of the way. With all the poise and grace of a master courtesan, she knelt on the wooden floor tiles so that she could push her cushion up next to Danlo’s. When she sat back down again – with her spine straight and her feet tucked politely beneath her long robe – her face was very close to his. She looked at him and took up his hands. Across a short space of the firelit room, they looked at each other eye to eye, and Danlo remembered that this touching of the eyes was one of the oldest of the merging yogas. He felt her breath on his face, all warm and soft and sweet with mint and honey. He remembered then how they had once breathed together for hours, synchronizing the movements of their bellies in and out as they drew in streams of cool, sweet air. Sometimes, they had breathed each other’s souls all night in front of the fire, merging eye to eye, and at last, when they could stand it no longer, coming together lip to lip and belly to belly as they fell into the deepest merging of all.
‘Perhaps the Entity did what She did out of compassion,’ Tamara said.
‘Perhaps.’
‘Is that so hard to believe?’
‘Compassion,’ Danlo said. ‘There is an Alaloi word for compassion. Anaslia – this means suffering with. But why would a god wish to share anyone’s pain?’
‘I believe that the goddess healed me for you.’
‘For me? Truly? But why?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But if this Entity were really a compassionate being, then wouldn’t She have healed you purely out of compassion for you?’
‘Well, I believe She did. But how can either of us guess at Her deeper purposes?’
‘But I have to guess,’ Danlo said quietly. ‘I must know … how I am being tested.’
Tamara squeezed his hands together and said, ‘If there’s really a test, perhaps it’s nothing more than your willingness to accept a gift freely, without doubts. Without doubting what you really know.’
‘But I know … so little.’
‘You know that I’m here, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ he said. He looked at her strangely, then almost smiled. ‘It is you, isn’t it?’
In answer, she ran her long fingernail over his scarred knuckles in the way she had often done before losing her memories. She laughed softly and said, ‘I think I’m almost the same as when we met in Bardo’s sunroom. I’m the same woman you gave the pearl to, in this house – do you remember?’
‘Do I remember? Do … you?’
‘I remember everything, Danlo.’
‘Truly?’
‘I remember that we promised to marry each other.’
‘I remember that, too.’
At this, she pulled his hand closer and pressed it to her chest, over her heart. Beneath the softness of her robe, he felt something round and hard, almost like a nut. He remembered very well what this thing must be.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘I still wear it, do you see?’
She stood up and slowly undid the buttons of her robe and let it fall to the floor. Between her naked breasts there dangled a single black pearl shaped like a teardrop. The pearl – of a soft sable colour cut with streaks of purple and pink – made a fine contrast with the whiteness of her skin.
‘I … see,’ he said.
Tamara sat back down on her cushion. At the sight of her sudden nakedness, Danlo drew in a quick breath of air and felt a tightening in his belly. Because she liked to be naked beneath her clothing, she wore no undergarments. The skin enfolding her body from her toes to her forehead was wholly bare, a marvellous covering of flesh whose smooth, ecstatic touch his fingers remembered so well. She was sitting back on her heels, a difficult posture for many but one that she held rather easily due to the strength of her long, naked thighs, her full hips, the long flowing muscles that stood out along her spine. Her hands were folded neatly over the thick golden hair below her belly, not out of any sort of modesty but simply because this was the most natural way for her to sit. In truth, she was completely at ease with her nakedness. He remembered very well how she loved going naked about her house at all times of day or night. He had always thought that her instinct to bare herself to the world was one of her most beautiful qualities. With her head held high and her long hair falling like a curtain over her lovely shoulders, he was struck for the thousandth time by her unbelievable beauty. She seemed mysteriously unsullied by the evils of her life, just as he remembered her. He gazed at her for a long time to hold in his eyes the fullness of her lips, the loveliness of her face. He remembered, then, how he had always loved looking at her. He had thought that he always would. Only now, with the fire hot on her skin, with the distance of light-years between them, he was beginning to see her in a somewhat different light. She was still beautiful, of course, but her imperious nose suddenly seemed too perfectly sculpted, her eyes a shade too dark, her dazzling smile too full of passion and pride. There was something strange about her, he thought. There was some terrible strangeness in her soul that he could see but could not quite touch.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she said, putting her finger to the pearl. ‘I remember when you made this for me.’
‘In truth, it was the oyster who made the pearl, not I.’
She smiled almost to herself, then ran her finger over the cord of the necklace, which was braided of many long black and red hairs twisted tightly together. ‘But it was you who found the pearl and made the necklace?’
‘Yes.’
‘And gave it to me as a marriage troth?’
‘We … promised that we would marry each other. Someday, perhaps farwhen – whenever we could.’
‘When you had completed your quest, and I had completed mine,’ she said. ‘Do you remember?’
‘I think it is impossible … that I could ever forget.’
‘And I can’t forget how I almost gave the pearl back to you,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, Danlo. That was so wrong. Because in a way, we’ve been married since the instant we first saw each other.’
‘I know,’ Danlo said. ‘Since that moment – and perhaps even before.’
Tamara laughed softly at his strange ideas and his romanticism, which seemed to please her greatly. And Danlo laughed, too, as they locked eyes and drank in each other’s delight. Then Tamara rose off her cushion and came over to him. It took her almost forever to unzip his kamelaika, to slip her skilled hands between the fabric and his skin and peel the clothing away from him. At the touch of her skin, there was a rising heat in Danlo’s belly, and he remembered how long it had been since he last lay with a woman. There was a deep pressure in his loins, a surge of blood running up the root of his membrum to the inflamed tip. In truth, he was too full of seed, much too full of himself. Even if he hadn’t been dying to die inside Tamara, it had never been his way to refuse the gift of sexual ecstasy when offered by such a beautiful woman, and so he pulled her gently down onto the cushions and kissed her mouth, her neck, the soft golden hair falling down across her breasts. In the way she returned his kisses – fiercely and almost desperately
