Shroud of Shadow (28 page)

She was thrust through the opening and into the darkness of Jacob's bedroom. Oh, yes, she remembered. Her mind remembered. Her body remembered.

I'm dry now. I'm too dry. It's going to hurt, him going in and all. But I've got to do it, 'cause they'll hurt me if I don't. But they'll hurt me if I do, too, 'cause I'll get hurt doing it.

I hurt Marjorie. Didn't I just do a good job there? But I want her. I haven't had a woman in thirty years. Faithful unto death. Nitwit. I know where Josef got it now.

The panel ejaculated its subtle poison and then slid shut. There was no way out for Dinah now. If she tried to escape, she would be considered an intruder, possibly a thief, and Edvard and Norman would do nothing to save her. Her only way out was through the death of Jacob Aldernacht.

Man smell. Old man smell, like dry leaves and dust. Dinah picked her way across the room. She heard breathing, wondered what Jacob looked like.

I'm a woman. I can do this. And there he is, over there in the bed (can hardly see it, so dark) but he'll know my voice, and he'll know what I am, and that'll be all it takes.

Marjorie. Haven't had a woman since Marjorie. Don't even know what to do now. Kill me, most likely, to do anything. That would be the way to do it, now, wouldn't it?

And tears streaked Jacob's old, dry face as he thought of the wife whose embrace he had shoved so brutally aside thirty years ago. She was gone. Gone like everything. Only Albrecht and his fool's errand of a cathedral harkened back at all to the days of fantasy and delusion that Jacob had forced himself to remember and believe. No, it had never been like that—money had been around for a long time, and people who like money had been around even longer—but it was a pleasant dream, and, half dozing, he allowed himself to dream it.

Odor, suddenly. Musk . . . and female musk. Still half-dreaming, Jacob let the scents envelop him. Marjorie had worn musk like that, once. He had been a much younger man, once.

Dinah stood uncertainly and silently at the side of his bed, wondering what to do, how to start. A virile young buck would have appreciated a quick leap and a warm cunt pressed against his mouth, but Jacob was old and, more than likely, asleep.

Got to do something, though. Got to get him up, get him in, shake him until he drops. He's old: won't take long. And then I'm going to leave Ypris. Knives in their pants one of these days, slit me up to the chin 'cause they're done with me.

Oh, and she moved under me, and she had those soft arms and soft lips. Don't know what she saw in me (but then the womenfolk don't have much to say in the matter, do they?) but she knew how to put me on my back and come down on me. . . .

Even as it dried, or perhaps because it dried, the scent of Dinah's melt wafted stronger. With shaking fingers, she peeled down the coverlet, took Jacob's inert hand in hers, moved it carefully to the curving round of her breast.

They all like waking up with their hand on a tit. Have to keep him from asking questions 'till he's pumped himself to death. Shouldn't take long please it won't take long . . .

God, and we'd laugh, and then she'd open her legs when I got my hands onto her breasts and we'd laugh some more. And then it'd be over and I'd be the same . . .

She closed his thumb and forefinger on her nipple, tried to feel the stirring in her belly that the gesture usually produced, but her fear had smothered any urgings from her loins, and so all she felt was manflesh cupping womanflesh without any real passion . . .

. . . and thank God for that 'cause I wouldn't have the nerve to stay here, trying to kill him with that thing inside me, waiting for it to go limp and his eyes get that funny look in them that you know means it's all over. . . .

. . . stupid selfish son of a bitch, telling her that she was stupid, that she should stick to her kitchen and her whelps. Hurt her. Of course I hurt her. Been hurting everyone for years. Wouldn't know how to stop if my . . .

. . . save what she was trying to squeeze out of her womb like an aborted fetus. And despite her efforts, Jacob still drifted in his dreams, his sleeping hand on her passionless breast.

. . . but my God he's not coming around and what can I do? I could sit on his face—

. . . life depended on it. Doesn't, though. Good thing, too. I'd be dead by morning if I—

Jacob's hand suddenly came to life, his nostrils flared with a sharp intake of breath.

?

?

