The Wild (20 page)

'It's beautiful,' she said, putting her finger to the pearl. 'I remember when you made this for me.'

'In truth, it was the oyster who made the pearl, not I.'

She smiled almost to herself, then ran her finger over the cord of the necklace, which was braided of many long black and red hairs twisted tightly together. 'But it was you who found the pearl and made the necklace?'

'Yes.'

'And gave it to me as a marriage troth?'

'We ... promised that we would marry each other. Someday, perhaps farwhen – whenever we could.'

'When you had completed your quest, and I had completed mine,' she said. 'Do you remember?'

'I think it is impossible ... that I could ever forget.'

'And I can't forget how I almost gave the pearl back to you,' she said. 'I'm sorry, Danlo. That was so wrong. Because in a way, we've been married since the instant we first saw each other.'

'I know,' Danlo said. 'Since that moment – and perhaps even before.'

Tamara laughed softly at his strange ideas and his romanticism, which seemed to please her greatly. And Danlo laughed, too, as they locked eyes and drank in each other's delight. Then Tamara rose off her cushion and came over to him. It took her almost forever to unzip his kamelaika, to slip her skilled hands between the fabric and his skin and peel the clothing away from him. At the touch of her skin, there was a rising heat in Danlo's belly, and he remembered how long it had been since he last lay with a woman. There was a deep pressure in his loins, a surge of blood running up the root of his membrum to the inflamed tip. In truth, he was too full of seed, much too full of himself. Even if he hadn't been dying to die inside Tamara, it had never been his way to refuse the gift of sexual ecstasy when offered by such a beautiful woman, and so he pulled her gently down onto the cushions and kissed her mouth, her neck, the soft golden hair falling down across her breasts. In the way she returned his kisses – fiercely and almost desperately in the fervour of her lips – there was a hunger that had never been there before. There was something new in their love play, almost an awkwardness as if they had never entwined legs or felt the sweat of each other's body before. Of course sex was always new, always a plunge into mystery and danger, but not quite in this way. The newness he sensed in Tamara was not so much of touch or technique or even emotion, but rather of being, of the way that she dwelt inside herself. It almost seemed that she was trying to hold on to herself, in the moment, as a child might grasp a beloved doll. She pressed up close to him, and she grasped his long, swollen membrum. She touched the scars there, the tiny blue and red scars that had been cut into the skin during his passage into manhood. The play of her fingers over him was exquisite and almost exactly as he remembered on their first night together. And Tamara, in the heat of her hands and sweet panting breath, was almost the same, too, as if she had never suffered the loss of her memories. And this was strange because she had once forgotten him and everything about him; this wounding of her soul should have been as much a part of her as her joy in being restored to herself. But – although she had spoken to him in heartfelt words of great loss – in the fire of her blood and flowing muscles, in the voluptuousness of her body, she seemed to have no memory of suffering at all. He sensed that this wilful return to innocence was somehow a betrayal of herself. Even as he kissed her lips and touched her between her legs, he sensed that he was betraying her, too – much as if he were a pilot journeying back in time to a younger and more innocent incarnation of herself.

He might have broken away from her, then. He might have caught his breath and stood up into the cool night air, away from the sweat-soaked cushions where they lay. But now, near the heat of the fire, Tamara was moaning and opening her legs and pulling at him. And now he was moaning too, or rather, breathing so quickly that the wind escaped his chest in a deep-throated rush of pleasure and pain. He could no more keep himself from sinking down into her than could a stone cast into the sea. He felt her pulling at him, with her hands and her eyes and the fullness of her hips; he felt himself impossibly full with the heaviness of this blessed gravity. And then he was falling, kissing her mouth and gripping her hand and reaching down with his loins toward the centre of her body. As always in joining with a woman, there was a moment of triumph. The thrill of entering her was intense and lasted almost forever. The anticipation of sliding deeply into her was almost more than he could bear. There was always the promise of new realms of ecstasy, of joining in a cosmic copulation that would leave him empty in the eyes and loins and mind, so utterly empty that only then could he become infinitely full of some deeper part of himself. So beautiful was the pain of this possibility that his whole being concentrated on a single moment of flesh pressing into flesh. As always, the hot wet shock of her vulva around him electrified his muscles and caused him to gasp for breath and move deeper into her. Such pleasure seemed too perfect to be real, and yet in a way it was almost too real, for he felt the clutch and shudder of it in his hands and his throat and deep in his belly. In rippling waves the rising tide of pleasure spread through his whole body. He couldn't have stopped it if he had wanted to. In his joining with Tamara this way there was wildness and joy, yes, but also a terrible inevitability. It was as if a secret force had fired his nerve cells and seized his muscles. In truth, he was almost helpless before forces that he could not control. Outside, there was wind and ocean, the far-off roar of a tiger. And inside, inside the house, he felt the fire's heat licking at his skin, while beneath him the fierce power and purpose of Tamara's body pulled him ever deeper into sexual frenzy. He felt himself moving to ancient rhythms, rocking with her and pressing up against her belly, rocking and moving and always moving to the inward roaring of his blood. If he had been able to think, he might have seen that there was something very strange in two people coming together this way to make such pleasure. For a man to lie with a woman in the naked clasp of her body was truly an exquisite madness. With her legs wide open Tamara rocked back and forth beneath him, always rocking and panting and pulling at his hips, wrapping her hands around him and pulling him into her. Danlo felt her fingers lock on to the tight bunching muscles behind his hips, and he felt a deep sense of wonder that any human being would so open herself to another. It was astonishing, too, that his deepest will would drive him in toward the opening of her womb, to enter that blessed place of all danger and desire. He gasped at the incredible audacity of penetrating her, of disappearing into the soft, clutching darkness inside her. He was ravishing her, yes, and yet as he moved to the convulsive rocking of her hips and felt her fingernails tearing lightly at his back, it was really she who ravished him. She enraptured him; she captured and engulfed him. In a perfect merging between man and woman, these senses and fears should dissolve into an ecstatic liquid oneness, into rapture, into love. Indeed, much of the joy in swiving each other was in overcoming the ancient opposition and discord between the sexes, and thus allowing two separate selves to become as one. It was the deepest of paradoxes that the self could find itself only in the other. Danlo, in his plunge into the salty rocking ocean inside Tamara, should have found himself in her, and so found the way to quench the terrible fire tearing him apart. In the sweat streaming down her face, in the sweet liquor of her loins, in her pulsing blood, he should have found the elixir to heal him of the wound that will not be healed.

