“Gustav’s a crossbreed,” Adrienne said. “Hanoverian warmblood on a Kabardin mare—you know, those north Caucasus mountain horses. Gustav here’s certainly plenty agile for his size, and he has extremely tough feet.”
Her mount was more lightly built, an Irish hunter, dapple-coated and two inches over fifteen hands. Sandra Margolin and a nahua stable hand came out with the blankets and saddles; they were a modified Western type, with several rings in the frame for ropes or gear, and machetes strapped to the left side beneath a coiled lariat; the horses champed a little with eagerness to get going. The young woman came back with the rifles, and they slid them into the molded-leather scabbards that rested at each rider’s right knee.
The lane ran through the stables, then out into a big grass paddock right at the foot of the hills, and then through a gate in a deer-high fence and into rougher country, grassland scattered with blue oak. Beyond, it turned into a track up alongside a rivulet that was probably small in spring and had shrunk back to about half that size now. The tinkling of the water over rock made a pleasant counterpoint to the clop of hooves, the occasional jingle of harness and creak of leather, the happy panting of the dogs as they cast back and forth and charged up the steep slopes to either hand, covering four or five times the ground the mounted humans did.
The track showed more deer and elk sign than horse hooves; the north-facing side of the V-shaped notch they were riding in was covered in big timber. Sparse-needled digger pine on the higher rocky slopes gave way to good-sized madrone and blue oak, goldcup oak, with Douglas fir and the odd redwood near the trickle of water—none of the king trees was a real giant like the ones up on the north coast, but they still towered over everything else, rising from forest shadow into the sunlight like great straight-shafted spears. The wildflowers were dying down as June wore on, but there were still clumps of ocean spray with drooping sprays of tiny creamy-white flowers, thickets of bitter cherry with silvery-bronze bark and sweet-smelling snowy clusters of blossom, thimbleberry and trailing blackberry beside the creek, blue chicory beside the trail. Silver-blue and long-tailed coppery butterflies started up from the horses’ hooves, though fortunately there weren’t many mosquitoes.
The air grew cooler as they angled up the ravine. After an hour or so he noticed something odd—a silence. The dogs stopped running through the underbrush and came back to stand by the horses; the mounts themselves tossed their heads a moment later. They both reined in and scanned the trees as their horses stamped and tossed and shifted their weight from foot to foot as a way of indicating they thought it was a bad idea to stop just then. One of the dogs gave a low growl and pointed, its nose locked on a big canyon oak about a hundred yards away. Tom peered closely, pushing back the brim of his hat with one big hand; dapples of sun and shade moved on the scaly gray bark of the trunk and thick limbs, but he thought that about thirty feet up…
“There,” Adrienne said, leaning close. He was pleasantly conscious of her breath on his ear and the contact of their knees. “That branch…”
“… there,” he said. “That isn’t a cougar, is it?”
“No,” she said softly. “Chui,” At his incomprehension, she went on: “We got that word from our when-wes. Leopard. A male, very large.”
There was something else jammed into the crutch of a branch higher on the tree: a mule-deer carcass, he thought. And the branch the big cat was lying on looked to be just perfect for dropping on anything that came by on the game trail beneath. He didn’t feel particularly alarmed; even big predators avoided people unless you cornered them or did something dumb like running away. Still, he didn’t intend to ride under that limb, either.
“Shall we turn back?” he said.
“Not unless you want to,” she replied. “There’s a very pretty little spot a bit farther on I was planning on showing you. Le Chui there’s probably been shot at before—they love the taste of dog, not to mention sheep. Pull your rifle out and see what he does.”
The cat’s head came around sharply as he slowly drew the weapon from the scabbard. It came to its feet as soon as he had the muzzle clear, and growled—a sound with more than a little of a rasping scream in it; then it whirled and went down the trunk of the oak like flowing water, disappearing into the bush so smoothly that scarcely a shrub quivered to the passage of three hundred pounds of carnivore.
