"Tarr,.Judith.-.Lord.Of.The.Two.Lands2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tarr Judith)

taking the name of that dance. The man was as eager as a
ram, and built like one, a heavy gleaming creature with
muscles that rolled like water. The woman was nigh as tall
as he, but if he was a ram, she was a tigress, turning sud-
denly in his clasp, locking legs about his middle and rak-
ing claws down his back. He grunted. She laughed,
arched, sank teeth into his shoulder. Her face through
streams of red-gold hair was wild, a little mad.

Her teeth had drawn blood. He took no notice of it,
though it ran in the lamplight in streams the color of wine,
or of the Tyrians' purple. Their shadows leaped and
danced, a mingled shape of dark and light upon the wall.
For a stretching moment it was a ram, a ram crowned with
the sun, and a serpent coiled about him, locked in passion
that was half war.

It broke, blurred, scattered. They dropped down in a
tangle of limbs and bodies and coppery hair.

There was a silence. Nectanebo, trapped in the scrying,
watched the wildness flow out of them. The man laid his
head on the woman's breast. His hair was black and thick,
cut as the Hellenes cut it, and he wore a beard like a Hel-
lene, and that was a Hellene's face, though ram-heavy,
ram-strong. She was slighter as befit a woman, but her
beauty was as Greek as his, the full rounding of her body
even in its slimness, the strong oval face and the long
broad nose and the wide low brow: to an Egyptian, heavy
and somewhat coarse, but striking for all of that. Her

4 Lord of the Two Lands

hands were long and strong, stroking the knotted muscles
of his back, smoothing them one by one.

"A god was in us tonight," she said. Greek indeed, but
not as it was spoken by envoys in the courts of the Two
Lands: broader and softer, with the hint of an antique lilt.

"Not one of your damned snakes again?" His voice was
deep, with the hint of a growl.

She laughed in her throat. "Not tonight, my jealous lord.
Didn't you feel it? Didn't you see the light that was on
us?"

"I saw you," he said.

"My lord." It was a purr. "My king. Were you Herakles