Jitterbug Perfume Part 11

The nymph whirled, intent upon returning to the thickets, but Kudra detained her. "Lalo," she called. "My husband claims, with some justification, to be king over himself, yet this morning he has momentarily lost sovereignty over his masculine pride. While he struggles to regain government over that portion of his kingdom, I wish to offer you my own promise, for what it is worth. It is presumptuous to imagine myself alive a thousand years hence, but should that miracle occur, I will do what I can to satisfy your plea. I promise."

"Thank thee, my lady, I thank thee well. If Pan were aware of these matters, I am sure he wouldst express his grat.i.tude at great length." She winked at Kudra. Kudra winked back. For a second, the two women, the one statuesque and umber, the other pet.i.te and rosy, smiled at one another knowingly. Then, as quick as a rabbit (a rabbit with a touch of arthritis), Lalo shot into the bushes and was gone.

Alobar made to speak, but Kudra hushed him. "Look up there," she whispered. High above them, barely visible upon the very pinnacle of the mountain, illuminated in the most resplendent manner by noonday sun, heel and horn almost silver, almost holy; stance jaunty yet solemn, regal yet a bit ridiculous; bearded head held at an angle suggestive both of an affection for the variety of life 'round about it and a suffering as primeval and sharp as the peak itself, stood Pan, reeds to lips, and though they scarcely could hear his tune, they felt it in the greasy stirring of the poppies and the mute breath of the snake that sunned itself on a nearby ledge. They watched him in silence for a while, inexplicable tears in their eyes; then Alobar, a.s.sisted, it seems, by sister Echo, yelled up the slope, "Lalo! Lalo! I promise, also! I promise! You have my word word ord ord."

Kudra gave him a sloppy kiss. She took his hand. She clasped the teapot. Off they went, over the pastures, breathing in the circular Bandaloop way, locked in a silence finally broken by Kudra's laughter when Alobar lit up her other shoe.

If wild animals could talk, would they talk like cartoons? Would the dismal swamp resound with shrill, befuddled, childlike voices; a cute choir of cuddly Kermits delivering gentle froggy inanities?

Or would beasts converse in the style of Hemingway, in sentences short, brave, and clear; each word a smooth pebble damp with blood; aboriginal speech, he-man speech, an economy of language borrowed by Gary Cooper from frontiersmen who borrowed it from Apache and Ute?

We ask, "Did you see two people pa.s.s this way, a man and a woman, walking north?"

The stag shakes its antlers. "Nope," he says.

"The woman was dark with a ripe body, the man had white in his hair. Sure you didn't spot them?"

"Yep."

"Well, how about you?" we ask a fox. "Have you seen a couple in Byzantine garb heading in the direction of Bohemia?"

The fox is slow to speak. "Tonight I dined on loon at the pond," he says. "It was a good meal. Food has an excellent place in my values. Quiet has an excellent place in my values. The forest has been quiet tonight. It is a good thing being a fox when the forest is quiet."

"We apologize for disturbing your peace, but we're searching for a husband and wife, racially mixed, who may be in sort of a daze because they recently had an audience with Pan-you know what that means-and are either wandering aimlessly through the woodlands trying to figure out what to do next, or else are making their way by the stars to Bohemia, where the man at one time-longer ago than you might imagine-had an important job and a large family. They may have pa.s.sed this way." We pause hopefully.

"The hunt was good," says the fox. "The moon was right. There was a fresh breeze. A man and a woman would have spooked the loon. What a good thing the forest is when it is left to the fox and the loon."

Is that the way animals would talk?

