Beneath an Opal Moon (33 page)

“Not yet.” She put her arms around him and squeezed. “And anyway, I'll never take this off no matter what anyone else gives me. It's a reminder of too many happy days.”

He would never remember the funeral with any degree of clarity. It was as if his conscious mind had pulled a misty curtain across that time so that now, even in dreams, it had a vagueness, as if he had never been present at all at the actual ceremony.

Afterward, as was the Iskamen custom, there was an elaborate if solemn banquet for the family and friends of his father which would precipitate the seven days of fasting.

Moichi sat beside Sanda. To his left was a tall, rather elegant woman. At a point when Sanda was gone, he became aware that the woman was staring at him. He turned and looked at her for the first time. She had black eyes and dark hair wound around and around her head. She wore a shimmering bottle-green gown which covered one shoulder while leaving the other one bare. The neckline swooped to the tops of her firm breasts.

“Please excuse me for staring,” she said in a slightly husky voice. “But you are the other son. The one who sails the seas.”

Their eyes locked for a brief moment.

“I am Elena.” And when the blank look remained on his face, she added, “Justee's wife.”

Moichi was astounded. The death of Justee's son in a brawl had been the cause of Moichi's swift departure from Iskamen a long time ago. Justee's son had picked a fight with Jesah and pulled a knife. Jesah, being unfamiliar with fighting, would surely have died if Moichi had not taken the other boy on. Justee, whose land bordered Moichi's father's own, was only slightly younger.

“Unfortunately, he is ill,” Elena was saying. “Else he would be here with me to honor his closest neighbor and friend. When he recovers, he will come to the grave of your father and say his prayers for his safe journey and his eternal peace.”

“Did you know my father well?”

“Alas, no. I am only recently married to Justee. After his first wife died, he took me.” Moichi thought this a peculiar way to put it. “I'm so sorry about your father. Please accept my heartfelt—”

“Excuse me,” Moichi interrupted her, standing. He felt abruptly claustrophobic and went out of the room. He went into the kitchen but this time it was crowded with cooks and servers. He saw Sanda in one corner going through the reserves of wine with a server and he thought, They still have her doing the chores.

He went out into the quiet night, searching for his stars, the Southern Cross and the Lion constellation, but it was overcast and not even the first-magnitude stars could be seen. The moon was but a pale haloed smear etched upon the cloud cover. There was a wind from the southeast, bringing with it the heat and spiced aridity of the Great Desert. He thought again of his father but no emotion surfaced; he felt nothing.

“Do you not miss this land?” a voice said behind him.

He turned to see Elena standing behind him, framed by the lemon light coming through the open back door. She seemed at that moment both coolly aristocratic and terribly vulnerable.

“I'm—sorry if I caused you to leave. I wanted to tell you—” She stopped, as if bewildered by him. “Would you mind if I stood beside you for a while?” There was nothing in her voice save, perhaps, sadness.

He nodded mutely and turned back, not knowing why he had given his consent. He should have sent her back inside the house. He heard the movement as her thighs brushed against the fabric of her gown, then he smelled the light musk, felt the heat of her body close by.

“I always miss Iskael,” he said after a time.

“Then why do you leave it?”

There was a rustling in the tall grass to their left and he imagined that the brown-and-white jackrabbit was back.

“My first love is the sea,” he said, surprised by the softness of his voice. “But one can have more than a single love.”

“Yes. I see.” She lifted a hand, wiped back a stray strand of hair behind one ear. Out of the small silence that built itself, she said, “No doubt you wonder why I married Justee.”

He said nothing, knowing that any answer he gave would be superfluous and that, in any event, she would tell him now because that was what she had come out here for.

“He was so very kind to me. I came here from the south, where the border skirmishes are ceaseless even to this day.” She meant between the Iskamen and their neighbors of Aden. It was an ancient and bitter dispute, for the Iskamen, it was said, had been born in Aden. “That was how my family died. My parents, my sisters.” She paused to lick her lips. “I arrived here with nothing and Justee took me in. I was not a beggar but, in truth, I had nowhere else to go. My father had once spoken of him but that had been such a long time ago, when I was but a little girl.

