She laughed to be thus rebuked, chiding them their ingratitude. They stank of the hills and the smoke of their campfires purled up round them like strands of wool. Her licentiousness was a special gift to them which they refused, speaking in loud unmanly voices of holiness, as if this holiness were a land they might return to if she mocked them much longer.
The dream, in which she gauzed the corridor’s far end, was her husband’s, and only half-pleasing to her, half-shadow, half-flesh, moving in her naked robes with an assassin’s grace. In the wasp-waist palaces of Jerusalem she had learned by watching. Skills acquired while off-stage voices instructed, voices which trembled as her skills polished themselves through excess and quantity. In a clamoring sex-mad circus under a Syrian sun; in a cramped lighthouse beside long-dead Sidon, with seven of her bodyguard still to blow before sun-up; on a barge which styed the iris of Lake Tiberius, spread upon the oyster-slick deck and crowned the Queen of Orgy.
On the torchlit balconies of Jerusalem she had learned by being watched. Her husband soiled himself in his paranoid bed and she soothed him with her hourly betrayals, tense as harp-string, languid as tiger, on all fours and laughing open-mouthed as her slaves sluiced her at either end. Her naked robes stuck to her smooth body as she crouched, loped in place, hips rocking to a cat’s ambush, peacock-spread, eel-writhe, crazy as lazuli in a deep surround of bedded black. And still her lovers queued to be bitten like cherries, bruised like pomegranates, to gorge upon her ruthless beauty and bilge their aching souls within her sin-vast solitude.