“I know, but you’ll have no problem. And this,” she said, holding the thicker envelope out, “if you’d give it to the same person. Sorry about the weight; it’s notes and the results of a project I’m working on with one of the healers in the City.” Dian took it curiously. It was more of a parcel than a letter, a bulky rectangle encircled with ribbon and sealed with red wax bearing Ling’s chop.
“Look,” said Ling before Dian had a chance to comment, “you must be cold. I was just going to make myself a cup of tea. Do you have the time? Good.” Dian followed her into the kitchen and planted her backside against the stove while Ling bustled about with sticks for the fire and water for the kettle.
“Ling, I’d like a traveling kit from you. The usual first-aid stuff, a couple of water-purification tablets if there are any left, that sort of thing. I won’t need a snakebite kit this time of year, but I would like some internal tampons, if you could make me up a dozen. There are times in the woods when it’s best not to give off any blood smell.”
“Happy to; I’ll bring it all by in the morning.” Ling turned to the cupboard and took down the pot and a tea caddy. She bent over the leaves with unnecessary concentration, to speak over her shoulder. “I should tell you, one of the things in that letter concerns you. I told my friend that you might want the Meijing specialists to examine you as to your fertility, and I suggested areas they might explore. If you don’t want it mentioned, I can remove it from the letter without difficulty.” She turned with the pot in her hands and looked at Dian, who was studying her own long fingers intently. “I just thought, with Isaac, you might be interested.”
“That’s good of you, Ling, very thoughtful. I doubt that I’ll want to do anything about it, but leave it in anyway. I may change my mind.” Ling nodded, seeming relieved at Dian’s easy response.
They drank their tea and talked of this and that, of Teddy and Judith and Sonja. Ling listened to Dian’s description of breakfast with Judith and her baby and suggested that Judith’s acceptance of her son was due to Kirsten, who had spent a fair amount of that first morning with Judith, but whoever was responsible, it was a blessing, both agreed.
They were interrupted by a noisy entrance and stepped out into the hallway to see one of Carmen’s sisters being helped out of a rain cape, her face pinched and white and one finger jutting out at a very wrong angle. Dian gathered her things to leave.
“Thanks for the tea.”
“Anytime. I’ll bring the kit by tomorrow. Oh, here—I wanted to give you this.” Ling paused in the act of settling her patient into a chair to fetch an object from her desk. It was a waterproof neck bag made of heavy plastic, only mended once; she slid the letter and list inside and worked the fastener, dropping the cord over Dian’s neck. “That will keep your papers dry even if you go swimming.”
“Which, from the looks of it, I may,” Dian said with a glance at the window. Ling laughed and waved her out, and turned to speak soothing words. Dian shrugged into her stiff, clammy waxed-cloth raincoat and closed the door on comfort, to splash away into the dark afternoon, her mind already racing ahead.
The following day, the last before she rode north, Dian took Isaac out of the Valley. The storm had cleared during the night and left behind it a day of intoxicating freshness and clarity, when even the autumn-dark leaves of the orchard took on a final sheen of beauty before falling victim to frost. They trotted down the puddled road with five of the dogs, crossing the bridge and passing the sheds, hearing ghostly whispers of that August night when the wagons had come. They were nearly to the Gates before Dian had Isaac dismount, and they led the horses down a narrow track toward a steady, growing thunder.
The trees fell away abruptly, leaving them standing on a sandy bank looking up at a thick sheet of brownish water that shot out of the hillside fifty feet away to plunge into one end of a pool, which was at the moment the color and probably the consistency of thin mud. Isaac stared, openmouthed.
“Well, there’s your waterfall.” Dian had to shout into his ear to be heard. “Fancy a swim?”
His answer came as a loud hoot and an assortment of clothing flying into the air. He raced naked across the narrow strip of sand and plunged into the deep, cold pool, and came up gasping for breath and bellowing at the top of his lungs.
“God, it’s cold! My God, it’s cold! Come on, Dian—it’s perfect! Oh, God, it’s freezing!”
