The Moghul

and thighs brushed lightly by a new, pungent fragrance.
    "We have cloaked you in petals of spikenard, to banish the sight of your unshaven body. A feringhi knows so little of what pleases a woman."
    He felt a light brush across his parted lips, and then her eyelashes, stiffened dark with antimony, trilled a path downward over his skin, to his nipples. The hardened lashes stroked each nipple in turn with rapid flutters, until the skin tightened almost to bursting. An excruciating sensitivity burned through him, but still the lashes fluttered, determinedly, almost unendurably, until his aroused tips touched the aching portals of pain. Then he sensed a tongue circle each nipple in turn, searching out the one most ripe.
    He felt her kneel above him, surrounding him with open thighs that clasped his chest. The room fell expectantly silent. Then, as an unknown syllable sounded somewhere above him, he felt the nipple of his right breast seized in the lock of a warm, moist grasp. The surrounding thighs rocked gently at first, but slowly increased their rhythm in time with the sound of breath. Suddenly he felt her body twist lightly and another tip, hardened as that on his chest, began to trace the nipple's swollen point. Her thighs were smooth and moist as she pressed in with spiraling, ever more rapid intensity. He found himself deeply conscious of her rhythms and the hard cadence of breath. He reached for the strength to rip the silk from his eyes, to end the dream's tantalizing dark. But strength was not there. Or time.
    Before he could stir, he sensed the hardened tip shudder. Again a grasp took his nipple and worked it with measured spasms, until the room's austere silence was cut by her sharp intake of breath, timed to match a single insistent contraction that seemed to envelope the whole of his breast. He felt her seize his hands in her own, and although he could see nothing, in his mind there grew a vision of her eyes at that moment. Then there came a sound, partially stifled in her throat, but not before it had found the gilded walls and returned, annealed to a glassy relic of release.
    He felt her slowly withdraw, but then her mouth took his breast, till it had drawn away the musk. At last, perhaps to signify repletion, she lightly brushed his lips with the tip of her tongue.
    "You have pleased me." Her voice was quiet now, almost a whisper. "Now we will please each other."
    A hand worked at his loins, methodically applying a viscous, harshly scented oil.
    "Would you could see with my eyes. The lingam of the fabled Shiva was never garlanded such as this, or anointed so lovingly."
    Then her voice turned harsh as she spoke short staccato commands in an unknown tongue. Bangles sounded and silk rustled as the room emptied. Now he caught a new scent, the harsh smell he remembered from the box the governor had offered.
    "I will tell you my secret." She whispered close to his ear. "There is no more exciting way to experience the ecstasy of love than with affion , the essence of the poppy. But I have a way to receive it no one else knows. It is like the burst of a lightning stroke. Its power envelopes the senses."
    He felt her smooth a thick paste along the sides of his phallus, and sensed a tingle as she clasped it carefully with both hands. Again she moved above him, but curiously there was no touch of her body. Only the presence of her scent.
    A tight ring seemed to circle his flesh, and he felt the weight of her rounded buttocks slide down onto his thighs.
    He startled upward in shock and disbelief. Never will I . . .
    "You must lie still, my love. In your surrender, only I may have my will."
    She began at once to move above his thighs, and again muted sounds struggled stillborn in her throat. With deliberate regularity her rhythm mounted, while an overwhelming sensation spread upward through his body. Slowly he felt his new resolve slipping from him.
    The convulsions started in his lower thighs, as muscles tightened involuntarily. And then the precipice grew near and he was at its edge and he was falling. He felt the surge, as though drawn out by the twist of her buttocks. Then again and again, each spasm matched by her own as she worked to envelop him completely. He was scarcely aware of her nails fixed in his breasts. At that instant he seemed to drift apart from his body and observe mutely as it was consumed by its own sensations. Until numbness washed over him, stilling his sense.
    As he lay in exhaustion his mind