A Dream of Ice (10 page)

“Nope,” she said. “Just Ben. I needed to feel . . .” She sought a better word than “human,” settled on, “normal.”

Anita's expression was warm and understanding and she gave Caitlin a hug as she grabbed her purse and headed out.

She arrived in the lobby before Ben did, impressing the doorman and refusing to look at her cell phone while she waited. She stood near the door, watching life and traffic, ivory clouds against a darkening sky, people moving north and south and plugging into their own intangible, invisible worlds of thought and wireless conversation.

I shouldn't be here
, she thought with a welling of guilt. She glanced back toward the elevators, felt the pull. She started back, fished in her purse for her cell phone . . . then stopped herself.

No. You're right downstairs. Jacob will be fine. You need this, need to get out, grab distance, perspective.

A cab pulled up and Ben charged from it like Pheidippides announcing that the Persians had been defeated at Marathon. Either he was running from his day or—

His expression as he came through the door settled the question. He stopped inside, stunned to immobility. Ben's mouth was the first thing to move, forming the widest grin she'd ever seen. He was very happy to see her.

“Crap,” he said.

“Just the word I was hoping you'd say,” she told him.

“No—no, Cai, you look amazing! That's what that meant. Not ‘crap.' ”

She smiled, smelling her own lipstick . . . and smiled a little wider. She walked toward him, hugged him. They continued to hold each other, moving aside only to get out of the way of other tenants.

“You're going to get through this,” Ben said in her ear. “You and Jake.”

“I want to believe,” she said.

“Then do. We understand the nature of the problem, if not the specifics. The solutions are out there.”

“Ben, my son was—possessed. That's the only word that applies.”

“No, it's a convenient label that conjures up all kinds of negatives,” he said. “What happened is something ancient, something Galderkhaani, and that's our new business: understanding that world and its processes. We've done pretty well so far, I'd say.”

“You would,” she said. “You've been studying it . . . I've been living it.”

Ben drew back slightly. “That's not fair. I've been there every step. I've seen how ‘possession' affected Maanik, how it affected you. That wasn't easy. I wasn't just an observer.”

“No, you weren't,” she agreed. “I'm sorry.”

“Apology accepted, and I'm going to tell you now what I've said before: we are in this way too deep to be objective. We have to regain some of that.”

“I know.”

He stepped back a little farther and offered his arm. She had been sobbing, just a little. She dried her eyes with the sleeve of his jacket.

“Nice,” he said.

“You better mean that.”

“I do!” he said as she hooked her arm in his. “I also want you to know I feel underdressed.”

“You're not,” she said, finding a little laugh. “You look—Ben-ish.”

He made a sour face. “Is that good or bad?”

“Sartorially neutral,” she replied. “It's the man in the clothes that matters.”

He took her arm and held the door open with the other. They walked into the cool night, amid but apart from the throng.

“Jesus,” he said, shaking his head. “Cai, you really are beautiful.”

“Thanks.”

“I feel like we should be going to the opera. Well, you should, anyway.”

“There was a time,” she said, “when people dressed for dinner . . . every night.”

“Only people of means,” Ben pointed out. “Servants like my ancestors, we ate around a butcher-block table in the kitchen.”

Mention of ancestors threw a chill into Caitlin. Ben saw it, put his free hand on hers. “Cai?”

“It's okay,” she said, putting on a smile. “I'm discovering that there are shiny new trip wires in my life. Got to work around those.” She squeezed the fingers on top of hers. “Let's eat.”

She gave his arm a tug and headed to the corner, turned west—toward a halal food truck with ten people in line: single men and women, some with dogs; a female cop; and a group of teenagers.

Ben stopped hard when he saw it. He was thrown back to their college days, grabbing street-corner hot dogs before their next lecture. This was classic Cai.

“Zero romance,” he said, raising a hand in surrender. “Just us.”

She grinned. “Just us.”

