Huge, leaden-gray rocky peaks towered above us, and when you tilted your head up as far as you could until your gaze was almost perpendicularly upward, you could see higher into the blue sky from the peaks dotted with silvery white ice and snow. There was not a tree, not a house, not a trace of human habitation as far as the eye could reach on all sides.
The city of Gekyong in Trisong Dzong (prefecture) was only about twenty miles in a straight line from our little village of Chinka, but we had to cross this transverse mountain of Meghaburi snow. We had to walk for most of the day on weathered gravel flakes through the Gedan Pass, where even in July there were snowflakes. It was a labor-intensive journey, and as we approached the pass, the mules and horses had to climb up and down with great difficulty, dragged and pushed by the men.
My warriors clustered around me slowly forward, in front of us is Tenzin manor ragged family slaves, they are carrying our weapons, bullets, and more cycads. The hunter Dhondup, who had traveled all over the snowy mountains of the plateau, tended to them close behind, and at times the sound of striking human flesh rang out: “Climb quickly, lazy lackey!” He shouted at Drolma, the only woman left at the end of the line, and whipped her bare legs and buttocks with a leather whip. Her skinny legs wobbled and buckled, and Choma fell to one knee on the steep slope of the gravel.
“Damn minions! First day on the job and you don’t listen!” Tonjou stepped up and kicked her, grabbing her by the hair and pulling her upwards.
The ancient leather cabinet carried on Drolma’s back was the treasure of Lama Pile Poor, filled with the scriptures he had brought with him when he fled the monastery to begin his career as a horse thief. And beneath the woman’s bare, flaccid breasts, strips of wool torn out of felt were haphazardly twisted and bound tightly around a baby. Beyond that she remained naked, dragging heavy chains around her hands and feet. Between the tattered boots of the house slaves, on the sharp edges weathered from the rocks, trod the bare feet of the only pair of swollen, lax and blood-cracked Dromae.
The clear blue sky that had been there when we left Tenzin’s estate in the morning was now filled with rolling clouds, and the temperature seemed to have dropped ten degrees compared to the base of the mountain, with tiny particles of ice in the sudden, violent wind. Before crossing the Gedan Pass we had to take one last break: “Tonju, we’re almost at the pass, let’s stop for a while!”
We sat down in a circle wrapped tightly in our hunting robes and felt the cold air seeping in through the lapels. Chroma remained on the slope with one knee braced on the ground, her whole body frozen in place, her entire naked body already frozen and purple.
And then resounded a baby’s cry.
It took her several hard tries to pull the curled leg out from under her hip and let the whole thing slump to the ground. But urged on by the doll’s cries, she braced herself up with her hands, drew her withered legs back together side by side in front of her, shrugged her bony back toward the direction from which the wind was blowing, and between such two barriers she cradled her all-red baby close to her breast, and stuffed her flaccid, empty udders into his mouth, but still the little thing kept on wailing and howling and spitting its mother’s nipple out of its mouth, the Chroma herself was crying silently as she wrapped her arms more tightly around her naked little son. All the blisters on her lips had dried up in a few hours from the cold winds of the mountains, turning into greenish-white crusts that flopped up and down on the sides of her mouth, and blood was still seeping out from between the cracks of her lips.
I threw a piece of sheepskin, which had been worn to a bare board, at her feet, and the female house-slave, Chroma, looked at the tattered and soiled thing in disbelief, and then flung herself down on the gravel with her son in her arms, her forehead touching the ground. She sat down and placed the kicking, leggy little thing on top of the sheet of skin and wrapped him up.
“Choma, the women of the highlands have to get up and carry water after they have given birth to their dolls. We are not flatlanders, remember, we are not lazy and weak like flatlanders.”
Since she could no longer speak, Chroma knelt once more and kowtowed to me again.
We crossed the various butte passes where layers of snow had accumulated in the backdrop, and on the suddenly open downward stretching out slopes there was a small cluster of buildings the same color as the rocky soil, little houses that looked like abandoned piles of small cardboard boxes. That was the other side of the snowy mountains of Meghburi, the main transportation hub connecting the Snowy Region, the Cloud Ridge, and the Y Country, the Geshang City of the Qusong Clan!
I know that every highlander living in this town has heard of my name, and at the same time they will not have failed to hear of what the army-carrying lord Dieben, who lives in the Tenzin estate in the village of Chinka, has been doing all these years.
Dieben refers to the commander of the Highland Army, roughly equivalent to a regimental commander. I myself am not an official official of the Snowlands government. My army was also organized on my own by myself when I returned from Y after the Flatlanders had moved into Snowland. But my long life in Y made me quite a few friends there, and I received a British-style education in Y. And the highland army led by the Koben (company commander) of that snowy government stationed at Qusong still carried spears! In this way, my fellow highlanders, the Gelé Living Buddha of the Zadan Monastery and the Zongben of the Quzong Dzong, when faced with the might of the flat-earth armies, addressed me very respectfully as Lord Dieben.
I am proud of my reputation, and I would have it spread far and wide among the snowy highlands, and I hope that the flatlanders who are to come will know of it as well. I want to prove to the Flatlanders who harbor ambitions and to our own cowardly Highlanders that I can still do what I want, even in the city of Geking, where the Flatland army is stationed. I will challenge the limits of those outsiders’ tolerance.
If there was any doubt that they might still have about my resolve, the naked Chroma, whom I had brought into the city of Ghoshang, would be a constant reminder of it. I hadn’t gone to all this trouble to get Droma over to Megbury Hill with the intention of having her wash my warriors’ clothes.
My warriors and I lived across the street from the Quzong Dzong Office, and across a dirt road and a dirt field was Tenzin’s earthen building in Gesheng. In addition to his estate in Qinca, Tenzin did still have some property. During the last few days of waiting to welcome our flatland guests, I went around recruiting free highlanders, hunters and herders, expanding my ranks with the support of Living Buddha Gelé of Zadan Monastery and Trisong Dzongpala Dzongpon. On the fifth day of my entry into Gesong, as I sat in the council room of Pala Dzongpon, I said to him, “Go to the prison room next to your office and find a cage to stand in. You don’t even have that, do you?”
“Of course I did, or I asked the carpenter, Phuntsho, to nail it up with highland oak the year of the earthquake in Quga! He also made me a baseboard for the prisoners to stand on by the way, and nailed it full of little steel nails that went up. I use the best of the best for my Trisong Dzong.” He said.
I was afraid that the prisoners of his Quzonzon were kept in the worst possible place, and I followed him into his subterranean cell where the law and order were maintained. The only thing visible in the total darkness was the small window that let in light in the wall immediately above the roof.
Of course it stank there, and we waited for a while, gradually adjusting our eyes to the darkness to see a rectangular frame shadowed in the middle of the room.
“Call a couple of people to move it out.” Then I heard a little noise in the corner: “Rats?”
“When you hear ‘rustling’ in the grass, you know it’s a poisonous snake, and when you hear ‘squeaking’ in the corner of the house, it can only be a rat.” He said, “The rats in here are big, let’s go up.”
“Uh… uh… uh…” A clear humming sound came out from inside, and I’m afraid that even the biggest rats don’t make that kind of noise.
Para was the zonbon of a whole clan, and I must say, he seemed very courageous and intelligent in that situation.
He jumped to the exit on his belly and called out to his enforcer, “Zazie, Zazie, do we have any more prisoners in here?”
We heard the sound of running back and forth up there, knocking things over, and then the long, thin-faced Zahi appeared in the hole at the top of the stairs holding a pine torch: “There’s ah, there’s a woman.”
With a little firelight we could see the dark figure sitting on the ground floor by the wall, there was a large wooden yoke in front of her, the round thing with fluffy hair showing from it was supposed to be her head, and there were two bright spots reflecting the light that could only be the woman’s eyes.
We climbed up the stairs, “Who is she?” I asked.
“Who is she?” Parazomben asked. His enforcer muttered, “I don’t know, it’s been locked up for months.”
“Ah, ha ha ha!” After dragging his fat body back into the sunlight, Para finally remembered: “She’s the wife of Dorjee, the yak hair collector in town! A few months ago, you came to Geking to bury Dorje alive, didn’t you? She came looking for her husband, so I put her in there.”
“Para Zongben, there’s no need to keep her that long. The Flatland army is coming, so at night tell Zazi to put a sack over her and throw her in the Quga River! Oh, but let’s wait until tomorrow to do that.”
