The ritual ablutions of the previous night were repeated with, if anything, still greater care. Instead of the oil, they anointed her body with some heavy scent which soon began to make her head swim unbearably.
'Don't use any more of that scent,' she protested, seeing one of the women pour another hefty dollop into the palm of her hand. 'I don't like it!'
'Your likes or dislikes are of no importance,' Ishtar retorted coolly. 'This is the perfume of love. No man, even on his deathbed, can resist one who wears it.'
Marianne's heart missed a beat. She understood now: tonight, this very night, she was to be delivered up to Damiani. The stars, it seemed, must be favourable… A wave of terror swept over her, mingled with rage and disappointment, and she made a desperate attempt to escape from the hateful ministrations which made her feel suddenly sick. Instantly, six granite hands came down on her and held her fast.
'Be still!' Ishtar adjured her roughly. 'You are behaving like a child, or like a lunatic! You must be one or the other to fight against what can't be helped!'
That might be true but Marianne could not resign herself to being offered up, bathed and scented like an odalisque for her first night with the sultan, to the revolting creature who desired her. Tears of rage filled her eyes as, her anointing completed, they dressed her this time in a flowing tunic of black muslin, wholly transparent but scattered here and there with strange geometric figures in silver thread. Her hair was dressed in innumerable tiny plaits, like black snakes, and on it Ishtar placed a silver circlet at the front of which was a coiled viper with emerald eyes. Then, taking a pot of kohl, she set about exaggerating the girl's eyes enormously while Marianne, momentarily accepting defeat, let her have her way.
This done, Ishtar stepped back a pace or two to review her handiwork.
'You are beautiful,' she said flatly. 'Not Cleopatra or the mother-goddess Isis herself was ever more so. The master will be pleased. Come, now, eat…'
Cleopatra? Isis? Marianne shook her head, as though to rouse herself from some bad dream. What had ancient Egypt to do with it? This was the nineteenth century and they were in a city full of ordinary people, under the protection of her own country's army! Napoleon was master of the better part of Europe! How dared the old gods raise their heads?
She felt the breath of madness touch her cheek. In an effort to bring herself back to earth, she tried the food which was brought her and drank a little of the wine, but the dishes seemed tasteless and the wine without flavour. It was like food eaten in a dream, tasting of nothing…
She was embarking, without relish, on the fruit when it happened. The room began to revolve slowly about her, it tilted unnaturally and everything in it seemed suddenly withdrawn to an immense distance, as though she had been sucked into a long tunnel. Her sense of hearing and of touch became infinitely detached… Before she was borne away on the great blue wave which rose up suddenly before her, Marianne had just time to understand in a lightning flash what had happened: this time, her food had been drugged.
Yet she was conscious of neither anger nor alarm. Her body seemed to have broken all its earthly moorings, including all capacity for fear, suffering or even disgust, and to be floating weightlessly, marvellously airborne amid a brilliantly coloured universe made up of all the glowing hues of dawn. The walls had fallen away. She was no longer in prison: a vast, shimmering world, shot through with all the colours of Venetian glass, opened up before her, full of rippling light and movement, and in a kind of trance, Marianne sped towards it. She seemed to find herself all at once on a tall ship… perhaps the very ship whose coming had for so long figured in her dreams, steered by a green siren? High up on the prow, she sailed towards strange shores where fantastically-shaped houses shone like metal, where the plants were blue and the sea purple. The sails sang and the ship drove on over a richly-coloured Persian carpet, while the sea air carried the scent of incense, and Marianne, breathing it in, was no longer astonished at the strange sense of animal well-being which spread through every fibre of her being.
It was a weird sensation, a joy which tingled in the minutest nerve-endings, even to her fingertips. It was a little like the moment after love when the body, satisfied, wrought to the ultimate pitch of sensation, wavers on the very verge of oblivion. It was a kind of oblivion. For all at once everything changed, darkness was everywhere. The fabulous landscape melted into thick night and the soft, scented warmth gave way to an air cool and damp. Yet still Marianne floated on in the same tranquil happiness.
The darkness through which she moved was gentle and familiar. She could feel it all about her like a caress: the darkness of the prison, squalid but wonderful, where for that one, only time in her life, she had given herself to Jason. Time rolled back. Once again, Marianne could feel the rough boards of their nuptial couch beneath her bare back, their harshness an apt counterpoint to the touch of her lover's hands.
She could feel that touch now. It slid over her body, lapping her in a web of fire beneath which her own flesh flamed and opened like some hothouse flower. Pressing her eyes shut, Marianne held her breath in the effort to hold on to the miraculous sensation which was yet only a prelude to the supreme delight to come… She felt her throat swell with unuttered moans and cries of pleasure but they died unvoiced as the dream changed again and plunged into the absurd.
Far off at first, but growing nearer, moment by moment, there was the sound of a drum beating slowly, terribly slowly, like some dreadful knell. It quickened gradually until it was like the pulse-beat of some gigantic heart, throbbing faster as it came nearer, beating faster and faster, louder and louder.
For a moment, it seemed to Marianne that it was Jason's heart she heard, but then, as the sound grew clearer, so the amorous darkness thinned and melted like a fog and became tinged with a red light. And suddenly she was hurled from the heights of her dream of love into the very midst of the nightmare from which she had seemed to have escaped.
She seemed in some strange way to have become two people, for she could see herself stretched out in her transparent black draperies which lay like a dark veil over her nakedness. She was lying on a low table made of stone, like an altar, beyond which rose a brazen serpent with a golden crown.
The place itself was a grim, windowless cavern, with moisture dripping from the low, vaulted roof and slimy, pitted walls lit by great black wax candles which gave off a greenish light and an acrid smoke. Below the altar sat two of the black women in their sombre draperies, holding small round drums between their knees, on which they were beating rhythmically. Only their hands moved: everything else remaining perfectly still, even their lips which yet emitted a kind of musical humming, a strange, wordless melody. To this weird music, Ishtar was dancing.
She was quite naked, except for a slim, golden snake which was coiled about her loins, and the candlelight shone blue-black on her gleaming skin. Eyes closed, head flung back and arms upraised, stressing the curve of her heavy, pointed breasts, she was turning in circles on the spot, whirling faster and faster, like a top…
Abruptly, Marianne's wandering spirit which had been floating in a kind of limbo of detachment above this extraordinary scene, re-entered her prostrate body. And with the return came fear and dread, but when she tried to move, spring up and run away, she found that she could not stir. Nothing bound her to the stone table, no bonds that could be seen or felt, yet her head and limbs refused to obey her, as though she were in a trance.
The sensation was so terrifying that she tried to cry out but no sound came. Beside her, Ishtar was now whirling madly. Sweat ran in shining trickles down her black skin and her overheated body gave off an almost unbearable wild beast odour.