The rest was chance and coincidence. It had to be so.
Reassured, Ordier leaned forward and pressed his forehead against the slab of rock above the slit. He looked down, into the circular arena below.
It was as if nothing had changed. The Qataari were waiting for him.
The young woman lay back on the carpet of rose petals, the garment lying loosely and revealingly across her body. There was the same visible crescent of pale aureole, the same few strands of pubic hair. The man who had kicked her was standing back from her, looking down at her with his shoulders hunched and stroking himself in the groin. The others stood around: the women who had thrown the petals and bared their bodies, 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 woman’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 her, meeting her gaze, marvelling at her beauty and the lust in her expression.
He felt a tightness in his crotch, a new tumescence.
She moved suddenly, shaking her head from side to side. The ritual immediately resumed.
Four of the men stepped forward from the edge of the circle, picking up long ropes that had been coiled beside the statues. As the men moved towards the woman, their feet stirring the petals, they uncoiled the ropes. Ordier saw that the other ends were tied around the bases of four of the statues. At the same time, the women picked up their panniers of rose petals and came forward with them. The others began to 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 for the ritual to resume, had taken up their movements at the same time.
The men were tying the woman by her wrists and ankles, the ropes being stretched taut and the knots tied forcefully about her. Soon her arms were stretched out on both sides and her legs were held wide open. She struggled against the men, but ineffectually. She was writhing as best she could: a circling of her pelvis, a slow turning of her head.
The garment had worked almost completely from her body: while she struggled against being tied the flimsy robe had slipped away from her. One of the men stepped over her, temporarily blocking Ordier’s view. When he moved back he had rearranged the garment so that she was covered again.
Through all of 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 secured the men withdrew. The chanting came to a sudden end. All the men, except the one who stood before the woman, walked away from the arena, towards the plantation, towards the distant Qataari camp.
The spreadeagled young woman writhed helplessly in the hold of the ropes. The flower petals were falling on her like snow, drifting across her and burying her. Ordier could see the petals landing on her face, her eyes, into her open mouth. Helplessly, she shook her head from side to side, trying to clear the petals from her face. Still they landed on her. As she pulled desperately against the ropes, Ordier could see the mound of petals heaving with her struggles, could see the ropes flexing and jerking.
At last her efforts ceased and she stared upwards again. Looking at her through the binoculars, Ordier saw that in spite of her violent writhing her expression was relaxed and her eyes were wide open. Saliva brightened her cheeks and jaw, and her face had a healthy, ruddy flush, as if reflecting the colour 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 signalled the start of the next stage in the ceremony, as if the victim of the ritual was also its director, because no sooner was she staring lasciviously upwards than the man who stood before her leaned down. He crouched beside her, reaching into the heap of petals. He began stripping the panels of her loose garment from her, tearing them up and away, tossing them behind him. Petals swirled around him. Ordier, staring eagerly down, saw tantalizing glimpses of her body, but the petals were flying too densely above her. The other women closed in, throwing more petals, concealing the nakedness so briefly revealed. The last part of the garment, the piece that had been beneath her, came away with difficulty. As the man snatched it away the young woman’s body bucked against the restraint of the ropes: bare knees and arms, a naked shoulder, heaved momentarily from the mound of petals.
Ordier watched as more and more of the petals were heaped on top of her, completely burying her. The women were no longer throwing the petals with their hands but now upended the panniers on top of her, letting the scarlet flower petals pour on to her like liquid. As the petals fell the man knelt beside the young woman’s body, shaping and smoothing them over her with his hands. He pressed them down against her body, heaped them over her arms and legs, pushed them into her face.
Soon it was finished and the man stepped back. From Ordier’s viewpoint above, the small arena now looked like a smooth lake of petals, with no hint of the shape of the woman’s body beneath. Only her eyes were uncovered.
The man and the women with the panniers moved away from the arena. They walked back towards the distant camp.
Ordier lowered his binoculars and took in the general scene. Throughout the plantation the work had stopped. The Qataari were returning to their homes behind the dark canvas screens of the encampment, leaving the woman alone in the arena.
Ordier looked down at her again, using the binoculars. She was looking back at him steadily. To Ordier it seemed she was making a frank, explicit enticement, a steady stare, challenging him, inviting him.
There was a suggestion of darkening around her eyes, like the shadows left by recent grief. As her steady gaze challenged and beckoned him, Ordier, partially drugged by the narcotic fragrance of the roses, saw a familiarity in her eyes that froze all sense of mystery. That bruised look of the sensitive skin around her eyes, that confident stare …
Ordier looked back at her for a long time. The longer he stared the more convinced he became that he was gazing 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 flight of narrow steps. He regained his balance by resting one hand against the main wall of the folly, then went past his discarded scintilla detector and started to descend the steps towards the ground.
