Still, we made Suways by close on midday on our forty-second day out of Goa, which was about what I had told the Prince to expect. It now fell to me to organise the next stage of our journey: not only was I the only person in the party who had knowledge of Ingerlond. our ultimate goal, but I was, too, the only Arab, with knowledge ot that tongue and of the processes and prices, the snares and snags that befall travellers in those parts.
First, I had to find lodging for our party and then camels to carry us and our baggage to Al-Iskenderia, named after the great Iskender who conquered the world some two thousand years ago, or so they say, and this delay bred another. It had been our plan to give Misr-al-Kahira a miss, and pass as inconspicuously as we could across the delta and out of the country – a plan I did not much like as I had hoped to seek Haree, my son, in his place of study, and spend some time with him. However, wandering in the souk Prince Harihara came across a shop which sold the hides of various wild animals including a tawny, ragged affair with a mask still partially intact beneath a tangled halo of coarse black hair. It was, of course, the pelt of a lion.
He called me to his side. 'Ali, is not this the skin of a lion?'
I thought of temporising, of perhaps speaking to the merchant, a lean man in a red gown with a red tarboosh but no turban to go round the rim, and asking him in Arabic to deny the obvious. But, I thought, why not? I could see where this would lead, and I was in no great hurry to get to Ingerlond. It was not my brother we were looking for. Suddenly I realised I was looking through a window of opportunity, that of seeing Haree. after all.
'Yes, Highness.'
'Can lions then be found in Egypt?' 'I believe so. Highness."
I le stood there, in the dusty dusk of the shop, with the bright sunlight beyond its striped awning searing the eyes, and all the noise and bustle of the alley beyond, and quizzed me further. He pushed his glossy black hair back off his shoulder and briefly caressed his marble smooth chin. 'What other large animals live wild?'
'Crocodiles in the Nile, and, upstream, hippopotami, I believe… There are large birds too. Pelicans, storks, cranes and herons…'
We left the shop in a hurry, with its keeper tugging at my sleeve. 'Will he not buy, then? Does your master not want to buy? F can lower the prices,' he shrilled.
'I think he plans to kill his own,' I replied, tearing myself away.
It took some organising. First, we had to abandon the status of incognito travellers we had adopted. We went to Misr-al-Kahira. after all, and introduced ourselves to the Caliph's court where, as representatives of an empire as rich as any in the world, and having offered suitable gifts from the small treasury we had brought with us, we were made welcome and given lodgings in that part of the palace set aside for honoured guests. There followed a week or so of feasting and such like while a full-scale hunting party in the desert was prepared.
One of the few bitter moments of the whole trip arrived when I went to Haree's lodgings. There I discovered that he had left only a month earlier to study the causes of blindness under a Moorish physician in the university of Kamatta-al-Yahud, which the Christians call Granada.
We were well lodged in a pillared pavilion set in a rose garden with a rectangular pool edged with basalt. Unfortunately there were not enough rooms so we had to share – cooks, soldiers, servants, clerks, fakir and monk all together in a quite small vestibule. Of course, our Prince and his chamberlain had cells to themselves close to the communal baths. So it was that when the day dawned on which the week-long hunting trip was to start. I asked to be excused. My plea was that I am not happy on a horse, hate camels, and that I am too old for such sports. Prince Harihara was reluctant to leave me behind, but some days previously I had discovered that one of the Caliph's musicians had once played his flute in a military band belonging to a Pathan chief and hail enough Hindustani vocabulary to manage interpretation at a simple level. Consequently my services as interpreter were not essential. My aim, apart from avoiding the pains and terror of horse-riding, was to rest: I was, after all, and I do not think I have mentioned this, by far and away the oldest in our party and the strains of travel were taking their toll.
I watched the party leave, the grooms lumbered with a variety of crossbows, including the monster engine designed for crocodiles. As soon as the great arched gate hail closed behind them, and the dust settled, I made my way back to our quarters.
