Perhaps it is for this reason, Dekkeret thought, that we have a system of double monarchy here. As the Coronal grows older and more rigid, he moves on to the higher throne and is replaced at the Castle by a younger man, and thereby the wisdom and experience of age is yoked to the flexibility and vigor of buoyant youth.
Fulkari greeted Dekkeret with a warm embrace when he returned to their quarters after parting from Dinitak. She had just been bathing, it seemed, and wore only a thick furry robe and a bright golden strand at her throat. A sweet aroma of bathing-spices rose from her breasts and shoulders. He felt some of the stress of his meeting with Prestimion beginning to ebb from him.
But clearly she was able to tell, just at a single glance, that things were not right. “You look very strange,” she said. “Did things go badly between you and Prestimion?”
“Our meeting covered a lot of difficult ground.” Dekkeret flung himself down carelessly on a velvet-covered divan. It creaked in protest as his big form landed on it. “Prestimion himself is becoming rather difficult.”
“In what way?” said Fulkari, seating herself at the divan’s foot.
“In a dozen ways. The long weariness of holding high office has had its effect on him. He laughs much less than he did when he was younger. Things that once might have seemed funny to him no longer amuse him. He gets angry very easily. He and Abrigant had a peculiar little argument that never should have taken place in front of me. Or at all, for that matter.” Dekkeret shook his head. “I don’t mean to speak harshly of him. He’s still an extraordinary man. And we mustn’t forget that his youngest brother has just met a horrifying death.”
“Small wonder that he’s behaving like this, then.”
“But it’s painful to see. I feel for him, Fulkari.”
She grinned mischievously. Taking one of his feet in her hands, she began to knead and massage it. “And will you also grow cranky and ill-tempered when you’re Pontifex, Dekkeret?”
He winked at her. “Of course. I’d think something was wrong with me if I didn’t.”
For an instant she appeared, despite the wink, to have taken him seriously. But then she laughed and said, “Good. I find cranky, ill-tempered men very attractive. Almost irresistible, as a matter of fact. Just the thought of it excites me.”
She slithered up the divan toward him until she was nestling in the crook of his arm. Dekkeret pressed his face against her copper-bright hair, inhaled its fragrance, kissed her lightly on the nape of her neck. Slipping his one hand into the front of her robe, he lightly traced the line of her collarbone with his fingers, then let the hand slide lower to cup one of her breasts. They remained like that for a time, neither of them in a hurry to move onward to the next stage.
He said, after a while, “We’ll be returning tomorrow to the Castle.”
“Will we, now?” said Fulkari dreamily. “That’s nice. Although it’s very nice here too. I wouldn’t mind staying another week or two.” She wriggled against him, fitting her body more snugly into place against his.
“There’s plenty of work waiting for me at home,” Dekkeret persisted, wondering why he was so perversely bound on shattering the developing mood. “And once I’ve caught up with that there’ll be a little traveling for us to do.”
“A trip? Ooh, that’s nice too.” She sounded almost on the edge of sleep. She was coiled against him in a state of utter relaxation, warm and soft, like a drowsy kitten. “Where will we be going, Dekkeret? Stee? High Morpin.”
“Farther. Much farther.—Alaisor, in fact.”
That woke her up quickly. She drew back her head and stared at him in amazement. “Alaisor?” she said, blinking at him. “But that’s thousands of miles away! I’ve never been that far from the Mount in my life! Why Alaisor, Dekkeret?”
“Because,” he said, wishing most profoundly that he had saved all this for later.
“Just because? Clear to the other side of Alhanroel, just because?”
“It’s at the Pontifex’s request, actually. Official business.”
“The matter that you and he were just discussing, you mean?”
“More or less.”
“And what matter exactly was that?” Fulkari had extricated herself from his embrace, now, and had swung around to face him, sitting crosslegged at the foot of the divan.
Dekkeret realized that caution was in order here. He was hardly in a position to share much of the real story with her—the rebellion that was supposedly starting up in Zimroel, the reappearance of Mandralisca, the possibility that the Barjazid helmet had been used to drive Teotas to his death. Those were not affairs that he was able to speak of with her. Fulkari was still a private citizen. A Coronal might share such things with his wife, but Fulkari was not his wife.
