Conquistador (61 page)

“There,” Adrienne said, leaning close. He was pleasantly conscious of her breath on his ear and the contact of their knees. “That branch . . .”

“. . . there,” he said. “That isn't a cougar, is it?”

“No,” she said softly.
“Chui,”
At his incomprehension, she went on: “We got that word from our when-wes. Leopard. A male, very large.”

There was something else jammed into the crutch of a branch higher on the tree: a mule-deer carcass, he thought. And the branch the big cat was lying on looked to be just perfect for dropping on anything that came by on the game trail beneath. He didn't feel particularly alarmed; even big predators avoided people unless you cornered them or did something dumb like running away. Still, he didn't intend to ride under that limb, either.

“Shall we turn back?” he said.

“Not unless you want to,” she replied. “There's a very pretty little spot a bit farther on I was planning on showing you.
Le Chui
there's probably been shot at before—they love the taste of dog, not to mention sheep. Pull your rifle out and see what he does.”

The cat's head came around sharply as he slowly drew the weapon from the scabbard. It came to its feet as soon as he had the muzzle clear, and growled—a sound with more than a little of a rasping scream in it; then it whirled and went down the trunk of the oak like flowing water, disappearing into the bush so smoothly that scarcely a shrub quivered to the passage of three hundred pounds of carnivore.

“Well,
he
knows what a rifle looks like and what it's for,” Tom said. “Doesn't particularly like it, either.”

“Neither would I, if I could only bite back,” Adrienne said, clicking her white teeth together and laughing. “That was lucky. They tend to be scarce near settled country.”

The dogs relaxed, and the horses went forward without objections; he judged that meant the leopard had either gotten downwind or far away, or both. After a half hour of companionable silence they reached the spot she'd spoken of; it bore the first signs of humankind he'd seen amid the mountains.

“Here it is. Quite famous.”

“Well, you
could
call it pretty, I suppose,” Tom said.

They'd come out of pine-smelling forest onto a jutting triangle that emerged from the canyonside to make a flattish area about a quarter-acre broad, with pockets of growth amid the rocks. A spring bubbled up from the base of the overhanging sheer mountainside to the rear; it had been ringed with stones to collect the flow in a shallow gravel-floored pool, surrounded with a lush growth of star jasmine. That climbed the cliff higher than his head, grew thick around the water, and trailed along the sides of the trickling stream as it wound over the ledge and plunged off the rim. The water disappeared as mist among the trees below, turning to a constant drift of rain. The clustered white blossoms were thick among the vines, and the heady scent mixed with the forest smell and the chill dampness of the springwater. The ledge didn't feel exposed, though; it was as if he'd walked into magic and become part of it, connected with everything he saw yet separate from it, safe and walled away.

Yet it was the view that caught at the throat. They were deep enough into the Mayacamas highlands that the ledge of rock seemed to float disembodied above the steep depths beneath and amid the lower rolling peaks about, gashed with occasional cliffs north to the barely glimpsed cone of Mount Saint Helena. The trees and brush about them merged into a deep green velour in the middle distance, fading to indigo that deepened as the sun declined toward the western crest.

They watered the horses, unsaddled them and tethered them to iron rings set in the living rock where the trail emerged from the mountainside; then they walked forward to the tip of the triangle, where a single small oak cast a patch of grassy shade amid poppies and wild hyacinth; the earth fell away beneath their feet. They could see Seven Oaks below them, toy-tiny yet absurdly close after their hours in the saddle, and the soft-colored palette of the valley beyond: the white steeple of a church in a crossroads village to the north, yellow stubble in blocks amid the green of leys, the tree-studded pasture, the occasional geometrical regularity of a vineyard or olive grove or orchard, and long shadows falling toward the riverbank forest from the lines of Italian cypresses. Light glinted on water, on the windows of the scattered farmsteads, and touched the tops of trees with a moving shimmer as people and animals moved antlike below.

It changed as they watched, tingeing the whole with a yellow haze, turning to burnished gold on the bare tops of the Vacas across the valley floor.

“But it's
not
pretty,” he said. His arm went around her waist, and she leaned into his shoulder, a motion that seemed very natural. “Its beautiful . . . like something in a dream, or an old book about stepping through a mirror.”

“It's the Land of Lost Content,” Adrienne said softly.

The words matched what he saw, but they also had the feel of being part of a larger whole. Adrienne must have felt the question through his arm, for she went on in the same half-dreaming tone:

“But Granddad found it for us again, just for us, against all hope,” she continued, and shivered slightly. “That's what scares me about going through the Gate, Tom, scares me bad every time I leave. What if I can't get back?”

She turned in to his embrace and they kissed. Suddenly their hands were eager on each other, scrambling with belts and fasteners; they rolled on the long silky grass. . . .

Some time later Tom Christiansen laid himself back, sweaty and exhausted—and glad they'd paused for a moment to get a blanket to lie on.
Jesus,
he thought blissfully, staring up at the deepening blue of the sky.
I feel like a teenager again—or did for a couple of hours.
They said a man's stamina peaked at sixteen, and it was all downhill from there.
But maybe not.

Adrienne propped herself up on an elbow and kissed him. Then she started working her way down his throat; her long, bronze-colored hair tickled, then mingled with the sparse pale blond thatch on his massive chest.

“Adri,” he said, “I'm flattered. But I'm also thirty-two, not sixteen—I was just thinking about—
Jesus!
”

He was lost for long moments. When his eyes cleared she was swinging astride him.

