One night, after a session of particularly fierce love play, Danlo lay back against the furs to catch his breath. His hair was a sodden mass of black clumps stuck to his dripping face and neck. 'I am dying ... of the heat,' he said. 'Couldn't we open a window?'
'Have we finished?' Tamara sat near him, looking down at him, and streams of sweat ran between her wide, heavy breasts and flowed down her belly into her navel. The golden hair between her legs was thick with moisture, and her whole body glistened like cream. She used her fingers to comb her long, wet hair away from her face while she evened her breathing, then smiled at him and said, 'If we've finished, why don't we go into the tea room and take our refreshments?'
They dried themselves with towels then, and put on kimonos of black silk. They went into the tea room, which adjoined the meditation room. It was much cooler there. Danlo always liked the feel of the tea room, with its rosewood beams, paper walls and clean, good smells. It was starkly decorated, but Tamara was an aficionado of beautiful things, and the few objects to be seen impressed him with their beauty: the porcelain tea service set out on a low table; a shatterwood doffala sculpture of a bear that had been carved by a man of one of the Alaloi tribes; and, arrayed atop the sill of the sliding windows, seven oiled stones that she had found on the beach. He sat between the table and the window, and he turned to admire these stones. The window was cracked open, letting in streams of cold sea air. Below him, below the cliffs he sometimes liked to climb, was the Starnbergersee, frozen and quiet with the cold of deep winter.
'Would you like tea or coffee?' Tamara asked.
'Tea, please. Peppermint, if you have any.'
Tamara went into her kitchen to prepare their little meal. Hers was one of the few houses in the City to have a kitchen. Most people considered taking meals alone in one's own house to be a barbaric, most unsocial act, but she was a courtesan, after all, and she found it difficult to dine in public restaurants. After a while, she re-entered the tea room carrying a tray laden with a tea pot, silver knives and spoons, a small bowl of honey and a larger bowl, full of bloodfruits and tangerines. She set the tray on the table and sat across from Danlo. She poured the steaming, golden tea into their little blue cups and she served him with the precise and graceful movements that the courtesans are taught when they first learn their art.
Danlo took a sip of the scalding tea while his eyes followed her long, lovely hands. 'I love watching you,' he said. 'The way you move.'
She smiled at this compliment the way she always did, then used her long fingernail to slice open the skin of a tangerine. She peeled it with exquisite care, in a most pecu-
liar manner: she pulled the skin away from the meat in a single, long, twisting strip, around and around the tangerine from north pole to south. When she was finished, she gave it to Danlo, who held the ends of the spiral strip between his fingers and played with it, pulling up and down, letting the peel uncoil and then coil again as if it were a bouncy orange spring. He marvelled at the care she took in accomplishing little things. He loved the way she poured tea into the exact centre of the cup, the way she meditated on the golden stream as it arched out of the teapot. Everything seemed to delight her. She seemed intensely interested in spoons or teacups, or in the clear articulation of her words as she searched his face and spoke to him. She paid attention to everything that happened around her, and she paid attention to him as no one had ever done. This was her grace and her gift, to pay attention. The whole of her art was to know people intimately and help them awaken into joy. She wanted to be the bearer of joy, to spread it among the people she knew, just as she used a silver knife to spread honey over each of the tangerine sections before putting them into Danlo's mouth. It was her deep desire to let her awareness spread out and encompass every rock and snowflake in the world, to take joy in everything, and in every act, whether it be the washing of dishes or polishing stones or joining with Danlo in slow, sweaty ecstasy. 'Ecstasy lies in details,' she told him one night. It was her pride to bring him to a greater ecstasy of life, and so she ate tangerines with him and talked about little things, and she listened as only a courtesan can.
'I love watching the way you move,' she said to him as she tore apart two sections of a tangerine. 'The fluidness – it must come from growing up in the wild. Civilized men move as if they're made of metal.'
'Have you taught many men ... how to move?'
'I've tried,' she said. 'But the men of your Order are so stiff and brittle.'
'I cannot believe you have not had your successes.'
She bowed her head and smiled in false modesty. 'No one is unteachable,' she said.
