In spite of the heat, she found that she was shivering, but with excitement, and she knew that, exhausted as she was, she would not be able to sleep. All she wanted was to escape, as soon as possible! The absurd and revolting scene which had just taken place had left her in a kind of daze from which only the sheer animal instinct of self-preservation had roused her briefly when she made her dash for the candelabra.
She knew that she must break out of this deathly fog and rid herself of the paralysing fear which held her. She had to get a grip on herself. After all, this was not the first time she had been a prisoner, and so far she had always managed to escape, however desperate her situation. Why should luck and courage desert her now? Her captor was half-mad and her gaolers half savages. With wit and patience she ought to be able to find a way out.
Comforted a little by these reflections, Marianne made a further bid to regain her self-possession by washing her face and then drinking a little water and eating some fruit. The fresh, fragrant scent of it did her good. Then, because its voluminousness still draped about her got in the way, she tore the sheet in half and knotted one of the pieces firmly round her chest. For all the thinness of the covering, the sensation of being more or less dressed was reassuring.
Thus prepared, she repeated the tour of her room with minute care, in the vague hope of finding something passed over during her first examination. She stood for a long time at the door, studying the complicated play of the lock, only to reach the dispiriting conclusion that it was impossible to open it without the key. The sinister chamber was as securely fastened as any strong box.
Next, the captive returned to the window and studied the bars. They were thick but not very close together, and Marianne was slim. If she could only get one out she might be able to slip through the gap and, with the help of her sheets, climb down into the little inner court from which there must surely be some way out. But how to shift the bars? And what with? The mortar welding them into the stone was old and might crumble easily enough if attacked with a strong tool. The difficulty lay in finding such a tool.
There was the tray, but the cutlery on it was made of fragile silver-gilt, quite unequal to the task. That was no use.
But Marianne, thirsting for freedom, was not to be so easily discouraged. What she wanted was a piece of iron and she continued her obstinate search for it in every nook and cranny, studying the walls and furniture attentively in the hope of finding some answer, some object she could use.
Her perseverance was rewarded when she came to the big coffer and saw that the lock was ornamented with dainty but thoroughly medieval volutes of wrought iron ending in sharp points. A quick reconnaissance with eager, careful fingers produced a gasp of joy, quickly stifled. One of them was loose, its nails rusted through. It might come off.
Trembling with excitement, Marianne took the cloth off the tray to save her fingers and sitting down on the floor by the chest began working at the iron to loosen the grip of the nails in the antique wood. It was harder than she had first thought. The nails were long and the wood sound. In fact, it was painful and tiring work, made no easier by the heat, but with her whole mind concentrated on her goal, Marianne was unaware of it, any more than of the bites of the mosquitoes which tormented her continually, attracted by the light of the candles at her side.
By the time the piece of metal she wanted dropped into her hand, the night was far advanced and Marianne was exhausted and perspiring. She looked for a moment at the heavy piece of ironwork in her hand and then, getting to her feet with an effort, went to have another look at the seating of the window bars. She sighed. There were several more hours' work there and it would be daylight long before she had finished.
As though in corroboration, a clock somewhere nearby struck four. It was too late. There was nothing more she could do that night. Besides, she was feeling so tired and so cramped from her long time crouching over the lock that it was doubtful if she could have managed the descent by the sheet. Prudence dictated waiting until the next night and praying that nothing disastrous happened in the intervening day. Meanwhile, she must sleep, sleep as much as she could to recoup her strength.
Having made her decision, Marianne calmly returned the piece of iron to its original position and replaced the nails which held it. Then, with a murmured prayer, she went and lay down on the big bed and, pulling the covers over her, for the chill mist of dawn was stealing into the room, fell sound asleep.
She slept for a long time, waking only when a hand touched her shoulder. Opening her eyes, she saw Ishtar, draped in a flowing black and white striped tunic with big gold rings in her ears, seated on the edge of her bed gazing at her.
