A lost explorer prepares to die.
Guest Story by Zyzzyva
tags: nsfw, the Ocean Sea
Ginés Pérez de Cabrera e Hita was going to die.
He had survived three months crossing of the Ocean Sea, until they were eating shoe leather and beetles and drinking nothing but rainwater. He had survived two weeks’ resupply in Vitoria Berria, a pestilential shantytown that was still somehow the centre of Hispaniola. He had survived a month and a half of Ovieto’s expedition up the Léon River, through jungles unseen by human eyes, and beasts—not to mention pests and parasites and poisons—unimagined by human minds.
And then his riverboat had capsized in a storm and river had swept him away from the party and its guns and supplies, and he was going to die. It would be tremendously unfair, except that there was nothing fair about this hellish continent. Sixteen members of the expedition were dead already, not to mention the two others in his boat who he had seen no trace of since the disaster, and Ginés knew, deep down, he was just going to be the next on that melancholy list.
He cut through a liana with his machete and kept moving anyways. He didn’t know where Ovieto had gone—if any of the others had survived the storm—or if he was even looking for Ginés, but there had been a hill of sorts a day back. It was rocky and clear, and out of the most feverish parts of the river lowlands, and the obvious place to make for to try to survive and be found. It was also well more than a day away on foot, in soaked clothes and without food and through all of the terrors of the jungle they had been trying to avoid with the boats, but it would give him something to do with the last few hours of his life before the grey sweat or the tigerworms got him.
He was making downstream as directly as possible, but that was hindered by the fact that the Léon was wide and shallow and ended by degrees in almost untraversable mangrove swamp on each bank. So instead he was left trying to keep parallel to it as best he could, hundreds of yards from the clear water he had rowed up so blithely only two days ago. The ground was firm here, and the insects a little less. If he misjudged the distant river’s course, well, he’d die here in the jungle instead of at the hill. He slashed another liana.
The ground sloped away beneath his feet. That meant either the main Léon, curving towards him, and he’d have to curve with it, or a tributary coming in at an angle that he’d have to, appallingly, cross. But when he let himself look out a little, and stopped concentrating on watching for the thousand nearby horrors that could kill him for a moment’s incaution, he saw that it was neither. A vast depression, maybe a mile across, stretched out before him. It was clear and open, a wide green meadow speckled with blue and yellow flowers; and in the centre, there was a city. Huge stepped pyramids, gleaming white plaster and deep carmine red and each topped with a tall, sparkling gold-and-blue building, rose up in a tight cluster.
The impossibilities tumbled over themselves. There were no other people in Hispaniola to build such a city—nothing intelligent at all upriver of the last Iberian settlement at San Juliana. (Well, the tigerworms were smart, in a sense, but they certainly didn’t build cities.) And no one in their right minds would build a town here. Even forgetting the city, a low place like this would be flooded from the river immediately in the first storm—in a storm like that Ginés had been lost in, only two days ago.
I’m hallucinating, he thought. There were plenty of toxins in the jungle that could do that to you, before you died. Then he thought, I’m going to die, and walked down towards the city.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
There was no one in the wide, grassy fields sloping down to the city. But when he walked across the packed, dry earth around the fringe of the great pyramids, he could hear a rustling of noise, like a crowd. There was a passage or road between two of the great towers looming over him, and he walked around the blank backs of the pyramids to go down it. As the road opened up in the centre of the town into a great, white plaza, he saw the people of the town; and they saw him, and fell silent.
There were hundreds of people here, ochre-skinned, black haired, lightly dressed in loose skirts and jade jewelry. Despite the vast collective attention focused on him, Ginés had the strange sense that he was not interrupting, but rather that they had been waiting for him. The crowd parted before him, as he walked towards the tallest pyramid.
There was a woman atop the pyramid, and by the time he reached the base of its stairs he was definitely walking towards her. The people of the city were all good-looking, soft and muscular in just the right proportion, far more than what a gathering might have looked like in any town Ginés had ever lived in; but the woman atop the pyramid was incredible. She was, like the people on the plaza below, half naked, but on her somehow it was erotic and not just a mode of dress. Wide hips, a softly swelling belly, firm heavy breasts with each nipple pierced by a gold bar, gleaming like the gold and jade plates across her shoulders and neck. She stood at ease, bare feet flat on the stone of the pyramid-top, with one long-fingered hand resting on her thigh and the other cocked on her hip; but there was tension in her muscles and Ginés could tell she was waiting for him. He was tired, and hungry, and hot in the beating sun of the bare shadless city, but he picked up his pace on the brutally steep stairs to reach her.
She was taller than he was. She looked down on him from deep warm brown eyes, and after a moment she smiled. “I am Xibalba,” she said. “Welcome to my city.”
That she was speaking accented but clear Iberian was hardly a surprise to the placidly disoriented Ginés at this point. “I am Ginés Pérez de Cabrera e Hita,” he said.
“Yes,” said the woman—Xibalba. She spun on her heel and walked into the darkness of the little building atop the pyramid. Ginés watched the rhythmic sway of her ass for a moment or two before he caught himself, wrenched his gaze a few feet up her back to the spot where her long black hair swished across the muscles of her shoulder blades, and followed her in. Behind and below him, the crowd on the plaza sent up a cheer.
The interior of the building was surprisingly small, and even at noonday was only dimly lit by torches. The walls were lined with reliefs, picked out in dark earthy pigments with the occasional touch of gold or jade or lapis shining in the torchlight. Ginés couldn’t concentrate on them for more than a moment, though. In the half-dark, somehow Xibalba was even more striking. Her earrings and pectoral and piercings and belt all gleamed, and so did her eyes and even, white teeth as she smiled at him again.
