“I can see the lamplight through your flesh.” The Mahdi took her earlobe between his fingers and turned it to catch the beam of the lamp, admiring the pink luminosity of light that shone through. She blushed with embarrassment and he remarked the change immediately. “You are like a little chameleon. Your skin changes colour in tune with your moods. That is remarkable, but enticing.” He took her earlobe between his teeth and bit it, hard enough to make her gasp but not enough to break the skin or draw blood. Then he sucked on the lobe, like an infant at the breast. She was unprepared for her body’s reaction. Despite herself she felt the heightened sensitivity of her nipples rubbing against the silk of her bodice.
“Ah!” He noticed her inadvertent response, and smiled. “All women are different, but also the same.” He cupped one of her breasts in his hand and pinched the engorging nipple. She gasped again. He sat back on his haunches and unfastened the front of her bodice. He seemed in no hurry. Like a skilled groom with a nervous filly, he moved with gentle deliberation so as not to startle her.
She realized he was highly skilled in the amorous arts. Well, he has had much practice, hundreds of concubines. She set herself to remain aloof and unmoved by his expertise. But when he lifted out one of her breasts from the opening of her bodice, and bit her nipple as he had her earlobe, with a tender sharpness that forced another gasp from her lips, she found her good resolution wavering. She tried to ignore the ripples of pleasure that radiated from her nipple through her body. When she started to pull away he held her with a light pressure of his teeth. The pleasant sensation was piqued by guilt and the conviction that what was happening was sinful. Not for the first time in her short life she realized that sin, as much as sanctity, held its own peculiar attraction. I do not want this to happen, she thought, but I am helpless to prevent it.
His mouth wandered over her breast, his lips kneading and plucking at her flesh, his tongue slithering and probing. She felt her sex melting, and the shame receded. She began to itch with a strange impatience. She needed something more to happen but she was not sure what.
“Stand up!” he said, and for a moment she did not understand the words. “Stand up!” he ordered, more sharply. She rose slowly to her feet. Her bodice was still open and one breast bulged free. He smiled up at her as she stood over him, his smile sweet and almost saintly.
“Disrobe!” he ordered. She hesitated, and his smile faded. “At once!” he said. “Do as I tell you.”
She slipped the robe off her shoulders, and let it drop as far as her waist. He looked at her, and his eyes seemed to caress her skin. A light rash of goose pimples rose round her nipples. He reached out and drew the fingernail of his right forefinger over it, scratching the skin lightly. Her knees felt as though they might give way under her. Although she had known all along that this must happen, she felt her shame return powerfully. She was an English woman and a Christian. He was an Arab and a Muslim. It flew in the face of all her training and beliefs.
“Disrobe!” he repeated. Her dilemma was insoluble, until her father’s words, which she had so recently read in his journal, returned to her: “One must always bear in mind that this is a savage and pagan country. We should not seek to judge these peoples by the standards that apply at home. Behaviour that would be considered outlandish and even criminal in England is commonplace and normal here. We should never forget this, and make allowance for it.”
Daddy wrote that for me! she thought. She hung her head demurely. “No man has ever laid eyes on what lies beneath this silk.” Shyly she touched the swelling of her own pudenda beneath the cloth. “But if you will remove my covering I will know that it is the Hand of Allah and not of a common man that does so. Then will I rejoice.”
Unwittingly she had hit upon the perfect response. She had abrogated the responsibility to him. She had placed herself in his power, and she could see that in doing so she had pleased him inordinately.
He reached out again and slipped the dress down over the bulge of her hips. As it fell round her ankles, Rebecca cupped her hands over her Mount of Venus. He did not protest at this last demonstration of modesty. It was what he expected of a true virgin, but he said softly, “Turn.” She revolved slowly and felt one of his fingers trace the curve of her buttock where it met the back of her thigh.
