by Robbi McCoy
They took frequent rest stops, during which they could survey the steep green mountains surrounding them, shrouded in mist, and watch the river below. The landscape was breathtakingly beautiful and Cassie snapped photos regularly on the way up.
At one of the stops, Cassie removed her vest, leaving just a T-shirt layer. Sweat glistened on her forehead. She stuffed the vest in her backpack, then turned to look at Lauren and smiled broadly. “This is fantastic! Thanks for letting us come along.”
Cassie patted Lauren’s shoulder, then, to signify she was ready to continue. Lauren cast a glance over at the others. Jennifer was staring at the ground. Faith was grinning with the sheer joy of being here.
“What a place to be put to rest!” Faith exclaimed, sounding a little winded.
“Ready,” Lauren said to Joe, who sprang off ahead. They didn’t really need a guide, since the trail was easy to follow, but it was a political requirement. The Chinese government liked to keep track of its tourists. They were visiting a cultural heritage site, so this was a sensitive situation. Faith had had to obtain permission, a process that had taken months. She’d had to submit her reasons and her credentials to government scrutiny. If she were not a qualified scientist, she wouldn’t be allowed to make this trip. Ordinary tourists were only able to view the coffins from water level.
Periodically, Lauren stopped to observe an interesting plant—interesting to her, at least. If they weren’t bursting with showy flowers, they didn’t have any appeal to the others, so she kept these stops brief. Once she squatted next to a small fern surrounded by tender grass, its leaves just beginning to unfurl. She slipped her index finger into the curl of one of the fronds, letting it hold her finger like people do with newborn babies.
“What is it?” Cassie asked as the troop came to a halt.
“A fern. Not one I’m familiar with. I’ve always liked ferns. In some ways, they’re very simple plants. They have no seeds and no flowers. Yet they’ve survived so many millennia with their basic structure unchanged.” Lauren slid her finger gently from the grasp of the plant and stood.
“That’s the law of the jungle, right?” Cassie said. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
Lauren nodded. “I like the idea of something staying the same for so long that you can almost call it forever.”
“But nothing lasts forever,” Faith announced cheerfully.
Lauren smiled to herself. She knew Faith didn’t consider that a negative idea. They were living in the same world, but somehow they seemed to see such different things. Faith was unquestionably a glass half-full sort of person. Lauren could tell that Cassie was one of those too. Although she wasn’t one herself, she did admire the point of view.
As they plodded up a steep, muddy incline, she heard a sudden cry from behind and turned around to see Jennifer being held securely in Faith’s arms. Faith laughed as Jennifer got her feet under her and stood.
“She slipped,” Faith explained.
“Thanks,” Jennifer said, hitching up her shorts. “If you hadn’t caught me, I’d have been sitting in the mud.”
“My pleasure,” Faith said, a hint of the flirt in her voice. Lauren narrowed her eyes at Faith and she winked her response. She was in very high spirits today.
After an hour, they had climbed two-thirds up the height of the cliff to reach the site. There were three hollowed-out tree trunks set in natural recesses in the limestone, resting on wooden poles wedged into the rock face to form supports. Silently, the four women removed their packs.
“Don’t touch them,” Joe warned.
“I’d like to look inside,” Faith said. “I won’t touch anything.”
Cassie slipped an arm around Jennifer’s waist and asked, “You want to look inside?”
Jennifer shook her head and shivered.
“Well, I do,” she said.
The coffin Faith approached was carved out of a single tree trunk and rested in a shallow, natural depression in the cliff.
“This is Song Dynasty,” Joe said. “Eight hundred years old. The oldest ones are twelve hundred years old, Tang Dynasty. They used to have lids covering them and artifacts inside. Textiles and pottery. Weapons too. Knives and spears, that kind of thing.”
Faith turned from the coffin to face them and Cassie took her photo.
“The artifacts have been removed,” Joe added.
“By whom?” Faith asked.
