Whiskey and Water (56 page)

Could be a long wait." But he came
around to the door and let himself in, pausing between the peeled boles that
framed the entrance. The dogs swung to their feet to greet him, and he trailed
his cramped right hand over each wiry-browed head, rubbing coarse coat between
his thumb and forefinger. Their noses were cold, their muzzles almost silken.
He crouched and fondled their tulip ears. "I'm not just here about
Don."

I didn't think you were. But drink, and
we'll talk."

"I might prefer to skip the
talking." He stood while she poured water. "You know the Bunyip's
name."

"I know everyone's name." She
paused, elbow and wrist bent, head half turned, the iron kettle raised as
lightly as a spoon in her flannel-armored hand. "Well, nearly everyone.
But his for certain. I wouldn't recommend you try to bind him with it, though.
Elaine might be strong enough for that. But it's not your métier, Matthew
Magus."

"There are other uses to which a name
can be put."

She smiled through her hair and poured the
water into a speckled blue and gray pottery teapot with grooved sides.
"Hm. But I can't just give these things away, you know."

"Bad for business?"

"Bad for the magic."

She rehung the kettle on its arm and set
the lid on the teapot, trapping the steam within. One thin tendril curled from
a spout shaped like a curious elephant's trunk. She swaddled the body of the
pot in cheerful yellow and red linen napkins before she looked up again.

"I thought it would take longer to
wear you down." She poured a cup and pressed it into his hands. His
fingers curved into grooves that matched those on the teapot. "It might be
a little weak yet." "Second cup is the best," he said.
"Like yesterday's soup."

"I didn't know you were a tea
drinker."

"Jane is." He toasted her and
raised the cup, lemon verbena and mint steam curling against his cheeks. "You
learn to cope."

"Truer words," she replied, and
tasted her own cup. Of course she could have poisoned his despite that, or
drugged it. Pouring two potions from one pot is no handicap to a witch.

He drank anyway. "I might be tired of
everybody waiting to see which way I'm going to jump." "Your sex life
as spectator sport makes you uncomfortable?"

"It's not my power to use, is it?
It's my power to give. And then I have no control over what happens next."

She smiled. "How does it feel to play
a woman's part?"

"Is that what this is?"

"Historically speaking."

He frowned into his cup. "I'm
sorry."

"Don't worry," she said. "I
have more deserving targets to blame for the patriarchy."

He chuckled as she took the empty cup out
of his hand, rough warm pottery brushing his fingertips. "I suppose I
could swear to die a virgin — "

"That," she said, "would be
a very great loss." She put her hand against his cheek. She was taller
than he, her breath warm and lemony across his face.

"What will you use it for?"

"Could you trust me if I told
you?"

"Very well," he said. "The
name."

"You'll laugh."

He leaned close and drew her into his
arms, against his chest. "So let me laugh."

She closed her eyes, lips moving against
his. "After." Her hand slipped up his shoulder, behind his ear, through
buzzed prickles and into the longer, nylon-slick cap of yellow hair that swung
blunt-edged against his cheek. "You've got some gray in this,
Matthew."

He pushed a silver-streaked lock of red
off her own face. "I'm not the only one."

She grinned, and pulled his mouth against
her mouth.

Climbing the ladder to the loft was such a
profound statement of intent that it made his hands tremble. She took his
glasses away and set them beside the bed on the window ledge. Her mattress was
deep and soft, rustling straw-tick under springy sheepskins, and over those a
leather bed like the ethereal warmth of spring. The ropes creaked; he flinched
and Morgan laughed. "You'll come to no harm." Do I seem
intimidated?"

You wouldn't be the first," she said,
and slipped under the covers too. Her long ivory body was covered in speckles —
darker where the sun regularly touched, paler on her legs and shoulders and the
white curve of her belly. She laid her right hand on his chest, fingers
together and thumb spread wide, and framed the scar over his heart in the
reversed L. "Wasn't it better to come to me willingly?"

He arched an eyebrow at her. "Better
than what?"

"Better than being clawed to scraps
by the Maenads, for one." She kissed him and he kissed her back, gaining
confidence.

"I hope you don't carve notches on
your bed frame."

"Do you see any?"

He craned his neck. She laughed and struck
his chest with the heel of her hand, her hair sliding over their shoulders.
"It would take a room of bed frames, Matthew. Fifteen hundred years I've
been a woman. That is no short while."

"Ah, there's the intimidation —
"

"I'll teach you."

"That's supposed to soothe me?"

"Fair enough," she said, when
she stopped laughing. She flipped the covers over their heads. "Let me feel
your hands."

He touched her, breath swelling his chest
when his palm skimmed over her breasts, his misshapen right hand steadying her
hip. She outlined the ink on his skin with the pads of her fingertips and
straddled his hips to kiss him again. Her thighs caressed him as she leaned
forward, warmth trapped between them, the down coverlet tented over her head
filtering light from the window under the eave into bright transparency.

Her bones made sharp relief under the
skin, shoulder blades elegant as vaned wings, spine like a string of baroque
pearls. He touched them, stroked each one, warmed her pulse with his open mouth
while her nails skittered across his abdomen and thighs. He let her make him
want her. It was easier that way.

When she wrapped her fingers around his
shaft, running her thumb over taut, crepey skin, he closed his eyes and hissed
through gritted teeth.

"Don't do that," she said.
"Open your eyes."

He did, focusing on her face, reaching
one-handed to steady her as she lifted herself over him, drew a sobbing breath,
and pressed herself down, enfolding his sex in her own. He watched as she took
him in, her eyes, her mouth, her hands first cradling him and then spread on
his belly, fingers flexing as he tightened his abdominal muscles and arched his
hips, rising to meet her, gasping as she caught his wrists, pushed them against
the bed, and bore down until their bodies locked tight as mortise and tenon.
She smiled at him, and he drew a deep breath in and let it out slowly, relaxing
under her weight.

