Lord of Emperors (24 page)

She held out her candle to him and, without speaking, gestured again inside, towards the stairs which were unlit by any lamps at all. He took a breath, felt the hammering presence of something deep within himself and acknowledged a part, in the heavy current of the moment, of what the intensity of this stirring meant. The fury of mortality. Darkness, some light carried, but not very much.

He took the flame from the girl's cold fingers and went up the winding stair.

There was no illumination but his own, throwing his moving shadow against the wall, until he reached the upper landing and turned and saw a glow-orange, crimson, yellow, rippled gold-through the partly opened door of a room along the corridor. Crispin remained still for a long moment, then he blew out his candle and set it down: a blue-veined marble-topped table, iron feet like lion's paws. He went down the hallway, thinking of stars and the cold wind outside and his wife when she died and before, and then of the night last autumn here when a woman had been waiting for him in his room before dawn, a blade in her hand.

He came to her door now through this dark house, pushed it open, entered, saw lamps, the fire, low and red, a wide bed. He leaned back against the door, closing it with his body, his heart drumming in his chest, his mouth dry. She turned; had been standing by a window over an inner courtyard.

Her long pale golden hair was unpinned and down, all her jewellery removed. She wore a robe of whitest silk, a bride's night raiment. In bitter irony, in need?

His vision actually blurred with apprehension and desire, seeing her, his breath coming ragged and quick. He feared this woman and almost hated her and he felt that he might die if he did not have her.

She met him in the middle of the room. He was unaware of having stepped forward, time moving in spasms, as in a fever dream. Neither of them spoke. He saw the fierce, hard blue of her eyes, but then she suddenly twisted and lowered her head, exposing her neck like a wolf or a dog in submission. And then before he could even react, respond, try to understand, she had lifted her head again, the eyes uncanny, and took his mouth with her own as she had done once, half a year ago.

She bit him this time, hard. Crispin swore, tasted his own blood. She laughed, made to draw back. He cursed again, aroused beyond words, intoxicated, and held her by the curtain of her hair, pulling her back to him. And this time as they kissed he saw her eyes fall shut, her lips part, a pulsing in her throat, and Styliane's face in the flickering firelight of her room was white as her robe, as a flag of surrender.

There was none, however. No surrendering. He had never known lovemaking as a battle before, each kiss, touch, coming together, twisting apart for desperate breath an engagement of forces, the need for the other hopelessly entangled with anger and a fear of never coming back out, never controlling oneself again. She provoked him effortlessly, would approach, touch, withdraw, return, lowered her neck again once in that brief, submissive averting-her throat long and sleek, the skin smooth and scented and young in the night-and he felt a sudden, genuinely shocking tenderness entwine with anger and desire. But then she lifted her head again, the eyes brilliant, mouth wide, and her hands raked his back as they kissed. Then, very swiftly, she lifted his hand and, twisting away, bit him there.

He was a worker in mosaic, in glass and tile and light. His hands were his life. He snarled something incoherent, lifted her off the ground, carried her before him to the high, canopied bed. He stood a moment there, holding her in his arms, and then he laid her down. She looked up at him, light caught in her eyes, changing them. Her robe was torn at one shoulder. He had done that. He saw the shadowed curve of her breast with the firelight upon it.

She said: "Are you certain?"

He blinked.
'What?

He would remember her smile then, all that it meant and said about Styliane. She murmured, ironic, assured, but bitter as the ashes of a long-ago fire, "Certain it isn't an empress or a queen you want, Rhodian?"

He was speechless a moment, looking down upon her, his breath caught as on a fishhook embedded in his chest. He became aware that his hands were shaking.

"Very certain," he whispered hoarsely, and pulled his own white tunic over his head. She lay motionless a moment then lifted one hand and traced a long finger lightly, slowly down his body, a single straight movement, illusion of simplicity, of order in the world. He could see that she was struggling hard for her own control, though, and that added to his desire.

