Tales of the Lost: Monsters of the Amazon

Photo by Persephone Bolero

Chapter 5: Gold
By Persephone Bolero

(Tales of the Lost is loosely based on actual roleplay adventures in the Amazon in Second Life. To start at the beginning, go here. Photos courtesy of unsplash.com.)

The first step toward building my city was a risky negotiation over real estate, the kind of hard-ball play my father carried out in courtrooms for and against men and women of great influence and power. My proposal to the chief of the Yakturo three years ago involved sums of money that were paltry by Los Angeles standards, but my father never risked his life to make his deals.

I’d like to think, if he’d been able to see it happen, he would appreciate what I accomplished, if not the particulars. The outcome, though, ensured I’d never leave the Amazon, as my purpose here then eclipsed any possibilities I could have ever realized in Los Angeles. After it was done, I would never see that city or my parents again.

When I found the box canyon in the middle of Yakturo territory, I knew it would be easy to defend and it had irrigable land adjacent to it for farming. It was perfect for what we needed. The only problem was convincing the Yakturo to give it to us. We didn’t have the numbers or hardware to fight them -- few did. What we had was the knowledge to mine and pan for gold.

For years we had been roaming the Amazon, settling down in temporary camps for a month at most. We were a small band of lost souls trying to survive, picking up our camp and moving on when threatened. We were all tired of running, tired of seeing good people die. And I had become just desperate enough to act bravely, or perhaps I’d finally lost my mind.

There was, of course, no way to call up the Yakturo chief’s assistant and schedule a meeting. I couldn’t even ask a tribe member to act as a liaison in arranging such an appointment. The Yakturo were known for enslaving and killing non-natives, a practice that began with a prolonged war with the Knights of Vahn. The bloody conflict was over before I became lost in the jungle, and though the Knights were long gone, the Yakturo's scars showed themselves in a relentless, prejudiced grudge against anyone not born in the Amazon.

The only way to get an audience with the chief was to walk right up to him and make my offer. The last thing the tribespeople expected was for a small American woman to come waltzing right into their village. They kept their distance, staring out their windows from the darkness inside their huts. A band of curious children collected behind me, chattering with bewilderment.

I passed a few men with guns, and they watched me walk by and looked at each other for some hint how to respond. I stood just over a meter and a half, and I held no weapons. But in their superstitious minds, only a woman with the power of witchcraft would act so boldly, and if they acted to hastily, my bare hands could cast curses upon them. I had no such powers, and though my knees trembled beneath me, I kept my strides steady.

Two soldiers, apparently unconcerned with witches, ceased my charge through the village. They didn’t point the military rifles they had slung over their shoulders at me. They just stood in my path, arms crossed and eyes glaring.

“I want to see Kartago,” I told the warriors assertively.

They were clad in loincloths and bone jewelry. Their mahogany skin, needled with monochrome tattoos, lay over defined muscles. They looked at each other, confirming they were both hearing the same thing, and began to laugh contemptuously. There were some laughs from the spectators as well, like this was a play for their entertainment. So, I tossed the bag I was carrying on the ground, squatted down, and opened it. The warriors looked inside and stopped laughing.

“My name is Persephone,” I said slowly, emphasizing each syllable and pointing at myself. “I have gold. Take me to see Kartago.”

What else were they going to do now? They gripped my arms roughly and shoved me over to the chief.

With his skin lighter than most Yakturo, the chief stood out among his tribe. He sat upon a wicker throne wearing an elaborate bib of bones, a skirt made of wide leather flaps, and gold rings and necklaces. A gleaming Rolex watch wrapped around his wrist, glaringly incongruent with the primitiveness of his bone jewelry. The other members of Kartago’s court — there were five standing with him -- were likewise adorned in ostentatious jewelry.

Two white concubines dressed in cotton chemises knelt off to the side, their expressions vacuous, like cattle in pens. One of them I recognized as Cherise Roberts, from Indiana if I remember right. A couple years ago she had been among our little nomadic tribe, but she was caught stealing. So, we banished her. I guess she didn’t do to bad for herself, as most women in this lawless jungle die without a tribe to protect them.

The warriors who led me to their chief pushed me down to my knees, their calloused hands planted down on my shoulders as they bowed low before their leader. Kartago leaned forward, peering at me like a little boy with a magnifying glass looming over an ant on a sunny day.

“Majesty,” the warrior on my left said, “ʻLelo maila ʻo Per Sef Uh Nee kona inoa. Ua noi ʻia e ʻike iā ʻoe.”

I had learned enough of the native language to guess I was just introduced. I kept my eyes to the ground and waited for an invitation to speak.

“Ua lawe mai ʻo ia i kēia gula, Your Majesty,” the warrior on my right added and dropped the sack down before the chief. “Gula,” I knew, was the native word for gold.

