You have to understand: I grew up alone, set apart from the other village children. Oh, when I was a little child I ran and played with them, but as I grew older things changed. Our family had been here for centuries before the village of Stijenjarac was founded, fulfilling our ancient duty until war and political turmoil and expanding horizons had scattered and dwindled its numbers. We had always been treated as separate from the rest of the village; sometimes we would intermarry, but only our boys choosing their girls. I was the last of the line to grow up here. Schooling in the village was little more than rudimentary, and at fourteen I was the only girl still being taught; all the others my age were laboring with their mothers in the house and the fields. At sixteen I was still studying under my father’s tutelage, and had become a freak in the eyes of the whole community. The girls turned as one and cut me off from their company, erecting a wall of sneering hostility. The boys just teased me unremittingly, their curiosity expressed in the crudest manner. Thrown stones were the least of my worries.
I think Father was secretly pleased I showed no interest in the village boys. He hoped I would go to university some day, like him.
Perhaps I should have made an effort to understand my peers more, and tried to make friends. Perhaps. But I was naive, and I thought all men should be like my gentle, scholarly father, so I was alone a great deal. I looked after the house when Father was out—his ability to fix generators and rotavators was something the villagers valued him for as much as his priestly status, I think. I cooked and did the laundry. I read. I climbed the hillsides on my own, being careful to avoid the shepherds up there. And I went to visit our prisoner, every day.
As I grew older I grew bolder too. I stole wine for him. I baked him honey cake. I would bring water to wash the grime off his body, slightly shocked by my own recklessness as I wiped down the heavy slabs of his muscles, or slid a hand under a lower leg so that I might massage his calf and relieve the ache of his trapped limbs to some tiny extent. Sometimes he would focus upon my face long enough to whisper my name.
His body fascinated me. I learned its illicit contours in the half dark, mostly by touch. He felt cold all over, like the rock he lay on, but there were smooth bits and there were places rough with hair. There were harder and softer stretches. There was a big, jagged scar over the right side of his abdomen, but it looked old.
There were things only a married woman should see.
I wanted to take his pain away.
I was book-smart, as they say in America—there was no such phrase in our village, though they understood the concept perfectly—and I was burning with curiosity, but not wise. One day I lay down beside him on the stone and nestled my head on his chest. I could hear the slow beat of his heart. The bars of his ribs were like carved prehistoric rock-glyphs, and I walked my fingertips across each ridge and furrow. The skin above his hip was so smooth it was like stroking feathers, but the old altar cloth felt damp and coarse in comparison. There was something repulsive about the feel of the grimy cloth that preserved his modesty. With my right hand I drew off that swatch, and then for the first time I touched him without the excuse that I was tending him. Without any excuse at all.
Hair, matted into curls. Below that, duskier skin. I shut my eyes. My hand, for once, was bolder than my gaze.
Soft.
Silky.
A small cool heft in my hand, yet heavy with a secret weight: the significance invested in the forbidden. My heart was racing, far faster than the heavy beat against my ear. My mind shied away from what I was doing. But my body seemed to be sure of what it wanted, and urged my hand to its task.
Tentatively I began to caress him.
He responded to that. Not just that sleeping creature stirring to wakefulness under my open palm, but his heartbeat waking with a kicking thud and then his whole frame following—his back stretching, his breath catching in his throat, his toes flexing and curling. I snatched my hand away, terrified and thrilled, and when he groaned deep in his chest I felt it through my bones.
“Ansha?”
I didn’t recognize the name, if it was a name. His eyes were wide open, staring, but I couldn’t be sure he saw anything. I pushed myself up into his line of sight.
“Milja,” I whispered. “I’m Milja.”
His cracked lips parted, and he made a sound of need. He was beautiful in a way I couldn’t understand: so beautiful I felt it as pain. So I returned my hand to its former position and nearly jumped with shock when I found that everything had changed. Nothing soft anymore, and nothing cold, and just so much more of him, flesh brought into existence from the nothing, from the void. Like a miracle.
