Past Events in the Snowy Region (XV)
“Chroma, you may have actually saved His Lordship’s life, but it is absolutely unforgivable for a slave to do such a thing, and His Lordship must give you a very severe punishment.”
Chroma fell to her knees and agreed with an “ah,” then nodded vigorously.
“The fingers have taken the pen, so cut off the fingers; the legs have straddled the horse, so cut the hamstrings. Do you hear me, slave girl Chroma?”
Chroma “ahs” and kowtows again.
Such a highland torture required boiling oil, and the frying pan eventually boiled and smoked. The yoke tightened both of Chroma’s wrists before placing her hands flat on the countertop so that they could no longer move. The sharp edge was pressed against the index finger of the slave girl’s right hand, at the first joint. The hardened Chroma, who had suffered endless pain, opened her dark eyes wide and stared at the blade, and her hand, along with Tonjou.
The hammer in Dondo’s hand slammed down, and the iron clashed together with a “dang,” and another muffled crack, and “yow,” and Chroma’s eyes closed for two seconds. . The knife, the hammer and everyone’s attention moved to the second joint of the index finger, the same sound, the third time before slicing off the root of the stump.
Chökyamuni silently watched her fingers shorten section by section, leaking blood and throwing them away to the side as she watched the palm of her right hand turn into a bare patty of flesh. Chökyamuni’s upper teeth sliced downward into her lower lip, “Mmm… mmm!” She said with patience.
She didn’t move a muscle when the yoke was opened, but when the two men gripped her little arms tightly and dipped them into the bubbling oil beside her, the woman instinctively jerked her bloody stump backward, her bare, duck-flippered palms pivoting ridiculously back and forth before exploding in the oil with a “splintering, splatting, snapping” sound. “Ahhhh! Aaahhhh…” she finally cried out, pulling out her charred limbs and waving them wildly in front of her face.
The tradition of such a highlander is to sterilize the wound of the tortured person, to reduce the chance of her dying from sensual discharge, and to stop the bleeding. I came to understand this after I was exposed to western science by studying in Y.
She finally quieted down, shivering and blowing cool air into her right palm as people grabbed her hand and shoved it back into the round hole of the wooden yoke. Now it was Choma’s turn to take the first knuckle of the index finger of her left hand, and that day she endured a total of twenty-eight cuts to each of her knuckles on both hands.
Her legs had been bent on the ground on her knees, and the next step was to step on her calves tightly and push back on her paws, and straightened out, narrow and protruding taut, was her Achilles tendon. The hunter’s knife sawed down around the edge of the shackle’s iron ring to the deep carpal bone. In the incision that blossomed in Chroma’s coarse, hard skin, the severed muscles and tendons, the discrete strips and filaments, contracted back into the depths at either end like terrified snakes.
“Oh… oh… oh… oooooh… ah…” Chokyma, who had been gripped tightly by several hands on her shoulders, wrinkled her brow and let out a moaning cry of pain. She would never be able to get up and walk across the Gatan pass to report the news, but if she was determined enough, she might still be able to climb across, so that wasn’t all.
Finding a piece of chestnut wood thick enough to be sawed in half, and chiseling four semicircular openings in the center, with freshly broken forks and spurs, he clamped down on Chroma’s calf while she was still lying on her back, tossing and turning and aching, and nailed the big board into one piece with a bar of iron across the top of it.
It is summer in the Highlands, and the Dawa brothers and their wives have made their new home at the door of the stable, though I have promised them that they may live in the stable in the winter when it snows.
Throughout the morning, the farmers in Qinka brought yaks with them to bring vats of fresh milk to Tenzin Manor, and the slave girl, Drolma, began to work at that time to beat the pearl oil from the fresh milk, which was one of the important daily tasks of the women in the plateau. She used a wooden stick to pound the milk in the bucket, so that the milk in the bucket, where the oil and water will gradually separate, the oil will be condensed in the upper layer. The oil and water will gradually separate, and the oil will congeal on the top layer. The oil will be picked up by hand and pinched into a ball shape, and the water will be squeezed out to make the Marginal Oil for the Highlanders, and the rest of the milk will be used to make milk residue.
Chroma could do the bucket after about a thousand strokes up and down, more containers of the same were piled up around Chroma, being a master never letting a house slave stop to be idle.
The common way for women was to stand in front of the large barrel, hold the center of the pestle in their hands, and lift their hands in unison, striking down with the force of the blow. Choma’s first problem was that she could only kneel, and by then the edge of the barrel was already at her chest, so she could only support the pestle against the edge of the barrel, raise it as high as her arms could possibly lift it, and then pound it down into the barrel, which was much more laborious.
Whenever she began her work early in the morning, she had to be helped by her faithful and honest husband, Tsomai, to wrap the rope around the stick where she held it, and then tighten it around the handcuffs which Choma never removed day or night, and which Choma then clamped with her crippled palms. Having thus bound her tool to her crippled hand, there was no need to untie it again until she had finished making the milk that had been brought in that day.
This, in effect, made the only place Droma stayed during the whole day was by the door outside the stable, and from the time she rose early in the morning and began to kneel until darkness fell in the evening, the only thing she did was to keep lifting her hands and pounding them down, along with the heavy tool. With her ability, of course, she could no longer replace the milk and oil in the pail; that was Dawa’s business. When it was done, she pulled it out of the pail and “ah, ah,” summoned her strong husband to haul a new pail from the side.
Chroma sometimes lowered her head and wiped a handful of sweat from her bound hands, trying to use her arms to help flick back the strands of hair that had drifted down her back. She would pause for a moment to glance at her young son, tethered to the trunk of a nearby tree, who was happily crawling in the dirt, picking up small stones. Sometimes he would try to pronounce the monotonous syllables: “Ma… Ma…” Chökyamun turned her head and raised her pestle back up, mouthing “Ba, Ba” in response.
For the first six months of her life, Chroma’s arms were not strong enough for a slave who was just beginning to learn to adapt to life on the plateau, and her tattered palms ached until they were completely healed, especially in the afternoons, when she gradually dropped her head onto her tightly bound hands, and at times stopped moving them, something a slave on the plateau should never be allowed to do.
There were only a dozen or so Highland warriors left on the estate at that point who still followed me, and with nothing to do with their days, some of their remaining usefulness to me was probably disciplining lackeys.
“You go and watch Chroma for me today, I always think the woman is not very obedient.” I said, so that a man would go over to the stables with a whip.
He sat by the door and watched the eagles circling the sky with the disabled Tsomai, listening to the rhythmic sound of Drolma’s large wooden stick striking the bottom of the bucket while he swung the whip in his hand to flick the weeds and flowers with boredom. When he felt the rhythm of the mortar and pestle become sluggish, the tip of the whip flew up and smacked Drolma’s shoulder, and Drolma, with her head hanging low, would “oooh” and jump on her knees in fear, hurrying to get herself ready to work.
Then things went a little too far, and the bored men gathered more and more over there, building fires to roast beef and mutton to eat and drink wine. In a place as isolated as the manor, if there was a naked woman somewhere, no matter how bad she was already, it would inevitably become a place where men gathered.
