contrary, it seemed the most violent of separations: two contrary beings flung at each other in heat and clumsiness, in trust and in menace, the feelings of each unknowable and unfathomable to the other-its sweetness terrible as its brevity; its loneliness hurtful as its 'undeniable fire.
And never had she looked so frail to me as she did now, her eyes closed, her head turned into the pillow, her breasts no longer heaving but very still. It seemed an image to provoke violence-to beckon to the most wanton cruelty in a male heart.
Why was this so
I didn't want any other mortal to touch her!
I didn't want her own guilt to touch her. I didn't want regret to hurt her, or for any of the evils of the human mind to come near her.
And only now did I think of the Dark Gift again, and not of Claudia, but of the sweet throbbing splendour in the making of Gabrielle. Gabrielle had never looked back from that long-ago moment. Clad in strength and certainty, she had begun her wandering, never suffering an hour's moral torment as the endless complexities of the great world drew her on.
But who could say what the Dark Blood would give to any one human soul And this, a virtuous woman, a believer in old and merciless deities, drunk on the blood of martyrs and the heady suffering of a thousand saints. Surely she would never ask for the Dark Gift or accept it, any more than David would.
But what did such questions matter until she knew the words I spoke were true And what if I could never prove their truth to her What if I never had the Dark Blood again inside me to give anyone and I remained forever trapped in this mortal flesh I lay quiet, watching the sunlight fill the room. I watched it strike the tiny body of the crucified Christ above her bookshelf; I watched it fall upon the Virgin with her bowed head.
Snuggled against each other, we slept again.
Chapter 16
SIXTEEN
NOON. I was dressed in the clean new clothes which I had bought on that last fateful day of my wandering-soft white pullover shirt with long sleeves, fashionably faded denim pants. We had made a picnic of sorts before the warm crackling little fire-a white blanket spread out on the carpet, on which we sat having our late breakfast together, as Mojo dined sloppily and greedily in his own fashion on the kitchen floor. It was French bread and butter again, and orange juice, and boiled eggs, and the fruit in big slices. I was eating hungrily, ignoring her warnings that I was not entirely well. I was plenty well enough. Even her little digital thermometer said so.
I ought to be off to New Orleans. If the airport was open, I could have been there by nightfall, perhaps. But I didn't want to leave her just now. I asked for some wine. I wanted to talk. I wanted to understand her, and I was also afraid to leave her, afraid of being alone without her. The plane journey struck a cowardly fear in my soul. And besides, I liked being with her...
She'd been talking easily about her life in the missions, of how she'd loved it from the very beginning. The first years she'd spent in Peru, then she'd gone on to the Yucatan. Her most recent assignment had been in the jungles of French Guiana- a place of primitive Indian tribes. The mission was St. Margaret Mary-six hours' journey up the Maroni River by motorized canoe from the town of St. Laurent. She and the other sisters had refurbished the concrete chapel, the little whitewashed schoolhouse, and the hospital. But often they had to leave the mission itself and go directly to the people in their villages. She loved this work, she said.
She laid out for me a great sweep of photographs-small rectangular colored pictures of the crude little mission buildings, and of her and her sisters, and of the priest who came through to say Mass. None of these sisters wore veils or habits out there; they were dressed hi khaki or white cotton, and their hair was free-real working sisters, she explained. And there she was in these pictures-radiantly happy, none of the brooding melancholy evident in her. In one snapshot she stood surrounded by dark-faced Indians, before a curious little building with ornate carvings on its walls. In another she was giving an injection to a wraith