“There is nothing I can do for your husband,” Lucie said with a shrug. “As you have seen, reality has once more escaped him.”
“I won’t let him die! Do you hear me?”
“If Fyrea wants him dead, She’ll have him,” Lucie stated with unarguable finality, “just as She’s had my daughter.”
Marie went to Charles by the window. She took his arm and gave it a forceful tug to pull him around to face her.
“Charles, listen to me!” she shouted. “If we don’t get out of here, and soon, we are all going to be toast. Are you going to stand there and let that happen?”
“Cécile....”
“I am not Cécile! Nor have I ever been. Cécile is dead! Cécile is buried!”
“Cécile....”
“IS DEAD! IS DEAD! IS BURIED!”
He looked confused. Marie could only hope she was, somehow, getting through to him.
“I’m Marie, your wife, Charles. Do you want me to die, because I’m not going to move one step out of this house without you? If we don’t leave together, we’re going to end up as dead, together, as this crazy old lady, over there, is going to end up dead with her daughter.” She’d pointed to Lucie.
“Marie?” Charles asked as if buried deep in the ground, calling up though the smallest of air holes in his casket.
“We...have...got...to...get...out of here, Charles,” Marie insisted. She gripped both of his biceps and gave a hearty shake that jarred her teeth while hardly budging her husband’s muscled body.
“We can’t get out,” he told her. “The lava already blocks the road.”
“We’ll take the horses,” Marie said, “and go around the lava.”
“I’ve turned the horses loose,” he said. This was something Marie had surmised earlier. Still, if nothing else, she took heart in the fact that his mind was apparently once again functioning in the present.
“Then, we’ll just have to walk out of here,” she said, hoping he could get himself enough together to make a more viable suggestion than that. “Well walk to the cove where Pierre Yonne has a boat waiting.”
No way did she believe Pierre would still be waiting, even if he had returned all of the way to shore. On the other hand, she felt if she could just get Charles started into doing something—anything—his natural instincts for survival were bound to kick in.
“Pierre Yonne?” he asked; his expression gave the impression he was genuinely searching his memory for a way to put a face to the name.
“You don’t know him, but I do, Charles,” Marie said. “He’s from Isla Charlotte and has his boat in a cove not too far away that can get us to safety.”
“Likely story!” Lucie Bruay huffed, screwing up her nose in disdain.
“Shut up!” Marie commanded and turned back to Charles.
His eyes seemed brighter. He rubbed the side of his jaw like a man just hit and trying to come out of the resulting stun.
“Pierre is waiting with his boat, Charles. Really he is. I can’t get there by myself, though, because I’m too weak and too frightened. You have to come with me.”
“I can’t,” he said. “I have to stay here and wait.”
“Wait for what?” Marie asked in furious frustration. “The only thing you’re going to find here is death, and you don’t really want to die. You don’t really want me to die with you, do you?”
“I must,” he said, shaking his head to clear it of haze which wasn’t just inside it but floating the air in result of the conflagration in progress outside.
“Why must you die, Charles? Why?”
“She said so,” Charles said, glancing toward Lucie who eyed both of them from the chair.
“What does she know?” Marie asked, feeling she was definitely making headway.
She was encouraged that his past spells always ended, eventually, followed each time by longer stretches of rationality. If she could shake him free of this one, she was sure things would turn out all right.
“Fyrea would have me,” Charles said. He nodded in Lucie’s direction. “She said it was so.”
“If Fyrea really wants you, Charles, do you really think She won’t get you, whether you stay here or try to get me to safety? Isn’t doing something better than just waiting like a sacrificial lamb destined for slaughter? Well, isn’t it?”
“Who’s Pierre?” Charles asked. “Some man you’ve been seeing on the sly?”
His eyes sparkled, and there was just a definitive trace of embarrassment within the slight grin on his lips.
“Charles, is it really you? Is it?”
