The Moghul Part 23

climax of sitar and drum, and then the English song seemed to dissolve slowly into the incense around them. After only a moment's pause, the musicians immediately took up a sensuous late evening raga.

Hawksworth looked about and noticed for the first time that the lamps in the room had been lowered, settling a semi- darkness about the musicians and the moving figures around him. He felt for his gla.s.s of _bhang_ and saw that it was dry, and that another had been placed beside it. He drank again to clear his mind.

What's going on? d.a.m.ned if I'll stay here. My G.o.d, it's impossible to think. I'm tired. No, not tired. It's just . . . just that my mind is .

. . like I'd swilled a cask of ale. But I'm still in perfect control.

And where's Mukarrab Khan? Now there are screens where he was sitting.

Covered with peac.o.c.ks that strut obscenely from one screen to the other. And the eunuchs are all watching. b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. I'll take back my sword. Jesus, where is it? I've never felt so adrift. But I'm not staying. I'll take the chest and d.a.m.n his eunuchs. And his guards. He can't hold me here. Not even on charges. There are no charges. I'm leaving. I'll find the men . . .

He pulled himself defiantly to his feet. And collapsed.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The dream was more vivid than reality, intensely colored and astir with vague forms that drifted through his mind's ken, appearing then fading. The room seemed airless, a musk-filled cell of gilded blue panels and gold brocade. Guarded faces hovered around and above, their eyes intense yet unseeing, distant as stained-gla.s.s masks of cathedral sinner and saint.

A fingertip brushed his cheek, and with its touch the room gloried in a powerful fragrance of saffron. Then a hand, floating unattached, gently removed his doublet; another slid away his mud-smeared breeches.

He was naked.

He looked down as though from afar at the texture of chest and thigh, and he wondered dimly if they were his own. Then other hands . . . and suddenly he was immersed in a sea whose sh.o.r.es were white marble, whose surface sheened with oil of the rose. Translucent petals drifted randomly atop the crests. Hands toured his frame, discovering every tightened nerve, while powdered sandalwood enveloped his hair and beard until he seemed lost in a fragrant forest.

As suddenly as the sea had come it drew away, but now there were steaming wraps tingling with astringent orange and clove, and he drifted through a land of aloe balm and amber.

The room dissolved into semi-darkness, until at last only a single face remained, a woman with eyes round and moist and coldly dark. Her lips were the deep red of betel, while her hair was coal and braided in a skein of jeweled tresses. A faceted stone sparkled on her left nostril, and heavy gold rings swung gently from each ear. Henna-red nipples pressed erect against her diaphanous blouse, and between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s clung a garland of pearls. The heavy bracelets on her wrists and her upper arms glistened gold in the flickering candlelight.

As he studied her eyes, they seemed locked into his own, and betrayed no notice of his body. He sent his voice through the dream's carpeted chambers, but his words were swallowed in dark air that drew out their sound and washed it to thin silence. In a final, awkward futility he struggled to free himself from the velvet bolster.

But gently she pressed him back.

"What would you have, my love? Sweet _bhang _from my hand?"

A cup found his lips, and before he knew he had taken more of the incendiary green confection. Its warmth grew slowly into a pale light that shimmered off the gilded panels and then coalesced into the rainbow now pivoting pendulum-like above him, a glistening fan of peac.o.c.k feathers swayed by a faceless, amber-skinned woman.

His gaze returned to the eyes, and again he searched for sound. Then came a voice he recognized as his own.

"Who are you?"

"You may call me Kali. Others do. It's a name you would not understand.

But can you understand that love is surrender?" The words coiled about his head, coruscating and empty of meaning. He shook them away and watched as she brushed a strand of hair from his face. With that simple motion, her nipples traced twin heliotrope arcs across the gossamer screen of her blouse. He examined her in disbelief, unable to find words.

"When my lover lies silent, I do as I choose."

Deftly she uncoiled the white silk sash from around her waist and in a single practiced motion bound it over his eyes. The room vanished. In the dream's sudden night he grew intensely aware of touch and smell.

Commands came in an alien tongue, and he felt his breast and thighs brushed lightly by a new, pungent fragrance.

"We have cloaked you in petals of spikenard, to banish the sight of your unshaven body. A _feringhi _knows so little of what pleases a woman."

He felt a light brush across his parted lips, and then her eyelashes, stiffened dark with antimony, trilled a path downward over his skin, to his nipples. The hardened lashes stroked each nipple in turn with rapid flutters, until the skin tightened almost to bursting. An excruciating sensitivity burned through him, but still the lashes fluttered, determinedly, almost unendurably, until his aroused tips touched the aching portals of pain. Then he sensed a tongue circle each nipple in turn, searching out the one most ripe.

