The Watched Page 5

  X

  Ordier marched into his house and slammed the door behind him. He went out to the patio, and sat down on the cushions scattered across the sun-warmed paving stones. A bird fluttered away from where it had been perched on the grapevine, and Ordier glanced up. The verandah, the patio, the rooms of the house… they all had their undetected scintillas, making his home into a stage for an unseen audience. The uncertainties remained, and Luovi’s brief, unwelcome visit had only added to them. He was hot and breathless from running after the woman; so he stripped off his clothes and swam for a few minutes in the pool. Afterwards, he paced to and fro on the patio, trying to marshal his thoughts and replace ambiguity with certainty. He was unsuccessful. The unmarked scintillas: he had almost convinced himself that they were being planted by the Qataari, but the possibility remained that someone else was responsible. Jenessa: according to Luovi she had deceived him, according to his instincts she had not. (Ordier still trusted her, but Luovi had succeeded in placing a doubt in his mind.) The trip to Muriseay: Parren had gone to Muriseay (today? or two days ago?) to charter an aircraft, or to collect the monitoring equipment. But according to Luovi the aircraft had already done its work; would this have been carried out before Parren had his decoding equipment ready? Luovi: where was she now? Was she returning to the town, or was she somewhere along the ridge? Jenessa, again: where was she now? Had she gone to the ferry, was she at her office, or was she returning to his house? The folly: how much did Luovi know about his visits to the hidden cell? And what did she mean about the folly being built for something “in the first place”? Did she know more about it and its past than he did? Why was there an observation cell in the wall, with its clear view across the valley?

  All these were the new doubts, the additional ones for which he had Luovi to thank; the others, the major ones, remained. The Qataari: did he watch them, or did they watch him? The Qataari girl: was he a free observer of her, hidden and unsuspected, or was he a chosen participant playing a crucial role in the development of the ritual? In his perplexity of free will and contradiction, Ordier knew that paradoxically it was the Qataari ritual and the girl that provided the only certainty. He was convinced that if he went to the folly and placed his eyes to the crack in the wall, then for whatever reason or combination of reasons, the girl would be there waiting… and the ritual would recommence. And he knew that the choice was his: he need never again climb up to the cell in the wall. Without further thought, Ordier went into the house, found his binoculars, and started to climb up the slope of the ridge toward the folly. He went a short distance, then turned back, pretending to himself that he was exercising his freedom of choice. In fact, he was collecting his scintilla detector, and as soon as he had the instrument under his arm he left the house again and climbed toward the courtyard gate. He reached the bottom of the folly wall in a few minutes, then went quickly up the steps to his hidden cell. Before he went inside he put down the detector and used his binoculars to scan the countryside around his house. The track leading toward town was deserted, and there was not even any drifting dust to show that a car might have driven along it in the last few minutes. He searched along the parts of the ridge visible from here, looking for Luovi, but where he had last spoken to her was an area dotted with high, free-standing boulders, and he could see no sign of her. In the distance, the town lay in the hot, pellucid air, seeming still and abandoned. Ordier stepped back, squeezed between the two projecting slabs, and went through into the cell. At once he was assailed by the sickly pungent fragrance of Qataari roses; it was a smell he associated with the girl, the valley, the ritual, and it seemed subtly illicit, sexually provocative. He put his binoculars on the shelf and opened the scintilla detector. He paused before switching it on, frightened of what he might find. If there were scintillas here, inside the cell, then he would know beyond any doubt that the Qataari had been observing him. He pulled the antenna to its full height and threw the switch… and at once the loudspeaker gave out a deafening electronic howl that faded almost at once to silence. Ordier, whose hand had leaped back reflexively from the device, touched the directional antenna and shook the instrument, but no further sound came from it. He turned off the switch, wondering what was wrong. He took the detector into the sunlight and turned on the switch again. In addition to the audible signal there were several calibrated dials on the side which registered the presence and distance of detected scintillas, but these all stayed at zero. The speaker remained silent. Ordier shook the instrument, but the circuits stayed dead. He let out a noisy breath in exasperation, knowing that the detector had worked the last time he used it. When he checked the batteries, Ordier found that they were dead. He cursed himself for forgetting, and put the detector on the steps. It was useless, and another uncertainty had appeared. Was his cell seeded with scintillas, or wasn’t it? That sudden burst of electronic noise: was it the dying gasp of the batteries, or had the instrument actually been registering the presence of scintillas in the last microsecond of the batteries’ power? He returned to the claustrophobic cell, and picked up his binoculars. Qataari rose petals lay thickly on the slab where he normally stood, and as he stepped forward to the crack in the wall Ordier saw that more petals lay there, piled so thickly that the aperture was all but blocked. Not caring whether they fell back into his cell or out into the valley, Ordier brushed them away and shuffled his feet to kick them from the slab. The fragrance rose around him like pollen, and as he breathed it he felt a heady sensation: arousal, excitement, intoxication. He tried to remember the first time he had found petals here in the cell. There had been a strong, gusting wind; they could have blown in through the slit by chance. But last night? Had there been a wind? He could not remember. Ordier shook his head, trying to think clearly. There had been all the confusions of the morning, then Luovi. The dead batteries. The perfumed petals. It seemed, in the suffocating darkness of the cell, that events were being contrived by greater powers to confuse and disorientate him. If those powers existed, he knew whose they were. As if it were a light seen wanly through a mist, Ordier focused on the knowledge and blundered mentally toward it. The Qataari had been watching him all along. He had been selected, he had been placed in this cell, he had been meant to watch. Every movement in this cell, every indrawn breath and muttered word, every voyeuristic intent and response and thought… they had all been monitored by the Qataari. They were decoded and analyzed, and tested against their actions, and the Qataari behaved according to their interpretations.