“By the looks of things, we are in a pretty mess, here,” he said. “We’re going to have to move very fast if we plan to get out.”
“Oh, Charles!” Marie exclaimed, sobbing her relief. She fell into his arms, gathering comfort beyond belief from his very nearness.
This was her Charles! This was her man! She had, with persistence, triumphed over Cécile, and Lucie, and brought back to reality the man she loved.
“One thing I don’t need right now, it’s an hysterical wife,” he said, his mouth spreading into a wide smile, while his eyes flashed genuine concern for their situation. “Promise me you’re not going to fall to pieces on me at this stage of the game.”
“I promise,” she said, quickly wiping away her tears of joy. “I do, I do, I do...truly promise.”
* * * * * * *
They stopped from pure exhaustion. Smoke burned their eyes and throats. Branches had striated their arms and faces with whip and burn marks during their mad dash thorough a jungle often in flames.
“You’re both fools!” Lucie Bruay spat as Charles squatted to put her unceremoniously on the ground. Against Lucie’s great protest, and Marie’s uncertainty, Charles had carried the old woman from the Château with them. “We can, none of us, escape the wrath of Fyrea. The least we might have done was waited gracefully for our end in the relative comfort of the Château.”
“I can’t believe a feisty old woman like you can really want to go out without a fight,” Charles said, his sentence punctuated by the resounding boom of thunder.
Ominous clouds were piled in an increasingly impressive crown atop Mont d’Esnembuc. Lightning flashed with more and more regularity, turning the growing twilight to full day.
“Fools! Foolish fools!” Lucie muttered.
Charles turned his attention to his wife.
“You do know the chances are slim that your friend is still going to be there, in the cove, with his boat,” he said, shaking his head.
“I know,” Marie admitted.
“Even so, they’re the best odds we seem to have at the moment. Heading any other way would have us fenced in by lava flows.”
“Best to go out with a fight, isn’t that what you said?”
He gave her a kiss at the exact moment a gust of wind blew a sheet of hot smoke to engulf them. They came apart, coughing.
“Time to move on, Lucie,” Charles said, taking hold of the old woman’s feather-weight body and lifting.
Lucie started coughing; managing to stop only after Charles was, once again, running with her through the smoke-filled jungle.
“Fools!” Lucie muttered indignantly, suspecting that if Fyrea didn’t soon kill her, the mad rush through the flaming forest was liable to do just as good a job.
* * * * * * *
Marie didn’t remember the cove as being quite so far. Maybe, that was because her return to it was filled with so many detours necessitated by the myriad ravages The Cauldron’s eruption made upon the landscape. Everywhere, there were great geysers of steam spewing out of the ground, or pools of liquid bubbling viscous goo. The human trio was continually faced with gaping chasms, too great to jump. There was the fire, the heat, the blinding and suffocating smoke. Meanwhile, the grumbling mountain continually insinuated it hadn’t yet finished all it planned to do.
The earth began a new series of shimmies and shakes. As long as the rolling of the ground remained minor, Marie could
continue, having become somehow as accustomed to the movement as a sailor became eventually adjusted to the flux of the sea beneath his ship.
When the ground groaned, buckled, and gave massive heaves that were impossible to ride out, though, there was very little the trio could do except go down and pray the bucking would soon stop, and hope, against hope, that one of the increasing number of toppling trees wouldn’t decide to fall on top of them.
When the gauntlet was finally run successfully, the three panting their ragged gasps for breath to bring little else into their lungs but hot, smoke-saturated air, they found what had been a possibility all along was, in fact, reality: Pierre Yonne and his boat weren’t there.
Marie felt sick to her stomach, knowing she had secretly held out hope for Pierre and rescue by him, no matter what the odds against it. That hope had kept her going when she had thought she’d no strength left. Now what? They might as well have been back at the Château. While Isla Charlotte was out there, obscured by the haze, it might as well have been halfway around the world without any feasible way to reach it.
