"He wouldn"t need this place to do that," I said. "How on earth do you find your way out of here?" Nothing she had said had lessened my uneasiness.
"The years," she said seriously, "have taken care of that."
She pulled at me and we sat, our torsos in the deep shade of the hedges, our stretched-out legs in the b.u.t.tery warmth of the sunlight. Somewhere, close at hand, a b.u.mblebee buzzed fatly, contentedly.
I put my head back and watched the play of light and shadow on the hedge opposite us. Ten thousand tiny leaves moved minutely in the soft breeze as if I were watching a distant crowd fluttering lifted handkerchiefs at the arrival of some visiting emperor. A kind of dreamy warmth stole over me and at once my uneasiness was gone.
"Yes," I told her. "It is peaceful here."
"I am glad," she said. "You feel it too. Perhaps that is because you are a writer. A writer feels things more deeply, is that not so?"
I smiled. "Maybe some, yes. We"re always creating characters for our stories so we have to be adept at pulling apart the people we meet. We have to be able to get beyond the world and, like a surgeon, expose their workings."
"And you"re never frightened of such things?"
"Frightened? Why?"
"Of what you"ll find there."
"I"ve discovered many things there over the years. How could all of them be pleasant? Why should I want them to be? I sometimes think that many of my colleagues live off the unpleasant traits they find beneath the surface." I shrugged. "In any event, nothing seems to work well without the darkness of conflict. In life as well as in writing."
Her eyes opened and she looked at me sideways. "Am I wrong to think that knowledge is very important to you?"
"What could be more important to a writer? I sometimes think there is a finite amount of knowledge-not to be a.s.similated-but that can be used."
"And that is why you have come here."
"Yes."
She looked away. "You have never married. Why is that?"
I shrugged while I thought about that for a moment. "I imagine it"s because I"ve never fallen in love."
She smiled at that. "Never ever. Not in all the time-"
I laughed. "Now wait a minute! I"m not that old. Thirty-seven is hardly ancient."
"Thirty-seven," she mouthed softly, as if she were repeating words alien to her. "Thirty-seven. Really?"
"Yes." I was puzzled. "How old are you?"
"As old as I look." She tossed her hair. "I told you last night. Time means very little here."
"Oh yes, day to day. But I mean you must-"
"No more talk now," she said, rising and pulling at my hand. "There is too much to see."
We left the labyrinth by a simple enough path, though, left to myself, I undoubtedly would have wandered around in there until someone had the decency to come and get me.
Presently we found ourselves at a stone parapet beyond which the peak dropped off so precipitously that it seemed as if we were standing on the verge of a rift in the world.
This was the western face of the island, one that I had not seen on my journey here. Far below us-certainly more than a thousand feet-the sea creamed and sucked at the jagged rocks, iced at their base by shining pale-gray barnacles. Three or four large lavender and white gulls dipped and wheeled through the foaming spray as they searched for food.
"Beautiful, isn"t it?" Marissa said.
But I had already turned from the dark face of the sea to watch the planes and hollows of her own shining face, lit by the soft summer light, all rose and golden, radiating a warmth....
It took me some time to understand the true nature of that heat. It stemmed from the same spot deep inside me from which had leaped that sharp momentary anger.
"Marissa," I breathed, saying her name as if it were a prayer.
And she turned to me, her cornflower blue eyes wide, her full lips slightly parted, shining. I leaned over her, coming closer inch by inch until I had to shut my eyes or cross them. Then I felt the brush of her lips against mine, so incredibly soft, at first cool and fragrant, then quickly warming to blood-heat.
"No," she said, her voice m.u.f.fled by our flesh. "Oh, don"t." But her lips opened under mine and I felt her hot tongue probing into my mouth.
My arms went around her, pulling her to me as gently as I would handle a stalk of wheat. I could feel the hard press of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, the round softness of her stomach, and the heat. The heat rising....
And with the lightning comes the rain. That"s from an old poem my mother used to sing to me late at night when the storms woke me up. I cannot remember any more of it. Now it"s just a fragment of truth, an artifact unearthed from the silty riverbed of my mind. And I the archeologist of this region as puzzled as everyone else at what I sometimes find. But that, after all, is what has kept me writing, year after year. An engine of creation.
