A Short, Sharp Shock

21. A Face

He trod home through soft sand, the image of the hawk fixed in his mind. That night Khora’s dominion seemed more sad and degraded than ever, a tired performance of a play whose audience had long since gone away, the mating automatic, the torch gleam on the quartz a tawdry effect of colored light, nothing more. And yet he behaved just as always.

Stirring in the queen’s disordered bed, then driven out into the silent night by his thoughts, Thel stared up at the stars, feeling himself draining out of his body with his wine-scented piss. The torchlight snagged in the cracks in the quartz, and he stood for long moments, mindless.

By the ruddy light he saw a face rise over a broken wall. He stepped toward it and she stood up from behind the wall—the swimmer, gesturing for silence.

He fell running to her, but when he stood she was still there, hopping the wall to come to him, finger crossing lips as she whispered “Shh, shh, shh,” and he was holding her, holding that strong hard body and then he pushed her back to look at her. Still her: it made him weep and laugh at once in the same hot convulsion of his face, it was her, no doubt of it, standing right before him as real as his living hand. “I thought you were dead,” he whispered.

“And I you.” Her voice. “Come on, get your things. Clothes, sandals, some food,”

“They’ll stop us.”

She looked around. “They’re asleep. Drunk sleep.”

Irrational fear spiked through him. “She’ll stop us.” And explained: “Their queen, she has… powers.”

“Don’t wake her, then. Be quick about it, and quiet.”

So he tiptoed back into the queen’s chamber, over the crumpled tapestries and her snoring courtiers, and picked up pants and boots and the mirror in its bag, averting his head so that he would not see Khora’s sleeping face, never see it again, and the pain of that was completely flooded in a rising elation, he skipped out the broad arched doorway into the plaza where a false dawn streaked the eastern horizon and made the guttering torchlight pale and ghastly. There the swimmer took his hand and led him out of the ruins west and up a tumbled boulder slope to the crest of the spine, where they could see the light pool of the sea split by the dark peninsula, and the sky darkly luminous and semitransparent, revealing for an instant the world behind the sky, and he could always have done this, could always have just walked on westward, but the swimmer had shown him the way; still astounded by her presence he started to run, pulled her along in her clumsy swimmer’s gait, and they ran along the spine trail.