He fell upon me, grabbing my shoulders, shouting for me to stop, stop, it wasn’t that at all! “No, Kay-tee, no!” he whispered in my ear as he held my body against his. The fur fell to the ground and I was now fully bare in his arms. “It is not you—you are perfect, you are beautiful, you are far too good for me. It is me. I am disappointed in myself.”
“What?” I pulled back to look at him. “Why? Because you married me?”
“No! Well, yes.” Hector sat back on his heels and sighed. “It is my duty to protect you, to see you safely home, but . . .” He looked at me so sadly I almost started to cry again. “We have a long, long, long way to go. It is a difficult, almost impossible Journey in any case, sure to take at least another year. But if you are . . .” He gestured a big belly on me and said a word in his language which I assumed meant “with child.” He stopt and looked down in anguish.
Relief washed o’er me like a cleansing rain. “Oh, Hector—is that what worries you? That is nothing. Women have babies all the time in all kinds of places under all kinds of conditions. My mother had a baby in a big canoe on the ocean. She had another in a . . .” I said the English word for “wagon,” reminding him of the device I wanted to use to carry the canoe. “A baby might slow us down, but we will still be able to go on!”
Hector looked at me hopefully, then stood up and turned his face to the river again with a mournful expression. “You do not know how far we must go, the dangers we will face. I do. I should have been stronger. For your sake, I should not have done this.”
Still on my knees, I pulled the fur back o’er my shoulders and looked up at him critically. “You know this conversation is about a day too late, yes? Because what’s done is done. What I don’t understand is what’s different. You didn’t seem to have any doubts yesterday. You’re the one who first spoke of marriage.”
Hector literally hung his head. “I did not think you would accept me.”
My mouth fell open and the fur fell to the gravel again. It took a long moment to recover my senses, close my mouth, and pick the fur back up. “Why would you think I would not accept you?”
“You rejected me twice.”
“But I did not know you were . . . approaching me!”
Hector shrugged unhappily, looking at the ground. “It was wrong of me to approach you. You are a Spirit Keeper. I am just a man. I am not . . . good enough for you.”
My mouth fell open again. “Oh, my heavens!” I said slowly in English. I looked up at Hector, remembering when I had the same conversation with Syawa, or at least tried to. The absurdity of my being on the other side of this conversation made me want to laugh. I said, “Hector, you are good enough. You are much, much better than I am.”
He stood facing the river, still looking down, tight-lipped, shaking his head. A long moment passed. “You do not understand. My father will say I took advantage of your . . .” He said a word which I had to ask him to define. It meant “vulnerability.” He went on to remind me his father thought he was impulsive, brash. “Now I know what he means.”
I sighed, looking up at the glistening leaves in the trees. I may have broken with my past, but Hector had not and ne’er would. “Your father will not approve of our marriage?”
Hector glanced at me glumly. “Marriage is a sacred thing. It is not just between a man and a woman. It is a bond between families, between communities, between generations. Marrying you now, like this, is an insult to all.”
Oh, wonderful. If we e’er made it all the way to Hector’s home, everyone there would hate me right from the start. Huzzah.
But no, that was not the case, Hector assured me when I said as much. He mumbled about the complex social rules of his people. Apparently being a Spirit Keeper elevated me beyond the reach of his class or clan or some such thing, which meant he had no right to approach me. The fact that I did not know it was wrong only compounded Hector’s responsibility and subsequent misconduct.
Class, society, la, la, la—these ridiculous concepts had tormented me my entire life. Because my father married below his class, he was expelled from his homeland, denied his inheritance. Because my mother married above her station, she was always frantic, frazzled, and furious. Because my siblings and I all must struggle to improve our positions, we constantly fought each other and everyone we met. But the truth was, were it not for the social misconduct of my parents, I would not exist. Therefore, who could blame me, as I sat naked in the midst of that wild land, if I decided once and for all I no longer had any use for social rules?
