Crystal Warrior: Through All Eternity (Atlantean Crystal Saga Book 1) (39 page)

‘Then it's fortunate, isn't it my Queen, that these sacks naturally refill themselves, guaranteeing not only your satisfaction but more sacks full of gold in the stadrag?’

Heat that had nothing to do with sexual desire flooded Gynevra and she snatched her hand away and flounced into the corner of the bed, thumping a clagren down between them.

‘Most men give up contract siring when they take a sacred partner.’

‘I collect I'm lucky to still be whole,’ Taur commented after briefly checking his nether regions. Then rolling on his side, he leant on his elbow, and fixed her with a sparkling gaze from under a quirked brow.

‘I don't have a sacred partner.’

The heat, which a moment ago had suffused her body, coalesced into a lancing blade biting deep into her heart.

Like an archer's bolt she flew upright and began untangling herself from the blankets.

With a gentle swing of his arm Taur hauled her back into his embrace.

‘Join with me,’ he pleaded huskily.

‘You know I can't do that! It’d be a lie!’ Gynevra cried, pushing against his arms. Suddenly she stopped, and searching his face, asked, ‘Would you give up contracts if we joined?’

He gazed steadily back at her for a long moment before he answered. ‘I couldn't promise you that. I'm the King. My people expect me to sire their children.’

‘Does it occur to you,’ Gynevra asked sweetly, ‘that our grandsire was an egotistical arabo and that you're exactly like him?’

‘No. But he was a nostum arabo and in that I'm definitely like him.’

‘Well, you can go satisfy your problem, egotistical or nostum, somewhere else. I've had enough,’ Gynevra declared, and this time when she surged out of his embrace, he didn't try to hold her.

Indeed, he was out of the bed before she was, hauling on his kirt and boots, his face dark with anger.

‘Thank you for reminding me of my Kingly duty, my Queen. I'll attend to it forthwith. Meantime, I'll command Lord Maden to send you every seamstress the Castle boasts and ask my movuon to send a maid to you. If you put one foot outside this door before you're fully clothed I'll whip you within a whisker of your life!’

The harsh words were flung over his shoulder as he strode from the room. Arrested by his sudden similarity to Gotham, Gynevra stood by the bed long after he'd gone, wondering at what was yet so different. By now Gotham, temper raging out of control, would’ve tethered her to the bed and mercilessly lashed her until his passion had transmuted from rage to desire, when he would take her with a crazed disregard for her welfare or satisfaction. The fear that had sprung to life like an opening flower in her breast subsided. She told herself she was a fool to expect Taur to sire children only on her. Wasn't it enough that he didn't beat her for making him angry? She already knew he was different to Go', that he had more charisma, more honesty than any other man she knew.

Why then must she cry for the moon, for so much more than any Paggi woman would dream of expecting from a man? Sacred Ist, she whispered, leaping onto the bed and tenting the blankets about her shoulders, it's because I would give him more than he would ever expect from a woman.—But I cannot!

The thought spiraled through her being, a silent wail of despair. To keep herself from devolving into a water-spout once more, Gynevra leant her elbows on the window-ledge and gazed out onto the world far below. Half a dozen donkeys pulling carts laden with bulging sacks were being driven along the coast road toward the Castle and everywhere were people going about their business.

A ship under the distinctive squared orange sail of a loaker from Khemu sailed up the harbor, sailors like ants on her deck, and Difleer was in her mind again as she so often was. What would Difleer have done when Gynevra was reported missing? Sweet Ist, she missed her housekeeper's irreverent wit, her laughter, her caring.

Difleer would love this place. There must be some way she could get her here. Her gaze roved up the harbor to the stepped-pyramid powerhouse, its seven tiers of huge clear quartz generators topped by a king transmitter glowing like an obscene jewel on the gently heaving breast of the water. Warily she tested the energy, proving the presence of the deadly curved webbing waves and just as quickly disengaged before the vibration could damage her own soul energy.

