Harriet Page 8

  When daylight came she was still afloat, lying on her back under a blue sky, looking in vain for any sign of the ‘Cormorant’. What she did see was a naked man standing upright in the sea, leaning against a wooden rail with several long pieces of cane extending like fishing rods on either side of him. In fact they really were fishing rods and the man turned out to be standing upon a raft of logs lashed together and almost level with the little waves that lipped over from time to time and washed about his ankles. Startled by the sound of a female voice crying out in a waste of waters, he spotted Harriet’s white arm waving desperately. He stood staring for several minutes as if dumbfounded, a lean brown-skinned muscular man with long black hair, not quite naked she saw, but wearing nothing other than unbleached linen drawers.

  “Sereia?” he called; then at last he bent down and produced a long paddle with which he manoeuvred the log raft until he could reach down and pull the naked fish-tailed girl aboard. “Sereia?” he sounded so hopeful that Harriet nodded, feeling it was as well to keep her rescuer happy. He bent down again and from a small bag tied to the wooden rail on which he leant, produced a small wineskin, uncorked it and offered her a draught. The wine was sharp and washed the salt water from her mouth and throat very satisfactorily. The raft rose and fell over the gentle ocean swell but from where she was kneeling, there was nothing visible but empty horizon and, with a mixture of feelings, she concluded that she had seen the last of the prison ship. The raft she was resting upon had a bamboo mast resting in a hole drilled in one log and four long fishing poles which extended outwards and trailed long lines either side. In a gap in the logs a shallow bag hung in the water containing a few small struggling fish. With two of them now aboard, the water washed almost continuously over his toes and her fins.

  “Sereia,” the man said coaxingly. Close to he was young and handsome. He had been examining Harriet from her long drying hair to small wet finny feet. The sea-chilled nipples stood out like dark bullets on her bare breasts. Her costume stretched across the width of her hips, gaped in exactly the place to reveal her other very female attribute. His thin drawers showed clearly what he was thinking. Harriet wasn’t sure if it was relief and gratitude at her rescue, the isolation in the midst of empty ocean or the wine that went to her head. She handed him the wineskin and, slithering on her knees in the wash of water, pulled down his drawers while he hastily swigged what was left of the wine.

  He yelped as she handled his cock and, but it rose rampantly to her touch, not- withstanding her cold hands. He lifted her up bodily, revealing a strength that clearly precluded any second thoughts on her part and drew her to the rail. Its uprights were solidly set into the logs with a thick top rail level with her hips, and lashed to the uprights at either end. He bent Harriet back over the rail while she clung to its extremities with her back arched. Balancing to the gentle tip and swing of the sea, he manoeuvred before her with spread legs and aimed unerringly into the gaping fishy split. Their shifting weight made the light craft dip and roll sending water swilling forward and back. Harriet was doing her best to accommodate him, but since her thighs were held together, he had to force his way between their slowly yielding inner surfaces barely nudging his true goal. His cock was long and drove deep and the mere warmth and softness between her thighs seemed for the moment to be satisfying him. Harriet’s own desire to reward her rescuer resulted in desperate efforts to help by forcing her thighs to part. The ultimate result was an abrupt widening of the split that spread rapidly to her knees. She squirmed and kicked her way out of the sheath, a sea creature suddenly turned into a land one. Her thighs opened wide, the loose skin slithering free, just as the fisherman burst into his climax from sheer excitement, spurting even as he drove and discharging into the very vestibule of her sex.

  Released by the gratified mariner, Harriet knelt on the logs with confused feelings, washing away the stringy white masculine emission with water from the sea surge. With astonishing swiftness of recovery, her erstwhile partner was hauling in fishing line hand over hand with sudden urgency until he could land the flopping, rose and silver coloured fish onto the raft. Almost before he had transferred it to the net, the other line was jerking with another.

