When he stood on the peninsula again, it felt like home, and he turned west with relief. On the southern slope it felt warm even under a steady blanket of cloud, so warm that he arched his shoulders and lay on rocks just to feel it. Then one day as he passed a small cove the sun broke out, and he ran down into the water, and rolled naked in the sand until a coat of it stuck everywhere to his skin, and he fell asleep on the beach baking in that layer of crushed rock and shell. He slept all day.
In the later afternoon he foraged for beach food, and that evening he walked easily along the southern slope, reveling in the warm air and his full belly. Just to be alive and thoughtless, an animal in its moment of pure duration, that was happiness enough. The flood of stars spilled across the sky, providing light enough to see the wide trail on the bluff above the southern beaches. Up and down over grassy hills he walked, until ahead of him he saw a cluster of lights, as if a constellation of yellow stars had fallen onto the spine.
Torches.
He approached carelessly because he was careless, and found himself in the outskirts of what once must have been a considerable town, sprawling over a plateau in the spine from north beach to south. Now many of the stone buildings were in ruins, big quartz blocks tumbled about the maze of streets, shattered in a way that suggested earthquake; many of the walls were only waist high. But in the center of town was a plaza flagged by turquoise and coral, smoothed to a sheen by centuries of wear, and around it several small buildings remained standing, lit by torches that flickered in the breeze atop short fat pillars.
Many people were gathered in this plaza, laughing and eating from long tables piled high with food: they greeted Thel cordially and without surprise, and bid him eat, watching his face and nudging each other with elbows. They wore feather capes over plain brown pants and skirts; various birds’ most colorful plumage had been sewn together, so that there were capes of solid emerald or sapphire, others striped like metallic rainbows, yet others spotted with enormous eyes.
A tall black-haired woman wrapped in a full-length cape of ruby feathers emerged from the largest building, and approached Thel. She commanded the attention of all, and when she turned and gave instructions under her breath to a retinue of young women in blue, they hurried giggling back into the building.
The woman then smiled at Thel, and welcomed him in a commanding voice. “This is Olimbos, and I am Khora, its queen. Tonight we celebrate our new year, and the arrival of a stranger after sunset is a good sign. Will you join our celebration?”
Thel nodded and said he would.
The queen smiled, laughed; the citizens of Olimbos laughed with her, then chattered among themselves. Musicians playing hand drums and mandolins struck up a long flowing melody, which never seemed to end. More torches burned and the quartz blocks sparked all shot with light.
The queen sat at a table and ate. Some women gave Thel a plate of pungent cooked meat, and a tall glass of a fiery liquor that tasted of dune grass; it burned all the way to his stomach, and made his vision jump.
The young women serving the queen emerged with a long yellow cape, which they cast over Thel’s shoulders as if throwing a net. Everyone cheered and the music picked up its tempo, the hand drums quick and insistent, the mandolins sweet and swaying. Thel had seen a small bird whose chest feathers were the color of his cape, a bird that flashed above streams as it struck the surface, a kind of kingfisher, its breast a glittering yellow in the shadows under the banks. It had taken a lot of them to make a cape so large. Thel drank more of the grass liquor and pulled the cape about him, pleased at its brightness. They gave him a chair to sit in, and he sat and watched.
When the tables of food were considerably emptier people stood and danced in the plaza, turning in groups of two, three and four, small steps punctuated by spins that swirled their capes in the air. The queen stood and walked among the dancers. She threw her cape back over her shoulders and Thel saw that she was naked under it. Her body was long and smoothly muscled, dramatic in the torchlight: as she walked among the dancers her hipbones jutted and swayed, flanking the long curve of her belly, which led the eye down to a tall mass of glossy black pubic hair. As Thel looked at this triangle of hair it bulged out and down like the tail of a panther, waving before the queen; then the cord of fur extended forward and grew into a cat’s body and hind legs, which touched the ground as the forelegs and head bloomed out of the body’s front end. A small black cat, yes, walking before the queen with its tail a sort of long leash, stretching back up and into the queen’s pubic fur.
Thel swallowed heavily, and his pulse raced. He could not shift his gaze from the cat, and saw the queen’s laughter only peripherally. She walked around the plaza toward him, and the black cat ranged from side to side ahead of her, its eyes two reflective dots of green torchlight. The dancers swirled in circles about the queen and Thel in his chair, shedding the clothes under their capes. Some kissed each other hungrily as they danced, others watched the queen approaching Thel.
She stood before him. The cat padded forward and rubbed itself against his ankles, purring loudly. The queen smiled. Her ribs moved with her quick breath. The small smile stayed on her lips, and her gaze wouldn’t leave him.
