Lion of Ireland (27 page)

“She may be suffering from an illness, as you said; people can get sick in their minds, as well as in their bodies. Or perhaps she is under an enchantment, cursed for some deed done long ago in another life. Or, yet again she may have been born under a malevolent star.”

Brian cocked an eyebrow. “I’ve heard of that old superstition, but . . .”

She grinned at him. “You would call it a superstition, but it is a science, and a true one. My people have always known how to cast horoscopes and learn the forces that influence us, Can your priests do that for you?”

“No,” he said shortly, and fell silent, gazing thoughtfully into his empty cup. Fiona got up to refill it for him and left him alone with his thoughts.

At last he spoke. “I’m a Christian, and everything I’ve been taught tells me that what you are offering is somehow evil. But I’m also a warrior, and one thing a warrior must learn, if he is to stay alive, is to explore every possibility and accept the fact “that there are usually alternate ways to achieve a goal. I believe in my God, and in Christ, but I have to do everything I can to help my wife, even if it means imperiling my own soul.”

Fiona threw back her head and laughed with delight. “Oh, Brian, you’re not endangering your soul!”

He scowled at her. “I don’t know why I came here at all!”

Her laughter softened to a gentle smile. “You came because you need help, Brian, and deep down you knew that I could give it to you. And so I shall—you have only to ask. It won’t cost you your soul, either.”

She stood before him with her head thrown back, the clean line of her arched throat inviting, the lift of her breasts demanding his gaze. There was the unstated price; it only remained to learn what it would buy.

And to determine if he would pay it. Rain fell on the thatch, and hens scrabbled at the door like dogs, anxious to be let in. “Do what you can,” Brian said at last. As the night thickened into blackness and a rising wind blew skitters of leaves against the cottage, Fiona drew the forbidden symbols upon her earthen floor and cast Deirdre’s sun-signs for him, using the information he gave her about the girl’s time and place of birth.

Then she insisted that Brian bow with her as she chanted the prayers to Dagda, the good father, and Lugh, god of light, and she sang in a soft monotone those hymns that were no longer heard by day.

When the ashy dawn was beginning to seep through her shuttered window she turned at last to Brian.

“I’ve done all I can,” she told him in a voice roughened and grainy with weariness. “I can tell you this: There is no curse on your Deirdre, the gods have no quarrel with her, and the burdens she brought with her into this world from her last life are minor ones. But there is a darkness hanging over her; she has been done a great wrong, and she goes into a doomed future as a lamb goes to sacrifice.”

Brian was horrified. “Have I wronged her so?”

Her glazed eyes saw through him to untold worlds. “Not you. Another. But she is damaged and mortally afraid.”

“What can be done for her?”

Fiona’s expression cleared. “I have a mixture I can give you for her. It dissolves in wine and has no taste, but it has a very soothing effect on the spirit. You can calm her and make life bearable for her as long as the effect of the drug lasts.”

The words frightened him. “Can it harm her?” “No, it’s perfectly safe, although I suspect your court physician would never approve of it if you were foolish enough to tell him about it. He no doubt has his own remedies and believes only in them.”

“I’ve already spoken to him,” Brian told her. “He seemed to think I wanted an aphrodisiac, and he was shocked.”

The smile lurked at the corners of her mouth again. “Do you’”

Brian returned to the palace to a hero’s welcome, as if he had won a great battle instead of an isolated skirmish. Toasts were raised to him in the banqueting hall. Deirdre greeted him with eager eyes and a misty smile, but her lips trembled when he brushed them with his and he felt her small body stiffen.

He found an excuse to take her serving maid aside, and in a dark passageway he emptied the prescribed amount of clear liquid into her silver goblet.

The entertainment for the evening was to be a team of touring acrobats. Extra lamps and rushlights were provided, and a space in the center of the floor was swept clean and sprinkled with wood shavings and water, then swept again to give them a safe performing surface. Deirdre was excited about the coming performance, as she seemed to be excited about anything which could keep her one moment longer from the marriage bed, and Brian watched her closely, waiting to see if the potion she had drunk with her dinner had begun its work.