As it turned out, Alobar and Kudra did pa.s.s through that forest, before or after the fox's dinner; did hike, guided by constellations, northward across Serbia, Croatia, and the Kingdom of Hungary, arriving in the summer of 1032 (or thereabouts) in that area where the feudal state of Bohemia bordered the Slavic territories. There was no trace of Alobar's former citadel. It had burned, like much of the ancient world, in the medieval furnace, its ashes swept under the rolling carpet of civilization. Compared to Western Europe, Bohemia and the Slavic territories were still wild and thinly populated, offering many a fox a place to linger over a bit of loon, like some remote animal ancestor of Ernest Hemingway, but even there in the Eastern backwash, the gold-dust twins, Christianity and Commerce, had set up their crooked wheel of fortune.

Kudra had the odd feeling that she had been there before. Alobar stared into the lacquered' grapes of her eyes and asked if the name "Wren" meant anything to her. "Nothing," she insisted. They didn't speak of it again, but the deja kept right on vuing. Once, Alobar saw a huge hound at a distance. "Mik!" he cried, running after it. The dog turned on him and might have chewed off some of his best parts had not its owner intervened. Ghosts are good for short-term thrills, in the long run they're boring. Alobar and Kudra departed for Aelfric, but not before purchasing a sack of beets.

Aelfric was four or five times its previous size. It had a wall around it. "Why do you wish to enter here?" asked a soldier at the gate where orchards used to stand. Alobar peeked in at the narrow, crooked streets, deep in garbage, flowing with sewage; dark shadows enlivened by the chirping of rats. If this is what people must resort to in order to operate their shops and wors.h.i.+p their Jesus, perhaps they should return to the hunt and the morning star, thought Alobar. "State your business," demanded the guard. By then, Alobar had lost considerable interest in searching for his progeny. "Bandaloop business," he said brightly. The guard scowled, but his feet executed an abrupt and completely involuntary dance step, leaving the soldier staring at his own boots, as if he might arrest them for lewd conduct, or, at least, insubordination. Alobar and Kudra hurried away only to pause a short while later near the place where the shaman had lived.

"Why are we stopping in this field?" asked Kudra.

"I have to replace a door," replied Alobar, but what he did was build a fire and roast beets.

"I take it we are not to explore Aelfric," said Kudra.

"Wasn't a glimpse enough? If your grandchildren were citizens of Aelfric, would you be anxious to meet them?"

"Maybe. Out of curiosity-."

"My curiosity does not extend to dung beetles, even if they crawled out of my family tree. Besides, if I am truly immortal, I am my own grandchild, my own descendant, my own dynasty. I am not obliged to live on through what I pa.s.s down to others."

"Then pa.s.s me a beet," said Kudra. And he did.

The Middle Ages hangs over history's belt like a beer belly. It is too late now for aerobic dancing or cottage cheese lunches to reduce the Middle Ages. History will have to wear size 48 shorts forever.

In the pit of that vast stomach-slos.h.i.+ng with dark and vinegary juices, kindled by a thousand-year heartburn-major figures stimulated acute contractions, only to be eventually digested, adding to the bloat. Clovis, Charlemagne, Otto I, William the Conqueror, Rurik the Viking, Pope Leo, Thomas Aquinas, Johann Gutenberg, and a platter of other renowned generals, kings, philosophers, and popes fermented and dissolved in that mammoth maw. Our little couple, however, our Alobar and Kudra, remained intact and indigestible, like the hard octopus beaks that sicken the stomachs of whales, causing them to vomit the ambergris that bonds the bouquet in great perfumes. Like octopus beaks, our couple. Or maraschino cherries.

More than a decade after his death, Nikolai Lenin's body was removed from its sepulcher in the Kremlin and a belated autopsy performed. Four maraschino cherries were found in Lenin's colon. Perfectly preserved, as whole and candy red as the day (or days) that he swallowed them, the cherries were in better shape than Lenin himself. It is rumored that maraschino cherries are prepared with a chemical resembling formaldehyde, thus can neither be a.s.similated nor eliminated but must ride in the baggage rack of the bowels for a lifetime, like the seabags of the Flying Dutchman. If that is the case, and one is prepared to believe the worst of maraschino cherries, looking, as they do, as if they were picked in the orchards of Pluto; as if they were carved out of spoiled neon; as if they were vegetable visitors from the twenty-third century, beamed here to make us appreciate our old-fas.h.i.+oned beets; if it is true, then we could say that Alobar and Kudra were maraschino cherries lodged in the tubes of history's paunch.

