Race of Scorpions - Dorothy Dunnett [228]
Storax. That was what the trees were: the great Hygrambaris on whose resin gods and butterflies fed. And whose oils had been pressed on Katelina, soaked into the reverse of her linen. He had no hands to clear his own face but she was safe, cocooned, her face on his shoulder. Safe, although she was rigid as death and he had, somehow, to get her into the sunlight; away from the trees where every step that he took plastered them both, thicker and thicker with a whiskered, fluttering mass of brown and yellow and orange.
There was no time to ask any of the polite questions one asked a woman, before doing what he was going to do to her. In any case, his lips were smothered shut. As best he could, he stumbled with her as far as the dappled, sunlit dell of the fall, and set her down, clearing his clogged, streaming face. Then he put hands to her scarf and tore it cord and all from her hair, dragging it free of her shoulders and flinging it with his shirt as far off as he could. A carpet of moths rose as he did it, and hesitated, and then flew to fasten upon it again where it lay. The rest dropped and lingered like leaves upon the hot, perfumed skin the veil had laid bare.
Nicholas gave the things no time to cover her face or her hair or her shoulders. He took her by both arms and jumped with her into the pool, pulling her down, ducking her under the surface. He brought her up, commanded ‘Breathe!’ and thrust her down again. Drowning moths dimpled all the green surface: others swung overhead, waiting to alight once again. He could see the glutinous patches still in her hair, on her neck; and found wet wings alighting on his own bare shoulders, where her scent had stuck.
She seemed almost lifeless, and certainly beyond words. He took her arm and, half swimming, half wading, drove her under the waterfall. There, in a place where she could breathe, surrounded by spray, he rubbed her face and twisted and fretted her hair in the falling, cool water and then, with both hands, tore apart her sticky dress and the chemise below it and pulled them down from her shoulders. He paused at her waist and, stirring for the first time, she laid her trembling hands over his and dragged her skirts down until they jumped and tugged at her ankles. Then she moved, and they were gone in the foam. And loosed from her bosom the broidered zone, curiously wrought, wherein are fashioned all manner of allurements; therein is love; therein desire; therein dalliance – beguilement that steals the wits even of the wise.
Aphrodite.
He remembered, in Bruges, how she looked. The black Borselen brows, that she was too strong-minded to pluck and to pencil. The full-blooded mouth; the long hair, thick enough, even wet, to lead his eye down to what it didn’t conceal. The pretty breasts, round as fruit with their wet, swollen tips. The rib-cage strong, the waist narrow, the thighs shapely and generous. And the glittering, dark place between them where, with such consequences, she had admitted him.
He saw she was no longer rigid. Her body was quiescent in the quiet, running water. No. Not quiescent. He could feel her burning warmth, and his own. The waterfall thundered about them. His throat tight, he sought to look at her face but was stopped by her hands at his waist. Then she said something he had never expected to hear; and, lifting his eyes from her fingers, he saw her lips were open, and near. He closed