  He had become a scintilla to the Qataari. Ordier gripped a piece of rock jutting out from the wall, and tried to steady himself. He could feel himself swaying, as if his thoughts were a palpable force that could dislodge him from the cell. It was madness. That first day he had found the cell, the very beginning. He had been concealed , and the Qataari had been unaware of him. He had watched the Qataari, the realization of the nature of his stolen privilege growing in him slowly. He had watched the girl moving through the rosebushes, plucking the flowers and tossing them into the pannier on her back. She had been one among dozens of others. He had said nothing, except with his thoughts, and the Qataari had not noticed. The rest was chance and coincidence… it had to be. Reassured, Ordier leaned forward and pressed his forehead against the slab of rock above the slit. He looked downward, into the circular arena below.

  XI

  It was as if nothing had changed. The Qataari were waiting for him. The girl lay back on the carpet of rose petals, the red toga loose and revealing across her body. There was the same crescent of pale aureole, the same few strands of pubic hair. The man who had kicked her was standing back, looking down at her with his shoulders hunched, and stroking himself at the top of his legs. The others stood around: the two women who had thrown the petals and bared their bodies, and the men who had been chanting. The restoration of the scene was so perfect, as if the image of his memory had been photographed and reconstructed so no detail should be omitted, that Ordier felt a shadow of the guilt
that had followed his spontaneous ejaculation. He raised his binoculars and looked at the girl’s face. Her eyes, although half closed, were looking directly at him. Her expression too was identical: the abandonment of sexual anticipation, or satisfaction. It was as if he was seeing the next frame of a film being inched through a projector-gate. Fighting the feeling of associative guilt, Ordier stared down at the girl, meeting her gaze, marveling at her beauty and the sensuality in her face. He felt a tightness in his crotch, a new tumescence. The girl moved suddenly, shaking her head from side to side, and at once the ritual continued. Four of the men stepped forward from the circle, picking up long ropes that had been coiled at the base of four of the statues. As they moved towards the girl, the men unraveled the ropes and Ordier saw that the other ends were tied around the bases of the statues. At the same time, the two women found their panniers of rose petals and came forward with them. The others began a chant. In the rose plantation beyond, the Qataari were moving about their tasks, tending and plucking and watering. Ordier was suddenly aware of them, as if they too had been waiting, as if they too were a part of the ritual. The girl was being tied by her wrists and ankles, the ropes knotted tightly and roughly around her limbs: her arms were stretched, her legs were forced wide open. She made no apparent struggle against this, but continued to writhe in the petals in the way she had done from the start, and as her arms and legs were tied, her movements changed to a circling of her pelvic girdle, a slow rotation of her head. The garment was working loose from her body; for an instant Ordier saw a small breast revealed, the nipple as pink as the petals being thrown across her, but one of the men with the ropes moved across her, and when he stepped back, she was covered again. Through all this—the tying of the ropes, the throwing of the petals—the solitary man stood before her, working his hand across his genitals, waiting and watching. When the last rope was tied the men withdrew, and as they did so, the chanting came to a sudden end. All the men, except the one central to the ritual, walked away from the arena, toward the plantation, toward the distant Qataari camp. The women showered petals, the man stood erect, the spread-eagled girl writhed helplessly in the hold of the ropes. The flowers were drifting down across her like snow, and soon only her face was uncovered. As the girl pulled against the ropes, Ordier could see the petals heaving with her