Blood and Sand

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  More faint lamplight gleamed through branches of pomegranate and oleander, reflected back by long narrow strips of water. The woman moved ahead with that heavy moth-like motion and Thomas, following, found himself on the threshold of one of the charming small pleasure-houses that hid themselves in many of the great gardens of Cairo.

  The woman checked, saying something softly, and a girl’s voice answered small but clear on a note of authority and they went in. As they did so, another dark shape rose and melted into the further shadows.

  Several lamps, fragile-seeming as flowers, hung from the ceiling, and the moonlight filtering through panels of airy tracery on the walls filled the little pavilion with a soft confusion of gold and silver, light and shadow in fantastic filigree. The coffee hearth was lit and glowing before the pile of cushions on which the Lady Nayli reclined, playing delicately with the ears of the little grey cat who sat beside her.

  She looked up as he entered and smiled. “Ibrahim Effendi, it is kind that you come to ease this sad ennui of mine.”

  Thomas murmured something about being honoured and folded up on to the spread of cushions she indicated on the guest’s side of the coffee hearth. It was the first time he had seen her completely unveiled since the night of the Vicereine’s supper party, though he had thought of her more often than he cared to admit, and he was licensed to look at her now more freely than he had been that night. And looking it struck him that her chin was very like the little cat’s; proud and small and delicate, sweetly poised above her slender neck, and rather startlingly predatory. Out of his schooldays two lines from Love’s Labour’s Lost flickered into his mind: “A whitely wanton with a velvet brow, and two pitch balls set in her face for eyes.” Even as a boy he had sensed something of the raw desire that lay behind the bitter description … But the warning half-memory was gone again almost before he was aware of it, and he turned himself to the promise of the evening.

  The Lady Nayli clapped her hands. “Fahama, bring the sherbet and sweetmeats.”

  The usual three coffee pots were ranged beside the little hearth on which the ancient and fire-blackened fourth bubbled gently giving forth its fragrance of coffee and cardamom to mingle with the sweetness of jasmine and some heavier nameless perfume that seemed to float upon the air like oil on water. And while the woman from the shadows brought out little sugar cakes and sherbet, and poured rose water over Thomas’s hands as he held them out to receive it, the Lady Nayli attended to the coffee-making ritual herself, pouring the bitter brew from one pot to another, leaving it a few moments in each for the grounds to settle, until it reached the long-necked pot from which she poured it into the small handleless cup which she passed to Thomas.

  He wondered why she chose to perform at any rate the final part of the ritual herself. At her mother’s functions — at least any that he had attended — the coffee was made elsewhere and brought in on a tray, much as it would have been in the West, though it was the usual thick, pungent Turkish brew. Maybe it was so that he should see her hands in action and notice how pretty they were with the delicate henna designs on palms and fingertips. He supposed girls were much the same all the world over. But whatever the reason, this was the way in which he had grown used to receiving his coffee during those first days at El Hamha — though in the desert the hands tending the coffee pots would never have been a woman’s — and the familiar ritual relaxed the strangeness of the situation and made him feel more at ease.

  “You see how I wait upon you myself,” said the Lady Nayli. “That is because I am so grateful to you for coming to ease my loneliness. I have not been well — oh, nothing serious” — she touched a hand to her throat — “and the hakima ordered me down here for a few days, for the space and quiet of this place and the gardens. You can have no conception how close-pent one can feel in the harem apartments up at the citadel. But nothing happens here. It is so lonely, so boring — Oh, the terrible ennui!”

  “If I can help to lift it a little, I am happy,” Thomas said, taking a sip of the scalding coffee.

  The Lady Nayli sipped her sherbet. “I thought that with all your friends gone south, maybe you would be bored and lonely also.”

  She gave him a wavering smile, and he realised afresh what a child she was, and because she had sensed his loneliness his heart warmed towards her and he smiled back.

