The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [128]
‘Wet,’ said Lymond, ‘but unimpaired, mark you, even in dignity. He has decreed that we are worthy of his Cherkassy Cossacks.’
‘Ah,’ said Güzel. ‘The note called Coquetry and the note called True. Was it necessary to make your point with your fists?’
‘Yes,’ Lymond said. ‘It was what he wished; and because he is a romantic, he is satisfied. The rewards of immaturity. Others do not have the same requital.’
A flicker of colour ran through her even skin, and was gone. She said, ‘The mature are not incapable of making their wishes known. It is a matter of choice.’
‘It is a matter of dignity,’ Lymond said. ‘And patience. And reticence.’ He had moved half-way into the room and had come to rest on the arm of a couch, his hand laid like a fan upon the carved wood of the back. He said, ‘Did you know that for the first hundred years after Mohammed, the King of Persia always kept a horse saddled for his return, and one of his daughters reserved for the Prophet? I wonder if the Prophet laughed, or wept for them.’
‘They would be honoured,’ Güzel said. She moved, giving a small sigh, and slipping her feet down the bed-skirts stood for a moment on the silk carpet, her linen robe straight as the robe of Osiris. She said, ‘Life has many strands. You will take some wine?’
The swan-necked flagon with its silver chain stood beyond the circle of lamplight, where the paintings and the figured hangings and the diapered silver-gilt of the haunch pots reflected all the mosaic reds of the brazier. Flat-backed as a caryatid, her beautiful Greek face without expression, the mistress of all the Voevoda’s great establishment laid her hand on the flask and found it taken from her, gently, by the Voevoda’s hand from behind. ‘Life has many strands,’ said Francis Crawford, ‘but with one lacking, it is a lame thing. I have been absent too long. I have come to ask forgiveness.’
Her hands dropped to her sides, she stared without turning at the brazier. She said, ‘You have been absent too long. You are forgiven your debt.’
She could feel his warmth behind her, but he did nothing to touch her. He said, ‘You must be more generous than that. You must say my debt is paid.’
‘It is paid,’ she said.
They were speaking in English. He was so close that she could see his hand leave the flask and rest on the table, the light from the silver lacing the bruised and capable fingers. He said, ‘And what of your obligation?’
She turned then, to see his face. ‘Mine?’
In the loose, glimmering play of the light his gaze was direct and blue and, for once unequivocal. ‘You dragged out of Greece a sorry carcass, rotten with opium, and barred against every assault of the senses. You have destroyed the weak places and undermined, one by one, all the bastions.… They are all open, Güzel.’
‘And my obligation?’ she said with composure, while the thread round her throat ran with sudden, shimmering light.
‘To walk through,’ said Francis Crawford, and raising his hands to her shoulders bent and kissed her for the first time, softly, full on the lips.
Her lids fell closed. Her breath, issuing, made a short sound, without words. Then her lessoned mouth opened and her body, trained and pliant as honeysuckle, joined its hard warmth to his. After a while, without speaking, he carried her to the lamplit pillows where she lay within the wick-black smoke of her hair, and putting up her fingers, threw back the abused, furlined folds of his night robe.
The fathomless eyes, searching up into his, possessed all the old secrets and mysteries, and had practised them. The concupiscent tongue, the soliciting fingers, the flexible body had owned many men, and had admitted few masters outwith her own implacable will.
But this time, her arts scarcely hid what her senses demanded. His hands wooed her, gleaning her body. And bringing to this his own long experience, every breath he took was a caress, designed only to please her. While her fingernails strayed and her lips changed beneath their long, unceasing engagement