The Spirit Keeper (32 page)

It was an exquisite experience.

When he was done, he said his body was now my body and I must wash him the same way. I trickled the water o’er him with shaking hands, keenly aware of his eyes upon me. When I began rubbing the water into his skin, he closed his eyes and raised his face to the gray sky. The light raindrops trickled down his body, and I traced their passage with my now-bold fingers.

When I was finisht, he opened his eyes, took my shoulders in his hands, and looked deeply into my eyes. “You are now my wife,” he said.

“You are now my husband.”

We embraced.

 • • •

Modesty prevents further description of the afternoon. Suffice it to say that I experienced an ecstasy I ne’er knew existed, forging a bond which completely obliterated any lingering tie I had to my unhappy past and my miserable childhood. If I was meant to die in that farmhouse in Pennsylvania, I was destined to be born again there on the banks of that wild river.

As usual, I took the first watch that night. Hector fell asleep immediately, but I would not have been able to sleep if I tried. I wanted only to sit beside him and watch him sleep, to enjoy the feelings he had awakened in me and bask in the bliss that was now mine.

When he stirred in the middle of the night, I slipt into his sleeping fur and we once again celebrated our new union. This time he left me there to sleep whilst he rose to stoke the fire and take his turn at watch.

 • • •

I awoke in the morning from a deep, dreamless sleep. I smiled at the smell of Hector in the fur beneath my cheek. I opened my eyes, so happy, and touched the place where he had lain beside me. I sighed.

The rain was done and the sun was well up—Hector had let me sleep too long. I sat up, tied back my hair, wrapt his sleeping fur ’round me, and crawled out from under the canoe. He was standing at the water’s edge, throwing rocks into the water. His face was stone, but I could tell by his stance and furrowed brow that he was deeply troubled. I walked quickly in his direction, concerned. Tho’ his eyes softened when he saw me, there was a definite cloud hovering o’er him. “What’s wrong?” I asked as I approacht.

He turned from me to hurl the rock he was holding into the water, the power of his throw belying the emotion he was working hard to conceal. But Hector would not lie to me. “I should have waited,” he said simply, looking out across the river.

“What?” I exclaimed, stunned. “Why? What’s wrong? Did I . . . did I displease you in some way?” My thoughts raced across the events of the previous day, desperately searching for whate’er it was that had caused this apparent change of heart. I wailed in English, “I’ve disappointed you! Oh, God in Heaven! I’ve disappointed you!” Then I switched back to his language. “You thought I was . . . something I’m not . . . and I’ve disappointed you!” I felt as if I had been punched in the stomach, and I fell to my knees, doubled o’er under the fur. I was sure he had somehow discovered I was lying about being Syawa’s Spirit Keeper and now he hated me as I knew he would. “I’m sorry, Hector!” I sobbed, “I’m so, so sorry!”

He fell upon me, grabbing my shoulders, shouting for me to stop, stop, it wasn’t that at all! “No, Kay-tee, no!” he whispered in my ear as he held my body against his. The fur fell to the ground and I was now fully bare in his arms. “It is not you—you are perfect, you are beautiful, you are far too good for me. It is me. I am disappointed in myself.”

“What?” I pulled back to look at him. “Why? Because you married me?”

“No! Well, yes.” Hector sat back on his heels and sighed. “It is my duty to protect you, to see you safely home, but . . .” He looked at me so sadly I almost started to cry again. “We have a long, long, long way to go. It is a difficult, almost impossible Journey in any case, sure to take at least another year. But if you are . . .” He gestured a big belly on me and said a word in his language which I assumed meant “with child.” He stopt and looked down in anguish.

Relief washed o’er me like a cleansing rain. “Oh, Hector—is that what worries you? That is nothing. Women have babies all the time in all kinds of places under all kinds of conditions. My mother had a baby in a big canoe on the ocean. She had another in a . . .” I said the English word for “wagon,” reminding him of the device I wanted to use to carry the canoe. “A baby might slow us down, but we will still be able to go on!”

