Authors: Laura Kinsale
In the chilly dark, he lay down on the carpet beside her and drew her into his arms. He touched her cheek, and her hair, drifted his fingertips across her forehead and down the line of her chin.
She turned her face into his hand and kissed his palm. There was no passion in this embrace, only the need to be close, as they'd been in the long months of hardship on the island. With a sense of warm familiarity, she did now what she'd often done then: turned on her side and settled into the curve of his body with only the soft desert robes between them.
"You're so beautiful," he said in the darkness. "You're the most beautiful thing in my life."
I can see it coming," Sheridan said to her under his breath as the magicians consulted their pans of burning charcoal. They were ponderously determining the proper moment to conduct the mad English prophet into the presence of Ishak Pasha, the mighty vizier of all eastern Anatolia. "He's got an ailing wife, or a son with a cast in one eye, and I'll be expected to foam at the mouth and say 'The whale weeps at midnight' twenty-nine times before anyone's allowed to go to bed."
Olympia bit her lip, watching three white eunuchs pad by, soft-footed and long-limbed like graceful insects. She and Sheridan stood beneath an archway that opened into a garden, surrounded on all sides by fabulous tiled walls of blue and green and gold designs.
Sheridan was right—a wild performance always seemed expected of him, though in reality all he ever did was bow smoothly in the eastern manner and converse with his "hosts" in Arabic while Olympia sat without headdress or
yashmak
in the presence of men who'd never seen a woman's face outside the hareem. As he'd predicted, his polite sanity and her calm flouting of convention created more sensation than any fit of mania—fits being pretty common stuff among the wandering
darwayshes
and holy men in any case.
The magicians determined that they must wait four more hours before the auspicious moment. Olympia's shoulders fell at this news—she was tired, having ridden all night and morning down from the foothills of Kurdistan and then been bathed and perfumed and dressed and fussed over by the hareem servants for the rest of the day. Even the magical sight of Ishak Pasha's palace, its domes and minaret floating up out of the haze like a vision from the Arabian Nights, with the vast plain below and Mount Ararat's peak of snow in the purple distance—not even that wonder could erase the cumulative exhaustion of weeks of weary travel.
But she sighed and nodded when Sheridan told her, trusting him to know the proper etiquette. He looked at her for a moment. She smiled tiredly. Something came into his face: his mouth hardened and his eyes took on a cold, fixed light—he spoke abruptly to the magicians and grasped her arm.
Without waiting for the usual attendant to slink ahead, or the eunuchs to whisper their arrival in the vizier's ear, or any of the other points of procedure that had been followed at every stop from Jidda to Ha'il to Baghdad, he led her swiftly beneath the arch and into the antechamber, past the little fountain and right up to the startled figure of Ishak Pasha on his cushioned divan.
Sheridan did bow—cursorily—but she was horrified to see that he didn't slip off his footwear before he bypassed the guests and petitioners who sat hunched on low stools before the dais. He stepped up onto the carpeted platform and seated a bewildered Olympia on the divan next to the plump, old vizier. With a disinterested air, Sheridan sat down himself on the other side. She saw that the
teskeri hilaal
had appeared, to lie conspicuously against his chest like a glinting warning. They'd dressed him in Turkish clothing: tight trousers and a deep red velvet tunic encrusted with embroidery, but instead of slippers he wore European boots, which he raised casually to rest on the vizier's divan as he clapped his hands.
Ishak Pasha turned white beneath his plumed turban. Olympia held her breath. She'll learned enough of oriental etiquette to know they'd just delivered a series of murderous insults. But as a moment of silence passed and the other guests began quickly to stand and perform their greetings, bending low—not toward the vizier, but to Sheridan and then herself—she understood with astonishment that the governor of the whole territory was trembling with fear instead of fury.
She looked at Sheridan and saw the fixed expression there still, the calm lit by a cold excitement in his eyes. He could have been a real prophet—he had that look of inhuman intensity, that flame of passion locked in ice that she'd seen in the battle with the pirates.
The demon had woken again.
