Seize the Fire

  She was aghast. Distantly, she recognized that she ought reasonably to be afraid for herself, listening to what he was saying, that he wanted to kill someone—but it was Sheridan she was terrified for. He would turn this on himself. She had a clear and dreadful vision of him gazing down the barrel of a pistol in his cabin aboard Terrier.

  "I don't know what's happening to me," he mumbled. "I don't understand."

  Olympia didn't understand either, but she knew when it had begun. She'd become engaged to Francis, and she would never forget Sheridan's face when he heard it. Somehow—though he'd denied it and said it wasn't her fault—something inside him had gone dreadfully wrong from that moment.

  "Sheridan," she asked shakily, "do you want to kill me?"

  "No!" The single syllable held absolute horror. He turned to her, grabbed her shoulder. "Not you—I swear—dear God, Princess—never you; I'd never hurt you!"

  She remained quiet under the cruel grip of his fingers. With sudden resolution, she said, "No…of course not. But you have a right to be angry with me. After what I've done. I said I loved you and trusted you, and then I turned to Francis."

  "I have to protect you," he said intensely.

  She bowed her head. "If I were you, I'd be furious at me."

  His hand left her shoulder. "I have to protect you," he repeated. But a faint note of anxiety had crept into his voice.

  "You're not angry?"

  He hesitated.

  "Sheridan? Are you angry with me?"

  "Why are you asking me that? I'm tired of it," he said explosively. "I'm tired of hurting and killing people."

  She shivered in the cool night air, struggling to make sense of it all. "You just said it would make you feel better."

  "Somebody else!" he exclaimed. "The enemy. Not you. I'll protect you; Princess, I don't want to hurt you. Never. Never."

  "Yes," she said honestly, "I believe that. I only want to know if you're angry at me."

  "I told you I won't hurt you!" The agitation in his voice mounted. "How can you even think it?"

  She looked at him intently. With slow thoughtfulness, she said, "They aren't the same thing. You can be angry without hurting and killing."

  He didn't answer. She watched his silhouette and saw him put his hand to his temple.

  "You can be angry with me, Sheridan," she repeated softly. "Do you understand? I won't be happy, but I'll survive it."

  "My head aches," he said fretfully.

  She almost pushed him. But a newly awakening intuition stopped her. She felt like a flower opening petals before a thunderstorm, sensitive to each shift and play of wind. It was a risk; she might end up torn and beaten—but the storm wouldn't dissipate; it could only grow until it broke with furious intensity. She would have to spread and bend, though it meant opening to enfold depths of pain and violence she'd never imagined.

  She thought again of Julia, tried to imagine how she would act, what she would say and do to give him comfort. After a frowning moment, Olympia realized with a sense of wonder that Julia wouldn't do anything at all, except put as much cool distance between herself and the hazard as possible. Perhaps she'd been his lover, but she would not stand by him at peril to herself—Olympia felt that in her bones.

  For the first time in her life, she was proud she wasn't Julia.

  There in the desert moonlight, she came to the truth, and a sense of infinite calm spread through her. Julia was more beautiful, Julia was slender and sophisticated and everything Olympia was not—but she didn't love Sheridan. Olympia doubted she'd ever loved anyone. In fact, growing up with that icy perfection, Olympia knew that if Fish Stovall had never taken pity on a lonely child and spent those warm, silent hours with her in the Norfolk marshes, she would never have known anything about love or friendship or faithfulness at all.

  She could turn away from Sheridan and this darkness inside him; she could say he was dangerous—that he had a killing demon in him that was struggling for control…but she'd met that same demon face-to-face on the bloody gun deck of Terrier and it had defended her—with unselfish, single-minded, savage loyalty.

  Love might exist in strange shapes, and demand more than simple commitment. A wolf was not a lapdog, not after a lifetime in the wilderness—but still it might long for a hearth and home.

  The moon was setting, silhouetting the bleak mountains in an unearthly glow. On a hill ahead, the dark shapes of camels stalked in slow rhythm across the silver disc of light and then disappeared into shadow beyond: so lovely and majestic and alien they were like a dream of an unknown world. Their own mounts reached the top by steady steps—and there, spread before them, was a valley of frosted light, the long column like faint smoke winding through it.

