Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [163]
Jerott looked down at the cup. ‘That stuff? I want my senses about me.’ But all the same, in his stomach, a small, comfortable fire had started to burn, and was flickering, wistfully; hoping for fuel.
‘Eat, then,’ said Marthe. ‘They are meant to go together. When you have eaten, you need have no fear of the raki.’
It might have been true, had they not refilled his goblet so often. Marthe did not stop them, and after a while, since he remained so exquisitely clear-headed, he saw no point in confusing the cupbearers. By then they could hardly have heard him refuse, in any case, for the music had begun, from some source he could not quite make out; sinuous wind music, loosely serpentine like the golden verses sewn on the curtains and woven into the carpets: reedy flute music, with the tinsel patter and throb of a corymb of drums. A man and a woman rose, prostrated themselves in front of the Baba, and started to dance. The arena cleared.
The sheepskins had gone; the dervishes, seated crosslegged beside the Baba, cups in hand, swayed with the music and someone began to sing to it; a kind of chant which the others took up. ‘These are Nefes’es; the intonations,’ said Marthe. ‘The sound of them, with the special properties of the raki, leads to a state of spiritual ecstasy, and the desire to express this in dance. Others will follow.’
There were a dozen figures already on the floor, dancing in pairs; man with woman, man with man. The figures were formal, and performed in deliberate sequence: a swaying of the body to right and to left, slowly with the surge of the music, then quickening fraction by fraction till, breathless, each dancer stopped.
They stopped with their robes touching, their breasts heaving still with the effort. Then each put his or her left hand on the breast, bowed, and still bent, their heads close, they swung their arms rhythmically, hypnotically, to right and to left, again and again as the music wavered and pulsed.
Jerott watched their faces. Of the dancers nearest him, the woman’s face, half hidden by the fall of her hair, was white and glazed with the heat. Her brows, raised with the effort, had creased her white skin into a thousand fine lines: Jerott could see water run down her temples, and the pulse there beginning to throb, as her skin darkened with the uprush of blood. Full of raki, full of exaltation, her head down, she swayed to and fro, her arms swinging like white silken chains.
When the figure ended she staggered, and her partner, smiling, his eyes fixed, caught and steadied her: somewhere someone had fallen. More and more men had pressed in with the dancers. The music changed and, swaying, they began encircling the room. The music got quicker, and louder, and moving round, in a swirl of warmly fumed, linen-swathed bodies, of sweating skin and sinuous hands, close together couple by couple, each dancer began to revolve.
Jerott found he had a full bowl of raki in his hands. He drank it and got up. ‘No,’ said Marthe.
He was stronger than she was, and he could prove it. He closed his hand on her wrist and pulled; and although she resisted at first, she suddenly came quite easily, so that he nearly cannoned back into the other dancers. There were tears in her eyes. He stretched open his own, to see more clearly.
They were tears of rage, or of pain. She was rubbing her wrist. Her arm, under the loose sleeve of the robe, was milky white on the underside, and toasted very pale gold on the outside, like a chicken half done on the spit. He thought that picturesque, and was going to tell her so, when his gaze fell on her throat, just above the high linen neckline, and he wondered what colour her skin was, just under it. They had somehow got into the press of the dancers, swaying and crowding thick against them, and the drums throbbed like a headache and the flutes sobbed and ached