Larun

Hel was awake at dawn and put in two hours of work on the garden before he took breakfast with Hana in the tatami ’d room overlooking the newly raked sea gravel that flowed down to the edge of the stream; “In time, Hana, this will be an acceptable garden. I hope you are here to enjoy it with me.”

“I have been giving that matter consideration, Nikko. The idea is not without its attractions. You were very thorough last night.”

“I was working out some stresses. That’s an advantage.”

“If I were selfish, I would hope for such stresses always.”

He chuckled. “Oh, will you telephone down to the village and arrange for the next flight back to the United States for Miss Stern? It will be Pau to Paris, Paris to New York, New York to Chicago.”

“She is leaving us then?”

“Not just yet. I don’t want her in the open. But the reservations will be stored in the airline’s computer bank, and will be immediately available to Fat Boy. It will throw them off the track.”

“And who is ‘Fat Boy’?”

“A computer. The final enemy. It arms stupid men with information.”

“You sound bitter this morning.”

“I am. Even self-pitying.”

“I had avoided that phrase, but it is the right one. And it’s not becoming in a man like you.”

“I know.” He smiled. “No one in the world would dare correct me like that, Hana. You’re a treasure.”

“It’s my role to be a treasure.”

“True. By the way, where is Le Cagot? I haven’t heard him thundering about.”

“He went off an hour ago with Miss Stern. He’s going to show her some of the deserted villages. I must say she seemed to be in good spirits.”

“The shallow recover quickly. You can’t bruise a pillow. When will they be back?”

“By lunch surely. I promised Begigot. You said you were taking Hannah to the lodge. When will you be leaving?”

“After twilight. I’m being watched.”

“You intend to spend the night there with her?”

“Hm-m. I suppose so. I wouldn’t want to come back down those roads in the dark.”

“I know you don’t like Hannah, but—”

“I don’t like her type, thrill-seeking middle-class muffins tickling themselves with the thrill of terror and revolution. Her existence has already cost me a great deal.”

“Do you intend to punish her while you’re up there?”

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

“Don’t be harsh. She’s a good child.”

“She is twenty-four years old. She has no right to be a child at that age. And she is not good. At best, she is ‘cute.’”

Hel knew what Hana meant by “punishing” the girl. He had occasionally avenged himself on young women who had annoyed him by making love to them, using his tactical skills and exotic training to create an experience the woman could never approach again and would seek in vain through affairs and marriages for the rest of her life.

Hana felt no jealousy concerning Hannah; that would have been ridiculous. During the two years they had lived together, both she and Hel had been free to go off on little trips and seek sexual diversion, exercises of physical curiosity that kept their appetites in tone and made more precious, by comparison, what they had. Hana once chided him lightheartedly, complaining that he had the better of the arrangement, for a trained man can accomplish decent levels of exercise with a willing amateur; while even the most gifted and experienced woman has difficulty, with the gauche instrument of a bumbling man, achieving much beyond lust-scratching. Still, she enjoyed the occasional well-muscled young man of Paris or the C

They drove along the twisting valley road, already dark with descending evening. The mountains rising sharply to their left were featureless geometric shapes, while those to their right were pink and amber in the horizontal rays of the setting sun. When they started from Etchebar, Hannah had been full of chatter about the robust good time she had had that afternoon with Le Cagot, wandering through deserted villages in the uplands, where she had noticed that each church clock had had its hands removed by the departing peasants. Le Cagot had explained that removing the hands of the clocks was considered necessary, because there would be no one in the churches to keep the clock weights screwed up, and one could not allow God’s clock to be inaccurate. The dour tone of primitive Basque Catholicism was expressed in a memento mori inscription on the tower of one deserted church; “Each hour wounds, the last kills.”

