Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [167]
And was silent, abashed, as Lymond, his eyes wild with anger, rose to his feet like a cat and twitching the glass from his brother’s lax hand, tossed wine and vessel into the fire.
‘Drink to it, you and he,’ he said.
*
In March, on her bed beside the spilling fountain in the corsair Dragut’s beautiful seraglio, where the filigreed walls with their prayers to Allâh opened on the sunlit aviaries and the parks beyond, watered with cisterns and planted with pine and cypress and weeping willow and the blazing flowers of Africa, Oonagh O’Dwyer gave birth to her son.
Patience was something her Irish soul would never learn. But through the eternity of that winter, destitute in luxury, solitary amid hundreds, she clung to one thing. This was by her own will. Her own decision that she had cast off Cormac O’Connor, the debased son of kings, whose hectoring, black-visaged face she would see again in her child and his. Her own assent had freed Francis Crawford to return to Europe and his own arrogant destiny.
Dragut, old and princely corsair, had troubled her little and she had learned to respect him, and after Galatian, the pathetic weakling, to find no hurt to her pride in serving him. She had soon found that he was little in the palace, wintering near the Sultan and putting to sea at the first sign of fighting weather. In the seraglio she slept in silk and had pages and slaves black and white to fill every wish; and occasionally Güzel would come, whom she had never seen unveiled: Güzel the jewel of Dragut’s old age, who alone went with him to Djerba, to Constantinople, to the winter palace at Aleppo; who spoke English and wherever she moved, in little clouds of serving boys, with her women, her slaves, her poets and singers, her artists and guards, her musicians and dancers, was surrounded, always, by laughter.
It was Güzel the anonymous, with her fleeting, uninformative visits, who had kept Oonagh’s tough pride alive; prevented her from hammering the foul feet in her belly which thrust jumping through her tender skin day and night; the great skull and round buttocks and tight fists that squeezed and pressed the mills of her life into whining disorder; the interloper who deprived her of rest, of thought and of all delicate things.
Then, as the fretting crystals over her bed stirred in the first breeze of March, she felt her burden eased. She ate, and walked, and planned for when the swollen by-blow would be gone, and her mind and body her own. When the welcome, murmuring ache began she was inspired, relieved, exhilarated, and bore it in triumph until dusk. But when the gentle, timeous aches became elastic agony, and her monstrous young raped mind and spirit from her again, she wrestled alone in the dark under her silken sheets until, at the moment when suddenly she was afraid to be solitary, Güzel’s voice said in Arabic, ‘Now!’
And the room sprang into blazing light; and the commotion of many voices, the hiss of steam, the chink of china and silver, the grip of kind hands and the tone of friendly cheer, encouragement and delight suddenly warmed and melted her cold heart.
Time, excited, agonizing, magnificent time flew, to the lilt of Güzel’s voice. The frenzy mounted, mounted and exploded in a vast, irresistible burgeoning. From between Güzel’s ringless, capable hands came a string of brief, mellow cries; silence, and then a small, clear renewal of complaint, and two feet, blue-mottled morsels of flesh, kicked lost in the limitless air.
Oonagh’s child had been born. It was a son, small-boned and perfect, with skin as white as new milk within a day of its coming, and hair downy gold as a chick’s. It could not, in a thousand miraculous nights, have been begotten by Cormac O’Connor.
‘May God grant thee prosperity,’ wrote Dragut Rais to Sir Graham Malett in Scotland, fingering the smile in his grizzled beard as he paced up and down in front of his scribe. ‘He that fulfils his oath is thrice blessed. The woman from Ireland, on being brought to birth of her child, has through