Halfway down there was another narrow ledge, which ran unevenly across the wall as far as the end of the folly. Obsessed with the urgency of his need, Ordier walked precariously along the ledge. At the end he was able to climb down to the top of the wall which surrounded the folly’s courtyard. Once there 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 had been further away than he thought. He grazed a hand and took a painful knock on one knee, but apart from these, and being winded by the fall, he was unhurt. He crouched for a few seconds, recovering his breath.
A hot, stiff breeze was blowing through the valley and along the ridge, and as Ordier’s breathing steadied he felt his head clearing. At the same time, with a sense of regret, he felt the sexual arousal dying too.
A moment of the free will with which he had flattered himself earlier had returned. No longer driven by the enigmatic stimulation of the Qataari ritual Ordier realized that it w
as once again in his power to abandon the quest.
He could scramble somehow down the overhangs and broken slabs of the ridge and return to his house. He could see Jenessa, who might have returned by now with an easy, plausible explanation of the contradictions Luovi had raised. He could seek out Luovi and apologize to her, then try to find an explanation for Jacj Parren’s apparent or actual movements. He could resume the life he had been leading until this summer, before the day he had found the cell. He could forget the Qataari woman and all that she meant to him, and never again visit the folly to spy on her.
So he crouched on his boulder, trying to be clear in his mind.
But there was something he could not resolve by walking away.
It was the certain knowledge that next time he looked through the crack in the folly wall – be it tomorrow, or in a year’s time, or even in half a century’s time – he would see a bed of Qataari rose petals, and staring back at him would be the bruised eyes of a lovely young woman, waiting for him and reminding him of Jenessa.
Ordier scrambled clumsily down the last overhanging boulder, fell to the scree beneath and skidded in a cloud of dust and grit to the sandy floor of the valley.
He stood up and brushed himself down. The gaunt height of the folly loomed beside him and above him. He regarded it with interest, never having seen the building from this angle before. The side that looked out over his grounds was an effective fake, constructed of stone slabs and built to resemble a medieval castellated tower. On the rear no such efforts had been made to forge an appearance. Although the lower part of the main wall was built with stone blocks, from about the height of a man’s head upwards the wall had been constructed with a variety of bricks and stone blocks, clearly being whatever materials the builders had had to hand at the time.
Ordier knew there was nobody about because as he had been climbing down the rocky ridge he had an uninterrupted view to all sides. There were no guards visible along the ridge, no other Qataari anywhere. The breeze blew through the deserted rose plantation. Far away, on the other side of the valley, the screens around the camp hung heavy and grey.
The encircling statues of the arena lay ahead of him. Ordier walked slowly towards them, excited again and apprehensive. As he approached them he could see the mound of petals and could smell the heady perfume being given off by them. Here in the shadow of the folly the breeze had little effect and barely stirred the surface of the mound. Now he was at ground level he saw that the petals had not been smoothed to an entirely flat surface over the young woman, but that they lay irregularly and deeply. The flatness had been an illusion caused by his position high above.
Ordier hesitated when he came to the nearest of the statues. It happened to be one of the ones to which the ropes had been tied. He saw the rough-fibred rope stretching tautly across to the mound of petals, vanishing into it.
What was he supposed to do now? What was expected of him?
Should he walk across to the young woman in the mound of petals and introduce himself, formally and conventionally? Should he stand threateningly before her in imitation of the way that the man had done earlier? Should he simply take advantage of the fact that he was alone with her and possess her at last, rape her? Should he release her from the ropes? He looked around helplessly, hoping for some clue as to what to do.
All these possibilities were open to him. He was aware, though, that his apparent freedoms were actually created for him by others. He was free to act as he wished, but whatever he did would have been preordained by the mysterious, omniscient power of the Qataari.
Still he yearned to be with her, to seize her, to know her. She was there, trapped, a short distance away from him. He was free to have her.
But he was also free to leave. That too would have been predetermined as his choice.
So he stood uncertainly by the statue, breathing the dangerous sweetness of the roses, feeling again the rise of sexual desire. At last he stepped forward but some residual trace of social convention made him clear his throat nervously, signalling his presence, his approach.
There was no audible reaction from the young woman.
He followed the rope until he came to the edge of the mound of petals. He craned forward, hoping that something of her could be seen without him having to push through the piles of petals to reach her. The fragrance of the petals lay heavy – his presence stirred it up like flocculant sediment shaken from the bottom of a bottle of poor wine. He breathed it deeply, embracing the dullness of thought it induced, welcoming further surrender to the mysteries of the Qataari. It relaxed him and aroused him, made him sensitive to the sounds of the breeze, inured him to the great dry heat of the overhead sun.
