Free Tefuga by Peter Dickinson Page A

drifted over to watch what I was doing and got interested. Soon I had a real audience. At least it meant there were more people for the flies to land on and someone kneeling on the other side fanning away and someone fanning behind for the privilege of standing near the Great Artist! They began to chatter and comment I only had to run a block of shadow down a wall and they’d all sigh with appreciation, and when I took a fresh sheet of paper and started to do a serious sketch of the courtyard—straight off with the brush, risking absolutely everything, dashing it in—and at first they couldn’t make out what the blobs and lines were meant to be and then someone realized and a brown arm would come over my shoulder and point and explain and point at the right bit of a building—oh, the chatter and laughter! I simply had to carry on. I wanted to, anyway, but this was probably the most exciting thing that had happened to those poor girls for months!
    I hadn’t really finished that one when KB was ready at last and paraded his prize cattle in front of me. He wanted them as a group but by now my blood was really up and I refused to let that fat devil tell me what to paint, as if he owned me and my brushes as well as those unlucky women! I jumped off my stool and chose the ones I wanted and smiled at them as I posed them and then rushed back and slapped and dabbed them onto the paper, fast as my hand would move, never a hair wrong. I just knew my hand would do it without me having to think, tho’ it was a great help having had a bit of practice with the skin colours on the way up river. I don’t know. Even if I’d never tried to paint a black skin before I think I’d have got it right. That’s how I felt yesterday—quite, quite certain that my hand would do what my eye was seeing, as tho’ there was nothing else of me between them. Oh, if only it was always … no, I suppose not. Mustn’t be greedy, Bets.
    I did a group of three, one of them carrying a dark red jar on her head. They stood like queens, and so still in that blazing sun. And those beautiful bright robes. Then I did the big woman with the horse-bones and the yellow beads—not at all beautiful, but interesting. I wonder why KB chose her—so much I’ll never know. I did her standing beside a pale thin Fulani woman—a complete contrast except for the lovely native dignity. The Fulani was wearing earth green and ochre stripes and the horse-face the most marvellous royal blue edged with gold, which set off the blue-shot lights in her skin to perfection. I wonder if KB chose it on purpose for her. If so he’s really got an eye, in spite of being so horrible every way else! Then I did four sitting in a pose like a Victorian photo. That came out just right too. And then, snap, it was over. I was exhausted. Drained. I only just had strength to clean my brushes and put them away. When the women understood they sighed, all together, slow and soft.
    Something interesting. Oh, what a futile way to say it! Something really important! While I was painting the women my audience behaved quite differently from before. Perfect decorum. Silence. Stillness. We might have been in church. Yes, awe. I know what that funny word means now. Perhaps they’re better at feeling it than we are in spoilt Europe. I don’t mean awe at me or what I was doing. There was something there, working through me—not just me, all of us—a force, a spirit, something to do with us all being women. They gathered it, standing behind and around me, and then it came funnelling through me into the pictures I was painting, making them special. I don’t believe, however much practice I have, I’ll ever do anything as good as those three sketches in my whole life.
    Of course the only one who didn’t understand was the Emir. He’d been sitting over to one side having a snack (goodness, I was hungry!) which some