The warrior opened the bag to show Kartago the approximately ten ounces of unsmelted gold sitting inside. I could see the chief’s greed change his posture in that instant. He leaned back in his throne, contemplating a situation that was no longer just a matter of taking on a captured slave.

“Per sef uh nee,” Kartago said in his native accent, pronouncing the syllables of my name clumsily, “from where you get much gold?”

“This gold is yours,” I answered, “and I will bring you more each month. In return, my people will live in that canyon to the east, and you will allow us to farm the paddies just outside it.”

Kartago exchanged glances with the advisors, turning his head to the left and right. Their expressions indicated no inclination to accept my offer.

“Majesty, ka wahine na ka wahine,” the advisor on his right offered. The man had a deep scar down his face, and one arm was cut off at the elbow. He was warning Kartago I was crazy. Natives saw mental illness as having a demonic source -- dark spirits that could jump from one person to another. The possessed and the insane were one of the same in their eyes.

“Why not I take your gold and make you serve me with the other slaves?” Kartago threatened, jutting his thumb towards his pleasure girls sitting silently off to the side.

I was the one who passed sentence on Cherise, and keeping her eyes to the ground, she bared a bit of a vengeful grin at the threat.

I was prepared for this question and, though my heart was pounding inside my chest, I managed to answer steadily, “Because if you do that, this is all the gold you’ll ever see from us. You can have another slave or a steady river of gold. Which would make you stronger?”

“Hoʻohana lākou i nā ʻāpana e hana i ke gula ma ka muliwai, Majesty,” another advisor told him.

As best I could translate, he was telling Kartago we made gold from the river, which was their understanding of the practice of panning. The gold I offered to pay, however, would not be panned. Unbeknownst to the Yakturo, their box canyon contained a sizeable vein of the precious metal.

Before approaching him with this offer, I had learned as much as I could about Kartago and his Yakturo tribe. Like most male-dominated tribes, the chief of the Yakturo was the guy who had so far managed to kill any challengers in one-on-one combat. Tribal rule was always tentative and almost always ended in death.

Kartago was half-white, the child of one of his father’s slaves, and his light skin made him the target of distrust among his people. He had many challengers, far more than his respected father. For Kartago, the slightest hint of weakness was an opportunity for an ambitious warrior to seize power from an unpopular chief infected with the white man’s blood. He had to be particularly brutal in his dealings with everyone, hiding all vulnerabilities behind a wall of perpetual cruelty and rape.

Any hint of defiance from his subordinates was met with excessive punishments, which is probably, I guessed, how his advisor got that facial scar and lost his arm. On the way into the village, I passed three villagers crammed into small bamboo cages left sitting in the sweltering jungle heat. Their crimes were mostly likely petty matters, but their chief had a reputation to maintain.

Possibly due to his mother’s European influence, Kartago loved western culture. His great hall, as he called it, was powered by a large generator. He had a bar, waterbed, a few arcade games, a large screen television, and an extensive library of DVDs.

He was a big fan of the television series The Tudors, which revolved around the life of King Henry VIII. He watched all four seasons over and over again. Considering the predicament he faced with maintaining his hold over the tribe, it’s not surprising he’d be drawn to a show set in a culture where even thinking about the king’s death was a capital offense. Idolizing Henry VIII, Kartago insisted on being addressed as “Your Majesty."

His love of electronic entertainment was not cheap. While the wealth he stole from the white settlements he conquered had made him one of the richest natives in the jungle, it was nothing compared to the tribute I offered. Upon that fact, I gambled that, rather than rob, enslave, or kill me, he’d accept the offer and I could begin building the City of the Lost.

Kartago sat silent as he contemplated a decision. There were many eyes upon him: members of his court, his slaves, and the villagers watching at distance. The flies buzzed around my skin as I knelt before him with the tropical sun hot above me. Drops of sweat, seeping from heat as much as nerves, rolled down my cheeks.

The chief finally reached down, grabbed the gold, and barked, “We take gold and keep the canyon. You go.”

I was stunned. He shot his arm out and flicked his wrist with a finality that left no room for my response. The two warriors lifted me up and shoved me back in the direction I came. With my offer inexplicably rejected, I feared I would be killed before I left the village. I walked briskly away in a trot towards the river.

No one was in pursuit. Behind me, I heard the chief tell his advisors in their language something to effect that he wanted his concubines cooked for him. No, that wasn’t what he said. He requested they be “prepared.”

Against my better judgement, I stopped and turned back to watch. No one was paying any attention to me. The children had scattered, and the adults were going about their daily chores, sweeping porches and cooking rice. By decree of the king, I had become inconsequential.

