George & the Virgin

by Lisa Cach

  The years on the mount had been worth it, if George was her reward.

  The murmurs of the crowd grew louder, and then began to quiet as they drew near. Pippa’s music floated out from behind her, and the sun broke through the clouds, sparkling on the seabed all around them. Alizon felt a smile tickling at the corners of her mouth. Verily, they must make quite the spectacle! She wished she could hear the thoughts of the gape-jawed men and women who were staring dumbfounded.

  She was too nervous to focus on the faces long enough for recognition, her eyes skipping from one to another, her thoughts slowing down and clogging up.

  George, however, was in his element.

  “Greetings!” he shouted, and the mob jumped. Pippa’s music tweetered out.

  Alizon felt a nervous giggle in her chest. God’s body, she wished she could stop shaking. She wished she could focus on a face.

  “I am Saint George,” her love called from beside her, “and your dragon has been slain!” He released her hand and used both of his own to raise Belch’s giant tooth up above his head. “Behold, the fang of the beast!”

  The crowd murmured, and glances were exchanged. No one seemed to know what to make of this.

  “Behold!” George shouted again, and gave the tooth a punch in the air. “The dragon is dead.”

  “The dragon is dead?” a male voice from the crowd asked.

  “Yes! Dead! Behold the fang of the beast!”

  “Someone killed it?”

  “Yes. I am Saint George,” he repeated, sounding to Alizon’s ears as if he were getting a little annoyed by the slowness of the villagers.

  She felt another giggle coming on. She had tried to warn him.

  “Saint George the dragonslayer?” another man asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What are you doing here, in Markesew?”

  Alizon heard him sigh. “I was summoned to kill the dragon. Which I did, with the help of this fair maiden you once knew as Alizon.” He put the tooth under his arm and with his free hand pulled her forward.

  She heard the mumbling of the crowd, her name repeated in question, “Alizon? Alizon?”

  They did not remember her. She felt the pain of it even deeper than their rejection could have cut. All those years she had seethed over their acts, and they had forgotten her the moment she was gone from their sight.

  “Yes, Alizon!” a woman’s voice said. “Damn you sorry lot, do you not recognize the girl you sent to her death twelve years past?”

  Alizon searched the crowd, saw movement as a woman pushed her way to the front. She caught her breath on a sob. “Emoni?”

  “Alizon! By the rood, but you’re beautiful for being dead!”

  Alizon stumbled the few steps left between them, and they fell into each other’s arms. “I would never have let your daughter go to the dragon,” Alizon croaked past her suddenly rough throat, not knowing why it was the first thing she chose to say after all these years.

  “Marry, of course you would not have!” Emoni squeezed her tight, as if not quite believing she was real. They held each other for long moments, and then Emoni said, “God’s breath, is that Greta?”

  Alizon pulled back, and realized Emoni had seen over her shoulder. “Greta, and more.”

  George took the cue and stepped up onto the seawall. “Behold, the virgins you cast unto the beast! Greta! Lavena! Reyne! Sisse!”

  One by one he named them, and as he did they came forward, up onto the seawall, their steps and faces uncertain, their eyes skimming over the crowd for some sign of greeting or recognition. The crowd backed away, forming a half-circle, leaving the virgins to stand like freaks, surrounded by a space that no one wanted to cross.

  “Braya! Joye! Ysmay!” George called. “Kit! Malkyn! Pippa! And last, but certainly not least, Flur!”

  There was a gasp from a woman, who fell to her knees at the edge of the circle. “Flur?”

  “Mama!” Flur cried, and ran to her mother’s open arms.

  “Joye?” an old man asked. “Joye? Is it you?”

  “Papa?” Then Joye was gone from the small group.

  One by one names were called, and girls reunited with what members of their families remained. Alizon looked at George, and caught him wiping at his eye with a knuckle. Milo, behind them, was openly weeping, the tears dripping off his cheeks.

