And he, pretending ignorance there on the sort of collonade, a roof set up on posts outside her house (for she did not seem to feel the need of any house-as-fortress … in fact there were no walls around the settlement), pretending ignorance he said, “But I thought Babylone had been destroyed.”
She gave him a swift and quizzical look. “Babylone Destroyed is like Thrice-Vanquished Carthage, it is always being vanquished and destroyed. But they are on the main routes, just where one needs a city to be, so a while afterwards they are builded up again, a mile from where they were before. And some Imperial Decree says the new city is to be called Philadelphia Paradoxica or Theopompa Abbadabba. Scythia Pelloponesia. But inside of a week everybody is calling them ‘Babylone’ or ‘Carthage’ all over again. And then the parchments have it, oh Hippodupos Hippodupolis, also called Smerg, something like that, I’m sure you’ve seen it a hundred times,” and gave him the same look.
“You are very cynical,” he said. She made a small defiant mock pout. He kissed her. She embraced him, pressing close. “Ah, that’s what I like,” he said, by and by: “none of those false embraces which a woman initiates with her arms spread wide and then she switches her head the other way until almost you fear it will fall off: and thus she gives you the air behind her ear to kiss; why do they bother?”
“Pretense,” she said. “The silly game. And you are supposed not to notice and kiss the air behind her ear with a great big smack —”
He nodded. “And one wonders if one smells that rank, and later learns that she has been equitating her mule-groom, who could not in any way smell less rank —”
“— but there’s no pretense here.”
“No.” He could not help but see the dust-motes dancing slowly in a shaft of that marvelous sparkling sunshine; “No … Not here … And won’t you come with me, then, Huldah, and we two can show the world — and even more: ourselves — how to live without pretense, and the silly game?”
She looked at him, he felt the quickening sorrow that she did not at all look like saying yes: but there was no pretense there, there in those agate eyes. “You wouldn’t be content to live long here,” she said, “and I wouldn’t be content to live away from here, and from Five-Limbed Uluvendas. Do you know why I am named Huldah? Oh, not just that matter of the genet and the weasel and the cat — it’s because that is the name of here. This place is called Huldah and I am this place and it’s not possible for me to forsake it.”
“But, you see …”
“I don’t see …”
“… you know …”
“I don’t know …”
He held her in his arms. “I am half-mad to stay here with you and I am half-mad to turn, and return to Naples and all my work, my works, damn all kings, back there … always centered there. Half, I cannot leave, and half, I cannot stay. What am I to do, Huldah?”
She retreated just a bit from him, perhaps a slightly deeper flush or blush, a slightly higher color in her cheeks; so well-looking, that touch of deep rose in that face, darker than sallow. “Why … you must leave in a short while, while you still have a ship going the way which you must go. And then you must see to your work … your works … And then, if you will, you will return. And then,” she paused, “and then we shall have our own Mute Trade … our own Silent Commerce and exchange.” She referred, he knew, to that most ancient way of business, sometimes called the Dumb or Mute Trade, or the Silent Commerce, a form devised long and long ago as a compromise between the desire for trade and the mutual trepidations of those trading: in this system, the merchants from over the sea would come to a place suitable for landing and in a place where they knew there were peoples who had something to sell and wanted to buy but who desired not the proximity usually attendant on buying or selling. One man of the ship would row ashore in a skiff and set forth an old piece of sail on the sand and on it place articles such as scarlet-weave, glass vessels, iron knives and arrow-heads: whatever. And then row back out to the ship and wait. Presently to the beach would come the people of the land, survey the merchandise, and leave raw gold or elephant or gemstones — what they had to offer to the amount they thought right — and retreat into the forest. Presently the shipman would land again, take up the goods if satisfied, and depart. Sometimes several trips were needed before the satisfaction of both parties was achieved. Of course there was the possibility of theft, cheats, murders: but in such cases no further trade was conducted on such beaches. (Interlopers unaware of this tended to lose their goods and their lives fairly swiftly).
“Each of us shall set down what each has to offer,” said Huldah. “And then we shall part again. And we shall consider, you and I, if each accounts the other’s offer worth the full value of what the other wants.
“And then … we shall see. Shan’t we. You will have supposed,” she said “that other men have been here and have asked, ‘Let me stay here, Huldah,’ and I have sent them all away, some with a pleasant word and a present; and some with such sayings as, ‘First fetch me what lies upon the Golden Table of Apollo in the South — would you wish to know what lies there? then you must go forth, venture, and seek; I don’t urge it’ — or some like words, largely worthless: why rob Apollo, never has Apollo robbed me, and perhaps risk a dragonvisit, or a plague or mice? And to some, some very, very few, who have said, ‘Come with me away, thou Huldah,’ to them I have said what I have said to you, just now.” Only a breath she tarried, then asked the question which troubled and trembled in his heart: “How many have returned, of either sort? Oh, none have returned. Not one. Not even a single, single one.”
He parted from her, then walked across the scented floor of scented wood, to the end of the room, that long room; then he walked back. He stood before her again, but they did not then embrace again. “I see it must be so,” he said. “You are not a woman who says no merely in order that I should try persuade her to say yes. And so, surely not as a consideration of commerce, but just as a gift from me to thee,” from his pouch he took the patch of golden fleece and from it he took the two rings of orichalcum in their incredible juxtaposition; saying further, “This is neither the Riddle of the Sphynx nor yet the Gordian knot.”
“Yet a rare thing, of great value,” she said. “I felt … something … not describable … when you placed it in my hand. I am not necessarily expected to solve this matter. But it abides with me as a thing of memory of you, not that I should forget, but this is a memory which I can touch. Well. You will go. And now I tell you what I have told no other. I shall, after a reasonable while plus a, shall we say, even an unreasonable while, expect your coming. Your return. I shall arrange for the Veil of Isis to lift, upon your approach. Make a plan, a sketch, a map and notes, of this place — a periplus, call it. Or a chart. Not forgetting the headland. And on that headland, when the moon is dark, if I sense your approach, I shall light a fire for you to see—”
“Ah, I wish it were the Pharos of Alexandria!”
“— it is not. — a fire for you to see, and by which to guide you.” She fell silent, contemplating, brow pressed down, lips uttering soft thought he could not hear; then her face opened and she smiled on him. “And in case, by reason of cloud or rain, over which my skill is limited — it is easier, if not easy, to make rain than to make rain cease — you might not see the fire, or should the winds bring you too far out of sight as you pass by this fire, I shall kindle it and fuel it with scented wood alone: calamus and quinnamon and citron-wood and of the roots of nard and of the twigs of thyme, of juniper, cedar, and of such sundry others as, of yet, I do not know.