Very certain.
It was entirely true, and yet hopelessly not so, for where could certainty lie in the world in which they lived? The clean, straight movement of her finger was
not
the movement of their lives. It didn't matter, he told himself. Not tonight.

He let the questions and the losses slip from him. He lowered himself upon her and she guided him hard into her, and then those long slender arms and her long legs were wrapped around his body, hands gripping in his hair and then moving up and down his back, mouth at his ear whispering things, over and again, rapid and needful, until her own breathing grew more ragged and terribly urgent, exactly as his own. He knew he must be hurting her but heard her cry out harshly only as her body curved upwards in its own arc and lifted him with her for that moment, away from all the jagged edges and the broken lines.

He saw tears startle like diamonds on her cheekbones and he knew-
knew-
that even consumed like a burning taper by desire she was raging within against the revealed weakness of that, the dimensions of longing betrayed. She could kill him now, he thought, as easily as kiss him again. Not a haven, this woman, this room, not a shelter of any kind at all, but a destination he'd needed overwhelmingly to reach and could not, by any means, deny: these bitter, furious complexities of human need, down here beneath the perfect dome and the stars.

"You have no dread of high places, I may assume?"

Lying beside each other. Some of her golden hair across his face, tickling a little. One of her hands on his thigh. Her face was averted, he could see only a profile as she stared at the ceiling. There was a mosaic there, he now saw, and abruptly remembered Siroes who had made it, whose hands had been broken by this woman for his failings.

"A fear of heights? It would be an impediment in my work. Why?"

"You'll leave through the window. He may be home soon, with his own servants. Go down the wall and across the courtyard to the far end by the street. There is a tree to climb. It will take you to the top of the outer wall."

"Am I leaving now?"

She turned her head then. He saw her mouth quirk a little. "I hope not," she murmured. Though you may have to depart in haste if we delay too long."

"Would he… come in?"

She shook her head. "Unlikely."

"People die because of unlikely things."

She laughed at that. "True enough. And he
would
feel compelled to kill you, I suppose."

This surprised him a little. He'd somehow concluded that these two- the Strategos and his aristocratic prize-had their shared understandings in matters of fidelity. That servant with her candle, visible to the street in the open doorway…

He was silent.

"Do I frighten you?" She was looking at him now.

Crispin shifted to face her. There seemed no reason to dissemble. He nodded his head. "But in yourself, not because of your husband." She held his glance a moment and then, unexpectedly, looked away. He said, after a pause, "I wish I liked you more."

"Liking? A trivial feeling," she said, too quickly. "It has little to do with this."

He shook his head. "Friendship begins with it, if desire doesn't."

Styliane turned back to him. "I have been a better friend than you know," she said. "From the outset. I did tell you not to become attached to any work on that dome."

She
had
said that, without explaining it. He opened his mouth but she held up a finger and laid it against his lips. "No questions. But remember."

"An impossibility," he said. "Not to be attached."

She shrugged. "Ah. Well. I am helpless against impossibilities, of course."

She shivered suddenly, exposed to the cold air, her skin still damp from lovemaking. He glanced across the room. Rose from the bed and tended to the guttering fire, adding logs, shifting them. It took him a few moments, building it up again. When he stood, naked and warmed, he saw that she was propped on one elbow, watching him with a frank, appraising gaze. He felt abruptly self-conscious, saw her smile, seeing that.

He crossed back towards the bed and stood beside it, looking down at her. Without shame or evasion she lay, unclothed and uncovered, and let him track with his gaze the curves and lines of her body, arc of hip, of breast, the fine bones of her face. He felt the stirrings of desire again, irresistible as tides.

Her smile deepened as her glance flicked downwards. Her voice, when she spoke, was husky again. "I did hope you weren't in haste to find the courtyard and the tree." And she reached out with one hand and stroked his sex, drawing him to the bed and back to her that way.

