Perched on the edge of the tub, Sal brought Tomaj’s hand across his silk-covered thigh, and ran the sponge up and down his arm as though wringing laundry dry. Shivers rushed up Tomaj’s spine, and his stiffened penis poked from the surface of the steaming water, but he didn’t care. He was as languid as a jellyfish.
“If I may enquire about your ring …” Sal said softly, squiggling the foaming sponge around Tomaj’s amputated finger. “It appears to be of celestine, which I don’t know to be hard enough for making jewelry. Is it a new kind of corundum sapphire, perhaps? The crystals appear to be rhombic.”
Tomaj didn’t want to think about Wenkai Zhang, but Sal’s steady stroking put him in a more genial mind. Perhaps it was the afyuni, perhaps the muggy effervescence of the bath, or that this room had always been associated with acts of pleasure. Tomaj heard himself saying, like a disembodied voice that floated up near the skylights, “It is celestine, indeed, my dear Salvatore. That’s very astute of you. I had a fellow encase it in a sort of amber resin after mounting it in Zulu gold, and it’s been indestructible. But in general, yes, you’re right … celestine doesn’t make for lasting jewelry. It’s much too soft.”
Sal’s hand stilled as an attractive wide-eyed wonder came over his face. Tomaj stretched infinitely, unfurling his spine with delight. Squatting in the tub, he gripped both edges and looked Sal levelly in the eye. “A Chinese pirate cut off my finger, hoping to get the celestine ring. All he got was the first joint … and the nose of my treasured quartermaster, who had cruised with me since New Orleans.”
Satisfied with the proper level of amazement on Sal’s cherubic face, Tomaj got out of the tub, sluicing Sal’s legs with oily perfumed water. He grabbed a towel of Nubian cotton, but it wasn’t to cover his prick, which had drooped a couple of centimeters at the thought of his finger and his quartermaster. No, he stood proudly tall as he rubbed his long silken mane with the towel, thoroughly aware he was so arrogant he wanted even men to admire his prick.
Sal’s darkly lined eyes took in the whole of Tomaj’s form. “Chinese pirate? And why did he want the ring so badly? Celestine is not a costly gem like the sapphire, or the diamond, like the Pitt Diamond, sold for 130,000 pounds sterling to the Duke of Orleans.”
“Ah, yes, the Regent Diamond.” Tomaj smiled. “It was then owned by Bonaparte, who had it set in the hilt of his sword.” He continued to muss his hair with the towel, pretending not to hear the other part of Sal’s question, turning his back to him and meandering over to the tepidarium. Eschewing the oil of clove that sat atop a dressing table, he snatched up two bottles, one of plain Muscat grape-seed oil, another of attar of roses.
Tomaj had laid carpets over the tile in this room, which was lined with marble tables and warmed by two Pennsylvania fireplaces. Taking several towels from where they were steaming atop one of the fireplace’s iron plates, Tomaj arranged them on a low marble table. He then tossed his wet towel onto a drying rack.
Behind him, Sal ventured softly, “This Chinese pirate. Is he the one you’ve been after in the Mauritius these last few weeks?”
Tomaj turned. Sal stood before one of the stoves tossing a handful of something that looked like roots into the cedarwood that burned. “Yes, the very same. The King of the Eastern Seas. What are you doing?”
Sal came toward him, his face moist from the steam. “I don’t blame you … He killed your closest friend.”
“What’s this?” Taking one of Sal’s hands, Tomaj spread open the bejeweled fingers and picked out one of the roots. “Ginseng. In the fire?”
Sal appeared sheepish now. “It’s part of nvwoti. Cherokee herbal knowledge.” He pressed a nonexistent pearly lock of hair into the bun he’d made with chopsticks. “My grandfather taught me a lot before I … had to leave.”
“And what’s ginseng for?”
“Acting on the cedarwood, it counteracts the effects of asgina dreams. The malevolent ghosts can’t abide the smell.”
“Bad dreams? Come, lie down. Here we have different ways of coping with bad dreams. Some of this particular medicine has come from Turkey, some from India, some from China or Muscat. I take what I like—what smells good and feels good—and to call it ‘medicine’ puts the official stamp on it. That’s how we Bohemians live. Isn’t it grand?”
Sal, too, leaned against the warm marble table. “No, you have to lie down, for I have what ails an aching back.” Deviously, from his robe pocket he withdrew a green glass vial with amber liquid. “The asgina dream I had while you were gone.”
