“Let go,” I say, and push him. He lets my arm slip from his hand and stumbles back a step. I should run, but I don’t.
“Who are you?” he asks. The words are soft in his mouth, not clipped like the woman’s. He holds his hand out, as if asking me to wait.
“Ourania,” I say.
“Have you come from a play?” He turns to look around the wood. “Or do you belong to the Classical Society?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I say, creeping back against the nearest tree. “Why would I want to be in a play?”
“Your dress,” he says.
I look down at my chiton. Mother and I painted it with beeswax and dyed it blue so a pattern of cream-colored birds and flowers shows through. Some of the flowers have come away smudged a muddy green from my leaning against tree trunks and falling asleep in the grass. I lick my finger and try to rub at the stain, but it’s set in already. I sigh. He must think I’m part of a paupers’ troupe with my dirty robe and bare feet. I reach up to retie the bands around my hair and pull away a dead olive leaf. I crumble it in my free hand and drop the shreds to the ground, hoping he hasn’t added that detail to my catalog of shames.
“I’ve been working,” I say. “I fell asleep on the grass.”
He blinks at me, then swallows and blinks some more. “What are you?”
I feel a scowl cloud my features. “I’m Ourania, like I said. What are you?”
“Aaron Lyell. I’m an apprentice engineer.”
“A what?”
“An engineer. You know, for locomotives.”
I stare at him.
He clears his throat. “Trains. You know.” He shuffles his feet over the rocky ground.
I cock my head to the side and wait for him to explain himself.
“If you don’t mind my asking, where do you come from?” He raises his eyes and looks at me with pure, innocent curiosity.
“Down the valley,” I say, nodding to the slope beyond the break in the trees. “This is our olive grove.”
“I’m sorry,” he says. He runs his hand through his mess of short, curling hair, the same burnished yellow as the girls’ braids. “The company was surveying this tract of land for railway development, and I found this lovely meadow. Looked like a nice place for a picnic. I didn’t know anybody was living here. We’ll have to go back over the property records now, naturally. . . . ” He trails off, staring at me again.
“Should I draw you a picture?” I say.
“What’s that?”
“I said, should I draw you a picture,” I repeat. “That way you wouldn’t have to look so hard.”
“Sorry,” he says. His pale skin goes a deep red and he looks down. “It’s only . . . I’ve never, well, in books, but I’ve never seen anyone like you before.”
“You’re a strange one,” I say, leaning against the tree behind me. “I’ve never seen anyone like you either. It’s like you stepped out of a wives’ tale or—”
“You’re lovely,” Aaron interrupts, looking up at me suddenly.
I feel my own face go hot and I look down at my bare feet. A peddler said something like that about me once, when my mother and I traded him some eggs for ribbons, but it didn’t mean the same.
I hug the book to my chest. We stand in silence, avoiding each other’s looks.
“May I ask,” Aaron says to break the long pause, “what is it you’re reading?”
I hold the book face-out so he can read the lettering.
“On the Origin of Species,” he reads aloud. His eyes light up the way Father’s do when he’s telling how he brought down a hart after a daylong stalk through the forest. “You’re interested in natural history?”
I shrug, then lift my eyes to look at him sidelong. “Have you read it?”
“Oh, yes,” he says, a grin parting his lips and tugging up his serious brow. “Engineering science is my trade, but I’ve a great interest in naturalism. Mr. Darwin is marvelous. Here.” He digs in his back pocket and produces a thin leather-bound volume. He holds it out at the tip of his fingers.
I step forward warily and take the book. It opens up to reveal small, cream-colored pages crowded with precise drawings of flowers and birds, sketched in graphite. Below each likeness, the name of the specimen flows in Aaron’s neat hand. I sit down on the ground and begin to page through from the beginning. “You did these?” I ask.
“Yes.” Aaron sits cross-legged beside me.
“I’ve never had time for drawing. Mother calls it a hobby.” I lift a page and stop with the book open to a sketch of the two girls I saw in the meadow. The older one is sitting with her feet up under her on a plump cushion, her head bent over an embroidery hoop. The younger leans against her, fast asleep, her hand resting on a cloth poppet.
