That longbow was a nuisance—but so is an M-l. Star had her little bow slung, shoulder to hip. I tried that, but it tended to catch on things. Also, it made me nervous not to have it ready since she had admitted a chance of needing it. So I unslung it and carried it in my left hand, strung and ready.
We had one alarum on the morning hike. I heard Rufo's bowstring go thwung! -- and I whirled and had my own bow ready, arrow nocked, before I saw what was up.
Or down, rather. A bird like a dusky grouse but larger. Rufo had picked it off a branch, right through the neck. I made note not to compete with him again in archery, and to get him to coach me in the fine points.
He smacked his lips and grinned. "Supper!" For the next mile he plucked it as we walked, then hung it from his belt.
We stopped for lunch one o'clockish at a picnic spot that Star assured me was defended, and Rufo opened his box to suitcase size, and served us lunch: cola cuts, crumbly Provencal cheese, crusty French bread, pears, and two bottles of Chablis. After lunch Star suggested a siesta. The idea was appealing; I had eaten heartily and shared only crumbs with the birds, but I was surprised. "Shouldn't we push on?"
"You must have a language lesson, Oscar."
I must tell them at Ponce de Leon High School the better way to study languages. You lie down on soft grass near a chuckling stream on a perfect day, and the most beautiful woman in any world bends over you and looks you in the eyes. She starts speaking softly in a language you do not understand.
After a bit her big eyes get bigger and bigger...and bigger...and you sink into them.
Then, a long time later, Rufo says, "Erbas, Oscar, ‘t knila voorsht."
"Okay," I answered, "I am getting up. Don't rush me."
That is the last word I am going to set down in a language that doesn't fit our alphabet. I had several more lessons, and won't mention them either, and from then on we spoke this lingo, except when I was forced to span gaps by asking in English. It is a language rich in profanity and in words for making love, and richer than English in some technical subjects—but with surprising holes in it. There is no word for "lawyer" for example.
About an hour before sundown we came to the Singing Waters.
We had been traveling over a high, wooded plateau. The brook where we had caught the trout had been joined by other streams and was now a big creek. Below us, at a place we hadn't reached yet, it would plunge over high cliffs in a super-Yosemite fall. But here, where we stopped to camp, the water had cut a notch into the plateau, forming cascades, before it took that dive.
"Cascades" is a weak word. Upstream, downstream, everywhere you looked, you saw waterfalls—big ones thirty or fifty feet high, little ones a mouse could have jumped up, every size in between. Terraces and staircases of them there were, smooth water green from rich foliage overhead and water white as whipped cream as it splashed into dense foam.
And you heard them. Tiny falls tinkled in silvery soprano, big falls rumbled in basso profundo. On the grassy alp where we camped it was an ever-present chorale; in the middle of the falls you had to snout to make yourself heard.
Coleridge was there in one of his dope dreams:
And here were forests ancient as the hills, Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething—
Coleridge must have followed that route and reached the Singing Waters. No wonder he felt like killing that "person from Porlock" who broke in on his best dream. When I am dying, lay me beside the Singing Waters and let them be the last I hear and see.
We stopped on a lawn terrace, flat as a promise and soft as a Kiss, and I helped Rufo unpack. I wanted to learn how he did that trick with the box. I didn't find out. Each side opened as naturally and reasonably as opening up an ironing board—and then when it opened again that was natural and reasonable, too.
First we pitched a tent for Star—no army-surplus job, this; it was a dainty pavilion of embroidered silk and the rug we spread as a floor must have used up three generations of Bukhara artists. Rufo said to me, "Do you want a tent, Oscar?"
I looked up at the sky and over at the not-yet-setting sun. The air was milk warm and I couldn't believe that it would rain. I don't like to be in a tent if there is the least chance of surprise attack. "Are you going to use a tent?"
"Me? Oh, no! But She has to have a tent, always. Then, more likely than not. She'll decade to sleep out on the grass."
"I won't need a tent." (Let's see, does a "champion" sleep across the door of his lady's chamber, weapons at hand? I wasn't sure about the etiquette of such things; they were never mentioned in "Social Studies.")
She returned then and said to Rufo, "Defended. The wards were all in place."
"Recharged?" he fretted.
She tweaked his ear. "I am not senile." She added, "Soap, Rufo. And come along, Oscar; that's Rufo's work."
Rufo dug a cake of Lux out of that caravan load and gave it to her, then looked at me thoughtfully and handed me a bar of Life Buoy.
The Singing Waters are the best bath ever, in endless variety. Still pools from footbath size to plunges you could swim in, sitz baths that tingled your skin, shower baths from just a trickle up to free-springing jets that would beat your brains in if you stood under them too long.
And you could pick your temperature. Above the cascade we used, a hot spring added itself to the main stream and at the base of this cascade a hidden spring welled out icy cold. No need to fool with taps, just move one way or the other for the temperature you like—or move downstream where it evened out to temperature as gently warm as a mother's kiss.
We played for a while, with Star squealing and giggling when I splashed her, and answering it by ducking me. We both acted like kids; I felt like one, she looked like one, and she played rough, with muscles of steel under velvet.
Presently I fetched the soap and we scrubbed. When she started shampooing her hair, I came up behind her and helped. She let me, she needed help with the lavish mop, six times as much as most gals bother with these days.
That would have been a wonderful time (with Rufo busy and out of the way) to grab her and hug her, then proceed ruggedly to other matters. Nor am I sure that she would nave made even a token protest; she might have cooperated heartily.
Hell, I know she would not have made a "token" protest. She would either have put me in my place with a cold word or a clout in the ear—or cooperated.
I couldn't do it. I couldn't even start.
I don't know why. My intentions toward Star had oscillated from dishonorable to honorable and back again, but had always been practical from the moment I laid eyes on her. No, let me put it this way: My intentions were strictly dishonorable always, but with utter willingness to convert them to honorable, later, as soon as we could dig up a justice of the peace.
Yet I found I couldn't lay a finger on her other than to help her scrub the soap out of her hair.
While I was puzzling over this, both hands buried in heavy blond hair and wondering what was stopping me from putting my arms around that slender-strong waist only inches away from me, I heard a piercing whistle and my name—my new name. I looked around.
Rufo, dressed in his unlovely skin and with towels over his shoulder, was standing on the bank ten feet away and trying to cut through the roar of water to get my attention.
I moved a few feet toward him. "How's that again?" I didn't quite snarl.
"I said, ‘Do you want a shave?' Or are you growing a beard?"
I had been uneasily aware of my face cactus while I was debating whether or not to attempt criminal assault, and that unease had helped to stop me—Gillette, Aqua Velva, Burma Shave, et al., have made the browbeaten American male, namely me, timid about attempting seduction and/or rape unless freshly planed off. And I had a two-day growth.