The Shadow of the Sun (The Way of the Gods)

by Barbara Friend Ish

  “You didn’t go back to Aballo?” she said.

  How could I? I would have been just as forcefully rejected there. The wizards had closed ranks in public, and no one beyond Tellan’s borders knew what had happened; but I was still the biggest disgrace they had endured in centuries. And at Aballo I would truly have been a celibate man in a tea-house. For a while. I would quickly have been forsworn, and irretrievably damned.

  “I vowed to give up the practice,” I said. “I went to live on the Ruillin, and got serious about the harp, and…”

  “And shortly they declared you their leader, because that is just what people do,” she laughed.

  I found myself smiling. “They didn’t bring it to me; I went and got it. There’s a cloak, you know—it looks like something Loeg would wear—and I just…” Truth caught up to me.

  Hid, I thought. Tried to pretend I was someone else.

  “That seems like a pretty good idea,” Letitia answered, and I realized she’d heard the thought.

  Terror dropped out of the sky, nearly crushing me. I had spent the past month in the company of telepaths and neglected the simple precaution of mental shields. How much had they heard?

  “How often does that happen?” I choked.

  “What?”

  “You heard the thought.”

  Letitia frowned. “Did I?”

  I nodded, throat tight.

  She looked thoughtful; for a moment she was silent.

  “I don’t remember having heard you think before tonight.” She gazed up at me in further pensive silence. “I like it. You’re beautiful on the outside, but I think your inside is much more interesting.”

  I should have laughed. Instead I found myself staring at her, sudden emotion welling painfully within. I swallowed, but my throat didn’t ease.

  “Thou’rt beautiful, too,” I croaked. “If I were less drunk I would have something more artful to say.”

  “This is better,” she replied, voice barely above a whisper and emerald eyes locked on mine.

  “Then I shall stay drunk,” I said, closed the distance between us, settled beside her and picked up the bottle again. She snuggled against me; my arm wrapped itself around her of its own accord, and I realized belatedly that I was caressing her, savoring the softness of her waist and the delightful angles of the girdle of bones beneath the flesh of her hip. I forced myself to stop, banished the readiness raging through me. She gave voice to a sigh of pleasure, snuggled closer, and laid a hand atop my thigh, which made it necessary to banish my aching need all over again. I was less successful this time, but managed to keep things below the level of embarrassment.

  But then she shifted, wrapped her arm around me, turned and climbed into my lap: facing me, mouth just inches from mine and knees to either side of my hips—and I forgot how to ward off my body’s inevitable response. All the blood raced away from my brain. She stared into my eyes, utterly serious. I let my hands settle on her waist, telling myself it would be rude not to, finding my fingers resting on the cold smooth skin of her back where her shirt had hitched northward and the waist of her pants dipped south. Even cold, the texture of her skin made my head whirl.

  She was a virgin. Virgins never have any sense of the meanings of the things they do, not when it comes to loving. They are forever promising things they don’t understand. I held myself still, hardly allowing myself to breathe, but all the apocryphal stories of Tana and the way they simply take the men they want stampeded through my head. I thought of Easca in some storage cubby with Sainrith, getting makeup all over her neck and gods only knew where else. I reminded myself of the difference between a woman of experience, who is ready for a quick simple tumble, and a virgin, who knows only what she feels. But my breathing quickened anyway, and my fingertips couldn’t help but move, just enough to take in her miraculous textures.

  She reached up, tangled a hand in my hair, raked her fingers through it until the thong that bound it back fell free and it tumbled forward around my face. Her gaze was still locked on mine, and I realized she meant this, at least; I couldn’t guess how much more she meant, and I suspected whatever unfolded here would not be drunken forgetfulness of her commitment to Iminor but rather a rebellion against it, something born of anger as much as desire.

  A better man would have stopped and questioned her motives. I pulled the thong from her braid, slid my fingers through the silken mass to trace the curve of her scalp as she closed her eyes, arched her neck, leaned into the caress with such abandon that I very nearly grabbed and pressed her to me.

  But no. She had suffered an unwanted advance already today. And I wasn’t sure what the choice would mean, because I might not like Iminor, but even in the midst of desire and uisquebae I recognized how much more bound me to him than to any of the men whose wives I ordinarily seduced. I had not yet done something truly wrong.

