The Last Four Things

11

But Kleist was about as far from death as it’s possible for a human being to be.

‘Do you think,’ said a naked Daisy, sitting astride Kleist and leaning back on his knees, ‘that sexual intercourse with me is better than heaven?’

Kleist considered her breasts carefully. Why, he wondered, were they so wonderful? Even his short enough time in Memphis and his previous lack of experience of pleasure had made it clear you could get tired of anything if you got used to having it often enough: lemon curd, chess, tormenting Koolhaus, having nothing to do, too much sun or wine. But naked women? This was something he’d never get used to. His sense of amazement at women’s bodies had certainly changed: he was more familiar with them but it was like eating and being satisfied – a few hours later and you were as hungry as the first time you were ever hungry. But why wouldn’t you get used to it?

Lying back he pretended to close his eyes so that she would not realize he was looking at her so closely. It was not that she minded his intense scrutiny of her but that he himself felt something shameful about the intensity of his fascination. Because she was leaning back and kneeling astride him her thighs were tensed slightly, stretched over the bone and revealing the powerful muscles. They were not like the long and slender legs of the Materazzi girls he’d been able to glimpse as they insolently strode into a great ball sometimes with dresses slashed to the upper thigh revealing that elegant smoothness you could never be allowed to possess. If the harlots in Kitty Town were less coltishly refined and more various in size and shape, plump Mukie girls, the tiny but cheerful Gascons with enormous brown eyes, still none of them had the great muscularity of Daisy’s thighs, oddly out of proportion to the rest of her, like those of an unusually strong young man. And then the hair and folded skin between her legs, the source of so much wonder and astonishment. Unimaginable until a few months ago except that he had assumed that the inhabitants of the mythical Devil’s Playground would have had something familiar like a pair of balls and a cock but more pointy and ferocious befitting something so infernal. The reality of something so hidden and so soft still made him catch his breath with shame and joy. What an idea? What a thing? Then her belly with just a barely perceptible belt of fat. Then the roundness of the breasts and the harder brown and pink, the strong neck, the wide lips tinged with that waxy red stuff that she almost always liked to wear. Then the happy, smiling eyes and the long hair.

‘Do you notice anything different about me?’ she said. ‘If you’ve finished gawping.’

He opened his eyes fully.

‘You don’t like me to look at you?’

‘I love it. But you don’t have to hide.’

‘I wasn’t hiding,’ he said, irritable and ashamed.

‘Don’t be angry. You can look at me any time you like. Anyway you haven’t answered my question. Well?’

Obviously there was something that he ought to have seen but hadn’t.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, after looking her up and down. ‘Tell me.’

‘You’ve no idea?’

He noticed that her tone and expression had changed. She was not annoyed with him for having failed to appreciate a braiding in her hair or a more elaborately decorated middle fingernail. She was naked after all. What could possibly be different?

‘I’m pregnant.’

He stared at her as if he didn’t understand. Which in fact he didn’t.

‘I don’t know what that means.’ She stared back at him in equal bewilderment; this was going to be more difficult or at least much stranger than she had thought.

‘I’m going to have a baby.’

Although his expression changed to one of astonishment, it didn’t seem to Daisy to suggest any greater understanding.

‘But how?’ he said, appalled.

‘What do you mean?’

‘How can you be having a baby?’

‘You don’t know how babies are made?’

‘No.’

‘They didn’t tell you at that Sanctuary of yours?’

‘I never even saw a woman until this year. No. No I don’t know anything. What are you talking about?’

‘You didn’t think to ask?’

‘About babies? Why would I?’

‘How did you think they got here?’

‘I don’t know. Why would I think anything about babies?’

‘I don’t believe this.’

‘Why would I lie to you?’

She looked at him, bewildered and bothered.

‘No, I don’t mean you’re lying. I just can’t believe you had no idea about ...’

‘Well, I don’t.’

They looked at each other, Kleist white with horror, Daisy pale with confusion. There was a brief silence.

‘So tell me why you’re having a baby,’ he said.

‘Because of you.’

‘Me? I don’t know anything about babies.’

‘You gave me a baby.’

‘How could I?’

She realized slowly just how unfathomably deep his ignorance was. She sat down, lost.

‘When your penis is inside me and you have the conniptions. That’s how you make babies.’

‘My God! Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I didn’t know you didn’t know.’

‘I don’t know anything.’

This was not an unreasonable claim. Before he went to Memphis he knew nothing much except about religion, which he hated and feared, and killing, which he was good at but also feared because he feared to be killed back. In Memphis knowledge about all sorts of things had been poured over him and like the great dry sponge of ignorance he was he had soaked up enormous quantities of stuff. Sadly he had yet to put it all in order and make the kinds of connections which even a very stupid fifteen- or sixteen-year-old might have made long before. In some respects he wasn’t much more than a baby himself.

‘What are we going to do?’ he said hopelessly.

‘You’ve already done it,’ she replied, unfair and bad-tempered.

‘You knew about this. It’s your fault.’

‘Mine?’

‘Yes. Your father will kill me.’

‘No, he won’t.’

‘Thank God. Are you sure?’

‘Only,’ she said, ‘if you don’t marry me.’

‘Marry you?’

‘Now you’re going to pretend you’ve never heard of marriage.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘It’s no more ridiculous than not knowing how babies get made.’

This was too much to hear.

‘People get married in front of you. They talk about it. Nobody ever talked about babies and how to get them.’

‘Well,’ she said, miserably, ‘now you know.’

