Fire in the Wind (42 page)

The Watcher was still, watching. A perfect, vital stillness held him, as though a statue pulsed with life. His skin was the colour of golden new-cut trees—cedar or hemlock; and his high-bridged nose and wide prominent cheekbones gave his face a cast that men of other races would call noble. His eyes, like his hair, were black, and no emotion troubled their gaze as he watch what he watched.

The Watcher stood on a low promontory of rocks above an ocean, and what he watched was in the water, below and beyond him: a woman, struggling against the sea. She was naked, and her long wet hair was the colour of foxes, or of fire.

Something flickered behind the Watcher's eyes: regret that the woman would die. Never had he seen hair of that colour; and her skin was pale. He would be sorry to kill the woman.

It was evident that the waves would not kill her. The woman struggled valiantly to keep her head above the water, and although she was exhausted, the tide was with her.

The gods, too, were with her: in all this rocky coast she was being carried towards the flat sandy stretch of shore below th epromontory on which the Watcher stood. She would not be broken against rocks.

When the water was a little less than waist deep the woman found her feet and stood up out of the water. Her long hair fell dirpping down her back and over one full breast; water droplets clung to her chilled skin.

She was exhausted but triumphant, and the Watcher felt a distant admiration for her, as he might for one of the Seimmers evading his trap, or the bear his arrow. He wondered fleetingly if she were one of the Swimmers, taking human form. In that case perhaps he ought not to kill her....

The woman, nearly out of the water, paused for a moment, lifted her face to the heat of the sun and gasped deeply for air. Now that her goal was so close exhaustion gripped her more surely.

She moved forward again through the breaking waves, the water alternately pushing and pulling at her strong thighs. For all her exhaustion the motion of her naked hips was smooth, the glistening sway of her sily-wet breasts hypnotic.

She was beautiful. When she stepped onto sand above the water's reach her triumph was overcome by fatigue, and she dropped to the sand and lay gratefully drinking in the heat of the sun with her body. Her long hair was splayed out beneath her, and her body heaved as she gasped for breath.

Something stirred in the Watcher then: a fire that had not troubled him before lighted in him now. It flickered up behind his black eyes as he gazed at the heaving body on the sand. He would not kill her yet, he thought. Not yet.

The Watcher moved.

Chapter 1

Something woke her up. Something frightening, so that her heart was beating as though she had just had a brush with death. Shulamith sat upright in the silent gloom, her ears straining for the repetition of a sound she did not want to hear.

The drapes and her window were open as they always were at night—she could feel the sea-scented breeze stroke her forehead as she motnionlessly listened, but the noise hadn't come from outside the protective shell of the house. It had come from within.

It came again, after a long moment when she hardly breathed; and with the sharp grace of a cat Smith turned her face towards the noise, as though drinking in its location as much through her wide eyes, sighless still in the dark, as through her ears. The sound was muffled, certainly not as sharp as the one that had awakened her, but still unmistakably threatening: a noise of quiet scuffle, and single, low-voiced command.

"Daddy!" she callled wildly into the night. Her voice came out as a whisper, a cat's frightened hiss, but there was no point in calling again—she mustn't waste time. Shulamith ripped back the light blanket covering her legs and was running as soon as her feet hit the soft thick carpet.

A gleam of light showed around the door to her father's room, she saw when she reached the doorway, and the sight quickened her breathing and her pace, because the door should have been open, not firmly shut. She sped silently around the wide balcony that overlooked the large front hall, terror snapping at her heals, clutching her throat.
He should have listened to me, he should have hired a nurse,
she thought, and then,
I should have argued more, I should have insisted.

She had convinced him to sleep with his door open, and that was all.

But the door was closed now, the fine thread of light around its well-cut seams proof, at this hour in the morning, that whatever had caused her to start up out of a sound sleep, heart pounding, had been no nightmare. Smith bit her lip. Why was the door closed. She realized she had already begun a prayer in her head. Prayers were so simple after all.
Please, God, please don't let him be dying. Please.

She was almost crying the last words aloud as she fought for a clumsy second with the door handle, and then the door flew open under her determined, desperate hand.

And then she screamed.

It was a pipeline of sound from the deepest reaches of terror within her, an icicle of comprehending-uncomprehending horror that destroyed the close hot silence of her father's room at a stroke. The sream lasted only a moment before abruptly dying, and in its frozen aftermath Smith felt her body begin to shake, felt her muscles quiver, and then a chill sweat exuded from every pore.

Around her father's bed four darkly clad men wearing black balaclavas stared at her in mute surprise. On the bed lay her father, his pyjama top drenched with perspiration, or water, or both; his face grayly, sickly pale and beather with the same icy perspiration was was forming on Smith's own forehead. His breathing was shallow and fast. For one second there was no motion, no sound in the room. Then, some movement on th eperiphery of her vision released Smith from immobility, and she whirled to see that a figth man, his eyes fixed on her, was replacing the phone receiver in its cradle.

Ever after she would be amazed at the speed with which her mind suddenly functioned in that therrified moment. In a strange, half-consecutive, half-simultaneous burst of understanding she realized that if the man was using the phone, then the lines had not been cut; that there was a phone in her father's bathroom and a deadbolt on the door; that if she tried to run away from these men down the stairs they would certainly catch her but that if she ran
into
the room, she might make it to the bathroom before they understood her intent.

