Galilee (42 page)

So he began again, revisiting the scene that he'd been describing, to be sure she remembered where the story stood.

“Jerusha was lying down on the grass, a little distance from the river. She was certain he'd come, and she wanted to be ready for him when he did, so she pulled off her shoes and her stockings, then lifted her hips off the ground to pull her underwear down. Then she drew up her petticoats and her skirt until they were over her knees. She didn't need to touch herself to be aroused. A warm breeze came along just as she opened her legs and moved like a breath against her sweet pink pussy; spears of grass sprang up and gently pricked the insides of her thighs. She started to moan; she couldn't help herself. If her life had depended on her silence at that moment then she would have perished, she was so utterly overwhelmed.

“Then she heard him . . .

“The river god,” Rachel said.

“You've heard this before.”

Rachel laughed. “That's what he is, isn't he?”

“A
god,
no. But something like that.”

“Is he old?”

“Ancient.”

“But not very clever.”

“What makes you say that?”

“If he was smart he'd know to stay in the river. That's where he belongs.”

Galilee sighed. “It's not always possible to stay where you belong. You know that.”

She stared at him in silence for several seconds. “You know who I am,” she said.

“You're my Jerusha,” he replied, conferring the name upon her with the greatest gentility. “My child bride.”

At this, Rachel reached up and took hold of the sheet that concealed her lower body. “Then I should let you see me,” she said, and pulled the sheet off
.
Her knees were a little raised; the space between them was shadowy. But Galilee's eyes lingered there nonetheless, as though his gaze was piercing the darkness and seeing her clearly; piercing her too, maybe: insinuating himself between her labia to see what he would find.

The thought did not distress her; quite the reverse. She wanted him to look at her, and keep looking. She was his Jerusha, his child bride lying on a bed of soft grass, excited as she'd never been excited before. She was trembling with pleasure, and the prospect of pleasure, as aroused by him as he was by her; by his face, by his words, by his very presence. Most of all, by the sight of his watching her. She'd never experienced anything remotely like this before. She'd had sex with seven men in her life, including her fumblings with Neil Wilkens. She was no great sexual sophisticate, to be sure; but nor was she a complete novice. She'd had wild times. But nothing so
intense
as this; nothing so naked.

They hadn't even touched one another, for God's sake, and she was shaking. The bed between her legs was soaked. Her breaths were shallow and fast.

“You were telling me . . .” she said.

“Jerusha . . .
”

“ . . . lying on her back, waiting for the river god . . .”

“She looked up—”

“Yes.”

“—it was strange to see him coming between the trees the way he did, with every step an effort, a terrible effort, that made his head sink lower and lower.”

“Did she wish she'd never asked him?” Rachel whispered.

“No,”
Galilee replied.
“She was too excited for regrets. She wanted him to see her more than she'd wanted anything in her life.”

“And as he came toward her, there were times when he passed through a shaft of sunlight, and rainbows sprang from him, rising up into the trees.

“She was about to ask him if he liked what he saw when she heard the whirring of wings, and a beetle—about as big as a hummingbird, but dark and ugly—came circling over her. She remembered what the man in the river had said—”

“Poisonous things,” Rachel said. “Things that have been eating corpses.”

“This beetle was the worst of the worst. It ate only the bodies of people who'd died of disease. It carried every kind of contagion.”

Rachel made a disgusted sound. “Can't you make it fly away?” she said.

“I told you before: you can finish it if you like.”

She shook her head. “No,” she said. “I want to hear it from you.”

“Then the beetle has to circle . . .
and suddenly it dropped down onto her body.”

“Where?”

“Shall I show you?” Galilee said, and without waiting for a reply he went to the bottom of the bed and reached between her legs. She wanted him to touch her labia, but instead his fingers nipped the inside of her thigh between finger and thumb.
“It bit her,”
he said.
“Hard.”

She cried out.

“She cried out, more with surprise than pain, and killed the beetle with one blow, squashing its body against her white skin.”

He withdrew his hand. Rachel could feel the beetle's ooze running down her leg; she reached up as if to wipe it away, and then reached further, to catch hold of Galilee's fingers.

“Don't go yet,” she said.

“I have not finished telling you what happened,” he murmured, and eased his fingers from her grip. Instinctively she pulled the sheet back over her nakedness. The story was souring. If Galilee noticed what she'd done, he made no sign of it. He simply kept talking.

“It was as if the beetle's bite had broken a trance,”
he said.
“Jerusha looked down at herself in horror. What was she doing lying here this way? She started to get up, tears stinging her eyes.”

“ ‘Where are you going?' she heard somebody ask her, and looked round to see that the man from the river was standing just a few yards from her.

“He looked wasted. His body, which had been shiny and strong when he was sitting in the water, was thinner now. His teeth were chattering. His eyes were rolling in their sockets. How could she ever have thought he was beautiful, she wondered?

“Then she turned her back on him and started to make her way home.”

“Did he follow her?”

“No. He was too confused. He hadn't seen the beetle, you see. He just assumed she'd changed her mind; decided he was too strange for her after all. It wasn't the first time a woman had rejected him. He went back to the river, and sank from sight.”

“What happened to Jerusha?”

“Terrible things.

“Almost as soon as she got back into her father's house she started to sicken. The beetle had put so much poison into her she was barely conscious by sunset. Of course her father sent for his doctors but none of them looked between her legs, because they didn't dare, not with their patron standing over them, telling them what a good, pure child she was. They did what they could to bring down her fever-cold compresses, leeches, the usual rigmarole—but none of it worked. Hour by hour through the night she grew hotter and sicker, until blisters started to appear on her neck and face and breasts as the poisons showed themselves.”

