden bench on which lay a curious whip. Its handle was not more than six inches long, made of heavy, doubled and tightly sewn ox hide; but the thongingeniously affixed to it was twenty-four inches in length, some three-eights of an inch wide and almost a quarter of an inch thick. Most singular of all, the last four inches of this remarkable flagellatory implement were tapered into a width of about a quarter of an inch and ended in a heavily knotted tip. The thong was grayish-white in color, and it looked singularly soft, with hardly any punitive quality to its caress.
Kneeling at the edge of the dais were Li Woo's two female torturesses and executioners, both of whom had burned incense before the shrine of the Goddess Kuan Yin, the patroness of Chinese justice. They had recalled to each other this glorious morning how their beloved and mighty master Li Woo had saved them from ignominious death and elevated them to such rank as they now held this day, a day when they would show to the nobles and the soldiers assembled here theiringenious skills in punishing the sorceresses who had sinned against Mother China. Soo Fa and Ma Loo knelt facing the mandarin, clad in sleeveless red and yellow robes, arms folded across their bosoms and their heads bowed towards him in humility and obeisance. But their eyes sparkled with pride and anticipation, for they knew that in the audience on the lower level, were shopkeepers, minor officials of Hanchow, wealthy merchants, and Buddhist priests who had angrily decried the rising of the hated Christian faith in their diocese.
A death-like silence had fallen now over this huge courtroom as all understood that the moment was at hand. Li Woo, conscious of his powers and gloating over them as much as did his two sadistic female enforcers, intoned in a ready voice, a prayer in honor of Tsu Hsi. Then he went on: "What a great honor as mandarin and first magistrate of the Celestial One in this, her Imperial City of Hanchow, I have to signal to you and how unworthy I am of this exalted task. Now, on this very hour of never-to-be forgotten day in the sixth moon of the Year of the Fox, I pronounce the opening of the trial of those foreign devils who have bewitched and betrayed our good, illustrious and humble people, who have subjected them to the insolent and cruel tyrannies of soldiers bearing arms against our beloved nation, who have cheated them in the market places and corrupted their very souls in the name of that blasphemous religion which I will not signify by uttering its name. And so, to all of you, I bid welcome in accordance with the will of the divine Tsu Hsi and of the great Prince Tuan, and I announce that this tribunal is now open to hear the cases of those malfeasants and malefactors who shall appear before you, stripped of all their pride and their arrogance, just as verily, their raiment shall be stripped from their pampered flesh to taste the justice of those against they have so grievously sinned!"
He eyed Guey Wong, who nodded excitedly, clasped his hands in an attitude of prayerful joy; and the smile on his cruel, moist full lips deepened in appreciation. Clearing his throat, he went on: "Let it be said at once that justice and mercy will vie with each other, yet it will be Chinese justice and Chinese mercy, in no way akin to the hypocritical and sanctimonious laws which these foreign devils have us enact. I hereby invoke the ancient god of wrath and I summon up before you the imperishable memories of our most ancient dynasties when I declare that in this court and before me, punishment must befit the crimes of the culprits. Those of you who are here to attend, I beg of you to watch in silence and to observe with respect how sentences are carried out upon all criminals who shall be adjudged guilty by our tribunal."
A murmur of anticipation came from the gathered throng, on the lower level of this enormous courtroom. Li Woo smiled again, glancing at his old friend, and then, his face solemn and his voice harsh, went on: "Our first case will be a simple one, as is our tradition. You will hear and see a young white harlot who, according to that information which has been furnished to us, has herself perhaps committed no crime against China. Yet since she is the spawn of a white devil who has helped to make crafty and villainous treaties that would deliver all of us into the power of these foreigners, she is as guilty as her father before the law. Therefore, I say that her punishment shall inspire atonement as well as the divine spirit of humility, wherefrom it is hoped that she will inform us freely and without equivocation of all those heinous crimes which she knew her father was devising against Tsu Hsi. I now call for her to be brought forth!" And with this, he clapped his fat hands thrice.
Far to his right, and on the lower level, a silken drapery hid a doorway, a drapery on which had been sewn the symbols of the Dragon, the Fox, and of the Clenched Fist as well. It was now drawn aside by one of the uniformed soldiers, and the door on the other side was opened by a Boxer officer to permit the first captive to face her vindictive judge.
A third Chinese woman, Kee Ming, dressed in a robe of black and red, entered first, leading Lida Garconniere. The exquisite honey-haired French girl stumbled forward on a leash, which fitted to a ring in a leather collar round her neck. Her wrists were bound behind her back with rawhide thongs, and her hair was disheveled. She wore a white muslin dress, quite new and strange to see after the long weeks of her captivity in the underground cell. But the fact was that Li Woo's cunning sadism explained this attractive dress, which she might have worn for a social function; on his order, all white females lodged in his dungeons were to be given clean new attire such as their kind normally wore. Thus, when they brought before him and stripped for punishment, their humiliation would be all the greater!
Li Woo contemplated the shuddering young French blonde with glittering eyes. Two nights before, he had paid a stealthy visit to the dungeons of the subterranean vaults of his dwelling, peeping through hidden little panels in the doors of each cell in order to inspect his intended victims and savor in advance their intoxicating physical charms. In this appraisal, he had already secretly marked Lida as his future concubine. The heart-shaped, exquisite modeling of her face, with her large dark-blue eyes now filled with tears and piteously anguished, the tremulous quality of her mouth and the milky pallor of her bare skin, ignited his bestial lusts as he now sat in judgment upon her, knowing exactly what he was going to order for her chastisement, gloating over his unchallenged powers over not only her but also all of the others who awaited their own moment before the tribunal.
It was true that she, like all the others, were officially hostages to be held under the sacred order of Tsu Hsi herself; and yet there had been no stipulation and there was no law, that Lida and the others should not serve his own ferocious rut so long as she and the others did not perish. And because his first critical consideration of all these frightened young women and girls had marked her with a particular relish, he had already decided that she should be the first to endure his "Chinese justice" so that her magnificent body might be exposed before his admiring eyes as a prelude to his eventual and far more prolonged possession of her white flesh.
"Sorceress," he intoned, "you stand before us charged with having treasonable knowledge of your father's plot against the mighty Empire of China and Tsu Hsi herself. How do you plead to this charge?"
He prided himself on being learned; besides several dialects of Chinese, Li Woo spoke English, French, a little German and Dutch, and had some acquaintance with Spanish and Italian as well. Because of this, Tsu Hsi had selected him as her magistrate, since he could better interpret and comprehend the defenses which these accursed foreign devils would bring before their judges.
Lida Garconniere trembled. Her frightened eyes stared at all of the men before her, the gray-haired old peddler, the Boxer officer, the prosperous merchant, and finally, the terrifyingly cruel and salaciously menacing face of Li Woo himself.
Since he had spoken to her in English, she replied in that tongue: "I I've done nothing! My father is assistant to the French Consul in Peking, and I know that he wanted no war with the Chinese. You have no right to imprison us, my mother and me. We've heard nothing from Peking."
"It is my humane compassion which permits me to enlighten your ignorance, you young sorceress," the mandarin retorted. "Your father is dead, so at least his treason against China has been avenged. But this does not absolve you of your own guilt. Tell us now, I order you in the name of her Celestial Majesty what you know of the treaties and the secret messages which your father must surely have composed for the destruction of our glorious nation!"
"That is a lie! I know nothing, my father served his country, and better than you serve yours, you cruel, hateful man!" Lida Garconniere cried out indignantly. Tears ran down her cheeks,-for the news of her father's death had stunned her, news that seemed like a nightmare.
But her brave defiance, motivated by the agony of this dreadful news, was rash indeed, for it defied not only the justice of the Dowager Empress whose agent the mandarin was in symbol of this tribunal but what was worse, it rendered personal insult to the mandarin himself. Sucking in his breath with ill-concealed fury, Li Woo controlled himself with a visible effort. In a severe voice, his eyes seeking out the spectators and ignoring the trembling blonde, he declared, "It was the blessed custom during our ancient and glorious Ming Dynasty to put the question to the offender who refused to speak truth. And so now I invoke the ancient laws, and I sentence this unreasonable and irascible white sorceress to the bench of exquisite captivity. Acquaint her with it at once!"
