Inversions

23. THE DOCTOR

The Doctor and I stood on the quayside. About us was all the usual tumult of the docks, and, in addition, the local confusion which normally attends upon a great ship preparing to depart on a long voyage. The galleon Plough of the Seas was due to sail with the next doubled tide in less than half a bell, and the last supplies were being hoisted and carried aboard, while everywhere about us, amongst the coils of rope, the barrels of tar, the piled rolls of wicker fenders and flatly emptied carts were played out tearful scenes of farewell. Ours, of course, was one.

“Mistress, can you not stay? Please?” I begged her. The tears rolled miserably down my cheeks for all to see.

The Doctor’s face was tired, resigned and calm. Her eyes had a fractured, far-away look about them, like ice or broken glass glimpsed in the dark recesses of a distant room. Her hat was pulled tight over her brindled scalp. I thought she had never looked so beautiful. The day was blustery, the wind was warm and the two suns shone down from either side of the sky, opposing and unequal points of view. I was Seigen to her Xamis, the desperate light of my desire to have her stay entirely washed out by the bounteous blaze of her will to leave.

She took my hands in hers. The broken-looking eyes gazed tenderly upon me for the last time. I tried to blink my tears out of the way, resolved that if I would never see her again, at least my last sight of her would be vivid and sharp. “I can’t, Oelph, I’m sorry.”

“Can’t I come with you then, mistress?” I said, even more miserably. This was my last and most dismal play. It had been the one thing I had been determined not to say, because it was so obvious and so pathetic and so doomed. I had known she would be leaving for a half-moon or so, and in those few handfuls of days I had tried everything I could think of to make her want to stay, even while knowing that her going was inevitable and that none of my arguments could carry any weight with her, not measured against what she saw as her failure. During all that time I wanted to say, Then if you must go, please take me!

But it was too sad a thing to say, too predictable. Of course that is what I would say, and of course she would turn me down. I was a youth, still, and she a woman of maturity and wisdom. What would I do, if I went with her, but remind her of what she had lost, of how she had failed? She would look at me and see the King and never forgive me for not being him, for reminding her that she had lost his love even if she had saved his life.

I knew she would reject me if I said it, so I had made an absolutely firm decision not to ask her. It would be the one piece of my self-respect I would retain. But some inflamed part of my mind said, She might say Yes! She might have been waiting for you to ask! Perhaps (this seductive, insane, deluded, sweet voice within me said) she really does love you, and would want nothing more than to take you with her, back to Drezen. Perhaps she feels that it is not for her to ask you, because it would be taking you away from everything and everyone you have ever known, perhaps for ever, perhaps never to return.

And so, like a fool, I did ask her, and she only squeezed my hands and shook her head. “I would let you if it was possible, Oelph,” she said quietly. “It is so sweet of you to want to accompany me. I shall cherish always the memory of that kindness. But I cannot ask you to come with me.”

“I would go anywhere with you, mistress!” I cried, my eyes now full of tears. I would have thrown myself at her feet and hugged her legs if I had been able to see properly. Instead I hung my head and blubbered like a child. “Please, mistress, please, mistress,” I wept, no longer even able to say what it was I wanted, her to stay or me to go.

“Oh, Oelph, I was trying so hard not to cry,” she said, then gathered me in her arms and folded me to her.

At last to be held in her arms, pressed against her, and be allowed to put my arms round her, feeling her warmth and her strength, encompassing her firm softness, drawing in that fresh perfume from her skin. She put her chin on my shoulder, just as mine rested on hers. Between my sobs, I could feel her shake, crying too, now. I had last been this close to her, side by side, my head on her shoulder, her head on mine, in the torture chamber of the palace, half a moon earlier, when the guards had tumbled in with the news that we were needed because the King was dying.

The King was indeed dying. A terrible sickness had fallen upon him from nowhere, causing him to collapse during a dinner being held for the suddenly, and secretly, arrived Duke Quettil. King Quience had been in the middle of a sentence, when he stopped speaking, stared straight ahead and started to shake. His eyes had revolved back into his head and he had slumped down in his seat, unconscious, the wine goblet dropping froze his hand.