“Please visit the earthen building left behind by Tenzin across the street from your mansion this evening, there will be an auspicious gathering there.”
The highly respected Gelé Living Buddha of Zadan Monastery, the valiant protector of Zadan Monastery, Iron Stick Lama Abu, Dzongpon Pala of Trisong Dzong, and his enforcer, Gashi, were gathered in the main room adorned with sherpa blankets, and we were seated on the floor, along with Lama Dzongpon, who had always been my follower, and Dhondup, my faithful hunter.
On the opposite side of our pile knelt the meek and speechless slave girl Drolma, naked Drolma, with her limbs chained and her hands cuffed tightly, kneeling upright in front of a copper basin of water. She bit her lower lip and stretched her arms forward to hold up a stack of old, yellow scriptures on the top of the water, a pile of treasures poorly collected in the leather cabinet. We finished two small kegs of green tree wine, and she had held it up like that for a long time.
“Drolma, the master said to beware of the scriptures falling into the water! You can be flayed for desecrating the scriptures, you know?”
“M… M… M…” The slave girl only nodded softly, and a bead of sweat was already rolling down her withered cheeks to her chest and shoulders.
Aoki Wine is all around us, and the older we drink the better we get, and the more thoughtful words we say.
“Dai Ben of Qinca,” said the Living Buddha steadily, “Zadan Monastery is willing to give you command of the iron stick lamas who guard the monastery.”
This cunning old man, whose notorious Zadan monastery claims to have one hundred and eight iron rod lamas. He knew that I had the weapons of the whites that had been brought in from Y, and tried to get a little equipment for his men that way.
“Right! Leader of the troops, Dieben, you have too few men. I will order all the estates of the clan to send green trees, barley, and, and silver dollars!” He uttered that last word as if he had spelled it out, “We shall have five hundred, a thousand warriors for the Highland contingent!” Pala Zongben waxed yearningly lyrical about his vision.
“Leader of the army Dieben, lion of the plateau, you are the hope of our snowy region. With you here, the Flatland Army must not be allowed to act capriciously in the Qusong Dzong.”
Everyone calmed down in the shyness that follows flattery, when from the next room there was a sudden cry of a baby.
The slave girl Drolma’s arms had been crushed close to the surface by the stack of scriptures, but she was still shivering and struggling to hold on. She gradually lowered her head as if she were about to fall asleep, and her growing black hair slipped forward to cover her face, but the sound of weeping made her stand up with a shudder, and she pursed her lips and let out a loud “Ba… ba… ba…” as if she wanted her son over there to hear his mother’s voice. She seemed to have an impulse to stand up, but she immediately came to her senses and timidly cast her gaze at my face, her thin, naked body shrinking back. But it was too late; the three books of scripture resting at the top fell one after the other into the middle of the basin of water with a beautiful splash.
The poor lama, who had already made preparations, jumped over, grabbed the woman by the hair, pushed her backward against the wall, and kicked her stomach and thighs as if she were mad, finally shouting out the curses he had long ago memorized in his mind many times, which gave him great pleasure: “Damn slave girl! You have destroyed my scriptures! And my companion all the time, as precious as the scriptures! I’ll accuse you to Trisong’s Trungpa, Buddha will punish you!”
He retreated with spittle hanging from the corners of his mouth, gasping for breath. The slave girl, Chroma, who had gotten an opening, crawled forward and prostrated herself, hitting her head on the ground with a thud.
Para coughed dryly and began, “The law enforcer of Quzon, Zazie, make a note of it.”
“Yes, Lord Munemoto.”
“Drolma, the slave girl of the Tenzin family, disobeyed the advice and intentionally wet the scriptures of the Lama’s heap of poor, uh… three scriptures, a grave sin.” He turned his bulky stomach and folded his hands, “Gyeltsen, Lama Abul, do you see this?”
“It’s like this, Soubon.” The esteemed two said gruffly.
“Good, good, witnesses, Gelay Living Buddha, Abul Lama. There is nothing suspicious. You should… uh… you should… oh, you should be shackled in a cage by the gate of the dzongkhag for six months, and each night you can be brought back by your master to be taught a stern lesson.”
“In case of death, escape, etc., the husband of this Chökyi…” he whispered in my ear, “Who is her husband?”
I stared at him like a cat that was growing horns, “XXX!” I said viciously.
“Yes, yes, this Choma’s husband XXX should be tortured on his behalf…” He paused in doubt and asked, “Can we do that?”
I said to Zazie, “Don’t remember this!”
“Dieben, Dieben, Dieben of the Leader, this is how the laws of the Snowlands must be. If there is no mutual protection or guilt by association, the house slaves and peasants will not be afraid and will flee from their estates and lands. If this… this Drolma really broke the wooden bars of the cage and fled, how can I have my judgment enforced? I am a duly appointed dzongben of the Kashag of the snowy region, and if one day even my judgment cannot be enforced… What difference is there between a highlander, this, and a flatlander?”
I sighed long and hard: “Zazi, you remember, Dawa, the husband of Drolma, and the brothers Tsomai, you remember!”
You see, we Highlanders are a really honest bunch, and we really went through a trial to punish a guilty slave, and based on facts. The trial that took place in front of the Gelé Living Buddha was a serious one, and if the Gelé Living Buddha heard that Drolma was the wife of Dawa and Tsomai, then she had to be their wife.
Past Events in the Snowy Region (XII)
I bowed in front of Tenzin’s earthen building and watched the backs of the living Buddhas, lamas, and dzongpens, then turned my head and summoned Dawa and Tsomai, who had been huddled at the base of the wall, “You guys, come in with me.”
Dawa’s slave mother gave birth to Dawa at the age of fourteen, an age too young for childbearing, and as a result today Dawa is a man in his early forties, but I’m afraid his intelligence does not exceed that of a three-year-old child. Dawa’s second problem is: apart from various speculations, no one in Qinka village really knows who his father is.
Their mother gave birth to Tsomai after being formally assigned to a male slave by Tenzin’s father, ten years after Dawa’s birth. Tsomai had never had normal intelligence, but when he was nineteen he broke his leg on a log during the labor of repairing Tenzin’s estate, and since then he had been crawling on the ground.
Tenzin also had to be considered a charitable host, letting the unfortunate half-brothers live in Gexing, his only job just being to look after his property in Gexing when no one was living there. But no one remembered them after Tenzin slipped away, and the brothers, Dawa and Tsomai, have survived to this day by begging in Geking, where they have always slept at night next to the outer wall of the earthen building.
It is not uncommon in the snowy regions for house-slaves to make their homes under the eaves of their masters’ houses, and what is really surprising is that, though their masters are not with them, the faithful house-slaves neither run away nor take it upon themselves to live in the houses. In the snowy regions you will find many such examples of the absurdity of the Flatlander’s theories of hatred, struggle, etc.
Wrapped in broken serge, they stood in a crouch, respectfully spitting out their tongues.
“Dawa and Tsomai, I, Dai Ben, the leader of the army, will take care of you instead of Master Tenzin. See this woman? From now on, she is your brothers’ wife!”
I turned to the slave girl, Chroma, who was sitting on the ground floor against the wall, the woman was shaking the child in her hands with her head down, rubbing her large flaccid nipples against his little face. She had no qualms about stretching forward and spreading her two bare legs, standing high on the soles of her flat, filthy feet.
“Hear that, Chroma!”
Like sitting on a scorpion, she bounced straight up off the floor, knelt at my feet, and responded, “Huh?”
“Did you hear what His Lordship said, Chroma?”
She arched her back to kowtow and lifted up to look me in the face, wrapping her arms around the baby as she did so. She finally shook her head, so she bowed down again. I actually held back, in a very rare way, from lifting my foot and kicking her in the face, and I said, “Listen, Choma, the lord has married you to these two men, do what a good woman should do!”
Innocent Dawa stretched out his finger to point at her, his saliva hanging at the corner of his mouth the whole time: “This woman, can I hug her?”
“Yes, the Master gave her to you, of course you can hold her.”
He walked over to him with his arms outstretched, like a boy’s game of catch, his lips touching intermittently with a “tapping, tapping, tapping” sound. Chroma straightened her upper body on her knees and stared at him in disbelief, perhaps not reacting yet, perhaps not sure what to do, but whatever happened, all she could do was accept it.