Drunkenly, they gathered around Drolma, sitting on her backward curled calves and fondling her breasts, lying on her legs and groping for her genitals, thrusting twigs in and out of Drolma’s anus. The naked woman, of course, did not dare to be distracted by them; she could only keep raising and lowering the pestle and mortar in her hands, and if she paused for a moment, the iron that had been roasting in the bonfire would be pressed against her body.
Sometimes it was because she was slow, sometimes it was just for fun, and as a result of this, their desire rose, and they would pull the woman’s hair and twist her face around, pressing her head into their crotch. They cum in the woman’s mouth again and again, and these bored men can go on like this all day long.
They had an invention that would rather please the master of the house slaves. They nailed a stake into the ground and every morning lifted Chroma’s body up and set it so that it went right into the top of the woman’s vagina. Chroma stood on her knees, which unlike her feet had no elasticity, and once the stake was in her body she had absolutely no way of lifting her ass up to pull it out, and so for the rest of the day she knelt in front of the milk pail with the thing propped up inside her and unable to move the slightest bit more. I love such an honest Highland slave.
At this point it would be fun to whip Droma, and they moved the milk pail to make room for a thorny branch of hemp to whip the naked Droma. Drolma shrieked and covered her head, crawling on her two knees like two frightened gophers, pushing her body around the stake in the center of her body like a mill, always making the bystanders laugh. Later the woman got down again with her hands on the ground to protect her chest, but had to strain very hard to tuck her stomach upwards, she had to keep her ass still pinned in place with a hard strap-on, so everyone spanked her immovable, shivering bare ass hard again.
The poisonous thorns of hemp stuck all over Zhuo Ma, and the red, swollen flesh would hurt and itch like fire, and she was having a very hard day. With her hands tied to the mortar and pestle, and the pestle stuck in the pail of milk, Drolma could not touch any part of her body, she just wriggled like a worm, trying to rub her bare buttocks and bare back somewhere, but in the end all she could do was to make herself move around violently, forgetting as much as possible about the intense stimulation all around her, and so she struck up and down the pail like a madwoman, screaming “whimpering” because that was all that mattered. “So she struck the pail up and down like a madwoman, whimpering and screaming, because that was all Chroma could do.
Later on, to make things easier, every day before they started to work, the men would play with Zhuo Ma’s genitals together, and they seldom really raped Zhuo Ma at that time, but only touched her with their hands, poked her with a wooden stick, and when the woman’s vagina was opened and slippery, they dragged her from the ground, inserted her into the stake, and then whipped her with a few sticks of marijuana. They told me that after doing this, the woman would whimper and squirm throughout the day, but would work very hard and would not need to be controlled.
In those days the beautiful Yonkin girl was already in a much better position than the ordinary slave-girls of the estate, and she used to go round in front of the stables and tease the children with some English candy which she had brought from Tenzin’s place, though no one ever saw her in any communication with Drolma. By then, the highland warriors who followed me to live in the Tenzin estate were more or less wary of Yangjin, and when the girl sat with her arms around the boy and looked with her big, smoky eyes at the men who were always swinging their whips around, he’d give a little stupid grin and hide that riding crop under his buttocks.
Until finally Yangjin took the child from the stables, she called him little Puqin (little boy) and tried to teach him to call himself “Mom, Mom”. At night she insisted on sleeping with P’ui-ch’ien, and seems to have quarreled with T’ung-chu, who slapped Yang-jin several times, swelling the girl’s cheeks, but it was T’ung-chu who gave in, and from then on it was Yang-jin’s girl who carried the boy.
The Snowy Past (XVI, End)
At the end of the day, when it was dark, another thing that the-oiled Zhuo Ma had to do was to climb out of the manor with her husband Tsomai. The first place she had to go was the meadow on the slopes of Meghaburi where the Tenzin family’s livestock grazed, where more than a dozen of Tenzin’s house slaves lived, of whom all but one, a family of four, were single young men. Since I am not in the mood right now, and Tenzin did not leave enough female slaves for them to get married, I let them use Zhuo Ma’s body for entertainment every day to reflect my benevolence as a lord.
Honest Tsomai would wait there with his wife, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, and then they would slowly climb down the slope side by side to enter the village of Chinka.
Qinka village only about fifty families, even the old to the young is only two hundred people, all of them are rented Tenzin land, and for the Tenzin estate to provide unpaid services to the farmers, Tso Mai has been able to call out the name of every person in the village. “Chikang,” he and his wife Choma knelt side by side in front of the family’s door, his old voice ringing out in solitude, “On behalf of this lord’s wishes, your son Tenzin can sleep with Choma, and I have brought her to you.” Then, as he had done in Geking, he watched as his naked, chained and shackled woman slowly crawled past him, propped up on the ground by her tattered palms.
Those little dirt huts of theirs were so small that a woman wearing a three-foot wooden yoke couldn’t turn around in them at all, and they’d always done it in the doorway.
At my request they had to crawl through the door of every house in the village where there was an unmarried man, and make the same request to the widower, or to the young men who were not yet married. I did not particularly care whether they did or did not do it, but I began that year to charge these men a “woman’s money” in addition to the tax on greens, peas, sheep, etc., and they were expected to pay something in return for the use of the women provided by his lordship.
Thus their tired two crawled back to the Tenzin estate in the middle of the night, and now by the stables door Choma belonged wholly to her two husbands. As far as I could observe, Dawa, who had been patient all day, was very impulsive at this time, and he gleefully dragged Drolma around to beat her and enter her, and then a moment later jumped up and kicked her all over the place, so that he was not really a husband who was easy to satisfy.
I managed the manor in place of Tenzin, collecting all kinds of taxes and arranging for the teams of branch messengers to bring back all kinds of outputs from the neighboring villages, and in the process of busily dealing with all these trivialities, I passed through the year calmly.
As I sat outside the house in the evening, watching the snow-covered white peaks of the Meghaburi snow-covered mountains turn slowly into a dazzling peach color in the evening sunlight, and looking down like a huge grass mat stretching down to the mangled slopes of the small village of Qinka, I experienced a great sense of emptiness and the breath of God in the snowy region.
“Yonkin, go get Chroma!”
The dark, thin slave girl slowly crawled to my feet, prostrated herself and touched the ground, then lifted her naked body, her hair covering her face and flowing in a disheveled manner. Her fingerless palms were cuffed together, hanging down in front of her blossoming, outturned, filthy genitals, gently shaking unconsciously.
“Youngin, go get some pea tsampa to feed the horses.”
“Throw it in the ground. Chroma, this is yours.”
First she kowtows, then she slumps down and sips the loose tsampa into her lips. She shrugged her ass and crawled around in circles in front of my feet to find the ones, a ligament protruding from the back of her neck that stretched and tugged.
“Yonkin, go bring a bucket of water.”
I scooped up a spoonful of cool water from the bucket and poured it down on the back of the head of this woman slumped on the ground, and she instantly froze in a column of water, no longer daring to move the slightest bit.
“Head up, woman, open your mouth.”
She tilted her head back and opened her mouth, her hair sticking up in large clumps like the fur of a dog that had just crawled out of the water.