I wrapped my hand around that burgeoning miracle.
So heavy. So strong. My hand embraced that hardness, stroking. His breath started to come faster, with a little tremble at the end of each exhalation, interspersed with murmured, unintelligible words. Soon he was so eager that he was too thick for my grasp.
I paused. I wasn’t entirely sure where this was going, or how long it would take to get there. My own body was a cauldron of conflicting needs and fears.
“Milja!” he groaned, desperate.
That was when I heard a noise, like an echo of his cry. My head snapped up.
There—again: “Milja? Where are you?” A footfall on rock.
My father, entering the cavern.
I slid off the prisoner’s boulder, scraping raw lines on my bare shins. Clumsy with terror, I found the fallen altar-cloth in the gloom and threw it across his hips in an attempt to hide the evidence of my sin. Then I backed away, but a loose stone turned under my feet and fell clinking among the slabs.
“Who’s there? Is that you, Milja?”
A light sprang out in the half darkness, as my father snapped on his flashlight. There was nowhere for me to hide. I blinked and cringed as the beam caught my eyes.
“Milja! What are you doing down here?”
I couldn’t answer. My skin burned with shame, proclaiming my guilt. I felt like there was no air in my lungs.
Father hurried forward across the fallen stone, frowning. The light swept the agonized lines of our captive, from his clenched hands to the mounded folds draped over his groin and the dig of his heels against the rock, pushing his thighs and hips an inch higher in his vain quest for solace.
“Girl!” Father’s brows were knotted in anger, as if he were the Patriarch Moses surveying the sinning Israelites when he came down from the mountain. I had never seen him with an expression like that. He’d always been so mild and gentle with me. “What have you been doing?” he thundered.
“Nothing!” I lied, shrinking into myself.
“You shouldn’t be here alone!”
“I’ve not done anything!”
The prisoner groaned.
My father shook his head, like the tolling of an execution bell. His heavy voice and damning words made it clear that he believed the man and knew that I was the one bearing false witness. “Didn’t I tell you, child, that Azazel is the teacher of seduction? Did you not hear what I said?”
I bit my lip and wondered if I was going to be sick.
“I will send you away, Milja. You cannot stay near him! Your cousin Vera is in Boston: I will send you to her.”
America?
I was twenty-three before I saw him again.
I went to Boston, Massachusetts, as my father arranged. He sold several of the icons and statues from within the tunnel to pay for me; there’s never any shortage of black-market buyers for that sort of thing. Wheels were greased—some of them, I know, less than legally. I went to college. I graduated as a structural engineer and got a promising job.
I was even engaged to be married, briefly. Father was delighted, although Vera and her husband Josif thought I could do better—by which they meant some Orthodox boy who’d been born in America but whose parents remembered the Black Mountain or at the very least spoke our language—and they only redoubled their efforts to set me up with some eth
nic relative.
I never warmed to those young men my cousin steered to me. It wasn’t that I wanted to be on my own…but they weren’t what I dreamed of. Nor was I what they wanted: I wasn’t ugly, I guess, but tallish and skinny, with breasts too small for American tastes, my wavy dark hair tied back and my nose buried in a book.
And anyway, I was no use at talking to men the way they wanted to be talked to. Growing up without a mother or sisters or girlfriends, I’d never learned how. There are ways of conversing, and laughing, and moving, and appearing; signals girls give off that say I’m fun: I’m interested in guys: You want me. I’d never learned how to do any of that. I was too earnest, and when men did hit on me I’d either respond to their flirtations with serious conversation, or curl my lip at their silliness. Aggressive teasing just made me recoil, offended and scared. I did once try dying my hair blonde, which I dimly realized was one of the Right Signals, but the sight of my big dark eyes staring out from among long yellow locks just freaked me out and I hennaed it dark again even before it grew out.
