Free Tefuga by Peter Dickinson

swords were eunuchs, and the funny crooked entrance rooms were like that so you couldn’t see right through from the outside. I remembered how KB had looked at me when we first met and a mad horrible idea crossed my mind and I’m afraid I actually turned half round to run away. It was no use. The other door was blocked by one of the eunuchs coming through. It was like the worst possible nightmare for a mo, but then I saw he was carrying my parasol and paints and stool, and—I don’t know why—that told me I was just being silly. Nobody would dare. They know what would happen if they did. I think the eunuchs guessed, tho’, from the way they grinned.
    A hammering noise had begun outside and when I got through the door I found KB banging away with a sort of cudgel at an old bit of carved black plank which was hanging by the doorway. There were about a dozen women, the two or three nearest grovelling to KB and the ones further off just sitting. Soon as I showed up they started to stare. I thought that was all his wives but almost at once more of them came. More and more. They oozed from tiny doors which must have had little dark rooms behind them—hardly a window anywhere. I began counting but lost track almost at once ’cos of the way they kept appearing, around sixty in the end, I should think, all sorts milling around and staring at me in a vague, scared way, pale cattle Fulani and black Hausa and dark brown little women with terrific face-scars, and glossy Kitawa and three who I think must have been half-castes—half- Chinese , one of them—and a tall purply-black girl with huge bones like a horse and her hair knotted into yellow beads, and others too—Africa’s extraordinary like that, how many there are! They were all dressed in long, loose, wrap-around cotton, worn like a plaid, with a different coloured skirt, mostly rather dirty. Some of them didn’t look more than about thirteen, and none of them very old, though KB’s seventy. Only half a dozen children that I could see, clinging to their mothers like babies tho’ they were much too big for that.
    I’ve made it sound rather picturesque, but really I felt absolutely sick to look at them. It was disgusting . Like being in a farmyard—not ’cos it was dirty which it wasn’t specially, but ’cos the women weren’t people. They were cattle. They stared at me with dark stupid cow-eyes. They didn’t know anything, they didn’t do anything, they were just herded into this place and kept here for that filthy, fat, leering old brute to—I will write it—to copulate with. It was so shocking I almost fainted, not ’cos of the heat or the smells, but the absolute horror of it. But I clenched my teeth and told myself this was what I’d chosen and I’d got to go through with it. I tried to smile at them but they didn’t smile back.
    There was a shade-tree here too so I turned away and started to set up my easel while KB went strolling among his women picking out the prize ones for me to paint. Some of the others rolled huge clay pots out from inside and dragged out special clothes, grander and brighter than what they were wearing. KB chose who should be dressed in what for her picture. I was ready ages before he was so I started a quick practice sketch of the courtyard with KB pushing his wives around—my hand was absolutely aching to paint. The flies were a nuisance so I called out in Hausa for a whisk and KB turned and pushed one of the women towards me—only a girl, really, about fourteen. She hadn’t understood what she was supposed to do but soon as I showed her she whisked away. I wasn’t really paying attention to her ’cos my sketch was going so well. It was only a cartoon, really, but I think it was ’cos I was so furious with KB and couldn’t say so that it came alive, the way they sometimes do.
    By now a few of the other women had