Christopher Priest - The Watched

He had become a scintilla to the Qataari. Ordier gripped a piece of rock jutting out from the wall, and tried to steady himself. He could feel himself swaying, as if his thoughts were a palpable force that could dislodge him from the cell. It was madness. That first day he had found the cell, the very beginning. He had been concealed , and the Qataari had been unaware of him. He had watched the Qataari, the realization of the nature of his stolen privilege growing in him slowly. He had watched the girl moving through the rosebushes, plucking the flowers and tossing them into the pannier on her back. She had been one among dozens of others. He had said nothing, except with his thoughts, and the Qataari had not noticed. The rest was chance and coincidence… it had to be. Reassured, Ordier leaned forward and pressed his forehead against the slab of rock above the slit. He looked downward, into the circular arena below.

It was as if nothing had changed. The Qataari were waiting for him. The girl lay back on the carpet of rose petals, the red toga loose and revealing across her body. There was the same crescent of pale aureole, the same few strands of pubic hair. The man who had kicked her was standing back, looking down at her with his shoulders hunched, and stroking himself at the top of his legs. The others stood around: the two women who had thrown the petals and bared their bodies, and the men who had been chanting. The restoration of the scene was so perfect, as if the image of his memory had been photographed and reconstructed so no detail should be omitted, that Ordier felt a shadow of the guilt that had followed his spontaneous ejaculation. He raised his binoculars and looked at the girl’s face. Her eyes, although half closed, were looking directly at him. Her expression too was identical: the abandonment of sexual anticipation, or satisfaction. It was as if he was seeing the next frame of a film being inched through a projector-gate. Fighting the feeling of associative guilt, Ordier stared down at the girl, meeting her gaze, marveling at her beauty and the sensuality in her face. He felt a tightness in his crotch, a new tumescence. The girl moved suddenly, shaking her head from side to side, and at once the ritual continued. Four of the men stepped forward from the circle, picking up long ropes that had been coiled at the base of four of the statues. As they moved towards the girl, the men unraveled the ropes and Ordier saw that the other ends were tied around the bases of the statues. At the same time, the two women found their panniers of rose petals and came forward with them. The others began a chant. In the rose plantation beyond, the Qataari were moving about their tasks, tending and plucking and watering. Ordier was suddenly aware of them, as if they too had been waiting, as if they too were a part of the ritual. The girl was being tied by her wrists and ankles, the ropes knotted tightly and roughly around her limbs: her arms were stretched, her legs were forced wide open. She made no apparent struggle against this, but continued to writhe in the petals in the way she had done from the start, and as her arms and legs were tied, her movements changed to a circling of her pelvic girdle, a slow rotation of her head. The garment was working loose from her body; for an instant Ordier saw a small breast revealed, the nipple as pink as the petals being thrown across her, but one of the men with the ropes moved across her, and when he stepped back, she was covered again. Through all this—the tying of the ropes, the throwing of the petals—the solitary man stood before her, working his hand across his genitals, waiting and watching. When the last rope was tied the men withdrew, and as they did so, the chanting came to a sudden end. All the men, except the one central to the ritual, walked away from the arena, toward the plantation, toward the distant Qataari camp. The women showered petals, the man stood erect, the spread-eagled girl writhed helplessly in the hold of the ropes. The flowers were drifting down across her like snow, and soon only her face was uncovered. As the girl pulled against the ropes, Ordier could see the petals heaving with her struggles, could see the ropes flexing and jerking. At last her struggles ceased, and she stared upward again. Looking at her through the binoculars. Ordier saw that in spite of her violent writhing, the girl’s face was at ease and her eyes were wide open. Saliva brightened her cheeks and jaw, and her face had a healthy, ruddy flush to it, as if reflecting the color of the flowers. Beneath the petals, her chest was rising and falling quickly, as if she was breathless. Once more she was seeming to look directly back at Ordier, her expression knowing and seductive. The stilling of her body signaled the next development, as if the victim of the ritual was also its director, because no sooner was she staring lasciviously upward than the man who stood before her bent down. He reached into the heap of petals and took a hold on one of the red panels of the girl’s toga. He tore it away, throwing into the air a cloud of swirling petals. Ordier, looking down, thought he saw a glimpse of the girl’s body revealed beneath, but the petals drifted too densely above her, and the women were throwing more, covering the nakedness so briefly revealed. Another piece of the dress was torn away; more petals flew. Then another piece of fabric, and another. The last one came away with difficulty; this was the piece beneath the girl, and as the man snatched it away, the girl’s body bucked against the constraint of the ropes, and bare knees and arms, a naked shoulder, heaved momentarily from the mound of petals. Ordier watched as more and more of the petals were poured on top of her, completely covering her; the women no longer threw the petals with their hands, but up-ended their panniers, and let the scarlet flowers fall on her like liquid. As the petals fell, the man knelt beside the girl and shaped and smoothed them over with his hands. He patted them down over her body, heaped them over her arms and legs, pushed them into her mouth. Soon it was finished. It seemed to Ordier, from his position above, that the girl lay beneath and at the center of a smooth lake of petals, laid so that no hint of the shape of her body was revealed. Only her eyes were uncovered. The man and the two women stepped out of the arena and walked away, heading for the distant camp. Ordier lowered his binoculars, and saw that throughout the plantation the work had stopped. The Qataari were leaving the valley, returning to their homes behind the dark canvas screens of the encampment, and leaving the girl alone in the arena. Ordier looked down at her again, using the binoculars. She was staring back at him, and the invitation was explicit. All he could see of her were her eyes, placid and alert and yearning, watching him through the gap the man had left in the covering of roses.

There was a darkening around her eyes, like the shadows left by grief. As her steady gaze challenged and beckoned him, Ordier, partially drugged by the narcotic fragrance of the roses, saw a familiarity in the girl’s eyes that froze all sense of mystery. That bruising of the skin, that confident stare… Ordier gazed back at her for several minutes, and the longer he looked, the more convinced he became that he was staring into the eyes of Jenessa.

Intoxicated by the roses, sexually aroused by their fragrance, Ordier fell back from the slit in the wall and lurched outside. The brilliance of the sunlight, the heat of its rays, took him by surprise and he staggered on the narrow steps. He regained his balance by resting one hand against the main wall of the folly, then went past his discarded detector and began to walk down the steps toward the ground. Halfway down was another narrow ledge, running across the wall as far as the end of the folly, and Ordier walked precariously along this, obsessed with the urgency of his needs. At the end of the ledge he was able to climb down to the top of the wall which surrounded the folly’s courtyard, and once on top of this he could see the rocks and broken boulders of the ridge a short distance below. He jumped, landing heavily across the face of a boulder. He grazed a hand and took a knock on one knee, but apart from being slightly winded, he was unhurt. He crouched for a few seconds, recovering.