“Justee never asked how long I would stay or even if I would ever go at all.” The stain of the moon waxed for a moment and then the running clouds passed thickly before it, blotting out its light. “His wife was already ill, then, had been for some time, and he would become easily vexed by her constant requests, the attention she required. There was a need for me and I stayed with her constantly until she died. Afterward, he came and asked me if I would marry him.”

“Did you do it out of convenience?”

“Convenience? What do you mean?”

“For his money.”

She seemed surprised. “Not at all.” But did not take offense. She shrugged. “Perhaps I needed a father then.” He heard all of the pent-up frustration in her voice. “But not now.

“I don't want to hurt him. But I need—something else now.” Her cool fingers touched his neck, warming as they picked up his body heat. Her touch was very delicate and she knew where to put her fingers.

Abruptly, it did not seem absurd to him or even wrong but merely the most natural thing to do. He wanted it too. “Over there,” he said thickly and led her by the hand into the high grass.

She sank with him onto the earth.

“I'm so lonely,” she said, her lips against his so that he felt as well as heard her words.

Slowly he stripped off her gown and her skin glowed in the night, a beacon lighting the way toward what? Solace? Salvation? Perhaps nothing so complex: pleasure only.

Her skin was softer than any he had ever known and so moist that he could believe she was a nocturnal flower covered in dew.

He spent a long long time with her. A lifetime, it seemed. And all the while she whispered to him, soft words and endearments, cried questions and languorous replies; and these soul-torn communications he remembered more clearly than the feel of flesh against flesh, the sensual contacts which were in a way incidental, though, as part of the whole, important.

When it was all over, her cheeks were streaked with tears for what he had given her, the chasm he had filled, what she now possessed. It was the intimacy of the listening while they performed the most basic and beautiful of acts. As if she allowed less men to hear her than to enter her.

It was a very special gift.

He stayed on in the chirruping night after she had returned indoors; after she had kissed with her lips and her artful tongue his mouth and cheeks and eyes. Thinking. It had given him great pleasure and a release from a building tension.

This had been the beginning: knowing that he was doing it with
her
, knowing whom he was cuckolding. But it was because of her, what she was, that this notion was soon trivialized into a childish fantasy. For there was an honesty about her, a genuineness that had touched him, transcending circumstance. She had approached him without guile, made no bones about what she needed.
Can you give this to me?
she had asked him silently with her fingers and her lips.
And this? And this? And I, in return, shall give you—

More than he could ever have anticipated.

He became aware of something settling over him and he rose and went out into the grass, naked still, clothes forgotten, as he had when he was a little boy and his father would call to him to put something on and his mother, laughing, would just shake her head from side to side and let him go—until the house was but a black silhouette punctured by smeared yellow light. He turned for a moment and the blaze from the kitchen windows seemed quite remote, as if on the other side of a vast gulf.

He felt now as he had always felt in his father's room—a warmth, an ancient protectiveness cloaking him. And, at last, he knew what this feeling was: the long violent history of the Iskamen, as palpable and as potent as a living entity. Truly, he belonged to them and they to him.

He faced outward, toward the distant but invisible mountains where the Hand of God had fashioned the tallest peak to guide the Iskamen to this, their home.

The night beat on around him. He was aware of the tall grass brushing his calves, the cicadas' wail, the stands of aromatic cedars and, further away, the luminescent birch, scattered among the grazing land, rising like signposts. Above all, the mountains made their presence felt. He felt himself brushed by—

“Hello,” he whispered.

“So you have come back.”

“The wind brought me. It told me of your dying.”

“The wind.” The voice was scoffing. “It was God. God told you.”

“The wind. God. Does it matter?”

