Field Work Ch. 01 - Capture

It's been a hot minute since I've taken a course on it, but I'm 99% sure anthropological field studies don't work like this, lol. Grain of salt. This is nothing but a fun bit of mixed-consent erotica and worldbuilding infodumps.

I am aware that all existing hunter-gatherer societies are made up of people of color, and I don't want to portray POC as savage tribal racists, so the tribe has a back story that makes them more or less white. There's probably another contradiction in trying to be a conscientious writer of rape porn, but there you go. Please feel free to imagine Attalos or any of the other characters as people of color if that gets it done for you; there's no reason that any of them, or Dr. Perry, couldn't be other races, or mixed.

There was still time to back out.

Dr. Perry crouched in the brush and watched the hunting party pass. There were four men, all in their late twenties or thirties, and judging by their weapons and nets, they were after birds today. They carried longbows, and the sort of thin arrows that they used to hunt ducks and quail. Dr. Perry's colleague had done his doctoral dissertation on these weapons, and in the moment of fear she was experiencing now, she thought about coming back to him with new information about the tribe's tool use, and it made her a little braver.

Anything helped. She was about to do the most terrifying thing of her life.

The hunting party's trajectory was bringing them nearer, but they would miss her by a country mile unless she made some noise. No one at the university would actually blame her for losing her nerve. An ethics panel had approved the study, with deep reservations, but most people, when it had been brought up, were appalled that she was putting herself in such a position. "They're not even real tribespeople," an adjunct professor had said. "They're what, four or five generations from modern Greek society? They fought in the trenches in the first world war, for God's sake."

Which had been the point, though, hadn't it? No one had ever gone back. Certainly not a European people, who had lived a certain way since antiquity. The fascinating thing was, this wasn't going back; it was an entirely new hunter-gatherer and occasionally agrarian society that had sprung up from the devastation of war a hundred years ago, and had been left more or less to its own devices. It was so hostile to outsiders that the surrounding nations had washed their hands of it; Turkey said it was Greece's problem, Greece said it was Turkey's, and the Cypriots mostly just posted extra troops at their shoreline and hoped the tribes would stay on their own island.

So they had gone more or less unstudied these past hundred years. Now and then a tourist or a boat full of African immigrants would show up on their shore, lost or curious or shipwrecked, and later the anthropologists would greedily descend on the unlucky survivors. Dr. Perry had debriefed a few herself. The intrusion of outsiders was changing the tribes on the eastern coast of the island, and in the past decades they had gotten gentler with outsiders, in particular refugee boats; lost tourists could expect to be captured and released in fairly short order if they behaved themselves. It was possible to speak to the coastal tribes, who didn't want an armed response any more than the European Union wanted to invade, and a great deal had been learned about them, and in turn about their neighbors to the interior.

Which is why what Dr. Perry was doing was not... safe, exactly, but not suicide. It would have been if she had been a man. Her colleague who studied weapons could expect, in her place, to become more intimately acquainted with them than he would have liked, but Dr. Perry had few such concerns. Any harm that could come to her was less direct: infection, psychological trauma. That didn't seem to console anyone who was aware of what she was planning, though; they had treated her very gently these past few weeks, as though she was about to intentionally contract a fatal disease. She was already famous for what she was about to do, and oddly, the thought of that was bothering her more than what she was about to become famous for.

The hunting party was nearly past her. If she didn't show herself now, she'd be stuck here for hours in the burrs until they passed her way again, or she requested extraction from the team waiting off the shore.

She stood.

There was a certain level of acting that she expected to have to do in this moment, but to Dr. Perry's surprise, she found that she wasn't acting at all. Panic took her. She stumbled backward and fell, and then scrambled to her feet and ran.

She was wearing hiking boots and long pants, and they were barefoot and sparsely clothed, but they gained on her in a hurry, without apparent effort. She looked over her shoulder and saw them, far closer than she had expected, in a hurried but undesperate jog. Her capture was, evidently, inevitable, and Dr. Perry was both relieved that they had taken the bait, and afraid of what would come next. There would be no backing out now, and no rescue; the governments of the surrounding islands had made that clear. You can do your study, Dr. Perry, but at your own risk. We will not expend resources to help you.

Fair enough.

These men were not only competent hunters of birds, but competent hunters and handlers of women, too. One of the men pulled ahead and ran alongside her to the right, too far away to grab her, and she knew that there would be another man to her left and just far enough back to make the way look clear at first glance. A more canny woman -- one of the communities of their own kind, who also lived in single-gender groups -- would keep running straight, and be intercepted at some further point or else escape (though the latter was unlikely). Dr. Perry, now winded from the sprint, with a slightly more level head and an absolute awareness that the "escape" ship had sailed, ran deliberately into the trap.