The night is impenetrable with cloud and the hissing downpour. But still I stand at my open window, high up above the city, at the very edge of heaven.
I cannot see the streets below me-the one or two hurrying people beneath their trembling umbrellas or the lights of the cars, if indeed there are any out at this unG.o.dly hour-just the spectral geometric patterns, charcoal-gray on black, of the buildings" tops closest to mine. But not as high. None of them is as high.
Nothing exists now but this tempest and its fury. The night is alive with it, juddering and crackling. Or am I wrong? Is the night alive with something else? I know.
I know.
I hear the sound of them now....
The days pa.s.sed like the most intense of dreams. The kind where you can recall every single detail any time you wish, producing its emotions again and again with a conjurer"s facility.
Being with Marissa, I forgot about my obsessive desire to seek out Morodor. I no longer asked her where he was or when I would get to see him. In fact, I hoped I never would, for, if there were any truth to the legends of Fuego del Aire, they most a.s.suredly must stem from his dark soul and not from this creature of air and light who never left my side.
In the afternoons we strolled through the endless gardens-for she was ill at ease indoors-and holding her hand seemed infinitely more joyous than looking upon the castle"s illimitable marvels. I fully believe that if we had chanced upon a griffin during one of those walks I would have taken no more notice of it than I would an alley cat.
However, no such fabled creature made its appearance, and as the time pa.s.sed I became more and more convinced that there was no basis at all to the stories that had been told and re-told over the years. The only magical power Marissa possessed was the one that enabled her to cut to the very core of me with but one word or the merest touch of her flesh against mine.
"I lied to you," I told her one day. It was late afternoon. Thick dark sunlight slanted down on our shoulders and backs, as slow-running as honey. The cicadas wailed like beaten bra.s.s and b.u.t.terflies danced like living jewels in and out of the low bushes and the blossoms as if they were a flock of children playing tag.
"About what?"
"When I said that I had never been in love." I turned over on my back, staring up at a fleecy cloud piled high, a castle in the sky. "I was. Once."
I took her hand, rubbed my thumb over the delicate bones ribbing the back. "It was when I was in college. We met in a child psychology cla.s.s and fell in love without even knowing it."
For a moment there was a silence between us and I thought perhaps I had made a mistake in bringing it up.
"But you did not marry her."
"No."
"Why not?"
"We were from different... backgrounds." I turned to see her face peering at me, seeming as large as the sun in the sky. "I think it would be difficult to explain to you, Marissa. It had something to do with religion."
"Religion." Again she rolled a word off her tongue as if trying to get the taste of a new and exotic food. "I am not certain that I understand."
"We believed in different things-or, more accurately, she believed and I didn"t."
"And there was no room for... compromise?"
"In this, no. But the ironic part of all of it is that now I have begun to believe, if just a little bit; and she, I think, has begun to disbelieve some of what she had always held sacred."
"How sad," Marissa said. "Will you go back to her?"
"Our time has long pa.s.sed."
Something curious had come into her eyes. "Then you believe that love has a beginning and an end, always."
I could no longer bear to have those fantastic eyes riveting me. "I had thought so."
"Why do you look away?"
"I-" I watched the sky. The cloud-castle had metamorphosed into a great humpbacked bird. "I don"t know."
Her eyes were very clear, piercing though the natural light was dusky. "We are explorers," she said, "at the very precipice of time." Something in her voice drew me. "Can there really be a love without end?"
Now she began to search my face in detail as if she were committing it to memory, as if she might never see me again. And that wild thought brought me fully out of my peaceful dozing.
"Do you love me?"
"Yes," I whispered with someone else"s voice. Like a dry wind through sere reeds. And pulled her down to me.
At night we seemed even closer. It was as if I had taken a bit of the sun to bed with me: she was as radiant at night as she was during the day, light and supple and so eager to be held, to be caressed. To be loved.
"Feel how I feel," she whispered, trembling, "when I am close to you." She stretched herself over me. "The mouth can lie with words but the body cannot. This heat is real. All love flows out through the body, do you know that?"
I was beyond being able to respond verbally.
