Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [146]
It was not empty, but darkness concealed those who rolled on the straw with which it was strewn, and whose cries and creakings were audible. It seemed of little importance in the magnificent war in which he found himself; when a fourth girl joined him, hot as ginger, he laughed aloud and with a cheerful, a maniac zest charged into battle.
His life, oddly fashioned, had had little to do with bought love and none with orgiastic indulgence. Before the teaching years, the years of his training at the hands of aristocrat, princess, courtesan, he had discovered his own form of joy in the barns and attics and hedgerows of Bruges, with maids who had no expectations of marriage and who knew how to avoid trouble. He and they had made love, you might say, carelessly and freely as animals, except that animals were not moved by such exercise to affection, to compassion, to the benison of glorious laughter.
Since he was eighteen, he hadn’t bedded a woman with laughter. He realised it just before dawn, and the girl beneath him – the third, the fourth, for they had changed, he well knew, all through the night – caressed him with her toes and her fingers and dried his damp eyes with her lips. And then, agile and cruel, witty and eager and inexorable, had brought in her reinforcements, and challenged his vigour again.
Gelis van Borselen, wakeful through the long night, watched the long troughs approach at first light with their sated, silent men. Her arms spread on the rail, she let pale Vicente go by, and tipsy Luis and fiery, half-quenched Vito. She saw Fernão miss his step, sleepily, on the ladder. She observed the child Lázaro plod on board, with his hectic face and brilliant, glittering eyes. She saw Godscalc confused, Jorge dazed, Diniz conscientious, and finally Nicholas, stepping from canoe to ladder with confidence, and from ladder to deck with positive triumph. Then he saw her, and clutched unexpectedly at the rail.
She began to laugh. When Bel of Cuthilgurdy strode to her side Gelis seized her for support and laughed harder. She said, ‘Niccolino! What have they done to you?’
And Nicholas, rueful, happy, exhausted, broke into laughter as helpless as her own and said, ‘Broken me. Don’t laugh. My God, don’t laugh. I don’t think I can walk.’
‘Would you like me to carry you?’ said Gelis. ‘What do you have in your hand?’
He looked down at the object. It was frail and white and peculiar. It was a bone.
‘An aphrodisiac?’ suggested Bel with some sourness.
He made a sound like an underground spring, examining it. ‘It could be. I shan’t pretend I should have refused it. But no. It was a present.’
‘For services rendered?’ It was Gelis.
He said, ‘They thanked me in other ways.’ His eyes, dark round the rims, shone pale and childishly bright in the dawn. He said, ‘It was a present for you. A cat bone. It’s hollow.’
She took it. He reeked of bed and women and happiness. It was a bone, and both ends were sealed. She opened one, and dust ran out into her palm. Yellow dust. She stopped it quickly and looked at him.
‘For you,’ Nicholas said. ‘Unless you would like anything else.’
‘How did you guess?’ Gelis said. ‘Come to my cabin.’
‘Oh, my God,’ Nicholas said; and, pushing himself off the rail, patted her on the shoulder as he passed and ruffled her hair with unforced, unthinking bonhomie. She heard him hit the wall as he wandered into his chamber. She was still standing looking after him when