“Drink it.” I poured the water over her face, splashing it in all directions. She strained underneath to take it, eyes closed, her thin, protruding throat sliding sharply up and down, sinking into a deep nest of flesh in the loose, wrinkled folds of skin on the woman’s chest below her neck.
“Well, today the master leads you to the pasture.”
Chroma climbed her familiar path ahead of her, her two bare feet dangling dangling out of the wooden shackles that stood sideways on the ground. The muscles on them had atrophied a lot, and the skin wrapped tightly around the skeleton, the high protruding bones and blood veins made these bare feet look like a pair of wooden statues. Her disheveled toes were like a handful of dead twigs, no longer as short, fat and round as we had seen at the beginning, with a childish innocence that did not quite match her age.
She rubbed her knees against the flinty sandstone, moving up to her left knee first, the wide wooden yoke support on the ground tilting from the front left to the back right, her head leaning forward, almost touching the ground already. Chroma moved up to her right knee again, at which point she lifted her body a little to look at the path and pushed her locked palms forward along the ground to find the next support. By the end of the day, Chroma had gotten this whole routine down to a science.
My riding boots stomped on the pasture grass that blossomed in the snowy summer to a halt, and Chroma, who was kneeling in front of the door of the hut at the ranch, lay down on her side; she had to lift one leg into the air, and make a great circle in the air to drop the wooden yoke on her ankle over her head, so that she could sleep with her face on her back. Her paws were completely limp and she couldn’t put any force on them at all. She tilted her face up and opened her eyes wide, staring expressionlessly at the sky that was darkening.
“No, Chroma, I don’t want you to lie down there to-day; the master wants you to climb over them.”
The shepherds of the estate, who waited every day for this moment to add a little interesting variety to their dull lives, stripped off their ragged serge and waited in scattered groups by the side.
Draco seemed to sigh slightly, and it was obvious that she would have liked to be able to lay there as a rest after the day’s exertions. She lifted her legs up high again and flipped the yoke back over, rolling onto her knees on the ground. She climbed on top of the first man, “mmmmmmmm” she told him as he lifted his feet over the horizontal planks that held her legs, and Droma crouched down on his stomach while the man rested his calves across her crotch on her yoke. It was all Chroma could do to push against the man’s chest with her cuffed arms, and her two knees for support to move herself up and down, and gradually the agitated man wrapped his arms around the woman’s slender waist.
I was as silent as my lackey Tsomai that day in the remaining rays of the evening sun as I watched Drolma climb into the belly of one man after another and busily satisfy them.
Chroma’s eyes closed slightly as she moved up and down, and she grunted through her nose in order to exert herself. For the first few times, she was able to “mmmmmm” in the second half of the movement, puckering her bare ass higher and higher, only to suddenly squeeze down and stop against the man’s bulging belly; but then she was a little too weak to do it, and Jörnma fell on top of the man more and more frequently, panting heavily, and the halfway-halfway-half man was pushing her upward angrily, desperately, in a desperate attempt to get her to move. desperately pushing upward against her body.
I had to say to the lackey who happened to be standing next to me, “You, get a horsewhip. When she stops, you whip her down!” I said to him, he “snap” two times, immediately hit the ground of the woman lifelessly up and down, no longer dare to be lazy and not move.
“There, have you done it all? Chroma, look up at me and, do it, again, one, more time.”
She crouched on the ground and inclined her face to look at me for several seconds, crawling forward to retrieve the men. They were sitting lazily around, most of them still undressed. The woman grunted softly and tried to get one of them to lie down again.
This time she used her hand directly, and I knew she was a smart woman, using her own bottom once more was both laborious and not always successful. Of course she no longer had her fingers, and Dromeda knelt beside the man, clamping her palms around his thing and rubbing it hard, and this time she had to do it for a long time before the thing grew a little bigger. She hung her head wearily and paused, the man immediately went limp, “Splat!” of the riding crop on her waist.
With a low “oh” she got a little anxious and slid up and down harder, her shaking body tossing loose strands of hair out and down. The man below her probably grunted in pain as Draco finally made one, which had made her so tired that she was rubbing her chest with her joined wrists and gasping for air.
“Hmph, Chroma, put your hands on the ground and flatten them.”
She slumped down in silence, her arms stretched out in front of her, and she rested her head on them. I stepped down on her cuffed wrists, and her small, frail arms flailed under my boot, and Chroma let out an “Ow!” and retracted her arms from under my relaxed foot, rubbing them against her cheeks. I stood still, watching the cuffed palms slowly drag the chain flat back to its original position as I stomped down again.
“Chroma, next. Use your mouth, not your hands.”
“Oh… oh.” She sobbed.
Not every man has the strength to do it once and then immediately do it a second time. The woman’s snot and tears and saliva mixed with the man’s bright spills and smeared her face and his little tummy. She held his organ and tossed her head furiously, pulling him upward so long that she had to stop a couple of times to catch her breath, but immediately got two lashes.
The man undulated and cried out hoarsely several times, but he just didn’t cum. Chroma finally moved to press her face between the man’s legs with his load in her mouth, straightening her throat and letting out a sob. Glistening sweat poured down her entire naked back under the raised torch.
“This woman is crazy, you, lift him up and hit her in the mouth. I hate women who can’t move without crying.”
He picked up Drolma by the hair and slapped her twice: “Still crying?”
“Uh-uh.” Draco struggled in the lackey’s hands and shook his head.
“Well, keep doing it.”
That night the herdsmen in the pasture followed me and dragged the bruised and exhausted slave girl, Choma, into the small village of Qinka. The villagers had long since gone to sleep, but what honest highlander would dare to fail to come out and do what they had to do when his lordship beckoned them?
In the late spring of the following year, I heard that the highway, which the Flatlanders had built with great enthusiasm, had been completed and opened to traffic. Although by this time there were no more resident Flatlanders in the city of Gershon, in those few days a number of great men, both highland officials and nobles of Syracuse and Flatlander cadres, were brought in by car, and an earnest opening ceremony was held with great joy.
I guess those days Parazomben must have been very happy that he had a chance to throw his weight around, and as I hadn’t left Cinca’s estate, these things had nothing to do with me. But when I arrived at the gate of the estate the next day, I knew I was wrong, standing in front of me was a big man of the Flat Earth Army with two guards following him.
He said, “Dieben of Qinca, I am XXX. I have heard that there is a slave girl named Drolma on your estate who went over the Gatan Pass to deliver a message to Gokyong during the Buring rebellion, and I would like to meet her and express to her in person the gratitude of the preparatory committee of the government of the snowy region.”
I said, “Ah, yes… no, she’s not here, Choma is not… I don’t know, it should be…”
I almost wanted to simply say that Chroma was dead, but was afraid he would kill me immediately.
He took off his pistol and gave it to the guard: “Wait for me at the intersection outside the village of Cinca.” Then his eyes looked into mine, as unfathomable as the woman’s: “I’m just saying a few words of thanks to her. I’m alone, are you afraid?”
