Falling in Love (9 page)

“
Oh.” She looked around in
confusion.

They were right there a minute ago,
and now the silence was unnerving to say the least.

***

Jayne stood at the end of the jetty
and cussed in a rather unladylike manner as the bright yellow blob
that was the back end of the boat slowly receded off into the warm,
hazy distance. There were clouds on the eastern horizon and the
moon was rising. Looking at her watch, insects sounded all around
her and the heat of the day was beginning to abate. It was a hot
country, but the nights could get chill this time of year. She
already knew that from their arrival yesterday.

It was the elevation.

“
Drat.” This was sheer
disaster.

Jayne looked around at the uninhabited
island, which to all intents and purposes sat smack dab in the
middle of Lake Kanritsar, high up on the barren plateau of eastern
Anatolia, thinking that the frickin’ monks had loved their privacy
perhaps just a little too much.

She silently cussed Melanie, who in
her own inevitably flaky way, had come down with a bad case of
boyfriend-itis, a mysterious malady that would hit her whenever a
new and particularly troublesome drummer or hip-hop producer came
onto the scene. With Mel that was a crowded one to begin with.
Melanie begged off at the last minute, more likely money problems
than anything else. The conversation had been an unusually short
one for them, what with Mel calling up at the last minute and
all…Mel had been planning to pay with cash, but like a fool Jayne
put it all on her credit card weeks in advance. Mel wasn’t going to
lose a cancellation fee if she didn’t go. Jayne really wasn’t known
for swearing, but at the time she sure felt the
temptation.

She shook her head and stomped her
feet, kicking at the loose yellow dust of the path. She’d wondered
once or twice if it was a pure set-up. Mel wasn’t vindictive, and
probably not that clever. Still the thought persisted.

“
Damn you, Melanie
Pringle.”

The sun was setting in the west. She
prayed that someone would soon miss her, either on the dock or when
they got on the bus. Surely they would at the hotel. The bus was
leaving at ten tomorrow morning after a free-for-all buffet
breakfast at eighty-thirty or nine. All she could think of was to
go back to the ruined old church with its crumbling roof, a corner
missing and heaps of rubble on three sides and wait it out. That or
the dock was the first place they would look. Maybe that
Bartholomew twerp would say something. Surely he would miss her
presence. He would remark upon it.

When the sun fell into another dark
band of purple cumulus to the west, she was glad of the decision.
It was getting darker out by the minute. She cursed not bringing a
sweater or a jacket, but of course they’d left hours before, in the
heat of day.

She didn’t even have any matches to
start a fire with.

***

She sat inside on a flat slab of
rubble, with her back to the wall and her knees drawn up in the
deepening gloom.

She had certainly gotten her wish. She
had all night to study the blasted mosaics. The thought rattled
Jayne, for the dark held many terrors, not the least of which might
be rats. The idea disgusted her, and she clutched her purse as if
it might be a weapon, which it most assuredly was not. She’d smash
her reading glasses and that wouldn’t do. Her little read before
bed-time was the only thing keeping her sane lately. Maybe they
would have them for sale somewhere in town, but that wasn’t the
point.

The purse was no weapon. Not a very
good one, anyway, but she hadn’t seen anything looking like a
viable stick or club or anything like that in the ruined old
building. It was all stone around here. Using indigenous materials,
especially away from the capital in smaller centers, was a feature
of many Byzantine buildings. A bitter irony, in that she knew so
much about the place but had no idea how long it would take to be
missed. She couldn’t even really picture where she was. On the
other side of the lake was a dock and a village, and a highway went
through there. It was in the suburbs. She knew that
much.

She didn’t even know if there was a
daily tour of the place. Maybe no one would come back for days or
weeks. That was a sobering thought, that and the chill creeping in
with the night. The faint images on the walls mocked her. She was
hoping for salvation, of the most pedestrian kind…sooner or later,
someone had to come.

Jayne began to cry, in spite of her
best efforts, but coming after all that had happened in the last
weeks, and months, and years, it was more than she could handle. It
might even do her some good. She had known, deep down inside, for a
long time even, that it was coming anyway.

Sooner or later it had to.

Fresh spasms of grief and hopelessness
wracked her form, as her sobs rang up and around the hard stone
walls, mocking her self-pity with a kind of harsh
insolence.

Occupied With Gloom and
Pain

Occupied with such gloom and pain,
including the first major pangs of thirst, she must have missed his
footsteps. A man stepped out from a corner aisle just as the pale
orb of the moon, hanging low and austere in the vast gap in the
southeast elevation, began to redden and dim in the beginnings of
an eclipse. He must have heard her crying and come looking. The
light was fading strangely and it seemed as if the whole world went
dead quiet. It was like the calm after the storm, when the air
tingled with ozone.

“
Oh!”

The eclipse. They were supposed to go
up into the hills above the city and watch it, then go on to the
all-hours disco, and she’d just remembered that.

She stood up as he came to a full
stop, turned and stared in wonder. The vague back-splash of light
off the walls and floor was enough to illuminate a remarkable
figure of a man with a homely but angular face. The fellow was
completely wedge-shaped, with big, wide, flat shoulders bulging up
into an impressive set of neck muscles. His naked torso gleamed in
the bloody glow of the moon, half gone it as it was now.

She wrung her hands and her purse and
carefully stepped out of the shadows, watching her step among the
rubble, moving out into the imaginary warmth of the moonlight. His
jaw dropped and his eyes swept her up and down. He straightened up
and took a half-step backwards, one hand lifted, knees bent and his
other arm poised in frozen action.