“Fools, fools, pathetic fools!” Lucie muttered, trying to settle as best she could against the rock where Charles propped her upon letting her down. Her bones had been so jolted, in Charles’ arms, that they now provided one huge ache that failed to escape any part of her body.
“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” Marie insisted.
For a very long minute, Charles simply held Marie close and waited for her nerves to calm, which they eventually did.
“Feel better?” he asked, giving her a grin.
Despite their nearness to the ocean, there was no relief from the increasing heat. The air became very much like that of a blast furnace, turning their faces red and sweaty.
Charles ripped off the tail of his shirt and went to the water’s edge, dipping the material into the salty liquid. The ocean was warm, heated from the tons of lava The Cauldron poured into it at several points along the island’s shoreline.
He brought the damp rag back to Marie and began to wipe off her face. Lucie seemed smugly content that he hadn’t bothered to perform any similar service for her. She well knew a pitiful damp rag wasn’t about to save any of them, anyway.
“I actually thought Pierre might be here,” Marie said, laughing at the absurdity of ever holding out any such hope.
The smoke and steam continued to cause a thickening gray fog within the cove and beyond, further masking Isla Charlotte which, under normal conditions, would have been readily visible against the horizon.
“We’re still alive,” Charles reminded, offering the only consolation he could come up with at the moment. He guided Marie over to a large boulder and pulled her down with him beside it.
“Yes, we are still that, aren’t we?” she admitted.
“Together, too,” Charles reminded. “Don’t forget that, either.”
“How could I?” she said and cuddled deeper into her husband’s strong arms, preferring his animal warmth to the sickening heat that was taking full possession of the air all around them.
CHAPTER TEN
BIRDSONG
It was the sound of one bird, somewhere in the jungle, above the cove, that pierced Marie’s subconscious and sucked her back to reality with a jolt.
For the birds had all left Saint-Georges, hadn’t they? She had seen them go.
Her first emotion, upon fully waking, was shock that she had been asleep at all. How wasteful if she had spent her last hours of life dozing when she should have savored each and every precious moment she had remaining with the man she loved.
Next, flashed fear, in that Charles was gone. It was Lucie Bruay who stood over her.
The air was opaque with floating motes of dust that made the sun seem a Cyclops’s eye obscured by milky cataracts. Mists swirled the surfaces of the water and the land.
“Your husband asked me to stay with you until you woke up, or until he got back,” Lucie said.
The earth was still; the air was hot without being suffocating, and...there...were...more bird songs in the distance.
“So, when he gets back, you must tell him that I did what he asked, and have gone,” Lucie said. Somewhere she had located the charred piece of tree limb that she used as a staff.
“Gone where?”
“While we have survived, others, I fear, haven’t been nearly so fortunate,” Lucie said. “I must give whatever help to them that I can.”
Marie was tempted to throw it up in the old woman’s face that, yes, they were alive, despite Lucie’s continual prophesies of doom and gloom throughout the whole previous afternoon, evening, and night, but she held her tongue. There was too little to be gained by prematurely thumbing her nose at fate, especially if what had seemingly ended might not be ended at all.
“Fyrea can be a forgiving goddess,” Lucie rationalized, possibly suspecting the thoughts, at that very moment, racing through Marie’s head.
“Where is Charles?”
“Gone to look around. He said to tell you he won’t be long.”
“Shouldn’t you at least wait until he gets back?”
“Why? What is done is done...for the moment.”
Marie wondered how the women could possibly be so certain, especially since Lucie’s foretelling of death for the three of them had so-far proven wrong.
Had it been wrong, though, only because of the magnanimity shown them by the goddess deity of the volcano?
Lucie started toward the pathway leading up the slope, moving with considerable agility, considering her age and all she had been though. Before she reached the base of the bluff, however, she turned back.
“I know the properties of the plant Digliji very well,” she said. “Your husband’s spells will become less frequent. In time, they will cease entirely, leaving him free of any ties with which my daughter once sought to bind him.”
