Shibumi

Italian driver's use of the automobile as an extension of his penis, or the British, driver's use of it as a substitute.

For half an hour after leaving the valley road, they pulled up toward the mountains of Larun, over an unimproved road that writhed like a snake in its final agony. Some of the cutbacks were inside the turning radius of the Volvo, and negotiating them required two cuts and a bit of skidding close to the edge of loose gravel verges. They were never out of low gear, and they rose so steeply that they climbed out of the night that had pooled in the valley and into the zebra twilight of the high mountains: a blinding glare on the windshield when they turned toward the west, then blackness when outcroppings of rock blocked the setting sun.

Even this primitive road petered out, and they continued to ascend along faint ruts pressed into stubbly alpine meadows. The setting sun was now red and huge, its base flattened as it melted into the shimmering horizon. There were snow fields on the peaks above them glowing pink, then soon mauve, then purple against a black sky. The first stars glittered in the darkening east while the sky to the west was still hazy blue around the blood-red rim of the sinking sun.

Hel stopped the car by an outcropping of granite and set the hand brake. 'We have to pack in from here. It's another two and a half kilometers.'

'Up?' Hannah asked.

'Mostly up.'

'God, this lodge of yours is certainly out of the way.'

'That's its role.' They got out and unloaded her pack from the car, experiencing the characteristic frustration of the Volvo's diabolic rear latch. They had walked twenty meters before it occurred to him to perform his satisfying ritual. Rather than go back, he picked up a jagged rock and hurled it, a lucky shot that hit a rear window and made a large cobweb of crackled safety glass.

'What was that all about?' Hannah asked.

'Just a gesture. Man against the system. Let's go. Stay close. I know the trail by feel.'

'How long will I be up here all alone?'

'Until I decide what to do with you.'

'Will you be staying tonight?'

'Yes.'

They walked on for a minute before she said, 'I'm glad.'

* * *

He maintained a brisk pace because the light was draining fast. She was strong and young, and could stay with him, walking in silence, captured by the rapid but subtle color shifts of a mountain twilight. Again, as before down in the valley, he intercepted a surprising alpha tone in her aura—that rapid, midvolume signal that he associated with meditation and soul peace, and not at all with the characteristic signature timbres of young Westerners.

She stopped suddenly as they were crossing the last alpine meadow before the narrow ravine leading to the lodge.

'What is it?'

'Look. These flowers. I've never seen anything like them before.' She bent close to the wiry-stalked bells of dusty gold, just visible in the groundglow.

He nodded. 'They're unique to this meadow and to one other over there.' He gestured westward, toward the Table of the Three Kings, no longer visible in the gloom. 'We're just above twelve hundred here. Both here and over there, they grow only at twelve hundred, Locally they are called the Eye of Autumn, and most people have never seen them, because they bloom for only three or four days.'

'Beautiful. But it's almost dark, and they're still open.'

'They never close. Tradition has it that they live so short a time they dare not close.'

'That's sad.'

He shrugged.

* * *

They sat opposite one another at a small table, finishing supper as they looked out through the plate-glass wall that gave onto the steep, narrow gully that was the only access to the lodge. Normally, Hel would be uneasy sitting in front of a glass wall, his form lighted by an oil lamp, while all was dark beyond. But he knew that the double plate glass was bulletproof.

The lodge was built of local stone and was simple of design: one large room with a cantilevered sleeping balcony. When first they arrived, he had acquainted Hannah with its features. The stream that flowed from a permanent snowfield above passed directly under the lodge, so one could get water through a trap door without going outside. The four-hundred-liter oil tank that fueled the stove and space heater was encased in the same stone as the lodge, so that incoming gunfire could not rupture it. There was a boiler-plate shutter that closed over the only door. The larder was cut into the face of granite that constituted one wall of the lodge, and contained thirty days' supply of food. Set into the bulletproof plate-glass wall was one small pane that could be broken out to permit firing down into the tight ravine up which anyone approaching the lodge would have to pass. The walls of the ravine were smooth, and all covering boulders had been dislodged and rolled to the bottom.

'Lord, you could hold an army off forever!' she exclaimed.

'Not an army, and not forever; but it would be a costly position to take.' He took a semiautomatic rifle with telescopic sights from its rack and gave it to her. 'Can you use this weapon?'

'Well... I suppose so.'

'I see. Well, the important thing is that you shoot if you see anyone approaching up the gully who is not carrying a xahako. It doesn't matter if you hit him or not. The sound of your fire will carry in these mountains, and within half an hour help will be here.'

'What's a... ah...?'

'A xahako is a wine skin like this one. The shepherds and smugglers in these hills all know you are here. They're my friends. And they all carry xahakos. An outlander wouldn't.'

'Am I really in all that much danger?'

'I don't know.'

'But why would they want to kill me?'

'I'm not sure they do. But it's a possibility. They might reason that my involvement would be over if you were dead, and there was nothing more I could do to repay my debt to your uncle. That would be stupid thinking, because if they killed you while you were in my protection, I would be forced to make a countergesture. But we are dealing here with merchant and military mentalities, and stupidity is their intellectual idiom. Now let's see if you can manage everything.'

He rehearsed her in lighting the stove and space heater, in drawing water from the trap door over the stream, and in loading clips into the rifle. 'By the way, remember to take one of these mineral tablets each day. The water running under the floor is snowmelt. It has no minerals, and in time it will leech the minerals out of your system.'

'God, how long will I be here?'

'I'm not sure. A week. Maybe two. Once those Septembrists have accomplished their hijack, the pressure will be off you.'

While he made supper from tinned foods in the larder, she had wandered about the lodge, touching things, thinking her own thoughts.

And now they sat across the round table by the glass wall, the candlelight reversing the shadows on her soft young face on which lines of character and experience had not yet developed. She had been silent throughout the meal, and she had drunk more wine than was her habit, and now her eyes were moist and vague. 'I should tell you that you don't have to worry about me anymore. I know what I'm going to do now. Early this morning, I decided to go home and try my best to forget all this anger and... ugliness. It's not my kind of thing. More than that, I realize now that it's all—I don't know—all sort of unimportant.' She played absently with the candle flame, passing her finger through it just quickly enough to avoid being burned. 'A strange thing happened to me last night. Weird. But wonderful. I've been feeling the effects of it all day long.'

Hel thought of the alpha timbres he had been intercepting.