“Why are you here?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. He had been floating with the current since he first saw the city.
“Why are you here at all?” she asked again, gesturing broadly around her, at the endless miles of Hispaniolan jungle around her. “This is not a place for people.”
“We were looking for gold,” said Ginés. “Precious stones, spices, ivory. Or just a route through the jungle to a less terrible place.” They’d found little of the former and no sign of the latter: the city was cool and clean and Xibalba was wearing without concern what had to be several pounds of gold, but, of course, Ginés was hallucinating and soon going to die.
“You won’t find that here,” said Xibalba. “You were lucky to have found me.”
“I suppose,” agreed Ginés.
“You may rest here, and we will speak again later.”
She again turned away from him, and Ginés again followed.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
He was bathed, and dressed, and fed. The two women who seemed to have been assigned to him were dressed much like the people down on the plaza, in brief white skirts and a little jewelry and nothing else, leaving a great deal of clean copper skin on display. They would have been spectacularly beautiful anywhere else – and six weeks of miserable travel since his last, hasty sexual encounter with a colonist woman back in Vitoria Berria, he should have been quite easy to distract – but instead he could only think of Xibalba. The servants lovingly washed and dressed him, running their hands over his body gently, insistently, continuously, and all Ginés could think of was the amused, superior look in Xibalba’s eyes as she smiled at him.
His filthy, sodden travelling clothes were gone, and he didn’t much care. They had instead dressed him in a heavy robe, open at the waist, made (to his distracted respect) out of black-and-green tigerworm hide. They gave him a jade pectoral, and a headdress of gold and bright sky-blue feathers, and seemed disappointed that his ears were unpierced, although they didn’t press the matter.
The food was meat he didn’t recognize, and vegetables he didn’t recognize, all spiced so intensely his eyes watered after the first bite. But it was delicious and he’d eaten little cooked food in the last six weeks either, so he cleaned his bowl. The heat seemed to migrate from his lips and tongue to his nipples and cock and the ring of cold gold-plated leather on his brow.
Xibalba had returned. He was back in the room atop the pyramid, lined with squirming bas-reliefs and sweaty as an oven. He was monstrously erect. The cloak, hanging loosely from his shoulders, didn’t even slightly cover it. He hoped she approved.
She didn’t glance down, but when she looked down at his face and smiled again it was like a tongue on his cock. She was now somehow even more gorgeous still, soft and round and lean and hard, her skin glistening with sweat in the torchlight. She put her hand on his chest, warm and slim and red-nailed, slid it up under his pectoral, and said, “good.”
She shoved him hard and he toppled backwards to the floor. It didn’t hurt. The thick tigerworm hide cushioned him and, of course, the stone floor caught him and gently settled in shape beneath him. The two women—or others, with Xibalba before him he was paying no attention to them—crawled over the floor towards him. They licked his ears and throat and nipples and their hands stroked him and their bodies writhed up close to him as he stared up at Xibalba above him.
She watched, unmoving, as the hands and lips and teeth and fur and flagstones keyed him up to a frenzy, his hips bucking with need. After a little while, when Ginés almost could not stand it, she said “good” again and undid her skirt. It dropped to the floor with a clink of metal and then the currents of the stones swept it away.
Her pussy was deliciously pink beneath a swirl of dark hair, and it was wet and hungry for him. Ginés was overjoyed that she wanted him too. She knelt over his hips and then plunged down onto him – her eyes closed and her mouth opened silently for a moment even as Ginés moaned in ecstasy – and then that cool look of control came back over her face. She leaned forward, her hands resting on his chest, and then she began to rock, her nails clawing up and down his chest as her tits bounced and her cunt slid warm and wet and tight over him.
The world was bleeding together around him but he could see it now, the bliss and the disorientation showing him the truth while Xibalba licked and stroked and sucked and Xibalba held him up warm and cradling and Xibalba rode him and all around Xibalba throbbed with life as she took Ginés into herself and he could see hidden behind the plaster and stone and gold and the people below and the impossibly erotic woman above the truth of who Xibalba was and what she was beneath and what she wanted from him and he was screaming with joy and pleasure as he agreed and the stone and flesh folded and closed around him but it didn’t matter because Xibalba’s beautiful cruel generous human face was still looking down and smiling and
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
Ramón Fernando de Rojas, Duque de Ovieto, sat unhappily shivering by the embers of the fire. It had been three days since the storm and the dawn just come brought them to two days and two nights atop the bare hill by the riverside. The tigerworms hadn’t found them yet, and the pause had given them time to repair their surviving boats and hunt and dry a little meat for supplies from the nearby jungle, but their time was clearly running out.
There were twenty-five of them besides Ovieto atop the hill now, which left well more than a third of the expedition dead or, after this latest disaster, missing. The distinction hardly mattered; they had waited as long as they could and no one from Cabrera’s boat had turned up. If he was going to save the rest of the lives of his party, and his own life, they needed to move soon.
Ovieto stood, and their eyes turned to him. “We go back downriver today,” he said, and watched their shoulders slump with relief. He had liked Cabrera, too, but even if he was somehow still alive out there, he was going to die soon.
There was nowhere else to have gone. Around the hilltop, the featureless sea of tree stretched out in all directions.
Author’s Notes: This was a direct response to Devi’s Siren, which I commissioned. I decided the underlying idea (Caravan Palace – “Miracles” fanfic) was too strong for just one story, so I did my own take, which as you can see hews a lot closer to the original video than Devi’s. I enjoyed writing it a lot, though. And it’s neat seeing the different versions of the same basic prompt.