Do we know, or do we not, friend?
Both sides are framed by the reluctant hour
and chiseled on the faces of men.
✧
S
he does not know the monster she incites with her poetry. How could she? Why would I recognise it, a foreigner, from seas away? I close my eyes. There is a young man dancing behind them before firelight; tossing spiraled horns as aloud he cries the same chorus, drunken, elated. It is the closest I had ever come to kissing him, to reaching out and saying, I love you so fucking much I cannot stand it, you take the breath from me, you make me more than I am--
Bondike or Boudika, it did not matter. The tiger was in their rugged stripes and blood-bright eyes, in the fierceness of all that they were. And that was the poem--that was the poem written for them.
How could she know? There is a moment of distrust, of disbelief--she cannot understand, she cannot possibly conceive--
And when I open my eyes to examine her, it is with the sudden knowledge she does not understand the depth of her commentary. Perhaps she had thought it coy, or clever. The irony is simply a blade slipping through my breastbone, into my heart, stealing my breath. Somehow, I smile; and as I smile (another lie, another lie) Damascus laughs, a sound like the earth breaking. “How is it you knew I was a man of poetry?” There is nothing in my voice to betray the way my heart catches, still, in my throat. “A girl after my own heart.”
She is too thin, too veiled in something other. Her eyes hardly belong to a woman, but shine with the brightness of the sea, or a goddess. There is something in them I cannot trust but also cannot name. What word had she used, I wonder to myself. It is hard to remember, on the fringes of the time between when I had last seen her--but it comes upon me suddenly.
Wicked.
There is something wicked about her, now. But I suppose it is in me, too. Sometimes, I blame the dragon; but tonight I can only blame the poetry and the memories that shackle me, remembering once, having had the world--
Damascus laughs again, this time more deeply. He recognises something I do not, and I know this; but he does not reveal the knowledge to me. Too often, I have found the dragon to be uncannily observant; yet he is coy like a cat, and rarely divulges what he knows. He drops his great, snaking head down to rest it eye-to-eye with our new “guest.”
I wonder, briefly, how she had found me--if she had been looking. But decide against asking. “I will start a fire,” I suggest. “If you’d like, you are more than welcome to stay the night with us.”
