Julian Rathbone - Kings of Albion

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 feel 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."

I did. And when she arched back her neck and cried I heard through it a rising shout, prolonged like surf, then crashing to a fall. It came from a distance, from a thousand throats, and it was real enough. Again she shuddered, and not from the ecstasy she had just experienced.

We resumed our clothes and returned to the gardens and the pavilion in the noontide heat, where the white stone seared the eye and the black shadows drowned it. The songbirds were still and only white doves cr-cr-crooed in the eaves. Uma sat in a leather-slung chair, legs stretched out, head forward and to one side, resting on the palm and fingers of her right hand. The posture-was mannish and revelatory. I suddenly realised that this Buddhist monk was not Uma but Suryan, her brother. Or, rather, that she-adopted the disguise as Suryan or as a monk so that she could move about on her own, indeed travel to the ends of the earth, untroubled by the annoyances that crowd in on a lone woman.

'I had,' she was saying, 'just come back from the impaling. I did not stay for the second lot – you heard the crowd shout just now when they were done.'

My blood ran cold to think she had been to the place of execution and seen what she had seen.

She went on, 'They were no good, you know. They wasted it. Such a waste.'

I felt a glimmer of understanding. 'They were cowards?' I volunteered.

'The worst sort. They screamed, they struggled, they shit themselves. They had the chance of the highest ecstasy, the greatest sensation. Through their agony they could have experienced, if they had been prepared to relish it, a moment of immortality. More than a moment. Instead they made it a village shambles.'

I have lived in Misr-al-Kahira and in many other Arab caliphates. I had known what that shout had been: the public impaling of robbers in the execution square. Snake-shaped hooks like those butchers use to hang dead oxen had been slung over the parapet of the gaol. The criminals had been hoisted on to the upturned points, which had thrust up through their backs, their entrails and out through their stomachs, and there they had been left to die. And Uma, driven by her strange theology, had been there to watch, hoping to see souls as well as bodies transfixed with the spikes of ecstatic pain.

Trumpets and drums. A week had passed. The hunting party was back. They came in through the big double gate, trying to look as if they had had the time of their lives – but nothing could disguise the fact that they were caked in desert dust, scratched and bruised from where they had taken tumbles, almost incapable of walking after being mounted on galumphing camels for hours on end, splattered with dried blood, their own as well as that of the animals they had killed, and weary to the point of terminal exhaustion. Behind the hunters came four carts that seemed to be loaded with heaped black flies; they trundled along beneath a buzzing, snarling haze.

Even Prince Harihara, who had been determined that the trip should be judged a success, looked thoughtful as the carcasses – matted, shapeless, bloody lumps of fur and hair – were tipped out beneath spiralling twisters of insects into that peaceful, harmonious courtyard, lined with citrus trees and roses, its long rectangular pool running down the middle. He walked through the black cloud, which glittered in the sun, prodding the bodies with the butt of his hunting spear, his other hand resting on the silver hilt of a Malayan hunting-knife that was stuck in his jewelled belt. His long, normally glossy hair was matted and dirty, his robe was torn, and for once his chin showed signs of stubble. 'Two buffalo, Ali, fine beasts.

Six desert foxes. Eight quail, four sand-grouse, three gazelles, a hippopotamus, a crocodile and, best of all, three lions. What do you think?'

He didn't usually turn to me for praise – it is a commodity thought to be debased when offered by the lowly – but no one else was on hand to give it.

Well. The buffalo were white, had spreading horns six feet across and huge dewlaps. I presumed they had not been pulling carts when his crossbow bolts struck home, though I imagine not many hours had passed since they had been. The foxes were dogs which, Anish later told me, had come bounding to greet them from a village they were approaching. The quail had been netted by local bird-trappers and the sand-grouse were poultry, though of a distinctive breed and plumage. Hippo and crocodile were babies, the adults having fled. One of the lions was a cub, the lioness its mother which, while trying to protect her young, had exposed herself to the hunting party's missiles; the male was mangy, old and toothless. The gazelle were genuine, having been shot from horseback with ordinary bows and arrows by an Ahl Bedu chieftain and his sons, in whose tents the party had spent a couple of nights after getting lost in the desert.

'Truly, O Prince, you are a second Nimrod, and before Allah a great hunter.'

'Nimrod, eh, Ali? Who was Nimrod?'

'A great hunter, Prince,' I answered, risking a hint of impatience in my voice.

‘Ah’

And he and the whole troupe headed for the baths, leaving them muddy, bloody and spoiled for a full twenty-four hours until the flow of water cleansed them.

Later I stood with Anish, supervising the cleaning and repacking of the crossbows and the somewhat diminished supply of bolts. 'That,' he murmured, 'was about the worst experience of my life. Truly we have passed beyond the bounds of civilisation.'