Skelim, Quettil’s doctor, was there. He had had to remove the King’s tongue from his throat, or he would have choked to death immediately. Instead he lay there on the floor, senseless and shaking spasmodically while everybody rushed around. Duke Quettil attempted to take charge, apparently ordering that guards be posted everywhere. Duke Ulresile contented himself with staring, while the new Duke Walen sat in his seat, whimpering. Guard Commander Adlain posted a guard at the King’s table to make sure nobody touched the King’s plate or the decanter he’d been drinking from, in case somebody had poisoned him.

During all this commotion, a servant arrived with the news that Duke Ormin had been murdered.

My thoughts, oddly, have turned to that footman whenever I have tried to envisage the scene. A servant rarely gets to deliver genuinely shocking news to those of exalted rank, and to be entrusted with something as momentous as the intelligence that one of the King’s favourites has taken the life of a Duke must seem like something of a privilege. To discover that it is of relatively little consequence compared to the events unfolding before you must be galling.

I was, subsequently, more than usually diligent in quizzing, as subtly as I could, the servants who were in the dining chamber that evening, and they reported that, even at the time, they noticed that certain of the dining guests did not react as one might have expected to the news, presumably just because of the distraction of the King’s sudden predicament. It was almost, they hazarded, as though the Guard Commander and the Dukes Ulresile and Quettil had been expecting the news.

Doctor Skelim ordered that the King be taken directly to his bed. Once there he was undressed. Skelim inspected the King’s body for any marks that might indicate he had been shot with a poisoned dart or infected with something through a cut. There were none.

The King’s blood pulse was slow and becoming slower, only increasing briefly when small fits passed through him. Doctor Skelim reported that unless something could be done, the King’s heart was sure to stop within the bell. He confessed himself at a loss to determine what had befallen the King. The doctor’s bag was delivered from his room by a breathless servant, but the few tonics and stimulants he was able to administer (little better than smelling salts by the sound of them, especially given that Quience could not be induced to swallow anything) had no effect whatsoever.

The doctor considered bleeding the King, in effect the only thing he could think of which he had not tried, but bleeding somebody with a weakening heartbeat had proved worse than useless in the past, and on this occasion, thankfully, the urge not to make matters worse overcame the need to be seen to be doing something. The doctor ordered some exotic infusions to be prepared, but held out little hope that they would be any more effective than the compounds he had already administered.

It was you, master, who said that Doctor Vosill would have to be summoned. I am told that Duke Ulresile and Duke Quettil took you aside and that there was a furious argument. Duke Ulresile flew from the room in a blinding rage and later took a sword to one of his servants such that the poor fellow lost one eye and a pair of fingers. I find it admirable that you stood your ground. A contingent of the palace guards was sent to the questioning chamber with orders to take the Doctor from there by force if necessary.

I am told that my mistress walked calmly in to the terrified confusion that was the King’s chamber, where nobles, servants and, it seemed, half the palace were assembled, crying and wailing.

She had sent me, with a pair of guards, to her chamber for her medicine bag. We surprised one of Duke Quettil’s servants and another palace guard there. Both looked anxious and guilty at being caught in the Doctor’s rooms. Duke Quettil’s man held a piece of paper I recognised.

I have never, I think, been so proud of myself for anything I have done in my life as for what I did next, for I was still half terrified that my ordeal had merely been postponed rather than cancelled. I was shaking and sweating with the shock of what I had witnessed, I was mortified at the callow and cowardly way I had felt in the torture chamber, ashamed of how my body had betrayed me, and my mind was still spinning.

What I did was take the note from Quettil’s servant.

“That is the property of my mistress!” I hissed, and stepped forward, a look of fury on my face. I grabbed the note from the fellow’s fingers. He looked blankly at me, then at the note, which I stuffed quickly into my shirt. He opened his mouth to speak. I turned, still quivering with rage, to the two guards who had been sent with me. “Escort this person from these apartments immediately!” I said.

This was, of course, a gamble on my part. In all the excitement, it had been quite unclear whether the Doctor and I were still technically prisoners or not, and therefore the two guards might rightly have concluded that they were my jailers, not my bodyguards, which was the way I was treating them. I would modestly claim that they were able to recognise something transparently honest and true about my righteous indignation and so decided to do as I commanded.

The Duke’s man looked terrified, but did as he was told.

I buttoned up my jacket to further secure the note, found the Doctor’s bag and hurried to the King’s chamber with my escorts.

The Doctor had turned the King on to his side. She knelt by his bed, stroking his head in a distracted way, fending off questions from Doctor Skelim. (A reaction to something in his food, probably, she told him. Extreme, but not poison.)