  “Sereia!” He showed impeccably white teeth in a delighted grin at Harriet who beamed in return, pleased at his success. He pulled in fish thick and fast and soon had the fish container crammed with threshing silver forms. Chuckling delightedly, the fisherman picked up another bamboo pole wrapped in canvas, unrolled it and fastened one end to the mast, where it turned into a narrow triangular sail, point downwards. Controlling it with one hand, he pointed to his mouth and gestured into the distance. Clinging to the rail, since the log raft was tilted so far as to seem to be in imminent risk of turning over, Harriet made a similar gesture at her own mouth. The fisherman made an expansive gesture at the collection of fish, as if to say help yourself. Harriet nodded. Perhaps she could sell her share ashore or persuade someone to cook it. She gestured in the direction they seemed to be heading but the fisherman shook his finger, frowning and shaking his head. He picked out a fish and offered it, pretending to bite it. Harriet gestured impatiently to put it back. Since both had only one hand free to employ and no idea of each other’s language the communication was not a success.

  A human voice drew Harriet’s attention away from the puzzle. Another man had appeared, standing on a similar raft, level with the sea. Her own fisherman folded the sail as they drew abreast and Harriet was able to let go her grip on the rail. He held up the dripping catch in jubilant demonstration and the two men engaged in a shouted conversation in which Sereia figured frequently, Harriet’s captor holding up the tatters of her former tail. The first fisherman indicated that he wanted Harriet to transfer to the other raft, the other man making encouraging noises and calling ‘Sereia!’ Harriet kept pointing to where she presumed the shore must be, though by now she was no longer sure in fact that she had the right direction. At last, the fisherman simply tipped her off the raft and into the sea. By the time she recovered the surface, clawed the hair out of her eyes and looked round, the sail had been spread again and her former refuge was heeling away beyond pursuit.

  The new man hauled her aboard. He was an older man, thicker in the body than the first but equally muscular, with the snub-nosed brown face of a satyr in a picture. His curly black hair was greying at the sides. As he helped Harriet up until she could grip the rail she was aware of his excitement and guessed what it meant. She looked round. The first raft was a diminishing shape. Several others were visible in the far distance. There was still no sign of land. Sighing, she looked for the wineskin. This fisherman was no better equipped than the first. Apart from the wineskin he had only the crust of a small loaf of an unfamiliar grain, which Harriet promptly wolfed hungrily, to his seeming astonishment, but without his opposition. The inevitable payment seemed to be required. This time she was bent face forward over the rail and taken from behind, beginning with both of them standing up, with the seawater washing over the raft about their feet and ending with Harriet clinging to the uprights almost upside down, her wet hair swilling to and fro below her, with her legs spread wide and feet kicking in the air either side of her partner’s driving brown body. The new man turned out to be more skilled at this than the first. Harriet clung tightly at first but with more confidence as the raft swooped gently up and down in a long rhythm. The fisherman balanced expertly, timing his thrusts to the movement of the sea. He speeded up gradually, holding her steady while little shuddering ripples ran through the water that gradually spread the floating ends of her hair. Harriet’s residual acquiescence in the rewarding of a rescuer turned to her astonishment, into a repeat of her experience of guilty ecstasy in the convent garden on the island of Papilla.

  Afterwards, the haul of fish was even bigger, the fisherman grinning at Harriet as if she was responsible. It was beginning to dawn upon her from his gestures that she was suspected of being some
sort of mermaid who gave good catches to her human lovers. When at last, he decided to call it a day, Harriet clung determinedly to the rail. By now it was growing towards dusk and she had no desire to be dumped again. Her rescuer, however, was not unwilling, she thought. It had dawned upon him perhaps that her mermaid’s tail, lying shrivelled and disregarded where the first man had thrown it, was not in any state to be resumed. They scudded along, heeling to the wind driven by the triangular sail until on the horizon ahead appeared first a low green line and then a white sand beach. The log raft was simply run up onto the sand and, between the two of them, hauled up beyond the reach of the waves for the logs of which it was composed were astonishingly light for their size. Carrying the net of fish and Harriet’s mermaid tail between them, they walked up the beach to where a low mud and thatch cottage nestled on the edge of thick woods just above the shore.