I had known the possibility was always there he’d refuse the first offer, and I had contingencies ready to make counteroffers. I had not planned that I’d be allowed to go, alive and unharmed, if he took no interest whatsoever in my initial offer. If all negotiation was concluded, I was as much an enemy of the tribe as any other white in the jungle. What was I missing?

I watched the two warriors shove Cherise and the other slave over to their chief and remove their chemises. The girls stared passively at the ground as the king looked them over. Kartago then stood and made an overt display of ordering the girls to wait for him in his bed. If I got the translation right, he announced to everyone, bellowing his words, that was going to “fuck them without mercy.” By the volume by which he made this declaration, he seemed intent on everyone in the village hearing it.

As the naked women scampered off to his great hall, I realized the miscalculation I had made. No matter how much gold I offered, my skin was white and I had no cock. I was, by Yakturo standards, not even human. The gold I offered wasn’t going to raise me to the tribe’s equal. Negotiating with me was going to bring Kartago down to my level, making him look weak, even if the offer doubled the tribe’s wealth. I left him vulnerable. Now, he was going to punish his slaves with his manhood, and make sure the whole tribe knew about it, leaving no doubt as to his strength and power over females.

Letting me go free, I deduced, was a means to leave open the possibility of accepting the offer when circumstances would allow him to do so without harming his reputation as an impervious and dangerous warrior. He wanted my gold, but he couldn’t lose his life for it.

Would I have had a man to approach Kartago with the offer, I could have easily remedied this problem, but Thomas was the only man in our group with the confidence to carry out such a task. And I had chased him off. If I was going to get that canyon, I needed to frame my offer in such as way so that Kartago could accept it without appearing to treat a white woman as an equal.

I knelt down and unlaced my boots, and once removed, I pulled my tank top over my head and threw it on the ground. I unbuckled my belt and pushed my shorts down, along with my panties. I walked back up to Kartago as nude as his slaves. The king and his court watched me approach, stunned at my naked reappearance. I knelt down before the chief, eyes to the ground.

“Your Majesty,” I said, holding my hands together beseechingly, “in addition to the gold, I will offer myself to you every month, for whatever would be your pleasure.”

Now, thirty-six months later, I was still paying tributes of gold and flesh to the Yakturo chief every month for the privilege of living in the Yatoru canyon, where I built my city. The chief had many slaves for that purpose, but the access to my body demonstrated to the Yakturo that I was not paying rent. I was submitting to my superiors.

In all honesty, the chore was not that terribly unpleasant, requiring only that I set aside my pride for one night a month. In the privacy of his waterbed, Kartago could be as rough as any man could be in the heat of passion, but he had no need to be needlessly cruel. After all these nights together, he’d even come to respect me, I think. Once, he drank too much and asked me to become his wife, a proposal I answered with an uncommitting flirt to avoid bruising his ego. He plowed me until he came and rolled over to sleep. The matter was forgotten by morning.

Despite any respect he extended me, there was no dismissing the fact this man was a murderer and rapist of people who, like me, were sucked into this rain forest with no means of escape. So I had no qualms over blackmailing him, and even after Miss Shards was dead, I would hold the secret over the his head whenever it proved useful to do so.

The chief was a man of ritual, and the steps to his bed were well defined. As I did every month, I approached his court and undressed. With my arms out before me, I stacked the chemise, neatly folded, on top of them, the gold sitting on top of the chemise. After Kartago finished other business before the court, he invited me to approach, which I did and curtsied low.

“Majesty,” I gasped with feigned reverence.

An elderly Yakturo man took the gold away, and Kartago told me to wait for him in his great hall. Like every month, I started an episode of the Tudors to be displayed with the sound down on the big screen television while we coupled in his bed. I poured a glass of Merlot into a large glass goblet and opened the green bottle of impotency potion I’d stolen from Aries, which was concealed in the hidden pocket of my chemise. I emptied it into his glass. Then I hid away the empty bottle back into the pocket from which it came.

When Kartago entered, I was kneeling before his chair under the glare of Jonathan Rhys Meyers, portraying Henry VIII, shouting with frustrated rage. The glow of the television painted my bare skin in the darkness of the chief's hall. I raised the glass of contaminated wine to Kartago as he sat. He took it with a salacious grin.

“You are a beautiful woman, Lady Persephone,” Kartago said, his English heavy with accent but much improved from when I first made the offer of the tribute to him three years ago.

“Thank you, Your Majesty,” I replied as he gulped the wine. He never sipped anything.

As was his custom, I began to massage his feet, my thumb pressing into the flesh above his arch. His feet were far less calloused than those of most natives. My gold was affording him a life of leisure and making him lazy. I hoped it wouldn’t get him killed, as a successor might not be as willing to take the gold.

We exchanged small talk about the weather and then discussed the disappearance of the Hoplons. I pretended to be oblivious to their fate.

