see her .. ” He looked again, as if to confirm the dreadfulness of the sight, and again made as if to rush to where Misery had been tied to a post in a jungle clearing, her arms over her head. Glimmering on her wrists and fastening her to the lowest branch of the eucalyptus, which was the only tree in the clearing, was something the Bourkas had apparently taken a fancy to before sending Baron Heidzig into the mouth of the idol and to his undoubtedly terrible death: the Baron’s blued steel handcuffs.
This time it was Hezekiah who grabbed Ian, but the bushes rustled again and Geoffrey looked into the clearing, his breath momentarily catching in his throat, as a bit of fabric may catch on a thorn—he feltlike a man who must walk up a rocky hill with a load of decayed and dangerously volatile explosives in his arms. One sting, he thought. Just one and it’s all over for her.
“No, boss, mussun‘,” Hezekiah was saying with a kind of terrified patience. “It like d’utha boss be sayin’ ... if you go out dere, de bees wake up from dey dream. And if de bees wake, it doan matter for her if she be dine of one sting or one-de-one t‘ousan’ sting. If de bees wake up from dey dream we all die, but she die firs’ and de mos”orrible.”
Little by little Ian relaxed between the two men, one of them black, the other white. His head turned toward the clearing with dreadful reluctance, as if he did not wish to look and yet could not forbear to.
“Then what are we to do? What are we to do for my poor darling?”
I don’t know came to Geoffrey’s lips, and in his own state of terrible distress, he was barely able to bite them back. Not for the first time it occurred to him that Ian’s possession of the woman Geoffrey loved just as dearly (if secretly) allowed Ian to indulge in an odd sort of selfishness and an almost womanly hysteria that Geoffrey himself must forgo; after all, to the rest of the world he was only Misery’s friend.
Yes, just her friend, he thought with half-hysterical irony, and then his own eyes were drawn back to the clearing. To his friend.
Misery wore not a stitch of clothing, yet Geoffrey thought that even the most prudish church-thrice-a-week village biddy could not have faulted her for indecency. The hypothetical old prude might have run screaming from the sight of Misery, but her screams would have been caused by terror and revulsion rather than outraged propriety. Misery wore not a stitch of clothing, but she was far from naked.
She was dressed in bees. From the tips of her toes to the crown of her chesturt hair, she was dressed in bees. She seemed almost to be wearing some strange nun’s habit—strange because it moved and undulated across the swells of her breasts and hips even though there was not even a ghost of a breeze. Likewise, her face seemed encased in a wimple of almost Mohammedan modesty—only her blue eyes peered out of the mask of bees which crawled sluggishly over her face, hiding mouth and nose and chin and brows. More bees, giant Africa browns, the most. poisonous and bad-tempered bees in all the world, crawled back and forth over the Baron’s steel bracelets before joining the living gloves on Misery’s hands.
As Geoffrey watched, more and more bees flew into the clearing from all points of the compass—yet it was clear to him, even in his current distraction, that most of them were coming from the west, where the great dark stone face of the goddess loomed.
The drums pulsed their steady rhythm, in its way as much a soporific as the sleepy drone of the bees. But Geoffrey knew how deceptive that sleepiness was; he had seen what happened to the Baroness, and only thanked God that Ian had been spared that ... and the sound of that sleepy hum suddenly rising to a furious buzz-saw squeal ... a souhd which had at first muffled and then drowned the woman’s agonized dying screams. She had been a vain and foolish creature, dangerous as well—she had almost gott en them killed when she had freed Stringfellow’s bushmaster—but silly or not, foolish or not, dangerous or not, no man or woman deserved to die like that.
In his mind Geoffrey echoed Ian’s question: What are we to do? What are we to do