As soon as I was down, she put one hand on my chest and pushed me back onto the furs and began to undo the thongs of my sandals. I relaxed and let her do it, enjoying myself immensely and fighting hard to keep the pleasure of looking at her and enjoying her ministrations separate from the sexual anticipation that was urging me to seize her and bear her down with me into the intimacy of the soft furs. The former was permissible; the latter was simply not.
Her head was bowed as she concentrated on untying the knot that held my left sandal in place and I propped myself up on my elbows, the better to enjoy the sight of her beauty in the leaping firelight; I decided that on my next journey I would bring her something richer and softer to wear than the plain cloth tunic she wore now. The knot came loose and she pulled the sandal off, leaving me free to wiggle my toes, and as I did so she laughed aloud. The sound shocked me, for it was the first time I had heard it, and I was astonished to realize that she laughed like any ordinary woman, in a gurgle of clear, liquid notes of great purity and beauty.
"Cassandra!" I said, but of course she paid no attention. I touched her on the head and she looked at me in inquiry, the laugh still radiant on her face. "You laughed!" She saw my lips move and tilted her head to one side like a puppy dog and again I was smitten with pain at the impossibility of communicating with her. The smile lingered on her face and I made myself smile back at her as I shook my head to indicate that it was not important. She reached for my hands again and tugged me to a kneeling position. I offered no resistance, allowing myself to be positioned as she wanted. When she had me kneeling upright, she made a strange gesture which had me completely at a loss. She read the incomprehension in my face and repeated the gesture, crossing her arms in front of her and drawing her hands up her sides, and I realized that she was telling me to remove my tunic. All at once I was overcome with embarrassment. I shook my head firmly. This time, her tiny headshake and slightly puzzled frown said Why not? as clearly as though she had spoken the words aloud. I could only shrug helplessly. Very deliberately, she tilted her head again, this time to the other side, and scanned my face intently, then she rose to her feet and slowly drew her own shift over her head, not taking her eyes from mine for a second in die process. I stared in wonder at her beauty. She had gained weight and lost all signs of her injuries since the time when I had gazed in horror at the damage that had been done to her. Then, her lacerated body had seemed thin and undernourished; now, it seemed as though I was looking at a different woman. Her breasts, though not large, were full and rounded, her belly smooth and flat and unblemished. She stood with her feet slightly apart and only a blind man would have been unaware of the thick profusion of hair between her firm, round thighs. I knew my mouth had fallen open, rapt as I was in the splendour of the sight before me. And then she stooped, quick as a wink, seized the top fur of the pile and was underneath it almost before I saw her move, pulling it up to her chin so that only her perfect face with its huge eyes and mouth remained exposed to my gaze, and still I did not move, though the blood was hammering in my ears.
Slowly, lying on her back, her gaze fixed on mine, she raised the covering in a plain request for me to join her. Eventually I moved to do so, reaching for the edge of the covering, but she dropped it immediately and shook her head and pointed her chin explicitly at my tunic. I removed it, feeling strange—not foolish, but unsure of myself, for I could hear Daffyd's exhortations against doing anything that might hurt her either physically or in her mind. I moved again to join her, now wearing nothing but my breech clout, and again she stopped me with an upraised palm and three distinct, pointing jabs of her finger. I nodded my understanding and rose to extinguish the lamps, after which I returned to find her holding up the covering to allow me to climb in beside her.
The furs smelled of wild lavender and roses and I wondered how she had managed to achieve that effect as I lowered myself cautiously to rest beside her. We had soft bedclothes at home in Camulod, but still used skins on campaign. My own campaign bed skins still smelled feral after years of use. I could see her face quite clearly in the flickering firelight, although my face must have been in shadow to her. As I came to rest facing her, lying on my left side, she moved slightly towards me and I felt the warmth of the soft underside of her thigh against my bent knee. I held my breath, not daring to believe that this was actually happening. I lay there unmoving, drinking in the beauty of her, my knee, our sole point of contact, feeling as though it was being burned with exquisite fire. We lay like that for long moments until my breathing steadied and my smile became less like a rictus, and then I felt her thigh withdraw from my knee and knew bitter disappointment until I realized what she was doing. She pulled herself up on her right elbow above me and undid the fastening of her hair with her left hand, allowing it to fall in a loose cascade across her face. The action exposed her breasts to my view from a distance of less than a handspan and I gazed at the tension of the firm skin and the pointed pinkness of her tiny nippies. She reached her free hand towards me and traced the outline of my cheek in a feather-like caress. I felt a lump of pure tenderness swell in my throat. Goose-flesh broke out all over my body as her fingertips dropped from my chin to my neck and moved down almost weightlessly to trace the length of my breastbone. She saw my hissed intake of breath and felt the involuntary stiffening of my whole body, for she smiled again and increased the pressure of her index finger by a hair's weight, continuing her movement until her fingertip rested gently in my navel. My stomach was as tight as a drum as her hand retraced its delicious journey until her palm and fingers gently cupped my right shoulder and pushed until I was lying flat on my back. I closed my eyes and felt a shudder pass through my body with the pressure of her breast against my chest and the soft, moist, unbelievable warmth of her glorious mouth covering my own, and I realized that all of the kisses I had ever experienced had been waiting for this.
I am an old man, now, recalling this night across the abyss of fifty years and more, but the memory of that kiss still stirs the hairs on my arms and causes nightingales to sing in my memory. In all of his writings, save for those in which he dealt with his friend Equus's sister Phoebe and with Scilla Titens and a few intimate recollections of his marriage, Publius Varrus kept his private thoughts of his women to himself, as did my grandfather Caius. My father spoke to me of love and lust on a few occasions, straightforwardly as a soldier will, but I, for my part, spoke to no man of love. I was regarded as a celibate, which indeed I became. But I have known a love that transformed my life and shaped the man I was to become, and I feel no constraint in writing of that love today. The awakening of it that night, when I was reborn into a world of brilliant colours and amazing textures, changed my life and reshaped the foundations of my manhood.
It was the most wondrous night of my whole life, and I passed through it as one would a wonderland of purest fantasy, willing the falling sands of time to float like thistledown in summer zephyrs and struggling mightily now and again, flaring in silent rebellion, each time an errant thought of Camulod and that other, lesser life teased at the edges of my consciousness to remind of me of things undone and duties unfulfilled. The hours stretched slowly, filled with wondrous, rippling darkness and unearthly joys the like of which I had never imagined.