He chuckled, so did she, and they settled into the line. The cop and a man from her building noticed her, looked partly away as the line moved forward a few paces.

“We don't have Washington Square Park to sit in,” Ben noted, “no guitars or drummers or hip-hoppers with boom boxes.”

“We have my building's courtyard and the playlist on my cell phone, if you want. All eighties, all the time. Besides, we may not have many alfresco nights left,” she went on.

“Winter's around the corner—frost on your rivets and ice in your nose,” Ben said.

He twitched his mouth like his beloved fellow Brit Charlie Chaplin and Caitlin smiled, then hugged him. She held him closer, harder than she expected. He wrapped around her and they just stood in the hug, ignoring the world, the grid of skyscrapers, the impatient horns of taxis jerking across the intersection. Finally, the big guy behind them told them to move up, and they stepped forward with their arms still around each other. Ben gave Caitlin a peck on the top of her head and she disengaged.

“So how are you?” he asked.

“We'll get to that,” she replied. “How are
you
?”

Ben laughed, and despite her anxiety over the afternoon's events, Caitlin smiled too as memories—her own—flooded back warmly, the repetitive, stalling
Alphonse and Gaston
bits they sometimes stumbled into.

“It's good to be home,” Ben said to avoid the logjam. “Obligatory question number one: how are you?”

“Better, for the moment,” she answered truthfully.

“Glue or spit?”

“Glit,” she replied. That was something Ben used to ask her before an exam: did she know the material or was she winging it, was she held together securely with glue or tentatively with spit.

God, our past is good
, she thought.

“What's obligatory question number two?” she asked.

“Hold on, woman. I don't consider ‘glit' an answer.”

She whispered, “It's Galderkhaani for ‘I'm going to take whatever the world dishes out, even if it takes some time and adjustment.' ”

“I don't remember that one,” Ben said.

“You'd have to have been there,” she said sheepishly. “In Galderkhaan.”

Ben laughed out loud.

“That's my Cai,” he said. “Just walk right over to the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room and kick him in the stones.”

“Question two?”

“Us. In English, please.”

“Specifically?”

Ben looked around. “Since our sleepover,” he said delicately.

Caitlin shoved her hands in her jacket pockets. “I don't know how you're feeling about our night together, and I'm not completely sure how I'm feeling about it either. I don't have the first clue about going forward, I just think that we should—”

She stopped as she noticed that Ben was not just grinning but chuckling.

“What?” There was annoyance in her voice but she couldn't help smiling.

“Oh, I've got you. I've totally got you.”

“Care to elaborate?”

“This is going to
kill
you. Caitlin O'Hara,” he whispered into her ear, “it's only been a week and change. And I'm a guy. And there
you
are, getting deep and intense about it—”

She narrowed her eyes at him in mock offense, then chuckled and shook her head. “Damn, I'm doing the Girl Brain thing.”

“Like you're in high school,” he chortled. “You have a crush on me, a crushy crush!”

She swatted him on the arm. “You might speak a dozen languages but modern slang is not one.” Then she laughed wholeheartedly for the first time in days. It felt good.

“Move, ya lovebirds, before I crush ya,” said the construction worker behind them. “The man's waiting for your order.”

“Sorry,” Ben said, though he continued to mock her while their food was being prepared. They stood in silence and then headed toward the small courtyard behind her building. Caitlin couldn't wait and took her first bite as they walked, exclaiming how good her dinner was.

“Note to self,” Ben said, “she's got Girl Brain
and
she's a cheap date.”

“Note to self,” Caitlin echoed, “watch out. He's making noises like he's planning for
some
kind of future.”

“Not true,” Ben replied. “I know better. I wish I didn't.”

They allowed the relationship discussion a respectful moment to die before moving on.

“All right then, Ben,” Caitlin said. “Back to the gorilla. Give me the good stuff.”

He looked around puckishly. “What, here, in public?”

