"It's Dora."
"I know," I said, willing her to ignore it. "Annika will see to her."
"No, the child's sick. She has a fever."
"She has a cold, that's all. My problem is more urgent."
She ignored me for a moment, head cocked, straining to hear, but the cry was not repeated, and at length she relaxed and returned her attention to me.
"Problem? You have a problem? What problem?" She moved her body delightfully, then. "Oh, that problem?"
I sensed her smile as she moved in the darkness beneath me.
"Well, my love, that one is easily dealt with." She reached down towards her waist and pulled her skirts higher, then seemed to flex her entire body and wrap it around me, gripping me with her thighs and grasping me by the ears as she pulled my face down and filled my mouth with her hot, thrusting tongue. I felt her belly writhe and rise to meet me, her body opening and engulfing me like the hot waters of a bath, and I exploded, losing all awareness of everything except the crashing roars of ecstasy in my head. Then, while I was still spent and gasping, I felt Luceiia move beneath me and away from me, slipping her body free from mine.
"Don't go to sleep, I want more," she whispered.
I rolled onto my side. "Where are you going?" But I knew, and she was already gone. The lover had merely abetted, not replaced, the mother.
I lay there for a long time, recapturing my senses, and then I rolled off the bed and adjusted my clothing so that I could stand comfortably before crossing to the window and opening the shutters. It was a warm, mellow, late-June night and it bore no signs of the torrential rain that had poured down for so long earlier. I hitched up my robe and threw one leg across the sill and perched there, feeling the coldness of the stone against my naked skin and listening to the sounds of the early night as I thought of the pleasures I had found in the woman I had married. My loins were empty, almost achingly drained, and I luxuriated in the joy of satisfaction, idly attempting to recall the furious sensations so recently stirred up in me by my lust. But that was fruitless, of course, since our minds and bodies are no more capable of remembering fleeting pleasure than sudden pain, and I soon became distracted by the sounds out in the night. I could hear voices, nearby, man and woman, though I could discern no words, strain as I might, before they moved off and died away and a cacophony of barking dogs sprang up to fill the night with chaos and comfort. And then, somewhere far off, a nightingale began to sing, and I sat for a long time, entranced by the beauty of the sound, lost in a land of fantasy that knew no rhyme or reason until a drunken voice broke out beneath me, startling me with its suddenness, bellowing a tuneless song that spluttered into silence and was followed by the sound of a body falling heavily, and then more silence. The nightingale began to sing again and I shifted restlessly, moving my now-cold buttocks in complaint against the harshness of the stone window-sill. I had not heard Luceiia return, but suddenly she was behind me, running her fingers through my hair and breathing gently on the soft skin at my neck. And, all at once, the passions that I had sought in vain to recall came back to me, overwhelming in their urgency. I withdrew my leg from the cool night air and returned to our bedside, my hands, my lips, my awareness filled with the reality of Luceiia, and this time, we took the time to remove our clothes before offering our nakedness to one another. Our coupling now was wondrous and filled with love and leisure, the joining of two lovers who enjoyed perfect familiarity each with the other's body. We melted together, moving in loving fidelity and reaching that peak together that leaves both partners hanging between life and death, knowing that happiness is achievable on either side of the divide.
And suddenly it was I who was raised, tensed on one elbow, my head cocked to hear again the alien sound that had jerked me back from the edge of sleep.
"Publius? What is it? What's wrong?"
"Shh! Listen! What's that noise?"
"What noise?"
I sat up, my face pointed towards the open window-shutters. "That noise! Listen!"
It came again, a man's voice, raised in a shout of panic, faint and far off, smothered by distance, but now taken up and repeated by another, nearer, and then another and several more. I leaped from the bed and ran to the window, leaning out, straining my ears, and heard the dreaded word, "Fire!"
"Fire," I said, over my shoulder to Luceiia. "They're raising the alarm. There's a fire." I could see nothing, could smell no smoke, but my guts churned in apprehension. "Quick! Light a lamp." I began scurrying to find my clothes in the darkness, dragging them on somehow and running from the room before Luceiia was able to find the tinder-box.
I emerged from the main door to find the courtyard already filled with running bodies and saw a horseman thunder into the yard and head straight for me. He saw me and leaped down from his horse's back, almost falling at my feet. I grabbed him and held him erect.
"What, man? What is it? Where's the fire?"
"The granaries," he gulped, drawing a deep breath. "The granaries, Commander, up on the hill! Four of them are in flames."
"Four of them? Damnation! Where were the guards? Are they all blind up there?"
One granary alight was a tragedy; four meant catastrophe. We would be hard-pressed to save enough food for the coming winter. I gripped him firmly by the shoulder and seized his horse's bridle in my other hand.
"I'm taking your horse. Give me a leg up, quickly."
He hoisted me up cleanly, and I fought for a second to control the animal, which resented having someone new leap onto its back so soon after shedding one rider. Finally I brought it under restraint and swung it around in the direction I wanted to go.
"Summon every man in the Colony," I yelled at the rider. "Every soldier, every colonist. Get them up to the hilltop as quickly as they can run. Who's fighting the fire?"
"Only the soldiers who were on duty up there. There's no one else nearby."
"Damn and blast! I'm going up there now. Get the others on the road as quickly as you can. Tell them it's going to be a hungry winter if they're slow." I put my heels to the horse, and as soon as we were on the pathway that rounded the south-west end of the villa I saw the baleful, smoky glare of the fire on the hilltop ahead of me.
The hours that followed are hazy in my memory, so intense was the frenzy with which we fought the blaze. It burned with an ugly, sullen fury, refusing to be mastered, its roots smouldering deep within the piled banks of dried grain. I remember clearly, however, that I found signs, early on in the struggle, that the burning piles had been soaked with oil before being set alight; around the edges of the conflagrations, there were scatterings of grain, kicked away from the flames by the first discoverers of the catastrophe, and they were glued into clumps, held together by the viscous, flammable stuff poured over them by the incendiary madman who had done this.
That knowledge, that there was a madman among us, startled me into realizing that there might well be no men at all left down at the villa, and that this madman, whoever he was, would almost certainly not be up here at the fire.
The man working beside me was Erasmus Sita, a young giant and a decurion in our colonial forces. Sita was huge and strong, a full head taller than me with a mighty breadth of shoulders. I tugged him by the arm and motioned him to step away with me, back from the noise of the fire and the smoke. He leaned close to hear what I had to say. I ordered him to select ten of the youngest, strongest soldiers he could find and take them at the double, forced-march pace, back down to the villa as quickly as he could. He was to find Luceiia and make sure that she was in no danger, and then he and his people were to remain at the villa, standing guard and at the ready for anything that might develop. I saw the puzzlement and curiosity in his eyes and I waved towards the fire.