  The cottage was single storey, the main room seemed mostly a kitchen, un- ceilinged, with the walls roughly plastered and whitewashed. Hams and strings of onions, garlic and bundles of herbs were suspended from the rough wooden beams. A low fire glowed in a stone fireplace, pots and dishes piled upon a cooking bench and huge storage jars were set against the wall. Her rescuer/captor filled a pottery bowl from one of the storage jars and handed it to Harriet. While he busied himself shifting a blackened pot onto the fire, she drank with trembling gratitude. It was like the wine from the skin, fresh and sharp and delightfully cool. The man watched, shrugging as he saw she had drunk down the whole cupful or so that it contained, then taking the bowl away from her, he refilled it fully, this time with a mixture of wine and water.

  The wine had been good. The pot on the stove smelled deliciously and she licked her lips. He gestured first at the pot and then at her. When he had her attention he let his hand drop between his legs and then again pointing at the region of her crotch, made another vivid gesture. If she wanted to eat she had to earn it! Resignedly, she nodded. It was perfectly delicious and she ate every drop. There was more wine and she drank recklessly. When at last she had scraped the last traces from the plate with the rough bread, he rose and crooked his finger.

  It was more comfortable in a bed than kneeling on water-washed planking in the middle of an ocean, though very hot and sweaty out of the breeze, but somehow it made the encounter seem less romantic and more mercenary. Harriet performed her part dutifully, barely able to keep awake. It was better in the cool of the morning, when after a frugal breakfast the fisherman took her back to bed. She had found a colourfully patterned dress on a washing line at the rear of the cottage while she was looking for a latrine. She had already guessed that all this comfortable domesticity was not bachelor living, that he must have a wife somewhere. The dress was several sizes too big for her, but at least it made her look less of a mermaid. When he saw the dress on her he looked surprised, then he grinned.

  “Mama?” she ventured.

  “Mulher,” he said, shrugging, and waved his hand airily, presumably whoever it was, she was absent from home. The dress quickly came off again.

  The owner turned up unexpectedly later that morning while they were still in bed. She was a big, handsome, black haired, dark skinned woman with arms and thighs like hams who arrived bestriding a small donkey and accompanied by half a dozen children. Unfortunately she had already spotted the absence of the dress from the line and, bursting into the marital bedroom, spotted it at once, stained and crumpled where it had fallen by the bedside.

  Her husband heard her coming and uttered only a tersely explanatory “Mulher,” before springing from the bed and swiftly flinging the shutters open. He had slid over the sill and gone before Harriet was properly awake. The long kitchen knife that the woman flung at her departing husband was left quivering in the window- sill made their relationship clear and, with a soaring crescendo of indignation, the woman pounced upon Harriet as the one remaining culprit. With an astonishingly strong grip yanked her out of the bed, abusing her volubly.

  From the distance the faint shouts of the fisherman repeated the word ‘Sereia,’ and was answered with “Escravo! Prostituta!” Propelling her captured supplanter into the main room the irate wife snatched up a more useful weapon in passing, a large wooden spoon off the cooking bench. Stretching the tearfully protesting Harriet face down across her ample lap with muscular determination not to be gainsaid, she began laying into her prisoner, with the smacking spoon marking red rings upon girl’s up-turned bottom. Harriet kicked fruitlessly and yelled her objections, in English of course, equally fruitless though she felt that the tone of her language must be easily interpreted. It only infuriated the brawny matriarch the more and the smacks multiplied so rapidly that Harriet changed her tune entirely, sobbing and pleading replacing her protests. Meanwhile the children, one of whom was certainly old enough to get ideas, stood in a half circle, forming a wide-eyed audience.