The row of dogs stared aghast at the man’s swift and inexplicable lapse into madness; when Dian saw their expressions she began to giggle. She looped the reins over a branch, took off her clothes, and folded them into a neat pile in a relatively dry spot out of the reach of hoof and paw, then walked up to the water, steeled herself, and dove cleanly in, coming to the surface halfway to the center of the pond. With a tremendous effort she did not scream at the shock of it but instead shook the liquid mud out of her eyes and trod water, and controlled her chattering teeth long enough to bellow at Isaac, “What’s wrong? Too cold for you? I guess they make them soft up in Oregon. Why, you think this is cold—I’ve swum here when you had to break the ice to get in. I’ve swum here when the snow—” Isaac came after her with a roar of mock anger, and she slid away from him to swim, invisible, over to where the falling water boiled back up from below. The noise was deafening. She looked around for Isaac’s blue, drowned-looking face and mouthed, “Coming?” Without waiting for an answer she clambered up the rocks and around to the not-so-secret niche behind the wall of water and sat in the little cave, shivering hard and hunched over her knees.
In a few minutes Isaac ducked through the sheeting water, hair, beard, and body hair plastered down and one knee bleeding from a gash. He sat down beside her.
“Warm enough?” he shouted politely.
“I could be warmer,” she admitted. “I don’t think I’ve ever been this blue before.”
Isaac turned his attention from the sheet of water in front of them to examine her skin.
“It’s a very attractive color,” he said. “However shall we warm you?”
“Oh, I can think of one way,” she replied.
It was some time before either of them noticed the cold again, but eventually they burst out of the hidden cave and began leaping about vigorously. The dogs, who had more sense than to venture into any such inhospitable body of water if they did not have to, lay on the far bank and watched them grimly: the man’s insanity was obviously contagious. The two humans ran along the edge of the pond, splashed through the outgoing stream at the far end, and ran back to their horses and the wary dogs. They dressed quickly, or, rather, Dian did. Isaac put on various odd bits of clothing as he found them, but it was a good quarter of an hour before they discovered his second shoe in the branches of a tree.
They climbed back to the road, mounted, and continued out through the Gates. The shoulder of Isaac’s jacket, which had come to rest in a puddle, steamed gently in the warm sun. The dogs flushed a hare out of cover, but Dian called them back, partly because a hunt would change the tone of the outing, but mostly because she didn’t want to give Isaac any ideas about hunting that he might decide to follow up after she had left. They rode for half an hour, to the top of a rise overlooking the stream where it joined another, larger creek, and there they sat and ate sandwiches and drank cider beer, and talked. They decided that Crazy Isaiah had a lot of sense after all, for this place where Miriam proposed to build a new town was a good one, easily irrigated and not impossible to defend. They decided that Isaac should choose three or four of the most promising boys and work on their skills with the bow and arrow. They decided that white clouds were a perfect complement to sky that particular color of blue. They talked of things unimportant and of things vital, and for a while they lay back on the damp hillside and talked of nothing. Isaac broke the silence.
“Why dogs?” he asked.
“Sorry?” He might as well have asked, Why air?
“It’s just, when you and Teddy are together with the dogs, I sometimes feel like
I’m tone-deaf, or color- blind. I mean, I like dogs, and I can certainly see how useful these of yours are, but it almost seems like they’re more . . . real to you than half the people around you.”
“They are more real. They’re my life. They’re my partners, my friends; they make me laugh, they challenge me. They keep me honest. Training a dog is like growing a new limb, one that you weren’t born with. Before you grow it you couldn’t imagine much use for it, but after you have it, you can’t imagine doing without. When I train a dog, part of what I’m doing is training myself to listen to that dog, to understand its own individual way of looking at the world, what that dog needs to enable it to come into full awareness of itself as my partner. When you partner a dog, you become that dog, and it becomes you. Otherwise it’s all bullying and bribery. You can force a dog to obey by bullying and bribery, but there’s no honor in it, and that dog will almost never give you its all.”
