Everything Under the Heavens (Silk and Song) (13 page)

She closed her eyes tightly for a moment. When she opened them again the desire was still there but on a leash. “All right,” she said. “What do you want me to do?”

He pulled her towards the lake. “We have to take off our clothes to swim, don’t we?”

She brightened, marched down to the water’s edge and without further ado pulled her tunic over her head. The setting sun played over her flushed skin, gilding her nipples. Her trousers followed her tunic and the sun turned the soft curls between her long legs to gold. The sight nearly drove him to his knees. “Johanna,” he said, his throat thick. “You’re as beautiful as I thought you would be. No. More beautiful than I ever dreamed.”

She reached for him with impatient hands, pulling his tunic over his head, finding the ties of his trousers and slipping them down. She stood back to look at him, from dark eyes to wide shoulders to strong arms to narrow hips to sturdy legs and back up to rampant, strutting desire. “So are you.”

She stretched out a hand to touch him. He grabbed it and used it to lead her into the lake. The water was lukewarm, but to their overheated skins still a shock. They cupped it in trembling hands and smoothed it over their bodies. Johanna leaned forward to follow her hands with her lips, sipping the water from his skin from mouth to chest to thigh, to touch her tongue to the length of flesh upright and hot and hard against his belly.

He pulled her out of the lake and into his arms. Her skin, cool from the water, shivered delightfully against his and he bent his head and placed his lips to her breast. One hand knotted in her hair, the other slipped between her legs to find her wet and hot, and with a groan he kissed his way down her body to bury his mouth in her. She cried out her pleasure, back arching like a bow, and would have fallen but for his arms steadying her.

“Johanna, Johanna,” he muttered against the soft skin of her belly. “I’m sorry, I can’t wait any longer.”

“Finally.” He almost laughed at the breathless exasperation in her voice, and forgot to when she slid to her knees, her mouth seeking out his, her hands exploring. “Please, Edyk,” she sobbed, clutching at his shoulders. “Please.”

“All right,” he said through gritted teeth, and pulled her down on him, so that for the first time she felt all that heat and pride pressed up inside her. If there was pain she never felt it. She came to climax at once, crying out in sheer delight, opening her eyes afterwards to see him staring at her, his eyes burning, his body still hard within her, and then she felt the cool grass against her spine as he laid her down.

He brushed the hair back from her face, kissed her, tiny, teasing kisses, holding himself inside her as the sweet shuddering of her body slackened. Then he began to move, long, deep strokes, pushing slowly all the way up, then pulling as slowly out, loitering both within her heated flesh and without, teasing her, taunting her, urging her on to renewed desire. She gasped at the return of feeling, staring up at him with wide astonished eyes and parted lips. He smiled. Her hips began to lift to his and he threw back his head. “Yes.” When he drew almost all the way out she dug her nails into his back in protest and her inner muscles closed around him. He groaned and began thrusting faster and harder and deeper. She wrapped her legs around him and met him thrust for thrust. When he plunged inside her for the last time she convulsed and cried out, a low, disbelieving sound joined to his own growled pleasure.

They lay speechless in the light of the rising moon for a long time afterward. When he had recovered he shifted his weight. Wordlessly she clutched him to her, silently protesting, and he subsided, content to remain where he most longed to be.

Presently she stirred, and he raised his head to see her eyes sparkling in her flushed face, tendrils of hair clinging to her skin, her braid damp and tangled against her neck. In a voice lazy with pleasure she observed, “Now I know what Jade and Blossom have been giggling about for the last three years.”

“What!”

She said reasonably, “Well, we had to talk about something, and they can’t ride and I don’t embroider, and all we had in common was you.”

He stared at her for a long, long moment. She grinned, and he threw back his head and shouted with laughter. She laughed with him, and the sound of it pealed across the still water of the lake and lingered beneath the boughs of the drooping willow trees.

