The Promise Ese (43) “Jobs! Queen Catherine had brushed off her hysterical despair, trice and thrice. Make us a steaming brew of lemon-scented tea. A pesticide might stifle the verminous bats.” “I can read out the girl-guide laws if that’s of any use,” said Gwennie, stalwart. * * * “What are you after?” Hector queried, after throwing himself like a wet towel into an easy-chair. “Wait and see,” Katherine called, clinking bottles. He heard a cabinet door clatter shut then saw Katherine like a furry shade emerge from the corridor carrying a glass and silver decanter, the silver as sinuous as twining ivy around a sculpted crystal tree. She set it down upon an hexagonal mosaic side-table, explaining that ‘this is a special liqueur’ with a camphorry aroma. Remember she liked medicinally sharp and potent grogs? “Smell it.” She thrust the stopper under Hector’s outstretched nose as if it was a phial of smelling salts and he was unconscious; until he baulked. “Pine forest…” he reacted automatically. “There’s an order of monks in Umbria, Franciscans. Their grove of fir trees is hundreds of years old. They actually distil the needles. Do you believe me, do you reckon a tree can be magicked into a potion.of love… of Pan…of Eros, his blood?” Hector vouched he found it difficult to believe but was willing to sample a puff – no he meant a dram. “Oh,” Katherine added, non-specific. “You may sniff before you swallow. May clear you of tonight’s debauching. We over-ate tonight. You have a large appetite. Even I felt peckish, you know, possessed of the appetite of a gigantic bird, the foe of Sinbad, the Rok.” She unlocked another cabinet, like unbuttoning a coat, then presented him with a tulip glass, petite and tiny and uncurling like a rosebud. She poured, dripped his portion of golden liquid as if libations were the rage, then sipped. Hector had grown accustomed by now to the ceremonies performed by women he knew. It was as though everything was ritual. Emmy poured his breakfast tea religiously. But Katherine deigned to lighten things up. She crashed on his lap like a shot bird, sipped again, then proffered the delicate glass to Hectors lips, the way she had the absinthe, as if all the cycles of life were revolving to their origins, the snake to its tail, the breaking of bread, the passing of wine, the drinking of shared and compulsive experience. “Has a powerful punch, ol chum, “ she gurgled. Hector felt her backside pulsating and squirming in the crinkly, flaky fabric of her colourless dress. It shone fishy, silvery white coating the woman in aspic. He jogged her up and down for a moment. She hiccuped and giggled and gushed. “You’ve decided to play my father, haven’t you? He was a sanctimonious old coot but jolly sometimes…” The strong liquor together with a squishy desert had addled her brain – this action of his seemed to knock her senseless. He swum before her. “Pine-tree, “ he suddenly, adventurously suggested, “how about some more work on the monolith by candlelight?” “Here?” “No, there.” “Here,” she insisted, commencing to feast upon him with slobbering, flammable kisses, her gauzy arms nursing his neck like a yoke. “Hector,” she slurred, “you’re beautiful, I mean spiffing…really beautiful. If I am fond of something, my fondness cures ugliness or sorriness and renews its beauty to the very second of birth, when the creator falls to his hands and knees and rubs his hands together and tears come into his eyes because it is the work that affirms every aspiration….what a dux you are in your tux.” Her speech had become playful and affectionate. “My pendant is a Celtic love-charm.” Hector smoothed his hands up and down the dip of her waist, corsetless, giving. “You are not a particularly gleeful girl are you Katherine? I think you try too hard – I can feel the intense energy of your efforts wrinkling you and winding you. Albatross dance instinctively. Could we be albatross, tonight, the necking kind?” They sparred with their tongues. Katherine fit her mouth over his like a vacuum and sucked and sucked. He mentally reiterated a line of literature about Eros ‘bringer of pleasure, earner of love.’ He stared her out in the cross-eyed manner of experimental lovers. If anyone ever needed pleasure, it was she. Hector the provider. “Come,” he murmured, tipping her off. “How do we get there?” “Hector, you haven’t forgotten what I reminded you much earlier…. you might make me a Mama”. He laughed. How naïve she seemed for a sex goddess. Her life was poetry, almost a nursery rhyme. The derisive laughter embossed an embarrassed frown onto her glowing face. “This is serious,” she nipped back, tentatively, “you are cruel to me and a prankster. I can trust you, can’t I? I mean your ridicule of me, it’s a ruse, isn’t it…?” For reply he gently stroked her throat, smiling ingenuously, baldly, sincerely blending in phrasing that in all likelihood would constitute her own homespun designation of that winsome but manly smile and conciliatory petting. “I kid you not,” he affirmed again. “look into my eyes.” Sincerely, baldly, ingenuously, obvious, puckish. “Edifying. I learn you are a good liar. But I don’t like being toyed with.” He cuffed her ear then proceeded to drag- her sneakily through to the entrance hall where a hallstand replete with walking-sticks, canes and umbrellas snarled their progress. She expounded upon her weird predilection for the gnarled