“Well, he knows what a rifle looks like and what it’s for,” Tom said. “Doesn’t particularly like it, either.”
“Neither would I, if I could only bite back,” Adrienne said, clicking her white teeth together and laughing. “That was lucky. They tend to be scarce near settled country.”
The dogs relaxed, and the horses went forward without objections; he judged that meant the leopard had either gotten downwind or far away, or both. After a half hour of companionable silence they reached the spot she’d spoken of; it bore the first signs of humankind he’d seen amid the mountains.
“Here it is. Quite famous.”
“Well, you could call it pretty, I suppose,” Tom said.
They’d come out of pine-smelling forest onto a jutting triangle that emerged from the canyonside to make a flattish area about a quarter-acre broad, with pockets of growth amid the rocks. A spring bubbled up from the base of the overhanging sheer mountainside to the rear; it had been ringed with stones to collect the flow in a shallow gravel-floored pool, surrounded with a lush growth of star jasmine. That climbed the cliff higher than his head, grew thick around the water, and trailed along the sides of the trickling stream as it wound over the ledge and plunged off the rim. The water disappeared as mist among the trees below, turning to a constant drift of rain. The clustered white blossoms were thick among the vines, and the heady scent mixed with the forest smell and the chill dampness of the springwater. The ledge didn’t feel exposed, though; it was as if he’d walked into magic and become part of it, connected with everything he saw yet separate from it, safe and walled away.
Yet it was the view that caught at the throat. They were deep enough into the Mayacamas highlands that the ledge of rock seemed to float disembodied above the steep depths beneath and amid the lower rolling peaks about, gashed with occasional cliffs north to the barely glimpsed cone of Mount Saint Helena. The trees and brush about them merged into a deep green velour in the middle distance, fading to indigo that deepened as the sun declined toward the western crest.
They watered the horses, unsaddled them and tethered them to iron rings set in the living rock where the trail emerged from the mountainside; then they walked forward to the tip of the triangle, where a single small oak cast a patch of grassy shade amid poppies and wild hyacinth; the earth fell away beneath their feet. They could see Seven Oaks below them, toy-tiny yet absurdly close after their hours in the saddle, and the soft-colored palette of the valley beyond: the white steeple of a church in a crossroads village to the north, yellow stubble in blocks amid the green of leys, the tree-studded pasture, the occasional geometrical regularity of a vineyard or olive grove or orchard, and long shadows falling toward the riverbank forest from the lines of Italian cypresses. Light glinted on water, on the windows of the scattered farmsteads, and touched the tops of trees with a moving shimmer as people and animals moved antlike below.
It changed as they watched, tingeing the whole with a yellow haze, turning to burnished gold on the bare tops of the Vacas across the valley floor.
“But it’s not pretty,” he said. His arm went around her waist, and she leaned into his shoulder, a motion that seemed very natural. “Its beautiful… like something in a dream, or an old book about stepping through a mirror.”
“It’s the Land of Lost Content,” Adrienne said softly.
The words matched what he saw, but they also had the feel of being part of a larger whole. Adrienne must have felt the question through his arm, for she went on in the same half-dreaming tone:
Into my heart an air that kills
From that far country blows:
Wh
at are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
“But Granddad found it for us again, just for us, against all hope,” she continued, and shivered slightly. “That’s what scares me about going through the Gate, Tom, scares me bad every time I leave. What if I can’t get back?”
She turned in to his embrace and they kissed. Suddenly their hands were eager on each other, scrambling with belts and fasteners; they rolled on the long silky grass….
Some time later Tom Christiansen laid himself back, sweaty and exhausted—and glad they’d paused for a moment to get a blanket to lie on. Jesus, he thought blissfully, staring up at the deepening blue of the sky. I feel like a teenager again—or did for a couple of hours. They said a man’s stamina peaked at sixteen, and it was all downhill from there. But maybe not.
Adrienne propped herself up on an elbow and kissed him. Then she started working her way down his throat; her long, bronze-colored hair tickled, then mingled with the sparse pale blond thatch on his massive chest.
