Grant knew that the chance of curing such people was small. But at least he could try.
She slipped from his knee and splashed her face with water, rubbing herself dry with the coarse bath-towel. Every trace of make-up had been removed and her features were faultless, her lips warm with the colour which best suited her deeply tawny skin. And with her hair straggling across her forehead she was more bewitching than ever. ‘Then you will treat him?’
He nodded. ‘I promise.’
She sighed contentedly and then slowly unfastened the brooch which anchored her sheath.
‘No,’ he snapped. There was a primitive aura of violence about this woman which made him scared of what he might do to her—or she to him. But she had the most expressive eyes he had ever seen and he cursed silently with vicious fury as he saw her face go blank with surprise.
‘But you want me? Why can’t I sleep here?’
‘I want you too much,’ he said brusquely.
She slipped behind him and eased off his jacket. ‘Then that is as it should be. So I shall be your slave and undress you, watch you shave and help you into bed. Or, better still, I can shave you myself. Every woman on our oases is expert with a razor.’
She unknotted his bow-tie and hung his shirt on a hook inside the tiny wardrobe. His vest she put in the basin. ‘I shall also do some washing before we go to sleep. One learns on the desert whenever it is possible always to be fresh.’ She folded his pants, carefully pinning the creases into position and then draping them on a hanger collected from his case. His briefs were added to the basin, and then she smiled. ‘You look very well. I like your strong firm legs and flat stomach. But you are a man who has had much exercise. How was that possible when you work so long in hospital?’
Nothing missed her, even when she was afraid. ‘I had a gymnasium,’ he said shortly, ‘and kept my weight down with steam baths.’
‘The Sahara will soon do that for you.’ She smiled. ‘Look at me. Not a kilogramme more than is necessary.’ She swiftly unclipped her skirt and threw it across the bed. Her top half dropped, billowing, after one wriggle of her shoulders, and she leaned across the room, her figure curved like a taut bowstring as she placed it in the basin. The skin of neck and shoulders fell with a sable sheen over her breasts, lightening a little around the flanks.
How different, he suddenly remembered, from Jacqueline, who would have done anything to work up a good ‘all-over’ tan and who was continuously furious because her breasts were crowned with creamy skin which had never been exposed sufficiently long to shade in, evenly, with the rest.
The girl was less self-conscious than anyone he had ever met. ‘Now I shall wash,’ she said. ‘These rooms are warm and I don’t think you need pyjamas.’
Her sudden matter-of-factness was a novelty in itself for Grant, but as he watched her rinse out her clothes and scrub his singlet he tingled with expectation. She was supremely lovely.
Even marriage would be exciting with a creature like this and—he hesitated—it had to be faced. Marriage was her price. And the price of entry to the oases. Marriage the price of riodorium!
He lifted his pipe from the bedside locker. It was almost two o’clock and a moment of decision. But he knew that, price or no price, for at least three more days’ time would cease to matter very much and that minutes had suddenly become precious. The girl, too, seemed happier and was humming a fragment of flamenco while she draped his clothes over a towel and opened her handbag. ‘One cigarette, and then I shall become your bride of tomorrow—or of another tomorrow. Your fiancée.’
She sat by the edge of his bunk, her hand resting on his arm as they smoked in silence, content to look at one another and think, until, abruptly, she threw her cigarette stub into the washbasin and slowly cupped his chin in her hands. His pipe fell to the floor as he allowed himself to relax against the pillow, her lips nibbling the thick curling hair of his chest and fluttering upwards to his cheek.
‘So smooth,’ she sighed, ‘and so warm.’ Her skin was softly cool and her eyes alight with mischief as they twinkled beside him, her fingers desperately eager as they fastened around his waist and she wriggled into the narrow bed.
Breasts and thighs were moulding their taut, rounding firmness to his own straining muscles when suddenly her eyes went dark, the twinkling lights faded and for a heart-beat in time he glimpsed the smouldering rawness of naked passion as she crushed her lips against his teeth, deeply kissing with a slowly writhing violence which tingled their every sense into quivering togetherness.
The ship was thrusting steadily over deep waters, the ocean breaking against its listing hull, when they separated for the last time. As he turned over to go to sleep a small voice came from above. ‘I am sending down my hand. Please kiss it good night.’
He looked up. Forearm and hand were dangling above him. Gently he kissed the tip of each finger and rubbed the firm, small palm against his cheeks. ‘Sleep well,’ he whispered.
As he was turning over she whispered again. ‘In the Sahara we say goodbye with a shake and then we stroke the hand, but I think I want you always to kiss it.’ She hesitated, and then: ‘Promise,’ she said.
He spoke very quietly. ‘I promise.’
Chapter Twelve – ‘It is not good for a man always to have a slave around’
Everything about Viera y Clavijo was old and Grant sometimes wondered why she did not split at the seams and go down like a stone. The channel between the Canaries and Africa can be the windiest place in the world outside of Antarctica, and as they drew closer on-shore a heaving ground swell added to the violence of a seventy-mile-an-hour gale. Decks slithered with water whilst she wallowed at nine knots towards Villa Cisneros, and the few passengers had to remain either in their poky cabins or in saloons where stiff chairs were almost as uncomfortable as the rock-hard mattresses of bunks.