You stood, master, arms crossed, near the Doctor. Duke Quettil lurked in a corner, glaring at her.

She took a small stoppered glass vial from the bag, holding it up to the light and shaking it. “Oelph, this is the salts solution number twenty-one, herbed. Do you know it?”

I thought. “Yes, mistress.”

“We’ll need more, dried, within the next two bells. Can you remember how to prepare it?”

“Yes, I think so, mistress. I may need to refer to our notes.”

“Just so. I’m sure your two guards will help you. Off you go, then.”

I turned to go, then stopped and handed her the note which I had taken from the Duke’s man. “Here is that paper, mistress,” I said then quickly turned and left before she had time to ask me what it was.

I missed the uproar when the Doctor pinched the King’s nose and clamped a hand over his mouth until he turned nearly blue. You, master, held back the protestations of the others, but then grew concerned yourself, and were about to order her away at sword point when she let the King’s nose go and thrust the powder which the vial had contained under his nostrils. The ruddy powder looked like dried blood, but was not. It whistled into the King as he took a huge, deep in-drawing breath.

Most of the people in the room took their own first breath for some time. For a while, nothing happened. Then, I am told, the King’s eyes flickered and opened. He saw the Doctor and smiled, then coughed and wheezed and had to be helped to sit up.

He cleared his throat, fixed the Doctor with an outraged stare and said, “Vosill, what in the skies of hell have you done to your hair?”

I think the Doctor knew she would not need any more of salts solution number twenty-one, herbed. It was her way of trying to make sure that she and I were not brought to the King, made to cure him of whatever had befallen him and then promptly led away again back to the torture chamber. She wanted people to think that the course of treatment required would be longer than what amounted to little more than a quick pinch of snuff.

Nevertheless, I returned to the Doctor’s apartments, with my two guards in escort, and set up the equipment necessary to produce the powder. Even with the help of the two guards — and it was a refreshing experience to be able to do the ordering around, rather than to be subject to it myself — it would be a close-run thing to produce a small amount of the substance in less than two bells. At least it would give me something to do.

I only heard later and at second hand about the outburst of Duke Quettil, in the King’s chamber. The sergeant of the guards who had released us from the cell in the torture chamber spoke quietly with you, master, shortly after the King was brought back to the land of the living. I am told you looked a little shaken for a moment, but then went, grim-faced, to inform Duke Quettil of the fate of his chief questioner and his two assistants.

“Dead! Dead? By fuck, Adlain, can you arrange nothing right!” were the Duke’s precise words, by all accounts. The King glared. The Doctor looked unperturbed. Everybody else stared. The Duke attempted to strike you, and had to be restrained by two of your men, who acted, perhaps, before they thought. The King inquired what was going on.

The Doctor, meanwhile, was looking at the piece of paper I had given her.

It was the note that purported to be from you and which had lured her to the trap that had killed Duke Ormin and was supposed to dispose of her. The King had already heard from the Doctor that Ormin was dead, and that she had been meant to appear to be the killer. He was still sitting up in bed, staring ahead and trying to digest this news. The Doctor had not yet given him the details of what had supposedly happened in the questioning chamber, but merely said that she had been released before being put to the question.

She showed him the note. He called you over and you confirmed that it was not your writing, though it might be said to be a decent attempt at it.

Duke Quettil took the opportunity to demand that somebody be brought to justice for the murder of his men, which may have been a little hasty, as it raised the question concerning what they had been doing there in the first place. The King’s expression darkened as he gradually took in all that was revealed, and several times he had to tell people trying to interrupt others to stop, so that he could get clear in his still slightly befuddled head what had actually happened. Duke Quettil, reportedly breathing heavily and with staring eyes and spittle on his lips, at one point attempted to grab the Doctor’s wrist and pull her away from the King, who put his arm round her shoulders and ordered you to keep the Duke distant.

I was absent for all that passed over the next half bell. What I know was passed to me by others, and so must surrender the toll which information tends to pay when it passes through the minds and memories of others. Even so, without having been there, I believe there was some quick thinking done in that chamber, principally by yourself, though Duke Quettil must, at the least, have calmed down sufficiently to consider things in a more rational manner again and accept the path you were mapping out, even if he could contribute little of the cartography himself.

