Behind a screen in that room, Gentiola showed Charlinder a pegboard filled with hooks, all of which except the last few at the bottom held a miniature hank of yarn with its own wooden tag.
"This," she said, pointing to the first one on the board, a disjointed blend of fine red wool and a coarse, sparkling bluish material that he suspected was a modern-era synthetic, "is the first memory I saved in wool. It's my decision to go to university in Florence. There's no tradition behind this, but I felt at the time that an especially confusing and difficult memory was best preserved with alternating and contrasting fibers, and I've held onto the practice ever since."
"How was that memory difficult and confusing?"
"At the time it led to some family arguments. In hindsight, I realized that was also the time when I decided not to return to Albania."
Charlinder said nothing. Gentiola looked back at him. "The country was a wreck at the time, and it ended up getting a lot worse before it got better, but it's not an easy thing, to say goodbye to your home."
"You haven't told me very much about your life," he observed. "I'd like to know more."
"Yes," she replied, looking suddenly flattered, "we can certainly do that."
He choked on the dark red drink that Gentiola poured for each of them in the living room.
"Oh, I'm sorry, I guess you don't have wine where you come from?"
"We make home-brew out of apples," he said through coughing, "but it doesn't taste like this."
"Well, this comes from grapes, and you're supposed to sip it, very gently," she instructed.
"Right," he replied, after getting his respiration under control, "so. How did you manage to survive the Plague and still live another 120-some years?"
"That much, I still don't know," she answered, "but I grew up in a city called Elbasan. We supposedly prided ourselves on our emphasis on education, but of course that didn't mean youngsters were supposed to go out and get a diploma at all costs. While my older brother snuck into Greece to send money home, I found, at my local high school, that I was most drawn to the life sciences. So I went to school in Florence and eventually became a microbiologist at the university in Bologna. During my education in Florence, I had a Dutch classmate named Pauline, who introduced me to her other friends. We were the ones she trusted to protect the secrets she was about to share, and she began teaching us magic. I was the one in the group who picked up her teachings the best, and in fact I eventually taught her some things at least as valuable as what she taught me. In the end, I learned a lot more magic than she ever knew.
"Of course, university only goes on so long, and eventually Pauline went back to the Netherlands and the rest of us went our separate ways. I had my job and research in Bologna. I didn’t really have friends after I finished my Master’s degree. I got along well enough with my colleagues, but I think they just never really knew what to make of me. I kept in touch with my family, though not very frequently, until my parents died, at which point my younger brother took the next visa to Canada.
"There wasn't much to report after that, until the Plague happened when I was thirty-five. I can only suppose it's the magic that's kept me from aging since then."
"Did magic keep you from aging before the Plague?" Charlinder asked.
"No one I knew at the time said anything to that effect," she said curiously. "No, I think I aged normally until the disease started spreading, but since it ended in 2012, my body hasn't gotten any older."
"How would that work, though? Why would you become immortal only after the Plague?"
"I may never know for sure, but I can only suppose," she began, and apparently reached some difficulty, "--you have to understand, when Eileen and I were growing up, the world looked very different. The Earth, specifically, was nowhere near as healthy as She is now," Gentiola explained, as if their planet were a female animal rather than a huge piece of rock. "Human beings as a species became so populous and widespread and made such powerful advances over nature through the centuries, the damage done to the planet was staggering. You weren't around to see it, though Eileen may have written something about this. The water was contaminated, the soil was disappearing, the air was filthy--in fact the air was so altered that the balance of climate was thrown increasingly off-center, and in favor of hotter rather than cold. A few people turned that to their economic advantage, but in
ecological
terms, it was sheer disaster in the making."
Throughout this explanation, Gentiola's eyes glowed brighter than he'd yet seen. While she stopped to catch her breath, Charlinder asked, "Sorry. How was that affecting your life?"