“Look, Hector—I do not know your father,” I said slowly. “But I do know you. You saved my life. You defended me. You fed me. You protected me. You cared for me. I have told you about my life and you must understand this: no one else I have e’er known has e’er truly wanted me. No one was e’er even kind to me ’til I met you and the Seer. You think I am something special. I am not. You are. You gave up a life you loved for me, you traveled across this entire land for me, you risk your life every day for me. You are the most glorious person in the world. How could I not accept you?”
He tipt his head, more miserable than e’er. “This is what I mean when I say I took advantage of your vulnerability.”
I sighed and stood up, naked before him, hands on hips, one eyebrow raised. “Truly? After what you’ve seen me do, after knowing what I’m capable of, can you honestly say you think I’m vulnerable? I’m pretty sure I could beat you in a fight.” I lifted my chin and stared at him, a challenge in my eyes. His eyes went grave as he met my gaze, and for a moment we were in my family’s loft again, toe to toe, eye to eye, weighing each other, wondering, calculating our next move.
Hector inhaled deeply and turned back to the river. “We should not fight.”
I walked to him, breathing on his neck. “I agree. We should be married instead.”
He raised his eyebrows as he turned his face to me. “You think married people do not fight?”
“I think married people have a strong reason to stop fighting.” I could see my breath on his shoulder was affecting him, but he turned his face away, still unconvinced. I stared at him, saw his suffering, and a new thought occurred, a disturbing thought, a nagging doubt which began to grow and fester in my brain. “But, wait—something makes no sense. If you believed you and I could not marry, then why did you ask me to marry you in the first place?”
Hector hung his head again. “I did not,” he mumbled. “Because I could not.”
Stunned, I reviewed our conversation from the day before, that sick feeling spreading from my brain to my stomach. Was Hector saying he ne’er meant to marry me at all, that I had assumed things that were not true, that this was just another huge misunderstanding? “But you gave me a burning stick! Three times! Why would you do that if you believed we could not marry?”
Staring at the riverbank, he inhaled and exhaled a couple times. Finally he spoke without looking up. “I should have explained it all to you. I was trying to. If I had explained, then you would have known how wrong my actions were. You would have known you must reject me. But I . . . I wanted you more than I wanted air to breathe. And when it seemed you wanted me, too, I could not stop myself. I knew you didn’t understand and I knew I should explain, but I also knew this was my chance, my only chance. So I took it.”
I stared dumbly into the river. “So . . . so you’re saying you did take advantage of me. You knew I was stupid and you gave me the stick, knowing I wouldn’t understand, knowing I would assume . . .”
“I did not intend to trick you into marrying me, but that is exactly what I have done. I ne’er dared hope it would work, but it was the only way . . .”
A single laugh shot from me. “Hector, did you plan all this, just to get ’round your people’s rules?” When he shrugged, head still hanging, I became vastly amused, and, quite frankly, impressed. He hadn’t exactly lied to me, but by withholding vital inform
ation he had allowed me to believe things that weren’t true. “But I still don’t understand. If you had explained everything to me, what was I supposed to do? Slap your face, push you away, threaten to tell your father?”
“That is what others in your position have done. We are people who could ne’er marry, so you should have ignored me, and if I approacht you as I did, you should have apologized for enticing me and stopt torturing me with what I could never have.”
“I should have apologized?” I shook my head, staring into thin air. For a moment I was back in Philadelphia, watching my sisters entice the men they met. They wore their bodices low, breasts bulging out the top. They batted their eyelashes, smiling coyly, licking their lips or running their fingers seductively across various parts of their body. They breathed heavily as they presst their loins against the swollen breeches of the men they teased. They laughed and got the men to do whate’er they wanted.
And then I thought of how I behaved with Hector. I had, on countless occasions, stood before him in various stages of undress, including complete nudity, and he had not reacted in any way. But apparently whene’er I smiled at him, or talked to him, or—God help me—looked at him, he was unbearably aroused. Why is it that knowing this only made me love him all the more?
