Caliban
Illyria has a secret passion. Not because she thinks it should be kept
away from anyone, or even because it is something designed for privacy,
solitude, as her visit to Abu Simbel was. It is a secret simply because
no-one, as yet, knows. She has only just discovered it herself, almost
by accident, charged with sleeplessness and electricity on a night when
even Xander's arms cannot pull her back into dreams, and the memories
of who she once was - is - ricochet in her mind like hard pellets, unabsorbable
perpetual motion.
She knows that it will stop, that she is becoming something more, something
new, emerging from her carapace of invulnerability to become a new hybrid
that is not God-King or human shell, nor combination of the two, but
a new being all its own.
The process is frightening at times - during the day she can barely
stand to glimpse her own reflection, for fear of what she will see.
The knowledge that Xander has always seen whatever-this-is, loved it
from the moment he began to feel such emotion, is no consolation in
the dark, when she will not wake him, and yet hates the silence.
She is only safe in the dark, and only safe awake, safe from herself,
and perhaps this is why she has ceased to sleep in its blindfolding
grasp.
Night after sleepless night, she gives in to her strange desire for
this new infatuation, and slips out into the garden, crossing the lawn's
pattern of long tree-shadows from the street outside, sharp-cut across
the blank, moon-blanched level of the narrow path. All the colours are
drained away, even to her eyes, only the treetops picked out, line by
cold line, in a thin wash of silver light.
She is moon-charged, powerful, oddly elated, by the time she pauses
at the river's edge, looking at the water's shine, the ripples of light
changing subtly as it flows on. It is hers alone, and she takes off
her few clothes and steps in, dipping her body under the surface rapidly,
while the water slips over her breasts, around her shoulders, covers
her body. She embraces the chill with fervour, her new addiction soothed
even as the water wounds her, and her breath comes shudderingly in the
moments before she adjusts to the temperature, and begins to swim downstream.
She never goes far. Not that she fears crocodiles, or any of the other
dangers that they warn of in the guide books, but she does not want
to be caught, and stopped. And this is new, sstill, an exquisite joy
that she had not contemplated, for the shell she inabits has no memories
of such a pleasure, and her own form, even mutated, would never feel
this silvery cold.
This is a sacred and passionate mystery, like the moonlight itself;
the water in love with her body as she is becoming with it. Each time
she returns, she gives herself to it with reluctance, and its embrace
is bitter. But the more she endures it, the more she desires it, the
more its harshness is appeased, gentled, until it holds and caresses
her in its motion.
The moon shines full on the bank when she lifts herself out, and lies
down on the grass beside her clothes, waiting to dry off a little. She
knows that in the old days, women did this on their rooftops, hoping
that the rays would bring them fertility. She had never even troubled
to mock such things, far above them as she should have been. Now, though,
there is the faintest glimmering of understanding in her mind of that
need, that longing.
Around her, the shadows stand still. Her body, in the moonlight, is
transfigured into lines of such purity that it seems composed more of
light than of flesh as she gazes down at it, tilting one silver-lined
foot back and forth and watching the light change on it. She gets up,
and stands still for a moment; soon she must hide this new, night-transformed,
silverwhite body, and return to ordinary light, and then it will cease
to be a miracle.
Half way back to the house, she stops, bewildered. The solitudes of
darkness, she realises, hold forms now - her own, the river's, the trees,
the ones in her mind, the ones she loves. Everything is populated with
voices, whether in her mind or no, where for so long only half-imagined
shapes have hovered, feeding the emptiness. She understands that without
even realising that the moment passed, she has slipped out of that lucid,
credulous life between waking and sleep, and into the new reality that
has haunted her for days, passed through her Valley of Shadow safe and
unharmed.
She knows that this will stay a secret. But not because she does not
want anyone to know. Because she does not need it any more.
She is ready to face her dreams again.
*
