Ordinarily I’d have said “Good evening", or “Come in, my dear, it’s your birthday", but she had insisted, you remember, that in moments of crisis she and she alone should take the lead, so what could a dutiful soldier do but lie to attention as she made a meal of me, teasing and fondling until I was fit to burst, at which point for tunately she began to conduct herself like some randy Roman empress in a rogering competition, bestriding me furiously with ecstatic cries, those unseen lips finding mine at last as she plunged and writhed in a perfect frenzy, grunting and gasping with an abandon which I shouldn’t have thought her style at all, but you never can tell how they’ll behave in the happy throes, and when she concluded her performance by throwing up her arms and screaming, I confess I entered into the spirit of the thing uninvited, going “brrr!” between her boobies as she collapsed whimpering on my ruined carcase.
“Uliba-Wark,” says I, when I’d got my breath back, “from the moment we met I knew our love was fated, and I’m here to tell you you’re the best ride I’ve had since I left home.” For I like to give credit where it’s due, you know.
I spoke in Arabic, and she replied in a distracted way in what sounded like Amharic, heaving herself up to full stretch above me, and for the first time her head was in the moonlight—the beau tiful Egyptian head and shining black eyes of Sarafa’s woman. She, too, was breathing with difficulty, smiling at me in a most ingrati ating way and murmuring a question which I could only suppose was a plea for a high mark from the examiner.
Well, she’d earned it, eighty per cent at least, even if my imme diate instinct had been to cry “Sold! Impostor!” But that would have been downright discourteous, after the little darling had exerted herself so splendidly, and I was too blissfully sated to tax myself with wondering why Uliba-Wark had put her up to it, or why, so soon after her hysterics of grief for Sarafa, his bint had been ready, nay eager, to pleasure herself groggy with your correspondent—on whom, I may say, she worked her wicked will twice more before daybreak, the naughty little glutton. Seeking consolation?
Obeying mistress’s orders? Beglamoured by Flashy’s whiskers? Who could tell?
A moment ago I said that I knew women… and I should have added that what I know is that there’s no explaining ’em, or under standing ’em, or telling what they’ll do next. If you’re lucky enough to be bedded unexpected with a beauty like Sarafa’s wench, you must just follow the wisdom imparted to me by an Oriental lady of my acquaintance, after she’d filled me with hasheesh and ridden me ruined: “Lick up the honey, stranger, and ask no questions.”
So I didn’t, rising late and greeting Uliba-Wark and her household with cheerful composure and not a word or sign to suggest that I’d spent half the night trollop-wrestling. That Sarafa’s lass had been less discreet was plain from the reluc tance of Uliba’s ladies and elder statesmen to meet not only my eye but my presence, and the shameless giggling and whispering of the Bosom Brigade when they served me breakfast. I confess I’d hoped that Uliba herself might have her curiosity piqued by my nonchalance, but if it was, she didn’t show it. Her first words to me were that Yando and his gang hadn’t put in an appearance, so we should be able to set off south next day.
“But he may be about still, on the watch, so we shall ride out before dawn. There will only be the two of us, remember, without Sarafa and his man to scout, so we must go warily and quickly. Come, I’ll show you the way we must follow in the dark.”
The vantage point was the top of the far tower overhanging the valley, which we reached up various ladder-stairs, and a pretty picture she made climbing nimbly in her little leather tunic, with Flashy panting wearily in her wake. I was breathless by the time we reached the roof, despite a brief rest while I studied a peculiar contraption in the top chamber: a massive hook dangling in the middle of the room from a rope which ran over a great wheel in the ceiling to a windlass near the wall. Most sinister it looked, but when I asked Uliba about it she said simply, “That is the dungeon,” and directed my attention to the astonishing panorama before us.
South in the misty distance towered the huge silver peaks of the Ab highlands, beyond a vast rocky plateau criss-crossed by forested strips and ravines. Immediately below us, at a depth so dizzy that I automatically kept a hold on the parapet, lay the valley floor, a boulder-strewn river-bottom along which a thin thread of silver indi cated the stream which flowed out of a jungly cleft ten miles away.
“That is our road, along the river to the woods,” says Uliba. “Once under cover of the trees we shall besafe from pursuit. If we should be parted in the dark, we shall rendezvous by the white rocks yonder, where the river emerges. If I don’t arrive in twelve hours…” she pointed to the mountains “… Lake Tana lies beyond the ranges. You remember the names of the river and village? And the compass bearing? You are sure? Good… Well, since I see that you are more intent on staring foolishly at me than in studying the road on which your life depends, I suggest that we go down, and you can use the rest of the day changing yourself from a moon struck farangi soldier into an Indian traveller with his wits about him. Come.”
She said it with a smile, ever so pleasantly, and she looked so delectable in that shiny leather corset of which I had been men tally stripping her, that I thought, oh, what the devil, the blazes with pretences, let’s have the cards on the table.
“Hold on,” says I, and took her gently by the arm as she moved past me. She turned in mild surprise, and I’ll swear she expected lustful assault then and there, so I stared into those proud fearless eyes for a long moment, and then said: “You have the damnedest way of punishing insolent slave-girls, haven’t you?”
A split second’s bewilderment, and then delight that I’d been first to mention it. “Punishment? You think that was why I sent Malee to you?” She started to laugh. “I do not believe it! You have far too brave an opinion of yourself to think you could be a penance to any woman! Punishment, indeed!”
“Well, thank’ee ma’am, but you did speak of whipping or selling her, you know.”
“Oh, fool’s talk! What, whip or sell Malee, who was my playmate? Who prepared my bridal bed? Who would give her life for me, even as Sarafa did? I owe her too much kindness and friend ship for that!”
“So much kindness that you stole her lover?”
“What has that to do with anything? I took him because he pleased me—and since my own husband dallied with Malee when he’d tired of me, why should I not enjoy Sarafa?”
A fair question, which had me stumped. It was being borne in on me that the moral climate of Abyssinia was not quite that of our own polite society—not that Uliba’s Belgravian sisters are averse to a cut off the joint from time to time, but they know enough to keep quiet about it. But I was still well in the dark.
“You say she’s your old playmate, bosom pal, God knows what—yet she harangues you like a fishwife in public, calls you a heart less whore, and you box her ears—”
“We have been calling each other that and worse since we were ten years old and rivals for the same schoolboy!” cries she, laughing. “Not that I could ever rival Malee! Is she not lovely? You seem to have found her so, from what she tells me,” she added, with a sniff in her voice. “The little slut could hardly keep her eyes open.”
“Well, now you know what you missed,” says I. “Sending me a proxy-doxy in your own dress to fool me in the dark! Is that some kind of Abyssinian insult?”
“First a punishment, now an insult!” cries she gleefully. “No, effendi, merely a whim, a little trick, a jest to remind the great farangi soldier that the wild barbarian woman will do what she will do in her own good time… not his.” The carved lips were pouting impudently, and suddenly laughing before I could deal with ’em. “But if it will soothe your manly pride, know that I sent Malee to you at her own request… no, truly, when she had cried out her tantrum, and implored my forgiveness, as she always does, she begged me. Why? Because she believes that you are my new fancy, and whatever I have, why, Malee must have, too. And she’s a lech erous strumpet, as you’ve no doubt discovered, with the appetite of a rutting baboon. So I indulge her.” She arched her brows, playful-like. “Am I not a kind mistress to my bondwomen?”