Seize the Fire (53 page)

"There," she said, looking down matter-of-factly. "I've bled a little. That should help." She smiled at him. "I love you."

He swallowed. He was past speaking, simply past it. He wanted to pull her into his arms and hold her against his heart, hold her safe from everything that could hurt her—knowing in the same instant that he was going to hurt her, that he contained in himself the cruelest weapon to wound her of all.

She hugged her legs and rested her cheek on her bare knees, gazing at him. He looked down, unable to cope with the particular view she presented—not in his current precarious state.

"I can't wait to break the news to Julia," she said. "And that beastly Prince Harold. Do you know, on his orders they actually had a doctor examine me yesterday to see if I was pure? I kicked him." Her lower lip set in aggression that looked more like a pout. "Where it hurts, I hope."

Sheridan managed a faint smile. "Vicious mouse."

Her mouth flattened. "They examined me anyway. But this will change everything." She reached over and lifted his hand. Her lips warmed the back of his palm. "Thank you. Thank you."

He felt as if he were going to fall into a hundred crazy pieces. "Don't be a fool, Princess." He drew his hand away.

"I'm not. This will work. It's perfect. You should have seen the look of relief on Prince Harold's face when they reported I was still a virgin. His Royal Snottiness won't take soiled goods."

Sheridan scowled. "You're not 'soiled goods,' damn it. Don't talk rubbish like that."

"Yes, I am." She smiled at him impishly and patted the stained satin. "I can prove it."

He caught her arm and gripped it hard. "Princess—don't tell anyone about this. And don't tell Prince Harold anything. Not even after your wedding."

"What wedding? I thought that was the point, to get out of the wedding. It has to be something drastic like this, Sheridan. Plain escape isn't good enough. They have my grandfather's permission and everything. You know they can marry me off without me even being there!"

He was back to himself now, finding cold sanity in her talk of the usual manipulations by greater powers. She still believed in him, and saw this ravishment as a gallant plan to rescue her instead of what it was—just a last, selfish indulgence in the pleasure of her body and a thumbing of his nose at the victors. But everything had its price, and the price of this time together was facing her loving innocence and betraying it one final time.

"What do you think you're going to do, then," he asked with deliberate indifference, "if you manage to escape this marriage they've planned?"

She looked up at him quizzically.

Before she had time to think about it, he added, "Now that you're 'soiled goods,' as you put it."

She tilted her head, naked and luscious. "Well—I thought—perhaps…that you would take me to Rome. Or to Oriens."

"Why the devil would I want to do that?"

He said it carelessly, and watched the cut go deep. Her eyes widened a little, but she did not move. After a moment, she said quietly, "You don't?"

"Mahmoud's given me a palace and a rich post. Servants. Women. Power. What do you have to offer?"

She stared at him silently.

"A revolution?" he asked dryly. "More travel? What little's left of your bloody jewels?" He let his eyes slide along the length of her curled body. "Or maybe you thought I couldn't live without the pleasure of soiled goods?"

He saw the glaze of pain in her eyes. He wished she would get angry. There was something in his throat—but he forced his voice past it. Harshly, he said, "You're nothing, Princess—you couldn't run a revolution even if you got yourself to Oriens somehow. Look at the mess you made of a paltry little mutiny. They'll never let it happen anyway—the British or Julia or your uncle. They're far too smart. Out of your league entirely. You won't get away from them and you can't stay here; I don't want you. I have other things on my mind."

She'd begun to tremble, a faint shudder that ran the length of her naked body.

"You've got nowhere to go but where they tell you," he said. "Be a good girl. Be clever instead of stupid for once, and go."

Her lips parted a little. The glaze had gone to vacancy, as if she stared at him and saw nothing. He felt like nothing. Worse than nothing. But his mouth somehow kept working, saying the necessary words.

"I'm leaving now. I won't see you again. You're leaving for Stamboul tomorrow, but there's a fleet inspection ordered and I shan't have time to say goodbye." He gathered up the fur-trimmed robe and stood, pulling it on. She didn't look at him.

He gazed at her, long and desperately. Her eyelashes, her shower of hair, her hands and waist and feet.

