Skin (35 page)

My heart jumped furiously in my chest. Since we had last spoken, I had been marked
as my country's Kendra. I had journeyed and known animal form. Would I appear the
same to him? Would he to me?

I rang the bronze bell and blotted my palms on my skirt.

The skins were pulled aside and he filled the doorway, his tunic falling open around
the hollow of his throat. For a moment I was frozen, unsure, and then a frown flickered
over his face, and I saw how deeply he had yearned for me. Without breaking his gaze,
I reached for his hand.

He pulled me to his mouth. We had kissed before but never with such fierce intent.
Never with such freedom. ‘I knew you would come,' he murmured.

‘I have only moments to speak with you—' I said, as he pulled me inside.

The doorskins flapped behind us in a burst of wind. As Taliesin retied them, I waited
by the fire. The hut was sparse and well kept. I picked up a woven basket from the
floor, its pattern and style oddly familiar.

‘My mother made it,' he said, standing beside me.

I put the basket down and we both sat on the floorskins, close to the fire. ‘Tell
me the truth of you,' I said. ‘Is this your home?'

He took a deep breath. He was more assured here but somehow even sadder. ‘Often I
am in the forest,' he said, ‘hunting and fishing for the Mothers. I sleep there sometimes.
Otherwise this is my home.'

‘But this is a women's place. And a place of death. Why have you come?'

‘I didn't come.' He stared at the ground. ‘I was always here. I was born here.' I
heard his breath hasten with agitation.

‘Please,' I urged. ‘There is so little time. Tell me how.'

‘All right!' he said. ‘But do not forget, when you have heard it, that you desired
to know it.'

I nodded. ‘There is nothing that could turn me from you.'

He faced the fire and did not meet my eye. ‘My mother was born of the hardworld.
A gifted journeywoman. She was carrying me when she walked with these Mothers and
I was brought to flesh here, where I should not be.'

‘Why did she not take you back?'

‘She could not. The boundary yielded for her alone but with me she could not pass.
Because I was born here, the Mothers had claim of me. Knowledge has its own will.'

‘Yes,' I nodded. ‘I know it.'

‘She stayed for my first four summers, although the Mothers had finished with her.
She promised that she would never leave without me. But one morning she went harvesting
and did not come back.' He paused. ‘In the end, she broke her promise.'

‘She must bear a heavy loss for that choice,' I whispered.

‘If she does, I do not know of it.'

‘So you have lived all your life in this place?' I said, struggling to imagine it.

‘Yes,' he said, without emotion.

I reached for his hand, warm and fine-boned, like a small creature, in mine. ‘With
no one to teach you the ways of men?'

He frowned. ‘I have been raised by teachers. It is not knowledge I have lacked.'

I was quiet in the thinking of it. He was trapped, with no kin, in country that was
not his own.

‘Do not pity me,' he said, reading my silence. ‘My kin ties were torn, but I have
walked and slept all my summers on Mothers' land. I have made kin of sacred places,
sacred waters. My mother left me with skin-law, and I have kept it strong.'

Indeed I had not met one whose skin was stronger. ‘Yet the Mothers themselves do
not honour skin?'

‘No, they do not. I have been alone in it.'

There was too little time to ask of the Mothers, when there was so much else I needed
to learn of. ‘How then did I met you in Summer?' I asked.

‘It was as I swam in the river last spring. There was a red hazel berry of such brightness
floating at the water's surface. I was compelled to bite it and, the moment I did,
I was pierced through the mouth with a hook and dragged deep beneath the water. My
arms were as fins and I could not loose myself from the hook—'

I nodded, urging him to continue.

‘My bones and skin were all turned to fish,' he said. ‘There was pain in the transition.'

‘You are the fish…' I murmured, my mind twisting in the figuring of it.

‘When I finally found the light of the surface, I was in a different place. The hardworld.
You were there and I was man again.'

‘That was the first time? When I found you with the hook?'

‘Yes.'

I stared, incredulous, into his dark eyes. He took fish form, unaided, without intent.
He was the most gifted of journeymen. ‘Am I the first you have known then, other
than these women with whom you live?'

‘Not the first. There have been other visitors here, other journeywomen. But none
as strong as you. You are the first who has lured me out of this place. If only for
a short while.'

I leaned forward and pressed my lips against the ridge of his cheek, flooded with
tenderness toward him. He was at once so needing of care, yet so firmly held within
his own skin, as if my love would roll off him like water.

The wind squalled outside the hut and I heard distant shouts from the Mothers as
they secured their doors.

There was little light beneath the doorskins now. I burned to be gone, but I could
not leave now, not without hearing the whole of it. ‘Why did you not tell me this
as we met?'

‘Because I did not understand. I no longer knew myself.' He glanced at me. ‘All I
knew was that I was under some kind of spell and I could not venture more than a
few paces beyond the edges of water before I was bound by the way of the fish.'

I nodded, speechless at the workings of the realms.

‘With every passage, I saw more clearly what had happened. But my love for you had
grown also. I thought you would not wish to meet me if you knew the truth.'

I squeezed his knuckles, still held in mine.