I look up from the book. “Are they your sisters?”
He opens his mouth to speak, but a voice echoes up from the direction of the meadow instead. “Aaron?” It’s the woman, stretching out the sound of his name. “Aaron, where’ve you gone?”
He jumps up at the sound of her voice. “Coming,” he shouts back. Then quietly, his voice straining with nerves, he leans close and says, “Will you come here again next Sunday?”
I sit on the forest floor in a muddle. “When’s that?”
“Seven days,” he says. A twig pops some way off among the trees. He glances over his shoulder and begins backing toward the sound. “Meet me here. Please. In the meadow. I only want a chance to know you better.”
His eyes stay fixed on me until I nod, and then he’s gone, the soft thud of his shoes fading into the twisting file of trees. I wait a moment longer, and hear the woman’s voice cut out mid-call. My body feels odd and full of humming energy. I can’t feel my fingers, and when I look down, I see I’m still holding Aaron’s little leather-bound book. I stumble up after him. I jog through the shaded grove, dodging olive trees and hopping stones. But when I reach the meadow, the only trace of my strange visitors is a square of flattened grass where they laid their blanket. I walk slowly back to the spot where Aaron and I sat, gather up both books in my arms, and turn my feet toward home.
The afternoon passes slow and sluggish in the heat. Mother sets me to a column of geometry equations that have to do with the volume of water in our well during different seasons, while she ties on her veiled straw hat and heads out to check on the bees. I sit by the window with a wax tablet and stylus laid out in front of me and watch her white-swathed figure moving between the bee boxes. I would rather be out under all that cloth and sun than cloistered here with mathematics.
I slip my hand between the folds of my robe and pull out Aaron’s book. Its cover is worn smooth from handling. I dart my eyes to the window. Mother is easing a honeycomb from one of the hives. I spread the pages open and crease each one down as I turn. Aaron’s hand is exact, picking out the smallest veins and petals of the flora and fixing a lively glint in a bird’s eye, but I don’t recognize a single one of them. A Latin name and a common one accompany each drawing. Both sound strange on my tongue, like a cousin to a word I know. Cercis occidentalis. Judas Tree. Junco hyemalis. Dark-eyed Junco. Callipepla californifica. California quail. I try to sound them out, but they turn my tongue to clay.
I flip the pages under my thumb and the book falls open to a detailed sketch of an even road, flanked on both sides by tall bricked buildings. It’s a street in a city of some kind, but nothing like the places I’ve read about or Mother describes. What might be blown glass clings to the buildings in sheets, and little curls of iron or wood jut from the stonework. Tradesmen’s signs hang down from posts ensconced in the walls. There are hardly any animals in Aaron’s picture, except a single horse and some kind of pygmy dog led by a woman dressed more or less the same as the one I saw in the meadow. No oxen. No goats. No chickens. No market stalls, even. The men wear tall hats, and the women cover their hair with bonnets. The next page holds the schematics for some sort of spoked wheel and chain device. Next, the skeleton of an impossibl
y tall building, and an oblong shape moving among the clouds. Zeppelin, the script beneath it reads.
I put my hand to my lips and remember to breathe out. Is it real, or something Aaron made up in an idle hour? When I was young, I would draw fancy pictures full of lichen-dripped crevasses and monsters with hundreds of heads bobbing on their long, eel-like necks.
“Ourania!” Mother’s voice clips across my thoughts. She is struggling up the hill with two pails balanced out from her body in either hand.
I snap the book shut.
“Ourania!” Mother calls again. “Help me with the door.”
I open the door and stand back so she can pass through with the pails, honeycombs resting in sticky blocks at their bases. I keep quiet the rest of the evening. We finish butchering the stag in the cellar and jar the honey. We bake more bread. We light our lamps. We wait.
“Father,” I ask that night when most of the bread from our dinner is gone. “Could you take me with you to the wood, if you wanted?”