Then he picked up the lamp and turned, striding for safety. He locked the wooden door behind him. The glow lit blue-and-red tiles and intricate arches in a fluttering globe around him as he walked back to his apartments—back to security, back to isolation, back to where nothing touched him.

He doused the lamp and sat cross-legged, staring into blackness. Inside him was a heaviness. It seemed unbearable. He thought he was going to cry. He was surely going to cry now.

But he looked into the empty dark and didn't.

In the days after she was gone, he felt the last of his humanity slipping. Sultan Mahmoud gave orders for a purge, in preparation for the new, updated navy. The first time Sheridan went out to the flagship and ordered the trumped-up accusations read, then watched a hapless capitan pasha marched below and saw the head come up on a tray a few short minutes later, he had to make a conscious effort to busy his hands with writing a report, because they had a slight tendency to tremble.

The second time he smoked a chibouk, and his hands didn't shake. The third, he shared the pipe and a careless joke with the new captain as the loser's head was presented to them before being sent on to the Sultan's palace as proof of the deed.

That was the way the Osmanlis did things—cold-bloodedly and efficiently. It backfired on them in the occasional revolt, but for the most part it had held an empire together for five hundred years.

The trick was to keep one's own head off that platter.

He had, besides the admiralty, the governorship of four towns in Anatolia. Mustafa was in his element after leaving Fitzhugh's party, strutting up and down the corridors of the waterside palace, brandishing a hippopotamus-hide whip, inspiring respect and striking terror in the hearts of every slave and supplicant he could find. He complied enthusiastically with Sheridan's order to fill the hareem, presenting a selection of veiled females daily for perusal. When Sheridan returned from assisting at the Sultan's divan, he had the ritual of inspection to go through: he commanded the veil removed, the hair taken down, the cheeks wetted and rubbed to reveal painted artifice.

He felt very strange, as if he were watching himself from outside. He chose the dark ones, with black, lustrous hair and slender limbs. One time, with a sly, sanguine air, Mustafa presented a plump Russian girl, blond and green-eyed, taken from an Afghan trader who claimed to have bought her from a Chinese magician at Kabul. She spoke French with the manners of a gentle, frightened aristocrat, and when Sheridan ordered her sent on to the Russian consulate, she threw herself at his feet and wept. He couldn't tell if she was joyous or terrified, and he didn't care. He only wanted her away from him.

He had Mustafa caned with his own whip for that trick, and for two weeks the little servant came crawling into his master's presence on hands and knees. That was the extent of Mustafa's quailing; he was too full of his status and his own new riches as the savior of the Sultan's favorite Englishman to be chastised for long.

Sheridan never visited his hareem. He sat on his palace terrace overlooking the water at sunset, smoking hashish and thinking about going. Sometimes, on his orders, Mustafa had a graceful group brought out for examination, and Sheridan selected one to be prepared for his visit. But he never went.

He just watched himself with a mild curiosity, functioning coolly, flattering the Sultan with perfect subtlety, forming alliances and identifying enemies, bestowing gifts in the right places, never tasting food until his servant had tasted it first, consolidating wealth and power and feeling the crack in his reality widen into a rift.

It was all right. It was strange, but it was detached and undemanding.

He lost none of his survival instincts. He honed them. The impersonal way he felt about himself made it easy; no distractions, no emotions or desires interfered with his perception. So he knew instantly when he left his audience chamber one afternoon and someone followed him.

It was Mustafa's duty to prevent that kind of thing. The audiences were full of petitioners who'd been carefully sorted and screened as to the merits of their pleas and the depth of their purses. It wasn't cheap, buying a captaincy in Mahmoud's new navy. Sheridan's authority as Grand Admiral would have plummeted if it had been. But he insisted on a few elements of seamanship and a commitment to an arduous course of study to make up the deficiencies, and so he gave even the richest ones a brutal interview session.

A few proud sons of pashas he turned down, in spite of their generous offerings, and he thought this shadow in the empty corridor might be in the service of one of those who held a grudge. He made no change of pace, but walked through the doors his guards held open and wondered idly how this chap intended to get into his private apartments.

The doors shut behind him. A Negro servant rose from the comer. Sheridan dismissed him with a wave as usual and then looked around the silent room. He pushed back the latticed screens himself, stepped out onto the terrace and waited.

