Something was wrong. Instead of an elephant prod, Kudra found a braid of hemp. Was rope to be her destiny? Alobar was limp enough to knot, and even now he was pulling away from her embrace.
Bewildered and embarrassed, she grabbed a shredded old pony blanket and tried to cover her nakedness. “Is it my color?” she asked.
“What about your color?”
“A horse cannot mate with a cow. Is it possible that a fair-skinned man is incapable of intercourse with a dark-skinned woman?” Kudra had slept with only one man in her life and had experience neither with impotence nor rejection.
“No,” said Alobar. The idea made him snort. “I had a reputation, in fact, as a man who relishes dark meat.”
Kudra thought, You also had a reputation as a warrior, to hear you tell it, but you did not fare too well against the Bandaloop. She asked, “Is it my nose, then? Perhaps its size offends you.”
“You are lucky to own such a fine large nose. It will serve you as a rudder and steer you through the troubled waters of life.”
Was he sincere? She had never considered her proboscis in that regard. “Well, I must have been too forward: my kiss, my tongue. .”
“A new experience for me, I do admit.”
“Truly?" You need only open your mouth not your mind, she thought. But she said, “Then why do you spurn me?” She adjusted the worn-out blanket in an attempt to protect a larger area of her body from the evening's chill and Alobar's gaze.
“Yes, this 'kizz' as you call it is unknown in the west. A rather odd sensation, but one I would not object to repeating. I have an open mind.”
“To be absolutely frank, it is your smell.”
“My smell?!” She was incredulous. “But I have just bathed and rubbed myself with fragrant oils. You were willing enough to take me in the grass, when I was caked with grime and sweat; I saw the bulge in your robes; yet, here on the soft, private straw, when I am clean and perfumed. .”
“You smelled fine up there on the hill, you smelled like a woman. Right now you smell like one of those little piles of powder they burned in the caves; you smell like a — like a fruit bush!”
They worked it out. It was back to the trough for Kudra, to scrub the jasmine and patchouli scents from her skin, whereupon, Alobar, whose wives and concubines had known little of the science of the bath and nothing of the art of perfumery (save for the rare spices they sewed in their harem cushions), sniffed her from head to heel, pronouncing her, if not arousing, at least inoffensive. With a little help from her rope-yard-deft fingers, he commenced to wax. And wax. And wax. Until she squealed.
“Did not I explain that I was once a king?”
A king you are still, she thought, vowing never again to doubt his various reputations.
Within the hour, the molecules reaching his nose were more to his liking, although the sounds in his ears — dove, cuckoo, green pigeon, parrot, sparrow, flamingo, duck, and quail — destroyed any illusions he might harbor that he was on familiar ground.
Later, by what little moonlight that remained, she cataloged five types of scratch marks on his shoulders and back. To him, they each stung the same.
“I would like to read this Kama Sutra,” said Alobar. “Except that I cannot read.”
“Nor can I. But I can teach you those of its contents that might benefit you most. Unless you object, I will demonstrate rather than recite.” She had had four orgasms and was feeling assured. “For now, however, you must tell me more of the Bandaloop doctors.”
“There is nothing left to tell.”
“You mean that you never heard of them again?”
“Oh, stories about them abound, but their veracity. . Actually, something happened once. .”
“What happened, Alobar?”
“One spring, on the pass south of here, there was a snow slide. Travelers were buried. Some of us from Samye went to help dig them out. We removed several bodies, frozen stiff, which we laid on the side of the road. After a bit, one of them stirred. It was a female. She stood and stretched, and thanked us and walked away. Just walked away. Fosco must have noticed that I was stunned, for he put a hand on me and whispered, 'She was a Bandaloop woman.' That was all that was ever said about it. The rest of the victims behaved the way corpses ought to.”
Kudra, propped on her elbows, shaking her head in amazement, said, “And she was merely one of their women.”
“Yes.”
“Hmmm.” She lowered herself into the straw, her rump in the air. The last moonbeam of the evening was snagged in the tangle of her pubic moraine. Alobar reached in from the rear, as if to free it. Like a careless animal on the lip of a tar pit, his middle finger slipped and sank quickly from view. Kudra writhed automatically, then lay still. Her mind was off somewhere. Her body and Alobar waited patiently for its return. He fell asleep with his hand still in place. When the lamas awoke him, well after sunrise, his finger was waterlogged. But Kudra was gone.
One thing about moving out of a Tibetan Buddhist lamasery, you don't have to hire a cart. Alobar's worldly possessions — a tea bowl, a change of clothing, and a knife that in twenty years had been used only for shaving — were packed in a flash. He bid farewell solely to Fosco. Fosco put down his brush, folded his inky hands upon his belly, and regarded Alobar affectionately. The little lama did not seem surprised by the departure, but rather hurried him to the gate, where, looking into the only blue eyes the Himalayas had ever known, he said something so incomprehensible that Alobar was ready to delay his leave to get to the bottom of it. Fosco withheld any explanation, however, and soon Alobar was winding down the mountainside, pausing every few hundred yards to glance back at the placid walls of Samye. Stone remains, water goes, he thought. For once, at least, he knew where he was going.
In less than a day, he caught up with Kudra. She was squatting by the path relieving herself when he rounded the bend. She leapt to her feet in midstream and threw her arms about him.
“I knew you would follow me,” she said, with the kind of confidence some women exude when they sense that they have made a clean capture with the vaginal net.
“You left without a word,” he said. Her kiss, so wet and exotic upon his unpracticed Western lips, vented much of the steam from his accusation.
“I feared that you would talk me out of it. You have talked me out of several things already, including my widow's virtue and my obligation on the funeral pyre.”
“Praise Shiva,” he said mockingly.
“Praise Shiva,” she repeated, after a long pause, and with more than a hint of the poignant.
She still had not pulled up her boy's trousers, and Alobar kneaded her bare, piss-damp thighs. “You made it impossible for me to remain at Samye,” he said.
“Your stories of the Bandaloop made it impossible for me to remain there.”
“So, your destination was the caves.”
“My destination is the caves. And you are going with me.”
Any protest he might have uttered was drowned out by the fluttering of the pages of the Kama Sutra, dog-eared pages with notes in their margins, which she taught Alobar to read with his one oozing eye, the Kama Sutra being a book that usually opens in the middle and begins at the end.