The brief of it was that Duke Ulresile was to be blamed. The writing on the note was his. The palace guards swore that Ulresile had commanded them on your authority. Later that night one of Ulresile’s men was brought before the King, sobbing, to confess that he had stolen the scalpel from the Doctor’s apartments earlier that day and that he had killed Duke Ormin, then run away and out of a back door of the Suitor’s Wing shortly before the Doctor entered by the front door. I was able to play my part, averring that the fellow could well have been the man who had rushed towards me in the dim corridor in the Suitor’s Wing.

The fellow lied about the scalpel, of course. Only one of the instruments had ever gone missing and that was the one I had stolen two seasons earlier, the day we had visited the Poor Hospital. Of course, I delivered it into your hands, master, though not in the literal sense in which it was later delivered into the body of Duke Ormin.

Duke Ulresile, in the meantime, had been prevailed upon to remove himself from the palace. I think a more mature mind might have thought this through and realised that to fly so was to appear to confirm any accusations that might be levelled at him, but perhaps he did not think to compare his predicament or possible actions with one so base as poor, dead Unoure. In any event, he was funnel-fed some story about the King’s displeasure being great but brief and largely a matter of a misunderstanding which Quettil and yourself, master, would need a short period to sort out, but a short period which absolutely required the young Duke’s absence.

The King made it very clear that he would take any further attempt to traduce the Doctor’s good name very ill indeed. You promised that everything would be done to clear up the remaining points of confusion in the matter.

Two of the King’s own guards were stationed outside our apartments that night. I slept soundly in my cell until woken by a nightmare. I think the Doctor slept well. In the morning she looked well enough. She completed shaving her head, making a neater job of it than Master Ralinge.

I assisted her in this, in her bedroom while she sat on a chair with a towel round her shoulders and a basin on her knees in which warm suds and a sponge floated. We were due to attend another meeting in the King’s chamber that morning, the better to give our side of the events of the previous night.

“What did happen, mistress?” I asked her.

“Where and when, Oelph?” she asked, moistening her scalp with the sponge and then scraping at it with a scalpel — of all things — before passing it to me to complete the job.

“In the questioning chamber, mistress. What happened to Ralinge and the other two?”

“They fought over who would have me first, Oelph. Don’t you remember?”

“I do not, mistress,” I whispered, with a look round at the door through to her workshop. It was locked, like the one beyond and the one beyond that, but still I felt frightened, as well as a sort of anguished guilt. “I saw Master Ralinge about to…”

“About to rape me, Oelph. Please, Oelph. Steady with that scalpel,” she said, and put her hand on my wrist. She lifted my hand away a little from her naked scalp and looked round with a smile. “It would be too ironic to survive a false charge of murder and be delivered from the very brink of torture only to suffer injury by your hand.”

“But mistress!” I said, and I am not ashamed to say that I wailed, for I was still convinced that we could not be surrounded by such fatally cataclysmic events and such powerfully antagonistic personages without attracting extreme harm. “There was no time for a dispute! He was about to take you! Providence, I saw him. I closed my eyes a heartbeat before… there was no time!”

“Dear Oelph,” the Doctor said, keeping her hand on my wrist. “You must have forgotten. You were unconscious for some time. Your head rolled to one side, your body went limp. You fairly drooled, I’m afraid. The three men had a fine old argument while you were out of your senses, and then just as the pair who had killed Ralinge slashed at each other, you woke up again. Don’t you remember?”

I looked into her eyes. Her expression was one I found impossible to read. I was reminded suddenly of the mirror mask she had worn at the ball in Yvenir palace. “Is that what I ought to remember, mistress?”

“Yes, Oelph, it is.”

I looked down at the scalpel and the gleaming mirror-surface of its blade.

“But how did you come to be released from your bonds, mistress?”

“Why, in his haste, Master Ralinge simply did not secure one of them properly,” the Doctor said, releasing her grip of my wrist and lowering her head again. “A woeful lapse of professional standards, but perhaps in a way a flattering one.”

I sighed. I picked up the soapy sponge and squeezed some more of the suds on to the back of her head. “I see, mistress,” I said unhappily, and scraped away the very last of the hair on her head.

I decided, as I did this, that perhaps my memory had been playing tricks on me after all, because looking down at the Doctor’s legs, I could see her old dagger sticking out from the top of her boot as usual, and there, quite plainly, was the little pale stone on the top rim of the pommel I had been so convinced had been absent yesterday, in the torture chamber.