"We call this inspiring respect and striking terror." He used English in a tone that sounded as if he were pronouncing some sentence of doom. "This little tub of butter thought he'd bought some nice expensive playthings to pass along and ingratiate himself with the Sultan." He smiled with sweet menace at the hapless pasha, caressing the
teskeri
as if it were a weapon. "But it's not quite that easy, is it, my fine basket of tripe? We're not going to await your pleasure. We're tired; we want to go to bed. We're going to be such overbearing bullies that even Mustafa couldn't find fault with the way we insult our inferiors. Too bad he ain't here to do it in our behalf, but we'll have to muddle through by ourselves. Here are the pipes." He stared with magnificent gloom at the riveted faces around the room, still speaking English. "Pretend to try yours, and then push it away. Show us some royal disgust."
He nodded, and the silent servants stepped forward together from the lower end of the room, each one placing a long-necked pipe before an individual guest. Olympia looked down the five slender feet of modeled clay to the glowing bowl, and then at the jeweled mouthpiece presented to her lips.
She touched it delicately to her tongue, and barely suppressed a cough at the flood of sharp tobacco smoke.
"Kikh!"
She thrust it away with the expression she'd heard a Bedouin use upon startling a rat out of a grain bag.
The servant before her looked horrified. Instantly he removed the pipe, disappeared and brought another, more exquisitely decorated than the first. Olympia repeated the refusal. The vizier sweated miserably and addressed anxious questions to Sheridan. After two more rejections, when the servants and the vizier appeared almost beside themselves with stress, Sheridan allowed her to settle for tea.
He monopolized the conversation, asking sharp questions of the vizier and receiving voluble answers. When at last they rose to leave, Ishak Pasha leapt to his feet and personally ushered them down the single step and all the way to the anteroom, cooing a single phrase over and over. When they'd been led to a chamber and left alone with bowls of figs and pastries stuffed with cheese, Olympia asked what the vizier had been saying so earnestly.
"'Go with the fortune of a prince,'" Sheridan interpreted, smiling grimly. "The highest compliment for a departing guest. We have him on the run, anyway."
She drew a breath to calm herself. Her heart was still beating painfully fast after the ordeal of defying a vizier in his own palace. "You have the most amazing nerve."
"We're out of Arabia and amongst the real Osmanlis now." He touched the
teskeri
. "This buys me any damned thing I want—including Ishak Pasha's fat head. That's what I hope he thinks, at any rate."
"It's not true?"
For a moment he didn't answer, stating pensively down at the rug they sat on. "I don't know. I'd reckon odds are against it." He shrugged. "Ishak says a message has gone out from the Sultan already to all the provinces. The Great Mahmoud has a wish to see the crazy Englishman who wears his crescent. That could mean anything—good or bad." He looked up at her, his eyes a cool gray, giving away no emotion. "And it seems Fitzhugh hasn't wasted any time taking his gripe right to the British ambassador at Stamboul, demanding his fiancé and restitution for the attack on his ship. We're a wanted pair in the Ottoman Empire."
She dropped her eyes. Then she glanced around at the chamber, so serene and simple and lovely, carpeted with myriad soft rugs, the walls glowing with painted tiles and the air filled with the whispering of fountains. "Are we in much danger?"
He laughed and stretched out to his full length, his shoulders propped against the low divan. "You haven't changed a bit, have you? Christ, yes, we're in danger. D'you think just because this Ishak sweats and scrapes that he's actually developed any affection for us? As long as we've got the nerve to wipe our boots on his divan, he'll ooze charm and generosity. But just wait for the word to come through that we don't have the Sultan behind us, and we'll pay for every insult. With interest."
She looked at him dubiously. "It seems a risky way to go on. Can't we just be customarily polite?"
"I was under the impression you didn't care to stand around for hours waiting on a bunch of constellations to converge."
She sighed. "I suppose not."
"Ripping slack stars they've got in this place," he muttered, adjusting a tasseled pillow beneath his head.
Olympia tried to smile, but didn't quite manage to banish her uneasiness.
He reached out and touched her cheek. "Princess…I'll take care of you."
She bent her head. An eastern silence fell between them, full of rustling leaves and the soft sound of water. He lowered his eyelashes, sliding a glance along her body. A distant muezzin called the faithful to evening prayer with a singsong drone.
"They've rigged you out enticingly," he murmured.
