City of Ruin - Mark Charan Newton [37]
*
Later she showed him more of this world of hers, aware of somague symbolism in the gesture. It wasn’t so easy, however, to do this, to permit him back into her life.
Did she still love Malum? That wasn’t a simple question. She had affection for him, but she didn’t like being with him any more, and certainly she didn’t care for his absolute rages where he could almost turn into a monster. When did he ask her about progress in her work any more? The last time was probably their conversation about golems, but when she admitted it wasn’t her area of expertise, he had lost all interest. The time she was now spending with Lupus replaced months, even years, of Malum’s empty substitute for conversation. How had she and Malum drifted apart? When was the moment that he ceased to provide for any of her emotional needs?
Beami and Lupus talked of the gap that had developed in their understanding of each other, the missing years of shared acquaintances, the onslaught of the Freeze – the slow ice age that had now taken a grip of the Boreal Archipelago and how it was changing their lives and the lives of others all around them. More than anything else, she felt the impending ice had forced a sense of urgency for things to happen. Perhaps this was in the back of her mind when she reopened herself to Lupus.
She possessed some undetermined fear that Malum would hurt her if he discovered what was going on, but while she and Lupus were here, in this otherworld, they were quite safe and she knew they would return to the Boreal Archipelago at the precise instant they had left it.
There was an aching perfection to the landscape, now that they were a part of it. Light began to add new textures to the surroundings, refracting off each substance – grass, water, tree – as if the landscape itself possessed some ethereal quality. Newer creatures passed by, their body shapes seeming unlikely – four-legged oddities that shifted along under a diamond-shaped spine, and pink fist-sized insects with choppy patterns of flight.
Now and then a garuda would skim past just above the ground, its downdraught rippling through the sedges. She had tried communicating with them before, through voice and sign, but they never responded, perhaps not recognizing the Jamur shapes she made, or perhaps merely ignoring her as, impassive, they soared ever upward.
There were some ruins of a civilization around them which she did not recognize. Structures that were dense and elaborate, mixing unusual shapes and materials. Monuments that were crippled by time; vines and lichen had long ago begun reclaiming them, wiping out any cultural residue carved into the stone. For some time the two of them hesitated on coloured tiles that blended effortlessly with grass, as they peered through a window arch towards the vista beyond.
The deep sense of long-past time was humbling.
*
Beami told her lover of the names she had assigned to certain placehere, simple names so that she had something easy with which tamiliarize herself over the year or so she had been visiting the hiddeorld. Lupus wanted to name something there after himself, teaseer until she gave way by re-titling some ugly fish in his honour.
Silences in their conversation were not in any way awkward – much was revealed in them by the tender gesture of a hand, a searching look. They sat in the shade of a salix tree, its graceful weeping form astir in the wind. Still she could not get over the unaccustomed warmth.
The discussion of their