On the other hand, octopus beaks, pointing to the birth of future fragrances, might be a more accurate and lyrical a.n.a.logy.

At any rate, Alobar and Kudra survived wars, robbers, fires, pillages, plagues (including the Black Death of 1347-1350) and the intolerances of the Church; survived freezing winters, famines, Gothic art, and uncomfortable furniture; survived, most importantly, the "natural" process of aging, which, according to Dr. Wiggs Dannyboy, is so unnaturally cruel that only man could have ordained it-neither nature nor G.o.d would stoop so low.

Should one be shallow enough to view existence as a system of rewards and punishments, one soon learns that we pay as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats, and the couple's victory over aging created as many problems for them as did witchhunts and feudal strife. Nowhere could they remain for more than a decade or two. In those rough times, people aged even faster than we do today, making it all the more noticeable when Kudra s and Alobar's gums remained a-bristle with teeth. They did their best to maintain a low profile, but, let's face it, they weren't the most inconspicuous pair to mosey down the medieval pike. For one thing, they were obviously frying with love and l.u.s.t for one another in an age when romance simply did not exist within the bounds of matrimony. Virtually all marriages in the Middle Ages were arranged between strangers, and the Church disallowed divorce. Therefore, romantic love was almost exclusively a function of adultery. It was for adulterers that troubadours sang their courtly ballads, it was for the attention of another fellow's wife that the jouster risked the lance. When Alobar and Kudra refused to partic.i.p.ate in the continental pastime (in their centuries together, Alobar was cuckolded only by Pan, and that was not precisely cuckoldry, that was . . . something else), it escalated the suspicions already aroused by her exotic coloration and his regal manner, by their funny way of breathing and their tendency to wash. So they were obliged to keep moving. A few years in Heidelberg, a few near Rome; green seasons in Flanders, dry seasons on Crete. Fortunately, they subscribed to no magazines. The post office would have gone nuts.

Early in the 1300s, attending the fair at Beaucaire in the south of France, they encountered a group of people whose proclivity for travel made Kudra and Alobar seem as though they were chained to a stump. These nomads rumbled from town to town, fair to fair, in brightly colored wagons. Variously called Logipciens, Bohemians, or Gypsies, they were ostensibly itinerant metalworkers, but music and magic were their true vocations. Although the Gypsies were new to Europe, Kudra had known them in India and could converse in their dialect. Moreover, her pigmentation was the same shade as theirs. Their chief invited her to join them. Reluctantly, he agreed to include Alobar.

For the next half-century (time flies when you're having fun), they lived as Gypsies, b.u.mping over the quasi-roads of the continent in a red and orange donkey cart, sleeping in a tent of woven fabrics kept precariously in place by stones, warming themselves with tezek, that charming fuel made of cow dung and straw. They indulged in some serious horseshoeing and harness making, but more frequently their band earned its living amusing, and sometimes fleecing, visitors to holy sites, festivals, and feirs. The Gypsies danced, they sang and strummed, they navigated a pea beneath a walnut sh.e.l.l so slickly you'd wager your last sou that it was beneath the one next door. When they shook their tambourines and sistrums, in voluptuous poses, feudal barons found them irresistible, but that made them all the more hateful in the eyes of the pious and grave, a reaction that was for Alobar a source of endless delight. Kudra chided him for it mildly, but he was rarely happier than when savoring the fear and disgust that welled up in proper Christians at the sight of their rattling, tinkling troupe.

