Patrick Chance’s Diary
Tashkara
I’m writing this in a narrow dim room with a wooden floor and a faint scent of sandalwood on the air. Through the window is a view of the jade and ivory palace, infuriatingly remote and impossibly beautiful.
By contrast, I’m in a low-roofed flimsily built structure just beyond the city gates. There’s a table and chair and a kind of rush mat on the floor, and around the walls prance a series of murals that beat anything London’s seamiest brothels ever displayed hands down. Suppose they must be thankas, which is the Tibetan word for the wall paintings that adorn some of the monasteries out here. Apparently a good many thankas are believed to be imbued with such immense power that the lama monks consider them only fit to be exposed on the holiest of holy days. The thankas in here are only fit to be exposed to a roomful of men intent on a bawdy night in a brothel, because they depict several men in astonishing positions with huge cats, most of which I should have thought physically impossible although that might only indicate the paucity of my experience. The men are perpendicular with arousal – the cats are pretty rampant as well – and if the paintings were taken from life it looks as if Fenris hit it square on when he talked about unbridled licentiousness. Halfway around, the pictures change to show a solitary female lying naked on the ground before another of the cat-creatures, plainly waiting to be ravished by it. After that they become progressively more explicit, ending (predictably) with the lady being penetrated, although judging by the size of the beast’s accoutrement, impaled might be a better word. If that’s the legendary Touaris I may have to rearrange my ideas.
All of which forcedly flippant garrulity is designed to put off the moment when I must write down what has actually happened during the last two days, and when I must face how extremely afraid I am. It’s an Englishman’s duty not to show fear under any circumstance, of course, but I’ll bet the Englishman who coined that one was never imprisoned in a stone room with his very own scaffold being built under his window and nothing but painted copulating cats for company! I don’t know yet what these barbarians are going to do to me on that scaffold, but judging by what I’ve seen so far, they won’t be short of ideas.
In the past half-hour the light has begun to fail, and although shadows are stealing across the floor the small bronze lamps in the wall niches have been lit (yak oil again!) and I can see quite well to write this. I’m trying very hard to ignore the shadows, because they’re beginning to look like black disembodied hands, feeling their macabre way across the floor to where I sit. That’s just nerves, of course; they say that prisoners start to imagine things after a time. Maybe I’m succumbing to gaol fever. To wake up inside Newgate would be the greatest relief ever, in fact just to wake up would do.
I’m locked in. That’s the first thing to admit, and it looks just as awful written down as I thought it would.
The locking in was done with immense courtesy – they’re very courteous, the natives of Tashkara – but it was also done with a silent implacability that was absolutely bone-chilling. I’ve no idea where Theodore is: they took him off somewhere, but I suppose he’s locked in as well. And probably indulging in an orgy of I-told-him-so’s. No, that’s unfair; he’ll be worrying himself into apoplexy.
I’ve been allowed my writing things. A small bamboo table was carried in about an hour ago by two men, and arranged under the window. (More of that granite-faced courtesy.) It might have been a concession to a privileged prisoner, but it felt more like the condemned man being given the tools to set down his last wishes. Write it down in a good firm hand that I bequeath my worldly goods to the ladies of London Town and my body to medical research . . . Or should it be the other way about? They’ve angled the table so that as I sit at it I’m looking straight at the last wall painting: the one showing the cat-thing in the very act of ejaculating fountain-like across the unknown lady’s thighs.
As far as I can make out I’m to be taken at midnight to face something called the Punishment of the Decalogue. I haven’t yet discovered what this is, but it sounds extremely severe and it looks regrettably public: for the last two hours the courtyard below my window has echoed to the sounds of hammering, and if I look out I can see a wooden platform being built. It’s that that bears such a sinister resemblance to a scaffold and if I could place any other connotation on it, I would.
Later. The hammering stopped about twenty minutes ago and the resultant silence is brimful of a very unpleasant expectancy. In the privacy of these pages I admit that I’m by now extremely frightened. There’s a sense of growing menace everywhere, and – worst of all – an impression of excited anticipation. Whatever they’re going to do to me they’re going to enjoy it.