These thoughts were superimposed one on the other in a fascinating ripple, like the individual colours of a landscape painted on separate squares of glass that together form the image. Her brain was so clear that she did not have to make even the smallest glance towards the bathroom. Some instinct told her, with a combined sensation of darkness and space, that across the room the bathroom door was wide open.

By the time the receiver in the fifth man's dark hand clicked in the cradle Smith was in midflight across the room. She wasted no energy on imagining pursuit, on listening for a stifled shout or a footfall behind her. She thought of nothing but running, of moving the mass of her body through as much space in as little time as possible; she thought of getting into her father's bathroom and ramming the bolt before those evil animals behind her—animals dangerous with the cunning of men—got their unimaginable hands on her. She thought of the phone with three outside lines, on one of which she would surely be able to dial 0 before they blocked the lines or kicked down the door.

Then she was through the doorway into the cologne-scented darkness, reaching unerringly for the door with one and then two outstretched hands; she was turning, with a coordination so perfect it felt like slow motion, to ram the door shut. She saw with an unsurprised satisfction that the fith man—the quickest of all, since he had been the farthest from the bathroom—was still only halfway across the room. The other four were in various postures of surprise, consternation and motion, but too far away to be any threat.

The door, half shut, stopped moving under her weight. Smith's gasp of horror ripped out of her throat as she felt the door run aground, but she cut the sound off instantly. There was no time to waste on fear. Her eyes dropped down from the threateningly advancing fifth man to find what was bloocking the door...

Her father's bath towel, draped on the doorknob, had caught on the carpet and been ground underneath until the door could no longer move. In one sharp motion Smith pulled the door back off the towel and plucked the material from the knob.

But the fifth man was too close: she had lost the precious advantage that surprise had given her. In a last, wild effort she flung the giant glue towel—still damp from her father's shower—at the man's head and turned into the familiar darkness to grope for the phone that rested on the broad strech of marble by the sink.

By the time they had moved into this house, Shulamith had been far too old to sit on the edge of the tub watching her father shave, and it had been many years before that since he had encouraged it. So she had never seen the phenomenon of her father shaving and discussing business on the phone at the same time. In those long-ago days of laughing, sun-filled Paris mornings there had been no business to discuss in the morning, no phone anywhere in the flat, let alone the bathroom, but thgere had been sun on the dusty roofs and pouring through the tiny bathroom window, and the aroma of breakfast mixed with that other constant scent of oil paint and turpentine.

But still she could reach for the phone unerringly in the dark now, for she had polished the marble countless times and placed the plain black phone back in position. This blind knowledge of the room gave her a momentary advantage again, and she pushed a plastic button and dialed 0 second before a lean bronzed hand, darker in the loom, reached out from behind her to push down the hook and extinguish the tiny orange glow that for a second in time had been a light of hope to her.

Shulamith St. John, who had committed very little violence in the course of her life, threw the receiver at the man's masked head with a force that surprised her. Not waiting to see it connect, she didged around him to run back into her father's bedroom.

Two of the masked me were close enough to make any more running futile. She drew up short, suddenly aware that she was breathing in tortured, shuddering gasps.

"He's got a bad heart!" she choked out as the fifth man came up behind her. Her voice broke oddly on the silence. For the first time she became fully aware of herself, of her flimsy cotton-and-lace nightgown, of her total vulnerability. But that was lay insanity, and she pushed the awareness away and concentrated on the gray face of her father, who lay in her line of vision between the two men facing her. No one moved.

"He'll have a heart attack! He'll die!" she shrieked at them, hating the blank, insensate masks that hid all humanity. Each mask, in a ludicrous attempt to reassert lost individuality, she thought, was trimmed with a different colour around the eyes and mouth.

"He'll die!" she repeated. "Call the hospital!"

The red- and turquoise-trimmed masks in front of her blinked emptily, but White Trim, behind her—the tall, fast-moving, fifth man—said quietly, his voice resonating strangely in the room after her high, tense shrieking,

"An ambulance has already been called. Your father may have had a heart attack. If you—"

"His pills!" she choked, wishing her voice were not this terror-stricken cry that gave her away so obviously. She pushed between Red Mask and Turquoise Mask, who seemed unsure of what to do and might have let her pass. But the tall man behind her, obviously more in control of the situation, restrained her with a firm hand closing on her arm above her elbow.

"He has been taken his drugs," he said. "You can do nothing more for him at the moment. If you will...."

She turned on him, almost spitting. She had never in her life felt such a blinding burst of anger, hatred, helplessness and violence as the one that flamed through her now, a supernova exploding simultaneously in her brain and her stomach, sending its fires through every cell of her being.

"Get your hands off me!" she commanded, her voice a deep primal growl. "I want to go to my father!"

Two more men, in yellow- and green-trimmed masks, were still bending over her father in a kind of helpless anxiety; suddenly the three surrounding Smith took on a little of the same confusion, as though she, too, were deathly ill. White Mask's hand on her arm relaxed, and the two men by the bed straightened.

With an imperious motion that dared them to stop her, Smith crossed to the bed and placed her hand on her father's damp forehead. She drew in a shaking breath: she knew nothing about what to do for a heart attack. Why, oh, why, hadn't he let her hire a nurse?