Birds of Prey - Smith Wilbur - Страница 29

• Предыдущая
• 29/228
• Следующая

Just before sunset Hal called a halt, and they rowed back towards the anchored galleon. They were still a hundred yards from her when, on an impulse, Hal stood up in the stern and stripped off his stinking slime-coated clothes. Stark mother naked he balanced on the thwart, and called to Aboli, "Take her alongside and unload the catch. I will swim from here." He had not bathed in over two months, since last they had anchored in the lagoon, and he longed for the feel of cool clear water on his skin. He gathered himself and dived overboard. The men at the galleon's rail shouted ribald encouragement and even Sir Francis paused and watched him indulgently.

"Let him be, Captain. He's still a carefree boy," said Ned Tyler.

"It's just that he's so big and tall that we sometimes forget that." Ned had been with Sir Francis for so many years that he could be forgiven such familiarity.

"There's no place for a thoughtless boy in the guerre de course. This is man's work and it needs a hard head on even the most youthful shoulders or there'll be a Dutch noose for that thoughtless head." But he made no effort to reprimand Hal as he watched his naked white body slide through the water, supple and agile as a dolphin.

Katinka heard the commotion on the deck above, and raised her eyes from the book she was reading. It was a copy of Francois Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel which had been printed privately in Paris with beautifully detailed erotic illustrations, hand-coloured and lifelike. A young man she had known in Amsterdam before her hasty marriage had sent it to her. From close and intimate experience, he knew her tastes well. She glanced idly through the window and her interest quickened. She dropped the book and stood up for a better view.

MevroU, your husband, "Zelda warned her.

"The devil with my husband," said Katinka, as she stepped out onto the stern gallery and shaded her eyes against the slanting rays of the setting sun, The young Englishman who had captured her stood in the stern of a small boat, not far across the quiet lagoon waters. As she watched he stripped off his soiled and tattered clothing, until he stood naked and unashamed, balancing with easy grace on the gunwale.

As a young girl she had accompanied her father to Italy.

There she had bribed Zelda to take her to see the collection of sculptures by Michelangelo, while her father was meeting with his Italian trading partners. She had spent almost an hour of that sultry afternoon standing before the statue of David. Its beauty had aroused in her a turmoil of emotion. It was the first depiction of masculine nudity she had ever looked upon, and it had changed her life.

Now she was looking at another David sculpture, but this one was not of cold marble. Of course, since their first encounter in her cabin she had seen the boy often. He dogged her footsteps like an over-affectionate puppy. Whenever she left her cabin he appeared miraculously, to moon at her from afar. His transparent adoration afforded her only the mildest amusement, for she was accustomed to no less from every man between the ages of fourteen and eighty. He had barely warranted more than a glance, this pretty boy, in baggy, filthy rags. After their first violent meeting, the stink of him had lingered in her cabin, so pungent that she had ordered Zelda to sprinkle perfume to dispel it. But, then, she knew from bitter experience that all sailors stank for there was no water on the ship other than for drinking, and little enough of that.

Now that the lad had shed his noisome clothing, he had become a thing of striking beauty. Though his arms and face were bronzed by the sun, his torso and legs were carved in pure unsullied white. The low sun gilded the curves and angles of his body and his dark hair tumbled down his back. His teeth were very white in the tanned face, and his laughter so musical and filled with such zest that it brought a smile to her own lips.

Then she looked down his body and her mouth opened. The violet eyes narrowed and became calculating. The sweet lines of his face were deceiving. He was a lad no longer. His belly was flat, ridged with fine young muscle like the sands of a wind-sculpted dune. At its base flared a dark bush of crisp curls, and his rosy genitals hung full and weighty, with an authority that those of Michelangelo's David had lacked.

When he dived into the lagoon, she could follow his every movement beneath the clear water. He came to the surface and, laughing, flung the sodden hair from his face with a toss of his head. The flying droplets sparkled like the sacred nimbus of light around the head of an angel.

He struck out towards where she stood, high in the stern, gliding through the water with a peculiar grace that she had not noticed he possessed when clothed in his canvas tatters. He passed almost directly under where she was but did not look up at her, unaware of her scrutiny. She could make out the knuckles of his spine flanked by ridges of hard muscle that ran down to merge with the deep crease between his lean, round buttocks, which tightened erotically with every kick of his legs, as though he were making love to the water as he passed through it.

She leaned out to follow him with her eyes, but he swam out of her view around the stern. Katinka pouted with frustration and went to retrieve her book. But the illustrations in it had lost their appeal, paling against the contrast of real flesh and glossy young skin.

She sat with it open on her lap and imagined that hard young body all white and glistening above her and those tight young buttocks bunching and changing shape as she dug her sharp fingernails into them.

She knew instinctively that he was a virgin she could almost smell the honey sweet odour of chastity upon him and felt herself drawn to it, like a wasp to an overripe fruit. It would be her first time with a sexual innocent. The thought of it added spice to his natural beauty.

Her erotic daydreams were aggravated by the long period of her enforced abstinence and she lay back and pressed her thighs tightly together, beginning to rock gently back and forth in her chair, smiling secretly to herself.

Hal spent the next three nights camped on the beach below the heads. His father had Hplaced him in charge of ferrying the cannon ashore and building the stone emplacements to house them, overlooking the narrow entrance to the lagoon.

Naturally Sir Francis had rowed across to approve the sites his son had chosen, but even he could find no fault with Hal's eye for a field of fire that would rake an enemy ship seeking to pass through the heads.

• Предыдущая
• 29/228
• Следующая