Free The Moghul by Thomas Hoover Page B

around them. After only a moment's pause, the musicians immediately took up a sensuous late evening raga.
    Hawksworth looked about and noticed for the first time that the lamps in the room had been lowered, settling a semi- darkness about the musicians and the moving figures around him. He felt for his glass of bhang and saw that it was dry, and that another had been placed beside it. He drank again to clear his mind.
    What's going on? Damned if I'll stay here. My God, it's impossible to think. I'm tired. No, not tired. It's just . . . just that my mind is . . . like I'd swilled a cask of ale. But I'm still in perfect control. And where's Mukarrab Khan? Now there are screens where he was sitting. Covered with peacocks that strut obscenely from one screen to the other. And the eunuchs are all watching. Bastards. I'll take back my sword. Jesus, where is it? I've never felt so adrift. But I'm not staying. I'll take the chest and damn his eunuchs. And his guards. He can't hold me here. Not even on charges. There are no charges. I'm leaving. I'll find the men . . .
    He pulled himself defiantly to his feet. And collapsed.

    CHAPTER EIGHT

    The dream was more vivid than reality, intensely colored and astir with vague forms that drifted through his mind's ken, appearing then fading. The room seemed airless, a musk-filled cell of gilded blue panels and gold brocade. Guarded faces hovered around and above, their eyes intense yet unseeing, distant as stained-glass masks of cathedral sinner and saint.
    A fingertip brushed his cheek, and with its touch the room gloried in a powerful fragrance of saffron. Then a hand, floating unattached, gently removed his doublet; another slid away his mud-smeared breeches.
    He was naked.
    He looked down as though from afar at the texture of chest and thigh, and he wondered dimly if they were his own. Then other hands . . . and suddenly he was immersed in a sea whose shores were white marble, whose surface sheened with oil of the rose. Translucent petals drifted randomly atop the crests. Hands toured his frame, discovering every tightened nerve, while powdered sandalwood enveloped his hair and beard until he seemed lost in a fragrant forest.
    As suddenly as the sea had come it drew away, but now there were steaming wraps tingling with astringent orange and clove, and he drifted through a land of aloe balm and amber.
    The room dissolved into semi-darkness, until at last only a single face remained, a woman with eyes round and moist and coldly dark. Her lips were the deep red of betel, while her hair was coal and braided in a skein of jeweled tresses. A faceted stone sparkled on her left nostril, and heavy gold rings swung gently from each ear. Henna-red nipples pressed erect against her diaphanous blouse, and between her breasts clung a garland of pearls. The heavy bracelets on her wrists and her upper arms glistened gold in the flickering candlelight.
    As he studied her eyes, they seemed locked into his own, and betrayed no notice of his body. He sent his voice through the dream's carpeted chambers, but his words were swallowed in dark air that drew out their sound and washed it to thin silence. In a final, awkward futility he struggled to free himself from the velvet bolster.
    But gently she pressed him back.
    "What would you have, my love? Sweet bhang from my hand?"
    A cup found his lips, and before he knew he had taken more of the incendiary green confection. Its warmth grew slowly into a pale light that shimmered off the gilded panels and then coalesced into the rainbow now pivoting pendulum-like above him, a glistening fan of peacock feathers swayed by a faceless, amber-skinned woman.
    His gaze returned to the eyes, and again he searched for sound. Then came a voice he recognized as his own.
    "Who are you?"
    "You may call me Kali. Others do. It's a name you would not understand. But can you understand that love is surrender?" The words coiled about his head, coruscating and empty of meaning. He shook