She understood. ‘Home,’ she said. Her eyes shifted focus, as if she could see some glorious vista far beyond the silk walls of the pavilion.
When she had finished with the small wounds, she began to rummage through the gear scattered about the pavilion; she finally located a half-full wine bag. As she moved about, the lamplight shone through her linen petticoat and Haraldr could see the outline of her slender flanks and the contour of her breasts. She took a small silver goblet from the chest and mixed an ochre powder with the wine. She drank some first to show Haraldr that it was not poison.
‘Not hurt,’ she said as she began to pull the blood-caked linen from Haraldr’s forearm. The wound was deep but clean. She daubed ointment from a jar into it. Haraldr began to feel drowsy and very comfortable. His head nodded.
‘Lie.’ She gestured at Hakon’s bed. It was an enormous, intricately carved wooden frame covered with thick, down-padded silk covers. Disgusting, Haraldr had thought when he had first seen it that morning. Just another reason why Hakon’s Varangians, who would sleep tonight on hard ground beneath coarse blankets, had so willingly endorsed the usurpation of their leader.
Haraldr shook his head and looked for his own gear bag. He couldn’t find it amid Hakon’s splendid clutter. He did want to lie down.
The healer guessed at Haraldr’s reservations and dragged the down covers off the bed and spread them on the floor beside him. Haraldr wondered briefly if she had been forced to sleep beneath them. He felt very good. He slid off the camp stool and lay down on the covers.
The healer knelt beside Haraldr and began to wrap clean linen around his forearm. The light behind her gave her raven hair a golden aura. He reached up and grazed her arm with the very tip of his fingers. He did not feel her soft skin so much as a curious shock, like the sparking when one touched a kettle or a knife on a cold, dry day.
She shuddered at some similar sensation. She studied the cup of medicine for a moment, and then drank the rest of the narcotic draught. The wine slicked her lips with a brilliant sheen.
‘Swaa . . . swaan?’ she asked.
Haraldr’s groin tingled. She remembered his words in Kiev. ‘A swan is a white bird,’ he answered, drawing the curve of the neck in the air. ‘Noble and white. And soft.’ He touched her again.
Her erect torso swayed slightly. ‘Serah,’ she said, touching her breast.
Her name was unlike any Norse sound, and it made a beautiful and mysterious music. He thought momentarily of Elisevett, but she was a distant thing of cold beauty, a glacier diminishing into a sliver of icy light beyond the horizon. Serah.
Serah’s hand burned and chilled his chest. His body lost weight, as when he had flown above the river today. But now there was no fear.
Wizard-quick, Serah rustled, white revealing white. She threw the linen petticoat aside. Dark hair fell around Haraldr’s face. Serah tugged at his breeches. The still air felt like a summer sea-wind over his nakedness. He was as hard as an axe staff. Serah’s body settled over him like a silk drape.
This was different from the two times before. The first, a whore, had been a meaningless lesson in the art-skills a king must know. Elisevett had been a passion that had rushed along like a torrent before exploding in a moment of aching, ungraspable ecstasy. Tonight was a deep pool, dark and warm, and in it Serah slid against his tingling flesh, drawing him deeper into the iridescent blackness. There is another place, Haraldr whispered to himself. Not the cold, dark place where the dragon lurks. A place he had never sensed before, a place where only a woman could take him. He plunged deeper into these depths, his pleasure more liquid and languid, only a single steel core left to his body. For an instant he wondered if there was danger in this place as well, but Serah gripped him and whispered, and the thought drifted away on the warm current.
Long after they had finished, they held each other and listened to the sigh and hiss of the Dnieper. Finally Serah tilted her head to look into his eyes and said, ‘Serah. Princess. Khazar.’ Her finger gently pressed against his chest. ‘Har-- Haraldr . . . ?’
Haraldr held her close again. ‘Haraldr. Prince,’ he whispered distinctly, realising she was no threat, wanting her to share with him the secret that he held as dearly as life. ‘Like you, I am far from my people.’
She understood, and this new bond brought desire to another pitch. Her hands began to brand his chest. Her lips devoured his face and neck. ‘Haraldr, Prince,’ she said next to his ear, her voice urgent with passion. Her lips moved down his chest.
Neither of them heard the slight stirring of the silk curtain, or the lithe footsteps in the night.
‘I will see him, Nicetas.’
The eunuch bowed and the doors slid shut behind him. Maria turned to Ata, her palmist. ‘This is Giorgios. The one I like.’ Ata grinned; his teeth were very bad, though he could not have been much older than thirty. He stood up, smoothed the wrinkles out of his robe, touched his hand to his forehead, bowed, and also left the room. Giorgios was shown in a moment later. He wore the uniform of the Imperial Scholae: an embossed gold breastplate over a short-sleeved crimson tunic, and a short leather kilt. His tanned face was flushed with exertion; he probably had been riding.
Maria kissed him on the forehead and brushed his blond curls back. ‘Why did you come? Is Alexandros with you?’
Giogios eyes were wild, like a pursued stag’s. He stammered. ‘I … I love you. My every thought is of you. You consume me. I can’t bear to watch you.’ His neck corded. ‘I can’t eat any more. Do you . . . love Alex?’
‘Alexandros disgusts me. He is a boor.’ There was no expression on Maria’s face. She was as serene as a marble Aphrodite but more beautiful.
Giorgios blinked rapidly, as if he had been slapped. ‘Then why . . . why . . . ?’
‘I want to inflict upon you the pain you will cause me to suffer.’
Giorgios blinked again.
‘Ata says that for me fate and love have crossed once before. Though he could not know it, he is right. Now he says that my next crossing will bring together fate, love and death. He says that a man will destroy me with his love. A fair-hair. Perhaps you are that man.’ She paused. ‘I am almost certain that I love you.’
Giorgios wavered as if he would topple. It was a moment before he could speak. ‘I would never … I adore you, I worship you, I would die before--’
Maria put her fingers to her lips. Her eyes were like blue flames. ‘I know,’ she whispered. ‘Now go. I won’t see you for several days. But know that when you are thinking of me, I am thinking of you. Now go.’
Giorgios made his way to the vestibule with intoxicated steps. As the eunuchs slid the ivory-inlaid doors open, he turned and looked at Maria pleadingly. ‘I am sleeping with Alexandras tonight,’ she told him.
‘That hole is no deeper than a man’s member, said Halldor. His words were whipped by the stinging, salted gust. ‘But many a man has fallen to his death within it.’ He nodded at Haraldr, staring morosely out over the deep blue swells of the Rus Sea. ‘It’s a good thing that Khazar girl went off for Kherson. She only had him for five days, but by the end of that time I feared for him more than I did when he was in the death-square with Hakon.’
Ulfr smiled fondly. Three weeks ago they had sailed out of the broad estuary of the Dnieper into the Rus Sea, and they had dispatched the contingent of twenty boats bound for Kherson. Haraldr had arranged transport for the Khazar girl, and when he had bid her farewell, he had kissed her all over her face and hair, and then tears had visibly streaked his face as he watched her ship disappear into the eastern horizon. Many of the men present had been shocked by this weakness in their new hero; a warrior was supposed to bid his woman farewell with a smile and a wise remark. Let her do the pining. But Ulfr himself knew how a poet’s heart was, and he had gone among the men to explain that the same passion that had crushed Hakon’s chest like a bird’s made Haraldr’s own breast tender to a woman’s touch. Within a few days it became the fashion among the Varangians to lament lost loves they had hardly thought about for months.