The distant grey roofs of the monasteries showed through the naked trees. Close lay the gates of the Esikananzi estate. He let the brown hoxney slow to a trot, sensing its lack of stamina. The species was preparing for hibernation. Soon all hoxneys would be useless for riding. This was the season for training up the recalcitrant but more powerful yelk. When a slave opened the Esikananzi gate, the hoxney turned in at walking pace. The distinctive Esikananzi bell sounded ahead, chiming randomly as the wind took its vane.
He prayed to God the Azoiaxic that his father knew nothing of his activities with Ondod females, that wickedness he had fallen into shortly before paralysis had overcome him. The Ondods gave what Insil so far refused him.
He must resist those inhuman females now. He was a man. There were sleazy shacks by the edge of the forest where he and his school friends — including Umat Esikananzi — went to meet those shameless eight-fingered bitches. Bitches, witches, who came out of the woods, out of the very roots of the woods… And it was said that they consorted with male phagors too. Well, that would not happen again. It was in the past, like his brother’s death. And like his brother’s death, best forgotten.
It was not beautiful, the mansion of the Esikananzis. Brutality was the predominant feature of its architecture; it was constructed to withstand the brutal onslaughts of a northern climate. A row of blind arches formed the base of it. Narrow windows, heavily shuttered, began only on the second floor. The whole structure resembled a decapitated pyramid. The bell in its belfry made a slatey sound, as if ringing from the adamantine heart of the building.
Luterin dismounted, climbed the steps, and pulled the doorbell.
He was a broad-shouldered youth, already lofty in the Sibornalese manner, with a round face seemingly built naturally for merriment: although, at this moment, awaiting sight of Insil, his brows were knit, his lips compressed. The tension of his expression caused him to resemble his father, but his eyes were of a clear grey, very different from his father’s dark, in-dwelling pupils.
His hair, curling riotously about his head and the nape of his neck, was light brown, and formed a contrast to the neat dark head of the girl into whose presence he was ushered.
Insil Esikananzi had the airs of one born into a powerful family. She could be sharp and dismissive. She teased. She lied. She cultivated a helpless manner; or, if it suited her better, a look of command. Her smiles were wintery, more a concession to politeness than an expression of her spirit. Her violet eyes looked out of a face she kept as blank as possible.
She was carrying a jug of water through the hall, clasped in both hands. As she came towards Luterin she lifted her chin slightly into the air, in a kind of mute exasperated enquiry. To Luterin, Insil was intensely desirable, and no less desirable for her capriciousness.
This was the girl he was to marry, according to the arrangement drawn up between his father and hers at Insil’s birth, to cement the accord between the two most powerful men of the district.
Directly he was in her presence, Luterin was caught up once more into their old conspiracy, into that intricate teasing web of complaint which she wove about herself.
‘I see, Luterin, you are on your two feet again. How excellent. And like a dutiful husband-to-be, you have perfumed yourself with sweat and hoxney before presuming to call and present your compliments. You have certainly grown while in bed — at least in the region of your waistline.’
She fended off an embrace with the jug of water. He put an arm about her slender waist as she led him up the immense staircase, made more gloomy by dark portraits from which dead Esikananzts stared as if in tether, shrunken by art and time.
‘Don’t be provoking, Sil. I’ll soon be slim again. It’s wonderful to have my health back.’
Her personal bell uttered its light clap on every stair.
‘My mother’s so sickly. Always sickly. My slimness is illness, not health. You are lucky to call when my tedious parents and my equally tedious brothers, including your friend Umat, are all attending a boring ceremony elsewhere. So you can expect to take advantage of me, can’t you? Of course, you suspect that I have been had by stable boys while you were in your year’s hibernation. Giving myself in the hay to sons of slaves.’
She guided him along a corridor where the boards creaked under their worn Madi carpets. She was close, phantasmal in the little light that filtered here through shuttered windows.
‘Why do you punish my heart, Insil, when it is yours?’
‘It’s not your heart I want, but your soul.’ She laughed. ‘Have more spirit. Hit me, as my father does. Why not? Isn’t punishment the essence of things?’
He said heatedly, ‘Punishment? Listen, we’ll be married and I’ll make you happy. You can hunt with me. We’ll never be apart. We’ll explore the forests—’
‘You know I’m more interested in rooms than forests.’ She paused with a hand on a door latch, smiling provocatively, projecting her shallow breasts toward him under their linens and laces.
‘People are better outside, Sil. Don’t grin. Why pretend I’m a fool? I know as much about suffering as you. That whole small year spent prostrate — wasn’t that about the worst punishment anyone could imagine?’
Insil put a finger on his chin and slid it up to his lip. ‘That clever paralysis allowed you to escape from a greater punishment — having to live here under our repressive parents, in this repressive community — where you for instance were driven to cohabit with non-humans for relief…’
She smiled as he blushed, but continued in her sweetest voice. ‘Have you no insight into your own suffering? You often accused me of not loving you, and that may be so, but don’t I pay you better attention than you pay yourself?’
‘What do you mean, Insil?’ How her conversation tormented him.
‘Is your father at home or away on the hunt?’
‘He’s at home.’
‘As I recall, he had returned from the hunt not more than two days before your brother committed suicide. Why did Favin commit suicide? I suspect that he knew something you refuse to know.’
Without taking her dark gaze from his eyes, she opened the door behind her, pushing it so that it opened to allow sunshine to bathe them as they stood, conspiratorial yet opposed, on the threshold. He clutched her, tremulous to discover that she was as necessary to him as ever, and as ever full of riddles.
‘What did Favin know? What am I supposed to know?’ The mark of her power over him was that he was always questioning her.
‘Whatever your brother knew, it was that which sent you escaping into your paralysis — not his actual death, as everyone pretends.’ She was twelve years and a tenner, not much more than a child: yet a tension in her gestures made her seem much older. She raised an eyebrow at his puzzlement.
He followed her into the room, wishing to ask her more, yet tongue-tied. ‘How do you know these things, Insil? You invent them to make yourself mysterious. Always locked in these rooms…’
She set the jug of water down on a table beside a bunch of white flowers which she had picked earlier. The flowers lay scattered on the polished surface, their faces reflected as in a misted mirror.
As though to herself, she said, ‘I try to train you not to grow up like the rest of the men here…’
She walked over to the window, framed in heavy brown curtains which hung from ceiling to floor. Although she stood with her back to him, he sensed that she was not looking out. The dual sunlight, shining in from two different directions, dissolved her as if it were liquid, so that her shadow on the tiled floor appeared more substantial than she. Insil was demonstrating once more her elusive nature.