THERE WAS WATER STANDING by from earlier in the evening. It was still warm. Taylor had already earned a reputation for requiring hot water at all hours of the day.
She placed the big bathing bowl on the tiles and slid the hassock close by. She would need to stand on it to reach higher than Brody’s head. From the shelf nearby, she unstopped the jar of unguent that foamed on contact with water and was lightly scented and placed it next to the bowl. “This is supposed to have some medicinal properties that I have yet to discover,” she told Brody, “but it makes great soap.”
She lifted the heavy urn of hot water and climbed onto the hassock with some difficulty, for the hem of her robe got in the way and she needed both hands to lift the urn. Then she looked at Brody where he stood by the window. “Your shower waits.”
Slowly, he padded across the tiles, his bare feet making no sound. He seemed to be weighed down by heavy thoughts. Even his movements were slow as he stripped the tunic from him. He hesitated before he stepped into the bowl, then he gingerly placed his feet on the broad base. In the moonlight the copper wrist bands flashed as he moved.
His head was bowed again.
Brody’s posture, his silence and introversion worried her. Taylor considered him as she lifted the urn and slowly poured a third of the urn over his head, turning the spout so all his hair was properly wetted.
Of course coming back to this time would have an impact on him. She had seen for herself the awful after-effects Brody’s enslavement had delivered, sixteen centuries into the future, so returning to Constantinople would be a terrible trauma.
It was just that the Brody standing before her was so different from the man she knew and loved. The Brody she knew devoured life. He laughed a great deal – usually he threw his head back and let his laughter loose with a bellow that shook his shoulders. He did everything with gusto—music, reading, dancing, making love.
Over the last three nights, in her lonely and luxurious bed, Taylor had lain awake hoping that Brody’s enthusiasm for life, plus sixteen centuries of living and the undying love of two people would give him the resiliency he needed to survive the slave quarters a second time.
Now, as she put down the urn and poured some of the ‘soap’ onto his hair, she wondered if her hope had been a way of trying to console herself for not reaching him sooner, or if she had underestimated the intimidation and soul-destruction that came with being a slave.
As Taylor reached out to plunge her fingers into the wet, tangled mess of knots and filth, to lather the soap and distribute it, Brody’s chin lifted and his hand gripped her wrist. “No,” he said flatly, his voice low.
“But surely you want clean hair?” she asked reasonably.
“I’ll do it,” he told her. “I won’t have you touching me. Not like this.” He glanced toward the divan sitting a few feet away, where piles of thick folded cloth sat. They were adequate towels. “Sit down, Taylor. Relax. You must have waited up for me to arrive, so I know you’re tired.” He grimaced. “I remember what tired is like, now. It’s not fun.”
The tears that stung her eyes were hard like bullets and she blinked furiously, trying to hide them. It would hurt to shed them and it hurt to hold them back. This wasn’t Brody, this sad, defensive man. It really was Braenden, a slave with no hope.
He detached her fingers from the gracefully curved handle of the urn, taking it from her. “Sit,” he told her.
Taylor stepped down from the hassock slowly, her own gut instincts at war with Brody’s quiet command. She moved over to the divan, but didn’t sit. Her mind was racing.
Brody had set the urn on the floor next to the bowl and was lathering the soap himself.
He had turned away from her.
A single, scalding tear did slide down her cheek and it seemed to burn all the way down. Pain was tearing at her throat.
As she watched Brody silent wash himself, she twisted her fingers together helplessly, mentally reaching for something, anything that might fix this. If only Veris were here. He would know what to do. He had nearly ten centuries of medical expertise and research lodged in his memory and his whole long lifetime’s worth of folk-remedies and plain common sense.
Veris knew Brody. He knew him inside out and upside down, in a way only possible after centuries of intimacy. Taylor had known Brody a sum total of eight pathetically short years…not nearly enough to help him now his past was catching up with him.
She swallowed back the hard, hurtful mass in her throat and looked toward the windows, where the carved stone privacy trellis was dappling the gauzy curtains with moonlight and shadow. Veris was so far away that it could still be daylight where he was.
Taylor was quite alone. She was scared, human and lacked the experience that so many years of living had given Brody and Veris.
But Brody needed help. Unlike the first time he had lived through this, she was here. Miraculously, she was here to help.
Taylor watched Brody pick up the urn to rinse the suds away, as the cool voice of reason whispered in her mind. It’s all up to you, Maggie Taylor Yates. You’re the one that has to do this. There is no one else.
The pain driving her pity tears dissolved as she realized how fundamentally alone she was. There wasn’t an Internet around to consult for moral support or stupid questions, nor was there anyone she could confide in. They would burn her as a witch or stone her to death if she breathed anything of the truth. She had to provide her own cheering squad…and Brody’s, too.
If it was up to her, so be it. She would die if she had to, to release Brody from these awful chains—both the mental and the physical ones.