  What was that scent that hung so heavy on the air, like violet oil but something more than violet oil? Whatever it was, as she leaned to pour more coffee into his cup, he realised that it came from her loosened hair, which swung forward like curtains of black silk on either side of her face. Thomas’s pulse began to quicken. Too much of it might make a man’s senses start to swim, he thought, and drew back very slightly on the cushions.

  “I was bored and lonely also,” he agreed.

  “And eager to be away in the south, getting yourself killed like a hero? Oh, you men! — and never a thought to spare for the grief that you leave behind you.”

  He laughed a little harshly. “I do not imagine that I should leave much grief behind me. But, in fact, the question does not arise. By the order of His Excellency, your father, I am chained up here in Cairo as a training officer for the duration of the campaign.”

  “My father must have a great opinion of you,” said the Lady Nayli softly. “Any soldier would serve to send south under my brother Ibrahim, but he trusts you with this much greater matter.” She began to nibble at an almond sweetmeat. “Two days since, as I was driven here, I saw many men on horses with their swords flashing in the sun, making swirling patterns of themselves on the Great Maidan.”

  “Mounted sabre practice,” Thomas said.

  “That is part of the training?”

  For a while they talked about his work, she questioning like an eager child, he answering the questions as best he could. She knew so little and yet it seemed to him that she had a mind, alert and eager for knowledge, that was wasted in the curtained world of the women’s quarters. But it seemed at last that she grew weary of the subject, for abruptly she changed it. “Oh, it is too bad of me to tease you with all these questions.” She shook back her hair and began to feed crumbs of honeyed almond to the little cat. “Do you remember the evening of my mother’s supper party and how you sang to us then? I have not forgotten, so now I shall tease you for another song.”

  “I am delighted that you should wish it,” Thomas said formally, “and I am at your command. Which song shall it be?”

  “Oh not one that I have heard before. A new song — new to me.”

  Thomas reviewed the songs he had been going over in his mind earlier that evening. Not a love song, he decided, though he would have dearly liked to sing a love song to the Lady Nayli. And out of the past, beyond even the second of those he had sung at the Vicereine’s supper party, an old, old ballad came to his mind. “This is about a lord of my own people who was slain by treachery and never more came home to his castle and his lady waiting there,” and gazing into the small glowing heart of the fire, he began to sing, quietly, almost as though he were singing to himself:

  Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,

  Oh, where hae ye been?

  They hae slain the Earl o’ Murray

  And laid him on the green.

  He was a braw gallant

  And he played at the ba’,

  And the bonnie Earl a’ Murray

  Was the flower among them a’.

  Oh long will his Lady

  Look frae the Castle down,

  Ere she sees the Earl o’ Murray

  Come sounding through the town …

  The last brooding notes of the old lament sank away into silence.

  “They are sad, the songs of your country,” said the Lady Nayli after the silence had endured a few moments. “The words I do not understand and the music is strange to me, but I feel the sadness here in my heart. Maybe that is because my people also are a hill people, though I have never seen my own hills. Can you be homesick for what you have n
ever known?”

  Thomas shook his head. He did not know.

  “You have known your hills,” said the Lady Nayli with a hint of envy after a few more moments, looking up from caressing the little grey cat. “Tell me of them.”

  And Thomas began to tell, at first a little self-consciously, simply out of a wish to please her and taking care with his French. But little by little his memory and his tongue loosened, and he told her about Broomrigg, the sheep on the hills and the horses in the stables, the brown burn coming down from the moors, where you could fish for salmon-char in the pools under the birken trees, and his French grew less careful and the odd Scots word slipped in. And all the while the Lady Nayli listened with her dark eyes on his face; and all the while, as though drawn unconscious of herself by his talk, she crept little by little nearer and nearer round the edge of the coffee hearth where the embers burned red and low, turning almost to the red glow of peat on the wide hearth of Broomrigg …

  Thomas woke to the fact that she was much too close and he was leaning towards her. He drew back, shaking his head a little as though to shake some kind of bemusement out of it. “But I am boring you with all this talk of my country … Lady, shall I find you another song?”

