132 - Life is perfect

It was only at a distance, the distance across my hands clenched and pulling at my own hair and the echoing of the cry I let out, that I heard Surya say to Niku, “Tell me, does that explain a few things?”

“Oh... oh yes... it does… Ama Kalandris… love. It’s not true…” I could not bear to see her say this as well as hear it, and so buried my face in my arms.

A firm hand took hold of my wrist; when I looked I saw Surya was gripping her wrist with his other hand. “So,” he said. “You aren’t worthy of his love as you are not special enough, and you aren’t worthy of her love if you live past thirty. So neither of you truly believe it when the other says, ‘I love you.’ And you wonder why you quarrel?”

Both of us laughed, through our tears. I felt as if I had been struck by lightning; also that there was a further chasm of depth unexplored in this. Surya would take me down into it; I could be certain of that. “Neither of you could bear to look at the other while hearing the truth,” he said. “So you each faced it alone.”

Niku and I stared at each other, and our eyes locked, trembling on the edge. I spoke my heart. “Niku, of course you’re special enough to be worthy of my love… you are a thousand times special enough. I love you like life itself.”

Everything else faded, but for her eyes, and her voice. “Chevenga… Virani-e. You are worthy of my love if you live a thousand years.”

It was as if some unknown darkness that had always been there was lifted away from us, as if the sun came from behind cloud for the first time in our lives, letting us see each other clear for the first time. Her face was the same as ever, but entirely different somehow, every line brighter and sharper than life, like the sparkling stones at the bottom of a spring-fed stream. I saw in her eyes that mine looked the same to her.

Neither of us dared at first, out of the sense, perhaps, that it might be like medicine that was too strong; that it might shatter us. But I opened my arms, and she said, “I want to hold you so badly I’m aching with it.” When two warriors fling themselves into each other’s arms it can be blurring fast and so hard it causes pain, but they won’t care. She felt as she had looked, the usual pleasure of her touch as scalding hot as the sight of her face was searing bright.

For a while we just clung weeping, saying sorry and I’ve-missed-this-so-much-it-hurts and I-didn’t-understand and I-love-you-please-believe-me. “Always and forever,” she breathed. “Always and forever,” I whispered back, “and none of this ‘as long as we have’ shit?” She laughed, “Ye-e-e-es! Eighty years, maybe, that’s as long as we have?”

“Maybe longer,” Surya said, with that sort of spiritual smile a senahera gets.

“Hah,” I said, brushing my lips through her hair that was soft and wiry at once. “He believes like Lakans, in reincarnation.” One of her hands let go of me, to feather-brush one of my nipples through my shirt, and the core of me was roaring with rising flame. “Visit’s over,” Surya snapped. “Go upstairs!”

I gave myself long enough to kiss his hand in gratitude, she did the same, and then we were running upstairs to the bedchamber, giggling breathless like two kids, struggling and whining with being torn between the simultaneous imperatives of taking the stairs three at a time—even hugely pregnant as she was—and running our hands all over each other.

Once we were there, we stripped each other so fast we tore seams, flung ourselves onto the bed, and then leapt into each other like swimmers into lakes. Her lips, her tongue, her veined slabs of muscle under silk-soft skin, her belly round as the Earthsphere with the mother-line down it, her black-nippled breasts, hard with milk for the coming twins, her gripping hands—all of her was more real than real, same as the first time we ever had, and yet more so. I didn’t hear the tap of a finger on the door, and nor did she, until it became the rap of a knuckle. “Chevenga!” Skorsas yelled. “There’s a runner from Assembly Palace!”

“That… can… wait,” I said, the words coming in the moments I could get my mouth free. “I’ll kick him,” Niku whispered.

“Jewel of the World, he says it’s urgent.”

“Skorsas!” Niku hissed. “Please!”

“Tell… him… to… leave it… in my office,” I breathed between tongue-strokes.

“Look, you two didn’t see me, for some reason, but I saw you when you went in there, and believe me, I wouldn’t dream of disturbing the two of you for anything that didn’t warrant it,” Skorsas said. I could imagine his nose rising a touch. “He’s not going anywhere, he says. He can’t leave until he has your signature on this, it’s that important.”

I took a deep breath. “Kyash… I’m sorry, love… I’d better deal with this. I will be so fast you’ll miss it if you blink.” I sprang up and threw on a robe.

