by James Enge
Morlock shrugged and waited.
“There wasn’t a complete spell in the book. It was almost entirely ruined. But there were parts of spells I thought I could fit together. And I knew that people who use binding spells are subject to them in turn. So I. So I made a spell up out of the different spells I could read part of in the book. That was dangerous. Wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Morlock quietly. “It was.”
“But it worked! Whenever he got aroused, his penis hurt. Like fire, he said. Kept on trying to dip it in cold liquid. My grandma found him dipping his erection in some cold soup in the pantry. That’s when they decided that Cousin Nothos was crazy and his little ways couldn’t be tolerated anymore. Ruin a granddaughter, so what. Ruin the evening soup, that’s different. I hate that old woman. So anyway they locked him up until he died.”
“He’s dead then,” said Morlock, with unmistakable satisfaction.
Somehow, after everything she’d said and remembered, that was what made her break down and start weeping like the little girl she’d had to give up being long ago. He held her and waited and waited. God Sustainer, how the man could wait.
“I was so glad when Nothos died,” she said, when she could talk again through the tears and snot, though she was still weeping. “I knew I was all screwed up inside, broken, ruined. It was because of the magic. You have to use part of yourself to make it.
“And I never could . . . I never. Not once. It was like. Like with you, before, that first time. It hurt so bad whenever anyone was inside me, sometimes when I only thought maybe someone wanted to be.
“But when he died I figured. I figured. Well! He’s dead; spell’s gone; I’d be all right. But I’m not. It’s always been the same. Always will be, I guess. Still. I can live with it. And maybe me finding that book was a coincidence. But I got what I needed when I prayed for it. I have to be loyal to that. I have to stand by that girl no one else would stand by. So I believe in the God she believed in, and screw anyone who doesn’t like it.”
She sat up and wiped the tears from her eyes. “So! That’s the story of my religious conversion. I hope you enjoyed it.”
Morlock had a thoughtful look on his face. “I saw the spell-anchor, I think.”
She looked askance at him. “You saw it.”
“In your talic self. During my vision. It was like the hooks the gods had set in me, at least a little.”
“Well. Good for you.”
“Aloê, I broke them.”
“What?”
“I broke the anchors in introspection.”
She thought about this through a silence that was nearly Morlockian in length. “Are you saying you can do the same for me?” she asked finally.
“No. Maybe you can.”
Visionary rapture was slow in coming; she was soaked through with words—words she remembered, words she had said, words she had thought of saying, words. Their logic was hostile to the visionary state.
Morlock fell asleep, but she stayed awake, and listened to the rain, and thought things without words. In the hour before dawn she ascended into vision without thinking about it, and found herself floating some distance above her own body.
Instead of turning her awareness outward to the living world, she turned it inward to her living self. She saw nothing like the anchor that Morlock had described . . . but then he hadn’t said much. She summoned memories she normally suppressed: about Cousin Nothos, about the time she had tried to have sex with Navigator Stynsos (the first of many failures, until she learned to not even try, not even care).
The pain lanced through her talic self, and she saw its source, deep within her: like a fishhook, perhaps, but one stuck in an old trout who’d run away with the bait, the hook still in him, the flesh growing around the evil bitter thing until it seemed like part of the fish.
She inserted long fiery fingers of intention into herself, drew the hook from her, willed it out of herself, drove it into nothingness.
The pain was not gone, but it had changed, lost its focus, its bitter corrosive heat. She passed from vision to sleep without ever touching consciousness.
Aloê awoke in midmorning. There was a gray light filtering through the thoroughly damp walls of the shack, and the rain was still drumming its fingers on the roof. Morlock was peering through a break in the wall with a mopey expression on his face.
“Still raining,” he said to her somberly. “Looks like it’s not stopping soon.”
“Well,” she said, sitting up. “We may get a bit wet then.”
Morlock’s face became even more somber, even grim. He nodded.
“Morlock,” she said, “you do realize we are going to an island? Islands are surrounded by water on nearly every side. It’s sort of a tradition, I think.”
He grunted and looked so sad that she had to laugh.
“It’ll be all right,” she said, patting his hand. “I suppose we should eat before we get started. Have we got any of that dried meat you’re so fond of?”
They had reclaimed their cloaks and rolled up their blankets and were leaving the shack semi-ruinous and bereft in the dim day.
“River over there,” Morlock said, nodding southward.
“Maybe just runoff from the highlands,” she said, listening over the roar of the rain. “Still . . .”
She didn’t say it because she didn’t have to say it: it might carry them faster than their feet to the Sea of Stones.
They followed the sound until they came to the river. Aloê judged it a magnificent piece of water: broad and pleasingly deep around the middle, with nice sharp banks and a delightful absence of the dimples and foam-streaks that mark underwater obstructions.
There was a stand of those odd thinly tall trees near the shore, and Morlock went to fell a lot of them with Armageddon. Aloê whittled pins for a while, then split the trees into rails and stripped off their bark. At last she started nailing them together into the frame for a canoe.
“What’s that?” Morlock asked, as he came over with a load of trees in his arms.
