“All right,” she said.
She sat down on the grass of the hillside, took off the scarf she had tied around her head and shook her hair out. She was wearing some old, autumn-brown slacks and a dark green shirt, open at the throat. Her neck rose in one straight column from the spread collar of the shirt, and under her dark hair, now loose about her head and shoulders, her eyes were blue-green and brilliant.
I took the basket and went into the house. I rummaged around the kitchen, trying to remember what she had shown a liking for, in the way of food. I had become a halfway decent cook in my years alone in the north woods before the time storm hit; but there was not much available here in the way of foodstuffs. We were all living off stored goods until fall, when the crops of our recent planting would hopefully be in.
I finally found a small canned ham, and with this, some canned new potatoes, and three of the highly valuable eggs from our community’s small flock of chickens, managed to make a sort of ham and potato salad, moistened with a spur-of-the-moment, homemade mayonnaise I whipped up from the yolk of one of the eggs and the corn oil we had in fair quantity. I also hunted around the palace and found a bottle of Liebfraumilch that was not overage. There was no way to cool it, lacking electricity for our refrigerator; but salad and wine, once I had the card table and chairs set up outside with a tablecloth of sorts on it, looked reasonably festive.
“That’s good,” said Ellen, about the salad, as we ate; and I warmed clear through.
“Glad to hear you say so,” I told her. “Do you realize I really don’t know that much about what you like to eat?”
“I like everything,” she said.
“That’s good. Because it’ll be a long time before we have anything like what we were used to before,” I said; and I went on about what we could expect in the way of diet that winter, even if the crops went well.
I was talking around and about, trying to get her to give me some sort of conversational lead from which I could get onto the topic I wanted to bring up. She said nothing, however, to help. Nonetheless, with the relaxation of the food and wine in me, I finally began to drift on the tide of my own words into the area I wanted.
“There’s two chances that might help protect Marie and the others,” I said. “One’s that when Paula’s soldiers arrived and found the country changed where we’d been, they figured I’d magicked everybody safely forever beyond their reach, and Paula bought that idea when they told her—”
“Do you really think she would?”
I hesitated.
“No,” I said. “If she was completely normal, mentally, I’d think she might. But part of her mind is never going to rest, where I’m concerned; and sooner or later, word is going to reach her of people who’ve met and recognized some of our people who stayed behind. Then her hunt’ll be on again. All we can really hope for is a delay.”
“What’s the other chance?”
“That’s the long one. If I ever do get into contact with the time storm fighters here and get to work with them, maybe I can learn some way to go back and make Marie and the rest permanently safe from Paula—maybe by shifting Paula herself to a different time.”
Ellen said nothing. There was a little silence between us; and a fly that had discovered the empty wine bottle circled it, droning.
“God help her!” I said; and the words broke out of me, all of a sudden. “God help them all!”
“It was her decision,” said Ellen.
“I know,” I said. “But I-”
I looked at her.
“How much did Paula have to do with her going?” I asked.
“Not much,” said Ellen.
“You both knew how I reacted to—to Paula. Believe me, I didn’t even know it myself. I didn’t even realize it until after I caught on to what she actually was, headwise, and then I knew I had to get out of there.”
“Paula wasn’t that important to Marie.”
“You say that? If it hadn’t been for Paula and how I felt about her, we’d still have Marie and Wendy with us.”
“I don’t think so,” Ellen said.
“How can you say you don’t think so? Marie never talked about leaving before.”
“Not to you. She did to me, lots of times.”
I stared at Ellen.
“She did? Why?”
“She told you why, when she left. Marc,” Ellen said, “you don’t listen. That’s one of the reasons she went.”
“Of course I listen!”
She said nothing.
“Ellen, I loved Marie!” I said. “Why wouldn’t I listen to someone I loved? I loved Marie—and I love you!”
“No.” Ellen got up from the table, picked up the empty plates and silver and started in toward the house. “You don’t, Marc. You don’t love anyone.”
“Will you come back here!” I shouted after her. She stopped and turned. “For once will you come back and say more than three words in a row? For Christ’s sake, come and sit down and talk to me! There’s something here, in the air between us. I can feel it. I bump into it every time I turn around. And you’re telling me that there was something like that between Marie and me and I didn’t know about it. Come back and tell me what it was. Come back and talk to me, damn it!”
She stood facing me, holding the dishes.
“It wouldn’t do any good.”
“Why not?”
She did not answer.
“Do you love me?” I said.
“Of course. So did Marie.”
“She loved me and she wanted to leave me? I didn’t love her and I want to keep her? What kind of sense does that make? If you loved me the way you say you do, you’d explain it to me, so I could do something about it, about me, or whatever was necessary.”
“No,” she said. “You’ve got things the wrong way around. I love you without your doing anything.”
“All right, then!”
“But you’re asking me to change. Talk doesn’t come easily to me. You know that. If I have to talk before you can love me, then you don’t love me. You wanted Marie to change, too, but she couldn’t. I can, but I won’t. It’s up to you, Marc, not me.”
I stared at her; but before I could say anything more, a stranger walked around the corner of the summer palace and came up to us. He was a startling figure, a good four inches taller than I was, completely bald, and wearing only a sort of kilt of white cloth around his waist. Even his feet were bare. His features looked something like those of an Eskimo’s but his skin was brown-dark, and the muscles stood out like cords under the skin. He looked as if he had spent his lifetime exercising, not with barbells, but on the parallel rings and other gymnastic equipment. He came up to me.
“Marc Despard?” he said. He had no accent that I could put my finger on, but the timbre of his voice was somehow different from that of any other human voice I’d heard. “My name’s Obsidian. Sorry we took so long to come forward and meet you, but we had to study you for a while, first”
32
He was offering his hand in ordinary fashion. I took it and shook it automatically. I had been expecting him, or at least someone like him; but the delay had been long enough, and he had appeared so suddenly that he had managed to knock me off balance with his appearance, in spite of all my expectations. I found myself going through the social routine... my wife, Ellen.”
“Ellen,” and he shook hands with Ellen, “my name’s Obsidian.”