The sound of his name on her lips, freighted with a touch of menace, or so he heard it, spurred him to flight. Unwilling to look away from her, he took a backward step, tried to run, but stumbled, and went sprawling onto his belly. He scrambled to one knee and found her standing above him.
“Are you afraid?” she asked, tipping her head to the side.
Her eyes were dark, the irises large, leaving room for scarcely any white and her face, with its sharp cheekbones and full lips and delicate nose, was too perfect, lifeless, as might be an uninspired artist’s rendering. She repeated her question and, like her face, her voice was empty of human temper. The question seemed pragmatic, as if she were unfamiliar with fear and was hoping to identify its symptoms. Though she looked to be a mature woman, not a girl, her breasts and hips and belly betrayed no marks of age or usage.
Hota sank back into a sitting position, dumbstruck.
“There’s no reason to fear. We have a road to travel, you and I.” A cloud passed across the sun; the woman looked up sharply, scanning the sky, and then said, “I’ll need some clothing.”
Somewhat reassured, Hota edged away from her and got to his feet. He gave thought again to running, but recalled being lost among the thickets and decided that running would probably do him no good.
“Did you hear?” she asked, and again her words conveyed no sense of impatience or anger. “I need clothing.”
Hota framed a question of his own, but was too daunted to speak.
“Your name is Hota, isn’t it?” the woman asked.
“Yes.” He licked his lips, tried to dredge up the courage to ask his question, failed, and succeeded only in making a confused noise.
“Magali,” said the woman, and touched the slope of a breast. “My name is Magali.”
He could detect nothing of her mood. It was as if she were hidden inside a beautiful shell, her true self muffled. She waited for him to speak and finally, when he kept silent she said, “You know me. Is that what’s troubling you?”
“I’ve never seen you before,” Hota said.
“But you know me. You saw me fly. You saw me while I was yet changing.”
This, though it was the answer to his unasked question, only confounded him further and he merely shook his head in response.
“How can you not believe it? You saw what you saw,” she said. “You have nothing to fear from me. I’m a woman now. My flesh is as yours.” She reached out and took his hand. Her palm was warm. “Do you understand?”
“No…I…” He shook his head vigorously. “No.”
“You will in time.” She released his hand. “Now can you bring me some clothing?”
“There are no shops that sell women’s clothes in Teocinte.”
“Borrow some…or bring me some of your own.”
By agreeing to do her bidding, Hota thought he would be able to make his escape. “All right. I’ll go now,” he said.
“You’ll come back. Don’t think you won’t.”
“Of course I will.”
She laughed at this—it was, he thought, the first purely human thing she had done. “That’s not what is in your mind.”
“How can you know what’s in my mind?”
“It’s written on your face,” she said. “You can’t wait to be gone. Once out of sight, you’ll run. That’s what you’re thinking, anyway. But later you’ll tell yourself that if you don’t return, I’ll come after you. And it’s true—I would. And you have deeper reasons for returning as well.”
“How can that be?” he asked. “We have no history together, nothing that would furnish a depth of reason.”
She moved away a few paces, turning toward the sun, and a pattern of leaf shadow fell across her hip, reminding him of the pattern that had faded from her skin. She arranged her hair so that it trailed across her breasts, dressing herself in the black skeins.
“You’ll come back because there’s no other direction for you,” she said. “Your life until this moment has been empty and you hope I’ll offer fulfillment of a kind. You’ll come back because you want to. And because the road you and I must travel, we have already set foot upon it.”
When Hota and Magali, clad in an unflattering ankle-length dress he had borrowed from a prostitute, arrived at Liar’s House that evening, Benno Grustark, portly and short-legged, his round, dark-complected face set in grouchy lines, framed by oily black ringlets, hurried out of his office and admonished Hota that if the woman were to spend the night, he would have to pay extra. However, after taking a closer look at Magali, after she turned her flat stare upon him, his delivery sputtered and he fell silent. When they passed up the stairs, leaving Benno looking up from the dusty lobby, not offering, as was his habit, further admonitions, Hota suspected that the innkeeper was unaccustomed to having so beautiful a woman frequent his establishment.
Ushering her into his room, Hota apologized for its sorry condition, but Magali paid no attention to the disarray and walked over to the wall beside his bed and began to inspect the weathered gray boards, running her forefinger along the black complexities of their grain, appearing to admire them as though they were made of the finest marble. Still daunted to a degree, Hota busied himself by straightening the room, picking up carved dragons and stowing them into drawers, dusting his rude furniture with a shirt. Glancing up from these chores, he saw that Magali had taken a seat on the bed and was picking at the folds of her skirt.
“I’d like a green dress,” she said. “Dark green. Do you have a seamstress in the town?”
Hota wadded up the dust-covered shirt and tossed it onto a chair. “I think so…yes.”
She nodded solemnly as if he had imparted a great wisdom and then swung her legs up and lay back on the bed. “I want to sleep for a while. Perhaps we can have something to eat afterward.”
“The tavern downstairs has food, but it’s not so good.”
She closed her eyes, let out a sigh, and after a minute or two Hota assumed that she had drifted off; but then, with a sudden violent twisting of her body, she turned onto her side and said, her words partially muffled by the pillow, “Just so long as there’s meat.”
Their first days together passed uncomfortably for Hota. Magali left the room only to visit the bathroom down the hall and spent much of the time sleeping, as if, he thought, she were acclimating to her new form. When awake she would peer at the boards or sit silently on the bed. Their infrequent conversations were functional, pertaining to things she needed, and if he was not off running errands for her, he sat in the chair and waited for her to wake. The town’s seamstress delivered two dark green dresses. Magali, without thought for modesty, would change from one to the other in full view of Hota and he would feel stirrings of desire. How could he not? He was not used to this sort of display. His wife had gone to bed each night swaddled in layers of clothing, and even the prostitutes with whom he slept would merely hike up their skirts. With its high, small breasts and sleek flanks and long, graceful legs, Magali’s body was a sculptor’s dream of unmarred sensuality. But desire would not catch in him. He was still afraid, his mind too full of questions to permit the increase of lust, and he never ventured near her, sleeping on the floor or in a chair. What, he found himself wondering, was the road they were to travel? Was she truly a dragon recast as a woman, or was this all the result of a trick, a conspiracy of event and moment? And, most urgently, why had any of this happened? How could it be happening?