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Life among academics had taught me that a well-expressed opinion is usually better than a badly expressed fact, so far as professional advancement goes.
THE REST OF the journey passed uneventfully, if you consider it uneventful to ride fifteen miles on horseback over rough country at night, without benefit of roads, in company with kilted men armed to the teeth, and sharing a pony with a wounded man.
I now realized that I did recall some things about the actual trip through the stone. Very minor things. I remembered a sensation of physical struggle, as though I were caught in a current of some kind. Yes, I had deliberately fought against it, whatever it was. There were images in the current, too, I thought. Not pictures, exactly, more like incomplete thoughts. Some were terrifying and I had fought away from them as I … well, as I ‘passed’. Had I fought towards others? I had some consciousness of fighting towards a surface of some kind. Had I actually chosen to come to this particular time
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People are gregarious by necessity. Since the days of the first cave dwellers, humans – weak and helpless save for cunning – have survived by joining together in groups; knowing, as so many other edible creatures have found, that there is protection in numbers. And that knowledge, bred in the bone, is what lies behind mob rule. Because to step outside the group, let alone to stand against it, was for uncounted thousands of years death to the creature who dared it.
I looked at the port-wine stain on my grey serge skirt and vanity won out. If I were in fact to be married, I didn’t want to do it looking like the village drudge.
“Ye are Blood of my Blood, and Bone of my Bone. I give ye my Body, that we Two might be One. I give ye my Spirit, till our Life shall be Done.”’
But what I would ask of ye – when you do tell me something, let it be the truth. And I’ll promise the same. We have nothing now between us, save – respect, perhaps. And I think that respect has maybe room for secrets, but not for lies.
‘Does it ever stop? The wanting you?’ His hand came around to caress my breast. ‘Even when I’ve just left ye, I want you so much my chest feels tight and my fingers ache with wanting to touch ye again.’
The colours of living things begin to fade with the last breath, and the soft, springy skin and supple muscle rot within weeks. But the bones sometimes remain, faithful echoes of the shape, to bear some last faint witness to the glory of what was.
‘Then let amorous kisses dwell On our lips, begin and tell A Thousand, and a Hundred, score An Hundred, and a Thousand more.’
We had forgiven each other, but our words still hung in memory, not to be forgotten.
A man killed by a musket was just as dead as one killed by a mortar. It was just that the mortar killed impersonally, destroying dozens of men, while the musket was fired by one man who could see the eyes of the one he killed. That made it murder, it seemed to me, not war. How many men to make a war?
Still, when had the right to live as one wished ever been considered trivial? Was a struggle to choose one’s own destiny less worthwhile than the necessity to stop a great evil?
One ring for each hand, one silver, one gold. And the thin metal suddenly heavy as the bonds of matrimony, as though the rings were tiny shackles, fastening me spread-eagled to the bed, stretched for ever between two poles, held in bondage like Prometheus on his lonely rock, divided love the vulture that tore at my heart.
‘Because I wanted you.’ He turned from the window to face me. ‘More than I ever wanted anything in my life,’ he added softly.
‘As though, knowing that everything is possible, suddenly nothing is necessary.’
if there were all the time in the world, then the happenings of a given moment became less important.
For where all love is, the speaking is unnecessary. It is all. It is undying. And it is enough.
