“What’s all this about the sunrise, boy?”
But before I could answer: “Shut up, Hugh. For God’s sake.”
I respected Fiona’s need for silence, always respected the stillness that contained her sudden electrical sense of purpose, and so refrained from remarking that dawn was Fiona’s hour and that everything about my wife suggested the flights of dawn and excitement of the first light, despite her admitted shivers of theatricality and the interference of Hugh’s crude temperament. Behind Fiona’s tight back I shrugged, glanced away from Hugh, and allowed this first clear chilly breath of morning to fill my chest. Fiona said nothing more, Catherine leaned forward and crossed her legs. Like Fiona, I tilted my head back into the rising light and contented myself with the paradox that while Fiona was concentrating on the sunrise Catherine was no doubt thinking of nothing more than the possibility of turning and placing a gentle hand on my bare chest. Again Hugh cleared his throat.
So we sat together, waited together, on a fragment of stone wall in this sacred spot. At our feet lay the abrupt and nearly vertical and rock-strewn descent, and down there the windy darkness of the miniature valley contained one field of waist-high grass (remembered now from previous occasions rather than seen) as well as a single line of small pungent olive trees marching, so to speak, across the soft floor of that sheltered contour of darkness, gloom, silence. But beyond it all, beyond perfect valley and rock wall and Fiona, Hugh, Catherine and me (four witnesses seated flank to flank in the uninterrupted tension of Fiona’s rare feminine interest in natural phenomena), three low purple hills and a sweep of bare silvery horizon belied witnesses, lyricism, grape-bespattered joys of love, sleeping children, sleeping invisible village, belied the sunrise itself. Once more it occurred to me that the splendor of ominous distance reflected a side of Fiona and even an aspect of my own personality which Hugh, for instance, would never appreciate. After all, Fiona enjoyed the sight of moody colors and somber landscape — why not? Only Hugh’s compulsive interest in Fiona’s more obviously active life blinded him, I decided then, to the understandable necessity of Fiona’s silences. Fiona was sexual but hardly simple.
“Look, baby,” she whispered clearly, “an eagle.”
“Big one,” I murmured, “a real beauty.”
“Where, boy? I don’t see any eagle.”
“Take another look,” I said after a moment. “He’s there.” It was a small matter, of course, and yet the sky, it seemed to me, was empty except for rolling darkness and cold bands of silver. I looked, I squinted (seeing dark hills, inhuman sky, nothing more) and assumed that this was merely another instance of Fiona’s occasional inaccuracy for the sake of a deeper vividness, for the sake of an important mood. Between Fiona’s voice and Hugh’s sometimes brusque insistence on reality there was, for me, no choice.
“I see him,” Catherine said, and pointed. “Up there.”
“She’s right, boy. He’s unmistakable.”
Nodding, suddenly identifying the crooked speck at the end of Catherine’s finger: “A sign,” I murmured deeply, agreeably, “it’s a doubly significant sign, Hugh, don’t you think?”
“Keep quiet, baby. Please.”
Correct and incorrect, I thought, right and wrong. And yet at bottom my sense of the situation was essentially true, and I felt only pleasure at the sight of this new justification of Fiona’s vision and my own supportive role. Unmistakably, as Hugh had said, the eagle was now hooked almost directly above us on bent but stationary wings in the black and silver medium of the empty sky. Stark, unruffled, quite alone, a featureless image of ancient strength and unappeased appetite, certainly the distant bird was both incongruous and appropriate, at once alive and hence distracting but also sinister, a kind of totemic particle dislodged from the uninhabited hills and toneless light. Here, I thought, was a bird of prey that would utter no cry, make no kill. And for some reason his presence brought to mind the handfuls of dark cherries which Fiona was carrying in the off-white woolen bag still slung from her firm shoulder.
But was the bird descending, drawing closer to us, a deliberate herald of the rich desolation that lay before us, fierce bird of prey somehow attracted to large lovers and the cherries in Fiona’s bag? Was he singling us out as further confirmation of Fiona’s essential soberness and lack of fear, or even as a reminder of the terror that once engulfed the barbarians and from which Hugh, for instance, was still not free? At any rate the bird was descending and the hills, like distant burial mounds, were dark. Slowly I put pressure with my upper arms first on Catherine’s shoulder and then on Fiona’s.
All eyes on the approaching eagle. Fiona began to shiver, Catherine returned the pressure of my affection. But Hugh, I thought, was growing impatient, was much too preoccupied with his own doubts and desires to realize that sometimes the faceless eagle heralds not only the breath of dead kings but the sunrise.
Yes, the sunrise. And now, quite suddenly, the sunrise was so immense, so hot and brilliant that Fiona found it necessary to respond in kind and leaped to her feet, all at once was standing upright between Hugh and me and taking swift athletic breaths of the golden air, apparently unconscious of my own hand steadying her right calf and Hugh’s her left. The black and silver sky turned orange and foamed for miles behind the stationary air-borne eagle, and the purple hills dissolved, reappeared, revealed on thick green slopes a clear pattern of thistle, clay, warped trees, a few abandoned stone huts. Mist filled the valley at our feet and then lifted. The cold air grew warm, the eagle suddenly glided downward to the east and was gone, simply gone. The day was ours.
“What’s that, baby? Listen.”
I listened, we all listened, Catherine’s ring hand was on my thigh. Across from us the large round sun had already outlived its bright circumference, its glorious round orange shape had already given up its enormous singular shape to time, had become only the light of our day, the undefined brilliance of our morning song. But that clear random tinkling sound from the valley? That metallic musical sound too unstructured for music and yet harmonizing, so to speak, with the sweet smell of our still unexplored valley?
“Sheep bells,” Catherine murmured. “That’s what it is.”
“By God, boy, do you see what I see?”
“Couldn’t be better,” I said, and drew Fiona’s upright leg more tightly to my rib cage and with my other hand signaled Catherine through the brown cloth on her hip.
Because cold dawn had given way to hot morning, the sun had yielded to light, the eagle had flown off only to return to us as a flock of long-haired semidomesticated animals.
“Goats,” I said pleasantly, “not sheep.”
“But the girl, baby. Look at the girl.”
It was the new day’s gift to Fiona, nature’s final gift to my wife. Yes, the random tinkling sound we had heard was produced by bells fastened around the necks of goats, small rusty pear-shaped iron bells hand-forged by peasants oblivious to the sad melodies that unknown cultivated strangers might hear in their noise. And goats, an entire flock of them, wearing long brown shaggy robes the color of Catherine’s slacks but more shiny, and bearing bone-colored curling horns on the tops of their nodding heads, now suddenly filled our valley with motion, color and the sound of their bells. From where Hugh and Catherine and I sat and Fiona stood, we could see that these stately animals were attended by a young girl wearing a large white hat and running, slowly running, through the tall grass.