Flesh: Sacrifice Ch. 02

"They coaxed you out of your underwear?" Benitez laughed.

Dani put a hand over her eyes in a combination of mock and genuine shame.

"You wouldn't be the first," he went on. "Huaca girls like to get their hands on Western clothes."

That explains the espadrilles, Dani thought to herself. "Okay, okay, you guys were right. I should have just started off this way." She took a seat on a log next to Benitez, extremely careful about just how she sat.

Benitez shrugged. "When in Rome..."

Dani scowled. "So where's your loincloth?" she teased. "Where's your nipple piercings and body paint?"

"Believe me," Benitez smiled, "if these people had any interest in me for their ritual, I'd be done up in traditional garb the way you and Summer are."

Dani swallowed hard. "I'm not...?"

"No," Benitez laughed. "No. A million times no. That's what Summer is here for."

"Just making sure."

The party seemed to develop all around them. Bottles of chicha and corn beer were all around them, and Dani, sobering up somewhat from the afternoon in the cave with Uturunku, developed a taste for a sweet, fermented fruit juice that was made from something called a "carambola." There was cheering, and laughing, and singing, the villagers each stopping by to shake Benitez's hand and meeting Dani. "Qapila sutiymi," Dani introduced herself, eliciting a raised eyebrow from Benitez.

"It's easier being Qapila," Dani explained. "Daniella D'Annunzio would have a hard time with all of this."

"You're not 'Qapila' quite yet," Benitez joked. "You're still 'Sika Sika," a caterpillar in her cocoon." He gestured up the river, vaguely in Summer's direction somewhere out of sight. "She's the Qapila."

Dani chose to ignore the comment. If what Summer intended to do was necessary in becoming a butterfly, Dani was happy to remain "Sika Sika," thank you very much. Instead, she asked, "Where is she?"

Benitez looked up the river again. "Up the river somewhere." He shrugged, and wrinkled his brow. "Maybe out in the jungle? There's probably a little altar or something where they're readying her for the t'ojsiy."

"Aren't you worried about her? Don't you want to know where she is?" Dani asked, wondering if there was anything worse that the Huaca could do to her that she hadn't already volunteered for.

"I used to be," Benitez answered. "When I first started traveling with Summer, I was. But she'd been doing this for years before I showed up on the scene, and she knows these people better than I ever will. She trusts them, trusts them absolutely." He took a sip of his corn beer. "And so I have to, too."

Benitez nodded in Uturunku's direction as he joined the party, and Dani offered a little wave. Behind him was Tutakura, who made a b-line across the little clearing and grabbed at Dani's wrist.

"The chimaychi," Benitez explained. "She wants you to dance with her."

Dani had no interest in dancing. She'd certainly drunk enough chicha and carambola wine in order to dance if she were back in New York, but back in New York she never had to worried about the way her tits bounced around in the open, or whether her loincloth was going to fall aside and expose her once more. But Tutakura was insistent, and no amount of head-shaking from Dani seemed to get her lack of interest across. Benitez was no help, laughing at her protestations, and Taksa Kuchu had already joined a number of the girls from the bathhouse in a long line of skipping and hopping dancers.

As it turned out, there wasn't much to the chimaychi dance, at least not in the one-step, two-step nature of the waltz or the tango. The more important thing, Dani realized, was that the dancer display unbridled joy, and so long as her hips and shoulders shook in some relation to the rhythm of the jungle drums, Dani would be all right. She felt like a stripper, jiggling around in nothing more than an animal-print loincloth, and her breasts seemed to move independently of the rest of her body. But, aside from Benitez, she was surrounded by men and women similarly attired, similarly undulating in beat with the music, and similarly looking ridiculous. So long as she was able to forget that the Argentine doctor was there, Dani was able to cut loose a little, to forget her current state of undress, and to have a good time.

Dani, as it turned out, wasn't the only one to lose her loincloth that night. There was a man in his late twenties who lost his while dancing to the beat, and the gathered crowd burst out in laughter. It was all in good fun, however, and the naked young man smiled sheepishly, retied his loincloth, and rejoined the chimaychi line with no lingering bad feelings. Dani had laughed along with everyone else, and so when the knot holding her own loincloth slipped and dropped down her thighs once more, all she could do was laugh at herself. Unfortunately, she was careening around a small fire at a fairly high speed, and the sudden exposure was enough to trip her up, and start a small collision of bodies as she fell to the ground and grappled for her only clothing.

