Dark Dance (20 page)

There was nothing in his face that she could interpret as affection or even as desire. It was the face of a high priest at the moment of offering. And she—she must be the altar, for he came towards her spontaneously.

‘Rachaela,’ he said, ‘do you want the light, or not?’

‘I want the light.’

He had come in barefoot. Now he lifted the pullover off over his head, unbuttoned the shirt and dropped it, the trousers and underpants sloughed gracefully and quickly, as if he were very practised in this. His body in the lamp and hearth light was tawny as an icon, the white changed to gold, long and thin and leanly muscled, the belly nearly concave, the ribs evident as carving. The legs were long and strong, like those of a runner, the shoulders wider than they had seemed when concealed.

The hair at his groin was blue-black, and there the serpent lay, which she knew of only from literature, a rape, and the daft little things of little boys in childhood. Like amber, the snake, soft still and quiescent; the thought of her, then, the sight of her under the covers, had not yet woken it.

Only when he was naked did he take the edge of the covers and draw them gently off her body.

She believed she lay before him as golden-white as he, the amber budded on her breasts, the fleece of her groin indigo-black, closed and secretive as his was not.

He looked at her, and she saw him come erect, the magical mechanism of the male penis, lifting and filling out to a great rod the colour of a dull sunset.

She slithered to one side of the bed, and he moved through the gilded air, angling his body down to hers. He lay beside her and she knew a primal terror, old as hills—older far than the Scarabae.

‘I’m afraid.’

‘Yes.’

Supporting himself on one elbow he leaned over her. His face was grave, composed. A dual creature, the rod of appetite and the priest’s face. He touched her lips with one finger, then bent his head and put his mouth against hers. With the other hand as he kissed her this chaste cool kiss, he reached back and shook free something from behind his neck. A shower of black rain. His hair, coming unbound, washed over her, over her breasts, like a deluge of rough silk.

‘Your hair,’ she said, ‘your hair,’ and reached up and took sliding handfuls of it, and the kiss changed, became the kiss of before.

The terror flared up and engulfed her. It was not terror.

His mouth left hers. She turned after it and a line of his hair, flavoured with night, ran across her lips. She bit at it as his mouth strayed down across her throat and found her breasts.

His tongue tattooed them with circles of heat. He took their centres in his mouth and sweet tremors ran through her body. A harp string plucked in her loins, chains of stars running in highways of feathers and lights from the points of her breasts into her centre, her groin, the soles of her feet, her brain.

He moved down her, the hard smooth flesh of his body, the velvet rasp of the hard penis as it rubbed against her belly, her thigh...

His hands were on her breasts where his mouth had been. The music was fiercer, glissandi of fires.

He kneeled in prayer between her thighs, his face cruel as an angel’s. His head was lowered.

A rhythm began like breathing. The core of her body was in a moment melted. Long waves of pure ecstasy washed through and through her.

She groaned and threshed on the bed in an anguish of pleasure, redness behind her eyes, her ears singing, sea in a shell.

His tongue described valleys and hillsides, the coil of rivers. Waves poured in like the ocean.

She was carried up and flung outward. She heard herself cry aloud, as if she had left her body, expelled by the spasm which shook it.

He lay beside her again, looking at her, quietly stroking her ribs and stomach.

She watched him, not wanting to speak.

The movement of his hand was soothing now. She calmed under it. It was as if she had let go of a great burden.

She heard the sea under the cliff, low and ceaseless.

He took her hand, drew it across his body to the hardness of his sex.

She touched this totem carefully, gaining confidence as it quivered and tautened. She played with him as he had played with, played her. He lay back and she stretched her body over his, leaning to his mouth and parting his lips with her tongue. Where their flesh touched she became one thing with him. She gave herself to his body and her own, and to her instinct.

His hair was spread behind him like a black raiment. She slipped her hands through the strands of it, and along his sides.

He gripped her and swung her over, reversing himself along her body. The black cloak of hair streamed now over her hips and legs.

She felt again the dagger dart of his tongue, like a flame lapping at her core.

She kissed and mouthed his belly, the firm cavity of the navel. Her own tongue moved on him in sympathetic sorcery. She found the burning rod and tasted its length, the swarthy tower-head, like a smooth-skinned fruit swollen with juice.

She was lost in him, the textures, tastes of his flesh, the exquisite torture of what he did to her with mouth and fingers.

Everything else forgotten.

She was solely feeling when he turned again and leaned above her. His golden shadow fell on her from the lamp. He spread her thighs with a tender ruthlessness.

She was no longer afraid, but opened herself for his invasion.

Nevertheless she was rammed, split. She had only known one man, a moronic battle in neon light. That had torn her, now she was torn afresh. She did not care. She forced her body wide and pressed up the length of him. Red pain lanced through the sweetness, and a deeper pain like thunder.

She moaned and lay beneath him, quite taken, filled to her brim, impaled.

He kissed her mouth and breasts. Shallows of the sweetness flooded her.

When he moved again the pain flared into a glorious friction.

Again she pressed herself to meet it, was wounded, rose again.

She grasped his body, his hair, clinging to him on the brink of chaos.

His face above hers was also shadow, but she saw the savagery of it, to match her own.

Then he lay down on her, his weight sinking her in the bed as if in sand.

She worked and leapt to meet his onslaught.

The pain was gone in an agony of ascent.

His mouth was on hers, at the line of her jaw, blazing on her neck.

In the tumult, rushing, she felt the second invasion, the sharp bite of two merciless teeth, and tried to cry out his name, but she was choked and vanquished.

She experienced the pull of her blood into his mouth like threads of silk drawn up from her vein.

He ravished her like a lion, thrusting into her, his lips drawing out her life.