“Adri,” he said, “I’m flattered. But I’m also thirty-two, not sixteen—I was just thinking about—Jesus!”
He was lost for long moments. When his eyes cleared she was swinging astride him.
“You underestimate yourself, darling,” she said, and sank back with a shivering moan. “Turnabout’s fair play….”
The smell of star jasmine mingled with sweat and musk; his hands clenched on her hips. Her face was remote, eyes closed behind a mist of swaying hair, until she stiffened and froze, crying out—quivering motionless except for the strong internal clenching. He shouted and heaved convulsively, and heard the sound die in echoes against the rock as she collapsed forward on his chest; his hand slid up the slick skin along her spine to the back of her neck.
“Oh, my.” She sighed; he could feel the coolness as her breath met his damp skin, although her face was hidden. “Oh, my.” After a moment she went on, obscurely, “Now, that was certainly no chocolate éclair.”
He lay and enjoyed the sensation of her pressed along him—it was a lot easier for him to bear her weight than the reverse, of course; he had a gentleman’s chafe marks on his elbows. That went on for a long lazy time, until the sun struck his eyes and he noticed the time.
“I hate to say it, but oughtn’t we be going? People might suspect….” Adrienne chuckled lazily. “Suspect? They’ll do more than suspect, honeypie. Seein’ as I brought you up alone to Lover’s Leap.”
“So that’s what it’s called?” he said, and tweaked her.
She yelped and rolled off him, glaring in an anger only half-assumed; the tweak had been delivered in a highly sensitive spot, and one she couldn’t have politely rubbed in public. She could here, and did: even in his exhausted state the sight did remarkable things.
“What was that for?”
“For taking me up unto a high place and showing me all the kingdoms of the Earth,” he said, wagging a finger at her—and then grabbing her wrist when she tried to retaliate with a tweak of her own. They both laughed.
She went on, “Well, it worked, didn’t it? Unless you were planning on resisting temptation?”
“I may have Christ in my surname, but the first one isn’t Jesus,” Tom said.
A swing band was tuning up as Tom and Adrienne dismounted at the stables; sunset was about over, leaving only a red glow behind the Mayacamas. He grinned at the sound of the music; he’d been a teenager when the swing-dancing revival was at its height, and the thought of tossing Adrienne around to a brassy big-band sound held no terrors. That and square dancing were the most popular forms here, from what he’d heard.
Then a thought hit him with a sudden chill: It probably wasn’t a swing revival . For all he knew, it had never gone out of fashion, in this enclave of the dimensionally displaced. The population was too small to generate many fashions of their own, and if they were cut off from the living currents of society on FirstSide by choice or circumstance… He remembered his father remarking once that an uncle had gone on a trip to the old country in the 1950s. Modern Norwegians had barely been able to understand the archaic peasant dialect the uncle had picked up from the grandparents who’d made the original westward migration.
Tom and Adrienne helped the stablehands unsaddle their mounts, then walked hand in hand back to the manor. They parted with a kiss at the door to his room on the second floor; he took the time for a quick shower—rubbing down with handfuls of cold springwater wasn’t enough, considering the amount of exertion of various sorts he’d gone through today. The Commonwealth equivalent of party clothes for this sort of affair made him feel a little self-conscious at first—there was a definite zoot-suit influence—but they fit well; for a semiformal occasion like this they included a jacket with broad lapels, an open-necked shirt and loose-cut slacks, with two-tone leather shoes. He gave a thumbs-up sign to the mirror and went out to meet Adrienne. She wore a cream silk dress with a pleated skirt, and low-heeled shoes with diamond-studded buckles.
Whoa, he thought, taking her in.
It must have shown, or maybe he simply couldn’t contain an inarticulate cave-man grunt of admiration, for she curtsied; he offered an arm and she tucked hers through it as they walked down the curving staircase and out the tall doors to the gardens.
“And the same to you, sir,” she said. “Ready to eat? And dance?”
