And made love, I remembered, for the first time; Cassiline and anguissette.
Desire beat in my blood like the distant thunder of drums upon the mountain.
Joscelin saw me and went still, water dripping from him in the sunlight. Even when I'd resented him, long ago, I'd thought him beau tiful. He stood patient under my regard. Every one of the scars that marked him, he'd gotten on my behalf. I did not have words to speak to him.
"Phèdre," he said at length, saying my name softly. "Will you join me?”
I nodded without speaking and stayed where I was.
He took a few steps, shadows in the hollows of his flanks, and lifted me from the rocks as if I weighed no more than his enormous fish, lowering me to stand before him. The skirts of my gown floated on the water and I put both arms around his neck as he lowered his head to kiss me.
That kiss, I cannot describe.
It was like a poem, a prayer, a homecoming unlooked-for. It was like dungeon walls crumbling to reveal a glimpse of sky. It shook me to the very roots of my soul.
All I could do was cling to him and gasp.
With infinite gentleness, Joscelin undid the buttons of my gown, sliding it from my shoulders until I stood in its water-billowed folds as at the center of a lotus. What flesh he unveiled, he touched, until I shivered, the tenderness of it nearly unbearable. With cupped hands, he poured water over my head, until droplets clung to my lashes, then followed the water's course with his lips. When he kissed my closed eyelids, I could have wept.
I relearned him that day, with hands, mouth and tongue, tracing the line of his collarbone, the flat planes of his chest that no blade had yet marred, like a blind woman learning sight by touch. Mostly, though, I yielded, and relearned love. He undid my hair, that I wore at the nape of my neck. When his hands rose, dripping, to cup my breasts, I sighed; I whimpered at the touch of his mouth, warm and wet, encompassing my aching nipples.
He lifted me out of the floating lotus of my gown, setting me so that my buttocks rested upon the warm stones to perform the languise-ment, parting my moist nether-lips with a touch delicate as a breath, the tip of his tongue tracing the swollen shape of Naamah's Pearl. And that is where time itself seemed to stretch and flow. I lay open beneath the sky, and everything done by the Mahrkagir was undone, every cruelty, every iron thrust—undone, undone, undone, every kiss, every lick, every stroke, imprinting love upon my flesh, until I shuddered and knotted both hands in Joscelin's hair, calling his name out loud, and my climax followed with the inevitability of the spring-fed waters tum bling over the rocks.
At that, Joscelin lifted his head and smiled.
"Come here" I said, drawing him to me.
He did, hoisting himself out of the water on both arms, the left as solid as the right, hands braced on either side of my shoulders. I bit my lip, reaching down to fit him into me, his phallus rigid and hard, the walls of my nether parts still throbbing. Any other man—any one I have known—would have begun, then.
Not Joscelin. He waited, his brow touching mine, sheathed to the hilt in me and our loins enjoined. Slowly, my breathing eased to match his, and our heartbeats synchronized.
In the space between the beating of our hearts, I felt the presence of Blessed Elua.
I'd felt it before, that golden light filling me, the taste of honey in my mouth. I felt it now, and Joscelin's mouth tasted of honey to me, his tongue like nectar as we kissed. I smelled lavender in his damp hair as it fell to frame my face. The world pulsed and surged as he moved within me, and I moved to meet him, hips thrusting, no longer certain where I began and he ended, my fingers seeking the line of his back, the column of his spine, his muscled flanks. His eyes, summer-blue, looked into mine, shining with Elua's tide.
This is how we were made whole.
I cried out, at the end, and whose name it was—Joscelin's or Blessed Elua's—I could not say. It was one and the same, then. And if I had called what had gone before a climax, it was naught to what came after, welling from someplace deeper within me than I knew I had, until I could only cling to Joscelin with all my limbs and shudder at the force of it. And he—Elua! He went rigid against me, within me, and I felt the vibration all the length of his spine before his loins shiv ered and he spent himself within me.
So it was done.
"I'm sorry," I said when we had finished, and the presence had faded. "Joscelin, I am so, so sorry for what I've done to us."
He brushed my lashes. "For what, love?" he asked, examining my tears on his fingertips. "You did what you were called to do. So did I. What is there to forgive?"
"You know," I said softly. "You heard . . . stories. Some of them are true."
"Yes." He drew a line from the corner of my eye, the left one, with its crimson mote. "Do you wish to speak of them? I swear to you, I can bear it now."
Remembering, I shook my head. "No. Let them fade, and be for gotten. No."
"Then it is what it is," Joscelin said, "And we are what we are. No more, and no less." He smiled. "Never less. Do you agree?”