She was silent now, awed by the desolate beauty of the mountains rising so abruptly from the narrow valley that they seemed to overhang. Twice, Hel frowned and glanced over at her to find her eyes soft and a calm smile on her lips. He had been attracted and surprised by the alpha saturation in her aura, uncommon and unexpected in a person he had dismissed as a peppy twit. It was the timbre of calm and inner peace. He was going to question her about her decision concerning the Septembrists, when his attention was arrested by the approach of a car from behind driving with only wing lights. It flashed through his mind that Diamond or his French police lackeys might have learned that he was moving her to a safer place, and his hands gripped the wheel as he recalled the features of the road, deciding where he would force the car to pass him, then knock it into the ravine that raced along to their left. He had taken an exhaustive course in offensive driving, in result of which he always drove heavy cars, like his damned Volvo, for just such emergencies as this.

The road was never straight, constantly curving and twisting as it followed the course of the river ravine.

There was no place a safe pass could be made, but that, of course, would not deter a French driver, whose adolescent impulse to pass is legendary. The car behind continued to close the distance until it was only a meter from his back bumper. It flashed its headlights and sounded its horn, then whipped around while they were in a tight blind curve.

Hel relaxed and slowed to let the car pass. The horn and the lights told him that this was not an assassination attempt. No professional would telegraph his move like that. It was just another childish French driver.

He shook his head paternally as the underpowered Peugeot strained its motor in its laboring effort to pass, the young driver’s knuckles white on the steering wheel, his eyes bulging from their sockets in his effort to hold the road.

In his experience, Hel had found that only older North American drivers, with the long distances they habitually travel on good roads with competent machines, have become inured to the automobile as toy and as manhood metaphor. The French driver’s infantile recklessness often annoyed him, but not so much as did the typical Italian driver’s use of the automobile as an extension of his penis, or the British, driver’s use of it as a substitute.

For half an hour after leaving the valley road, they pulled up toward the mountains of Larun, over an unimproved road that writhed like a snake in its final agony. Some of the cutbacks were inside the turning radius of the Volvo, and negotiating them required two cuts and a bit of skidding close to the edge of loose gravel verges. They were never out of low gear, and they rose so steeply that they climbed out of the night that had pooled in the valley and into the zebra twilight of the high mountains: a blinding glare on the windshield when they turned toward the west, then blackness when outcroppings of rock blocked the setting sun.

Even this primitive road petered out, and they continued to ascend along faint ruts pressed into stubbly alpine meadows. The setting sun was now red and huge, its base flattened as it melted into the shimmering horizon. There were snow fields on the peaks above them glowing pink, then soon mauve, then purple against a black sky. The first stars glittered in the darkening east while the sky to the west was still hazy blue around the blood-red rim of the sinking sun.

Hel stopped the car by an outcropping of granite and set the hand brake. “We have to pack in from here. It’s another two and a half kilometers.”

“Up?” Hannah asked.

“Mostly up.”

“God, this lodge of yours is certainly out of the way.”

“That’s its role.” They got out and unloaded her pack from the car, experiencing the characteristic frustration of the Volvo’s diabolic rear latch. They had walked twenty meters before it occurred to him to perform his satisfying ritual. Rather than go back, he picked up a jagged rock and hurled it, a lucky shot that hit a rear window and made a large cobweb of crackled safety glass.

“What was that all about?” Hannah asked.

“Just a gesture. Man against the system. Let’s go. Stay close. I know the trail by feel.”

“How long will I be up here all alone?”

“Until I decide what to do with you.”

“Will you be staying tonight?”

“Yes.”

They walked on for a minute before she said, “I’m glad.”

He maintained a brisk pace because the light was draining fast. She was strong and young, and could stay with him, walking in silence, captured by the rapid but subtle color shifts of a mountain twilight. Again, as before down in the valley, he intercepted a surprising alpha tone in her aura—that rapid, midvolume signal that he associated with meditation and soul peace, and not at all with the characteristic signature timbres of young Westerners.

She stopped suddenly as they were crossing the last alpine meadow before the narrow ravine leading to the lodge.

“What is it?”

“Look. These flowers. I’ve never seen anything like them before.” She bent close to the wiry-stalked bells of dusty gold, just visible in the groundglow.

He nodded. “They’re unique to this meadow and to one other over there.” He gestured westward, toward the Table of the Three Kings, no longer visible in the gloom. “We’re just above twelve hundred here. Both here and over there, they grow only at twelve hundred, Locally they are called the Eye of Autumn, and most people have never seen them, because they bloom for only three or four days.”

