The Kanshou (Earthkeep) (9 page)

"Is it secure?"

A long pause, then, "Everybody else went down it."

"Reach for it, Ardis."

Even the mindstretch seemed to come between gritted teeth.  "Jez, there's too much nothing between me and the ground.  I can't move."

Jez felt the swirlings in Ardis's head.  "You don't have to move, Ardis.  Just breathe.  Breathe hard.  Now tell me about rice fields and rubber plants.  Tell me about Borneo."

"Wish to Oshun I was in Borneo -- "  The mindstretch was a whisper.

"The swamp and the mangroves, Ardis.  Tell me about the thickets of mangroves."

Ardis calmed.  Jez began seeing  images of deep jungles and intertwined mangrove vines.  She also felt the bursts of Ardis's self-condemnation for her cowardice, for her foolhardiness at thinking she could pass this test, for her attempts to hide her fear of heights.  "I thought I had it licked," she panted.  "Lucked out on the preliminary exams.  Had them fooled."

"Mangroves, Ardis.  Jungles.  Rivers."
"Rivers.  Let's swim the Barito Fork."  Ardis eased again.  Jez sent swirls of strong air, winds to lean upon, images of rolling waters to buoy up Ardis's tense body.  And Ardis relaxed enough to reach for the ladder and place her foot on it.  She let Jez talk her down the wiggling rungs, over slick girders to the rough walls, over rough walls to the crowded street below.  Down to relief and gratitude.  Down to safety and pride.

Abruptly, Jez lost the contact altogether.  She sat upright on the cot in the bare recovery room, dumbfounded by what had taken place.  She left the dental office in a daze.

Neither she nor Ardis acknowledged the incident in their daily comings and goings.  But Jez received a small package two days later by express gert from Borneo.  There was no card, but inside lay a reddish brown conical berry.  It held, she discovered, a mangrove seed.

* * * * * * * *

Some months later Jez and Zude were both off duty but still in uniform as they stepped out the door of Maud's Again and rounded the corner to the rolling walkway.  The evening air vacillated between swelter and unseasonable cooling.  It was cool again now, as Zude hesitated at the on-step.  Jez raised her hand to take Zude's elbow.

"I'm fine," Zude announced to the world.  "One gin swirl and you treat me like an invalid!"  She leapt immediately to the middle corridor and to prove her steadiness caught Jez's hand as she joined her.  They angled smoothly onto the fast strip, Zude balancing her arm lightly on the hand bar and speaking loud against the wind. 

"Love, those Irish girls were wonderful," she said, shifting the pack that sheltered her fiddle case.  "I never saw such bow work -- or such clogging!"  She pulled Jez closer to her.  "Did you bribe them to ask me to play with them afterwards?  Tell true, now.  Did you?"  Abruptly she raised a finger and a thumb in half-womb response to three chelas approaching on the opposing roller lane who were sending them the same salute.

"Negative," Jez answered, offering the chelas her own belated acknowledgement.  "I asked them if they'd be winding down after their performance, and if so, could they use another fiddle.  They said, 'Of course,' of course," she gave Zude a squeeze, "particularly when I explained that I was treating you to a wish day."  Jez patted the fiddle case.  "Guarna seemed in good shape, too.  So you both loved it?"

"A perfect ending to a perfect day, Bella-Belle."  Zude swayed a little on the fast-moving walkway as she planted a kiss on Jez's cheek. 

"Far from ended," Jez corrected her, "unless you're too schnockered to enjoy some more."  She kept her arm on the rail behind Zude, steadying her by leaning on her. 

"Never!" Zude proclaimed.  "Where are we headed, my jewel?  "Toward what new adventure do we speed?"

Jez sighted an upcoming liftlane.  "Toward a new and special den of iniquity over by the shipyards," she answered, "called the Fools Rush Inn.  Are you compos mentis enough to swing?"  When Zude began an outraged response, Jez sprang onto the liftlane.  "Then come on!"

Zude vaulted onto the stepped track after Jez, barely clearing the guard rail.  They rose up and over the low buildings toward the dark sky.  With a whine of acceleration, massive hidden pumps whisked them higher, story after story, along the cold windowless wall of Hong Kong's Education Administration Center.  A rising wind accompanied their ascent. 

They waited atop the building while swinging cables passed them at intervals of 50 feet.  Jez stopped their passing in order to help Zude secure her grasp of one of the cableclasps.  When she tugged on the cable, the swings resumed their flight over the twinkling city below them.  One loud yahoo of exultation as Zude lifted her feet.  Then she sailed off into the blackness.  Jez followed her on the next cable and together they swung laughing and bellowing over Hong Kong toward the sea.

