The air smelled of salt. It was warm, and she pulled open her pressure suit. Two brown gulls were floating in the air above the ship. Junna ran off along the line of the breakers, away down the beach.
“Here.” Tanuojin handed her flute to her in its case.
She pulled off the sleeves of the suit. “Why is the air fresh here?”
“All this grass is making the oxygen.” He waved his hand toward the inland. On the dunes blades of sawgrass sprouted out of the loose sand. “But it’s only this stretch. Twenty miles that way the air’s foul again.” He nodded down the beach after his son. “Ten or twelve miles the other. Three miles inland.” He stood over her while she tugged her feet up out of the boots of the space suit. “There’s sweet water, and if you work, you can find enough food to live. But you don’t get off this beach until you realize where your place is.”
She stepped out of the pressure suit. “You’d better call your son before he swims to China.”
Tanuojin looked up. Junna’s head bobbed in the ocean, forty feet beyond the breakers. His pressure suit and uniform lay in a heap on the wet sand. Paula took her flute and walked away along the beach. She stopped once and looked back. Tanuojin stood there staring down at the sand at his feet. He would not look at her. Perhaps he could not. She turned and went on her way.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
An American novelist, Cecilia was born December 31, 1943 in Henderson, Nevada, and began writing at the age of twelve, recording the stories she made up for her own entertainment. From the beginning, her focus was on history because “being twelve, I had precious few stories of my own. History seemed to me then, as it still does, an endless fund of material.”
She attended Pennsylvania State University for a year, and received her Bachelor of Arts degree in 1965 from Connecticut College, where she took a course in creative writing and was encouraged by poet William Meredith and short story writer David Jackson. Jackson took Holland’s first effort to his editor at Atheneum and her first novel, Firedrake, was published in 1966. She had just dropped out of graduate school at Columbia University to work as a clerk at Brentano’s in Manhattan. She has been a full-time professional writer ever since. (Firedrake was actually the fourth novel she had written; Jerusalem is the final, mature version of one of the earlier ones. Pieces of the other two also have made their way into her published work.)
Most of her novels are based on historical subjects including her first, The Firedrake (1966), which explores past history from the fall of Rome onwards. The Death of Attila (1973) and The Belt of Gold (1984) encompass the Dark Ages; Until the Sun Falls (1969) is set in Mongol Asia; The Earl (1971) and several companion volumes deal with medieval Europe; and Home Ground (1981) is set in the contemporary world, as is Pacific Street (1992).
Even her first science fiction tale, Floating Worlds (1976), unfolds an environment which seems to reflect some actual domain.
She lives presently (2004) in Fortuna, California, a small town in rural Humboldt County, California. She is married with three daughters. Once a week, she teaches a two-hour creative writing class at Pelican Bay State Prison in Crescent City, California. She was visiting professor of English at Connecticut College in 1979 and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1981-1982.