Yearn by Tobsha Learner Read Free Book Online Page A

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which I recognized from the cloak of a man I had been introduced to as a priest: a distinctive design of strips and crosses. Upon our approach the young man lit a low burner of incense and began chanting, rocking backward and forward. The girl knelt slowly on the edge of the blanket, her knees placed carefully on two points of the pattern.
    Otheothea turned to me: “She is for you. She is part of the magic. The four of us will make a window of pleasure, and together our joy will join to wake the Earth Lizard and he will give me the eyes of my enemy for half a day.”
    At the time I thought I had misinterpreted her intention, a meaning lost in translation. But when she placed my hands on the oiled breasts of the young girl, and she herself had straddled the lap of the priest, the nature of this magic ritual was apparent.
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    An ember suddenly crackled in the hearth, startling the young biographer, absorbed as he was by the detailed description of the ritual. It was almost as if Banks had written the account as a set of instructions left, if not for himself, for posterity. Even if he had hidden the journal it was evident to D’Arcy that some part of Banks must have assumed its discovery sooner or later, otherwise why had he not destroyed the pages, or even not written them at all? It was a moral argument the biographer allowed himself to be pursued by.
    D’Arcy stared into the fire. It was as if the four figures themselves danced amid the flames, bronze skin gleaming as buttock pounded into buttock, breast against breast, Banks’s pale figure embraced by both man and woman—all abandoned to an instinctive animal force greater than the conventions of both D’Arcy’s era and that of the late eighteenth century. This transcended the rationality of modern man. Gripped by inspiration, D’Arcy could hardly breathe. It was a powerful and seductive vision. He returned to his reading. The next two pages provided a detailed account of the ritual itself, involving an elaborate orgy the movement of which appeared to be so highly choreographed that the four participants would reach orgasm simultaneously, the intent being (as far as D’Arcy could ascertain) that the energy of this sexual climax would then channel directly into the truth-seeker, who had hung about his or her body objects belonging to the person she/he wished to see through the eyes of. In the ritual described by Banks it was locks of hair, and some beads that belonged to the woman his native “wife” had accused.
    Afterward Banks wrote of his skepticism, but also of his intense pleasure in witnessing such a ritual. Then came the last paragraph, the content of which fascinated the young biographer almost as much as the sexual acts so beautifully and lyrically portrayed.
    I had dismissed the whole event as an excuse for the usual indulgence of the senses these people (as innocent as children) so delighted in, and had just decided to regard my involvement as a delightful memoir I might return to when age and infirmity had made such pleasures unobtainable when Otheothea who, up until that moment, had been lying quietly beside me, seemed to go into an apoplexy. Her eyes rolled up into her head and she began to shake wildly. I could not bring her to her senses. This went on for just under an hour until, as swiftly as it had begun, the paroxysms ceased. Sitting up and smiling peacefully, the native girl appeared to have returned to her normal self. “I have been with her, Joseph, I have seen through her eyes and she is guilty.”
    After these words she insisted I accompany her to the hut of her enemy, gathering witnesses along the way. Upon arrival, despite violent protests from the accused, Otheothea went straight to a wooden chest in the corner and opened it. Hidden inside were the stolen fruits and crops. The location of the chest was not obvious, and neither were the crops hidden within. And