Chapter Two

Predisposed

Seized

It is either later the same afternoon or possibly even the next day that I am shaken from my stupor. Whichever it is, the clouds are gone completely and the sun is strong and hot. I’m lying half in the water with the surf washing up dangerously close to my face. Still battered, weak as a newborn and now maddened by thirst I’m jerked into an awareness of my many miseries by rough hands that suddenly grab me all over and drag me away from the waves. These are accompanied by a gabble of excited voices.

In my sludgy semi-consciousness all I perceive of the former is that they are uncommonly large and strong – and utterly devoid of any tenderness. Likewise the voices that are raised at my discovery lying here half-drowned and helpless, though seemingly all female, are not informed with care and solicitude but with a savage exultation.

In my muddled state I can make no more sense of them than that. Nevertheless I recognize that the tongue spoken is a dialect of one of those I’ve studied in preparation for this venture. Perhaps it is a variant descended from the original after a long period of separation. Hopefully when I’ve recovered some I will be able to communicate my benign intentions – or at least forestall any violence. As I’m dragged further up the beach I at last manage to blink my bleary gaze clear. The first thing I focus on is the forest of legs surrounding me.

As befits the tropical climate these are brown and mostly bare. The feet (uncommonly large like the rough hands grasping me) are shod with sandals. The leather straps securing these continue past the ankle and well up the sturdy calves in crisscrossing fashion. From their tops below the knee dangle decorative, brightly colored feathers, the plumes of local birds presumably. Though heavily muscled and much larger than my own, something about the shape and set of those hairless legs suggests they indeed all belong to females.

Suddenly I’m dropped with brusque disregard on a stretch of turf between the sandy beach and the first fringe of a looming jungle. Then straightaway those rough hands begin tearing at my garments, painfully wrenching my emaciated limbs in the process.

My once fine clothes are little more than wet rags by now and give way easily. With a purr of ripping cloth my gaunt body is quickly bared. Only my belt remains intact, and in the process of worrying it free (and finishing unceremoniously stripping me completely naked), my rescuers – or perhaps captors – finally roll me over to face them.

At the moment they’re examining my finely wrought and elaborately worked belt (a parting gift from the previously peerless Lady Abigail) with overlapping exclamations of appreciation. I might well add my own to the chorus – were I not struck speechless. Fear, amazement, intimidation, perplexity, unwilling arousal and a further related emotion I’ve only just learned to admit to are suddenly combining to absolutely stagger me. From a ship full of filthy men of the most scurrilous sort, from the salty doom of a sea crowded with sharks, I now find myself lying naked at the feet of the most astounding group of aborigines.

There are half a dozen of these natives, all female as I’d suspected. Yet these are females like I’ve never dreamed of seeing. For starters they are all of simply monstrous stature.

Towering above my prostration like animate colossi, these savages are to a woman at least seven feet in height. Yet not only ar