Miss Turquoise refused to be left alone and had openly transferred her baggage to Grant’s room. She seemed to know most of the crew and mentioned that it was the seventh time she had made the trip during the previous six years. He had discovered that she was twenty-four and that eight years earlier a marriage had been arranged with the heir to a neighbouring tribe but that he had been killed in a fracas with a patrol of legionnaires.
After that her health had suffered so badly that the old Caid had sent her out of the oases and paid for her education abroad. It had been an astonishing thing for such a conservative old man to do, but he had been sensitive to progress and guessed that his favourite niece would be the best person to advise a successor who would have to come to terms with a changing world. Apart from that he needed a reliable contact in the underworld.
She had told Grant everything. How once accustomed to life in Casablanca, Las Palmas and Madrid it had been a simple step to use her for carrying messages to middle-men in the slave trade until she had come to know the compound in Casablanca as well as she did the bazaar at home. And such was her training that never once had she kicked against organizing a steady trickle of human merchandise into the interior.
‘But always by air?’ queried Grant. They were sitting huddled together under a rug in a corner of the deck, the wind cutting across their faces and streaming green waves heaving fifteen feet below.
Now she spoke as though she accepted him as part of herself. ‘Yes. Patrols of soldiers or desert police try to stop slave caravans, so it is safer to fly.’
She had told him how the traders operated and even more about the colony itself. Boys, girls and young adults were collected from Morocco and the Canaries, or sometimes even bought from peasants. Cabaret girls and night-club hostesses with no local connections might be kidnapped. And sometimes even tourists disappeared, especially if they drifted into the fringe of a night life which was still dangerous to outsiders. Storage depots and collecting centres existed under the noses of the police and it was seldom that raids were ever successful.
Spanish control over their Saharan colony was nominal. Indeed, the plac
e had only a ‘face’ value and it probably cost more to run the thing than Madrid would ever get out of it. There were no dock or port facilities, and at Cisneros and Guerra ships lay a mile off-shore, everything being unloaded by launch and dumped on the sand until camels or jeeps collected it for distribution over the desert. Even water was delivered monthly by a Spanish ship, and since practically nothing could be grown the services had to be supplied by a steady flow of cargoes of tinned foods and cereals.
At Villa Cisneros ten or twelve small cement bungalows housed a few senior Service officers, the men living in barracks which were worse than an average prison. Catholic priests had opened a church and there was a small hospital with ten or twelve beds. A native Medina had grown up on the edge of dusty parade grounds. But it was really a brothel for soldiers, and the only half-decent thing near the place was a tented village where almost a thousand Berbers had given up their nomadic life and settled down beside the sea to be influenced by all that was worst in so-called civilization.
But Guerra in the south was even more depressing, a wind-blown trade link with Mauretania huddled round a tottering Beau Geste type of desert fort. And Miss Turquoise was flat definite that for Grant there could be no other approach to the deep interior.
Officials at Cisneros ran things by the book, but at Guerra the Governor was a lonely man and friendly. The chances were that he would want company and offer them a room for the night without asking questions, especially since she would introduce Grant as her fiancée, explaining that she was giving him a lift to Mauretania.
He would guess, of course, that she really meant to take him back to her family. But he was an easy man to deal with, and so long as he could report back to Madrid that the foreign doctor had left for Port Etienne everyone would be happy.
Guerra had also another advantage. A rough track joined with two hundred miles of piste used by lorries for taking iron-ore from mines two hundred miles inside Mauretania to the port. So they would collect the girl’s jeep and by-pass the frontier, striking the piste inland at a safe place and following it for a full hundred miles. Another hour over hard desert would then bring them to the caravan. Her camels would not yet be fully refreshed and servants were not expecting her back so soon, but even so they ought to reach the oases well within three weeks.
They were standing by a corner of the empty bridge looking towards the east. The sun had newly set and an afterglow still lit up the horizon when she slowly gripped his arm and squeezed it with a violence which almost made him gasp. ‘You are my man but I would like to do this thing well and teach you about my country. Perhaps teach you even to love it. Look.’ She pointed to the play of fading colour on the horizon. ‘You have never known the far desert, or the peace and beauty which cover it at night when the beasts are tied up in a circle around our tents and one can hear only the crunch of their jaws as they chew stiff grass, the shuffle of their bodies as they wriggle against the dust, the chant of men at prayer, or their rugs painting the sand with little patches of colour as they kneel towards Mecca, and the chatter of women as they light fires or break wood. And perhaps you have never known the great darkness of night after the sun has gone down, when the last colour has faded from the sky, when men and women become shadows against deeper darkness and in the distance you know that men are lying on the sands nursing a rifle, lost in the folding ground, but on guard until dawn.
‘And I think you have never known the peace of a tent when wind whips the skin into little night noises. When the friendly smell of men and beasts wafts around the blankets. Or the comfort of floor carpets against one’s feet as one walks from the water-basin to cushions which are pillows. Or the pleasure of a last cigarette on the edge of the camp, one’s back resting against the warmth of a young camel and with smoke drifting into a blackness which ends only at the stars.