  And then no more names were being called. Greta, Braya, Reyne, and Pippa still stood in their small group. Alizon saw Greta’s brother in the crowd, and saw him turn away from the searching gaze of his sister.

  Pippa had been an orphan, and both Braya and Reyne’s parents had died during the time they had been on the mount: each year’s new virgin had brought news of births and deaths from the village. If the remaining virgins had siblings here, none were coming forward to claim their lost sisters.

  “How?” Joye’s father asked. “How come they to be alive? Did you find them in the dragon’s belly?”

  “We never went to the dragon,” Alizon said, finding her voice. Her anger over the hurt she saw in the faces of those virgins who remained unclaimed gave her the strength to speak out. “He was satisfied with the flesh of sheep. We have all been living in the fortress these many years, afraid to return. It was never necessary to send a virgin to her death. All those lost lives were for nothing.”

  Voices rose in protest.

  “Aye, that is right! No one need ever have died!” she shouted.

  “They were in the belly of the beast,” a different man called. “That is the truth of it. When the saint cut him open, out they fell!”

  “No!” Alizon shouted. “We were in the fortress!”

  But no one wanted to hear her. “In the belly!” people were repeating. “Fell out like a nest of tangled snakes!”

  “You never had to kill us …”

  “Let them be,” George said, laying his hands on her shoulders, “They won’t listen.”

  “But they must! It was unjust, what they did.”

  “They can’t allow themselves to believe you. Let them be.”

  “It’s not right.”

  “No, it’s not. But it’s for you to choose if this battle is worth fighting. Look instead at those who have been reunited. And look at those who haven’t. You know what matters most.”

  She looked to the four who remained, and to Milo. George was right: They were all that need concern her. She could do nothing about whether the villagers accepted what they had done, or changed their way of thinking; and she had already had her years of vengeance upon them, for what little joy it had brought her. Time now to live with love, and to leave hatred behind.

  “Are you ready to come with me and George?” she asked the others.

  Milo sniffed back the rest of his tears. “Mistress, if you do not mind, I would stay in my cottage.”

  “Milo, are you certain?”

  “It suits.”

  George turned to the man. “I could have a cottage built for you, near my home.”

  Milo shook his head.

  George slapped him on the back. “Good luck to you, then, my friend. And take a word of advice from a man who knows the value of a spectacle: Put up a gate and charge admission to the castle and cavern. You’ll be rich.”

  “No one comes to Devil’s Mount.”

  “They will. Believe me, my man, they will.”

  Alizon spoke to Pippa and the other virgins. “Will you come with us? It will be a long journey, to a faraway place, but at least we will be together.”

  Pippa wrinkled her nose at the villagers and spoke for them all. “The farther, the better.”

  Alizon, George, and the remaining virgins spent the rest of the day with Emoni and her family, the words flowing fast between them as they tried to share years in the space of a few hours. Alizon wished they could have a month together, but George and Emoni both felt something that told them that their time was short.

  So it was that she now found herself in Emoni’s barn, standing with the others in a circ
le around a curious crystal in a gold base. Candles surrounded the crystal, their flames reflecting deep within the faceted stone.

  She hadn’t given much thought to the method of travel when she had insisted that she and George return to his world, and insisted as well that the virgins accompany them. She felt a stab of superstitious anxiety now that she was face-to-face with it, though.

  What in God’s name had she been thinking, to ask to be sent through a crystal to another world? How could such a thing possibly work, and how could she and the others possibly survive it?

  “Hey. Are you all right?” George asked.

  “Huh?” she grunted, coming out of her panicked reverie.

  “I did this once before, you know. We’ll be fine.”

  “Yes, I suppose.”

  “ ‘Suppose’ nothing.” He tugged her hand until she looked at him. “I love you.”

  She smiled. “I love you, too.”

  “We’ll come through. All of us.”

  She found herself believing him. She turned her gaze to each of the girls, seeing their fright and trying to reassure them without words.

  Then she met Emoni’s hazel eyes. There were no words that could encompass what she felt for her friend, and at leaving her once again. “I will never forget you,” she finally said, feeling it inadequate, but the closest she could come to what was in her heart.