Hector looked at me hopefully, then stood up and turned his face to the river again with a mournful expression. “You do not know how far we must go, the dangers we will face. I do. I should have been stronger. For your sake, I should not have done this.”

Still on my knees, I pulled the fur back o’er my shoulders and looked up at him critically. “You know this conversation is about a day too late, yes? Because what’s done is done. What I don’t understand is what’s different. You didn’t seem to have any doubts yesterday. You’re the one who first spoke of marriage.”

Hector literally hung his head. “I did not think you would accept me.”

My mouth fell open and the fur fell to the gravel again. It took a long moment to recover my senses, close my mouth, and pick the fur back up. “Why would you think I would not accept you?”

“You rejected me twice.”

“But I did not know you were . . . approaching me!”

Hector shrugged unhappily, looking at the ground. “It was wrong of me to approach you. You are a Spirit Keeper. I am just a man. I am not . . . good enough for you.”

My mouth fell open again. “Oh, my heavens!” I said slowly in English. I looked up at Hector, remembering when I had the same conversation with Syawa, or at least tried to. The absurdity of my being on the other side of this conversation made me want to laugh. I said, “Hector, you
are
good enough. You are much, much better than I am.”

He stood facing the river, still looking down, tight-lipped, shaking his head. A long moment passed. “You do not understand. My father will say I took advantage of your . . .” He said a word which I had to ask him to define. It meant “vulnerability.” He went on to remind me his father thought he was impulsive, brash. “Now I know what he means.”

I sighed, looking up at the glistening leaves in the trees. I may have broken with my past, but Hector had not and ne’er would. “Your father will not approve of our marriage?”

Hector glanced at me glumly. “Marriage is a sacred thing. It is not just between a man and a woman. It is a bond between families, between communities, between generations. Marrying you now, like this, is an insult to all.”

Oh, wonderful. If we e’er made it all the way to Hector’s home, everyone there would hate me right from the start. Huzzah.

But no, that was not the case, Hector assured me when I said as much. He mumbled about the complex social rules of his people. Apparently being a Spirit Keeper elevated me beyond the reach of his class or clan or some such thing, which meant he had no right to approach me. The fact that I did not know it was wrong only compounded Hector’s responsibility and subsequent misconduct.

Class, society, la, la, la—these ridiculous concepts had tormented me my entire life. Because my father married below his class, he was expelled from his homeland, denied his inheritance. Because my mother married above her station, she was always frantic, frazzled, and furious. Because my siblings and I all must struggle to improve our positions, we constantly fought each other and everyone we met. But the truth was, were it not for the social misconduct of my parents, I would not exist. Therefore, who could blame me, as I sat naked in the midst of that wild land, if I decided once and for all I no longer had any use for social rules?

“Look, Hector—I do not know your father,” I said slowly. “But I do know you. You saved my life. You defended me. You fed me. You protected me. You cared for me. I have told you about my life and you must understand this: no one else I have e’er known has e’er truly wanted me. No one was e’er even kind to me ’til I met you and the Seer. You think I am something special. I am not.
You
are. You gave up a life you loved for me, you traveled across this entire land for me, you risk your life every day for me. You are the most glorious person in the world. How could I not accept you?”

He tipt his head, more miserable than e’er. “This is what I mean when I say I took advantage of your vulnerability.”

I sighed and stood up, naked before him, hands on hips, one eyebrow raised. “Truly? After what you’ve seen me do, after knowing what I’m capable of, can you honestly say you think I’m vulnerable? I’m pretty sure I could beat you in a fight.” I lifted my chin and stared at him, a challenge in my eyes. His eyes went grave as he met my gaze, and for a moment we were in my family’s loft again, toe to toe, eye to eye, weighing each other, wondering, calculating our next move.

Hector inhaled deeply and turned back to the river. “We should not fight.”

I walked to him, breathing on his neck. “I agree. We should be married instead.”

He raised his eyebrows as he turned his face to me. “You think married people do not fight?”

