“Ishraq?” he whispered. “Can you breathe? Love, my love, can you breathe?”
He was certain that she was a little less chill; her cheek against his was no longer icy, as if he had warmed her. He pulled back and looked down at her still face. Was there the slightest hint of color in her face? Was there a tiny pulse at the base of her neck? Could it be that his body heat was somehow bringing life back into her lifeless, cold being?
Without knowing what he was doing, or what miracle was taking place, Luca spread himself on and around her, stretching on top of her so that they were belly to belly and chest to chest and face to face. He pulled up the rough covers of the bed over them both so that they were cocooned together, hidden by the warm wool bedding. He was so close to her, so intent on her that now he found he was breathing in rhythm with her, breathing together, that he was forcing the breath in and out of her dying body, and, in his passionate longing that she should live, he dropped his mouth to hers, gathering her into the crook of his shoulder, rocking her slightly from side to side with each breath. He believed he could feel the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed his air, as his mouth met hers.
“Don’t go,” he said in her cool ear. “Don’t leave me. I love you.”
He felt her quiver in response, a shudder that went all down her body, and he pulled back to see her dark eyelashes fluttering on her cheek as if she were trying to open her eyes but was still held by sleep.
“I do,” he breathed. “I love you. I never knew it till this night, but I love you with all my heart and soul. You are mine; you are my love. I am yours.”
He saw her lips move, as if she were trying to speak, like a swimmer choking in deep water. “Take them out,” she croaked.
“What?”
Her whisper was no louder than a labored breath. “Take them out.”
He realized at once that she meant the earrings, and he carefully unhooked one and then another from her pierced ears. He thought that there might be some poison on the shaft and nuzzled into her neck to take the lobe of her right ear in his mouth, sucked a bitter taste, and spat it on the floor, and then held her close so he could suck her left earlobe and spit. He knew it was to save her, but at the same time it was an act of intimacy that gave him a deep pulse of desire. He rubbed his mouth on the sheet of her bed as she gave a little sigh, as if some poison had been drawn from her. Her dark eyes opened and slowly she smiled at him.
“Kiss me.”
Though his mouth had already been on hers, and his body pressed against her, Luca felt overwhelmed with desire. “Ishraq . . .”
“Kiss me.”
He rubbed his mouth clean of the poison and held her; he kissed her, feeling desire for her flood through him, and she felt her lust for life and her longing for Luca come together in a rising, unstoppable wave of pleasure.
“I love you,” he repeated. “My God, Ishraq, I love you.”
Her dark eyes smiled, hazy with desire, back from the very threshold of death but still with a will as hard as rock: “Never, ever say that to me again,” she said.
Freize felt as if his feet had mastered him. His scuffed brown riding boots were jigging along as if he were dancing for joy. Against his will they danced out of the safe cover of the bushes at the side of the road and into the middle of the track where the growing daylight exposed him to the dancers who were coming along behind him.
He heard an ironic cheer as they spotted him and then their breathless laughter as they saw he was dancing, dancing like them, with a sort of weary stagger and an irresistible hop every time the fiddler tore the tune out of the strings. The drummer kept them to time with the little tambourine: a steady, fast beat that nobody could resist.
They looked like a mad circus of wild people, trailing down the road with Freize at their head, followed by the fiddler and the drummer, who were swiftly gaining on him, then the landlady, laboring along with the other dancers from the town. In a few minutes, Freize knew they would catch up with him and then, he was certain, he would join them and never be able to get away. His determination to save Isolde would drain from him, he would be like them: without love, without loyalty, bound only to the dance. He would jig and reel and follow them wherever they went, to the next aghast town, to the next horrified village, to the next murderous lord, until he too was tipped over the parapet of a bridge, slammed with a metaled fist, or simply left to die of thirst and exhaustion on a hard road outside a strange town, and Isolde would dance past him, unknowing.
Something in the triumphant skirl of the song alerted Isolde that the fiddler was victorious. She was still torn between dancing and running, keeping ahead of the straggling trailing dancers with the Being’s hand pulling her forward, his big palm pushing her in the small of the back, forcing her onward, faster and faster, away from the dancers. But she turned and then she paused as she saw Freize.
The round face of the Being looked back too, and Freize saw Isolde say his name, and something else. Then the two of them stopped in their tracks and turned toward him as if they would come back for him.
Freize wove across the road in a jaunty side step and then stopped and twirled. “No! No! Go!” he said, as he realized that he could not break free from the dance. “Go as fast as you can. Run! Save yourself, Isolde! Don’t come back for me! You go on! You go on!”
They did not run. Isolde, white-faced, her feet still betraying her in the bright red shoes, urged the Being and they came back down the road toward him.
“Go! Go!” Freize shouted at her, and now it was like a race, the blond girl with the strange giant of a companion, hurrying back to reach Freize and, farther down along the road, the whirling dancers, laughing as they closed on him. Freize himself danced as if he were wading through a mire, fighting to get away from the dancers toward Isolde.
She got to him first, reached out her hands and grabbed him. “Freize! You’re dancing!”
“I can’t help myself. I was trying to come for you. You go now, you get away from them.”