His clothes were feeling stiff and constraining on him, so he quickly stripped them off. He saw the pile of bright red material where the young woman’s torn toga had been tossed aside. He threw his own clothes on top. When he turned back to the pile of petals he crouched down and took hold of the rope. He tugged on it and felt the tautness, knowing that as he twitched it she would feel the pulling on her limb and realize he was there.
He stepped forward and the petals stirred around his ankles. The scent thickened, like vaginal musk of desire.
Then he hesitated again, suddenly aware of an intrusive sensation, so distinct, so intense, that it was almost like pressure on his naked skin.
Somewhere, somebody hidden was watching him.
The realization was so definite that it penetrated the pleasant delirium brought on by the rose perfume. Ordier stepped back again. He turned around, looking first at the high wall of the folly behind him, then across at the plantation of roses. There was no one in sight.
The encircling statues faced inwards, their blank metal visages staring down at the woman trapped beneath the petals.
A memory, surfacing sluggishly like waterlogged timber through the muddy pool of his mind: the statues, the statues. Earlier in the ritual – why were the statues there? He remembered, dimly, the men gathered around the woman, the cleaning and polishing of the statues. And later, as she walked into centre of the arena … some of the men climbed into the hollow statues!
The ritual had not changed. When he returned to his cell that morning the Qataari were positioned exactly as he had last seen them. But were the men still inside the statues? Were they still there?
Ordier stood before the one nearest to him and stared up at it.
It depicted a young man of great physical strength and beauty, holding a scroll in one hand and in the other a long spear with a phallus for a head. Although the figure was naked from the waist up, its legs were invisible because of a voluminous, loose-fitting garment shaped around them, worked brilliantly by the sculptor to appear to have the texture of cloth. The face of the statue looked forward and downwards, directly towards where the woman lay buried under the petals.
The statue’s eyes—
There were no eyes. Just two holes, behind which it would be possible for human eyes to hide.
Ordier stared up, looking at the dark recess behind the eye-holes, trying to see if anyone was there. The statue gazed back vacantly, implacably.
Ordier turned away towards the pile of rose petals, knowing the naked young woman still lay there a few paces away from him. Beyond the petals were the other statues, staring down with the same sinister emptiness. Ordier fancied he saw a movement: behind the eye-holes of one of the statues, a head ducking down.
He stumbled across the arena, tripping on one of the buried ropes (the petals of the mound rustled and shifted; had he tugged at the woman’s arm?), and lurched up to the statue. He felt his way round to the other side, groping for some kind of handle which would open the hinged back. His fingers found a knob shaped like a raised disc; one touch, and he recoiled away. The metal was sun-hot, almost unbearable to grip. He tried again, arching his fingers, trying to spread the pain by rolling them as he gripped. He managed to raise it. The hinges squeaked, the back came open, the door slammed into a
fully open position. Superheated air billowed out from within.
Ordier looked inside. The statue was empty.
He opened the others, using his discarded shirt to protect his hand from the burning metal. All the statues were empty. Ordier kicked his naked foot against them, he hammered at them with his fists and slammed the metal doors. The statues rang with a hollow reverberation.
But the young Qataari woman was still there, bound and silent beneath the petals. Ordier was growing increasingly aware of her silence, her mute, uncritical presence.
He returned to the mound of petals in the centre of the arena, satisfied, as far as possible in his mental state, that he had done all he could. There was no one about, no one watching. He was alone with her. Even so, as he stood before her, breathing the sickly fragrance of the roses, he could still feel the pressure of watching eyes as distinctly as if it were the touch of a hand on the back of his neck.
An awareness of what he had to do was growing in him. He had to succumb to the fragrance of the flowers. He had dreaded that in the past, but now there was no alternative. He gulped in the hot midday air and the perfume it carried, holding it in his lungs and feeling his skin tingle, his senses dull. He was painfully sensitive to the woman’s silent presence, to the promise of her offered sexuality. Images of her bruised eyes, frail body, innocent demeanour, her evident excitement, all swam before him. He kneeled down, reached out with his hands, began to search for her in the mound of petals.
He pushed forward on his knees, wading through. The petals swirled about his sides and his elbows like a light, foamy liquid, scarlet coloured, desire perfumed. He came to one of the ropes beneath the petals and followed it with his hand towards the centre of the arena. He was close to her now, sensing her ahead of him, and he tugged lightly on the rope several times, feeling it yield, imagining it bringing one of her hands nearer to him, or spreading her legs a little wider. He waded forward hurriedly, groping for her.
There was a deep indentation in the ground beneath him. Ordier, leaning forward to put his weight on one hand, fell instead. He pitched forward into the soft, warm depths of the petals. He shouted as he fell and many of the petals entered his mouth.