  “Nor I you, not in a thousand years.”

  Emoni came to her, and Alizon embraced her friend one last time. Sniffing back tears, she whispered, “Good-bye.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  George held Alizon’s hand on one side, Pippa’s on the other. They were all six standing with clasped hands in a circle around the quartz crystal on its small table, candles glowing around it. He had Belch’s tooth hanging from a rope around his neck, and the others wore their improvised satchels of belongings crosswise over their chests. Alizon had her rolled-up tapestry between her feet.

  He squeezed her hand, and Alizon looked up at him, nervous uncertainty in her eyes. He felt it himself. Would this work? Could it possibly? Would he awake to find himself surrounded by virgins in his own living room, or would he wake with nothing more than memories and a broken heart?

  But no. Love was real. Even if all else in this world was but whispers of the imagination, there was no questioning what he felt for Alizon, and what he saw shining back from her. This was real.

  He would believe nothing else.

  The spell would work because it had to, because Alizon was now too finely woven into the very fiber of his soul for them to ever be separated.

  Emoni began her chant. He looked at Alizon one more time, tracing with his gaze the line of her profile and the smooth arch of her brow. He would carry her back with him, if he had to trade his soul to do it.

  There was no force more powerful than love. There was no truth greater. There was no corner of the universe, in time or space, where it couldn’t reach.

  There was nothing else that mattered but love.

  He turned his gaze to the crystal and sent the plea of his heart to the flame that glowed deep within it.

  Alizon centered her vision on the crystal, the dark barn around her fading away. Emoni’s chanting voice grew faint, and then she could not hear it at all. She was aware only of the crystal, and of holding George’s hand on one side and Greta’s on the other. She felt a fluttering of fear in her chest.

  Would they make it? And what would they find on the other side?

  She held to her faith in Emoni, and to her own love for the circle of people who stood with her around the crystal. Whatever world they were going to, there was a promise in it for a future better than to be had here. And whatever trials might await, George would be with them.

  No one was going to be left alone. Ever.

  For a heart-stopping moment she lost all sense of touch and sound, unable even to feel her own body. She was alone in a nothingness, her vision filled by the white light at the center of the crystal.

  And then she heard a woman’s voice, faint at first, then growing louder. It spoke in an accent that was difficult to understand, but the tone was calm and deliberate, and there were a few words that kept repeating that came clear:

  “George” and “slowly waking.”

  Then all of a sudden Alizon could feel her body again, and the hands clenching tight at her own. The light in the crystal extinguished itself, wiping the glare from her vision.

  The woman’s soft speech abruptly turned to a scream.

  Alizon blinked and looked about. A dark-haired woman was sitting in a strange chair, her hands slapped over her mouth as if to keep in further screeches. Her wide hazel eyes were jumping from virgin to virgin as they held hands in their circle: from Pippa to Braya to Reyne, Greta, and then herself.

  The woman’s hands dropped from her mouth as she met Alizon’s eyes. A frown of puzzlement creased her brow.

  Alizon tilted her head to the side, staring at the woman, feeling an unaccountable sense of recog nition.

  “Emoni … ?” she asked softly.

  The woman’s lips parted, her frown deepening, as if searching her memory for a face that should have been there but was not. She shook her head slightly, as if helpless to answer.

  “Holy Christ,” George said. “It worked!”

  Alizon broke her gaze with the woman and turned to George. He was still clasping her and Pippa’s hands but was sitting in the same strange type of chair as the woman, wearing clothes she had never seen, and his beard was gone. The dragon tooth was no longer hanging around his neck.

  Alizon glanced down, suddenly anxious. Her tapestry was still with her.

  “George?” the woman squeaked.

  He released their hands and jumped up, sweeping Alizon into a bear hug and lifting her off the floor. “It worked! It worked!”

  Alizon was too dazed to answer, but felt a smile begin to stretch across her lips. She was here, wherever here was. They all were! She started to laugh.