“Very well, Hector,” I said slowly, turning back to him, “if you want an apology, here it is. I am sorry. I truly am sorry. Because I am not going to stop enticing you. I will ne’er stop enticing you. I plan to entice you as much as I can every single day for the rest of my life.”
Hector looked at me with a worried frown. “Well, then it is a good thing we are married.”
I laughed. “I think so, too.” He finally smiled with me—a sheepish grin, with face downcast. I thought for a moment, trying to choose my next words carefully. I sighed. “But because of all you have said, I must ask you something. Why in the world would you want me so much? Is it because you are forbidden to have me? Is it because I am the Creature of Fire and Ice? Is it because I am his Spirit Keeper? Hector, I need to know—is there any part of you that wants me, that married me?”
Hector pursed his lips, considering. Knowing he would be nothing but honest, I awaited his answer in great trepidation. “It is not possible to”—he gestured so I would understand the next word—“separate those parts of you. You are all those things. But I have been with you for a very long time now. I have seen you. I have heard you. And I love you, Kay-tee.” He looked at me with such a fiery affection I melted before him. “I think you know I love you.”
I nodded, smiling. “I do. And you know I love you, too.”
We came together passionately, ’til suddenly I pulled away. “Oh, but wait! My husband will be very unhappy if we do not travel a great distance today! He hates it when I delay.”
Hector would not release me. He growled, “Your husband will be very unhappy if you do not delay!”
And so we delayed.
~27~
I WISH I REMEMBERED every tiny detail of the days which followed, but alas, I do not. My memories are a blur of bouts of unbridled passion interspersed with periods of recovery from and build-up to e’en more passion. We traveled slowly through those glorious days of autumn. We tried to move quickly, for Hector was still determined to reach a certain village before the full force of winter set in, but no matter how determined we were to get an early start or to keep paddling as long as possible, our impulsive natures frequently got the better of us.
One thing I remember is that he did, finally, teach me to say his name. It took a great deal of coaching and laughing and trying again as we rolled together naked, but eventually I could replicate the sounds exactly as he made them. Thereafter, all I need do to start a fire in his loins was whisper his name. Because of this reaction, I continued to call him “Hector” most of the time, saving his other name for special moments. E’en if I could write a rough equivalent of his name in English—which I cannot—I would not do it, for his name is far too precious to sully it with ink.
I remember, too, how much I missed just talking with him. I had enjoyed talking with Hector so much after our long period of silence, but after marrying we entered into a new period of silence. It was not that we did not want to talk; it was just that whene’er we were not paddling, hunting, cooking, or cleaning, we were too entangled with each other to talk. In a peculiar way, I missed Hector. No matter how intimate we were physically, I wanted more and more and more of him—his words, his thoughts, his feelings, his soul.
We still understood so very little about each other.
At one point, shortly after we married, I complained it wasn’t fair I had to sit in the front of the canoe because I must turn if I wanted to see him. The river was smooth and easy at that point, so I twisted ’round and played at paddling backwards. Hector smiled at my silliness, but replied I had it easy—it was far more difficult, he said, to sit in the back of the canoe, as he must do. “I stare at your hair, your arms, your back,” he said wistfully, “and at times it has taken all my strength not to reach for you. I do not know why we have not run into more rocks!”
I stopt playing with my paddle and stared at him, surprised. “Is that so? Since when have I distracted your paddling?”
“Since the moment you got into my canoe.”
I sat there watching him paddle for a while, knowing I was distracting him, but I was too hungry for the mere sight of him to stop. Thereafter I was oft a distraction for him. Once I insisted on sitting in the back of the canoe with him, the way we did when we escaped from Three Bulls. I leant against him, so happy, surrounded by his strong arms as they pulled through the water again and again. After a short time of this sort of stimulation, however, I found myself insane with desire, unable to do anything but insist we pull over and yield to my rabid need immediately or I would die. Hector was surprised by the extremity of my passion, but he obliged me without complaint. Afterwards, I apologized for the delay, saying I guessed I could not sit in the back of the canoe with him. He laughed and said I had the appetite of a man—which I’m sure he attributed to the Spirit I kept. Concerned, I asked if it was bad for a woman to be so lustful. Hector grinned at the sky and said, “Not for me!”
