Kill the Dead(40)

“You’re not dead,” he murmured, vocalising his thoughts.

“You say the nicest things.” She kissed his cheek lightly.

He shivered, with pleasure and nervousness. And then it occurred to him to look about for Parl Dro. Presently he located a dark inconclusive shape, stretched across the base of a tree, which had to be Dro. So much for watching. Or... had it been Myal’s watch, and had Myal fallen asleep?

“I want you to come with me,” said Ciddey Soban, touching him once more with her real live icy lips.

“Well, I really ought—”

“Don’t argue. You know you like me. Let’s go for a walk together. Wouldn’t you like that? Down into the wood. It isn’t far.”

“Well, all right.”

He had gone walking in a wood with the Gray Duke’s daughter. The walk had ended in a pile of leaves, and ultimately, a few months later, in an escape by night, with thirty of the Duke’s men, drunken and murderous and equipped with mastiffs, in headlong pursuit. Somehow, Myal had got away. Somehow, he always did. Maybe he was not so unlucky as he generally believed himself.

With feigned debonair nonchalance, he let the girl draw him, by her small cold hand, down the slope. Almost inadvertently, he had slung on the instrument as he came to his feet. Now, as they picked their way among roots and channels in the earth, the weight of the wood unbalanced him, and he and she would bump into each other, which was not necessarily displeasing. Minute by minute, Myal grew more excited and more apprehensive. By the time they entered the first arching avenues of the woods that walled the end of the slope, he was feverish and stupidly laughing, clinging to the girl whenever he could, his heart noisy in his ears, an awful leaden murmur of warning droning, ignored, in the pit of his brain.

She, too, undrowned Ciddey, seemed a little fevered. In the soft, faintly luminescent cave of the wood, she turned and embraced him. The long, long kiss was cold and marvellous. Their bodies melted into one another and clamoured never to draw away. In the act of sex, they might literally be turned into a quivering, gasping, ever-orgasmic tree.

But then she broke away, teasing him. She laughed, and ran off along the aisle of living columns. He ran after her, naturally. The shadows of trunks striped over her paleness, so she seemed to flare on and off like a windblown lamp. Then suddenly she disappeared.

He had forgotten the supernormal aspect of her former visitations, and dashed toward the spot where she had been, calling her name, partly in anger, and partly because he knew she had meant him to. She would make him desperate, flaunt, tease, elude. When he had reached a stage of sufficient confusion and actual physical discomfort, she would give in.

In a moment, he found her. She had elaborated upon the process of teasing and eluding and flaunting to a unique degree.

A pool lay amid the trees, black and shiny as a slice of highly polished night sky fallen down there. Glancing up, sure enough there was half a white hole in heaven where the piece of sky had come away.

The moon burned on Ciddey at the pool’s centre, standing in the water, which coiled passively about her knees. She seemed to have grown from the pool, a slender stem, with a flower of face. Her hair was wet, darkened by water at its ends, but she peeled it from her and draped it behind her shoulders. Her dress was all wet and had grown thin and transparent as paper, so he saw her nakedness through it, smokily, unmistakably. Her lips were parted, and smiling, and her eyes heavy. She beckoned to him, urgent as the urgency that now was stabbing through him. Even so, he hesitated, eager to get to her, but not liking the sheen of the water, so cold, so oddly still though she rose from it, smoothing her hair, stirring her limbs a little, beckoning.

“In there?” he asked, hoarse and stupid.

“Yes, oh, yes,” she moaned.

At her voice a pang went through him so great that he could no longer bear to keep away. He splashed into the water, clenching his teeth and fists at the cold of it He thought, in an ecstasy of frustration, she might start to move away from him again as he got closer, but instead she strained her arms to him, though not moving her feet, as if she could not, as if they had grown into the sucking mud on the pool’s floor.

He reached her abruptly, and grabbed her. The instrument thumped him on the back. Congratulations. As her snake-like arms curled around him, he knew a moment’s horror of the inevitable aftermath, the entanglement, the trap, the complications, but the horror could not keep pace with the anguish of pleasure. The second horror—the possibility of disappointing, failing—had yet to come. It might ruin the supreme moments, or everything might be well, but as yet he did not care. Even the dreary nervous consideration as to how they would manage, nowhere to lie or lean, only the mud and the water underfoot, had not yet taken hold.