The witch turned, reached hands to shoulders, lowered the gown. Large breasts, the faintest trifle overripe, floated into view, tipped with apricot nipples. Slowly she let the cloth slip down, over a full, soft belly, its deep navel aswim in shadow. A tuft of hair appeared, and, laughing, she held the dress so that only the very topmost hint of her vagina showed.
“Oh, the heart is like a little bird,” she sang softly, swaying in time to the music, “that perches in your hand.”
This woman was a trap. The bureaucrat could feel it. Gregorian had his hooks set in her just below the skin. If he were to kiss her, the barbs would pierce his own flesh, too deep and painful to rip out, and the magician would be able to play him like a fish, wearing him down, tiring him out, until he lost the will to fight and sank to the bottom of his life and died.
“And if you do not seize it…” She was waiting.
He should leave now. He should turn and flee.
Instead, he reached for her face, touched it lightly, won-deringly. Her lips turned to his, and they kissed deeply. The costume rustled as it fell to the floor. Her hands reached inside his jacket to undo his shirt. “Don’t be so gentle,” she said.
They tumbled to the bed, and she slid him within her. She was wet and open already, slippery and warm and fine. Her soft, wide belly touched him, then her breasts. She was just past her prime, poised on the instant before the long slide into age, and especially arousing to him for that. She’ll never be so beautiful again, he thought, so ripe and full of juices. She clasped her legs about his waist and rocked him like a ship on the water, gently at first, then faster, as if a storm were building.
Undine, he thought for no reason. Ysolt, Esme, Theodora — the women here have names like dried flowers or autumn leaves.
A gust of wind sent the flowerlight scurrying for the comers, hurrying back again. Undine kissed him furiously on the face, the neck, the eyes. The bed creaking beneath them, they rolled over and over one another, now on the bottom, now on top, and over again, until he lost track of who was on top and who on the bottom, of where his body ended and hers began, of exactly which body belonged to whom. And then at last she was Ocean herself, and he lost all sense of self, and drowned.
“Again,” she said.
“I’m afraid you’ve mistaken me for someone else,” the bureaucrat said amiably. “Someone considerably younger. But if you’re willing to wait twenty minutes or so, I’ll be more than happy to try again.”
She sat up, her magnificent breasts swaying slightly. Faint daggers of Caliban’s light slanted through the window to touch them both. The candle had long since guttered out. “You mean to say you don’t know the method by which men can have orgasm after orgasm without ejaculating?”
He laughed. “No.”
“The girls won’t like you if you have to stop a half hour every time you come,” she said teasingly. Then, seriously, “I’ll teach you.” She took his cock in her hand, waggled it back and forth, amused by its limpness. “After your vaunted twenty minutes. In the meantime I can show you something of interest.”
She threw the blanket lengthwise over her shoulders, as if it were a shawl. It made a strange costume in the dim light, with sleeves that touched the ground and a back that didn’t quite reach her legs, so that two pale slivers of moon peeped out at him. Naked, he padded after her into the clearing behind the hut. “Look,” she said.
Light was bursting from the ground in pale sheets of pink and blue and white. The rosebushes shimmered with pastel light as if already drowned in Ocean’s shallows. The ground here had been dug up recently, churned and spaded, and was now suffused with pale fire. “What is it?” he asked wonderingly.
“Iridobacterium. They’re naturally biophosphorescent.
You’ll find them everywhere in the soil in the Tidewater, but usually only in trace amounts. They’re useful in the spiritual arts. Pay attention now, because I’m going to explain a very minor mystery to you.”
“I’m listening,” he said, not comprehending.
“The only way to force a bloom is to bury an animal in the soil. When it decomposes, the iridobacteria feed on the products of decay. I’ve spent the last week poisoning dogs and burying them here.”
“You killed dogs?” he said, horrified.
“It was quick. What do you think is going to happen to them, when the tides come? They’re like the roses, they can’t adapt. So the humane-society people organized Dog Control Week, and paid me by the corpse. Nobody’s about to haul a bunch of mutts to the Piedmont.” She gestured. “There’s a shovel leaning against my hut.”
He fetched the shovel. In a month this land would be under water. He imagined fishes swimming through the buildings while drowned dogs floated mouths open, caught head down in tangles of drowning rosebushes. They would rot before the hungry kings of the tides would accept their carcasses. At the witch’s direction, he shoveled the brightest patches of dirt into a rusty steel drum almost filled with rainwater. The dirt sank, and bright swirls of phosphorescence rose in the water. Undine skimmed the top with a wooden scraper, slopping the scum into a wide pan. “When the water evaporates, the powder that remains is rich in iridobacteria,” she said. “There’s several more steps necessary to process it, but now it’s in concentrated form, that can wait until I reach the Piedmont. It’s common as sin now, but it won’t grow up there.”
“Tell me about Gregorian,” the bureaucrat said.
“Gregorian is the only perfectly evil man I’ve ever met,” Undine said. Her face was suddenly cold, as harsh and stern as Caliban’s rocky plains. “He is smarter than you, stronger than you, more handsome than you, and far more determined. He has received an offplanet education that’s at least the equal of yours, and he’s a master of occult arts in which you do not believe. You are insane to challenge him. You are a dead man, and you do not know it.”
“He’d certainly like me to believe that.”
“All men are fools,” Undine said. Her tone was light again, her look disdainful. “Have you noticed that? Were I in your position, I’d arrange to contract an illness or develop a moral qualm about the nature of my assignment. It might be a black mark on my record, but I would outlive the embarrassment.”
“When did you meet Gregorian?” The bureaucrat dumped more dirt in the drum, raising mad swirls of phosphorescence.
“That was the year I spent as a ghost. I was a foundling. Madame Campaspe bought me the year I first bled — she’d seen promise in me. I was a shy, spooky little thing to begin with, and as part of my training, she imposed the discipline of invisibility. I kept to the shadows, never speaking. I slept at odd times and in odd places. When I was hungry, I crept into the homes of strangers and stole my food from their cupboards and plates. If I was seen, Madame beat me — but after the first month, I was never seen.”
“That sounds horribly cruel.”
“You are in no position to judge. I was watching from the heart of an ornamental umbrella bush the morning that Madame tripped over Gregorian. Literally tripped — he was sleeping on her doorstep. I learned later that he’d walked two days solid without food, he was so anxious to become her apprentice, and then collapsed on arrival. What a squawk! She kicked him into the road, and I think he broke a rib. I climbed to the roof of her potting shed and saw her harass him out of sight. Quick as a thought, I slid to the ground, stole a turnip for my breakfast from the garden, and was gone. Thinking that was the last of that ragged young man.
“But the next day he was back.
“She chased him away. He came back. Every morning it was the same. He scrounged for food during the day — I do not know if he stole, worked, or sold his body, for I was not quite interested enough to follow him, though by now I could walk down the center of Rose Hall in broad daylight without being noticed. But every morning he was back on the stoop.