Overheard in a Dream (29 page)

“Poor love. Listen, shall I cheer you with my news
?”

“Aye. Aye, of course. I’m sorry I hadn’t asked. So tell me what is happening at home
?”

Mogri said, “My prospects aren’t as grand as yours. I’ll never bed a holy-born, but I’ve done well enough for me. I carry Tadem’s child.”

Torgon lifted her head abruptly. “I don’t believe this
. What? My
little sister? Oh, now I do feel old, Mogri. I’ll have grey hairs next.” Torgon cuffed her sister’s shoulder playfully. “So when’s the wedding planned
?”

“In the month of flowers. Tadem’s family wouldn’t have me until they knew I’d quicken. Now the baby comes in summer, so the wedding feast is set.”

Smiling, Torgon leaned forward to hug her sister. “I’m so glad for you. It cheers me very much knowing you are happy.”

“Things may well change for you too,” Mogri said. “There’s two months until the marriage. Perhaps it will be Ansel who comes to perform our rites. Who knows? Perhaps we both will carry babes.”

In the month of the first sowing, Torgon came to feed the Seer. The night was bright with a full moon, so she didn’t bother with a candle. She entered the darkness of his private cell and in the wan moonlight saw him lying on his bed, his mouth gone slack in death
.

Relief flooded her with tears. She wiped them back with her fingertips. “What? You think I cry for you? No, old man. You taught me better manners than that. I cry for joy. I cry for me …” Reaching out, she gently stroked his cooling hand and, through the moonlight, the tears on her fingers left glistening trails across his aged skin
.

The acolytes were sent home for the mourning period and the pyre women came in and washed the Seer’s body. After that, it was Torgon alone in the compound. Kneeling beside the body laid out on the stone flags in the altar room, she poured the death oils and anointed him, then said the prayers of intercession, that he might journey safely and find peace among the dead
.

Torgon had never met his son Ansel face to face. As a low-born woman, she could not speak to him or even look him in the face in those years before her calling. Matters now, however, were very different. Their roles had been reversed. Holy-born though he might be, hers was the divine calling. He’d be the novice in the compound, although Torgon knew he’d never be the homesick innocent she had been. Destined from birth to take the holy robes, he’d been raised in the compound, receiving a special education apart from the other acolytes, and initiated into the ways of holiness even before his manhood rites. Moreover, Ansel was no longer green with youth. His father had lived such a span of years that Ansel had passed the best part of his manhood among the warrior band and, some would say, had had to wait too long to take up the position due him
.

The investiture was held on the sixteenth day of the month of the first sowing, when winter had passed away and the world was just greening up with spring. It was a hard month for lavish feasting, for the storage huts were empty and the crops were yet all seed. Two half-grown bull calves were roasted for the feast and Torgon sacrificed a twelve-point stag in Ansel’s honour
.

When the ceremony was at its height, she brought the holy robes to him and laid the golden circlet on his head. It was their first time face to face and there should have been a modest dropping of his eyes at the sight of the divine anaka benna. But not so. As she came before him, he looked her fully in the face and smiled, his expression both casual and intimate, as if they’d been secret lovers all along. Torgon’s cheeks burned red for fear the elders saw his look and thought it might be true. And yet … She met his gaze. It would unseemly if she did not. In the end, she couldn’t help but smile too
.

“W
hen I came out of the hospital after my seminar the following afternoon,” Laura said during her next session, “there was the Prophet, leaning against my car. I was startled to see him, to say the least. He laughed and said jokingly ‘You doubted my ability?’

“If anything, he looked more handsome there in the waning light of a winter’s afternoon. He knew how to dress well. He had on casual clothes – a sheepskin coat, a hand-knitted sweater and a very long scarf – but they were expensive and fashionable. His loose curls fell roguishly over his collar and his cheeks were reddened by the cold.

“I don’t think I’d even been in love before that night. I had genuinely liked Alec and had expected love to develop from it, but it didn’t happen. To be honest, I was secretly afraid Steven might have ruined me permanently and I wasn’t capable of falling in love. Then I met Fergus and everything changed.

“What was so incredible, however, was that he felt exactly the same way about me. There he was, standing against my
car in the hospital car park less than twenty-four hours after our first meeting. He opened his arms and embraced me in a heartwarming hug and I felt like I was coming home. I pressed my face into his coat and breathed in his marvellous smell, like woodland and sea at the same time, and it felt so undeniably right to be hugged by him. We kissed then, for the first time. Or perhaps it wasn’t the first. Who knows?

“The second kiss was with a passion I’d never experienced. It was almost as if he was going to devour me. I’d never been kissed anything like that before, but far from being startled by it, I was desperate for it not to stop. My body responded with such unexpected intensity that if he’d asked me to strip and make love to him right there in the hospital car park, I’m sure I would have considered it. The only thing I could think was: ‘
This is it. Mr Right. Prince Charming. The fairy tales really are all true.
’

“‘Come with me,’ he said when we broke apart. ‘Let’s go eat.’

Of course, I went without question. We got into his car and he headed off towards the city centre. All the way he chattered. Fergus was bursting with vitality. This was his most enchanting quality: he was always just so temptingly alive. It was almost a kind of electricity, fizzing and crackling around him. There was none of the eeriness nor profundity of the night before. He talked to me as if we were good friends, as if I had simply been away somewhere on a long journey and had now at last returned. When I called him ‘Prophet’, he chastized me good-naturedly, saying, ‘What’s with this false reverence of yours? It’s not as if
you
were one of the acolytes.’ Even with the unexpected use of the word ‘acolyte’ my mind did not stray from giving him my full attention.

“We went to a small, rustic Italian restaurant – like something out of a lost corner of Sicily with red gingham tablecloths, candlelight, a Verdi aria playing softly and the room redolent with the scent of fresh-baked bread and olive oil.