Danlo wiped a drop of tangerine juice from his lip and said, 'You like teaching people things, yes?'
'Some people,' she admitted.
'I have wondered ... if it is your intention to teach your art to the Ringists.'
'Do you think I should?'
Danlo ate another section of tangerine, then took a sip of tea. The cold-hot mint tea brought out the fruit's acidity and quite succeeded in waking up the taste buds along his tongue. 'I have wondered why you take such an interest in the Way. I have wondered why any of us have. You want to wake people up – you have said that before. The cells of our bodies, to wake them up so that we can live ... as true human beings. But this does not accord very well with the third pillar, does it?'
Tamara took a bite of tangerine and smiled. 'Which is the third pillar? I keep forgetting.'
' "That human beings can become as gods if, and only if, they will follow the way of the Ringess",' he quoted.
'But don't you think we should become fully human before we go off becoming gods?'
'Does it matter ... what I think?'
'It matters very much.'
'Then I think that you should teach your art to Ringists,' he said. 'You were born to teach these things, yes?'
She nodded her head, then she picked up a bloodfruit and examined it as if it were a diamond and she were looking for the perfect way to cut it. 'Even when I was a little girl,' she said, 'I wanted to be a courtesan. Of course, so many do, and so many are turned away, but I always had a sense that this was my calling, that I'd be very unhappy if I were turned away, too.'
Danlo smiled at her and said, 'But how could they have turned you away? You are the most beautiful person I have ever known.'
For a while she laughed easily with a rich, musical laughter. Then her face fell serious and she said, 'You know it's thoughtless of you to flatter me as you do. I've always been much too vain.'
In truth, she was quite vain, and she hated being so, even though she tried to accept this part of herself in a graceful and natural manner, as she did everything else.
'You are what you are,' he said.
'And you're not completely glad that I do what I do, are you?'
'It limits certain possibilities between us,' he admitted.
'Are you speaking of marriage again?'
He nodded his head. 'Marriage, yes, but not just that. The making of a family ... a true union.'
'Is that so important to you?'
'In the end, it is everything,' he said. He turned and pressed his forehead to the cold window before saying, 'Ever since I came to the City, I have lived ... for myself. My quests, my misfortunes, my dreams. This is the civilized way. So many here do the same. Even the professionals and pilots. We are supposed to give ourselves to the Order, yes? We crave this giving. To sacrifice a part of our lives for a greater life ... as part of something greater than ourselves. Everyone knows this. This is the ideal, but few achieve it, I think. The Order is dead – everyone is saying this – and so we turn to the Way to fill the hollowness. But it cannot be filled by crowding elbow to elbow into a cathedral. Or by kneeling together while Bardo gives us a taste of sea water. At least, I cannot ... fill myself this way. I would be glad to leave the City forever, if it were not for you. What we could make together. Call it marriage or union, it does not matter. It would be something splendid. Blessed. It is what we were meant for. I see that now. I was blind for so long. When my tribe died ... I died. A part of me. But now – I never dreamed that anyone like you existed. Now, these nights here, I am alive again. For the first time in a long time, I think I am truly sane.'
He finished talking, and he slid open the window to let in some fresh air. The night was cold and clear; far below, the frozen waves of the Sound sparkled in the starlight. And beyond the Sound, the mountains rose up and loomed upon the horizon like dark, ancient gods.
Tamara came over to him and knelt by his side. Despite the serious lines of her face, her eyes were sparkling. She touched his hand with her fingers, and she said, 'You're a beautiful man and you always speak so beautifully. But is it fair to speak of marriage when you're forbidden to marry?'
He turned his head and looked at her. 'I am still a journeyman – I have not taken my pilot's vows.'
'But you will soon, won't you? They'll forbid you to marry, and then you'll be chosen for the Vild mission, and we'll have to say farewell because you'll be gone forever.'
'Not ... forever.'
'Would you return to Neverness?'
'As soon as I could. As soon as I find a cure for the plague. If there is a cure.'
'I understand – you have to complete your quest.'
He shrugged his shoulders, a habit he had acquired only since his admission to Resa. 'You could call it a quest, if you would like.'