She knocked into the man to her left. Before she had a chance to dart away, he threw one arm around her waist and another around her neck, and swung them both around, so they fell together in a controlled fashion, she on top of him, both on their backs. Another hunter threw a net over them, and her captor rolled on top of her, so she was face down on the ground, her cheek pressed into the rough sisal of the net. There was no time to react; with a knee in her back and a hand on the back of her head, and all four men working to subdue her, she found her hands tied behind her back and her ankles bound together before she could move.

"No no no no no." Everything was going according to plan, but Dr. Perry wanted it to go substantially more slowly. She needed more time to get herself together. She had expected all of this, but had discounted how frightening and overwhelming it would be to be so powerless, and was suddenly very aware of how necessary all her preparatory psychological training had been.

The men were hardly breathing hard. They had wrapped her in the net with her head sticking out, and now set her upright in a sitting position, which she had to be held in to keep her from falling over. One of the men held out his waterskin to her. There was every reason for Dr. Perry to see these men as research subjects or partners, but the visceral terror of her capture had made her limbic system scream Enemy! and she refused it, though she was thirsty.

The man withdrew the skin, and she sat propped against his legs while he conversed with the other men. This had been something else she was experiencing like a native woman would; they spoke in a patois of various European and Northern African languages, but the dialects between tribes were anything but homogenous, and the dialects of the interior regions in particular were poorly-studied. It would be valuable to know what her captors were saying to each other, but... well. Language was not Dr. Perry's strong point, anyway. So many things had to be "good enough," and she didn't see any linguists stepping up to the job.

It was a hot day. The waterskin was offered again, insistently, and this time she drank. He picked her up and carried her over his shoulder. She had thought they would turn around and take her back to their camp, but they began to walk toward the marsh, in the same direction they had been walking before she had interrupted them. Well, of course. They still had to eat. Being carried like this was uncomfortable, but she would get to observe them hunting, and more importantly, would be able to prepare herself for what would happen when they got back to the other men.

They set in the shade of a tree and double-checked her bonds, then tied her sitting up to the trunk, still wrapped in the net. It kept her upright more than it really secured her; the net and bindings were doing a good enough job.

She got her first good look at them as they walked away. They were dressed in what a man from the 1910s might have thought of as "tribal" wear, and the clothing had evolved little since its inception. The women had decorative elements to their clothing, but the men's was strictly utilitarian, and had the purpose of keeping the sun off and protecting their genitalia. They wore underwear-like loincloths -- no dangly bits to catch on anything or become ragged -- and loose, formless wraps on their shoulders that could be worn singly or in layers or not at all, depending on the weather. Two of the four men wore wraps, slung over the shoulders that held the weapons straps, and the other two were barechested. They were heavily tattooed with tribal symbols, and their physical condition was superb: due to the easily availability of food on the island and their level of activity, they were neither underfed nor unmuscled. Like most of the tribes here, they had short hair and kept beards trimmed if they had them at all.

Their physical appearance more or less hewed to the western ideal, and since they tended to die somewhat young -- in their fifties, if accidents didn't get them first -- few among them reached an age that most westerners would have found unattractive. As a result, the eastern coastal tribes enjoyed an infrequent but steady supply of foolish but brazen tourist women, who would invariably do what Dr. Perry had done: step onto the island and allow themselves to get captured and ravished, and then be released a few days later to the waiting arms of the Cyprian boat they had paid to illegally deliver them there. The women were always a bit disingenuous about their purposes, but the eastern tribes knew exactly what was going on. Furthermore, they knew how to keep it happening: gentle, solicitous captivity, a short experience, careful attention to captives' pain thresholds, and the generous application of orgasms. Dr. Perry had heard of them letting women go early when it was clear a terrible time was being had.

In the interior, however, she could expect no such concessions. They weren't complete monsters, certainly, but they had a very specific relationship with women, and didn't need to treat her gently to ensure themselves return customers, which they could get with little effort from the neighboring women's settlement. She was livestock, now, and expected to be treated like it. No one went out of their way to be cruel to a cow, but no one really stopped to consider the cow's feelings, either. If something painful or frightening needed to be done to her, well, that was too bad. She had a very clear purpose here, and they were not about to let her opinion get in the way of making her fulfill it.

They took it in turns to come check on her and offer her water, and they piled their kills next to her as though she was just another product of their hunting -- which of course she was. After several hours, one of the men brought a pair of ducks back, and sat down next to her, and she watched as he made a brace out of rope to make the birds easy to carry. He talked to her, which was interesting, and showed her what he was doing: how he was tying the knots, how he turned a pile of waterfowl and quail into something that could be easily brought back to camp. Another of the men arrived after awhile, and started a conversation with the first man, and they sat cleaning and tying and waiting for the others.