Kee Ming laughed softly and nodded. Tugging at the leash, she forced the frightened honey-haired captive to stumble behind her and marched her towards the low bench before which Soo Fa and Ma Loo already waited, having hastened to it the moment they had heard their revered master pronounce this cruelly euphemistic phrase. Then she turned and swiftly removed the leather collar from Lida's neck, while the other two Chinese women swiftly and expertly stripped her of the muslin dress, her petticoat and camisole.
This was not done without frantic cries of shame and protest, as Lida twisted and jerked in her captors' grasp. She denounced them, as she did the mandarin and she threatened the latter with the reprisal of her own native land. To this Li Woo made a furious gesture, and Soo Fa and Ma Loo again seized her while she tried to huddle herself, clad now only in white batiste drawers, gray lisle stockings and shoes, her sumptuously round young titties with their dusky coral buds panting in her terror and shame before all those hateful, alien eyes.
Now the two capable Chinese torturesses ripped off her batiste drawers. Even as she shrieked and clapped one hand over her furry cunt, they crouched at her feet and yanked off shoes and stockings till at last, she stood naked before the entire court.
"Is she to have a mere whipping, then?" Guey Wong whispered in apparent disappointment.
"Ah, good old friend, your ears are not so sharp as when we caroused in our youth together," Li Woo smilingly reproved him. "Much more than a mere whipping, be very certain. Did you not hear me say that she should taste the bench of exquisite captivity? Watch. No bonds will hold her when she receives the lash. Moreover, it will not be the bamboo rod nor the leather thong, but instead the delightful tickling of the eel skin upon that magnificent bottom and those lithe, firm white thighs! Ah, Guey Wong, watch and see how it used to be in the old days when China ruled the world in wisdom and in justice!"
Soo Fa and Ma Loo again seized the sobbing honey-haired victim, forced her to the bench and turned her so that she faced the lower level of the courtroom, while her bottom and back were exposed to the full view of the intent tribunal. Soo Fa forced Lida flat on her belly on the bench, then crouched near her head and shoulders while Ma Loo knelt on the other side about at the level of the girl's waist. Both of them seemed to be sliding their hands under her body, and the old peddler leaned forward, a puzzled look on his face, to follow the proceedings. Suddenly there was a shrill scream from Lida, and her lusciously rounded milky bottom-cheeks clenched together in a violent and convulsive spasm. Her head rose, her dark-blue eyes blurred with tears. And she seemed to be shuddering as the two women rose, Ma Loo untying Lida's wrists. Indeed, she seemed to he upon the bench and to be tied to it in no way.
Kee Ming seized the eel skin whip, and now returned to the bench, to take her place at Lida's left. She turned and bowed towards Li Woo and waited the sign.
Again the room fell deathly silent as the superb honey-haired French girl found herself free of pinions. Cautiously she placed her palms against the edges of the bench as if to lift herself. Then her eyes again widened in inexpressible horror and as she raised her head, her lips parted in a sobbing cry: "Ohh, mon Dieu, oh mon Dieu, oh no, oh no! It's too horrible ayez pitie!"
She looked back over her left shoulder at the tribunal. Tears glittered in those exorbitant eyes, and the delicate wings of her nostrils flared and shrank agitatedly. The old peddler stared at her superb naked body, devouring her as if he could never get enough of that milky-white skin.
Li Woo turned to stare at his old friend, then chuckled, and he raised his right hand. Kee Ming drew a deep breath, her lips forming a vicious smile. Slowly she raised the heavy leather handle of that curious whip, held it aloft in the air an atrociously long moment, and then swept it down across the top of Lida's naked hips.
The effect was electrifying! Lida started convulsively as the gray-white end of the whip adhered to the upper curves of both bottom-globes. Then her hands clawed the air, her head flung back, and a frenzied shriek resounded through the courtroom: "Ohh, it hurts me! Have mercy on me, I've done nothing, I'm not guilty of any wrong oh why do you torture me this way?" her little toes clawing and curling and clenching incessantly. And yet on the white expanse of that magnificent posterior, there was not the least sign of any mark. Already the Chinese torturess was slowly raising her arm for the second stroke.
Lida now tensed her muscles, tightening the cheeks of her bottom with all her might. Lo, shuddering flexions ran up and down her thighs and calves; her shoulders jerked, her arms stretched out ahead of her and her fingernails probed into the hard wood of the low bench. She seemed at once to be steeling herself for an ordeal that was virtually beyond her power to endure.
Then at last Kee Ming's arm slashed down and the thong danced over the tensing hemispheres of Lida's bottom, perhaps an inch below the tender flesh where that lash had kissed. The wicked eel skin clung to Lida's bare bottom with a lascivious and greedy caress; once again the flogged young victim's body trembled in violent, spasmodic tremors. All her limbs were in play, and most of all were the muscles of her bottom. These tightened and relaxed, only to tighten again in erratic tempo. Once again Lida started under the whiplash as the gray-white thong clung to her milky bottom with a prolonged and vicious kiss; once again her face was contorted with unspeakable torture, and her eyes glazed with new tears to follow those already streaming down her flushed, contorted cheeks. Her cry was poignant, harassed: "Ohh, mon Dieu, I can't bear such pain! Tuez-moi, tuez-moi, I'm innocent, I swear before le bon Dieu that I've done no harm to any of you kill me now, end such suffering!"
"How talkative this young sorceress is," the old peddler murmured to the mandarin. "But I can't understand it. Kee Ming has applied the full strength of her arm, and yet I do not see a single mark on that magnificent white flesh. How is it that this sorceress does not throw herself off the bench under those furious blows?"
"For the very excellent reason, admired friend of my boyhood," Li Woo smilingly explained, "that tiny wooden vises set into the surface of the bench have been clamped to the lips of her cunt and to the buds of her sensitive nipples. Hence should she try to leave her position of serene repose, I fear she would injure herself quite seriously. But then you ask about the absence of marks left by the lash well, here we have the unusual advantage of employing the eel skin. Thus one can flog an obstinate culprit for a long while, yet without tearing the flesh or shedding blood, which is always unesthetic. Oh to be sure, eventually you'll see swellings, but not once will you find streaks or the dark gashes which are left by the bamboo or the leather whip."
"Oh, what imagination, what genius! Truly, Li Woo, you have surpassed yourself!"
"But this is nothing," Li Woo modestly retorted, lowering his eyes to show that the compliment, while appreciated, was not yet fully deserved. "Before we finish with all these accursed sorceresses, you'll see far more ingenious chastisements for their sinfulness and their impiety."
While this dialogue went on, the Chinese torturess continued to apply the eel skin to Lida's naked bottom-cheeks with cadenced and methodical regularity. The whip rose high in the air, was suspended, for a terrible suspense-ridden moment, then swept down to attack precisely the place which Kee Ming had chosen. She employed this novel whip in a constant downward progression. Covering the entire bottom from the slopes of Lida's hips to the tops of the young girl's thighs, with about a thirty-second interval between each stroke, she seemed to strike a new place, one not yet touched, each time.
Shrieking, then sobbing wildly and unable to catch her breath, the unfortunate French girl clawed her own palms with her fingernails, dug her wriggling toes into the whipping bench. Her face turned restlessly from side to side as she tried futilely to find a less agonizingly vulnerable position in which to offer her bottom to the suctioning embrace of the eel skin thong.
Lida's screams were deafening now as Kee Ming stopped after the twentieth stroke and paused to await further orders from Li Woo.
"Will you speak at last, you stubborn harlot?" the mandarin exasperatedly demanded. "Confess your sins, throw yourself upon the mercy of this august court, and I shall end the thrashing."
"Ohh pitie, le bon Dieu knows I have never heard of any plots! Oh my poor father you cannot speak for me or yourself, but you loved only France and you could not have wished war
oh pity, the pain is too much, my poor fesses are cut to pieces!"
"Your howling does not move this court," the mandarin sarcastically replied. "And I see no stripes and no blood on that fat bottom of yours. You may proceed, Kee Ming, but this time, administer the stripes first vertically, and then horizontally. By crisscrossing the lashes, we should be able to induce this obstinate slut to speak truthfully in front of her betters!"