  When the husband ventured back it was to find the demoted mermaid with a tearful face and a reddened bottom on her hands and knees, scrubbing desperately at the red dress in a tub of suds. The word ‘Sereia’ re-occurred frequently in the ensuing argument and the fisherman went out to fetch in the shrivelled remnants of Harriet’s tail along with his heavy catch, now neatly gutted and strung on a line. Attempts upon Harriet’s part to interrupt were only met with more hard smacks, but Cecilia, as the woman’s name turned out to be, seem to be mollified. Clearly Harriet had been accepted for the moment, if only reluctantly, as the fisherman’s luck token. She hardly dared to disabuse the pair even had she been able to speak the language, finding that from being treated as a wicked adulteress she was accepted as a kind of backward child. The fisherman’s wife picked Harriet up with alarming ease and, setting the meekly submissive captive between her knees, drew a short cotton skirt up over Harriet’s hips and a short and well-washed camisole over her head, slapping her hands away crossly as if she was a recalcitrant child. Then turning her about, she set about ruthlessly plaiting the nineteen-year-old’s sea-ravelled hair into a couple of long tight braids, throwing terse remarks all the while at her apologetic husband.

  Next day Harriet went out again with the fisherman, naked again as she had come from the sea, though perhaps because he now expected to have his wife to satisfy, he teamed up with her original discoverer and they fished in close association. Harriet was fucked once again by the younger man, this time upon all fours, both kneeling on the water-washed logs. But the fish were slow to come and the two men conferred gravely. Harriet was transferred back to her original raft where the older one promptly gave her a spanking as if to liven her ideas up and stimulate the production of fish. Her bottom smarting as a reminder, she was hoist up against the stand, hands gripping it with her arms behind her and the cross-piece in the small of her back. With her legs lifted and hooked over the fisherman’s broad shoulders she was rocked precariously to and fro, squeezing his thrusting penis for all she was worth to show her eagerness and escape another spanking.

  Returning to the beach in the evening, Harriet resumed her skimpy attire, the camisole coming down just over her nipples to which it clung, the skirt tight across the hips. Under the frowning supervision of the formidable Cecilia, she cleaned, scoured and scrubbed, fetching water in a heavy and vulnerable pitcher, feeding the pigs and goats and milking the latter, sleeping in the hut with the goats at night and chained up like them.

  After a week of this routine, she was loaded up with a tall basket of dried fish and with a rope halter about her neck to stop her from bolting, taken in tow by Cecilia, carrying the produce for sale at the market in a small settlement a few hours walk away. By now every inch of Harriet was as brown as a berry from long days spent naked and baked by the sunlight that reflected off the water. She was relieved to find that most of the young females they met were almost as skimpily clad as she, their midriffs exposed to view though most of the skirts covered a little more thigh than hers. The town was a primitive sprawl of thatched wooden
shacks, the market of the most elementary sort of goods.

  The only signs of sophistication came with the appearance of a two-seated phaeton drawn by thoroughbred horses and driven by a white clad gentleman in a broad brimmed hat, a lady seated alongside him. The carriage bore a coat of arms with multiple quarterings surmounted by a spiky coronet. A huge black man ran at the carriage step, with another clearing the way before, like running footmen accompanying a Lord’s coach in London, except that the black men were nearly naked wearing only tight white drawers and iron collars with large gold medallions dangling on their chests. Harriet eyed the muscular ebony torsos and bulging thighs and then the equally conspicuous bulge in the thin drawers. The man at the reins drew only her second glance. He was a plump and languid, young man with drooping black moustaches and an incipient pot belly. His companion looked quite young, fashionably dressed in the latest high-waisted muslin gown with her hair piled up in elaborate style a la greque. He reined in his horses and looked down upon Harriet with a cruel quirk of his lips as if her fairness had suddenly attracted his attention among the darker-skinned market folk. They had shrunk back into an anonymous crowd at the first sign of the horseman’s interest with hissed ejaculations of “O Conde” and “O Diabo” leaving Cecilia and Harriet isolated. Harriet shook off her mistress’s grip, excited at the prospect of authority taking an interest in her, but the fisherman’s wife stood up to the gentleman’s questions quite truculently.