Poor clueless Dawa didn’t realize what he really needed, he probably just felt something burning somewhere in his body. He clumsily threw himself on top of Chroma, and the two of them fell backwards together, all the while Chroma was holding his newborn baby boy in her arms. The little thing, already asleep, was squeezed between the two of them and let out a loud cry.
At that moment Dava was trying to touch the woman’s face, whereupon Droma, who had suddenly bared her teeth like a she-wolf, took a bite out of his hand. He screamed like an animal and jumped back with great agility. He looked at his brother aggressively and said, “She bit me, she bit me!”
Biting slave girl of course should be beaten, but the master could not personally help an incompetent house slave to sleep with his wife. I said to Dawa, “Dawa, you haven’t touched a woman, not like this. First, take off the serge, take it off!”
He wiped a handful of drool and hesitantly untied those sack piece-like things from his body; Dava’s naked body was indeed as dirty as a potato freshly dug out of the earth, and I don’t think he’d really had a bath since he was born.
“Well, Dava, a man has to beat the woman who belongs to him hard at first, grabbing her by her long hair to kick her legs and buttocks with his feet. Don’t be afraid, the woman will cry and scream, but she will love it in her heart, and after kicking her all over the place like that, she will crawl over to you and do serious work for you, so that you will feel like it too. Other men and women do that when they get home, they just don’t let you see it. Have you ever heard a cat go ‘awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww’ at night? Yeah, that’s the male cat beating the female cat, and they both end up happy.
Well, try again and don’t let your brother down.”
In this gap Droma stepped back to the wall and dropped the baby, then she crawled towards us, blocking herself between Dawa and her son, whereupon the idiot man who had summoned up enough courage to take a full grip on her hair lifted her up and looked towards me as if begging for help.
“Kick it, kick her!”
With a single kick he sent the scrawny Chroma rolling, and encouraged by the achievement he jumped forward and stomped on the woman’s puckered buttocks before he slipped and fell himself down onto Chroma’s torso again, this time arching his head between the woman’s two breasts with all his might.
Chökyamuni shook her head and said to the man on top of her, “Ohh…” She raised her two cuffed arms up to try to block his hands from Dawa’s wild scratches on her face. But her strength was quickly running out, so she lowered her hands to her breasts and slid them against their tightly-packed stomachs, into the lower half of their bodies. Suddenly the manic man began to calm down.
After a few moments of this, Chroma withdrew her hand and pushed Dava up very gently until the man was sitting upright on his upper body behind her own bony hips. She could now be seen holding Dawa’s genitals in her chained hands, sliding them up and down, then straining to move the man on top of her from side to side, spreading her thighs a little further apart.
Dava stared dumbfounded at all that the woman below was doing, and he saw his new wife revealing a patch of slippery, tender flesh he had never seen before between her spread thighs, opening and closing pinkly and oozing with sticky water. His wife was feeling up with her own hand where she had made a hole.
The mute slave girl, Chökyamuni, encouraged her idiot husband, saying, “Ah… ah… mmmm… mmmm…” as she pressed down on the man’s stubbornly bucking cock… The directions were so clear that Dawa followed Chökyamuni’s hand to the right place, and he obediently returned to the woman’s bare breasts. The woman smiled a little rueful smile as she moved her free hands out from in front of Dawa’s dark-haired, standing head and attached the cuffs and chained bibs to her man’s waist, pressing down on it and pushing upward with her elbows. Then there was no need for her guidance; Dava moved about quite like that on his own.
“Ouch, ah ah! Tsomai, Tsomai ah, Lao… Srila Prabhupada…” he cried at the end, and in animal ecstasy he bit down on Chökyi’s shoulder.
“Get up, Dawa, women are a good thing, aren’t they? Tsomai, you do it!”
Tsomai slowly crawled over, Dawa crouched down and watched attentively, then he said, “Master, Dawa wants more.”
I said majestically, “Tsomai, take your brother and your women, go out and return to the place where you spent the night!”
I watched as Chroma pushed Dawa away and crawled into the corner to reclaim her baby as she slowly got to her feet, but hunched over against the wall beside her. Some of the loose wrinkled skin was hanging down by the side of her pussy door that had been in labor for nothing more than five days, and the bright red colored discharge was running down the side of her leg again, mixed with some dark brown filth.
I decided that I would never uncuff her again, there was no telling what ridiculous things she might do when she was no longer with me.
“Tsomai, remember the master’s words, and beware of your new wife; watch her well, and don’t let her run away, or seek to be pampered. When you are going to sleep, you must remember to tie her to that hitching post by the door, with her hands. If anything happens, the master will skin your brothers alive.” Then I slowed down my tone: “Tsomai, pick up that woolen felt by the wall again; there is a woman, and count it as the master’s reward for you.”
“Dawa, remember, hit her hard every time. The master will reward you when he hears you beat her to a scream.”
Dava was such an obedient servant that the four of them, the big three and the little one, walked out the door, and in only a few minutes the cries of a woman came in through the window, and then the little one joined in. The few of them continued to make noise until midnight.
The next morning, while I was still wrapped in a woolen blanket embroidered with auspicious patterns, I heard the menacing roar of the law enforcer, Zahi, from downstairs: “Drolma, are you Drolma? Get up!”
“Ah.” Was her reply.
“Put your foot in here, the other one!” There was a heavy clatter of pounding iron.
“Stand up and go!” Followed by the very sluggish sound of chains.
Master Munemoto’s sentence was indeed carried out, and Para’s sentence was greatly transcribed by the enforcer Zasi, stamped with Munemoto’s great seal, and affixed to the side of the gate of his official residence. From this morning onward, at the gate of his residence, the tortured slave girl, Zhuo Ma, stood every day during the day in that narrow wooden cage, gazing through the wooden railing at the wide field of earth outside.
Master Munemoto had mentioned shackles, so in addition to the leg irons, a heavy wooden shackle was clamped to the woman’s calf, nailed with iron nails, and Chroma had carried it since that first morning, and had not opened it for a long time.
The wooden yoke, nearly three feet long, was wedged just right into the standing cage so that Chroma’s feet could not move in the slightest degree during the whole day. The dark chestnut-colored wood covered most of the slave girl’s feet, as well as the small spiked soles that Pala had mentioned, but it must have been placed under Droma’s bare feet, because the dark red blood had been drenched between Droma’s bloated, stubby, skin-crinkled-by-burns toes poking out from under the large wooden shackles.
Unlike the other convicts sentenced to stand in the cage, Drolma, who had just given birth to a child, held her son to her chest with a strap. But the young mother’s own hands stretched out outside the wooden cage, separated by a wooden post and then handcuffed, so that during the whole day of torture she could not rely on them to do anything, especially when the baby hanging on her chest cried and scratched her mother’s body with her little hands trying to find a friendly nipple, Zhuo Ma’s whole body can only move a little bit of her head, and she was only able to lower her head and look at the little doggy shed a little bit of tears. She was only able to lower her head and look at the little puppy and shed a few tears. It was only later that her husband, Tsomai, learned to climb up and help her, holding the little thing up to Zhuo Ma’s nipple through the wooden fence.
Apart from that, having a woman like Drolma standing naked in a cage for public display was not unique in the snowy region, and in general, a woman convicted of adultery would be likely to be sentenced by a magistrate to such a punishment. So when, three days later, the Flatlander officers of the Office’s preparatory group, escorted by a platoon of Flatland soldiers, finally entered Geking, and were welcomed into Munemoto’s residence by the two Snowland officials, Palla and I, one civil and one military, they politely did not show too much surprise at the manner in which our justice was administered. The young, innocent flatland soldiers inclined their heads in only slight embarrassment as they passed by the naked, dark-skinned slave girl.
After offering khaddar and green wine in the council room of the Pala Dzongben, Mr. Zhang, the head of the preparatory team, sat cross-legged with us on a warm bed. “Highlanders… people of the plains… friends… brothers…” Mr. Chang began his speech, which is what the people of the plains are best at: “The great family of nations… people of the plains have achieved… by leaps and bounds… unity… harmony… to help our compatriots of the highlands… to create the office of the Trulku Dzongsang Preserving the original way of life in the snowy region…” he said in a drowsy buzz, and then suddenly shouted, as if possessed, “Along the… main road… march!” The unprepared Paramitra Dzongben was startled.