“Eating sounds good,” he replied. “Dancing sounds great in the conditional future tense.”
The rear of the great house was bright, the windows a blaze of lights and Chinese lanterns hanging high in the limbs of the trees, stretching away into dimmer reaches to the west. A set of trestle tables had been set on the velvety lawn, surrounding a white fountain of tapering stone basins; the band was setting up farther away, on a low stone platform nearer the paved area around the pool. A crowd of people awaited them, bowing or curtsying as Tom and Adrienne came out the main doors onto the patio that spanned the rear of the building beyond the enclosed courts. Tom felt hideously self-conscious at that; Adrienne waved with every appearance of calm, and the people went back to milling around and chattering, obviously excited and happy at the special occasion.
They were all in their best, and of all ages from just past toddlerhood to the elderly. The children were surprisingly well behaved….
Or maybe not so surprisingly, he thought.
One started to kick up a ruckus; the five-year-old’s mother grabbed him by an ear and administered half a dozen solid whacks to his behind with the other hand, reducing the noise to a teary pout that soon vanished in the general excitement and high spirits.
Guess a swift smack to the fundament hasn’t been redefined as assault here, he thought, amused.
Tully stood under a string of Chinese lanterns, talking to Sandra Margolin; she was giggling, and then burst out into wholehearted laughter, which with her figure was enough to make you blink; she was wearing a low-cut blouse and peasant-style skirt.
“Not wasting any time, either,” Adrienne said, amusement in her tone.
“He usually doesn’t,” Tom said—he’d always been a bit baffled by Tully’s success with the opposite sex. “He never has any problem finding company. Keeping the woman interested is another matter,” Tom said. Then: “Hi, Roy. Where in hell did you get that oufit?”
Tully’s jacket was acid green, his shirt purple, trousers fawn, belt-buckle silver and turquoise, and his shoes brown, white and black; the cut of the clothes also had a much bigger hint of the zoot suit than Tom’s.
“Picked it up in Rolfeston. I was assured that it’s the height of local fashion,” the smaller man replied loftily. “Hello to you too, Kemosabe.”
“It’s not that people in men’s-wear stores keep lying to you, Roy,” Tom said. “It’s the way that you keep believing them that gets me.
”
“I think he looks fine,” Sandra Margolin said, and Tom threw up his hands.
Besides, I’m feeling at one with the world, and everyone’s friend, he thought, grinning.
A bell began to ring, summoning them to the harvest supper; people streamed off toward the tables set up on the lawn. Those were in the shape of a large T with a double stem and a small crossbar. From what Adrienne had said, Tom gathered that this was a twice-yearly occasion, after the wheat harvest and then in the fall after the grapes were brought in; the manor’s cook—a middle-aged woman of Franco-American-Italian descent and formidable heft—her staff, the housewives of the rest of the estate’s households, and the odd man who fancied his hand on a grill had all been working overtime, and with a certain ferocious competitiveness. The food reflected the mix of people who’d gone into founding this strange country: the Southern take on traditional Anglo-Saxon cooking, but with a heavy Latin influence via Italy and southern France, and a dash of German and East European.
He suspected that the mix of plebian and haute cuisine dishes was unique to occasions like this, though. Corn on the cob for starters, with an alternate choice of ranch-cured duck prosciutto and pears, or spicy tuna tartare, tomato fondant and chilled coriander broth… No, there was a twenty-first-century Californian influence there, too.
The crowd took their places, waiting expectantly. Adrienne had seated Tom at her right, with Tully and his new friend beyond that; the rest of the top table held the mayordomo and his family, and the other senior staff and theirs; Simmons’s tracker and the nahua sat at a separate section at the base. There was also a large ceremonial salt shaker, evidently a social marker separating the upper table from the hoi polloi even on a community occasion like this.
Adrienne rose, and took her glass of white wine in hand. Silence fell, after a few shouts of “Speech! Speech!” and “Go for it, Miz Rolfe!”
Conquistador Page 43