Picking his words judiciously, Dekkeret said, “A few odd things have been going on lately across the sea. What sort of things isn’t particularly important right now. But Prestimion wants me to head west and station myself somewhere along the coast, so that if it turns out to be necessary for me to go to Zimroel in the near future, I’ll already be well on the way there.”
“Zimroel!” She said it as though he were talking about a voyage to the Great Moon.
“To Zimroel, yes. Perhaps. None of this may ever come to pass, you realize. But the Pontifex feels that we need to look into it even so. Therefore he’s asked Dinitak and me to head out to Alaisor and—”
“Dinitak also?” Fulkari said, her eyebrows shooting upward.
“Dinitak will be traveling with us, yes. Doing special government research, using certain detecting equipment that—” No, he could hardly speak of that either. “Using certain special equipment,” he finished lamely. “He’ll be reporting to me on a daily basis. You do like Dinitak, don’t you? You won’t have any problem about his accompanying us.”
“Of course not.—And Keltryn?” she asked. “What about her?”
“I don’t understand,” Dekkeret said. “What in particular do you mean?”
“Is she going to be coming with us too?”
He felt lost. “I’m not following you, Fulkari. Are you saying that whenever we take a trip anywhere, you’ll want Keltryn to come along with us?”
“Hardly. But we’ll be gone several months at the very least, won’t we, Dekkeret?”
“At the very least, yes.”
“Don’t you think they’ll miss each other, having to be apart as long as that?”
This was utterly incomprehensible. “Dinitak and Keltryn, you mean? Miss each other? I don’t at all understand what you’re talking about. Do they even know each other, except in passing?”
“You mean you don’t know?” Fulkari said, and laughed. “He hasn’t said anything about it to you? And you honestly haven’t noticed? Dinitak and Keltryn? Really, Dekkeret! Really!”
3
Keltryn was in the little bedroom of her apartment at the Setiphon Arcade, laying out the cards for what she thought must be her three thousandth game of solitaire since the Pontifex had summoned Dinitak to Muldemar House for Teotas’s funeral.
Four of Comets. Six of Starbursts. Ten of Moons.
Why was it necessary for Dinitak to be at Teotas’s funeral? Dinitak had no official place in the government nor was he a member of the Castle Mount aristocracy. His only role at the Castle was as Dekkeret’s friend and occasional traveling companion. And, so far as Keltryn was aware, Teotas and Dinitak had been only nodding acquaintances, nothing more, until very recently. There wasn’t any reason for him to be at the funeral. No one had said anything at all about Dinitak’s going down to Muldemar House when the funeral arrangements were first being set up.
And then, right on the eve of the funeral itself, a courier in Pontifical uniform suddenly arriving to say that Prestimion requested the presence of Dinitak Barjazid immediately at Muldemar? Why? On such short notice, Keltryn thought, it was unlikely that Dinitak would have been able to get down there in time for the ceremony. So it must have had to do with something els
e. And why had the message summoning Dinitak come from the Pontifex, rather than from his own good friend Lord Dekkeret? Dekkeret was down there too, after all. The whole thing was very mysterious. And she wished that Dinitak would hurry back, now that the funeral was done with, she assumed, and Teotas safely deposited in his tomb.
Petulantly she dealt out the cards.
Pontifex of Nebulas. Damn! She had the Coronal of Nebulas on the table already. Couldn’t the Pontifex have turned up five minutes ago? Nine of Moons. Knave of Nebulas. She slipped the Knave below the Coronal of Nebulas. Three of Comets. Keltryn scowled. Even when the cards turned up in the right order she took no pleasure from it. She was sick of solitaire. She wanted Dinitak. Five of Moons. Queen of Starbursts. Seven of—
A knock!
“Keltryn? Keltryn, are you in there!”
