Robert Adams - The Witch Goddess

“Looks like you’ll live. Heh heh. I ’uz b’ginnin’ to hope you’d die, ‘r Long Willy’d git impatshunt and slice your gullet. Heh’heh. Been right long sincet thishere bunch et a woman, and I be right fond o’ some cuts o’ female, I be. Heh heh.” The harridan poked a stubby, stained finger into the swell of the bosom under the hair-shedding hide coverlet.

Then the stringy-haired creature arose, saying, “Bes’ I gits Long Willy. Heh heh. Don’tchew go ‘way, Ahrmnee gel, heah? The man who came back in with the stunted female was tall; his shaggy head brushed the thatch. Without a spoken word, he bent and stripped back the covering hide from the nameless woman. He kicked off a pair of shapeless rawhide brogans, propped the sheathed longsword he had carried in the near corner, then shucked his dirt-shiny shirt to bare muscular arms and body as hairy as an ape’s except where old scars and several pus-oozing sores peeked through.

As he unbuckled a scuffed belt which supported one large and three smaller knives, he spoke his first words. “You feed ‘er yet, Lizzie?” When the flat-chested creature indicated the negative, he went on, “Wai, soon’s I’m done fuckin’ ‘er, you stir your scrawny stumps and git ‘er a bowla stew.”

After he had pulled two broad, stubby knives from their sheaths under the hides cross-gartered to his lower legs, he untied the length of rope holding up his pair of once-fine trousers and threw himself upon the naked, defenseless body of the captive woman.

A bony knee forced her thighs apart. His entry was immediate and violent, a series of short, powerful thrusts which drove his engorged organ relentlessly inward, deep into her dry, unresponsive vagina. She screamed in pain, tried desperately to push his bulk off her, but she was still too weak. He was ready for the fingernails she drove at his eyes, laughingly pinioning her two hands with but one of his own, while the other went about mauling her breasts.

He never tried to kiss her, rather held his head high up from her, his eyes tightly closed throughout his protracted use of her body, ignoring her screams, her gasps, her moans and, finally, her pitiful sobs.

When, after eternities of endless time, he was done with her, had dressed and left, the nasty, cackling Lizzie returned. In one hand she bore a wooden bowl, and in the other a horn spoon. Despite the shock and pain of the abuse she had just been forced to endure, the nameless woman found the smell of the steaming fish broth mouthwatering, irresistible, after who knew how long without food. And no sooner had she swallowed the last drops in the bowl than she sank back on the rough mattress, oblivious to all that went on around her.

And much went on in the camp of Long Willy’s bunch that night. As the captive’s ravished body sank into sleep in the rude cabin, he who had so cruelly raped her sat in an old and scarred and oft-repaired seat that once had been a large and intricately carven chair; his longsword lay across his lap, and one of his hands held the shiny firestick that had been slung diagonally across the woman’s back when she had been found by Kevin and Joe-Bob.

Long Willy was ambitious. He was determined to learn how to make one of the metal-and-wood devices spurt out the noise and the killing fire. Armed with so witchy a weapon, he knew that he could gather a much larger bunch, a bunch so large that the fearsome Buhbuh, even, would hesitate to try to force deference or a percentage of hard-won loot Perhaps with a firestick he might even be able to slay the huge Kleesahk and thus take over ultimate command of all the bunches.

But previous experiments with captured firesticks had ranged from fruitless to disastrous. The first one, captured on the dawn when they had tried to attack the camp of the strangers, had seemed to be out of fire (actually, the trooper had emptied the weapon at the oncoming Ganiks before he had been slain), so torches had been applied to it at every single conceivable place, resulting in nothing but scorched wood and metal so hot that it burned Long Willy’s hands.

The second had been taken from the garroted corpse of a trooper lassoed and lifted off his horse (although Long Willy, of course, had no way of knowing it, that had been a sniper rifle, the scope not in place, but still loaded with a single long-distance load). Long Willy’s principal lieutenant, now deceased, had been covertly observing the strangers for some time and managed to convince his leader that he knew the way in which new fire was added to the sticks. So, holding the small end firmly against his flat belly, just over the navel, he had grasped it by the big, wooden end and held a blazing torch directly under the part that was of both wood and metal, intermixed.

So muffled had been the noise that those at any distance had been unaware of any untoward occurrence. Long Willy and his bunch had thrown the treacherous firestick away and then consumed most of their former comrade.

But Long Willy had learned from both episodes, being a trifle more intelligent than most of the degenerate folk he led. Thanks to his lieutenant’s unintended sacrifice, Long Willy figured that he now knew just where to feed the fresh fire into the stick and knew, also, that the small, hollow end must be held away from the body, unless he who held it was desirous of becoming the main course at the bunch’s next barbecue.

The next firestick captured (this one had contained one round chambered and three more in the magazine) he had placed with the big, wood end against his abdomen and, amid a circle of his followers, he had applied and held the flare of a torch to the central area, then waited for something to happen.

Something did happen. The chambered round cooked off, slamming the bronze-shod butt into Long Willy’s belly with the force of a mule’s kick, and the round thus fired blew off the head of the man so unfortunate as to be in line with the muzzle. Moreover, the recoil-activated mechanism chambered a second round, which the overheated metal of barrel and action fired off so close on the heels of the first that the two explosions of sound seemed but one, and this happened twice more, only ceasing when the magazine of the piece was empty.

In the close-packed throng of observers, all the bullets killed; one, which due to malfunction failed to explode, even killed two men, drilling through one, then the other, and speeding on to crease the rump of a pony. Even when Long Willy could at long last breathe almost normally, so fierce was the agony in his punished belly that he feared that he too would shortly die, to go onto the spits and into the stewpots.

The following day he gave an order that the next man bearing a firestick was to be captured alive if in any way possible. He had come to realize that he needed instruction from an expert in such esoteric devices.

But the expected man had turned out to be a woman, and now he was facing down the entire bunch and sat ready to violate bunch-law and bunch-tradition in order to gain his private ends.

Strong Tom stood before Long Willy, his face flushed with his anger, stamping his feet and shaking his knotty fists to add emphasis to his heated words.

“It be wrowng and you knows it, too! I tooked ‘er and letchew fuck ‘er fust, din’t I? Thet’s bunch-law. Now, me ‘n’t’othuh bullies gits to fuck ‘er,‘t’night. You gots to brang ‘er outchere, damn you!”

“You done tawkin’, Strong Tom?” Long Willy demanded coldly, and when only a glare answered him, continued, “Then you lissun tight, ‘cause I ain’ gonna say it but the once!

“Onlies’ way thishere bunch is evuh gonna git eny powuh is thishere firestick.” He raised and shook the rifle. “And we-awl done learnt—leas’-ways, I done learnt—the onlies’ way eny part of the bunch is gonna learn how you puts the fire back in thishere stick, is one the folks whut done used ’em fer to show us, or show me, enyhow.