“That’s how you were for each other? Made for each other?”
“That’s how. He said never one like me before. For me it was never anyone before and never one since.”
“It’s like your edges are dissolved, and you feel yourself spreading out … ”
“Gossamer thin,” she said, giving me an astonished look. “Feeding on starlight.”
We stared at one another. “I know,” I said at last. “I know.”
She dropped her head, scowling at her shoes. “After a while Leely was born. Not long after that, my former self reasserted itself. And then Leelson left me.”
“Did he leave you? Or Leely?”
“He wanted me but not Leely. I wanted them both. I wouldn’t let Leely go because he needs me.”
Hearing those words, I accepted that she was a serious person.
There was something implacable in her voice. Something rigorously dutiful. Leely needed her. I thought it possible that until Leely, Lutha had never known herself truly, and Leelson had never known her. Likely he had known only a soft and corrupted creature who dangled from his lips like fruit from a vine, sweet and yielding, rotten with juice. That woman had laughed and cried and tempted. That woman had been sensual and mindless. But finally she had remembered herself and became Lutha Tallstaff again, saying no, no, I will not send Leely away.
“You can’t help yourself, can you?” I asked softly.
“I can’t,” she snarled, half-angry, half-amused. “The only way I can resist him is by being furious at him. The only way I can stay furious is to remember what Leely and I came here for. We’re not going to be disposed of just because Leelson would prefer it so! I will do my duty!”
“Yes,” I murmured. “Yes, of course, Lutha.”
“I promised,” she said. The words had the feeling of old familiar sounds, worn smooth by repetition. I looked up to see tears.
“What?” I demanded.
“When Leely was almost lost, back there in the Nodders … ” She gulped, fell silent.
“You were frightened?” I suggested. “Panicky?”
She shook her head, a quick motion, a denial she could not admit even to herself. I read it.
“You thought he was gone. You felt … relief.”
“How could I!” She leaned upon her knees and wept, her shoulders heaving. “How could I?”
How could she not? How could she not feel as though a window in her soul had been cracked open upon joy. A gigantic relief, as though the solution to some painful problem had unexpectedly presented itself! As it had for me, to come on this journey.
“It was the shock,” she said firmly, raising her head and wiping at her eyes. “It was only the shock.”
So she slammed the door shut on her feelings, despite all Mama Jibia’s teachings. She would not allow herself to want him gone. No matter how she sagged beneath the burden of him, no matter how wearying his needs and demands, no matter the evenings like this when she wearied herself with minutiae so she could sleep, the deep heedless sleep of exhaustion, lying so drunken with sleep she could not worry over days to come; no matter all this, he was her son and she loved him!
So she said to herself as she rose to go within and be with him, leaving me at last in peace, now that I no longer wanted it.
The night was without incident. Trompe roused us at daybreak. By early afternoon we emerged from the last canyon onto the winding plain the map had shown as the site of the omphalos. Since leaving the Burning Springs, we had had on our left a small stream that occasionally surged over its banks in response to the rain that fell far away, upon the heights. I thought we would need to cross it between surges, but this proved to be unnecessary, for once out of the canyon, the stream relaxed into a gurgling, shallow brook that meandered in silken loops across the plain to join a considerable river flowing toward the south. According to the map, this river was the Tahs Ahlai, which is a Dinadhi way of saying, the future, or time to come. All waters, we say, run into the Tahs Ahlai. All lives run into the pattern.