"Hey you," Enhar chuckled from the front seat. "It is our thing you must drink like we must drink your father's good thing for work."

The other men laughed with Enhar.

"Is that not so?" Balloo asked, letting her raise her heads obviously expecting her agreement.

"No," she said definitely.

"And why not?" Balloo asked.

"Your good is foul tasting," she said.

"Your good feels foul in the flesh," he answered her. "It is living as an empty cloud instead of as a man!"

Julie was thunderstruck and not quite sure what he meant. She knew that the natives considered the clouds to be heavenly vessels empty when white and filled like a bowl when dark with rain.

"You are good like an empty cloud, Missa Julie," Enhar explained although it was difficult to know whether he was serious or being silly because they laughed at everything.

"Yeah," Kubby contributed from the driver's seat. "We good like a cloud heavy filled with svench."

"We don't wish to be empty clouds, Missa Julie," Balloo took up the explanations, and they all burst out laughing again, and the bowl went around. Svench was what they were drinking, Julie thought she remembered. That was not their word for rain.

Julie found as the bowl went around that she had no choice about drinking. The men chortled loudly as she swallowed defensively so that she could breathe. It always seemed like all eternity before Dawak passed the bowl onto Enhar and Kubby, but with each further round she was forced to drink her share. At first, it almost made her sick with each gradual bit forced down her, but it did begin to deaden her feelings. She found herself almost wishing it would be her turn again each time the bowl left her mouth. Soon it began slowly but perceptively to deaden her sense of dread, a dread of what was almost certain to come.

In fact, between his turns at the bowl, Balloo let his hands play over the smooth rounded corners of her ass behind her, and in spite of the deadening effect of the alcohol, she still tried hopelessly to squirm away.