struggles, could see the ropes flexing and jerking. At last her struggles ceased, and she stared upward again. Looking at her through the binoculars. Ordier saw that in spite of her violent writhing, the girl’s face was at ease and her eyes were wide open. Saliva brightened her cheeks and jaw, and her face had a healthy, ruddy flush to it, as if reflecting the color of the flowers. Beneath the petals, her chest was rising and falling quickly, as if she was breathless. Once more she was seeming to look directly back at Ordier, her expression knowing and seductive. The stilling of her body signaled the next development, as if the victim of the ritual was also its director, because no sooner was she staring lasciviously upward than the man who stood before her bent down. He reached into the heap of petals and took a hold on one of the red panels of the girl’s toga. He tore it away, throwing into the air a cloud of swirling petals. Ordier, looking down, thought he saw a glimpse of the girl’s body revealed beneath, but the petals drifted too densely above her, and the women were throwing more, covering the nakedness so briefly revealed. Another piece of the dress was torn away; more petals flew. Then another piece of fabric, and another. The last one came away with difficulty; this was the piece beneath the girl, and as the man snatched it away, the girl’s body bucked against the constraint of the ropes, and bare knees and arms, a naked shoulder, heaved momentarily from the mound of petals. Ordier watched as more and more of the petals were poured on top of her, completely covering her; the women no longer threw the petals with their hands, but up-ended their panniers, and let the scarlet flowers fall on her like liquid. As the petals fell, the man knelt beside the girl and shaped and smoothed them over with his hands. He patted them down over her body, heaped them over her arms and legs, pushed them into her mouth. Soon it was finished. It seemed to Ordier, from his position above, that the girl lay beneath and at the center of a smooth lake of petals, laid so that no hint of the shape of her body was revealed. Only her eyes were uncovered. The man and the two women stepped out of the arena and walked away, heading for the distant camp. Ordier lowered his binoculars, and saw that throughout the plantation the work had stopped. The Qataari were leaving the valley, returning to their homes behind the dark canvas screens of the encampment, and leaving the girl alone in the arena. Ordier looked down at her again, using the binoculars. She was staring back at him, and the invitation was explicit. All he could see of her were her eyes, placid and alert and yearning, watching him through the gap the man had left in the covering of roses.

  There was a darkening around her eyes, like the shadows left by grief. As her steady gaze challenged and beckoned him, Ordier, partially drugged by the narcotic fragrance of the roses, saw a familiarity in the girl’s eyes that froze all sense of mystery. That bruising of the skin, that confident stare… Ordier gazed back at her for several minutes, and the longer he looked, the more convinced he became that he was staring into the eyes of Jenessa.

  XII

  Intoxicated by the roses, sexually aroused by their fragrance, Ordier fell back from the slit in the wall and lurched outside. The brilliance of the sunlight, the heat of its rays, took him by surprise and he staggered on the narrow steps. He regained his balance by resting one hand against the main wall of the folly, then went past his discarded detector and began to walk down the steps toward the ground. Halfway down was another narrow ledge, running across the wall as far as the end of the folly, and Ordier walked precariously along this, obsessed with the urgency of his needs. At the end of the ledge he was able to climb down to the top of the wall which surrounded the folly’s courtyard, and once on top of this he could see the rocks and broken boulders of the ridge a short distance below. He jumped, landing heavily across the face of a boulder. He grazed a hand and took a knock on one knee, but apart from being slightly winded, he was unhurt. He crouched for a few seconds, recovering.