  She opened her eyes, gaze lit with something that felt like the caress of fire in the hands—and touched my mouth with her fingertips, tracing my lower lip with her thumb. I turned my face into her palm, kissed her hand, aching with a flavor of need whose like I couldn’t remember: both relieved and oddly terrified when she slid her hand away, down my jaw, and leaned in to kiss me.

  But then her lips touched mine, and everything else vanished. I forgot myself, wrapped urgent arms around her, buried my hands in her hair while she crushed against me, her suddenly-heated skin and cold damp clothing sending wildly conflicting messages into me, the thing I most wanted pressing through the mail shirt and against my groin so I shuddered and growled. Fire raced all over my body; nothing existed beyond burning need and its miraculous answer, but just outside the bubble of unreason hovered the knowledge that I was doing something that couldn’t be undone. I pulled back, gasping for breath.

  “Letitia,” I breathed. “Annu.”

  “Shut up,” she whispered, breath feathering my lips. “Shut up.”

  But I didn’t. Instead, when she stopped my mouth with her own, I opened my lips to her, and she to me, and I realized we were still within territory she knew. I grabbed lean handfuls of her this time, cupping the curves of her bottom; she leaned into me with such fervor that I gasped and pulled back lest I push her too far. Her eyes burned into me; her long fingers sought the clasps of my mailshirt; I recognized, with the remote wisdom of drunkenness, the stupidity of allowing it but couldn’t find it in myself to care—and then it was off, and her breasts pressed into me and she came to rest against my groin, and I was very nearly lost.

  “Wait,” I breathed. “Wait.”

  She frowned. “What?”

  It took me several seconds to figure out what was wrong.

  “Wait,” I said again, and returned to caressing her slowly, trying to give my brain time to catch up; savoring the soft delicious energy that hung on her, the veil of invisible light that caressed my fingers as it let them pass, stretched out to reach me in all the places where I leaned close, sent a glow of warmth into my consciousness. Gradually it dawned on me, as the silken skin of her neck slipped along beneath my fingertips, as blind need shifted into the sort of desire that allows things to build and last: whatever happened, however things changed when we stepped inevitably back onto that boat, I stood on the threshold of something miraculous. I might not be the first human ever to bed a Tana, but no doubt I was the first to enjoy a virgin. I would carry the secret to my pyre. It was only right to bring all the art of which I was capable to bear, to allow myself to remember and her to truly enjoy. But I looked into her face, seeing something that began with anger and drunken lust but hinted at the possibility of more—and nearly lost myself in her eyes again. I leaned in to brush my lips against hers.

  “No regrets,” I whispered against her mouth, feeling her tremble under the caress. “No regrets. Or stop me now.”

  “No regrets,” she whispered, and the tremor infected me, but I shifted my grip and drew her to her feet, still unable to tear myself away from her mouth; lifted her, carried her from the
center of the little circle to a spot in the moonlight-dappled shadows beneath a tree. She melted into my arms as we settled, let me stretch her out in the shadows and tangle myself around her—and then, somehow, her hands were unbuckling my sword, unbuttoning my shirt, sliding across the skin of my chest while she trailed kisses and delicate devastating teeth along my jaw, until I almost lost myself again, diving into her long white neck and very nearly giving into the urge to bite. Instead I employed every trick of the lips and tongue and gentle tooth I knew, and she gasped and writhed and gave voice to maddening noises—and I found myself lying on top of her, mouth full of her succulent lips, fingers working buttons by the sheer miracle of muscle memory. I drew back as the last button opened: head whirling, vaguely aware that I had lost any semblance of the style whose reputation I so carefully cultivated in Ilnemedon—and stopped without planning it, dumbstruck by the wonder.

  I prayed I would remember: Letitia lay in the grass, moonlight gleaming in her ardent emerald eyes and the tumult of her golden hair, Amien’s talisman glittering on its delicate chain, the long stretch of her neck unfolding into the clavicles I had glimpsed on occasion and the soft perfection of her breasts; all bathed in the seductive glow that no one but a wizard would ever see. For a moment I forgot how to breathe. I had completely lost track of reason, and if I didn’t recover now, it would be over much too soon.