The opinion that "all good things must come to an end" is a confession of fatalism that the immortalist hand of Alobar would never sign. Nonetheless, he realized his days as a Gypsy were numbered when he surprised several of the chiefs sons ransacking his and Kudra's belongings, searching for their presumed "elixir of youth." As a matter of feet, their tent and wagon had been broken into thrice before, but Alobar had written it off to routine Gypsy thievery and to the Gypsies' insistence on treating them as second-cla.s.s citizens. Claiming to be the direct descendants of the biblical Cain, the Gypsies considered themselves a race elite. It was obvious that their ethnocentricity would never allow complete acceptance of outsiders, no matter how compatible. They not only stole from Kudra and Alobar, but they also served them last at communal meals and required them to perform occasional menial ch.o.r.es. For example, on Sat.u.r.days Kudra was expected to clean the chiefs wagon and launder his many brilliant scarves.

It was while she was sweeping out the executive cart one day that she noticed that the chiefs wife's famous crystal ball had been left uncovered. For a while Kudra managed to ignore the naked sphere, but at last curiosity got the best of her and she peered into it, shyly at first, then so piercingly that the chiefs laundry could have been hung out to dry on her gaze. She saw nothing in the ball. There was nothing to see. It was, after all, a mere lump of polished gla.s.s. As a point of departure for the psyche, however, a crystal ball has merit, although a mandala, a seash.e.l.l, or a cigarette pack can be as effectively employed. There are apparently few limitations either of time or s.p.a.ce on where the psyche might journey, and only the customs inspector employed by our own inhibitions restricts what it might bring back when it reenters the home country of everyday consciousness. When Kudra shut her eyes to rest them after their intense probing of the crystal innards, a vivid scene unfolded in her mind. She saw Alobar and herself, bound with rope, in the process of being tortured by the Gypsies, who were demanding a map to the fountain of youth.

When she returned to their tent, Kudra told Alobar of her vision. "That settles it," he said. That night, when the moon had set, they stole away. As they disappeared into the woods, they glanced back to see shadowy figures advancing on their tent.

In the excitement of their escape, Kudra had neglected to inform Alobar that she had consulted the crystal ball a second ime ere she left the chiefs wagon that Sat.u.r.day. A finely detailed scene had again flashed before her mind's eye as she rested after examining the crystal. This second vision seemed far less urgent, which is why she put it aside, but it was stranger, more difficult to interpret. In it, a tall black man, blacker by several shades than she, was beckoning to her, laughing all the while. The black man wore the oddest clothes she had ever seen, and the oddest item in his wardrobe was his cap. It turned out to be not a cap at all, but a swarm of bees.

Although finished with Gypsies, per se, Alobar and Kudra retained their vagabond life-style, working the European fair circuit on their own. Alongside booths overflowing with cotton, furs, metals, wine, tea, Venetian gla.s.s, meat, produce, and livestock, they sold or traded aromatics to a populace that was beginning to appreciate pretty fragrances, despite-or because of-the fact that it had yet to accept the concept of the bath. When business was poor, Kudra slipped into her Gypsy skirt and danced the dodole, Alobar accompanying her on tambourine. Less than approving of the leers his wife's dancing elicited from fairgoers of masculine gender, it nonetheless amused Alobar to meditate upon her real birthdate as she undulated those secretly ancient hips and loins; and, of course, it invariably elevated his mood when the priests came by to consign them to h.e.l.l for their detestable display.

Actually, the priests proved to be good customers after Kudra decided to start manufacturing combustible cones from the raw aromatics in which she customarily dealt. Influenced by the Byzantines, the Western Church had become increasingly fond of the ritualistic burning of incense, ostensibly as an evocation of the sweet oxygens of heaven, but more likely a way of combating the concentrated funk of sweaty congregations. It appeared as if incense might become a rage in the cathedrals of Paris, so Alobar was not overly surprised when Kudra announced one morning that she wished to settle in the French capital and open a permanent shop.

"A shop might be a smart idea;" agreed Alobar, "but when you say 'permanent, you mean, of course, permanent compared to our usual knocking about." They had been on the road for several centuries.

