The Sky Road

Suddenly we were both laughing. She caught my hand and swung it and we started walking again, talking about I don’t know what. Out on the edge of town we turned a corner into a litde estate of dozens of single-storey wooden houses with chimneys. Some of the houses were separate, each with its own patch of garden; others, smaller, were lined up in not quite orderly rows. Even in the summer, even with electricity cables strung everywhere, a smell of woodsmoke hung in the air. Yellow light glowed from behind straw-mat blinds. A dog barked and was silenced by an irritable yell.

“Hey, come on,” Menial said with an impish smile.

I hadn’t realised how my feet had hesitated as the path had changed from cobbles to trampled gravel.

“Never been in a tinker camp before,” I apologised.

“We don’t bite.” Another cheeky grin. “Well, that is to say…”

You really are a terrible woman.”

“Oh, I am that, indeed. Ferocious—so I’m told.”

“I’ll hold you to that.”

“I’ll hold you to more.”

She held me as she stopped in front of one of the small houses in the middle of the row, and fingered out a tiny key five centimetres long on a thong attached to her belt but hidden in a slit in the side of her skirt. The lock too seemed absurdly small, a brass circular patch on the white-painted door at eye level.

“So are you coming in, or what?”

Lust and reason warred with fear and superstition, and won. I followed her over the polished wooden threshold as she switched on the electric light. I stood for a moment, blinking in the sudden 40-watt flood. The main room was about four metres by six. Against the far wall was a wood-burning stove, banked low; above it was a broad mantelpiece on which a large clock ticked loudly. The time was half past midnight. On either side of the stove were rows of shelves with hundreds of books. In the left-hand corner a workbench jutted from the wall, with a microscope and an unholy clutter of soldering gear and bits of wire and tools. Rough, unpolished seer-stones of various sizes lay among them. The main table of the house was a huge oaken piece about a metre and a half square, with carved and castered legs. A crocheted cotton throw covered it, weighted at the centre by a seer-stone hemisphere at least thirty centimetres in diameter, so finely finished that it looked like a dome of glass. Within it, hills and clouds drifted by.

Menial stood by the table for a moment, reached up behind her head and removed a clasp from her hair, so that the two narrow braids fell forward and framed her face. Then she lifted the chain with the talisman, and the other, finer silver chain, from around her neck and deposited them on the table.

The place smelt of woodsmoke and pot-pourri and the bunches of flowering plants stuffed into carelessly chosen containers in every available corner. The wooden walls were varnished, and hung with an incongruous variety of old prints and paintings—landscapes, ladies, foxes, cats, that sort of thing—and tacked-up picture-posters related to the project. An open door led to a tiny scullery; a curtained alcove beside it took up the rest of that end of the room. I presumed it contained the bed.

But it was to a big old leather couch in front of the stove that she drew me first. She half-leaned, half-sat on the back of it, and began unbuttoning my shirt, then explored my chest with her lips and tongue—and teeth—as I applied myself to undoing the fastenings down the back of her dress, and working my boots off. As I kicked away the right boot the sgean dhu clattered to the floor. By this time she had unbuckled my belt, and with a shrug and a step we both shed our outer clothes, which fell to the floor in a promiscuous coupling of their own. Mer-rial stood for a moment in nothing but her long silk underskirt. I clasped her in my arms, her nipples hard, her breasts warm and soft against my chest; and we kissed again.

We moved, we danced, Menial leading, towards the curtained alcove. She pulled away the curtain to reveal a large and reassuringly solid-looking bed. I knelt in front of her and pulled down her slip and knickers, and kissed her between the legs until she pulled me gently to my feet. I managed to leave my own briefs on the floor.

We faced each other naked, like the Man and the Woman in the Garden in the story. Menial half-turned, threw back the bedcovers and picked up from the bed a long white cotton nightgown, which she shook out and held at arm’s length for a moment.

“I won’t be needing that tonight,” she grinned, and cast it to the floor, and me to the bed.

I woke in daylight, and lay for a minute or so basking in the warm afterglow, and hot after-images, of love and sex. Rolling over and reaching out my arm, I found that I was alone in the bed. It was still warm where Menial had slept. The air was filled with the aroma of coffee and the steady ticking of the clock—

The time! I sat up in a hurry and leaned forward to see the big timepiece, and discovered with relief that it was only five o’clock. Thank Providence, we’d only slept an hour and a half. With the same movement I discovered a host of minor pains: bites on my shoulder and neck, scratches on my back and buttocks, aching muscles, raw skin…

The animal whose attacks had caused all this damage padded out of the scullery.

“Good morning,” she said.

I made some sort of croaking noise. Menial smiled and handed me one of the two steaming mugs she’d carried in. She sat down on the foot of the bed, drawing her knees up to her chin to huddle inside her sark, its high neck and long sleeves and intricate whitework giving her an incongruous appearance of modesty.

I sipped the coffee gratefully, unable to take my eyes off her. She looked calmly back at me, with the smile of a contented cat.

“Good morning,” I said, finding my voice at last. “And thank you.”

“Not just for the coffee, I hope,” said Menial.

I was grinning so much that my cheeks, too, were aching.

“No, not just for the coffee. God, Menial, I’ve never…”

I didn’t know how to put it.

“Done it before?” she inquired innocently.

Coffee went up the back of my nose as I spluttered a laugh.

“Compared with last night, I might as well not have,” I ruefully admitted. “You are—you’re amazing!”

Her level gaze held me. She showed not the slightest embarrassment. “Oh, you’re not so bad yourself, colha Gree,” she said in a judicious tone. “But you have a lot to learn.”

“I hope you’ll teach me.”

“I’m sure I will,” she said. “If you want to stay with me, that is.” She waved a hand, as if this were a matter yet to be decided.

“Stay with you? Oh, Merrial!” I couldn’t speak.

“What?”

“Nothing could make me leave you. Ever.”

I was almost appalled at what I was saying. I had not expected to hear myself speak such words, not for a long time to come.

“How sweet of you to say that,” she said, very seriously, but smiling. “But—”

“But nothing!” I reached sideways and put the mug on the floor and shifted myself down the bed towards her. Without looking away from me, she put her mug down too, on a trunk at the end of the bed, and rocked forward to her knees to meet me. We knelt with our arms around each other.

“I love you,” I said. I must have said it before, said it a lot of times through the night, but now there was all the weight in the world behind the words.

“I love you too,” she said. She clung to me with a sudden fierceness, and laid her face on my shoulder. A wet, salt tear stung a love-bite there. She sniffed and raised her head, blinking her now even brighter eyes.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I’m happy,” she said.

“So am I.”

She regarded me solemnly. “I have to say this,” she said, with another unladylike sniffle. “Loving me will not always make you happy.”

I could not imagine what she meant, and I didn’t want to. “Why are you saying this?”

“Because I must,” she said. Her voice was strained. “Because I have to be fair with you.”

“Aye, sure,” I said. “Well, now you’ve warned me, can I get on with loving you?”