Aegypt

by John Crowley

  EIGHT

  The storm did not come then; neither did it pass. After the darkening wind and a few inconclusive drops it seemed to pause, leaving the evening sky clear; it lay still visible on the horizon, though, muttering lowly from time to time, probably raining (those at Spofford’s party said to one another) on someone else’s party, somewhere else. The dense hot air was charged with its nearness, and when the moon arose, to toasts and laughter, immense and as amber as whiskey, her light gilded the scalloped hem of its clouds.

  Pierce and Spofford drove down to the party from the cabin in Spofford’s aged truck. Pierce’s feet were amid the toolboxes and oily rags, and Spofford drove with one arm across the steering wheel, the other propped on the window sill, holding on the roof. Gravel roads, the old truck’s smell, night air on his face, had Pierce thinking of Kentucky, of long-ago summer Saturday nights, out sparkin’, of freedom and expectation: as though this road were an extension of one he had once been on, one that he had left years ago and had suddenly rejoined at this juncture, who would have thought it led here, who would have thought.

  They turned onto an unkempt paved road, jouncing mightily, and in not too long a time drew up at a shuttered roadside stand. By the headlights Pierce saw that it sold, or had once sold, a long list of summer foods. They parked there amid other vehicles, old trucks like Spofford’s and newer ones and ones fitted out to special uses, and a bright little red convertible and a vast station wagon. Spofford pulled off the brown Indian-patterned blanket that covered the truck’s seat, rolled it and put it under his arm; he hooked with his forefinger from the back a huge jug of red wine, slung it over his shoulder, and led Pierce to a path that ran behind the roadside stand and descended through a pine woods toward a triangle of gold and black water. There were others on the path, darkish shapes or moonstruck and white, carrying hampers, shepherding children.

  ‘Is that Spofford?’ said a big woman in a tentlike dress, cigarette between her lips.

  ‘Hello, Val.’

  ‘Good night for it,’ Val said.

  ‘The best.’

  ‘Moon’s in Scorpio,’ Val said.

  ‘Is that so.’

  ‘Just be careful,’ Val chuckled, and they debouched into a peopled clearing, firelight, greeting voices and dogs barking.

  It was Spofford’s party only in that the stretch of waterside where it went on was his, a little pleasure-ground his parents had used to operate in the summer, the stand, a few picnic tables and a scattering of stone fireplaces like a druid ring, a brief wooden pier and a pair of outhouses, Jacks and Jills. Spofford brought the jug of wine, but did no hosting, was only a little seigneurial as he and Pierce strolled down amid the people, saying hi and passing remarks. The tables were piled with meats and fruits, bottles and cheeses and bowls of this and that, enough for multitudes it seemed, each of them there his own host to all. Fires had been lit in some of the dolmens, and woodsmoke mingled with the night air; a thin piping could be heard, curling through the pines’ hushing.

  Hands in his pockets, nodding to left and right as Spofford did, Pierce walked with Spofford down to the water’s edge. The moon above the massy trees on the far shore seemed to be a hole cut out of a jet sky to let the light of a far cool heaven through. Out on the water as they stood there, one, two, three figures broke the surface suddenly, as though they had been sleeping on the river’s bottom and had just awakened; laughing and naked, they climbed the ladder onto the pier and stood in the moonlight drying themselves: three women, a dark, a light, a rose; three graces.

  ‘Well, she’s here,’ Spofford said quietly, turning away.

  ‘Oh?’ said Pierce, not turning away. The dark one twined her thick hair in her hands to squeeze the water out; the blond steadied herself with a hand on the dark one’s shoulder, drying her feet. The third pointed to Pierce, and they all three looked up, and seemed to laugh; their voices carried to him over the water, but not their words. Pierce, hands still in his pockets, smiled and stood. Just then there was a heavy padding behind him, and a naked man ran past him and flung himself into the water, praying hands outstretched and long hair flying, as though drowning himself in tribute: it was he they had laughed at.

  He was followed by a blond child, rushing in to his knees with a shriek and then stopping in surprise; then an older child who raced on past him and went under. A large woman, their mother it might be, drawing off her smock, her great breasts rolling with her stride, followed them in, churning the gold-barred water into silver foam.

  Pierce turned away, a fullness in his breast and the grin still on his face. Adamites. How had they escaped the curse?

