Cloven Hooves

by Megan Lindholm

  Pan has a small smoldering fire going, more for the comfort of the flames than for any usefulness. “A pity about the quilt,” he says from behind me. “I remember it as being a pretty thing. I think it was what they call a Wedding Ring pattern. You would have liked it. But, come, let’s get you comfortable.”

  There is a strange cadence and lilt to his words. I glance up at him, wondering which Pan I am speaking to, mine, or the one who lived here a hundred years ago. He understands my glance for he smiles abashedly. “Returning to a place like this, and finding it so little changed … it brings the memories back, so strongly I scarcely know who I am, or when. But then I look at you …” His voice trails off and his eyes drop from mine to my belly. When they come back to my face, there is a warmth in them such as I have never seen in a human man’s eyes. I could be Helen of Troy, or Eve, or the Earth Mother for the adoration that shines there. “Let’s get you comfortable,” he says again, and makes the words a promise of Eden.

  He tests the ropes on the bed frame, but the old hemp speedily parts. Shaking his head, he discards it onto the fire. “You get out of those clothes and go soak for a bit,” he directs me. “I’ll make up some kind of a bed for you.”

  He helps me to my feet. I am staggeringly tired. “I think I’d rather just sleep,” I tell him, but he shakes his head.

  “Come on,” he says softly. He slips an arm around me as he leads me back to the shadowed pool. I am too weary to protest or help as he begins work on my buttons. I take off shirt after shirt, and soon become aware, despite the sulfur smell of the water, that I smell worse. Goose bumps pop up on my skin. While the cave is nowhere near as cold as it is outside, it is still no place to go nude. He skins my jeans down for me, and then drags off my socks as I lift each foot, exclaiming when he comes to the cut on my heel. “That’s definitely got to be soaked,” he tells me, solicitous as a mother hen. He gestures at the pool.

  “It gets deeper, and hotter, quite gradually. Take it slowly,” he suggests. And leaves me.

  I wade in cautiously, finding it as he says. There is a mineral sediment of some sort on the bottom that I try not to stir up. I wrinkle my nose against the smell. I venture out, into darkness and warmth, feeling the hot water ease the kinks out of my feet and ankles and knees. When I am hip-deep, the water is quite warm, almost hot. I sink down slowly, feeling the hot water take the weight of my belly off my spine. For a few moments, I wash myself, scrubbing at my pubic hair and the surprising growth of hair under my arms. My fingers gingerly explore the cut on my heel. Then I plant my palms behind me and lean back against them. I have never known hot water to feel so good. As I become used to the sulfur smell, it becomes almost unnoticeable. Muscles unknot, and the deep cold is driven out of my bones.

  I am almost dozing when I feel the water move and hear the light splashes of his passage. Pan sinks down beside me. He sits behind me, bracing me, so I can lean back against him. His wet flesh is warm and firm and his arms come around me securely. His long-fingered hands settle over my belly, caress it possessively. For long moments we are still, and then his strong hands begin to move over me, massaging away the last of the aches. I move back closer into his embrace, only to come up against the jut of his prick against my buttocks. I find myself laughing.

  “You’re too tired,” he says, moving slightly away from me.

  “Are you?” I ask him, and my answer is the sudden spice in the smell of his musk as he leans forward and kisses the side of my neck.

  “We shouldn’t,” he says regretfully. “The baby is so large.”

  But I turn to him and give him a push that inclines his body back into the water. He braces his hands on the pool floor behind him to catch himself, looking startled. I don’t give him time to react. I straddle him, grip him, and guide him into me as I settle on him. I realize with surprise that it is the first time I have been so aggressive with him. He seems almost shocked. In the wavering yellow light of the kerosene lamp, his eyes are wide and incredulous. I have to smile and lean forward to kiss his mouth. It is a moment before his lips move under mine, and then he responds almost shyly.

