soon as it is possible, for the taking of your vital fluid will weaken you. Just build yourself up for my next visit and don’t fret. Occupy your days with that embroidery.’
‘Well, what am I to do if you are not here? Rub myself raw?’ pouted the girl. ‘Go away, leave me to mournful solitude. I have decided to be Clotho, the youngest Fate, and embroider a tapestry with scenes that depict your adventures while I suffer alone here. Go away. There is my canvas and there is my wool; they shall be my friends. But wait, I have no picture.’
‘Silly, silly goose, you mix up the stories ... and as for that blank canvas. Give it here.’
‘See, it is as blank as your heart; and if I mix up the stories, it is because you mix me up. O let me be that other Fate, the third, Atropos who cuts the thread that ends a life. I need you too much to live on alone.’
‘Be like Penelope and embroider while you wait.’
‘O enough of these silly stories. You will go and I shall cry and then I shall embroider. Leave me something that I may begin. When my needles pierce it through and through, I will imagine your teeth at my neck.’
‘Give me the canvas, the night is seeping away. There! This is how the journey began. That is the governor and his wife. Saint George sits in his bughi and a native constable on that dray. It is enough, for that corner. The rest I will sketch in as we go along and I visit you.’
‘But where are you? I want you more than them. Your pale hair, your glowing fair face, your azure eyes tinged with the red of the sunset. I want you as you are now, naked and unashamed and flushed with my blood.’
‘Let it be, my sweet one; let it be! See in that tree? What is that which hangs there with strange reddened eyes that peer out at the scene?’
‘It is a bat. I want you there, Mela!’
‘But let that be me, and I’ll figure too in the other pictures I shall draw for you. Now I must hasten; but before I go I’ll do another scene. There is Saint George, it is but a joke of mine. There is your husband playing the preacher in front of his flock; but where he should clasp a Bible he holds a golden nugget. There, that is your next tapestry scene done. You shall have more as we go along, and when you think of me, look to the picture in which I shall be hidden.’
‘Is that you in the darkened sky, obscuring a star?’
‘It is, and that is where I soon shall be. Hug me now and I’ll lick away the blood which still drips from your lacerated neck ... Now farewell. Ah, you taste so very sweet, like a peppermint. I could easily suck you all away; but, no, there are others. Sweet dreams and in them I shall come to you all moist.’
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