  "I wish this night would go on forever," Sheridan whispered. "I wish I never had to live in the world again."

  The ache in his voice made her throat close. Her camel swayed down the slope next to his. They took up the trail behind the others.

  "Would you sing for me?" she asked.

  He looked at her, but she couldn't see his face. They were in shadow now, the night pressing closer as the moon disappeared.

  Softly at first, his voice hoarse and faintly uncertain as if he'd half forgotten the words, the melody of "Greensleeves" rose above the shuffle of sand. The quiet conversations around them hushed. As midnight enveloped them, his fine voice gained depth and rhythm, drifting out over the silent desert: sweet reminder of home and love sung in time to the camels' march.

  They made camp in the dark, pitching tents for the few hours of rest before the pre-dawn signal to move again. Sheridan stayed with her of his own will, and when they were together in the tent, he did not call for the chibouk, but dismissed the servant girl and doused the lamp.

  In the chilly dark, he lay down on the carpet beside her and drew her into his arms. He touched her cheek, and her hair, drifted his fingertips across her forehead and down the line of her chin.

  She turned her face into his hand and kissed his palm. There was no passion in this embrace, only the need to be close, as they'd been in the long months of hardship on the island. With a sense of warm familiarity, she did now what she'd often done then: turned on her side and settled into the curve of his body with only the soft desert robes between them.

  "You're so beautiful," he said in the darkness. "You're the most beautiful thing in my life."

  Twenty-Four

  * * *

  I can see it coming," Sheridan said to her under his breath as the magicians consulted their pans of burning charcoal. They were ponderously determining the proper moment to conduct the mad English prophet into the presence of Ishak Pasha, the mighty vizier of all eastern Anatolia. "He's got an ailing wife, or a son with a cast in one eye, and I'll be expected to foam at the mouth and say 'The whale weeps at midnight' twenty-nine times before anyone's allowed to go to bed."

  Olympia bit her lip, watching three white eunuchs pad by, soft-footed and long-limbed like graceful insects. She and Sheridan stood beneath an archway that opened into a garden, surrounded on all sides by fabulous tiled walls of blue and green and gold designs.

  Sheridan was right—a wild performance always seemed expected of him, though in reality all he ever did was bow smoothly in the eastern manner and converse with his "hosts" in Arabic while Olympia sat without headdress or yashmak in the presence of men who'd never seen a woman's face outside the hareem. As he'd predicted, his polite sanity and her calm flouting of convention created more sensation than any fit of mania—fits being pretty common stuff among the wandering darwayshes and holy men in any case.

  The magicians determined that they must wait four more hours before the auspicious moment. Olympia's shoulders fell at this news—she was tired, having ridden all night and morning down from the foothills of Kurdistan and then been bathed and perfumed and dressed and fussed over by the hareem servants for the rest of the day. Even the magical sight of Ishak Pasha's palace, its domes and minaret floating up out of the haze like
a vision from the Arabian Nights, with the vast plain below and Mount Ararat's peak of snow in the purple distance—not even that wonder could erase the cumulative exhaustion of weeks of weary travel.

  But she sighed and nodded when Sheridan told her, trusting him to know the proper etiquette. He looked at her for a moment. She smiled tiredly. Something came into his face: his mouth hardened and his eyes took on a cold, fixed light—he spoke abruptly to the magicians and grasped her arm.

  Without waiting for the usual attendant to slink ahead, or the eunuchs to whisper their arrival in the vizier's ear, or any of the other points of procedure that had been followed at every stop from Jidda to Ha'il to Baghdad, he led her swiftly beneath the arch and into the antechamber, past the little fountain and right up to the startled figure of Ishak Pasha on his cushioned divan.