  Playfulness. Style. Those were the things I needed, the things that usually came as effortlessly as the knack of flirtation I had lost somewhere in Fíana. I tried to remember what the rakehell of Ilnemedon would have done. I bent to kiss each breast in turn, the soft silk-and-velvet textures under my lips and tongue sending me spiraling towards uncontrol again, and moved on to the thing that would allow me to recover a more playful mood: I shot her a wicked grin, bent and grasped the talisman with my mouth, steadying it between my tongue and the roof of my mouth as I moved it aside so I could kiss her heart.

  My head fired; the talisman lit me up with a power more brilliant and immediate than the delight that hung on Letitia when her wards were gone, and for a moment everything was as bright as day. My mind fell irretrievably open; Letitia’s awareness hung within me like a bright fog, and all at once I knew exactly what she wanted, which caresses would answer the places that begged for my touch. I kissed the power back into her chest, surprising a low sound from her; sudden, unconquerable need pounded through me. It was too late for style; it didn’t matter: I dove in to her breasts again, raining kisses downward as I undressed her, giving voice to a wholly unexpected moan as her hand found its way inside my pants and closed around me. Finally I recognized that I was as open to her mind as she was to mine, and she had read my desire as easily as I read hers. The vulnerability of it should have frightened me; instead it roused in me a strange wildness.

  “This. Yes,” she panted, as I twisted around to taste her mouth again. Her fingers moved, making me moan once more.

  “Thou. Art,” she whispered in Ilesian.

  “Thine,” I breathed. I didn’t know when it had happened, didn’t care. There was no longer any need to deny.

  “Show me,” she said, half a moan; once again I saw what she wanted. I let her pull off the rest of my clothes, until I was as naked in body as I was in my soul, and gave her everything a man can safely give a woman on whom he does not intend to father a child: not with style, but with a tenderness that welled from some place whose name I didn’t know, serving her every need with my pleasure until she wilted, spent and trembling. Finally I lay back, gathered her against me, lay there staring at the branches above us: listening to her heart slow, to her breathing shift as she sank into sleep.

  An odd peace descended over me; uisquebae unrolled a new layer of fog in my head, and through it I watched cherry blossoms flutter on a light breeze that somehow failed to reach the ground, admired the profusion of stars strewn across the moonlit velvet of the sky, breathed in the scent of the waters in the well, the soft earth on which we lay, the mystery that was Letitia. Her presence beside me and her warm softness under my hands felt unassailably right; for the moment everything outside this little enclave seemed very far away. It would have been easy to begin imagining ways in which this moment might become permanent; but for all the ways in which uisquebae dampens pain, it always unlocks the bare truth as well: this was a moment, no more. There had never been, never would be a battle between me and Iminor, and I had won nothing but the privilege of becoming her secret refuge. The best I could do was savor this moment and try to remember.

  Suddenly, strangely, I found myself on familiar ground, but everything was different than ever before. I had never bothered trying to count the number of women I had seduced, nor the—thankfully smaller—number of husbands I wound up dueling when those women forgot about discretion. Over the years the patterns of it had become so familiar that I could predict each affair’s unfolding, and I knew the emotional stages we would endure. After the thrill of the trespass came the woman’s regret, followed by her decision to try to hold on to everything: the husband who gave her comfort and status, the lover who made her feel bold and wild. I became the dark little secret, the repository of all other inadmissible truths; it became my role to introduce her to the tastes for the illicit and transgressive she hid, possibly even from herself. Her discretion would be absolute—until, suddenly, it was not. Sometimes the breakdown in discretion came from a yearning for the thrilling danger of revelation; sometimes it was because the woman wanted, whether consciously or not, to extract the same kind of attention from the husband she betrayed; sometimes, but rarely, it was because she had developed a temporary infatuation and mistook it for genuine attachment. In any event, whatever caused the breakdown in discretion, the number of days remaining in the relationship might be counted on one’s hands. That was the part I liked least, because the end of that countdown was nearly always marked by a duel, by another death for which everyone knew who to blame even though nothing was ever proven or recorded: none of it ever my idea, but usually, after all the damning and generally truthful words uttered in the run-up to the duel, a proceeding I regretted little until afterward. But the more times I ran that course, the deeper the regret grew. There were days when that part of it made me want to give up on women altogether.