'It is sunset,' she said simply, 'but I let you sleep on for you were weary, and there was little else for you to do. Now it is time for your bath.'
The other two women were already waiting in the centre of the room, surrounded by all the same preparations as on the previous night. But instead of rising, Marianne curled further down among the bedclothes and stared at Ishtar sullenly.
'I don't want to get up. I'm hungry. I can have my bath afterwards.'
'I think not. Food shall be brought to you afterwards. But if you are still too tired to rise, my sisters will help you.'
There was a threat, sardonic but unmistakable, in the soft voice. Remembering how easily the tall black woman had hoisted Matteo's huge bulk over her shoulder, Marianne realized that it was useless to resist; and rather than waste the strength which she foresaw might be desperately needed, she got up and submitted herself, with no more argument, to the ministrations of her strange attendants.
The ritual ablutions of the previous night were repeated with, if anything, still greater care. Instead of the oil, they anointed her body with some heavy scent which soon began to make her head swim unbearably.
'Don't use any more of that scent,' she protested, seeing one of the women pour another hefty dollop into the palm of her hand. 'I don't like it!'
'Your likes or dislikes are of no importance,' Ishtar retorted coolly. 'This is the perfume of love. No man, even on his deathbed, can resist one who wears it.'
Marianne's heart missed a beat. She understood now: tonight, this very night, she was to be delivered up to Damiani. The stars, it seemed, must be favourable… A wave of terror swept over her, mingled with rage and disappointment, and she made a desperate attempt to escape from the hateful ministrations which made her feel suddenly sick. Instantly, six granite hands came down on her and held her fast.
'Be still!' Ishtar adjured her roughly. 'You are behaving like a child, or like a lunatic! You must be one or the other to fight against what can't be helped!'
That might be true but Marianne could not resign herself to being offered up, bathed and scented like an odalisque for her first night with the sultan, to the revolting creature who desired her. Tears of rage filled her eyes as, her anointing completed, they dressed her this time in a flowing tunic of black muslin, wholly transparent but scattered here and there with strange geometric figures in silver thread. Her hair was dressed in innumerable tiny plaits, like black snakes, and on it Ishtar placed a silver circlet at the front of which was a coiled viper with emerald eyes. Then, taking a pot of kohl, she set about exaggerating the girl's eyes enormously while Marianne, momentarily accepting defeat, let her have her way.
This done, Ishtar stepped back a pace or two to review her handiwork.
'You are beautiful,' she said flatly. 'Not Cleopatra or the mother-goddess Isis herself was ever more so. The master will be pleased. Come, now, eat…'
Cleopatra? Isis? Marianne shook her head, as though to rouse herself from some bad dream. What had ancient Egypt to do with it? This was the nineteenth century and they were in a city full of ordinary people, under the protection of her own country's army! Napoleon was master of the better part of Europe! How dared the old gods raise their heads?
She felt the breath of madness touch her cheek. In an effort to bring herself back to earth, she
tried the food which was brought her and drank a little of the wine, but the dishes seemed tasteless and the wine without flavour. It was like food eaten in a dream, tasting of nothing…
She was embarking, without relish, on the fruit when it happened. The room began to revolve slowly about her, it tilted unnaturally and everything in it seemed suddenly withdrawn to an immense distance, as though she had been sucked into a long tunnel. Her sense of hearing and of touch became infinitely detached… Before she was borne away on the great blue wave which rose up suddenly before her, Marianne had just time to understand in a lightning flash what had happened: this time, her food had been drugged.