  I experiment, taking in only as much of him as is comfortable. Buoyed by the water and astride him, my pregnancy seems small hindrance. A different sort of passion seizes me, and my exhaustion drops away. I am suddenly determined to possess him, to have him as no woman ever has, to his satiation. I lean forward and kiss him, tonguing his mouth open, deliberately pushing his head back into the water, so he must push his mouth back against mine or go under. I use him as I have never used a man, brazenly putting my nipples to his lips, watching them tighten at the touch of his tongue, and then swell. The third time I kiss him, I feel him shudder, and the small echo of it inside me as he pulses to climax. But I do not release him.

  Some demon is on me, some urge, to territoriality, to possession, to dominance, to I know not what. Knee and thigh, I grip him, trapping him inside me. I grab the hair on the back of his head firmly, force his mouth up to mine. I kiss his eyes, taste the side of his throat, bury my nose against his hair and the scent glands at the base of his horns. I bring his mouth up to mine, kiss him deeply. He pulls briefly free of me. “Evelyn?” he says, and there is no disguising that there is an edge of fear to his wondering. An unease. He had thought he knew me.

  I had thought I knew me. I was wrong.

  “Remember this,” I tell him. “For all time and for all children to come.” And then his horns become my grips as I guide his mouth to my body. I ride him, through the lapping of warm water and yellow light against our bodies, ride him until I feel him yield his maleness to me twice more. Taking his energy, draining him as surely as a vampire at his throat. And still I hold him, clasped within my thighs and gripped within me, caring nothing for my own orgasm, but taking a different kind of release from his body each time I bring him to climax within me. I feel him trembling slightly beneath me, and I know I am shaking as with a fever. The day has been too long and arduous for any of this, I am hungry and tired and every muscle in my body should be sore and aching. But I do not let him go.

  “Evelyn,” he says softly, against my throat. “The child,” and he is almost pleading.

  “I know what I’m doing,” I say, and almost, I do, for the firm grip of my thighs on his furred haunches keeps him from penetrating farther than is comfortable for me. I smile down at him, and wonder if the shadows can hide from him the cruelty that I know lurks in my smile. I fear what is driving me, but I cannot deny it. I bend once more to my task, running my hands over his body beneath the water, nuzzling his face, rasping my cheeks and breasts against his beard with animal abandon. He moves against me suddenly, startlingly, and for an instant I think he is struggling to get away. And then I recognize that, no, he is trying to unseat me and mount me again, to be over me once more.

  I don’t let him. He cannot take me without hurting me, and I know he will not do that. I take his face between my hands, burrowing my fingers through his curly beard, using him as I want to, controlling him, as I move sure and swift atop him, building his passion whether he will or no. He cries out aloud this time as I take him, an animal sound, almost of fear, that escapes past my wet mouth on top of his. I feel the spurt of his seed, hotter than the warm water that laps around us. But it is not that, but the feel of him suddenly flaccid, slipping away from my muscled grip, that brings me to cataclysmic orgasm.

  I fall forward atop him, skinning my elbows on the rough stone at the bottom of the pool as we come free of each other. We move apart, both shuddering and panting, to lie back in the warm water. I hear myself mutter something, too soft to be true words, too quiet, not intended for the satyr to hear, and he doesn’t. But the sound of them echoes in my own mind, and leaves me aghast.

  “I win.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  * * *

  I awaken early, before the faun. We are sleeping, belly to belly, with the bulge of his child between us. Our old blankets are a pad beneath us, but the hardness
of the rock floor is still very much evident. The thick homespun wool blankets over us smell of the pungent herbs from the chest. The folded rug serves as a sort of pillow. This rudimentary bed is warm, but it cannot begin to explain the immense sense of well-being I have.

  I look into his sleeping face. When I study the features, there is something distinctly unhuman about them. Not inhuman. No. It is something, the slight flare of a nostril, the suggestion of a point on the tip of one bared ear, the whiteness of his teeth that show as he breathes through parted lips, something that suggests a closer kinship with the natural world. It is a balanced thing, for even as he can cope more readily with the natural world, he is equally dependent upon its largesse. Like an animal, he alters himself to fit the world rather than alter the world to suit himself. These blankets and the cookware are trappings of humanity that he has assumed for my convenience. Were it not for me, and the child I carry, I doubt he would choose this place to winter. Instead he would depend on his kinship with the natural world to get him through the hard times. That which grows within me, parasitically, will share that kinship. It will be born almost ready for its world, near as capable as any beast, without the long human period of helpless infancy. So he has said.