This urge toward unity was very strong in him. He felt his heart's strong contractions in his chest urging him to move; he felt himself urging in his belly and his hips, urging him into her powerfully and deeply, always urging him toward life, on and on. It did not matter that out of this urge and ecstatic union would come more life, more suffering, and inevitably, more wounding in separation when their child was born nine months hence and torn away from his mother in blood and pain. The great wheel of life would spin on and on – there was no help for a child's cry, no way to deny life's terrible urgency. And Danlo did not want to deny anything. In the heat of his passion, with his breath coming in hard, quick gasps and his loins trembling to be released of the terrible pressure inside, he was ready to accept all the sorrow and suffering in the universe if only he could die with Tamara into a single moment of screaming, shuddering ecstasy. Many times before, on Neverness, lying before a blazing wood fire, they had found this blessed place together. Many times since then he had dreamed of kissing her neck as he moved in perfect rhythm with her. Only now, in the light of a different fire, even as she tore at his back and cried out in joy, he knew that on this night there would be no true merging. He knew there would be no oneness, no mystical union of their souls. He was not, at first, aware of where this knowledge came from. But he had a deep sense of being engulfed against his will, utterly consumed by Tamara's fierce inner fire. He felt this burning all through himself. He felt it in her. He sensed that the temperature of her body was slightly too high, not as in the normal heating up of the flesh in the sexual yogas, but as in a fever. His body was the measure of hers, of her memory, of the true memory that lay deeper than her mind. Once a time they had joked that their lust for one another was so great that the very cells of his body loved the cells of hers. In his moment of orgasmic release there had always been a sense that his sex cells were returning home to a place of intimacy and utter love. All the cells of his body and hers: in the burning press of skin against skin, in the moisture of her lips, in her vulva's hot silky clasp, he touched her deeply, cell to cell. He licked her neck and tasted the sweat glistening there; it was as salty as blood, and strangely, almost bittersweet like the remembrancer's drug. He smelled the lovely musky scent of her body, which was redolent with strange hormones and some other bewildering essence of her metabolism that he could not quite identify. In this way, he sensed something about her. Perhaps it was a matter of tender tissues pulling at each other, touching, the life inside their cells sending out signals across thin walls of flesh. Perhaps the nuclei of his cells were somehow open to secret messages encoded in hers. Somehow he sensed this deep cellular consciousness of streaming plasma, energy pulsing through mitochondria, and vibrating DNA. She moved beneath him quickly, too quickly, and her whole body streamed with an intense consciousness of being. There was something wrong with her consciousness, he thought, something wrong with her soul. In the way she grasped at him with her burning hands, as if she were trying desperately to hold and keep her pleasure all to herself, she seemed intensely self-conscious as she had never been before. She seemed strangely alone with herself, watching herself. And watching him. Although her eyes were tightly closed, Danlo sensed that she was somehow watching him, even as he might study a butterfly delirious with a fireflower's sweet nectar. For a moment, as she screamed in ecstasy and tore at him with her fingers, he stared down at her lovely face. Even as he moved and moved to the quickening rhythm of her hips, he stared at her and something strange, vast, and terrible stared back at him. It looked deeply inside him, drinking in the light of his eyes, devouring the tissues of his soul. And then he screamed, too, and they entered their moment together. Only there was no true togetherness, just two frantically rocking and thrusting human beings tearing a moment of feverish pleasure from each other's bodies. They cried out simultaneously, not as one voice but as two separate selves alone with each other. They rocked and they rocked through an endless howling moment, and they writhed and they shuddered, and at last they collapsed in each other's arms, exhausted and completely spent.

