Marianne, the Magus & the Manticore (8 page)

"It was my passion once, if twelve-year-old girls may be allowed to have passions. I had a wonderful horse, Rustam. I loved him above all things. When he was sold, after Papa died, I cried for days. I never could tell it if was for Papa, or for Rustam. I think it was for Rustam, though. I had already cried for Papa."

"That was at your home?"

"Yes." She picked at the edges of her salad, a spiraling rosette of unfamiliar vegetables, intricately arranged. "I was just learning to jump. Rustam already knew how, of course, and he took great care to keep me on his back. I was always afraid I was in his way, hindering him."

"Is it something you want to do again someday?"

"Something I dream about. I would love to ride again, if I haven't forgotten how."

"There is some particular affinity, I am told, between adolescent girls and horses. Some girls, I should say."

"Some, yes. I was very conscious of being... well, what can one say? Not weaker, exactly, but less able to force myself upon the unimpressionable world. Less able, that is, than Papa, or Harvey. Mama didn't seem to care. There were things the men did which I simply couldn't understand. And yet, when I rode Rustam, the barriers were gone. I felt I could go any-where, through anything, over anything. That I would be carried, as on wings."

The look she turned on him was full of such adoring memory that he clenched both fists in his lap, fighting down the urge to make some poetic outburst: "Oh, I would be your steed, lady. I would carry you to such places you have not dreamed of...." Instead, he hid his face behind his napkin, managed to say something in a half-choked voice about Pegasus, leaving the poetry unsaid though the words sang in him like the after-sound of a plucked string, reverberating, summoning sympathetic vibrations from his loins.

"I asked," he said in a voice deliberately dry, "because the house which we have leased while we are in the country has attached to it an excellent stable. The people who own it are vacationing in the Far East, and they left us in complete possession of their own riding horses—that is, once they learned that we are not barbarians." He choked back a laugh, remembering the oblique correspondence which had finally established this fact to the satisfaction of the Van Horsts. "I do not want you to miss the opportunity to ride with us this weekend, Marianne. I do not want to miss the opportunity to ride with you. I have invited other people, good friends, people you would enjoy. You would not need to be in the company of your brother at all. I will beg you, importune you, please. Be my guest."

She could not refuse him. Whether it was the wine, or the thought of the horses, or the candlelight, or his own face, so full of an expression which she refused to read but could not deny, she murmured, "If you're quite sure it won't be awkward for you if Harvey behaves oddly toward me. Perhaps he won't.

I know I'm a little silly about him, sometimes."

"Do you think he will be unpleasant company for my other guests?"

"He can be charming," she said offhandedly. "I think he is only really unpleasant to me."

"Do you know why?"

She flushed, a quick flowing of red from brow to chin which suffused her face with tension. He saw it, snarled at himself for walking with such heavy feet where he did not know the way, did not give her time to reply.

"Ah, here come the crabs. Now we shall see if this is indeed a delicacy or merely one of those regional eccentricities which litter the pathways of a true gourmet."

"Gourmand," she said, relieved that the subject had been changed. "I think a gourmet would not eat soft-shelled crab.

They are supposed to be an addictive indulgence, like popcorn."

"I wasn't warned," he said in mock horror.

"Be warned. I will fight you for them."

Makr Avehl could not have said whether he liked the dish or not. He ate it. More of it than he would have eaten if alone.

He drank little wine, afraid of it for the first time in his life, of what he might say unwarily, having already said the wrong thing several times over, afraid of what he might do that would frighten his quarry.

"Quarry?" boomed the Magus, deep inside. "I warn you again, Makr Avehl. Kinswoman." He heard it as an echo of her own voice, "Be warned."

Marianne had not expected the wine, was not guarded against it, did not notice as it flowed around the controls she had set upon herself, washed away the little dikes and walls of the resolutions she had made, let her forget it was to have been an evening of politeness only, without future, without overtones. She felt herself beginning to glitter, did nothing at all to stop it, simply let it go on as though she were twelve once more, at the dinner table with Cloud-haired mama and Papa and their guests, full of happy questions and reasonably polite behavior, ready to be charmed and charming. 'Tell me about Alphenlicht," she demanded. "All about it. Not the politics, but how it smells and tastes. What it is like to live there."