The Fools Rush Inn mimicked in every detectable detail a nineteenth century hotel of the Old American West.  In its clamorous saloon two lighthearted Amah cadets sang along with the chorus lines, caught gaudy garters, and carried frequent beers to the inexhaustible piano player.  When at last the saloon's patrons dispersed, Jez and Zude climbed the red carpeted stairs to the privacy of their cool, low-lit room where the embroidered sheets of the four-poster bed were turned back in welcome. 

"Mother's Blessings!"  Zude exclaimed.  She was charmed: by the chiffonier, the dark wood walls devouring the light of oil lamps; by the tall bulky wardrobe and the flowered thunderjug under the bed.  She dropped her pack and turned to Jez.

Jez stood without moving, her bright eyes holding Zude in a sheath of patent desire.  Zude's own eyes fastened upon Jez's neck, the small birthmark just below the left earlobe.  It pulsed in a customary assurance of Jez's carnal excitement.  Zude blinked slowly, her lips halting just short of a smile.

Then the space between them collapsed, lost in a burst of emancipated ardor and the engagement of two wills, each pushing, each pulling, in the arousing tilt for primacy -- so familiar yet ever so unpredictable.  Each was peak and each was valley, each was crest and trough, each the matter of the universe and each its dynamo. 

Suddenly, and by tacit mutual consent, they broke apart.  With eyes locked, they breathed their fire and restrained laughter while they removed dangling earrings -- first Jez her laminated feathers, then Zude her silver unicorns, placing them ceremoniously, and by touch only, on the marble top of the washstand.  Their gaze still unbroken, they ritually flung off the breeches, buskins, and tabards of the Amahrery and parted the thin arm-and-torso seams of their rhyndon bodystockings.  They stood then, shining bodies bathed in yellow lamplight, a tableau of classical athletes poised in expectation of some decisive moment.

Jez moved first.  She feinted to the left then swept up and under Zude's credulous response to embrace and immobilize that astonished body.  Zude's howl acknowledged the affront of being bettered.  She closed her eyes, let her lover's tongue discover her own, and sank with undisguised anticipation down to the meager resiliance of the room's big rag rug. 

She was a lake in a high meadow, welcoming the steady tapping of a spring rain upon her surfaces, the gentle expansion of her depths with the filling of her edges.  Near her was a second lake, also swelling to the visit of the rain, to its tiny insistent pressures and its covert bid to annex every bank.

She leaned toward lower land where her borders were disappearing, urging her fullnesses in that direction.  A companion outpouring from the other lake joined her on the friendly mountainside, merging their abundances without hastening their waters.  They were a stream a-borning, bound to roll together toward distant valleys, to touch newborn embankments, to tease clumps of earth from rocks and roots for the seasoning of their progress.  But the angle of their descent would be modest, and their journey would be long and slow.

Jez's face above her was curtained by long hair, her eyes a sparkling green where the lamplight crept through.  She was watching Zude's face as she made love to her. 

A sweet ambition swept through Zude.  She raised her head and drew Jez's mouth toward her lips.  Her kiss asked for a change in priorities.  "Jez," she whispered, "I want to make love to
you
.  Now."

"Zude -- !"

"It's my wish day, remember?  Anything I want, you said."  Zude drew them both to a sitting posture, hushing Jez's protest with a finger to her lips.  "'Anything,' you said."  She knelt and urged her lover onto the bed, then covered the outspread body with her own.  "This is what I want."

"Zude, I -- !" 

"Sh-h-h!"  Zude's lips formed soundless words by Jez's ear.  "We'll do this one together," they assured her.  The body under Zude eased, and she whispered carefully, "Open to me, Jezebel."

Jez lay long and golden in the lampglow, invitation stretching upward from her every highlight and shadow.  Zude began by touching her only with her breath, then with tongue and fingertips, until the stream began again its slow expanding movement down the sloping meadow.  When at last she set her hand at its proper angle between the eager thighs and gave her fingers their appropriate berth, Jez gasped, and the stream leapt forward in a sudden drop to terrain more rugged and steep.  It charged sharply downward now, its broad white waters alert with purpose.

Zude moved her fingers in rhythmic caresses that never varied in tension, speed, or angle.  She could move this way forever, she knew, in this particular fashion of loving Jezebel's body.  And Jez could stay forever trembling on this  edge before the ecstasy. 

