The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [11]
Signs are for other people, he says. Here – down here.
The path is no more than a furrow. Discarded tissues, gum wrappers, used safes like fish bladders. Bottles and pebbles; dried mud, cracked and rutted. She has the wrong shoes for it, the wrong heels. He takes her arm, steadies her. She moves to pull away.
It’s practically an open field. Someone will see.
Someone who? We’re under the bridge.
The police. Don’t. Not yet.
The police don’t snoop around in broad daylight, he says. Only at night, with their flashlights, looking for godless perverts.
Tramps then, she says. Maniacs.
Here, he says. In under here. In the shade.
Is there poison ivy?
None at all. I promise. No tramps or maniacs either, except me.
How do you know? About the poison ivy. Have you been here before?
Don’t worry so much, he says. Lie down.
Don’t. You’ll tear it. Wait a minute.
She hears her own voice. It isn’t her voice, it’s too breathless.
There’s a lipstick heart on the cement, surrounding four initials. An L connects them: L for Loves. Only those concerned would know whose initials they are – that they’ve been here, that they’ve done this. Proclaiming love, withholding the particulars.
Outside the heart, four other letters, like the four points of the compass:
The word torn apart, splayed open: the implacable topography of sex.
Smoke taste on his mouth, salt in her own; all around, the smell of crushed weeds and cat, of disregarded corners. Dampness and growth, dirt on the knees, grimy and lush; leggy dandelions stretching towards the light.
Below where they’re lying, the ripple of a stream. Above, leafy branches, thin vines with purple flowers; the tall pillars of the bridge lifting up, the iron girders, the wheels going by overhead; the blue sky in splinters. Hard dirt under her back.
He smoothes her forehead, runs a finger along her cheek. You shouldn’t worship me, he says. I don’t have the only cock in the world. Some day you’ll find that out.
It’s not a question of that, she says. Anyway I don’t worship you. Already he’s pushing her away, into the future.
Well, whatever it is, you’ll have more of it, once I’m out of your hair.
Meaning what, exactly? You’re not in my hair.
That there’s life after life, he says. After our life.
Let’s talk about something else.
All right, he says. Lie down again. Put your head here. Pushing his damp shirt aside. His arm around her, his other hand fishing in his pocket for the cigarettes, then snapping the match with his thumbnail. Her ear against his shoulder’s hollow.
He says, Now where was I?
The carpet-weavers. The blinded children.
Oh yes. I remember.
He says: The wealth of Sakiel-Norn was based on slaves, and especially on the child slaves who wove its famous carpets. But it was bad luck to mention this. The Snilfards claimed that their riches depended not on the slaves, but on their own virtue and right thinking – that is, on the proper sacrifices being made to the gods.
There were lots of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything, and the gods of Sakiel-Norn were no exception. All of them were carnivorous; they liked animal sacrifices, but human blood was what they valued most. At the city’s founding, so long ago it had passed into legend, nine devout fathers were said to have offered up their own children, to be buried as holy guardians under its nine gates.
Each of the four directions had two of these gates, one for going out and one for coming in: to leave by the same one through which you’d arrived meant an early death. The door of the ninth gate was a horizontal slab of marble on top of a hill in the centre of the city; it opened without moving, and swung between life and death, between the flesh and the spirit. This was the door through which the gods came and went: they didn’t need two doors, because unlike mortals they could be on both sides of a door at once. The prophets of Sakiel-Norn had a saying: What is the real breath of a man – the breathing out or the breathing in? Such was the nature of the gods.
This ninth