"No," said Kudra. "I mean permanent."

"I needn't remind you of the troubles in store should we hang around long enough to flaunt our perpetual freshness before the envious eyes of our steadily decaying fellow citizens. Ahem. We can realistically expect fifteen, maybe twenty years as Parisian incense merchants. But that will be a welcome change, a nice recess, and when the time comes, we shall move on."

"I am not moving on. I am finished with moving on. I want a shop, I want a home, and I want to stay there."

"Stay," repeated Alobar. "How long, exactly, do you intend to stay?"

"As long as ... I don't know. As long as it d.a.m.n well pleases me."

"Well, it better not please you beyond fifteen years or so, because when it dawns on the neighbors that we aren't aging-"

"But maybe I will age."

"What?"'

Kudra gave him a look that you could spread on a bun. Her words, however, p.r.i.c.ked him like the knife that does the spreading. "We are capable of aging, if we want to. We stopped the aging process and we can start it again. Haven't we fallen into a rut, being the same age for over five-or is it six-hundred years? 1 don't know about you, but I am a little fed up with it. I really wouldn't mind aging again."

Alobar couldn't believe how calmly, serenely even, she had spoken the unspeakable. Icy fingers tickled the harpsichord keys of his vertebrae. "You-you don't know what you're saying. Here, let me pour you some tea. You aren't awake yet, that's your problem."

"I am awake, darling. I have been awake most of the night. And the night before. I have thought about this through more sleepless nights than you could shake a tambourine at. And I am ready, willing, and actually eager to settle down in one place like normal people, and grow older like normal people. I am."

Alobar held back, refusing to speak until his vocal cords could be trusted not to quiver. Alas, he waited too long, overshot the mark, and heard his voice go well beyond evenness into petrification. The finest stone carver in France would have been proud to chisel his mark on any word in the following sentence: "Aging seems a high price to pay for normalcy."

"I do not care. I am willing to pay it. Besides, if I do not like getting older, I can always stop."

"Can you?" Simple little question chipped from solid basalt. "How do you know for sure?" Six words weighing in at a ton, not including punctuation. "We believe that we can start it and stop it at will, but the feet is, we have never tried. What if you cannot stop it, what if you just keep on growing older until, until ..." The voice had become so rigid that it cracked. That's how molecules behave today, and that's how they behaved back then, though in those days n.o.body blamed molecules for brittleness any more than they credited them for plasticity.

"Until what? Until I die? First of all, Alobar, neither you nor I is convinced that aging has to automatically lead to death. We have talked about that many times. Where is the courage of your convictions? It is not aging that leads to death, it is the belief that aging leads to death that leads to death. Do I speak rightly or wrongly?"

"You are probably right," squeaked Alobar, in his newly broken voice. "We do not know for certain."

"There is only one way to find out."

"But what if-"

"What if I die? Then, by s.h.i.+va, I die! Dying does not strike me as such a horrible fate anymore."

"I cannot believe you are saying this. You are reverting. You are regressing. You are-"

"I am facing the truth," Kudra interrupted, "and the truth is, there is nothing so almighty wonderful about this long life of ours." He recoiled as if she'd spit on him. She took his hand, kissing each spear-nicked finger in turn. "Darling," she said, "look at us. We are a couple of Gypsies, running from the dogs of authority. From town to town we go, fair to fair, sleeping in fields, eating those awful mangel-wurzels, selling pretty smells to hypocrites, and hardons to yeomen. Where is the value in that? What is the purpose of-"

"We are alive!" shouted Alobar. "And there-"

"And there is not another couple like us on this whole round planet. Well, so what? Our uniqueness doesn't make the ground softer or give the beets flavor. It doesn't improve feudal conditions or reduce violence or contribute to the welfare of the people. What important thing have we accomplished in all these past six hundred years?"