Ben Dearing was, to my cousin’s consternation, as WASP as they come. I met him at college, where he was in a student metal band called Loki Unbound. That was the reason we started seeing each other. I was standing in front of the flyer pinned to the gigs board in the hall, staring, when he first came up to me.
“You going to come see us play, then?”
“What does it mean?” I demanded, pointing at the poster, not even looking up at him. The picture, clearly drawn by someone with crude talent but in need of a lot of training, showed a muscular man in a loincloth bound hand and foot in a cave—the jagged stalactites made the location clear. Over his rage-twisted face dangled a serpent, poison dripping from its fangs. “Who’s that?”
“That’s Loki. The Norse god.”
I felt cold, like all the blood was running out of my body and pooling in my leaden limbs. “Norse?” I made myself look up at the guy, taking in his long fawn hair and happy smile. “Scandinavian, you mean?”
“That’s right. Vikings. You heard of them, yeah? Loki was a trickster and a troublemaker: sometimes on the side of the gods, and sometimes on the side of their enemies the giants.”
“Giants?” I repeated stupidly, like I believed every word.
“Uh, yeah. Eventually the gods got so mad they tied him up under the earth, using the sinews of his own murdered son, and placed a venomous snake over him. When the poison drips in his eyes he thrashes about, causing earthquakes.”
“But he escapes?”
“He will, just before Ragnarok.”
“And what’s that?”
“The End of the World. Are you going to come and watch us? I’m the drummer. And…that’s my picture. D’you like it? You can have a copy if you want one. I’m Ben.”
“I’m Milja,” I said, still not thinking straight.
“Cool!”
Loki. Prometheus. Azazel. Amirani in Georgia, as I found out later when I started searching on the Internet. All demiurges involved in the creation and nurture of mankind. All rebels fettered for eternity by a God or gods who would not tolerate insurrection.
I went to the gig. I didn’t have to dance, which was a relief. I could just stand at the back with my plastic cup of cola and watch. I liked the guys’ long unfashionable hair.
Despite his metal aspirations, Ben was really quite sweet. And I was a good girl from the old country, so we didn’t actually sleep together until we were engaged. We fooled around, of course. I was an expert with my mouth and my hands long before I gave up my virginity. And he did a good job unknotting the insecurities and the ignorance tangled in my psyche. When we did finally go all the way, it was not such a big step as I’d feared.
But it didn’t work out well in the end: on our third night of actually having sex together I begged leave to tie him up, spread-eagled on the bed. Then I straddled him, slipping him into my hungry embrace. Below me, in the warm, dim light of the candles we’d lit, his body lay stretched out like a sacrifice: narrow hips, long pale hair, elbows raised as he braced against the scarves knotted at his wrists.
A stray thought grazed my mind: a wish that he had darker hair, and more of it on his torso. But it was only momentary, a twist in the rising surge of my appetite. I clenched my muscles and moved to make him gasp. Every time I ground against him a wave of heat seemed to billow up from the point where we were joined, filling me to bursting. My vision grew blurred. I tugged at my nipples, grinding them between my fingers. Ben bucked beneath me, thrusting upward, trying to fill the need he saw in me—but without the slightest idea of how great and hollow and ancient was that void in my soul.
For a moment, I didn’t see Ben or the bed. I saw a great slab of rock, and a man without a name, and my wails seemed to echo back from stone walls as I slammed down upon him, burning with the ferocity of my orgasm, my face distorted with pain.
“Whoa,” he said. “Jesus, Milja.”
I burst into tears and struck at him, howling, over and over again. He couldn’t even shield his face.
Poor Ben freaked out then. He told me that I had serious fucking issues, you crazy bitch. And that was it, for that relationship.
Vera was pleased when I told her the engagement was off, though she tried to show sympathy.
