“Do you mean that if I take your favors, you can’t give them?”
“A slave has none to give. They are already forfeit.”
Straightway I was delivered from an evil as though I had prayed, and my heart leaped in joy. I kissed her soft lips again with intense pleasure, but I did not ask her to reciprocate or to make any kind of an answer. Perhaps she took this for the kind of fairness that English people like, and wanted to reward it. At least the lingering tension went out of her body as it nestled against mine.
As I fed with deepening hunger at her warming mouth, she was being instructed by another master. Her lips rounded out with the surge of her own blood, and the changes in her glowing eyes revealed the ebb and flow of her maiden passion. And I, a liberal Venetian, would teach her the arts of love.
“I didn’t know that wooers——” she began when she had held her breath a long time.
“Don’t English swains woo their sweethearts in that way?” I asked.
“No, they are too bashful. And it’s a good thing they don’t, because a peasant youth might prevail over a daughter of the manor.”
I had thought for a moment that she was jesting and this might change the scene. Truly she was not guilty even of a childish artifice. The magic grew apace. Soon I had lowered her shift until its top was around her waist, and the tapered slimness there caused it to hang loose in enthralling invitation.
“Wait, my lord,” she said, holding my hand.
“If you like.”
“Perhaps you can do all you desire, but I’ll not be the same.”
“I spoke of that, and allowed for it,” I said.
“Will you be the same? I ask the question in my need.”
“Do you mean that we may fall in love with each other?”
“If we did, what would happen?”
“I’d leave you your virginity—as it’s counted in the market place—and sell you for a thousand pieces of gold.”
She let go of my hand. “I suppose that’s all I need to know.”
“Didn’t you know it before? I thought I’d told you. If not in those same words——”
“You did tell me, but tonight I’d begun to doubt it. I thought it would not be easy for you to let me go. You seemed so happy in making me happy.”
“Since I’ve already given my heart, it must be the imitation of love. Still, I’ll act as though it were real as long as the game lasts. Let your robe fall.”
“Why not? I must do so for any buyer in the market. What may a slave expect but imitation love—imitation life?”
For the first time in my hearing her voice was slavelike, and so was the expression on her face. With downcast eyes and mechanical motions she slipped off the garment and hung it over the gunwale. To do this last she emerged from the partial shadow of the canopy into the moonlight.
Then a change came over her, arresting my attention. It was the effect of some swift revival of her spirit, but what had caused it I did not know. Perhaps the change was merely the sight of her body, pearllike in hue almost to the semblance of iridescence, slight, beautifully feminine, but intimating a kind of strength no man can attain or understand. She did not withdraw into the shadow: I thought she was too proud. Her head raised, her face lifted, her eyes seemed to be seeking some beacon in the sky.
“I told you I’m a good walker,” she said quietly. “I didn’t tell you I’m a good swimmer, too. I wouldn’t be here if I weren’t.” She turned to me, unashamed of either me or herself. “Follow me, Marco. Keep pace with me if you can. The imitation of love is only lust, and we’ll drown it in the sea.”
3
In Miranda’s manifold aspects of beauty, there was none more telling than these glimpses of her whiteness in the dark, moonlit sea. At her strokes its sheen broke into myriad gleamings. She swam as serenely as a heron flies.
I could not remember when I could not swim. My mates had played in and out of the canals as children in dry-land cities play in and out of the streets. Stronger of limb, I could easily overtake her present gait, but I wondered if I could keep pace with her in a long jaunt. I was a splasher and a thruster, while she appeared to insinuate herself through the heavy water with mermaid ease. For the moment I did not accept her challenge and kept to her silver wake. Her rhythmic movements delighted my eyes.
Gaining slowly, I drew within ten feet of her. Then I became aware of a little something wrong, a flaw in the perfection of the adventure, which I had not yet identified. It was a common experience with me to feel a fall of spirits before discovering its cause. Suddenly my gaze riveted on Miranda’s right foot. I saw clearly now what I had seen inattentively for several seconds—a black mark on the white sole. It was of crescent shape and in better light would be blood-red.
Stroking a little faster, I slowly gained until I came abreast of my companion. Thus she had ceased to be my slave in a single moment in this still dim world of moonlight and wide waters; and her half-glimpsed nakedness did not mean what it had meant before. I had thought to forget the dreadful mark, but instead it wrought upon me with greater force; it too had a different meaning for me, deeper and more portentous. It took the center of my mind. I began to perceive that it was the central fact of the present situation; because of it, this was not merely a moonlight adventure, but what I believed was a stroke of fate. The journey was not an aimless one—Miranda and I were bound for somewhere.
My mind and heart open to mystery, no longer afraid to confess it, I caught the signal of Fate in the shriek of a sea gull. It was not a common sound at this late hour and I searched for the bird in the dim sky, wondering at its trouble. I did not find it, but I found a shadow on the water some fifty fathoms distant. Emerging from reverie, I recognized it as an islet, not more than two acres in extent, known to shipping by the unromantic name of Sea Pig’s Wallow. Sea pigs were of course porpoise; perhaps a dying porpoise had been stranded in a shoal here before the land rose. This could have happened a century ago; the silt from the rivers built slowly but surely, and the very Rialto was its handiwork. Sea Pig’s Wallow was a mile or so off the ship lanes, and since it appeared to be only a reed bank common along these shores, it was as forsaken by human kind as a barren reef in mid-ocean. But if gulls were nesting there—which I now believed—it must have solid ground.
“Let’s try to land,” I said.
She did not reply at once, only swam toward the islet. When the water shoaled to waist-deep she found firm footing on the weedy bottom and turned and faced me.
“Is that a command?” she asked.
“No. You can take it as a request.”
“We’re already hidden from the world, and there we can’t hide from each other.”
“I don’t want to any more.”
“Then what will we find there, Marco?”
“Maybe I’ll find truth. That’s what I want—and need. Until I do, I can’t set a course.”
“The truth of—what?”
“Who you are. Why you are a slave. What the brand is that you wear.”
“I told you those were my secrets——”
“I want to know them. I think it is for your good as well as mine.”
“There are no buyers here—and I am naked.”
“That will help me to find the truth. I can never find it by hiding from temptation. Are you afraid?”
“No. I once was brought onto a ship deck nearly naked. I was afraid then, and with full cause, and after that——”
She stopped because her throat filled, but she continued to look at me with tear-filled eyes.
“Do you want me to promise——?”
“No. I’ll ask for nothing that’s not my due as a slave. It was the agreement I made.”
I led the way to a beach of well-packed silt; then there was knee-high grass as soft as meadow clover. Gulls rose in pale flocks, shrieking their protests at our invasion. Miranda followed me, glimmering in the moonlight.