"I think we've seen just about enough of that," Dani wheezed as she returned to Benitez and his log bench. She reached into his backpack, felt the cup of her lace bra, and managed to lay her hands on the red thong beneath it. Stepping into it, she wriggled the panties up her thighs and under her retied loincloth. And, as it was a thong, it did little to shield the orange-yellow handprint that Tutakura's friend had placed on her backside.

"Maybe I'm tying this wrong..." Dani wondered allowed as she sat back down next to Benitez.

"I'm sure it's fine," Benitez offered absentmindedly, glancing up the river. He was paying the girl no mind. In front of him was a large banana leaf, covered in some type of fresh fish and rice. As she fiddled with the knot at her hip, Dani leaned over and helped herself to Benitez's dinner.

"Is it true?" Dani asked. She'd just quickly relayed the story Uturunku had told of Summer and the High Priestess of Sipusiki overthrowing Uru Kuchi and his mother.

Benitez laughed heartily. "Yeah, Summer led a real insurrection," he offered sarcastically. He took another swig of beer, wiped his mouth, and explained. "This is years before me, but it's all wrapped up in the tall tales and mythology that the Huaca have for Summer.

"So she gets back from Hanan Pacha, the first place she'd ever done this little rite. And in less than twenty-four hours, she becomes the talk of the entire valley. Somehow. Somehow, a people with no telephones or proper writing and spread out over two departments manage to communicate gossip faster than any people on Earth. And so Summer's camp starts getting bombarded with requests, invitations to come perform the t'ojsiy at these little villages thoughout Huaca country -- Beni, Pando, Santa Cruz, and even into Brazil. And she's still a little freaked out about what she'd done in the first place, so naturally, she says "no." She just wants to get back to her work.

"But they keep coming. And begging. And pleading. And Summer gets so guilt-ridden about their plight that she agrees to go with them -- just once more. She's already done it once, so really, how much more would they be asking of her? It's not as if anyone from back home will ever know what she was doing. And, you know, after working in a lab for long, and helping some god-awful pharmaceuticals company come up with the next beauty secret or face cream or breast enhancer or whatever, she's struck by the opportunity to have a real impact on the Huaca. If not for her, maybe the whole way of life disappears.

"So if she's going to do what she's going to do just one more time, she decides that she better do it in Yapamantataq, which is more or less the capital of the Huaca world. Like, five days into the jungle, completely hidden from the Western world, plucked from way back in time -- you've got to see it some day, it's amazing. It's like an old Incan city, if the Conquistadors had never come. And so she goes to Yapamantataq, she meets the High Priestess and she meets this fat, fat 'king' -- Uru Kuchi.

"Now, bear in mind, Summer has no idea the underlying history of the Sipusiki curse -- she just thinks that it's this self-propagating myth that needs to be extinguished for the Huaca's own good. And, of course, the revelations about Uru Kuchi not being Hatun Paka's son, and the poisoning and all else -- that didn't come out until afterwards, even if there were whispers among some of the elders. But Summer goes in, gets pushed to the limit in that way that only the Huaca can do to a volunteer, and then performs the t'ojsiy. Uru Kuchi gets so turned on, panting and clutching his chest and what-have-you, that he just drops dead."

"So Summer....?"

Benitez nodded. "Killed him with her orgasm." He chuckled a bit. "So Summer's freaked out, naturally, but the truth starts trickling out. Apasanka had cheated on Hatun Paka. Uru Kuchi was actually the son of Chimpilaku. Chimpilaku poisoned Hatun Paka. And so on and so on. The High Priestess hands the throne to Hatun Paka's next oldest son, Sipusiki's curse is lifted, and so on and so forth."

Dani let this all sink in. She was a bit worried about Benitez casually slipping in the part of about the Huaca pushing their volunteers; she sat there in nothing but a loincloth and her red thong, and could relate. But she was curious about something else. "Sipusiki's curse gets lifted? So then...what're we doing here?"

"Tradition," the doctor answered. "The t'ojsiy used to be performed every year, as a part of the Phancha festival. Usually on an animal. Sometimes on one of the village girls. But then here's Summer. And she seems somehow blessed by Sipusiki. Like Sipusiki's possessing her, or Summer's channeling Sipusiki, or something. It's a bit mixed up."

A beat passed. Dani, scratching her forehead, asked, "Then why am I here? Why has she been trying to recruit other girls? Wouldn't she be only one able to perform the ritual?"

