“Lord, you could hold an army off forever!” she exclaimed.
“Not an army, and not forever; but it would be a costly position to take.” He took a semiautomatic rifle with telescopic sights from its rack and gave it to her. “Can you use this weapon?”
“Well… I suppose so.”
“I see. Well, the important thing is that you shoot if you see anyone approaching up the gully who is not carrying a xahako. It doesn’t matter if you hit him or not. The sound of your fire will carry in these mountains, and within half an hour help will be here.”
“What’s a… ah…?”
“A xahako is a wine skin like this one. The shepherds and smugglers in these hills all know you are here. They’re my friends. And they all carry xahakos. An outlander wouldn’t.”
“Am I really in all that much danger?”
“I don’t know.”
“But why would they want to kill me?”
“I’m not sure they do. But it’s a possibility. They might reason that my involvement would be over if you were dead, and there was nothing more I could do to repay my debt to your uncle. That would be stupid thinking, because if they killed you while you were in my protection, I would be forced to make a countergesture. But we are dealing here with merchant and military mentalities, and stupidity is their intellectual idiom. Now let’s see if you can manage everything.”
He rehearsed her in lighting the stove and space heater, in drawing water from the trap door over the stream, and in loading clips into the rifle. “By the way, remember to take one of these mineral tablets each day. The water running under the floor is snowmelt. It has no minerals, and in time it will leech the minerals out of your system.”
“God, how long will I be here?”
“I’m not sure. A week. Maybe two. Once those Septembrists have accomplished their hijack, the pressure will be off you.”
While he made supper from tinned foods in the larder, she had wandered about the lodge, touching things, thinking her own thoughts.
And now they sat across the round table by the glass wall, the candlelight reversing the shadows on her soft young face on which lines of character and experience had not yet developed. She had been silent throughout the meal, and she had drunk more wine than was her habit, and now her eyes were moist and vague. “I should tell you that you don’t have to worry about me anymore. I know what I’m going to do now. Early this morning, I decided to go home and try my best to forget all this anger and… ugliness. It’s not my kind of thing. More than that, I realize now that it’s all—I don’t know—all sort of unimportant.” She played absently with the candle flame, passing her finger through it just quickly enough to avoid being burned. “A strange thing happened to me last night. Weird. But wonderful. I’ve been feeling the effects of it all day long.”
Hel thought of the alpha timbres he had been intercepting.
“I couldn’t sleep. I got up and wandered around your house in the dark. Then I went to the garden. The air was cool and there was no breeze at all. I sat by the stream, and I could see the dark flicker of the water. I was staring at it, not thinking of anything in particular, then all at once I… it was a feeling I almost remember having when I was a child. All at once, all the pressures and confusions and fears were gone. They dissolved away, and I felt light. I felt like I was transported somewhere else, someplace I’ve never been to, but I know very well. It was sunny and still, and there was grass all around me; and I seemed to understand everything. Almost as though I was… I don’t know. Almost as though I was—ouch!” She snapped her hand back and sucked the singed finger.
He laughed and shook his head, and she laughed too.
“That was a stupid thing to do,” she said.
“True. I think you were going to say that it was almost as though you and the grass and the sun were all one being, parts of the same thing.”
She stared at him, her finger still to her lips. “How did you know that?”
“It’s an experience others have had. You said you remembered similar feelings when you were a child?”
“Well, not exactly remember. No, not remember at all. It’s just that when I was there, I had the feeling that this wasn’t new and strange. It was something I had done before—but I don’t actually remember doing it before. You know what I mean?”
“I think I do. You might have been participating in the atavistic—”
“I’ll tell you what! I’m sorry, I don’t mean to interrupt you. But I’ll tell you what it’s like. It’s like the very best high on pot or something, when you’re in a perfect mood and everything’s going just right. It’s not exactly like that, because you never get there with hooch, but it’s where you think you’re going. You know what I mean?”
“No.”
“You never use pot or anything?”
“No. I’ve never had to. My inner resources are intact.”
“Well. It was something like that.”
“I see. How’s your finger?”
“Oh, it’s fine. The point is that, after the feeling had passed last night, I found myself sitting there in your garden, rested and clear-minded. And I wasn’t confused any more. I knew there was no point in trying to punish the Septembrists. Violence doesn’t get you anywhere. It’s irrelevant. Now I think I just want to go home. Spend a little time getting in touch with myself. Then maybe—I don’t know. See what’s happening around me, maybe. Deal with that.” She poured herself out another glass of wine and drank it down, then she put her hand on Hel’s arm. “I guess I’ve been a lot of trouble to you.”
“I believe the American idiom is ‘a pain in the ass.’”
“I wish there were some way I could make it up to you.”
He smiled at her obliquity.
She poured another glass of wine and said, “Do you think Hana minds your being here?”
“Why should she?”
“Well, I mean… do you think she minds our spending the night together?”
“What does that phrase signify to you?”
“What? Well… we’ll be sleeping together.”
“Sleeping together?”
“In the same place, I mean. You know what I mean.”
He regarded her without speaking. Her experience of mystic transport, even if it was a unique event prompted by an overload of tension and desperation, rather than the function of a spirit in balance and peace, gave her a worthiness in his eyes. But this new acceptance was not free from a certain envy, that this vague-minded muffin should be able to achieve the state that he had lost years ago, probably forever. He recognized the envy to be adolescent and small on his part, but this recognition was not sufficient to banish the feeling.
She had been frowning into the candle flame, trying to sort out her emotions. “I should tell you something.”
“Should you?”
“I want to be honest with you.”
“Don’t bother.”
“No, I want to be. Even before I met you, I used to think about you… daydream, sort of. All the stories my uncle used to tell about you. I was really surprised at how young you are—how young you appear, that is. And I suppose if I analyzed my feelings, there’s a sort of father projection. Here you are, the great myth in the flesh. I was scared and confused, and you protected me. I can see all the psychological impulses that would draw me toward you, can’t you?”
“Have you considered the possibility that you’re a randy young woman with a healthy and uncomplicated desire to climax? Or do you find that psychologically unsubtle?”
She looked at him and nodded. “You certainly know how to put a person down, don’t you? You don’t leave a person much to cover herself with.”
“That’s true. And perhaps it’s uncivil of me. I’m sorry. Here is what I think is going on with you. You’re alone, lonely, confused. You want to be cuddled and comforted. You don’t know how to ask for that, because you’re a product of the Western culture; so you negotiate for it, bartering sex for cuddling. It’s not an uncommon negotiation for the Western woman to engage in. After all, she’s limited to negotiating with the Western male, whose concept of social exchange is brittle and limited, and who demands earnest money in the form of sex, because that’s the only part of the bargain he is comfortable with. Miss Stern, you may sleep with me tonight if you wish. I’ll hold you and comfort you, if that’s what you want.”