Jack Whyte - The Sorcer part 1 - The Fort at River's Bend

Then had come my terrifying brush with the spectre of leprosy and the foulness of contagion. There was a binding and convincing reason for being celibate! But that had passed, with the arrival and relief of Luke's lost parchment and the shrinking size of what I had assumed to be a leper's lesion.

Amidst all these elements, there had been growing and ■ emerging the love and pride I took in young Arthur Pendragon, and the responsibility I felt for giving him all that lay within my mind and my abilities to give. I had believed that celibacy would empty my mind of all that was profane and leave me free to learn and to teach the boy. And then had come this lovely and attractive young woman Tressa.

My reactions to the merest sight of Tressa had confounded me for a time, but then I had begun to lose my fears of her, recognizing them for what they were: simple fears of rejection and of having grown too old, at forty, to be attractive to a young woman.

Beyond that, I had an illogical fear that the mere admission of being physically attracted to a woman could somehow endow that woman with power over me, and that fear persisted despite the fact that the logical part of me knew it to be untrue—Shelagh was proof of that. I also knew that being attracted by this Tressa woman was a far cry from allowing myself to be besotted by her; I knew my intellect would arm me with the means to keep myself protected from her wiles and knew, besides, that she could be no match for me in such matters. Her speech was slow and simple, her demeanour humble and submissive and her manner deferential and respectful. Her presence, therefore, might be pleasantly distracting, but it could be in no wise threatening, now that I had defined the terms within which I might deal with it.

Having settled my mind to a great degree, I turned again and walked slowly back to my quarters, where I found Tressa working still, setting the place in order against my return. I greeted her calmly, noting the pleasure with which she greeted me, and then attempted to ignore her for the time being, an effort doomed to fail because I was acutely aware of the brightness of the yellow smock she wore, and of her physical proximity.

Once I had assured her that her presence would not disturb me, I seated myself at a small table by one of the windows and busied myself with reading one of Uncle Varrus's large books, while she continued to bustle about, fulfilling the tasks set out for her by Shelagh. In so doing, however, she passed quite close to me on several occasions, and I became acutely aware of how the smell of her filled up the air between us and suffused my breathing. She had a pleasant smell, warm and clean and faintly musky with the suggestion of fresh sweat. I tried to shut it from my consciousness, but the mere awareness of it had awakened in me the realization that I sat there naked, having come from the bathhouse unclothed save for my tunic, and I found myself becoming uncomfortably engorged with lust and blank-minded with helplessness.

Tressa, of course, had no suspicion of the effect her nearness was having on me, and it was that innocence that finally enabled me to overcome my condition and once more achieve a semblance of calm. Once she saw that I was not upset or disgruntled by her presence, she began talking as she worked, prattling on in her soft Cumbrian dialect about innocuous things, and I began to find it subtly pleasant and relaxing to sit there and listen to her voice. As I had suspected from her reaction to my appearance, she had not expected my return so soon. She had been there for only a short time when I arrived, she told me at one point, shouting the words from my sleeping chamber where she was engaged in spreading fresh bedclothes on my cot, but she had almost finished now and would soon be gone, leaving me alone to recover from my journey.

As I half turned to hear her words, which came to me muffled and distorted by the doorway between us, my eyes took in the other table in the room, the main table, and now I noticed that a pile of assorted clothing, all of it mine, lay there beside a covered basket. Curious, I crossed to look more closely at the basket. Its lid opened to reveal a pincushion containing at least a score of various-sized needles and a profusion of small balls of yarn, thread and twine, all mingled with an assortment of bright-hued bits and pieces of cloth. I heard her come back into the room and move towards me, and I turned guiltily, as though she had caught me prying. She seemed unaware of my awkwardness, however, merely glancing at the pile behind me before telling me that when she had finished her first tasks, she had intended mending some of my more ill-used clothing, but that she would now wait until a more convenient time, when I was elsewhere in the fort. She moved towards the table and it suddenly seemed to me that she came looming towards me. Caught flatfooted by this unexpected approach, and incapable of speech, I moved away from her, quickly, stiffly and awkwardly, as though I feared she might attack me, and in doing so I succeeded somehow in overturning her basket, scattering brightly coloured balls of yarn all over the table and onto the floor.

Quick as a kingfisher, without a word of reproach, she bent and began scooping them up, making a lap of her skirts and dropping the balls into it as she reached and stretched to gather them, moving in a scuttling crouch that I found more erotic than erratic, revealing as it did far more of her shape than I was prepared to see. My throat swelled up with excitement and I stood transfixed, aware of a bared ankle and the swell and thrust of legs and buttocks beneath tight-stretched cloth, but incapable of removing my eyes from the sight of the hanging scoop of the bodice of her smock and the full, vibrant breasts exposed there by her posture and activity. Full knowledge of my unconfined condition came flooding back to me as I felt my loins stir and then harden rapidly, and then she caught a foot, somehow, in the fabric of her skirts and wavered, almost overbalancing and lurching close to where my phallus jutted very visibly against my tunic. I spun away from her again and strode into my sleeping chamber, swinging the door safely shut behind me and leaning back against it, hearing the thumping of my heart loud in my ears and wondering if she had seen my blatant and unambiguous arousal.

Months, now, it seemed, I had awaited this moment, only to be undone by the unforeseen clash between my own readiness and unreadiness. The fear of losing the opportunity, of frightening her off by being too importunate, loomed over me like some avenging demon. And then, still overwhelmed by panic moments later, listening with my ear against the door while my heart thudded palpably at my ribs, I heard her leave, pulling the outer door closed behind her. I leaned there, against the door, for a long time, willing my heart to slow down and attempting vainly to empty my mind of the riotous thoughts that swarmed there. When I moved out again, into the main chamber, I knew both pleasure and regret, for although I had succeeded in not alarming Tressa and damaging my own chances, I had yet lost an opportunity that might not be repeated, for Tressa was gone again, safely out of my life for the time being.

Sometime after that, when I had regained my equanimity and my sense of humour and proportion, Shelagh knocked loudly at my door and leaned inside, looking at me strangely.

"Are you well?"

"Come in," I said, squinting at her, outlined as she was against the brightness of the afternoon behind her. "What do you mean, am I well? Luke was the one who looked unwell, remember? How is he?"

She stepped inside, leaving the door ajar, and moved to lean beside the window. By now I had shed my old tunic and was dressed completely in fresh clothes. Shelagh, however, was still wearing the travelling clothes she had worn on the journey to and from Ravenglass, a suit of riding leathers fashioned of a long tunic, split to the waist on both sides and worn over soft breeches. It was modelled on my own suit of leathers, which was, in turn, modelled on the clothing worn by Publius Varrus and fashioned for him originally, prior to their wedding, by his wife, Luceiia. At first, upon seeing Shelagh riding like a man, in leather breeches, some people had been scandalized, but she had ignored their outrage, and so inured had everyone become in the interim to seeing her dressed thus that they had now lost all awareness of her sex in this particular respect.