Oh, how I tried my best not to think about the prisoner after that, as I studied and made new friends and, after graduation, buried myself in my new job. What would be the point, when Father would not let me go home—not until I was safely married? And to be honest it wasn’t too hard to forget, most days, because in Boston it all seemed entirely unreal: not just the cavern and the bound man isolated in darkness, but the silent little church and the mountain village. It seemed like a story, something from a movie I’d watched as a child. America was loud and roaring with life, and its steel and glass and crowds and wide horizons filled me to the brim, leaving no room for memories. I loved my new world and I tried my hardest to fit in—as much as any shy, bookish foreigner can fit in.
But I dreamed about him at night. I dreamed about him stretched out, shifting hopelessly the few inches permitted by his bonds in a desperate attempt to relieve his locked muscles. I dreamed he stared into the darkness and stretched back his head and called my name, and that he told me everything about himself: secrets always forgotten when I woke. I dreamed him shivering under the snow of our brutal winters, and choking in the flash floods of spring. I dreamed his body under my hands. And every morning for five years I woke with my pillow wet with the tears I’d cried in my sleep.
Then one day I received a phone call.
“Hello, Nana Vera.” I said, cradling the flat plastic slip awkwardly between jaw and shoulder as I tried to wrestle papers back into a folder, and hearing the shutter sound effect that told me I’d accidentally taken a photo of my ear again. “What’s up?”
I was desperately hoping she wasn’t in one of her chatty moods. My boss could see me across the open-plan office and we weren’t supposed to take personal calls during work time. I’d told Vera that, several times, but she was under the impression that the rules didn’t apply to her.
“Milja. I’m so sorry, honey. I’ve got bad news.”
“What?” I dumped the files on my desk and took a proper grip on the phone. “What’s happened?”
“It’s your father. He’s been taken ill. You have to go home straightaway.”
Home. For a moment the shiny modern office around me flooded with shadows, and I smelled damp stone and church incense. On my tongue was the greasy taste of mutton, and under my feet was the bounce of wild thyme.
“Milja? Did you hear me? Are you still there?”
“Father is ill?” I repeated, faintly. Far away, I heard the screech of the mountain eagle, high and cold and cruel.
Chapter two
EGAN
We flew out of Logan International together. Vera was old enough to be my mother, and I had no one else to take that role. It was a comfort to have her wit
h me, though at the same time we seemed to be driving each other crazy. My cousin worried and tutted the whole way from my apartment to the airport—about the taxi being late, about the way everyone else was driving, about the cost of the last-minute tickets, about the clothes I’d chosen to travel in and the airline luggage allowance and the rudeness of people nowadays, all pushing and grousing at the terminal entrance. We elbowed our way through the press with the best of them, and trundled our wheeled suitcases down the interminable ranks of desks to our designated check-in.
That was where I discovered that I didn’t have my passport on me anymore.
The gush of panic made me feel sick. I knew I’d had it with me in the taxi, because I’d checked for the fourth or fifth time, at Vera’s insistence. I’d slipped it into my jacket pocket, I’d thought—but the pockets weren’t very deep. Now they were inarguably empty.
“What were you thinking of, you silly girl?” Vera asked, her voice rising. “One thing I ask you to do, and look what happens! We’ll miss the flight now!”
I could see the people in the queue behind us starting to stare. “Ring the cab company and ask them to get the driver to check, Nana,” I suggested desperately. “And I’ll go back and look. It might have fallen on the floor.” I wanted to get away from Vera for a moment, just so my ears could stop ringing. My cousin was five-foot-nothing when she took her spike heels off, but she had the voice projection of an opera singer.
I left my suitcase with her, waiting resentfully to one side of the desk while the next customer checked in, and I headed back down the long, long hall of the terminal, scanning the scuffed floor for my passport. The thought that we might miss our plane, that we might not be able to fly, that we might not reach my father for another day or perhaps at all—it made my throat swell and my eyes burn. Hundreds of feet passed back and forth under my frantic gaze. Knots of people clustered everywhere, waiting for their desk announcements—could they have parked their overstuffed baggage on my fallen passport without realizing? I wanted to shout at them all to get out of the way. I wanted to beg them for help.
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