The Watched

II

Jenessa lounged in the sun and drank her coffee, and then poured herself a second cup. She yawned and lay back in the sun, her hair dry now and shining in the light. Ordier wondered if she

was intending to stay all day, as she sometimes did. He enjoyed their lazy days together, alternating between swimming in the pool, lovemaking, and sunbathing… but the previous evening she had been talking of spending the day in Tumo Town, and he was uncertain of her intentions. At last, though, she went into the bedroom to dress, and afterwards they walked together down to her car. There were last words and kisses, and then she drove away. Ordier stood idly by the grove of trees on the edge of his grounds, waiting to wave to her as she turned from the track to the main road leading toward Tumo Town. The brisk wind of the evening before had died, and the cloud of white dust thrown up by the wheels hovered behind the car… and long after Jenessa had passed from sight, Ordier stared after her. She sometimes returned unexpectedly. When the dust had settled, and his view across to the distant white buildings of the town was interrupted by nothing more than the shimmering of early heat, Ordier turned back to his house and walked up the slope to the main door. Once inside the house he made no attempt to conceal the impatience he had been suppressing while Jenessa was there. He hurried to his study and found his binoculars, then went through the house and left by the door which opened on the rough ground behind. A short walk took him to the high stone wall that ran laterally across the ridge, and he unlocked the padlock on the stout wooden gate and let himself through. Beyond was a sandy, sun-whitened courtyard, surrounded on all sides by walls, and already hot in the windless day. Ordier made sure that the gate was locked on the inside, then climbed steadily up the slope toward the angular height of the battlemented folly on the summit of the ridge. It was this folly and its walled courtyard that Ordier had first chanced upon, and with the same recklessness of spirit of the madman who had built it three centuries before, he bought it and

the land around it after the most cursory of inspections. Only later, when the headiness of the purchase had faded, had he taken a second, calmer look at his new property and realized that the place was completely uninhabitable. So, not without regret, he had hired a local firm of builders, and his house had been put up a short distance away. The ridge that marked the eastern boundary of his property ran due north and south for several miles, and for most of its length it was unscalable, except by someone equipped with climbing boots and ropes. It was not so much that it was high—on the side facing Ordier’s house it rose on average about two hundred feet above the plain—but that it was broken and jagged, and the rocks were sharp and friable. In the geophysical past there must have been a tumultuous upheaval, compressing and raising the land along some deep-lying fault, the crust snagging upwards like two sheets of brittle steel rammed against each other’s edge. It was on the summit of this ridge that the folly had been built, although at what expense in human life and ingenuity Ordier could not imagine. It balanced on the broken rocks, a daring edifice, and a tribute to the singularity and eccentricity of its architect. When Ordier had seen and bought the folly, the valley that lay beyond it had been a wide tract of desert land, muddy and overgrown with rank vegetation, or cracked, barren, and dusty, according to the season. But that had been before the coming of the Qataari, and all that that had entailed. A flight of steps had been built across the inner wall of the folly, leading eventually to the battlements. Before Ordier had moved into his house, he paid the builders to reinforce most of the steps with steel and concrete, but the last few had been left unrepaired. The battlements could be reached, but only with great difficulty. About halfway up, well before the last of the reinforced steps, Ordier reached the fault that had been contrived carefully inside the main wall. He glanced back, staring down from his vertiginous perch across the land beneath. There was his house, its evenly tiled roofs glittering in the sunlight; beyond, the untamed stretch of scrubland, and beyond that the buildings of Tumo Town, a sprawling modern settlement built on the ruins of the seaport that had been sacked at the outbreak of the war. In the far distance were the brown and purple heights of the Tumoit Mountains, rich in the mythology of the Dream Archipelago. To north and south Ordier could see the splendent silver of the sea. Somewhere to the north, on the horizon, was the island of Muriseay, invisible today because of the haze. Ordier turned away from the view, and stepped through into the fault in the wall, squeezing between two overlapping slabs of masonry which, even on close inspection, seemed to be so solidly in place that nothing could lie behind them. But there was a warm, dark space beyond, high enough and wide enough for a man to stand. Ordier wriggled through the gap, and stood inside on the narrow ledge, breathing quickly after his climb. The brilliant sunshine outside had dulled his eyes, and the tiny space was a cell of blackness. The only light came from a horizontal crack in the outer wall, a slit of shining sky that seemed, in contrast with the rest, to darken, not lighten, the cell. When his breathing had steadied, Ordier stepped forward onto the ledge where he generally stood, feeling with his foot for the slab of rock. Beneath him was the inner cavity of the wall, falling irregularly to the foundations far below. He braced himself with his elbow against the wall as he transferred his weight, and at once a sweet fragrance reached his nostrils. As he brought his second foot onto the slab he glanced down, and saw in the dim light a pale, mottled coloring on the ledge.

The smell was distinctive: Qataari roses. Ordier remembered the hot southerly wind of the day before—the Naalattan, as it was called on Tumo—and the whirling vortex of light and color that had risen above the valley floor, as the fragrant petals of the Qataari roses had scattered and circled. Many of the petals had been lifted by the wind as high as his vantage point here in the cell, and some had seemed to hover within grasping distance of his fingers. He had had to leave his hidden cell to meet Jenessa, and he had not seen the end of the warm blizzard of petals before he left. The fragrance of the Qataari rose was known to be narcotic, and the cloying smell released as his feet crushed the petals was sweet in his nose and mouth. Ordier kicked and scuffed at the petals that had been blown onto the shelf, and swept them down into the cavity of the wall. At last he leaned forward to the slit that looked outward into the valley; here too the wind had deposited a few petals, and Ordier brushed them away with his fingers, careful that they fell into the cavity beneath him, and not out into the open air. He raised his binoculars to his eyes, and leaned forward until the metal hoods over the object-lenses rested on the stone edge of the horizontal slit. With rising excitement, he stared down at the Qataari in the valley below.