He looked downright cute like that,
and she was glad she had her everyday glasses on as he was quite a
remarkable sight in his own right.

“
Oh, thank God. I was so
afraid I’d be stuck here all night—”

He uttered some words in a language
that didn’t sound like Turkish at all, for she’d caught the flavour
and accents of it in a couple of days here.

She smiled encouragingly and stepped a
little closer. He stood there staring at her.

She sighed at the inevitability of it
all. Of course he wouldn’t speak English.

He lifted a palm and beckoned her
forward. Then, as Jayne let go with a quick squeal of surprise, the
fellow stooped a bit, grabbed her in behind the knees and put an
arm behind and under her shoulders.

When he swept her up off of her feet,
it was a total reflex to sling her right arm over his neck and hang
on for dear life with her left, clutching a veritable thatch of
rugged chest hairs.

“
Oh, dear me. Goodness,
gracious, me.” Her pulse quickened, but he was gentle and strong
enough to bear the weight.

She might as well try and put a good
face on it.

“
Oh, thank you ever so
much.”

He grunted, taking the stairs two at a
time in the darkness of the passage, his breath strong but
contained. The gentleman certainly was very fit.

He smelled very manly. He could have
used a bit of a shower, maybe, that and a breath mint. He wasn’t a
smoker and that was good. He wasn’t drunk either. It was all very
visceral all of a sudden, as she acknowledged the sick sense of
fear in the depths of her abdomen.

Jayne giggled nervously.

“
Well. I can’t complain
about the service, anyway.”

The red moon shone down through a hole
in the roof, and her neck prickled with something electric. It was
certainly all very exciting as she breathed through parted lips,
eyes shining and locked on those intent dark eyes only a foot or so
away.

His face was locked on hers in a kind
of fascination, then he turned and carried her through the
blackness of the vestibule with panther-like grace, taking her down
the front stairs and out of the building as the moon finally died
and the soft evening breeze seemed somehow warmer now, as if an
eclipse of the moon could have anything to do with local weather
patterns on the Earth down below.

Maybe it was just warmer hanging onto
the guy. Jayne stared in numb disbelief at the gleam of what must
be the hilt of a massive sword slung on a broad leather band over
his back and shoulders. It registered on her tired mind in a kind
of delirious revelation and her jaw really dropped this
time.

“
Uh, sir? Please? You can
put me down now.”

He just kept trotting along with more
attention to the path now, all fluid masculine grace but a bit of a
jostle as she clung to his sweaty body with a nice mat of dark and
curly chest hair right there in front of her eyes.

“
Holy, Kowalski.” She said
it in pure disgust, the reflexive response going back in the family
for generations. “Argh.”

This just kept getting better and
better all the time.

***

The fellow had a horse, looming pale
and ghostly in the returning moonlight, and it seemed he was camped
not far from the ruins.

His blanket was spread on the ground,
and he laid her upon it and then knelt and began going through a
hefty brown bag of some indeterminate fabric.

She sat, hugging her knees, and she
watched.

There was a canteen there. She spoke,
more of a rueful grunt than anything, and pointed. He beckoned at
it, and she lifted it up and uncorked the thing after a brief
struggle. The man must have hands of steel to ram that in there so
tight. The water was cool and tasted fine, although she wondered at
the source.

She’d never seen or heard of anyone
like this in her entire life. You would think the brochures would
have mentioned it. Corking it, she put it down where he could get
at it.

He offered her something with a few
quiet words.

With her nostrils catching some scent,
she took the slightly-tacky offering and brought it up to her
face.

It looked and smelled like dates. It
had to be something like that, a familiar smell from her mother’s
kitchen. These resembled nothing she’d ever seen before, being
fresh and not coming in a rectangular clump, all wrapped in brittle
cellophane and cheap purple corrugated paper, heavy on the glue.
She could almost picture the garish label, and there was a sudden
stab of homesickness.

They tasted divine, practically
melting in her mouth, and he also had some kind of soft, tangy,
spongy cheese and a hunk torn from a loaf of dark, coarse bread to
go with it.

“
Thank you.” She was
ravenous.

The man nodded thoughtfully, and took
a bite of his own bread and then both he and the horse seemed to
listen carefully to the night, which was oddly bright now that they
were out in the open.

They sat very quietly and had their
meal.

He had a bow, a quiver full of
arrows…the horse and the blanket and little else but a breechclout
or loincloth, on top of leggings with fringe along the outer legs.
They seemed to tie onto the same belt, but only at the front. A
good deal of his hard buttocks were exposed. He wore some kind of
high lace-on boots of thin suede dyed in dark blue. If he had a
proper shirt, it would have to be in one of the bags.

For the time being, they could live
without it, she thought.

If only the fellow could speak
English. It really was fascinating, once you sort of got over the
inconvenience. It might have taken away some of the worry about
getting back to the hotel.

Letting go of something inside, she
heaved a deep sigh of relief.

Oh, thank God.

And, one more thing: Oh, my,
God.

What a hunk.

But even
objectively
speaking,
this was an improvement.

It was better than sitting around all
night in the dark, alone in some church, wondering if you were
going to starve, freeze, bake, die of thirst…or be eaten by
rats.

She took some more dates, which went
very well with the bread and the cheese.

“
Thank you.” She studied
him in unabashed fashion. “Thank you, oh, handsome stranger, for
rescuing me especially, and for the lovely little snack as
well.”