And Dinah, thinking quickly, shrugged herself out of a gown that was now dripping with the sweat of fear and flung herself on the supine elder, shoving her hands down to grab his manhood in stubby but practiced fingers, milking him rhythmically as she knew from years of experience that men like being milked (little finger finding that perfect groove beneath the foreskin), holding him between her spread legs and waiting, hoping, for that sudden lift, engagement . . .

Eyes glazed from the abruptness of the attentions forced upon him, Jacob at first lay motionless, his body, awash in a welter of conflicting thoughts and longings, awakening in spite of three decades of disuse. It might well have been Marjorie who now stroked him with the wiles of a woman's hot desire, pressed her lips to meet his, moistened his thighs with her slick runoff.

. . . but I've got to feel this, 'cause I won't know what to do unless I feel it, and isn't he skinny. Maybe he's dead already. Please he's dead already.

Marjorie wore scent, and her tongue flicking my lips just like that. Women don't have any say about who they bed, but she made the best of it. . . .

Jacob, struggling up from sleep, his dreams banished by the stiffness of his erection and the weight of a lost wife now, in dreamtime, suddenly returned, opened his eyes in the darkness, heard the harsh gasps of the woman struggling on top of him.

Old bird, damn you, come, come, COME! Get that spit of seed out, give that last little jerk that the men always do, and then die! But he's not coming and they're on the other side of the wall and I know they can hear that he's not coming and he's waking up . . .

What's she doing in here? Don't recognize the voice. But she's like Marjorie and . . . that feels like Marjorie but it's not Marjorie. What the hell? Didn't think I could still do that? Why would she want to come back to me anyway? Just be more of the same. And that feels . . .

Heaving herself up, straddling him, she pressed her damp labia against his mouth. “I want you,” she whispered, trying to project in her voice a sense of something that was not fear, that did not echo the rising panic now crawling up her back, down into her womanhood. “I'll be anyone you want me to be. I want you to want me.”

But Jacob was crying now, for himself, for his lost wife, for the desire that had suddenly, uselessly, awakened in him. This woman on his chest was speaking to him in the accents of fantasy and delusion that could not but remind him, ever more deeply and painfully, of the deceit of the imagined past, of the uselessness of the future.

This isn't working. Got to try something else. They're listening, and I've got to make this work. Here, they like this. They always like this.

Can't be her. Dead now. I'm dead, too. They can have it. Stupid money. Paul and his boys will have to fight with Francis. Poor Paul. I'm dead.

Dinah strove, now shoving her breasts in Jacob's face (the skin of age against her, like a crinkling of parchment), now fondling him with ever increasing desperation, her breath coming with a hoarseness born of no passion save fear.

One of them would die tonight. She knew it. It was going to happen.

Whimpering, she straddled, milked, sucked, pressed, grabbed the weeping Jacob and tossed him on his stomach, gnawed at his buttocks, rimmed his anus with a dry, shaking tongue while her stomach clenched and the nausea of fright sent acid and bile up the back of her throat.

Got to . . . try this . . . no, this . . .

Damn it all. Just give it all and go away.

At last, Dinah—shaking, numb, exhausted—sat back on her trembling ankles and bowed her head. Defiled, debauched, degraded, and now dead, she bent over the still-sobbing form of her failure, her hands to her face, trying to comprehend the horror and the magnitude of what would happen.

What's wrong with me? Don't I know what I'm doing? Can't I do anything? Do I have to die?

What's wrong with me? Don't I know what I'm doing? Can't I do anything? Do I have to die?

Dinah sobbed, and Jacob sobbed, and while the whore contemplated her failure and her doom, the old man did the same.

His eyes flickered open. His hand groped, came up against Dinah's breasts. She flinched away, but he did not pursue.

His old lips moved. “I . . .”

She stared into blind darkness.

“. . . I'm not worthy of you.”

And then she fled, flinging herself off the bed, scrambling to the door, bloodying her hands on the unfamiliar latch. The hallway was dark and empty, and she had no idea of the layout of the house, but she ran nonetheless without light and without knowledge, bumping into walls, slamming into chairs and tables, sending the household into alarm and uproar with her clattering and clashing and muffled sobs and screams. They would find her, she knew. They would find her and kill her.