  ‘You couldn’t buy this, in the city,’ he said to Spofford, who poured red wine for him black in the moonlight. ‘Couldn’t buy it. This amenity.’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ Spofford said. ‘It’s not for sale.’ He handed Pierce a thick crackling joint from which ropy smoke arose. ‘You want something to eat?’

  Roasted corn and tomatoes sweet as berries, the harvest was coming in; crumbling bread from someone’s oven, blackened weenies, nine kinds of slaw and salad, his paper plate sogged and bent beneath it. ‘What do you suppose this is?’ he asked a woman filling her plate next to him, prodding a cakelike thing. ‘I dunno,’ she said. ‘Beige food.’

  He carried his plate to a suitable rock for sitting, in view of all; on the rock next to him sat the piper, his thin uncertain music coming from a set of bound reed pipes, and himself looking Pan-like in a mild-mannered way, bow mouth pursed to blow and a boyish beard. A sleepy child sat with his head in the piper’s lap.

  ‘Syrinx,’ said Pierce when the piper stopped to shake spit from his instrument.

  ‘What say?’

  ‘The pipes,’ Pierce said. ‘Syrinx is their name. She was a girl, a nymph, that the god Pan loved. And chased.’ He paused to swallow. ‘She was chaste, I mean she tried to get away, and just as he reached her some other god or goddess took pity on her and changed her into a bunch of reeds. At the last moment.’

  ‘You don’t say.’

  ‘Yup. And Pan made his pipes from the reeds. Syrinx. Same word as “syringe” by the way – a hollow reed. And he blows her to this day.’

  ‘So who calls the tune?’ the piper asked. He tried a note. ‘You can’t play much on it.’

  ‘You can play,’ Pierce said, ‘the Music of the Spheres. In fact.’

  ‘Maybe after a few lessons.’ The curl of his mouth and his light, husky voice made it seem he was about to laugh, as though he and Pierce shared a secret joke. ‘I was trying for “Three Blind Mice.”’

  Pierce laughed, thinking of octaves and ogdoads, Pythagoras and Orpheus’s lyre. He could go on. It was the smoke; he rarely smoked these days, it only made him paradoxical and cryptic, he had found, whatever clarity it seemed to create within him, which made him doubt the clarity. The piper looked at him as though trying to make him out, or remember who he was, still smiling that smile of pleasant complicity. ‘I’m a stranger here,’ Pierce said. ‘Name’s Pierce Moffett. I came with Spofford.’

  ‘My name’s Beau.’ He offered no hand, though his smile broadened.

  ‘I’m not supposed to be here,’ Pierce said.

  ‘Oh yes?’ Something about Pierce or his explanation tickled the piper more and more.

  ‘I was headed somewhere else entirely. I was buswrecked. So.’

  ‘So you’re a crasher. Just broke right on in.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Not hurt, though?’

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘Hi, Rosie,’ Beau called into the darkness. ‘Come talk.’ Pierce looked into the crowd of people passing. A dark girl walking away, beer in her hand, glanced back at him just then and caught his eye, and smiled as though she knew him, and went on.

  ‘Well,’ said Beau, fingering the stops of his pipe, ‘if you’re here, I guess you put yourself in the way of it. Right? One way or another.’

  ‘Well, that’s so,’ Pierce said. He set down his plat
e, and instantly there was a dog to investigate it, who found nothing of interest. ‘That’s so, I suppose, in a way,’ he said, rising.

  The child in Beau’s lap lifted his head, wanting more music. Beau played. Pierce wandered away after the smile he had seen, which had disappeared amid the partygoers. Syrinx. Now what would an item like that go for around here, that was a real hot item, special this month. Only he would have to show his wares in order to sell them, and showing them gave them away. What would you pay to know where, why that pipe, what that pipe’s intervals can be made to picture or echo . . . She sat on a log down by the shore, a little apart it seemed; when she twisted her long hair in her hands, he knew her. He heard someone passing say to her:

  ‘Hey, is Mike coming, do you know?’

  She shrugged, shook her head, Mike wasn’t coming; or no, she didn’t know; or she refused the question. Or all three. She seemed briefly embarrassed, and drank thirstily.

  ‘Hello, Rosie,’ Pierce said, standing over her. ‘How’s Mike?’ It was the smoke, the damned smoke and drink making him devilish.