“Thank you...for telling me that,” Marie said.
“My daughter was a fool,” Lucie said in a weary voice that relayed the full weight of her years. Her head began to shake; whether of her initiative, or because of an automatic spasm, was impossible for Marie to say.
The old woman turned and began her slow ascent of the hillside.
* * * * * * *
Marie didn’t have fresh clothes but felt better, nevertheless, after stripping down to take a soapless bath in the surprisingly lukewarm water of the cove. Shortly after she was dressed, she heard Charles call from the top of the bluff. She scampered up the slope to meet him halfway, falling into his arms, and eagerly opening her hungry lips beneath the demanding pressure of his.
Oh, how she loved him!
Their kiss finally broken, he wrapped his right arm securely around her waist and helped her finish the climb to the top.
She glanced over an expanse of terrain with great smoldering swaths of denuded landscape where greenery had once grown.
“It’s still standing?” she marveled, hardly believing the distant chimneys of Château Camaux seen through the mist.
“I imagine you’re not too keen on still living there, after all of this,” Charles said thoughtfully. “I’ve been thinking you might prefer we live in England.”
“England?” Marie asked indignantly. “My home is wherever you are. If you think you married a woman who is scared by a few obstacles thrown in her way, you are sadly mistaken.”
“You’d consider staying on Saint-Georges, then?” he asked, obviously surprised and delighted.
“You do want me to stay, don’t you? I mean, you don’t really want us to live in England, do you?”
“I want to live where you are...forever.”
“Then, it’s settled!” Marie gave her husband’s muscled waist a tight squeeze. “So, let’s go see what damage is done to our home, shall we?”
“In a minute,” Charles said, turning Marie lovingly in his strong arms, kissing her eyes, her nose, her mouth, her throat....
Heat quickly possessed their bodies which was far more
intense and all-consuming than anything which had ever yet raged within The Cauldron.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
William Maltese, an international best-selling author of novels, short stories, including his popular Wildside Mystery Double, Incident at Aberlene and Incident at Brimzinsky (Spies & Lies #1-2), has published (under various pseudonyms) some 200 books in genres ranging from straight and gay erotica, mystery, romance, western, adventure, espionage, cooking, wine, young adults and children, and twenty-four science fiction/fantasy/horror novels, beginning with Five Roads to Tlen in 1969 (as “William J. Lambert III”) through Bond-Shattering (2007). For a comprehensive list of his literary output, see Draqualian Silk: A Collector’s and Bibliographical Guide to The Books of William Maltese, 1969-2010 (Borgo Press, 2010). With a Business/Advertising degree, Maltese enlisted in the U.S. Army, where he achieved and was honorably discharged with the rank of Sergeant (E-5). You can find him at:
www.williammaltese.com
www.facebook.com/williammaltese
www.myspace.com/williammaltese
[email protected] (e-mail)
BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY WILLIAM MALTESE
Anal Cousins: Case Studies in Variant Sexual Practices
Back of the Boat Gourmet Cooking (with Bonnie Clark)
Blood-Red Resolution: An Adventure Novel
Catalytic Quotes (Some Heard Through a Time Warp)
Draqualian Silk: A Collector’s & Bibliographical Guide to the Books of William Maltese, 1969-2010
Emerald-Silk Intrigue: A Romance
Even Gourmands Have to Diet (with Bonnie Clark)
The Fag Is Not for Burning: A Mystery Novel
From This Beloved Hour: A Romance
Fyrea’s Cauldron: A Romance Novel
Gerun, the Heretic: A Science Fiction Novel
The Gluten-Free Way: My Way (with Adrienne Z. Milligan)
The Gomorrha Conjurations: An Adventure Novel
The “Happy” Hustler
Heart on Fire: A Romance
In Search of the Perfect Pinot G! (with A. B. Gayle)
Incident at Aberlene: An Espionage Novel (Spies & Lies #1)
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