Outside the door, the runner looked wretchedly contrite, as he handed me the packet, wordlessly. He had a pen; I skimmed down fast, though I’d never seen one of these before, found where I should sign and dashed it off, and did the same on the other copy. Since I was ceremonial only, right now, I wasn’t wearing the signet, which saved me the time of sealing. I handed one copy back to him and, when he gave me his chalk-sign, blew like wind back in, smacking my copy on the sideboard, and dove onto the bed.

“So what was that?” Niku said.

“No matter,” I said, and then our lips and tongues were otherwise engaged.

I can’t begin to describe how it was, in words. The second or third, I began seeing colours on each one; then they stayed even in between, and I heard music as well. Sometime, I am not sure when, she said, “Omores… Vaimoy Sala… let’s make afolkarig.” Clouds and rain, that means; love-making airborne.

In the sky, passion may be expressed not only in the motion of body, but in the swing and swoop and turn of wing. The A-niah have mastered such things as how to time momentary dives with a man’s thrusts, so that the thrusts go deeper, and how to go so high that the thinning of the air brings the partial smothering that heightens ecstasy, though we would not do that while she was with children.

It is also, if you can’t stand to wait until you are so high no one can see or hear, very public. There were already seven or eight writers resolutely camped around the Independent, and I saw another pair heading up from Terera. We left their calls of “Chevenga! Chevenga!” below as the ridge-wind seized and flung us skyward. We couldn’t stand to wait; let them write what they would.

When we were spent, we wanted to bask in utter laxness, so we landed, far enough in from the eaves that they could not call us, and staggered down into the bed again. There is sexual ecstasy, and then there is the sexual ecstasy with meaning so vast it goes deeper than the bones.

“I will strike the signature,” I whispered into her hair.

“Oh…” she breathed against the skin of my chest. “I’d forgotten.”

“I should have just done it, without saying anything. I’m sorry.”

“No, you did the right thing, omores. We needed to hear each other. I’m sorry.”

“No, no. I’m more sorry.”

“Oh, no, you don’t. I’m more sorry than you are!”

“My sorriness vastly exceeds yours.”

“Hmmph... my sorriness is more sorry than your sorriness.”

“The vast mountain of apology required of me looms massively over the anthill of slight contrition required of you!”

You can’t giggle with someone lying half on you without making them giggle; still, she held it enough to say, “Look, I would have to fly to get above the soaring peak of repentance I owe you!”

“Love, the sorritude of the sorriness of my ultimate apology is so vastly superiorly patheticly…” I couldn’t go on for giggling.

“I’m soooooo sorrrrrrry… I’ll never be able to plumb the depths of my ultimate abjectitude!” She lost it too, snorting.

“All right, you win,” I said. “Sorry.”

“Sorry.” Waves of laughter, so sweet after waves of sex, rolled over us endless and breaking, likes waves on a shore.

In time we calmed, as the sea does, and lay boneless and silent, but for the gentle susurrus of each other’s breathing. Even that was more beautiful than ever.

“Ohh,” she said. “My womb is in training.” I felt the tension rise and then ebb against me. I ran my hand over it, and them. “Sweetlings… you need fear nothing. I will never hurt you.” How much more deeply my heart fell into peace, to be able to promise that to an unborn child, or two, for the first time.

“Life,” I whispered, “just doesn’t get better than this. If Surya were to pop out from the door and say ‘Everything is going as it should,’ for once I would truly believe him.”

“Yes.” She drew it out a little, dreamily, like the note of a song. “What did that runner want, anyway?” she added absently.

I kissed her brow lightly. “No matter, as I said.”

“It has nothing to do with why all those writers were gathering, like buzzards around a kill?”

“I imagine it has,” I said, and kissed her brow again. Kahara… might we actually find it in ourselves to do it again? My spine felt like water, but so often we have more strength than we know.

“I’ve been charged,” I said, between kisses again. “Under the Statute semanakraseyeni… sections 21-1 and 21-5-7.” Her hair was like the leading edges of moth’s wings, on my lips. “Standard punishment, judicial impeachment, maximum punishment…” I lifted my head slightly, to flick my eyelash against her brow. “Exile without safe conduct.”

“Wh… what?”

“Shh, love,” I said. “Life is perfect, and everything is going as it should.”

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