  But whatever he is, beast or man, last night I mastered him. I try to be ashamed of the satisfaction uncoiling within me. I do not understand it, cannot fathom what drove me. Perhaps I had simply been his unquestioning follower too long, and felt driven to assert myself. Perhaps the worship so apparent in his eyes awoke some sadistic taste for mastery in me. Whatever it was, I cannot deny the enjoyment I took of it. He spoke little afterward, but when I came out of the water, he dried my body with one of my T-shirts and then made up a bed for me, tending my needs as if I were a goddess, all with a sort of dark wonder in his eyes. Something had changed between us, but I could not put a name to it.

  Watching him sleep, I know my affection for him has not diminished. He is not slave nor pet, nor anything less than what I am myself. What has changed is that I feel strong and competent again. Capable of matching him, and sometimes beating him. Strong on my own, with or without his supporting me. It is a strange thing to base on a sexual victory, but I am obscurely pleased by it. My fingers trace the line of his jaw beneath his beard, and then I drowse back to sleep.

  When next I awaken, I am alone. The blankets have been snugged down close around me. I rise, taking one blanket around my shoulders as a sort of cloak, and go looking for him.

  The grey light of day reaches into the cave, dispersing its mystery and making it smaller somehow. I can see now that it does not extend much farther back than the farthest reaches of the sulfur spring pool. Already, I am accustomed to the sulfur smell. I notice more pegs driven into the wall, a teetery old bench in a small grotto near the pool, the remains of several rotted barrels, and other minor signs of his housekeeping. The second chest stands open now, contents scattered on the floor. Pan is gone. I go to the lip of the cave and urinate where the moving water will carry it swiftly down the rock face. I look out over the ravine and the far bowl of the valley, but there is no sign of him. All the trees have been dusted with snow, giving the scenery a Christmas card look. More snow will fall today, the grey clouds promise. Shivering, I return to the semiwarmth of the cave.

  The second chest seems to have contained hardware of various kinds. There are several small jaw traps on the floor, gleaming with grease. An extra lantern. A stack of thick white lamp wicks wrapped in heavily waxed paper. Hatchet and rough saw. Both of those need new handles. A paper of needles, some of steel and two of bone. Two tin plates, battered but usable. Two wooden bowls, one cracked. A single mug of heavy blue-glazed pottery. A whetstone. And, set aside, on a separate paper, in a box woven of cedar, a string of tiny blue beads, and a handful of drilled shells, and a fine silver ring.

  I step back from it, feeling as if I have been reading someone’s diary. I suddenly know that whatever satyr lived here was not always alone. It had been made a fit place to bring a human mate. That is why he chose it, why we trekked here. A sudden streak of jealousy chills me. I wonder if this place stirs memories of her for him. Was she dark-skinned and deep-eyed, did her skilled hands weave that box? Or was she some settler’s daughter or trapper’s widow, stitching the patchwork quilt by the yellow lantern light? And then I smile, wondering if this was what I sensed last night. For I know that last night I marked this place and this satyr, at least, as mine, in a way that will not be forgotten, not to the end of his line.

  I pause in that thought, amending it. For the child I carry now will not be marked by that memory. I wonder where the link of memory is forged. Will he remember the moment of his own conception, and then have a blank of six months until his own birth? I will have to ask Pan when he returns. I think of the child having the earliest memories of his mother be of mating with her in a forest glade. It unsettles me for a moment, as I imagine looking into infant eyes and sharing that memory. Then I push it aside. I will ask the faun about it when he returns.

  In the meantime, I decide to be domestic. I take every scrap of clothing I own, and the old wool blanket, and carry them to the sulfur pool. I have no idea what the mineral water will do to the fabrics, but it can scarcely make them smell worse or be scratchier. I wade out with them and dump them in the pool. One at a time, I slosh and rub them and scrub them in the hot water, and then wring them out and drape them as best I can over the bed frame.