The twenty-year veteran of the war was enveloped in his aura that could have intimidated an army, and as if I had been hypnotized by his eyes, I heard my own voice, completely against my will: “Oh, yes, yes, HQ la (sir) please.”
After turning the corner of the house they could see the door of the stable, where all three of them were, and in front of the big wooden vat that held the milk was the monotonously heaving back of the naked Droma. “Droma, Droma, stop, the Flatlander’s officer is here to see you.” I said very, very peacefully.
The reply was a tedious “ah” as she carefully lifted the pestle and mortar high enough to pull it out of the barrel, which had been strapped tightly to her wrist, and she dragged the unwieldy tool with her on the ground, turning both knees back around. She kowtowed to me as usual, then looked at the Flatlander officer beside me, and after a moment of silence, prostrated herself and kowtowed as well.
The stake was always upright in her cunt, and she had to lower her hands slowly to the ground, crouching down while having difficulty keeping her crotch straight in its original position, at which point she lowered her head again before the top of her head could barely touch the ground.
Great drops of sweat poured down from her forehead at this point toward her spreading hair, her withered but glistening from grease mess that had grown to just below her waist, and was streaked with streaks of perspiration that clung to her forehead cheeks and the base of her neck, half concealing Slavegirl Chroma’s breasts, both of her naked and-softly hiked hides on her belly.
Her whole body had long since been tanned by the highland sun to a uniformly oily black charcoal color, thick deposits of dirt and grime under her neck, in her armpits and leg crevices, the bruises and purple lumps of the beatings on various parts of her body were almost indistinguishable from each other, but the lash marks, which had been lifted up in chunks of skin and flesh, were much more visible, and the reddish, rotten, shredded skin and meat that had turned up from the wounds looked like the petals of peonies blossoming in the darkness of the night.
As the stake deep inside rubbed back and forth, her various feminine objects that should have been deep inside tumbled out of her cunt in layers, some tightly wrapped around the dark glowing wooden post, others trailing and swaying along her thighs. I felt her lower her brow to dart a quick glance at the wet, sticky heap of detritus between her legs, along with the deep-penetrating log. On the collarbone, which stood like a little piece of wing under her right shoulder, still wore and hung a small iron ring, the surface of which was already stained.
“Choma,” he spoke in his skillful highland language, but the content was hollow and flatly official: “You crossed the snow-covered mountain of Meghaburi alone to send a message for us, helped us crush the rebellion of a handful of reactionaries, and ensured the safety of the lives and property of our compatriots in the highlands and the flatlands of Gekyong City, and though … I think the people of the Highlands and the Peaceful Lands will all remember you and thank you.”
He leaned down toward her and grasped her bare shoulders that were so sharp that there was only a handful of bone, “Chroma, Chroma,”
He said, as he lowered his head more deeply, kissed the forehead of the slave girl, Chroma, and pressed the woman’s firewood-stick naked body against his own breasts. Chroma twisted her back and angled the crippled palm of her hand that held the wooden pestle and mortar to the side of her body to give way to him, while closing her eyes.
By the time she opened her eyes, the First Officer of the Flatland Army had walked over to the side of the dirt building. The two of us stood side by side, one kneeling and the other standing, and watched as he walked down the dirt path outside the estate’s gates to the side of the small group of soldiers that awaited him on the hillside.
Along the Snowlands, we’ve heard rumors of some subtle changes in his standing in the Flatland army, influenced by his wife’s defection, and with his divorce officially announced and his rankings switched to the bottom of the list when it comes to attending various festivities, he may be leaving the Snowlands soon.
I waited until their diminishing silhouettes disappeared into the rugged rocky folds of the Megbury Hills before I felt some confidence that I was probably safe for the day. The Flatland armies were amazingly disciplined in their decades of bitter fighting, and they were terribly tough, and they had won this country on the strength of that, but I wondered if such discipline and fanatical faith would help them to govern this country?
“Dunzhu, Dunzhu!” I shouted, “Take this lowly slave girl to the stables, bind her tightly, and tell Yonkin to light a fire in the big copper basin; I want to burn Drolma’s breasts!” What else could soothe my fears but to beat our Drolma?
We did it until early the next morning, facing Zhuo Ma whose whole body was swollen with a large piece of hot naked flesh, I put the thin incandescent iron bar that I had just taken out of the fire deep through the woman’s pussy, and poked it all the way into Zhuo Ma’s body, and my hand stirred the sticky and slippery flesh in the depths of her abdominal cavity vigorously with that iron, and I shouted frantically: “Li Chun, forget your Li Chun, forget your husband, never think of your husband! You will always be a slave to the Highlander, always!”
“Ohhhh… ohhhh… ohhhh… ahhhhh!” The hot branding iron hid inside her, the muscles of her stomach drew frighteningly tight together, and her bound body twisted like a snake swimming on the surface of the water.
I could tell that I was very scared indeed.
In that final year, Snowdonia finally began its ultimate upheaval, and after a series of bloody clashes, the Flatlanders, backed by force of arms, directly and forcibly altered the traditional system by evicting the manorial lords from their estates, disarming the nobility of the highlands from the ransomers, and dividing the land equally among all classes.
As I said, by that time I had left the sword and the fighting, and had been calmly running a farming and herding business for more than two years on the Tenzin estate, managing house slaves like Tsomai and Drolma. But now, large numbers of the Flatland Army had moved back into Gesheng, and work crews were ready to measure and then distribute the land. People’s hearts are restless and rumors abound; the flatlanders probably won’t take my life, but I must not lose the dignity of a highland nobleman and live in humiliation under the rule of the flatlanders, along with my equals, the Rangsangs and Dupuyongs. I will leave my snowy region, and I wonder when I will be able to return? Or, never.
The slave girl, Drolma, knelt quietly in front of the building, wiping down the vases and jades and placing them in the colorfully decorated wooden cabinets and large cowhide chests as instructed by Yonkin, and after three days and three nights of hustle and bustle, we were almost done. The horses and yaks had been fed, my only remaining dozen or so faithful attendants were ready, and Dhondup would bring his beautiful Yangjin girl with him.
Dhondup stood beside the slave girl, Chroma, who was already so sleepy that she could barely keep her eyes open, and lifted her toes to pick at her hanging breasts: “What about her?”
“Dig a hole and bury her.” I said.
As if she hadn’t heard anything, Chroma held the silver vase without even lifting her head.
The four year old little house slave, Little Poo Poor, could already run and chase butterflies in the manor’s yard, his Yonkin’s mother wrapped her arms around him and looked at the two of us in turn, she opened her mouth but stymied her throat, nothing came out at first, and she shed a tear: “That, then leave Little Poo Poor to the slave girl, Yonkin!”
No one answered, she was trembling with fear, but still knelt down as if she had made up her mind: “Master, leave Little Pu Poor to slave girl Yang Jin!”
“Well, to you as a son!”
The night before we were ready to go on the road, outside the door of the big stable, Dawa lay down and lifted up the hem of his serge and spread his legs, and the slave girl, Chroma, kneeling there in the middle, bent down and swallowed back and forth her man’s genitals, and she did it more and more quickly, and at last she spat out the juicy him, and nuzzled up her lips, and made a circle round the whole of her husband’s fleshy pole, and rubbed her face flatly against the thicket of his black, dense pubic hair. .
