two of the black women in their sombre draperies, holding small round drums between their knees, on which they were beating rhythmically. Only their hands moved: everything else remaining perfectly still, even their lips which yet emitted a kind of musical humming, a strange, wordless melody. To this weird music, Ishtar was dancing.
She was quite naked, except for a slim, golden snake which was coiled about her loins, and the candlelight shone blue-black on her gleaming skin. Eyes closed, head flung back and arms upraised, stressing the curve of her heavy, pointed breasts, she was turning in circles on the spot, whirling faster and faster, like a top…
Abruptly, Marianne's wandering spirit which had been floating in a kind of limbo of detachment above this extraordinary scene, re-entered her prostrate body. And with the return came fear and dread, but when she tried to move, spring up and run away, she found that she could not stir. Nothing bound her to the stone table, no bonds that could be seen or felt, yet her head and limbs refused to obey her, as though she were in a trance.
The sensation was so terrifying that she tried to cry out but no sound came. Beside her, Ishtar was now whirling madly. Sweat ran in shining trickles down her black skin and her overheated body gave off an almost unbearable wild beast odour.
Marianne was unable even to turn away her face.
Then she saw Matteo Damiani loom up out of a dark corner of the cavern and she wished that she could die. He came towards her slowly, his eyes wide open and staring blankly, bearing in both hands a silver cup containing some bubbling liquid. He was dressed in a long, black gown, not unlike the one Marianne had seen him wearing on the dreadful night at the Villa Sant'Anna when she had snatched Agathe from his devilish rites, but this one was patterned with long snakes in green and silver thread and was open down the front to reveal a fat, grey, hairy chest, breasted almost like a woman's.
At his approach, Ishtar ceased her frantic dance abruptly. She dropped, panting, to the ground, pressing her lips to the man's bare feet. Matteo continued to advance as though he had felt nothing, pushing the woman aside with the toe of his black sandal.
Reaching Marianne, he stretched out a hand to grasp the muslin tunic, and ripped it off in a single movement. Then, taking a small tray from the floor, he placed it on her stomach and set the silver cup upon it. After this, he dropped on to his knees and began chanting strange verses in some foreign tongue.
From the depths of her paralysing trance, Marianne realized with sick horror that he was going to perform on her the same satanic rites which she had witnessed in the ruins of the little temple, only this time she was at the very centre of the black magic. It was her own body which was to be made the altar for this sacrilege.
Ishtar had risen and was kneeling beside Matteo, playing the role of acolyte in the infernal ceremony, chanting the responses in the same unknown language.
As her master seized the cup and drained it to the last drop, she uttered a wild shriek blending into an incantation, as if she were invoking for him the protection of some dark and terrible deity, probably the gold- crowned serpent whose emerald eyes seemed to glitter with ominous life.
Matteo had begun to shake. He seemed to be possessed by some kind of religious mania. His eyes were dilated and rolled in their sockets and there was foam on his lips. He was making a low rumbling sound in his chest, like a volcano about to erupt. At this point, Ishtar handed him a black cockerel and he severed its neck at a stroke with a great knife. The blood flowed, splashing over the girl's naked body.
At that, the horror that welled up in Marianne broke through the paralysing power of the drug that held her in thrall. She found her voice in the utterance of one fearful, inhuman shriek which seemed to tear itself from her rigid throat. It was as if her vocal cords had come to life of themselves and in this feeble effort had used up all her strength, for scarcely had the echoes of that dreadful cry died away in the cavern than Marianne mercifully lost consciousness.
She did not see Matteo, at the height of his madness, cast off his robe and lean over her with outstretched hands. She did not feel him throw himself with all his weight upon her bloodstained body, possessing her with all a madman's fury. She was far away in a world without colour or sound where nothing could reach her.
There was no way of knowing how long she remained unconscious like this, but when she surfaced at last in the real world again she was lying in the great pillared bed and she felt deathly ill.
Possibly, in order to subdue her resistance, they had given her a dose of the drug too strong for her constitution, or perhaps the mosquitoes which, as soon as night fell and the candles were lighted, filled Venice with their whining hum had already injected their stagnant fever into her veins, but she was tormented by agonies of thirst and stabs of pain drilled through her temples.
She felt too ill to be very much aware of what was going on around her. What little thought remained was concentrated on the single, fixed and obstinate idea of flight. She had to get away… as far away as possible, out of the reach of these devils!
In fact, her brain had cleared sufficiently for her to realize that her long dream, which had foundered at the end so catastrophically in the worst practices of black magic, had not been entirely a dream but, in its last stages at least, a horrible reality. With the help of his black sorceress, Damiani had succeeded in violating her without the least resistance.
The thought was at the same time revolting and destructive for Marianne knew now, beyond all doubt, that short of starving herself to death there was nothing she could do to escape from the degradation forced upon her by Damiani. There was nothing and no one to prevent her captors, whenever they chose, from employing the mysterious drug which rendered her powerless to resist the steward's lust.
Marianne's thoughts chased one another round and round, increasing her fever and with it her thirst. She had never known such thirst. It was as though her tongue had grown to twice its normal size, filling her mouth with its swelling.
With a painful effort, she managed to raise herself on her pillows, trying to measure the distance between herself and the water jug. The movement brought fresh stabs of pain to her head and she uttered an involuntary groan. At once a black hand put a cup to her lips.
'Drink,' said Ishtar's quiet voice. 'You are burning hot.'
This was true, but the presence of the black witch produced a shudder of revulsion in Marianne. She raised one hand to push away the cup but Ishtar did not move.
'Drink!' she commanded. 'It is only a tisane. It will bring down your fever.'
Slipping one arm underneath the pillows to lift the girl, she brought the vessel once more to the parched lips, which this time took in the tepid fluid instinctively. Marianne had no more strength to resist. Besides, it smelled pleasantly of good, familiar things, of woodland plants, mint and verbena. There was nothing suspicious there and when at last Ishtar laid her back on the pillows, Marianne had drunk it all to the last drop.
'You will sleep again now,' she was told, 'but it will be a good sleep and you will feel better when you wake.'
'I don't want to sleep! I don't ever want to sleep again!' Marianne burst out tearfully, seized by a fresh terror of dreams which began beautifully only to end in ugliness.
'Why ever not? Sleep is the best medicine. And you are too tired to resist it…'
'What about… him? That – that beast?'
'The master is asleep also,' Ishtar responded placidly. 'He is glad because he came to you at a propitious hour and he trusts the gods will accept his sacrifice and give you a fine son.'
At this tranquil evocation of the ghastly scene in which she had played a principal role, Marianne was overcome by a violent spasm of nausea which left her gasping and sweating on her pillows. She was suddenly aware of the violation of her body and recoiled from it in disgust. A kindly providence had taken away her senses at the crucial moment but the shame and humiliation remained, and with it the loathing of her own flesh possessed by the other.
How, after this, could she ever look Jason in the face, supposing that God ever allowed her to see him again? The American sea captain was everything that was open, clean-cut and straightforward in mind, in no way given to superstition. Could he accept the evil conspiracy to which Marianne had fallen victim? He was jealous, and in his jealousy violent and unbridled. He had accepted, though not easily, the knowledge that Marianne had been Napoleon's mistress. He would never bear to think of her subject to Damiani. He might even kill her… he would undoubtedly leave her, overcome with revulsion, and never return.
These thoughts jostled and battered in Marianne's aching head with a frenzy that brought an increase of suffering and despair. Her shattered nerves broke suddenly in a burst of convulsive sobbing to which the big black woman, seated silent and motionless a little way from the bed, listened with a little frown.