She moved her fingertips on me, then the petal softness of her palms. "I feel your body. How you respond to me. Its depth. As if I were the moon and you the sea." Her lips were at my ear, her esses sibilant. "It is important. More important than you know."
"Why?" I sighed.
"Because only love can mend my heart."
I wondered at the scar there. I moved against her, opening her legs.
"Darling!"
I met Morodor on the first day of my second week at Fuego del Aire. And then it seemed quite by chance.
It was just after breakfast and Marissa had gone back to her room to change. I was strolling along the second-floor bal.u.s.trade when I came across a niche in the wall that I had missed before.
I went through it and found myself on a parapet along the jutting north side of the castle. It was like hanging in mid-air and I would have been utterly stunned by the vista had I not almost immediately run into a dark towering shape.
Hastily I backed up against the stone wall of the castle, thinking I had inadvertently run into another outcropping of this odd structure.
Then, quite literally, it seemed as if a shadow had come to life. It detached itself from the edge of the parapet and now I could see that it was the figure of a man.
He must have been nearly seven feet tall and held about him a great ebon cape, thick and swirling, that rushed down his slender form so that it hissed against the stone floor when he moved.
He turned toward me and I gasped. His face was long and narrow, as bony as a corpse"s, his skin fully as pale. His eyes, beneath darkly furred brows, were bits of bituminous matter as if put there to plug a pair of holes into his interior. His nose was long and thin to the point of severity but his lips were full and rubicund, providing the only bit of color to his otherwise deathly pallid face.
His lips opened infinitesimally and he spoke my name. Involuntarily, I shuddered and immediately saw something pa.s.s across his eyes: not anger or sorrow but rather a weary kind of resignation.
"How do you do."
The greeting was so formal that it startled me and I was tongue-tied. After all this time, he had faded from my mind and now I longed only to be with Marissa. I found myself annoyed with him for intruding upon us.
"Morodor," I said. I had the oddest impulse to tell him that what he needed most was a good dose of sunshine. That almost made me giggle. Almost.
"Pardon me for saying this but I thought... that is, to see you up and around, outside in the daylight-" I stopped, my cheeks burning, unable to go on. I had done it anyway. I cursed myself for the fool that I was.
But Morodor took no offense. He merely smiled-a perfectly ghastly sight-and inclined his head a fraction. "A rather common misconception," he said in his disturbing, rumbling voice. "It is in fact direct sunlight that is injurious to my health. I am like a fine old print." His dark hair brushed against his high forehead. "I quite enjoy the daytime, otherwise."
"But surely you must sleep sometime."
He shook his great head. "Sleep is unknown to me. If I slept, I would dream and this is not allowed me." He took a long hissing stride along the parapet. "Come," he said. "Let us walk." I looked back the way I had come and he said, "Marissa knows we are together. Do not fear. She will be waiting for you when we are finished."
Together we walked along the narrow parapet. Apparently, it girdled the entire castle, for I saw no beginning to it and no end.
"You may wonder," Morodor said in his booming, vibratory voice, "why I granted you this interview." His great cape swept around him like the coils of a midnight sea so that it seemed as if he kept the night around him wherever he went. "I sensed in your writing a certain desperation." He turned to me. "And desperation is an emotion with which I can empathize."
"It was kind of you to see me."
"Kind, yes."
"But I must confess that things have... changed since I wrote that letter."
"Indeed." Was that a vibratory warning?
"Yes," I plunged onward. "In fact, since I came here, I-" I paused, not knowing how to continue. "The change has come since I arrived at Fuego del Aire."
Morodor said nothing and we continued our perambulation around the perimeter of the castle. Now I could accurately judge just how high up we were. Perhaps that mist I had seen the first night had been a cloud pa.s.sing us as if across the face of the moon. And why not? All things seemed possible here. It struck me as ridiculous that just fifty miles from here there were supertankers and express trains, Learjets and paved streets lined with shops dispensing sleekly packaged products manufactured by multinational corporations. Surely all those modern artifacts were part of a fading dream I once had.
The sea was clear of sails for as far as the horizon. It was a flat and glittering pool there solely for the pleasure of this man.
"I"m in love with your sister." I had blurted it out and now I stood stunned, waiting, I suppose, for the full brunt of his wrath.