"Well, a ritual's a ritual, right? Summer gets inserted into the Huaca cosmology, and suddenly things get a bit more complicated. It's not as important to the Huaca that it's Summer, exactly. But just that it's not a Huaca. The only girl that Summer was ever able to get to actually do this, to actually get to perform the rite, was one of her graduate students back in La Paz, this girl from Montevideo. And yeah, there a few hoops to jump through at the beginning when she and Summer got to that first village, but...you know...it worked itself out."

"And she's the one who went native?"

"Yeah," Benitez answered solemnly. "Never met her myself, so I can't really speak to it as well as Summer might be able to. But it wasn't anything nefarious or mind-controlling or anything like that. She was somewhere out by Porto Velho, and just decided to stay." Benitez looked out across the dancing Huaca. "It's not such a bad life. Simple. And getting treated like some sort of goddess on top of that? I can understand the temptation."

There was too thin a line between goddess and sexual plaything for Dani, but she supposed that she could understand someone falling for this life. There were a few modern t-shirts and tools scattered about Aya Pampa, and Dani recalled a pick-up truck being mentioned in Summer's first story. But for the most part, Dani guessed that the Huaca were living as close a life to their pre-Spanish ancestors as possible. They weren't caught in some kind of bastardized half-life in the way that the Kwirku were. And while she hadn't talked to Benitez about the medical situation, and guessed that the abundance of fruit and food and liquor were in celebration of the Phancha that evening, she guessed that she, too, could understand the temptation. After all, hadn't she signed up for the Peace Corps, in part, to get away from the Western World for a while?

The Argentine and the American were interrupted by one of the guides from earlier in the day. Qarachupa, Dani recalled. He greeted them both warmly, and joked with Dani -- through Benitez's translation -- about dancing the chimaychi and wearing the "chupika" paste on her body. Red panties aside, Dani herself had gone even more native than she'd intended.

But Qarachupa introduced Dani and Benitez to his wife, Turuschu, and his two-year-old daughter, whom he'd named Chaqiska in honor of Summer. And then, a short while later, Dani met another little girl named Chaqiska. There was a ten-year-old named Hatun Chaqiska. A five-year-old named Tumpa Chaqiska. There was a Lunku Chaqiska. Even one of the little boys, less than a year old, was introduced to Dani and Benitez as Inti Chaqiska. And though Dani wondered at the wisdom of naming half the young girls in the village Chaqiska or some variant thereof, she was starting to fully understand the impact that Summer Monroe had made on these people's lives. Total degradation notwithstanding, maybe there was more to Summer's sacrifices to the Huaca.

Could Dani actually go through with this? Could Dani actually do what Summer wanted her to? Less than twenty-four hours ago, she'd screamed and cried about even coming this far. Just that morning, she'd thrown a fit about what Summer and Benitez and Taksa Kuchu intended her to wear. And yet she found herself in the middle of Aya Pampa, laughing and singing and dancing with the Huaca people, surrounded by children whose parents were so thankful for what Summer had done for them that they'd been named in her honor. She was already in her underwear, and had exposed herself twice already to Benitez and the village as a whole -- and that didn't even include the girls down at the bathhouse. She'd already been "violated" by Tutakuru, having had the chief's niece run her hand up and down her pussy while being "washed." And, after all, wasn't Summer about to do something in front of these people that they'd seen dozens of times before? No matter how debased and vulgar Dani may have viewed the t'ojsiy, these people looked upon it less as a sexual rite and more as a religious rite.

But this was all in the abstract. Dani would have liked to help the Huaca in any way she could...in the abstract. She might be willing to consider taking part in the t'ojsiy...in the abstract. The real world would prove to be far more real than she was willing to bear.

"It's starting," Benitez announced, turning from his conversation with one of the village elders.

Dani, who'd been standing beside him, pondering her own sexual will as the doctor jabbered on in the Huaca tongue, turned up river, as well.

The drums had slowed, but continued to beat in an ominous, steady rhythm. The drinking, the talking, the laughter -- it had all come to an almost immediate halt. There was shouting somewhere up the river, a voice that Dani recognized as Qaray Puka's, the village's medicine man.