  Sheridan did bow—cursorily—but she was horrified to see that he didn't slip off his footwear before he bypassed the guests and petitioners who sat hunched on low stools before the dais. He stepped up onto the carpeted platform and seated a bewildered Olympia on the divan next to the plump, old vizier. With a disinterested air, Sheridan sat down himself on the other side. She saw that the teskeri hilaal had appeared, to lie conspicuously against his chest like a glinting warning. They'd dressed him in Turkish clothing: tight trousers and a deep red velvet tunic encrusted with embroidery, but instead of slippers he wore European boots, which he raised casually to rest on the vizier's divan as he clapped his hands.

  Ishak Pasha turned white beneath his plumed turban. Olympia held her breath. She'll learned enough of oriental etiquette to know they'd just delivered a series of murderous insults. But as a moment of silence passed and the other guests began quickly to stand and perform their greetings, bending low—not toward the vizier, but to Sheridan and then herself—she understood with astonishment that the governor of the whole territory was trembling with fear instead of fury.

  She looked at Sheridan and saw the fixed expression there still, the calm lit by a cold excitement in his eyes. He could have been a real prophet—he had that look of inhuman intensity, that flame of passion locked in ice that she'd seen in the battle with the pirates.

  The demon had woken again.

  "We call this inspiring respect and striking terror." He used English in a tone that sounded as if he were pronouncing some sentence of doom. "This little tub of butter thought he'd bought some nice expensive playthings to pass along and ingratiate himself with the Sultan." He smiled with sweet menace at the hapless pasha, caressing the teskeri as if it were a weapon. "But it's not quite that easy, is it, my fine basket of tripe? We're not going to await your pleasure. We're tired; we want to go to bed. We're going to be such overbearing bullies that even Mustafa couldn't find fault with the way we insult our inferiors. Too bad he ain't here to do it in our behalf, but we'll have to muddle through by ourselves. Here are the pipes." He stared with magnificent gloom at the riveted faces around the room, still speaking English. "Pretend to try yours, and then push it away. Show us some royal disgust."

  He nodded, and the silent servants stepped forward together from the lower end of the room, each one placing a long-necked pipe before an individual guest. Olympia looked down the five slender feet of modeled clay to the glowing bowl, and then at the jeweled mouthpiece presented to her lips.

  She touched it delicately to her tongue, and barely suppressed a cough at the flood of sharp tobacco smoke. "Kikh!" She thrust it away with the expression she'd heard a Bedouin use upon startling a rat out of a grain bag.

  The servant before her looked horrified. Instantly he removed the pipe, disappeared and brought another, more exquisitely decorated than the first. Olympia repeated the refusal. The vizier sweated miserably and addressed anxious questions to Sheridan. After two more rejections, when the servants and the vizier appeared almost beside themselves with stress, Sheridan allowed her to settle for tea.

  He monopolized the conversation, asking sharp questions of the vizier and receiving voluble answers. When at last they rose to leave, Ishak Pasha leapt to his feet and personally ushered them down the single step and all the way to the anteroom, cooing a single phrase over and over. When they'd been led to a chamber and left alone with bowls of figs and pastries stuffed with cheese, Olympia asked what the vizier had been saying so earnestly.

  "'Go with the fortune of a prince,'" Sheridan interpreted, smiling grimly. "The highest compliment for a departing guest. We have him on the run, anyway."

  She drew a breath to calm herself. Her heart was still beating painfully fast after the ordeal of defying a vizier in his own palace. "You have the most amazing nerve."

  "We're out of Arabia and amongst the real Osmanlis now." He touched the teskeri. "This buys me any damned thing I want—including Ishak Pasha's fat head. That's what I hope he thinks, at any rate."

  "It's not true?"

  For a moment he didn't answer, stating pensively down at the rug they sat on. "I don't know. I'd reckon odds are against it." He shrugged. "Ishak says a message has gone out from the Sultan already to all the provinces. The Great Mahmoud has a wish to see the crazy Englishman who wears his crescent. That could mean anything—good or bad." He looked up at her, his eyes a cool gray, giving away no emotion. "And it seems Fitzhugh hasn't wasted any time taking his gripe right to the British ambassador at Stamboul, demanding his fiancé and restitution for the attack on his ship. We're a wanted pair in the Ottoman Empire."