There are few delights as rich as that which comes from the knowledge that one has a limited but extensive time to oneself, in pleasant surroundings, with adequate comforts and ways to pass the time with satisfaction. I folded my tired old knees on to a pile of cushions near the pool, and sitting thus cross-legged, completed a breakfast of quails' eggs with aubergine mashed in mare's yoghurt, sesame-seeded rolls, followed by almond and honey cakes. It occurred to me that a cup of K’hawah would be the ideal accompaniment, but the effort and time required in preparing it precluded the possibility and I made do with my usual glass of lassi aromatised with a pinch of the Moluccan nutmeg we had brought with us.
For a time I watched and listened to the songbirds, many with bright and lovely plumage, who inhabited that walled garden as if it were an aviary, and made friends with a sleek grey cat with a broad flat forehead and large ears which, either from lethargy or experience of repeated failure, made no attempt to menace the birds. The time wore on and the heat built. The sun flashed from the gilded domes and minarets that rose above the nearer roofs, and my eye was caught by a pair of vultures. They were soaring almost without motion on wings white with black tips against the deep azure of the sky – quartering, I reckoned, the execution maidan where impaling were scheduled. Since its odours, of charcoal burning and rotten offal, were masked by the fragrance of roses, orange blossom and an almond-scented purple creeper that festooned one of the walls, the birds were the only visible signs of the rapacious hustle and bustle of the great city beyond.
I had thought to begin a letter to Haree, an account of my journey so far, to leave at his lodgings when we left, but already the delightful sloth that comes when one has nothing pressing to do was filling my soul and I decided instead to take a bath.
The main pool was covered by a dome, open to the sky at its centre, and pierced with smaller lights below. These let in direct sunlight, blindingly bright and warm in contrast to the velvety darkness of the rest. The water shimmered blackly except where the light fell, and there it was emerald green and laced with patterns like the veins in marble. A deck of grey granite surrounded it, also rippled but this time with quartz, and beyond were cubicles, or alcoves framed with looped-back curtains of fine cotton gauze. Steps with balustrades led down into the pool and at their head was a pair of life-size sculpted lionesses, which sat on their haunches, heads up and alert above the taut musculature of their shoulders, round ears pricked.
I stood on the threshold of this circular hall to allow my good eye time to adjust to the dark and light, and for my ears to savour the play of ripples on the sides of the pool and the rhythmical pulses of water dripping on stone and on water. Then I slipped off my sandals, not wanting to soil the floor with dust, and made my way to the nearest but one of the alcoves (who, in such a situation, ever takes the nearest opening that offers?), intending there to divest myself of cape, loincloth and turban. I did not use the alcove out of modesty, for I fully expected to be alone, but because it had a low stone shelf, and the floor by the pool was wet. There I loosened my turban, unwound it, and pulled my cape over my head. Just as it came free I sensed, rather than heard, a presence. My right hand delved into my loincloth, where my stiletto always remains hidden, then relaxed. The new arrival was the Buddhist monk and I foresaw no harm coming from him, though I felt a touch irritated that the solitude I had been relishing was gone.
He pulled off his sandals and his voluminous habit, leaving them on the deck at the water's edge before stepping down between the lions and into the pool.
Most of what light there was was in front of him and
, bouncing off the water, as sharp as diamonds, made only a dark silhouette of his figure, yet one sunbeam, catching the haze of tiny droplets its heat sucked up, fell between us. A moment or two passed therefore while my mind struggled with the vision my one good eye was feeding it. It is extraordinary, is it not? how the brain refuses to yield to the evidence of the senses when confronted with stimuli that contradict its expectations. In such circumstances it will swear sour is sweet, and hot cold. And on this occasion that those softly rounded shoulders, the waist that really was a waist above broad dimpled hips and generous buttocks belonged to a man.
