by Ben Blake
*
Afterwards they lay side by side, one of her legs resting between his, their clothes dotted around them.
“Look,” she said presently. “A cloud shaped like a wolf.”
“A wolf?”
“There, can you see its snout? It’s about to pounce on that sheep there.”
Paris squinted at the sky. “A sheep that has no legs, it seems. Hardly difficult to catch.”
“As I wasn’t?”
“I’m no wolf,” he said.
“All men are wolves.” She shook her head and pointed again. “That one looks like a boat. One of the Greek galleys, sailing the endless sea.”
“The sky is endless.”
“So is the earth,” she responded. “That one’s shaped like a lyre.”
“Or the horns of a bull,” Paris said.
She turned to look at him. “You see? Men are wolves. Always thinking about war.”
“I’m not thinking about war. Bulls don’t always mean battle. You’re thinking of boars.”
“So contrary today,” she said, smiling a little. “Perhaps I should have hidden among the trees and let you blunder about alone, calling my name until light drained out of the day.”
For answer he tangled a hand in her hair and kissed her, and as always she lost herself in him. They were still kissing when he touched her somewhere else and she shivered all over, moaning against his teeth.
“Perhaps you should,” he said, teasing her.
Oenone shook her head, her quicksilver mood shifting to serious in an instant. “There’s something about you, city bred though you are. My sisters disapprove, they say I should find a mate among our own kind, a mountain man. But I only feel truly alive with you.”
He studied her with hazel eyes. Witch hazel eyes, she thought a little wildly. I am a woman of the streams, tied to running water for longer than a thousand lives of men. I hardly remember what I was before. I’m the one who is meant to captivate and enthral. But this prince of Troy has turned all that back on me. He’s taken my heart, not I his.
Not I his.
“You’re more alive than any woman I’ve ever known,” he said finally. “Living on this mountain has given you something special. Joy, energy: I don’t know. But you glow with it.”
“Does that mean you love me?”
“I love you.” He ran fingertips down her bare leg, making her shiver again. Grass prickled at her back. “What did you mean, earlier? About a woman yet to come?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Oenone,” he said.
She sighed. Love was the greatest joy she’d ever known, like summer sunlight playing on a still pool. But when Paris made demands his love became annoying, like thorns under the skin. “I saw it, that’s all. When you said I would be the death of you.”
“Saw what?”
“That a woman will be,” she said.
After a moment he grinned. “I’ll die because of a woman? There are worse ends, I suppose.”
She reached up to brush brown curls away from his forehead. “Don’t joke. I can’t bear it.”
“So what will she do?” Paris asked, still joking. “Torment me to death in a pillowed bed? Knife me in my sleep?”
“I don’t know!” Oenone cried. “I never know! You might never meet her, or hear her name. But what she does will affect you, one day.”
“Well, then,” he said. His smile had gone at last. “I’ll be sure to keep a wary eye out for her, I promise.”
That wouldn’t matter. Nothing mortals did could affect the threads of the Fates. Clothos spins, Lachesis measures, Atropos cuts the thread. They did their work with cold efficiency, never hearing the cries and pleas of those desperate for more life. A man yearning for a single minute so he could tell his wife she was loved. A woman praying that her baby live through the next hitching breath. None of it mattered, or changed what the three Fates did.
She couldn’t explain that to Paris. Or rather, she could explain but he would never understand. City folk didn’t, men most of all. They were too set in their rigid ways, the patterns of thought that solidified as they grew until they might as well have been cut in stone. They built a city and called it permanent, forgetting the lesson learned by the men and women who lived amidst the wild; nothing is permanent. Everything changes.
Even the mightiest fall.
She wanted suddenly to be back among her people in the deep forest, where axes had never thudded into wood. There was peace there, the calmness of thousands of uninterrupted years. Sometimes at night she would float in her stream and listen to the singing of the dryads, gentle spirits dancing in their glades in the darkness. They would startle if she came close, so she just lay and listened, and watched the stars wheel above her.
She’d never found that sort of peace with Paris. He was too hot a man for that, too caught up in his own emotions and whims. Oenone knew she wouldn’t hold his heart for long. She didn’t need the gift of prophecy to foretell that.
But he was mortal, and would age and die while the dryads still sang, and Oenone still dwelt in her pools and streams. Long, for him, was a mere instant for her. He was here now though, and she reached up to cup his face in her hands and kiss him again, then stroke the inside of his thigh with her toes. He reacted as he always did, all that fire and passion rising up in him, and shortly after Oenone was swept away and she didn’t think about endings anymore.