Jack Whyte - The Saxon Shore

"I know. I saw him before I came here. I went looking for you, but found Ludmilla instead."

As I spoke, the inner door opened and Ludmilla herself entered, carrying a jug of wine. Both of us blinked at her and started to rise. She raised a hand. "Please, stay as you are. I only bring this." She placed the jug on the table against the wall and left as quietly as she had entered. My voice started to stop her from leaving, but my tongue, or some other part of me, would not permit the utterance of the words. I subsided, blinking owlishly at the closed door that shut her from my sight. Luke blew out his breath in an explosive rush. He pushed himself erect from his couch and crossed to the table, where he refilled his goblet before bringing the jug to mine.

"Well, Caius Merlyn, what think you of my student?"

"Ludmilla?" I thought about that for a moment and then smiled. "She strikes me as being a wondrous fine student."

"No, Cay, she is an excellent student, a gifted student, perhaps a divinely inspired student. . . but a mere student, nonetheless. Her wondrousness is of a different order. As you have noticed, she is a wondrous woman."

"What d'you mean, 'As I have noticed'?" I felt myself flush, and was embarrassed that I should.

"What do I mean?" He laughed aloud. "Come, Cay, admit it, you are taken with her. A blind man could see that, and why should you not be?"

"Nonsense!" The denial emerged terse and angry-sounding, and the sound of it wiped the laughter from his face. He straightened up, languidly.

"Oh, then I beg your pardon, Caius Merlyn," he drawled, making no attempt to hide the mockery in his tone, and I found myself growing angrier, even though I knew I had no cause and was overreacting beyond logic.

"Fine, then," I snapped. "My pardon is extended—graciously," I added, in a gentler tone, breathing deeply, fighting for composure. "I find Ludmilla admirable, simply because of the terms in which you have spoken of her, but I have no special awareness of her as a woman."

"No special awareness. . . I see. You find her undesirable?"

"Yes!" Far too abrupt, I told myself immediately, and then began again. "No, that is untrue. I find her very . . . attractive, I suppose would be the word, were I attracted to her." Lucanus looked down at his cup, masking his face with his free hand. "Besides," I went on, "I have no allure for her. She is your student, your devotee." I straightened in my own seat now, drawing a deep breath. "What do you plan for her?"

He lowered his hand from his face and raised his goblet in my direction, a slight smile on his lips. "Plan for her? What do you mean? Or should I take that merely as it emerged? I plan, if anything, that she shall become a gifted surgeon, woman though she be. God knows, she has the gifts and the abilities to make me proud of having taught her."

" Taught her? Is that all?"

His smile seemed to grow wider. "All? What more could there be?" His pause was brief, but I sensed a change in the direction of his thoughts. "Caius, when we first met, you did not like me. You told me so in no uncertain words, do you recall?"

I did, and nodded my acknowledgment. He sniffed. "Why did you feel that way, can you remember?"

I shook my head, recalling it clearly. "I was an idiot, young and intransigent, arrogant and conceited. I thought I knew everything there was to know of men and life. It struck me that you had no sense of humour; that you were staid and pompous; humourless. Yes, that was it."

He nodded, looking into his cup. "Hmm! Quite natural, I suppose. It was a mutual thing. I found you equally distasteful, although I never told you so. And yet, as time progressed, and circumstances brought us together more and more, our antipathy changed to something vastly different. We became friends."

I grimaced, stretching the skin around my mouth and eyes, trying to shake off the wine haze. "So?" I asked. "What has that to do with Ludmilla?"

"Nothing at all, and everything. How long have we been friends now?"

I thought about that. "Five years? Six, perhaps seven."

Something in his eyes, something enigmatic, alerted me to the import of what he would say next, yet when they came his words caught me unprepared. "Seven. And how often have you known me to consort with women?"

I shrugged, puzzled. "Seldom. Never, in fact."

" That is correct." He nodded. "Now tell me, have you ever wondered about that?"

"No," I said, and then paused, frowning. "At least, not until I found you at the campsite with Ludmilla. Then I wondered."

"As well you might, and should have." He shrugged, made a tiny face, sipped his wine and then sat back against the couch. "Caius, my friend, I, as a man, have little use for women."

I felt something sag within me, some bracing, deep within my being, that had been stressed with the anticipation of bearing a different weight from that which it now felt. Luke watched me, that same enigmatic smile playing about his mouth.

"Does that dismay you, Cay?"

I merely shook my head, unable to articulate a response. His smile grew wider.

"You have loved a woman, Cay, and found happiness therein. I never have, but then, I have never sought what you sought and found. It is not in me." He voiced each of those five words separately, leaving their emphasis to fall upon my ear like five clear notes upon a harpist's lyre, then leaned forward quickly, his eyes fastened upon mine as consternation bloomed across my face. "Wait, Cay!" he said, before I could respond. "Before you say a word, or think a thought, consider this: the man from whom you have just heard those words is your close friend Lucanus."

I sat back, leaning away from him, struggling to keep the disgust that roiled inside me from showing upon my face.

"What difference does that make?"

He seemed unruffled, but I detected something, a settling, a guardedness descend about his eyes. "Difference, Cay? What difference should it make? None at all. I have not changed in any way since we began to speak of this." He drank again, unhurriedly and naturally. "I have not changed in any way since first we met, or since we became friends. I am myself. Lucanus the physician. Legionary Surgeon. Your friend. I have merely admitted that there is no intimate place for women in my life."

I could no longer sit still and face him. I rose to my feet, feeling the drunkenness falling away from me as though I had been doused with cold water. Stooping, I placed my goblet on the tabletop in front of me and then stepped away from him, my eyes sweeping around the walls of this familiar room as though seeking an anchor, a point of reference from which I could regain my lost perspective.

"How can it not make a difference, Luke?" I barely recognized my own voice. "There is a vast difference."

"In what?" I heard the challenge in his voice.

"In everything!"

"You mean in your opinion, do you not?"

"Yes, I do, since you push me to admission. It is unnatural, it seems to me, to say what you have just said. How can a man be natural, if he has no place for women in his life?"

"Unnatural? I said no intimate place, Cay, not no place."

"Place, space, need, desire, they all boil down to the same thing in terms of men and women, Luke. The need for intimacy exists in all of us. It is an inescapable part of life, one of man's primal urgencies. In normal men, it demands the closeness of a woman."

"And therefore men untouched by such demands must be unnatural. Is that what you are saying?"

"Of course it is!"

"Of course it is. Why then, you are unnatural."

The enormity of that left me speechless for a moment. I was unnatural, when he had just confessed to being homosexual? He pressed on.

"Ludmilla is a beautiful woman, by anyone's criteria. She is young, strong, lovely, healthy, intelligent, articulate and free of encumbrances, and yet you feel no attraction to her. Even worse, it seems to me, you are prepared to fight against the mere suggestion you might find her pleasing. That, my friend, is unnatural."