“I loved this scooped-up-and-embraced sensation of belonging to him, but it was still overwhelming. I had only met this man the day before. At one point, I sat back and blinked in surprise at what I was doing.

“Fergus was such a master at reading emotions. His expression melted into sympathy. ‘Oh, poor darling,’ he whispered. ‘You don’t remember any of this, do you?’

“‘Remember what?’ I asked.

“He reached out both his hands and put one either side of my face. Then he leaned forward across the table until we were sitting almost forehead to forehead. ‘Close your eyes,’ he murmured. His breath touched my skin as he spoke.

“Pressing his fingertips more firmly against my temples, he whispered, ‘We’ve been evolving upwards together all these eons, you and I. Inextricably connected through countless lifetimes. Blackness. Let your thoughts go. Give your mind over to blackness.’

“With my eidetic ability to visualize, the moment he said the words, it was as if black velvet dropped across my thoughts.

“‘Accept the visions the Voices give you,’ he whispered so softly as to be more a breath than a sound. His head was touching mine. To others in the restaurant we must have appeared as if we were praying. ‘Remember, remember, remember.’ His voice was hypnotic. ‘You will still possess some shadow of memory, for we’ve been together so long, you and I. Since Egypt. Since Atlantis. Since time before the stars.’

“Stars and planets spun across the velvet blackness of my mind as he spoke. Helixes formed, like the DNA models I’d seen in the lab at the university. A flash of gold appeared and then the masks of Egyptian sarcophagi.

“‘We’d almost reached the light, you and I,’ he murmured. ‘I would have joined the Beings of Light. I would have been among the Voices now. But I lost you. I came into awareness and you were gone …’ His voice cracked with sudden emotion. ‘I
had
to come back for you. To find you. I couldn’t leave you here alone.’ He lowered his hands.

“When I opened my eyes, I saw his face was awash with tears. He smiled beatifically through them. ‘And now, at last, I’ve found you.’

“What could I say? I was astonished to find myself at the centre of such a florid, yet achingly romantic story. It was so beautiful. While part of me found it weird, a much more powerful part of me wanted it
and
him. I wanted to touch him, to kiss him, to make love to him. I wanted that more than anything else at just that moment. More than being a doctor. More than Torgon or the Forest. Way more than common sense. So, as out-of-this-world as his ideas were, I felt something in them. I felt maybe this moment
had
been destined since time before the stars.

“The next evening it was out to dinner again. Fergus couldn’t pick me up until after eleven because he had appointments to do readings at the health club through until ten o’clock.

“All day I’d been thinking about him obsessively. Any desire I’d had to test him or to show him up as a fake had vanished entirely, as did any desire to deceive him about myself. I decided that I was going to be fully truthful with him
about Torgon from the onset. I was going to describe Torgon exactly as she was – the
real
Torgon – and not the hokey thing she’d turned into for the Tuesday night group.

“Fergus was very interested in my relationship with her. How had I first got in contact with Torgon? How had I maintained the contact? What information had I got from her? How did I use it in my everyday life? When had I first felt compelled to share the information with others? What goals had she set for me? What world goals had she offered?

“
World goals
? The conversation had been getting out of hand well before we got to world goals. I was trying to be very honest with him, to explain to him that Torgon wasn’t really a spirit guide, but he kept asking questions to the point that it was clear he just wasn’t hearing me when I said I was giving people my own advice and simply presenting it as Torgon’s. But world goals? Even in my most extravagant imaginings, world goals had never been involved.

“‘With as great a gift as you have,’ Fergus said, ‘you must start thinking this way. It’s wrong to keep it to yourself when you are meant to do good with it.’

“I protested and tried to explain that ‘using my gift’ to help unhappy people at the Tuesday night group was doing quite enough good.

“‘No, no, no,’ he said and lovingly touched my face. ‘We have much greater things to do, you and I.’

“We talked for several hours that night. We were still sitting at the table in the restaurant at one in the morning and the proprietor was making obvious noises with his keys. When I realized what time it was, I became concerned because my alarm was due to go off in only four-and-a-half hours. I mentioned to Fergus that I’d better go and he said ‘
No
,’ in this
anguished tone and pleaded with me to stay longer. Flattered as I felt by his insistence, I was too tired and needed to go home. When I objected, however, Fergus became not quite so loving. He said dismissively that I was only tired because I let my body rule my mind, although he did relent and take me home.

“Needless to say, my practicum at the hospital the next day was a session in hell and I sat through Betjeman’s afternoon seminar with all the animation of a starfish in formaldehyde. When it was finished and I was preparing to leave, Betjeman stopped me.

“‘Stay a moment, Deighton,’ he said.

“I was thinking, ‘Oh God, not now, not today.’ Whatever he had to tell me, I was too tired to care.

“He closed the door to the seminar room and turned to me. ‘Are you having problems?’ he asked.

“‘No sir,’ I said. ‘I’m just a bit tired today, sir. I stayed up too late last night and realize now I shouldn’t have.’

“‘I mean more broadly, Deighton. Some of the shine seems to have gone off your work over these past few months. Is there something wrong?’

“My heart began to sink. My work
had
slipped. With all the excitement of the Tuesday night meetings and getting together with people to talk about Torgon’s advice, I couldn’t do the amount of studying I’d done before. As I’d never had any kind of social life before this, I didn’t think I was expecting too much in wanting to enjoy it a little bit. I didn’t think I was being excessive. Things would no doubt settle down again, and I’d be able to get back to my studies and catch up on what I’d let slide.

“‘Are you still thinking about going abroad when you’re through?’ he asked.

“‘I guess,’ I said. I still intended to follow the jungle doctor idea through, but I wasn’t in quite the same hurry to get at it as I had been the previous year.