The Revolt of Aphrodite (19 page)

But we had come now to a shady clearing among the trees on the nether side of the hill which dipped down towards flat green country of simple brush, iodine coloured. Here the old falconers were gathered about the awkward wooden cages which held their choicest birds. They looked like all specialists look—all members of bowling clubs, artisans, artists, tend to look. Old wrinkled specialists who spent their whole time hanging about the falcon market in Istanbul waiting to pick up a bargain—an eyas tiercel or a peregrine or a jack Merlin (strange that should have been the name of Benedicta’s father). Did he look rather like the bird? The little group talked in low moping tones, they had all of them grave bedside manners, walking among the unfidgeting birds. A single cigarette passed from hand to hand. The gunbearers stood about in dispirited fashion, but with our arrival all was animation; the horses were trimmed, girths checked. Jocas elected to fly the largest of the falcons, his favourite, while the girl chose a smaller short-winged bird—one
that could be discharged from the wrist at the first sight of prey almost in the manner of a shotgun. We wound down the hill in single file before fanning out the beaters and the dogs, trained skilfully not to overrun. Once down the hill Jocas looked over our dispositions and released his hawk with a shrill musical cry, slipping the hood from its eyes. After a swift look about the great bird rose magnetically, its wings crushing down the air as it rustled upwards in a slow arc, to take up its position in the sky. This one would “wait on” in the higher air to have the advantage over far-flying quarry. But as yet we had hardly begun the beat, moving with the sun at our backs; a couple of woodcock rose with a rattle and began their crashing trajectory across the lower sky. At once the shrill ululations of the falconers broke out, encouraging the great falcon: sometimes these sounds reminded one of the muezzin’s call to prayer from a minaret in the old city. So the battle began. One of the woodcocks went to earth in the bracken and refused to be flushed, but the second put up a struggle characterised by tremendous speed and finish. It seemed to be able to judge the moment when the falcon had positioned itself for the stoop; instantly it would dive for cover, only to be flushed once more by the ever advancing line of beaters. After the third or fourth repetition of this tactic it began to tire; its flights became shorter and more erratic, its plunges for cover more desperate. The hunt had now broken into several parties, interest being divided by other quarry, by new birds taking the air. I saw Benedicta discharge the short-winged hawk from her wrist at the sight of something rising among the holm-oaks. It flew at incredible speed—fired like sling-shot.

But the battle between Jocas’ falcon and the woodcock had drawn us on ahead of the rest. It was exciting, the gallop across the flat plain after the failing woodcock. It was after about a mile and a half that one saw the falcon shortening its gyres, closing the space between it and its quarry. It was winding it in almost, as a fisherman winds in a fish. The woodcock despite its fatigue was game and rose again and yet again, but falteringly now. It was becoming clear that the end was not far off. The falcon once more positioned itself, helped now by a slight change of the wind’s direction. It took careful aim and suddenly came plummeting down at incredible speed, adding
impetus
to its own great weight. Too late the woodcock tried to evade it by a feint, sliding sideways as it fell. The falcon struck it a
devastating
blow with its hind talons—must have struck it stone dead in fact. Down they both went now in a tangle of wings, leaving a trail of slow feathers in the amazed sky. At once the horsemen shrilled and ululating broke into a ragged gallop to retrieve. Jocas, red faced and sweating, was radiant now. “It was that shift of wind” he said. “Game won’t fly upwind under a hawk. What elegance eh?”

So the day wore on; the quarry was rich and various, and the incidents of the kill quite absorbing. I quite forgot my saddle-
soreness
. The longest and dourest battle Jocas fought was, strangely enough, with one of the slowest birds of all, a marsh-heron. One would not have believed that this slowcoach of a bird could outwit a trained hunting falcon, but this was very nearly the case. Indeed the heron proved so cunning that it had Jocas swearing with admiration. Though in lateral flight it is slow, the big concave wings give it the power of rising rapidly in the perpendicular, almost in
balloon-fashion
: meanwhile the falcon has the task of trying to gain sufficient height for her swoop by circling. The old heron used this advantage so skilfully that the battle ranged over several miles. Twice the hunter misjudged its distance, or the heron sidestepped it in the sky: for the falcon, missing it, lost the superiority of altitude and was forced laboriously to circle once again until it could take up the required position. But at last—and both birds were tiring—it found its site and with a swoop “bound to” the heron and both came tumbling out of the sky together with a crash and scream.