‘And I’m sure you have never learned how stars on the desert shine more brilliantly than anywhere else. How they seem to rise and fall like beacons, or how they gather in thousands to make the darkness glow like a necklace of diamonds.’
‘No,’ said Grant softly, ‘I have never seen it like that.’
She leaned against him, her head close by his chin, and her lips were smiling. ‘We shall be at Guerra in two days. And two nights later we shall be with my servants. After that . . .’ She shivered slightly and her eyes were glowing with a light which Grant had never seen in any woman he had known. ‘After that,’ she whispered, ‘we shall be lovers together under these diamond-dusted stars, and we shall marry when we reach the oases.’
‘What like is it?’ said Grant. He had been more moved than he cared to admit even to himself.
She became very subdued. ‘The ground is greener than Andalucía. We have more than ten springs and our crops are good. Some people might call it a Garden of Eden lost in the desert. Which is one reason why we want to be left alone, because with modern air-travel it could easily become a holiday resort. And that is the last tragedy.’
‘Even if it brought money?’
‘Money is not everything and our oases have things which money can never buy.’ She looked at him anxiously. ‘You have said nothing about what I told you. Will you still want to love me when we are alone in my tent? The carpet is from Shiraz and soft as a horse’s muzzle. I have over twenty camels and a strong guard. We shall be safe there, and then I shall feel for the first time that we really belong.’
‘Yes,’ he whispered softly.
There was nothing more he could say. The whole affair was beyond his past experience of women and of life. He had moved, it seemed, into a new world, into a new standard of values, into a bizarre mood of resignation which was oddly restful. And Aniseeh Bobaida was teaching him more about himself than most of the women in his life put together. They dined at leisure, alone in the saloon, and afterwards he followed her to their cabin.
Her mood changed as he closed the door and he could almost feel the mounting tension as she undressed and stretched out warily on the bunk. ‘We are getting to know one another better. After last night and today I am even beginning to believe that you really do love me.’
‘Why?’ She was in one of her unpredictable moods and he was ready for anything.
She covered her lips with her hand and stared at him through her fingers. ‘There is fire in you when the sea is rough, and you laugh when the boat rocks. Your eyes twinkle when you have to fight your way along the deck against wind, and when we are not speaking you whistle little pieces of music. So I think you are happy.’
‘And you?’ he asked.
‘I am happy because I think you love me.’ She paused and a spark of mischief lightened her face. ‘Even although you know now that I steal girls to please men like you or sell boys to fat chiefs in the East.’
‘And you still want to sleep here.’ Her lips were pouting moistly and he guessed that she was hell-bent on making him want her.
‘Of course.’ She stretched out lazily, her long limbs pointing against the bulkhead as she wriggled against the sheets like a puppy. ‘Though tonight I shall watch you fold your pants, because it is not good for a man always to have a slave around even although she is his fiancée and spoils him by giving too many kinds of love.’
She was still watching from between her fingers and drew herself into a tight ball as he dived on top of her. The ship rolled as he moved and his head cracked heavily against the edge of the upper bunk, splitting skin open just below the hair-line. Blood was trickling down his cheek, and a crimson blob had landed on the girl’s chin. She moaned like an animal in pain and leapt out of bed.
The wound was clean-cut, but the edges were gaping and he knew that it would need at least two stitches. He always carried first-aid kit in his overnight bag and there were several patent ampoules each holding a thin cutting needle fastened to fine-gauge nylon thread.
‘Sit down.’ The girl’s voice was very soft. ‘I teased you once too often, and later I shall show that I am sorry. But now tell me what can b
e done about your head.’
The cutting needles were new to her but as he washed his hands and snapped open an ampoule she took control. ‘I can see what to do. The needle is sharp with a little triangular point and the thread is strong. Remember,’ she added. ‘that I do a lot of fine embroidery on the oases and I am sure I can sew much better than you. Even skin,’ she added quietly. ‘But since it is the skin of my own man I shall do it neatly.’
Her hands were steady and it was easier to agree than to argue.
She gripped the needle like an expert between finger and thumb. ‘Is this going to hurt?’
‘Like the devil. Especially if you put it through slowly.’
‘Then I shall do it quickly,’ she whispered. ‘Like that.’ There was only a short sharp sting as it pierced one side.
‘Very good. But now put it through the other so that the scar will be neat with no puckered edges.’
‘For that,’ she whispered, scowling as she concentrated, ‘I shall hurt you very much. I told you I am expert. This time I do it slowly, like that.’
The little so-and-so! thought Grant furiously. She had actually meant it. The second time was really sore.
‘You see,’ she said firmly, ‘one must not tell experts what to do. When I am finished you will look almost as good as new.’ She tied her first knot correctly, a proper ‘reef’ with no chance of slipping.
The last suture anchored the edges perfectly and slipped in with practically no pain. She cut the thread with a pair of nail scissors and dabbed the wound dry with a freshly laundered pocket handkerchief.
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