I did. I demonstrated to him with a degree of ferocity the extent to which I agreed, until he caught his breath and laughed, and then until he laughed no longer, but tumbled me over with keen desire. And if the presence of Blessed Elua was no longer with us, our own presence sufficed.
I asked nothing more.
For once, it was enough.
SEVENTY-ONE
THERE WERE jests, of course; Jebeans speak with frank delight about the arts of love, and there are no secrets in a small campsite. But they were good-natured and I did not mind, and Joscelin bore it well. Their great fish had been gutted and cleaned, and strips of flesh hung to smoke over a second fire. We had some of it fresh that evening, fried in an iron pan with coriander and wild onion, and I thought it was the most delicious dish I'd ever tasted. Like as not it wasn't, but it seemed so that night.After we'd eaten, we sat about the fire discussing plans to make ready on the morrow for the following day's departure. Bizan shared around a skin of honey-mead he'd been hoarding, and the taste of it was sweet and fiery in my mouth. I caught Joscelin's eye and he smiled, lacing his fingers with mine.
"There are thorns and there are thorns," Nkuku said judiciously, noting it. "Some are larger than others, but their prick is more pleasant."
At that, there was laughter; such was the manner of jest we endured. Imriel sat with his legs drawn up and his arms wrapped round them, peering over his knees with scarce-disguised joy. I understood it better, now.
Make me whole, I had prayed in the Temple of Isis. Make us all whole.
We had become like family to him.
There are ties that bind more complex than blood. I knew it, who'd been sold into indenture at the age of four; when I think of the family I have lost, I think of my lord Anafiel Delaunay and my foster-brother Alcuin. Of a surety, Joscelin knew it too, he who was an adored stranger in his childhood home of Verreuil.
I'd not thought about the ties we had forged with Imriel, and what they meant to him.
Nor to me.
Well and so; we were a long way yet from home, whatever Joscelin might claim, and our quest was far from over. One day, Elua willing, it would be done and we would be home. Imriel had a destiny that would claim him, with Ysandre's protection extended over him and obligations to House Courcel. And there was Melisande, too. What she would make of this, I dared not think. But I had placed myself in Blessed Elua's hand that day, trusting to his mercy. If it brought love unlooked-for, what right had I to complain? I drew Imriel to join us and he knelt in the firelight between us, leaning against Joscelin's knee, smelling faintly of fish and content for the first time since I had known him.
And Joscelin and I, who had regained the trick of knowing one another's minds without speaking, gazed at each other over Imri's head and wondered.
The next day was a flurry of activity. The new-cured hides must be sewn, the smoked and dried meats gathered, our replenished stores packed, unpacked, rearranged and packed again, boots patched and blades whetted. Tifari Amu showed me on the Ras' map where we would be going, striking out across the mountains to intersect the Great Falls.
"What will happen," I asked him, "when we reach Saba?"
Tifari shrugged, quiet and diffident as always. "As to that," he said, "I cannot say."
So we departed, and left behind our pleasant campsite. I turned in the saddle as we left, watching it vanish behind a bend in the river.
"I never thought," I said to Joscelin, "I would be so grateful to a rhinoceros."
He grinned. "I never thought I'd be so grateful to a fish."
The Jebeans thought we were a little mad, of course, although they didn't mind it. I don't know what Kaneka had told Tifari—during the times she deigned to speak kindly to him, which had been enough to encourage him—but it had got about that we were god-touched, all three of us. That, it was allowed, was why Queen Zanadakhete had blessed our journey, and Ras Lijasu had provided for it. As members of the guard, Tifari and Bizan understood the politics of it better, but they still considered it madness. And Joscelin challenging the rhinoceros hadn't helped. They watched him in the mornings and evenings, performing his Cassiline exercises, and merely shook their heads.
It didn't matter. With each day that passed, we drew nearer.
Once again, we mounted the green heights, wending our way through forests. It was beautiful, untrammeled country, devoid of human inhabitation; too far, Tifari said, from the cities, and too hard to build roads. To be sure, it was hard going, but there were trails carved out by wildlife and these we followed.
"Who do the Sabaeans trade with, then?" I asked Tifari as we rode.
"No one, now." He was silent for a few minutes. "There are other tribes—Zenoë, Shamsun—in this area who owe allegiance to neither Jebe-Barkal nor Saba. But they are hunters, mostly, and bandits. Saba— the Melehakim—have been isolated for a long time, Lady, many hundreds of years. I do not know what you expect, but you may find them otherwise."