“Researchers. Sometimes vandals. These coffins will be moved before the water rises. You can go to the museum to see the artifacts that have been found. There were hundreds of these here once.”
“Don’t miss the inscription on the rock here,” Faith said, coming away from the coffin. “It’s very faint, but there are some marks done in cinnabar.”
When it was Lauren’s turn, she stood on tiptoe and peered into the coffin. A layer of sand several inches deep filled the bottom, but didn’t completely cover the skeleton within. The rib cage was partially visible, as was the skull. She had seen more than her share of skeletons during her fifteen years with Faith, but they never failed to move her, even so. Her mind always managed to put skin and muscle on them, as well as an imagined life complete with emotions, loves, losses, triumphs and defeats. Although there were many things you couldn’t know about a human life, any human life, one thing that no one ever disputed was that each one was special and unique. One of the things Lauren loved about Faith was that even though she approached her subject matter with a cool, scientific expediency, she never lost sight of the human component. She retained respect for the people she studied, keeping in mind that they once had been people with dreams and imaginations as rich as her own.
Cassie took her turn after Lauren, snapping several photos of the interior of the coffin. When she came away, she grinned and said, “This is so cool.” She was obviously thrilled.
“Come on, Jen,” Faith said. “Take a look. You’ll regret it if you don’t. Always do everything.”
To Cassie, Lauren said, “She always says that. Do everything. Take both. You know, when somebody says, do you want the cheesecake or the tiramisu, she says, ‘both.’”
Cassie laughed, showing all her teeth. “I like that!”
Faith’s philosophy of life was always to grab whatever gusto life offered. She wasn’t one to sit on the sidelines of anything. It was one of the great advantages of being her partner. Lauren knew that her own life wouldn’t have been nearly as exciting if not for Faith. She had a tendency to hang back, approach life tentatively. She recognized her younger self in Jennifer.
Faith took hold of Jennifer’s hand and walked her up to the coffin. She continued to hold her hand as Jennifer peered over the edge. As the tallest woman present, Jennifer was the only one who didn’t have to stand on her toes to see inside.
“Oh, shit!” Jennifer whispered.
Cassie and Lauren sat on a mossy boulder to take in the view. The river far below was silent from this height. There was a lone hawk gliding on air currents at eye level. Like the mountain they were perched on, all the mountains as far as they could see were round-tipped triangles pointing into gray mists. The moist mountains were covered with verdant green vegetation except in this channel where the river had cut down through the soft limestone, creating sheer borders of bare rock, interspersed with an occasional small tree. The cliffs of this gorge were too steep and unstable to support much plant life.
Cassie, who had been sitting silently observing the scenery, turned and smiled at Lauren, a tranquil, undemanding smile. In that moment, Lauren was struck with the feeling they had known one another for a long time. Cassie was one of those rare people who felt familiar almost immediately, like you had known her in another lifetime and were picking up again in this life where you’d left off some centuries ago.
“Better than a Buddhist temple?” Lauren asked.
“Yes. Much better, although we’ve seen some really great temples. Everything is so ancient here. It’s hard to get your mind around it. The
Terra Cotta Warriors, the Great Wall, the Forbidden City. All the things we’ve seen are hundreds or thousands of years old. This culture has been here for so long. It’s mind boggling.”
“I’ve felt that way so often on our travels. In awe, you know, of what people have accomplished.”
“You’ve been all over the world,” Cassie observed.
“Still a lot of places to go, though. One thing about Faith’s research is that she’ll never exhaust her subject matter.”
“Everybody dies.”
Lauren nodded. “Everybody does die. And most of them don’t do it without making a little fuss. Or a lot of fuss.”
“Like this.” Cassie pointed to the three coffins. “So nobody knows why they did this?”
“No. Nobody knows how they did it either. Some of these things are suspended on completely sheer vertical walls with no place for anyone to walk or stand. And those coffins are heavy. I imagine when Faith writes this up, she’ll back one of the theories, but they’re all just educated guesses. The Bo people had no written language. Not much is known about them at all. Their culture was wiped out during the Ming Dynasty. These coffins are the main thing they left behind.”