It gave up the pretence when she stooped a little and, in a gesture that somehow contained the essence of femininity, scooped water over the breasts I could not yet see before wading into the centre of the pool where the water came up to her armpits. She turned and I could see that her brown body was indeed female and, in a flash, I recognised Uma, the – I was about to say goddess – but the young woman, sister of Suryan, who had given me hospitality on my first night in the City of Victory.
Chapter Eleven
‘Ali?' How to describe the way she sang those two syllables?
Her voice caressed the air and water and yet it was a call, a question. 'Ali ben Quatar Mayeen? Don't be shy. Please come in with me.'
I released the hilt of my stiletto, leaving it wrapped in the folds of my loincloth, limped forward out of the alcove and stood at the top of the steps, between the two lions. With my good hand I gripped the right ear of one. My heart was beating like the wings of a newly caged bird, and I'll tell you why. I had not seen, in the flesh, an entirely naked woman for twenty years, not since the day dear Haree's mother told me she was with child.
Uma was beautiful and whatever she had in the way of what a purist would call flaws, such as a mole or two on her back, gave her the perfection she would have otherwise lacked – they conferred upon her the individuality, the thisness that shields true beauty from the dullness that measures itself against an ideal. In those moles lay mutability and mortality, the twin pillars on which the lintel of life is placed. Ah. Does that surprise you? My way of life and physical limitations, taken with a predilection to speculation, which began with the question 'How can this be?' have led me to read and talk with great minds.
The austerity of her shaven scalp was now mitigated by a thin pelt which lent her head a vulnerability that immediately invited a gentle caress. Her features seemed more marked: her eyes, pools of darkness shot with green, seemed larger, her cheeks less prominent, her red-ochre lips more full. Moreover, when I had seen her before she had been painted, her eyelids green or blue and silvered, her lips carefully outlined and filled in, her anus and neck had been hung with bangles and chains of precious stones and gold, all of which had contributed to an attraction that invited fantasy but precluded tenderness.
She moved towards me through the water, from the deepest part to the shallows, passing through sun-splashes that gilded the darkness of her skin to nightlike shadow and into light again. The water rippled first like blue-black velvet then liquid gold against her rounded breasts, her chest, the gentle mound of her belly, her sex and her thighs. Some drops remained to twinkle like diamonds in the darkness of her hair. "Come on. Come in.' Her hand unfolded towards me, the paler palm upwards, soliciting nearness.
For a second the water, though warm, struck cold to my ankle as it took my foot in a noose and I allowed myself a short shiver before my feet found the shelving bottom of the pool.
Uma had moved away and backwards as I descended but now she came forward again, the water surged between us, and she folded me into a clinging embrace with her cheek against my chest. I realised that she was shuddering, but I sensed that I was not the cause.
Then she stood back a pace and did something no one had ever done before, not even the whores I frequented in the years before I married Haree's mother, and which she could not do because she was blind and I was loath to prompt her. Uma placed her finger in the hollow between my ribcage and hip, the deep hollow starred with loose skin where the Sunnite's scimitar had finished its work sixty years before. Slowly, so the skin crept beneath her touch, and I shuddered with her, she moved her finger up the jagged line through the valley the steel had carved in my ribs, across my still angled collar-bone, up over my cloven chin and split lips, across my cheek and into the sightless socket of my eye. Then she laughed, the sound like bells reverberating quietly beneath that egg-shaped vault.
She came in closer again and I could smell the cinnamon fragrance of her skin beneath the sharper odours of the water, which rose, warmed by the earth's inner heart, from a deep spring far below, and slipped her hand between my arms and torso, high up almost in my armpits. There was awkwardness now as my twisted left arm got in the way, but she ran her hands down my flanks to my hip-bones and then up again, but on the way she let me feel her nails and provoked a sudden shock of desire. She smiled up at me. put her hands on my shoulders, and I felt the old bald man below thicken at last against her belly and, with a sense of sacrilege almost, trespass anyway, I put my hands – both of them, the withered claw as well – on her sides so that my forearms could feel the swell of her breasts, which were heavy but firm, and then the comfort beyond the comfort of apples as they pressed into my chest.