She swept the cards to the floor. “Dinitak! You’re back at last!” She ran toward the door, remembered at the last moment that she was wearing nothing but her loincloth, and hastily snatched up a robe. Dinitak was so terribly fastidious about such things, so very moral. Despite everything that had passed between them since they had become lovers, he would be shocked if she were to come to the door virtually naked. The robe had to be on her before it came off: that was how he was. Besides, Dekkeret might be with him. Or the Pontifex Prestimion, for all she knew.
She opened the door. There he was: alone. She caught his wrist and tugged him inside, and then she was in his arms, at last, at last, at last. She covered him with kisses. It felt to her as though he had been gone at least six months.
“Well!” she said, releasing him, finally. “Are you glad to see me?”
“You know I am.” His eyes gleamed fiercely, shining like beacons in his narrow, angular face. He moistened his lower lip with a quick movement of his tongue. Straitlaced and high-minded as he might sometimes be, he seemed quite thoroughly ready right now to pull the robe from her.
A roguish mood seized her. She decided to make him wait a little while. It would be a test of her own fortitude as much as his. “Did you and your friend the Pontifex have a lot of interesting things to talk about?” she asked, taking a couple of steps back from him.
Dinitak looked very uneasy. His eyelids flickered three or four times very rapidly in what seemed almost like a tic, and a muscle twitched in one of his lean, sun-darkened cheeks. “It’s—not something I can really discuss,” he said. “Not now, anyway.” His voice sounded strained and hoarse. “We had meetings—the Pontifex and the Coronal and I—there are some problems, political problems, they want me to provide some technical assistance—” He was still staring at her hungrily all the while. Keltryn loved that, the fierce way he looked at her. Those dark gleaming eyes, that powerful gaze, that tremendous intensity of his, the powerful magnetic force that emanated from him, that coiled-spring tension: those aspects of him had fascinated her from the first moment.
“And the funeral?” she said, deliberately continuing to hold him at bay. “What was that like?”
“I got there too late for it. But that didn’t matter. It wasn’t for the funeral that they asked me down, you know. It was for the other thing, the technical assignment.”
“The thing you won’t tell me about.”
“The thing I can’t tell you about.”
“All right, don’t tell me. I don’t care. It’s probably enormously boring, anyway. Fulkari’s told me about the official things that Lord Dekkeret does all day long, now that he’s Coronal. They’re colossally boring. I wouldn’t be Coronal for anything in the world. They could wave the starburst crown in front of me and the Vildivar necklace and Lord Moazlimon’s ring and all the rest of the crown jewels and I still wouldn’t—” Abruptly she had had enough of this game. “Oh, Dinitak, Dinitak, I missed you so horribly all the time you were at Muldemar! And don’t say that it was only a few days. It felt like centuries to me.”
“And to me,” he said. “Keltryn—Keltryn—”
He reached for her, and she went willingly to him. The robe fell away. His hands ran eagerly up and down her body as she tugged him to the carpeted floor.
They were still new enough as a couple so that the physical part of their intimacy had a ferocious, almost compulsive urgency about it. Keltryn, to whom all of this was entirely unfamiliar, felt not only the excitement that came with the release of pent-up desires but also a powerful sense of wanting to make up for lost time, now that she had at last allowed herself to experience this aspect of adult life.
There would be sufficient opportunity later on, she knew, for deep, searching conversations, long hand-in-hand strolls through quiet corridors of the Castle, dinners by candlelight, and such. Enough of the old tomboyish Keltryn still remained alive in her, the virginal student of swordsmanship who was so adept at holding boys at bay, that she would tell herself from time to time that they ought not to allow their relationship to be entirely one of sweaty grappling and hot, wild copulation; but yet, now that she had had her first taste of sweaty grappling and hot, wild copulation, she found herself quite willing to postpone those deep, searching conversations and long hand-in-hand strolls for some future phase of the affair.
Dinitak, for all the asceticism that seemed to be an inherent part of his makeup, appeared to feel the same way. His own appetite for lovemaking, unleashed now after who knew how long a period of restraint, was at the very least as strong as hers. Gladly they pushed each other again and again to the edge of exhaustion, and beyond the edge.