Thinking of it afterwards, he supposed they must have eaten and slept, but all he could remember was the laughter and the loving, on the floor, in the grass, in the lake, sometimes they even made it as far as the bed. She gave him everything her smile had promised and more. His thoughts, his hands, the strands of his hair, the pores of his skin, his nostrils were filled with the taste and texture and smell of her. He memorized the straight, arrogant bridge of her nose, the sultry curve of her mouth, the vulnerable hollow of her throat, the sweet slope of her breast, the silken texture of her skin, the seductive smell of her femininity. She responded completely, openly, wholeheartedly, without reservation or shyness, her astonished pleasure at each new sensual delight a reward in itself. He taught her the difference between loving and rutting, he seduced her sweetly and showed her how to return in kind, every skill he had learned from every woman he had ever loved he exerted to show her how much he cared, how much he needed, how much he wanted this one woman in his arms, in his life.

He could not bear to think of life without her, and so he didn’t think of it. “We will build a home in Kinsai,” he murmured into her hair late into their second night at the summerhouse. “We will have many sons, and we will teach them to bargain and to trade, and take them with us when we travel. I love you, Johanna.”

“I love you, Edyk,” she whispered.

His last thought before he fell into a deep, dreamless sleep with her locked securely in his arms was, she’ll never leave me now.

But when he woke the next morning, she was gone.

So was North Wind.

NORTH WIND WAS NOT
the only priceless possession to have gone missing in Cambaluc that morning.

The house of the late, honorable Wu Li was in an uproar as his widow stormed through every room, leaving chaos in her wake. Drawers were yanked out, their contents dumped on the floor, the drawers tossed aside. Shiny lacquered boxes were wrenched open, found wanting, and hurled against the wall. Tall porcelain vases were turned upside down and shaken in vain for anything that might have been secreted there, and when they proved empty were shattered into a hundred pieces on every hearthstone.

“Where are they?” the widow said. Her voice rose to a shriek. “Where are they!”

The kitchen was a scene of bedlam by the time she finished there. The undercook bled from four parallel scratches on his cheek from the widow’s nails. Every pot was taken from its hook, every pan from its shelf, the spit pulled from the wall and used as a club to strike the drab assigned to turn it. The drab lay unconscious in a corner, breathing stertorously through bubbles of blood that extended and retracted through her nostrils. One of the maids was blinded, possibly permanently, having caught the brunt of the widow’s rings across her eyes. The rest of the servants had fled, or were cowering beneath tables and chairs and behind doors and bureaus, hoping against hope to escape her notice.

Gokudo was made of sterner stuff. “My lady,” he said.

She snarled and whirled, both hands curled into bejeweled claws. “Where are they?” she shouted, advancing on him.

“I do not know, my lady,” he said.

She raised a hand, long, now broken fingernails already stained with blood. “Tell me where they are! The stables!” She stepped forward. “Get out of my way!”

Gokudo stood his ground. “Wu Li’s daughter is gone,” he said.

She didn’t appear to hear him, at first, the mad light in her eyes undiminished, the claw of a hand still upraised to strike. He repeated himself, raising his voice, enunciating each word in a slow, clear voice. “The daughter of the honorable Wu Li is gone from this house. As is Shu Shao, the kitchen drudge, and Jaufre, the stable boy.”

This time she heard him.

They stood there, facing each other, motionless, no sound in the kitchen except for the heavy breathing of the widow, the whimpers of the undercook, and the crackle of a cinder, raked out from the hearth in the struggle over the spit and now doing its best to set fire to the floor.

Her hand dropped. “Show me,” she said.

It was the first time she had been in the little mongrel’s room. The smallness of the room, the shabbiness of its furnishings did not register with her.

What did register was the narrow bed, neatly made, and the box resting in the middle of the plumped pillow with the carefully mitered corners. Clad in layers of black lacquer, scarlet leaves twined around the join between lid and base, the box was in itself a work of art a handspan square. It had been made for its purpose, and it looked well used, and well loved.