“You underestimate yourself, darling,” she said, and sank back with a shivering moan. “Turnabout's fair play. . . .”

The smell of star jasmine mingled with sweat and musk; his hands clenched on her hips. Her face was remote, eyes closed behind a mist of swaying hair, until she stiffened and froze, crying out—quivering motionless except for the strong internal clenching. He shouted and heaved convulsively, and heard the sound die in echoes against the rock as she collapsed forward on his chest; his hand slid up the slick skin along her spine to the back of her neck.

“Oh, my.” She sighed; he could feel the coolness as her breath met his damp skin, although her face was hidden. “Oh,
my
.” After a moment she went on, obscurely, “Now,
that
was certainly no chocolate éclair.”

He lay and enjoyed the sensation of her pressed along him—it was a lot easier for him to bear her weight than the reverse, of course; he had a gentleman's chafe marks on his elbows. That went on for a long lazy time, until the sun struck his eyes and he noticed the time.

“I hate to say it, but oughtn't we be going? People might suspect. . . .” Adrienne chuckled lazily. “Suspect? They'll do more than suspect, honeypie. Seein' as I brought you up alone to Lover's Leap.”

“So
that's
what it's called?” he said, and tweaked her.

She yelped and rolled off him, glaring in an anger only half-assumed; the tweak had been delivered in a highly sensitive spot, and one she couldn't have politely rubbed in public. She could here, and did: even in his exhausted state the sight did remarkable things.

“What was
that
for?”

“For taking me up unto a high place and showing me all the kingdoms of the Earth,” he said, wagging a finger at her—and then grabbing her wrist when she tried to retaliate with a tweak of her own. They both laughed.

She went on, “Well, it worked, didn't it? Unless you were planning on resisting temptation?”

“I may have Christ in my surname, but the first one isn't Jesus,” Tom said.

A swing band was tuning up as Tom and Adrienne dismounted at the stables; sunset was about over, leaving only a red glow behind the Mayacamas. He grinned at the sound of the music; he'd been a teenager when the swing-dancing revival was at its height, and the thought of tossing Adrienne around to a brassy big-band sound held no terrors. That and square dancing were the most popular forms here, from what he'd heard.

Then a thought hit him with a sudden chill: It probably wasn't a swing
revival
. For all he knew, it had never gone out of fashion, in this enclave of the dimensionally displaced. The population was too small to generate many fashions of their own, and if they were cut off from the living currents of society on FirstSide by choice or circumstance . . . He remembered his father remarking once that an uncle had gone on a trip to the old country in the 1950s. Modern Norwegians had barely been able to understand the archaic peasant dialect the uncle had picked up from the grandparents who'd made the original westward migration.

Tom and Adrienne helped the stablehands unsaddle their mounts, then walked hand in hand back to the manor. They parted with a kiss at the door to his room on the second floor; he took the time for a quick shower—rubbing down with handfuls of cold springwater wasn't enough, considering the amount of exertion of various sorts he'd gone through today. The Commonwealth equivalent of party clothes for this sort of affair made him feel a little self-conscious at first—there was a definite zoot-suit influence—but they fit well; for a semiformal occasion like this they included a jacket with broad lapels, an open-necked shirt and loose-cut slacks, with two-tone leather shoes. He gave a thumbs-up sign to the mirror and went out to meet Adrienne. She wore a cream silk dress with a pleated skirt, and low-heeled shoes with diamond-studded buckles.

Whoa,
he thought, taking her in.

It must have shown, or maybe he simply couldn't contain an inarticulate cave-man grunt of admiration, for she curtsied; he offered an arm and she tucked hers through it as they walked down the curving staircase and out the tall doors to the gardens.

“And the same to you, sir,” she said. “Ready to eat? And dance?”

“Eating sounds good,” he replied. “Dancing sounds great in the conditional future tense.”

The rear of the great house was bright, the windows a blaze of lights and Chinese lanterns hanging high in the limbs of the trees, stretching away into dimmer reaches to the west. A set of trestle tables had been set on the velvety lawn, surrounding a white fountain of tapering stone basins; the band was setting up farther away, on a low stone platform nearer the paved area around the pool. A crowd of people awaited them, bowing or curtsying as Tom and Adrienne came out the main doors onto the patio that spanned the rear of the building beyond the enclosed courts. Tom felt hideously self-conscious at that; Adrienne waved with every appearance of calm, and the people went back to milling around and chattering, obviously excited and happy at the special occasion.

They were all in their best, and of all ages from just past toddlerhood to the elderly. The children were surprisingly well behaved. . . .

Or maybe not so surprisingly,
he thought.

One started to kick up a ruckus; the five-year-old's mother grabbed him by an ear and administered half a dozen solid whacks to his behind with the other hand, reducing the noise to a teary pout that soon vanished in the general excitement and high spirits.

Guess a swift smack to the fundament hasn't been redefined as assault here,
he thought, amused.

Tully stood under a string of Chinese lanterns, talking to Sandra Margolin; she was giggling, and then burst out into wholehearted laughter, which with her figure was enough to make you blink; she was wearing a low-cut blouse and peasant-style skirt.

“Not wasting any time, either,” Adrienne said, amusement in her tone.

“He usually doesn't,” Tom said—he'd always been a bit baffled by Tully's success with the opposite sex. “He never has any problem finding company.
Keeping
the woman interested is another matter,” Tom said. Then: “Hi, Roy. Where in hell did you get
that
oufit?”