It was finally over. In our highland hospitality, we let the chiefs and soldiers of the Flatland Army into Tenzin’s two-story, earth-built house, and my warriors and I moved over to Master Soumoto’s side of the house. As petty as Master Para was, he really needed the company of someone to bolster his courage so badly these days.
The Dawa brothers rolled up two sheets of tattered felt and fled to this side of the house to settle into their new home. “Chroma, Chroma?” I walked over to the wooden cage and greeted the pudgy, sweaty slave girl, whose hands, which had been locked tightly outside the cage, were spread wide with her fingers spread wide apart, and who wearily pressed her forehead against the wooden post of the cage, and hoarsely “Ba… ba… ba…” downward to the small face that was crookedly resting on her breasts.
“Hey!” I said, lifting her chin up with the pole of the whip in my hand, and she looked up dully, responding, “Ah.”
Her cage was set facing the main road, and further on was Tenzin’s house, at the gate of which now stood two dolls of soldiers in grass-green uniforms, in full uniform, gazing straight ahead without a glance. They were doing very much in accordance with sentry duty orders, except that directly in front of them was me, Dai Ben, the leader of the highland army, and Drolma, who was naked and on public display. Chroma, staring in silence across the three-foot-wide dirt field from her former kinsmen, saw that they were looking at her, too, and that they were looking at her strangely.
For a very long time. It wasn’t until I uncuffed her and pulled open the cage’s barred door that the first thing her free hand did was instinctively prop her son up high on her breast and shove her nipple into his little mouth without looking, but she still tilted her head back.
“Come out, punished Chroma, the sun is setting below the icy peaks and your family is waiting for you to return for the night!” Along with the thick plank of wood that held her ankle hostage, she lifted one foot high and stepped out, this so that she could pull the steel spikes that were densely lodged in her footplate out of her flesh, and stepped out high again with the other. The bottom of the empty wooden cage could now be seen to be planted indeed with vertical upward-facing needles, one by one slippery and black and purple with pus and blood. Her calves stiffened in two half-circles, moving herself forward another step, leaving bloody marks on the floor.
I came to her ear and whispered: “I’m afraid your rank is even higher than that chapter leader, isn’t it? You must remember, you are now my slave girl Choma, is Dawa Tsomai brother’s wife, they will never salute you.” I thought I saw a little watery glint actually wavering in her eyes, “Now that’s what you get every day!” The whip swung up and hit her hard in the face, hard enough to pull through the skin of her cheek. She jumped in surprise as if she had been electrocuted and bowed her head submissively.
At this time of day when he released his wife, the innocent Dawa would be thrilled, and it was not uncommon for him to press down on Chroma right in front of the cage and immediately do it once or twice; after all, we Highlanders are more tolerant of our mentally deficient servants. Today, however, Dawa seemed to instinctively feel some special atmosphere, he just held Drolma’s arm and dragged her forward.
As his wife finished her chastisement for the day in the late afternoon, their strange family slowly made their way down the dirt road into the small town. Ever the half-open-mouthed, drooling, giggling elder brother, he was followed by his and his brother’s wife’s naked, full-bodied slave girl, Choma. She held the baby by a strap over her breasts and pressed him to her breast with her right elbow, while her hands, dragging with chains and handcuffed together, were held up in front of her, holding an empty, broken wooden bowl.
Her bare soles were crushed under a heavy wooden yoke, and she had to step left and right around a center of a circle.
With every step her legs shook a little, the soles of her zapped and rotted feet hurt, and five round beans in front of her with a small curved blood-red barefoot print behind them stayed all the way behind her. Tsomai dragged her legs across the dirt, following at the end.
They stopped in front of the first house down the road, and the wife, Chroma, took a small step forward to kneel. With the wooden shackles on her wrists, her legs had to move at the same time, so she squatted down cautiously on her right and left legs, shrugging her bare buttocks awkwardly backward and crouching forward until her handcuffed hands supported her on the ground. She put her weight mainly on her hands, which made it possible to stabilize her empty knees on the ground, and at that point, with the shackles supporting her, Chroma’s bare soles in the long planks of wood hung helplessly in the air.
She step by step, slow to do these like a religious ceremony, finally until she was able to raise the upper body, the wooden bowl in the hand raised in front of the face. Tsemay said, “My gracious lord, the children of the XX women and the X monkeys of the highlands, waiting outside your door with great respect, are Master Tenzin’s domestic slaves, the Dawa brothers and their wives, the slaves you have been taking care of…”
The owner of that house comes out and puts something in the bowl in Drolma’s hand, pea tsampa, I think. Drolma put the bowl on the ground and ambled over to the alms-giver, then she maneuvered the kneeling procedure in reverse, struggling to overcome the obstacles in her legs to stand, and the family made their way over to the next doorway.
As I have already said, it is in this way that the Dawa brothers live in Gesheng, waiting for their master to return from afar. Choma was their wife, and of course she had to help her husbands. As far as I know, their begging has become easier since Drolma joined them, and when the man who comes out of the house says, “Ah, Drolma, come in and get it!” When the man came out of the house and said, “Ah, Drolma, come in and get it!”, Drolma would knowingly turn back to Tsomai and lift up her breasts, waiting for him to help take her son down for a moment to look after him; she didn’t trust Dawa. Then Droma crawled inside dragging her yoke behind the man, it would take too long to get back on her feet again. When she came out of it in the last few moments, she’d probably bring some dried milk crumbs with her, in addition to the tsampa!
They knelt along the dirt road from house to house while the sun was still shining, and came back in the dusky twilight to sit against the corner of a wall covered with two pieces of ragged felt, and probably with some food in the wooden bowl for the morrow. If Zoma was lucky, she would have a little time to feed the baby undisturbed for a while, humming “mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. The sturdy Dawa was already wiggling around and getting annoyed, and the woman wisely ducked on the other side of Tsomai so that Dawa wouldn’t jump on her unawares and she’d still have time to push the baby into Tsomai’s arms.
Then she was yanked tight by Dawa’s hair and dropped into the dirt field in front of her. The experienced Chroma first clutched at her bottom, twisting her face as far to the side as she could, while the rest of her body was left to the mercy of her foolish man. Sometimes she grudgingly bent her legs upward against Dawa, waiting until he was tired of fighting and sat down to catch his breath.
At this point she put on a miserable smile that was pleasing to the eye and moved her hand away from her own pussy to carefully stroke Dava.
She had always done her best to keep from screaming when she was being beaten by Dawa, but now she was trying to “grunt” flirtatiously, fumbling to undo the serge pieces that bound Dawa’s waist, and pulling Dawa towards her body.
Sometimes Dawa just obediently ambled over to her, but there were also times when Dawa raised his hand and slapped her across the face. Chroma immediately moved to shrink back and waited for him to finish this next round of seizures before trying to seduce him all over again. They eventually did what needed to be done in the open dirt field and Dawa, who had become obedient, would pick his woman up and walk back to the wall. The submissive Chroma looked at her other man inquiringly, “Hmm?” She slowly squatted down in front of him, her legs spread stiffly due to the shackles, her wet, dripping pussy wide open in front of Tsomai’s eyes. “Hmm?” The woman said as Tsomai, lying against the wall, reached out and began to touch her.
No matter how far the three of them went, the two husbands never forgot at last to co-operate in binding their common wife to the hitching-post, which was his lordship’s command, and which the house-slaves were obliged to obey. Because Chroma’s hands were always cuffed together, it was difficult to get her hands behind her back without opening the cuffs, and she carried a very cumbersome yoke under her feet, which she couldn’t get around from underneath, and it wasn’t as if we wanted to leave Chroma’s hands in front of her body, and maybe she’d even be able to use her mouth to chew through the rope that was tying her up.
The method Tonjoo taught her husbands was to have Droma lie down on her side by the stake, arch her back and bend her legs so that her buttocks were against the stake, and then pull her handcuffed hands behind her from between her thigh gaps and tie them to the post with a rope. It was a pretty good idea, Chroma could lie down and rest, but she couldn’t move, it was uncomfortable, and she couldn’t reach her hands anyway. To accommodate the length of the wooden shackles under her feet, Droma had to let her legs twist over, one in front of the other, and flatten them into a straddling running position on the ground.
Tsomai placed the child she had wrapped in a sheepskin next to her stomach and waited until the morning when Zazi, the enforcer, would come back and put her in the station cage, every day and every week like that.
Para Zongben complained to me, “Dawa beat Drolma on the road while she was begging in the city, and then pressed the woman to the ground and did that, not caring how many people were standing next to her.”