Tomaj, only too glad for the opportunity to repose in the position he was most accustomed to, clambered facedown onto the table. The soft warm cotton of the towels imbued his torso with a tranquil yet aroused tension, and he swiveled his hips with spread thighs so that his taut cock rubbed pleasurably against the material. “Aching back? How’d you know my back ached? Don’t tell me: asgina.”‘
“Asgina,” agreed Sal affably, pouring a little pool of oil into the concave of Tomaj’s lumbar. Sal’s hands, larger and stronger than those of the tiny Betsimisaraka women Tomaj was accustomed to, massaged intolerable waves of rapture down the backs of his thighs. “I dreamed you were in a forest in a rainstorm, chasing a lemur up a tall tree.”
“Hmm. That’s interesting, because on the way back from the Mauritius, we encountered a regular Mozambiquer. We needed to run under bare poles, but my lemur wouldn’t come down from the mizzenmast, so I had to go aloft to retrieve her. I knitted myself into the futtock shrouds, as I needed two hands to lean toward her and grab her.”
“Yes,” Sal said thoughtfully. “In the dream, you were tangled up in the branches, because you needed two free hands to grab the monkey. That’s when you hurt your back. Men were climbing all over you in their haste to get down.”
“Aye! Top men scrambled all about furling sails, and damned Sansing came running down the shrouds, thought my shoulder was a ratline, nearly hove us both into the spindrift. Do you know the exact day you had this dream?”
“Yes, because it was the night Dagny had her first report of an aye-aye, and we’d been muddling about in the forest with no moon at all to see by.”
“No moon, quite right. Why, that’s astounding!”
“Too bad I didn’t get the details right. I saw you in a tree, not up a mast.”
“Close enough to be impressive. Ah!”
Sal’s nimble fingers had found the knot in Tomaj’s shoulder blade—the result of Sansing’s ass-wiper feet as big as jolly boats. “Sorry, sorry, I’ll be more gentle … So, did you find your Chinese pirate?”
Tomaj did not like discussing Wenkai Zhang, but he couldn’t refuse Sal. He felt no threat from the sweet-tempered geologist, who had somehow managed to remain pure after all his years of travails. “Yes, and then ultimately, no. It was easy enough to find his god-damned junk—you know those craft, they have those sails that resemble our ladies’ fans—in a lagoon, so we proceeded to Grand River to find Lieutenant Colonel Staveley, who told us the bastard pirate’s brother was employed as an opium planter, of all things. Just then we received word the overseer at the plantation had been brained by a crowbar and the ricemen had escaped. We chased them back to the coast, following their road of destruction. A shopkeeper got a pick-ax in the head for a few mangoes. The brother told the harbormaster the governor had officially pardoned him.”
Tomaj scoffed. “Governors don’t have the power of pardons, only partial revocation of a convict’s term, and the humor was further heightened seeing as how Staveley was standing right there, and he would’ve been the one to deliver the revocation. Those beetle-brain convicts spend their days under the tamarind trees at Grand River unguarded, dozing, smoking their hubble-bubble …”
“Sounds like you and your men,” Sal remarked.
“Yes. Except we’re pleasant fellows.”
Sal’s fingers squiggled around Tomaj’s neck vertebrae, where it stung as though lye had been poured there. “Do you think he’s coming for you, or di
d he just come to the Mauritius for his brother?”
Tomaj tolerated Sal’s fingers until he could bear it no more. Sal’s touch was rich yet punitive, and at last Tomaj bucked off the hands by rolling onto his side, propped on an elbow. He smeared his long tangled mane from his forehead. “He’s coming for me.”
“Ah.” Sal nodded. He resembled a favored concubine the way the amethyst dressing gown slid from his fine, white shoulder, a lock of nacreous curl escaping from the chopstick and laying across his clavicle—his entire person shimmered with unearthly charms, lit from above by holy beams from the skylights. “Why does he hate you so? Why did he kill your quartermaster?”
Tomaj sighed deeply and swung his legs off the marble table, so Sal stood between his thighs. “Wenkai killed Yves because it was the second best thing to killing me. He led us into a trap in the Strait of Malacca, and just as I realized it was a trap, it was too late.”
Sal lifted a soothing hand to Tomaj’s shoulder. “You loved him, your quartermaster.”