“Beautiful. But it’s almost dark, and they’re still open.”

“They never close. Tradition has it that they live so short a time they dare not close.”

“That’s sad.”

He shrugged.

They sat opposite one another at a small table, finishing supper as they looked out through the plate-glass wall that gave onto the steep, narrow gully that was the only access to the lodge. Normally, Hel would be uneasy sitting in front of a glass wall, his form lighted by an oil lamp, while all was dark beyond. But he knew that the double plate glass was bulletproof.

The lodge was built of local stone and was simple of design: one large room with a cantilevered sleeping balcony. When first they arrived, he had acquainted Hannah with its features. The stream that flowed from a permanent snowfield above passed directly under the lodge, so one could get water through a trap door without going outside. The four-hundred-liter oil tank that fueled the stove and space heater was encased in the same stone as the lodge, so that incoming gunfire could not rupture it. There was a boiler-plate shutter that closed over the only door. The larder was cut into the face of granite that constituted one wall of the lodge, and contained thirty days’ supply of food. Set into the bulletproof plate-glass wall was one small pane that could be broken out to permit firing down into the tight ravine up which anyone approaching the lodge would have to pass. The walls of the ravine were smooth, and all covering boulders had been dislodged and rolled to the bottom.

“Lord, you could hold an army off forever!” she exclaimed.

“Not an army, and not forever; but it would be a costly position to take.” He took a semiautomatic rifle with telescopic sights from its rack and gave it to her. “Can you use this weapon?”

“Well… I suppose so.”

“I see. Well, the important thing is that you shoot if you see anyone approaching up the gully who is not carrying a xahako. It doesn’t matter if you hit him or not. The sound of your fire will carry in these mountains, and within half an hour help will be here.”

“What’s a… ah…?”

“A xahako is a wine skin like this one. The shepherds and smugglers in these hills all know you are here. They’re my friends. And they all carry xahakos. An outlander wouldn’t.”

“Am I really in all that much danger?”

“I don’t know.”

“But why would they want to kill me?”

“I’m not sure they do. But it’s a possibility. They might reason that my involvement would be over if you were dead, and there was nothing more I could do to repay my debt to your uncle. That would be stupid thinking, because if they killed you while you were in my protection, I would be forced to make a countergesture. But we are dealing here with merchant and military mentalities, and stupidity is their intellectual idiom. Now let’s see if you can manage everything.”

He rehearsed her in lighting the stove and space heater, in drawing water from the trap door over the stream, and in loading clips into the rifle. “By the way, remember to take one of these mineral tablets each day. The water running under the floor is snowmelt. It has no minerals, and in time it will leech the minerals out of your system.”

“God, how long will I be here?”

“I’m not sure. A week. Maybe two. Once those Septembrists have accomplished their hijack, the pressure will be off you.”

While he made supper from tinned foods in the larder, she had wandered about the lodge, touching things, thinking her own thoughts.

And now they sat across the round table by the glass wall, the candlelight reversing the shadows on her soft young face on which lines of character and experience had not yet developed. She had been silent throughout the meal, and she had drunk more wine than was her habit, and now her eyes were moist and vague. “I should tell you that you don’t have to worry about me anymore. I know what I’m going to do now. Early this morning, I decided to go home and try my best to forget all this anger and… ugliness. It’s not my kind of thing. More than that, I realize now that it’s all—I don’t know—all sort of unimportant.” She played absently with the candle flame, passing her finger through it just quickly enough to avoid being burned. “A strange thing happened to me last night. Weird. But wonderful. I’ve been feeling the effects of it all day long.”

Hel thought of the alpha timbres he had been intercepting.

“I couldn’t sleep. I got up and wandered around your house in the dark. Then I went to the garden. The air was cool and there was no breeze at all. I sat by the stream, and I could see the dark flicker of the water. I was staring at it, not thinking of anything in particular, then all at once I… it was a feeling I almost remember having when I was a child. All at once, all the pressures and confusions and fears were gone. They dissolved away, and I felt light. I felt like I was transported somewhere else, someplace I’ve never been to, but I know very well. It was sunny and still, and there was grass all around me; and I seemed to understand everything. Almost as though I was… I don’t know. Almost as though I was—ouch!” She snapped her hand back and sucked the singed finger.