The black cat jumped neatly into his lap, curled up there. The queen leaned forward, put her hands on his shoulders, kissed him. He felt the kiss, and then the blood pouring down into his penis, stiffening it under the cat’s body.
The queen caught up his arms and pulled him to his feet, and he had to catch the cat in his hands. He could feel the little ribcage cradled in his palm, feel the vibration of its purr. The queen reached down and unfastened his pants, and they dropped around his ankles; as he stepped free each hard knock of his heart lifted his cock another notch, until it stood upright before his belly, feeling taut and live and full. Just to walk felt good with such an erection. The queen led him across the plaza to her residence, and dimly he heard the cheers of the dancers, mixed with the hand drums and mandolins.
Inside the building rugs and tapestries warmed one central room, which was lit by a score of small torches. A big square bed against one wall was piled high with quilted blankets, and the queen pulled Thel onto them, kissing him passionately. As they kissed the cat purred and licked at him, its little tongue rough against his skin. Thel thrust with his cock at the cat’s head, and the long tail pulled back up into the queen until cat and cock disappeared in her, in one fluid purring motion. Then they were joined and the queen was laughing at his expression, rolling over onto him and riding his thrusts. She rolled sideways and Thel buried his face in her tangled hair and plunged away, and they rocked in rhythm to the hand drums for as long as he could hold on, until his spine shot great bolts of electric pleasure down and around and up, the pleasure radiating sideways in him until he felt it tingling in his arms, his hands, his face, all his skin.
Later as he lay beside her the black cat returned, purring and licking him back to life. The queen twisted so that she could lick at him along with the cat, and he was instantly stiff again. And so it went, through the night. Thel scarcely noticed the faces in the doorway to the chamber, and when he did, he didn’t care.
In the blue just before sunrise he crawled past the guttering torches to his clothes and bags, left in the doorway by some thoughtful celebrant. The mirror was still in its bag, and on a whim he took it from its cloth sack and looked into it.
It was the queen’s face—the male version of the queen’s face, coarser and bearded, but recognizably hers. The queen stirred in her sleep on the bed, and he put the flat gold plate back in the bag. It fell heavily against his legs.
He returned to the bed, looked down at the sleeping queen. His head was cold. If only he could warm his ears; it seemed never once on this endless peninsula had he gotten his ears warm.
He got back under the blankets and snuggled next to her, put his ear against her ribs and heard her heart, beating quietly. She stirred and rolled toward him, pulled him to her; feeling her war
mth triggered a wash of pure desire in him, and he melted again.
NINETEEN
THE THEATER OF GHOSTS
Days passed, and it stayed like that. Nothing seemed to warm him but Khora’s touch. Otherwise he felt empty and cold. He swam under the sun, lay asleep on the beach, fished; and always cold.
Khora’s people wandered the ruins of quartz, furtive by day and lascivious in the dusk, stroking each other, kissing, reaching inside each other’s clothes. Nights were much darker and quieter than the festival night of Thels arrival: the evenings punctuated by soft laughter and the gleam of one central torch, breaking its light in the big chipped blocks of quartz that lay around the plaza; and the long nights strange voyages of pleasure in the queen’s big bedroom. The cat never again flowed out of her pubic mound, but the memory of it—the idea of it—inflamed Thels imagination, at the same time that he was repulsed by it. In the bed she pushed him about, brought her maids in to watch, told him what to do, even slapped him hard in the face; and he began to find this more and more exciting, even though he hated her for it. He only seemed truly to live when he was in contact with her body. Everything changed then, the chamber seemed charged with color, and the stars in the doorway sparked as if engendered by a blow to the head.
Then one night—he had lost track of time, it seemed he had been in this life for weeks and weeks—the routine changed, and they lit four torches and set them at the corners of the plaza, and sat at the center among their crossed shadows. The queen walked among them, naked under her long red cape.
“You wonder how this world came to be,” she said to Thel.
He shrugged, surprised. In fact he had stopped wondering long before. He didn’t know what to say.