“You speak as a foreigner.” The tone turned bitter. “But you did not have to leave home to speak thus. Your brother—”

“Would you have me as Jesah is?”

“He is faithful to Iskael.”

“He is unhappy.”

“He is faithful.”

“As am I.”

“You are faithful to yourself only.”

“That is the difference between us. I see that as good. You do not.”

“You turned your back on me a long time ago.”

“No. Never on you. Only on what you tried to make me into.”

“I knew what was best for you.”

“No, you didn't. The sea is where I belong. I am happy there.”

“You have always defied me!”

“I defied only the reins by which you meant to hold me to yourself. People are not animals. You cannot harness them in order to make them do as you wish. This is the message of Iskamen history—”

“Do not blaspheme!”

“Is that what I'm really doing? Listen to what I say for once—for once.”

“A child has a duty to his father. He must respect him. Obedience is a sign of that respect.”

“But you never understood that respect must be earned. If you had listened to me, heard what I was saying, you would have understood that I was a
person
and not an extension of you. The Iskamen broke free of their bondage in Aden. This you can accept. Can't you see that this is the same? I had to be free to choose my own destiny.”

There was silence for a time. Even the cicadas had fallen still.

“I was always a stubborn man. I did not want you to leave my side.”

“I never saw that.”

“I could never express it.”

“Someday, I will return to Iskael again, perhaps to stay.”

“You will never stay here for long. But now I know your heart. Just coming back, that is enough, now—my son.”

And he was alone in the night, tears distorting his vision, thinking: Gone, gone gone. He's gone.

Sardonyx

They gained the far shore of the Deathsea at dusk. Nearing Mistral, they passed through a vast undulating field of daffodils and buttercups, their heavy bells swooshing in the breeze, heralding the beginnings of night. In the sudden darkness, their lush saffron was chilled in the ruddy moonlight. Fireflies zoomed and swooped about them.

When they broke, without warning, from the lush field, they found themselves upon a jutting rock promontory below which was a drop of perhaps six meters to a rushing, foam-filled river beyond which Mistral stood.

It was set on the peak of the high ground, though beyond it lay land that was higher still as the topography graduated toward the steppes and mountain range in the northwest.

Mistral might easily be mistaken for a crag itself, for its foundations were composed of rhyolite, a kind of greenish granite that, nevertheless, was earlier more volatile as volcanic magma. At its base, the castle was four-sided but, above, the battlements, towers and crenellated ramparts branched off into so many angles that it hurt the eye just to stare at it too long.

The portcullis stood open and, as they went through, they felt vulnerable indeed. Inside, the courtyard was deserted but they were startled to hear a song playing, as if on the very air. Looking up, Moichi saw that as the wind passed through the turrets and fenestrated needlelike towers, it set up resonances and harmonies within the complexities of the architecture so that it was the castle itself which sang this mournful tune.

Before them, the stone doors to the main hall stood open as if awaiting their arrival.

They dismounted and went up the wide steps. Above him, Moichi saw that an enormous atrium towered the height of the structure; and this, he realized, was what relieved much of the heaviness of the stone.

He saw the narrow staircase, made all of shiny obsidian, arching like the tendril of some mammoth spider's web, and he turned to Chiisai to tell her—

“You have been expected,” Mistral said.

He sprinted for the double doors but it seemed a terribly long way now, saw them swinging shut even as he thought this, clanging home with funereal finality. He stopped. There were no handholds on their inner side.

Chiisai was gone. But how? He was certain she had entered with him.

“There is no escape there,” said the voice. “Nor anywhere—unless I grant it.”

He whirled around. “Where are you?” he cried. “Show yourself!”

“Here I am.”

He turned. Indeed the voice had seemed to coalesce and he looked up, saw a shape at the first landing on the staircase. He crossed the hallway and climbed the stairs.

He confronted a girl of perhaps ten, slender, light-eyed, with a compassionately beautiful face without a single hard edge. It was the face of innocence.