She nodded, her hair all around them under
the bedclothes, her fingers rippling on his wrists. "He is the saltwater
oldest brother; Garndukgu-Wurrpbu is his name. Can you say it?"

He tried, and failed. She coaxed; on the
third time, he got it, but she made him repeat it twice more. "And you
don't think I can bind him?"

"I don't care if you can bind him.
And another thing. All you damned men are the same, but
I
am not Ygraine."
She released his wrists, rocking back on her heels. And then she slapped him
across the face hard enough to turn his head and leave the shadow of her
fingers on his cheek. She shook her hand, blowing on her fingers, and twisted
her hips savagely. The quilt slid from her shoulders to slump across his
thighs. "And I will thank you to come to my bed wearing your
own
face
in the future, Master Marlowe, unless you fear to be turned away."

He covered the welted cheek with his palm.
"You knew."

"You're not the player Will
was." Scornful dismissal. She braced herself against his shoulders as she
rocked in an oceanic rhythm. "That's not how Matthew folds his arms."

Her hair covered his face. Her waist
lengthened and relaxed under his palms. "And the name?"

She leaned back, locked her left hand in
his reaching one, and slid the other between his thighs to squeeze and seek in
the moist warmth there. He groaned and turned away. "See? I've not
forgotten all. Would Matthew like that, Christopher?"

He pushed himself up, the left hand still
in her own, now encircling her waist, pulling her arm across her body as he
pressed his face between her breasts.

She shook her hand free of his, laced it
in Matthew's blond hair, and pulled Kit to her, rubbing her sweat into his
skin. "I like his strength on you."

Kit flinched, but insisted: "And the
name, why give me that? What does it gain you?"

You find it easy to forget that Murchaud
was my son too." Madam," Kit said, kissing her collarbone, "you
do not make it easy to remember."

The Western Isles do not exist on any map.
They are a wild and untrammeled country, England when England was young and the
wolves roamed her dark forests, Ireland when Ireland was trod by the feet of
warlords and queens. They are a measureless land, one that brushes against the
iron world where the iron world rusts thin: in the marshes where the
witchlights burn, on the hills crowned with kingly thorns. They are boundless
in that; they can be reached from America as easily as England, from Mozambique
the same as Vietnam. And yet they are a land circumscribed on all sides, a
green jewel set in a bone-white ring of sand adrift on a nameless tide, a
handful of jade hills with their feet washed by the sea, and bigger on the
inside than around the edge.

Matthew walked the beach below the palace
while he waited and wondered how far he'd have to walk before he would find his
own footsteps in the sand. It was a project for an afternoon, anyway. One lap
around Annwn.

He needed the exercise.

And it kept him out of sight of the
castle; he couldn't afford to be seen. Maybe Bunyip would lurch up out of the
deeps and eat him, and he would be quit of all the ridiculous plans and
demands, the claims and counterclaims. There
bad
to be something better
he could do with his life.

A mile and a half later, he broke into a
trot. The beach had more of a Pacific than an Atlantic character, the sand fine
and hard-packed enough to run on, and he made the most of it. Blue jeans and
boots weren't ideal clothes for jogging in, but they weren't the worst, and he
managed a pretty good two or three miles counting breaths until his progress
was slowed by a bouldery stretch. The tide was rising, but the high-tide mark
was well below the tops of the rocks, so he clambered up. It was tricky
climbing mostly left-handed, balancing with his right, and the rocks were
spray-slick when the sea hissed in and out under his feet.

At least the scramble took enough
concentration to distract him from the endless replay of his last conversation
with Kit.
You hate her,
Matthew had said, as Kit was buttoning his
collar over the faux tattoos painted black on his chest. And Kit had smiled and
stared at himself in the mirror as his hair grew paler and brighter and his
shoulders broadened to fill Matthew's shirt, and said,
Hate id a strong
word, Matthew. We need that name. And it'd nothing I haven't done before.

And he'd let Kit have his way, when what
he should have said was
More reason you shouldn't have to do it again.

Mist was right about him.

He paused at the highest point of the
sea-swept boulders, in the shadow of the red cliff behind, and watched the tide
surge through the stones underneath. Spray wet his cuffs and splashed his
boots, tall curtains of fountaining surf flashing like chains of pearls and
diamonds in the sun. He could pick his way forward ten steps, or a dozen, and
stand right beside it, feel the tremble of the angry sea under his rubber soles
converted to a roar, be deafened by it, be ravished. If he slipped, the sea
would kill him in an instant, dash him on the rocks without a breath of
thought, cave his rib cage and crush his skull.
And we think we bound that,
Matthew
thought, and twisted the rowan ring on his thumb.
Only inasmuch as it ever
permits itself to be bound.

He turned away from the sea and continued.

He had to look down, watch his feet,
calculate his balance as he hopped. Wavelets slurped in the crevices, washing
strings of filamentous seaweed cemented among wet black snails and mussels
showing anoxic violet lips. Chalky barnacles flicked feather dusters and one
grim red sea star grappled a doomed shellfish near where Matthew skipped down
the last few rocks.

The sea ran softer here, rolling up a slow
shelving beach rather than hurling its wrath at the stones. He splashed through
swirling water that drank his footing and clutched his ankles to gain the firm
sand near a withered high-water mark. The waves weren't all the way in, and the
needle-fine outlines of seabird tracks still embroidered the margin recalled
from last night's tide. The tracks were beginning to crumble at the edges,
where the sun baked the water from the sand.