"We have beaten death," said Alobar, and his tone was as firm and even as it had ever been. More than that, it was proud. "We have beaten death. What everyone who has ever been born since the beginning of time has longed to do, we have done. What could be greater than that?"

"To what end have we beaten death? We can't teach others how to beat it, or else the Church would come down on us and wipe us out, and those we taught in the bargain. We can't sell this grand knowledge, for the very same reasons. We are forced to hide our supreme accomplishment as if it were a shameful crime. Where is the glory in that? Our lives are selfish and covert and none too easy. Methinks that you had a greater life back when you were mortal. You were a king then, Alobar, a leader of men, and every day, every hour, was charged with significance."

"And threatened by the Reaper. Charged, but threatened, because to the Reaper a king is no less fodder than a slave. In my clan, a king was actually an easier harvest."

"Threatened by death you may have been, but look what a life it was that was threatened! And look at it now, my ragged Gypsy-"

"We are about to move to Paris!"

"Yes. I to ply the incense maker's trade, you, n.o.ble warrior, to be my a.s.sistant."

She paused. Together, they watched the sun break through the morning fog, coming back to the deserted fairgrounds like a dandy returning to the boulevard, prepared, when the moment was right, to strut some stuff. With a clover stem, Kudra traced the pathway of Alobar's veins, through which such endless tides of blood had run; she kissed the forehead that had been greeted by so many rising suns.

"For you," she said, "longevity for longevity's sake is enough.

That is no longer satisfactory to me. Is there a position in the Kama Sutra that we have not mastered, a recipe for mangel-wurzel that our cook pot hasn't memorized? Oh, darling, I know that life is good, and that it still holds surprises for me, but maybe death is good, too; certainly it offers some surprise. Relax, now, don't get upset. My destination is an incense shop, not a tomb. But if I must age to have a happier life, then I will. And should aging lead to death, then I shall explore the planet of death awhile. Certainly I have been on the terrestrial voyage a nice long while. Long enough, frankly, that despite my love for you I do grow bored."

"I will wager that death be a million times more boring than life."

"If so, I shall come back to life. If we are truly immortal, we ought to be able to travel back and forth between both sides."

"Ha!" scoffed Alobar. "Yes, we ought to be able to. We ought to, all right, and if we had remained in the caves long enough, we probably could. We might have been able to dematerialize and rematerialize at will. But we cannot. At least, there is no hard, evidence that we can. You talk about facing truth. The truth is, Kudra, we hardly know what we are doing. There is so much more to this immortality business, so much more we might have learned from the Bandaloop, but, no, you had to go and see the world, you could not wait, so here we are half-educated and half-a.s.sed, conducting the greatest experiment in human annals and not fully qualified to conduct it correctly, just groping in the dark like mice in a bin. Why, oh why, did I let you talk me into leaving the caves before we had all the answers? Well, I can tell you one thing, you are not going to talk me into aging. If you want to risk it, go ahead, but you are stupid."

Kudra released his hand. "I may be stupid," she said, "but I am not a coward."

And the sun pulled a cloud down over its ears. And the wind set to whistling a distracting tune. And crows that had been breakfasting on fairgrounds crumbs glanced at some clock or other and realized that they were late for work. And the cookfire flames retreated into the soundproof cellar of ashes. And the tea in the teapot nearly broke its neck in its haste to evaporate.

There's an old axiom: "A couple's first quarrel is Cupid's laxative."

The next worst thing to a quarrel is a compromise. They made one at once.

Since Alobar had been nearly forty chronological years older than Kudra from the start, it was agreed that Kudra could permit herself to age for four decades, more or less, stopping when she had "caught up" with her mate. If she could stop, that is. As for Alobar, he would cross his bridges as he came to them.