He laughed and shook his head, and she laughed too.

“That was a stupid thing to do,” she said.

“True. I think you were going to say that it was almost as though you and the grass and the sun were all one being, parts of the same thing.”

She stared at him, her finger still to her lips. “How did you know that?”

“It’s an experience others have had. You said you remembered similar feelings when you were a child?”

“Well, not exactly remember. No, not remember at all. It’s just that when I was there, I had the feeling that this wasn’t new and strange. It was something I had done before—but I don’t actually remember doing it before. You know what I mean?”

“I think I do. You might have been participating in the atavistic—”

“I’ll tell you what! I’m sorry, I don’t mean to interrupt you. But I’ll tell you what it’s like. It’s like the very best high on pot or something, when you’re in a perfect mood and everything’s going just right. It’s not exactly like that, because you never get there with hooch, but it’s where you think you’re going. You know what I mean?”

“No.”

“You never use pot or anything?”

“No. I’ve never had to. My inner resources are intact.”

“Well. It was something like that.”

“I see. How’s your finger?”

“Oh, it’s fine. The point is that, after the feeling had passed last night, I found myself sitting there in your garden, rested and clear-minded. And I wasn’t confused any more. I knew there was no point in trying to punish the Septembrists. Violence doesn’t get you anywhere. It’s irrelevant. Now I think I just want to go home. Spend a little time getting in touch with myself. Then maybe—I don’t know. See what’s happening around me, maybe. Deal with that.” She poured herself out another glass of wine and drank it down, then she put her hand on Hel’s arm. “I guess I’ve been a lot of trouble to you.”

“I believe the American idiom is ‘a pain in the ass.’”

“I wish there were some way I could make it up to you.”

He smiled at her obliquity.

She poured another glass of wine and said, “Do you think Hana minds your being here?”

“Why should she?”

“Well, I mean… do you think she minds our spending the night together?”

“What does that phrase signify to you?”

“What? Well… we’ll be sleeping together.”

“Sleeping together?”

“In the same place, I mean. You know what I mean.”

He regarded her without speaking. Her experience of mystic transport, even if it was a unique event prompted by an overload of tension and desperation, rather than the function of a spirit in balance and peace, gave her a worthiness in his eyes. But this new acceptance was not free from a certain envy, that this vague-minded muffin should be able to achieve the state that he had lost years ago, probably forever. He recognized the envy to be adolescent and small on his part, but this recognition was not sufficient to banish the feeling.

She had been frowning into the candle flame, trying to sort out her emotions. “I should tell you something.”

“Should you?”

“I want to be honest with you.”

“Don’t bother.”

“No, I want to be. Even before I met you, I used to think about you… daydream, sort of. All the stories my uncle used to tell about you. I was really surprised at how young you are—how young you appear, that is. And I suppose if I analyzed my feelings, there’s a sort of father projection. Here you are, the great myth in the flesh. I was scared and confused, and you protected me. I can see all the psychological impulses that would draw me toward you, can’t you?”

“Have you considered the possibility that you’re a randy young woman with a healthy and uncomplicated desire to climax? Or do you find that psychologically unsubtle?”

She looked at him and nodded. “You certainly know how to put a person down, don’t you? You don’t leave a person much to cover herself with.”

“That’s true. And perhaps it’s uncivil of me. I’m sorry. Here is what I think is going on with you. You’re alone, lonely, confused. You want to be cuddled and comforted. You don’t know how to ask for that, because you’re a product of the Western culture; so you negotiate for it, bartering sex for cuddling. It’s not an uncommon negotiation for the Western woman to engage in. After all, she’s limited to negotiating with the Western male, whose concept of social exchange is brittle and limited, and who demands earnest money in the form of sex, because that’s the only part of the bargain he is comfortable with. Miss Stern, you may sleep with me tonight if you wish. I’ll hold you and comfort you, if that’s what you want.”

Both gratitude and too much wine moistened her eyes. “I would like that, yes.”

