Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [62]
“No, I don’t want it.”
Maillart pulled her to him, hand at the small of her back, and thrust once, to make her gasp—the gasp was quite well known to him, encouraging. He kissed her more deeply, inhaling her breath, as his free hand worked loose the bodice laces with a desperate ingenuity. His fingertips brushed something unexpectedly hard and cold, then burrowed toward the more familiar softness. He was trying to pull her down to the sand. Isabelle bit through his lower lip, then, as he recoiled, hit him hard on the cheekbone with her closed hand.
Maillart backed off and spat blood in the sand, touched his finger to his lip, staring at her in astonishment.
“Tu me fais mal.” Isabelle tucked her small breast back into her bodice in a businesslike manner, and fastened the laces back up to the neck. “And you’ve also broken my necklace.”
Maillart glanced down at his right hand; the ends of the gold chain unspooled from his fingers. On his palm lay a dark cylindrical object—a carved stone penis, life-sized or near.
“But what is that?!”
“Un objèt d’art, évidemment,” Isabelle snapped, “A souvenir from the time of the caciques.”
Maillart’s eyes bulged at the stone phallus. He had seen arrowheads and thunderstones and a few carved fetishes of the long-vanished Arawaks, but nothing remotely resembling this. “They worshipped these?” he asked.
“No more than you worship your own. Bah, you have destroyed the chain.”
Maillart’s back stiffened. “Allow me to have it repaired for you.”
“No, give it to me.” Isabelle took the chain, squinted, and closed the broken link with a pinch of her nails. She reached behind her neck to refasten the clasp, then thrust the pendant back into her bosom. Maillart glared as she shook out her hair.
“Ça va?” he said with an ironic lift of his eyebrows. He wiped a little blood off his chin.
Isabelle turned toward the west, where the sun was a red disk dissolving in the molten water. “You misunderstand me,” she said. “When I come here at this hour, I think of my children.”
The captain considered this for a moment. “Accept my apologies,” he said.
“But it was I who provoked you,” Isabelle said. “After all, you are only a man.”
“True,” the captain said, with an unaccustomed sense of humility. “I admit that.”
His heat had by now completely subsided, and he felt his anger fading too, leaving confusion, then a kind of calm. They stood at arm’s length from each other, until the sun had cut entirely through the surface of the water and dropped under like a coin in a slot. Behind was a wake of color streaked across ragged scraps of cloud. Seagulls crossed the red-rippled sky, crying as if the sun was something they had lost.
“We had better go in,” the captain said practically. “A horse might break a leg on these rocks in the dark.”
Isabelle nodded, speechless. The captain assisted her back to the horses. When she had mounted, she retained his hand a little longer.
“I have still a need for friendship,” she said.
“I offer whatever you will accept.”
They rode back to the town in the same silence in which they had come. The captain glanced back once to look for Isabelle’s hat, but it had either foundered or floated out of sight.
Dinner chez Monot was convivial enough—Isabelle seemed rather more animated than usual, and Maillart managed, at last, to rise to the occasion. If Monsieur Cigny suspected anything, he gave no sign of it . . . and after all, this time there was little to suspect. Maillart retired to his room, resolved to stay there, renouncing any adventures on the balcony . .