He sat up, slowly. He winced, and touched his side. Then he looked puzzled: there was a beading of wet blood there, but there was no wound beneath it.
He reached out a hand, and she put her ajnj around him and helped him to his feet. He looked across the meadow as if he was trying to remember the names of the things he was looking at: the flowers in the long grass, the ruins of the farmhouse, the haze of green buds that fogged the branches of the huge silver tree.
“Do you remember?” she asked. “Do you remember what you learned?”
“I lost my name, and I lost my heart. And you brought me back.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “They are going to fight, soon. The old gods and the new ones.”
“You want me to fight for you? You wasted your time.”
“I brought you back because that was what I had to do,” she said. “What you do now is whatever you have to do. Your call. I did my part.”
Suddenly, she became aware of his nakedness, and she blushed a burning scarlet flush, and she looked down and away.
In the rain and the cloud, shadows moved up the side of the mountain, up to the rock pathways. ‘
White foxes padded up the hill in company with red-haired men in green jackets. There was a bull-headed minotaur walking beside an iron-fingered dactyl. A pig, a monkey and a sharp-toothed ghoul clambered up the hillside in company with a blue-skinned man holding a flaming bow, a bear with flowers twined into its fur, and a man in golden chain mail holding his sword of eyes.
Beautiful Antinous, who was the lover of Hadrian, walked up the hillside at the head of a company of leather queens, their arms and chests steroid-sculpted into perfect shapes.
A gray-skinned man, his one cyclopean eye a huge cabo-chon emerald, walked stiffly up the hill, ahead of several squat and swarthy men, their impassive faces as regular as Aztec carvings: they knew the secrets that the jungles had swallowed.
A sniper at the top of the hill took careful aim at a white fox, and fired. There was an explosion, and a puff of cordite, gunpowder scent on the wet air. The corpse was a young Japanese woman with her stomach blown away, and her face all bloody. Slowly, the corpse began to fade.
The people continued up the hill, on two legs, on four legs, on no legs at all.
The drive through the Tennessee mountain country had been startlingly beautiful whenever the storm had eased, and nerve-wracking whenever the rain had pelted down. Town and Laura had talked and talked and talked the whole way. He was so glad he had met her. It was like meeting an old friend, a really good old friend you’d simply never met before. They talked history and movies and music, and she turned out to be the only person, the only other person he had ever met who had seen a foreign film (Mr. Town was sure it was Spanish, while Laura was just as certain it was Polish) from the sixties called The Manuscript Found in Saragassa, a film he had been starting to believe he had hallucinated.
When Laura pointed out the first SEE ROCK CITY barn to him he chuckled and admitted that that was where he was headed. She said that was so cool. She always wanted to visit those kinds of places, but she never made the time, and always regretted it later. That was why she was on the road right now. She was having an adventure.
She was a travel agent, she told him. Separated from her husband. She admitted that she didn’t think they could ever get back together, and said it was her fault.
“I can’t believe that.”
She sighed. “It’s true, Mack. I’m just not the woman he married anymore.”
Well, he told her, people change, and before ,he could think he was telling her everything he could tell—her about his life, he was even telling her about Woody and Stoner, how the three of them were the three musketeers, and the two of them were killed, you think you’d get hardened to that kind of thing in government work, but ydy never did.
And she reached out one hand—it was cold enough that he turned up the car’s heating—and squeezed his hand tightly in hers.
Lunchtime, they ate bad Japanese food while a thunderstorm lowered on Knoxville, and Town didn’t care that the food was late, that the miso soup was cold, or that the sushi was warm.
He loved the fact that she was out, with him, having an adventure.
“Well,” confided Laura, “I hated the idea of getting stale. I was just rotting away where I was. So I set off without my car and without my credit cards. I’m just relying on the kindness of strangers.”
“Aren’t you scared?” he asked. “I mean, you could be stranded, you could be mugged, you could starve.”
She shook her head. Then she said, with a hesitant smile, “I met you, didn’t I?” and he couldn’t find anything to say.
When the meal was over they ran through the storm to his car holding Japanese-language newspapers to cover their heads, and they laughed as they ran, like schoolchil-dren in the rain.
“How far can I take you?” he asked, when they made it back into the car.