The acrobats were two young men and a slender girl, boyishly flat of bosom, all dressed alike in pleated linen tunics. Their arms and legs were bare, their hair cropped to a uniform length and bound with fillets of copper. They swept abreast into the hall, smiling and holding hands, and bowed low before the king’s seat. Then, well schooled in protocol, they bowed first to Brian and then to Aed, and then to the rest of the audience.

The larger of the boys produced three smoky glass balls from somewhere within his scanty garment and there was a

ripple of admiration in the room. Deirdre laughed and clapped her hands together like a child. The boy tossed the spheres into the air in succession, rotating them expertly, and as he did so he began to perform a stylized dance. This was the cue for the others, who wove themselves around him, bending in and out, leaping, somersaulting, doing daring feats of agility that threatened but never destroyed the geometry of the tossing glass balls.

The graceful young bodies were lovely in the golden light. The-harper played a subtle accompaniment for them, and the rhythms of their dance became wilder, more abandoned. Once the girl leaped high into the air, twisted her body head to heels, and then came to rest perched on the shoulders of her partner, arms outflung and smile radiant. Now the juggler set his globes aside and joined them, and the two young men threw the girl back and forth between them as if she weighed no more than the glass balls. And each pattern produced by their bodies was more beautiful than the one before.

At one point in the performance the girl came to a panting halt directly in front of Brian. The warmth of her body sent its own perfume to him as her bright eyes looked into his. He could see the firm points of her nipples beneath the sheer, damp fabric of her tunic. He smiled back, enjoying her and himself, and in that moment he felt Deirdre’s small hand come to rest, lightly but firmly, on his knee.

“My husband,” she said to the acrobat, in tones as soft and clear as birdsong. The two women spoke briefly to one another in some language of eye and body that utterly excluded Brian, and then the girl spun away. She did not pause in front of him again.

Sensitized to her every movement, Brian felt the change in Deirdre’s body as she began to relax. Keeping his face forward he glanced at her sidelong and noted the dreamy, bemused expression, the tranquility of the violet eyes. Her hands were no longer clasped tensely in her lap, as was her habit when the evening yawned toward night. They lay palm up, fingers half-curled inward, like weary little animals gone trustingly to sleep.

Wait, don’t rush it, he warned himself. Give her time, be sure the potion has fully affected her or she might shake it off. So he sat, tense as she had been, and tried without success to concentrate on the acrobats. But their performance was coming to an end. Aed rose to recite a poem in their honor, Mahon gave them a gift of gold, and they left the hall.

Deirdre was, decidedly, leaning against Brian’s shoulder. He looked down at her, his eyes lovingly tracing the glossy black curls that had pulled themselves free from her hairdress. “Do you want to go to bed?” he asked gently.

She widened her eyes, trying to see him clearly. She felt deliciously drowsy, all the sharp edges of everything were blurred away; even the black menace of the shadows had been transformed into something soft and welcoming. The man beside her was so big and warm; it was pleasant just to lean against him and feel his heat. “If you want to,” she replied to his question, her voice almost inaudible.

Brian put his arm about her waist as they walked to their apartment, and her pliant body accepted his support without resistance. Her maidservant was waiting at the door to their chamber, but he waved her away. “I will take care of the princess myself,” he told the woman, and was mildly amused at the lascivious gleam in her eyes as she backed away, bowing and grinning.

He undressed Dierdre himself, with fingers suddenly gone cold and awkwardly stiff, but she did not flinch from their touch. She stood, patient as a child, her head drooping on the fragile stem of her neck, a half smile curving her lips. When her white body bloomed free of its confinement she gave one deep sigh.

Her skin was scented with almond oil, and softer than any woman’s he had known. The bones lay just beneath the surface, lightly padded; he cupped his hand over her hip and felt the marvelous play of the joint in its socket as she turned toward him. The lust that had tormented him seemed to drain away, leaving him with a worshipful awe for the perfection of her. God’s creature, molded into a masterpiece.

