The slave came back, gave him what he called a silly look-but she had, by nature, a silly expression—and resumed the floor-washing. Then, through the arch came, not Dorcas, but another girl named Lydia, known to him by sight and by name but hardly recognisable. She had just been
roused from sleepand her unpainted face looked almost phosphorescent in the gloom. But she was a professional; she made an effort, said, “Welcome back, Ephorus,” and laid her henna-tipped fingers on his arm.
“Where’s Dorcas?” he asked. The dry-leaf rustling whisper was not his own voice.
“She’s gone.”
“Gone,” he repeated stupidly.
“Gone where?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then fetch somebody who does.”
“Oh, if she’d told anybody, she’d have told me,” Lydia said.
“But she wouldn’t tell me. So nobody knows.”
“When did she go?”
“A little more than three months ago. I miss her very much.”
“You miss her!” he said brutally.
“I came back to marry her!”
“Oh. Then that is why she left you a message.”
Stupid bitch, he thought. Of course Dorcas would have left a message for him; and anybody with any sense would have said so, at first.
“What was it?”
She closed her heavy eyes and said, like a child dutifully repeating a well-conned lesson:
“She said—If Ephorus comes, tell him I wish him well and not to be unhappy because he will live to thank me. That is what she said.” She opened her eyes and blinked.
“And that is all? Think. Try to remember. Nothing else?”
“Nothing else. Ephorus, you are distressed. Let me get you a drink.”
“Who’d she go with?”
“Oh, a man.” The way she said that indicated what a stupid question it was.
“What man? What was his name?”
“How should I know? He wasn’t my customer. He wasn’t a regular. He came—twice I think. The second time he gave her a bracelet. She said, “Look what my fat friend gave me.” He was fat. Then she told me she was going to live with him. But she didn’t say where, and she gave me the message for you. Oh, and she’s gone to a palace.”
“How do you know that?”
“When she packed. She was in a strange mood, not like herself at all, half laughing, half crying. She took things out of her chest and said, “Is this fit to wear for a palace? No!” and then she’d fling them on the floor. She took hardly anything.”
“And you haven’t any idea where the palace is? Lydia, even if she vowed you to secrecy, tell me. I must know.”
“She didn’t tell me anything. It was all very sudden; and I had my own customers. She just told me she was going and gave me the message for you. What she said about the clothes told me that she’d gone to a palace. And that, Ephorus, truly is all I know. Except that it is a red palace.”
“Red? Who told you that?”
“She did. At least, I guessed. You see, she had a red dress;’ new; she’d only worn it once. She threw it on the floor with the rest. She said she wouldn’t take it, there was enough of that colour where she was going; even the stones there were red….”
She was more widely awake now, recovered from her abrupt wakening.
She said, “If you really thought of marrying her, I’m sorry, Ephorus. And I think you need a cup of wine. Come with me. She’s gone, but we’re still here.”
Business as usual!
Repulsed with no word spoken, simply reading the look on his face, she hunched a shoulder and said, not without malice:
“The way she went was understandable. She’s gone with a rich man, to live in a palace; she wouldn’t want anybody who knew her here to go seeking her out. Would she?”
Something must have happened inside his head. He had no memory of taking leave of Lydia or of leaving the house. But here he was, in a tavern, and pretty drunk too. Folding his arms on the table, putting his head down on them and crying. Everything wrapped in a red mist.
And there was the tavern-keeper saying in a quiet, tactful way, “Go
elsewhere to weep, please. It is such a bad advertisement.“The man was fat. Noting this, through the red mist, Ephorus said:
“I hate fat fellows. A fat fellow robbed me. A fat fellow in a red palace. She said a year would go swiftly, but when I was sick in my belly it seemed a long time. And how many red palaces are there in this world? Because I shall find her if it takes the rest of my life.”
The tavern-keeper, experienced and reasonably honest, helped him to his feet.
“You go home and sleep it off. And look out for that money.”
“I shall,” Ephorus assured him.
“I spewed it up, every coin, out of my guts.”
And so began the timeless time when he was never sober from the moment he woke until he fell into sodden sleep again. But in every day there was a time when, sober enough to be coherent, drunk enough to be confidential, he’d ask anyone who gave him a moment’s attention if they’d ever heard of a red palace. And the day came when a man said:
“That’d be Petra, surely. Red as a rose, they say it is. Red as a rose.”
“They say? Who say so? Have you ever seen anybody who’s been there?”
“Yes, I have,” the man said a little truculently.
“A man I do business with. If you want to know, it’s the capital of Nabatea, a very busy place, with caravan routes to Gaza and Boara and Damascus. And it’s all cut out of red rock: houses, palaces and temples. Quite a sight to see. But it’s a long way away.”
Ephorus asked a few questions about direction and received unsatisfactory and conflicting answers which worried him little. It was only a question of navigation, he told himself; he had a Greek tongue in his head, and on none of his voyages—except to the tin island—had he found a place where he couldn’t make himself understood. Money didn’t bother him either; he still had some; less than he should have had, for he had been drunk in dubious company more than once; if the money gave out before he reached Petra he would have to earn some, or beg or steal.
What exactly he intended to do when he reached the distant city, found a red palace and Dorcas in it, he didn’t know. Shock and steady drinking had rendered him incapable of making any coherent plans. He felt under a compulsion to see Dorcas again, to reproach her to her face; he wished to do some real damage to the fat man who had, he felt, robbed him. Meanwhile he walked.
He was still drinking; his hearty appetite had vanished, and at the end of the day’s march he was often too tired to eat. So he drank and slept, woke in the morning with a queasy stomach and walked on. The weather was hot, and this was the first time he had experienced the inland heat. At midday or about then he’d buy bread or fruit, find a shady place, eat and rest a little, then on again. He was aware, in a dull kind of way, that his hitherto superb health had deserted him; there were times when he turned dizzy, times when he shook as though he had palsy, times when he lost his sight for a few minutes.
He had such a spell one afternoon, just after he had resumed walking; and the next thing he knew, he was lying on a bed and being tended by Eunice. She told him—oh, how often-how a decent honest man with two camels had deposited him at her inn, senseless and naked but for a breech clout.
“Nobody but me would have taken you in,” Eunice said. Over and over again. Somebody must have robbed him, even of his shoes. And probably hit him over the head, too, for he was now disabled in a fashion which did, he knew, result from some head injuries, His left arm and leg were almost powerless, seemed to weigh heavily and were afflicted, every now and again, with a maddening tingling.
Eunice couldn’t have been kinder. She was Greek, which made a bond; she was eight or nine years older than he, and not uncomely in her way. She was so sympathetic that she invited confidences, and to her he told what, drunk or sober, he had never told in full to anyone—the story of his love and his betrayal. She said, “You’re young. You’ll get over it. Your mind will mend with your body.”
His mind, if not mending, was clearing, because for the first time
since his talk with Lydia he was sober; and he could see thesense of Eunice’s argument when she said: