The SONG of SHIVA (17 page)

“Make you a deal,” Lyköan said with a nod and a wink. “You keep your eyes and ears open tonight, watch my backside and I’ll keep my eye on yours. Not that I haven’t already. There’s just something about Pandavas that bothers me.”

“Why, Mr. Lyköan,” she breathed coyly, “I’m flattered ― I think.”

“You’ve every right to be. Seriously though, you
are
planning to deliver that speech tonight, right? As you say, we’re probably only uneasy because of our good fortune. What’s that worth? Nothing. No harm, no foul. We can play it easy for now. Keep in touch. If it’s alright with you I’d like to do that for more personal reasons anyway. How about we get together after this wingding breaks up tonight and compare notes? See if we’ve learned anything.”

“I’d like that. I was only teasing earlier. I’ve been working on the speech for days. Overworked it maybe. That bet business was just my attempt at stress relief. Successful for a while too. Had you going, didn’t I? Anyway, if I’m forced to play to the crowd, I intend to play my role to the hilt. The world is coming to praise Doc Carmichael ― I don’t intend to disappoint them. You’ll see.”

“I bet I will,” Lyköan agreed.

“I’ll deal with tonight when it arrives,” Nora said. “Right now I’d like to inspect these stones. You may think I’m crazy, but there’s something so familiar about them. This may be my only chance to get a closer look.”

“Sure. And I agree. They’re powerful. A presence. I feel it too. We’ve got time. Let’s take that look.”

He rode with her as she went back to circling the megalith.
My, my, my, Doc Carmichael, but you
do
look absolutely fetching in the saddle
.
It even sounds as though you may harbor a reciprocating opinion of me in mine.

But you’re too humble by half, my dear. Seize your moment. They’re rare.
No matter how vehemently you may deny it
―
I’m sure you’re shortchanging your contribution. Lives were saved. You played a large part in it.

Lyköan had to admit that the last thing he would ever have wanted was a spot in the limelight. Apparently Nora felt the same. Was it human nature? He didn’t think so. Irrational though the feeling might be, he also felt some degree of impish glee seeing someone squirming in the glare of inordinate praise ― especially when that person dreaded the attention as much as this woman obviously did.
Some sort of reverse
schadenfreude
, he wondered,
joy at another’s fear of
good
fortune?

“Learn to appreciate the beneficent inherent in the everyday,”
Sun Shi had once said.
“Accept and cherish what grief demands. Then move on. Everything changes with time. Even desire.”

Grief might change, old man
, Lyköan had responded and did so once again in the memory,
as you said, even desire. People change every day. In the last four years I’ve changed plenty. But the past itself never changes. As badly as we might want it to. No amount of effort is capable of satisfying
that
desire. Effort hasn’t worked. But might something else? Something like the present?

Looking across at Penny orbiting the locus of the dolmen, he thought:
Actually, right now’s not half bad.

While he might not have admitted it to another person, Lyköan knew he had been smitten. For Nora, the clockwork of altered perception may have been ticking at a slower pace, but it was heading towards the same inexorable destination. That nervous klutz from the Ayutt Haya elevator, who seemed edgy and odd back in Bangkok, was being transformed.

He certainly isn’t
ugly
, she thought.
Not afraid of a challenge either. Interesting.
Why hadn’t she seen it before?
Even that self-deprecating cynicism is appealing
―
almost gallant. And those eyes
―
what’s really going on behind those eyes and under those ringlets, Mr. Egan Lyköan? I bet I could find out.

Whoa! Getting a little ahead of yourself aren’t you, girl? But it would be interesting
...

Eight riders had set out from Cairncrest stables to explore the estate’s enormous acreage. Of the eight, only Nora and Lyköan were more than middling equestrians. Following a game trail that broke from the stable’s gravel road, they soon found themselves paralleling a sleepy brook meandering towards the River Avon some miles downstream.

Nora, not content with simply plodding along, had decided on a whim, at one of the brook’s bends, to throw down the challenge to race for a certain oak barely visible above the brow of a nearby hill and taken off at a gallop. Without a second thought, Lyköan had bolted after her.

In the space of two hundred yards, charging through the hail of hoof-thrown clods of turf flying from Nora’s horse, he had slowly closed the distance between them. On more than one occasion, flailing like a ruffled ribbon extended in a gale, the black stallion’s tail had whipped the tip of his straining mount’s nose, the ground rumbling deafeningly as the fifteen-hundred-pound animals thundered up the hillside. 

Leaning precariously over the mare’s neck, her streaming mane whipping his face, he had pulled inside just as they reached the second hedgerow. Hands too tight into the jump, the mare’s back hoofs had scrapped the pruned tops of the blackthorn and he barely cleared the far-side borrow ditch. The mare hesitated for an instant and Nora pulled two lengths ahead. Weaving between trees, jumping hedgerows and walls, galloping across the intervening hillside contours, Lyköan closed the gap half a dozen times only to have her consistently outmaneuver him at a ditch crossing or barrow transit.

As the oak loomed larger ahead of them, he had gambled everything on a slightly different route to the tree, hoping to overtake Nora’s horse in the final hundred-yard sprint to the finish. The wind blew hard into his face, buffeting his hair tight against his skull. Fingers knotted in the reins, forearms taut, the animal panting loudly beneath him, he had passed the oak half a length out of the money.

In a race between two horses, second place must be considered losing. But if racing was ultimately really about living, then the only possible loss was death. How long had it been since he had last felt this alive? He could remember to the day.

How could that scene from years ago retain such clarity when these fresh events, he was certain, were already being altered by the biochemical action of consciousness? Where it specifically differed from the reality that had actually transpired he couldn’t say, for it was entirely unintentional. It was enough to know it
was
altered. “
Don’t trust memories,”
Sun Shi had warned. “
They restrict forward vision
.”
Here we go again
, Lyköan thought with a sigh.

Back in the present, Nora looked down at the felted ground and dismounted. Standing in the sheep-cropped grass, the smell of humus thick in her nostrils, she looked up at Lyköan for an instant and told him with honest resignation, “I’ll be looking out in the audience for you tonight, knowing we share a secret. We may not know what that secret is yet, but maybe, together, we can find out – you think?”

“Or find out we’re just paranoid and resentful because of our good fortune. Don’t think I haven’t considered
that
possibility too.”

After tying the reins to a scrub oak growing from the base of one of the pylons she put her hand on the stone. Still wet from the rain, the moss covered surface produced an almost electric shock of recognition. Now she remembered where she had seen these stones before. Circling the megalith frantically on foot, she peered between the pylons half expecting to hear the crash of surf. Far off in the crisp distance, numerous hilltops away, bracketed between the dolmen cap, the dank earth and two pylon stones, back along the lazy brook’s ragged course, Cairncrest manse gleamed like a dusky jewel upon the horizon. Between here and there the green grass was so intensely brilliant it made her eyes ache.

Lyköan came down off his horse and stood beside her. Holding the reins in one hand he asked, “Beautiful, isn’t it?” He was finding the green just as painful. No one standing at this spot at this moment under these circumstances could have avoided the pain. He was suffering from other aches as well.

“Beautiful? Maybe,” Nora said. “I remember reading somewhere that the source of beauty is a wound. Think they knew what they were talking about?”

“I’m certain of it,” Lyköan replied, placing his free hand over the one Nora had once again placed against the pylon, her tenuous anchor to a dream.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Vanýek Sabeiha :
The Path of Ha’ph Sihn

Lyköan rocked back in his chair with a raucous laugh, free of reservation and totally unembarrassed, a booming staccato of repeating, oddly-turned vowels, rising from somewhere way down deep. Bouncing off the ornate ceiling moldings it echoed back sharply, startling him for an instant. He shrugged. In the postprandial chatter of the banquet hall the outburst hadn’t even raised an eyebrow. It had been too long since he had felt this unencumbered, so totally beyond the reach of social intimidation.

Sitting next to him, a mid-level bureaucrat from the Thai embassy, a complete stranger before this evening, had just finished happily embellishing a less-than-flattering anecdote limning the prodigious and long-celebrated carnal appetite of the newly elected Thai Prime Minister.

Apparently arriving late for a meeting with a visiting Chinese cultural delegation one recent morning, disheveled and reeking of hired allure after a government limousine backseat tryst, the Thai head of state had been ushered into the meeting. A perceptive Chinese delegate, in impeccable Thai, had quipped, “Your celebrated love for the Thai people is well known, your Excellency. I trust the constituent responsible for today’s delay
profited
from your personal attention.”

Without blinking an eye, the consummate politician had allegedly replied, “The demands upon a public servant often must take precedence over diplomatic protocol, I’m afraid.” Refusing to be cowed by his predicament, he excused both the dalliance and his poor manners by adding, “especially when that servant is obliged to provide so much service to so many.”

While it lost a little in the translation, the story so appropriately illuminated its subject’s brash worldliness that anyone familiar with the man’s reputation
had
to laugh. The young bureaucrat’s freshly scrubbed face and congenial demeanor had been deft tools, adding immensely to the deadpan delivery. Lyköan knew that Thais considered a prime minister the perfect foil for such a tale. Whether it was true or not, he was considered fair game. And the current caricature-like holder of that office presented so fine a target that such potshots seemed almost obligatory. It may have been that only someone who had spent years in country and was familiar with the target would have found the anecdote humorous, but that final quip had illuminated the subject of the story perfectly. No Thai would have dared circulate a similar ribald tale about the king. There were bounds to decorum and this young man hadn’t crossed any.

It was quintessential
sanuk
, that sense of “fun” Thais valued so highly ― the very core of their cultural being. Sanuk was desirable above all else, even if achieved at another’s expense ―
especially
at another’s expense. Lyköan was pleased to have struck such an instantaneous chord of commonality with this stranger. Normally, Thais would never denigrate their nation or culture in front of a farang.

This guy must feel comfortable with me
, Lyköan thought. Winning the young man’s confidence was a wonderful denouement to an absolutely perfect day. Or maybe it was the combination of ethanol and an abundance of negative ions. The reason didn’t matter. 

Lyköan leaned forward, placing all four chair legs back on the floor and surveyed the room. He was seated at a table along the dining room’s exterior wall, his back to a line of tall Palladian windows. An immense centerpiece, containing every imaginable horticultural hue and fragrance available from the English August, blocked his view of the middle of the room, but it also shielded him from full exposure. Overhead, a sea of chandeliers cast scintillating highlights twinkling off crystal and polished silver.

Through one of the tall windows, he watched as the last velvet of dusk played across the southern sky. In the gathering darkness, the twilight waltz of fireflies was dancing through the landscaped grounds like a flickering infusion of absolute tranquility. Around the room the sonorous rumble of after dinner chatter rolled like summer thunder, kilometers away and nonthreatening.             

What a surprising revelation today had been. The very fabric of reality had changed. A cloud had lifted. He considered pinching himself. The contract signing had taken less than fifteen minutes. Not a hint of trouble. At precisely seven o’clock the remaining parties to the agreement, including Innovac’s Purchasing VP, a nondescript little man whom Lyköan had never met before, had all retired to a small antechamber. They signed without ceremony, had their signatures witnessed and notarized, and left. After months of angst, the final detail had been the easiest. Past experience had led him to expect at least one last fly to drop into the ointment. He was genuinely surprised when it had failed to materialize. Everyone he had met today had treated him with respect, as a professional. He was learning to accept that assessment. Had his karma really entered some new and decidedly better phase?

This afternoon had opened other doors as well. Some pleasant, others the kind he generally kept closed, tightly locked in fact. He knew he would ultimately have to deal with those issues, but for the moment the universe felt relaxed and full of possibility.

Cairncrest’s grand dining room was a cavernous hollow, filled with silverware striking china in a clamorous percussive dissonance. Against this baseline din, a delicate syncopation of fine crystal played cymbal-like, incisive counterpoint to the great organic rumble of more than a hundred mouths engaged in conversation. As the hour approached, this symphony of voices and utensils built rhythmically towards a final crescendo and then abruptly softened as the dining room chandeliers were dimmed, subtly announcing the approaching ceremony. At the back of the great hall the chamber quartet that had been playing quietly throughout dinner fell silent and the musicians began packing their instruments.

Across the room, dressed in white eveningwear, Pandavas was leaning between two chairs speaking softly into the British Foreign Minister’s ear. Politely ending his conversation, he withdrew from the table and walked to the front of the hall, stepping behind a darkened podium. A soft spotlight came up, setting his tuxedo ablaze.

“Good evening ladies and gentlemen, honored guests,” he began, the feverous chatter immediately falling off. “Before we get started, I would first like to recognize the artists who provided dinner’s wonderful ambiance, the St. Martin’s Chamber Quartet. Flawless as ever.” The room, now silent, fell into polite applause.

Oh, this is rich!
The irrepressible thought and an accompanying twisted grin arrived together. Hoping no one else at his table had noticed, Lyköan fought to suppress the rakish smile.
A circus like this
deserves
a glitzy ringmaster. The guy’s perfect.

The rest of the audience, however, in hushed deference, was hanging upon his every utterance. They had come expecting pronouncements from on high and here was just the prophet to deliver them. The only sound in the vast hall, other than Pandavas’s well-modulated voice, was the occasional clink of crystal or muffled cough. In concert with his delivery, an army of waiters floated unobtrusively through the room continuously refilling glasses, dark burgundy and pale peridot apparently issuing from inexhaustible fonts.

Following brief introductions and recognition of the worldwide peerage in attendance, to which Lyköan paid little attention, the angels of the hour were introduced and made to feel as self-conscious or unabashedly proud as their personalities permitted. Ms. Yin took the podium first. Her nervous stream of technical description emerged in accented barebones English, blanketing the room like a muffling snowfall. Appropriately punctuated by applause and perhaps explaining the very nature of the universe, Lyköan was not the only one relieved when she finally vacated the spotlight.