“Well, that’s not very nice. I’ll talk to Tenzin when I see him, my lord.”
“But, but, Dieben, who led the troops, Tenzin did ask you to look after his estate and house-slaves before he left, I know it was so.”
“All right, I’ll manage this on his behalf. Tonju, bring out my riding crop.”
Right by the front door, the energetic Dawa was riding on Drolma’s stomach, punching the woman in the face as I had been taught to do, making Drolma cry out, while her little son slept soundly in Tsomai’s arms. After the beating he started to fuck her and we waited for him to finish.
“Chroma, get up on your knees!”
“Is it true what Master Munemoto said about you and your husband mating like dogs right there on the main road?”
“Ah… oooh…” she kowtowed, then nodded again.
“Master Soubon does not like this! Tonjou, lead her over to the standing cage and give her fifty lashes of the horse whip.”
Tonju made her kneel with her back against the standing cage, lifted her handcuffed hand up and wrapped the rope haphazardly around the wooden post above her head, then smacked her breasts and tits hard, slowly working her way down all over her stomach.
“Ah… ah… ah… ah…” Chökyi cried out in a low voice, her face raised up to the sky, the top of her head grinding back hard against the stake.
“Chroma, not screaming loud enough! As you can see, there are some new flatlanders, and the master wants them to hear how the highlanders discipline their house slaves. Dawa, come here!”
Dawa, a man of great strength, dragged the woman’s entire lower body to the front under our direction, and then he drew up both of Droma’s legs together with the triangle formed by the large wooden yoke attached to them, and he dug himself into the center, pinning the woman’s legs separately toward her armpits. Chroma’s other end was bound to the wrists of the wooden cage, and the slave girl’s body hung suspended in the center swinging around.
Dava, who had never known it possible to be happy with his wife even in such a state, literally squeezed himself and the woman’s flesh forward in a bit of a frenzy, balling Chroma up into a strangely shaped semi-circle between his body and the standing cage. With half of her back against the wooden post, the woman’s legs parted and her knees bent, her head sticking out from amongst her dangling arms and being pushed forward onto her own stomach, she jawed at the big thing that was moving in and out of Dawa’s own body, right in front of her eyes.
“You see, you again seduced the husband on the roadside to do this dirty deed.” After Dawa retreated with a gasp I said, “Tonjou, did this slave girl just use her legs to lewdly clamp down on her man?”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Then crush the bend of her leg, crush the knee she won’t have the strength to do that tomorrow.”
The woman hung limply from the wooden post, and they folded her calves back behind her, put a thick wooden stick through the bend of her knee, and tried her feet on the ends of the stick.
“Tonju, it’s all about adding something under the knees.”
“All right, my lord. But what is it?”
“Let’s say… let’s use the board under the cage!”
A couple of men dragged the floorboard with the vertical pins from the station cage outside, careful to guard against sticking their hands, then wrenched up Chroma’s leg and pushed the pinboard under her knee.
“Oh… oh… oh…” she said.
Kneeling on a needle can be painful because there’s only bone there, and a thin needle will go into the crevices of the joints. Getting your butt stuck with a needle is like sunbathing on a beach by comparison.
Then the two men stomped down heavily on that stick, “One, two, three!” Both sides of their riding boots stomped down in unison.
“Ready, one, two, three!”
“Aaah… ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Ah…”
“Tonju, step on it and don’t let go!”
“ah… ah… ah… oooh… ah… hmm… hmm… hmm…”
“Wake her up.”
“Chroma, are you awake?”
“Oh… uh… uh… uh…”
“Tonju, step on it!”
“ah… ah… ooh…”
“Watering… Choma, Choma, are you awake? …she’s awake. Again, step on it!”
┅┅
“Tonju, see? That’s the way it’s going to be. The Parazon would have had many traditional ways of doing this, no worse than our generators. You take them here, and when you see that the slave is conscious, you squeeze her hard, but when she’s about to pass out from the pain, you relax her a little bit, just a little bit, let her breathe a little bit, so that she can’t die, and then you squeeze… it’s that simple… and you just keep on doing it until tomorrow morning, and then she’s really going to know what it’s like to be as good as dead. Isn’t that right, my Chökyi?”
Tonjou and the others took turns that whole night, and the first half of the night Droma screamed her heart out and sounded miserable, and by the time the second half of the night rolled around it was less audible.
Later, Drolma continued her public execution by leaning against her cage, which was narrow enough that we didn’t worry that she wouldn’t be able to stand up, even if her knees did shatter. But at night she had to crawl side by side with one of her husbands, the invalid Tsomai, into the city to beg, the baby hanging and swaying below her belly, and her breasts hanging downward in the same way.
After a night of pressing a wooden bar in this way, she feared she would be unable to stand for half a month, and her knees would be full of bleeding pinholes. But since Chroma had been walking on the planks of her feet, which had been pierced all over with steel needles, she had crouched on her knees with those too. Honestly, it was a very heavy job for a woman to drag her naked body forward in such a condition with wooden shackles on her legs and handcuffs on her hands, but at last in the twilight we saw them slowly creeping along the roadside.
Past Events in the Snowy Region (XIII)
“Chroma, Parazon would have liked to know, did you do that again today with your husband in public on the main road?”
This woman probably thought the game was over. No, it’s just begun!
“Hmph, I know you can’t control your rotten ones. You’re embarrassing His Lordship so much that Palazomben will think that His Lordship is a man who can’t even control his lackeys. Tonjou, I guess we’ll just have to seal up that thing she can’t control.”
“With a thud, stakes were driven into the dirt, and because of the wooden shackles, Chroma’s feet, which were always spread apart, were now tied to the stakes with ropes so that they too could not move. Rolling up the Dawa brothers’ piece of wool felt and stuffing it under the woman’s buttocks, Dondo brought a bucket of dry, hard soybeans, and Zazie, the enforcer, squatted down and opened the woman’s high-facing pussy door.
The first is to have that soybeans really dry and have had a lot of sun; the second is to have it stuffed firm and full.
They filled the woman’s vagina with soybeans, and the yellow color of the soybeans opened up her delicate opening, but this was only by hand, adding tools would be different. They got some sticks to use as tools and pushed them in like pounding rice… Sure enough, Chokyam’s vagina was empty again, and they filled it up again and pressed it down again.
“I’m not a woman, I’ve never used a needle before!” Tonjou shrieked with laughter and pushed the large mass of needles and thin twine into Zazie’s hand, but he was only joking. It was the needle and string used to seal the mouth of the sack, and he held the needle awkwardly in his thick fingers, picking up Choma’s left labia majora, penetrating it with all his strength, pulling through it with the thin string, the woman’s wet, greasy piece of flesh sliding in and out of his hand, and then penetrating the one on the opposite side of the woman, circling back around, and taking maybe eight stitches to do it all.
“ohh. ohh. ohh. ohh.” cringing and twisting her head as her own labia were pierced, having suffered so much already, this wasn’t something that Chroma couldn’t stand at all.
Tonju drew the rope tight and knotted it over the woman’s tightly closed cunt. The twine stretched taut and straightened up, strangling and lengthening the perforated wounds in Drona’s flesh. The lips of Droma’s scarred, bloodstained flesh were twisted and forked with rope after rope, like an official seal used by our Lord Para to drive a man out of his house.
The really unbearable thing would be after midnight, when the dried soybeans had absorbed the water from Chroma’s body, and they would rise up in there, and some people said it would be four or five times as big as it had been, and then it would be a lioness that would become completely insane.
In order to prevent her from being able to tear herself away, Tonjou tied her hands to the top of the cage and made her stand against it. Luckily, she had already exhausted her energy the day before, and not only could she not speak, but her voice could not produce any sound, so she did not make much noise that night, except for a slight “hmmmm” or “whimpering” moan all the time. We just heard a muffled “thump, thump, thump” sound, probably Chroma was hitting her body against something.
In the middle of the night, Dunzhu asked someone to go and see why she was not moving, and then there was the sound of a whip striking bare flesh, and still Drolma could not scream, but the “thong” sounded even more ferocious.
It is said that until the morning after she was shoved into the cage she was still stomping her feet like crazy, sometimes bouncing ridiculously on the iron spikes at the bottom of the cage. On top of it she slammed her chest hard against the wooden bars, then arched up and slammed her butt back, rubbing her back back and forth. She puts her head between the wooden bars and arches and burrows desperately, turning sideways and slapping her cheeks to the side.
