Chapter 6: The Jealous Wife

If jealousy can be heartless, cold and self-obsessed; if it can be packaged and distilled into a single Korpian avatar, then that embodiment would surely be Euodia Kikomendes.

You wouldn't think it by looking at her. At the Aphrodite, with her customers, you'd suppose that she was a kind, confident, considerate soul; an angel of goodness or a nurse sent to comfort the sick; whereas in reality, the opposite was true. Euodia was morbidly and destructively and selfishly jealous.

This was an appalling secret formed by her nurture, for although she was from Korpius by nature: sultry, earthy and as Greek as the soil and the sea, her character had been buckled and twisted by her upbringing. She had been bent and misshapen through inhabiting an island that cannibalized women.

To understand her character it's essential to remember that her childhood had been spent in the eye of a storm. She'd been brought up on a slave farm five miles outside Scala, the only free woman on an otherwise male estate. She was daughter to an old-style girlie farmer, a man who regularly invited groups of tourists to his farm for what he advertised as 'Raunch at the Ranch' parties – gatherings that involved a great deal of drinking and betting on the results of girl baiting competitions. The memories were etched into Euodia's brain of coach loads of disoriented foreigners arriving at the farm and how these would park in front of the house and be escorted round the girl sheds to look at the women.

This would make the men frisky and put the women on notice. It created a party atmosphere and reinforced the notion that women were sexual objects available for the pleasure of men. The men were then taken to an "arena" where they'd scream excitedly from wooden benches during contests organized between naked girls who'd been trained to swing whips at each other's sweaty, blood covered bodies.

These bouts continued until one of the contestants collapsed from exhaustion too weak to defend herself, leaving the other to finish her off, for Euodia's father was an old-fashioned redneck who'd never understood words like mercy, empathy or compassion. He enjoyed old-fashioned sports in the old-fashioned way, and so the whips used in these games were embedded with shards of glass, metal and broken bone that lacerated the opponent's skin and churned up the flesh. The rules of the contests stated that the girls must fight until one of them was meat, and so they reigned down blows until their rival's screams weakened and fell quiet, until that vanquished girl's involuntary spasms of shock subsided and until her blood ceased flowing and her breathing labored to a halt.

This was Euodia's father's music: the final moment of silence: the moment of conquest. That was his passion.

He thought nothing of placing a lit match beneath a Mudawana's nipple and keeping it there until the skin blistered and split. He'd do it on the pretext that the girl was too pretty or stubborn, or simply because she'd refused to lie in his bed.

It therefore seemed to Euodia that the Mudawana had always been present in her life. They were part of her psyche: as omnipresent as the red poppies that stood in the marsh grass or the summer mosquitoes that followed her wherever she went. Even as a toddler they'd been inescapable, just as the warm scent of oregano that trickles from the slopes of Mount Athos and that then sits idly on the low-lying plain.

As the daughter of an unapologetic misogynist, she too had become accustomed to degradation and pain. She well remembered being eleven or twelve and shivering with fear as her father had lined up a dozen Mudawana in order to teach her a lesson. The lesson had been that the best way to control a woman was with an electric prod thrust deep between her legs. Euodia had been wearing a loose cotton dress at the time on account of the heat, a pair of white cotton knickers and plaits in her hair. Talos, her elder brother, had been close by, and he'd been wearing dirty black trousers, an old faded tee shirt and a shifty boyish expression that had become dirtier and increasingly less boyish as the lesson had developed - because after their father had smashed the prod into the genitalia of a twenty year old girl immediately in front of him and the girl had collapsed writhing in agony on the ground, he'd withdrawn the prod from her cunt. He'd wiped the resultant juice onto a tuft of hay and he'd proffered the prod to Euodia. "Your turn," he'd whispered with a broad vicious smirk. "You do the next one. Put it in her and twist it about and get it right up in her up to the hilt. Let's see how well you do it." And then, as Euodia had glanced pityingly at the next, poor, petrified girl, her father had added malevolently, "It's not a game, Euodia. You do the next one and you stick it all the way in, or else your brother does you. Do you understand?"

She had, and she'd tried to do it. She'd forced the girl's legs open despite the desperate protests and struggling, and she'd managed to get the prod at least two inches inside, but the girl's screams and frantic resistance had strangled Euodia's efforts, and because of it, her father's patience had run vindictively short and Talos had been handed the prod.

With a tent pole exploding from the front of his shorts, Talos had marched Euodia past the corrugated girl sheds containing the docile Mudawana, past mournful cries and imploring hands and arms that hung helpless from unshielded windows. He'd marched Euodia through a woody copse to a secluded meadow where he'd switched on the prod and had warned her what would happen if she refused to obey him.

"Lift up your dress," he'd ordered, staring at her groin, licking his lips and sucking his breath. The cotton dress had been bright yellow with an image of faint white butterflies sewn as an intricate motif into the delicate bodice. It had been buttoned at the front and had had a cotton belt fastened at the waist. Euodia had been wearing white cotton socks and scuffed black shoes.

"No, Talos! Please Talos! I'm your sister!" she'd cried, tugging emotionally at the belt.

