The Eagle and the Dove Page 9

  “Well, one cannot do anything in it except lie around eating apricots,” she said.

  “And why should you wish to do anything else?”

  Sarita swung herself off the ottoman with a vigor that belied her complaint. The rich material was caught beneath her breasts with a girdle of twisted silk and fell straight to the floor, skimming her hips. Abul smiled appreciatively.

  “I do not like to lie around,” she said, impatient at this diversion. “Perhaps you didn’t hear me. I said I wish to leave here.”

  “Very well,” Abul said, as if there had never been any question about it. “I will return you under escort to your people. They are still encamped in the olive grove. You will be back with them within the hour.” He watched her through narrowed eyes. It was a calculated risk he took, but he was counting on the desperation that had already driven her from the tribe’s protection.

  The color in her cheeks ebbed. Her hands twisted. “No, I cannot do that. You don’t understand.”

  “I understand that you ran from them yesterday. But if you do not wish to remain here, then I can only assume that you wish to return to them.”

  “No, I do not wish to return.”

  He heard the tiny tremor in her voice. His own voice was all sweet reason. “But there is nothing else for you to do, Sarita. I know the dangers in my land. You would be taken from the open road by the first brigand band and sold to the first slave trader they came across … after they had amused themselves with you, of course,” he added, making a steeple of his fingers.

  “I will take my chances,” she said fiercely. “I knew the risks yesterday. They have not changed.”

  He shook his head. “But they have changed. You have come under my protection—no, let me finish,” he said as her mouth opened on a surge of indignant protestation. “I am the caliph of this land. All who travel in it do so with my permission and under my writ. Only thus can I keep order within my frontiers. If I turn you loose to roam the highways alone, some offense will be committed against your person, and since you are under my protection, that offense will therefore be committed against me. I would have to punish the perpetrator. You see my difficulty.” He smiled, tapping his fingertips together.

  There was a certain diabolical logic to it, if you looked at it in a certain way, but Sarita had no intention of using those eyes. “Your reasoning is specious,” she declared. “An offense has already been committed against my person … by you.”

  “How have I hurt you?”

  “You abducted me. You cannot deny that.”

  He shook his head. “I removed you … a lone and unprotected woman … from the dangers of the open road.”

  Sarita felt as if she were wading through quicksand. The grounds for complaint slipped and slithered beneath her, yet she knew they were just. “You are holding me against my will,” she said finally. That at least was unarguable.

  But again Abul shook his head. “No. I have said I will return you to your people. I have said simply that I will not permit you to leave here with no protection.”

  Sarita turned from him. Leaning her elbows on the marble basin of the fountain, she stared down into the cool, clear surface, rippling beneath the constant plash of the descending stream. She was remembering a woman of the tribe who had run away from her husband with a man from another clan. The husband had hunted her down, killed the lover as Tariq had killed Sandro. The woman’s screams and the crack of his lash had rung out from the woods around the camp for hours, it had seemed. Sarita remembered how nauseated she had felt, how she had tried to drown out the sounds, but the camp had been horribly silent, as if they were all participating in the man’s vengeance. He had tethered the woman to the wheel of his wagon with a cord around her ankle. There had been enough play in the cord to permit her to perform her domestic duties. Sarita could see her now, stumbling between wagon and hearth, lifting the excess cord to carry it so it wouldn’t chafe too much when she had to go farther afield. And no one had any compassion for her. It was tribal justice. It had been many weeks before her husband had freed her. But she had been a broken woman then, silent, walking with her shoulders hunched, cringing at the slightest unexpected movement.

  “I cannot go back,” Sarita said.

  Abul stood up. Coming up behind her, he laid his hand on her back between her shoulder blades. Her body leaped beneath the touch, her skin rippling through the thin silk. “Did you run from the man who killed your lover?”

  Shocked, she straightened and turned to face him. “How could you know that?”

