by Mindi Meltz
Then Chelya handed her the third thing. It was a wreath of white flowers such as Lonely had never seen before—like the hands of the moon, if the moon were a sorceress that walked upon the earth.
“This isn’t for you, exactly,” Chelya said. “It’s for your horse.”
“For my horse?”
Chelya laid it in her hands and the petals melted against her skin like a thicket of slick tongues.
“It’s a crown,” Chelya said, looking down at it, her voice a little hushed. “The animal spirits gave it to me. They said that your animal, the animal that carries you, is known throughout the forest. She is like a queen among the animal spirits, but she does not remember herself. They want you to help her remember herself, because they need her.” She finished, looking up at Lonely’s face.
Lonely shook her head. “I don’t understand.”
“They said to place it on your horse’s head, over her forehead like a crown, and she will remember herself,” Chelya answered, though this did not make things any more clear to Lonely.
Then Chelya leaned forward hastily and kissed Lonely on the cheek. Her lips looked raw and human, and Lonely wondered who had kissed them tonight. “I’ll miss you,” she said to Lonely, and then she turned and ran.
“Chelya!” Lonely called, not understanding the abundance in her arms, not knowing what to do with such kindness. A thousand years? Had someone been making her something for a thousand years? The idea of such a past, like the story of her own past, was something she had to swallow back, to dredge out of her heart much later on. “Thank you,” she whispered.
That night, somewhere in the woods when she was too tired to go on, Lonely stood before her horse with the crown in her hand. She wondered what it meant, and if something would happen when she placed it on the horse’s head, and if she should say something special as she did it. She looked at the horse to see if it might give her a sign, but the horse hung its neck low, and seemed unaware that she was holding anything.
So she laid it around the horse’s ears, and then tied the bundle of the dress to the horse’s back, and slung the food over her own shoulder. Her heart was heavy, but the heaviness made her feel calm, less wondrous than on her first journey from the sea through the meadows and less dazed than on her first journey through the forest which had landed her in Rye’s arms. Every day that she traveled after that, she ate of the food that Chelya had given her, and every day she tasted the memory of love. She tried to understand again what love was, and how it was given.
How had she loved, or had she loved at all? Had she loved Rye, or Chelya, or Eva, or Fawn—or only needed them to ease the terror of her nightmares and the ache of her past and the emptiness of her future?
Fawn. Who had loved her despite her own shyness, despite her fear. Who had taken Lonely in, trusted her, shared with her, touched her, and given of the warm, gracious planet of herself, perfectly, in every moment that Lonely had been near her. Had Lonely ever loved her back, or only taken what was given, all the while betraying every gift with that secret lust for Rye—for which she knew she ought to feel shame and yet never did? These are the things she wondered as she walked, and then climbed.
Tonight as she lies among deep-breathing trees, her horse wandering awake near the river, she wishes she’d asked Chelya about her love—whoever she met that night. She feels sorry for envying her. Chelya deserved love because she gave it so freely. And Lonely sees that love is, after all, something that is given. Which is maybe why she still feels lonely now, even after all the love she took.
How else can she go forth, in pursuit of love, if not in a loving manner? Surely she must somehow walk in love, the way Chelya does, so that when her prince sees her, he will recognize that love. But how? She glances at the bundle she untied from the horse’s back and lay by her side—the demure bundle of rags that holds the magical dress made just for her. She has been afraid to open it. She has been afraid to see who Chelya and the spirits think she is.
After the rain, Dragon emerges from his cave. He rubs his eyes in the sunlight, not knowing why he has risen. For a long time, there has seemed no reason to.
On the full moon after Delilah left, one woman came to him: a goddess. He thought he recognized her. She reminded him of one of his mothers and sisters from the Garden. But when he began to touch her, when his fire rose for her, the resemblance faded. He could not allow himself to believe she was one of them. They were purely goddesses in his memory: always noble, always more holy than he could ever be or touch, and he needed them to stay that way.
After the goddess was gone, he could not remember her clearly.
But he kept remembering Delilah. He remembered vividly the small weight of her head against his belly, and the childish pride in her voice when she struggled to find words for her past, and her pain which was killing her but which she could not see. The memories repeated mechanically, without thoughts attached to them. There was some emotion they triggered inside him that he could not get enough of, and yet he could not fully feel it.
He isn’t sure how long it has been that he has lain on the floor of his lair with the boiling water roaring in his ears, remembering her and watching the dreams of dragon ghosts play over a ceiling of fire. Sometimes, he suddenly wondered if he would stay here forever after all or if there were other worlds out there for him. Where did all those women come from? What was his purpose, in this land?
After Delilah had lain still—after it had happened—he felt strangely numb. They lay still for a long time. He no longer had an erection. Perhaps he slept. Then she said, “Take me out of here, please.” He was able to follow this easy, clear instruction. When they reached the sand, it was dawn, and she turned quietly out of his arms and walked back the way she had come without looking back. Still feeling nothing—or almost nothing—he, too, turned and went under again.