“I loved him because he was the only thing good of my former life in New Orleans. Now I can love no more.” But he needed to touch and be touched, and since touching Dagny, he needed it more than ever.
Frowning, Sal feathered his healing fingers up Tomaj’s throat, tickling him behind the ear. “No. You love my sister, I know that. Don’t deny it—shut up, say nothing, Tomaj.”
“I’m not saying a thing.”
“Then why is he coming for you, if he’s already killed that which you love best?”
Tomaj had to touch Sal’s mouth. His exquisitely bowed lips were those of an erotic cupid, soft as milk under the callouses of Tomaj’s fingertips. Tomaj had never favored a concubine as much as he favored Sal. “To get my celestine.”
Sal’s breath stilled, and his eyes widened. “But you—” To quiet the excitable man, Tomaj enwrapped Sal’s hips in his thighs, tracing Sal’s full lower lip with his thumb.
“I’ve got many celestine mines, up in the mountains behind Nosy Tovaraty—hush,” he whispered. Sal’s fingers trembled, now woven into the mat of thick black hair at the nape of Tomaj’s neck, and he stood so close to the marble table his erect silk-covered cock bobbed against Tomaj’s thigh. Nearly pressing his forehead to Sal’s, Tomaj breathed, “I didn’t want you to find them. I didn’t want to put you in danger, if you were mining there and he came upon you, I’d never forgive myself.”
Sal fairly panted with trepidation at the mention of celestine mines. He touched Tomaj’s nose with the tip of his perfectly formed one. “Please, please tell me. I don’t care, it’s not a risk—”
“Hush, hush, you are too beautiful … too beautiful for me to lose.”
Tomaj kissed Sal, in order to shut up his pleading.
Sal was compliant, and fell into the kiss like a woman, wrapping his hand round Tomaj’s neck, running his other bejeweled hand down Tomaj’s chest.
They licked each other’s mouths gently, with affection sucking on each other’s lips. Sal uttered exquisite keening sounds, like he was about to collapse from weightlessness any moment. Tomaj stroked the sculpture of Sal’s back, clutched him by the hips and squeezed him to his chest.
Tomaj wasn’t ashamed, and he kissed the sweet man fervently, the mellow aroma of the rosemary and aloe mingling in their hair, as though they tussled with each other in Fiddler’s Green, and not this house where men were harrying down the hallway toward the tepidarium, their bellowing voices echoing against the faraway ceiling, and—
Tomaj drew away a few millimeters. “Who the hell is that?” he breathed.
Tottering slightly, Sal seemed awash in a miasma of devotion. “Dagny was right.” He smiled. “Who the hell is what?”
Gripping Sal by the biceps, Tomaj leaned toward the hallway entry. There seemed to be … about three men, shouting … in a strange mixture of English and Malagasy, their boots resounding against the granite tiles as they stormed toward the bath-house like cavalry.
But they fought among themselves. Bodies were thrown against the hallway walls—sudden forceful exhalations from men punched in the stomach.
“By my ancestors,” whispered Tomaj, pushing Sal away as he got to his feet. “That’s—”
Boom! The heavy door hit the wall. Tomaj swung Sal behind him, protecting him. Tomaj’s dressing gown and double-barreled flintlock were on a chair by the bathtub. He eyed a heavy brass candlestick on a nearby table, but he wasn’t concerned enough to bother picking it up.
Hands outstretched into claws, Zeke pivoted about like a player in a game of football. “Aha!” he roared, when he spied Tomaj, who was, after all, buff, and had nowhere to conceal a weapon.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE BLACK PICTURE
BLOOD TRICKLED FROM ZEKE’S NOSE, HIS EXPLOSION of hair in disarray, but even Bellingham, and Slushy behind him clutching the doorjamb, hadn’t been able to stop him.
“There you are, you filthy freebooter!” Zeke stomped forward like Gulliver among the Lilliputians. “Not satisfied to ruin the reputation of my hallowed sister, you’ve now proceeded to poison the upright morals of my brother!”
Lowering his hands to his sides, Tomaj chuckled, and was doubly relieved to hear Sal chuckle behind him, too. “Listen here, Zhukov. Aren’t you just a bit of the skeleton at the feast? Why is it you persist in busting in where you’re not wanted, to annoy people who are doing what they want to do?—Hey, who bloodied his nose? Extra ration of whiskey for that man.”