The sun was well past meridian when we broke off the sport, all parties converging once more on the hillside where, on the eastern side, there was an old abandoned marble fountain in the denser part of the wood. Here a spring boomed and swished among the rocks and the air was sweet and dense with moisture. Here we lounged and ate the food which had been sent up from the boat in a wicker
hamper
. The cool shade was luxurious and sleep-inducing—and indeed Jocas had dozed off for a few moments when a messenger rode into the camp from the boat and summoned him back on urgent business to the town. He left at once, with a resigned good humour, promising to send the pinnace back to collect us that night. I was left alone with
Benedicta. Watching her move among the falconers, smoking a cigarette, I felt the same tightening of the heart-strings as I had when she rode out of the mist towards me. That, and also an awkward sense of premonition: the sense of having embarked upon a course of action which would reward me perhaps by the very damage it might do to my self-reliance, or my self-esteem. Rubbish. And yet at the heart of it all there was a magical content—for there seemed to me to be absolutely no alternative to make me hesitate. Apart from the greed of the eyes and the mind which contemplated her bright abstract beauty there was a kind of inner imperative about the matter —as if this was what I had been foreordained to execute. Yes, I had been born to get myself into this extraordinary, this bewitching mess. So that it was with a complete calm assurance of happiness that I merely nodded and agreed when she said: “I am sending them all down to the boat this evening, but I shall stay here tonight with you. Yes?” The “yes” was quite unnecessarily wistful, and now I repaid the debt of my earlier negligence by taking up the slender fingers and pressing them back to life. So we sat side by side on the grass eating a pomegranate, surrounded by all the bustle of the encampment breaking up. They were to leave us sleeping bags, wine and food; torches, cigarettes, and horses. It took them hours to pack up. We stood side by side in the green evening light to watch the cavalcade straggle down the valley towards the sea. Then, thoughtfully
stripping
off her clothes, she turned slowly towards the broken marble cistern where the water drummed, she walked into it, seizing the foaming jets with her hands, crying out with joy at its intense cold. So we lay rolled about and were massaged by the icy spring, to climb out cold and panting at last, and lie down as wet as fish in each other’s arms. But before making love or attempting any kind of intimacy, lying mesmerised like this, still trembling from the cold water, she uttered a cautionary phrase which to my bemused mind sounded as normal, as natural, as the bustle and boom of the water in the marble dish below us. “Never ask me anything about myself, will you? You must ask Jocas, if you want to know anything. There’s a great deal Ido not know. I mustn’t be frightened, you see.”

It seemed to me perfectly logical and I accepted the proposition, sealing the pact there and then with kisses that grew ever more
breathless, refining themselves, exploding like oxygen bubbles in the blood. It was like that, the sun shone, the water drummed: everything had become explicit. We sank, deeper than pain, into this profound nescience. And here again (as always when we made physical love) her teeth were drawn back in a kind of agony under her lips, and she said: “O help me, please help me, you must help me.” An awkward Galahad was born. I vowed to help her—how I did not know. And mentally I replied—as I have continued to reply ever since—“Of course, my darling, of course: but against what, against whom?” There was never any answer to my question, only the pain swelling up between us; she pressed ever harder upon me as if to blot it out, as if to still the ache of some great bruise. Thus our sensuality was touched by a kind of unconscious cruelty—kisses
inflicting
pain, I mean, rather than pleasure. It was all very well the “Help me”: but afterwards she lay like the ghost of rigor mortis itself, her lips blue, her heart beating so that she could hardly breathe. But at last her eyes unclouded by the invading terror. Sex cleared the brain, if only for an instant. She ached in my mind like a choice abstraction.