  “Yusuf saw the killing,” he said. “I had sent him to discover what he could about you after I saw you on the road in the afternoon.”

  “Tariq had forbidden our marriage. We didn’t know why.” She spoke over his shoulder, aware of how close he was to her, feeling the warmth from his body, wanting suddenly to be held. She forced herself to continue speaking as if such a wanting did not exist. “It was because he wished to marry me himself. When I refused …” She stopped. He knew the rest.

  Abul put his arms around her, drawing her against his chest. “You cared deeply for this man?” Her tears wetting his tunic were answer enough. He stroked her hair, frowning. She had all the headstrong commitments of youth informed by the mores of her people, and could not yet see that there were many different kinds of relationship between men and women; that enjoying pleasure with one was not necessarily a betrayal of another.

  He felt her trust, though, as she wept in his arms. So long as she trusted him, he could teach her to see things his way, to yield to the pleasure she had denied them both with such fierce despair last night. But he must do it lightly, tapping the rich currents of her sensuality to keep her on the brink of arousal, but without seeming to threaten the integrity she had taken upon herself. It would put a considerable strain on his own powers of self-control, Abul recognized wryly, but it could be done, and her eventual capitulation would be all the sweeter.

  “No more weeping,” he said, holding her away from him. Her tear-drenched eyes were like drowned seaweed. He slipped a hand to the nape of her neck and bent her head over the fountain, splashing her face with the cool water. “I am going to teach you the delights of the baths. You will learn to relax and allow both grief and pleasure to be a part of you.”

  Sarita shook her head free of his restraining hand and wiped her wet face with her palm. “There is no need to drown me.”

  Tears and the recounting of tragedy had not cowed her, he realized with satisfaction. The recuperative powers of the young were always to be relied upon. “Did your women not bring you towels? You’re dripping all over your robe.”

  Sarita wiped her face dry on a square of linen that smelled of sunshine. She sniffed vigorously. They were the first tears she had shed for Sandro, and in their wake had come a resurgence of energy. Muley Abul Hassan was not going to give her free passage from the Alhambra. He had made that perfectly clear, and she was under no illusion that she would be able to change his mind. Therefore, she must contrive her own escape. To do that, she must persuade him that she accepted his edict: if she would not go back to the tribe, then she must remain here. He had promised he would force nothing upon her but his company, and she would yield to that until her opportunity came.

  In truth, she had no objection to his company, quite the opposite. But that didn’t alter the fact that she was his prisoner, she reminded herself hastily.

  “I had a bath last night,” she said. “I do not need another.”

  Abul chuckled. “This is not a bath solely for cleansing purposes, as you will see. It is to refresh the spirit as much as the body. Come.”

  He walked to the door, and Sarita, after a moment’s hesitation, followed. What was there to lose?

  Chapter Six

  Abul paused at the garden gate, waiting for Sarita to come up with him. “Do you have questions about the Alhambra?”

  “Many,” she said frankly. “But what is the place across the ravine?” She gestu
red behind them to the cluster of roofs showing above the deeply wooded mountainside.

  “The Generalife.” He turned onto the cypress-lined path, taking her elbow in a light clasp. “A place of gardens and miradors, terraces and porticos. A place of repose and of beauty. We will go there in a day or so.”

  Sarita kept pace with him, finding his clasp of her elbow strangely reassuring. She was not accustomed to men adapting their pace to that of their womenfolk, who were generally expected to trot along in the rear, keeping up as best they might. Either that, or they strolled in their own groups at their own pace, deep in their own discussions. Walking so companionably with a man was a novel experience, and she was not to know that it was as novel for Abul to walk arm in arm with a woman. But he felt the need to offer her some protection, some sense of belonging in a place that must be alien to her.

  He talked easily about the palace, telling her of the great aqueducts that brought water from the mountains and circulated it through the palace, feeding its streams and fountains and ponds. He pointed out the great edifice of the alcazaba that she had seen from the road to the city of Granada, and told her that an army of forty thousand men could be garrisoned within the fortress.