Dawa was capricious, he wanted the top if he liked the top and the bottom if he liked the bottom, except that everyone in the room, except himself, knew that this was the last time he would ever enjoy Chroma.
“That’s enough, Dawa, get up. Take this and dig a bigger hole, one that you can put your wife in.”
“Yes, Master, yes, Master.” Dawa, who had just painfully ejaculated in his wife’s mouth, agreed in a good mood as he soldiered on and plunged his shovel into the earth.
“Tsomai, go ahead and do it one last time.”
“Gah, Master.” Tsomai was always very obedient, but tears had stained the lines of his old wrinkled face as he crawled over to hug the naked woman who was bent over the wall staring at him.
“That very night, a blood-red fire streaked across the night sky outside the manor, there were shouts, my night watchman’s slave, and then silence… A calm voice rang out: “Lord Dieben, this is Brynn. Watchman’s friend look carefully, I’ve rested my gun at my feet.”
“Lord Dieben, I know you have a wish that you have kept for two years to kill the highlander called Brynn, and I have placed him in your hands today. I know that your lordship is leaving, and before you go I also have a wish that I have kept for two years, the same XX woman and X monkey’s descendant, and I beg Lord Dieben to help me fulfill it.”
The Highlander man wore a hunting robe that hung in tatters around his shoulders and waist, and he was as filthy as a beggar. Brynn stood in front of me on his one right leg, the other half of his hunting robe empty, and he carried a walking stick under his left armpit.
He noticed my gaze, smiled oddly, and said, “The wound is still rotting up there, I’ll die on this.”
“So, brave Highlander Brynn, what is your wish?”
“Skin this woman alive.”
We spent more or less time getting ready, finding some rope and knives. “Okay, Chroma, crawl under those stakes in front of the building.” Silent and speechless, Choma braced herself on all fours as we ordered her, and crawled over toward the underside of the two stakes erected in front of the building, her dark, thin, sharp, bare buttocks wriggling from side to side as she strained under the ground, and lit a roaring fire with the bulky furniture dragged out of the building, let’s say, the carved bed of Tenzin’s daughter.
“Tonju, you help Brynn with them and tie the woman up.”
A hunting knife was used to split the sturdy wooden shackles under Chroma’s feet, remove the cuffs that had been on the slave girl’s wrists for almost two years, and then a hammer was used to roughly knock down the iron rings that had been placed around her hands and feet until they fell off through the woman’s hands and feet. The resulting iron rings of the shackles crushed the ankle bones of Chroma’s feet, and she whimpered in pain as they hauled her to her feet.
Like that first day so long ago, the slave girl, Choma, had her arms pulled apart and bound to the top of the stake, and her ankles and wrists tied to the roots of the stake. She would probably struggle fiercely as she was skinned, and Tonju bunched the cowhair ropes one after the other very tightly.
“Wanderer of Shannan, begin to fulfill your wish!”
In the light of that great fire, Brynn skillfully employed his wooden support, and he stepped steadily forward with a lightly pointed knife in his mouth, scarcely discernible as a man with a missing leg.
He and she stared at each other there for a while as he began to calmly caress the woman’s chest. Droma’s torso had been visibly drying out and shrinking over the years, her skin piled up vacantly all over her body, brittle, thin, and wrinkled, and Brynn’s hands pushed them to glide soothingly over the woman’s body, and he nodded his head contentedly as he picked them up, squeezing and tightening them.
“Ask for some cotton, lots of it.” He said.
With the sharp knife he made a slash under the woman’s collarbone, splitting smoothly from her left shoulder to her right. A very shallow cut, the flesh snow-white and blooming like a plow blade cutting through the earth, blood bursting out one after the other as Brynn’s left hand gripped the cotton cloth and pressed it up tightly, stopping still.
“A few moments of pressure will be able to stop your bleeding, Flatland girl, don’t be afraid, you don’t have any large blood vessels under your epidermis.”
He moved his left hand to look at it, the sharp tool of his right hand was inserted through the center of the crack, the thin blade of the knife cut down vertically, evenly divided the woman’s chest that protruded into the shape of a skeleton, the woman looked down at her own split breasts and belly, her lips turned blue in the firelight, and her nostrils “hmmmm” with the force of Droma’s only voice.
The tip of the knife stopped at the woman’s round protruding pubic area, where Chroma was left with only a sparse tuft or two of hair. He stopped the bleeding all the way through her, “Your skin is probably only a point or two thick, I’ll cut three or four points deep, I don’t want to cut open your cavity to expose your insides just yet.” He grasped his hand into the wound and pulled it to the side, the woman screaming at the pain.
“Look at the section, the thin dark layer on top is your skin, the yellow and white underneath, which is oozing, is your fat, and the light red, with the network of veins showing on the surface, is the lean.” He pressed the tip of the knife into the wound and cut down and back again, almost seemingly lightly and cautiously, but Chroma’s naked body bounced violently into the air, like a fly that had landed on a spider’s web.
“I know this will hurt.” Brynn commented, “The slightest touch in the wound is unbearable.” The woman threw her head back towards the night sky and hissed.
“Look, this little tip, this is where I start.” He picked at that trifurcated point where the horizontal and vertical cuts had been made with his knife, peeling the woman’s skin away from the slippery flesh beneath, and he grasped the upturned skin of flesh.
“A good butcher can tear a whole yak’s hide with just his hands, but I have to use the knife to help.” He used the tip of the knife to pick away at the white and yellow adhesions that were pulled up underneath, sometimes focusing his attention on the face of the meaty skin, biting down on the knife to hold down the woman’s neck with one hand as he ripped the skin apart with the other. But honestly he wasn’t successful, the slippery skin always slipped out from between his fingers and he had to painfully stick the knife underneath again to cut back and forth.
Red chunks of the woman’s right breast were gradually exposed, the torn skin lifting considerably to the edge of Chroma’s right breast. A few spots of blood sprang up on the bare flesh, and Brynn pressed them with a cotton cloth: “I’ve got plenty of time. It’s an interesting place down there, now that I have somewhere to grip it.”
Standing on one leg, he tested the wooden staff in the ground to find a good place to support himself steadily, and he curled the five fingers of his right hand like iron hooks into the crevice of skin and flesh, and with his left hand he pressed firmly on the woman’s breast and pushed it forward, as if he were trying to peel its thick, tough rind from a tangerine.
He removed the knife from his lips and probed under the skin, soaked in blood and mucus and thus soft and slippery, and re-cut their roots like grass. Gradually, the soft skin from the woman’s breast fluffed up, he pulled it up with his left hand, there is a layer of mesh-like things linked in the middle, he Gradually, the soft skin from the woman’s breast fluffed up, he pulled it up with his left hand, there is a layer of mesh-like things linked in the middle, he cut it again, the woman’s large red breasts will be trembling extrusion to the outside, that is a blotchy blood naked flesh mass.
On the shedding of the fleshy skin, Chroma’s large, gentle, flattened nipples suddenly became lifeless, like the eyes of a dead animal it had been removed from the supply of life.