She felt herself unravel from her flesh.

To the first pleasure this was a cataclysm.

Rachaela screamed. She was flung up into madness, as she rode the whirlwind. Panes of light and darkness shattered before her. She was crucified, obliterated. And as she fell she sensed him plunge to meet her like a meteor on fire, heard the sound he made against her sundered throat.

‘The lamp’s dying,’ she said. ‘Cheta didn’t put in enough oil.’

‘Lie still,’ he said.

He was touching her even now, smoothing out her body, caressing her breasts, brushing back her hair.

A tiny flower of blood, like the one Anna had embroidered, lay on the pillow.

‘Like virginity,’ she said. ‘The first time, I bled for a week.’

‘You can’t compare that to this.’

‘He didn’t drink my blood.’

Adamus lifted himself. He put his lips softly to her neck and mouthed the little wound. Delicious, the sensation, another melting.

‘Do you need it?’

He raised his head. ‘No.’

‘But it pleases you.’

‘Very much.’

‘How long...?’

‘Your mother was the last.’

‘Something else she never told me.’

He drew again on her vein. The stars lit through her body, following the pressure of his mouth. She tensed and shivered and his hand slipped between her thighs, the fingers daintily probing after the sparks of delight. She climaxed instantly, startlingly.

‘Do it for me,’ he said. He licked at her throat hungrily, closing his eyes.

She snared the tower of him, once more erect and satin-hard, rubbing, tickling, feeling the tremors of its second almost separate life.

She felt his urgency as he moved against her and his breathing caught against her neck. The flaming juices of him burst into her hand.

He kissed her. She tasted salt, the spice of her own blood.

‘What will happen?’ she whispered.

‘Nothing. A love bite.’

A faint noise, beyond the dark world of the room, in the corridor.

‘Is it the cat, looking for you?’

The cat never looks for me. He comes and goes.’

‘Would they be voyeurs?’

‘The family? No, they’ve seen it all. Done most of it.’

Rachaela eased herself up from the bed of sheets and pillows, skin and hair.

‘Don’t,’ he said.

‘I want to see.’

She lit a candle from a bedside match, went to the door and unlocked it.

Outside, something lay.

‘One of Camillo’s gifts,’ she said.

She bent down.

It was a peculiar, twisted heart, made of driftwood.

Camillo was the wicked one.

She reached to take the heart and it crumbled, fell to bits.

‘Oh.’

She came back into the room and shut and locked the door.

‘What had he left you? A cat turd in foil? He’s been known to do that.’

‘A broken heart.’

‘I see. Not just a comment on our morals.’

She set the candle down. Its wavering light lit his long body, ice-white now on the lake of hair. He looked like a prince from an uncensored story, a Beardsley illustration of male perfection. Even to the sleeping phallus, which doubtless Beardsley would have fashioned upright.

‘Why a heart which breaks?’ she said.

‘He’s a romantic. Did he tell you about his flight by night from a besieged city?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘He’s like an old baby. Mischievous and clever. He cares about nothing.’

‘Maybe he cares about you.’

‘It’s my heart, then. The breakage.’

‘Come here,’ he said.

She went to him slowly.

He drew her down and again she lay the length of him, over him.

She was accustomed to it now, the torrent of feeling.

‘Tomorrow,’ she said, ‘I will be ashamed.’

‘Tomorrow it will be too late.’

‘Yes.’

He circled her with his arms.

She rested her head in the curve of his neck. She mouthed him, as he had done to her before the bite of his lust.

‘You’ve made love to me five times,’ she said.

‘You’re counting.’

‘We haven’t slept.’

‘Sleep tomorrow,’ he said, ‘when you’re ashamed.’

He rolled their bodies over and pinned her beneath him.

‘I can’t any more,’ she said.

‘Once more, for old time’s sake.’

Beyond his shadow, she saw the dim shapes of the window of the temptation.

‘It’s getting light.’

‘That happens.’

She did not want the day, the day of shame and confusion.

He pierced her without prologue. Used to him now, her open body received him easily. He moved in her slowly to the rhythm of the distant sea.

The deep melodious ache began in her. She could not ignore it.

They rose and fell on the beach of silence.

Behind him the window merged through silver into a dusk of green and chrysanthemum. The red blood drops of the apples appeared.

‘I want to see you,’ he said.

He drew out of her and she groaned at her deprivation of him. He stood back, blew out the candle, watched her as the body of Lucifer was spread out over her own.

‘The apple lies on your groin. Appropriate.’

‘They will have placed the bed so that it would. Come back to me,’ she said, ‘quickly, quickly.’

He lay down on her and penetrated her again so that she gave a cry of relief.

She danced beneath him, writhing on a spindle of galvanic motion.

‘Go faster.’

‘Not yet.’

He held her in waiting between earth and heaven as the window bloomed into its insanity of dyes. The surf pounded in her head. His mouth came gently to her neck and she gave herself again to the lion.

She could not even scream now. The window boiled. She had forgotten everything, past, future. And outside, tiny creatures ran from the driftwood heart.

‘How many miles to Babylon?

Three score and ten.

Can I get there by candlelight?

Yes, and back again.’

A thrush or some brown bird answered from a thicket. Rachaela watched it, and walked on. The bird sang a few more notes and flew away.

‘How many miles, how many miles?’

Where had she heard the rhyme? Not from her mother. It came now because it was applicable. She had been to Babylon, and come back.

How canny of her to have chosen a new sweater with a roll neck. This and a little piece of elastoplast denied the most outrageous element of the visit to Babylon. The blood had stopped, had been dry when she woke up. He was gone. But her whole body, strained and bruised as if he had beaten her, that was the monument to his reality.