  ‘Fine,’ she said automatically, looking up and smiling again; her teeth were brightly white, large and uneven, long canines and one front one chipped. ‘I forget you,’ she said.

  ‘Well hell,’ he said, sitting beside her, ‘hell of a note.’

  ‘Are you in The Woods? I don’t know everybody there.’

  ‘In the woods?’

  ‘Well,’ she said, looking helpless.

  ‘That was an imposition,’ Pierce said. ‘A joke. You don’t know me from Adam.’ And how will we know, when we get to Paradise, which man there is Adam, without being told? Special this week.

  She seemed to take no offense, only looked at him curiously, waiting for more. She had the long-nosed, plump-cheeked look of an Egyptian cat sculpture; the summer dress she had pulled on was pretty and childish. ‘No,’ he said, ‘really. I’m a friend of Spofford’s. I came along with him.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘We knew each other in the city. I’m visiting. I’m sort of thinking of throwing in with him here, though. Getting into sheep.’ He laughed, and she did too, it seemed like a punch line; at that moment Spofford himself appeared out on the little pier, with others, doffing his clothes.

  ‘So you know all these people?’ she asked.

  ‘Not a bit,’ he said. ‘I thought you would.’

  ‘It’s not exactly my crowd.’

  ‘But Spofford.’

  ‘Oh, well, yes.’ Spofford was naked now, except for his broad straw hat; he was being challenged by the others; horseplay was threatened, but Spofford drew apart, holding them off.

  ‘Best-looking man here,’ Pierce said. ‘I think.’

  ‘Do you.’

  ‘Far as I can tell.’

  ‘What about the guy I saw you talking to before?’

  ‘Cute,’ Pierce said. ‘Not my type, though.’

  They watched Spofford whisk off his straw hat and skim it down the pier; then he poised himself, looking in fact (Pierce noticed) very striking, and dived.

  ‘Mm,’ Pierce said. ‘I like that.’

  She giggled, watching him watch, holding her glass in both hands; she looked into it, and found it empty. Louder music was beginning, thud thud thud of a portable stereo, there were glad cries and encouragements for this. Pierce drew from his pocket a slim silver flask – a gift of his father’s, someone else’s initials were on it, it was worn plate but Axel had thought it just the thing for his son – and uncapped it.

  ‘I don’t usually drink hard stuff,’ she said.

  ‘Oh?’ he said, poised to pour.

  ‘It’s not good for me.’ She moved her glass beneath the spout, and Pierce poured scotch, he had filled the flask and put it in his bag when he left the city, you never know, clever of him.

  ‘So how did you say I know you?’ she asked, lifting her cup to stop him pouring, as priests had always done when he poured wine for them at Mass.

  ‘You don’t, yet.’ He capped the flask, taking nothing. He suddenly wanted to be clear-headed. Among the Adamites there was no shame in nakedness; no sin for the saved. He felt goat-footed among them, uninvited but himself also, for other reasons, unashamed. ‘I never saw you before tonight.’ He indicated the water. ‘Rising from the Deep.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ she said, returning his look. The music chugged and rang, and her head moved to it, laughter in her eyes. ‘You liked that too?’

  They both laughed then, heads close together; her eyes – maybe it was the moon, which had come overhead and gone small and white but brighter than ever – her eyes glittered with moisture but didn’t seem soft; it was as though they were coated thinly and finely with ice or crystal.

  The music was both new and old, supplemented by a gang of instruments the people produced, rattles and bangers and cowbells and bongos. The dancing was eclectic too, with overtones of country clodhopping and Shaker ecstasies; everyone joined, or nearly everyone, Pierce sat it out mostly, in the city these days the dancing was done chiefly by semiprofessionals, wiry boys dashed with sweat and glitter you wouldn’t want to compete with – Pierce had no skill in it anyway, and for this happy corybanting he had no taste; even in the days of the great parade he had not been good at melding with the throng and going with the flow. A fogey. And it was of that parade that he was reminded here, by the bouncing folk and the homemade rhythms, as if a contingent or spur of it had split off back then and wound up here and kept on turning in happy ignorance of what elsewhere had become of their fellows; still piping, still corybanting, going naked but raising kids and vegetables and baking bread and breaking it with others in the old new hospitality. Couldn’t be so, not really; it was the smoke (the old taste of it was in his mouth, sweetish and burnt, he had never been able to describe it, artichokes and woodsmoke and buttered popcorn) and the sense he had of having stumbled in among them, city dirt in his pores and city vices in his heart.