But establishing that kind of relationship had not been at all simple to achieve. For the first two weeks after their initial accidental meeting outside Lord Haspar’s Rotunda they had seen each other practically every day, but he never even came near to offering anything like a physical approach, and Keltryn had no idea how to elicit one. She had become only too well accustomed to the unwanted attentions of classmates like Polliex and Toraman Kanna; but how did one go about inviting wanted attentions? She began to wonder whether Dinitak might be the same sort of man as Septach Melayn, and whether it would be her peculiar destiny to fall in love only with men who were by innate nature unavailable to her.
She had no doubt that she was in love with him. Dinitak was unlike anyone else she had ever known, both in her girlhood in Sipermit and at the Castle. His dark, brooding good looks, that lean, taut Suvraelinu look that came from having grown up under the harsh, unforgiving sun of the desert continent, held a powerful, almost irresistible, appeal for her. That he was slender, almost flimsy, of build and hardly an inch taller than she was herself made no difference to her. When she looked at him she felt—in her knees, in her breast, in her loins—a sense of overpowering attraction of a sort she had never experienced before.
He was unusual in other ways, too. There was a bluntness, even a roughness, about his way of dealing with people that must have come, Keltryn thought, from his upbringing in Suvrael. He was a commoner, for one thing: that made him different right there from the boys she had grown up with. But there was something else. She knew very little about his background, but there were rumors that his father had been a criminal of some sort, that the father had tried to play some sort of ugly trick on Dekkeret when Dekkeret was a young man traveling in Suvrael, and that Dinitak, appalled at his father’s schemings, had turned against him and helped Dekkeret take him prisoner.
Whether that was true or not, Keltryn had no idea, but it felt true. From various things Dinitak had said, to her and to other people around the Castle, she knew that he held a hard, austere view of things, that he had no patience with any sort of irregular behavior along a range that ran from mere laziness and sloppiness at one end of the scale to criminality at the other. He seemed driven by a powerful moral imperative: a reaction, someone said, against the lawlessness of his father. He was an idealist, honest to the point sometimes of brutality. He was quick to denounce lapses of virtue in others, and, to his great credit, he did not seem to commit any such lapses himself.
Such a person, Keltryn
knew, could all too easily seem prudish and preachy and self-righteous. Yet, strangely, Dinitak did not strike her that way. He was good company, lively, entertaining, graceful in his manner, capable of a certain sharp-edged wit. No wonder that Lord Dekkeret was so fond of him. As for Dinitak’s powerful sense of right and wrong, one had to admit that he lived by his own strictures: he was as hard on himself as he was on anyone else, and asked for no praise for that. He seemed naturally upright and incorruptible. It was simply the way he was. One had to take a person like that as he came.
But was a person like that, she wondered, too high-minded to indulge in the bodily passions? Because she herself had finally decided it was time to indulge in those passions herself, and she finally had found someone with whom she would like to indulge, and he seemed utterly unaware that she felt that way.
In her desperation it occurred to her, at length, that she had an expert in such matters right within her own family. And so she consulted her sister Fulkari.
“You might try putting him in a situation where he really has very little choice, and see what he does,” Fulkari suggested.
Of course Fulkari would know how to go about it! And so one afternoon Keltryn invited Dinitak to join her for a swim in the Setiphon Arcade’s pool that evening. Hardly anyone seemed to be using the pool these days, and no one at all—Keltryn had checked—went there in the evening. Just to be certain, though, she took the trouble to lock the door to the pool from within once she and Dinitak arrived.
He had brought a swimsuit with him, naturally.
Now or never, Keltryn thought. As he started off to one of the dressing rooms she said, “Oh, we don’t really need to wear suits here, do we? I never bring one. I haven’t brought one tonight.” And she slipped quickly out of the few garments she was wearing, trotted blithely past him with her heart thundering so violently that she thought it would crack her ribs, and executed a perfect dive into the pink porphyry tank. Dinitak hesitated only a moment. Then he stripped also—she looked up from the pool, staring in wonder and awe at the beauty of his trim, narrow-waisted body—and leaped in after her.
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