"You may call me Kali. Others do. It's a name you would not understand. But can you understand that love is surrender?" The words coiled about his head, coruscating and empty of meaning. He shook them away and watched as she brushed a strand of hair from his face. With that simple motion, her nipples traced twin heliotrope arcs across the gossamer screen of her blouse. He examined her in disbelief, unable to find words. "When my lover lies silent, I do as I choose." Deftly she uncoiled the white silk sash from around her waist and in a single practiced motion bound it over his eyes. The room vanished. In the dream's sudden night he grew intensely aware of touch and smell. Commands came in an alien tongue, and he felt his breast 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.