“He’s taking me from them.” She nodded upward to the Being who towered above them and now took each of their hands. “He’ll help you too.”
Freize flinched at the damp chill of his grip, as if the Being had just come from the cold waters of the canal at Venice; but still his feet pounded the road to the rhythm of the drum.
“Where’s he taking us?” he demanded, as he felt the Being take his hand in an overwhelming grip and start to drag him forward.
“Who cares? Away from them!” Isolde gasped.
The Being drew them on. Freize tried to make his wandering feet go straight forward, but he could not prevent a little hop every third pace. “You’ve grown to a powerful height,” he said to the Being, gasping out the words.
The Being hauled them both onward and Freize felt his extraordinary strength.
“I think this fellow could carry us both if needs be,” he whispered to Isolde across the massive girth. “But where is he taking us?”
“It doesn’t matter, as long as we get away!” she panted. “I know you can’t stop dancing, but see if you can dance forward.” She cried out as her wayward feet made a little drumming step on the spot. “We have to hurry, we have to get away.”
Anxiously, she glanced over her shoulder. The fiddler and the drummer leading the dancers were only the length of a field behind them. “Come on, Freize, we have to go faster.”
Freize scowled with concentration, trying to master his feet.
Isolde glanced behind again. “They’re slowing down—there’s something wrong with the drummer,” she said.
Freize broke into a couple of dance steps and felt the Being’s arm come round his shoulders and scoop him onward. It was like being pushed by a big horse—the arm had the strength of three men. Freize stumbled under the weight of it.
Isolde gave a cry of delight. “It’s the landlady! Oh, she’s wonderful. Look! She’s laid hold of the drummer; she’s stopping him playing.”
“Come
on!” Freize said. “This is our chance!” As the insistent pounding of the tambourine stopped for a moment, he found that he could break into a run and not dance on the spot. Isolde’s feet in the red shoes went faster, and the Being gave a little grunt of encouragement.
Behind them, the fiddler burst into a wail of sound, but they pressed on, the distance between them and the fiddler widening all the time. They turned round a bend in the road and suddenly before them was a steep slope where the road curled and doubled back on itself, and at the bottom of the valley was a small walled village, a river all around it, and a bridge leading the road to the open, welcoming gates.
“If we can get help here . . .” Isolde panted.
“Come on,” said Freize.
Pushing forward, with their feet occasionally skipping to one side or another, they went down the steeply sloping road, sometimes cutting between one hairpin bend and another, stumbling on the stones and sliding toward the village. Isolde flinched as the thin soles of her dancing shoes tripped on the stony path; she would have fallen if the Being had not held her up.
“They’re still coming,” she said breathlessly, looking back up the slope. High above them the scrape of the violin was matched with the drum of the tambourine. “They’ve seen the village; they must know we’re trying to get there. We have to get inside before they reach us.”
“Quick then,” Freize said, and the three of them raced toward the bridge and to the gate of the village that was slowly but certainly closing against them.
“Open up!” Freize shouted. “For the love of God!”
“Help us!” Isolde cried. “Let us in!”
But there was no pity; someone inside was determinedly pushing the heavy double gates closed. They banged shut just as the trio staggered across the bridge, and then they could hear the dreadful sound of someone inside shooting the iron bolts.
In the little bedroom of the inn, Luca, in a dream of desire, heard Ishraq’s words and their meaning shocked him like a dash of cold water in his face.
She repeated herself, a smile in her dark eyes as her eyelids fluttered and then closed again. “Never say that again.”
He jerked back a little. “You’re alive?”
She blinked. “I seem to be.”
“What happened?” He rolled to one side, but stayed close to her, propping his head on his hand, his other hand gently resting on her rising and falling diaphragm, as if he wanted to be sure that she continued to breathe. She did not push his hand away, but closed her eyes again and turned her face toward him, as if to draw comfort from his closeness. He saw her inhale the scent of him as if he himself could give her life.
“It’s like a dream that I can hardly remember. I was in the taproom with Isolde and a peddler came in . . .” She broke off and struggled to sit up. “Where is Isolde?”
“Freize is with her,” Luca reassured her, not daring to tell her the truth yet. “Lie down. Rest. Go on.”
“The peddler said he had some beautiful black sapphire earrings and Isolde wanted me to have them. I started to refuse, but when I saw them—” She drew a longing breath, he felt his hand rise and fall, and despite himself he stroked the soft warmth of her belly, the raised ridge of her ribs. “They were really beautiful.”
He reached over to the table beside the bed where last night’s candle and Brother Peter’s rosary were beside the earrings in a little bowl. He brought the bowl so that she could see where he had put them. “These?”
She looked at them wide-eyed, but did not touch them. “Yes. Those. They said that I should try them on, and Isolde put them in for me. The landlady said that I might look in her glass, so I went upstairs to her bedroom.” She looked troubled. “And then I can’t remember. I think I fainted. I can’t remember anything until now.” Unconsciously, her arm tightened round his muscled back. “Until the moment that I woke.” She turned her face to him as if seeking his kiss. “With you.”
