Chapter Seven

 

 

Isobel’s travelling cage had been re-employed and within it she was being transported from the place of sale, through the city by way of a warren of narrow alleys, the cage loaded upon an outsize wheelbarrow. The alleys were lined with open fronted shops, their counters almost within reaching distance on either side. Every vertical surface of the shop fronts were painted with complex ideograms on bright red backgrounds and a wealth of red cloth streamers stretched between poles. The barrow was propelled by a coolie who supported the weight of his cargo by a broad sling over his shoulders. The cage constantly brushed against startled foot passengers, yokes of merchandise in baskets and, with more difficulty, scraped past an occasional gaudily red painted sedan chair. Then, entering one of the small open spaces that marked the junction of several alleys, the crowd suddenly became even denser, producing a deafening and ugly sounding clamour, made worse by the frantic beating of gongs. Isobel’s bearer promptly set down the wheelbarrow in the midst of the throng, though fortunately the people nearby seemed not to be immediately interested in what the cage contained. The man who seemed to be the centre of their attention and the confusion occasionally came into sight through gaps in the crowd, a slow moving figure clad in dusty black with the sharp features of a European, his bald head bowed and his hands clasped behind him, the black garment being just distinguishable as a cassock. A missionary! Isobel made urgent sounds and shook the bamboo bars, then, unable to make enough noise, gathered her breath to shriek, seizing her empty water tin to bang it on the bars. The missionary was just visible in a kneeling position and then a gleaming sword swung high above the heads and went flashing down. The crowd howled and roared and Isobel, dropping the tin, kept very quiet. She was thankful when the coolie, having satisfied his curiosity and vented his spleen by a few minutes of yelling and fist shaking, picked up the shafts and calmly resumed his journey.

She had been sold in a food market, exposed alongside the extraordinarily eclectic array of creatures, dogs, cats, birds, monkeys, snakes, amphibians as well as the more conventional varieties of meat animal destined for the table. She had been the centre of some debate as buyers prodded her and argued over whether she was some kind of monkey or merely a wild sub-human. But in the end, the only bidder had been a man who had taken particular pains in his examination, employing a pair of the wooden chopsticks the natives used to eat with. He had tested her pierced nose and nipples, lifted her moustache and thoroughly probed all three of her orifices, nimbly manipulating her flesh with his implements. A sharp spank had induced an involuntary reaction that made Isobel reveal the mystery of the foundations of her tail, a detail the keepers of the menagerie had not ventured to reveal to their master. Now her immediate destination in the city was a poky workshop in an alleyway devoted to the manufacture of small curiosities, where her new owner having already preceded her was impatiently awaiting her delivery by the dilatory barrowman.

The workshop shelves were filled with carved items of wood, bone and ivory, and hung with small ornamental metalwork, rings, chains and buckles. The craftsman’s young apprentice took a firm grip of Isobel’s hair, clearing the great volume of it from off her nape, pulling hard to force her to stretch her neck out from the cage resting it against a small anvil. The golden collar had already been removed for separate sale and no doubt decorated some rich woman’s pet dog. It was a heavy leather collar that replaced it, closed firmly about Isobel’s neck and held in place by the boy. Bellows pumped rapidly and hissed viciously, blowing a little brazier into sudden vigour producing rapid pulses of heat and light. The craftsman raked with a set of tongs among the coals. Isobel made a last effort at speech though she knew they would not understand her, seeing out of the corner of her eye something approaching her between the jaws of the tongs. She quivered as she felt its sudden heat against the side of her neck and smelt singeing hair, then close to her ear the smith’s small hammer beat a rapid tattoo, a few stray sparks stinging her skin. A splash of cold water cooled hot rivet, leather, hair and scorched flesh all at the same time. It seemed a prosaic replacement that symbolised Isobel’s reduction from the status of a rich man’s curiosity, but to what?

Still held firmly in place, her muzzle was removed and her tongue drawn out with pincers to be clamped in that protruded position between two pieces of split bamboo. Her dumb condition was being ensured! A hole was pierced though her extended tongue and plug of bone fitted through, with a threaded end to which a bone finial could be screwed. Her strange appearance was further embellished with two fake tusks that stuck out from her lower gums to beyond her upper lip, connected inside by a thin, flat, bridge of bone to which her newly pierced tongue was also securely fastened.

The man who had bought her produced a short whip which he cracked expertly, evidently impressing the other men and conveying an equally convincing message to his purchase. With her muzzle carefully replaced, Isobel was removed from her cage, gurgling pitifully, and stretched out on a low form. Thick leather cuffs were fastened about each wrist in the same way as the collar with the ends riveted together. She could see the metal-rimmed openings that took the rivet and supposed the collar to have been fitted in a similar manner. Her legs were lifted up to have leather bands riveted in place just above her knees. All the bands held metal D-rings obviously designed to secure her limbs. Finally the sharply pointed bone spindles that pierced her nipples were replaced by larger versions made in two pieces with carved knob ends, drawing particular attention to her breasts and nipples which, though no longer milk-producing, had never lost their enormous bulk and bold protrusion. The spindle through her clitoris was withdrawn, to be replaced by a small metal ring carrying a small bell that made a silvery tinkling between her legs as she was moved back into her cage for final delivery.

Her new owner, it transpired, was the owner of a waterborne travelling circus, housed aboard a river sampan, a circus in which double-jointed acrobats, mostly tiny girls perform extraordinary feats of skill and daring, jugglers manipulated complicated combinations of objects and where, as a side attraction, a menagerie of strange wild beasts were exhibited in cramped cages. Isobel had been prepared for her appearance as a circus freak, the Wild Woman of the Forest.