"Shall I be scholarly and give you the history? Or do you want a travelogue?" Gods but she is beautiful. In this light, her skin is like pearl.

"Don't tell me how it got that way. Just tell me how it is."

She licked her lips un-self-consciously, and he felt them on his own. He turned to look out the window and summon his wits.

"Well, then. Alphenlicht is a small country. You know that.

It is a mountainous one. There is no capital, as such. Instead, there are many small towns and villages gathered around the fortresses built by our ancestors, many of them on the sites of older fortresses built by the Urartians centuries before. Hilltop fortresses, mostly, with high stone walls topped by ragged battlements. They march along the flanks and edges of the mountains as though they had been built by nature rather than by man, gray and lichened, looking as old as forever.

"Outside the walls, the towns straggle down the hillsides, narrow streets winding among clumps of walled buildings, half stable, part barn, part dwelling. We came from Median stock, remember. The Medes could never do without horses, and their houses were always surrounded by stableyards."

"Hies," commented Marianne. "There would be lots of flies."

"No," he objected. "We are not primitive. The litter from our stables enriches our farmland. Then, too, there is a constant smoky wind in Alphenlicht. We say it is possible to stand on the southern border of our country and know what is being cooked for supper on the northern edge. You asked what the country smells like, and that is it. Woodsmoke, as I have smelled here in autumn when the leaves are being burned; a smell as nostalgic among men as any I know of. A primitive smell, evoking the campfires of our most ancient ancestors." He thought about this, knowing it for a new-old truth.

"Our houses are of stone, for the most part. We are self-consciously protective about our traditions, so we have a fondness still for glazed tile and many wooden pillars supporting ornate, carved capitals, often in the shapes of horses or bulls or mythical beasts. There is plaster over the stone, making the rooms white. The walls are thick, both for winter warmth and for summer cool, so windows are set deep and covered with wood screens which break the light, throwing a lace of shadow into our rooms. Floors are of stone for summer cool, but in winter we cover them with rugs, mostly from Turkey or Iran.

Our people have never been great rug makers.

"Ceilings are often vaulted, with wind scoops at the ends, to bring in the summer winds. In winter we cover them with stout shutters which seldom fit as well as they should. We say of an oddly assorted couple that they fit like scoop shutters, meaning that they do not..." He fell silent, musing, seeing his homeland through her eyes and his own words, as though newly.

"What do you eat?" she asked, taking the last bite of her final crab. "I am not hungry any longer, but I love to hear about food."

"Lamb and mutton. Chicken. Wild game. I have a particular fondness for wild fowl. Then, let me see, there are all the usual vegetables and grains. There are sheltered orchards along the foot of the snows where we grow apricots and peaches. We have berries and apples. There are lemon and orange trees in the conservatory at the Residence, but most citrus fruits are imported. We are able to import what we need, buying with the gems from our mines."

"But no soft-shelled crab," she mourned. "No fish."

"Indeed, fish. Trout from our streams and pools. For heaven's sake, Marianne. How can you talk about food?"

"What did you order for dessert?" she asked, finishing her wine.

He nodded to the waiter once more. "Crepes, into which will be put slivers of miraculously creamy cheese from the Alphenlicht mountains, served with a sauce of fresh raspberries flamed in Himbeergeist and doused with raspberry syrup."

"That sounds lovely." She sighed in anticipation.

"It is lovely." He made a wry mouth, mimed exasperation.

"Also unavailable here. We're having an orange souffle which is available here, which has been recommended by several people with ordinary, people-type appetites. Try a little of this sweet wine. It has a smell of mangoes, or so they say. I like the aroma, but I confess that the similarity escapes me."