  She dropped her eyes. Then she glanced around at the chamber, so serene and simple and lovely, carpeted with myriad soft rugs, the walls glowing with painted tiles and the air filled with the whispering of fountains. "Are we in much danger?"

  He laughed and stretched out to his full length, his shoulders propped against the low divan. "You haven't changed a bit, have you? Christ, yes, we're in danger. D'you think just because this Ishak sweats and scrapes that he's actually developed any affection for us? As long as we've got the nerve to wipe our boots on his divan, he'll ooze charm and generosity. But just wait for the word to come through that we don't have the Sultan behind us, and we'll pay for every insult. With interest."

  She looked at him dubiously. "It seems a risky way to go on. Can't we just be customarily polite?"

  "I was under the impression you didn't care to stand around for hours waiting on a bunch of constellations to converge."

  She sighed. "I suppose not."

  "Ripping slack stars they've got in this place," he muttered, adjusting a tasseled pillow beneath his head.

  Olympia tried to smile, but didn't quite manage to banish her uneasiness.

  He reached out and touched her cheek. "Princess…I'll take care of you."

  She bent her head. An eastern silence fell between them, full of rustling leaves and the soft sound of water. He lowered his eyelashes, sliding a glance along her body. A distant muezzin called the faithful to evening prayer with a singsong drone.

  "They've rigged you out enticingly," he murmured.

  It was the first time since they'd left the island that he'd mentioned her appearance. Without thinking, she'd slipped off the hot and heavy brocade robe she'd worn into the audience room, and now she felt her cheeks grow scarlet as she looked down at the thin rose-colored trousers, embroidered with flowers and covered with a gauzy smock that showed her breasts right through it. The open caftan that matched the trousers was somewhat more modest, but the cut fitted so closely to her body that she squirmed in embarrassment. "I've gotten much too fat."

  He clasped his hands behind his neck and shook his head with a silent smile.

  Olympia sat with her legs crossed. She slanted a look toward him, wondering if he was going to call for the pipe and hashish. Since the desert, he'd continued to retreat into that sleepy asylum daily, silently forbidding any effort to speak of troubling things. Olympia had chosen not to push at the wall, but she watched him.

  He made no move to summon the chibouk. He reached out and ran his fingers over her hand and across the thin
silk that covered her thigh, his touch warm and sensual. "I haven't forgotten," he murmured. "I think about you…every day."

  She closed her eyes. Like one of the fountains in the courtyards outside, instant warmth sprang up inside her. It had been so long…just the lazy, rhythmic stroke of his hand along her thigh was enough to spark excitement.

  She wanted him. She wanted him so much.

  She put her hand over his, caught it and stilled it. "Sheridan," she asked softly, "how do you feel?"

  She thought he might pretend to misunderstand the question. But he seemed to think about it; he stared soberly into space for a moment, as if checking inside himself, and then said, "I feel all right." He looked up at her. His hand pressed her thigh. A slow smile lit his face. "I feel pretty damned good."

  Olympia took a deep breath. This was the moment, the opening in the wall. With no notion of whether she was right or wrong, with only love and instinct as a guide, she held out her hand to the savage wolf hidden in the silver depths of his eyes and asked it to take a step toward civilization.

  "How did you feel in the vizier's chamber?" she asked, playing with his fingers on her thigh, stroking and caressing the sun-darkened skin. "Did you feel good in there?"

  Instantly, his hand curled into a fist. He was silent. After a moment, he said abruptly, "I don't remember."

  All along his arm, the muscles had gone tense. She stroked his hand, slipped her fingers into the taut curl, asking it to open. "Yes, you do," she insisted gently. "It wasn't that long ago."

  "I felt fine." He pulled his hand away.

  Olympia reached out and took it again. "Alive?" She stroked the back of his palm with her thumb.

  The sinew beneath her fingers tensed and relaxed in restless rhythm. He stared upward, into the shadows of the domed ceiling, where painted tiles made a gold-and-blue sky of stylized flowers and Arabic script.

  She went on stroking his hand, waiting, not knowing what more to say if he would not answer.