a l a y a y a
The sun was glorious. It was golden and full and it loomed above the horizon like a pregnant peach, overripe with delicious splendour, spilling gold into the world. The nectar of it, the sweet ephemeral saffron-spun slivers of youth, could be tasted on the summer breeze. From this seamless fabric slipped, solid and chimerical, the daughters of imagination. They were creatures of smile and soundless euphoria, embodied of the sun and the earth and skipping through the realms that we inhabit oh so briefly, a wisp of snap-dragon or a hot breath that shivers in the face of cold logic. Their laughter, sweet and silken soft, is the melody of dreams and the cries of nightingales lost in the falling dusk; and the touch of their skin – damp with youth but hot with sensuous promise, is unbearable and golden. She was young, and carefree, and though the light never faded from her love-kissed eyes she had a sad understanding that only made her simple grace and her smile palpable, acceptable. She was a child exposed, but not corrupted, and she glowed in her singular philosophy. This child, the detached shadow of a new-made man, conspired with the nymphs as they trespassed through the dunes, played and laughed and basked with them until the strength of the sun drove them to a place beyond even her child’s imagination. She did this in the way her gaze followed the breeze the rest of them only felt, in the way she skipped over the sand (bare and gold, and increasingly hot) or in the way she sometimes walked: too mature, too self-possessed. She passed into the dunes of Mors as the sun crested the eastern horizon, and by mid-day she had wandered far within the ever-changing maze of sand and sky. The forests of Viride lay well behind her, now, and apart from the occasional shade of a tall, capped dune, there was no respite from the heat of the summer sun. She was alone and seemed supremely unconcerned. Silly creature – have you been alone all this time? She seemed to wander without thought of where she was going. A bird’s eye would have observed she made a more or less straight line toward the Day Court. This was probably coincidence, because there was no apparent logic for her choice of direction on the ground. Her steps were lithe. She flaunted youth and the fragile beauty of a female child: graceful, and mindless of watching eyes. At times she moved to a rhythm that undulated in the air, beneath all sound, and found expression in the touch of her little golden feet to the sun-drenched earth. There was laughter in her eyes and on her tongue, and she spun in a giddy circle as she stepped into the unfettered light of the desert. At other times she marched down the valleys between heaping dunes, chin tucked into chest and feet hitting the sand in a rigid staccato, playing at soldier on parade, the sun gleaming off her metallic coat like tiny shining armor. The sand must have scalded her by midday, but she seemed to relish the touch of it more and more as the day wore on. It was the first time she had seen only sand and sun and sky in all directions since she had left home, so many months ago, and she seemed to become wilder with every step that she took – more reckless and exuberant as the sun bore ever more fiercely down. As the day wore into afternoon the dunes got further apart. She had been humming to herself, the sort of catchy, nonspecific, repetitive tune that is familiar to all children. One tiny, slender ear turned toward a rustle on her right. There was a mound of warm sand, barely a dune really. The song stopped abruptly, leaving a stark silence in its wake, and her face whipped around to the sand. There can be no guessing what she thought she had heard, or seen, but she leapt immediately into giddy action, charging directly up the sandy slope. Without slowing as she reached the top she threw herself, feet slipping on the sand and tiny legs flailing, off the edge of the little dune. She tumbled, rolling over as she slid down the slope of the opposite side, screaming with mirth. She came to rest, fair golden face dusted with sand, at the base of the slope. A few feet further on the sand was giving way to a harder, drier earth, and the stones of the Day Court were not far away. She showed no intention of getting up, but settled herself back into the hot sand, wriggling into a more comfortable rest and pushing her feet down beneath the surface. And there she waited, like a carved idol just uncovered by the shifting sands of the desert, expectant. |