I’ve tried the door at five-minute intervals and I’ve tried smashing the lock as well. All to no avail. The only window is the slit-like affair which is halfway up a sheer stone wall and has a drop of forty feet. Six brass Buddhas, wreathed in yak-oil smoke, are watching me with sphinx-like imperturbability from the alcoves, and all round the walls cats are fornicating with humans. How in God’s name did I get into this?
How in God’s name am I going to get out of it?
There are five hours to midnight.
Entering the walled city was easy enough to make us suspicious, particularly Theo, who’s naturally suspicious to begin with.
The walk down the slopes took longer than either of us had expected – distances out here are deceptive; it’s the pure, thin air – and by the time we stood at the gates the sun was sinking behind the peaks and the walled city was plunged into a sullen crimson glow. Theodore shivered, for which I didn’t blame him, although it was unnecessary to say it was like descending into hell and we ought to turn back. I ignored the rest of his doomful utterances, since could not seriously believe in the practice of clay-potting unwary travellers’ heads in ovens, which Theo swore was standard procedure in these situations. Told him he had read too many Rider Haggard novels and had missed his vocation in life: clearly he should be writing adventure stories for bloodthirsty youths of fifteen.
But when we found that the city gates were ajar, even I stopped in my tracks. We glanced uneasily at one another, but at last, I said, ‘I dare say it doesn’t mean anything other than that they’re always happy to receive travellers.’
‘No, but people who go to the trouble of walling a city and building huge gates to keep the world out don’t normally leave those gates open for enterprising enemies to stroll in,’ said Theo. ‘But still, since we’ve come this far we may as well go on.’
Beyond the gates it was like a small town. There were various buildings, all plainly used for different purposes. Some were quite grand, as if they were occupied by the elite of the community, others were so far from grand as to be shanty-like. Dotted here and there were small temples, each with the characteristic tiered pagoda roof, some with tiny doll-like bell towers. A roughish road wound its way into the city, and as we set foot on it we both felt that we were being watched. The stupa on the palace and on several of the temples are painted with the flat enigmatic eyes intended to symbolise Buddha looking out on the four corners of the world, but as Theo and I entered the forbidden city it felt more as if the eyes were thinking: be blowed to the four corners of the world, let’s concentrate on this pair of adventurers. It was very disconcerting.
By tacit agreement we made for the jade and ivory palace, on the grounds that if Touaris existed at all, she probably existed inside it. Also, I was damned if I was going to get into a forbidden city and then be satisfied with plundering and raiding shanties. If there was any plundering going to be done, it might as well be done in the palace.
‘Although God alone knows what’s in there,’ said Theo, staring up at its soaring walls and pavilion roofs. His tone suggested he would not be surprised to find that the palace housed an army of blood-quaffing murderers still smeared in the gore of their victims, or devil worshippers dancing naked under the full moon.
Once or twice we thought we glimpsed movements, and once Theo stopped dead and turned to peer into the shadows.
‘What’s the matter? What can you hear?’
‘Nothing. There’s no one there.’
‘Well, that’s all right then. And no one’s come out to challenge us, have you noticed that?’
‘I had noticed it, Patrick,’ said Theo. (There may well have been a note of sarcasm in his tone.)
It was getting dark by this time and only the occasional flicker of light from the various buildings enabled us to see our way. It was absurd to find ourselves trying to avoid the stupa’s eyes, but we did. It was mad in the extreme to imagine that the eyes followed us, or that they flashed messages to one another across the pointed rooftops: The intruders are entering your territory now . . . Bait the traps, tighten the tripwires, dig the pits . . . Get ready, they’re almost with you . . .
I started to play that ridiculous childhood game: if we can reach the building on the corner without being seen we shall be all right. And then if we can get past the high wall on the left and not be challenged, we shall be safe.
