Green Eyes Page 0,108

I would not be able to leave Rumelya. I had - hadn't I? - moved from my position on the veve. I walked back and forth, left and right, attempting to fall off as I had the first time. To no avail. Then, just as had happened beneath the turret of Ghazes, I recalled the necessary function of my suit, that it acted to orient me within the geomagnetic field. I reached up and felt the connections in the air. Again, the mystic experience of transition. It was losing its impact, and I remember thinking during transit that such depersonalized ecstasy might grow boring. I found myself back on Junction 14 waving my arms like a man drowning.

By the time she had finished half the entries, Jocundra's foreboding had matured into disastrous knowledge. Either the immense electromagnetic forces were unhinging him, fueling fantasies with which to form a surrogate past, or - and this she could not fully disbelieve - he was actually traveling somewhere. No matter what the case, and though she was certain he had not told her to protect her from worry, his secrecy was a barrier between them.

The last entry in the journal detailed his arrival in a great hall whose walls were ranked to the ceiling with mirrors. Translucent creatures - 'crystalline imperfections in the air, as quick as hummingbirds' - flew between the mirrors. Images appeared in their wake. One mirror held a view of golden-edged green scales shifting back and forth, as though the coils of an enormous snake enwrapped the hall; a second showed a gem-studded game board, its counters swathed in cobweb; a third depicted a black-suited Yoalo standing atop one of the turrets of Moselantja, spinning around and around, his arms raised overhead, becoming more and more transparent until only a wind whirled in his place, bearing up dust from the turret floor. Each successive mirror image caused him to recall bits and details: the movements of military forces, names, a sequence of letters and numbers which reminded Jocundra of astronomical coordinates. A final mirror offered him the sight of a woman leaning forward, herself looking into a mirror, her face obscured by a fall of dark hair; she then bent her head and lifted her hair up behind her.

I was overcome with longing. The shade of her hair was identical to Jocundra's, dark brown wound through with gold, and her movements were Jocundra's, the way she held her back perfectly straight while bending. I envisioned the old man once again, his shoulders hunched, holding out something to me: an ivory sphere, one of those conceits carved and hollowed with smaller spheres within. It was cradled in his palm like a pearl in the meat of an oyster. 'If you lose something,' he said, 'you will find it here. And if it truly is yours, it will return to you.' I knew then that this woman, whether Jocundra by name or some other, was bound to me through worlds and time, and that all I had seen within the mirrors were the elements of days to come.

Jocundra set down the journal and went to the window. He was, it appeared, thinking about losing her, and now this same thought infected her. Though it was something she had once taken for granted, the prospect had become terrifying, impossible to accept. The house shuddered.

Branches clawed and scuttered against the outer walls. She wished she had a word with which to shout down the wind, an incantation to still it, because it seemed to her a howling prophecy of loss. But growing stronger, it sang in the eaves and shaped groaning, inarticulate words from the open windows, mournful sounds, like sad monsters waking with questions on their minds.

The pale sun, its corona shrunk in a cyanotic rim, showed an arc above the forest of Mothemelle. Donnell stood with an ear pressed in the window of the inn at Rumelya, trying to assure himself that there were no patrons inside. At last, hearing only a tuneless singing, the clatter of crockery, he pushed in the door. A dumpy serving girl threw up an armload of dishes and ran through a curtained doorway, leaving him alone in the common room. Long gray benches and boards; whitewashed walls, one having a curtained niche; floors of packed sand littered with scraps of gristle, bones, and a striped lizard curled around a table leg; a high ceiling crossed by heavy beams and hung with ladles and pans of