As Taylor realized and accepted the situation and her own role in it, calm returned. If the worst thing that could happen would be to die to help him then the matter was very simple. She would do whatever she had to. The rest of it was simple problem solving. She was a Ph.D. and had spent her entire professional life using her mind to solve problems. This was no different.
Taylor drew in a breath and let it out, locking down her determination.
Then she picked up the big folded cloths she had been using as towels and walked back around Brody to face him. She laid one on the tiles in front of him and shook the folds out of the other and held it out. “Do you want help rinsing?” she asked, keeping her voice light and breezy, like she might have used at home in Los Angeles.
Brody lifted his chin to look at her sharply. His dark eyes swept over her, from top to toe.
That was a look she had seen many times before, that full length assessing sweep. Her breath caught. Normally, that look was followed by a kiss or arousing caress, or if he really liked what he saw with that all-encompassing gaze, Brody wasn’t above pressing her up against the nearest wall, or bending her over the closest table top and taking her, hard and fast.
“I’m fine,” he said shortly and lifted the urn for the last time. He poured the remaining water over his head and returned the urn to the floor. The handle clinked wetly against the metal cuff around his wrist.
Normal, Taylor thought. He had responded to her being normal, being Taylor of the twenty-first century, not Tyra posing as Ariadne. Of course, those sorts of reminders would pull his mind back toward their time, to when life was infinitely better than now.
She could do normal. It was safe enough, in the middle of the night and the security of her private chambers.
Taylor mentally switched language channels. She was more practiced at it now, and the flip to English came more easily than it once did. With a heft of the cloth in her hands, she said in English, “Step out onto the towel and I’ll wrap this around you. I refuse to let you put that tunic back on.”
Brody drew in a long slow breath, staring at her. “Why English?” he asked, in English.
“There’s no local word for ‘towel’ here and now,” Taylor replied lightly. “Come on, move your ass, Gallagher. You wanna eat, don’t you?”
His stomach immediately growled, loudly enough for Taylor to hear it. She grinned. “That sounds completely fucking weird coming from you.”
Brody stepped out onto the towel she had laid down for him, streaming water. He stared at her, suspicion growing in his eyes. Then he registered what she had said properly. “Food?” he repeated.
“Lots of it. Kale warned me you would probably be hungry and that the food they give you isn’t the greatest, so I have some put aside for you.”
His stomach roiled and rumbled once more and Taylor smiled as she wrapped the sheet around his waist. She hurried over and picked up another one from the divan, then tossed it to him. “Dry yourself off, then come and eat.”
She hurried through the dividing curtains into the area she had mentally tagged the living room. There were more divans, soft cushions and low tables. The area was designed for lounging around.
The large tray of meats, cheeses, fruit, bread and wine had been left on the table, under a cloth covering. Taylor carried the heavy tray over to one of the low tables crouched next to the biggest and widest divan and removed the cloth. She poured a glass of wine from the decanter, then moved even more quickly through to the area where her bed was located. It was hidden behind painted dividers with carved fretwork at the top—for nothing in Constantinople, not even the mundane, most workaday tool—went without a single filigree or curlicue of some sort. Adornment was the heart and soul of Constantinople, right along with the richest, deepest and most varied range and hues of color that Taylor had ever seen in all her travels through history.
Moving as fast as her fingers would go, Taylor searched for and found all the metal pins and brooches holding her hair up in its convoluted up-do. She dropped them into the pewter tray that sat on three legs, next to her bed, that served as a nightstand.
As soon as her hair was loose, she bent over from the waist, brushed it all forward and ran her fingers through it, straightening out the curls and waves as much as she could, and getting rid of any sign of fifth century styling.
Then she stripped her belt and robe and jewelry and dropped them all on the embroidered gilt cover over her bed. Almost naked, she bent and unfastened the ties that kept her sandals wrapped around her ankles, and slipped out of them.
Now she was completely naked.
She picked up the cloth that lay over the table by the window, after shifting the little statues and candles that sat on it. The cloth itself was almost pure white, and apart from a simple border around the edges, completely free of Byzantine decoration.
She wrapped the cloth around her body like a sarong, and tucked the corner in tight. Brody had seen her hundreds of times wearing a bath towel in a similar fashion, and more than a few times had untucked the corner and unwrapped the towel with a deep growl of appreciation. He would remember.
Then she grabbed the small jar of scented almond oil and poured some into the palm of her hand. Kale had been forced to show Taylor how to remove the heavy accentuating eye makeup a high-born woman wore. Most of the make-up was kohl-based and impossible to remove if one didn’t know the trick. Taylor carefully dabbed her fingertips into the tiny pool of oil and quickly spread the oil over her eyes and face, the thinnest of layers. Then she carefully wiped away the oil with a cloth, bringing with it any makeup and dirt that has settled there. In four days of caring for her skin in this way, Taylor’s face had become softer, with the tiny lines she had noticed starting to show around her eyes disappearing. Her skin felt wonderful.