This morning he goes to the river and sits beside its song. He feels a little less dazed now. The fresh air excites him. But something nags at him too. When he remembers the feel of Delilah’s wetness on his fingers, he feels a compassion so hot it sickens him. And he felt spent, then, though he had not come. He felt happy, but for the first time he wanted to be alone. How complicated it was! Yet now he thinks of her and wonders if he should go to her. He wonders what she is doing, what she is thinking right now, if she is thinking of him. He wonders, in a way he never wondered with all the dream women who came to him on fire, what she felt when that was happening to her. When she came. For the first time since that moment, it explodes upon him: the memory of her explosion, how he was right all along about the beauty that lay dormant inside her and the veils that only he could see through.
But then he doesn’t think of Delilah again. Because as he stands up and fills his chest with a mighty breath, he looks downstream.
And he sees Her.
Lonely must have fallen asleep at last, because she wakes now to a shining light above her face. It’s not sunlight but a spear like a castle spire, spiraling from the center of her horse’s forehead. It is glowing like a beacon, with the new moon darkness still complete around it. The horse is lowering its horn over her head, so that its tip almost touches her own forehead.
In that moment, Lonely feels a sense of absolute certainty. She knows she will keep going. She knows she will reach the high mountain and not turn around. She knows that what she seeks is real.
Then she must have been sleeping again, or perhaps she never really woke, because now she it is morning. Her horse is sleeping by her side, standing with one front ankle tilted against the other. Lonely scrutinizes the horse’s lean, weary form and can find no sign of that other: no horn, no brilliant light. But she feels that light anyway, shining through the horse, pointing a direction. She feels the pathway unrolling in her own heart.
“It’s this river,” she says aloud. “This is the river we follow.” The horse opens her eyes, lowers her head, an
d takes a long drink, her lips whispering against the silk that flows under them. Then she looks right at Lonely, and Lonely knows the vision she had was not a dream.
from now on, says the horse, as if they have always spoken together, i will carry you. i know the way.
Dragon wants to kiss her—this beautiful woman whom he has never seen, lying by the river in the desert—but he doesn’t. The moment he sees her, he wants to do everything right from now on. And that includes not kissing her until, someday, she asks him to. He lifts her easily, wades back through the river flooding heavily against his thighs, and carries her all the way back to his lair. He carries her down inward, into the hot belly of the earth. There is no resistance.
Softly, as if she might break, he lays her head in his lap. Because it is the only thing he can think to do, he begins to caress her silver hair with his right hand. His fingers slip through it as through the limbs of a jellyfish, and it runs cold over his thigh. She opens her eyes in flickers, and does not seem to see him. Tears pour soundlessly and continually from those eyes—tears he will see again and again, never with any words, and never with a single tremor of her face.
He has no idea what to do with his other hand, and finally when it draws attention to itself by tiring, he notices he is holding it in midair, where it hovers above her belly in tremulous awe. He lowers it, and touches her fingertips where they lie against her hip. She murmurs and turns her head into his thigh, and opens her eyes again. Their electrifying darkness, at the center, gives way to light.
“Who are you?” he whispers, daring now to trace the long white outline of her face, her skin like milk spooned over waves of ocean.
She clutches convulsively at his fingers and then drops them, so that his hand sinks through the dress made of water and touches the warm flesh beneath. The shock of how easily her body can be reached tears his breath from him in gasps. But something magical has happened to him. He is able to ignore his desire—an insignificant thing that he tosses aside. He wants only to help her.
“Shh,” he says, though she makes no sound, and he leans over her. “Look at me,” he says, willing his voice to wake her into this reality. He hears its animal solidity in the darkness and she looks back at him, her eyes contracting around the picture of his face. She smiles with her slow, naked mouth. “It’s all right,” he says, “I’ll take care of you.” Without noticing his own motions, he opens his left palm over the contours of her body, lets it fall like the water over her curves as if in prayer. Simply to feel her luxury in his hands intoxicates him. With a swift passion he clutches her endless hair in his fist and lifts her head toward him. “Who are you?” he asks again.
“I don’t know.” Those are her first words. Her voice is like the last memory of rain before it dries in the hot sun—at once clear and hazed by rainbows. Its sorrow stops his words.
So he just hums to her a wild cascade of notes with no melody, that it seems the dragons sang to him long ago.
For days and nights in that timeless space without sun, among the formless shadows of fire and water, he holds the sleeping goddess in his lap, never taking his gaze from her face or his touch from her skin. His body aches so badly with desire and stillness that he begins to shake, but he keeps singing. Then the aching closes up, and the passion swarms back inside, shooting into his chest, into his throat, consuming him in fire. It fountains up through the top of his head and pours down his body, and he collapses hunched over himself. When she opens her eyes again, he knows only that she owns him. That he will do anything for her. That he is here in this world to love this woman and nothing more.
Like him she needs no food, and there is nothing he can give her. So for days and nights he sings to her, and he speaks to her, and he tells her the stories the dragons told him. For though she gives no sign of understanding, her mouth remembers a slight curve like a smile whenever she hears his voice, and often she closes her eyes and nestles into his chest, as if resting in the cradle of it, and sighs deeply. Softly, experimentally, he touches her with his fire. He wants her all the time, with a rage that ignites every particle of him. When he touches her so lightly with that fire, caressing the faraway hills and valleys of her as he did the first morning, flaming his hands around her waist and raising her up, he thinks he sees a divine delight pass over her ageless features, and she tosses her head back in slow motion, and her hair swirls around her face as if alive.