But the animal lurking within is seldom tethered by good intentions. When he awoke to her attentions and felt emanating from her the alpha/theta syncopation that attends sexual excitation, his response was not solely dictated by a desire to shield her from rejection.

She was exceptionally ripe and easy, all of her nerves close to the surface and desperately sensitive. Because she was young, there was a bit of difficulty keeping her lubricated, but beyond that mechanical nuisance he could hold her in climax without much effort.

Her eyes rolled back again and she pleaded, “No… please… I can’t again! I’ll die if I do again!” But her involuntary contractions rushed closer and closer together, and she was gasping in her fourth orgasm, which he prolonged until her fingernails were clawing frantically at the nap of the rug.

He recalled Hana’s injunction against dimming Hannah’s future experience by comparison, and he had no particular impulse to climax himself, so he brought her back down slowly, stroking and cooling her as the muscles of her buttocks, stomach, and thighs quivered with the fatigue of repeated orgasm, and she lay still on the pile of pillows, half-unconscious and feeling that her flesh was melting.

He washed in frigid meltwater, then went up to the overhanging balcony to sleep.

Some time later, he felt her approach silently. He made space for her and a nest in his arms and lap. As she dipped toward sleep, she said dreamily, “Nicholai?”

“Please don’t call me by my first name,” he murmured.

She was silent for a time. “Mr. Hel? Don’t be scared by this, because it’s just a passing thing. But at this moment, I am in love with you.”

“Don’t be foolish.”

“Do you know what I wish?”

He did not answer.

“I wish it were morning and I could go out and pick you a bunch of flowers… those Eyes of Autumn we saw.”

He chuckled and folded her in. “Good night, Miss Stern.”

Etchebar

It was midmorning before Hana heard the splash of a slab of rock into the stream and came from the ch

“Will I ever get this right, Hana?”

She shook her head. “Only you will ever know, Nikko. Is Hannah safely set up at the lodge?”

“Yes. I think the girls have heated the water by now. Do you feel like taking a bath with me?”

“Certainly.”

They sat opposite one another, their feet in their habitual caress, their eyes closed and their bodies weightless.

“I hope you were kind to her,” Hana murmured sleepily.

“I was.”

“And you? How was it for you?”

“For me?” He opened his eyes. “Madame, do you have anything pressing on your schedule just now?”

“I’ll have to consult my carnet de bal, but it is possible that I can accommodate you.”

Shortly after noon, when he had reason to hope the local PTT would be functioning at least marginally, Hel placed a transatlantic call to the number Diamond had left with him. He had decided to tell the Mother Company that Hannah Stern had decided to return home, leaving the Septembrists unmolested. He assumed Diamond would take personal satisfaction in the thought that he had frightened Nicholai Hel off, but just as praise from such a source would not have pleased him, so scorn could not embarrass him.

It would be more than an hour before the viscous and senile French telephone system could place his call, and he chose to pass the interval inspecting the grounds. He felt lighthearted, well-disposed toward everything, enjoying that generalized euphoria that follows a close call with danger. For a whole constellation of impalpable reasons, he had dreaded getting involved in a business that was trammeled with personalities and passions.

He was wandering through the privet maze on the east lawns when he came across Pierre, who was in his usual vinous fog of contentment. The gardener looked up into the sky and pontificated. “Ah, M’sieur. Soon there will be a storm. The signs all insist on it.”

“Oh?”

“Oh yes, there is no doubt. The little clouds of the morning have been herded against the flank of ahu The first of the ursoa flew up the valley this afternoon. The sagarra turned its leaves over in the wind. These are sure signs. A storm is inevitable.”

“That’s too bad. We could have used a little rain.”

“True, M’sieur. But look! Here comes M’sieur Le Cagot. How finely he dresses!”

Le Cagot was approaching across the lawn, still wearing the rumpled theatrical evening dress of two nights ago. As he neared, Pierre tottered away, explaining that there were many thousands of things that demanded his immediate attention.

Hel greeted Le Cagot. “I haven’t seen you in a while, Be

“Bof. I’ve been up in Larrau with the widow, helping her put out the fire in her belly.” Le Cagot was uneasy, his badinage mechanical and flat.