“Frame for a canoe. Enough with the trees already; leave some for the next guy.”
“Eh,” said Morlock, and dropped the trees.
“Get me the bark off those trunks.”
“Why?” said Morlock, sitting down.
“Cover the frame. Keeps the water out, you know.”
“Will that work?” Morlock was wearing his skeptical face.
“Yes. Even better if you can do that waterproofy thing.”
He could and did, although it took a significant chunk of daylight—longer than building the canoe itself. Maddeningly, he looked as if he were napping, at least until you noticed the slight glow from his closed eyes and the odd crinkling sound from the bark he was transforming.
Aloê borrowed Armageddon and used it to cut two decent slabs of wood for paddles out of a fallen pine tree. She was done, and the rain was done, and the sky in the east was bright and full of broken clouds when Morlock lifted his head, sneezed, and said, “How’s that?”
That was brilliant. Not only was the bark resilient and waterproof, but the edges were sealed together somehow.
“Morlock,” she said, looking up. “I am never going to travel without you again.”
“See that you don’t,” he said almost smugly, then sneezed again.
They lugged the canoe to the river, loaded their gear and themselves into it, and pushed off from the bank.
The sky above was a broken field of golden clouds streaked with shadowy blue. On their right were the red highlands of Kaen; on their left the misty green mystery of the masterless lands; abruptly blue water all around them.
“Isn’t this like heaven?” Aloê called forward to Morlock, sitting in the prow.
“Never been there,” said that grumpy young man.
Aloê laughed and skillfully drove the canoe down the river westward through the suddenly glorious day.
They were on the river enough days for Aloê to lose count.
They rowed all day and slept in each other’s arms at night, but they hadn’t been messing around at all since they left Kaen. Aloê didn’t want to, because she wanted to so much. If they tried to screw again and it didn’t work, if nothing had changed—she didn’t want to even think about it.
It hadn’t escaped Aloê’s notice that Morlock had taken to sleeping with his back to her. She knew that they could be doing other things besides coitus, and she waited for him to suggest it. But apparently he was waiting for her. He was good at waiting, but she was pretty sure she could win at that game.
She was never sure who won, but one night, anyway, the waiting stopped. She woke in the middle of the night from a heated sex-dream and lay panting against Morlock’s misshapen spine wishing these things didn’t just happen in dreams.
Then she heard herself whispering, “Hey: can you fuck me? Right now, I mean.”
She wasn’t sure he was even awake—but he was, and required no coaxing. He had her undressed much more quickly than she had him undressed, and faster than she could say I don’t think I need any foreplay this time he was inside her.
It was always a shock to be entered, to feel herself surrounding something that wasn’t herself. She had felt it before and remembered it vividly. The memory was shrouded with pain, though, and the fear of pain.
Even though it was what she had hoped for—maybe because she had hoped for it so long and so uselessly—she was surprised that this time there was no pain at all. In fact there was an odd sensation she had never felt before. As he thrust into her it blazed up: a pleasure as intense as pain, along the inner surface of her vagina, right at the top. It was like when you feel an itch between your shoulders or in the small of your back, and you can’t scratch it, and you live with it so long you almost forget about it (but not quite), and then you reach back and scratch it. It was like that, that blazing moment of relief, but it went on and on, and was renewed with every thrust.
“Oh God, that’s good,” she whispered in his ear. She tried to say it again but only got as far as the first syllable. When she spoke the “oh” it tingled from her neck down to her cunt, so she opened her throat and kept saying it, one long indeterminate vowel, brightening the blaze within her.
Then, too suddenly, it was over.
“What’s wrong?” she said, as he stopped moving.
“Um. Nothing. It’s just—”
“Oh!” He had come inside her. Her insides were sticky with him; she could feel it oozing out of her. It was sort of disgusting and funny, the way lots of things about sex were disgusting and funny. That was all right. It was just that she had sort of expected to have an orgasm herself.
“That was nice,” she said, though, and meant it.
He laughed and drew out of her. Then he reached between her legs and brought her off with his cunning fingers as he gently kissed her all over her face and neck, twisting one of her nipples with exactly the right level of rough gentleness. Soon she was screaming her way to orgasm again—all the way, this time.
“All right,” she said gasping, when she could speak again. “That was a little better than nice.”
They lay silent in each other’s arms for a long time.
“I have a technical question,” she said at last.
He made a sort of murmur that was probably intended as an acknowledgement.
“I sort of expected us to come at the same time,” she said. “Does that not usually happen?”
“Not to me,” he said. He shrugged. “If—”
“No, never mind. Shut up. You’re taking it as a criticism, which is all wrong. This is the best thing that ever happened to me that didn’t involve a boat somehow.”
“Ship?”
“Or a ship. Or swimming.”
“If—”
“No, I don’t want to hear it. Take yes for an answer. You make love as well as you make other things. Higher my praise cannot go, so stop fishing for compliments, you conceited bastard.”
He took her hand and put it on his penis. That startled her enough to change the direction of her thoughts.