"Lift your dress, girl!" he'd repeated, watching and waiting as Euodia's shaking fingers had moved timorously towards the hem of her dress, until finally she'd grabbed it, and had raised it, showing her knees, her thighs – and then even more. "Higher!" Talos had demanded. "Come on, you're mine, girl. Higher. Get it up! Fuck it. Much higher than that! Show me your knickers!"

"Talos! I beg you!"

He'd demonstrated no compassion. When the dress had been lifted to her waist, he'd examined every inch of her thighs, her exposed white panties and discernable camel toe, her acute and painful embarrassment like he'd have scrutinized a worthless Mudawana. And then with an overpowering surge of spite, greed and masculine lust, he'd ordered Euodia to remove her shoes and socks, and then to lower her panties and show him her pussy. That demand was met with such abject and poignant shock that Talos had been caught up in a breathless heavenly arousal.

It wasn't that he had a mind to fuck his sister. Rather, he just wanted to humiliate her and that was the reason he'd forced her to lower her panties and stand with her dress around her waist and her panties hobbling her ankles while he'd taken his time to explain in excruciating detail those places where a prod was expected to strike.

It would take a girl a long time to recover from the prod, he'd stated; especially if it was done deep to the back of her ass. She'd lie helpless and shaking, like an epileptic following a fit, with a terrible burning sensation wrapping her abdomen, and it wouldn't fade. It would reach deep into her rectum and up through her pussy and she wouldn't be able to sit or walk or stand straight. Her legs might be temporarily paralyzed and her private parts exposed to the perpetrator's scientific scrutiny and clumsy fingering.

"Bend over like you would if you touching your toes and then part your ass cheeks," he'd ordered, and Euodia had cried because of the horror of what was coming, but she'd bent over anyway because she'd had to. She'd pulled on her ass cheeks and had parted them, but he'd made her part them wider, and when the electric had come and he'd done it, she'd jerked up straight and her screams had filled the hillside and the valley beyond. They'd echoed from this side to that and back, and even her father had heard it from his office in the farmhouse, and he'd complimented Talos on the scream later at tea with Euodia's grandmother, cousins, aunties and uncles all present and silently listening. Talos had zapped her with the terrible prod not just once on that first, initial occasion, but on other times after that as well, whenever the whimsy had overtaken him.

Hunt days had been his regular, most reliable whimsy. Each time, he'd led Euodia by the hand to the head of a gorge and he'd sat with her in the dappled shade of the walnut trees where together they'd observed the strange foreign women scampering along in their titanium collars and their implausibly tight bikinis. He hadn't always zapped Euodia on those muggy airless days. Sometimes, he'd kissed her and played with her tits; he'd talked to her romantically as they'd lain in the grass, or he'd asked her to lick his balls and suck his cock, but the threat of the prod was always present and unspoken, and therefore the ghastly burning wounds continued to reside intense and overpowering in Euodia's mind, even if not always in her body.

Sometimes he'd make her stand bent over with the prod buried in her rear, waiting and not knowing whether the pain was coming, while the women scampered over the rocks through the gorge below her, followed by mischievous hounds driving roughshod through the lemon trees and the olive groves, whooping and howling and firing super-Kalashnikov stun rifles excitedly into the air.

Talos would remark on the shapes and sizes of the women and he'd wonder why they were wearing their swimsuits so tight, even as he'd give the prod a gentle half-turn in Euodia's butt. He'd wait expectantly for her reply, and so she'd humor him by flicking the tip of his knob with her tongue or by kissing his balls and she'd feel compelled to comment on the titanium collars and question whether the women removed them at night. She'd ask about the men and whether anyone chased them.

Talos, on the other hand, liked to press Euodia's opinion on what happened when the men caught the women, pushing the prod ever deeper inside her body and demanding a response until his boiling semen and Euodia's raw unedited thoughts came tumbling out of her mouth in equal disorder.

This was the way that he learned of her hidden fears and childish and adolescent imaginings, and her emerging sexual fantasies.

By the time Euodia was fifteen years of age, her understanding and sense of self-preservation had matured sufficiently that it no longer embarrassed her to use the prod on the farm. She understood that she was her father's daughter and that he expected her to use it without mercy, and therefore she accepted what would happen if she didn't. Euodia's job on the farm was to ensure that the girl sheds were clean, orderly and hygienic; and so she randomly plucked women from the pens and ordered them to empty the slop buckets, hose down the floors and sweep the hay. Of course, not all of them obeyed, and those that didn't were the ones that she zapped. She'd roll them across her thigh, part their legs, and then she'd bury the prod in their ass and flick the switch in a single unbroken movement. All the other Mudawana would watch as she did it, silent, distant and thoughtful; but the most attentive was Talos, because as the undisputed Master of the Prod, if he didn't hear the pathetic, foreign screams ripping through the sheds at least once every couple of days, he'd appear randomly and grab the prod from Euodia's grasp and haul her by the hand through the girl sheds, across row upon row of holding pens, ignoring the moans and cries and pleadings from behind him; and then, at the far end of the sheds, he'd clamber up the pipe work and onto the fragile tin roof, carefully tiptoeing to the top, following the joists like an impulsive tightrope walker performing at the circus, and at the summit he'd pull out his cock, glance fiercely at Euodia and he'd tell her to unbutton her dress and take off her panties.