As the pomp and circumstance continued, Lyköan began to see that while he had approached this evening with anticipation, the real thing was proving tediously burdensome, on the order of a second rate TV awards ceremony.

So what? I’ve got nothing better to do right now. No crises or demands
―
nothing but relaxed ambiance, outstanding food and drink
―
even the stitches have settled down.

Pandavas, a master of such ceremonies, was in his element, wooing and wowing his audience with surgical precision. For their part, the crowd would have eagerly crowned him by acclamation, if only in praise of his mastery over them. He seemed to understand them intimately. Through the very people who had achieved this medical miracle, he offered the spotlight in total humility and genuine appreciation for their achievement. As he admitted, he had done no more than allow them to follow their genius.

Lyköan watched all of it with bored disinterest, only perking up when the self-admitted scared rabbit of this afternoon took the dais. And Nora was magnificent. Just the right mixture of humility and deferred credit, augmented by a fascinating synopsis of
The
Trail of the Anti-Telomerase Trigger
, conveyed in precise detail, but told at a layman’s level of understanding, acquitting herself admirably. When her eyes finally searched for and found his during those fifteen minutes in the spotlight, he winked, receiving a knowing smile in return.

The wine, the span of days and ill slept nights, it was all catching up with him. He had succeeded in his primary goal for the evening, collaring the British and Thai officials and getting their signatures. If his body was crying out for rest, why not give in to the urge? So long as he didn’t fall asleep right here at the table.

Nora left the podium and other less involved but more self-important dignitaries began a long and boring parade to second the accolades Pandavas had already offered. Lyköan stopped paying attention. A glance at his watch only confirmed his suspicions, that the rulers of the universe had turned on Old Chief Broom’s slow machines and cranked the speed way down.

The gabfest following the ceremony, however, proved more than he could bear. He was barely conversant at this level of science, medicine or politics. The lights had dimmed on Pandavas’s closing remarks, but Nora was still surrounded by a bevy of petty potentates, secure in their belief that proximity to the lady of the hour would elevate their own stature. By eleven o’clock the winds had turned from fair to foul. 

After a little small talk and idle contact, recognizing she was unapproachable, he decided to slip up to his room and find the sleep that seemed to beckon. By doing so he would save himself from possibly voicing his personal opinion about her admirers, which he knew would serve only as an invitation to argument.

But for some reason, when he reached his bedroom, sleep’s allure had evaporated. Midnight arrived and passed and the echo of celebration in the great house slowly faded. After an hour of fruitless tossing upon the mattress he gave up, left his room and exited the building, located an isolated seat on the steps of the manse’s expansive rear patio, as guests excused themselves and, bidding their host adieu, left through the front foyer.

By one A.M. only a handful of diehard stragglers remained. It was a long drive back to London, a couple of hours even on deserted roads. Some of the more luminary dignitaries, keeping to strict schedules, had departed on military flights from the nearby Boscombe Down RAF base. The grand celebration was ending ― a mere blip on this summer’s busy diplomatic social calendar.

Lyköan looked up at the horned crescent moon shinning down from the star-strewn cloudless heavens. Waning towards extinction, it would be entirely dark in less than a week.

“I see you had to find your own spotlight, Mr. Lyköan. And a better one by far.”

Nora had finally shaken the last sycophant and come out into the cool of the evening, back to where she had begun the day.

“Yeah, a celestial spot. An empty stage ripe for the taking. A quieter audience too. You finally give your admirers the slip?” he asked.

“Abandoned at last. Thank God I’m the star of only one evening.”

“Want to come and sit by me?” He patted the cold stone next to him. “A duet for a different venue?” He opened both hands to the dark gardens and open shadowland beyond. She walked towards him, the fabric of her dress shimmering iridescently in the moonlight, rustling in concert with the whispering song of the summer insects. Sitting down very close, the slick satin brushed smooth and cool against his naked forearm, electric in the nocturnal stillness. She shivered.

An invitation or just an opportunity?
he wondered,
slipping his arm around her shoulders. She pulled even closer.

“I was just noticing,” he said, moving his lips to her ear, “that dolmen we found today ― you can see it shining in the moonlight from here.” He pointed across the gardens at a spot of light on the horizon. “See it?”

“I’ve eaten breakfast out here almost every morning,” Nora explained, “even come out at night a few times in the past few weeks, but never noticed it.”

“Must be a couple of miles away, even as the crow flies. But in the moonlight it looks like a
beacon
, sitting on the highest hill in this whole area. Even Cairncrest stands at a lower elevation.