While she was annoyed she couldn't even send a message, Gynevra noted with wry amusement, she was deeply relieved she couldn't apportate back to Qrazil, even though she was angry at Taur. Could it be she was prepared to share him with any number of women rather than not have him at all?

‘Good morning, Queen Gynevra.’

Startled, Gynevra turned to see a woman in the red and black plaid of a Castle servitor kneeling before the bed. Surely it was only that she'd been thinking of Difleer that an intonation of the voice had sounded familiar.

‘Good morning. You may rise.’

‘Thank goodness for that! Wool rash on my forehead would spoil my looks for sure and then who'd want to scrog me?’

‘Diffie!’ Gynevra squealed and leapt off the bed into the woman's arms. ‘Where—?—How did you get here?’

‘Lady, you're naked as a delilah in business!’ Difleer strove to sound disapproving while hugging Gynevra to her as if she were her own child.

‘I probably smell like one, too! Oh, Diffie! Diffie! I'm so glad you're here. Tell me how.’

Difleer grinned and held her mistress at arm's length.

‘So that great horny Bull's been having his way with you, has he? No wonder I feel like I'm lookin’ at the old Princess Gynevra and not that lifeless Archinus Elect I found at Qrazil. We'd better get you in the bath ‘cos an army of seamstresses is on its way an hour from now. It seems that once again you have no clothes, my Lady!’

Gynevra's eyes danced as she slipped away from Difleer and pulled a cover off the bed and draped it round her body.

‘But this time, Diffie, I have a King with a mountainous stadrag to provide them for me—and so he should since it's his fault I'm here with nothing to my name!’ she ended with a toss of her head.

‘He makes you angry, Lady?’ Difleer asked with concern.

‘Diffie, he makes me madder than a rat in a basket and—more nostum than a taglag on huoda! He has me here and says he wants me to join with him as his sacred partner but he doesn't intend to give up contract siring and—and—oh Diffie, I simply shouldn't be here but he won't let me go.’

‘Doesn't sound like you want to go?’

‘I don't,’ Gynevra agreed readily. ‘But I won't be able to stand it if he makes me witness his contracts!’

‘
First things first
was always my motto, and it seems to me the first thing you need is a bath,’ Difleer responded with her usual dry logic. ‘Have you seen the bath here, Lady?’

‘D’naa.’

‘Then you're in for a treat.’ Difleer gathered a bathing gown and drying linens from an ebony chest and handing the gown to Gynevra said, ‘This will be easier to wear than a blanket. Have you noticed how warm it is in the Castle?’

Gynevra pulled on the gown and crossing to the crystal brazier on its polished copper circle in the center of the room, curled her toes in the thick woolen rug on the floor.

‘In fact, it's warm everywhere,’ Difleer went on. ‘Even the stone walls are warm.’

‘The walls? How is that?’ Gynevra asked, moving to lay a hand against the inner wall. It was as Difleer claimed.

‘They say the reason is the crystal braziers have warmed the place for hundreds of years. The heat is in the very rocks. Now let's find that bath.’

‘And you'll tell me how you got here—and when,’ Gynevra ordered.

‘As soon as you're in the bath, my Lady.’

They traversed two day-rooms with crystal windows over-looking the city and harbor. Furniture was of ebony inlaid with gold and ornate carved couches with embroidered silk ilobaron abounded. Difleer veered off from the third room into a passageway leading straight into the mountain and lit by crystal lamps set into carved niches along the walls.

‘This place reminds me of the grotto in Mt. Qam!’

‘Wait until you see the bath,’ Difleer chuckled.

The passage opened into a small, intimate golden cavern. Gynevra came to a halt and gazed around in wonder. The whole place, floor, ceiling and walls, was overlaid with solid gold. Hot and cold water ran continually from the horns of a molded orichalcum bull's head into the deep gold bath, the overflow from which drained away through a hole in the rocks. Several polished ebony benches of varying sizes stood about the bath and crystal lamps glowed from niches around the walls. At the innermost point of the cavern where walls, floor and ceiling melded into one, stood a golden plinth bearing a luminous aquamarine statue of Ist and Asar standing on a perfect sphere of clear quartz. Bodies intimately entwined, foreheads reverently touching, the piece glowed with its own energetic light and Gynevra halted for an entranced moment and acknowledged the sacred presence.