He felt her kneel above him, surrounding him with open thighs that clasped his chest. The room fell expectantly silent. Then, as an unknown syllable sounded somewhere above him, he felt the nipple of his right breast seized in the lock of a warm, moist grasp. The surrounding thighs rocked gently at first, but slowly increased their rhythm in time with the sound of breath. Suddenly he felt her body twist lightly and another tip, hardened as that on his chest, began to trace the nipple's swollen point. Her thighs were smooth and moist as she pressed in with spiraling, ever more rapid intensity. He found himself deeply conscious of her rhythms and the hard cadence of breath. He reached for the strength to rip the silk from his eyes, to end the dream's tantalizing dark. But strength was not there. Or time.

Before he could stir, he sensed the hardened tip shudder. Again a grasp took his nipple and worked it with measured spasms, until the room's austere silence was cut by her sharp intake of breath, timed to match a single insistent contraction that seemed to envelope the whole of his breast. He felt her seize his hands in her own, and although he could see nothing, in his mind there grew a vision of her eyes at that moment. Then there came a sound, partially stifled in her throat, but not before it had found the gilded walls and returned, annealed to a gla.s.sy relic of release.

He felt her slowly withdraw, but then her mouth took his breast, till it had drawn away the musk. At last, perhaps to signify repletion, she lightly brushed his lips with the tip of her tongue.

"You have pleased me." Her voice was quiet now, almost a whisper. "Now we will please each other."

A hand worked at his loins, methodically applying a viscous, harshly scented oil.

"Would you could see with my eyes. The _lingam _of the fabled Shiva was never garlanded such as this, or anointed so lovingly."

Then her voice turned harsh as she spoke short staccato commands in an unknown tongue. Bangles sounded and silk rustled as the room emptied.

Now he caught a new scent, the harsh smell he remembered from the box the governor had offered.

"I will tell you my secret." She whispered close to his ear. "There is no more exciting way to experience the ecstasy of love than with _affion_, the essence of the poppy. But I have a way to receive it no one else knows. It is like the burst of a lightning stroke. Its power envelopes the senses."

He felt her smooth a thick paste along the sides of his phallus, and sensed a tingle as she clasped it carefully with both hands. Again she moved above him, but curiously there was no touch of her body. Only the presence of her scent.

A tight ring seemed to circle his flesh, and he felt the weight of her rounded b.u.t.tocks slide down onto his thighs.

He startled upward in shock and disbelief. Never will I . . .

"You must lie still, my love. In your surrender, only I may have my will."

She began at once to move above his thighs, and again muted sounds struggled stillborn in her throat. With deliberate regularity her rhythm mounted, while an overwhelming sensation spread upward through his body. Slowly he felt his new _Resolve_ slipping from him.

The convulsions started in his lower thighs, as muscles tightened involuntarily. And then the precipice grew near and he was at its edge and he was falling. He felt the surge, as though drawn out by the twist of her b.u.t.tocks. Then again and again, each spasm matched by her own as she worked to envelop him completely. He was scarcely aware of her nails fixed in his b.r.e.a.s.t.s. At that instant he seemed to drift apart from his body and observe mutely as it was consumed by its own sensations. Until numbness washed over him, stilling his sense.

As he lay in exhaustion his mind sorted through her words, and in the dream's darkness he vowed to take her again. The next time, it's you who'll surrender, woman called Kali. To my will. And you'll find out the meaning of surrender.

But his thoughts were lost among the gilded panels as she pulled the silk from his eyes and quietly whispered something he did not understand. In that instant he thought he saw where a tear had stained a path across one cheek. She looked at him longingly, then touched his lips with her own for a long moment before slipping quietly into the dark.

The dream dissolved in sleep. And she was gone. . . .

Hawksworth was suddenly awake. The chill of early dawn penetrated his face and hands, and his hair sparkled with light jewels of dew. His leather couch was moist and glistening, while the pale sky above was blocked by a tapestried canopy. Only in the east, above the white railing of the rooftop, could he see the glitter of a waning Venus, her brief reign soon to dissolve in the red wash of early sun. He looked about his white brick enclosure and saw only a light wooden door leading into a second-floor apartment.

He had no sooner drawn himself up to inhale the flower- scented dawn than two smiling men were standing over him, bowing. Both wore turbans, pastel-colored jackets, and a white wrap about their lower torso.

Squinting into their eyes, Hawksworth remembered them from the evening before. They had brought the basin of water in which he had first washed.

As he pulled the embroidered coverlet closer about him he noticed a strange numbness in his body. And his mind ached as he tried to remember what precisely had happened.

There was a game on horseback with the governor, and then a banquet, with an argument in which Mukarrab Khan threatened to betray us to the Portugals, a curious evening of music. And then dreams . . .