A flock of ignorant chattering birds, perhaps starlings, crossed our middle vision and settled in a cloud in a nearby tree. Benedicta foraged for the little carbine which they had left behind with the horses and began shooting at them. She shot in a brilliant
unpremeditated
way, like a woman making up her face, and with an
unerring
exactitude. The birds began to fall on the ground like
over-ripe
fruit. She emptied the magazine before throwing the hot gun down on the sleeping bag. How easily she could fill me with disgust. It was beautiful, the polarity. Then she went and lay face down by the spring, almost touching the foaming tumbling cataract with her lips. It seemed to me then, smoking and watching her, that she was something the heart must desire and I grew afraid of the depth of my feelings. I had never before actually feared to be parted from a woman; the novelty was overwhelming. Tomorrow I must leave for Pera, I decided; if only to get away from this suffocating network of ambiguities. After all, with her wealth etc. etc. I could hardly keep her as a mistress…. The ideas rose in clouds like sparrows to a
gunshot
. But even before they had fallen back into place she was saying:
“I feel this is decisive—that you’ll never leave me. I have never felt that before.” She always said this: she felt men expected it. All introspection now seemed little more than a fruitless mental debauchery. I closed up my mind and searched ever more frantically for that tame and now touchingly tremulous mouth. We fitted into each other like Japanese razors.

I had collected a couple of huge leeches which had settled on the back of my thigh; by the time I felt the slight discomfort their bites caused, they were already gorged with my blood and fit to burst. Benedicta found a salt cellar in the basket and dosed them until they spewed out the blood they had sucked and fell writhing into the dust. She seemed to like this. I went to wash in the spring. It was her turn now to sit and watch me which she did with a discomforting
intentness
.

Then she nodded to herself and came to sit beside me to dangle her long legs over the marble parapet. With a long stealthy look about her—as if to make sure that there were no interlopers about in the wood to oversee her—she bent down towards her right foot. I had already noticed that the small toe was bound up with a piece of surgical tape, perhaps to protect a scratch. It was this tape that she now stripped with a small slick gesture, holding out the foot for my inspection. The last toe was double! They were both perfectly formed in their twinship, but joined together. She watched me watching her with her head on one side. “Does it disgust you?” she said. It did, but I said that it did not; I bent to kiss it. Moreover I understood why she kept it bound away, out of sight of the
superstitious
inhabitants of the place—for it was a clear mark of
witch-craft
in popular oriental belief. The vestigial toe, known to the medievals as “the devil’s teat”. She flexed her feet, stretched, and then wandered away to sit under a tree with an air of morose
intentness
. “What are you thinking, Benedicta?” Her grave, unwavering abstraction melted; she put a stalk of grass between her teeth and said: “I was wondering what they will think when they know. But what can they do, after all?”

“Who?”

“Julian, Jocas, the firm; when they know what I have decided. About you, I mean.”

“Has this anything to do with them?” She looked surprised at the question and turned her head away to frown at the darkening sealine. “Besides,” I went on “just what have you decided?”

But to this her only answer was to beckon me down among the blankets where we lay luxuriously cradled between snore and wake. For much of the night we talked quietly between snatches of sleep. She spoke about a youth spent in Polis—but haphazardly, at a venture. And from these imprecise snatches of dialogue a sort of picture emerged of a childhood full of loneliness like my own, but spent in the sunken gardens of the Seraglio, in the glittering
emptiness
of the harem with its shallow female sensualities. In the summer heats of the old capital she had learned everything there was to be known about the sexual appetites before she reached puberty. Learned and forgotten. Perhaps this was why for her there clung about the act of lovemaking a hollow, disabused quality? I don’t know. She behaved as if her feelings, her private mind, were enclosed in the frailest of eggshells easily smashed by an indiscreet question. I asked her, for example, if her father was still alive; the idle question made her stiff with anxiety. She sat upright like a frightened hare and admonished me savagely for breaking the rule she had made. I must ask Jocas, she said. I had quite a task in calming her.

At dawn, or just after, we heard the purring of the ship and saw the long white furrow lengthening towards the harbour. She bound up her toe in haste. It was time to gather up our gear and leave.
Benedicta
was sunk in deep thought as the horses negotiated the shallow slopes of the hill. At last she said: “When are you going to sign those contracts?” I had completely forgotten their existence, and the question startled me. “I hadn’t really decided to in my own mind. Why, do you want me to?” She considered me gravely from under frowning brows. “It is strange that you should doubt us” she said. “But I don’t,” I protested “my hesitation hasn’t been due to doubts about the validity of the contracts, no. They are overgenerous if it comes to that. No, it was something else. You see, it isn’t easy
because
I am in love with you.” She raised her quirt and struck me across the wrist. “Reflect,” she said “reflect.”