‘How could I tell you that I had only a few hours or less to walk on your country
before I would feel the ache of the fish in my flesh? And that I must enter the water
or I would change right there on the ground and die with your disgust as my last
memory?'

‘Disgust? It could never be.' I stared at his profile, choking with love. There was
such intimacy in this truth, and yet the facts of it
brought us no closer. ‘But how
did you know when to come?'

‘I could feel through the water when you were near. At first I could reach you outside
the forest. But then I could no longer take form as man unless I was within the forest's
bounds.'

‘If only I had known this—'

‘I sang you my song! You did not return it. There was no purpose in telling you.
But when you showed me the sword—' His face buckled then hardened. ‘I don't belong
here, Ailia, I belong in the place where my mother was from, where you are from—'

I stared at him. I had no words, no answers. All I could offer were my arms, my mouth.
And these he accepted. He swung around to face me, loosening my robe with one hand
while the other pulled me close.

‘I have to leave,' I whispered.

His lips brushed my bare shoulder.

Our fingers trailed, trembling, over each other's arms and necks, then beneath our
robes, the secret places that made us both shiver and gasp, before we shed our clothes
and fell naked on the furs that lined the floor.

Now he did not pull away. Now he was here, above me, around me, grasping me to him
as though life itself depended on our union.

We rocked together as one: of bone, skin and muscle, faces buried in each other's
shoulders. Yet still we were not fully joined. Would he betray the force between
us again? ‘Now,' I whispered.

He raised himself above me and, with eyes locked to mine, entered my flesh and, with
it, my spirit. Our movement hastened, our bellies slipped with sweat until we were
clinging to each other as our world broke open.

We lay speechless, keeling.

His seed coursed within me. My flesh hummed as though made of light.

As the world re-formed, it was something other.

When my breath was quiet I sat up. ‘I have stayed too long, my love.' I said, reaching
for my dress.

He rolled over and did not respond.

‘What is it?' I asked, leaning on his shoulder.

‘I have given you all and now you will leave—'

‘It is not my will to leave,' I said, anguished that he would think it so. ‘Were
it not for my Cookmother…I will return as soon as I can.'

‘And I must wait.'

‘Can you come with me?' I asked.

‘How?' he said, as he turned back to me. ‘I will die beyond the waters of the forest.
Have you not heard me? It is only as fish that I breach the veil between the realms.
I cannot come through as man.'

As I listened, a truth began to form in my thoughts. ‘Taliesin, if you were made
kin to the hardworld—by marriage—could you come through as you are?'

He gave a despondent laugh. ‘I should not be surprised that you have reckoned it.
This is as the Mothers have always told me. They will release me by my marriage,
but that it must be true kinship, a marriage of souls. That means only you, and you
do not have skin. You cannot marry.'

‘Yet the Mothers do not call for skin!' I said.

‘They do not,' he said. ‘But I belong to where it is hard. I belong to where skin
is needed.'

Again, there was no time now to unravel what he might tell me of the Mothers' freedom
from skin. There was only time to forge our future. I paused before I spoke it. ‘I
do
have skin. I have met one who knows it.'

Something shifted with the utterance.

‘Has this person told it to you?' he breathed.

‘No,' I said. ‘But she will.'

I reached for the soft, dirty fabric of my under-robe and tore a long strip away
from the hem. ‘We cannot marry yet…' I pulled him to standing. ‘But this I promise
you: I will learn of my skin and I will return for you.' Hurriedly I laid my left
arm over his and bound the strip tightly around both our wrists as a handfasting,
a rough betrothal. ‘Taliesin of the Salmon, do you bind yourself to me?'

‘Yes,' he nodded, laughing.

‘Now you…' I urged, when he did nothing more than grin.

‘Oh.' He took a deep breath and lifted his chest. ‘Ailia of skin unknown, but who
hails from Caer Cad, do you bind yourself to me?'

For an instant, I saw far into the depths of him, and stood, teetering, at this precipice.
‘For all time.'

His kiss earthed me.

‘But now I must go. It is already dark and I must travel by torchlight.' I unwound
the rag from our wrists.

‘Ailia—' He frowned as he caught my spinning hand. ‘Stay this night.'

I shook my head. ‘My suckling mother ails—'

‘Give me this night and go back at dawn tomorrow to tend her. You do not know when
you will return to me. Give me a night to hold as a talisman.'

I hung poised, trapped by his gaze. He loomed before me, his eyes pleading and yet
challenging.

My breath caught with a sudden sense of danger but I clung to him, as if he were
all that was safe. I pressed my cheek to his bare chest, inhaling his soursweet skin.

‘Why have they kept you?' I murmured. But even as I uttered it, I knew the answer.

They wanted him because his bruised light knew all the world's
shadows, because anyone
who encountered him would want to be close, as I did, to the tattered wholeness of
the universe that turned within him.

I stared at him, so grateful, so disbelieving that he was mine. If I had nothing
else, this was enough. ‘One night,' I said.

After a burial, the closest kinswoman must pass the first night in the bed of the
dead.

This will prevent the spirit stealing back from the Otherworld.