Unfortunately, I found the more I had of him, the more I wanted, and I swear if I could have crawled inside his skin and bedded down like a parasite amidst his internal organs, I still would’ve wanted to get closer to him somehow, to have more of him, to become more inseparably intertwined.
Occasionally I felt guilty, horrendously guilty. I hated the fact that everything about our relationship was based on a lie, a miserable mistake, but I simply saw no way to undo what had been done. I knew, sooner or later, I must tell Hector the truth, and I thought of a million ways to say Syawa had not given me his Spirit and I was not, in fact, a Spirit Keeper, but long before I could push any explanation to my tongue, every single word withered in my brain and washed away in my pulsing blood. I couldn’t tell him. How could I tell him? I simply could not tell him. Not yet. Not whilst I needed him so desperately. And so I learnt to live with my horrific guilt the same way I learnt to live with my insatiable lust.
• • •
One evening as we lolled naked together, Hector asked what had caused a scar above my knee. He had been touring my scars—which are many—asking about each one, and when he came to this one, I smiled. “That’s my brother’s mouth,” I said and proceeded to tell the tale.
A girl who lived near us in Boston had been born with a club-foot, causing her to walk with a considerable limp. The girl was older than I—perhaps twelve to my eight—but she was frail and easily frightened and rarely left her house save when her mother sent her to the market with eggs. Then a gang of little boys would follow after her, cruelly mocking her uneven gait.
I could see the boys were a torment to her, and tho’ the girl meant nothing to me, I despised bullying, especially since two of those boys were m
y own little brothers. One day when the girl passed by, out the boys ran, and I marched out behind them to demand they have done. Tho’ the other lads ran off, my brothers were not inclined to take orders from me, reckoning, of course, they had me outnumbered. I had righteous indignation on my side, however, so when fists began to fly, I gave as good as I got, and in a moment I was sitting atop one brother whilst holding the other by his arm and slapping his face. With both my hands busy, the brother below took the opportunity to sink his teeth into my leg just above the knee, and when I jumped up to shake him loose, both boys escaped.
In the meantime, the crippled girl cowered in a doorway, terrified by the sudden flurry of violence. I dusted myself off and walked her to market, tho’ I fear anyone who saw us must’ve thought I was mocking her as much as the boys had been, for my bleeding knee made me limp. We laughed about that, and, thereafter, ’til we moved away a year or so later, I walked her to the market many times.
Hector listened to this story with a fond glow in his eyes, telling me afterward he wisht he could have been there to fight beside me. He said he could just see me as a little girl, my red curls bouncing as I battled my brothers. Then he got a sort of faraway look in his eye, saying he also could not abide bullies. “Someone must defend those who cannot defend themselves,” he said with conviction.
We went on to discuss other scars, and that was the end of that.
But the next morning I awoke with a start, my ragged gasp bringing Hector to my side in a heartbeat. “What is it?” he asked, far more concerned, I thought, than a simple gasp deserved.
“Just a dream,” I mumbled. “But such a strange one . . .”
He wanted to know what I dreamt, but, like most dreams, it was fragmented and fuzzy. “We were somewhere, you and I, where there were people. Boys. A gang of little boys. And they were picking on me, mocking me about something. They called me names—they chanted. One threw something . . . and you . . . you came out of nowhere. You pushed the bullies back. You hit them. It was strange, because it was you, like you are now, but you were younger than those children somehow, and there were so many. They piled on top of you. I wanted to help you, but I couldn’t, I just couldn’t . . . then someone was coming, and the boys ran away. You were on the ground, blood on your face. That’s when I woke up.”
The Spirit Keeper Page 25