There was nothing in his face that she could interpret as affection or even as desire. It was the face of a high priest at the moment of offering. And she—she must be the altar, for he came towards her spontaneously.

‘Rachaela,’ he said, ‘do you want the light, or not?’

‘I want the light.’

He had come in barefoot. Now he lifted the pullover off over his head, unbuttoned the shirt and dropped it, the trousers and underpants sloughed gracefully and quickly, as if he were very practised in this. His body in the lamp and hearth light was tawny as an icon, the white changed to gold, long and thin and leanly muscled, the belly nearly concave, the ribs evident as carving. The legs were long and strong, like those of a runner, the shoulders wider than they had seemed when concealed.

The hair at his groin was blue-black, and there the serpent lay, which she knew of only from literature, a rape, and the daft little things of little boys in childhood. Like amber, the snake, soft still and quiescent; the thought of her, then, the sight of her under the covers, had not yet woken it.

Only when he was naked did he take the edge of the covers and draw them gently off her body.

She believed she lay before him as golden-white as he, the amber budded on her breasts, the fleece of her groin indigo-black, closed and secretive as his was not.

He looked at her, and she saw him come erect, the magical mechanism of the male penis, lifting and filling out to a great rod the colour of a dull sunset.

She slithered to one side of the bed, and he moved through the gilded air, angling his body down to hers. He lay beside her and she knew a primal terror, old as hills—older far than the Scarabae.

‘I’m afraid.’

‘Yes.’

Supporting himself on one elbow he leaned over her. His face was grave, composed. A dual creature, the rod of appetite and the priest’s face. He touched her lips with one finger, then bent his head and put his mouth against hers. With the other hand as he kissed her this chaste cool kiss, he reached back and shook free something from behind his neck. A shower of black rain. His hair, coming unbound, washed over her, over her breasts, like a deluge of rough silk.

‘Your hair,’ she said, ‘your hair,’ and reached up and took sliding handfuls of it, and the kiss changed, became the kiss of before.

The terror flared up and engulfed her. It was not terror.

His mouth left hers. She turned after it and a line of his hair, flavoured with night, ran across her lips. She bit at it as his mouth strayed down across her throat and found her breasts.