  “George?” the woman squeaked again.

  The virgins released each other’s hands, blinking at the room around them, turning to look at the fire, at the woman, at herself and George. Her joy must have reassured them, because they started to smile, and then they were laughing, too, hugging each other and dancing around.

  “George!” the woman cried.

  George set Alizon down abruptly and kissed her hard and quick on the lips. He turned her to face the woman, who was standing now, trembling.

  “Alizon, I’d like you to meet my sister, Athena.” He spoke in a thick accent, like the woman’s, but slowly and carefully enough that Alizon could just manage to catch his meaning. “Athena, meet the heart of my heart, Alizon. You sent me to find her, whether you know it or not.”

  “I …” Athena said.

  Alizon felt tears start in her eyes. This woman was Emoni. Athena had sent George to her, across the boundaries of their worlds, Athena’s soul knowing their bond of friendship even if her mind did not.

  “Everything is clear to me now. Your little crystal there has powers you have not even guessed at.” He held his sister by the shoulders and kissed her forehead. “Thank you.”

  “I … well …” Athena looked at them both, then at the virgins, who were examining the room with eager interest. She turned a helpless expression back to George. “I need to put sheets on the guest beds—if they’re staying the night.”

  “I will help you,” Alizon said.

  “Yes … thank you.” Athena met her eyes, and then for a brief moment her confusion cleared away. “Alizon.”

  Epilogue

  Two years later

  “Dammit!” George said, hanging up the phone.

  Alizon looked up from her museum book of medieval art. “What is it?”

  She could see his face soften as he looked at her, in the way it always did. She was constantly surprised that he still found her as entrancing as back when they had first met, especially when she looked li
ke she did right now. She was lying on her stomach, on the sofa in the family room, wearing a pair of his boxer shorts and a threadbare T-shirt. Her hair was up in a loose bun, a green Japanese chopstick jammed through it.

  Sundays were her declared day of sin and sloth. Whether she was traveling with George or at home, she devoted herself with unflinching hedonism to junk food, lazing about on her beloved sofas, television, and letting her hands roam as often as they pleased over her husband’s body.

  She took the enjoyment of Sundays almost as seriously as she took Dragon Maiden Tapestries. She and the remaining virgins continued to weave their art, and George had arranged for their work to be sold through both their own Web site and a gallery on a street somewhere called Rodeo Drive. They sold for up to $45,000 apiece, depending on size and detail.

  The tapestry that looked so much like George hung in his den, never to be sold. He said that it reminded him to keep his head screwed on straight.

  She still wasn’t quite sure what he meant by that.

  “That was my agent. The studio wants my script, but only if someone younger and better-looking plays my part. Younger and better-looking! Can you believe it? Some candy-ass pretty boy is going to be playing me.”

  She ducked her head, her shoulders shaking, a snort of laughter slipping out.

  “They offered to let me play Milo.”

  She looked up, and at his disgruntled expression could hold it in no longer. She rolled onto her back, laughing, tears in her eyes.

  “You think that’s funny?” he asked, leaning over the back of the sofa.

  “Yes, my darling, I’m afraid I do. You are becoming an old, old man!”

  “I’ll show you funny, Ms. Fifteenth Century!” He reached down and tickled her until she squealed.

  “Stop it, stop it,” she cried.

  His hands stilled. Her giggles quieted, and she met his eyes. She wasn’t wearing anything under the T-shirt and could feel her breasts full and free beneath the thin white cotton. His warm palms slowly slid up her rib cage to her breasts, his thumbs stroking over the soft curves.

  She lifted her arms and dug her fingers into his hair, pulling his face down to hers. Her lips met his with a hunger that a lunch of potato chips and Junior Mints had done nothing to satisfy. He slid over the back of the sofa as her arms tightened around his neck, her lips demanding everything he had. He came to rest atop her, his body pressing hers into the deep cushions, the wakening of his own desire becoming a hard ridge against her belly.