Julian Rathbone - Kings of Albion

He pulled off his sandals and his voluminous habit, leaving them on the deck at the water's edge before stepping down between the lions and into the pool.

Most of what light there was was in front of him and, bouncing off the water, as sharp as diamonds, made only a dark silhouette of his figure, yet one sunbeam, catching the haze of tiny droplets its heat sucked up, fell between us. A moment or two passed therefore while my mind struggled with the vision my one good eye was feeding it. It is extraordinary, is it not? how the brain refuses to yield to the evidence of the senses when confronted with stimuli that contradict its expectations. In such circumstances it will swear sour is sweet, and hot cold. And on this occasion that those softly rounded shoulders, the waist that really was a waist above broad dimpled hips and generous buttocks belonged to a man.

It gave up the pretence when she stooped a little and, in a gesture that somehow contained the essence of femininity, scooped water over the breasts I could not yet see before wading into the centre of the pool where the water came up to her armpits. She turned and I could see that her brown body was indeed female and, in a flash, I recognised Uma, the – I was about to say goddess – but the young woman, sister of Suryan, who had given me hospitality on my first night in the City of Victory.

‘Ali?' How to describe the way she sang those two syllables?

Her voice caressed the air and water and yet it was a call, a question. 'Ali ben Quatar Mayeen? Don't be shy. Please come in with me.'

I released the hilt of my stiletto, leaving it wrapped in the folds of my loincloth, limped forward out of the alcove and stood at the top of the steps, between the two lions. With my good hand I gripped the right ear of one. My heart was beating like the wings of a newly caged bird, and I'll tell you why. I had not seen, in the flesh, an entirely naked woman for twenty years, not since the day dear Haree's mother told me she was with child.

Uma was beautiful and whatever she had in the way of what a purist would call flaws, such as a mole or two on her back, gave her the perfection she would have otherwise lacked – they conferred upon her the individuality, the thisness that shields true beauty from the dullness that measures itself against an ideal. In those moles lay mutability and mortality, the twin pillars on which the lintel of life is placed. Ah. Does that surprise you? My way of life and physical limitations, taken with a predilection to speculation, which began with the question 'How can this be?' have led me to read and talk with great minds.

The austerity of her shaven scalp was now mitigated by a thin pelt which lent her head a vulnerability that immediately invited a gentle caress. Her features seemed more marked: her eyes, pools of darkness shot with green, seemed larger, her cheeks less prominent, her red-ochre lips more full. Moreover, when I had seen her before she had been painted, her eyelids green or blue and silvered, her lips carefully outlined and filled in, her anus and neck had been hung with bangles and chains of precious stones and gold, all of which had contributed to an attraction that invited fantasy but precluded tenderness.

She moved towards me through the water, from the deepest part to the shallows, passing through sun-splashes that gilded the darkness of her skin to nightlike shadow and into light again. The water rippled first like blue-black velvet then liquid gold against her rounded breasts, her chest, the gentle mound of her belly, her sex and her thighs. Some drops remained to twinkle like diamonds in the darkness of her hair. "Come on. Come in.' Her hand unfolded towards me, the paler palm upwards, soliciting nearness.

For a second the water, though warm, struck cold to my ankle as it took my foot in a noose and I allowed myself a short shiver before my feet found the shelving bottom of the pool.

Uma had moved away and backwards as I descended but now she came forward again, the water surged between us, and she folded me into a clinging embrace with her cheek against my chest. I realised that she was shuddering, but I sensed that I was not the cause.

Then she stood back a pace and did something no one had ever done before, not even the whores I frequented in the years before I married Haree's mother, and which she could not do because she was blind and I was loath to prompt her. Uma placed her finger in the hollow between my ribcage and hip, the deep hollow starred with loose skin where the Sunnite's scimitar had finished its work sixty years before. Slowly, so the skin crept beneath her touch, and I shuddered with her, she moved her finger up the jagged line through the valley the steel had carved in my ribs, across my still angled collar-bone, up over my cloven chin and split lips, across my cheek and into the sightless socket of my eye. Then she laughed, the sound like bells reverberating quietly beneath that egg-shaped vault.

She came in closer again and I could smell the cinnamon fragrance of her skin beneath the sharper odours of the water, which rose, warmed by the earth's inner heart, from a deep spring far below, and slipped her hand between my arms and torso, high up almost in my armpits. There was awkwardness now as my twisted left arm got in the way, but she ran her hands down my flanks to my hip-bones and then up again, but on the way she let me feel her nails and provoked a sudden shock of desire. She smiled up at me. put her hands on my shoulders, and I felt the old bald man below thicken at last against her belly and, with a sense of sacrilege almost, trespass anyway, I put my hands – both of them, the withered claw as well – on her sides so that my forearms could feel the swell of her breasts, which were heavy but firm, and then the comfort beyond the comfort of apples as they pressed into my chest.

Her hands slipped up my neck, her fingertips explored its cord-like sinews, plucked teasingly at the loose skin, pulled the pendulous lobes of my ears, ran up the nape of my neck and over the wispy grey hair I keep well hidden beneath my old turban. The laugh came again, hardly more than a breath. 'Ali, how strong are you? Let's see.'

Her caress became a hug as she hung round my neck and launched herself upwards, spilling water from her flanks. Her thighs circled my waist and her ankles locked in the small of my back, and though she was not heavy and the water was buoyant, I was afraid I'd topple forward.

'Hold me, stupid.'

There was only one way I could – by placing my good hand under her buttocks and my bad one round her waist in the small of her back. She wriggled so that my fingers could not help but slip between and find the dark, warm moistness, not of the pool but of her secret places. Her shuddering faded now, and she placed her chin on my shoulder and nibbled my ear, then wriggled so her breasts parted from my chest with a delicious yet comic squelching noise, as when one sucks in one's cheeks through pursed lips.

'Ali, you need a wash, you know? Put me down over there, where the soap is.'

I had not noticed, but now I did, that a ledge ran round the pool just below the projecting rim but above the surface of the water. On it, not far from the steps where the water came only to my knees, there was a small alabaster flask and a sponge, perhaps one of the sponges we had bought from the boat-boy on our way up the Red Sea. I placed her so that she was sitting on the rim and handed her the flask and the sponge. The flask contained a thick, slippery cream, a dollop of which she eased out on to the sponge, which she grasped in the fingers of her right hand. 'Come closer. Between my knees.'

Imperious in the way only a young and beautiful woman can be.

And she dabbed the stuff, which was pearly white and scented with wild lavender, on my shoulders, chest and stomach. 'Closer still, I can't reach.'