And this time, in a slower, more intricate dance, she did eventually show him-as she'd offered half a year ago-how Leontes liked to use a pillow, and he discovered something new about himself, then, and illusions of civility. At one point, later, he found himself doing something to her he'd only ever done for Ilandra, and it came to him, feeling her hands tightening in his hair, hearing her whispering a stream of incoherent words as if unwilling, compelled, that one might feel the sadness of loss, of absence, love and shelter gone, but not be endlessly consumed and destroyed as by an ongoing lightning bolt of tragedy. Living was not, in and of itself, a betrayal.

Some had tried to tell him this before, he knew.

She made a higher sound then, on a taken breath, as if in pain, or fighting something. She drew him up and into her again, her eyes tightly closed, hands pulling him, and then swiftly turned them both together so she rode upon him now, harder and harder, imperative, her body glistening in the firelight. He reached up and touched her breasts, spoke her name, once: resisting that but impelled, exactly as she had been. Then he gripped her hips and let her begin to drive them both, and at length he heard her cry aloud and opened his eyes to see that arcing of her body again, the skin taut across her ribs as she bent back above him like a bow. There were tears on her cheeks, as before, but this time he reached up and drew her slowly down and kissed them, and she allowed him to do so.

And it was then, lying upon him in an aftermath, her body shaking, and his, her hair covering them both, that Styliane whispered without warning, eerily gentle in his memory of the moment after, "They will invade your country later in the spring. No one knows yet. It was announced to some of us tonight in the palace. Certain events must happen now. I will not say I am sorry. A thing was done once, and all else follows. Remember this room, though, Rhodian. Whatever else. Whatever else I do."

In his confusion, his mind not yet working properly, the sudden knife's blade of fear, all he could say
was, "Rhodian?
Only that? Still?"

She lay upon him, not moving now. He could feel the beating of her heart. "Rhodian," she repeated, after a considering silence. "I am what I've been made to be. Don't be deceived."

Then why were you weeping?
he wanted to ask, but didn't. He would remember these words, too, all of them, and the straining backwards arcing of her body and those bitter tears at her own exposed need. But in the silence that came after she spoke what they both heard was the front door down below closing heavily, reverberating.

Styliane shifted a little. Somehow he knew she would be smiling, that wry, ironic smile. "A good husband. He always lets me know when he comes home."

Crispin stared at her. She looked back, eyes wide, still amused. "Oh dear. Really. You think Leontes
wants
to spend his nights killing people? There's a knife in here somewhere. You want to fight him for my honour?"

So there
was
an agreement between them. Of some kind. He really wasn't understanding these two at all, was he? Crispin felt heavy-headed and tired now, and afraid:
A thing was done once.
But a door had slammed, down below, leaving no space for sorting matters through. He stumbled from the bed, began to dress. She watched him calmly, smoothing the sheets about her, her hair spread out on the pillows. He saw her drop her torn garment on the floor, not bothering to hide it further.

He adjusted his tunic and belt, knelt and quickly tied his sandals. When he stood again, he looked at her for a moment. The firelight was low again, the candles burnt out. Her naked body was chastely covered by the bed linens. She sat propped on pillows, motionless, receiving and returning his gaze. And Crispin abruptly realized then that there was a kind of defiance in this, as much as anything else, and understood that she was very young, and how easy it was to forget that.

"Don't deceive
yourself,"
he said. "While trying so hard to control the rest of us. You are more than the sum of your plans." He wasn't even sure what that meant.

She shook her head impatiently. "None of that matters. I am an instrument."

His expression wry, he said, "A prize, you told me last time. An instrument tonight. What else should I know?" But there was an odd, entirely unexpected ache in him now, looking at her.

She opened her mouth and closed it. He saw that she'd been taken off guard, heard footsteps in the hallway outside.

"Crispin," she said, pointing to the window. "Go. Please."

It was only when he was crossing the courtyard, past the fountain, making for the indicated olive tree at the corner near the street, that he realized she'd spoken his name.