He longs to pump his fire into her, over and over, and let it all be cooled and relieved and gone—and yet he cannot reach her. Never does she welcome him with desire, and it seems impossible to him that he could force her, even if he wanted to. There is something about the fluid, everywhere map of her that yields no specific entrance. She is unattainable and yet at the same time she surrounds him and drowns him, and he fears he might die in her embrace.
All this feels so terribly familiar that one night, in a state of confusion, he collapses his face against the cold pillow of her hair and weeps, and the name—the memory—that comes unconsciously to his lips is to him the sound of sorrow, the sound of loneliness beyond bearing. “Yora,” he whimpers, not knowing or caring any more whether or not he speaks aloud. “Please.”
She pushes warm against him, then turns with a suddenness he has not felt from her before. “Yora,” she repeats after him. “That is my name.”
Dragon starts, waking abruptly from his bleary sorrow. How can this be? He had thought Yora was a different girl, a young virgin, whom a Unicorn stole away from him two and a half moons ago. And yet he murmured her name to this goddess, as if they have some connection, for one reminds him of the other. “Have you come through the desert before,” he asks, “in another form?”
“Maybe,” she says. “I’ve been here in many forms.”
Dragon pulls back and grips her. There is a furious suspicion in his heart that he does not understand. “Another Yora came to me once,” he hisses. “Who are you? Tell me the truth.”
“The truth,” she repeats, and her eyes turn back on him with an otherworldly tenderness that makes his mouth contort with longing. “I don’t know the truth,” she says gently, without fear.
“Yora,” he chokes. He pulls her whole body onto his lap so that he can feel her smooth coolness against him. Sick with the heat of his own body, he leans into her, brushing her cheek with his.
“Ask me to kiss you,” he begs in a whisper.
But she doesn’t answer, only caresses his face with her hand. It is the first time she has ever deliberately touched him. He shakes as if a monster rattles him from inside, and she holds him, not tightly but completely.
“The goddesses sent me here,” she says then.
“What goddesses?”
“The Garden,” she says.
And Dragon’s gratitude shakes him even harder, whether with tears or laughter he does not know or even care.
There is a change in the horse as it walks beneath her, as it fills her again with that familiar comfort of flesh: a soft knowing that extends beyond Lonely, and at the same time guides her forward. She calls the horse female now.
“I’ll keep your secret,” she tells her, smooth arms wrapped around the hairy neck. She caresses the horse as they walk. She looks into one nervous eye, that looks back at her from beneath a bony brow. The flower crown that dangles above it never dies. Lonely remembers the men in the desert, how they tried to capture this beauty. And she knows that at least, if she loves no one else, she loves this animal—this animal that has carried her for as long as she can remember, and has both followed and led her, everywhere she goes. Even at the times when Lonely walks beside her, still the horse seems to carry her.
The river guides them for two days more through trailing thickets, and little meadows offered up like sunlit gifts between patches of forest. The mountains seem to pull her in, into that mysterious magnetism that keeps all life from floating into the sky. At the same time they
rise to meet her, lifting her.
Everywhere—in the slow turning of the earth from hill to valley, in the humble blinking of tiny blue flowers from the depths of the grass, in the tremble of rabbits as they freeze to let her pass, and in reflective interludes of shadow—Lonely still feels Fawn’s presence, Fawn’s confident feet upon the earth. Those feet seem to echo Lonely’s when she walks, as if the earth is a frozen pool beneath which her counterpart lives reflected, as if Fawn and the others are all parts of her—other lives she could have lived.
She is lonely. But she lets it hurt, day after day, and does not fight it. She knows where she is going.
She is hungry for a day before remembering she is a goddess; then she decides she can eat anything. As in her earliest days in the desert, she reaches for colors that seem to fulfill her. She eats the meadow grass, and the pieces of sunlight caught inside it melt on her tongue, turning her hair an even brighter yellow like the yolks of eggs. She eats flowers that make her eyes bluer, with rainbow flecks inside them. She eats the earth in its many textures—eats the death and the life in it, the wetness and the dryness, the dust and the clay. And it makes her calm.
She eats feathers she finds on the ground or caught in the branches of trees, and they pull her gaze upward toward the mountain, shivering in her belly with restless hope.
Then the forest thickens, and the meadows end. Sometimes, when the trees grow too thickly to pass through, Lonely and her horse must step from stone to stone in the middle of the river, all of their concentration focused on making one step and then the next, their minds stilled by the rushing of the river. Soon the river slows and deepens, leaving no rocks bare, and its color turns a rosy brown like the flushed cloth of Fawn’s skin. Lonely and the horse must bend their bodies in and out of the underbrush along the river’s edge, so that if one could see their motions in empty space—with all the dense life of the forest removed from around them—they would seem to be engaged in some strange, bobbing dance.