She was quiet, watching him with open, remote eyes, and a small smile that could mean everything or nothing.

He ran his hand, huge and rough, down the white flesh, waiting to feel the heat rise in him, but it did not.

He looked at her face and saw her eyes, watching, incurious. Bending over her he sealed them shut with kisses, then let his lips wander down her face, her throat, the slight swell of her virginal breasts. At the touch of his mouth the nipple stood erect in their dainty pink aureoles, and he saw that they were still like the nipples of a child.

Her body was cool and he tried to warm it with his hands. The ice had left his fingers; he could tell by comparison with her flesh that he was warmer than she. Slowly, expecting her to stop him, he moved his hand between her thighs. They did not open for him, but neither did they clamp shut.

At last it was beginning in him. The heavy weight in the loins, the intense, pulsating sweetness that had only one morality and one blind goal. He looked at her again, but her face was closed and calm, seemingly unaware of the hot club pressed against her leg. If she were going to reject him, she would already have done so.

As he moved over her he thought-she stiffened a little, but that was all. Fiona would have guided him with her hands and her body, moving and murmuring, punctuating each new beat of pleasure with her responding gasp. But Deirdre lay still as a carven image.

I should spend more time caressing her, he thought belatedly, but his body had already taken over with its own rhythms. He tried to enter her and found her dry, and used his saliva to moisten the way, embarrassed obscurely lest she open her eyes and see him. But the violet eyes stayed shut, the thick black lashes lying unquivering on her pale cheeks.

He made his first thrust tentatively, expecting to feel the taut barrier of the hymen, and was suddenly aware that he was deep inside her. A part of his mind registered the fact with a cold click, to be considered later, and a part of his emotions reacted with a wave of anger that freed him from gentleness and allowed him to drive strongly into her unresisting body.

Sunlight fell in slanting yellow bars across the room, and silver dust motes danced. She lay for a long time, aware only that her eyes were open, and then finally she realized it was morning. Her head ached.

Brian lay beside her, his back turned, his deep breathing very loud in the quiet chamber. Deirdre moved her legs a lit-de and felt something warm and sticky; when she tried to sit up a slight soreness told her the rest of the story.

It was done, then; the marriage was consummated. But why could she remember so little about it? Last night was a blue haze, and someone dancing, and someone else—Brian?--cradling her in his arms. Was it possible that her fear had washed away the memory of it? Surely Brian would not have taken advantage of her if she had not allowed it, but how could that be?

She turned to look at him, feeling her heart start to hammer in her chest. The fear was back. She wanted, more than anything to leap out of bed and put as much distance as possible between them. Yet how could she do that now?

His shoulder loomed in her vision. He must have felt her move, for the easy rhythm of his breathing was broken and after a time he rolled over and lay facing her, his eyes open and very clear. He said nothing, just studied her face, and in the morning light there was a guarded quality to his expression that had never before been there when he looked at her. “I wish you joy in the morning, my lord,” she said shyly, pulling the blankets into bunches with her nervous hands and unconsciously building them into a barricade between his body and hers.

“And I to you,” he replied with gravity. “Did you sleep

well?”

“Yes, I think so. I don’t really remember. My head aches this morning and I feel so ... did I drink too much wine?”

“Don’t you know?” he asked. It seemed as though he was asking something else.

“No.”

Her face was innocent, wounded, fearful beyond his power to reassure. How could he ask her outright if she had been a virgin? How could he be certain she wasn’t, he who knew so little about women? To use a Druid’s compound to make her calm, then seduce her, and then have the nerve to question her virtue—No! That was more than he would allow himself.

“I love you, wife,” he said gently.

The pale oval of her face broke apart as if she would cry, the features rearranging themselves in a swift succession of expressions. “Oh, Brian, last night ... I mean, did you? Did we ... ?”

He continued to smile at her. “We did. You remember nothing?”

She shook her head. “Nothing. It must have been the wine, I’ve never had a head for it. After this I shall only drink mead and water.

“But if you say it happened I believe you; I know you would never deceive me.”