"Oh not that infernal whip again ohh, Dieu me protege I cannot aiieeoouuyeoww!! ! "
The heartbreaking supplications of poor Lida were again interrupted by the hissing smack of the eel skin as the torturess sent the whip directly down the middle of Lida's left bottomglobe. The girl's posterior weaved from side to side, inflicting an atrocious agony in the tenderest part of her body (which of course, could not be seen because of her position on the whipping bench, since the tiny wooden vises fixing to the lips of her cunt were entirely hidden even from the torturess). Her head flung back again and again, her tear-blinded eyes fixed on the ceiling, her fingers dug and scraped at the bench, and her toes rubbed into the rough wood.
Now a new slash of the eel skin clung across the base of Lida's upstandingly rounded milky behind.
"Oh what a superb spectacle! How grateful I am to you for it, dear old friend!" the old peddler was beside himself. He licked his trembling lips, his eyes glittered with pleasure. "See how that big bottom of hers leaps up when the whip falls, although while it is still in the air descending, she tries to wriggle it as if to hide it from the eel skin. Oh, I must give that dear woman who wields the eels kin a piece of silver for this sublime treat! And to you, Li Woo, I lift this cup of wine to toast your genius!"
Another lash striped the right buttock vertically, and then the following stroke fell across both jerking, shuddering nether hillocks. Lida's shrieks were piercing, wordless. Her face was bathed in tears, her knees clattered on the bench, the muscles of her thighs and bottom jerked and twitched uncontrollably as if she had been seized with ague.
"So you will not speak the truth yet, you obstinate, wicked harlot?" the mandarin angrily harangued her. "Soo Fa, Ma Loo, each of you grasp one of that harlot's buttocks and draw them apart so that the whip may visit the tender groove between those fat posterior globes of hers!"
But this command had been spoken in Chinese and Lida did not understand it. Yet when she felt the two Chinese women prying open the swollen, throbbing cheeks of her bottom, she tried with all her might to clench them together. "Not there!" she wailed piteously, "I'm innocent oh, man Dieu, I'm only a girl, how could I harm any of you have mercy have mercy and I will . ... "
But at that instant with a deft flick of her wrist, Kee Ming darted the tip of the eel skin against the tender puckering orifice of Lida Garconniere's ass-hole.
Frenzied with pain, the unfortunate victim nearly wrenched her nipples loose from the invisible unyielding vises. Her palms braced against the bench, she seemed almost to lift her swelling titties from their hidden pinions. Then a raucous, prolonged yell was torn from her. Her bottom jerked and writhed as she kicked her bare feet up and down against the bench: "Aah, aah, ohh, I'll confess anything, if only you'll stop! Oh, je meurs it tears me to pieces, oh I'm a poor helpless girl, I cannot stand this inhuman suffering I confess, I confess anything!"
"To your father's part, then, in the conspiracy with other foreign devils who hoped to bring about the destruction of China?" Li Woo demanded in English. But at the same moment, he made a secret sign to the torturess with the whip. Her two colleagues at once obscenely yawned apart Lida's buttocks, and for the second time the infernally knotted tip of the eel skin thong smacked into the French girl's swollen ass-hole.
"Aiieeowahrr!! ! I confess I confess to everything I'm guilty yes, my father too oh kill me now, quickly, but not that pain again, oh God, I can't stand it, kill me, that's too much!"
The bench clattered as Lida's martyred body jerked and writhed upon it. And the old peddler, his hands secretly hidden under his robe, fondling his prick throughout this magnificent flogging, now uttered a sobbing groan and ground his teeth as orgasm stickied his palm with his own bubbling spunk.
"Let the sorceress be taken to my private chamber, and have the physician attend her. I shall interrogate her later and obtain the full confession," Li Woo decreed.
Soo Fa and Ma Loo released the half-fainting girl, their hands slipping under her sweat-drenched body to loosen the infernal little vises. This done, they dragged her to her feet by the wrists, her head slumped down, her hair streaming over her congested, tear-wet face, and turned her this way and that so that all might see the lividly swollen nipple buds and the raw-looking lips of her vulva. Then, at Li Woo's abrupt sign, they dragged her, moaning and whimpering, through the door whence she had been brought.
To the mandarin's own bed chamber they brought her, laying her on her belly upon the huge, perfumed, silk-sheeted bed. Binding her wrists and ankles with silken cords, they made these fast to metal rings set into the teakwood head and footboards of that lecherous bed, thrusting first a pillow under her loins to elevate her burning bottom. The woman who had whipped her so diabolically now brought a special salve to rub over that unmarked posterior, and all three mockingly promised her a night far warmer than the recent hour, and then they went out, leaving Lida Garconniere to moan and sob and to pray aloud for death, little suspecting what even more dreadful ordeals awaited her tender young body.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
"Oh master of sublime justice, genius of castigatory improvisation, what delicious spectacle comes next before this tribunal?" Guey Wong pantingly begged his august friend, the lordly Mandarin of Hanchow. "This time, old friend, we shall punish at the same time two wicked foreign sorceresses who, from the information I have received from a worthy officer of the Boxers who was employed in their household, were guilty of no treasonable crime against Her Celestial Majesty, but who have sinned in the most abominably depraved manner. Their turpitude is therefore a crime against the morality of our great, ancient, and honorable land, and it must be made known to these worthy spectators so that our ancient laws still stand unchallenged by such wicked evasions by these accursed white devils!" the fat Mandarin sententiously declared.
Clapping his hands, he now ordered Soo Fa and Ma Loo to have brought before him Nadia Kaplinski and her buxom aunt Katerina Ourosoff, as well as their accuser, Lieutenant Peng Chu, once that solemn and taciturn steward who had served the portly Russian Consul Piotor Vorshiof and who had spied upon their Lesbian love of lash and lust!
Katerina and Nadia, though their wrists were bound behind them and each was led in by a leash attached to a tight leather collar-just as Lida had been previously summoned to appear before the tribunal-did not appear to be too greatly distraught. From time to time Katerina glanced at her niece and gave her a tender smile. as if to tell her to have courage and that soon this insignificant moment would pass. But both of them had reckoned without the fiendish cruelty of Li Woo, whose power to administer the justice of Tsu Hsi furnished him uninhibited opportunities to satisfy his own insatiable hunger for tortured naked female flesh. The wheat-hued hair of Katerina Ourosoff was formed in an upswept pompadour, which made her buxom figure all the more imposing. She had been clad in a red satin evening gown, leaving her shoulders and arms bare in all their ivory pale splendor. The piquant contrast of her extremely light blonde hair with an almost brunette-like skin tint, together with her voluptuous curves of bosom and bottom and thighs, caused a murmur of lecherous admiration to rise from the avid spectators, as well as from the old peddler who again leaned forward to squint at them with glittering eyes.
Nadia, clad in a dainty pink muslin frock, her golden hair tumbling just below her shoulders, was equally appealing.
Li Woo studied the two women, and then made a sign. There rose the crash of a gong, and once again the little door to his right opened, the door whence had come these first three victims of Boxer cruelty. Dressed in the white robes of the Society of Clenched Fists, and with the yellow circle over his left breast, came the tall, grave-faced Peng Chu.
"A thousand thanks, good Lieutenant," Li Woo obsequiously greeted the former steward of the Vorshilo household, "for the valorous deeds you and your brave men have achieved on behalf of our beloved land! Twice blessed are you, not only for leading them on to victories which will drive all these white devils from our soil, but for giving up the glorious chance to wet your sword in their offending blood, that you may stand as the accuser of these two sorceresses now before us!"
Nadia and Katerina exchanged a frightened look. Peng Chu bowed low to the mandarin, then turned so that he could address the entire courtroom: "Sons of China, defenders of her honor and her glory, hear me! Before our immortal Empress deigned to have me summoned to serve her as a soldier, I was employed in the household of the Russian consul, whose cousin that older sorceress is, and so had occasion to observe her and the yellow-haired girl who is her niece. Upon the graves of my ancestors, I accuse them both of filthy and unnatural lusts, lying together naked in their harlots' bed, imitating the sex of the man and corrupting it into an illicit and forbidden pandering among themselves!"
There were the sounds of gasps and of muttered oaths, "Punish them, kill them, flay them, let them be given to the cage of rats for their shamelessness!"
But Li Woo lifted his hand, then nodded to Peng Chu to continue, and the Boxer lieutenant resumed: "In all justice, I cannot condemn them for treason, for they did no harm to me, or to the little housemaid whom I befriended, nor to any of the merchants or the people. They had no thought-indeed, their shallow minds are those of harlots, and so capable of no scheming plots-of the tyrannies which their nation, like all those nations of the foreign devils who have come to our land to steal it from us, visited upon us. So I do not charge them with conspiracy against the Empire. I ask only, noble Mandarin of Hanchow," this as he turned back to Li Woo and bowed his head, "that you punish them severely for their depravities.