“Are you kidding me with that thing?” she said.
“If,” he said firmly, “you’d like to try again, we could try again.”
Now she made a kind of murmur which was intended as acknowledgement, and they tried again.
This time he had her on her hands and knees, a position that seemed to her excessively undignified, except that it felt stunningly good when he entered her—even better when he reached around and began stroking her clitoris.
It was like the opposite of visionary rapture. Instead of fleeing from the constraints of matter it was like her mind was being pressed down into her body, being consumed by it, until she was one big nerve that throbbed with pleasure.
They didn’t come at the same moment, but this time she came first and had the ecstatic sensation of him thrusting into her all the way through her orgasm.
Afterward they lay together, too spent for conversation, not willing to be parted by sleep, kissing each other occasionally, utterly entangled.
She did not say, I love you. But that was the first time she felt herself thinking it.
They screwed almost every night until they reached the Sea of Stones. The only exception was a day when they screwed twice during their noonday break.
That day she remarked to Morlock’s shoulders, as they paddled downstream through the afternoon light, “Now I see why people are obsessed with sex.”
He moved his head from side to side and said, “I guess so. Sex doesn’t have to be good to make people crazy, though.”
“The voice of experience speaks.”
He did not shrug, thank God Avenger. It was a difficult thing to do while keeping a good stroke with a paddle, which was one reason she enjoyed talking to him in the canoe. Unable to shrug or use cryptic hand gestures, he was forced to fall back on words to express himself. Sometimes one could tease whole sentences out of the man.
“Some,” he admitted. “Never as much as I wanted. Obviously.”
“Why obviously?” she said. “Is it true about men, that they’re insatiable about sex?”
“Everyone likes it. Not just men, anyway.”
“So?”
“I’ve rarely had sex with a woman more than once.”
“Why not? Fuck them and forget them, is that your motto?”
He looked back incredulously at her. “They find me ugly, Aloê. Once for curiosity, or because they want something. Rarely twice.”
Ugly? She supposed he was. But God Avenger. The man was a force of nature.
“Stupid bitches,” she opined, and he laughed.
In Morlock’s memory, those were the happiest days of his life. Thoughts of them often returned to him later in dark moments of exile and loneliness and the presence of death. He never troubled to count them; he never forgot a single moment of them. But the golden days, whatever their number, ended, and one morning they smelled the clean sharp breeze from the sea biting their faces, and by noon they were rowing out of the mouth of the river into the wide bitter waters of the Sea of Stones.
“And now,” Aloê confessed, after they drew their canoe up on the greenish sand of the shoreline, “I have no idea what to do.”
Morlock said, “The Talazh Rame is north of here. The heresiarchs who go to the Apotheosis Wheel must have some way to reach it. Let’s go and see what it is.”
“That’s what I was going to say next.”
Anyway, that was what they did next.
The Talazh Rame was a ruined road on stone stilts that ran from the Narrow Sea in the west into the Sea of Stones in the east. They saw the tall supporting columns of stone from miles away as they walked northward on the beach. Black broken stones poked out of the green waves like fingers, for perhaps a mile or two into the sea itself.
At the base of a towering stone column on the beach was a relatively humble building of dark wood. Beached beside it was a bireme of ten oars on a side.
“Water taxi?” Aloê asked.
Morlock didn’t know what that meant, but guessed it was some sort of ferry, and nodded.
But as they approached the building they came upon a stone marker, inscribed in Kaenish runes. There was a spiderish sort of image and the word Hÿlohyphäntu.
“The Woodweaver?” Aloê hazarded a translation.
Morlock nodded. “Looks like a Kaenish godstone.” He gestured northward, where another finger of stone accused the sky.
“Something tells me we’ll want to avoid this place,” Aloê guessed.
Morlock pointed at something farther off: a bluish green cloud on the northern horizon. “Pine trees.”
“We can make our own boat. With propellers!”
He nodded. “Not a ship?”
“Shut up!”
They walked around the border of godstones and legged it all the way to the distant stand of trees.
Not distant enough, though: the stand had clearly been visited recently, logs being dragged off in the direction of the Woodweaver’s temple or ferry-service or whatever it was. So much was obvious from the stumps in the wood, the marks in the ground.
“We’ll have to keep an eye out,” Aloê said, following his gaze. “Still: if those dim fish can make boats out of this wood we certainly can.”
He nodded.
“But where we’re going to sail it: that’s another question,” she said, asking the question with her distressing beautiful eyes.
“Whatever the Wheel is,” he said, “it will present a unique talic distortion.”
“One of us will look for it in visionary flight, you mean.”
“Yes.”
“You talk about distortion. The Wheel might distort the identity of anyone who comes into contact with it. That seems to be what it’s for. Finding it while in rapture might be pretty dangerous.”
He shrugged. “The alternative?”
“I bet that Woodweaver, or his priest, has a way of finding the Wheel.”
“Would they give it to us? Should we trust it if they do?”
“Gleh. All right, do you want to toss a coin for it? Being the lucky person who gets to risk his sanity looking for the Wheel, I mean.”