Wu Li’s widow had no thought for the craftsmanship of the thing. She snatched it up and tugged. The lid was so well made that the seal created a vacuum that resisted her efforts. She tugged in vain. She even broke another nail. Tears of rage began to course down the widow’s painted cheeks, and she flung the box at Gokudo. “Open it!”

Gokudo got his hands up just in time to stop the box from hitting him in the face. He found the catch on the lid, and it opened with a huff of sound, the lid standing up on its intricately hand-crafted brass hinges. He held the box out at arm’s length so she could see inside. He could already tell what it contained by its weight.

She remained bent over the box, staring inside it with burning eyes.

There was a commotion at the front of the house. The widow didn’t move, and Gokudo swore and went to see what it was.

Edyk the Portuguese was struggling with the door man. “Where is she? Where is North Wind? Where are they? Tell this fool to let me go!”

“Release him, Bo He,” Gokudo said.

Bo He, an elderly gentleman in a ruffled state, stepped back and smoothed his coat. “As my mistress wishes,” he said.

Gokudo raised his hand to strike him for his insolence, but Edyk the Portuguese stepped forward. “Where is she? Where is Johanna? Is North Wind in your stables? Take me to them at once!”

“We shelter neither your whore nor your nag in this house, Edyk the Portuguese,” Gokudo said, not bothering to hide his sneer.

Edyk stopped and stared at him. “Johanna isn’t here? Where is she? When do you expect her back?”

Gokudo laughed, and Edyk raised his hand to strike him. Gokudo slapped it to one side and followed up with a sharp blow to Edyk’s sternum with the flat of his other hand. Edyk flew backward, tumbling to the ground in the center of the courtyard. He made as if to scramble to his feet and froze with the point of Gokudo’s naginata at his throat.

“Get up,” Gokudo said contemptuously. “Please, do get up.”

Edyk dropped and rolled out out of reach and got back on his feet. He snatched up a hoe someone had let fall in a bed of narcissus during the widow’s rampage and dropped into a guard stance, only to have the blade of the naginata slice off the head. Instead of retreating as Gokudo had every right to expect, Edyk thrust with the end of the stick, striking Gokudo hard in the chest. By the time the samurai caught his breath Edyk was gone and the bodyguard could hear the sound of hoofbeats from the other side of the gate, departing rapidly.

He cursed when he got his breath back, loudly and fluently in his native tongue, and spun around to see Bo He watching. He didn’t like the expression on the majordomo’s face so he cut it off. He stepped over the gurgling remains of the old man’s body and went back into the house to find Dai Fang.

She had returned to her own quarters and was in the restored orderliness of her sitting room with a pot of tea steaming in front of her. The madness of her fury was gone, vanished as if it had never been, to be replaced by a cold and deadly intensity that caused a ripple of unease to break out down the back of even his warrior spine.

She poured tea for both of them, and presented his cup with both hands. “Find her,” she said.

“My lady—”

She raised her eyes to his. “Find her, and bring her to me.”

He did the only thing she would permit. He bowed his head, accepted the tea, and said, “As my lady wishes.”

Her voice stopped him at the door. “And Gokudo?”

“My lady?”

Her glittering eyes raised to his. “In what condition she is returned to the home of her father is of no concern to me.”

He bowed again, and thought, not for the first time, of the bronze braid wrapped around his fist, and of forcing wide the long, lissome legs of the daughter of the house. “As my lady wishes.”

THE YAMBS THE GREAT KHAN
commanded to be built half a century before that greeted those traveling the road west at every eighth league had yet to fall into disrepair, and the great trees he planted to show the way were just beginning to leaf out as Johanna’s tiny group passed between them. Occasionally they met an imperial mailman, hurrying to complete his sixty daily leagues, but for most of the way the road was as bare of company as her companions were bare of conversation.