Gentiola took another deep breath, and when she looked back at him, her eyes were no longer flaming. "You have to remember that magic is all a process of drawing and controlling energy from the Earth and the life She gives. Since civilization spent so many centuries attacking and repressing magic, we practitioners don't know whether the damage wrought by industrialization made it more difficult to access the Earth's energies. When the Plague wiped us nearly all out, we lost all the ways we had of doing that damage, and the Earth started healing Herself, rapidly and thoroughly. She's been far more energetic in the last 123 years."
"That makes sense. So, did witches before industrialization live as long as you?"
"No, they didn't. That's what makes my case so confusing. I can only suppose it was not just the absence of damage, but the sudden healing, that's made the difference."
"Do you have any other witches around here to share your ideas with?"
"I don't think there's another practitioner of magic alive in the country. Most of us didn't avoid the Plague, you see."
Charlinder saw, indeed, what she meant. Magic was one of those areas that suffered not only a loss of population, but also of communication, to the body count of the Plague.
"I think it's about time to start making lunch, how about you?" she offered.
Charlinder spent much of the afternoon letting Gentiola tell him about environmental damage. Eileen had, in fact, written about the topic, and he had studied her writings just as assiduously as in all other subjects, but that was no substitute for getting to talk to a living person who'd been around to see it. When the sun set and the springtime air in the room chilled, Gentiola lit a fire in the hearth, and they let the topic veer off into other subjects.
"You see, this is why," she said in the middle of another glass of wine during dinner, "I keep memories stored in wool. Everyone learns history, but no one learns
from
it."
"Would you really say 'no one,' though?" Charlinder asked.
"Okay, 'no one' is too extreme, but not nearly enough people," she conceded. "Especially of the ones who have the power to make history repeat itself."
"I know what you mean."
Dinner was finished, plates were cleared, and Charlinder and Gentiola resumed their places nearer the fireplace. "I want to know," she declared, "how you became a teacher." She was lounging sideways in an armchair, her half-exposed legs dangling over one arm and her hair trailing toward the floor on the other side. "Were you the only one at the time?"
"Yeah, I was the only one; there are only about 150 of us, so we don't need to have more teachers. In fact, sometimes it feels like at least half the village wouldn't care if we didn't have a school at all, but," he trailed off, to Gentiola's chuckling. "Anyway. I was the best student in the class, and my teacher suggested that I take up the job after he quit. I mean, he first made this suggestion when I was sixteen, and at the time I was horrified to imagine myself in his moccasins," at this point Gentiola started giggling especially heartily, "but after I finished my schooling, I started thinking about it, and when I was eighteen, I went back and told him I was up for the job. He retired that summer, almost like he'd been waiting around for me to accept. Sometimes I wondered later if I should have just worked on my hunting and fishing techniques instead," he mused, to Gentiola's increased laughter.
"I take it they were a bunch of disruptive little monkeys, your students?"
"Yeah, I felt that way sometimes. I loved it, though. I did it for two and a half years and couldn't picture myself doing anything else, until I decided to come here."
"I can certainly relate to the disruptive little monkeys aspect," Gentiola shared. "When I was a teenager, and planning to get my education abroad, my family kept saying, 'Why don't you just go to university here and teach Biology at the local high school?' Of course my parents weren’t actually at school with me. For my first couple of years of secondary school, we were under the dictatorship, and the schools were basically just training camps for the regime, but at least they were orderly." She dismounted from the armchair and sat next to him on the sofa. "Then we transitioned to democracy, and the educational system was turned upside down, and not in a good way. And I saw what my teachers had to put up with, so I said, 'You want me to do
what
?!' And they got used to it eventually."
Charlinder scarcely had time to ponder the differences between Gentiola's and his experiences, when he was so focused on the woman in front of him. Her cheeks bore a lovely, rosy glow, probably from the wine she'd been drinking, but the cause was immaterial. She was a beautiful sight.
"Did you find another teacher to take your place?" she continued, still giggling.