He chuckles, raising his eyebrows at me over the soup bowl at his mouth. “What do you want with the forest?”
My eyes slide down to the empty bowl in front of me. I pick at a heel of bread. “You could teach me to hunt. I could help you.”
“But then who would help your mother? And who would be our messenger?” Father asks. He reaches across the table and pats my hand. “You make a better Mercury than you would a Diana, I think.”
I must be scowling, because Father laughs again. “Is your mother’s company wearing on you?”
“No,” I say. I pour the last of the wine into my cup. “I only miss you, that’s all.”
“And you don’t think my company would wear on you, too?” Father asks.
“No,” I say again, cutting my eyes down to the table. I can see he doesn’t mean to answer me. I open my mouth to speak again, then change my mind and snap my jaw shut instead.
Father lifts an eyebrow. “Is there something else you wanted to ask, Ourania?”
I duck my head and feel my face fill with heat. “No,” I say in a small voice.
“You know I’ll tell you anything you want to know,” Father says. “You only have to ask.”
I hesitate, and raise my eyes to him. “Do you know what a locomotive is?”
Father’s eyes narrow. “Where did you hear that word?” His voice has a tang of metal in it. I am suddenly aware of all the beasts he has felled.
“Nowhere,” I say, dropping my eyes again quickly. My heart speeds up and I can feel the bread and lentils in my stomach curdle. “Nowhere. I mean, I read it. There was a book Mother had me read.” I bite the sides of my tongue and widen my eyes at the empty space on the table between us. He can’t know all I’ve been reading. I might very well have seen the word written. I chance a look up to see if he’ll take in what I’ve fed him. He stares back at me with that same hard look in his eyes. His usual, easy smile is gone, and I catch a glimpse of something dangerous coiled in its place.
I rise to clear the bowls from the table. Father remains, watching me move about. I keep my back to him and push my hands beneath the water in our kitchen basin so he won’t see them shaking. After a moment, I hear the scrape of his chair as he rises, and then the low tumble of wood as he kneels to build up the hearth fire. I stay at the dishes longer than I need, wiping them dry with extra care so I won’t have to turn around and see the awful power in my father’s face again.
“Would you like to hear a story, Ourania?” Father asks, his voice softened and friendly again. He stands in the doorway, but I can barely hear him over the pop of burning logs.
I sigh, slipping back into the comfort of our routine. “Please,” I say.
Father has told me about Diana springing forth from father Zeus’s head, Lord Rama, and the hero Sunjata’s sister, who married the spirit beneath the hill, and later betrayed her husband to save her brother. Tonight he will tell me of the god Osiris, whose brother murdered him and scattered his flesh over the Nile, and of faithful Isis, who gathered together the body of her husband, and restored him to a throne in the underworld.
But down on the earth, the sun halted its course at the edge of the sky. Dark did not fall, and all the beasts were trapped in a terrible half-light.
“Why has Day stopped her course? Where is Night?” the animals cried. They cowered and trembled in the stillness.
One of the beasts, the one called Man, stood upright. He held aloft a burning branch that tempered the darkness. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “I will go and find them. I will set them back on their paths and restore order to the world.”
Man ranged over hill and valley. He scoured the salt oceans. At last, he scaled the summit of the highest mountain. There he came upon the two of them, cradled together in a bed of stars.
A hot anger flared in Man’s breast to see them so reposed.
“You, faithless ones,” Man said, and his voice sparked like new-caught fire. “How could you forsake us?” He reached up into the abyss of heaven and called down a terrible beast. It snaked across the sky like a serpent, and shook the earth as it passed. Thick scarab metal covered the length of its body, and it hissed and growled foul smoke that poisoned the air. Man set it on the lovers. So Night and Day were forced to flee from it, always, or be devoured.
I am careful to rise early the next seven days. I milk the nanny goats in the chill, predawn mist, make cheese from what they give, practice my Latin and geometry, and watch the grain grow. At night, I hold Aaron’s book open inside the copy of Darwin. Father asks me to read to him sometimes, but then shakes his head after only a few paragraphs of Mr. Darwin’s prose and says he’ll tell me a story instead. It suits us both better. By the way the wheat bows and the twinge of cold in the air at dawn, I know the harvest isn’t far off.