  “Are there that many now?” It seemed incongruous to Sarita to talk of soldiers and fortresses amid the exquisite beauties of the palace, yet it was true that the palace was contained within the fortress and not the other way around.

  “No.” Abul turned into a garden of massed flower beds. The air felt pleasantly damp, as if it had just been watered, and Sarita realized that the ground beneath her feet was damp. The warmth of the midmorning sun falling on the freshly watered earth set up a rich loamy scent to mingle with that of the flowers. “No,” Abul repeated. “Not at the moment. There is no need for such a garrison. I could call in that many if there were need … if, for instance, your Spanish monarchs decided to attack.” He looked down at her, his expression unusually grave. “Such an event is not unlikely.”

  “But why would they?” Sarita had no knowledge of politics, or of the wider world outside the clan’s journeyings. She knew of and feared brigands, slave traders, the Inquisition, dishonest merchants, any who might impinge directly upon her life. But the dreams and territorial aspirations of their most Catholic Majesties, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, were unknown to her.

  “Because many centuries ago my people conquered this land,” Abul told her. “The Spaniards have been slowly winning it back, kingdom by kingdom, for the last two hundred years.” He stopped and looked around him, waving an all-encompassing hand. “Only Granada remains to us now.”

  “And you would keep it so?” She had heard the intensity in his voice, seen the shadow in his black eyes as he glanced down at her.

  “But of course. I would keep it for my son, as it was kept for me.”

  This was another topic, one she had intended to bring up when he gave her an opening. “You did not tell me you had a son … or a wife, for that matter.”

  Abul took her elbow again and began to steer her across the garden toward a marble portico at the rear. The intensity had left his face and voice as he put aside the affairs of the world outside the Alhambra. “My wives and my children are no concern of yours, hija mía. Any more than you are any concern of theirs.”

  “But they are,” she protested. “And do not tell me no one wonders who I am or what I am doing here.”

  He laughed. “They know what you are doing here, Sarita. Or at least,” he added with a crooked smile, “they know what I had hoped you would be doing here.”

  Sarita said nothing for a second, since this had already been made abundantly clear to her by Zulema and Kadiga, who could see only one possible reason for her arrival and continued presence in the caliph’s palace.

  They stepped through the portico and into a cool hall where the light was a soft, diffused green, instantly restful.

  “But your wives and children do concern me.” Sarita returned to the attack. “I do not understand how you could think—”

  “It is our way,” he interrupted with a touch of asperity.

  “But it is not our way. My people do not—”

  A hand went over her mouth, and she found herself staring into the bright black eyes of her companion bent upon her with something less than tolerance. “Sarita, this is not a place for contentious subjects. It is a place where the mind and the body may meet in mutual refreshment, where you will have only quiet thoughts and speak only soft words. That is our custom. I see no reason why you should find it difficult to comply. Do you?”

  Not when it was put like that. Sarita shook her head vigorously, and the hand left her mouth. It went instead to cup her chin. A thumb ran lightly over her lips before he bent his head and laid his now smiling mouth over hers, and it was as it had been the previous night: that same delicious sensation, that same desire to make of a casual salute something deeper and more committed. Involuntarily, her lips parted in encouragement, her tongue darting to touch and taste the corners of his mouth.

  His hand dropped from her chin, leaving a cool space on her skin. And with the cool space came the knowledge that there was no compulsion. His holding her had offered a pretense of such, and in the safety of that assumption she had allowed herself to respond. Now any response she made was entirely her own.

  She stepped back from him, saw the flash of regret in his eyes, and ruefully recognized its match in the flutter of loss in her belly. But such reactions were impermissible, and she turned from him, looking around the cool green hall where they stood.

  “It is as if we are belowground,” she commented casually, her voice sounding miraculously steady. “There is no sense of the heat outside.”

