The Moghul Part 70

He felt the hard touch of her nipple as it began to trace the crease of his back. It moved slowly, tantalizingly, trailing just at the skin.

Now the musk of her perfume had begun to hover about his head, fogging his mind even more. But the sensation of her touch, and the knowledge it was the breast he wanted exquisitely to hold, attuned his starved senses to everything around him, even the quiet rhythm of her breath.

Suddenly, without warning, she slid the tip of her long red fingernail sharply down the same crease in his back, where his nerves strained for sensation. He felt a delicious burst of pain, and whirled to meet her smiling eyes.

"What . . .?"

"Do you see now how your sense of touch can be awakened? Now you may touch my b.r.e.a.s.t.s, but only with the nails of your fingers. Here."

She drew him to his feet and twined one leg about his body, her heel in the small of his back, enveloping him with her warmth as though it were a cloak. Then she embraced him with her thighs and took his hands in her own, forcing a pattern of scratches on each of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s with his nails. Each was different, and each time she pressed his hand, she named the shape of, the mark. Her breathing grew increasingly rapid from the pain, and soon both her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were decorated with a garland of hard red lines.

At last Hawksworth tried to speak, but she seized his lower lip between her teeth while her nails quickly imprinted a pattern of identical scratches across his own chest. He found the pain oddly exhilarating.

It seemed to flow between their bodies, attuning them deeply one to the other. Instinctively he moved to take her, but she twined herself even tighter about him, unattainable. Then, when he thought he could endure it no longer, she lowered herself easily against the bolster.

He scarcely noticed as the pace of the drum intensified.

"Remember, you cannot touch with your hands. Anything else is allowed."

The wine had saturated his mind, but now he found the pleasure of desiring of her body overwhelming. He moved across her lightly with the tip of his tongue, first tasting her lips, then her dark nipples, then the ivory-smooth arch beneath her arms. There her skin was soft as a child's and so sensitive he caused her to shudder involuntarily. He teased her slowly, languorously, until she erupted with cries of pleasure. Then he moved his tongue slowly down her body, trailing the circle of the navel lightly to find the few light wisps of down she had failed to banish. These he teased lightly with his breath until he sensed she could endure it no longer. Then he traced his s.e.x along the inside of her thighs, upward to the fringe of her silk wrap, until at last they were both lost in desire.

With a quick motion she rose and drew astride his body, still scarcely touching him. The silk at her waist came away in her hands and without a sound she twined it into a moist rope. Kneeling above him now she drew it slowly across the tips of her own nipples, then across his.

Then she pulled the binding of jewels from her hair and with a toss of her head spread the dark strands across his chest. As he watched, she seized the ends of her hair and began to draw them slowly, expertly, against the sensitive underside of the phallus that stood beneath her.

Her breath came in short bursts as she drew close enough to tease her own s.e.x as well.

He knew he had lost when he felt his last attempts at restraint dissolve. Then her breath told him she had lost as well. With their eyes joined, each exquisitely aware of the other's imminent resolution, she quickly slipped her left hand beneath her and caught the uppermost tip of the phallus with her nails, holding it taut, the pain intensifying his pleasure.

She had directed the pulse at the point of her own ecstasy, guiding the warm seed exactly as she wanted, against her own hard bud. As it struck her, she gave the _sitkrita _cry of release and with a hard shudder fell across him, loin against loin, exquisitely replete.

As the drummer pounded the final _sum _of the raga, Hawksworth realized she used his resolution to bring her own. Without their bodies touching.

The room lay silent about them, as though enfolded in their content.

Only their hard breath remained.

"I never knew lovemaking could be so intense." He startled himself by his own admission.

"Because I loved you with more than just with my body." She smiled at him carefully and reached out to touch the marks on his chest. "But that was merely the first stage of _kama_. Are you ready now for the second?"

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Nadir Sharif studied the pigeon as it glided onto the red sandstone ledge and rustled its feathers in exhausted satisfaction. It c.o.c.ked its white-spotted head for a moment as it examined the prime minister, then waddled contentedly toward the water cup waiting just inside the carved stone pigeon house.

He immediately recognized it as one of the birds he kept stationed in Gwalior, his last pigeon stage en route to Agra from the south. The cylinder bound to its leg, however, was not one of his own. Imprinted on its silver cap was the seal of the new Portuguese Viceroy of Goa, Miguel Vaijantes.

Nadir Sharif waited patiently for the pigeon to drink. He knew well the rewards of patience. He had waited patiently, studying the _feringhi_, for a full week. And he had learned almost all he needed to know.

The Englishman had been invited to durbar every day since his arrival.

Arangbar was diverted by his stories and bemused by his rustic gifts.