"It shall be as you desire, good Peng Chu," Li Woo decreed. While they had listened to Peng Chu's declaration, Nadia and Katerina had gasped aloud in shamed surprise, then constantly exchanged ever more fearful glances, their faces flaming. What most agonized them at this very moment, even at the moment of condemnation, was that Peng Chu had spied on them and actually seen them caress and girl-fuck. Overwrought, they both began to sob and to bow their heads, and Li Woo chuckled: "You see, good people of China? Already these wicked sorceresses know their guilt and are penitent. But they are ignoble bitches, whose bodies fear the male and so contrive to cheat him of their womanhood. It is therefore only just that they be furnished canine husbands, who will rudely and quickly acquaint them with what they tried so cunningly to escape. And since their new mates are animals, the punishment is fitting because they do not deserve the worthiness of good Chinese kurdus!"
The last word was the Chinese equivalent of "prick," and jeering laughter applauded the mandarin's cruel jest. Dazed, not yet quite comprehending what was in store for them, Katerina and Nadia stared at each other again, each trying to take some pitiful courage from the other.
The mandarin clapped his hands, and two soldiers came forward, pushing curious little carts before them. But they were more ingenious than this; there was a heavy wooden top about the height of a man's waist, and a bottom section some three feet below; four round wooden shafts connected to both top and bottom panels, and there were four round wooden wheels at the very end of these shafts, just below the baseboard section.
One end was completely open, but the other was closed by a vertical board designed like old-fashioned stocks: a hole in the middle for the victim's neck, and two smaller holes for the wrists. At Li Woo's sign, both women were, stripped naked except for their batiste drawers, fine clockwork stockings with flouncy garters, and pumps, and forced to kneel down and extend their necks and wrists through the yoke-holes made in the panel which they faced. This was two-sectioned, and when it was closed, they were imprisoned as in the old-fashioned punishment stocks. Their knees were corded tightly and the ends of the cords made fast to the posts at each side. Their bottoms were thus projected upwards and, since their knees were straddled a good yard apart, the cheeks were distended and tightly strained against the thin batiste covering.
They faced each other, so that Katerina's more spacious, mature bottom was turned towards the spectators, while Li Woo feasted his eyes on Nadia Kaplinski's appetizingly rounded, deeply cleft bottom-cheeks.
"Now," the mandarin instructed, "since the older sorceress undoubtedly corrupted her younger niece, her punishment shall begin first. And since her bottom is the more spacious and offers greater terrain for fustigation, let Soo Fa apply forty strokes with the bull pizzle."
"On the naked flesh?" Guey Wong hoarsely whispered to this friend, again licking his lips in avid anticipation.
"I have a better idea, friend of my youth," the mandarin chuckled. 'These sorceresses would have us believe that because they avoid the honest lusts of men, they are chaste. Well, we shall let them keep the last veil of modesty, but their rumps shall be doused with cold water so that the pizzle and the bamboo, which Ma Loo shall administer twenty times to the posterior of the younger sorceress, may tickle the more pleasantly even through that veil of chastity!"
Naked to the waist, Katerina and Nadia groaned and sobbed aloud, their necks and wrists chafed by the cruelly tight pressure of the stocks. They had not been tied in any other way except at their knees, so they could lower their torsos this way and that under the flogging.
The air was filled with tension as they awaited their fate.
And in this position, they stared with fear at each other, and by stretching out her slim fingers, Nadia could almost touch those of her beautiful buxom aunt. "Oh, I am so afraid, Auntie Katerina!" the golden-haired young beauty moaned.
"Have courage, have courage, galupchik. I told you it would only be a whipping. Do not think about it. And they are letting us keep our drawers, so those heathen beasts will not see our private parts."
"But that dreadful man spoke of canine husbands-" Nadia anxiously stammered.
"To frighten us and to mock us. Peng Chu knows that we are not wed, so they insult us. It is only their heathen way of talking, nothing else," Katerina Ourosoff delectatingly explained.
Then she shuddered and called out, "Oh my God!" as she suddenly felt the douse of a pail of cold water dashed upon her bottom, trickling down her thighs, soaking the batiste drawers and making them cling immodestly to the jutting prominence of her opulent posterior. She tried to close her thighs, but the cords at her knees denied her this modest gesture. And she hi the obscene catcalls and the derisive, viciously menacing exhortations of the spectators. Then she saw Nadia's lovely eyes dilate, saw Nadia's soft red mouth gape in a piteous cry as the other torturess laved Nadia's bottom with her pail of cold water.
Meanwhile, the third torturess, Kee Ming, who had flogged Lida so expertly with the eel skin, now approached with a lacquered, wide tray on which were placed the two implements of fustigation ordered by the mandarin. One was a bamboo rod two and a half feet long, with a sturdy handle. The end of it had been cut lengthwise so that only half the original thickness was left, and then the remaining half had been split right down the middle to form two thin, flexible, stinging withes. The pizzle, made of a nerve taken from a young bull, dried, and then stretched in vinegar and oil, formed a whip about two feet long which was attached to a heavy, short wooden handle. It was tough and yet supple, and it had the bite of an adder; it could draw blood at the very first lash if it were clumsily wielded. But in the hand of such a torturess as either of these women whom the mandarin had reprieved from horrible death, it could inflame the skin and the nerves until the victim went almost mad with agony, yet without breaking the finest-grained female skin while at the same time sending excruciating nervous shocks and unspeakably burning pain throughout her entire body!
If Li Woo had commanded the punishment of the older woman to take place first, it was purposely to drive the dagger of atrocious suspense and dread into the sensitive soul of the exquisite golden-haired Nadia. By lifting her head, she could just manage to see the Chinese torturess set down the tray on a nearby tabouret, and then grasp the handle of the bull pizzle and swing it about in the air over her aunt's bottom. Thisingenious cart-which as we shall see had been fabricated for the far more sinister purpose in view-hid Katerina's bottom from Nadia's eyes, since the horizontal top of the apparatus prevented such view. At the same time, the limited range in which Katerina Ourosoff's opulent bottomglobes were presented to the pizzle demanded of its wielder a great dexterity and skill.
Her feet planted well apart, the stocky Chinese woman studied the water-soaked batiste sheath which shaped out not only the hillocks but also the cleft of Katerina's posterior. Then came the hiss of the dreadful whip, which made the Russian widow stiffen as the pizzle rushed downward through the air to sweep across her tautened bottom globes just above the base.
She had never known such pain. Every nerve seemed to snap with exacerbation at that single burning slash which left a bright crimson streak across both jutting rotundities and plainly visible through the water-soaked batiste drawers.
It took all of Katerina's will power to keep from shrieking as her entire body vibrated from the shock of the lash. And then there was an atrociously long-drawn-out pause before the second stroke in order that the victim might feel the cumulative effects on her inflamed nerves, the real ordeal of this kind ofingenious and artful fustigation.
The woman who stood behind poor Nadia, bamboo already in hand, counted aloud the strokes, and Nadia began to weep in agonized compassion for her aunt. Her sobbing increased at each stroke, perhaps because Katerina Ourosoff had managed to suppress her cries-though stertorous moans escaped her each time the pizzle ripped the wet fabric of her drawers. Yet her convulsive movements, the frenzied fluxions of her thigh and bottom muscles, the sporadic tugging of her wrists against her narrow vising-yoke-holes, and most of all-and this Nadia could see with horror-the expression on her contorted, sweat and tear-stained face and the hugely dilated eyes, spoke eloquently of her supreme suffering.
Infuriated by the courageous widow's stoicism, the torturess lowered the sinuous black bull pizzle to the floor. Then as she stepped forward quickly, she flicked her wrist and sent it whisking up so that the last tapering inches of that fiendishly narrowed tip disappeared into the most intimate groove of all along which tender cunt and ass-hole were situated.
"Eeeyeearihheowwouu! Not there, not there, for the love of the Little Father and of dear God in Heaven!" Katerina Ourosoff's voice rose in a harrowing shriek. With almost demoniac strength, she yanked at her wrists, trying to arch her back, to close her straddled thighs and to shield her bottom by weaving it from side to side. But she was far too ingeniously pinioned, and all she could do was waggle her plump bottom in the most obscene way, to the joy of the spectators.