walnut wood in the collection. “This burr, she whispered, “does it remind you of a virginal bosom?” Hector gazed bemusedly at her admiring the cane before she lit an expensive beeswax candle to light their path to the studio. It was not as cold as before, but a fleck of yellowish moon illuminated the space. She lit more candles arranged to highlight the statues. Twice she almost immolated herself. Eventually, Hector forced her down onto the fountain plinth still loaded with upholstered feathers and tassels like the pouff of a Turkish houri. She seemed hot and rosy. The unknown soldier slept serenely without his head. Katherine made out Sir Hector’s eyes with difficulty. “You’ve black-brows, haven’t you, toff,” she said sultrily like a governess playing the strumpet he thought. He said: “I told you I’m an albatross. There is a type known as ‘black-brow’. Visited their nesting ground before the ‘Stalwart’ left New Georgia. Amazing kind of love the albatross treasure for each other. They return to the same site every two or so years, male arrives first and sets up the nest then the female comes and they court afresh, never a hint of infidelity. They both tend the hefty, single chick. Later on we ate a few from necessity, of the sooty variety…. Their courtship is jerky but perfectly harmonious…. they wrap their downy necks about one another and their beaks clash…I love them as birds, idolize them as lovers, envy them as parents and wander with them over the seas. Albatross stew…’ He was guzzling at the flesh on her neck. When he smoothly blew the word stew she laughed, half nervous. “Katrine,” he said, “do you fancy some fun?” He suddenly lifted her skirts and roved about her thighs unhindered. “none of your arty choreography….I’m a man of simple pleasures.” His touch wrenched a gasp from her, then a moan of agreement. His kiss was fervent like a smokescreen almost as if to wrench aside her attention as he drove his thumb deeply and deftly into her. Her wordless enthusiasm gave Hector the satisfaction sweetly earned by the bringers of pleasure. He demanded nothing further from her. Had Hunt made her breath burble? Had Hunt drawn torrents from her and contractions and the salacious slavering and the little sighs? Katherine carried the mental image of the “Adoration”. She thought ‘now I am it’. He had wandered down and put his head between her silken breasts. What would Lady Carpenter say’? Did he do this to her, did he serve her, did he dare to steer by touch and make her cry with joy like a seven year-old discovering some translucent insect wing on the lawn? Hector wedged the exquisite Celtic pendant into her mouth to occupy her tongue while he explored the warming regions. Moony had taught him many things about women – from whom she had learnt he never asked. Instinct combined with experience. Unhesitatingly, she would touch herself in front of him like a kind of low-class burlesque. Would Katherine Hunt in the moody dark display? He grappled her right wrist and moved it down to the mark. She swiped his strutting fingers yet seemed afraid. “Please” he cooed closely into her ear, “you’ll feel you’ve missed something.” Instead she began to control his own fingers, pushed out his thumb, increased the speed of groan, the tenseness of thigh muscle, the curling of toes, the back buckling. Incensed by her smell, Hector took the metallic necklace from her mouth with his…when triumphally, in tears the waves quit breaking and she subsided and all the moons alight in the ice-chest studio flickered, and her relief melted strain into tears and her kisses erupted and her pressure against his body grew super-human as the shame or timidity wafted away before dominant passion and thanks. “What about you?” she gurgled. Hector nestled. “Uh-uh,” he said, squeakily. “no babies. Enjoy that m’dear?” Hector felt bashful and imperilled by the situation. Leave the ball in her court. Her demesne. Her sensuality. Her responsibility. Had he earned love? He lay heavily on her, reminding and revealing. He wanted to drink her. He wanted her to drink. * * * “Drink this,” said King Hector persuasively. “It’s powdered milk laced with brandy.” Greaves hobbled to a packing case and sat. “They’re getting ahead of us, Boss, Hunt’s men. What do they think it’s a blooming marathon or something? Do you think the rescue ship will steam off without us, I mean without their sovereigns?” Hector belted him enthusiastically on the shoulder. “It’ll lay off, “ he reassured. “They have documents aboard to absolve them from errors of judgement. They await my command. I often linger behind with the halt and the infirm – my intended date for departure varies ten days either side, whereas the Tundra king …well he’s always off at a gallop regardless of his men’s’ discomfort.” Greaves steaming mug of milk splashed in the snow. Hector replenished it with some from his own when out of the blue a strange thing happened. A great, flaring light seemed to rise from the ice, with it a sort of transparent pudding-shaped dome pushing up like a jellyfish on a barber’s pole. Heavenly choirs swelled as if the entire landscape swung bells. The women and the trudgers ahead turned, let their pannikins fall and then fell themselves to their knees – the Pole. The Pole! The Pole! “You have found the Pole.” Amaranthus stated with a solemnity of churches.
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