He paused The hand felt warm now, and heavier than it had been in years It felt alive. He glanced down, but the bulge in his pocket was the same as ever Best to put it down to nervousness and forget it The witches had him spooked.
“Everybody knows why we are here. We are here to bury one of our own. And we are here to make a statement that those witches must not forget. We know you, and we burn with hatred for the evil that is in you, sons and daughters of Satan. For there is written upon your foreheads, ‘And they had tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in their tails. And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name is Abadon.” He pointed past the tall shadow of the burial mound, toward the darkening mountain.
He remained silent, pointing.
Let the spies guess what it meant. His own people knew. It meant tomorrow night and fire.
He flipped the lever that set the coffin to lowering, then thrust into his pocket to reassure himself that there was nothing genuinely wrong with the hand.
Whereupon it twined its warm, living fingers in his own—
Chapter 27
On her way down the mountainside Amanda had become aware for the first time of the density of flesh.
Every muscle and joint was stiff. The easy shorthand of movement she had enjoyed in the other world was replaced by a weighty crawling that she found most unnatural. Physical life was an astonishing limitation. She had never understood before the real effect of flesh on the soul, to stifle it in thick dying folds.
They had to carry her the final distance to the house. She had slept deeply, without dreaming. She was awakened by the whisper of the sun’s return. She could hear its light sweeping into the room. It poured across the floor, yellowing the damask curtains of the bed. She slipped from beneath the covers and parted the curtains, letting in the golden haze.
The quality of the tight reminded her of where she had been and, above all, what she had learned. The whole secret carnival paraded in her mind’s eye. It was impossibly beautiful, a series of images acutely charged with meaning. There were the terrors, Bonnie and the demon-girt Abadon, and of course Mother Star of the Sea. There were also her two fleeting moments of heaven, and in retrospect they had far more impact on her than did her long journey through her own guilt. Her few moments in the old backyard of her childhood were suffused in memory with the richest light that could be imagined, a light that illuminated both physically and emotionally. To know that she had left this light caused her the most intense suffering. She twisted and turned in the bed, experiencing her body as a tangle of iron chains.
Then there was that short flash of Mother Star of the Sea’s real fate, her own heaven. Hidden in her had been a great and compassionate spirit, trying by sheer strength of will to save the souls of the girls she was teaching. Did she know that she had become their demon, the arbiter of their guilt?
Yes, she knew, and upon that knowledge rested the palace of her happiness. For she also knew that she provided them with a safe means of working through the sour material of conscience after death. They used their memories’ of their stem, uncompromising teacher when they died to cleanse their souls for heaven. Because they had her, their work went quickly. To give them this enormous blessing, she had sacrificed love on earth and accepted a lonely death.
She understood the silence of Lazarus. How could you make voice from the air of so dun a world as this, after heaven? And she had seen only the edges, not the whole light of it. She felt actual physical pain, as if the air were being crushed by very longing from her lungs, and her blood boiling with a need beyond addiction.
She wanted nothing so much as to tighten into a little knotted ball and wait until she could return.
A shadow bulged in the canopy above her. “Tom?”
He didn’t stir. Nor did he purr. She found him awesome now, having seen him out of disguise. She wished she could thank him, but she had no idea how. She could hardly give him, say, a catnip mouse.
She looked down at her own flushed nakedness. It might be heavy and coarse, but she could still love this body of hers. Her blood sang in her veins, her skin thrilled at the simple contact of the air. She touched her own thigh, sensing the electricity of the contact between flesh and flesh.
There was also something else, a new and more objective awareness of the world around her. She saw the Covenstead as a tiny eccentricity of life, a final refuge of magical thinking. In her own mind she could see the blue stretches of reason and the bright shapes that defined the inner realm of her magic. She had acquired access to more of her mind than she had previously known. Her attention rushed into this vast new space. In it she saw Constance, who looked up at her with hollow, awestruck eyes. Instantly she knew Constance. Her knowledge was not verbal, but it was total. The experience had a powerful emotional impact on her. Without being able to say how, she understood the hidden meaning of this tragic and enigmatic figure.
Constance stared at her, and she was shocked to realize mat this was a shared experience. They were somehow linked. Then Amanda saw Ivy, then Kate, then Robin. His love poured out of his eyes, a perfumed glow. He was coming toward this room, bringing his innocence and his helplessness. She wanted to cherish and protect him. But for Constance, none of them were aware of her careful scrutiny.
Their attentions were not strong enough to enable them to see by this other light.
Outside the bed there was a small voice. “Amanda?” She pushed back the covers and raised her head into the full light of the sun. Beside her bed stood Robin, just as she had known he would. Instantly she knew what troubled him. Her heart opened to him. “Look at me,” she said.
He raised his eyes. His sense of rejection was easy to read. After his initial jubilation at her return, he had begun to see her as unreachably strange. There was nothing she could do but show him that she valued him and needed him. “Please,” she said, “kiss me.”
A peck.
So he was not so much awed as angry. “Robin?”