  She laughed and moved closer yet. “In a little while. Oh Ibrahim Effendi, I am not bored, yet it is pleasant to do other things beside listen to sad songs.” And laughing still, she turned and broke a spray from the jasmine in a tall blue jar beside her, drew it across her lips, then reached to tuck it into the folds of his turban-scarf.

  The gesture was charming, and for a Muslim woman completely shameless, shameless as the looseness of her gauzy rose-and-saffron dish-dasha which he suddenly realised was open and ungirdled over her silver-worked trousers. A couple of light experimental tugs and she would be naked. Young as she was, it seemed that the Lady Nayli knew as much of the old skills as did any of the Daughters of Delight. He wondered fleetingly if the serving women were watching from the shadows, and then forgot them.

  The light silken sleeve had fallen back from her upraised arm, leaving it bare to the shoulder, to the soft hollow between armpit and breast that was perilously near his face. He saw the nest of fine dark hairs. The warm smell of sweat and woman’s flesh was suddenly in his throat, more potent than the scent of amber and violet oil, a dark scent that stirred him to the utmost depths. He felt an urgent need to bury his face in the warm sweetness of her flesh, as though he might find there some kind of homecoming. Her hand fell lightly away, brushing his cheek in passing, and she leaned back, the diaphanous folds of her skirt falling in between her slightly parted thighs.

  His head was swirling a little. The sense of quickening between his own thighs became hot and fluid, spreading through his loins and belly. His breath shortened and he was shudderingly aware of his manhood gathering itself and rising in thrusting desire. Other needs crying within him too, for refuge, for a one-ness that would drive out the cold desolation left by the look in Medhet’s eyes.

  The Lady Nayli wreathed herself over against him much as the little grey cat might have done, leaning lightly across his knee, her face turned up to his, mouth a little open like her thighs and with the same suggestion of invitation. He bent towards it.

  As he did so, she laughed, a small laugh, cool and charming as a chime of glass bells, and twisted aside and sat up, scooping the cat back on to her lap.

  He knew that it was not a rebuff, merely a prolonging of the game of skill that she was playing. He wondered how many other men she had played it with, drawing them on as far as the idle fancy took her, then twisting away, tantalising them with half promises, not denied at the last moment but only deferred, withdrawn a little like a marsh light. Even with his own body still taut with the physical need she had aroused in him, even through the wild, sweet singing in his blood, he recognised exactly what she was doing, and, drawing a slightly shaken breath, he straightened and pulled back himself.

  The low embers of the coffee hearth were safely between them again.

  “I should like to learn one of your songs,” said the Lady Nayli as though the last few minutes had been nothing but a dream, forgotten on waking. “Will you teach me?”

  “It will be my pleasure,” Thomas said with formal courtesy, taking care again with his French, taking care also to keep his voice from shaking. Someone should warn her that this particular game of skill was dangerous. “Give me a moment to think of one that may please you.”

  She laughed again, shaking her head. “There is no need that you should think. You shall teach me the one my brother likes so much. The one I am for ever hearing him whistling and singing under his breath. Teach it to me so that I may sing it also — the song about the foster brother.”

  How bright her eyes were as they met his; how dark behind the brightness, dark enough to drown in …

  “The song about the foster brother.”

  There was a cold stillness in Thomas’s belly. Suddenly, and for the first time, he fully understood the cool and ruthless detachment of the girl’s interest in people, in what went on within them, in what made them bleed, in the extent of her own power over them. He understood that this was the test of her power over him. After he had yielded, she would give him the promised delight, full measure and without stint. The Lady Nayli, he knew instinctively, was one to keep her side of a bargain, spoken or unspoken — but only after he had yielded; forsworn another love, broken faith with certain matters deep within himself.