Then handing the gown to Difleer, she stepped into the water and commanded, ‘Now tell me how you came to be here. I was only that minute wishing that you were!’

‘If my Lady wants to adjust the heat of the water just turn the gold rings at the base of the horns.’

‘The water's fine! I want your story. I was worried what would happen to you.’

Gynevra settled herself with a sigh of delight on a ledge that took her under water to her shoulders.

‘Oh Lady! What a commotion there was! At first it was just thought you’d gone off somewhere without telling anyone. I did try to say as my Lady wouldn’t do nothing of the sort but who’d listen to the likes of me? It was nigh mid-day before the Archinus was informed and tuned in to your energy to see where you were. I guess she would’ve acted sooner but there was a great to-do in the city with people rioting and breaking into the granaries. The Archinus was with the King all morning. By that time you were already in a drugged state aboard the ‘Nyalda’, well clear of the canal and flying north.

‘Apparently that was all she was able to glean before her channel was obscured. You were obviously being kept under close guard—physically and psychically. It's the nearest I've ever seen the Stone Lady to losing her temper. There was much to-ing and fro-ing between the Temple and the Palace. King Ahron was like one beset by a swarm of bees.

‘What with King Cadal defecting, the priestesses of Poseidon hurling themselves off cliffs because the mob had over-run their sacred precincts and slaughtered the sacred bulls, the looting of the royal granaries, earthquakes, reports of steam erupting from Mt. Alti, and rumors he'd personally ordered the destruction of Trephysia, he didn't know which one to swat first! Wisely I guess, he concentrated on controlling the biggest threats, the mob and the mountain.’

‘Don't tell me who he sacrificed. I don't want to know,’ Gynevra hastily put in with a shudder. There were several elderly priestesses she knew in the glodad who were considered useless for anything except sacrificing to the mountain. It was a common end for old priestesses.

‘Huh! Old and useless wasn't even considered!’ Difleer scoffed when she voiced that concern. ‘Ahron wanted young and virile. So a lad and maid of the Moera were chosen. They were drugged and forced to join on the altar at the edge of the crater then bound and hurled into the volcano. Or so the story was told around the city.’

‘Diffie,’ Gynevra pleaded, her face paling. ‘No more of that please. Just tell me how you got here.’

‘Well, when things settled down I was sent to work for the High Priestess Deimah. I don't know what happened to your things. I was only allowed to take my own and I didn't enjoy working for that—that—bah!’

Gynevra laughed, relieved at the easing of the tension in her chest. Deimah was known for her airs of grandeur.

‘I didn't think twice when Nyd came to tell me a handsome warrior wanted to meet me secretly in the Military Zone Forest because he had a message from you, my Lady. He was handsome all right but he was also young and inclined to look down his nose at the likes of me. He said Taur had you safe in Nyalda and wanted me to join you. So I agreed to meet Taron at the same place after dark the following night with only as much stuff as I could carry. When he asked me if I could swim because we'd have to cross the Outer Canal, though, I don't mind telling you, I nigh cried off then. But I really wanted to be with you and he said they’d help me—and they did—’

Difleer's voice faded away and she sat with her eyes half closed and a soft smile curving her lips.

‘So how did they get you across the canal?’

‘He—Taron—guided me through the forest. Three more of his men met us at the inner bank of the canal and we all stripped and put our clothes into an elephant's gut-bag and when he tied the end of it, it floated and they made me lie on it and hang on and they paddled me across. I don't know why I had to take my clothes off really ‘cos I hardly got wet.’

Her black eyes danced but her curvy mouth never twitched.

Gynevra chortled.

‘And when you reached the other side?’

‘Taron said we couldn't tarry about to put our clothes on. It was more important to get into hiding. There was no one around but there was no cover near the bank so we ran until he said it was safe to stop. Then I just had to lie down.’