I need you… Her arms were free. She reached out blindly as she began to fall … felt arms catch her, circle her, hold her, stopping her fall.
“Moon—?”
She opened her eyes, blinking, dazed, hearing a man’s voice, a familiar voice, call her name. She opened her eyes, opened her mouth, tried to speak his name, as her vision cleared… “Sparks.” She heard the disbelief in her voice as she put a name to the face in front of her; Sea-green eyes gazed back at her; a blaze of flame-colored hair framed a face she had known, and loved, since forever…. Goddess, was it only a dream—? Still feeling another man’s lips on her own. A small, helpless sound escaped her, as her husband drew her close, holding her in his arms.
“I need you. too,” he murmured, against her ear, kissing her hair. “I saw Gran, I heard— Moon, I’m so sorry.”
She stiffened against him, almost pulling away. But then her arms closed around him, holding him against her, feeling the tautness of his muscles, his young, strong body hard against hers. She found his lips, began to kiss them with a feverish hunger that she had almost forgotten, as an urgency she thought had died inside her swept her away like the black wind.
This time it was her husband who drew back in surprise. She pulled him to her again, sliding her hands up under the linen cloth of his shirt, pressing her body against his, covering his mouth with hers to stop his questions. He sighed, letting her … responding more and more eagerly, answering her body with his own. His hands touched her everywhere with a heat neither of them had known in longer than she could remember.
He sank with her onto the thick white furs that covered the floor. She felt the rug as soft as clouds beneath her as he undressed her. as he explored her with his hands, his mouth, as she pulled him down on top of her, flesh against flesh, and felt him enter her. And as they rose and fell together, their pleasure like the tides of the sea, she closed her eyes, remembering a Festival night, safe in his arms at last... remembering another night, in the arms of a passionate, gentle stranger… ONDINEE: Tuo Ne’el
Reede Kullervo sighed, and sighed again; he shifted from foot to foot, gazing out through the high narrow window slit. The view did not inspire him. From this room near the pinnacle of the Humbaba stronghold, he could see for dozens of kilometers across low, rolling hills and tight valleys, all of them covered by impenetrable thorn forest. Spearbush and hell’s needle and firethorn were all that he could see, all of it well-named, and all of it in tones of ash gray shading to brown, looking dead, looking as if it had always been dead. The locals called this piece of real estate Tuo Ne’el—the Land of Death.
But the thorn forest was fiercely, volatilely alive. When it burned, it burned like the fires of hell. The leaves and bark of the plants were loaded with petrochemicals, they burned with furious heat and intensity, until there was nothing left but glassy-surfaced ash on vast sweeps of naked hill. He thought of the thorn forest’s life cycle as being like his own … except that when he eventually burned himself out, no dormant seed of his, waiting patiently for that immolation to set it free, would germinate and carry on his genetic line.
He began to hum a fragment of song whose words were incomprehensible to him, although he knew them all. Its tune sounded alien and disturbing to his ears, the tonal shifts and intervals made him feel vaguely queasy although he knew they were perfectly precise. He did not hum when he was happy. In the distance he could see other strongholds—fortress towers, sleek needles of self-contained strength rising like defiant fingers through the impenetrable barrier of the forests. He could name the drug and vice bosses who controlled each of them, who ruled the lives of communities of workers, researchers, and henchmen as if they were petty feudal lords. The shielded towers were easily reached only by air. In their business, the thorn forest made for good neighbors. It also kept locals who weren’t in their pay out of their hair.
Reede turned away from the twenty-centimeter-thick pane of virtually impenetrable ceramic, moving back and forth restlessly, running his hands through his hair, pushing them into the deep pockets of his lab clothing. He had not bothered to change, because Humbaba had sent word that he was to come up immediately … only to keep him pacing out here like some lackey. He hated waiting, hated to stop moving any time when he didn’t have to, any time when there was nothing to occupy his mind. … He sat down, stood up, his hands tightening into fists; began to pace again, pulling at his ear. “Shit—” he said, and said it again.
The sweet chiming voice of a hundred silver bells whispered his name, behind him. He turned, with the swiftness of a startled animal, as someone’s hand circled his arm.
“Mundilfoere—” He stopped himself, as abruptly and lightly as if he had no mass, at the sight of her face. She barely came up to his chin, and her face was veiled; the cloth was a filmy gauze, intentionally almost transparent, so that her features were clearly visible but still a mystery, sensually shrouded. The cloth of her gown, which covered her from neck to foot, was only slightly more opaque. She was Humbaba’s First Wife. She said that she was a jewel merchant’s daughter from the lands of the south, purchased on a whim to become one of his countless concubines. But she was more than she seemed—which was why she was now his First Wife, and held more influence over him than any of his advisors. And Humbaba was not the only one who had noticed her uniqueness.
Reede’s hands rose, trembling; he felt himself overwhelmed by his need for her, which was at once a terrifying physical hunger for the things that her body knew, and was teaching to him, and something deeper that he had never tried to name, let alone understand. His life seemed to have begun the first night that he spent in her arms, the morning that he had awakened to find himself lying beside her. “Where were you last night? I waited … 1 waited until the second moon rose—”
“I was with my lord Humbaba,” she said softly. “He required my presence.”
“Again?”
She shrugged, expressionless. She had been Humbaba’s favorite since before Reede had known either one of them; and as a rule, Humbaba was easily bored.
“I don’t suppose you were simply discussing business,” he said sourly.
“Not the entire night, no.” Her indigo eyes regarded him with mild censure from behind the silvered gauze.
He made a face. “How do you kiss him without vomiting?”
She did not smile. “All men are handsome in the dark, beloved,” she said softly. “Just as all women are beautiful.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“I must,”
He turned away from her, taking a deep breath. She waited without speaking until he turned back again. He found that she had drawn aside her veil. To see her face suddenly revealed to him was somehow as erotic as seeing her completely naked. He sucked in a breath, as a hundred different images of her face, of her body Snd his own together, filled his mind … a thousand memories of secret moments, hours, nights together in stolen corners of their hermetically sealed world. How long she had been his lover—or he had been hers, chosen by her—he wasn’t even sure. His life was all randomness and chaos, except when he was at work in the labs. Time had no meaning for him except when he was in her arms. He kept his hands rigidly open at his sides, afraid that his need would betray them both.
She moved away, as if she sensed his control slipping. “He is an old man, tisshah’el,” she murmured, barely audible. “Even he says so, so it must be true. He has never made me weep tears of joy… Only you can do that.”