He did not want to believe that. He resolved to meet the possibility of deception with a conscious act of faith, in the hope that that would make her be what she seemed to be.
"What's your name?" he asked.
"Sarise. And yours?"
"Nismile. Where do you live?"
"In the forest."
"Then there's a human settlement not far from here?"
She shrugged. "I live by myself." She came toward him — he felt his muscles growing taut as she moved closer, and something churning in his stomach, and his skin seemed to be blazing — and touched her fingers lightly to the cuts the vines had made on his arms and chest. "Don't those scratches bother you?"
"They're beginning to. I should wash them."
"Yes. Let's go back to the pool. I know a better way than the one you took. Follow me!"
She parted the fronds of a thick clump of ferns and revealed a narrow, well-worn trail. Gracefully she sprinted off, and he ran behind her, delighted by the ease of her movements, the play of muscles in her back and buttocks. He plunged into the pool a moment after her and they splashed about. The chilly water soothed the stinging of the cuts. When they climbed out, he yearned to draw her to him and enclose her in his arms, but he did not dare. They sprawled on the mossy bank. There was mischief in her eyes. He said, "My cabin isn't far."
"I know."
"Would you like to go there?"
"Some other time, Nismile."
"All right. Some other time."
"Where do you come from?" she asked. "I was born on Castle Mount. Do you know where that is? I was a soul-painter at the Coronal's court. Do you know what soul-painting is? It's done with the mind and a sensitive canvas, and — I could show you. I could paint you, Sarise. I take a close look at something, I seize its essence with my deepest consciousness, and then I go into a kind of trance, almost a waking dream, and I transform what I've seen into something of my own and hurl it on the canvas, I capture the truth of it in one quick blaze of transference—" He paused. "I could show you best by making a painting of you."
She scarcely seemed to have heard him. "Would you like to touch me, Nismile?"
"Yes. Very much."
The thick turquoise moss was like a carpet. She rolled toward him and his hand hovered above her body, and then he hesitated, for he was certain still that she was a Metamorph playing some perverse Shapeshifter game with him, and a heritage of thousands of years of dread and loathing surfaced in him, and he was terrified of touching her and discovering that her skin had the clammy repugnant texture that he imagined Metamorph skin to have, or that she would shift and turn into a creature of alien form the moment she was in his arms. Her eyes were closed, her lips were parted, her tongue flickered between them like a serpent's: she was waiting. In terror he forced his hand down to her breast. But her flesh was warm and yielding and it felt very much the way the flesh of a young human woman should feel, as well as he could recall after these years of solitude. With a soft little cry she pressed herself into his embrace. For a dismaying instant the grotesque image of a Metamorph rose in his mind, angular and long-limbed and noseless, but he shoved the thought away fiercely and gave himself up entirely to her lithe and vigorous body.
For a long time afterward they lay still, side by side, hands clasped, saying nothing. Even when a light rainshower came they did not move, but simply allowed the quick sharp sprinkle to wash the sweat from their skins. He opened his eyes eventually and found her watching him with keen curiosity.
"I want to paint you," he said.
"No."
"Not now. Tomorrow. You'll come to my cabin, and—"
"No."
"I haven't tried to paint in years. It's important to me to begin again. And I want very much to paint you."
"I want very much not to be painted," she said.
"Please."
"No," she said gently. She rolled away and stood up. "Paint the jungle. Paint the pool. Don't paint me, all right, Nismile? All right?"
He made an unhappy gesture of acceptance.
She said, "I have to leave now."
"Will you tell me where you live?"
"I already have. Here and there. In the forest. Why do you ask these questions?"
"I want to be able to find you again. If you disappear, how will I know where to look?"
"I know where to find you," she said. "That's enough."
"Will you come to me tomorrow? To my cabin?"
"I think I will."
He took her hand and drew her toward him. But now she was hesitant, remote. The mysteries of her throbbed in his mind. She had told him nothing, really, but her name. He found it too difficult to believe that she, like he, was a solitary of the jungle, wandering as the whim came; but he doubted that he could have failed to detect, in all these weeks, the existence of a human village nearby. The most likely explanation still was that she was a Shapeshifter, embarked for who knew what reason on an adventure with a human. Much as he resisted that idea, he was too rational to reject it completely. But she looked human, she felt human, she acted human. How good were these Metamorphs at their transformations? He was tempted to ask her outright whether his suspicions were correct, but that was foolishness; she had answered nothing else, and surely she would not answer that. He kept his questions to himself. She pulled her hand gently free of his grasp and smiled and made the shape of a kiss with her lips, and stepped toward the fern-bordered trail and was gone.
Nismile waited at his cabin all the next day. She did not come. It scarcely surprised him. Their meeting had been a dream, a fantasy, an interlude beyond time and space. He did not expect ever to see her again. Toward evening he drew a canvas from the pack he had brought with him and set it up, thinking he might paint the view from his cabin as twilight purpled the forest air; he studied the landscape a long while, testing the verticals of the slender trees against the heavy horizontal of a thick sprawling yellow-berried bush, and eventually shook his head and put his canvas away. Nothing about this landscape needed to be captured by art. In the morning, he thought, he would hike upstream past the meadow to a place where fleshy red succulents sprouted like rubbery spikes from a deep cleft in a great rock: a more promising scene, perhaps.
But in the morning he found excuses for delaying his departure, and by noon it seemed too late to go. He worked in his little garden plot instead — he had begun transplanting some of the shrubs whose fruits or greens he ate — and that occupied him for hours. In late afternoon a milky fog settled over the forest. He went in; and a few minutes later there was a knock at the door.
"I had given up hope," he told her.
Sarise's forehead and brows were beaded with moisture. The fog, he thought, or maybe she had been dancing along the path. "I promised I'd come," she said softly.
"Yesterday."
"This is yesterday," she said, laughing, and drew a flask from her robe. "You like wine? I found some of this. I had to go a long distance to get it. Yesterday."
It was a young gray wine, the kind that tickles the tongue with its sparkle. The flask had no label, but he supposed it to be some Zimroel wine, unknown on Castle Mount. They drank it all, he more than she — she filled his cup again and again — and when it was gone they lurched outside to make love on the cool damp ground beside the stream, and fell into a doze afterward, she waking him in some small hour of the night and leading him to his bed. They spent the rest of the night pressed close to one another, and in the morning she showed no desire to leave. They went to the pool to begin the day with a swim; they embraced again on the turquoise moss; then she guided him to the gigantic red-barked tree where he had first seen her, and pointed out to him a colossal yellow fruit, three or four yards across, that had fallen from one of its enormous branches. Nismile looked at it doubtfully. It had split open, and its interior was a scarlet custardy stuff, studded with huge gleaming black seeds. "Dwikka," she said. "It will make us drunk." She stripped off her robe and used it to wrap great chunks of the dwikka-fruit, which they carried back to his cabin and spent all morning eating. They sang and laughed most of the afternoon. For dinner they grilled some fish from Nismile's weir, and later, as they lay arm in arm watching the night descend, she asked him a thousand questions about his past life, his painting, his boyhood, his travels, about Castle Mount, the Fifty Cities, the Six Rivers, the royal court of Lord Thraym, the royal Castle of uncountable rooms. The questions came from her in a torrent, the newest one rushing forth almost before he had dealt with the last. Her curiosity was inexhaustible. It served, also, to stifle his; for although there was much he yearned to know about her — everything — he had no chance to ask it, and just as well, for he doubted she would give him answers.