“Your breakfast is ready.”
She got out of the bed and put on her robe, which she found neatly folded across the back of the big blue chair. “Robin, I love you.”
“Thank you. I love you, too. We all do.”
She felt a sharpness within her, a taste of salt. “I mean I love you.” She looked at him. “Holly King.” Did he know how long was their association, through how many lives they had danced together? No, not really. He had been told, but his awareness lay at the side of his mind, shrouded in dark curtains of doubt and confusion. The trouble with reason is that it is only one part of the mind. In him, as in all of them except Constance, it was a great, central bulk of a thing, condemning them to perceiving only the linear and the expected.
She saw that mankind was exactly like the dinosaurs. The reptiles had chosen physical overgrowth at the expense of all other development and so had perished. So also mankind, since the beginning of recorded history, has been crushing all parts of the mind except the reason, until this excessive mental growth threatens him with extinction.
Reason is useful for building buildings, but it cannot build a happy life, nor enable a human being to see the sacredness or the richness of the earth. It cannot allow him to feel with his own blood just how painful it is to hurt the land. We live in maya, the world of illusion. There is no need for most of what we have, not for all these transformations of material that we have accomplished—
We have built a civilization that is exactly like a poison in the earth, or a viral growth, or an exploding cancer.
Amanda saw it all so clearly, and as well that the Covenstead might be tiny—just a few people, after all—but because it stood against this terrible, fundamental human mistake, it was incredibly important.
May the idea of the Covenstead, rich and open and unchained by the hungers of the consuming society, spread through the world, freeing man from his own mind, and the terrible hypnosis that is going to extinguish the species if it is not broken s
oon.
“Amanda!”
Robin’s voice interrupted her. She was breathing hard, staring. “Sorry. I’m fine. I was in another world.”
Slumping in his black sweatshirt and faded jeans, his muddy working boots, he could not have looked more forlorn. “I’m sure.”
“No, I don’t mean—oh, Robin, I was preoccupied.” How could she tell him what wonders she now perceived? The mists had lifted from her vision. To her, people had been revealed as magic architectures of almost unbelievable beauty, and him especially.
She went to him, gathered his unresponsive body in her arms. “Please kiss me.” She opened her lips and waited, remembering the hungry passion of the kisses they had traded at the culmination of the Wild Hunt.
He held her stiffly.
“I’m only a person, Robin.”
“I know that. It’s just that—I saw you—”
She put her finger over his lips. “You don’t know what you saw.”
“The hell I don’t. I saw you dead!”
What could she do to bring him back to her? Nobody could be natural and at ease with a miracle.
She realized, as the strengthening sunlight set her blood to racing, that they were all going to react much the same way. “The last thing I need is worship. I’m still me, Robin. And I love you exactly as I did before. Or no, that’s a lie.”
“I’m sure it is.”
“I love you a million times more. More than you can possibly imagine!”
His expression closed. How stupid of her to say that! But the words were already out. They swarmed in the air, vibrating his whole being to a sort of brown despair. He was thinking he’d like to get this over with and get out to the fields. “I don’t want to keep you from the harvest,” she said.
“You can even read my mind. What are you, Amanda?”
She had asked that same question of Constance. From this side it was a bitter question to hear. “I know that I love you.”
“Quit patronizing me! I mean, what happened to you? What did you find out?”
She wondered how she could ever tell it. If death is truly what one makes it, then there was little to say.
“Something’s out there,” she said. He raised his eyebrows. “Surprise is important. I can’t deny you that.”
Robin held out his hands to her. She went to him, but she was little comforted by his stiff, nervous hug.
“Tell me anyway.”
“There is another world. It grows out of the mind when it is freed from the body. When you die you find your conscience waiting for you. It cannot lie. If you suffer then, it is because you choose to do so. If you go on into the highlands, it is because you feel ready to accept the joy of heaven.”
“Am I ready?”
She could see so easily into his soul Like her own, his guilts seemed terribly small. He was unsure that it was right to leave his parents, and he worried about not being able to provide for them in their old age.
She slipped her hand into his. “You should reconcile yourself with your parents. Growth for you lies in the direction of understanding how you really feel about them.”
“We’ve come to a pretty good understanding already.”
She heard the lie. But it was not her place to correct him. He had to travel his own path. “Robin, I have so much to tell you. I relived our past together.”
On the surface he barely heard her, so preoccupied was he by what he imagined as the distance between them. But his essence heard, and looked out of his eyes with graceful eagerness. “May I know?” he asked. The acid in his voice, so contrived, seemed silly to her, but she did not laugh.
“You didn’t choose the name Robin by accident. It’s been your name before. We were lovers a long time ago, when I had a house in the forest.”
How they had loved, in the warm Sherwood nights, when the cat watched from the branch, and the stars coursed beyond the treetops. “I don’t remember.”
Oh, but she knew that was a lie. He did remember, and very well. She saw it in his eyes. “The log palace? The fairy? The coming of the sheriff of Nottingham?”
