'Ah! It is your own design! How fascinating!'
'My toe, sir.'
'What? Oh! Oh, I'm sorry.'
'And your mask, Duke?'
'What? Oh, ah, some old family thing. Do you like it? Does it please you? There is a companion one for a lady. I would be honoured if you would accept it with my compliments.'
'I could not possibly, sir. I'm sure your family would object. Thank you, nevertheless.'
'But it is nothing! That is, it is very — it is, I should say, regarded as most elegant and graceful, the one for a lady, I mean, but it is entirely mine to gift. It would be an honour!'
The Doctor paused, as though considering this offer. Then she said, 'And an even greater one for me, sir. However, I already possess the mask which you see and have admired, and I find I can only wear one at a time.'
'But…'
However, with that it was time for the two to separate, and the Doctor returned to my side.
'Are you getting all this, Oelph?' she asked, as we caught our breath and executed the marking-time steps.
'Mistress?'
'Your partners appear to become mute in your presence and yet you had the look of somebody concentrating on a conversation.'
'I did, mistress?' I asked, feeling my face redden under my mask.
'You did, Oelph.'
'I beg your pardon, mistress.'
'Oh, it's quite all right, Oelph. I don't mind. Listen away, with my blessing.'
The music changed again, and it was time for the two rows of dancers to form a circle and then reconstitute themselves in an alternate order. In the circle, the Doctor held my hand firmly but gently. Her hand, which I'd swear squeezed mine just before she let go, felt warm and dry, and the skin smooth.
Before too long I was dancing in the middle of the great ballroom of our Kingdom's second palace — and arguably its first in opulence — with a smiling, giggling, porcelain-skinned princess from the Half-Hidden Kingdoms in the high, snow-besieged mountains that climb most-way into the sky beyond the savage anarchy of Tassasen.
Her cloud-white skin was tattooed on eyelid and temple, and pierced with jewelled studs at her nostrils and the septum between nose and upper lip. She was short but curvaceous, dressed in a highly ornamented and colourful version of the booted, straight-skirted fashion of her people. She spoke little Imperial and no Haspidian, and her knowledge of the dance steps was somewhat fragmentary. Still she contrived to be an enchanting dancing partner, and I confess that I caught little of what passed between the Doctor and the King, noting only that the Doctor looked very tall and graceful and correct while the King seemed most animated and merry, even if his steps were not as fluent as they would normally have been (the Doctor had strapped his ankle up especially tightly that afternoon, knowing that he would be certain to take part in the dancing). Both wore smiles beneath their half- masks.
The music swelled and rolled over us, the grand people and beautiful masks and costumes surged and eddied about us, and we, resplendent in our finery, were the bright focus of it all. The Doctor moved and swayed at my side and occasionally I caught a hint of her perfume, which was one that I was never able to identify and cannot ever recall seeing her apply. It was an astonishing scent. It reminded me at once of burned leaves and sea spray, of newly turned earth and of seasonal flowers in bloom. There was, too, something tenebrous and intense and sensual about the scent, something sweet and sharp at the same tune, at once lithe and full-bodied and utterly enigmatic.
In later years, when the Doctor was long gone from us and even her most manifest features were becoming difficult to recall with perfect clarity, I would, in diverse moments of private intimacy, catch a hint of that same odour, but the encounter would always prove fleeting.
I freely confess that on such occasions the recollection of that long-ago night, the magnificent ballroom, the splendid profusion of the dancers and the breath-arresting presence of the Doctor seemed like a capstan of ache and longing attached by the ropes of memory to my heart, squeezing and tightening and compressing it until it seemed inevitable that it must be burst asunder.
Engulfed in that riotous storm of the senses, by eye and ear and nose beset, I was at once terrified and exhilarated, and experienced that strange, half-elatory, half-fatalistic alloy of emotions that leads one to feel that if one died at that precise moment, suddenly and painlessly (indeed
'The King seems happy, mistress,' I observed as we stood side by side again.
'Yes. But he is starting to limp,' the Doctor said, and sent the briefest of frowns in Duke Quettil's direction. 'This was an unwise choice of dance for a man with an ankle which is still recovering.' I watched the King, but of course he was not dancing at that point. However, I could not help but notice that rather than make the fill-in steps, he was standing still, weight on his good leg, clapping his hands in time instead. 'How is your Princess?' the Doctor asked me with a smile.
'Her name is Skoon, I think,' I said, frowning. 'Or that may be the name of her homeland. Or her father. I'm not sure.'
'She was introduced as Princess of Wadderan, I believe,' the Doctor told me. 'I doubt that Skuin is her name. That is the name of the type of dress she is wearing, a skuin-trel. I imagine she thought you were pointing at that when asking for a name. However, given that she is a female of the Wadderani royal family, her name is probably Gul- something or other.'
'Oh. You know of her people?' This confused me, for the Sequestered or Half-Hidden Kingdoms are some of the most remote and thoroughly land-locked places in the known world.
'I have read about them,' the Doctor said urbanely, before being pulled into the centre to dance with the tall Trosilian Prince. I was paired with his sister. A lanky, generally ungainly and rather plain woman, she nevertheless danced well enough and seemed quite as merry as the King. She was happy to engage me in conversation, though she did seem under the impression that I was a nobleman of some distinction, an illusion which I was probably rather too slow to dispel.
'Vosill, you look wonderful,' I heard the King tell the Doctor. I saw her head dip a little and she murmured something back to him which I could not hear. I experienced a pang of jealousy that turned for an instant to wild fear when I realised who it was I was feeling jealous of. Providence, our own dear King!
The dance went on. We met with the Duke and Duchess of Keitz, then formed a circle once more — the Doctor's hand was as firm and warm and dry as before — and then took up again with our earlier eightsome. I was breathing hard by this time and did not wonder that people the age of Duke Walen usually sat out this sort of dance. Especially when one was masked, it was a long, hot and tiring business.
Duke Quettil danced with the Doctor in frosty silence. Young Ulresile fairly ran into the middle of our group to meet the Doctor and continued in his attempt to press some portion of his family's equity upon her, while she parried each suggestion as neatly as it was made awkwardly.
Finally (and thankfully, for my feet were becoming quite sore in my new dress shoes and I was in some need of relieving myself) we shared a set with Lady Ulier and Guard Commander Adlain.
'Tell me, Doctor,' Adlain said as they danced together. 'What is a… gahan?'
'I'm not sure. Do you mean a gaan?'
'Of course, you pronounce it so much better than I. Yes. A gaan.'
'It is the title of an officer in the Drezeni civil command. In Haspidus, or in Imperial terms, it would roughly correspond to a town master or burghead, though without the military authority and with an additional expectation that the man or woman would be capable of representing Drezen at junior consular level when abroad.'
'Most illuminating.'
'Why do you ask, sir?'
'Oh, I read a report recently from one of our ambassadors… from Cuskery, I think, which mentioned the word as though it was some sort of rank but without including any explanation. I intended to ask one of our diplomatic people but it must have slipped my mind. Seeing you and thinking of Drezen obviously secured it again.'
