"I understand you," he replied.
I won't do this because I bear Rachel any great affection, I don't. She's a damn fool for feeling what she feels for you. But I will not have you leave another soul dying for love of you. I know how it feels, and I'd rather slaughter my own child than have him visit that hurt on one more heart.
Galilee opened his arms, palms up, like a saint surrendering. "What do I need to do?" he said.
Prepare yourself… Cesaria replied.
"For what?"
I'm calling up a storm, she said, which will drive what's left of this little boat of yours back toward the islands.
"It won't survive a storm," Galilee warned her.
Do you have a better idea?
"No," he replied.
Then shut up and be thankful you 're getting another chance.
"You don't know your own strength when you do these things. Mama."
Well it's too late to stop it now, Cesaria said. Even as she spoke Galilee felt the wind come with fresh power against his face. It was veering, south-southeast.
He looked up. The clouds above The Samarkand were in uncanny motion, as though they were being stirred up by an invisible hand. The newly shown stars were abruptly eclipsed.
He felt a distinct quickening in his own veins; plainly whatever force of divine will Cesaria was using to stir the elements had some casual government over his blood.
The Samarkand bucked, broadsided by a wave; he felt its timbers shudder beneath his feet. The short, wiry hairs at the nape of his neck prickled; his stomach began to churn. He knew what feeling this was, though it was many, many years since he'd last experienced it. He was afraid.
The irony of this was not lost on him. Half an hour ago he'd been resigned to his demise. Not simply resigned; happy at its imminence. But Cesaria had changed all that. She'd given him hope, damn her. Despite her bullying and her threats (or perhaps in some part because of them) he wanted a chance to be back with his Rachel, and the prospect of death, which had seemed so comforting just minutes before, now made him afraid.
Cesaria was not indifferent to his unease. She beckoned to him. Come here, she said. Partake of me.
"What?"
You'll need all the strength you can get in the next few hours. Take some of mine.
She made quite a sight there at the bow, her arm extended to him, her body-lit by the flickering lamps-gleaming against the murderous sky.
Make it quick, Atva! she said, her voice raised now against the wind, which was whipping up spume off the waves. I can't stay here much longer.
He didn't need another invitation. He stumbled towards her along the pitching deck, reaching out to catch hold of her hand.
She'd promised him strength, and strength he got, but in a fashion that made him wonder if his mother had not changed her mind and decided instead upon infanticide. His marrow seemed to catch fire-a profound and agonizing heat that rose from the core of his limbs and spread out, through sinew and nerve, to his skin. He didn't simply feel it, he saw it; at least his eyes reported a brightness in his flesh, blue and yellow, which spread out through his body from his stomach; coursing through his wasted limbs, and revivifying them with its passage. This was not the only sight he saw, however. The blaze climbed into his head, running around his skull like wine swilled in a cup, and as it brightened there he saw his mother in a different place: in her room in the house Jefferson had built for her, lying on her temple-door bed with her eyes closed. Zelim was at the foot of the bed-loyal Zelim, who'd hated Galilee with a fine, fierce hate-his shaved head bared as if in prayer or meditation. The windows were open, and moths had fluttered in. Not a few: thousands, tens of thousands. They were on the walls and on the bed, on Cesaria's clothes and hands and face. They were even on Zelim's pate, crawling around.
This domestic vision was short, supplanted in a couple of heartbeats by something entirely stranger. The moths grew more agitated, and the flickering darkness of their wings unsealed the scene from ceiling to floor. The only form that remained was that of Cesaria, who now, instead of lying on the bed, hung suspended in a limitless darkness.
Galilee experienced a sudden, piercing loneliness: whatever void this was-real or invented-he had no wish to be there.
"Mother…" he murmured.
The vision remained, his gaze hovering uncertainly above Cesaria's body as though at any moment it, and he, might lose their powers of suspension and fall away into the darkness.
He called to his mother again, this time by name. As he called to her, the form before him shimmered and the third and final vision appeared. The darkness didn't alter, but Cesaria did. The robes in which she was wrapped darkened, rotted, and fell away. She was not naked beneath; or at least his eyes had no chance to witness her in that state. She was molten, laval; her humanity, or the guise of that humanity, flowing out of her into the void, trailing brightness as it went.
He glimpsed her face as it melted into light; saw her eyes open and full of bliss; saw her burning heart fall like a star, brightening the abyss as it went.
The insufferable loneliness was burned away in the same ecstatic moment. The fear he'd felt hanging in this nowhere seemed suddenly laughable. How could he ever be alone in a place shared with so miraculous a soul? Look, she was light! And the darkness was her foil, her other, her immaculate companion; they were lovers, she and it, partners in a marriage of absolutes.
And with that revelation, the vision went out of him, and he was back on the deck of The Samarkand.
Cesaria had gone. Whether in the process of tending him her strength had exhausted her, and she'd withdrawn her spirit to a place of rest-the bedroom where he'd seen her lying, perhaps-or she'd simply made her departure because she was done with him and had nothing more to say (which was perfectly in keeping with her nature) he didn't know. Nor did he have time to ponder the question. The storm she'd stirred up was upon him, in all its ferocity. The waves would have been high enough to match the mast, if he'd had a mast, and the wind enough to tatter his sails, if he'd had sails. As it was-and by his own choosing-he had nothing. Just his limbs, no longer wasted by denial, and his wits, and the creaking hull of his boat.
It would be enough. He threw back his head, filled with a fierce exhilaration, and yelled up at the roiling clouds.
"RACHEL! WATT FOR ME!"
Then he fell down on his knees and prayed to his father in heaven to deliver him safely from the storm his mother had made.
There was a great commotion in the house a few hours ago; laughter, for once. L'Enfant hasn't heard a lot of laughter in the last few decades. I got up from my desk and went to see what the cause was, and encountered Marietta-holding the hand of a woman in jeans and a T-shirt-ambling down the hallway toward my study. The laughter I'd heard were still on their faces.
"Eddie!" she said brightly. "We were just coming to say hello."
"This must be Alice," I said.
"Yes," she replied, beaming with pride.
She had reason. The girl, for all her simple garb, was slim and pretty; small-boned and small-breasted. Unlike Marietta, who enjoys painting herself up with kohl and lip gloss, Alice wore not a scrap of makeup. Her eyelashes were blonde, like her hair, and her face, which was milky white, dusted with pale, pale freckles. The impression such coloring sometimes lends is insipid, but such was not the case with this woman. There was a ferocity in her gray eyes, which made her, I suspected, a perfect foil for Marietta. This was not a woman who was going to take orders from anybody. She might look like buttermilk, but she most likely had an iron soul. When she took my hand to shake it, I had further proof. Her grip was viselike.