Unfortunately, what he actually says is: “My sight is rabid pleasure.”
Fatima titters.
Encouraged, he goes on, addressing the shadowy bulk before him. Battling case endings, syntax, verb tenses and a spotty vocabulary, the explorer waxes eloquent as Antony, Demosthenes and the Speaker of the House all rolled into one, telling her how much he’s appreciated the attention she’s given him, not to mention the jellied calves’ feet and puréed mung beans. At that moment, however, the elderly attendant enters with a taper and the explorer discovers that he’s been addressing a hand loom. The Queen is actually seated on the far side of the tent, rising up out of her enormous pillow like an Alp rising from the foothills. The explorer is bewildered. “Come over here,” she says.
At the sound of Fatima’s voice the old woman starts, then hurries about her business. She fixes the candle in the upturned palm of an ivory figurine, gathers her skirts and sweeps past the explorer with a lickerish grin. Mungo starts forward, but then hesitates. Something is wrong here — but what? Suddenly it hits him: Fatima’s head is bare, the thick braids fanning out over her shoulders like the runners of a plant. He’s never glimpsed so much as a single hair before — unless you count her eyebrows. “Come here,” she repeats.
The explorer steps up to her and bows, trying to think of something witty to say. She pats the pillow. “Up here,” she motions. Mungo shrugs. Then scales the pillow and sinks into its vastness. The old woman is nowhere to be seen. Nor is there any trace of the pantaloon girls. It occurs to him that he has never before been alone with the Queen. But now the pillow has begun to quake, flowing along its length like a wind-driven sea. He looks up. The Queen is pulling the jubbah up over her head, grunting daintily as she labors with the flashing fields of cloth. Beneath the jubbah: naked flesh. The explorer begins to get the idea.
“Help me,” she moans, the gown smothering her head and upper torso. Mungo leans forward and seizes the nape of the stupendous garment, thinking of sheets and flags and circus tents He tugs, she grunts. Her arms ripple beneath the cloth like animals in a sack, she gasps, and then suddenly her breasts jog free, shuddering mightily with the concussion, colossal orbs, heavenly bodies. They come to rest over the multiple folds of her abdomen like the twin moons of Mars. The explorer is suddenly stung with hurry and necessity. He jerks at the recalcitrant cloth with all the meat-eating fervor he can rouse, panting and moaning, until all at once the jubbah gives as if it were made of paper. He falls back, and there she is — the Queen — naked and ineluctable as the great wide fathomless sea.
“Yudhkul,”she whispers. ‘‘Yudhkul alaiha.’’
He flings the boots, paws at the buttons, jerks at his jubbah. Moist and mountainous, she waits for him, eyes aglow, veil lowered, her flesh smoldering like Vesuvius. He wheezes with haste and anticipation. It’s a dream, an attack of fever: no mere mortal could approach this magnificence! He scrambles atop her, feeling for toeholds — so much terrain to explore — mountains, valleys and rifts, new continents, ancient rivers.
♦ GLEGGED ♦
She’s a fortress under siege, is what she is. Ramparts manned, oil hot to scathe, gates shut tight as a drum. Since the day he surprised her in the tub she hasn’t had a moment’s respite. It’s been Gleg to the right of her. Gleg to the left. Gleg at the window. Gleg at the door. Gleg in the closet when she reaches for her wrap, Gleg in the garden when she goes out for a stroll. He’s inescapable, inexorable. In the morning he brings her flowers — great bundles of dead men’s fingers and pepperwort, then waits on the stairs while she dresses. At breakfast she finds love lyrics tucked between her oatcakes or folded into her napkin:
How should I love my best?
What though my love unto that height be grown,
That taking joy in you alone
I utterly this world detest,
Should I not love it yet as th’ only place
Where Beauty hath his perfect grace.
And is possest?
She can’t crack an egg without hearing about the “Blushing Mom” of her cheeks or the “Foaming Billows” of her breasts. Lovelorn sighs punctuate each sip of tea, while the scraping of her toast is, he protests, like the rasp of a file along the ridges of his heart. As the chairs shriek back and Zander and her father shuffle out of the room, Gleg leans toward her and whispers: “Had we but World enough, and Time, / This coyness Lady were no crime.” And then adds with a wink, “But we haven’t. And it is.”
Gleg, Gleg, she’s been Glegged to the gills. He is ubiquitous, unshakable, a flea under the collar, a fly in the ointment. In the evening he sits beneath her window, alternately dribbling into a recorder and howling at the treetops like a cat in heat. During the intervals between “airs” he composes poetry and tosses pebbles at the windowpane. One morning she stepped out of her room to find him mooning over the chamberpot she’d left in the hall. Another time she caught him stuffing his pockets with bits of fat and gristle in the hope of ingratiating himself with Douce Davie, her border terrier. She was adamantine. The dog was a pushover.
For today, though, she can let down the drawbridge and air out the battlements — she’s free of him till supper. Just after breakfast he and Zander went off with her father to roam the countryside draining pustules, letting blood and applying leeches to lumps and goiters and yellowing contusions. She watched them amble up the lane on their horses. Zander rhythmic and graceful, Gleg as ungainly as a mantis astride a beetle. At the top of the lane he turned to wave his handkerchief at her. The simp. She wanted to thumb her teeth at him, but he was so relentlessly absurd she actually found herself grinning. Which encouraged him all the more. The handkerchief flapped like a jib in a crosswind. He was a beaming boy, she was a blushing beauty. No doubt about it, there’d be poetry at supper tonight — “My heart’s a red running ulcer, / Putrefact, till your love’s sweet lance / Should cauterize and console her”—but it’s a small price to pay to be rid of him for a whole afternoon.
The first thing she does is throw open the window. Outside the grass has gone from yellow to green, feathers flash in the trees, and the rich raw odor of sodden earth hangs in the air. “Cheep-cheep,” call the mavises, chaffinches and whinchats, anathematizing one another from the rooftops and hedges. A breeze bellies the curtains and the sun throws rhomboids on the floor. Behind her the fish stir in their tank. She begins to feel restless.
She feeds her doves and dace, waters her plants. Starts a book, walks the dog, pulls out her sketchpad. Makes a tongue sandwich, bakes some scones. Sits at her spinet and tears through an up-tempo version of “Edom O’Gordon.” Stares at the clock. Finally she goes to her desk, unlocks the drawer, removes a letter and tucks it into her dress. Then slips out of the room like a thief. Into the vestibule, down the front steps, across the morass of the lane and into the wood beyond.
Ferns line the path like sentinels, clots of shadow gather beneath the bushes. The air is a transfusion. From the pond, the falsetto trill of the spring peepers calling for creeks-creeks-creeks. She’s seen them there, bug-eyed and blistered, trailing coils of mucus, crawling atop one another, foaming, seething, humping. Her feet pad over coupling earthworms, sprouting seeds, the hem of her dress tousles wild geranium and saxifrage, toadflax and meadow rue, gathering pollen, dispersing it. The letter is from Mungo. His last. She’s read it through a dozen times, and she’ll read it through again, on a bluff above the Yarrow, slugs and bugs and grubs mounting one another at her feet, larks twittering overhead, doing it on the wing, the whole world going at it in the slow persistent grind of beating blood and thirsting tissue.