  So the Viceroy’s daughter, a faint confident curve on her lips, waited for her power to do its work. But this time, maybe for the first time in her career as a manipulator of human beings, she had miscalculated. The demand which should have completed his thraldom had acted instead like cold water dashed in the face of a sleeper.

  “You know the one. Teach it to me,” demanded the Lady Nayli with pretty imperativeness.

  “I regret — that song is not for sale,” Thomas said.

  The moment he had said it he wondered if he might just possibly have signed his own death warrant thereby. But he could not wish it unsaid, even so. He waited for something to show behind the girl’s eyes, but she seemed not to have noticed the insult. She said only with light mockery: “So solemn, for so small a matter? But no, then, I will not tease you.” She reached for the brass pot. “I will make you fresh coffee. This has grown cold.”

  Thomas shook his head, drawing his legs under him. “You are very kind, but sadly I must be on my way. I am on early duty tomorrow and I have an arms list to check before I sleep. May I thank you for a most delightful evening.”

  “It is sad that it must end so soon.” She called behind her into the shadows: “Fahama.” And when the dark shape reappeared: “Ibrahim Effendi is leaving. Take him back to the street.”

  When the door in the shadow of the cypress tree closed behind him, Thomas pulled the spray of scented jasmine flowers from his turban and flicked it into the open gutter.

  He made his way back to the citadel feeling sick.

  And left to herself in the pretty garden-house, the Lady Nayli caught a moth, one of the dark velvet moths that blundered about the lamps, held it for a few moments beating like a pulse in her cupped hands, then pulled it wing from wing and fed it to the little grey cat.

  14

  Three nights later, by an odd contradictory quirk in the Pattern of Things, the Lady Nayli was in fact delaying the attempt on Thomas’s life already being lovingly planned in another quarter.

  She was entertaining Sulieman ibn Mansoor of the Mameluke Guard at the time.

  Sulieman, like many Muslims not of Arab blood, was as fond of wine as any Christian; and when he came to visit her, the Lady Nayli entertained him with wine as well as other pleasures. And being relaxed with all these pleasures, in the late hours of the particular night, he opened his mouth rather too wide, to dwell lovingly on his plans, aided by some chosen friends and followers, to avenge Aziz Bey in a highly colourful manner, which was to leave Ibrahim Bey
hacked to butcher’s meat with his own broadsword. Vengeance for a friend was a meritorious act, he pointed out, his face between the Lady Nayli’s little lemon-shaped breasts.

  Over the top of his head the Lady Nayli smiled into the middle distance, her hands not ceasing from their gentle probing movements into the back of his neck, where the hard tightness of an old scar gave her a certain pleasure. She had been toying with the same kind of idea for three days, with no really fixed intention of doing anything about it, but thinking how pleasant it would be all the same if the opportunity were to arise without too much trouble to herself.

  “And when will you do this thing?” she asked, conversationally.

  “Flower of my delight, I hold the thing in my hands to do it when I choose. Quite soon, I think —”. He caught his breath as the henna-tipped fingers suddenly bit too deep, and she gentled again instantly.

  If Tussun could be brought into this, how satisfying it would be. There had never been much love lost between brother and sister, and she was quite aware that it was Tussun who had kept the Scotsman from her three nights ago. So her malice spread out accordingly, to include him in her plans. Yes, it would be pleasant, interesting as well, to do him any harm, cause him any sorrow that came, as it were, conveniently to hand. Also, Sulieman, though stupid, was a more exciting lover than some others she had known, and she quite genuinely did not wish to lose him to the headsman’s sword just yet, as she most certainly would do if she left him to handle the thing on his own.

  “Oh my Beloved and my Lord,” she said, “do not be over swift. If you slay the man now, suspicion will fall instantly upon you, who were Aziz’s friends. Wait, but a while, until the southern campaign is over and Tussun my brother returns, and it may be that you will even be able to work upon him to give the order himself.”