“Grow up. What new translations have you done?”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, oh. I'm assuming you worked during your flight.”

“Guilty. My astonished cries woke the man sitting next to me. He looked at me funny.”

“You should be used to that.”

“Seriously, no exaggeration, I did actually vocalize at one point. Galderkhaan. Galder. Khaan. Remind you of anything?”

“No.”

“Old Norse and . . . ?”

Caitlin stopped chewing, then stopped walking. “No way. That obvious?”

“That obvious. I have no idea what the ‘
Galder
' is but ‘
khaan
' means the same thing as the Mongolian word—a title for a lord and master.”

“Who used it more,” Caitlin asked, “Priests or Technologists?”

“Very clever, you. First thing I checked. It wasn't the Priests.”

“That's surprising,” she said. “I would have thought they'd be the ones into the ‘supreme being' thing.”

“You're thinking like a modern person,” Ben pointed out. “Things were different then and there.”

A long, relaxed walk later, Ben guided Caitlin into Paley Park, a small courtyard that had more benches than trees. They had the courtyard to themselves. The views were mostly of brick, with an oblong of sky above. But it was quiet, save for a freestanding wall at
the back lit in russet gold and covered with long, beautiful, gently melodious rivulets of water.

“So was this
khaan
a god for the Technologists or a great ruler?” Caitlin asked.

“I don't know. My guess, based on nothing but intuition, is that the volcano was the
khaan
, given their focus on geothermal energy. Think Vulcan, Hades, the gods of the underworld.”

Caitlin made a face. “Somehow I'm reluctant to ascribe that kind of primal mind-set to them.”

“Why? It was good enough for the Greeks, Romans, and just about every other culture, including ours. Is modern religion any different? How many people believe in the ‘fire god' we call Satan?”

“Okay, point taken,” Caitlin said. “So with
khaan
in the name of the city or whatever Galderkhaan was, does that mean the Technologists were in power?”

“Shared and equal power, as far as I can make out, but with increasing hostility between them. Not physical hostility; there was a reference to banishment for anyone who used violence. Anyway, the two groups did split the place.”

“Geographically?”

“Nothing formalized”—Ben nodded at the pieces of the Berlin Wall that were displayed on one side of the park—“but each had their sector and there they lived.”

“Glogharasor and Belhorji?” Caitlin couldn't believe she was casually pulling names from one of her trances as if they were “Manhattan” and “Brooklyn.”

Ben regarded her. “Yes. Jesus.”

“Don't do that,” Caitlin said. “I'm trying not to freak
myself
out.”

“Sorry,” he said. “Sorry. The Priests lived in Glogharasor. They used the root word ‘
Glogharas
' when they spoke of themselves—the ‘dawn seers.' ”

“And Belhorji?”

“Don't know yet,” he admitted.

Caitlin returned to her food. She wasn't very hungry but needed something to do. Saying those two names had caused something strange to happen inside her.

“Cai, are you okay?”

“Hmm? Yeah. Yes. Why?”

“You looked like you went somewhere.”

“No, there's just—an idea. A thought. I don't know why I had it.”

“Speak,” he said encouragingly.

“Galderkhaan,” she said. “If there's anything left of it, we should find it.”

“I'm all for that, but how? And why, specifically?”

“Maybe it's not as strange and remote as we think,” Caitlin said. “How do we know that things haven't been found and misidentified and hidden in museums and universities somewhere, the way meteors and fossils have been for centuries?”

“I'm glad to hear you say that,” Ben said. “I had that idea myself. While I was in London I took a turn through the British Museum, looked at the relics with fresh eyes, peered here and there for Galderkhaani writing, wondered the same thing. I couldn't find anything, though.”

He stared at her as she munched. She looked at the fountain.

“Cai?”

“I'm here,” she said as she glanced at her phone and saw that there were no text updates from Anita about Jacob. “Do you mind if we walk some more—maybe just around the block?”