By the time I stepped out, though, she was exhausted and limp in a corner of the station cage, knees bent, leaning on her ass and shivering. All over her body were lumps and blood from her own collisions, and on her small stomach bulged a hard-looking mass. And most striking of all was a huge bulge puffed out at the base of Chroma’s legs, the two pieces of flesh covering it stretched wide and thin to the point where the veins showed clear purple-red webs on the surface, deeply embedded in one of the cords that had been struck across the body.
The skin of the package like a living animal, itself is slowly wriggling, like to take the initiative to break free from the restraints, climb out of Zhuo Ma’s body. Drolma is more like falling into the ice like shivering, her teeth knocked “da da” sound, but the whole body is like being roasted like in a thick layer of sweat.
The pained face turned around with the weight of a thousand pounds and saw me with tears in her eyes, “Ummm… Ummm… Ummm… Ummm… Ummm… Ummm… Ummm… Ummm… Ummm… Ummm… Ummm… Ummm… Ummm… Ummm… Ummm… Ummm… Ummm… Ummm… Ummm… Ummm… Ummm… Ummm… Ummm… Ummm… Then her head fell like a stone and hit the wooden fence in front of her with a loud thud. After a few seconds, she lifted her head with great difficulty and moved forward, “Ummm… ah…” “And then there was another thud.
I didn’t bother to speak, frowning as I turned away, “Ooohhhh…”, “Ooohhhh…”, I heard her wail hoarsely two more times from behind me.
“Dieben,” Mr. Zhang, who had finally appeared, stood in front of me and looked over my shoulder at my behind: “Is she sick?” He began politely, “There was a lot of arguing last night. Do you have to treat a woman like that? Even if she is a guilty slave?”
“Mr. Chapter is auspicious. Para Zongben was a very pious man, and he was angry with this slave girl. Spoiling the scriptures was a big mistake and would have been flayed. But I think she did interfere with the rest of your army, and I’m very, very sorry, we’ll figure out a way to shut her up.” I smiled up and looked into Mr. Chapter’s kind eyes.
His face went white, “Oh, no, there’s no need to tell her to shut up, shut up,” Mr. Zhang, who was a good speaker, stuttered slightly, “I just… it’s a matter for you Highlanders.”
On this day it was Tsomai who helped Drolma look after her son, sometimes allowing Drolma to squeeze her breasts through the cracks in the wooden railings to feed him some milk. This day she also did not set out with her husband to ask for food. I was mindful of Mr. Zhang’s face, and I did not let Drolma make any more noise that night.
A night and a day later, Chroma also looked like she was in less pain, women’s reproductive ducts are incredibly adaptable, they can get a baby out of there, so we didn’t allow her to untie the ropes that closed her off either, and she held those beanies in her vagina for days on end.
Dawa didn’t understand much about it, why he couldn’t find that funny hole now. For two nights in a row he pressed Chroma against the wall, pressing and squeezing the big bag with his hands, trying to push her back into his wife’s body.
It hurt when he pressed on it, and Drolma gently pulled his hand out, but Dawa insisted on finding out what he wanted, and when he was angered he raised his hand and hit his wife in the stomach, and even Tsomai couldn’t pull him out.
Drolma sighed and “mmmmm” like a child, lifted Dawa’s serge up to find his cock, she held it, and in a few strokes she had him out, a touching picture of heavenly bliss!
We didn’t want Choma to still be able to use her hands either. That night Tonjoo tied up the hands of the slave girl ZhuoMa, one by one to put bamboo nails into each of her fingernail cracks to go, as long as the heart is hard and steady hand, this is not difficult, he quickly finished. Thin and long bamboo nails from under the skin dive over the whole finger, poking Zhuo Ma hand on the back of the chapped skin, like a wolf’s teeth as through out, by the blood drain into a deep red color; and a few other downward tearing a woman’s hand on the thin pad of muscle, in the tip of the above hanging strands of shredded flesh, the rest of the remaining tip is probably still left in the palm of her hand, right!
The woman fell to her knees and stretched out her hands towards the front flat, she was in so much pain that her whole arm stiffened and she didn’t dare to move at all anymore. The second half of the night was another turn for the traditional ways of the Para Zongben, many of the Zongyas in the snowy region were indeed still stuck in the last century, and he was even able to find a pair of squeezes.
Thin, hard sticks were clamped between the fingers of Zhuo Ma’s hands, tightening the two ends of the rope, and we admired her blood-leaked fingers filled with bamboo shaking like plucking silk strings under the firelight, enjoying listening to her sharp and gritty screams spreading out in the night, reaching across to Tenzin’s earth building.
We know that after a few days of idleness she has a little more energy to endure and shout. Still the same, Tonjou held her by the hair, and he stopped when he felt that she was passing out, and shook her so that she could remain conscious of the deep, sharp pains inflicted on the roots of her fingers. Pala knew that in his career as an officer the most hardened thief would become as honest as a child after one or two consecutive chimes of squeezing his fingers like this, and in fact at that point Pala was able to get the suspect, who was screaming for mercy, to confess to stealing the British crown, or committing adultery with the Qing Empress.
And I had plenty of hands, and before dawn rose Tonju and the others had rotated four or five of them, and neither had she been rendered unconscious nor stopped. It’s just that Chroma no longer has a tongue, or I’d like to know what she’d admit to.
When at last Tonjou finally spoke up, she said, “All right, Minion, now go and please your idiot husband!”
Chroma’s face, which had been twisted crookedly all night, showed such intense gratitude, nodding desperately as she propped herself up on her elbows, holding her bloody ten fingers up in front of her face and crawling over them, dragging a wide trail of sweat across the muddy ground.
She couldn’t use her hands anymore and arched her head over Dava’s leg to get inside his serge hem, and Dava lifted his rags in surprise to see what his woman was doing. Watching his wife work so hard to get his organ into her mouth was frightening at first, and Dava felt better once Chroma had closed her eyes and slid up with her mouth bulging.
During the year that the flatlanders led by the chapter leader lived in Gokyo, our main entertainment was to beat up Choma on that dirt field, and we were constantly coming up with new ways to torture Choma, the slave girl of the highlanders, hard in front of them.
After two winter snows had fallen in Gekkei, the accumulated snow covered the bare feet of Choma, who stood in her cage. Master Soupen compassionately allowed Choma to wear a woolen felt during the daytime public display, and to wrap it around her naked body when she and her husbands went into town to beg for food. Her feet and the chains she dragged behind them made messy tracks on the snowy road, while her withered calves below the knee remained bare, red and swollen from the cold and oozing with ulcers, as did her bare feet.
In the even colder December that ensued, I asked Lord Zonben to suspend the punishment of Chroma, who fed her son and stoutly survived her first winter as a Highland slave girl in Master Pala’s stables, alongside her husbands.
As history has recorded, the creation of an office by the Flatlanders in the Snowlands was forced to stop after a year, and with it came rebellions in all directions. The Snowlands are too vast, and with highland nobles like us constantly making trouble for them, it is absolutely impossible to control the Snowlands peacefully in this way.
By the time the following spring came, I had developed a force of three hundred men, and I conceived that I had strength enough to overcome my opponents in a well-considered operation. But I hesitated, for up to this time Mr. Chapter and his men had not given me much trouble.
I prudently kept the main part of my army at Tenzin Manor in Chinka, so that Mr. Zhang would not know exactly what my real strength was. Only a few dozen of Dhondup’s men followed me to live in Geking, and the provisioning of three hundred men was already a problem; Pala Tsongben kept his promise to collect grain from the whole clan and carry it by human backs across the Gedang Pass. During that time, we traveled back and forth between Qinka and Geking very frequently.
When the snow and ice had just melted, and I returned to Tenzin Manor for the first time after a winter, I saw Brin, who had walked more than a mile out to meet me, and by his side stood the elegantly dressed girl of the Highlanders. She was dressed in an old but clean, rainbow-colored plateau-style dress, with a curved shoulder and an arm like a highlander, and an empty sleeve tied around her waist.
She spat out her tongue in a gesture of bowed respect, a humble smile on her round face, clean as the moon. What revealed her status as a house slave were her bare feet; she wore no boots, and from the hem of her skirt down they were snow-white and soft on the rough gravel slope, showing a natural, supple demeanor that was habitual.