  A stiff breeze was blowing through the valley and along the ridge, and as Ordier’s breathing steadied, he felt his head clearing. At the same time, with an indefinable sense of regret, he felt his arousal dying too. A moment of the free will he had accorded himself that morning had returned. No longer driven by the enigmatic stimulations of the Qataari ritual, Ordier realized that it was now in his power to abandon the quest. He could scramble somehow down the broken slabs of the ridge, and return to his house. He could see Jenessa, who might be there and wondering where he was. He could seek out Luovi, and apologize to her, and try to find an explanation for Jacj’s apparent or actual movements. He could resume the life he had led until this summer, before the day he had found the cell. He could forget the Qataari girl, and all that she meant to him, and never return to the folly. So he crouched on the boulder, trying to be clear in his mind. But there was something he could not resolve by walking away. It was the certain knowledge that the next time he looked through the crack in the folly wall—whether it was tomorrow, or in a year’s time, or in half a century’s time—he would see a bed of Qataari rose petals, and staring back at him would be the bruised eyes of a lovely girl, waiting for him and reminding him of Jenessa.

  XIII

  Ordier climbed clumsily down the last overhanging boulder, fell to the scree beneath, and skidded down in a cloud of dust and grit to the sandy floor of the valley. He stood up, and the gaunt height of the folly loomed beside and above him. He knew there was no one about, because as he had been climbing down the rocks he had had a perfect view to all sides. There were no guards visible along the ridge, no other Qataari anywhere. The breeze blew through the deserted rose plantation, and far away, on the other side of the valley, the screens around the camp hung heavy and gray. The encircling statues of the arena lay ahead of him, and Ordier walked slowly tow
ard them, excited again and apprehensive. As he approached, he could see the mound of petals and could smell the heady perfume from them. Here in the shadow of the folly the breeze had little effect, and barely stirred the surface of the mound. Now he was at ground level he saw that the petals had not been smoothed to a flat surface above the girl, but that they lay irregularly and deeply. Ordier hesitated when he came to the nearest of the statues. It was, by chance, one of those to which the ropes had been tied, and he saw the rough fibered rope stretching tautly across to the mound of petals, vanishing into it. A reason for his hesitation was a sudden self-consciousness, a need for guidance. If he had interpreted the actions of the Qataari correctly, he had been tacitly invited to relinquish his hiding place, and to enter the ritual. But what was expected of him now? Should he walk across to the girl in the petals and introduce himself? Should he stand before her as the man had done? Should he rape her? Should he untie her? He looked around again, helplessly, hoping for some clue as to what to do. All these possibilities were open to him, and more, but he was aware again of the way his freedom was created by the actions of others. He was free to act as he wished, and yet whatever he did would have been preordained by the mysterious, omniscient power of the Qataari. He was free to go, but if he did, it would have been determined that this would be his choice; he was free to throw aside the petals and ravish the girl, for that too had been predetermined. So he stood uncertainly by the statue, breathing the dangerous sweetness of the roses, feeling again the rise of sexual desire. At last he stepped forward, but some residual trace of convention made him clear his throat nervously, signaling his presence. There was no reaction from the girl. He followed the rope, and stood by the edge of the mound of petals where it became buried. He craned forward, trying to see the place where the gap for the girl’s eyes had been left, but the mound was irregular and he could not make it out. The fragrance of the petals lay heavy; his presence stirred it up like flocculent sediment shaken from the bottom of a bottle of liquid. He breathed it deeply, embracing the dullness of thought it induced, welcoming further surrender to the mysteries of the Qataari. It relaxed him and aroused him, made him sensitive to the sounds of the breeze, to the dry heat of the sun. His clothes were feeling stiff and unnatural on him, so he took them off. He saw the pile of scarlet material where the girl’s torn toga had been tossed aside, and he threw his own clothes on top. When he turned back to the pile of petals, he crouched down and took hold of the rope; he pulled on it, feeling the tautness, knowing that as he moved it the girl would feel it and know he was there. He stepped forward, and the petals stirred around his ankles; the scent thickened, like the vaginal musk of desire. But then he hesitated again, suddenly aware of an intrusive sensation, so distinct, so intense, that it was almost like pressure on his skin. Somewhere, somebody hidden was watching him.