He was fully awake now, and he was beginning to understand. He remembered how Laliene had gone wandering around here the other day while he was brewing the tea—examining the works of art, so he had thought. But she could just as easily have been planting something. Which now was broadcasting monstrous compulsions into his mind.
He switched on the light, wincing as it flooded the room. Now Thimiroi could no longer see that mocking, beckoning image of Laliene, but he still felt her presence all around him, the heat of her body, the pungency of her fragrance, the strength of her urgent summons.
Somehow he managed to find the card with Christine’s telephone number on it, and dialed it with tense, quivering fingers. The phone rang endlessly until, finally, he heard her sleepy voice, barely focused, saying, “Yes? Hello?”
“Christine? Christine, it’s me, Thimiroi.”
“What? Who? Don’t you know it’s four in the morn—” Then her tone changed. The sleepiness left it, and the irritation. “What’s wrong, Thimiroi? What’s happening?”
“I’ll be all right. I need you to talk to me, that’s all. I’m having a kind of an attack.”
“No, Thimiroi!” He could feel the intensity of her concern. “What can I do? Shall I come over?”
“No. That’s not necessary. Just talk to me. I need to stir up—cerebral activity. Do you understand? It’s just an—an electrochemical imbalance. But if I talk—even if I listen to something—speak to me, say anything, recite poetry—”
“Poetry,” she said. “All right. Let me think. ‘Four score and seven years ago—’” she began.
“Good,” he said. “Even if I don’t understand it, that’s all right. Say anything. Just keep talking.”
Already Laliene’s aura was ebbing from the room. Christine continued to speak; and he broke in from time to time, simply to keep his mental level up. In a few minutes Thimiroi knew that he had defeated Laliene’s plan. He slumped forward, breathing hard, letting his stiff, anguished muscles uncoil.
He still could feel the waves of mental force sweeping through the room. But they were pallid now, they were almost comical, they no longer were capable of arousing in him the obsessive obedience that they had been able to conjure into his sleeping mind.
Christine, troubled, still wanted to come to him; but Thimiroi told her that everything was fine, now, that she should go back to sleep, that he was sorry to have disturbed her. He would explain, he promised. Later. Later.
Fury overtook him the moment he put the receiver down.
Damn Laliene. Damn her! What did she think she was doing?
He searched through the sitting room, and then the bedroom, and the third room of the suite. But it was almost dawn before he found what he was looking for: the tiny silvery pellet, the minute erotic broadcaster, that she had hidden beneath one of his Sipulva tables. He pulled it loose and crushed it against the wall, and the last faint vestige of Laliene’s presence went from the room like water swirling down a drain. Slowly Thimiroi’s anger receded. He put on some music, one of Cenbe’s early pieces, and listened quietly to it until he saw the first pale light of morning streaking the sky.
Casually, easily, with a wonderful recklessness he had not known he had in him, he said to Christine, “We go anywhere we want. Anywhen. They run tours for us, you see. We were in Canterbury in Chaucer’s time, to make the pilgrimage. We went to Rome and then to Emperor Augustus’ summer palace on the island of Capri, and he invited us to a grand banquet, thinking we were visitors from a great kingdom near India.”
Christine was staring at him in a wide-eyed gaze, as though she were a child and he were telling her some fabulous tale of dragons and princes.
He had gone to her at midday, when the late May sun was immense overhead and the sky seemed like a great curving plate of burnished blue steel. She had let him in without a word, and for a long while they looked at each other in silence, their hands barely touching. She was very pale and her eyes were reddened from sleeplessness, with dark crescents beneath them. Thimiroi embraced her, and assured her that he was in no danger, that with her help he had been able to fight off the demon that had assailed him in the night. Then she took him upstairs, to the room on the second floor where they had made love the day before, and drew him down with her on the bed, almost shyly at first, and then, casting all reserve aside, seizing him eagerly, hungrily.
When finally they lay back, side by side, all passion slaked for the moment, Christine turned toward him and said, “Tell me now where your country is, Thimiroi.”
And at last he began—calmly, unhesitatingly—to tell her about The Travel.
“We went to Canterbury in the autumn of 1347,” he said. “Actually Chaucer was still only a boy, then. The poem was many years away. Of course we read him before we set out. We even looked at the original Old English text. I suppose the language would be strange even to you. ‘When that Aprill with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote.’ I suppose we really should have gone in April ourselves, to be more authentic; but April was wet that year, as it usually is at that time in England, and the autumn was warm and brilliant, a season much like the one you are having here, a true vintage season. We are very fond of warm, dry weather, and rain depresses us.”
“You could have gone in another year, then, and found a warmer, drier April,” Christine said.
“No. The year had to be 1347. It isn’t important why. And so we went in autumn, in beautiful October.”
“Ah.”
“We began in London, gathering in an inn on the south side of the river, just as Chaucer’s pilgrims did, and we set out with a band of pilgrims that must have been much like his, even one who played a bagpipe the way his Miller did, and a woman who might almost have been the Wife of Bath—” Thimiroi closed his eyes a moment, letting the journey come rushing back from memory, sights and sounds, laughter, barking dogs, cool bitter ale, embroidered gowns, the mounds of straw in the stable, falling leaves, warm dry breezes. “And then, before that, first-century Capri. In the time of Augustus. In high summer, a perfect Mediterranean summer, still another vintage season. How splendid Capri is. Do you know it? No? An island off Italy, very steep, a mountaintop in the water, with strange grottos at its base and huge rocks all about. There comes a time every evening when the sky and the sea are the same color, a pale blue-gray, so that it is impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins, and you stand by the edge of the high cliff, looking outward into that gray haze, and it seems to you that all the world is completely still, that time is not moving at all.”
“The—first century—?” Christine murmured.
“The reign of the Emperor Augustus, yes. A surprisingly short man, and very gentle and witty, extremely likable, although you can feel the ruthlessness of him just behind the gentleness. He has amazing eyes, utterly penetrating, with a kind of light coming from them. You look at him and you see Rome: the Empire embodied in one man, its beginning and its end, its greatness and its power.”
“You speak of him as though he is still alive. ‘He has amazing eyes,’ you said.”
“I saw him only a few months ago,” said Thimiroi. “He handed me a cup of sweet red wine with his own hands, and recommended it, saying there certainly was nothing like it in my own land. He has a palace on Capri, nothing very grand—his stepson Tiberius, who was there also, would build a much greater one later on, so our guide told us—and he was there for the summer. We were guests under false pretenses, I suppose, ambassadors from a distant land, though he never would have guessed how distant. The year was—let me think—no, not the first century, not your first century, it was what you call B.C., the last century before the first century—I think the year was 19, the 19 before—such a muddle, these dating systems—”