Daisy’s father was neither as pleased as she expected nor as murderously angry as Kleist feared. Her father was well disposed towards him because he had saved both his daughter’s life, probably true, and her honour, definitely not true. But this had happened elsewhere and they only had Daisy’s word that her description of events concerning her rescue was to be relied on. But even if they had taken her account of his physical courage and martial skill at face value the problem was that the Klephts did not particularly value these qualities. As a result, beyond their willingness to accept a stranger who had done a great kindness to one of their own, he had no significant status among the Klephts. Daisy was the daughter of a man of considerable wealth and importance based upon a talent for theft much admired even amongst a people whose name was a byword for larceny. Kleist’s offer, set on by Daisy, to be involved in Klepht raids after the revelations about the pregnancy only added to the problem. It was made so lightly and with such a clear belief that stealing on the scale practised by the Klephts was obviously not difficult that he caused offence, especially among those who had been sympathetic to his situation until his enforced clumsy proposal. This so undermined his request for permission to marry Daisy that she accused him of doing it deliberately. He had now offended everyone but especially the girl he now realized that he loved very much. Once over his astonishment at the means and fact of becoming a father, he became astonished all over again at how wonderful an idea it seemed. Babies as far as he could see from those around him were lovely and beautiful and, mostly, happy. Given that they were whisked away as babies usually are when they became a noisy nuisance and that he merely observed them at their best through a thick veil of total ignorance, his optimism was, perhaps, forgivable, however unjustified. But there were also many buried feelings growing in the depths of his tough young soul. Fatherhood, an unthought-of impossibility, now seemed like a wonderful adventure. However, his clumsiness concerning the offer to accompany the Klephts on one of their raids seemed to have tied the feet of his own happiness. Something drastic was called for. First he offered everything he owned to Daisy’s father, namely everything he had looted from Memphis and then stolen back from Lord Dunbar’s gang. This managed to please him and to mollify Daisy. Next he proposed a demonstration of just how very useful his brutally won skills as an archer could be and in such a way that did not imply any disrespect for the Klephts’ talents as thieves. Listening to the Klephts boasting about their almost, so they claimed, invariably successful raids it nevertheless became clear that their reluctance to stand and fight led them to pursue a dangerously simple policy once they’d deprived their neighbours of horses, cattle, preserved fruit and meat, cases of wine, chairs, money, sheep, goats, pigs, ornaments and anything else that could be driven or carried. The principle they always obeyed was simply to leg it out of wherever they were to the safety of the mountains as quickly as possible. The outright refusal of any Klepht to take a risk greater than any other Klepht and their general lack of enthusiasm for combat meant that no provisions were made for fighting rearguard actions or creating mobile defensive positions which could be used to slow pursuers no matter how determined.

In the months since he had arrived as a fairly honoured guest Kleist had been making a number of bows of considerably greater quality than the one he had used to slaughter Dunbar and his crew. And he was, truth be told, somewhat miffed himself by the Klephts’ attitude to his own talents. Now he thought he could impress them without putting their noses out of joint and make himself a reputation without taking much of a risk beyond those that were familiar to him and which he found easy to calculate. Thieving sounded dangerous to him – too many unknowns.

As he had already seen, their archery skills were as rudimentary as their bows – they could be effective enough firing en masse at large numbers but then so could anyone. Beyond that there was, in Kleist’s expert opinion, nothing to say that wasn’t insulting. He arranged, therefore, a demonstration at the site of a famous Klepht disaster in the low foothills of their territory where fifty men in a raiding party had been caught just on the edge of safety and slaughtered to a man. Fifty men to the Klephts was a hideous loss from a tribe of, Kleist guessed, less than fifteen hundred, two thirds women and children and older men. It was three years since the massacre and they were still recovering. This was as much as anything why they were so liberal with their women. There were simply not enough men for the Klephts to carry on the way the tribes round about did. More delicately this time and under Daisy’s tutoring, Kleist offered to show how he could help prevent a repetition. It was not easy to set up his demo because while they were ready to watch they were distinctly unenthusiastic about taking part. Kleist had shown them the blunt arrows he intended to use for his demonstration but the Klephts were right to regard them as still extremely dangerous. Indeed it took a considerable amount of time and a great deal of mockery from the women Daisy had won over to her side to agree the use of the horses Kleist needed. Eventually all was approved and the site prepared. Understandably those that gathered to watch were morose and some greatly grief-stricken at being reminded of such a calamity. Kleist had constructed twenty pretty roughly man-shaped dummies and Daisy and her friends had strapped them to the horses that had been so reluctantly provided. Kleist stood behind a chest-high wall he had built and disguised with branches just where the massacre had taken place. Five hundred yards away the bored horses looked on, unenthusiastically feeding on the spindly grass. Then, twenty or so girls herded the reluctant animals into a rough line facing the distant Kleist and each one drew back a leather whip and at Daisy’s shout, lashed down heavily on the flanks of the horses. That changed their attitude and they squealed and reared and with the girls screaming behind them set off at a terrified charge, the straw men on their backs bouncing and waving about on top of them. Just to make his point, Kleist had stripped to the waist to show off to the best his strange but impressive upper body, muscles like knots in thick rope and of someone twenty years older. He let off one shot. All watched as it arched upwards faster and in a far greater arc than anything they had seen before. It took the straw man he had been aiming at straight in the chest and came out the other side. It was impressive but still too far away to completely stun the natives with its excellence. He waited till they got closer, pushing his luck to make a show of it. Then in the ninety seconds it took the terrified horses to make it to his hide he loosed off an astonishing quick succession of arrows, missing only with two by the time they stampeded past.

The Klephts were impressed, but wary.

‘There were a hundred of them on the day.’

‘I could have taken out thirty long before they got here. No one will take those kinds of losses. Besides, I wouldn’t do it like this. I’d have been picking them off for hours or even days before they got here. From six hundred yards I can make five shots out of ten – eight if you count the horses.’

There were a few more objections but his case was made. Besides, what did they have to lose but a pleasant stranger who was, all said and done, nothing to them.