Trey Smiling Dove’s eyes glanced over behind me and her smile hardened as the first back slave standing behind me was the dark, lean and depleted, naked Chroma. Just as she had left the place, flabby breasts dangled over her naked chest and belly, while thick chain links locked her thin wrists and ankles, and even the small iron ring that pierced her shoulder blades hung where it had been, only temporarily removed for the sake of long walks. She was deeply bent at the waist and carried a large bag of oil on her bowed back.
As her master stopped, so did Chroma, and with the weight of her body she waited silently for his signal to start again. Her dark eyes gazing at the three of us were now like those of an animal that has no intelligence, only fear. I don’t think she cared about Cui Xiaogou and her changes, nor did she care that the wooden house in front of her was a new place, she just followed her master’s back closely, either stopping or walking, which was enough for a slave girl on the plateau.
I asked Brynn, “What about those other two flatland women?”
“Sick, with sores on it, living to feed the hounds.”
Well, that’s a bit boring for the warriors! Now that there are more people, I think Brynn probably won’t let anyone else touch his little dove girl.
“They’ve been chasing those slave girls that Tenzin left behind all day, driving them all over the place.” Brynn said.
“Do you see them still going after this? Droma was a house slave’s wife in Geking, and their whole family is dirty and smelly.”
Brynn laughed: “My lord, those hans we recruited are nothing more than vagabonds who used to wander the streets of Syracuse much dirtier than a good master’s house slaves could ever be.”
“All right, Chroma, put the stuff in the stables!”
“Ah.” Draco answered hoarsely.
“Dove girl, then you take Droma to the house where the warriors live.”
“My slave’s name is now Yangjin, the name Master Brynn gave my slave is Yangjin.” The girl said softly in Highlander with a raw but pleasant accent.
“Well, Youngin, why don’t you wait for Zhuo Ma to put down the oil and fetch some water for her to wash her body, more or less clean!”
Three hundred people, I think, would have filled that house upstairs and downstairs!
That first time I stayed on the estate for three days, and Chroma served among my greatly increased number of warriors for three days. It had been exactly one year since she had first been brought into the manor, and somewhat unlike then, when I walked into those large houses downstairs, the sight of the naked Chroma, pressed under men of all shapes and sizes and faces, and squeezed and pushed around day and night, had no expression left other than one full of dumbfounded obedience.
Past Events in the Snowy Region (XIV)
I’ve been writing my recollections for many days now, and anyway, I understand that eventually I’ll get to the end of this crazy story.
In thirty years I have traveled across the snowy region and beyond, killing countless people, but the only person who appeared in my dreams during these decades was the bloodstained Zhuo Ma, who rode on one of my majestic horses named Eagle and sped across the vast snowy region.
In my dream, however, she was not wearing the chains she had never left her body in the last three years, but she was indeed naked, with veins and arteries of green and red pulsing all over her body like a network of rivers, and her whole body crystallized and clear as a column of golden-red crystal stone in a riverbed beneath the snow-capped mountains of Meiguo, and enclosed in the depths of the vaguely visible kernel of which was Drolma’s beating heart.
On that day Para Zongben and I were invited to be guests in the preparatory group of the Flatlanders, who were at that time endeavoring to build the horse gang road through the edge of the city that was barely passable for automobiles, and on which we had intercepted Li Chun the previous year. The Flatlanders intend to make it a real road, and Mr. Chap wanted our support in enlisting more folk and pack animals, and expressed a desire to be able to acquire more grain on condition of paying for it.
I looked out of the second-floor window and saw Pala’s official residence across the dirt field, and the empty station cage by his gate. Drolma had again followed the back slaves of the support staff over the snow-covered mountains of Meghaburi to Qinka, this time led by Dhondup.
Autumn had come, and the brothers Dawa and Tsomai were still huddled stolidly under the corner there, wrapped in blankets, the one-year-old boy sitting on Tsomai’s lap. Now he was always the one who looked after the boy and fed him goat’s milk whenever Drolma was away. Then I heard the faint sound of horses’ hoofs, distant but very urgent, and I looked across the road in the direction of the snow-capped mountains, but the clutter of houses blocked my view.
Suddenly a brown stallion dashed into the dirt field downstairs, the stallion Eagle, my prized mount, that had been left behind in Qinca. I opened my mouth, but could not make a sound, and all kinds of strange thoughts flashed through my mind one after another.
I watched as the skinny slave girl, naked with only her two flaccid breasts fluttering, Choma, rode sideways on her horse, her tanned skin dripping with sweat and glistening in the evening sunlight of the plateau, her straggling hair burning in the air like black flames, she resembled a mythological goddess spiraling down from the peaks of snow-covered mountains. The chains on her feet dragged on the ground with a series of crisp crashes. She drove my horse in a gentle semicircle around the dirt field and stopped under our dirt building.
Gershon was a small town in the snowy country, but it had been built a hundred and fifty years. In all those years, no one had ever heard of a naked woman leading a horse over the passes of the snow-covered Meghaburi Mountains, and never, never, could a dirty, lowly slave girl ride so proudly over the city on a handsome horse, bare of her breasts and tits, and gallop across it. What happened on that evening later became a legend in the city of Gekyong, saying that Drolma, who was shown naked in front of the dzongsar, turned into a bird on that day and flew over the snowy mountains.
The sound of her shackles was coming up the stairs, and all of us were already all on our feet when the cloaked, naked, barefooted slave girl pushed open the door to her room.
I shouted, “Chroma, stop! You want to die!” I jumped in front of her: “Get down and come back with me to the other side!” But like a different person, she raised her hand and pushed me, her master, to the side, I never thought she had so much strength.
She said to Mr. Zhang, “Oooh, ah ah.” At the same time she gestured in the air with her right hand as if she were holding a pen, and Mr. Chang just said, “Choma, Choma, Choma, Choma…” Choma took a step forward and drew the pen that was hanging there out of his jacket pocket, and she turned around and wrote on the whitewashed wall, “Chinka’s Highlanders are going to sneak up on us this night. Gekkei, make preparations and notify the troops at the site.” She glanced at me and then continued, “Two hundred and thirty men, three machine guns, commanded by Brin.”
My legs went weak and I sat backward in my chair. I stared in disbelief at the woman’s calves on the floor in front of me, their veins bulging and curling, their sinews tangled and knotted, so solid and dry and hard as the legs of an overworked man; her ankles, rough as the bark of a pine tree, and her heels as hard as pebbles, were tightly bound by the rings of the shackles.
Only one squad of the Flatlanders stayed in Gershon during that month, the rest were on the road building site. Brin was obviously aware of the situation. Mr. Zhang had already rushed to the door of the room: “Squad Leader Zhao, tell someone to ride to the construction site and report the situation here to Platoon Leader Guan.”
“Ah! Ah!” Chokma waved at him from the wall, and when Mr. Chang turned back to her, she wrote on the wall, “We’re holding on to this place to lure the rebels into a siege. Based on the distance traveled, Platoon Leader Guan will be there in the middle of the night…” Her pen had worn out its point on the wall, and there was no ink left, so someone handed her a new one: “Tell Platoon Leader Guan to split up into two sections and to strike at the same time behind the rebels’ encirclement. They are not strong enough to fight, they will disperse, pay attention to control the direction of Meiguo Snow Mountain.”
“That way they can’t run back.” I thought subconsciously.
I watched the young, lean flatland soldiers running up and down the stairs, setting up their machine guns in the second-floor windows, and laying out the clumsy wooden-handled grenades of the kind they usually used in a row on the floor. Parazomben and I looked at each other like two fools, scared and curious at the same time, thinking that this was what I was going to do, though the truth was that it wasn’t what I was going to do, and I didn’t know anything about it. What does Bryn want? What am I going to do now?
I stood up and arched my hand to the chapter leader: “Brother will leave first.” Turning his head, he said, “Zhuo Ma, go with the master!”
Zhuo Ma step forward and close the legs, straight kneel down to the ground, “ah” answered, she from the posture to the look are in an instant completely changed back to a slave, just like the calm and decisive command of the appearance no longer exists in the slightest. At the same time, Mr. Zhang stepped in front of me: “Yorimoto and Munemoto, please stay with us for one night, if there are really rebels, I’m afraid you can’t guarantee your safety if you go out.”