“You’re telling me I was Robin Hood?”
“Yes. You were Robin Hood.”
He looked askance at her. He smiled just a little.
“You really were.”
He burst out laughing, and when he did the wall between them fell at last. He kissed her easily, and there was hunger in it, the real hunger of essence seeking essence. “Oh, Amanda, I’m so glad you came back!
We tried all night, we raised the cone of power, but nothing seemed to help. I worked and worked and worked and I was sure I had lost you. Then the Leannan came and a little while later there you were!”
He was covering her face with kisses now, and they were kisses of passion. “You’re so beautiful, I love you so much, I didn’t think I could live without you!”
She delivered herself to his embraces. They went back into the bed and she drew down his pants and underpants and opened her robe to him. There, in the secrecy of the curtained bed, they made furious, shaking, gleeful love, laughing and kissing as they did it. She opened herself to him and let him seek the center of her pleasure.
When he spent himself, she attained a level of ecstasy so intense that for an instant she blacked out.
Afterward it was as if the rich dark of her womb was vibrating, announcing the presence of new life.
They had conceived a baby just then, she knew. But that as for another phase of life in the Covenstead.
Just now, would keep her condition a secret.
They lay awhile, linked. She followed his semen on its journey, feeling it struggle up her fallopian tubes, a swirling, struggling cataclysm in the dark, until finally one bright speck of him reached the egg, and there burst forth a light that sang. The connection to the egg held, and a new voice jabbered up in her. She smiled, beatified by her womanhood. “Can you keep a secret?”
“Of course.”
She saw how thin was his real ability to do this. Keeping a secret is one of the most difficult of disciplines.
“You must keep it for about three days. Can you do that?”
“Certainly. Come on, tell me.”
“You made it,” she said. “I just got pregnant.”
His eyes widened. “How—”
“I felt it all. The whole thing.”
He fell on her in a wild excess of passion. “I was scared of you, my love. I was scared to death, but you cured me of it. You opened me up somehow.”
“You opened yourself up. When you saw there was still room to laugh.”
He laid his mouth on hers. She touched him all over, feeling every delicious inch of him.
Robin’s kiss went on and on, lingering now, probing now, seeking in the miracle of their joined selves.
Finally he cuddled beside her. There came from him a whisper so soft it was almost unarticulated… a thought. “Was it just dark, death? Were you telling me the truth?”
She hugged him. “You can look forward to great wonders.”
He went up on an elbow. “I still can’t believe it. You actually came back to life. This is a scientific fact.
And you have memories, knowledge from the world of the dead. This is incredible.”
She had to forgive him; he did not mean to make her feel lonely. “The better you know yourself before you die, the better off you’ll be.”
“Is there a moral order? Such a thing as sin? Is there a hell?”
“As far as moral orders are concerned, we make our own choices. We are our own judges. And we are never wrong.”
“So, like, if Hitler thinks he’s doing good, then he goes to heaven? Is that right?”
“After death, all illusions fall away. We know ourselves, exactly as we are. I think I had a glimpse of Hitler.”
“In heaven?”
The memory so thoroughly revolted her that she almost screamed. “No.”
Tom’s head appeared between the curtains. For a moment the tw
o of them just looked at it. It was much too far from the floor, and he certainly wasn’t dangling from the canopy.
“Is there a chair out there?” Robin asked nervously.
“Not that I recall.”
Tom extended his tongue and slowly, sensuously, licked his chops.
“He must be—he has to be—”
“I think it’s his idea of a joke. Don’t let it upset you.”
“The cat is floating in midair and you tell me not to get upset! Jesus! Scat, damn you!”
Instead Tom came in, rolling and playing in the air.
“I think he’s celebrating.”
He floated past and out the other side of the curtains. Robin was silent for some little time. Once or twice he started to talk. Then he shook his head. “As I recall,” he said at last, “you like pancakes.”
“This is truth.”
“Would you like some now?”
She regarded him with deep fondness. “Would I ever.” They both dressed, and she brushed her hair and washed her face, and they went down to the kitchen. She had expected light and activity, but the room was cold.
“They’re all down at the village,” Robin said. “They’ve a feast for you. As you might imagine, there is a great of excitement. Only the Vine Coven’s really greeted.
“I barely remember coming down the mountain. I was terribly tired.”
“You walked like a zombie.” He hesitated at his own words, then looked away, as if he had unthinkingly called attention to some deformity of hers.
The two of them went out into me morning.
There was more than one veteran in Simon’s congregation. His call had been heard, as a matter of fact, by no fewer than seven vets, three of them tough young steelworkers on indefinite layoff. All had been trained in modem infiltration techniques during the Vietnam War.
At Betty Turner’s request the command post was in her home. Simon sat before his makeshift desk in the family room, which had been renamed the Operations Room.
“I got the radios. Brother,” Tim Faulkner said. He put a big box down on the floor. “Just what the doctor ordered. Three hand-held CBs, all tuned to the same channel.”