On the seventh day, I trudge through the muggy heat of midday, up the hill to the olive grove. I carry a sack of bread and cheese. Aaron’s book rests snug inside my waist sash. A breeze picks up as I near the crest of the hill and the cool wood. I walk through the grove, trailing my fingers across the trees’ smooth backs and letting the wind lift the hair from my neck. The treetops create a canopy that filters little dapples of sunlight onto the ground. I am going to see Aaron. I am going to ask him if he’s seen the places he draws in his book, or if they’re fancies. I am going to ask him about the obelisk and the zepplin. I am going to ask where he found the Dark-eyed Junco, and what it is. I smile up at the canopy and round the last stand of trees.
The clearing stands empty. Aaron hasn’t arrived yet, so I crouch down and pluck at the blades of long grass. I split one down the middle with my fingernail to make a whistle, hold it to my lips, and blow. The grass makes a dry, sputtering tweet. I bite my lip and grin. If I close my eyes, I can picture my father sitting cross-legged beside me, showing my young self the trick of it. When I tire of my game, I make a chain of flowers and drape them around my neck and head, the way I saw the little girls do. I walk the circumference of the meadow, letting my hand trail over the saplings and low brush at its border. I pause at the spot where Aaron and the girls laid their blanket. Something has been carved into the thick trunk of one of the nearby trees. I kneel beside it and brush the markings with my fingers. The cut stands out faint and boxy, but I can read it. Ourania. A thrill passes through my chest. I stand and scan the meadow, expecting him to stride into view at any moment. But he does not come.
I take the little hinged, bronze knife I carry from my pocket and unfold it. The bark is thick, but I keep my knife sharp. It cuts a bright yellow line in the trunk below my name. I strain my arm against the hard wood and run my hand over my work when I have finished. Aaron. His name joins mine on the tree’s flesh. I braid long slips of grass into rope as I wait, flip through Aaron’s book again, and lie back to stare at the clouds passing soundlessly overhead. If only I could make time pass more quickly, the way the wind moves clouds at its whim, so Aaron could be here already. I close my eyes. A wind shakes the leaves a
t the top of the trees, making them rattle like a rainstorm on all sides of me. I lean back against the earth and rest Aaron’s book on the slope of my chest. For some reason, I find it easy to sleep here in the heart of the meadow. I’m sure Aaron’s footsteps will wake me when he comes. I let myself drift on the hush of leaves.
I dream of Aaron coming to me through the fold of trees. He kneels and lays himself over me. I feel the length and firmness of his body pressed against my belly, my breasts. The grass is like silk against the soles of my feet. It rises up and braids itself into a bower over our heads, shading us from the sun, as if the earth itself is responding to the heat in my body. I find myself over Aaron, with his hips tucked between my thighs. I pull the bindings from my hair and let it down so it falls in waves over his body. I kiss his throat, his chest, the soft, dark indentation of his navel, covering him with my hair. I feel his hands cupping my skin, and then, and then. . . .
I wake, feeling as if the world has tilted on its axis. My chest heaves as I try to catch my breath. At first, I don’t know where I am, and I paw at the bed of grass around me, trying to work my way to my feet. The sun has sunk low in the sky, a bloody bronze color. Far off, something howls. It is like the long, low baying of a wolf, but sharper, with the sound of rending metal folded in. My heart seizes, and I jump to my feet.
Late. It’s too late.
I make for the olive grove, scattering chains of flowers and grass behind me as I run. I clutch at my sash and discover I’ve dropped Aaron’s book. I scurry back to the meadow. There, beside the patch of grass I’ve tamped down in my sleep, it lies half-hidden in the weeds. I snatch it up and run again, through the darkening grove and down the hill, my feet fleet over the roll of the earth, terror beating in my chest.
The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2011 Edition Page 52