A full quarter hour passed. Then, through the lattice, he saw a movement beyond the archway that led directly from his rooms to the hareem. He raised his eyebrows. This was brazen indeed—to invade his women's quarters for access; a true leap of ingenuity for a Muhammadan mind. He wandered deliberately back inside, allowing his back to face invitingly toward the arch.

The bait was taken. He heard the faint hiss of silk behind him, ducked and came up with his dagger ready and his boot hooked in the intruder's robed legs. The figure went down with a soft curse, and Sheridan registered two things as he flung himself on top of his attacker: the curse was in English, and the enemy passed up an instant when Sheridan's guard was open in order to protect his own throat.

The effort failed. Sheridan held the dagger at the man's windpipe, a rush of speculation in his brain. Not an assassin, not a Turk—who, then? What? But he stayed quiet, his weapon ready, staring down into the man's dark eyes.

"I'm a friend," the intruder whispered hoarsely in English. "I have a message."

For a fleeting, shattering moment, Sheridan thought of Olympia. The dagger pressed into the man's skin.

"Wait—wait!" The frantic petition was no louder than before. "Hear me out, for God's sake! You sent a letter—Claude Nicolas—I've brought word from him."

Sheridan relaxed with an explosive breath. "You crimson idiot. Is that all?" He lowered the knife and rolled upright. "You might have brought it to an audience and waited in line like the rest of 'em. It's a damned year after the fact anyway."

The man looked sullen. He sat up on his elbows, glancing carefully at the dagger still resting in Sheridan's hand. He had dark, Italian eyes and olive skin that would allow him to pass easily as a Turk. "I've been trying to get by that bloody little eunuch of yours, but he wasn't having any of it. He wants you here."

Sheridan looked at him. "And you want me somewhere else?"

"Briefly."

Sheridan lifted his eyebrows in question.

"Briefly," the man repeated. "Then come back here." He waved his hand at the room around them. "Enjoy all this in perfect peace. Claude Nicolas can remove a great nuisance for you if you do him this one small favor."

"I can remove my own nuisances." Sheridan turned the knife lazily in his hand. "If and when I find it necessary."

"Are you sure?"

Sheridan ignored the pointed question. He shook his head with a dry smile. "Just how far behind the time is old Claude Nick, anyway? I can't do any favors for him, even if I wished. He doesn't think I've still got control of the princess, surely?"

"No. He's got control of her. This marriage the British have planned, to Harold of Braunfels—he's going along with that because the wedding's to be in Oriens. As soon as she crosses the border, she's in his hands."

The mild amusement Sheridan had been feeling sharpened into something else suddenly. He ran his thumb across the knife blade and drew blood. He stared down at the red drop, concentrating on the sting. After a moment, he said, "Well—what else does he want, then?"

"To stop the wedding itself. To be rid of her once and for good. She's become a rallying point for all the rebel factions—they'll fall apart in squabbling once she's been neutralized."

Sheridan touched his finger, drew a smear of blood down his thumb and across his palm. "What does he want from me?"

"Nothing dangerous. Only come to the wedding. Stand up and refuse to allow the ceremony to go forth. Announce that she's been living with you for a year and has a bastard planted in her belly."

Sheridan looked up. "Oh, is that all?" he asked mockingly.

The man frowned. He sat up, and as the light fell on his face, Sheridan saw that he was younger than he'd seemed at first. "Well, it's damned distasteful, I know. But it spares her life. The people won't have her once she's discredited like that, and neither will Harold, so she can toddle off and lose herself. Nobody will care."

"Claude's a real altruist, ain't he? Heart of gold."

"Come along, Drake—you know the stakes. You must have, or you'd never have written that letter to him in the first place. You've managed to make yourself a nice little nest here now; you may think you don't need what he's got to give, but there's something you may have forgotten."

"Such as?"

The man looked sideways at Sheridan. "One of these nights, you'll be lyin' there on your back—bare naked and gloriously ruined, if you take my meaning—being fanned by all those ladies next door, and one of 'em will slip a yellow noose around your neck and strangle you before you can say billy-o. Because under all those veils, she won't be a lady a'tall."