Dian dug a smooth stone from the ground at her feet and rubbed it around in her hands. She called Culum and let him see it, then flipped it off down the hill into the grass. He plunged happily after it. She went on talking.
“That’s why I wanted Teddy to get involved with dogs. Not only does he have that amazing rapport with them, but he badly needed to get outside himself.” Culum arrived back with the correct rock, which he dropped into her hand. Dian thanked him and threw it again. He plunged off into the brush after it, with a fraction less enthusiasm this time, it seemed to Isaac. “I didn’t think it all out that first day, not so clearly, but it just felt right then, and still does. Something about the way he looked, really looked at Culum was different from the way he looked at anybody else, except you. He was paying attention to Culum.” The dog returned, this time depositing the rock at her feet, but still within the acceptable limits of “fetch.” Dian, immersed in her thoughts, absently reached for it and threw it off again down the hill.
Culum, head lowered, studied her through his eyebrows for a long moment, and then trotted off dutifully down the hill.
“You know, Kirsten found me a book from Before about how they used dogs as a kind of therapy when they were dealing with criminals or sick people or angry kids. They found that these damaged people would respond to dogs when they wouldn’t to other humans, because the dogs seemed to be so undemanding. Dogs wouldn’t insist that the person shape up but would just accept them as they were.” Isaac was somewhat surprised to see Culum returning with the rock, for he had half-thought the dog would quietly fade away, bored with the game. But, no, here he came, looking if anything even more willing than he had been at Dian’s first throw. His tail was up, eyes alert, and he positively galloped up the hill to his pontificating mistress.
“The funny thing was, though the book didn’t seem to notice it, in the end the dogs would be more demanding than all the human counselors. The dogs would act as if their human was a truly noble being, worthy of partnership, and—to the amazement of the various authorities—the human came out of herself, or himself, long enough to begin actually to act nobly, and often never really went back in.” Culum stood before her now, rock in mouth. Dian absently held out a hand for him to deposit it into. “Not, of course, that Teddy was that disturbed, but—What the hell?” She stared at her palm, where the rock had turned into something else, a lump that suspiciously resembled a petrified clump of old deer droppings. “Culum!” she shouted in outrage.
Good heavens, thought Isaac, that dog’s laughing at her, and he was, standing there, tongue lolling, grinning from ear to ear at the effect his clever trick had on his mistress. Dian threw the lump of turd at him; it disintegrated off his head, one segment landing neatly in Isaac’s cup, then she launched herself down the hill after the rapidly accelerating, and still laughing, dog. The other dogs leapt up enthusiastically to join the chase, and there was soon a tide of dogs washing around Dian, each of whom would nimbly lay on just enough speed to scoot out of her reach whenever she reached out to catch them. Culum abandoned the game of tag and came to sit next to Isaac, and the two of them looked on from their viewpoint of lofty masculinity.
By the time Dian returned to Isaac, her chest was heaving and her face was red with effort. Culum retreated in dignity a few yards up the hill, just in case. She gave him a dirty look and dropped down next to the still-grinning Isaac.
“Okay, okay, enough said about the relationship between dogs and humans. I’m sure you got the point,” she said.
“Oh, I got the point, all right. In fact, it’s right there in my cup.”
Dian peered in and saw the dry turd floating placidly in the cider, and snorted. That set Isaac off again, and the two of them leaned against each other, shaking with laughter.
“Oh, Isaac, I’m going to miss you,” she said, and as if the sun had gone behind a cloud, the easiness of the afternoon shifted.
I’m going to miss you, Dian had said, surprising herself. She hadn’t intended to say it, hadn’t realized the depth of its truth until the words were in the air between them. What had begun as a somewhat bewildering but highly pleasant interlude was now something else entirely, something with roots that screamed at the threat of being pulled up. She loved Isaac, sure, but she’d never bargained on being in love with him. She had never intended anything but easy affection followed by fond memories and a degree of relief when she was allowed to go her way. But that was something very deep that had spoken: I am going to miss you.