“Finally, Jerusha's father lost patience with the doctors and sent them away. Then, once he was alone with her, lying on the bed, he started to talk to her, whispering close to her ear.

“ ‘Can you hear me, child?' he asked her. ‘Please, my sweet Jerusha, if you can hear me, tell me what happened to you, so I can find somebody to heal you.'

“At first she said nothing. He wasn't even sure she'd even heard him. But he was persistent. He kept talking to her as daylight approached. And finally, just as dawn was breaking, she said one word . . .”

“River,” Rachel whispered.

“Yes. She said river.”

“Her father instantly sent for his majordomo, and told him to take all the maids and footmen and cooks and to comb the banks of the river until they discovered what had happened to his beloved Jerusha.

“The majordomo immediately roused the whole house, even to the smallest boy who dusted the ashes from the hearth, and they all went down through the woods to the river. Jerusha and her father were the only ones left in the great house, as the light crept through it room by room.

“He wept, and he waited, holding his daughter's hand all the while, rocking her in his arms sometimes, telling her how much he loved her, then—forgetting all his rational principles, going down on his knees and praying to God for a miracle. It was the first prayer he'd spoken since he was a little boy and he'd been made to pray over his mother's casket, and thought to himself if you don't wake her up God, then I'm never going to believe in you ever again. Of course his mother had remained dead in her casket, and the boy had become a rationalist.

“But now all his faith in reason failed him, and he prayed with more passion than the Pope, begging God to bring a miracle.

“Down by the river, the servants were praying too, sobbing as they searched the bank

“It was the smallest boy, the one who brushed away the ashes from the hearth, who saw the man in the river first. He started yelling for everyone to come and see, come and see.

“By the time the majordomo got to where the boy was standing a figure had risen out of the river, and the morning sun, striking him crossways, pierced him, and emerged again as beams of pure color. Nobody knew whether to be terrified or ecstatic, so they simply stood rooted to the spot while the creature emerged from the water. Some of the women averted their eyes when they saw his naked state, but most just stared, the tears they'd been shedding forgotten.

“ ‘I heard somebody praying for my Jerusha,' the riverman said. ‘Is she sick?'

“To the death,' said the boy.

“ ‘Will you lead me to her?' the riverman asked the child.

“The boy simply took the creature's hand, and off they went between the trees.”

“Nobody tried to stop them?” Rachel said.

“It crossed the majordomo's mind. But he wasn't a superstitious man. He shared his lord's belief that there was nothing in this world that was not finally natural, that one day science would explain. So he followed the boy and the riverman at a little distance, without interfering.

“Meanwhile, in the house, Jerusha was very close to death. The fever was so high it was as though she would catch fire in the bed and burn away to nothing.

“Then her father heard a sound like somebody mopping the stairs outside the bedroom; slapping a wet mop down on the marble, then dragging it up a step and slapping it down again. He let go of his daughter's hand for a moment and opened the door. There was a flickering light filling the hallway, like sunlight off water. And there on the stairs, mounting one torturous step after another, was the riverman. His watery body was diminished with every stair he climbed. The further from his home he strayed, the more of his life-essence he spent.

“Of course Jerusha's father demanded to know who he was, and what he was doing in the house. But the riverman had no strength to waste answering questions. It was the boy who spoke.

“ ‘He's come to help her,' he said.

“Jerusha's father didn't know what to make of this. The rational part of him said: don't be afraid, just because you've never seen anything like this before. While the part that had prayed to God for intercession now whispered: this is what heaven has sent. And that part was very much afraid, for if this was an angel—this silvery form, swaying in front of him—then what kind of God sent it? And what kind of salvation had it brought his daughter?

“He was still puzzling over this, and blocking the riverman's way to the door, when he heard Jerusha say:

‘Please, Papa . . . let . . . him . . . in . . .'

“Amazed to hear his daughter speaking, he pushed open the door, and with a sudden rush, like a broken dam, the riverman pushed through it and went to stand at the end of Jerusha ‘s bed.

“Her eyes were still closed, but she knew her saviour was there. She started to pull at the clothes she was wearing, which were horribly dirtied with pus and blood and all the rest. She tore them with such ferocity she was lying there naked in half a minute, every inch of her wounded body exposed to her father and to the riverman.

“Then she raised her arms, like a woman welcoming her love into her bed . . .
” Galilee halted here; then began again more softly:
which of course was what she was doing.

“The room was suddenly completely still. Jerusha's arms raised, the riverman waiting at the bottom of the bed, the father staring at him, still not certain what he'd done, letting this thing into his daughter's presence.

“Then, without a word, the riverman threw himself down onto the girl. And as he touched her he broke like a wave, splashing against her face and arms and breasts and belly and thighs. In that instant all trace of his human shape disappeared. Jerusha cried out in pain and shock, as the water seethed and hissed on her body like water thrown onto afire. Steam rose off the bed, and afoul stench filled the room.

“But when it cleared . . .”

“She was healed?” Rachel said.

“She was healed.”

“Completely?”

“Every wound she'd had was gone. Every sore, every blister. She was healed from head to foot. Even the first bite, on her thigh, had been washed away.”

“And the riverman?”

“Well of course he'd gone too,” Galilee said lightly, as though that part of the story wasn't very important to him.

But it was to Rachel. “So he sacrificed himself,” she said.

“I suppose he did,” Galilee replied. Then, as though he were more comfortable addressing this question in the body of his story, he said:

“Jerusha's father believed that the whole thing had been brought about by his own lack of faith; that God had visited these torments on his Jerusha in order to make him realize that he needed divine help sometimes.”