"Well done!" the mandarin approved. "Repeat that excellent stroke, so that the older sorceress will repent her filthiness, being rightly punished where she has most contumaciously sinned!"
Soo Fa smiled with delight and nodded differentially. Once again, lowering the whip to the floor, she took a short step forward and then leaped it up into the cleavage between Katerina Ourosoff's straddled thighs. The woman responded with a maddened scream, and the cart creaked as she flung herself with savage energy against her pinions: "Ohhahh! No more, of dear God, no more, have pity! It is inhuman to treat a woman that way! Pardon! Oh, give me mercy, such pain cannot be endured by any woman in the world!"
"You repent your wickedness, sorceress?" the andarin questioned, leaning forward. And once again, the gray-haired peddler, his face flushed, his lips wet and slavering, was fingering himself slyly under his silken robes.
"I do-oh, anything, please, mercy, in the name of God in the Highest! I repent, kill me, but not that again, oh do have pity, it is too much!" Katerina Ourosoff cried.
The drawers had been ripped and here and there one saw the darkening weals of the pizzle. But so expert had been Soo Fa's artistry that nowhere was the skin broken, though it threatened to break in many places, particularly over the ripest curves of the summits. And now as she laid down the whip on the tray folded her arms, it was the turn of her compatriot Ma Loo, who took her station behind poor sobbing Nadia, the bamboo rod quivering in the air as if impatient to strike.
And wth sadistic relish, the torturess lightly tapped the split ends of the rod against the very middle of poor Nadia's tightening bottomglobes. The old peddler licked his lips again, once more his hands sought his swollen organ. Then the bamboo hissed through the air and landed with an angry splatt across the upper curves of both compact globes. Nadia cried out, seeking pardon: "Oh no-aahrr-of, have pity-oh! Aunt, Aunt Katerina, it is worse, oh so much worse than when you thrashed me-oh it is going to tear me to pieces, I cannot stand it, I shall die!"
But poor Katerina Ourosoff, almost fainting, could scarcely console her golden-haired niece, for her own bottom blazed with a ferocity with waves and spasmodic tremors throughout her entire body as she sagged in the stock which had been fabricated in this most ingenious wooden cart.
Behind her, the woman who expertly called out the count of poor Nadia's sentence. Twenty strokes seemed a pittance compared with the torment which her aunt had had to endure; the wickedly supple double-forked switch mercilessly stung Nadia's hind quarters, and each thudding impact drew an hysterical cry together with contractions and grimaces of her exquisite, sweet face. Cheeks bathed in tears, her lips trembling uncontrollably, she fought for breath as she tried to speak after each outcry, to beg for mercy, to swear that she was innocent of any wrongdoing, to implore pardon from that fiery kiss which methodically thrashed her jutting bottom. It swerved, it bounded, it tried to flatten itself in any possible way, it squirmed in evasion under that infernal agony. Ma Loo applied the switch with exquisite precision and never touched the same place twice, thus augmenting poor Nadia's agony.
When the final stroke had been counted out, one could see small rips in the fabric of the wet batiste, under the entire garment, her soft pink skin was now uniformly fiery-red.
Again at the mandarin's sign, the two torturesses ripped off the wet, torn drawers, and revealed the two women, with Nadia crying out in shame, "Oh, Auntie Katerina, they've made me naked-oh I wart to die of shame-oh what are they going to do to me now? Oh, no, no more, my bottom is on fire, I can't stand it!"
At the same moment, a concerted gasp mingled astonishment and sadistic joy was heard from the audience as two soldiers entered from that same narrow doorway, pushing iron cages on wooden wheels ahead of them. Each contained a gray wolf-like dog, for these animals had been specially trained by Soo Fa to copulate with women. At the mandarin's order, she had used either concubines who had fallen out of favor with fat Li Woo or women convicted of crimes in the city of Hanchow and who, given the alternative of death by the thousand cuts or the slow garrote while being pinioned and naked in an iron cage divided into sections and into which starved rats had been admitted, willingly submitted themselves to this bestial experiment.
A cart was wheeled up behind each moaning, victim, and Soo Fa now squatted down beside the front of Katerina Ourosoff's cart and turned a wooden windlass which lowered the vertical stocks-like panel. Thus the victim was compelled to bend still more, consequenting arching up her streaked, livid bottom. At the same time, the Chinese torturess slipped a sturdy little wooden tripod under Katerina's belly, its top rounded and harshly abrasive, which forced the unfortunate woman's loins up still higher and accentuated the distention of her straddled thighs to give access to the gaping pink cavern of her cunt.
Ma Loo repeated the process with poor Nadia, who pitifully implored her to reveal what was to be done to her. "Yellow-haired sorceress," Ma Loo jeered, as she reached out and viciously pinched one of Nadia's dainty nipples till the girl's face twisted. "And now you will have fun! And since you are a bitch, you may well believe that we have found a proper mate for such a slut as you!"
This done, and while both women groaned and sobbed and begged for mercy, Soo Fa carefully slid up the front of the cage behind the unfortunate widow, seized the leather collar of the dog with her left hand and showed it a piece of raw meat in her right. Then, salaciously, she rubbed the meat against Katerina's Ourosoff's cunthole while the unfortunate woman writhed and jerked, crying out stridently, "Oh dear God, what is being done to me? Have mercy, have mercy, I have suffered too much already!"
Soo Fa now donned a coarse rubber glove and began to masturbate the dog until its red, bony organ jutted out in ferocious menace. Again she rubbed the meat against poor Katerina Ourosoff's cunthole, and then, showing the whining animal the piece of meat, dropped it into the pocket of her robe and prodded her gloved forefinger into the victim's yawning love-crevice.
It was a ritual which the animal had learned to comprehend after a long, arduous training in the dungeons of the Mandarin of Hanchow. For immediately it whined again, then gave a low growl and suddenly reared on its hind legs, its front paws raking Katerina Ourosoff's naked back. Horrified, the buxom widow jerked and wrenched at her bonds, and tried desperately to swerve her naked hips away from the frightful phallic spear which loomed behind her. But Soo Fa, seizing the dog's penis with her gloved hand, guided it into that pink slit, and with an excited whine, the wolf-like dog jerkily effected congress, thrusting that hideous probe deep into the tender vagina. Katerina Ourosoff stiffened, her eyes rolling in their sockets, and then her face took on a look of indescribable horror, disgust and fear as she shrieked: "Ahhrr, oh take it away-oh not that, kill me, kill me, it's horrible, ohh, it is ripping me-oh dear God, I have done nothing to deserve this!"
"You lie, wicked sorceress," the mandarin gloatingly answered her from his dais, "you deserve nothing else! And now let the young sorceress be equally converted!"
"Auntie, what are they doing to you? Oh, heavens, I'm so afraid-oh no-don't touch me there-aahhrreeoww!" Nadia's piteous entreaty rose into a frenzied shriek as Ma Loo began to rub the dainty pink lips as her colleague had done with the widow, introduced the other dog's turgescent ramrod into that yawning slit. As soon as the animal's paws scraped lovely Nadia's tender naked back, the young girl shrieked and twisted, her neck and wrists fighting the yokeholes of the stocks, her eyes bulging, demented, her mouth gaping in shriek upon shriek. For without more ado, her canine mate had crammed its bony appendage to the very hilt and had at once began the characteristically jerky, cohesive act of copulation as indeed it would with a bitch!
The first day had ended. It was night, and Li Woo, having first bathed and anointed with exquisite oils and scents, waddled into his bed-chamber where poor Lida still lay spread eagled on her belly, her well thrashed bottom uplifted by the pillows under her belly. The slaves had done their work well, and it was almost impossible to see at first glance how severely she had been flogged with the eel skin. She turned her face towards the door and when she saw Li Woo approach her, naked, his prick already swollen with desire, she began to shriek for her stepmother. Now she was like a little girl who yearned desperately for the protection of the parent and now it was too late. Gripping the excruciatingly sensitive cheeks of her bottom, the mandarin yawned them apart and pressed his cockhead against the shrinking cleft of her ass-hole. Lida's head rose, her eyes mad with shame, despair and agony, as he began to bugger her with brutal, rapid thrusts, heedless of her hysterical entreaties. For she was now the bondslave of the Mandarin and would be until Tsu Hsi herself ordained the release of all the hostages. No, she would not die, but before that order came, she would long for death with all her soul and all her shrinking, tortured flesh. ...