  “No; it was designed for that effect.” Abul spoke as casually as she, and again she felt reassured. He would keep his promise in more than just the letter. “We will go within, to the hall of immersion.”

  He moved ahead of her, deeper into the palace, through marble-pillared halls and little chambers like grottoes where fountains played amid luxuriant shrubbery. Everywhere was the same greenish light, the same freshness of the air, the same omnipresent sense of water. It seemed as if they were penetrating deeper into the side of a mountain—an exquisitely decorated mountain where the walls were encrusted with beautiful tiles, the floors of white marble or elaborate mosaic.

  They met no one until they came to the central hall, where two sunken marble tanks stood amid pillars and fountains. There were two women waiting in this room. They wore simple white robes with muslin scarves on their heads, but their faces were uncovered; they stepped forward, bowing to the caliph and his companion.

  “Leila and Zayda are the keepers of the baths,” Abul said. “They understand the need for the tranquility that leads to true repose.”

  Sarita wasn’t quite sure how to respond, since her bathing hitherto had had no such elements. It had also belatedly occurred to her that since one could not bathe fully clothed, she and Muley Abul Hassan were going to be naked again in each other’s company. She remembered with uneasy clarity the unbidden arousal that had crept over her when she had been unclothed in front of him the previous evening, even before he had touched her. But there was a different atmosphere in this hall. Perhaps it came from the presence of the two women, for whom such nakedness was presumably all part of the working day. Zayda was already assisting Abul with his clothes in the most matter-of-fact fashion. If Sarita could cultivate the same attitude, or at least appear to do so, perhaps she would be able to keep unwelcome sensations at bay.

  She became aware that Leila was standing waiting to help her undress. “I can manage, thank you,” Sarita said, unfastening the girdle of her robe.

  “Leila speaks no Spanish,” Abul said, raising one foot so that his attendant could pull off his boot. “Let her do what she expects to do. You are here to learn the pleasure of the baths. Don’t impose your own expectations and experiences on something that bears no relation to either.”


  Sarita had never come across people who spoke like Abul, with such assured wisdom on such abstract issues. She wondered what kind of life he had led, what training and education he had received that had given him this complexity and authority. Were all his people like this? Did they all have the time and the inclination for abstruse reflection?

  Covertly she watched as the woman removed his tunic and britches. His physique was that of a warrior. There was nothing soft about this man for all that he spoke on occasion as if only the pleasures of the mind and senses were important.

  Her robe slipped to the tiles at her feet while she was absorbed in these thoughts, and she found herself naked without conscious awareness. Her attendant caught up the mass of bright curls and pinned them into a knot on the top of Sarita’s head, then smilingly gestured toward the sunken bath into which Abul was now stepping. They were to get in together, it seemed. But the space was quite large, and again she felt that there was something about the presence of the two women, not to mention Abul’s insouciance, that made it all seem quite ordinary and natural.

  Sarita stepped daintily into the hot perfumed water of the bath. She sank down on a bench cut into the marble side of the tank, stretching out her feet. Her toes touched Abul’s, and she withdrew her feet with an impulsive jerk. He chuckled and chased her foot with his own, but his eyes were closed even while he was playing, and she sensed his relaxation. Insidiously, she felt a delicious lassitude creep up on her as the water lapped against her neck, and she let her head fall back against the edge of the bath. In the tempered light or the hall she felt as if she were looking up through water, seeing images wave, break apart, coalesce under the gently moving surface. She wondered if there were something in the air or maybe in the perfumed water that created this sense of inhabiting a world of images, rather than one of concrete reality. But then she had had that sensation several times since Abul had brought her to this place.

  She became aware that her fellow bather was standing up. Slyly, she let her gaze from half-closed eyes run up his body. The inspection was a mistake: her nipples grew erect; prickles of excitement tightened her skin. She closed her eyes fully, but not before she had noticed to her chagrin that Abul’s body had evinced no signs of arousal. Was it just the baths, or had he ceased to find her body desirable?