The queen laughed at his expression. “You talk in your sleep, you see. Now listen. Everything is full of gods. And in the beginning the sea god filled the universe. The sea’s ideas were bubbles, and one bubble idea she called love, and all the water in the universe fell into that bubble, taking all the other gods with it. Most drowned, but two learned to swim, and these were the gods rock and dragon. These two loved the sea goddess, and for ages they swam in her and the three were lovers, and all was well until dragon went away, and came back and found rock plunged to ocean’s very center, an embrace dragon could never know, for rock did not need to breathe, and dragon did. And in a rage dragon flew away and grew as big as the sky, and reached back with one bony hand and clenched it around the two lovers, cutting through ocean’s body to grasp rock and strangle him. And rock died; and the sea goddess, cut in half, died; and seeing his two lovers dead, dragon died. And the bubble burst, leaving nothing but a theater of ghosts. And the lovers’ bodies rotted, until nothing of dragon was left but his skeleton; nothing of rock but his heart; nothing of ocean but her salty blood. And ages later dragon’s skeleton broke away and flew off through the empty sky, scattering its bones that are the stars. Only the bones of the hand which had strangled the lovers remained there, wrapping the round drop of ocean’s blood, cutting it down to rock. All who live on the remains of these three are accidental vermin, walking an edge of bone, which is highest at the old wristbones, and nearly submerged where forefinger once met thumb. We live by drinking ocean, eating rock, and standing on the dragon’s bones.”
And Khora laughed bitterly, and walked toward Thel with a stalking, vengeful lust.
TWENTY
THE CRUCIBLE OF SOULS
Cold days on the beach, warm nights in the queens bed. In the evenings sometimes she stripped him bare, aroused him and then led him out among her subjects, tugging on his erection as if it were a leash. He would flush with shame and an intense arousal, and back on her bed he felt his orgasms as if a too-large spine were erupting out of him; his life; she would take one more portion of it from him, laughing and gasping, her long supple torso contracting across the stomach while she came herself.
It was horrible, and each time he hoped it would last forever. During the days he could hardly wait for the next night, and he spent some part of each afternoon lying on the sand, dreaming of the moment when he would be led through the crowd, tugged this way and that by his imperious queen.
When one of her people told her that he owned the mirror, she laughed and made him show his reflection to the night’s gathering. Her face, her masculine face, stared out of the smooth gold surface, surrounded by a halo of torchlight, and when Thel rubbed his hand over his jaw trying to feel if there were an actual correspondence with the image, the villagers howled.
Afterward the queen showed no more interest in the mirror. This was a relief to him, because now it seemed that the mirror was his only friend, and sometimes he would take the bag on walks down the beach and let the mirror out and set it flat on the sand, the wet round gold surface indigo with reflected sky, and turning it every way but at himself and his traitor’s face, he saw in it the beach he had been born on, the cliffs he had first climbed to get up on the crest, the spine king’s bloody camp, the horse meadows, all a past that felt as remote to him as a life among the stars. Grains of sand on a circle of golden indigo, the limpid sky marred by a small fluttering dot, a kestrel hanging on the wind….
When he looked up and saw the little hawk was real, he rolled off his belly surprised, and sat up to watch it. It stood feathering on its column of air, falcon’s beak pointed down at the sea as it darted down and held itself back, darted and held back, then side-slipped and carved the wind with a splay of strong wings, before settling again in the invisible current. A windhover.
TWENTY-ONE
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 boulderslope 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 semi-transparent, 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.
TWENTY-TWO
EXFOLIATION
It was like being born again. They hiked through the long days napping only briefly at midday and wandered the long dusks hunting for food on the beaches, swimming and then sleeping in sand. In the midnights Thel rose and walked about looking at stars till he chilled, then returned to the swimmer and her blanket.
One night when he returned to the swimmer, lying against her back with an arm over her and feeling her bottom shift back into his belly, he noticed the wind pouring over them. They were sleeping on the very edge of a beach cliff, just for the fun of the views at sunset and dawn, tucked into a hollow scooped at the cliffs edge, and wind was tearing down and out to sea; but as he had walked around the central plateau of the peninsula the night had been perfectly still, he had noticed it particularly. He got up and walked back out onto the hills, and again it was still; and at the cliff’s edge, windy. He roused the swimmer and moved them inland a bit for the second half of the night. “The weight of the air keeps me awake,” he told her. “It’s falling over the edge.”
He found out what had happened to her in the time since the storm on the brough, but only in snatches, in response to his questions. She had bitten her way free of the rope, as he had guessed. She had swum for a long time, she couldn’t say how long, but from the way she spoke of it (or didn’t), he thought it might have been very long indeed; days, certainly. She had landed on the southern side, and, assuming they had all survived and made it to the cape, she had walked back to it and searched for them, but found nothing. She waited there for a long time, regaining her strength and assuming she would see Birsay, escorting other travelers across; but no one ever appeared, and so finally she started west again. Groups traveling east to west passed her, and she had hidden from them, afraid that they might be the spine kings or the sorcerers. And then one night she had come on him in the ruins.