They did move to Paris, they did open an incense shop. It was located on the rue Quelle Blague, next door to a brewery and perfumery, across the street from a monastery and cathedral. It did all right. Their marriage (it is fair to call it a marriage, though no formal ceremony ever transpired) did all right, too, which is to say the champagne was for from flat, although there were fewer bubbles per sip than there had been before the arguing started. They argued always about the same thing. It's best that way. If lovers have to argue, they might as well specialize. And the arguments usually concluded with Alobar's complaint that they had left the academy of the Bandaloop before they had completed their course.

(Oddly enough, he refrained from pressuring her to return to the caves for additional study, perhaps because he was of the opinion that after so long a time there were no vibrations left to "study." If Fosco of Samye could be believed, the Bandaloop had left the caves for good. Dance craze? Argen-what?) If they ever reached a point where they seriously considered separation, it would have been in the cruel winter of 1664, a season that no amount of firewood nor any variation on the Kama Sutra could quite warm. Yet right in the middle of the s.h.i.+vers and the shouts, something came along to bind them, a slapdash patch job by the mason of common cause.

Darkness arrived so abruptly that day it was as if a Gypsy had swept Paris under a walnut sh.e.l.l, good luck, ye gamblers, on guessing which one. By four o'clock, the street lamps were lit. Despite being called to work early, the lamps flickered dutifully, as though lighting a path for the snow. The snow would be along any minute. The clouds promised it and the lamps believed them. Alobar believed them, too. He also believed that there would be no more customers through the door that day, so he bolted it against thieves (a Gypsy who would steal daylight would surely steal incense) and the gales of January. Rejoined Kudra in the backroom.

Paying him little heed when he entered, Kudra remained bent over a large candle, heating some newly purchased storax resin in a metal cup. "It's cold in here," Alobar said. "Umm," she answered, without looking up. As it relaxed its grip on itself, the wad of storax caused the room to smell like the center of a chocolate cream. Sometimes when a stressful person relaxes, he or she will, in a similar fas.h.i.+on, perfume the air 'round about them. Alobar sat down and tried it.

The candle glow that held Kudra's head like an object in a showcase allowed Alobar to count five silver hairs in her mane. He hadn't noticed them until then. It was all he could do to keep from crying out. He wondered if she knew.

His thoughts flashed back to the afternoon that he met her, eight years old and sobbing, fleeing the funeral pyre. He thought of her in the Himalayas, dressed as a boy; the glossy black explosion her tresses had made when they tumbled from the turban. Then he thought of that fateful day when the concubines' mirror had shown him his own pale intruder. Such a chain of events that little fellow had set off!

So still for so long was Alobar that when he finally spoke, Kudra flinched. She must have forgotten he was there. The corona of candlelight and the vanilla halo of storax ringed her concentrically, as if she were twice blessed, a double madonna.

"Kudra," he said, "I have a splendid idea."

"And what splendid idea is that?" she asked, her head still bowed to the task.

"Let's sail to the New World."

"The New World?"

"Yes, the New World, the land they stumbled upon when they finally caught on that the Earth is round, as I, ahem, was saying all along."

"Only fortune hunters and Christian fanatics go to the New World. We are neither of those."

"Fortune hunters, Christian fanatics, and misfits. That last category describes us rather accurately."

"You may be a misfit, Alobar. I am not. Not any longer, at any rate."

He leaped to his feet and with two swift yanks reduced her silver quintet to a trio. Dropping the strands into the resin cup in front of her, he said, "In the New World, you wouldn't have to sacrifice your beautiful black hair."

Kudra stared at the hairs in the cup. She may have denied that there were tears in her eyes, but the reflection of candlelight upon tearwater proved otherwise.

"See those," said Alobar. "Those are worms from the rot of the grave."

She squeezed her eyes shut. A single teardrop broke through the barricades and made a run for it, only to lose its footing and topple into the cup with the resin and the hairs. Was that a finer place than it had been?

Alobar lay his hands on her shoulders and ma.s.saged them gently. "You don't have to go through this," he said softly. "We can sail to the New World."