We were nearing the palace compound, and I was just saying: and if we can cross that inner courtyard we shall be safe, when I caught a slithering movement from the nearest rooftop. I stopped dead and looked up, and the next minute a thick grey net, like a huge mosquito net, was dropped over me.
I fought wildly, but the more I struggled the more entangled I became. The impression of having been neatly and efficiently staked out and captured, in the manner of big-game hunters capturing wild animals, darted unpleasantly across my mind.
Something rapped me sharply across the head with the same neat efficiency, and the last thing I heard was Theo shouting my name before I crumpled into unconsciousness.
I have absolutely no idea of how long it was before I fought back to awareness.
There was a slight dull headache from whatever had hit me, but the smothering layers of net seemed to have vanished, and I was lying on a warm and very comfortable bed. I opened my eyes.
I will admit that I had only a quarter believed Fenris’s tales of a vaguely immortal cat goddess and her four score female attendants and I had certainly not given much credence to the veiled hints about licentious ceremonies. But unless I was still unconscious, or unless someone had secretly fed me De Quincey’s opium or Shakespeare’s poppy and all the drowsy syrups of the world, it looked as if I had tumbled straight into Touaris’s lair, or at least that of the handmaidens. And a lair thick with fleshly lusts it was.
(Should here mention that although I might have been drugged then, I’m not drugged now, and I can state with absolute surety that that place was so brimful of sexuality and sensuousness that the very air throbbed.)
The room was long and low-ceilinged, and firelight cast eerie shadows on the walls so that in those first moments of consciousness it felt as if I had tumbled into some kind of subterranean hell.
But hell and its fire-drenched caverns were presumably never furnished with silken cushions strewn about the floor or with low velvet-covered divans. And hell never had the drifting, quarter-soothing, three-quarters-exciting scent of musk and sandalwood and of warm soft femininity.
The leaping firelight came not from conventional brick hearths in the wall, but from scooped-out holes in the floor so that they burned at the room’s centre, the smoke spiralling upwards into smoke-holes cut in the ceiling. Slender sinuous female forms moved in and out of the warm slumberous glow. After a few moments I raised myself carefully on one elbow and looked around. There was no sign of Theodore, but the room was peopled by ten or twelve females, all of them young, all of them extremely good-looking. And all of them watching me.
Now I have no idea what anyone else would do in that situation, but in my defence certain things should be taken into account.
To begin with, I had been netted in a kind of giant fishing net and knocked unconscious, so that I was slightly confused and a bit dizzy. On this count alone I was completely at the mercy of my saviours. (Apologise for any biblical connotation that may be inferred here, and stress NO religious context meant.)
On a second count, if I was not precisely fed opium or mandragora, I was certainly given some extremely strong (and very delicious) wine.
Finally (and I do feel that here we reach the real crux of the matter), all of the ten or twelve females were so scantily clad they might as well have been naked.
Some of them were curled into graceful heaps before the fire, blinking in the warmth and occasionally sipping wine from jewelled goblets, and some of them were padding about the room on little bare feet. They were astonishingly alike: all with black silky hair, growing rather low on their brow and worn loose about their shoulders, and they were dressed in the thinnest of white gowns and nothing else. When they passed in front of the fire the gowns might as well have been transparent, and speaking as someone who cut his sexual teeth on laced corselets (extraordinarily complicated to remove those things, never mind getting tangled up in the lacing), it was loin-stiffeningly erotic. If these were the mythical four score handmaidens of Touaris the myth might have exaggerated the numbers, but it had not overrated the attractions.
Their faces were paler than most European girls, and although they had the slanting cheekbones of the East, they had large black-fringed green eyes and short curving upper lips. Like cats. The simile was impossible to avoid.
They bent over me, offering sweet potent wine and bringing bowls of warm scented water for cleansing. It was immensely soothing but it was also immensely arousing to lie in the glow of the firelight, the heady scents of the room washing over my body, feeling little silk hands, like velvet paws caressing my skin . . . I challenge anyone, short of an octogenarian Trappist monk, to find himself stripped of his clothes and washed by six half-naked females, all plainly hellbent on seduction, and not respond in the most basic of ways.