The skin on the right side of Zoma’s chest showed a large triangle that had been torn open to the side of her armpit, the lower edge of which was close to the woman’s navel, and hung down at an angle like a windless flag. Her skinless right breast showed large yellow sacs of flesh, like small wild bunches of grapes, which were the source of her milk, and were covered with a small translucent layer of fat after the blood and syrup had flowed from them. Chroma was too thin, and in her breasts the curd of womanly beauty had almost dissipated cleanly.
He caressed Chroma’s bare-fleshed breasts, and Chroma looked and felt cold. “Lady officer, another one of those other ones, eh?” Suddenly we felt the sweaty hairs on our arms stand on end, we had heard the same phrase sometime years ago.
He did the other one, and Chökyamuni sighed deeply, “Aaah…” Gradually, her left nipple left her body and floated in the air, and a twisted little tube of flesh trailed out, “Aaah…”
The next thing to do on the lower body was to work from the navel down, Brynn’s knife curved around the woman’s pussy, the incision extending down the inside of Chroma’s thigh, “Just to the knee for now.” But letting go of the outer edge of Chroma’s labia, the only thing left to do was to pull the skin over Chroma’s belly toward the side of her body to the protrusions of her hip bones.
There was some muffled, low ripping sound, with a lingering, somber feeling, and halfway through the sound, the woman responded with a loud howl, something like, “Ah… Oh!” And often it would stop, and there would be a silence waiting for Brynn to start the next tearing.
The skin on the front half of Draco’s body had opened up a good deal to the sides, like the large leaves that half-wrapped a column of ears of corn, except that they held up a rosy female nude in the center. Brynn twisted them together into a bundle, so that he finally had a handle on which they could rest.
Now he was just using his hands, and Brynn’s free left hand sought support on Chroma’s chest, which was full of watery, bare flesh, and his left hand slid around on it while the muscles on Brynn’s right arm tightened and pushed desperately outward. He clenched his teeth and said, “Hey! Hey!” The woman on top of him also clenched her teeth, closing her eyes with a tight frown and tossing her head to the sides with “uh… uh…” as beads of sweat reflecting the light of the fire flew from her forehead.
Dhondup went up to help him, and he plunged the knife into the blossoming union, slashing back and forth… Suddenly, Brin’s right elbow, which had been frozen in the air, jumped and moved back quickly, and with another squeak, the skin was almost completely disengaged from the woman’s belly. Even Chökyüma, who had been holding her breath, let out a breath as if she were relaxing, and then she looked up again and let out a hollow, dry cry.
Brynn paused and lifted his large arm to wipe the sweat from his forehead, the roll of skin still clutched in his hand. In the half-open depths, blood trickled darkly where the skin had just detached from the flesh, and gushed and dripped from the corner of the knife cut in the woman’s pubic area.
Bryn watched as the woman tilted her head to the side and pressed it tightly under her own shoulder, she shook her head insistently, almost as if she intended to burrow into her armpit to make herself escape from it all, and when Bryn grabbed the hair and pulled her away from her shoulder she still twisted like that, hopelessly trying to wiggle free of the man’s hand.
In that moment, the only thing that seemed to come out of Chroma’s sweaty face was a sadly wide-open mouth, but no sound came out of it; she just opened her mouth wide and shook her head like that frantically.
“Be quieter, be quieter! I’m not tearing anymore!” Brynn waited a long time for her to stop the bleeding by stuffing a cotton cloth into the slit, and then turned to her eyes, which were finally showing two thin slits from her face: “Flatland officer, do you regret it, do you regret it now?”
Holding her head in his right hand, his left hand still gripping the knife, he plunged the tip of the blade into the hanging strings of mammary glands that dangled from Chroma’s breasts, clumps of them attached to thin tubes and membranes of flesh, like small, decaying berries dangling from branches and vines, held together by a couple of larger, tendinous trunks, so that it was impossible to discern that this reddish-yellow, broken, disorganized mass had once been the content of one of the woman’s luscious breasts. The tip of Brynn’s knife pierced through them, separating them from the slimy heap, and he cut out a skewer of meat, which Chroma burped out with an “Ew.”
“Do you regret what you did? Flatland woman?”
In the light of the fire, Droma had a crystalline, translucent belly, and as Brynn tortured Droma’s breasts, a bulge fell quietly outward from her less restrained abdominal cavity, heavy belly intestines moving behind her thin peritoneum, and the pathetically shallow layer of fat on Droma’s belly stretched into what looked like a web, barely held together by a few milky white fibers.
Brynn fought the urge to bend over and pull back with all her strength for the last few tugs. The front of Chroma’s torso, now hanging by her outstretched arms, was all but bare of pinkish-white flesh, and her looking reddish, wet, soft skins lifted off to either side up to the ribcage on the woman’s side, where they each came together in a large coil, like the half-open wings of a resting bat. And the lower part of the union now extended to both of Chroma’s thighs, where the skin broke away from the fleshy surface, and there was a clear line of demarcation: the fine, moist, bare flesh and the other half of the hairy, dull epidermis.
Brin sat down on the ground: “I’m tired, my rotten legs are eating me up, I’m not the Brin I was two years ago. Can you get me a box of matches, please, brother Tonju? Or, is there any English cigarettes left? I would like to rest for a while.”
He coiled his only leg up to sit between Chroma’s legs and ran his hand over the folds around her pussy that he’d left especially for her, sliding his index and middle fingers together to penetrate them up and down. “You’ll be cool now, woman, and the refreshing breeze on your flesh will make you feel like steel needles too, won’t it? Let Master Dieben go to bed and I’ll wait with you until tomorrow, and I wonder if tomorrow will be enough time in the day to strip your back?”
He opened his hand, which was plunged inside the woman, and spread the woman’s pussy door fully apart in front of him, “Ah, here it is.” He picked up a match and tried inserting it backwards into the woman’s urethral exit at the top, exposing the match head. He rubbed the other one on his only leg and brought the flame closer, “Poof!” A larger spark rose, and Chroma’s body gave a jolt and a muffled “mmmm”.
Brynn parted her pussy door a little wider, “Ah, here.” He added, pulling his hand out and rubbing the woman’s clitoris, exposing the small bud and then using his other hand to start a fire, moving it up… “Ohhhh, ohhhh!” This time she tilted her head back in the air and Brynn brought her mouth up to light the cigarette.
Against the large chunks of freshly peeled flesh that ran from her belly to the base of her legs, Chroma’s entire female genitalia, which had grown wider and more diffuse over the past two years, appeared even more dusky and gray, suffused with the twilight of exhaustion. Chroma’s legs were drawn back, her shriveled, fleshy lips wide open, fluttering her wings over the small flames like a naked, struggling fledgling bird.
Brynn spent the rest of the evening at Chroma’s side, probably lighting fires to cauterize various parts of her body the whole time. And it occurred to me that I should turn Brin’s madness into something useful to me. Early in the morning, I ordered them to summon all the villagers of Qinka to the estate of their lord Tenzin to see what happens to a slave girl who betrays her lord.