In other bed-chambers in this ornate palace, the unfortunate Russian victims commenced their degrading servitude to their captors. Tender golden-haired Nadia, hysterical from her ordeal on the combination whipping and dog-fucking apparatus, was taken to Fa Joe, the prosperous merchant from Wosan and there forced, with two Chinese matrons plying bamboo rods over her back and titties and thighs, to suck her pro tern master's cock and then to pillow her head on her arms at the foot of the bed and present her bottom for his rut. As he contemptuously explained, to the great amusement of the Chinese women who seized poor Nadia by the shoulders and held her down, "I will not drive my worthy blade into an opening reserved for this bitch's proper mate. But I will fuck her in the posture which her mate would adopt to remind her of her vileness." So saying, he proceeded to bugger the golden-haired captive, ruthlessly cramming his prick back and forth inside her exacerbated ass-hole while her shrieks rang out as piteously as they had in the courtroom earlier this dreadful day.
And in a nearby bed-chamber, the beautiful widow was similarly ravaged by the Boxer colonel who, to show his own imaginative sadism, her placed on her back with her knees pulled p against her panting titties, her wrists corded to her kneehollows, and while one Chinese matron gripped her naked calves to prevent her moving too much out of position, a second torturess, wearing horsehair gloves, pinched her nipples and rubbed her shuddering titties and belly and thighs while the virile officer kneeling before her, delved his elongated, swollen cock into the sensitive trough of her bumhole.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The second morning of the trials of the captive females before the cruel Mandarin of Hanchow attracted an even larger and more vociferous audience, for those who had thronged into the huge courtroom the day before were loud in their praises of Li Woo's ingenious and highly appropriate justice meted out to these white sorceresses.
Claudia was summoned first to appear before her vindictive and salacious judge, and she was led in with a leather collar around her neck, her wrists bound behind her back, exactly as all these victims of Chinese justice were to be presented. Her face was haggard, for she had spent a sleepless night. Not only had she been compelled to watch the eel skin flogging of her young stepdaughter, but she had learned of her husband's assassination by the Boxers. And morally, she had had to brood upon Lida's wanton conduct with their own Chinese houseboy. Her efforts as a mother had therefore failed, and now she had been brutally widowed. Now perhaps for the first time she could really give way to fear for herself, since there was nothing left of her little world except her own captive person, now in the hands of the ruthless and lustful Boxers!
Soo Fa and Ma Loo seized Claudia Garconniere by the shoulders and forced her down upon her knees before the sinister Mandarin. Her eyes widened with revulsion as she saw his fat lips curl in a lecherous smile, his eyes glittering with lust. And then she started, for kneeling to her left was the homely little housemaid Ma Sue who had been summoned to testify against both Lida and her stepmother.
"You, sorceress," Li Woo began, "consort of that traitorous French dog who delivered our beloved country up to the depredations of France's mercenaries who look upon our wise and ancient people as no better than barbarians, I now accuse before this tribunal of full knowledge of his wrongdoing. More, from the lips of your own housemaid who is here by my express order, you are accused of complicity in the harlotry of your stepdaughter whom we had chastised yesterday. Admit your guilt, confess your sins, and throw yourself on the mercy of this court!"
"I was the wife of a man your accursed Boxers killed without reason, for his only crime was that he loved his country as much as you love yours!" Claudia Garconniere said in a trembling but courageous voice. "And that girl lies if she has told you that I had any part of poor Lida's shameful behavior. If she saw so much, surely she must have seen that I whipped my stepdaughter for her impertinence and her flirtatiousness, and that I was often scolding her because she did not behave as a proper young lady and a daughter of so important a representative of France should feel obliged to do."
"Oh yes," Li Woo blandly retorted, his smile deepening, "Ma Sue has told us how you whipped the girl. But come now, admit freely that you took sport from it and that it pleased you, more than the thought of righteous chastisement."
"What are you saying? That is an abominable He!" Claudia Garconniere gasped, her face crimsoning.
At thirty-one, the widow of Albert Garconniere was superbly desirable. Five feet seven inches in height, her face an autocratic oval with the delicate features of a cameo, her forehead high-arching, her clear, large and widely spaced gray eyes, her cheeks slightly high set, her mouth firm and not over-ripe, her nose delicately aquiline, and with her auburn hair coiffed into a modish psyche-knot at the back of her head, she conveyed an aura of sophistication and arrogant beauty beneath which was the sensual ardor of a mature woman conscious of her physical and psychological aptitudes.
Li Woo's face was mottled with rage at this insult. "You dare accuse me, chief magistrate of Hanchow and under orders from Her Celestial Majesty, of being a liar? I should have you flayed alive for your temerity, or strung up by the toes and your naked body flogged with adders! But since you speak with so forked a tongue, you yourself have suggested to me your punishment. Prepare her!"
The two torturesses seized the unfortunate young widow and proceeded to rip off all of her clothes except her corset, her lisle hose and shoes, leaving her splendidly high-perched, firm and delectably rounded titties bare before the tribunal. Since she had never conceived a child, the aureoles were large and of a dark coral tint while her nipples, though ripe, were soft and of an exquisite pink shade. Her skin was marvelously tawny and smooth and sleek. Claudia turned scarlet with shame at this enforced disrobing, struggling with her tormentresses but to little avail because her hands had remained bound behind her back.
Then they dragged her to a heavy wooden pillory which had been set up before the dais, locking her wrists and neck as the two-sectioned headboard was clamped down and locked back into place. Then squatting, the two Chinese women corded her slim ankles and made them fast to stout wooden pegs driven into the floor, straddling her thighs enormously. After that, the corset was torn off amid the hooting and obscene encouragements of the eager spectators, and Claudia Garconniere groaned aloud and wept in her atrocious shame to be naked save for her stockings, her back turned to the bloodthirsty audience.
The third Chinese torturess now approached the scene, and stood in front of the pillory. With her left thumb and median finger, she forced apart Claudia's lips and in her right hand approached a curious kind of clothespin, made of springy bamboo with a tiny metal catch which allowed it to be opened or closed by the wielder. Deftly probing, she caught Claudia's tongue in this cruel contrivance, and her lips thinned viciously as she clamped shut. A howl of agony was heard from the victim, whose body jerked and writhed in the pillory, while her eyes bulged with unspeakable torment.
Her magnificent bottom, the cheeks big, spacious ovals and rather broadly set apart so that the shadowy furrow between the cheeks was, thanks to this exaggerated straddle of her legs, lewdly distended, twitched and shuddered as she fought against the pain and the yoke and pinions which held her fast and left her helplessly vulnerable to all the cruel arts of the torturesses.
"Sorceress, hear me well," Li Woo intoned as he leaned forward. "Before I absolve you of your guilt, you must learn the lesson of humility. When you are ready for it you have but to nod your head three times and your punishment will halt. Then I shall put you to the test of your newly found obedience. Now let the chastisement proceed as I have already ordered!"
Ma Loo and Soo Fa took up six-inch lengths of bamboo which had been whittled off a fresh rod into narrow, sharp-pointed prods. The third torturess also procured one of these simple but diabolically effective slivers and placed herself in front of the pillory. At a given sign, the three Chinese women began to prick Claudia Garconniere's naked body, the two behind her amusing themselves by gouging the deadly sharp tips of their prods into her calves, knee hollows, thighs and bottom-cheeks, while their more recently appointed colleague Kee Ming tortured poor Claudia's panting, shuddering titties.
Voiceless plaints and groans and sobs were wrested from the naked auburn-haired captive as this torment continued in the most leisurely way. The prods did not break the skin, but their constant digging scratched and inflamed the tender bare skin, made all her feminine nerves flower and tauten excruciatingly till each new touch of the bamboo splint made her jerk convulsively, weaving her naked hips, trying to clench her shuddering thighs, and wriggling this way and that in vain to escape the other woman's torture of her sensitive breasts and even the nipples which grew dark and puffed with the access of blood from the exacerbation.