I’m going to miss you, Isaac heard, and the longing in her voice slipped into his heart like a knife. What had begun as a deliberate bid for shelter (and be fair—he had told her) for himself and Teddy, a move to defuse the growing tensions over his availability by making his own choice, had grown considerably more complicated. And he couldn’t have known that his chosen bond would be severed so quickly—when she’d told him the morning after Judith’s birth that her trip north would be immediate, his first thoughts had been a tumble: Shit, there go my plans and Thank God it won’t get any deeper and Couldn’t she have warned me? and Who would I have chosen instead, if I’d known? When she told him she was going, he’d very nearly unloaded all the secrets onto her—but he didn’t, because Emma’s people were his, and he’d given his word. And anyway, where would he begin? How to say to these people that the thing that terrified them the most was part and parcel of their future neighbors’ daily lives? He’d even played with the idea, briefly, of injuring Dian in some way to delay her, of having a quiet word with Sonja that would result in some minor but incapacitating broken bone. . . . But Judith would just have sent someone else instead, and he thought that, of all people here, Dian was the one whom he might trust to make a judgment based on her eyes, not her habits of thought.
“Can I ask you something?” he said, more to break the dangerous intimacy than because he wanted an answer.
Dian seemed relieved at the diversion. “Of course.”
“Why, honestly, are you making this trip? Do you think Miriam and I and everyone else are lying? I mean, not you, but I think I should know if the Valley sees me as a potential enemy within the gates.”
Dian looked at his dark eyes, seeing her own reflection there. “No, I don’t know of anyone who seriously suspects you of deceit. I’m going north because I made a promise, before we voted to accept you, that I would check with my own eyes to be sure that everything was as it was presented. It’s my job to guard the safety of my people here, even when the enemies are only in our imagination.” She smiled ruefully at him. “I trust you, I hope you know that. I would trust you with my life. But I cannot extend that to the whole village. I have no right to lay two hundred eighty lives at your feet. It would be irresponsible of me. Surely you can see that.”
The word trust twisted the knife deeper into his heart, and he wanted to cry out for her not to go, wanted to tell her what she would find and why it did not matter. But trust worked on other levels, and he had given his word. No, he would say nothing. She would go, as she clearly longed to, no matter how much she
would miss him; she would travel free and unencumbered with nothing but her dogs, and she would see what there was to see, and she would have the return journey to think about it and decide for herself that it did not matter.
Whether on her return she would trust him again was an entirely different matter. And she was studying him now, her eyes narrowing as she tried to see why he was hesitating.
“Yes,” he said, and leaned forward to kiss her lightly. “Of course you have to go. Just come back safely. Please?”
They were late returning home, and by the time Dian had sluiced off the dried film of grit from her body and arrived at the main house, dinner was just being laid on the table. Lenore looked up as Dian came through the kitchen door.
“Oh, good. Judith said you’d eat with her tonight, and I told her I’d bring hers up so you could talk without having to shout over the rest of us. Do you want to grab that tray there, and we’ll take it up?” Dian followed her up to Judith’s room, half-listening to Lenore’s chatter about the Meijing markets and half a dozen things she hoped Dian would look for, all of which were already on Dian’s list. Lenore knocked at the door before she opened it, and laid her tray on the table near the window. After greeting Judith affectionately and going over to look at the sleeping infant on the bed, she kissed Dian good-bye and left. The sound of voices and of cutlery on plates cut off sharply as the door closed behind her.
Judith joined Dian at the table, sitting on a thick cushion, and began to remove the covers from the steaming bowls.
“You’re looking well,” said Dian.
“I’m feeling great. I’ve been going downstairs for meals, but I wanted you to myself tonight.” She looked up guiltily. “It’s good of you to come—I’m sure you’d rather be with Isaac or getting packed.”
“Everything’s ready to go and I spent the whole day with Isaac. I want to have a nice, relaxed dinner with my sister and talk to my nephew, so don’t fret.”
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