“You know, before I met you two, I never thought much about how important the burial customs of a people are. It’s like the key to everything, isn’t it? Their philosophy, their mythology, their identity as a culture. How they died tells you a lot about how they lived.”
Lauren nodded and smiled at Cassie, thinking she was a very likable woman. She was curious and intelligent, good-natured and kind. She was probably a good teacher.
Faith and Jennifer were no longer looking at the coffin. They were standing near the edge of the cliff and Faith was gesturing in a way that took in the mountains around them. She’s explaining about terrace farm irrigation or some such thing, Lauren guessed.
“Do you usually do that?” Cassie asked. “Learn all about the stuff Faith is working on?”
“I like to know what we’re looking at, yeah. I enjoy it. I’m kind of a research nut. Sometimes when we go to a place like this, she’ll be asking me questions about it. Details, you know, that she doesn’t remember.”
“You two make a good team. You seem like a strong couple.”
Lauren glanced at Faith, who was still talking animatedly to Jennifer. “We are.”
“What about your own work? Does it absorb you?”
“Over the years it’s become very routine, like most jobs. It has its moments, but nothing like this. This isn’t routine for her either. We usually manage two trips a year. The rest of the time, she’s a teacher, like you.”
Since they had been motionless for a while, it had gotten cold again. Lauren took her windbreaker out of her backpack and pulled it on. Cassie helped her find the sleeve, then gave her a friendly pat on the back.
Faith and Jennifer walked over to where they sat.
“Are you glad you looked?” Cassie asked Jennifer.
“Yeah. It wasn’t that bad.”
“Time to head back,” Faith said. She took one more deliberate look around at the mist-filled gorge and the three coffins. Then she turned to Lauren with a look she knew well. Faith was happy beyond expression, like a child at Christmas.
Lauren couldn’t help but feel some of her joy.
Chapter Seven
Lauren’s hips rose up each time Faith’s hand thrust down, driving her fingers deep inside. Lauren locked her arms around Faith’s back, her grip desperate, her moans muffled by sheer determination, as per their agreement. We can leave the balcony door open to the cool night air, Faith had agreed, if you don’t frighten the farmers and livestock on shore. So Lauren was attempting to comply, suppressing her usual vocal enthusiasm.
Faith felt Lauren’s body tense into the last stage of frenzy. There was one cry of ecstasy that escaped into the night, but it was brief and probably would not bring the Chinese authorities out to the ship to investigate. Faith smiled to herself in the dark as Lauren’s body fell back on the bed, spent and satisfied.
It wasn’t really the farmers and their livestock she was concerned about, nor even the people who might be still on deck above. It was the neighbors. Although they were becoming friends with Cassie and Jennifer, they didn’t need to share everything. They had retired to their cabins at the same time, so Faith knew they were just on the other side of the wall.
She kissed Lauren, savoring her lower lip, which smelled and tasted of sex.
“That was a good one,” Lauren said, breathless.
“Despite no Uncle Dick?” Faith joked.
“I was just asking if you’d brought it. Obviously, we don’t need it.”
“I almost did bring it,” Faith said, turning on her side and inviting Lauren to spoon. “Maybe if it wasn’t purple I would have, but the thought of some juvenile baggage handler flashing that thing around put me off the idea. Carrying it in the carry-on would have been even worse, if my bag got searched going through security. Uh, what’s this, ma’am?” she mimicked.
“How would you have answered that?” Lauren asked.
“I don’t know. Uncle Dick? The only part of him worth bringing along, anyway.”
Lauren snickered, her hand sliding along the curve of Faith’s hip. She moved closer, wrapping herself around her back. “What a day!”
“Fabulous. It was a bitch to arrange, but absolutely worth it.”
“I think Cassie and Jennifer enjoyed it too.”
“Cassie, at least.” Faith gripped Lauren’s hand to her stomach. “Jennifer too, I guess, to some extent. I hope so.”