From far away Zude heard the roar that summoned them both: the voice of the approaching waterfall.  She knew precisely the touch that would sweep them inescapably to its brink and out over its roaring waters.  Carefully she reached with her tongue for the mound of flesh that was both the core of Jezebel's rising desire and her deliverance from it.  At her touch, a sharp cry brust from Jez's throat and mounted in a sustained crescendo.  The rising of her own climax matched Jez's cry.  She kept the movement of her fingers steady even as her tongue stroked the mound itself.

They plunged headlong toward the waterfall, colonizing rain and rivulet, engulfing any log or boulder that challenged their exuberance.  In the instant that Jez's body testified that it could no longer resist its explosion, Zude abruptly halted all motion and resolutely clasped with her full hand the pinnacle of Jez's exultation, catapulting at the same time her own excitement to its zenith.  Together they hung suspended over raging torrents of cascading waters, scorning for ageless moments the plunge into drenching release.  

Then, on wave after wave of wonder they rode down together toward the sea.

Almost an hour later, the night was becoming a swelter again.  Jezebel sat in a rocker by the white-curtained window, her feet perched on a wooden stool.  She swirled the remains of a stout brandy around in her glass.  Zude lay on the bed, her arms behind her head, her sleep shirt clinging wetly to her skin.  She watched the changing contours of her lover's face.

"I'm still holding you, Jezebel," she said in a low voice.

"You always hold me, Zudie.  Always," Jez smiled.

"I do," Zude agreed, "I do."  She wiped her face on the bedclothes.

"Here," Jez said, turning to the window.  Gently she summoned a cool breeze from the offshore waters.  It came, sweeping into the room to lift her own loose sleep tunic with short flaps and ripples.

"Love, how do you do that?" Zude whispered.

"Sh-h-sh," Jez whispered back.  She closed her eyes.  The breeze billowed into a mild but persistent gale, reaching out toward Zude's damp body.  It lifted the folds of cotton from her skin and suspended them in a fluttering, balmy surcease of her discomfort. 

Zude watched, hardly daring to breathe.  The billows died down, depositing on her torso the dry folds of her thin cotton shirt.  Zude shot a glance at her lover, then deliberately flipped onto her stomach, daring with her sweaty back an encore of the performance.

Jez smiled, her eyes still closed.  Her lips puckered only slightly, and the breeze obligingly wafted forward once more, lifting Zude's shirt from her back and dropping its cool dryness over her body again.

Zude lay still except for the tapping of her fingers on the bedclothes.  Her voice was muffled.  "Impossible," it said.  Then she pushed up to her elbow and turned to her lover.  "I never know what to say when you do something like that, Bella-Belle."

Jez finished off her brandy.  "A little 'thank you' will do fine," she replied.

*Of course," Zude whispered.  "I thank you."

"We both have our secrets, Zudie," she said.

Zude nodded.  "We do."  She shifted to a sitting position against a long bolster and a pillow at the head of the bed.  Seconds later she remarked, "It should be dawn."

"In another hour," Jez answered.  "Fifty-six minutes, to be exact," she added lightly.

Zude didn't question her statement.  "Time goes slow when you're having fun," she observed.

Jez nodded, rocking contentedly.

Zude retrieved her own near-empty brandy snifter from the bedside table.  She downed its contents and sat looking at Jez for a moment.  Then she set the glass back on the table.  "I have a secret to share too, Jezebel," she said.  When Jez cocked her head Zude continued.  "Is it still my wish day?"

"It is," Jez assured her.  Then she grinned.  "Until dawn."

"You'd give me a massage?"

The rocking slowed.  "Zude, I asked if you wanted -- "

"No, no, love," Zude assured her, "I'm not talking sexual."  She paused.  "I'm just inquiring . . . .  So, you'd give me a massage?"

"Zude, that's a crazy question -- "

"Bear with me," Zude said.  "If I wanted you to really pound my muscles, go in deep, relieve some tough tensions . . . I figure you'd do that for me . . . ?"

Jez stopped rocking.  "What are you getting at?" 

"There's something in my pack," Zude gestured.  "There, strapped to Guarna."

Jez extricated the violin case from Zude's pack and liberated from it a short thick stick protected by sharp-scented flannel.  Zude's nod urged her to unwrap it.  Jez unfolded the rounds of lightly oiled cloth, and into her lap rolled a finely-wrought handle of carefully tooled black leather.  Extending from one end of it were a dozen or more flat strands, each also of leather and about eighteen inches in length.  They were wrapped around the handle.  Jez picked it up and examined it.  Then she flushed, and snapped her head toward Zude.  Her eyes were ablaze.