Later, as they lay in silence before the dying fire, as Danlo watched the light of the flames reflecting from her sweat-streaked face, he remembered a saying that he had once been taught: The surfaces outside glitter with intelligible lies; the depths inside blaze with the unintelligible truths. He touched the scar on his pounding forehead, then. He rubbed the salt water from his burning eyes, and he marvelled that the search for the truth could leave him so empty and saddened and utterly alone.

Simulations cannot become realizations.

– Nils Ordando, founder of the Order of Cetics

Simulations must not become realizations.

• Horthy Hosthoh, founder of the Order of Mystic Mathematicians and Other Seekers of the Ineffable Flame
  

During the following days there were other ecstasy-making sessions in front of the fire, sometimes as many as five in one day (or night). Sometimes they would spend whole nights locked and sweating in the lotus position while Tamara lightly raked his eyelids and face with her fingernails and, like a tigress, bit softly at his neck. Despite the intensity of these dangerous pleasures – and despite a hundred other techniques for smashing the icy inner walls that separate two lovers – there never came the moment of breaking through into that golden realm of oneness and true bliss that Danlo had always cherished. And neither could they penetrate each other's deepest self with mere words. In the morning, they liked to sit by the window in the tearoom sipping coffee and talking as they watched the gulls fetch their meaty breakfasts from the ocean. They talked while taking their stroll at low tide along the beach, and in the fireroom before sleeping they talked in hushed and intimate tones. They talked endlessly and sincerely about everything from the Entity's capriciousness in keeping them prisoners on an unknown Earth to the universal nature of love; they opened their hearts to each other, or tried to, but in some mysterious way they were as strangers to each other.

In those dreadful moments of doubt when Danlo was alone in the house or down by the ocean's lapping waves, he found that all his thoughts of her had come to involve conflicting images and paradoxes: she was still the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, but all too often her golden face fell dark and deep as space and was terrible to look upon; she loved him with the same burning passion as she always had, and yet sometimes when she touched him in her great need for love, her fingers were like icicles stabbing into his heart. And then there was the deepest paradox of all. In some way that he could not yet apprehend, Tamara was truly herself, and yet she was not. She is not she, he thought. She was not quite the same Tamara that he remembered. Little things about her disturbed him. To begin with, there was the matter of her solitary, nocturnal walks along the beach. As they waited day after day for the Entity to speak to them again and reveal the nature of their respective tests, it became Tamara's habit to leave the house after midnight and wander the moonlit dunes by herself. On Neverness, of course, her profession had required her to make many journeys alone across the city's icy night-time streets. Danlo knew that Tamara was as brave as any courtesan – as brave as anyone – and yet he had never suspected that she liked skating along the Serpentine where it narrows down in the darkest part of the Farsider's Quarter, where the wormrunners and other dangerous men (and sometimes aliens) wait in the shadows of the brothels and whistle at any woman who passes by. Tamara, he was beginning to see, liked dangerous situations, not for the sake of danger itself, but rather for the sense of personal power that she gained in overcoming her natural fears of the world. Tamara, on Neverness's sometimes deadly slidderies and glissades, had always worn a little finger-gun, a spikhaxo, that murderous weapon favoured by warrior-poets and other assassins. In fact, in another age, the warrior-poets and the Society of Courtesans had once been the closest of allies, and it was the warrior-poets who had taught women such as Tamara about ekkana and naittare and other secret poisons. Like many of her sisters, when Tamara was out on an assignation, her spikhaxo was always loaded with several poison darts that she might fire into the flesh of any man so foolish as to think he might accost a beautiful courtesan and wrest a little grunting pleasure from her for free. And Tamara's darts were always impregnated with the black ink of naittare, a poison so poisonous that within seconds it would penetrate the blood-brain barrier and set off electrochemical storms in the cortex akin to an epileptic fit. Except that, the chaos of the brain that naittare caused was worse than any epilepsy; for it always killed, almost instantly, a horrible, hideous death of popping eyes and foaming lips and limbs jerking to the whip of randomly firing nerves. The agony caused by this drug was said to be even worse than that of ekkana, and for the victim the dying lasted nearly forever. Tamara's willingness to use naittare against men had never surprised Danlo because he understood the deterrent effect of such a poison; over the last thousand years only a few courtesans had ever fired a naittare-tipped dart at anyone, and these few instances were well-remembered in the stories that the wormrunners told in the cafés and had caused even the most depraved criminals to treat the courtesans with respect. But, on the first night that Tamara walked alone by the ocean's edge, Danlo was astonished to see her loading these deadly, black darts into her spikhaxo. And Tamara was astonished at his astonishment. She cited the tigers that hunted the beach at dark as reason enough for such precautions; who knew better than Danlo, she asked, about the tigers who preyed on innocent lambs? And Danlo did know about tigers, of course, but he could not understand why Tamara didn't carry a sheshat or some other kind of tranquillizer dart that would instantly immobilize a large predator and render it unconscious but would not kill. After all, there was no deterring one tiger by causing the hissing, screaming death of another. After all, Tamara loved animals, especially cats, whom she regarded as the most graceful and beautiful of all animals. Danlo would have thought that Tamara would do almost anything to preserve an animal's blessed life.