Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [145]
Many times, reliving that night, he pondered the vividness of it, and wondered what drugs might have induced it. The burning colours (from what impossible dyes?) worn by the dancers as, winding down the slope from the village, they stamped and swayed round the grassy arena before Gnumi Mansa. The hunkered knot of musicians on the King’s right, their unseeing eyes on the performers, their hands and sticks resonating on curious hides with a rhythm that stirred forgotten memories: water striking on armour in battle; a storm of rain driving its tattoo across a great army encampment; the distant beat and roar of a fire consuming a house and a business.
The impact of sound, and the awesome impact of sight. The vast roseate bowl of the African sky as the sun sank in the Ocean of Darkness and, behind the frieze of darkening bush, a strip of satiny water barred by the slender topmast of the San Niccolò, bright as a needle, her pennant stirred by the light river airs. And here beside him, under the tree, the circles burning red as two lamps on either side of the King’s spreading black nose.
The men fought, and the women danced, their feet rising and falling, their hands flailing, their heads low, their rumps in the air. The men retired and in the firelight under the indigo sky the women danced in circles, in rows, their hands twisting and clapping, their cries flying up to the brilliant stars, while the drums beat and beat. And from the watching, clapping crowds, first one woman and then another would slip out and join them, and then a man, and another man, the red light glistening on their eyes and their teeth and on the gold on their arms. Someone tugged Nicholas.
Already a group of the King’s wives had joined the performers, one or two alone, one or two with a white man drawn by the hand. The girl who fetched him to his feet was the one who had pressed behind him in the tent, whose tongue had touched his ear and his neck and whose arching foot had played by his thigh. She was small, with lustrous eyes and a proud neck and inquisitive fingers pliant as candlewick. There was another girl, a little taller, who rose and came with her. He let them lead him into the dancing, heavy with the effort of present restraint; dizzy with the cavernous ache of a well-made, well-practised body long denied its habitual deliverance.
He had no idea how to copy their dancing, nor did it matter. The drumbeat throbbed through his veins; before and behind, the limbs and bodies of men and women pressed against him; he found the smaller girl leaping at his flank, his hand caught round her waist. Round his own waist were the arms of the other girl. His doublet was open, and his shirt. The fires flared; their shadows streamed and leaped over the grass; the noise of the drums drowned all speech and deadened all thought. He saw Vito, flushed, dishevelled, freeing the black, fulsome breasts of a girl perhaps four months with child, who laughed up at him as he sucked and caressed her. He glimpsed Fernão in the flickering dark, already halfway up the slope with a girl at his hip and another, laughing, carried in his stout shirt-sleeved arms. He saw Vicente, and what Vicente was doing.
He realised that abstinence was not only impossible, but that without warning he had reached a state of overwhelming necessity. He could not speak. Unthinking, without effort it seemed, he found himself standing in the darkness under the trees, a girl’s spread hands on his buttocks, his clothes swiftly wrested apart so that he could continue and conclude a function he did not remember beginning.
The relief – the shameful parallel could hardly be avoided – brought him to his knees. Then he realised that two girls had taken part, one promoting, one acting; and that both were close to him now, their arms wound about him, their fingers exploring his body while they giggled and chattered and laughed. And then a third joined them, wearing nothing now but her golden ornaments, although he recognised her face from the tent.
She laughed at him,