  I realize belatedly that I have left myself nothing to wear. I end up fashioning a very heavy sari from one of the homespun blankets, and going barefoot on the stony floor of the cave. It is not too bad. The heat of the spring keeps the cave at a constant if rather drafty temperature.

  I try not to think about how hungry I am getting, nor that he has been gone longer than he has ever been gone before. Better to keep busy. I clean the cast-iron cookware with hot water and coarse sand from the cave mouth. I venture out a little farther, to pack the kettle with clean snow scooped from the jutting rocks just outside the cave’s protective overhang. I am not even going to sample drinking the sulfur water. I set it in the cave to melt. And then, although I try not to, I go back to the cave mouth and look for some sign of his return.

  But there is nothing, and nothing for me to do. No wood for a fire, no food to cook or eat. My clothes are all still dripping. I’m hungry, chilly, and bored. I think I should be grateful that today I don’t have to face a long hike, but instead I feel trapped. I go once more to the cave entrance and look out. Essentially, I’ve made myself a prisoner here. I’m certainly not going to cross that rock face again, not unless I have to. And every day that my pregnancy grows, the more difficult the crossing of it will become. So here I am, until my child is born. His child, I correct myself. And feel a brief flame of resentment. I try not to think about it.

  I decide to remedy the only thing I can. I go back to the blankets and cuddle into them. My chilled body gradually warms, and I am actually feeling drowsy when I hear his hooves on the rocks outside. I scramble up to meet him, and as he comes into the cave he drops his burdens and embraces me. His skin is cold to the touch, hugging him is like hugging winter itself. He steps back and looks at my naked body gloatingly for a moment, but when he lifts his eyes to mine, I meet his gaze. “My lady,” he says, in a voice full of respect and love. I turn aside to keep from blushing, his approving appraisal is that strong. I am suddenly struck by the change in my status, from the Potter family where being Tom’s wife and the mother of his child was somewhat akin to being a major appliance, to this cave, where I walk almost as a goddess. A barefoot, pregnant, hungry goddess, perhaps, but worshiped nonetheless.

  “I’m sorry I took so long,” he tells me. And then, the unnecessary question, “Shall we eat?” He has brought firewood tied in a bundle with a leather strap, and meat, two dead snowshoe hares, almost entirely white. Tied to his back are a number of long, straight sapling trunks.

  The long straight poles he sets across two spikes d
riven into the walls. I busy myself with the fire while he starts skinning and gutting the hares. I notice that this time he uses a knife. He works very competently and quickly, speaking as he works. “I set some snares this morning. Now that we’re settled, I’ll be able to bring in more food. With a bit of luck, there’ll be more by tonight. After we eat, I’ll spend some time bringing up firewood for you.” He rises and gets the skillet, nods to me that he notices it’s been cleaned. He cuts the rabbits into pieces, adds a dribble of snow water, and brings it over to my fire. “There used to be some rocks, ah, yes. Here we go.” He arranges three stones in a rough triangle in my fire, sets the skillet atop them. “Now. What’s wrong, my love?” he asks gently as he crouches down beside me.

  I haven’t been aware of it until he asks, and then suddenly I recognize it. “I don’t like being this dependent on you,” I tell him. “For wood, for food, for everything. It seems I can do nothing for myself up here.”

  He sets a gentle hand on my belly. “As I depend on you for everything here. As I can do nothing, but take care of you while you do it all. It’s the oldest division of labor that exists, my love. Don’t demean it. If you do not do one other thing for the next three months, you will still have done what I could not do for myself.”

  His words do little to assuage the uneasiness I feel. It is too foreign to current thinking, too much Tarzan and Jane, too much “you make baby, I bring food.” Not even his total sincerity can change it. He knows that, and gives me a grin that is one part sympathy to one part smart-ass. He knows as well as I do that the only thing I can do is accept the situation. My only real choice is whether or not I’m going to be gracious about it. I decide to be gracious, at least for now, mostly because the simmering meat smells so good that I can’t focus my mind on anything else.