He returned to Chryseis, who looked with her enormous eyes at him as if she wanted him to tell her that there was nothing within the clearing. He said, “She’s only bones now, and far past any suffering.”
“The gworl will pay for this!” she said savagely. “The Lord does not allow his creatures to be hurt! This Garden is his, and any intruders are punished!”
“Good for you,” he said. “I was beginning to think that you may have become frozen by the shock. Hate the gworl all you want; they deserve it. And you need to break loose.”
She screamed and leaped at him and beat on his chest with her fists. Then she began weeping, and presently he took her in his arms. He raised her face and kissed her. She kissed him back passionately, though the tears were still flowing.
Afterward, she said, “I ran to the beach to tell my people what I’d seen. But they wouldn’t listen. They turned their backs on me and pretended they hadn’t heard me. I kept trying to make them listen, but Owisandros”-the ram-horned man who had been talking with the raven-“Owisandros hit me with his fist and told me to go away. After that, none of them would have anything to do with me. And I … 1 needed friends and love.”
“You don’t get friends or love by telling people what they don’t want to hear,” he said. “Here or on Earth. But you have me, Chryseis, and I have you. I think I’m beginning to fall in love with you, although I may just be reacting to loneliness and to the most strange beauty I’ve ever seen. And to my new youth.”
He sat up and gestured at the mountain. “If the gworl are intruders here, where did they come from? Why were they after the horn? Why did they take Kickaha with them? And who is Kickaha?”
“He comes from up there, too. But I think he’s an Earthman.”
“What do you mean, Earthman? You say you’re from Earth.”
“I mean he’s a newcomer. I don’t know. I just had a feeling he was.”
He stood up and lifted her up by her hands. “Let’s go after him.”
Chryseis sucked in her breath and, one hand on her breast, backed away from him. “No!”
“Chryseis, I could stay here with you and be very happy. For awhile. But I’d always be wondering what all this is about the Lord and what happened to Kickaha. I only saw him for a few seconds, but I think I’d like him very much. Besides, he didn’t throw the horn to me just because I happened to be there. I have a hunch that he did it for a good reason, and that I should find out why. And I can’t rest while he’s in the hands of those things, the gworl.”
He took her hand from her breast and kissed the hand. “It’s about time you left this Paradise that is no Paradise. You can’t stay here forever, a child forever.”
She shook her head. “I wouldn’t be any help to you. I’d just get in your way. And . . . leaving . . . leaving I’d, well, I’d just end.”
“You’re going to have to learn a new vocabulary,” he said. “Death will be just one of the many new
words you’ll be able to speak without a second thought or a shiver. You will be a better woman for it. Refusing to say it doesn’t stop it from happening, you know. Your friend’s bones are there whether or not you can talk about them.”
“That’s horrible!”
“The truth often is.”
He turned away from her and started toward the beach. After a hundred yards, he stopped to look back. She had just started running after him. He waited for her, took her in his arms, kissed her, and said, “You may find it hard going, Chryseis, but you won’t be bored, won’t have to drink yourself into a stupor to endure life.”
“I hope so,” she said in a low voice. “But I’m scared.”
“So am I, but we’re going.”
IV
HE TOOK HER HAND in his as they walked side by side toward the roar of the surf. They had traveled not more than a hundred yards when Wolff saw the first gworl. It stepped out from behind a tree and seemed to be as surprised as they. It shouted, snatched its knife out, then turned to yell at others behind it. In a few seconds, a party of seven had formed, each gworl with a long curved knife.