Let there be peace for us and life for us . . .
We all waited with Elián. The pyre consumed both the body and itself. The press itself was the last thing to catch. The iron-hard oak of the footing beams blackened and cracked with heat, and the cracks began to glow. Little flames fitted themselves like spider legs around the pegs of the cogwheels. Smoke ribboned up the grooves of the great wooden screws. The central fire roared. I caught a glimpse of bones, glowing white. My throat grew as stiff as a flute, watching this, and I could hear the notes of my breathing.
And meanwhile Elián staggered through the kaddish over and over, whispering praise for that which is beyond all praise.
Help me, I thought, to whatever might have bent close to hear those words. I can do this. I cannot do this. Help me do this.
Time passed. The bone glow went out. Wilma’s white wrappings were long gone. She was black, an ember among the embers, the shell of a shape.
Finally one of the beams gave a scranch then a crack, and fell sideways into the pyre. Then the whole press groaned and gave way. Embers and spent coals shot outward. The fire, which had been dying down, sprang up again for a moment. When the moment was gone, the body of Wilma Armenteros was gone too.
The fire sank to coals. I could feel the night pass in the spin of the Earth. Hours, and hours. Dawn sidled near; the sky lightened over the loop of the river. And finally, finally, Elián turned. I took his hand, and Xie took mine, and Atta and Thandi and Han put their arms around each other, and we went toward the Precepture together. The building had a dark solidity against the luminous sky.
And deep in the shadows, Talis was still sitting. He was wrapped in his duster, almost unseen against the dewy stones. He had sat there, unnoticed, watching, all night. I was exhausted, and thought he must be too: I knew he could sleep, and guessed that he needed to, as much as any bodied thing did. That he hadn’t—the whole business had the look of a vigil.
Peace for us and life for us . . .
Let He who makes peace in the heavens . . .
Talis smiled up at me, soft-eyed. In the infrared overlay, I could see the deep chill on him. “Don’t forget,” he said. “Cut your hair.”
My hair.
Back in our cell, I asked Da-Xia to cut it. I explained why—Lu-Lien, who’d wiggled, the bolts against the skull. Xie’s face grew very still. “Greta.”
“Maybe it will kill me,” I said. I took her hand. “But . . . maybe it will not.” It was perhaps time to learn to hope. I’d taken the scissors, small and sharp, from the Abbot’s bookbinding kit. I held them out. “I can’t do this— Xie, I can’t do this without you.”
Help me, I thought again. Please help me.
Xie took refuge in deadpan. “There are those who believe that Talis was a hairdresser in his first life.”
That was so wildly unlikely that it almost cracked the moment. But I held to it. “Da-Xia. That’s not what I mean.”
And she touched my face, the way she had when I’d bolted from the threat of torture, in that moment just before I’d kissed her. “I know,” she said. She took the scissors from me.
The cutting of my hair took a long time. The scissors were small. My hair was heavy. Xie’s hands were careful, working their way close to my scalp, lifting a lock at a time. Odd that hair is called “locks.” This was an unlocking: one piece at a time, I was growing opener and looser, my breath coming deeper, warmer. Xie walked around me slowly in her work, her clothing brushing mine, her waist by my shoulder, her breasts by my ear. My skin came alive to hers, the way a drum skin shivers to the beat of another drum. Neither of us spoke.
It was full light, dappling down through the folded cranes, by the time Da-Xia stepped back from me. She looked me over. Her voice came roughened: we’d been silent all morning. “There. There you are.”
I lifted my hands to touch the lightness, the unfamiliar texture of the shorn ends, which were prickly, but soft, too, as if she’d turned me into velvet. “I look like a boy,” I said, wondering—feeling that transformed.
Da-Xia made a husky, amazed noise. “You do not.”
With my new vision I could see by heat how her blood moved—to her throat, her lips, her breasts. It was arousal. She did not hide it—she never had—but she did not speak of it either. And for how many years had I read Greek, and missed this? “Xie . . . ,” I said. I wished I knew how to shut off the implanted sensors. I wanted to see her through my own eyes. I wanted to see her. All of her.