Her expression, happy a moment before, had gone slack and distraught; he asked if she was all right.
‘Don’t even say his name,’ she said. ‘You don’t know, you don’t know . . .’
‘What don’t I know?’
‘Griaule . . . God! I used to feel him in the temple. Perhaps you think that’s just my imagination, but I swear it’s true. We all concentrated on him, we sang to him, we believed in him, we conjured him in our thoughts, and soon we could feel him. Cold and vast. Inhuman. This great scaly chill that owned a world.’
Korrogly was struck by the similarity of phrasing with which the old woman Kirin and now Mirielle had referred to their apprehension of Griaule, and thought to make mention of it, but Mirielle continued speaking, and he let the matter drop.
‘I can still feel his touch in my mind. Heavy and steeped in blackness. Each one of his thoughts a century in forming, a tonnage of hatred, of sheer enmity. He’d brush against me, and I’d be cold for hours. That’s why . . .’
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’ She was trembling violently, hugging herself.
He crossed to the sofa, sat beside her, and, after hesitating for a few seconds, draped an arm about her shoulder. Her hair had the smell of fresh oranges. ‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘I can feel him still, I’ll always feel him.’ She glanced up at Korrogly and then blurted out, ‘Come to bed with me. I know you don’t like me, but it’s warmth I want, not affection. Please, I won’t . . .’
‘I do like you,’ he said.
‘No, you can’t, you . . . no.’
‘I do,’ he said, believing it as he spoke. ‘Tonight I like you, tonight you’re someone it’s possible to care about.’
‘You don’t understand, you can’t see how he’s changed me.’
‘Griaule, you mean?’
‘Please,’ she said, her arms going around his waist. ‘No more questions . . . not now. Please, just keep me warm.’
As Korrogly began his opening statement, half his mind was back in the gemcutter’s apartment with Mirielle, still embraced by her white arms, nourished by the rosy points of her breasts and her long supple legs, finding that beneath her veneer of depravity there existed a woman of virtue and sweetness, replaying in memory the joys of mastery and submission. None of this posed a distraction, but acted rather to inspire him, to urge him on to a more impassioned appeal than that he had originally contrived. Strolling alongside the jury box, stuffed with twelve pasty-faced models of good citizenship culled from an assortment of less worthy souls, he felt like a sea captain striding the deck of his ship, and the courtroom, it struck him, was essentially a cross between church and vessel, the ship of state sailing toward the coast of justice, with white walls for sails and boxy divisions of black wood holding a cargo of witnesses and jurors and the curious, and lording over all, the judge’s bench, an immense teak block carved into the semblance of dragon scales, where sat the oracular figurehead of this magical ship: the Honorable Ernest Wymer, white-haired and florid, an alcoholic old beast with a cruel mouth and tufted brows and a shiny red beak, hunched in the folds of his black-winged gown, ready to pounce upon any lawyerly mouse that should happen to stray into his field of vision. Korrogly was not afraid of Wymer; he, not the judge, was in command this day. He knew the jury’s mind, knew that they wanted to believe Griaule was the guilty party, that this suited the mystical yearning of their hearts, and with all his wiles, he set about consolidating that yearning into intent. There was urgency in his voice, yet it was neither too strident nor too subdued, perfect, a blend of power and fluency; he felt that this harmony of intent and skill stemmed from his night with Mirielle. He was not in love with her, or perhaps he was . . . but love was not the salient matter. What most inspired him was to have found something unspoiled in her, in himself, and whether that was love or merely a place left untouched by the world, it was sufficient to renew his old enthusiasms.