Nevertheless, she held out valiantly, though the pinching of her tongue was constant and atrocious suffering, till at last Li Woo made another sign. The two women behind the auburn-haired victim now seized bunches of freshly cut nettles after first donning rubber gloves, as did the third torturess who faced the groaning, uncontrollably jerking naked captive. And all three of them began to switch her lightly with these deadly urticating blossoms, along the inner curves of her jutting bottom globes which led to that most sensitive cleft of all, over the hips and at the base of her posterior, as well as along the smoothly fleshed thighs and the bare calves having first rolled her stockings down to her ankles to give themselves still more terrain for the infliction of suffering. The woman in front of her stuck her bouquet against the sides of Claudia's titties, and then the inner curves, working them finally over to the pouting nipples. By the time that sensitive area was reached, Claudia's shrieks were inhuman and the pillory clattered and creaked as she frenziedly struggled to break free of the yoke.
"Still obstinate, sorceress?" the Mandarin gloatingly demanded. "Soo Far, rub the nettles well between her insolent, immodestly gaping legs and let us see if she will not come to terms and admit her wickedness!"
"At once, revered master," the Chinese torturess hissed with vindictive glee. Squatting down now, and pinching poor Claudia's bottom with left thumb and forefinger here and there where she saw the white blisters left by the nettles began to rise upon the tawny flesh, she passed her gloved right hand between the victim's hugely straddled thighs, though Claudia made the most superhuman efforts to clench her legs and thus defend her menaced tender cunt.
As the nettles brushed against the lips of Claudia's vulva, the auburn-haired victim uttered a frenzied, gurgling cry, her eyes rolling to the whites, and then her entire body convulsively twisting and jerked as her fingers clawed the air. She was seen to nod her head three times, and with her tear-blinded eyes to stare piteously at the Mandarin of Hanchow.
He gave another sign, and she was released. As she was forced down on her knees before him, Ma Loo sprang the little lock of the clothespin. Claudia Garconniere began to weep hysterically; rubbing her face with her hands, while she squirmed and wriggled on her knees because the burning torment of the nettles excoriated her in the most intimate regions of her womanhood.
"Come crawl before me and lick my feet in token of your humility, sorceress," the Mandarin ordered. And Claudia Garconniere, distraught from the indescribable torture that consumed her magnificently beautiful body, cast aside all pride and shame and ignominiously prostrated herself before him and, holding each foot in turn with her cuddling hands, frantically licked his toes.
She was taken to his bedchamber to await his dalliance with her in the night, and now it was the turn of Wilhelmina Preusser, the spinsterish secretary of the murdered German Consul who had been discovered by the Boxer soldiers at the very moment when Fritz Reimath had been about to make love to her.
When the two principal torturesses forced her down to her knees and when Li Woo ordered her on pain of serious punishment to reveal all she knew about the infamous treachery of the man she had served, Wilhelmina Preusser indignantly cried out, "How dare you judge so wonderful and kindly a man as Herr Reimath! You yellow beasts murdered him without cause! And I, a good German citizen, demand that you release me, or you will answer to the Kaiser himself!"
The audience gasped at this insulting defiance, and loud voices cried out for stringent punishment. But Li Woo chuckled and smiled, held up his hand, and then replied to the fuming mature brunette: "Sorceress, you too speak with a forked tongue. If you mourn your master, it was because he was about to make a woman of you. But since you call our noble and valiant Boxers yellow beasts, I will acquaint you with a true beast who will complete what your dead master could not finish!"
He clapped his hands, and then there was a cry of mingled horror and lustful anticipation from the spectators as, through that narrow door, two soldiers drew in an iron cage in which crouched a giant orangutan. "Yes, sorceress bitch," Li Woo snarled, "behold the man of the woods, the true beast of China! Lorchei longs for your embrace, and we shall not keep him waiting!"
Wilhelmina Preusser shrank back, her mouth gaping at the incredible sight. Then she shrieked and tried to rise, but Ma Loo and Soo Fa forced her to remain on her knees until the cage had been brought close to a rack in the middle of the upper level of the great courtroom. Its rectangular frame was about ten feet long, and as wide as the width of a human body. Actually, it was little more than a set of parallel bars and about waist height from the floor, but with a turning windlass at the head of each bar to allow for the traction of the victim's roped wrists and ankles. Wilhelmina Preusser was stripped naked and two soldiers helped lift her onto the bars, while Ma Loo and Soo Fa corded her wrists and ankles. Just under the bars was attached heavy cloth webbing to support her weight down as far as the small of her back, leaving her loins and legs free.
Suddenly the animal forced the bony cartilage of its sex organ into her cunt. Pierced to the cervix, driven mad by her hideous terror, Wilhelmina Preusser had succumbed to a heart attack.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The superstitious spectators who had watched the atrocious death of the buxom, black-haired German spinster and secretary to the murdered German consul were thunderstruck by her unexpected death. They began to mutter among themselves, wondering if this might not be an evil sign from the gods to show displeasure with the valiant Boxers. Understanding his people well, and realizing that in one sense he had broken the law of Tsu Hsi in having permitted even one of the hostages to die, the Mandarin of Hanchow had it announced to the populace that the trials would resume on the following Friday. Meanwhile, the next several days were to be spent in offering prayers and burning incense to the Lord Buddha for victory over the oppressors.
Moreover, the wily magistrate sent gifts to the poor people of his city, many bags of rice and tea, gifts as well of clothing and of trinkets which might made them forget his breach of the imperial law.
During those next days and nights, he satiated his lusts upon the tethered bodies of Lida Garconniere and her stepmother. On the night preceding the resumption of the tribunal, he conceived a salacious plan which he intended to carry out before the audience the next day.
Lida and Claudia were brought together in his chamber, naked except for the leather collar of servitude which marked their bondage to him. Their wrists, bound behind their backs, were chafingly corded, and they stared at each other shamefacedly as the fat magistrate faced them. He had stripped naked and armed himself with a three-thonged whip made from the tanned hide of a bullock. Jovially, mocking their shame, he told them that he wished to reunite them as mother and daughter and that, since they had atoned for their sins through public punishment, he now wished to observe their compliance to his will.
Claudia did not need a new reminder of what terrible suffering she would face if she showed the slightest hesitance in obeying Li Woo; the unspeakable agony of the nettles against her inner thighs, titties and cunt, had already crushed all thought of rebellion. Thus Lida could hardly recognize her formerly supercilious and authoritative stepmother when the latter, at the Mandarin's command, knelt down, bent her head forward, and began to lick at the tip of his cock with her tongue tip, while he amused himself by flicking the three glossily polished, short and tapering leather thongs over her naked tawny-sheened back and shoulders.
Then it was Lida's turn to take his organ into her mouth and to run her tongue over it and down the sides of the bulging shaft. The enormous glans, which looked like a mushroom cap, throbbed as the honey-haired young girl obeyed, retching and whispering in her abhorrence, but obeying because terror was a greater stimulant than revulsion.
Then he commanded them both to show their newly acquired amity, and to this end had Lida lie down on her back beside his bed. And now the stepmother was obliged to kneel over her stepdaughter's face, bow her head down between Lida's straddled thighs and gamahuch the honey-haired beauty, who requited her in kind.
Under the sadistic little flicks of his three-thonged whip, the fat, insatiable Mandarin compelled them both to reach an unwanted sexual climax. Thereupon, his own passions savagely aroused, he brought down his whip with all his might across Claudia's upturned naked back, and commanded her to roll over on her back and receive his swollen appendage. As he fucked her, he ordered the sobbing Lida to kneel astride her mother's face so that Claudia might continue to tongue her stepdaughter's cunt while submitting to his eviscerating thrusts, and his hands squeezed and kneaded Lida's delicious bubbies.
Katerina and her niece Nadia, meanwhile, were serving as prostitutes to the peddler, the rich merchant from Wosan, and the Boxer colonel.
When the tribunal resumed its third day of deliberations, Lee Wu summoned Dorothy Trowbridge and brown-haired, widowed Katya van der Groot before him. The charming young coppery-haired daughter of the provincial minister, still mourning her father's assassination, was stripped naked by Ma Loo and Soo Fa, while the third, torturess, Kee Ming, using her short bull-pizzle liberally, compelled the weeping Dutch widow to strip completely naked.