The rough furniture of Tenzin’s house had all been reduced to ashes, and as the day dawned, the old, ragged villagers of Qinka stood scattered in a great mass on the estate. In front of them was the slave girl, Choma, who had been hanging on a stake for a night, stripped of the skin on the front half of her body. Naked in the wind for a night, the tender flesh of her chest and stomach had become dull and stiff, and the surface had dried out a bit, no longer flickering devilishly with watery light as it always did in the night’s bonfire, with traces of blood drying out on all parts of her body.
Droma looked at the villagers of Qinca with half-open eyes, her face as bleak as snow, but her demeanor seemed remarkably calm and placid.
“See this Choma? Children of the snowy plateau, do not trust the flatlanders, do not approach the flatlanders. Whoever wants to forget the race of their own plateau, to curry favor, to help the alien flatlanders, to accept what the flatlanders give you and which should not belong to you, look at this naked slave girl, Droma! The lords will soon return!”
“Anyone who betrays the honor of the Highlands, who betrays your masters, look at this flayed slave girl, Chroma! The punishment of your Highland masters will fall upon you all in equal measure! Wait here and keep watching as this woman is stripped clean of her body!”
“Brynn, start!”
Brynn resumed lifting his sharp knife, which was coagulated with black blood, and he began with that incision in Chroma’s shoulder, distinguishing the skin from the flesh by the help of the blade, circling around the neck, and flipping the woman’s gradually buckling skin up and down her back. Again there was that long process of slashing, stopping the bleeding, and peeling away, and one of the great things that was done was to extend the cut in Chroma’s shoulder down the whole inside face of her arm to her wrist, and as many loops of rope had been wrapped there, Brynn cut a complete circle around her little arm a little upward from the rope.
“There are so many people waiting to see your skinned flesh, I’ll have to hurry.”
Dondo and he flayed both her arms simultaneously, and it took them over an hour to make the thin, soft skin of Droma’s arms slip off her arms like shoots. Zhuo Ma’s arms became polished and white again, some turbid body fluids and blood dripped down, and the large blood vessels that had been wrapped under the human skin were now round and convex, seeming to be additions hanging outside the flesh, and the blood flowing through the vessels made them appear to be small snakes crawling across the surface of the human flesh.
The two of them hanyou now stood behind the woman as they worked together to tear what was increasingly becoming a monolithic skin down towards her waist. The two narrow strips that had been peeled from Droma’s arms had been twisted together in their hands, and with the help of the blades, this was going faster and faster. The flaps of skin that had been peeled off were already large enough for the two men’s hands to have enough area to land on, and with a push, the split in the woman’s back opened wide and wide. It was also bright enough that they could clearly see which meridian or column of muscle was preventing the work, and it was only a matter of gently severing it.
The woman’s soft body bulged out from behind as they pulled and pulled, “Oh… oh… oh… ah!” The frequency of their tugging grew faster and faster, and finally the woman’s hoarse, mournful wail became one long, continuous sound, her head dropping helplessly to her own red, soft, fleshy breasts, and a large amount of liquid secreted from her eyes, nose, and mouth flowing over the spasmodic disk of her face, coalescing at the tips of her nose and chin in a column that hung downward. Her body trembled, as if she was trying to gather the strength of her whole body to scream, and then she screamed out in a horrible way… and started trembling again.
When that last long sound was uttered, she trembled as if she had been electrified, and suddenly raised her head, which she swept in a half-circle in front of her, but she looked at me as if she were looking into a transparent morning mist, and I began to wonder whether the woman had any lucid thoughts left.
On her back white flesh was being exposed in pieces, then blood oozed densely from underneath until it soaked the surface.
“Stop for a moment! Douse her with water and wake her up.”
A bucket of cold water was thrown over her head, and the stream of water washed away a great deal of the blood from Droma’s back, and soon small red spots showed up again from under her delicate bare flesh, and expanded rapidly, so that Brynn and Dhondup were able to see exactly where the bleeding was coming from, and they pressed them down with a cotton cloth. And Chroma, choking on the water, coughed up her staff and gasped for breath, and closed her eyes, only to reopen them after a while, this time with a clear light in them.
Suddenly, a shrill child’s voice rang out from the large crowd of silent Qinca villagers: “Mommy! Mommy!” It was little Pu Poor who rushed out of the crowd, and Youngin chased after him, but the girl’s bare feet kicked against the rocks and she fell to her knees.
Brynn held his knife in his hand as he came back to admire his work in front of Chroma, contemplating whether his next step would be to take the whole piece of skin and continue down to tear off Chroma’s ass, or to peel off both of her legs first. Brin was a man who had survived countless threats of death, his instinctive reaction to the unexpected change was to swing away his knife, and the little pooch took a step back to sit on the floor, shouting again, “Mama, Yonkin Mama!” Blood trickled down his forehead.
Both women cried out shrilly at the same time, their voices deafening, and Droma jerked her legs upward, pulling desperately at her arms, which were bare of pinkish-white muscle mass and sinewy strips of tendon, and those bare chunks of flesh twisted and twisted against each other sliding back and forth in a pattering fashion. Yonkin had sprung up to hold the child, and Brin’s second blade swung up in the air, and then he saw Yonkin’s ghastly white and beautiful face below, while Tonju leaped behind him like a panther.
Yonkin stepped back, she had burst into tears, she stared at the little pooch in her arms, the last thing she knew he had only scratched his skin. She shouted over toward the stake, “He’s fine, he’s not hurt, he’s just scratched his skin.” She took the boy in her arms and pressed his face between her high breasts: “Mother is here working for the master, and she’s fine too, let’s… let’s go inside and play.”
“Don’t stall, hurry up!”
The two Highlander men staring at each other each stepped back as they stepped to either side of the woman, each independently peeling out both of Chroma’s legs, turning over two small bowls of wrinkled, wiry leather where her pair of knees had been, and ending, as the arms had done, just above the ropes that had been cinched around the woman’s ankles.
Now the large, wrinkled, dirty X, pink on the inside and tawny on the other side of the bloody thing hung down from behind Chroma’s waist and dragged behind her as the men worked together for the last time, bending down to yank it forward from between the woman’s dangling legs. Chroma’s entire skin crawled out of her own naked crotch with a squeak, finally tearing away from her buttocks and dropping to the ground with a sticky thud.
Having passed out again and again and again and again as we doused her with cold water, long ago an exhausted Chroma could no longer lift her head which was crashed on her chest, and she opened her eyes in confusion just in time to see the disgusting mass at her feet, with the mischievous bulging up of the two large hollow leather blisters that used to encase both sides of her buttocks.
Like the nightmare I was to repeat over and over again for the next forty years, Drolma was now truly and completely naked, a quivering mass of rosy flesh. Green and red veins and arteries pulsed like a river network all over her body, and her bloodless muscles and fat were crystal clear, textured, and covered with a gauze-like membrane, like a pillar of golden-red crystal stone in a riverbed under the snow-capped Meiguo Mountains, and closed in the depths of the vaguely visible core was Zhuo Ma’s beating heart.