“I think married people have a strong reason to stop fighting.” I could see my breath on his shoulder was affecting him, but he turned his face away, still unconvinced. I stared at him, saw his suffering, and a new thought occurred, a disturbing thought, a nagging doubt which began to grow and fester in my brain. “But, wait—something makes no sense. If you believed you and I could not marry, then why did you ask me to marry you in the first place?”

Hector hung his head again. “I did not,” he mumbled. “Because I could not.”

Stunned, I reviewed our conversation from the day before, that sick feeling spreading from my brain to my stomach. Was Hector saying he ne’er meant to marry me at all, that I had assumed things that were not true, that this was just another huge misunderstanding? “But you gave me a burning stick! Three times! Why would you do that if you believed we could not marry?”

Staring at the riverbank, he inhaled and exhaled a couple times. Finally he spoke without looking up. “I should have explained it all to you. I was trying to. If I had explained, then you would have known how wrong my actions were. You would have known you must reject me. But I . . . I wanted you more than I wanted air to breathe. And when it seemed you wanted me, too, I could not stop myself. I knew you didn’t understand and I knew I should explain, but I also knew this was my chance, my only chance. So I took it.”

I stared dumbly into the river. “So . . . so you’re saying you
did
take advantage of me. You knew I was stupid and you gave me the stick, knowing I wouldn’t understand, knowing I would assume . . .”

“I did not intend to trick you into marrying me, but that is exactly what I have done. I ne’er dared hope it would work, but it was the only way . . .”

A single laugh shot from me. “Hector, did you plan all this, just to get ’round your people’s rules?” When he shrugged, head still hanging, I became vastly amused, and, quite frankly, impressed. He hadn’t exactly lied to me, but by withholding vital information he had allowed me to believe things that weren’t true. “But I still don’t understand. If you had explained everything to me, what was I supposed to do? Slap your face, push you away, threaten to tell your father?”

“That is what others in your position have done. We are people who could ne’er marry, so you should have ignored me, and if I approacht you as I did, you should have apologized for enticing me and stopt torturing me with what I could never have.”

“I should have
apologized
?” I shook my head, staring into thin air. For a moment I was back in Philadelphia, watching my sisters entice the men they met. They wore their bodices low, breasts bulging out the top. They batted their eyelashes, smiling coyly, licking their lips or running their fingers seductively across various parts of their body. They breathed heavily as they presst their loins against the swollen breeches of the men they teased. They laughed and got the men to do whate’er they wanted.

And then I thought of how I behaved with Hector. I had, on countless occasions, stood before him in various stages of undress, including complete nudity, and he had not reacted in any way. But apparently whene’er I smiled at him, or talked to him, or—God help me—
looked
at him, he was unbearably aroused. Why is it that knowing this only made me love him all the more?

“Very well, Hector,” I said slowly, turning back to him, “if you want an apology, here it is. I am sorry. I truly am sorry. Because I am not going to stop enticing you. I will ne’er stop enticing you. I plan to entice you as much as I can every single day for the rest of my life.”

Hector looked at me with a worried frown. “Well, then it is a good thing we are married.”

I laughed. “I think so, too.” He finally smiled with me—a sheepish grin, with face downcast. I thought for a moment, trying to choose my next words carefully. I sighed. “But because of all you have said, I must ask you something. Why in the world would you want me so much? Is it because you are forbidden to have me? Is it because I am the Creature of Fire and Ice? Is it because I am his Spirit Keeper? Hector, I need to know—is there any part of you that wants
me
, that married
me
?”

Hector pursed his lips, considering. Knowing he would be nothing but honest, I awaited his answer in great trepidation. “It is not possible to”—he gestured so I would understand the next word—“
separate
those parts of you. You
are
all those things. But I have been with you for a very long time now. I have seen you. I have heard you. And I love you, Kay-tee.” He looked at me with such a fiery affection I melted before him. “I think you know I love you.”

I nodded, smiling. “I do. And you know I love you, too.”

We came together passionately, ’til suddenly I pulled away. “Oh, but wait! My husband will be very unhappy if we do not travel a great distance today! He hates it when I delay.”

Hector would not release me. He growled, “Your husband will be very unhappy if you do
not
delay!”