I think I knew already then there was no going back to the way things had been before. Even so, it was a shock when the Doctor paid a visit to the King by herself two days later and came back to tell me that she had asked to be released from the post of his personal physician. I stood and stared at her, still standing in the midst of unpacked crates and boxes of supplies and ingredients which she had continued to collect from the apothecaries and chemicalists of the city.

“Released, mistress?” I asked, stupidly.

She nodded. I thought her eyes looked as if she had been crying. “Yes, Oelph. I think it is for the best. I have been too long away from Drezen. And the King seems generally well.”

“But he was at death’s door not two nights ago!” I shouted, unwilling to believe what I was hearing and what it meant.

She gave me one of her small smiles. “I think that will not occur again.”

“But you said it was caused by some — what did you call it? — some allotropic galvanic of salt! Dammit all, woman, that could—!”

“Oelph!”

I think it was the only time either of us spoke to each other in quite such tones. I shrank from my fury like a punctured bladder. I looked down at the floor. “Sorry, mistress.”

“I am quite sure,” she told me firmly, “that will not occur again.”

“Yes, mistress,” I mumbled.

“You might as well pack this lot back up again.”

A bell later I was in the depths of my misery, repacking boxes, crates and sacks on the Doctor’s orders, when you came to call, master.

“I would speak to you in private, madam,” you said to the Doctor.

She looked at me. I stood there, hot and sweating, dotted with little lengths of straw from the packing cases.

She said, “I think Oelph can stay, don’t you, Guard Commander?”

You looked at her for a few moments, I recall, then your stern expression melted like snow. “Yes,” you said, and sat down with a sigh in a chair which temporarily had no cases or their contents balanced upon it. “Yes, I dare say he can.” You smiled at the Doctor. She was just in the act of tying a towel round her head, having finished one of her baths. She always tied a towel round her hair after her bath, and I remember thinking, stupidly, Why is she doing that? She has no hair to dry. She wore a thick and voluminous shift which made her denuded head look very small, until she tied the towel round it. She picked a couple of boxes off a couch and sat.

You took a moment to seat yourself just as you wanted, moving your sword so that it was comfortable, placing your booted feet just so. Then you said, “I am told you have asked the King to release you from your post.”

“That is correct, Guard Commander.”

You nodded for a moment. “That is probably for the best.”

“Oh, I’m sure it is, Guard Commander. Oelph, don’t just stand there,” she said, turning to look at me. “Continue with your work, please.”

“Yes, mistress,” I mumbled.

“I would dearly love to know quite what happened in the chamber that evening.”

“I am sure you already do, Guard Commander.”

“And I am equally sure I do not, madam,” you said, with a resigned sigh in your voice. “A more superstitious man would think it must have been sorcery.”

“But you are not so deceived.”

“Indeed not. Ignorant, but not deceived. I think I can say that if I had no other explanation I would be sorrier the longer the matter went unexplained and you were still here, but as you say you are going…”

“Yes. Back to Drezen. I have already inquired about a ship… Oelph?”

I had let drop a flask of distilled water. It had not broken, but the noise had been loud. “Sorry, mistress,” I said, trying not to burst out crying. A ship!

“Do you feel your time here has been a success, Doctor?”

“I think so. The King is in better health than when I arrived. For that alone, if I can take any of the credit, I hope I may feel… fulfilled.”

“Still, it will be good to get back amongst your own kind, I imagine.”

“Yes, I’m sure you can imagine.”

“Well, I must be going,” you said, standing. Then you said, “It was strange, all those deaths at Yvenir, then good Duke Ormin, and those three men.”

“Strange, sir?”

“So many knives, or blades, at any rate. And yet so few found. The murder weapons, I mean.”

“Yes. Strange.”

You turned at the door. “That was a bad business the other night, in the questioning chamber.”

The Doctor said nothing.

“I’m glad you were delivered… unscathed. I would give a great deal to know how it was accomplished, but I would not trade the knowledge for the result.” You smiled. “I dare say I will see you again, Doctor, but if I do not, let me wish you a safe journey back to your home.”

And so, a half-moon later, I stood on the quayside with the Doctor, hugging her and being hugged and knowing that I would do anything to make her stay or be allowed to follow her, and also that I would never see her again.

She pushed me gently away. “Oelph,” she said, sniffing back her tears. “You will not forget that Doctor Hilbier is more formal in his approach than I. I have respect for him but he—”

“Mistress, I will not forget anything you have told me.”