Para let out a hollow laugh that deceived himself: “Joke, I am a snowy government appointed Soubon, how can I be unsafe? Who would have the guts to trouble me under Mount Meghaburi? I can go wherever I want, I…”
A large soldier grabbed him by the shoulders and dryly pressed him back into his chair : “Rest for a while, both of you!” He stayed by my side to keep an eye on us.
Of course, I’m just saying that, and whatever part I play in this affair, of course the Flatlanders can’t let us out, and while they’ve always been reasonably courteous, they’d never be so naive and stupid as to let us go out and talk nonsense after we’ve been listed in their pre-war meetings for so long.
Chökyi, who was still kneeling in front of me, looked at me silently with her curved black eyes, and began to say, “Oooh, bar bar…” She was still holding the second pen in her right hand, and with her left hand she made a gesture of floating in the air, and this time a piece of white paper was immediately placed in her hand. Without proof, she pressed the paper against her bare stomach and wrote a few flat texts upside down, the tip of the fountain pen scratching the surface of the paper. She came up on her knees, the chains on her wrists and hands rattled together, and Chroma habitually cupped her hands and raised the piece of paper in front of me, which read, “He’s going to kill you too.”
I did not leave Tenzin Tulou, where the Flatland army was stationed, that day, and after I had glanced at the line of type I knew that Drolma was right, and that I, always a man of many wits, had fallen for such a trick as to leave my army. Brin should indeed have taken this opportunity to kill me, and henceforth possessed that army which I had taken so much pains to organize.
I never did ask why Droma told me this, was it so she could spend more time in her people’s group? Or was it an instinctive desire to please her master? Or was it to create problems among us Highlanders? Or even if she just wanted to save me for the cause of the Flatlanders, maybe until then the chapter leader still saw me as someone to work with among the Highlanders.
They waited with their lights out, looking as if they were unsuspecting. I must say that my troops did have bad military qualities, and as they intended to steal in the night, they should have surrounded the little building without a sound, like hunters stalking close to a yellow sheep. But we saw early on the big and small fires, the sound of coughing staffs, and disorganized footsteps on the other side of the main road.
Mr. Zhang approached the window, and an ironic smile appeared on his face in the darkness of the night. Then a gunshot rang out from the dark shadows that were approaching, and it was fired at the sky. I laughed bitterly.
Then they fired indiscriminately at our earthen buildings. I’d still gotten them some good weapons from Y, and besides, they were way outnumbered by the flatlanders, so it was still very lively for a while. In one burst of fire after another, there were always a few bullets coming in through the windows and hitting the walls leaving some bullet holes.
Para had ducked under that table, with a bloated belly that made him look a little cramped; Droma was on one leg beside the machine gun shooter pressing bullets into his magazine, and she was doing it quickly, looking skillful.
Without warning, the flatland soldier manning the machine gun opened his arms widely and fell to the floor with a dull thud, his head resting just a little in front of my feet, and immediately stopped moving. Chroma leaned down toward him, felt in his chest, looked up at the others and greeted them with, “Ah, ah, ah.” Then she turned to the window and pressed the butt of the machine gun against her thin shoulders, her crouching legs steadily supporting her bare buttocks and back, which were throbbing with the recoil of the weapon, her feet curved like bows as she pressed them against the floor, and her large, flat, bare heels were attached to narrow, protruding Achilles tendons, which sprang and quivered.
There were two explosions in quick succession downstairs, and in the sudden burst of fire, Chroma’s pointed chin and the breasts bouncing fiercely on her chest had a gold and red glow about them.
Palla cried out as shrilly as a woman can, “Take them to the so-and-so room!” There was a shout over the sound of gunfire, and two soldiers roughly pushed us across the aisle and into a small room at the back. The big soldier was near the back window looking out, and Para and I were sitting on a plain army quilt spread out on the ground, he was scrunched up holding his head, and I think I was better off than he must have been.
There was a fire somewhere outside the building, illuminating the dark room. I turned my face to see an open document bag peeking out from under the green army blanket, some pieces of paper, and I subconsciously pulled one out.
“Briefing on Li Chun, former cadre of the Liaison Department (top secret). Li Chun (female), a former deputy regimental staff officer (with the rank of major) of the Liaison Department, was captured by the reactionary highlanders and defected to the enemy, handing over all the lists of personnel in his possession, which led to the murder of many people and had a considerable impact on our intelligence work in Shannan, incurring a blood debt. According to the report of the preparatory group of the Qusong Dzong Office, Li Chun now appears in the local highlanders’ armed forces, calls himself a highlander, changes his name to Zhuo Ma, and marries a local highlander. Although it is alleged that the local highland aristocracy will stand in the cage to show the public, should be due to their internal conflicts, considering the current situation, I do not arrest, do not interfere with the appropriate. Leave it to be resolved in the future, depending on the development of the snowy region’s democratization.”
Yes, I knew that the Flatlanders were a disciplined army that feared defection like leprosy, and that the mere experience of being captured by their opponents was usually regarded as a heresy that would be difficult to forgive for the rest of one’s life, and the betrayer was regarded as the enemy of all evils. I don’t know why, but I suddenly felt that Li Chun might have known about all this, that she and the Flatlanders of the Preparatory Group might not really be as uninvolved as I had seen them, and that I might not be aware of all of her behavior in Gekkei.
Behind those disorganized warriors of mine, the sound of continuous firing like the hammering of iron from a Soviet submachine gun rang out from all parts of the outskirts of the city of Geking, along with the usual dismal and grotesque trumpets of the flatland armies. Within ten minutes at the most, my three hundred Highland warriors were turned into scattered and fleeing prey, and I had long since learned that the Highlanders were really a peaceful people in temperament, and that they were better suited to singing songs in pursuit of yellow sheep.
Bryn was seen to be hit in the thigh by a bullet while running with his back to Tenzin Tulou, and he was seen crawling on the ground, but he disappeared anyway, and I neither saw him nor heard from him again for the next two years.
In addition to the corpses thrown horizontally and vertically on the dirt field below, the Chapter Leader asked those Highlanders who had not run away, or who did not want to run at all, if they would be willing to contribute to the construction of the highway when they could receive two pockets of flour for a month’s work, and indeed there were quite a few who were willing to do so. And Platoon Leader Kwan very carefully gathered up all the weapons they had discarded, without which there would never be an army again.
I went back into that big room and tried to regain some dignity. Chroma had left her gun and was sitting against the wall, and she was writing on the reverse side of the note with her head down, “I’d like some scrambled eggs.” She showed the paper to the flatland soldier beside her, with her customary little smile of ingratiation, but at the same time she saw me, “flung herself down” to my feet and kowtowed, raising her head and saying, “Ah, ah,” and staring fearfully into my face.
I sucked in my breath and walked over to the window, not realizing that she was following me on her knees, “Go on, go on, go on!” I said impatiently, “Ah” she agreed.
Without using chopsticks, she grabbed the oily, yellow rice and shoved it into her mouth, shrugging her two narrow, knife-backed shoulders and swallowing convulsively before burping violently. She licked her greasy fingers greedily. The flatlanders around me had retreated noiselessly, leaving me, a lord, to wait for his slave girl to finish her meal, for what I feared would be the only time in my life.
“Come, come with me, Droma?” Slavegirl Droma followed me down the stairs with a slight hunch, dragging the chains on her hands and feet as she slowly crossed the empty field.
As if nothing had happened, Dawa and Tsomai crouched where they were and watched us approach.
Dawa called excitedly, “Dro, Dro, Droma.” While putting her hand to her lower body to stroke, and the boy has been able to recognize his mother, he opened his hand and smiled.
I’m no longer a leading Dieben, I’m going back to Cinca Village to run the estate.
This time it was Dhondup who greeted me outside the gates of Tenzin’s estate, and now it was Dhondup who had the girl named Yonkin with him. I already knew that while Brin was planning his rebellion, it was Dhondup who had taken Drolma, who was busy serving the soldiers, to the stables, where our rows of handsome horses were tethered, and he had left her there alone and unlocked the door. Everyone drank in the room while Dromma took out the eagle and quietly slipped out of the estate. Did Tonjoo intentionally or unintentionally release Drolma to report to Geking because of his loyalty to me, or was it for the sake of this woman called Yangjin?
The first slave to follow me was still the naked and shackled Drolma, her paralyzed husband on her lowered body, her one-year-old son dangling from her belly. She and the naïve but powerful Dawa took turns carrying Tsomai over the Kodang Pass.
(to be continued)