If she was going to keep them straight in her head, she needed to give them temporary names until she learned their real ones, but nothing too common: she'd been cautioned to compartmentalize this experience as much as possible, so she had come prepared with a list of ancient Greek names she had never encountered before. The first man, who had spoken to her while he tied up the ducks, and had been the one to first put hands on her, was Attalos; the second, who he was speaking to, was Bardas. Cilix and Diagoras trailed in behind them.

They prepared their catch for transport, including her. She had to pee by this point, but they didn't seem to consider this, and when Attalos picked her up, her bladder pressed against his shoulder so hard she thought for a moment she would be unable to hold it. The urgent feeling, along with the treatment she knew she'd suffer at the hands of the other men in the camp, brought her to exactly the right state of mind for it: she was turned on. Man, her body screamed, as it was pressed against his shoulder. She felt his neck and cheek against her hip and the blood rushed to her sex as readily as it was rushing to her head. His arm on the back of her thighs was exquisite, and she wouldn't have struggled much if he had raised his hand a little higher.

She was going to be raped so many times tonight.

The fact that she was thinking of that with anything but the detached interest of an academic bothered her a little, but it was another thing that she had been counseled to expect, and which sounded accurate (if inconvenient); there was no way to divorce her feelings from her research. That was true for less sexually fraught studies, too, but giving into feelings generally resulted in ethically suspect decisions, such as trying to convince a tribal group elsewhere to not abandon its elders or commit infanticide. Anyway, part of the ritual that was to come involved getting her "consent" -- which was not consent at all but a series of forced orgasms symbolizing it -- that was required for her continuing captivity, a bit like how some groups formed a narrative of prey giving themselves to arrows so the tribe might eat. She could fight it, but she was going to lose.

She concluded, as she had many times before, stroking her clitoris in bed, that if she was in less mental turmoil, she'd be a better observer.

By the time they reached the camp, she had been passed among all the men, none of whom seemed to have a difficult time carrying her. They set her on the hard dirt ground near the fire, at the center of a circle of a circle of shelters that all faced inward and had little privacy. The birds were set aside, and all the men in the camp gathered around Dr. Perry, who was lying on her back in the dirt, unable to get up. She assigned names as the men interacted with her, and hoped she'd be able to remember them later. Elpides turned her over to examine her from both sides. Faenus looked carefully at her face, but not in her eyes. Geleon and Herodes began to pick at the net, and as it was removed and her wrists and ankles untied, Ibykos kept her on the ground with a forked stick on either side of her neck. Someone else had a foot on her lower back.

As far as she could tell, there were nine of them. They were pulling her feet apart, and now removed her socks and shoes and pulled her pants away from her ankles so her ankles could be tied again with rope. Something heavy was applied to them, and when they hauled her up by her arms, she could see that they had hobbled her with a smooth, well-worn log with holes in either end that a rope could be fed through. It sat flush against the backs of her ankles, and as she watched they looped the rope around her ankles and the hobble to secure it.

The forked stick with which Ibykos had held her down was one of a pair. Both of these were also smooth with years of use. They came together in a diamond around her neck, and had grooves near the forked ends where they had been tied together by ropes before. Dr. Perry didn't fight, but sat quietly as the device was put on her. A man on either side -- Attalos on the right and Faenus on the left -- tied rope around her wrists and then tied her wrists to the outside ends of the yoke in much the same way as her ankles had been secured to the hobble.

It was intense and scary, and Dr. Perry fought back tears. How naïve had she been to think that this wouldn't be an emotional experience? In that moment, she gave herself permission to feel whatever she needed to feel.

They hauled her upright by her arms -- she was grateful, in that moment, that they hadn't lifted her by the yoke. One of the men used it to hold her steady from behind, though, as Bardas undressed her. He unbuttoned her shirt in front, and then pulled out a knife and cut it off the rest of the way. The air hit the sweat on her skin, and her vulva throbbed. She was struggling now, and tripped over the hobble, and the man standing behind her had to drop the yoke and support her under the arms so she didn't hurt herself. Bardas cut her bra where the cups were sewn together, and then cut the shoulder straps, and her breasts hung free then, while the nine men who were going to rape her stopped to evaluate them.

She kicked in desperation, but couldn't get anywhere. Herodes, who in his late forties or early fifties, moved closer and took her left breast in his hand, licked his thumb and ran it over her nipple. It stood up as his saliva evaporated. He weighed her breast in his hand and palpated it with such thoroughness that Dr. Perry squirmed, and then he repeated the operation on the other. He had a conversation with Attalos while Bardas continued to undress her. He cut her pants down the sides, and then her underwear, one swipe at her hip and one through the crotch, and then he cleaned his knife on his wrap.

Her clothes were examined for belongings -- she had come with her pockets empty -- and she watched as they were thrown on the fire.

At this point, most of the men seemed to lose interest. She was led fully naked by Bardas and Attalos to one of the shelters, and set on Attalos's soft deerskin pallet. She watched, heart pounding and sick with fear, while the men went about their business and prepared the campsite for the evening.