The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [129]
Her needs over the years had become complex. Her passions, over the years, had found such force that one fulfilment could hardly assuage them. Couch to cushion to carpet became soft and desperate stations, moving from urging to torment to investment once again. And with an odd, detached insight, giving and withholding, exciting and loitering, he knew how to find her appetite, and force it into violence and withstand it without mercy, until she was aware of nothing in the whole moaning world but her famine. And then of nothing in the world but the exquisite act which occluded it. And towards dawn hunger, fed and fed, at last allowed her to lie dispossessed in dreaming calm, satisfied.
It was after that, when Leila had been sent from the locked door, that Güzel stirred from a half-sleeping trance to say, ‘Do you never sleep? They say you don’t.’
‘And so they should.’ Hands behind his head, Francis Crawford was gazing up at the tester, not at her. His hair, hazed by the sun from the window, was dry now and loose on the pillow. His lids were long and clear like the embroidered face on the cloth at her side, with its border of tall branching letters and its long figure, the mailed feet like willow leaves. He said, ‘Commanders never slumber, nor share the common pursuits of the vulgar. In fact, I prefer to sleep alone. It is an indulgence you will have to permit me.’
She closed her eyes smiling, and then opened them, to study his face once again, fair and smooth and burnished like ivory, with no lax muscle in it. She said, ‘I have brought you across many years for this night,’ and watched his mind awake, and his mouth deepen a little at the corner. He did not look at her.
He said, ‘Since Djerba?’
‘Since long before Djerba. I had heard of you.’
He turned on his elbows in a sudden, swift movement and cast her one of the wide, blue looks she could not yet understand. ‘I hope,’ he said, ‘that whatever you heard, you have not been disappointed.’
She smiled at him. ‘I heard of your ability. I heard enough to know you could do what you are achieving in Russia today. As for the rest——’
‘There has been no rest,’ said Lymond, ‘that I can remember.’
‘… as for the rest, I think we have been to the same school, you and I; and to the same trade thereafter. Man has an animal appetite, or I would be nothing. I too have had my Margaret Lennox and my Agha Morat and my child-whore Joleta Reid Malett … more of each, and for longer. It has destroyed neither of us. And now nothing can hinder us.’
She could not see his eyes, but his lips were smiling. ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘Excellent the recompense and goodly the resting-place. Now nothing can hinder us.’
He did not turn. For a moment, she lay without speaking and then, her thought turning again to the pleasure of the night, she lifted her hand, and ran its fingers, peacefully, down the suppleness of his skin. She remarked, ‘Do you know what you said?’
He turned, his chin in his hand. ‘What did I say? When?’
‘Last night.’
‘I seem,’ said Lymond, ‘to remember saying a great many things last night. The manifest fool is known by every ninth word he says requiring verification. Was it ungallant?’
His mistress dropped her fingers and lay back in her turn. Through the hangings, the snow-light touched kindly the black-browed face with its deep eyes and hard-boned, beautiful nose. ‘You said, “I must apologize for the faint smell of fish.”‘
For a moment he looked at her, then he began to laugh softly. He buried his face in the pillow and went on laughing for quite a long time until it ran down, like a clock, and he said, ‘I didn’t think that you heard that.’
‘Fish?’ said Güzel.
He turned round, his fine skin flushed a little with laughter. ‘The carp in the winter garden. I do apologize. Lover never came to his