She ran a hand through her hair. “Reason, reason, reason. That’s a big thing for you, isn’t it? Everything has to have a reason, everyone has to be reasonable.” She turned to me. With the chair and the fire, she now looked the part of a village hedge witch. “Cathy spoke highly of you. She loves you, you know.”
I blinked in surprise. If she meant something about the previous night at the river, I didn’t believe for a minute that Cathy would tell this woman anything so personal. “I think that’s the wine talking, Eppie.”
“You people,” she laughed. “Eddie, I didn’t say she was good at it. She doesn’t have a clue how to express it. She was raped as a child, again as a teenager and swore she would never feel love of any sort again. She took back power over herself, and in the process cut herself off from every tender feeling in her heart.” She pointed at me with the bottle. “Until she met you, bright boy. But you turned her down at her most vulnerable.”
“I suppose she told you all this?” It was hard to maintain my ironic distance with all the conflicting emotions suddenly churning inside me.
Epona nodded. “Right there in that bed. Where all secrets are revealed and all the walls come down.”
Now I knew this woman was nuts. Even if Cathy was interested in women, she wouldn’t just hop into bed with some drunken tart who lived in the woods. She also hadn’t had time, since she’d barely been gone the length of a dart game. “Right,” I said disdainfully.
Epona picked up a short, straight pipe from among the debris and pulled a stick from the fire to light it. She took a deep draw, leaned back and sent a stream of smoke toward the ceiling. She smiled, her eyes closed.
“Honestly, I don’t understand why you people don’t fuck all the time. What an experience-better than drinking, or smoking, or food, or anything. I thought I was prepared, I thought it couldn’t compare with what I knew, but damn. Your world is full of so many things you can touch, but that — touching each other-oh, man, is that the best.”
I rubbed my temples. The heat and smoke were giving me a headache, and I saw no reason to endure this crap any longer. “If you’ll excuse me, Eppie, I think I’ll head back to town.”
She looked up at me. Her gown fell off one shoulder, revealing perfect skin and the curve of her bosom. “You don’t believe I am what they say I am, do you?”
The sudden entrance of sexuality into the situation hit me with the force of a hammer to the stomach. I kept most of it out of my voice, though. “A goddess, Eppie? No. I don’t believe that.”
She tossed her head to get a stray lock of hair from her eyes. “But it’s true. I am a goddess. I chose to come here, to join you in this reality, to see what flesh felt like, because I love you all. I know all your thoughts, your dreams, your darkest secrets and brightest hopes. But I didn’t know what it really felt like to be clothed in flesh like you, until I decided to share it.” She nearly dropped the pipe as she brought the bottle back to her mouth. “You’re all so hungry, you have so many appetites.”
“Well, we like to keep busy.” I was annoyed, but there was an edge of sincerity to her I couldn’t explain. And I was thoroughly, almost embarrassingly aroused. To change the subject I asked, “So did you like your package?”
“Package? Oh, the trinket Cathy brought.” She looked around on the floor until she found it. “I knew it was coming. I wish it didn’t have to. But the world unfolds as it should.”
She handed it to me. It was a small, worn iron horseshoe, the kind you could find on any pony. Dirt and rust coated it. “Wow,” I said. “Lot of trouble for something so ordinary.”
“Yeah, Eddie,” she said distantly, sadly. “Andrew Reese has finally found me. Do you know who he is?”
I shook my head.
“Andrew Reese is broken to pieces,” she sang, and then repeated it over and over so that the rhyme, and the man’s name, were forever imprinted in my brain. Devils must sing it in hell.
Then she blinked, shook her head and looked up at me. “What were we talking about?”
I undid the top button of my sweat-soaked shirt. With the fire at my back and Epona before me, I felt like I might burn to a cinder. “Who’s Andrew Reese?”
She bent forward and rested her elbows on her knees. She held the bottle in one hand, the pipe in the other. “That’s why I wanted to see you. Let me tell you a little story, Eddie. Once before, I decided to walk among you. Not like this, not as one of you. But simply to let myself be seen and heard as a human being. I formed an island safely off the trade routes but near enough I might be visited. I made it a paradise, with plenty to eat and drink, but completely uninhabited. And then I waited. I had plenty of time, you understand.”
“I imagine you would,” I agreed.
“And so my first visitor arrived. Andrew Reese, a handsome young sailor who’d been washed overboard by a storm and managed to survive long enough to reach my island. I let him wander around for a while, get used to the place, until I finally decided to let him find me. I chose a form that he would like, that of a young woman beautiful by his standards.”
She grinned mischievously. “You should’ve seen me, Eddie. I was tall and willowy, delightfully fragile-looking, and yet I allowed my strength to shine through. I made my hair golden, because I knew he liked blondes. My birds attended me, always nearby but never landing. My horses awaited my command. I was such a sight, though, I don’t think he ever noticed them.” She took another puff on the pipe. “He only had eyes for me.”
“How’d it go?”
“I brought him to a cottage a lot like this one. I even put out a lavish dinner, with some of this.” She held up the wine bottle. “That turned out to be a mistake.”
“Now how can a goddess make a mistake?” I asked, convinced I’d finally caught her in a contradiction.
She was too tipsy to notice my mocking tone. “Okay, not a mistake, exactly. See, I decided not to allow myself full access to my knowledge of things. I wanted to feel surprise, to understand truly what it must be like to not know. So, because of that, I did something that, had I been at full oneness with everything, I would not have done. I gave wine to a man who should never, ever drink.”
“What happened?”
She snorted. “A drunken sailor, a pretty girl, what do you think happened? He didn’t try to rape me, exactly, but he wasn’t in the mood to take no for an answer. I finally had to subdue him, which he later put down to too much wine. After all, no mere girl could overpower him. But I did warn him not to ever again try to compel any living thing on the island to act against its wishes. My little experiment was important to me, I’d grown fond of what I’d created, and wanted to really see what this man was about.”
The gown had slipped further down. I wanted above all to kiss the line of her collarbone over to her neck. I couldn’t believe I was so monumentally, thoroughly horny; I hadn’t felt this much single-minded lust since… ever.
“When he sobered up the next day, I watched him in secret as he wandered around the island,” she continued. “My animals were gifted with a higher awareness than those you know, so when he spoke to them, he could tell they understood. I didn’t let them talk back to him, because I didn’t want to send him screaming for the hills. But I did want him to get an inkling of the gentleness and goodness existing beyond his normal perceptions.”
She paused for another draw on the pipe. “He understood,” she said in a cloud of smoke. “He felt it. Andrew was a decent man, with a kind heart and the ability to feel love. Until he started drinking again. This time he did attempt to force himself on me, and I let him know I was no ordinary woman. I broke his thumbs like that.” She snapped her fingers to illustrate the ease. “I told him that I’d forgive his bad manners once, but only once, and if he did it again, I’d show him just what I could do. Then I healed him. Of course it didn’t occur to him I was a real goddess, he just thought I was some well-studied magician or witch. Again, if I’d let myself know all I could know, I would’ve seen this wasn’t the best approach.”