My hands moved up to his ankles, and from there, climbed his calves, working their way up his leg, kneading his flesh and moving closer to his cock, which pushed up against a flap of his kilt-like skirt as it rose with anticipation.

As my hands reached the top of his legs, he pulled a flap in front aside. His dark, uncut shaft stood at attention in his lap. The glass of wine sat on a tray to his right, with nothing more than half a swallow at the bottom.

There was no guarantee the potion would work, and so I continued our ritual as if there was no other expectation for the evening. Though if it didn’t work, I would have no other means to fight Miss Shards.

As ritual dictated I requested permission to proceed. “Your Majesty,” I said, my eyes upon his swollen manhood, “it would be an honor to pleasure you with my mouth, if you would please allow me that privilege.”

“Please, Lady Persephone, indulge yourself,” he replied, as if the granting of permission were an act of largess.

I lowered my head over it, mouth gaping, and slid him between my lips. My head bobbed over his lap, saliva dripping down the shaft, as my hands rubbed his legs. For several minutes, his breathy, masculine moans were the only sounds besides the smacking of my lips as they traveled the several inches of his cock in slow, steady strides. He remained hard against my tongue, and as I started to taste the saltiness of semen seeping from the tip, I began to lose hope the plan would work.

But then, as I pondered means by which I could go into hiding from Miss Shards, he began to soften in my mouth. A discomforted murmur broke his moans. He shifted in his seat. Over the next couple minutes, he lost all potency.

“To the bed,” he ordered abruptly as he pushed my head up, his flaccid member flopping from my mouth. I looked up to him, and he averted his eyes from mine. He never did that.

Normally, when he transitioned to the bed, I walked over first, laid on my back, and spread my legs. He would then sit a long while, gazing up at the television before he joined me. Something about making women wait for him aroused the Yakturo king.

This time, though, he grabbed me bodily and shoved me over to the bed. I fell face-down upon its wavy surface, the water sloshing under the plastic mattress. When I tried to turn over he pushed me down onto my stomach with one hand and parted my legs with the other.

Awkwardly, he began pushing his soft cock against my opening, and when that didn’t lift him up, he moved to doing the same to my ass, with no more success. There was a desperation in his thrusts, their pace frantic. All the while, he kept his hand on the back of my head, pushing my face into the mattress, and the longer he failed to regain his erection, the harder he pushed, making it difficult to breathe.

“I need more wine,” he announced suddenly and returned to his chair, leaving me to get up on my own. As I poured him a glass, I looked directly at him. I wanted him to see my eyes, to see I knew his weakness.

He rubbed his mouth frustratedly and demanded, “Hurry up.”

“Everything alright?” I asked as I walked the wine over to him.

“Yes, everything is fine,” he spat out impatiently.

I again knelt at his feet before his chair under the television, which was showing Natalie Dormer, portraying Anne Boleyn laying her head down on the chopping block after a heartfelt speech. I lifted the flap of Kartago’s skirt and nuzzled my lips against his deflated manhood, pretending to try to excite him when I was really just emphasizing his problem. It was as unresponsive as a dead salamander.

He finally pushed my head away. He walked over to a dark corner, leaving me by the chair. He massaged himself, and when that produced no effect, he began masturbating furiously, beating his cock to punish it for failing him. Fifteen minutes passed, and he was whimpering with his arm moving rapidly, his face to the wall. He finally gave up and walked back over to the chair. He collapsed upon it and buried his face in his hands.

“You are no longer pleasing to me. You are becoming too old,” he said.

I fully expected he’d try to blame me for his dysfunction, and that was the signal to ensure the tables remained turned in my favor.

“Or maybe you’re becoming like an old man,” I replied defiantly.

He grabbed me by my arms and shoved me against the wall, under the television, which shook over my head.

“I should kill you,” he hissed, his eyes glaring less than an inch from mine.

“You kill me, Kartago, and there is no more gold,” I warned him.I let him hold my warning a moment before I continued, “I’ll just get chemise and return home. Maybe next month you’ll be more capable.”

“No, you cannot leave,” he said and pressed me harder against the wall.

This was the response I expected, which put upon the table the fact I now held a secret that could very well get the chief killed. I smiled knowingly at him, and for the first time in the three years since we met, he looked upon me with fear.

In the native masculine code, a man’s strength was based on his ability to violently subdue other men and sexually subdue women. Impotency was the greatest humiliation a man in Kartago’s position could face, and it could cost him his life.

“You must not tell anyone,” he said, his tone softer, his eyes to my feet. He was stating this as a request. I had him.

“I will say nothing to anyone...on one condition.” He met my eyes, listening. “I will moan and scream tonight for everyone in your village to hear. They'll be none the wiser. Then, before dawn, I go back to the City of the Lost with ten of your best warriors. A woman is coming tomorrow to kill me. Your men will protect me and kill her.”

(To be continued…)