CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The whip once again cut into James’ shoulder, the drying salt dripping into the wounds stinging deeply and making him wince with increasingly insupportable pain.

°I don’t think I can stand this much longer,” he told the slave standing next to him.

“They all say that,” replied the slave whose back was covered with a multitude of unhealed weals. “But death takes us away at the moment when we have had enough.”

“Does anyway actually escape from this hell?” asked James.

°I am told that last year someone actually managed to flee from one of the work parties but failed to avoid the quicksands which surround all unguarded passages of this labour camp…”

“How did he manage to get out?” queried James.

At this moment he felt a sting on his shoulder as a guard belted out; “cu out this cackle. You are here to work, not talk; work until you die, you less than pig fodder:”

James resumed his task of digging out a channel in the squelching mud so that the waters could flow into the newly drained salt reservoirs. He wanted to get out of this place before he was eventually killed by his labours extreme exhaustion. But how, how could he manage it? Tears entered his eyes as he thought about Helen, his beloved Helen back in the walled city. He continued his train of thoughts. True, he had succeeded in getting himself out of Billington Institution but getting out to where? What odd sequence of events had brought him to this sorry impasse, slaving away is a murky marsh on the sinking eastern shore? His thoughts ended with a laugh, an almost maniacal laugh as he considered the complete absurdity of his present predicament.

***

In Dunara Wulfstan furrowed his brows with anxiety. “We have not heard from Helen and James for over a week now. I fear their plans may have been discovered. They may even have been captured. How stupid we have been if that situation is true: The perfect fool? Ha: It is me who is the fool now. But how, how may we find out what has happened to them?”

Wulfstan continued his pondering as he decided he would summon an extra-ordinary council meeting to discuss the concern. Thoughts of a rescue party even entered into his mind. But lacking all intelligence of James and Helen he was hard put to formulating how the plan would work out and he fell into a pessimistic cogitation. “Whatever happens I can only blame myself if any harm comes to my two young lovers and heroes.” He turned towards the front door, opened it and began to walk up the street leading to the council hall.

***

“Please do not send Helen out to them men,” pleaded Amalia with Phalarea “‘let her be our playmate; we need someone like her to release our worries with, to ease our tensions.”

“So you are saying that she will not be send to serve the elite, that her body will not be an instrument of pleasure for them?” queried Phalarea.

“Yes, that’s right. Please, O please let her stay with us. Let her stay for us, to give us pleasure instead. We will, of course, not forget our duties to the men.”

Amalia’s beseeching eyes, her despairing tone and sinuous movements all had an effect on Phalarea, a desired effect, it seemed for she stated; “All right, let it be. Let Helen serve you and give you pleasure after your labours of the night.”

And so that day Helen became the girls’ own concubine; her body to give them pleasure, her whole being to be devoted to the comfort of their desires, nothing her own, all given to their prying hands and searching lips.

Much as she still felt she was changing into a sex-slave Helen thought to herself that perhaps there was something less tainted in serving her own sex rather than greasy, bearded and evil guardsmen of Mortan’s kingdom. And so, placed into a state of permanent and perfumed passiveness, she gave herself up to the pleasure of the concubines of the citadel’s harem, no part of her body unexplored by their inquisitive hands, her lips bruised by their kisses, her clitoris in a semi-permanent state of redness, her whole body barely recovering from one orgasmic climax and entering into yet another surfeit of pleasure.

Helen felt gradually weakened by this continuous state of sexual arousal: her body fell flaccidly into the arms of her feminine mates; her sleep was the half-sleep of sexual dying and felicity. She did not know whether she was changing into an icon of clitoral worship or whether she was collapsing into a limp rag doll. ­

***

Tippi was debating with herself on how to get out of Billington. Her Krishna, her James, where was he now? Surely, he would return to her, liberate her from the daily tedium of a system she no longer believed in. True, she had Kevin, her boyfriend of six years standing and a member of the Divine Life Mission. But he had become so boring, so predictable to her. And his latest fad – continence – did not appeal to her in the least. Her body yearned for a full and completely satisfying sexual experience, like the ones she used to have once with Kevin. OK, the development of spiritual consciousness was fine. But was it really necessary to preserve one’s energy, one’s kundalini in quite the same way that Kevin had specified. She still slept with him, still slept in the same room in the same house that she had been living in for all those seemingly interminable years. His mother’s house. A nice, a very nice person his mother she too deep into meditation and anti-materialist thought. But now long could this impossible situation go on for? How long could she stand to have Kevin’s desirable body lying flaccidly by her side while he was filled with/his so egotistical thoughts of personal energy preservation’? It sounded like Greenpeace gone scatty. Of course, they were beings gifted with a higher consciousness but she remembered reading somewhere that it was not what you did but how you did it that was the important thing. Fucking or not fucking with her boyfriend wasn’t the issue. Thoughts of Tibetan tantric Buddhism filled her longing body. In those parts making love was a prayer, an orison leading up with a direct line to the all-embracing deity. Indeed, the gods looked kindly on those that offered their bodies to him/her in this way and the rewarded the offering, with the gifts of increased awareness and further steps towards total liberation.

Then why couldn’t Kevin understand this point? She was awakened from her daydream musings by the staff ward nurse reminding her that “it’s time for Friend’s ward inmates to take their medication.”

Tippi smiled surlily at the staff nurse. “To hell with you and your medication,” she thought to herself and, walking towards the medication room, she suddenly took a sharp left out of the exit and into the driveway leading to the hospital’s main gate. “I’m going be free,” she said to herself. “I’m going to be free at last.”

In the crimson light of the late afternoon sun a lone nightingale had already begun singing his transcendentally virtuosic serenade. Trills permeated the soft evening scents.