Yet she was conscious of neither anger nor alarm. Her body seemed to have broken all its earthly moorings, including all capacity for fear, suffering or even disgust, and to be floating weightlessly, marvellously airborne amid a brilliantly coloured universe made up of all the glowing hues of dawn. The walls had fallen away. She was no longer in prison: a vast, shimmering world, shot through with all the colours of Venetian glass, opened up before her, full of rippling light and movement, and in a kind of trance, Marianne sped towards it. She seemed to find herself all at once on a tall ship… perhaps the very ship whose coming had for so long figured in her dreams, steered by a green siren? High up on the prow, she sailed towards strange shores where fantastically-shaped houses shone like metal, where the plants were blue and the sea purple. The sails sang and the ship drove on over a richly-coloured Persian carpet, while the sea air carried the scent of incense, and Marianne, breathing it in, was no longer astonished at the strange sense of animal well-being which spread through every fibre of her being.
It was a weird sensation, a joy which tingled in the minutest nerve-endings, even to her fingertips. It was a little like the moment after love when the body, satisfied, wrought to the ultimate pitch of sensation, wavers on the very verge of oblivion. It was a kind of oblivion. For all at once everything changed, darkness was everywhere. The fabulous landscape melted into thick night and the soft, scented warmth gave way to an air cool and damp. Yet still Marianne floated on in the same tranquil happiness.
The darkness through which she moved was gentle and familiar. She could feel it all about her like a caress: the darkness of the prison, squalid but wonderful, where for that one, only time in her life, she had given herself to Jason. Time rolled back. Once again, Marianne could feel the rough boards of their nuptial couch beneath her bare back, their harshness an apt counterpoint to the touch of her lover's hands.
She could feel that touch now. It slid over her body, lapping her in a web of fire beneath which her own flesh flamed and opened like some hothouse flower. Pressing her eyes shut, Marianne held her breath in the effort to hold on to the miraculous sensation which was yet only a prelude to the supreme delight to come… She felt her throat swell with unuttered moans and cries of pleasure but they died unvoiced as the dream changed again and plunged into the absurd.
Far off at first, but growing nearer, moment by moment, there was the sound of a drum beating slowly, terribly slowly, like some dreadful knell. It quickened gradually until it was like the pulse-beat of some gigantic heart, throbbing faster as it came nearer, beating faster and faster, louder and louder.
For a moment, it seemed to Marianne that it was Jason's heart she heard, but then, as the sound grew clearer, so the amorous darkness thinned and melted like a fog and became tinged with a red light. And suddenly she was hurled from the heights of her dream of love into the very midst of the nightmare from which she had seemed to have escaped.
She seemed in some strange way to have become two people, for she could see herself stretched out in her transparent black draperies which lay like a dark veil over her nakedness. She was lying on a low table made of stone, like an altar, beyond which rose a brazen serpent with a golden crown.
The place itself was a grim, windowless cavern, with moisture dripping from the low, vaulted roof and slimy, pitted walls lit by great black wax candles which gave off a greenish light and an acrid smoke. Below the altar sat two of the black women in their sombre draperies, holding small round drums between their knees, on which they were beating rhythmically. Only their hands moved: everything else remaining perfectly still, even their lips which yet emitted a kind of musical humming, a strange, wordless melody. To this weird music, Ishtar was dancing.
She was quite naked, except for a slim, golden snake which was coiled about her loins, and the candlelight shone blue-black on her gleaming skin. Eyes closed, head flung back and arms upraised, stressing the curve of her heavy, pointed breasts, she was turning in circles on the spot, whirling faster and faster, like a top…
Abruptly, Marianne's wandering spirit which had been floating in a kind of limbo of detachment above this extraordinary scene, re-entered her prostrate body. And with the return came fear and dread, but when she tried to move, spring up and run away, she found that she could not stir. Nothing bound her to the stone table, no bonds that could be seen or felt, yet her head and limbs refused to obey her, as though she were in a trance.
The sensation was so terrifying that she tried to cry out but no sound came. Beside her, Ishtar was now whirling madly. Sweat ran in shining trickles down her black skin and her overheated body gave off an almost unbearable wild beast odour.
Marianne was unable even to turn away her face.