“Good. Good. Here.” She reached into her jacket. She presented me with a sealed envelope. “I have arranged with the Mifeli clan that you have an account with them. This is the authority. You may use the earnings on what pleases you, though I hope you will do a little experimentation of the type I taught you—”

“Mistress!”

“— but the capital, I have instructed the Mifelis, the capital only becomes yours when you achieve the title of Doctor. I would advise you to buy a house and premises, but—”

“Mistress! An account? What? But what, where?” I said, genuinely astonished. She had already left me what she thought might come in useful to me — and what I might be able to store in a single room in the house of my new mentor, Doctor Hilbier — from her supplies of medicines and raw materials.

“It is the money the King gave me,” she said. “I don’t need it. It is yours. Also, there is in the envelope the key to my journal. It contains all the notes and the descriptions of my experiments. Please use it as you see fit.”

“Oh, mistress!”

She took my hand in hers and squeezed. “Be a good doctor, Oelph. Be a good man. Now, quickly,” she said, with a desperately sad and unconvincing laugh, “to save our tears before we both become hopelessly dehydrated, eh? Let us—”

“And if I became a doctor, mistress?” I asked, in a far more collected and cold manner than I would have imagined I was capable of at such a moment. “If I became a doctor and used some of the money to mirror your trip, and come to Drezen?”

She had started to turn away. She turned halfway back, and looked at the wooden decking of the quay. “No, Oelph. No, I… I don’t think I’ll be there.” She looked up and smiled a brave smile. “Goodbye, Oelph. Fare well.”

“Goodbye, mistress. Thank you.”

I will love you for ever.

I thought the words, and could have said them, might have said them, perhaps nearly said them, but in the end did not say them. It may be that that was the unsaid thing even I did not know I had thought of saying that let me retain a shred of selfrespect.

She walked slowly up the first half of the steep-set gangplank, then lifted her head, lengthened her stride, straightened her back and strode up and on to the great galleon, her dark hat disappearing somewhere beyond the black webbing of the ropes, all without a backward glance.

I walked slowly back up the city, my head down, my tears dripping down my nose and my heart in my boots. Several times I thought to look up and round, but each time I told myself the ship would not have sailed yet. All the time I kept hoping, hoping, hoping that I would hear the slap of running, booted feet, or the doubled thud of a pursuing sedan chair, or the rattle of a hire carriage and the snort of its team, and then her voice.

The cannon went for the bell, echoing round the city and causing birds to flap and fly all over in wheeling dark flocks, crying and calling, and still I did not look round because I judged that I was in the wrong part of the city to see the harbour and the docks, and then when I finally did look up and back I realised I had walked too far up into the city and I was almost in Market Square. I could not possibly see the galleon from here, not even its top-most sails.

I ran back down the way I had come. I thought I might be too late, but it was not too late, and by the time I could see the docks again, there was the great vessel, all bulbous and stately and moving towards the harbour entrance under the tow of two long cutters full of men heaving on stout oars. There were still many people on the dockside, waving at the passengers and crew gathered near the stern of the departing galleon. I could not see the Doctor on the ship.

I could not see her on the ship!

I ran around the dockside like a mad man, looking for her. I searched each face, studied every expression, tried to analyse each stance and gait, as though in my lovelorn lunacy I really believed that she had indeed decided to quit the ship and stay here, stay with me, this whole apparent departure just a maddeningly extended joke, and yet, on relinquishing the ship, for a jest had decided to disguise herself, just to taunt me further.

The galleon slipped out to sea almost without me noticing, letting the cutters come creasing back across the waves while she, beyond the harbour wall, let drop her creamy fields of sail and took the wind about her.

After that, the people drifted away from the quay until there were just a couple of sobbing women left, one standing clutched in about herself, her face quite covered by her hands, the other squatting, face raised to stare emptily at the skies while the tears coursed down her cheeks in silence.

… And I, staring out at the gap between the harbour light-towers towards the distant line that was the jagged far circumference of Crater Lake. And there I stood, and wandered, stunned and unsteady, shaking my head and muttering to myself, and started to leave several times but could not, and so drifted back towards the quayside, assailed by the treacherous sparkle of the water that had let her slip away from me, buffeted by the wind that was blowing her further on her journey with each beat of my heart and hers, and attended by the caustic cries of wheeling sea birds and the quiet and hopeless sobs of women.