by Ben Blake
*
She rested her arms on the rail beside him. Her skin was the colour of almonds or dark molasses, glowing in the sun. She was the same height as Calesh, though he was a tall man. The thousand braids of her hair fell in a curtain past her face, concealing it.
“So the journey ends,” she said in her warm-honey voice. “It will be good to have firm ground under me again.”
Calesh nodded agreement. He hadn’t been seasick, either on this trip or the one that had taken him to the desert more than a decade before, but he still didn’t really like sailing. He felt exposed on a ship, vulnerable to storms and whatever creatures might lurk in the deeps, waiting for unwary sailors to happen by. Heaven knew, enough ships went missing between one port and the next, either through bad weather or pirates, or something even worse. And if a man was left drifting in the water, his chances of survival weren’t good. A shipwreck wasn’t like falling off a horse. There was nothing solid to land on.
“How’s your knee?” she asked.
“Fine,” he said. “I could ride through the day and still manage a dance in the evening.”
Her black braids swung as she shook her head. “It’s still sore, then.”
“Hurts a bit,” he agreed. “By my heart and eyes, Farajalla, it’s not polite to tell a man you know he’s lying.”
“Forgive me,” she murmured. “I know so little of your customs. I am most contrite.”
He couldn’t help laughing. She knew his customs perfectly well, having been raised in a court where they were observed, and of course she wasn’t contrite at all. Farajalla and contrition did not coexist. Pride, yes, and certainly fierce possessiveness: she was more lion than lamb, and just as likely to show claws. He’d seen them unsheathed, once or twice. It was Farajalla who had killed the assassin in the yard of her father’s castle, while Calesh sprawled helplessly on the ground with a barbed arrow embedded in the muscle above his knee.
“So, I’m not sorry,” she said when his laughter faded. “But you should be. A husband should not lie to his wife.”
He snorted. “If I didn’t, I’d have no secrets from you at all.”
“You mean you do?” She turned her head slightly towards him, so he could see the quick flash of her smile. “I will have to amend that.”
“I expect you will,” he said, amused again. “I must say, I never expected having a wife to be such hard work.”
“Ah,” she said. “Now I am distraught. My lord is disappointed in me.”
“Hardly,” he said.
She turned to face him, one arm still on the rail. Calesh had thought her beautiful the first time he saw her, across a courtyard in the summer sun, and every time since he thought her more lovely still. She regarded him from under a fringe of short braids, her eyes unreadable. Without thinking Calesh reached out to touch her brown-skinned hand: not to hold it, but simply to touch, to assure himself she was real and she was here. Luthien said that certain philosophers from the east claimed the world was merely illusion, a trick of the mind. When he touched his wife, however faintly, Calesh knew it was not so.
“I’m glad,” she said. “That… matters to me.”
He smiled. “And to me.”
“Perhaps this home of yours,” she began, and checked herself. “Perhaps this home of ours will be a good place for a child.”
“It’s a wonderful place for a child,” he said.
Behind them, the captain shouted orders. A moment later the ship wallowed as topsails came down amid the rasping of hemp ropes. Sailors in calf-length trousers and stained linen shirts scrambled to furl them, barefoot on the dry deck. Calesh glanced forward again. The blur of land had drawn closer now, allowing him to pick out details: a patch of forest on the shoulder of a steep cliff running down to the sea, and the square shapes of fields. Houses clustered in a ramshackle sprawl, dotted here and there with the square tower of a Church or the slimmer, tulip-shaped spire of a Madai temple. In front of it all lay the harbour, three long breakwaters thrusting out to enclose a pair of artificial bays in which ships rode at rest. Tiny moving specks of colour were longshoremen at work, loading one vessel or emptying another, while the owners looked on and shouted at them to move faster.
“Will he be there?” Farajalla asked.
He looked at her, hearing the new note in her voice that meant she was no longer being playful. “I think so.”
“And if he isn’t?”
“Then he isn’t,” Calesh said. He hesitated. “Perhaps I should put on my armour. Just in case.”
“I’ll help you.”
“No, you stay here. I can manage.”
“I’m sure you can,” she murmured. “But with your knee still sore, husband, it will take you some time, and sap your strength. And if your friend Raigal is in that town, you might need your energy for dancing this evening.”
“Not likely,” he grinned. “Raigal isn’t one for dancing.”
“I am,” she said, all wide-eyed innocence. “Does my lord not wish to dance with his wife?”
“Of course I do,” he said. “But the sort of dancing I have in mind shouldn’t be done in public. Or standing up.”
“Oh, my,” she said. She looked up at him through her eyelashes. “Then it seems we’ll have a child to raise here in no time at all.”
He pulled her close and kissed her, tangling the fingers of one hand in her braided hair. Farajalla slipped her fingers inside the back of his belt, yanking his hips into hers. One of the sailors whistled, and Calesh made a rude gesture in his direction with his free hand even as the captain bellowed furiously for the man to pay attention to his work.
They parted. Farajalla ran a hand up his back.
“No time at all, indeed,” she said.
Calesh chuckled. “I’ll armour up. Let me do it,” he said when she started to turn from the rail. “You stay here. Have a look at your new home.”
“I’m already home,” she said softly. “You’re with me.”
He looked at her for a moment, with no clear idea what to say to that, and then went to the hatch. A moment later he was in the shadows below decks, away from the sunlight and the sight of home, and from his wife. He rubbed his knee surreptitiously. If he had to dance tonight, his leg was going to be pure murder in the morning.