  This time, though, while I saw the road stretching before me, the terrain looked completely different. It was easy to see the possibility of investing everything I had, everything I was, in this doomed affair; the idiotic part of me that had fixed its devotion on her could go right on maintaining a gambler’s face in public, dedicating my sword and wit to her defense, even while I marked the days by the stolen moments she gave me: until the war was won or I died in her defense, either outcome tracing a downward spiral towards something that would only seem like tragedy to the one experiencing it. To do otherwise would require changing the depth and nature of my devotion. In the glow of illusory closeness that always comes after the first tryst, the path of seemingly romantic self-destruction beckoned.

  Surely it didn’t have to be that way. Surely, with the application of some mental discipline, I could choose otherwise: to chart a path in which I accepted any subsequent trysts with Letitia as something that existed outside ordinary reality, as if they were arcane operations performed in an Aballo workshop; to allow myself to see tonight’s tryst for what it was, a long-overdue lancing of some pocket of overactive emotion in me. I had learned, with Marla, to be both a lover and a friend. Couldn’t I do that again here? Couldn’t I regain the perspective, the clarity that allowed me to navigate these waters in Ilnemedon?

  Yes, I decided: I could. I could accept whatever emotion Letitia might endure—surely it was all different for Tanaan, anyway—and count myself lucky that the Tanaan evidently had no tradition of dueling over lovers. I could allow my infatuation, deep as it was, to drain away. I could walk away when it was all over, carrying secrets and memories no one else would ever have.

  I lay there, letting the idea of allowing
myself to love Letitia, like the rest of them, as a friend and companion-in-arms, while enjoying the occasional tryst as time and circumstances permitted, to roll around with the uisquebae fog in my head. It was a good idea: all the things that made me want to devote myself so deeply to her were also reasons to hold her in the highest esteem as a friend; and if the madness of not having a woman I desired had been cured tonight, she was no less delicious than she had been three hours ago.

  By the time the pale light of dawn began and Letitia stirred and woke, I was ready to smile at her, to meet her eyes and salute her awakening with a kiss. The delight of her flavors and textures raised me to readiness again, but the madness of it had receded a little.

  “Ohhh,” Letitia breathed, her gaze traveling down the length of me. “I had been about to say that that was a thing we shouldn’t do again, but…”

  My newfound perspective allowed me to find the rakehell of Ilnemedon, finally, to draw him on like a favorite shirt. I smiled and leaned in to kiss her, feathered my lips past her eagerly-offered jaw, whispered into her neck: “But now? What will it be?”

  “Ahh…” she breathed. “Surely no one will miss us any more than they already do.”

  “Surely not,” I answered, and kissed her again. It was all coming back to me now: in sudden, great waves of remembered surety. I gently stretched out her arms, spread myself along the full length of her: following all the cues women don’t even know they give, building her desire and her pleasure towards the point at which even a moment’s pause drives a lover beyond reason. The glow of her gentle power infiltrated me, but I didn’t reach for her mind: that intimacy would throw me off balance all over again. Artful pleasure was enough this time. When I slipped inside, a moment of roaring emotion overtook me; but I was ready for it this time, and rechanneled it into the more controllable sort of passion. The wave of need pulled me under, and style was once again lost to me; but after a few moments of barely-conscious loving, I remembered my training, rode the waves of pleasure without succumbing to the release, ushered her shuddering and exclaiming across the line of climax and back again, and beyond the line once more. The echoing insanity spun me out into the places beyond the mundane realm, until I saw her shimmering energies even more clearly than I saw her face; felt them pulse all around me on the waves of her pleasure; shivered at the sudden sensation of her awareness within me once more, the intimacy of it inciting a wave of emotion that could only be managed by gathering her close, burying my face in her neck, hiding within the silken shield of her hair. When she shuddered towards exhaustion again I drew gratefully back, kissing her and trying to pretend there was not a knot in my throat, and began pulling on my clothes.