Masque by Bethany Pope Read Free Book Online Page A

as someone exchanged my body for his coins. I heard the grunts and sputters of a camel being mounted, heard the crash of whip on hide, and then I was dragged, mercifully, out of the beating sun and into some shade.
    â€˜Let’s see what I’ve bought, then.’ The Spaniard knelt above my bag; I felt his shadow severing the light. ‘Don’t move more than you must, or I’ll add to your ugliness with my blade.’
    He drew a section of the burlap taut and pierced it with a long, curved knife. It was the first solid thing that I had seen in several days. It looked so beautiful, so powerful, shining. I imprinted on it like a duck fresh from the egg. He widened the hole, using his enormous rough hands to tear the slit. I spared a thought of pity for his wife, his animals.
    He drew me out by the shoulders, cursing and gagging as he freed my bloody body from the sack. ‘Santa María, Madre de Dios, ruega por nosotros, pecadores, ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte.’ He left my body on a pile of straw and turned away to vomit, looking at me long enough to say, ‘I was not cheated. Creature, you live, and you’re guaranteed to terrify the marks.’
    I was too weak and angry to reply to this. It was all I could do to lie gasping in the straw. I felt like a fish, dying in a creel among the dried waterweed. Luckily, he did not appear to need any help in conversation. He continued, brushing my blood on to his poorly cured leather trousers and using those same filthy fingers to straighten his vest, ‘The only question, as I see it, is are you too ugly? Will you fascinate as well as horrify?’
    I glared at him, noticing for the first time that the straw I lay on was piled in the centre of a garish-painted tiger cage. I was already a captive. He was standing now, supporting his bearish bulk on one of the rusted iron bars. He nudged me with the cracked toe of his black boot. ‘You are always naked? Do you ever wear clothes?’
    I pushed myself up on to my elbows. It was all I could manage. Almost all. I spoke to him in my own language, ‘I have been accustomed to fine garments, Monsieur. I regret that you do not see me at my best at this moment.’
    â€˜It speaks. French! And in an educated accent.’ His grin was wide, leering. ‘Your garments (as you say) will hardly be fine here, but I will see that you have something to cover yourself with. After all, there will be ladies in our audience. Some of them young, and too innocent to be traumatised by that thing between your legs.’ He stooped to look closer. Had I any strength, I would happily have killed him. ‘One part of you is man, at least.’
    He laughed again, spat over his left shoulder. On his way out the door I asked for food to eat, water to drink and wash myself with.
    â€˜You will have food enough, I’m sure. I sell vegetables and other things for the crowd to throw, and as for water, I will bring some. You may wash, or drink. Really, I hope that you will drink. A wild man, a primordial monster, should stink a little.’
    He was as good as his word. That night the gates of the carnival opened and the crowds came in. I endured a hell that I never thought that I could speak of. It cost me something to survive as long as I did, something valuable that I am sure I will never recover. I was lucky to escape with my mind.
    It was seven years before I met my master again, though I had long since finished thinking of him in those terms. He wandered, by chance, into the carnival as we cruised the coast of Nice after a four-year tour of Italy. Wandering through the lines of cages, jostled by the crowds, he recognised my voice at once. I was sitting in a pile of dross on the floor of my cage (it had never been cleaned, there were bones everywhere) dressed in a tattered brown loincloth. It had once been white. My face was exposed, but Monsieur Garnier had never been made to look at it. He would