It was the first time since they'd left the island that he'd mentioned her appearance. Without thinking, she'd slipped off the hot and heavy brocade robe she'd worn into the audience room, and now she felt her cheeks grow scarlet as she looked down at the thin rose-colored trousers, embroidered with flowers and covered with a gauzy smock that showed her breasts right through it. The open caftan that matched the trousers was somewhat more modest, but the cut fitted so closely to her body that she squirmed in embarrassment. "I've gotten much too fat."
He clasped his hands behind his neck and shook his head with a silent smile.
Olympia sat with her legs crossed. She slanted a look toward him, wondering if he was going to call for the pipe and hashish. Since the desert, he'd continued to retreat into that sleepy asylum daily, silently forbidding any effort to speak of troubling things. Olympia had chosen not to push at the wall, but she watched him.
He made no move to summon the chibouk. He reached out and ran his fingers over her hand and across the thin silk that covered her thigh, his touch warm and sensual. "I haven't forgotten," he murmured. "I think about you…every day."
She closed her eyes. Like one of the fountains in the courtyards outside, instant warmth sprang up inside her. It had been so long…just the lazy, rhythmic stroke of his hand along her thigh was enough to spark excitement.
She wanted him. She wanted him so much.
She put her hand over his, caught it and stilled it. "Sheridan," she asked softly, "how do you feel?"
She thought he might pretend to misunderstand the question. But he seemed to think about it; he stared soberly into space for a moment, as if checking inside himself, and then said, "I feel all right." He looked up at her. His hand pressed her thigh. A slow smile lit his face. "I feel pretty damned good."
Olympia took a deep breath. This was the moment, the opening in the wall. With no notion of whether she was right or wrong, with only love and instinct as a guide, she held out her hand to the savage wolf hidden in the silver depths of his eyes and asked it to take a step toward civilization.
"How did you feel in the vizier's chamber?" she asked, playing with his fingers on her thigh, stroking and caressing the sun-darkened skin. "Did you feel good in there?"
Instantly, his hand curled into a fist. He was silent. After a moment, he said abruptly, "I don't remember."
All along his arm, the muscles had gone tense. She stroked his hand, slipped her fingers into the taut curl, asking it to open. "Yes, you do," she insisted gently. "It wasn't that long ago."
"I felt fine." He pulled his hand away.
Olympia reached out and took it again. "Alive?" She stroked the back of his palm with her thumb.
The sinew beneath her fingers tensed and relaxed in restless rhythm. He stared upward, into the shadows of the domed ceiling, where painted tiles made a gold-and-blue sky of stylized flowers and Arabic script.
She went on stroking his hand, waiting, not knowing what more to say if he would not answer.
"Yes," he whispered. "I guess so." He frowned at the ceiling. "I guess so. Taking us in there like that…it was a hellish risky thing to do. But they wanted to make you stand there for hours, and you looked so tired—you looked like a flower wilting—all pretty in your new clothes, and wilting, and I couldn't stand it. So I made 'em stop." He glanced at her. "I had to. Sometimes that feeling just…comes over me, and I can't stop. I would have killed 'em all if they'd tried to hold us."
His face tensed, as if his own words jarred him. Then he turned and stared into space—and she saw the wolf in his eyes, the pleasure at the thought of carnage.
"Thank you," she said, in an impulsive attempt to communicate with it. "I'm glad you're on my side."
He looked back at her warily.
She slid her fingers through his. She would not be afraid of him. He was too afraid of himself. What if he struggled to control this thing inside, to keep it trapped until it turned and destroyed him?
Come to me instead
. She lifted his hand and kissed the back of it, feeling the weight of hard muscle and bone—and his eyes watching her.
I believe in you. I believe you can learn another way.
For a long moment, the wariness held. Then one corner of his mouth curled upward. He made a sound, an awkward chuckle. "Glad?" He sounded hopeful and doubting…and so very, very vulnerable.
"Yes." She squeezed his hand. "Very glad."
"It did feel good," he said, "It feels like—a rush…like everything is so clear, and I know exactly what to do and say. I know what I want, and I can get it. I can keep you safe, and I can make 'em take care of you." He glanced at her, a sideways look, quick and shy. "It makes me…proud of myself."