Bellingham assumed a fresh attitude of pride, though a couple of buttons were missing from his monkey jacket. Punching the air in demonstration, he cried, “‘Twas me, sir! Though he be twice my size, I got him in that pugilist’s hold you taught me, and—”
Undeterred, Zeke stomped even closer, so that they were nearly yardarm to yardarm, bellowing, “I see from the half-mast angle of your stupid prick that you were on the verge of corrupting my innocent brother, you pixy-led old pouf!”
“All right, that’s more than enough, Zeke!” Sal came forward, shoving his bogus brother in the chest with his fingertips. To Tomaj’s surprise, the gangly man backed off, although he didn’t take his eyes off Tomaj. “Leave Tomaj alone. As for ‘Innocent,’ I’m about as innocent as the Earl of Rochester and you know it!”
Tomaj took this opportunity to stride back to his dressing gown and pistol. He shrugged into the dressing gown but didn’t pick up his double-barreled Parker’s, though Zeke had a flintlock in his waistband.
Sal yelled, “If anyone is corrupting any morals around here, it’s I who am doing that to him!”
“How can you come to the defense of this Russian slime? Boneaux himself has styled him a freebooter and a picaroon, and—”
“Sir!” Slushy shouted. “I’ll have you know! Men bold enough to make it as far as Madagascar have a code of honor! We’ve been adopted by the Malagasy, and we are not slavers! We live in harmony with the Malagasy, and keep on good terms with colonial governors both in North America and the entire Indian Ocean. We have formed the most democratic society in the history of mankind, and what we lacked in moral rectitude, what with our historical association with William Kidd, we more than make up for with our current leader, Count Pellegrin Tomaj Balásházy of Buda, who has succeeded in forming—”
Zeke turned on Slushy. “You old windbag! Don’t think I haven’t seen you lurking around Tamatave, hiding in bushes and lusting after my virtuous sister! Why, I ought to—”
When Zeke’s hand motioned for his flintlock, Tomaj had had enough.
Stepping before Zeke, Tomaj grasped Zeke’s right wrist in his own right flipper. Swinging to Zeke’s side in a charming waltz, Tomaj twisted the leaden arm into Zeke’s spine, at the same time booting him in the delicate back of the knee. Taking a handful of Zeke’s cauliflower hair in his other fist, Tomaj ran the hapless jackfool into the doorjamb, Slushy springing aside at the last moment, as though inconvenienced by such boorishness.
Tomaj smashed the face into the marble, taking
special care to mar the overly bulbous nose.
“Don’t harass a freebooter,” Tomaj hissed in his ear.
He jerked the gasping dolt back from the wall and hurled him into the hallway, where Zeke spun and sprawled like an octopus. One of his tentacles slapped up against Dagny’s comely slipper. Zeke tried to grab her ankle in his egress across the floor, but she lifted her foot and glared at Tomaj.
“What’s going on here?” Dagny demanded.
Tomaj smiled wryly, shrugging. “It may be true that the way we receive a visitor depends on the clothes he wears, but the manner in which we see him to the door is determined by the way he’s conducted himself.” He put his hands into the pockets of his dressing gown like an innocent boy, looking at her from under his lashes.
Her anger dissipated. The count was more elegant than ever, his long, tangled mane of obsidian hair twisted into a rope over his shoulder, steam still rising from his chest, where she was transfixed by the oily pelt of hair covering his muscular pectorals. He was a superb panther of a man, and even as she uttered the word “here” she knew she was fighting a losing battle, and the word teetered off her lips feebly.
Her brother could be a chore. She stepped over his fallen form, instantly imbued with a joyous excitement at being close to the count once more. “Yes. He means well,” she said weakly. Oh, my. She stood so close to him she smelled rosemary emanating from his shoulders. Such silken skin …
“He just got on the leeway of us,” Tomaj admitted.
Sal wandered into the corridor, apparently dazed by opium. Dagny told him, “Take care of Zeke,” and smoothly said to Tomaj, “I came by to check on my orchids.”
“Orchids, yes,” Tomaj said thoughtfully, lifting an arm to hover over her shoulders, guiding her into a sort of bath-house she had heard talk about. Perhaps he’d set her orchids inside the bath-house; that would make sense.
The Strangely Wonderful: Tale of Count Balásházy Page 15