When the crowd first parted, and Huaca carried Summer past, all Dani could think of was Jesus on the cross. For lack of a better term, that was more or less what Summer was splayed out on, completely naked, and held in place by leather binding at her wrists and ankles. It was a large, wooden "Y," built out of some sort of local wood, and it was being carried on the shoulders of a half dozen strong Aya Pampa men. Summer's wrists had been bound together, and tied above her head on one end -- the bottom of the Y -- while her legs had been spread, and secured far apart at each end of the top of the Y. Her pussy, shaven bare and glistening the torch light, was full exposed, her own crotch open at the crotch of the Y-frame.

"Oh my god," was all Dani could utter.

Dani had been painted with the chupika paste, but where Tutakuru had applied a simple, basic design, Summer had been covered in blues and reds and purples. She was very clearly naked, but her entire body painted in an ornate design, similar to those that the Huaca themselves had carved into their own skins. Her breasts heaved, each nipple as red as Dani's own, but encircled by blues and pinks that extended out from the areolae. There were square-little motifs that started at each hip and petered out, repeating designs of dots and lines and triangles. There was a lighting bolt on one thigh. There was a ray of sunlight on the inside of the other. And, around Summer's pussy, someone had painted diagonal lines, as if to guide the sacred dildo into its destination.

The procession moved past them, and down river, but it was quickly evident that nowhere in Aya Pampa would be open enough to accommodate everyone. The Huaca clamored for a better view, but as much as they pushed and jostled each other, they were careful to allow Benitez, Taksa Kuchu, and Dani through.

To look at her eyes, Summer was somewhere else. Or maybe she was more here than Dani was, more in the moment, more in the now. God knew what Summer had been doing these past few hours, while Dani was knocking back shots with Uturunku and feasting with the Huaca, but she looked like some sort of wild animal. She wasn't laying still, but rather heaving and panting on her the Y-frame, as if she were already in the throes of ecstasy.

"Oh my god," Dani repeated, her lip quivering in horror.

At Qaray Puka's instruction, the men came to a stop. They were each standing calf-deep in the trickling brook that ran through Aya Pampa. Upon orders from the medicine man, they began to tilt the Y-frame, so that Summer was head-down and pointed towards the little river, her legs open and pussy directed up into the air. They settled the top of the frame -- or bottom of it, given its current perspective -- into the water, so that Summer's fingertips, sticking up from where her wrists were bound, just disappeared beneath the surface. Two of the men continued to hold their ends of the Y-frame, the two men who had the two branches for each leg. The frame rests on their shoulders, and thus Summer came to a stop, positioned at a forty-five degree angle in relation to the ground.

Though blood was sure to be rushing to her head, Summer complained not at all. It was impossible, Dani knew, but from her vantage point a few yards from the Y-frame, she swore that she could smell the other woman's pussy. Or, feeling a sensation between her legs, maybe it was her own.

Uturunku made some sort of speech, but even if Dani had been able to understand what he was saying, she doubted she'd be able to pay him much attention. What Summer had described, what Benitez had told her that Summer had been doing in these little villages, what La Iniciativa expected Dani herself to do -- it had all been stories, it had had all been something that Dani hadn't even been able to relate. Five minutes ago, Dani had even been talking herself into taking part.

Not now.

"Is it always like this?" Dani stammered.

Benitez grimaced, and answered, "Not always. Each village tends to have their own variation on the concept, but it's more or less the same." He paused. "But maybe we shouldn't have started you off with Aya Pampa."

Uturunku's speech drew to a close, and the people of Aya Pampa began to chant. Again, Dani had no idea what they were saying, but there was a profoundly religious, powerful tone to it that seemed so distant from dildoing a woman off. But that was before Dani saw the dildo.

It was long, but it was the girth that fascinated the brunette. Dani simply couldn't get over how fat the silver dildo looked. Summer would later tell her that Aya Pampa's particular "qollqephichilu" (literally, "silver penis") was nothing in terms of what she'd taken in other villages, but Dani simply had no concept of how anything could be bigger than what she was now looking at. It was less a sex toy than it was a small sword, complete with a hilt for Qaray Puka to hold on to.

In her moment of shock and horror at seeing the qollqephichilu for the first time, Dani took an involuntary step back -- as if it would come to get her. As she did so, the knot at her hip slipped one more, and her loincloth began to slide down her hips again. Had she not been transfixed by the goings-on in front of her, Dani may have wondered if she'd traded away her black thong for a defective loincloth. She was wearing her red panties beneath, however, and absentmindedly grabbed the loincloth with her right hand, holding just tight enough in her balled fist to keep it from falling again.