Even so, I did not give way all at once, in fact I tried quite strenuously to resist. I certainly tried to think what might have happened to Theo and what I had better do about it, and whether there was any way in which I could communicate with these people.
But after about ten minutes of intimate exploration by those velvet-skinned hands (to say nothing of being within prick-ing distance of the sensuous gleaming thighs), Theo was relegated to the back of my mind . . .
I didn’t manage the entire twelve.
What I did manage was a very energetic five hours, starting off with a stand as rampant as any I ever had in my life, which took about five hours to gradually dwindle to wrung-out impotency.
It was intriguing, as well, to discover that it was perfectly possible to caress between the thighs of two females with my hands – one on each side, one hand to each – while a third bestrode me, and not lose any synchronisation of movement. That experience on the railcar earlier must have helped, or perhaps I simply have a natural sense of rhythm.
By the time dawn was lightening the low-ceilinged room, that portion of my body which is the most sensitive, was as raw as if it had been flayed with sandpaper and was clearly going to need several hours (if not an entire day) to recover. Some of the blame for this must be laid at the door of my companions who continued their attempts to coax a final few drops of passion, long after it must have been obvious that the last drops had been shed, and very agonisingly too, towards the end. However, I’d be interested to know how the achievements of Giovanni Casanova compare, because I refuse to believe anyone capable of making love satisfactorily to twelve women in five hours.
I had fallen into an exhausted sleep when there was a commotion outside, and the sound of marching feet and sharp commands in an unfamiliar tongue. The girls leaped up in panic and huddled into a corner of the room, chattering in terror and clutching one another. Plainly something castigatory was about to take place, and from the look of them it was going to take a very unpleasant form.
I grabbed my discarded clothes and scrambled into most of them – it’s an Englishman’s duty not to be caught naked in ladies’ bedchambers, no matter how bizarre the bedchamber or willing the ladies – and was fastening my trousers when the door was summarily flung open.
Eight men stood there, all of them armed with glinting wickedly sharp spears.
The armed men half dragged, half carried me out to a dawn-washed square, which seemed to be at the centre of the jade and ivory palace, and thrust me unceremoniously before four more of the black-haired men, who were standing in the courtyard’s centre with the palace behind them. Four sets of stupa eyes looked down.
There was a rather nasty air of hasty tribunal about the whole thing, and cold fear began to churn in the pit of my stomach: What had until now been a hazardous but intriguing adventure was beginning to slide into something very much darker and very much more frightening. I wondered if it was unreasonably optimistic to hope that Theo might have escaped.
All of the men bore a strong resemblance to the ladies in the firelit room – the black, low-growing hair appears to be a strong racial characteristic among them: it’s rather attractive but combined with the lean sinuous build it gives them an uncanny resemblance to huge cats, and it was the most unnerving experience in the world to be hauled before four men who looked as if they might bound forward on all fours at any minute and savage me. What was worse was that they looked as if they would enjoy savaging me. The cold knot of fear tightened.
I marked their leader out before he spoke. He radiated such authority that the air about his head positively sizzled and I was not in the least surprised when he stepped forward to address me. His teeth were slightly prolonged, and the upper ones were discernibly pointed.
Incredibly, he had a smattering of English. I won’t reproduce the vicissitudes we had to resort to in order to understand one another, or attempt to describe the sign language employed to reach precise meanings, because if an author’s licence is permissible anywhere, it’s permissible here. So I will simply set down the approximate gist of the conversation.
There was some kind of ceremonious exchange of bows – our version of a handshake, probably – and then the man, whose name is apparently Tamerlane after some long-ago conqueror of Samarkand, said, ‘You have entered the sanctum of Touaris’s handmaidens and violated them.’