“I think they may have been painted with some kind of poison,” Luca suggested. “A sort of poison that froze, but did not kill. You recovered as soon as you told me to take them out of your ears, and I sucked your earlobes and the taste was bitter.”
She searched his face. “You did that for me?”
“I would have swallowed the poison to save you. I would do anything for you.”
She nodded. They both noted that he did not repeat his words of love.
“There are all sorts of poisons,” she told him. “The Arab doctors have some that can make the body completely still, as if turned to stone. Was it as if I was paralyzed?”
“I thought you were dead. You were growing cold; you lost your pulses. You were not breathing. We prayed for your soul. The priest came to give you the last rites. Brother Peter is holding a vigil for you now in the chapel.”
“So, why didn’t I die? How did you wake me?”
“I think the poison was freezing every part of you: your limbs first, then your breath. I think it was about to freeze your heart when I lay with you, and warmed you up, and breathed for you.”
They had moved closer to one another almost without realizing and now they were all but mouth to mouth.
“How did you breathe for me?” she whispered.
“I didn’t know what I was doing,” Luca explained very quietly. “I am sorry—perhaps I should not have touched you. But I so longed for you to live, I can’t tell you how much. I laid on you and put my mouth to your mouth, and when I breathed out, I felt as if you breathed in, so I kept on doing it.”
Her eyelashes flickered down. “As if we were one.”
“Yes,” he said honestly.
“Breathing together. Breathing the same breath.”
“Yes.”
“Like lovers,” she pressed him.
He did not dare answer her.
She was silent, and he made a little move, as if to free her from his weight, from his touch. He felt torn by his powerful desire to hold her and never let her go, and his fear that she did not want him. He drew back a little and at once he felt her arm tighten behind his back. “Don’t go,” she said without a flicker of shame. “You are warming me through. I feel as if you are bringing me back to life. Stay with me.”
“It’s nearly dawn,” he said. “I can’t believe that you will see this day.”
“You saved me,” she said honestly. “You sucked the poison; you held me and breathed for me. You brought me back to life when any other would have said I was dead.”
He flushed like a boy. “I really think I did.”
“Then I am yours,” she said simply. “I owe you my life.”
“I want you,” he said, hardly knowing what he was saying. “I am yours, if you will have me.”
“Stay till the morning,” she said with sudden, open desire, bold as she was always bold, fearless and free of shame. “Stay with me till sunrise, till full morning, Luca. Let’s have this night together. Let’s be together this night; let us live together for one night, this night that we have stolen from death.”
She turned her face toward him, as if she had come back from the very brink of death and left all ideas of how a young lady should behave in the grave. She gave him her mouth, and then opened the front of her shift and held his face against her cool skin to warm her all through. Tentatively, they moved together, shedding their clothes, touching and responding, moving like conscienceless animals seeking and giving pleasure. Luca was stripped naked, his strong body arching over her as she reached up and clung to him, and then when he held her and felt her shudder with pleasure he dropped his mouth to hers as if he would breathe for her once again, and they were mouth to mouth, body to body, completely entwined. But even when he knew that he loved her, that he had never loved another woman like this, he made sure never to say the words that she had forbidden.
Then they wrapped themselves up together in the warm rugs of her bed, and they both fell asleep.
His feet hammering the doorstep of the village gate as he jigged and pranc
ed, Freize slapped on the great wooden timbers with his open hand. “For God’s sake, let us in!” he shouted. “We are fleeing from the dancers, the dancers! We will help you guard your village against them. But you must help us. We are lost if you don’t let us in!”
Isolde, looking over her shoulder, saw the fiddler and the drummer leading the dancers down the final corner of the winding path of the steep slope to the bridge. “They’re coming,” she panted. Despite herself her feet made a little jig on the spot. “They’re nearly at the bridge.”
“You’re Christians!” came the shout from behind the gate. “You’re trying to trick us to open up!”
Freize exchanged an aghast look with Isolde. “Of course we’re Christians,” he said, completely bewildered. “And we call on you in the name of Jesus to open the gate.”
“And what then?” came the bitter demand. “Will you rape our women and tear our children from their arms?”
“In God’s name!” Freize yelled. “Do I look like a rapist? Or do I look like a poor man under a terrible spell, begging for refuge and help?”
“How do we know who is behind you?”
“You can see who is behind me!” Freize bellowed in frustration. “A band of cursed dancers who spread the illness wherever they go, who are determined to catch me and this lady, to make us dance till we die. If you have any pity, let us in!”
“I dare not have pity. I dare not open the gate,” the voice came, but more uncertainly.
Freize collapsed on the stone doorstep. “Then open it just a crack and let the lady in,” he begged. “Leave me out here. I don’t blame you, whatever your fears. They can take me if they will. But rescue the lady! She is Isolde, Lady of Lucretili, and I am her most faithful and most loving squire. I would die for her. Please. Let her in and I will lead the dancers away from you and away from this place, if you will only save her.”
There was silence. The Being, who had stood in complete silence while Freize went from yelling to pleading, now turned his big, round face to Freize and looked at him with limpid eyes. Slowly, he nodded, as if he had learned something very important.