Brynn crouched under the fleshy woman’s body with his crutch propped up, and he held Droma’s feet with intent, where they were still dark and rough and had not yet turned ruddy and polished. But after a day and a night of tight bondage, the woman’s feet had been cut off from their blood supply and were practically necrotic, and like Chroma’s hands they were now withered and shrunken into a sort of bird’s-clawed shape, bruised and stiff. It was no longer possible to feel itch or pain there, and Brynn released them in disgust.
“All right, Brynn, put down the bloody knife. We can go inside and have a bowl of cymbidium, and come back later to see if our dromedary is cold.”
“It’s almost over, and I’ll have to cut her open at the end.” He turned back to Chroma, who was still hanging open on all fours, a vertical strip of clear cuts still remaining on her translucent stomach, which was distended like a drum, sinking shallowly into her flesh.
Brynn surveyed her entire body, his lower half consisting of his good left leg and his right crutch standing straight, but he bent his upper body toward the woman. He teased Droma’s soft, loose genitals with the tip of the knife, and at the end the knife was plunged into the woman close to her thighs, the blade glinting in and out, cutting down toward her perineum at the back, turning the corner at the midpoint of the woman’s wide-open lower body, less than a point inside her anus in the groin, and circling back around to the edge of Droma’s thigh on the other side.
It looked like Brynn was digging out her genitals, which had been the only part of Chroma’s torso besides her head, face, hands, and feet that still had human skin growing on it. The tip of the knife sawed down hard, and little by little, Chökyam’s two bare, white-boned knees twisted inward, and the red and white muscles of her thighs twitched in a confused way… as if the woman was still trying to gather up her skinned legs to hide her shameful place. Suddenly, a stream of urine poured down like a shower, which must have been the woman’s last urination.
After Brynn finished drawing this blood-colored circle underneath the protrusion of Chökyi’s pubic bone, we could see the sluggish movement of the opening of the woman’s throat under the tip of her low-slung chin, and then yellowish-green effluent spilled down in wisps from the corners of her mouth, “Oooh, oooh, oooh, oooh, oooh, oooh, oooh…” she made some muffled sounds and gasped for air again . Underneath her body, the small oval shaped wallet soaked in blood was dragged from her torso like a corkscrew, and the strips and tubes of muscle that followed it out hung suspended and swinging between Chökyüma’s legs.
Brynn’s knife was now free, and he stabbed the tip of the knife two inches above the woman’s belly button, deepening it, and a small bubble of blood popped out with a “pfft”. Brynn cut downward with a light hand, ending on top of Chroma’s pussy port. Where the knife had traveled, the weight of the entrails in the woman’s belly had crushed the opening into a diamond shape, and stuffed into that cavity was a pile of greenish-purple and pinkish-white with dark red veins. After much writhing and struggling, the first of a large, fleshy tube’s twists and turns crawled out of the fissure, like a monster poking out its full, glossy, faceless head, drenched in the blood that gushed out of the flesh’s section.
This could have been more than enough, and while Chroma’s whole body was still giving occasional spasms, her lowered head never lifted again, and I couldn’t see the expression on her face.
I walked all the way over to the large juicy chunk of flesh once named Chroma, the fishy stench was overwhelming and I could feel the flesh on her body rippling faintly. I wrapped my arm around Brynn’s shoulders pulling him away from there : “Come on, wanderer of Shannan, you’ve finally gotten your wish.”
He looked at his two open hands and let the knife slide to the ground as he wiped blood from his ragged hunting robe, “Yes, I have finally gotten my wish.” He said.
Not wasting the slightest bit of time, behind us, Tonjou lunged onto Brynn’s back with his knife in his hand, the blade that had condensed with Droma’s blood pierced through the left side of Brynn’s spine, and what I saw in front of me was a tip emerging from the left side of Brynn’s chest as I pushed him away.
“Oh! …” a muffled voice rang out from the crowd, passing behind us like a wave. Brynn lay on the ground staring at us, a series of blood bubbles popping out of the slash in his chest, one bursting followed by the next, and then turning into a stream of frothy blood. He opened his mouth several times, and finally he said, “Oh.”
Tonjou looked in the direction of the house with a complicated expression, not knowing whether he wished Yonkin was there or not.
I wanted to call Dawa to help, but after looking around I didn’t see the brothers. “Chijiang, Danba, come on, untie this woman and throw her into the pit! Fill it with dirt!”
Chroma sat curled up on her lower half on her heels, her back against the pit wall, her belly gut, which had run out in a circle, coiled around her legs, and the mass of cut-out lower cunt resting on the woman’s thighs, but these were hidden by the dark soil that had been filled back in.
“Enough!” The earth was buried up to the bottom of her breasts, which were broken into a rotten mess, revealing her reddish breasts and head, which stood up on the ground. I said, “Enough!”
Tonju casually found a leftover burnt bed-leg and nailed it into her back, pulling up her hair from side to side and twisting and tying it tightly around it, and with only a small half of her body exposed on the surface of the ground Droma leaned against the small stake and was forced to look up again, her tangled and knotted disheveled hair piled up in the earth under her chest. Once more I realized that all traces of pain had faded from her bloodless face; her eyes were half-open, and her face was now as calm as a brick street surface washed by a rainstorm.
“Chroma, Chroma, do you hear the master calling you?”
“Uh…”
I still did not see where Dawa and Tsomai were, and I shouted to the crowd, “Listen, it was my leader, Master Dieben, who said to leave Drolma here like this. If anyone dares to dig her up, the gods on the snowy mountain of Meghaburi will punish you!”
They slowly, the crowd from front to back, kneeling to the ground row by row.
Our procession of horses and yaks circled the gorge, Yonkin on his horse, the girl still bare with snow-white feet in the stirrups, as she was accustomed to do, and her skin always seemed unaffected by the hot plateau sun. In her arms she held the sleeping little Pooch, and there was a streak of blood on the boy’s forehead. We looked down on Tenzin’s estate from a higher slope, and in the patch of earth in front of the building the dark crowd, like little mushrooms growing in patches on the bark of a tree after a rain, remained silent and kneeling, facing the small, ruddy body in front of them, the woman half-buried in the earth, with whom they were motionless.
Postscript.
I collaborated with a voluntary Highlander student to finalize the manuscript, and we were speechless, shocked by the fury of hatred and blood. I felt that I saw something indefinable, but I didn’t know what it was for a moment, and then I suddenly remembered that it was the overseas friend who had given me the original manuscript who had been sitting and drinking tea together by the riverside four months earlier, and I had noticed that there seemed to be a faint scar on the corner of his forehead.
But that’s not right, even though the difference wasn’t too big, that gentleman’s appearance still gave me the feeling of being a foreigner from the start, he seemed to have a connection to the highlands from his lineage, it’s not possible that just because he followed a certain race that he took on their appearance! So I subconsciously typed in “XXX” on the keyboard, and after a few clicks of the mouse, I stared blankly at what was displayed on the screen.
“XXX, formerly known as XXXX, of high ethnicity, a native of XX County, XX Province, joined the X Army when it passed through his hometown in 1936, served as…,…,…,…,…,…, and retired in 1988.”
[End of text]