  Flirting. Only flirting. He could see Spofford nowhere in the maze of dancers or on the now-still water.

  Rosie turned and shuffled with the rest, impossible to tell if she had a partner, or if anybody did. The advantage to a watcher of this sort of dancing was that, since there were no rules of movement, it revealed character; there was no way to be good at it except to have a natural sense of rhythm and the knack of displaying it. Rosie moved dreamily and privately, erect, long hair aswing. She seemed to be unassimilated to the rout, though part of it, as though she had gone native amid a primitive tribe who, less graceful than she, knew better than she why they were doing this dance.

  At a change of music she came over to him, a little flushed, her high evident only in the brightness of her eyes. ‘Don’t you wanna dance?’

  ‘I don’t dance much,’ Pierce said. ‘But save me the waltz.’

  ‘You still have that teeny bottle?’

  He uncapped it; she had lost her glass, and drank from the flask; so did he, then she again. She looked around herself. ‘There’s one thing about your friends,’ she said. ‘They can be a little cliquish. No offense.’

  ‘They seem very hospitable to me.’

  ‘Well, sure. To you.’

  ‘Honest,’ said Pierce, rising, ‘I just got here.’ And for her information: ‘I’ll probably be leaving tomorrow. Or the next day. Soon, anyway. For good.’ He began to walk down toward the water; she followed. Where had Spofford vanished to? Out on the water a rowboat turned lazily, full of children being rowed around. Another rowboat was tied to the pier.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘You were throwing in with Spofford. Getting into sheep.’ She handed him the flask. ‘How come you keep changing your story?’

  ‘I live in New York,’ he said. ‘Have for years.’

  ‘You think so?’ Brightly.

  ‘So listen,’ he said. ‘If it’s not your crowd, and it’s cliquish, why did you come?’

  ‘Oh, to swim. And dance. Just look around.’

  ‘For somebody in partic
ular?’

  ‘No,’ she said, regarding him as frankly as her strange crystallized eyes allowed, ‘nobody in particular.’

  Pierce drank. ‘Would you,’ he said courteously, ‘be interested in going for a row? In the moonlight?’

  ‘Can you row?’ And then, like a kid: ‘I can. I’m good at it.’

  ‘Well, good,’ Pierce said, taking her elbow. ‘We can spell each other.’ Another punch line, the smoke could transform any remark into one, he laughed at that and at the rowboat he was untying (the pointy end he remembered went first with the operator facing backward) and, also, at a warm certainty just then hatching within him. He took off shoes and socks and left them on the pier, rolled his pants to his knees and pushed off, clambering in himself with not quite the grace he had hoped for.

  He maneuvered the old boat out into the moonlight, gradually putting back into his muscles skills he had learned long ago on the Little Sandy River and its cricks and branches; once again that old road seemed to lead here, knock of oarlocks and gulp of soft night water on the bows. ‘So,’ he said. ‘The Blackberry River.’

  ‘Oh, this isn’t the river really,’ she said. She was straddling her seat, moving her feet to keep them out of the seepage at the bottom. ‘Just a backwater. The real river’s over there.’ She pointed, thought, drew her finger along the bank. ‘Over there.’

  He looked over her shoulder, but could see no exit. ‘Shall we go see?’

  ‘If I can find the channel. More port,’ she said. ‘No, more port. That way.’

  Pierce pulled, catching a crab and nearly tumbling backward into the bows; she laughed and asked if he was sure he knew how to do this, reminding him of his claim to know in the same disbelieving tone she had taken toward his stories of who he was and where he had come from. He ignored it, and composed himself, looking over his shoulder at what seemed an impassable thicket of tangled trees. The current tugged gently at the boat, and more by its effects than by her directions they slid into a tunnel made of moonlight and willows.

  Pierce shipped one oar, it was too narrow here to row, and the current knew the way. He kept them from the tangled feet of trees and tall bullrushes with the other oar, stilled and feeling enormously privileged. How had he deserved this, this beauty, how did they; she, who lived always within having distance of it, with it for hers, with these willows drowning their long hair, these water-lilies floating in their sleep? How could it not make you both good and happy?