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It was not easy to think of Nesrin as weak and frail, but I tried hard to do so, and this is an example of how we force our thoughts to suit our wishes. In short, I said not one word. And with every step my hope mounted.
"I tell the truth to you," she said, and stopped again. "Yes, I decide alone. I choose you to stay, because I am free to choose. The other ones that watch me, I do not choose them. If they watch me or not, I do not care. I do not dance for them. But you, I care that you watch me. What is so difficult in that?"
We had started walking again and were drawing near to the stables. My heart was beating in my ears and my chest felt constricted. "I care that you listen to my singing," I said. "I was singing for you, that is the truth." We were close to the stable door now. The mare had heard my voice and step and she whi
"That is your horse? She knows you."
"She is waiting to go home. I do not live in the palace, I live in the town."
"I know this. Stefanos told me."
"Did he so? I wanted to ask you… I did not know if you came here with me… if you had mistaken the way."
"Mistake the way?" Her eyes had widened with surprise. "How can I mistake the way? How strange man you are. All this time, while we walk together, you ask yourself does she mistake the way? One would only go with you if she mistake the way?"
"But you did not say anything."
"What should I say? I go with you, where is need to say anything? I wait for you to say if you do not want me."
"Not want you?" I said. "Not want you?"
For a moment she looked solemnly at me, then she gave me a smile that threatened to take away what poor breath I had left. "I do not mistake the way, I know the way," she said, and her voice was softer than I could have thought possible.
As we entered the stable the mare shifted but there was no other sound.
Light from the lamp that hung outside the door fell across some straw bales piled against the far wall. There was the sharp smell of the mare, the smell of beaten earth and pissy straw. Smells of every day, deeply familiar, transformed into strangeness by the clasp of our hands together, the first kisses. I might have been a man at the dawn of creation, sniffing at a new world.
There was a loft above the stable where they kept feed for the horses. A wooden stairway went up to it. There were sacks of grain here and some loose hay. I made a bed with my riding cloak and surcoat and all the rest of my clothes, careless now of the finery I had do
"I must not hurt my new dress," I heard her saying. She was standing between me and the window and the moonlight fell on her as she undressed. I heard the rustle of her clothes, saw the movements of her arms as she raised the bodice over her head, saw the skirt fall to her knees, saw her step out and away from it. And all this was done with a deliberate grace, as if she was still dancing for me.
The moonlight lay on her hair and shoulders and flanks as she came towards me. Against these parts touched by the light, her eyes and the nipples of her breasts and the little bush of Venus made zones of darkness. Light was caught in the glass pebble at her abdomen, focus of my dreams, and in the thin chain that held it there, slung round the light bones of her hips. I was to think – not then, I was too stirred for thought, but later – that in these last moments before we were joined, as she showed herself to me, she was offering the beauty and promise of her body, an image on which love could rest, could guard itself through periods of separation in a way that memories of ecstasy, of bodies clutched together, ca
What she and I did I could not exactly say, in the sense of one thing following upon another. And since that night I have known for self-deceivers all those who claim a love was blissful and say first we did this, then we did that, as if there were one single track to the reaching of joy. It was no alleyway Nesrin and I entered together but a wondrous labyrinth, from the moment she came to me and with her nearness shielded the moonlight from me and brought me the feeling of darkness as our bodies touched, as if a band had been laid over my eyes. She came down to me and I remember – then or soon afterwards or later – my sight restored to see her face above me, lit once more by the moon, and her face had a look of sorrowing and she made a long murmuring sound. Then the moonlight was streaked with fire and I closed my eyes against the glare. I must have cried out because the mare was startled and snorted – I heard the sounds she made but not my own. I kept my eyes closed, as if the fiery light and the throes of my body could not be endured together, but I still saw the glimmers of red against the lids. They were like sunstreaks: it was like closing one's eyes against some ravishment of the sun. I swear it: there was cool and burn, moon and fire together, this first time we met with our bodies, as there had been on the night when we met with our eyes only.
XVIII
She was not there when I woke in the morning. On the floor, for only trace of her, was the red ribbon she had used to tie back her hair. The evening of that day they danced again and according to Stefanos, whom I asked to go in my place, they enjoyed a success no less resounding. He had not been asked into the hall, he said; Stephen Fitzherbert, with his jackal's nose for the whiff of success, had taken the Anatolians into his custody and care, and it was he who had presented them.
I was glad to hear of this second triumph, but glad also that I had not been there to assist at it. I could not feel regret for what had passed between Nesrin and me; I could not cease to dwell on it and marvel at it in my mind. But the morning light had brought guilt with it, memories of the vows I had made to Alicia and our exchange of rings at the lakeside.
She was so delicate and fine, a lady born, of noble family, all the best of my past was in her keeping, and all my hopes of betterment in the future. And in spite of this, within days of our promises, I had been overmastered by passion for a vagrant dancer of no birth or breeding whatever and no knowledge of what it means to aspire to knighthood.
Made gloomy by these thoughts, I fell to thinking how much simpler our life on earth would be, how much more tranquil and dignified, if we could return to the time before the Fall. It is clear that Adam was meant to pour his seed into Eve's womb; we know it from God's commandment in Genesis to go forth and multiply. But at that time there was no disturbance of lust. Saint Augustine explains this to us in his 'De Civitate Dei' – I think it is to be found there. He says that in the state of i