Suddenly one of the war captains exclaimed aloud and pointed out across the green waters. From out of the banks of silver sea fret, looming like a ghost ship through the mist, sped one of the galleys of Opet. With her single square sail bellied by the trade winds, and her banks of oars beating rhythmically, she sped in silence towards the north on her long voyage of trade to Cadiz.
Again a captain exclaimed, and they all looked towards the king. His face shone and dripped with sweat, and his jaws clenched and ground his teeth together with a sound like rock on rock. His eyes were burning mad as he watched the passage of the galley, and his body shook and shuddered with the strength of his hatred.
The captain ran to aid him, thinking him stricken with sudden fever. He touched the king’s arm.
‘High-born,’ he started, and Manatassi turned upon him in raging madness and struck him down with the iron claw, ripping half his face away.
‘There,’ he screamed, pointing with the claw at the disappearing galley. ‘There is your enemy. Mark him well.’
Each day brought its own excitements, its secret delights and ventures - and its happiness. It did not seem five years since she and Huy had become lovers, so swiftly had the years sped. Yet it was so, for the Festival of the Fruitful Earth was almost come around once more.
Tanith laughed aloud at the memory of her seduction of Huy, and she made her plans to repeat the performance during the coming Festival. Beside her Aina mumbled a question, peering at her quizzically from the depths of her hood.
‘Why do you laugh, child?’
‘I laugh because I am happy, old mother.’
‘Oh, to be young once again. You do not know what it is like to grow old.’ Aina began one of her monologues, and Tanith led her through the bustle of the harbour area, past the low taverns and the taunting street girls to where steps were cut into the stone jetty. She danced down the steps and leapt lightly to the deck of the small sailing craft moored to one of the iron rings in the jetty.
Coming out of the tiny cabin, dressed in rough fisherman’s clothes and with a scarf tied about his head. Huy was too late to help her aboard.
‘You are late.’
‘For your impertinence I shall punish you, just as soon as it is safe,’ Tanith warned him.
‘I look forward to it,’ Huy grinned, and helped old Aina over the gunwale, while Tanith ran forward to cast off the head lines.
Huy was perched in the stern with the steering oar tucked under his arm, and Tanith sitting as close beside him as she could without touching. She had thrown off her cloak, and wore now a light cotton tunic edged with gold thread and belted with a solid gold chain, a name-day gift from Huy.
Her hair billowed out behind her like black smoke, and her cheeks were flushed. Huy kept glancing at her, and each time she looked at him and laughed for no reason.
The wind was fine on their beam, and as they ran close-hauled for the islands the wind whipped droplets from the bow wave into their faces, and the water was cold in the warmth of the sun. Huy ran the vessel neatly through an almost invisible channel in the reeds, and they emerged into a quiet and sheltered lagoon whose surface was covered with the dark green pads of the water lilies and starred with the blue and gold of their blossoms. Water fowl paddled and dabbled and flighted over and upon the quiet waters.
They were out of the wind here and Huy took up a long pole from the deck and, standing in the stern, he poled them across the lagoon to the beach of dazzling white sand. Jumping out into knee-deep water he hauled the vessel up onto the beach.
Amongst the polished black boulders above the beach Huy rigged a sun shelter with a strip of sail, and he helped Aina across the sand and installed her beneath the shelter.
‘A bowl of wine, old mother,’ he suggested solicitously.
‘You are too kind. Holiness.’
They left her there, snoring quietly in the shade, and they walked hand in hand along the ribbon of beach, beyond the curve of the bay. Under the ivory palms Huy spread a cloak on the firm clean sand, and they rid themselves of their clothing and lay together talking and laughing and making love.
Then they bathed together in the clear warm lake water, and, as they lay in the shallows with the wavelets flopping lazily over them, shoals of silvery finger-long fish came to nibble at their naked skin. Tanith laughed and kicked at the tickle of their toothless mouths.
They went to lie in the sun and dry themselves, and Huy looked up at Tanith standing over him. Her hair was sodden and dangled in heavy black ropes down her back and breasts. The sun had brought a glow to her shoulders, and there were water drops clinging in her eyelashes. She stood proudly under his scrutiny, and she cupped her breasts, one in each hand.
‘Do you see ought different about me, Holy Father?’ She asked in her teasing voice, so that Huy smiled and shook his head.
‘Look closer,’ she invited him, and it seemed then that her breasts were fatter and more pointed, he noticed also that they were marbled with bluish veins beneath the white skin.
‘Yes?’ Tanith asked, and ran her hands down her body to cradle her belly.
‘And here?’ she asked. ‘Anything different here?’ And she puffed out her stomach, laughing at him.
‘You are getting fat,’ Huy reprimanded her, giving her back her laughter. ‘You eat too much.’
Tanith shook her head. ‘What I have in here, Holy Father, certainly never went in through my mouth.’
Slowly the laughter dried up in the back of Huy’s throat, and he gawked at her.
Huy lay in the darkness and he was still stunned and bemused. It still seemed impossible that some of the seed which he had sown so carelessly should have taken root; were not the priestesses of Astarte instructed in the secret ways of preventing just such an occurrence? This was really an event to rank with earthquake and storm and defeat in battle. Something would have to be done about it, something radical.
