When the meal was done she took the lamp — a simple clay saucer, undecorated, with a single pinched beak for the wick — and showed him to the sleeping compartment, where soft pelts were piled upon straw. It looked delightful.
Ivo flung himself down in the bed gratefully… but soon discovered that he had company. “Even the best of ships come into port at night,” she murmured.
She had removed her cloak and other apparel and snuggled under the pelts beside him, close, and he learned that his original estimate of her physical properties had erred conservatively. She was scented with a heavy perfume he could not identify, apart from its effluence of sex appeal, and she was as lithe and sleek as a panther.
Ivo was tired, but he had had a good afternoon’s sleep in the temple and was recovering nicely from his more recent wounds and exertions. Aia had taken good care of him, and the flesh injury of his left arm only hurt when he banged it. He felt, all in all, adequate to the occasion — except for one detail.
“My ship docks elsewhere,” he said. Then, not wishing to hurt her feelings by too blunt a statement, he tried to explain: “I love another woman, and have no inclination to embrace any but her. I mean no offense to you.”
“Your wife?” she asked alertly.
“No.”
“Your concubine.”
“No.”
“It is hard to see what she offers, then, that I do not. You have a very handsome ship, and I have a comfortable port. If we are to travel together—”
“I love her. Don’t you understand?”
She gazed speculatively at him, the lamplight flickering against the wall behind her head and touching her hair with reddish highlights. “What is her name?”
What harm was there in the truth, here? “Afra,” he said, and felt a kind of relief in the confession. “Her name is Afra, and she doesn’t love me and I have no right to her, no right at all, but I love her.”
“I loved a man once,” Aia said, “but he died. Then I saw how foolish it was to depend on such a thing. Love protects nothing, it only restricts pleasure. Take pleasure in me; she will not suffer.” A pause. “Or is she near?”
“No. She is thousands of years away.”
“Thousands of years!” It had been a slip, but he saw that it bothered her only momentarily, since of course she did not understand the connection. “By foot or by ship?”
“By ship,” he said, no longer worrying about misunderstandings.
“Then you will never possess her again.” She looked at him a moment more. “But how did you get here, so long a journey? You are still young.”
“My gods are very powerful.”
“Oh.” She pondered a little longer. “If the gods of the Canaanite had been stronger, I might have had my lover back.”
“How so?” He was not particularly curious about her tragedy, but wanted to divert the conversation from both her immediately amorous intent and her queries about his travels.
“I tried to follow the way of the gods, as Anat brought back Aliyan,” she said. “But it didn’t work.”
“I am not familiar with those names.”
“You must come from very far away,” she murmured. “I will tell you: El was the supreme god of the Canaanite: El the Bull, the Sun. His wife was Asherat-of-the-sea, mother-goddess. Together they begat Baal, god of the mountains, and of the storm and the rain.”
“Very interesting,” Ivo remarked absently, wondering what he had let himself in for. “How does that relate to your—”
“I’m telling you, lover-to-be. Baal’s son was Aliyan. The two of them entered into a struggle with Mot of the summer heat, who resides deep in the womb of the earth. They did not return, so Anat went in after them. She was Aliyan’s sister and his wife, of course.”
“Of course.” What was a little incest, between gods? “All in the family.”
“Yes. She found Aliyan’s body in the abode of the dead, and carried it to the height of Saphon and buried him there with many sacrifices. That’s what I did with my lover. I fixed him a very nice stone coffin—”
“I understand.”
She took the hint and returned to the mythological narrative. “Then Anat killed Mot, who had killed her husband. With a sickle she cut him, with a winnow she winnowed him; she scattered his flesh in the field, and he was dead.”
“I’m sure he was.”
“Then she brought Aliyan back to life and set him on Mot’s throne. And that was the way the seasons began again. When she killed Mot, that was the annual harvest, of course.”
Live and learn! So it was all a variant of the seasonal mythology he had heard in other guises. “But you couldn’t bring your lover back to life?”
“No. I tried, but the gods didn’t help. He just rotted. That’s one reason I don’t appreciate Melqart.”
“I sympathize. He really should have done more for you.”
“These things do pass,” she said philosophically. “I was denied my lover, and you are denied yours. Why don’t you pretend I am she, and I’ll pretend you are he whom I once loved. We shall have joy in one another, while both being true to our memories.”
The suggestion, phrased this way, caught him by surprise, and he started to make an angry refusal — but changed his mind. He was not sure what Aia’s true motives were, or how cynical might be her intent, but her body was decidedly conducive and the notion had its peculiar appeal. He had faith that somehow he would return to Afra, for this was not his world — but it was not time or distance that separated him from her. Afra would never be his — not so long as she loved a dead man. Not so long as their joint mission required that he give up his identity to the ruthlessly clever Schön.
Was he to torture himself by perpetual abstinence, knowing that his aspiration had no reasonable fulfillment? Why not settle for the unreasonable fulfillment, in that case? For what he could get?
Why not?
“All right,” he said.
Aia helped him to remove his tunic, touching him with exciting intimacy in the process, and they came together amidst the furry upholstery, shock of flesh against flesh. His left arm gave one twinge and anesthetized itself.
“Speak to me words of love,” she murmured, not yet quite acceding to the ultimate. “Tell me what you feel.”
Oh, no! “I can’t, I never spoke love before.”
“No wonder you never impressed her! Don’t you know that the whispered word moves a woman as no caress does? Hurry — I’m getting sleepy.”
He considered the request, distracted somewhat by her breathing. She was, by touch, as well-endowed as the goddess Astarte, but much younger. “The only words I know that would not be stupid are not my own. They’re from a poem, Evening Song, by—” But what would she know of Sidney Lanier, unborn these many centuries?
She was silent, so he went ahead with the poem. “Look off, dear love, across the sallow sands, / And mark yon meeting of the sun and sea. / How long they kiss in sight of all the lands. / Ah! longer, longer we.”
He recited the two remaining stanzas, frustrated because they had neither rhyme nor meter in Phoenician, and waited for her reaction. There was none.
She was asleep.
She was up before him in the morning, trying on finery from the domicile’s stock. “None of these will do,” she said sadly, shaking her head. “Too obvious.”
“Obvious?”
“If I go into the street in one of these, every person in sight will stare.”
She was not unduly pessimistic. She was, by daylight as by night, an extraordinarily lovely girl.