I took him by surprise. The punch connected with a thick smack and he went over sideways onto the terrace. But he rolled with it, and by the time I scrambled to my feet—strange light-headed lucidity almost like joy lifting me, finally, finally—he was up again and coming at me, low, hands out and taut like a street fighter. He feinted to one side and then the other, grinning when I leaped to follow, beckoning me on.
I charged at him. He ducked my wild swing, caught me by the arm on my way past, swung me around and let me go. I flailed backwards across the terrace and slammed up against the wall of the house. He came after me, pulled back a fist easy as that and jabbed me in the nose.
Something burst; for a moment I was blind, blood poured down into my mouth. I inhaled it, choked, and then he was on me. He grabbed me in a headlock and started punching me in the ribs.
I stamped down on his instep and heard his bark of pain. In the second he was off balance I got my foot up against the wall behind me and shoved myself off it.
The pair of us shot staggering across the terrace, still clasped together. We went down the steps to the garden tangling in each other’s feet, overbalancing, and fell full length. Before I could get my bearings he was on top of me and shoving my face down into the dirt.
He was bigger and ten times stronger than me. Earth pressed on my eyelids, earth filled my mouth. I couldn’t breathe.
I almost went with it. I almost relaxed all my aching muscles and let him guide me down, among last year’s leaves and small winter-dreaming creatures, between long-lost treasures and tiny curled bones, into the dark earth. But the wild heat of him pressing against me, his breath harsh in my ear: that night in my apartment surged up inside me and all I could think was, with a roaring fury that ignited every cell in my body, Not this time.
I got my knees under me, heaved myself up and over onto my back, and spat a burst of blood and dirt into his face. He jerked backwards and I got a foot in his stomach, shoved him off me, scrabbled away and up. He twisted to his feet like a cat and came charging at me, but I dug my heels into the ground and somehow this time I stayed standing. I grabbed hold of him and clung on.
We lurched in circles in the near-darkness like some grotesque monster, many-limbed and grunting, fumbling blind. There was a nightmare slowness to it all, feet sinking and sticking in mud, hands clawing at hair and cloth and skin. My breath was bubbling and rasping; his was harsh as an animal’s, I felt his teeth press against my cheek, and even through the blood clogging my nose I would have sworn I smelled his wild pine scent. He was trying to knee me in the balls and I was bashing uselessly at the back of his head but neither of us could get enough distance, or enough purchase on the shifting ground, for a proper blow.
He changed grip, grabbed me by the thigh and lifted me right off my feet. But I had an elbow around his neck, and when he slammed me down on my back I took him with me. In the same second that the wind was knocked out of me I heard his skull hit a rock, right beside my ear, with a terrible squelchy crack.
I lay still, fighting for breath. He felt like a sack of wet cement holding me down. High above me misshapen gray birds flickered against the black sky and I thought they were the last thing I would ever see, but at last I managed to gasp in a great whoosh of air. I flailed at him, scrabbling and shoving, till I heaved him off me and dragged myself onto my knees.
Slowly, inch by inch, he pulled himself up onto his hands and knees and turned his head to look at me. His eyes were huge and solid black, alien, and there was blood running down his face from a big gash in his forehead, spreading rivers of it, dark and glossy in the dim blue-white light. He made a deep snarling noise, lip lifting, and clamped one hand around my wrist.
I punched him in the face. His hand fell away from my wrist and I went at him with both fists, swinging with all my weight behind it, hammering at his head, grabbing his hair to slam his face into the ground. I didn’t even feel my knuckles splitting; I could smash through living rock, I was strong as a god and inexhaustible. He was still making the snarling noise and I was going to make it stop, he was never going to grab me again, he was never going to do anything to me again, never, never— Through the ferocious drumming of my heartbeat and the huge roaring silence of the garden I heard Susanna’s voice: Now imagine you did it. The holy rapture of it, the painless lightning running in my bones. Rising on the far side of that river into a world that was finally mine again.
In the end, little by little, the lightning drained out of me and I stopped. My arms were weak as cloth, they fell to my sides like they belonged to someone else, and I was breathing in great snuffling gulps. I knelt there in the dirt, swaying a little back and forth.
He was huddled facedown, forearms wrapped over his head. I couldn’t remember why we had been fighting. I had lost hold of any idea who he was, or who I was. All I knew was the vast cold cobwebbed darkness and us, two tiny sparks of warmth, side by side.
Birch seeds drifting down, hanging pale in the air, landing silently on his dark back. He was making a strange snoring noise. After a while he toppled, very slowly, onto his side.
I lifted one hand, heavy as granite, and put it on his shoulder. One of his legs twitched rhythmically. I thought I should lie down across him, so that the birch seeds wouldn’t cover him like snow, but I didn’t have the strength to do it. My nose was throbbing, dripping big dark spots of blood onto my jeans.
Snarled black branches, scrabble of something on the roof. I had only the foggiest idea where I was; the place seemed familiar but only barely, something from a dream or a story. It was terribly cold.
After a while the twitching stopped. Then so did the snoring noise, and I was alone in the garden.
I knelt there with my hand on his shoulder until I couldn’t stay kneeling any longer. Then I eased myself painfully down to the earth and curled up with my back against his. I was shivering in hard spasms, teeth clacking together painfully, but his back was warm and solid and somehow in the end I fell asleep.
* * *
?Thin gray light woke me. I was curled on my side, knees pulled up to my belly and fists tucked into my chest, like some Iron Age burial. My mouth tasted of earth and one of my eyes was stuck shut somehow. I was stiff and sore from head to toe, damp all over, and so cold I couldn’t feel my face.
I managed to inch one hand up towards my eye, but the sight of it startled me: it was covered in dried blood, blood grained into every crease, knuckles ragged and swollen. When I spat on my fingers and rubbed at my eye, they came back smeared with brighter red. Something bad had happened.
The earth under me was soft, but my back was up against something hard and very cold and I wanted to get away from it. It took forever, every movement feeling like it ripped muscles or snapped joints, before I made it to sitting. The effort and the pain left me shaky, with an ugly red pounding behind my eyeballs. I spat dirt and blood, wiped my mouth on my sleeve.
The garden was monochrome and dormant under a veil of dew. Nothing moved, not a leaf twitching, not a bird hopping or an insect scuttling. The sky was a null gray that made it invisible. Drifts of birch seeds had settled in the little valleys in the earth.
They brought something back to me. Someone, another person, here with me— I turned around and there he was.
Birch seeds dotting the outflung wing of his dark coat, dew silvering his hair. His head was twisted sideways, face buried in the crook of his elbow, other arm stretched above his head. His hand looked the same way as mine, the blood and the knuckles. I tried to lift his elbow away from his face so I could check if he was breathing, but it wouldn’t move; every muscle and joint was rigid, as if he was turning to stone from the inside out. His hand was even colder than mine.