Authors: Dorothy Dunnett
The Voevoda Bolshoia waited a moment, breathing quickly, until there was a movement in the lapping water and a dim blur in the whirling darkness, from which he judged that the Governor of Cherkassy had lifted his head and was sitting, sluggishly, at the foot of the pond. Then Lymond himself slipped into the stormy waves at the pool edge and, with a few long, lazy strokes, drove himself under and up from the cool, flowered water, until in turn he half sat, half lay, head thrown back, in the pool at the other man’s side. ‘You were saying?’ he said.
Prince Dmitri Vishnevetsky moved his stiff lips. ‘I was saying,’ he said, ‘that I believed my Cossacks would follow you.’
The Voevoda’s eyes, unseen in the darkness, were wide and calm and smiling. ‘I don’t want them to follow me,’ he said. ‘They will follow you, as always. My hope is that you and I may find ourselves yokefellows. It seems to me our whims are well matched.’
There was a moment’s silence. Then Vishnevetsky said gravely, ‘I fear the winter garden has suffered.’
Somewhere at the side of the pool was a tinder box. Lymond made his way groping towards it, and found a candle, and turned in a moment, the golden flame high in his hand. Ghostly as ruined Atlantis about them hung the shreds of Güzel’s winter garden. With equal gravity, the Voevoda looked at Vishnevetsky, his battered body supine in the water.
‘Even doves,’ Lymond said, ‘sometimes quarrel.’
Prince Dmitri Vishnevetsky began to laugh. He was still laughing, holding his aching ribs, when Lymond pulled him out.
*
The Governor of Cherkassy was in bed and the house was totally silent when Lymond was free at last to walk down the stairs, the key of the winter garden in the pocket of his stained caftan, and make his way to his room.
The wall-sconces were burning low, their glow falling like water-light on the fine tapestries hung throughout the long galleries which joined each wing of the great household. When, turning a corner, Lymond saw the loitering figure before him he thought at first it was a night-steward, tending the flame. Then he saw it was not, but the cloaked figure of a boy who slowed still further as he watched, and then stopping, looked over his shoulder as if he had heard Lymond’s step.
But he had not, because at the sight of him he stood perfectly rigid, his dark eyes dilated, and remained staring, without speech, while Lymond in turn walked up and stopped. ‘Venceslas?’
The boy took his hands away from his throat. ‘My lord.’
Below the fine, curling hair, his face was as stiff as a sledge of shot hares: his eyes, on Lymond’s face, were quite blank and darkly sleepless. He ran his hands up and down the cloak edge. Lymond said, ‘What are you doing? It must be four hours to dawn.’
The fingers ran up and down, up and down. The cloak slipped and he caught it, his soft fingers trembling. ‘My lady called me.’
Beneath the cloak, plain to see, had been the sheen of bare flesh. There was a pause of hardly perceptible length. Then the Voevoda’s veiled eyes smiled. ‘I think not,’ he said. ‘I think perhaps one of the Mistress’s charming young sempstresses is waiting somewhere … or one of Leila’s helpers? Am I right?’
The beautiful, clear face was grey-white as water-filled glass. ‘Yes,’ he said.
‘And you wonder if you are to be whipped, or if I will bear with the frailty and unadvisedness of your youth. The answer is that I will not bear with it, but I shall not whip you either; nor shall your mistress. Go back to your room, and make no more assignations until you are a man. There will be time enough then. Too much time.’
The eyes were pools of darkness: the fingers ran up and down. ‘Go!’ said Lymond sharply; and the boy jumped, and clutched his cloak, and turning, ran down the gallery.
Lymond watched him go. Long after Venceslas had vanished he stood there unmoving, looking at nothing. Unlike those of the boy, his hands were quite still, their knuckles discoloured with bruising. His body was drying within the wet fur of the robe: his hair had sprung wet from its combing and his face, almost unmarked, was set in an expression of familiar indifference under which was something frighteningly different: the face of a man who once looked upon the dead body of an archer he did not love, called Robin Stewart. Then he turned to the door beside him, which was that of Güzel, and knocked.
The walls were thick, and she had heard nothing. When she called ‘Enter’ and he opened the door gently, she sat up in her lamplit drift of lace pillows, her black hair ribboned loose from her shoulders, her arched, henna-laced feet crossed like a nun’s below the fine white Egypt robe, banded with coloured silk braiding. There was kohl on her eyes, and every fold of her body was scented, but she wore no jewels save a thread of gold which spanned her neck as if drawn by a quill, and ran between her breasts under the cuff of her robe. Held between cream and honey, the muted colour was exact from the undyed raw silk of the hangings to the sarsanet cover on which she was lying, woven in buff silk with spears and flowers and trees and Saracen horsemen. In all that lamplit mosaic within the dark warmth of the room, the only delicate accents were the darkness of her smoky black hair; and the stain on her lips.
Her cheeks had no flush of colour. The smooth olive of her skin did not change, nor did she move after her first sudden rising, except to lay her hands softly before her in her lap. Then she said, ‘You have something to say to me? If you lock the door, we shall not be interrupted.’
He did as she asked, and when he looked up she was smiling. She said, ‘Your hands.… Whose bones have thoughtlessly blemished them?’
Lymond spread his palms, smiling a little as he glanced down at the ruined caftan. ‘Dmitri Vishnevetsky’s. I have been removing the dross which bars his spiritual progress. I fear you must avoid the winter garden for the next few days.’
Straight-backed and wholly composed, she considered it. ‘Poor Lancelot Plummer. And how is Vishnevetsky?’
‘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 the jewel between her spired breasts jumped and jumped with her high, suppressed breathing until abruptly she found herself ultimately on that blind plateau from which there is no retreating. Her hands opened, stricken. Then, hard and sudden and sure, Lymond impacted the jewel between them.
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 mistress in the state I did yesterday …
‘… I can only say,’ said Francis Crawford tolerantly from the high ravaged bed, ‘that whoever slept with Dmitri Vishnevetsky fared much, much worse.’