“I like her,” Lauren said. “Cassie, I mean.”
“Yes, I can tell. You usually take longer to relax around new people.”
“I feel like I’ve known her a lot longer than two days.”
That was apparent, Faith thought, remembering how lively Lauren’s conversation with Cassie was earlier in the evening. Lauren had been positively vivacious, talking and listening enthusiastically to Cassie’s views on the importance of maintaining the literary tradition in modern English-speaking cultures to include people who were totally unreadable nowadays like Henry James. Then they had compared books they’d read and authors they admired, and finally Faith had left them there by themselves, absorbed in their conversation, while she went to the room to read. Lauren wasn’t normally so unguarded. It was nice to see her like that.
“She was very funny at dinner tonight,” Lauren said. “Talking about the absurdity of golf. A bunch of guys in loud pants hitting a tiny dimpled ball around a cow pasture, looking for gopher holes. Didn’t you think that was funny? I couldn’t stop laughing. It was the way she told it that was so funny.”
“Um,” Faith mumbled, feeling suddenly very drowsy.
After a moment of silence, Lauren whispered, “I love you.”
“Love you too.”
Faith lay facing the open balcony door, relishing the warmth of Lauren’s body tucked close up against her back. The only light in the cabin was a faint glow rising up from the ship’s halo of light on the water below. The sound of the river splashing against the ship came in through the open door. A tender breeze wafted over them intermittently.
Faith was almost asleep, or maybe she had been asleep and wakened again, when she gradually became aware of the sound of voices. They were indistinct, but clearly querulous. As she focused on them, she realized they were coming from the next cabin, from Jennifer and Cassie, a few feet beyond her head. They were arguing. Bits of their conversation came on the air currents. Their balcony door must also be open. What she was hearing, she realized, was Jennifer as she moved close and then further away from the open door. All she heard from Cassie was a muted voice through the wall, barely audible.
The phrases she could understand—“embarrass you,” and “you always do that,” and “am I supposed to ask your permission?”—were like one of those exercises where you’re given a photo with several pieces cut out and your brain fills in all
the missing bits. A few phrases were all you needed to reconstruct the entire argument.
After dinner, the four of them had gone again to the lounge for drinks. It had been comfortable and friendly. But there was that awkward moment when Jennifer had called the waiter over to ask for another glass of wine and Cassie had looked concerned. It was instantly apparent that she didn’t want Jen to have another, but how could she say that in this group of new friends? So she said nothing. At the time, anyway. And Jennifer had gotten noticeably loud after that drink. Not obnoxious. Just slightly more rowdy than before. It had been nothing to Faith and Lauren. Maybe it had seemed worse to Cassie. Later, if she said something to Jen, something like, “I wish you wouldn’t have had that last drink,” that might have been enough to cause a fight, depending on what buttons it pushed.
Of course, Faith realized she was imagining all of this. They might have been fighting over something completely different.
Lauren slipped out of bed, leaving a cool vacuum behind, and Faith watched her walk to the balcony door. The faint light in the room was no brighter than a single birthday cake candle might produce, but it was enough to create a silhouette of Lauren’s body, a classic female shape.
Lauren slid the patio door shut almost silently, then returned to bed. Faith could hear nothing now but the faint sound of women’s voices next door, far too quiet to understand words or to keep her awake.
Seeing Lauren’s outline at the patio door reminded her of Janie because of the way she used to stand naked in the doorway of their darkened bedroom, backlit by the bright nightlight she always insisted on in the hallway. Like a child, she was afraid of the dark. Janie had been someone completely unsuited to her, as often happens during the sexual rampages of youth. But Faith had loved her anyway, deeply and painfully. Painful because they were constantly finding fault with one another, were disapproving and disappointed even while craving one another. It had been an immature romance, which wasn’t surprising considering how young they were. Even now, thinking of Janie, Faith felt wistful. There are some people you never really get over, even after twenty years.