Her hands slipped up my neck, her fingertips explored its cord-like sinews, plucked teasingly at the loose skin, pulled the pendulous lobes of my ears, ran up the nape of my neck and over the wispy grey hair I keep well hidden beneath my old turban. The laugh came again, hardly more than a breath. 'Ali, how strong are you? Let's see.'
Her caress became a hug as she hung round my neck and launched herself upwards, spilling water from her flanks. Her thighs circled my waist and her ankles locked in the small of my back, and though she was not heavy and the water was buoyant, I was afraid I'd topple forward.
'Hold me, stupid.'
There was only one way I could – by placing my good hand under her buttocks and my bad one round her waist in the small of her back. She wriggled so that my fingers could not help but slip between and find the dark, warm moistness, not of the pool but of her secret places. Her shuddering faded now, and she placed her chin on my shoulder and nibbled my ear, then wriggled so her breasts parted from my chest with a delicious yet comic squelching noise, as when one sucks in one's cheeks through pursed lips.
'Ali, you need a wash, you know? Put me down over there, where the soap is.'
I had not noticed, but now I did, that a ledge ran round the pool just below the projecting rim but above the surface of the water. On it, not far from the steps where the water came only to my knees, there was a small alabaster flask and a sponge, perhaps one of the sponges we had bought from the boat-boy on our way up the Red Sea. I placed her so that she was sitting on the rim and handed her the flask and the sponge. The flask contained a thick, slippery cream, a dollop of which she eased out on to the sponge, which she grasped in the fingers of her right hand. 'Come closer. Between my knees.'
Imperious in the way only a young and beautiful woman can be.
And she dabbed the stuff, which was pearly white and scented with wild lavender, on my shoulders, chest and stomach. 'Closer still, I can't reach.'
Petulant now, she began to spread it over my front, scooping up water, and working up a lather. At first my skin cringed.
'Relax. It's meant to be fun. It's meant to feel nice.'
My heart began to palpitate again and I had to lean forward and put my hands on either side of her on the rim for support – which, of course, brought us closer still and again I could feel her breath in my ear. One hand, and the sponge in the other, slipped down my back, clasped my thin buttocks, wrinkled like walnut shells.
'Put your feet apart. Come on. Don't be shy. Your mother or your nurse did this for you when you were a baby.'
And again the bald man below pressed against her belly, but now he was harder and hot, as were my buttocks as her fingers slid between them. I could fe
el tears starting in my eyes, of pleasure, yes, but of a gratitude too, so intense that my heart began to swell as if it would burst, and also of a sort of vulnerability rewarded at last by shelter. After sixty years I felt as if I had come home. Her right hand now came round the front and slipped between us. Still pressing the bald man against her belly her fingers began to slide along him. Up and down, and the heat became burning. 'He's thin,' she murmured, 'like the horn handle of a knife, and long, and just as hard. Only in sensation are we truly alive,' she continued, 'but, remember, you have five senses.'
I could smell her, a muskiness like hot metal with the cinnamon and the soap; I could feel the water, the vapour around us, the stir of air on my back, the sting of tears, the heat of my body that now centred on a burning rod of fire, the slippery flags beneath the hot soles of my feet, the warmth of her breasts, the ripple of her fingers; I could hear the rustle of her breath, the drip of water and its lolloping gurgle too, the storm of beating blood in my ears; I could taste salt on her skin and panic in my mouth; and through my one blurred eye I could see the whirling sky-shards in the roof, the flashes of diamond off the water. Then all came together in a brief nova of joy.
Down in the water I knelt in adoration and clasped her, buried my face in her. She hoisted her buttocks on to the marble rim, spread her thighs and, with her hands now at the back of my head, made my mouth find her sex. She pushed on over me, and 'Eat me,' she said, 'eat me and drink me."
Kings of Albion Page 8