"Yeah, of course. One of my best friends had a cousin who wanted the job, and I thought she was a good fit, so I trained her up before I left, and...I
hope
she's still teaching now. It's been a long time since I thought about that."
"I'm sure you've had other things on your mind," she said, "and that's what I love about you."
Charlinder met her eyes, and they both burst out laughing. She fell backwards in a semi-reclined sprawl.
"I just said that out loud, didn't I?" she chortled. "Sorry." She pulled herself back up and leaned toward him with her elbows on her knees. Her face looked too intense to be embarrassed. "It's just been so long since I had someone here I could really talk to," she explained. Her gown had moved around while she chose her position, and the back scoop draped wide open, revealing a lustrous arc of skin tanned at the spine and paler near the shoulders.
"You can't have a good discussion with the local survivors?" he asked. He wanted to keep his eyes on her, to keep her sitting just like that.
"The survivors all died decades ago," she breathed. "These are their descendants. And no, I can't discuss with them like with you. They work so hard just to get through each day.”
"I know how that is. I never knew anyone else before who understood how I felt about some things," he explained. "You know, broader and deeper things than just how we'll get through next winter. Of course I haven't been around nearly as long as you, either," he reflected, "but, still."
"No, you haven't," she agreed, "but you're not too young to feel isolated."
"Is there any such thing as too young to feel isolated?" he said.
"Not once you're old enough to remember," she answered with a sympathetic tilt of the head.
At that moment he couldn't stop himself; it was more a question of "why not?" than "what are you doing?" He reached out and ran his left hand through her hair starting at the crown and drawing down. Gentiola's eyes fell closed and she released a sigh too quick to be in her control.
"Stay right there, will you?" he whispered as he moved from where he was to just behind her. He swept her hair around her shoulders and out of the way. He pressed his hands into the exposed skin of her upper back. She let out a high moan as he massaged the muscles just above her shoulder blades. He worked his way down her back and she arched around his hands. Her hair fell back off her shoulder and covered her back, but just as quickly twisted itself into a bun at the top of her head.
Again, he could have stayed right where he was and kept on doing what he was doing, but the next thing was not only the right thing but the only thing to do. He took his hands off her back and wrapped his arms around her waist, pulling her in closer, where she leaned back on his chest and laid her head against his shoulder, with her eyes closed and mouth tilted up. Before he knew it, he was kissing her, and underneath the taste of red wine still in her mouth were her lips and tongue demanding his, like the differences in age, countries and powers were merely a game they had played and there was no spell needed to let them talk to each other.
He sank his hands into the springy curve of her stomach through the layers of cotton in her gown. Her waist contracted and relaxed with her breathing, which he felt in sharp puffs from her nose pressed into his cheek with his mouth still exploring hers. One of her hands moved upward; there was a sagging of fabric to one side of her body over his hands. He opened his eyes just enough to see that she had dropped a shoulder of her gown off to the side. It left that whole swath of her body from her collarbone to her hip exposed. She was fuller than most people he'd known, startlingly pale under her clothes, and responded to his touch in undulating instinctual movements that made him turn rapidly hard. He took his lips away from her mouth and looked down at her body; he wanted to tell her how beautiful she was, but no words came. He kissed her other shoulder on the sun-laden exposed part beside the top of her gown. He brought his hand up to the bare side of her waist and stroked the skin there, and it was so smooth, so delicate and silky that he gasped along with her at the way she felt against the callouses on his hands.
She brought his hand up to grasp her breast, which filled up his palm in the most perfect way. The small brown nipple tickled his fingers as they brushed over it. He pushed the remaining strap of her gown off the shoulder and let the material sink into a messy off-white cloud around her hips. Gentiola disengaged herself from his grip, stood up, and let her clothes fall to the floor. Her eyes glowed deep forest green as she stared down at him. She took Charlinder's head in her hands and kissed him full on, leaving any restraint behind.