'You'll complete your quest, and heal your Alaloi, of course. And then? What would we have become? I've heard the stories of women who wait for pilots to return.'
'Do you mean the problem of the time distortions?' he asked.
'I've heard of pilots that age three years to their paramour's thirty.'
'Those are Einsteinian distortions,' he said. 'Sometimes, they are offset by the distortions of the manifold.'
She looked at him and said, 'Slowtime and dreamtime speed up body and brain, isn't that true? They speed up the interior time, the intime.'
He smiled and squeezed her hand. 'I keep forgetting that you know ... almost everything.'
'Not everything,' she said. 'I wouldn't know how to be married to a pilot. I don't think I'd know how to be married to anyone.'
She spoke of many things then, that she had been reluctant to reveal. They drank tea and ate bloodfruits, and she told him about her dreams and her secrets and her fears, especially the fear that all courtesans have: that of growing older more quickly than other people do. Because courtesans bring themselves back their youths after only twenty years of ageing, and because they can only make themselves young again three or four times, they must face their final old age much sooner than others. She feared growing old, and she feared losing her beauty, but more than anything else, she was afraid of what she might have become if the Society had not accepted her as a novice twelve years previously. 'If I hadn't left home I would have died,' she told him. 'I would have grown up to become like my mother, and that would have killed my soul. I'd be dead inside, just like everyone else.'
That night, after she had shut the window and stripped off her kimono so that she could sit more comfortably, she told him about her extraordinary family. She had come from a large astrier family who had settled more or less permanently in Neverness. Of course, all astrier families are large, and hers was in no way distinguished because of its size: she was the tenth of thirty-two children, most of whom still lived with her parents in a huge house in the Farsider's Quarter. Although it was unlikely that her family would ever achieve the ideal of a hundred children, her mother was still quite fertile, and she continued to give birth year after year. On five different occasions, she had borne twins, and once, quadruplets. Tamara suspected that her mother was really quite sick of breeding babies (as she put it, 'the way furflies breed little white maggots') but she was an Ashtoreth, an old and proud family who traced their line of descent, mother and daughter, back more than the thousand years to Alexandra Evangelina Ashtoreth. Alexandra was perhaps the most famous mother in history: half of her children had converted to the new religion of Edeism and established the Ashtoreth name, while the other half had carked their DNA and had claded off into the alien race known as the Hulda. The Hulda had disappeared into obscure parts of the galaxy, while the Ashtoreth family, in their millions, had gone on to populate planets. And cities: one of Tamara's ancestors had immigrated to Neverness and established her family there. Many Ashtoreths, over the centuries, had since left the City but many remained. Just south of the Winter Ring, where the Serpentine winds toward South Beach, the houses and apartments were overflowing with Ashtoreths. In fact, this district is known as the Ashtoreth District, and Tamara could count some ninety thousand cousins, nieces and great-grandaunts who bore her name. The Ashtoreths were not the only astriers in the City, but they were exemplars of their religion, and they upheld their traditions in the strictest manner. Tamara's mother – her name was Victoria One Ashtoreth – in many ways was the quintessential astrier matron: imperious, practical, materialistic, deceitful and intensely critical. She was fiercely loving, too, and self-sacrificing, patient, proud and terribly vain. Tamara's greatest fear in life was that she would grow to become like her mother. And she nearly had. When she was eleven years old, her mother had betrothed her to a rich astrier man ten years her senior. She was expected to wait seven years, to marry, and then begin bearing children. A great swarm of children: astriers – those who followed any of the Edic religions – were required to conceive as many children as possible, to ensoul as much consciousness as possible, miraculously transmuting dead matter into human beings so that, at the end of time, the entire life consciousness of the universe would be united and vastened in Ede the God. By fleeing to the Society of Courtesans, Tamara had escaped this fate of 'cancerous motherhood'. The very idea of marriage aroused in her intense anxiety and dread, and she usually avoided talking about it. And so, for the first time, as she clutched at Danlo's hand and gulped her tea, she spoke in her sad, bittersweet voice, and she told him why she could never marry him and be his wife.