Then the two sufferers were bound facing each other, with their wrists drawn high above their heads and corded to a ring set into the ceiling of the upper level and just before the tribunal. The younger girl was posed so that her bottom was presented to the avid audience. Li Woo then sardonically decreed, "Here, good people of Hanchow, we have two sorceresses whose male warlocks have for long years cast their vile spells over our nation. The young sorceress, I have discovered from the most reliable sources in the village where she dwelt, is still a maiden, while the older white devil-bitch, though wed to a
Christian minister, took little joy in the mating. Of her I say also that my spies have learned of her eagerly sought-for adultery, for she lusted for a young soldier of her own country and would willingly have cuckolded her righteous husband if the Boxers had not entered her village and captured her before she could bring dishonor upon the name of her rightful state."
Pausing to glance at the faces beyond and above him, he was able to note that he had held their attention and that there was not the slightest murmur against his autocratic judgments. Li Woo resumed, "Accordingly, we who believe in the ancient laws see here a sanguine opportunity to correct these wretched sinners and turn them back to the understanding of serenity and obedience. The whip shall warm them as they learn affection and comfort from each other."
At his sign, Soo Far stationed herself behind Dorothy Trowbridge, her eyes devouring the voluptuous virginal nudity of the young redhead, while Ma Loo took her station behind and at the left of Katya van der Groot. Each torturess was armed with a springy, whippy switch taken from the branch of a ginkgo tree. And at a signal, they began to lash the writhing naked bottoms and threshing thighs of their helpless victims.
The chaste young redhead, soon in tears under the merciless kisses of the ginkgo switch which darted and bit and nipped her tender flesh, hysterically implored the mandarin for pardon. This plea he ignored and directed that the executioner jump the switch up into the tender furrow between the young sorceress's buttocks. As she jerked and threshed about under those pernicious cuts, he coldly commanded: "You shall both be whipped until you seek to console each other, until you make love as women do!"
The two torturesses accelerated the tempo of the switching, and poor Dorothy Trowbridge, her face bathed in tears, lunged repeatedly against her naked companion in suffering. Expertly the two Chinese women plied their switches, until in desperation under the scalding swipes of the stinging withe, the young coppery-haired girl began to grind her cunt against Katya's. When this was observed, the woman flogging the Dutch widow intensified the punishment by lowering her switch to the floor and flicking it up to sting the pouting inner curves of the young woman's bottom as well as right into the shadowy furrow separating them. These flicks were most efficacious, for Katya, with wild screams and entreaties, lunged frantically against the triangle, rubbing her cunt against Dorothy's as if she were aggressively seeking to glean Sapphic pleasures.
Now the tempo was accelerated still more; the Chinese women raised their arms and swept them down with hardly a pause as the thin, stinging switches leaped and crackled over the naked, perspiring flesh, and such was the power of the lash that the chaste young daughter of the murdered minister cast aside all modesty and began wantonly to rub her pussy back and forth against Katya's. The latter, her bottom, thighs and back burning from the swiftly applied stripes, responded in kind until at last, against their mutual will, both naked victims began to feel the tides of passion seething in their cuntholes.
And when at last they swayed, half-fainting after that turbulent and coerced lovemaking, the fat mandarin had Dorothy Trowbridge taken down from the punishment hoist and carried to his bedchamber where she would accept his conquest this very night.
"This older sorceress admittedly avowed her adulterous love for a young soldier, a countryman," he told the excited spectators. "She shall have redemption by being honored by the affections of our own valorous Boxers!"
And then followed a scene of mass rape which had the audience in ecstasy. A platoon of eight Boxer soldiers ascended to the dais, first bowing before the smirking magistrate, and then taking turns with the shrieking, squirming and helpless naked Katya van der Groot. While one young Boxer private clutched her panting titties and dug his prick deep into her cunt, his crony stood behind the young Dutch widow and, gaping apart the streaked and swollen cheeks of her behind, took the maidenhead of her bumhole. And the six other Boxers dealt with her in similar fashion two of them at a time possessing her and making her jerk and twist while helpless tears ran down her contorted cheeks and she implored death rather than this painful dishonor, for these Boxers were virile and vicious in their violation of her two tender orifices.
That same night, poor Dorothy and Katya had to submit to the further lusts of the Boxer colonel, Guey Wong, and the wealthy merchant from Wosan, the three most honored guests of the Mandarin from Hanchow. That very night also, by courier who had come on horseback from the city of Peking, the fat Mandarin received the dreadful news that Tsu Hsi had taken flight from her palace to her most loyal province in the North and that much of the Forbidden City was in ruins. With this news had come word from the Lord Duke Lan that all the white hostages must be guarded with the greatest vigilance and that utmost care must be taken to preserve their lives so that China would have better bargaining power with the foreign usurpers when the inevitable peace terms were to be discussed.
And Li Woo, beating his breast and crying out upon the shades of his ancestor, knew the bitter truth that the cause of the Boxers had failed and, that the rebellion would not be a triumph as had been dreamed by those who ruled this mighty nation.
Yet no foreign troops had as yet approached Hanchow, and he could grant himself and his people a few more spectacles of Chinese justice. Hence, the next morning he commanded that the German vice-consul Kurt Hullweg, his wife Ernestine and his stepdaughter Erika, be brought before him.
Flaxen-haired young Erika wept in terror when she was led in by leash attached to her leather collar and saw her beloved mother and her handsome stepfather (to whom she was secretly drawn, although she had no way of knowing that he in his turn secretly lusted for her ripe young body). The Mandarin had really little charge to bring against this trio, particularly since their old amah Mei Fong testified that they had acted with courtesy and kindness to the merchants and the poor of Peking as well as to herself. Yet as she extolled their virtues, she unsuspectingly suggested to the sadistic magistrate a pretext by which he could furnish his enthusiastic audience with the lecherous spectacle they as well as he desired. She had insisted that Kurt Hullweg was a devoted husband as well as father to this girl who was not of his own loins. And at this point, Li Woo mockingly interposed, "Why, then to be a proper father he should indeed not hesitate to grant her the same love he would evince to his own spouse. Yes, you shall make a choice. Either you will make love to the young sorceress who, though you claim her as your daughter, is not truly of your own seed, or the wife you profess to love so dearly, will be given to a dozen strong young Boxers for their sport and, I assure you, before your very eyes!"
He flung himself upon her, his mouth crushing hers, his hands gripping the cheeks of her bottom as he thrust himself against the dark-blonde snatch.
Erika cried out, her eyes wide, horrified and poignantly appealing. And then she felt him press against the seal of her hymen, felt the masterful clutch of his fingers against her burning, cruelly whipped bottom. And then, to the lecherous delight of the mandarin and the spectators, and to the agonized sobbing of Ernestine Hullweg, flaxen-haired young Erika enfolded her stepfather with her arms and legs and, returning his kiss, passionately, writhed and arched her naked body to his irresponsive rut!
There was to be a final ironic twist to the fate of Erika and her beautiful mother. The Mandarin himself, following Ernestine's dangling, twisting anguish under the lash and then her heartbroken desolation as she watched her own husband fuck her young daughter, had Kurt Hullweg brought to his bedchamber and bound to a heavy chair so that he could not move. He was gagged, but he was allowed to see. Then, arming himself with a thin, swishy bamboo rod, Li Woo compelled Ernestine Hullweg to make Lesbian love to Lida Garconniere, after which he buggered her while her husband fought his bonds, his muffled cries adding immeasurably to the depraved rut of the
Mandarin of Manchow.
But again a courier galloped into the courtyard of the palace, and with the most calamitous news of all. Peking was now in ruins, soldiers of the German and French armies occupied all Kansu, and had established military rule in Tientsin as well as in Nanking. From her hidden retreat in the northern mountain region, Tsu Hsi was sending word to all foreign envoys that she wished an end to the slaying of her helpless people. Even Duke Lan declared that he had no more commands for the loyal but defeated Boxer troops and that he, with his Empress, would return to Peking to sign the treaty that would put an end to this short but bloody revolution.
The Dowager Empress understood that she was no longer invincible, no longer feared by all those nations which had paid homage to her in the past. The Imperial Palace had been looted, and on its walls were obscene pictures and vilifications of her reign. Old as she was, now her spirit was broken and she began to feel the burden of the long years of her reign. Thus it was that she decreed that Li Woo should, within a week, surrender all his hostages to the emissaries of the Red Cross. They would then be taken to Peking to be repatriated, and they would be given gold to compensate them for their suffering and their imprisonment.