Then she saw Matteo Damiani loom up out of a dark corner of the cavern and she wished that she could die. He came towards her slowly, his eyes wide open and staring blankly, bearing in both hands a silver cup containing some bubbling liquid. He was dressed in a long, black gown, not unlike the one Marianne had seen him wearing on the dreadful night at the Villa Sant'Anna when she had snatched Agathe from his devilish rites, but this one was patterned with long snakes in green and silver thread and was open down the front to reveal a fat, grey, hairy chest, breasted almost like a woman's.
At his approach, Ishtar ceased her frantic dance abruptly. She dropped, panting, to the ground, pressing her lips to the man's bare feet. Matteo continued to advance as though he had felt nothing, pushing the woman aside with the toe of his black sandal.
Reaching Marianne, he stretched out a hand to grasp the muslin tunic, and ripped it off in a single movement. Then, taking a small tray from the floor, he placed it on her stomach and set the silver cup upon it. After this, he dropped on to his knees and began chanting strange verses in some foreign tongue.
From the depths of her paralysing trance, Marianne realized with sick horror that he was going to perform on her the same satanic rites which she had witnessed in the ruins of the little temple, only this time she was at the very centre of the black magic. It was her own body which was to be made the altar for this sacrilege.
Ishtar had risen and was kneeling beside Matteo, playing the role of acolyte in the infernal ceremony, chanting the responses in the same unknown language.
As her master seized the cup and drained it to the last drop, she uttered a wild shriek blending into an incantation, as if she were invoking for him the protection of some dark and terrible deity, probably the gold-crowned serpent whose emerald eyes seemed to glitter with ominous life.
Matteo had begun to shake. He seemed to be possessed by some kind of religious mania. His eyes were dilated and rolled in their sockets and there was foam on his lips. He was making a low rumbling sound in his chest, like a volcano about to erupt. At this point, Ishtar handed him a black cockerel and he severed its neck at a stroke with a great knife. The blood flowed, splashing over the girl's naked body.
At that, the horror that welled up in Marianne broke through the paralysing power of the drug that held her in thrall. She found her voice in the utterance of one fearful, inhuman shriek which seemed to tear itself from her rigid throat. It was as if her vocal cords had come to life of themselves and in this feeble effort had used up all her strength, for scarcely had the echoes of that dreadful cry died away in the cavern than Marianne mercifully lost consciousne
ss.
She did not see Matteo, at the height of his madness, cast off his robe and lean over her with outstretched hands. She did not feel him throw himself with all his weight upon her bloodstained body, possessing her with all a madman's fury. She was far away in a world without colour or sound where nothing could reach her.
There was no way of knowing how long she remained unconscious like this, but when she surfaced at last in the real world again she was lying in the great pillared bed and she felt deathly ill.
Possibly, in order to subdue her resistance, they had given her a dose of the drug too strong for her constitution, or perhaps the mosquitoes which, as soon as night fell and the candles were lighted, filled Venice with their whining hum had already injected their stagnant fever into her veins, but she was tormented by agonies of thirst and stabs of pain drilled through her temples.
She felt too ill to be very much aware of what was going on around her. What little thought remained was concentrated on the single, fixed and obstinate idea of flight. She had to get away… as far away as possible, out of the reach of these devils!
In fact, her brain had cleared sufficiently for her to realize that her long dream, which had foundered at the end so catastrophically in the worst practices of black magic, had not been entirely a dream but, in its last stages at least, a horrible reality. With the help of his black sorceress, Damiani had succeeded in violating her without the least resistance.
The thought was at the same time revolting and destructive for Marianne knew now, beyond all doubt, that short of starving herself to death there was nothing she could do to escape from the degradation forced upon her by Damiani. There was nothing and no one to prevent her captors, whenever they chose, from employing the mysterious drug which rendered her powerless to resist the steward's lust.
Marianne's thoughts chased one another round and round, increasing her fever and with it her thirst. She had never known such thirst. It was as though her tongue had grown to twice its normal size, filling her mouth with its swelling.
Marianne and the Rebels Page 8