And perhaps it was instinct that led her through the mazed corridors of the labyrinthine house to the remote wing that housed the servants, and maybe it was instinct—or pain—that had kept Omelda from sleep that night; but the apostate nun heard the apostate whore in the corridor. Omelda found herself opening her door even though she was still half asleep.

“I'm dead!” Dinah was sobbing. “They're going to kill me!”

And Omelda, awake now, dragged the naked, frightened, thoroughly demoralized woman into her room, held her while she whispered, in frantic snatches and disjointed phrases, enough of a story to frighten her in turn, and then she bundled Dinah up in her tattered old cloak and led her down the hall to Natil's room.

But Jacob had also left his room. Dazed and despairing, he had pulled on what clothes had come to hand, and he had wandered down the hallway, undisturbed and unquestioned by the frightened servants. He saw little of anything, not only because he carried no light, but also because his inner vision was filled with Marjorie, with the wraith that had come to him in the musk-scented night and then, like Marjorie, had run away. Like the Marjorie of his memories, she had been weeping. Like the Marjorie of his dreams, she had been frightened.

“No . . . no . . .” he murmured. “Marjorie didn't die. She's . . . she's somewhere.” He fetched up against the front door and, still acting without benefit of light, he unbarred it and passed out into the courtyard.

Shouts in the house behind him. A clatter of weapons. Manarel was bellowing at Eudes. Eudes was bellowing—politely and dryly—back at Manarel. A woman screamed.

The guards at the gatehouse started at his approach. “Master?”

“Let me through.”

That was all he said. That was all it took. The master of the house asked, and it was immediately given unto him. Aldernacht money. Anything could be bought. But he had not been able to buy Marjorie. No, she had left. And she was . . .

Tears were running down his face as he stumbled through the moonlit streets of Ypris, one hand covering one eye, the other eye staring into the darkness as though it might contain either horror or miracle.

Miracle found him first. Staggering, half falling down in the square, he felt hands on him, and then heard a voice that filtered through the night as though through the dryness of infinite years and the wet sputum of tuberculosis.

“Jacob. I know you, Jacob.”

The moonlight was silver and treacherous, but he looked up into the aging face of a woman he knew not as Reinne . . .

. . . but as Marjorie.

***

As abuse and despair had broken Omelda's spirit, so fear and failure had destroyed Dinah's. The little whore sat on Natil's bed, her hands to her face, her defiant dark curls now bedraggled with sweat and despondency, her mouth downturned as much as her eyes.

She refused to answer questions about what had happened, and though Omelda told Natil as much as she had been able to piece together from Dinah's fearful blurtings, nothing made sense to the harper. Something about Jacob, and something about Edvard and Norman. Natil had read the grandsons' obsessions in their eyes, and sow as not surprised that they would be involved with a prostitute. But Jacob?

“Do you know anything else about this?” she asked Omelda. Outside her door, the house was awakening like a fever victim rising from a nightmare. Men shouted, doors slammed. Somewhere, in the distance, Edvard cursed furiously about being gotten out of bed in the middle of the night, but there was dissemblance in his voice.

“No,” replied Omelda. “Nothing.”

Dissemblance again, but much closer, and decidedly not from Edvard. Natil peered at her. “Are you sure?”

Omelda turned away.

Natil ran a hand back through her hair, and, discouraged, shook her head. Human . . . and among humans. There was no Lady, there were no stars. She was on her own.

We've got to do something,
Wheat had said, or would say in another five hundred years.
Even if it's not much. Even if it makes just a little bit of difference.

Natil wanted to weep, but she held to the fading vestiges of her calling and knelt before Dinah, who, with her arms about herself, was rocking back and forth to some frightened inner cadence. “Beloved.”

The once-defiant whore spread two fingers. An eye peered out through the gap.

“What do you need?” said Natil.

“They're going to kill me.”

Natil kept her voice patient. “What do you need?”

Omelda was standing behind her. “She needs to get out of this house,” she said tonelessly. “She needs to leave, to go far away.”