“So soft, so white, but touched with pink, like a cloud at dawn with the first ray of sunrise upon it.” With the touch and pressure of his finger he guided her, inducing-her to lean over with straight legs until her forehead almost touched her knees. She felt his warm breath on the back of her legs as he brought his face closer to examine her. Again his finger insisted and she moved her feet wider apart. She could feel his gaze, directed deeply into her most secret places. He was seeing things that no other person, nurse, parent, lover or herself, had ever laid eyes upon. In this respect she was truly a virgin. She knew she should resent this minute examination of her body, but she was too far gone, too deeply under his influence. He was possessing her with his dark, hypnotic gaze.
“Three things in this world are insatiable,” the Mahdi murmured. “The desert, the grave and the quimmy of a beautiful woman.” He turned her back to face him again, and gently removed her hands, which still covered her mount. He touched her pubes. “Surely this is not hair but spun thread of gold. It is silk and gossamer and soft morning sunlight.”
His admiration was so manifest and poetically expressed that she welcomed rather than resented his touch as he gently parted the outer lips of her sex. Of her own accord and without his further guidance she moved her feet apart.
“You must never pluck yourself here,” he said. “I grant you special dispensation not to do so. This silk is too beautiful and precious to be discarded.”
The Mahdi took her hands, drew her down beside him on the angareb and laid her on her back. He lifted her knees and knelt between them. He lowered his face, and she was amazed as she realized what he was about to do to her. Nazeera had not warned her of this. She had believed that it would be the other way about.
What happened next exceeded her furthest imaginings. His skill was sure, his instinct faultless. She felt as though she were being devoured. As though she were dying and being reborn. In the end she cried out as if in mortal anguish and fell back on the angareb. She was bathed in perspiration and trembling. She was deprived of the powers of thought or movement. She seemed to have become merely a receptacle of overpowering bodily sensations. It seemed to last for an age, before at last the spasms and contractions deep within her stilled and she heard his whisper. Although his lips were at her ear, it seemed to come from far away. “Like the desert and the grave.” He laughed softly. She lay for a long time, rousing herself only when she felt him begin to caress her again. When she opened her eyes she discovered to her mild surprise, that, like her, he was naked. She sat up and leant on one elbow looking down on him. He was lying on his back. After what he had done to her, all sense of modesty and shame had been expunged. She found herself examining him with almost as much attention as he had lavished on her. The first thing that struck her was that he was almost devoid of hair. His body was soft and almost feminine, not hard and muscled like Penrod’s or Ryder’s. Her eyes went down to his tam my Although it stuck up stiffly, it was small, smooth and unmarred by ropes of blue veins. The circumcised head was bare and glossy. It looked childlike and innocent. It evoked an almost maternal feeling in her.
“It’s so pretty!” she exclaimed, and was immediately frightened that he would find the description effeminate and derogatory, that he might take it as an insult to his masculinity. She need not have worried. Once again her instinct had been correct. He smiled at her. Then she remembered Nazeera’s advice: “Master and Lord, would it give you offence if I presumed to do to you as you were gracious enough to do to me? For me it would be an undreamed-of honour.” He smiled until the gap between his front teeth was fully exposed.
At first she was clumsy and uncertain. He seemed to regard this as more evidence of her virginity. He started to direct her. When she was doing what pleased him, he encouraged her with murmurs and whispers and stroked her head. When she became over-enthusiastic, he restrained her with a light touch. She became absorbed in the task, and her reward was a gratifying sense of power and control over him, however fleeting it might be. Gradually he urged her to increase the tempo of her movements, until suddenly he gave her complete and undeniable proof that she had pleased him. For a moment she was at a loss as to what to do next. Then she remembered that Nazeera had advised her to swallow quickly and have done..
Like a barbellate catfish in the muddy waters of the Nile, Penrod Ballantyne allowed himself to be absorbed into the teeming byways, alleys and hovels of Omdurman. He became invisible. He changed his costume and appearance almost daily, becoming a camel herdsman, a humble beggar or a nodding, drooling idiot almost at will. Yet he knew that he could not remain in the town indefinitely without drawing attention to himself. So, for weeks on end he left the sprawling city. Once he found employment as a drover with a camel dealer taking his beasts downriver to trade them in the small villages along the banks. On another he joined the crew of a trading dhow, plying up the Blue Nile to the Abyssinian border.
When he returned to Omdurman he made it a rule never to sleep twice in the same place. On the warning of