“Taylor?” Brody called softly.
“I’ll be right there,” she replied and dropped the cloth onto the now-bare table top.
She walked back into the living room area. Brody stood by the coffee table, looking down at the food there. He wore the bath sheet around his hips, which meant that on his long legs it came down to his ankles.
“Help yourself,” Taylor told him and slid onto the divan behind the table. She patted the cushions. “Why don’t you sit while you eat? It’s more…comfortable.” She had been about to say ‘civilized’, but here and now that word had too many connotations. Brody didn’t think of himself as civilized, not deep in his heart. He thought he was only pretending to be a reasonable man, despite everything she and Veris had tried to do to convince him civility wasn’t a genetic trait, but acquired through hard lessons, just as he had acquired it. This jump back to Constantinople would be bringing that belief into question once more for Brody.
So she patted the cushion again and smiled at him encouragingly.
Brody was studying her. “You look different,” he said flatly. He spoke English still, to her relief.
“I cleaned off the gunk,” she said. “I wanted to get comfortable, too.”
He circled around the coffee table and sank onto the cushions, then turned his attention to the big tray of food once more.
Taylor picked up the glass of wine and held it out to him. “It’s very good,” she told him.
Brody reached out for the glass, staring at it with a peculiar intensity. He curled his fingers around the thick base and took it, watching the dark red contents move inside.
“You don’t want it?” she asked. “They don’t drink beer here, I’m afraid.”
Brody let out an unsteady breath that sounded like a tiny laugh. “I’ve never tasted wine,” he said. He looked at the tray of food. “Or eaten meat like that.”
Taylor rode out her shock and dismay as she coupled up Brody’s personal history with this astonishing fact. He had been ripped out of Britain when he was thirteen and shipped here to Constantinople, where he had lived the life of a slave until he had died at thirty years of age, and been made a vampire.
It was entirely possible that he had failed to taste wine before he was thirteen, despite watered wine being considered a perfectly safe and nutritional drink for children. In all his long years as a slave, wine would have been a luxury denied him. Once he was made a vampire, the opportunity to taste or sip anything passed.
Brody had spent his whole human life eating the poorest of food and that was his only memory.
Taylor picked up an apricot from the tray, and the paring knife that sat beside it. “Oh, you’re in for a treat,” she told him, slicing it in half and removing the pit. “Here.” She held the apricot halves out to him on her palm. “Before you drink the wine and ruin your taste buds, try this.”
He picked up one half and bit into it. Taylor watched, fascinated. Brody eating food seemed quite ordinary and human, but at the same time it felt strange.
Brody’s brows lifted as he chewed. He swallowed and the corner of his mouth curled up. “Apricots. That’s what your mouth tastes like. Finally, I’ve figured it out.”
Taylor’s heart squeezed. “I didn’t know you were trying to.”
“Taste is a human memory that doesn’t last all that well,” Brody told her. He frowned. “It’s probably a good thing, too. We’d go mad with the knowledge that we could never taste richness like this ever again.”
Taylor cut a slice of the hard, aged cheese. “If you think apricots are rich, you’re going to love this.” She held it out to him.
Brody reached for the cheese with no hesitation this time. As he ate, Taylor sliced and prepared mouthfuls for him. In between he sipped the wine. His first mouthful made him grimace. “This is what people have spent centuries addicting themselves to? It’s…weird.”
Taylor laughed. “Wine is a great drink. You have to drink it properly though.” She taught him how to let the wine settled on his tongue and the flavors seep into his taste buds, then draw in a breath over the top so the bouquet would hit the back of his throat.
“I’ve heard all this before,” Brody told her. “From dozens of people, some of them wine freaks with cellars the size of our house in L.A. But it never really registered until now. I guess because I knew I was never going to taste wine I just didn’t take it in.” He took another sip as Taylor held out more lamb for him to eat, and a little absorbed frown appeared between his brows.
It was the same look of concentration he had been wearing, driving the chariot.
Taylor shuddered and dismissed the thought. Instead, she plied him with more food. “You’re not used to alcohol,” she told him. “And you haven’t eaten properly for four days at least. Eat more, then finish the glass, or you’ll be drunk before you know it.”
“Or asleep,” Brody replied. “I haven’t had a lot of that lately, either.”
Brody sleeping. It was another oddity. Taylor steered around the conversational minefield by handing him the knife and standing up. “I’m going to comb your hair out before it dries in those knots. You should keep eating.”
She found the comb that Kale used to untangle her own hair, then settled herself on the divan behind Brody to comb his hair while he ate. The oil lamp was next to her and for the first time she saw what the shadows and darkness in the bathing area had hidden.
Brody’s entire back was a mass of bruises, cuts and raw wounds. Most of them were long, straight marks running diagonally across his back. They ran from his shoulders down to where the bath sheet wrapped around his hips.
Taylor covered her mouth with her hand, holding in any sound she might make, because she knew it would be a sound of horror or despair.