He backed off a step to get a look. 'That was you?' She liked that. 'Did I look so pathetic?'
'You mean like a rescue job?'
'If you want to put it that way.'
'I used to climb,' he said. 'That was always the biggest nightmare, getting rescued. You do your best to stay in control. But sometimes things slip. You fall,.'
'I was in distress, then.'
'Nah.' Now he was lying.
'So how come the orange?'
There was no particular answer she wanted here. Yet the circle needed completing. Something about that orange demanded accounting for, the poetry in it, his intuition that she had needed just such a preoccupation at just that moment. It had become something of a riddle, this gift from a man so raw and brutalized. An orange? Where had that come from? Perhaps he'd read Flaubert in his previous life, before his captivity. Or Durrell, she thought. Or Anais Nin. Wishful thinking. She was inventing him.
'There it was,' he said simply, and she got a sense he was delighting in her confusion.
'It had your name on it.'
'Look, I'm not trying to obsess here,' she said. Immediately his words about staying in control came drifting in. She faltered. He'd pegged her problem, cold. Control. 'It was just so right, that's all,' she murmured. 'It's been a mystery to me, and I never got a chance to say –'
'Strawberry blondes,' he interrupted.
'What?'
'I confess,' he said. 'You're an old weakness of mine.' He didn't qualify between the universe of blondes and the singularity of this one.
It took Ali's breath away. Sometimes, once men found out she was a nun, they would dare her in some way. What made Ike different was his abandon. He had a carelessness in his manner that was not reckless, but was full of risk. Winged. He was pursuing her, but not faster than she was pursuing him, and it made them like two ghosts circling.
'That's it, then,' she said. 'End of mystery.'
'Why say that?' he said.
This was turning out to be a nice dance.
'I like her singing,' she said.
He took in her long body. It was a quick glance. She saw it, and remembered his scrutiny of the periwinkles on her sundress. He said, 'You do live dangerously.'
'And you don't?'
'There's a difference. I'm not a dedicated, you know,' he faltered, 'a professional...'
'Virgin?' she boldly finished. The wine was talking. His back muscles reflexed.
'I was going to say 'recluse.''
Ike pulled her tighter and stroked his front across hers, a languorous swipe that moved her breasts. It drew a small gasp out of her.
'Mister Crockett,' she scolded, and started to pull away. Instantly he let go, and his release startled her more. There was no time for elaborate decisions. Scapegoating the wine, she scooped him close again, got his hand seated at the hollow of her spine.
They danced without words for another minute. Ali tried to let herself be taken away by the music. But eventually the songs would stop and they would have to leave
the safety of this brightly lit floor and resume their investigation of the dark places.
'Now it's your turn to explain,' he said. 'Just how did you end up here?'
Unsure how much he really wanted to hear, she edited herself. He kept asking questions, and soon she found herself defining protolanguage and the mother tongue.
'Water,' she said, 'in Old German is wassar, in Latin aqua. Go deeper into the daughter languages, and the root starts to appear. In Indo-European and Amerind, water is hakw , in Dene- Caucasian kwa . The furthest back is haku, a computer-simulated proto- word. Not that anyone uses it anymore. It's a buried word, a root. But you can see how a word gets reborn through time.'
'Haku,' Ike said, though differently than she had, with a glottal stress on the first syllable. 'I know that word.'
Ali glanced at him. 'From them?' she asked. His hadal captors. Exactly as she'd hoped, he had a glossary in him.
He winced, as with a phantom pain, and she caught her breath. The memory passed, if that's what it was. She decided not to pursue it for the moment, and returned to her own tale, explaining how she had come to collect and decipher hadal glyphs and remnant text. 'All we need is one translator who can read their writings,' she said. 'It could unlock their whole civilization to us.'
Ike misunderstood. 'Are you asking me to teach you?' She kept her voice flat. 'Do you know how to, Ike?'
He clicked his tongue in the negative. Ali instantly recognized the sound from her time among the San Bushmen in southern Africa. That, too? she wondered. Click language? Her excitement was building.
'Even hadals don't know how to read hadal,' he said.
'Then you've never actually seen a hadal reading,' she clarified. 'The ones you met were illiterate.'
'They can't read hadal writings,' Ike repeated. 'It's lost to them. I knew one once. He could read English and Japanese. But the old hadal writing was alien to him. It was a great frustration for him.'
'Wait.' Ali stopped, dumbfounded. No one had ever suggested such a thing. 'You're saying the hadals read modern human languages? Do they speak our languages too?'
'He did,' said Ike. 'He was a genius. A leader. The rest are... much less than him.'
'You knew him?' Her pulse raced. Who else could he be speaking of except the historical Satan?
Ike stopped. He was looking at her, or through her, with those impenetrable glacier glasses. She couldn't begin to read his thoughts. 'Ike?'
'Why are you doing this?'
'I have a secret.' She wanted to trust him. They were still touching, and that seemed a good start. 'What if I told you my purpose was to get a positive identification of that man, whatever he is? To get more information about him. A description of his face. Clues to his behavior. Even to meet him.'
'You won't.' Ike's voice sounded dead.
'But anything's possible.'
'No,' he said. 'I mean you won't. By the time you ever got that close, it wouldn't be you anymore.'
She brooded. He knew something, but wasn't telling. 'You're making him up,' she declared. It was peevish, a last resort.
The dancers flowed around them.
Ike held out one arm. Turned just so in the light, Ali could see the raised scars where a glyph had been branded in the flesh. To the naked eye, the scars lay hidden beneath more superficial markings. She touched them with her fingertips... the way a hadal might in complete darkness. 'What does it mean?' she asked.
'It's a claim mark,' he said. 'The name they gave me. Beyond that, I don't have a
clue. And the thing is, the hadals don't, either. They just imitate drawings their ancestors left a long time ago.'
Ali traced her fingers across the scarring. 'What do you mean by a claim mark?'
He shrugged, regarding the arm as if it belonged to someone else. 'There's probably a better term for it. That's what I call them. Each clan has its own, and then each member his own.' He looked at her. 'I can show you others,' he said.
