Masque by Bethany Pope Read Free Book Online

the six-month journey to the palace, ‘It’s like grasping at a rotted toad.’
    The hands clamped all the tighter for wanting to let go. I tried to scream, only to feel my mouth filled with wood, a bar to bite down on. My foreman spoke in rough accents, ‘I know, my friend, but think of the gold.’
    I tried to fight as they peeled away the last of my gauze. I am very strong, much stronger than I look, but they had me securely. I was helpless as they saw my shame.
    â€˜My god, it’s a living corpse. You were right about the stench … this jinn will bring us better than a few old coppers.’
    My former foreman smiled with his toothless gums, ripping my robes to reveal my poor flesh, so that he held my naked form. ‘Yes, but first we must get it to our buyers. I can’t do that, if I have to look at it.’
    Had I been free, I would have bitten his nose off. At least I had the teeth to do the job. It might have improved his disposition.
    That was when they bundled my stripped body into that burlap sack. The rough fibres peeled my skin like an onion so that the fabric felt slicked with my brownish-red blood. I began to feel myself letting go of myself and found a brief relief in madness.
    5.
    I do not know how long the journey lasted, the days slid into one another, differentiated only by subtle differences in light and motion (the movement of the sack I was suspended in seemed to slow in darkness – it never stilled). The heat was unmitigated. I cannot describe what it was like to be suspended for so long in that scabbed chrysalis. My skin has always been delicate, fragile; it scraped off in strips like the half-solid rind that forms on cool cream soup. Days of beating sun spoiled the tatters so that I smelled like the corpse of the evil king in the Book of Judges who Ehud stabbed through the bowels. Say what you will about those Sisters, my time with the nuns proved useful in the end – if only through providing me with metaphors.
    My mouth dried, my eyes ached, parching in my skull; they felt raw and dry through closed lids. My temples throbbed and my throat ached with the acid residue of vomit. I only lived because some member of the party at whose mercy I was travelling decided that it would be more profitable to deliver living cargo to their clients, and not a desiccated mummy. Once a day I felt the joy of water as someone poured a bucket of brackish washing water over the burlap which encased me. This action also provided me with my first clue about my method of transport. The stench of wet camel is unmistakable.
    I do not know if I was still held captive by my foreman and his coolie; I suspect not. They would want to clear themselves of suspicion – Garnier, at least, would be looking for me. The Shah might seek me out as well. He would not wish to leave his stately pleasure drome in unfinished ruins. No one else could satisfactorily complete it. No, the foreman probably sold me on that very evening, allowing a travelling merchant to take a cut of his profit in return for allowing him to show himself bright and early at the work site, clearing himself of suspicion and adding his regular pay-cheque to his other illicit takings.
    In any case, the foreman was not present when the journey ended. I felt myself lifted from the camel, still encased in the sack. I heard a rough voice, bellowing curses in Spanish, saying, ‘Ay Dios Mio, what a stench! Are you sure it is not dead? We don’t pay for corpses, Mr Chinky.’
    Another voice, disgruntled, answered. ‘If you don’t believe me, give it a kick. It will whimper for you.’
    I knew enough to wriggle before the Spaniard took him up on it. I moved very lightly, knowing well enough by then that I was no butterfly, that this pupa could never be shed by my own power. My strength was greatly reduced by starvation.
    I had the dubious pleasure of listening to their laughter, and hear the familiar clink of gold