They finished the meal with inconsequential talk, together with more wine, with brandy. They had been at the table for almost four hours when they left, coming out into a chilly, clear evening with a gibbous moon rising above the bay to send long, broken ladders of light across the water.

"I am at the middle of the whole world," Marianne hummed.

"See how all the lights come to me."

They stood at the center of the radiating lights, town lights on the point stretching to the north and east, island lights from small, clustered prominences to the east and south, the light of the moon.

"If you can pull yourself out of the center of things," he said tenderly, "I'll take you home."

The drive back was almost silent. Marianne was deeply content, more than a little drunk without knowing it, warmed by the wine, unsuspecting of danger. As for him, he was no less moved than he had been hours earlier, but that early impetuous anticipation had turned to something deeper and more bittersweet, something like the pain of a mortal wound gained in honorable battle by a fanatical warrior. Heaven was guaranteed to such a sufferer, but a kind of death was the only gateway. "Death of what?" he fretted, "of what? I have never been one to attach great esoteric significance to such matters!"

He refused to answer his own question. Such metaphors were merely the results of wine-loquacity, a kind of symbolic babble.

He concentrated on driving.

When they arrived, he took her to the door and entered after her, saying "I'll hang those pictures before I leave you. No!

Don't object, Marianne. I want to do it," riding over her weak protests to come close to her, making a long business of the stick-on hangers, standing back to see whether the pictures were straight, putting them where those others had been meant to go, one in her living room, the other by her bed. And she there, watching, bemused, almost unconscious, eyes fixed on the picture of the maidens setting out their lights, stroking her own face with the fluffy eagle feather tassle of the medicine bag he had brought her, as a child might stroke its face with the comer of a loved blanket, her whole expression dreamy and remote as though she merely looked in on mis present place from some distant and infinitely superior existence. Then she turned to him, and her eyes were aware, and desirous, and soft....

He groaned, the man part breaking through his self-imposed barriers, groaned and took her into his arms, putting his mouth on hers, feeling her half-surprise, then the glorious liquid warmth of her pressed against him in all that silken flow as she returned the kiss. He dropped his lips to the hollow of her throat, heard her gasp as he pressed the silk away with his mouth to follow the swelling curve of her breast....

And heard her cry as from some great distance, "Oh... not that w a y . . . chaos will win... all my battles lost.... Oh, tomorrow I will want to die."

The words fell like ice, immediately chilling, making a crystalline shell into which he recoiled, immobilized, the Magus within him seeing her face, the mouth drawn up into a rictus which could equally have been passion or pain, so evenly and indiscriminately mixed that he could not foretell the consequence of the feeling it represented.

So then it was Magus, cold, drawing upon all his powers of voice and command, who took the feathers from her hand and drew them across her eyes, forcing the lids closed, chanting in his hypnotic voice, "Sleep, sleep. Dream. It is only a dream.

A little, lustful dream. It will be forgotten in the morning.

Order rules. Your battles will all be won. Makr Avehl is your friend, your champion, your warrior to fight your battles beside you. Sleep...." All the time afraid that the voice would fail him, that his man self had so undermined his Magus self as to make his powers impotent.

But they were not. She slumped toward him, and he caught her as she fell, placing her upon her bed. When he left her a few moments later it was with a feeling of baffled frustration and disoriented anger, not at her, not even much at himself, but at whatever it was, whoever it was who set this barrier between them. He mouthed words he seldom used, castigated himself. "Fool. You knew there was something troubling her, something you have no knowledge of, but you tramp about with your great bullock's feet, treading out her very heart's blood...." For there had been that quality in her voice which had in it nothing of coquetry but only anguish. "Idiot. Get out of here before you do any more damage."

But he could not leave until he had written her a note, folding it carefully. When he shut the door behind him, he turned to push it under the door, as though he had returned after leaving her. She would not remember anything of his—of his importunate assault. He had never felt so like a rapist for so little reason, and his sense of humor began to reassert itself as he went down the stairs. She might accuse herself in the morning, but it would only be of drinking a bit too much. She could accuse herself, or him, of nothing else.