Chapter 4 #2
Not at any of the nine worlds I would have expected from my knowledge of Norse myth. At a room.
The room was very clean. That was the first thing I registered—an almost aggressive cleanliness, white walls and pale wood and the kind of aesthetic restraint that spoke of deliberate philosophy rather than mere minimalism.
There was a dais at the center, low and covered in silk the color of old ivory, and on the dais there was a cushion, and over the cushion there was a young woman.
She was Asian. Chinese, I thought, though I could not have explained with certainty what cues told me that.
Young—perhaps my age, perhaps younger. Small-boned, with long dark hair that had fallen forward over her face as she lay over the cushion with her hips elevated and her hands gripping the dais’s edge. She wore nothing.
A man stood behind her and to one side. He was dressed in dark clothing of a cut I didn’t recognize, formal without being traditional in any way I could place.
His face bore no expression. I knew instinctively that he had practiced that expressionlessness until it became genuine.
In his hands he held something I recognized at first as an oar—long-handled, flat, lacquered—and then he raised it and I understood that paddle was a more appropriate word.
He brought the heavy blade of it down across the young woman’s upturned bottom with a crack that I somehow heard through the vision as clearly as I would have heard a sound in the physical world.
She cried out. The sound went through me.
He paddled her with methodical patience, spacing the strokes in a way that told me this was not anger.
This was something else, something that had rules I didn’t know, and the young woman’s cries changed as it continued—shifted in register, became less pure pain and more complex.
I recognized that note with a lurch of my stomach because I had just spent an hour looking at nine-hundred-year-old carvings that documented exactly this kind of transformation in exactly this kind of circumstance.
Perhaps I should have looked away. I felt certain I had become a voyeur in someone else’s vision, in someone else’s world, and good manners would have said I should look away.
I didn’t look away.
When the paddling stopped, the man set the implement down with care and moved behind her, and I understood what was about to happen, because the bride saddle and the carvings and the voice had educated me rather thoroughly in the last hour about what men did with women positioned exactly like this.
And she let him. She was whimpering—I could see her shoulders shaking—but she held very still as he positioned himself, and when he entered her there, in the place I had just been touching with two trembling fingers, her cry was different again.
And then—and this was the thing that stopped my breath entirely—she looked up.
Not at the man behind her. Up. At an angle that made no sense given the architecture of the room, an angle that could only have been directed at something above and beyond the room’s ceiling.
Directly at me.
Her eyes were dark and very bright and absolutely lucid, and in them I saw the same thing I imagined was in my own eyes at that moment: the disorientation of someone who had gone somewhere they had not expected to go, who was seeing something they had not expected to see, who was nonetheless—despite the pain, despite the tears still tracking down her face—also seeing visions.
She was on the tree too. She was somewhere on the tree, she was looking at me, and she knew I was there.
The shock of it was like cold water.
My third orgasm had been building through all of this, the bride saddle and my own fingers and the accumulated impossible weight of the last few hours. It crested at precisely the moment her eyes found mine. I panicked.
I panicked completely and entirely, the way I had not panicked when I found the mosaic or squeezed through the cliff face or read the inscription or mounted the bride saddle naked in the dark.
All those things had been, at some level, still within the domain of the explicable.
A woman looking at me from inside a vision, from somewhere on a world tree, with the lucid recognition of someone else who was also traveling…
I wrenched myself back. I didn’t know how I did it, any more than I had known how I arrived.
I simply refused, with everything I had, to continue, and the tree receded with a speed that left me gasping.
The cavern walls came back, and the cold air came back.
I was still on the bride saddle in the dark with my face wet, my thighs shaking, and my right hand’s fingers still pressed against my anus.
I climbed off the saddle. My legs did not cooperate fully, and I had to hold the wooden frame for a moment before I could stand upright.
My clothes lay on the floor where I had folded them with such methodical neatness, which seemed now like something a different person had done.
I put them on in haste. I tucked in the hem of my shirt.
I picked up my torch from where it had remained faithfully lit throughout everything that had just happened to me.
Then I walked back through the passage, past the other chambers with their patient, waiting bride saddles, and into the main cavern with its terrible, beautiful carvings and its impossible ship.
I did not look at the carvings. I kept the torch pointed at the floor in front of my feet.
I walked to the passage that led back to the cliff face, I went through it sideways the way I had come in, and I emerged onto the rocky Sicilian shoreline with the last of the evening light dying over the Tyrrhenian Sea.
I stood there for a moment with the salt air on my face, breathing.
My grandmother’s pendant lay cool against my breastbone now. The warmth had gone out of it entirely, as though whatever had used it had finished.
I thought about the young woman’s eyes. The specific quality of recognition in them.
How she had looked at me with an expression that was not surprise…
as though she had, perhaps, been expecting someone to be watching from the branches, had been told to expect it, had been prepared for it in ways that I had not.
I started walking back toward the goat track, the road, and the battered Fiat—and the rational world, a place that would require me to do, I felt certain, some substantial renegotiation of the terms of my existence.