She said, “My man’s gone that way. Gone to do business with another man. Buy something, or steal it, the bastard. He won’t be back till tomorrow. If he comes back then. If he isn’t lying blind drunk in some inn somewhere with some woman somewhere. If he isn’t too drunk to have a woman. I’m sorry.”
The dog had stopped growling and lay down with its sad muzzle on its thin paws. The woman walked away to the fire and used a long skewer to pick a meaty bone out of a pot which sizzled there. The dog rose, salivating pathetically as the woman waved the bone to cool it. Presently she placed the bone on the ground before the dog, and as it began to gnaw its meal, she caressed it with a painful tenderness.
“Poor thing,” she said to Dro, speaking of the dog as if about a child. “My man beats him, starves him. He’d do better on his own in the woods. He’d turn into a wolf and be happy. I tell him, the dog, I promise him, one night I’ll let him go, untie him and send him off. Then I’ll get the beating. But I will, one night. Won’t I, dog?” She glanced at Dro, who had stood there motionless all this while, watching her. “You’ll think I’m daft, I expect.”
“No.”
“You will. But you’re welcome to share the stew with me. I can’t feed the dog and not offer something to you.”
“You could.”
“I’d rather you didn’t go,” she said. “He just left me here, but I’d rather there was a man by. We came up from the south, do you see. This country’s new to me.” She straightened and looked at him. Her throat was delicate as if carved, the skin stretched taut, yet silken. Through it he could see her heart thudding.
“I’d like to stay, if you want me to,” he said.
She smiled, and said, “Yes, but that’s not an invitation, mind.” By which he knew it was.
He wondered stupidly if he in turn reminded her of some other, or if she were merely a slut, or simply lonely. Women were constantly attracted to him, and to the half-truth about celibacy and psychic power, and whether a ghost-killer would or not. Or did she not guess his calling.
They ate by the fire, and then she brought out a skin of beer, and they drank together. She began to comb her fingers through her hair until it became an electric crackling blizzard of golden smoke. She sang to the flames drowsily, her voice light and throbbing. She was making an intuitive magic, all of it for him. As Silky had done in the apple tree, sun in her hair, murmuring to birds or leaves... and when he spoke to her now, she gazed at him, unsurprised as Silky had been.
“Can I pay you for the meal?”
“I don’t think so,” she said.
They spoke about the season for a while, and about the showman’s trade her husband intermittently practiced. She asked Dro nothing, not even his name. He did not ask hers either. He could not have called her by it. Just as he could never have brought himself to call her “Silky.” The whole episode was dreamlike, transient.
The dog slept on its side, turned also to gold by the firelight, then to ruby as the flames sank low.
When they each leaned to cast a branch on the fire, their bodies finally touched. The act of sex had become so inevitable and so desired between them that he seemed to have had her before, many times. Everything was familiar, without hesitation, awkwardness or apology. She was lovely, even what the years had softly faded, or etched with their gold, was lovely, in her.
Afterwards, they lay wrapped together by the fire. The wood breathed. Their own breathing lulled both of them asleep, and later woke them again.
About an hour before sunrise, the whining of the dog roused Parl Dro.