A citizen perched elegantly on the pool’s rim smiled at him. “Ah, so you’ve come at last, Charles!” Char-less. Two syllables. Someone from Gioia’s set: Stengard, Hawk, Aramayne? He could not remember which one. They were all so much alike.
Phillips returned the man’s smile in a halfhearted, tentative way. He searched for something to say and finally asked, “Have you been here long?”
“Weeks. Perhaps months. What a splendid achievement this city is, eh, Charles? Such utter unity of mood—such a total statement of a uniquely single-minded esthetic—”
“Yes. Single-minded is the word,” Phillips said dryly.
“Gioia’s word, actually. Gioia’s phrase. I was merely quoting.”
Gioia. He felt as if he had been stabbed.
“You’ve spoken to Gioia lately?” he said.
“Actually, no. It was Hekna who saw her. You do remember Hekna, eh?” He nodded toward two naked women standing on the brick platform that bordered the pool, chatting, delicately nibbling morsels of meat. They could have been twins. “There is Hekna, with your Belilala.” Hekna, yes. So this must be Hawk, Phillips thought, unless there has been some recent shift of couples. “How sweet she is, your Belilala,” Hawk said. “Gioia chose very wisely when she picked her for you.”
Another stab: a much deeper one. “Is that how it was?” he said. “Gioia picked Belilala for me?”
“Why, of course!” Hawk seemed surprised. It went without saying, evidently. “What did you think? That Gioia would merely go off and leave you to fend for yourself?”
“Hardly. Not Gioia.”
“She’s very tender, very gentle, isn’t she?”
“You mean Belilala? Yes, very,” said Phillips carefully. “A dear woman, a wonderful woman. But of course I hope to get together with Gioia again soon.” He paused. “They say she’s been in Mohenjo-daro almost since it opened.”
“She was here, yes.”
“Was?”
“Oh, you know Gioia,” Hawk said lightly. “She’s moved along by now, naturally.”
Phillips leaned forward. “Naturally,” he said. Tension thickened his voice. “Where has she gone this time?”
“Timbuctoo, I think. Or New Chicago. I forget which one it was. She was telling us that she hoped to be in Timbuctoo for the closing-down party. But then Fenimon had some pressing reason for going to New Chicago. I can’t remember what they decided to do.” Hawk gestured sadly. “Either way, a pity that she left Mohenjo before the new visitor came. She had such a rewarding time with you, after alclass="underline" I’m sure she’d have found much to learn from him also.”
The unfamiliar term twanged an alarm deep in Phillips’s consciousness. “Visitor?” he said, angling his head sharply toward Hawk. “What visitor do you mean?”
“You haven’t met him yet? Oh, of course, you’ve only just arrived.”
Phillips moistened his lips. “I think I may have seen him. Long red hair? Beard like this?”
“That’s the one! Willoughby, he’s called. He’s—what?—a Viking, a pirate, something like that. Tremendous vigor and force. Remarkable person. We should have many more visitors, I think. They’re far superior to temporaries, everyone agrees. Talking with a temporary is a little like talking to one’s self, wouldn’t you say? They give you no significant illumination. But a visitor—someone like this Willoughby—or like you, Charles—a visitor can be truly enlightening, a visitor can transform one’s view of reality—”
“Excuse me,” Phillips said. A throbbing began behind his forehead. “Perhaps we can continue this conversation later, yes?” He put the flats of his hands against the hot brick of the platform and hoisted himself swiftly from the pool. “At dinner, maybe—or afterward—yes? All right?” He set off at a quick half-trot back toward the passageway that led to the private baths.
As he entered the roofed part of the structure his throat grew dry, his breath suddenly came short. He padded quickly up the hall and peered into the little bath chamber. The bearded man was still there, sitting up in the tank, breast-high above the water, with one arm around each of the women. His eyes gleamed with fiery intensity in the dimness. He was grinning in marvelous self-satisfaction; he seemed to brim with intensity, confidence, gusto.
Let him be what I think he is, Phillips prayed. I have been alone among these people long enough.
“May I come in?” he asked.
“Aye, fellow!” cried the man in the tub thunderously. “By my troth, come ye in, and bring your lass as well! God’s teeth, I wot there’s room aplenty for more folk in this tub than we!”
At that great uproarious outcry Phillips felt a powerful surge of joy. What a joyous rowdy voice! How rich, how lusty, how totally uncitizenlike!
And those oddly archaic words! God’s teeth? By my troth? What sort of talk was that? What else but the good pure sonorous Elizabethan diction! Certainly it had something of the roll and fervor of Shakespeare about it. And spoken with—an Irish brogue, was it? No, not quite: it was English, but English spoken in no manner Phillips had ever heard.
Citizens did not speak that way. But a visitor might.
So it was true. Relief flooded Phillips’s soul. Not alone, then! Another relic of a former age—another wanderer—a companion in chaos, a brother in adversity—a fellow voyager, tossed even farther than he had been by the tempests of time—
The bearded man grinned heartily and beckoned to Phillips with a toss of his head. “Well, join us, join us, man! ’Tis good to see an English face again, amidst all these Moors and rogue Portugals! But what have ye done with thy lass? One can never have enough wenches, d’ye not agree?”
The force and vigor of him were extraordinary: almost too much so. He roared, he bellowed, he boomed. He was so very much what he ought to be that he seemed more a character out of some old pirate movie than anything else, so blustering, so real, that he seemed unreal. A stage Elizabethan, larger than life, a boisterous young Falstaff without the belly.
Hoarsely Phillips said, “Who are you?”
“Why, Ned Willoughby’s son Francis am I, of Plymouth. Late of the service of Her Most Protestant Majesty, but most foully abducted by the powers of darkness and cast away among these blackamoor Hindus, or whatever they be. And thyself?”
“Charles Phillips.” After a moment’s uncertainty he added, “I’m from New York.”
“New York? What place is that? In faith, man, I know it not!”
“A city in America.”
“A city in America, forsooth! What a fine fancy that is! In America, you say, and not on the Moon, or perchance underneath the sea?” To the women Willoughby said, “D’ye hear him? He comes from a city in America! With the face of an Englishman, though not the manner of one, and not quite the proper sort of speech. A city in America! A city. God’s blood, what will I hear next?”
Phillips trembled. Awe was beginning to take hold of him. This man had walked the streets of Shakespeare’s London, perhaps. He had clinked canisters with Marlowe or Essex or Walter Raleigh; he had watched the ships of the Armada wallowing in the Channel. It strained Phillips’s spirit to think of it. This strange dream in which he found himself was compounding its strangeness now. He felt like a weary swimmer assailed by heavy surf, winded, dazed. The hot close atmosphere of the baths was driving him toward vertigo. There could be no doubt of it any longer. He was not the only primitive—the only visitor—who was wandering loose in this fiftieth century. They were conducting other experiments as well. He gripped the sides of the door to steady himself and said, “When you speak of Her Most Protestant Majesty, it’s Elizabeth the First you mean, is that not so?”