I thought this was a bit much, since any violating had been instigated by the handmaidens themselves, and I said so, quite forcibly. I’m aware that this is contrary to all laws of chivalry which decree that gentlemen don’t kiss and tell (and certainly don’t fornicate and tell), but these things shouldn’t be carried to excess and chivalry is no good to anyone in the face of four savage-looking gaolers, to say nothing of eight guards brandishing spears.
I also pointed out that if Tamerlane’s people don’t want guests they shouldn’t leave their city gates open and unattended, and that in my country the laying of mantraps is against the law. (Think I may have been on shaky ground there, but Tamerlane unlikely to be familiar with the niceties of English law.)
‘The handmaidens will be punished according to our law,’ he said. ‘They are allowed to take prisoners, but they are required to bring them all to me.’ He paused. ‘They are greedy and selfish, and they are aware of the punishment.’
‘Well, could I be aware of it as well, please?’
Tamerlane studied me and then said, ‘They will be brought to the Burning Altar at midnight.’ His hard green eyes glittered like bits of glass, and the thin cruel smile curved his lips, reminding me unpleasantly of the sharp long teeth. ‘As for you, English traveller,’ he said softly, ‘you, also, will be brought to the Burning Altar at midnight.’
‘Why?’ I said, with more insolence than I was actually feeling.
‘You have offended against the Decalogue,’ said Tamerlane. ‘You have intruded into our city, and you have sinned against the Eighth Stone of Treachery and Betrayal. Because of that, you will suffer the punishment graven thereon.’
He nodded to the spear-carriers and I was taken away from the square.
I have set my watch on the edge of the table and I’m watching the minutes tick away. It’s like one of those dreadful timing devices where thin sand trickles slowly but inexorably from one glass funnel into another.
Just over one hour remains until I’m to be taken out to face the punishment of the Eighth Stone Tablet, and God alone knows what it’ll be. Cannot decide if it would be better to know, or if ignorance until the last moment is preferable.
There’s still no sign of Theo, and I’m torn between hoping he managed to escape and wishing he were here with me. (This last utterly selfish, but true. I never felt so alone in my life.)
I can see the scaffold structure quite clearly, because Tamerlane’s people have set blazing torches all around the square, and the flames are washing over the palace walls, drenching the entire building with leaping flames. The glow is tinting the night sky, and it’s as if we’re at the centre of a huge bloody wound that’s leaking its gore upwards into the darkness— No, I daren’t think like that!
The guards are bringing out what looks like an immense table, easily ten feet square and covered with vivid scarlet and jade silk that ripples gently in the night air, so that there’s the impression of unnatural life under the silk. I find this unspeakably sinister. Hell and the devil, I find the entire thing so utterly terrifying that I don’t know how I’m managing to write this down!
The square is lined with wooden seats – had not noticed them when I faced Tamerlane, but they’re three and four deep and set around the edges in tiers like the auditorium of a theatre.
Fifteen minutes to go, and something’s happening.
About five minutes ago I became aware of dozens of human voices intoning a rhythmic chant and from my window I made out the flickering lights of a torch procession: a line of people walking slowly through the palace, each one carrying either a candle or a small burning cresset that spilled light through the palace windows. As they approached my heart began to beat erratically.
And then they were pouring into the square, through a door at the far side, chanting as they came: appearing in pairs but separating as they emerged, the men taking seats on the left, the women on the right. Tamerlane’s people – for all I know, Touaris’s people as well – the cruel beautiful dark-haired tribe of the forbidden city, all assembling to see the punishment of the Decalogue dealt to the English intruder.
I haven’t counted them but there must be at least a hundred and fifty. They’re all in place now, and the chant’s filling up the whole palace: a dark mesmeric rise and fall of human voices that thuds sickeningly against your mind and rakes at your senses. Somewhere within it is a soft steady drumbeat and I’m dreadfully afraid that it’s a death knell.
Two minutes to midnight and I can hear footsteps approaching along the passage outside.
The guards are coming for me.