(The only gift that had not entertained Arangbar was the book of maps he had wheedled out of the Englishman, which upon inspection showed India as something far less than the greatest continent on the globe.

But Arangbar found the map's rendering of India's coastline to be sufficiently naive to cast the accuracy of the entire book into question.) This was the first _feringhi _Arangbar had ever met who could speak Turkish and understand his native Turki, and the Moghul rejoiced in being able to snub the Jesuits and dispense with their services as translators.

But most of all, Arangbar loved to challenge the Englishman to drinking bouts, as night after night they matched cups in the _Diwan-i-Khas _until near midnight. As Arangbar and the Englishman drew closer, the Jesuits had grown distraught to near madness. The hard-drinking Englishman bragged of the East India Company and its bold plans for trade, of the old Levant Company and its disputes with Spain over Mediterranean routes, of English privateering in the West Indies. Of everything . . . except when the next voyage would come.

Nadir Sharif had listened closely to their expansive talk all those nights, and he had finally deciphered to his own satisfaction the answer to the question uppermost in Arangbar's mind.

The Englishman is bluffing. England has no fleet. At least no fleet that can ever hope to threaten Portuguese control of the Indian Ocean.

There'll be no more voyages, and no more presents, for at least a year.

The Englishman is living a fool's dream.

When his European presents are gone, and he's spent what's left of his money buying jewels and gifts for the Moghul, he'll be dropped from court. Arangbar plays him like a puppet, always hinting the _firman _will be ready tomorrow. But there'll be no _firman _unless Arangbar can be convinced the English king is powerful enough to protect Indian s.h.i.+pping from Portuguese reprisals at sea. And this the English clearly cannot do. At least not now, not without a fleet. The Englishman is living on borrowed time.

And I'm beginning to think he suspects it himself. He drinks more than a man in his place should. He's always able to stay in control, but just barely. If Arangbar were not always drunk himself, he would have noticed it also.

Nadir Sharif glanced at the silver cylinder and smiled to himself. So His Excellency, Miguel Vaijantes, is worried. Undoubtedly he's demanding I contain the Englishman, isolate him from Arangbar.

It will hardly be necessary. The Englishman is destined to be forgotten soon. How much longer can he hold the Moghul's attention? A month? Two months? I know his supply of trifles for Arangbar is already half depleted.

But why burden the Viceroy with this insight? Bargain with him. Let him pay enough and I will guarantee with my life that the sun will rise tomorrow morning. The end of the Englishman is no less sure.

Nadir Sharif stroked the pigeon lovingly as he began to unwind the silk binding holding the cylinder, and it reminded him again of the Deccan.

Still no pigeons from Mumtaz. How curious that her one dispatch in the last month, the one brought by the Rajput, was merely to request that small accommodation for the Englishman. Who knows why she asked it?

Perhaps it was a joke of the prince's.

Nadir Sharif congratulated himself on how easy it had been. The Englishman had never known.

And it was obvious the woman Kamala _had _changed him, smoothed him.

Was the prince grooming him for something? If so, why send the request through Mumtaz? Whatever the reason, it had been a pleasure to grant this one favor for the daughter he doted on. He also realized it might well be the last favor he could ever do for her.

It was clear now that Prince Jadar would be banished from Agra forever.

The events of the next four weeks were inexorable.

Today Arangbar's birthday celebrations begin. Next week Allaudin will be guest of honor at a _s.h.i.+kar_, a royal hunt. Two weeks after that, the wedding formalities begin, and the following week is the wedding itself. Four weeks and Jadar will be finished. Even if he returned to Agra today, he could not forestall the inevitable.

Nadir Sharif took the pigeon on his wrist and offered it a few grains of soaked _dal_ from his own hand as he gently slipped off the silver cylinder. When the bird was pecking contentedly he eased it onto the ledge, twisted away the silver cap of the cylinder, and settled against the rooftop divan to translate the cipher.

The morning wind from the Jamuna grew suddenly chill against his skin.

Then, as the message slowly emerged, the wind from the Jamuna became ice.

Nadir Sharif translated the cipher again, to be sure. But there could be no mistaking what it said. Or what it meant. He would have declared its contents an absurd hoax, perhaps even a hoax inspired by the Englishman, had not the message been intercepted by the Portuguese, by capture of one of Jadar's own pigeons.

The cipher did not say so, but doubtless a copy had also been sent to Arangbar. Even had it not, the Moghul still would hear the news within the day. His own intelligence network was the best in India, after that of the queen.

He closed the door of the pigeon house, picked up a small silver bell beside the divan, and rang lightly. Almost before he had replaced the bell, a eunuch was waiting.

"Your pleasure, Sharif Sahib."