When I returned, teapot in hand, and reactivated the game, the Duke and the Duchess were preparing to leave their love nest and return to the world. The sun was now high in their purple sky and judging by the open window in the houseboat their hot weather had begun, a more cheery setting for announcing a marriage, but somehow that stark sunlight seemed almost as ominous as the black-gray sky which had preceded it.
Nothing as minor as weather, however, seemed to be on the minds of Lenrau and B’Mella. He was helping her into her tunic, fastening the back, arranging it on her shoulders neatly, as if he were a servant girl. She was accepting his intimate ministrations with a submissive gratitude that managed to combine blushing bride and satisfied sex kitten, roles I would not have believed her capable of performing.
Then he helped her do up her hair, with fingers that could only be described as both possessive and reverent.
“You’re very kind to me,” she murmured.
“Perhaps I’m only trying to delay facing our people.”
“They will support us,” she said confidently, touching his arm with respect. As long as we stand together…”
“I know.” He kissed her lightly. “Come, we must go forth.”
“I love you,” she said simply, taking his arm in her own. “I knew I would.”
It was a bit much for Lenrau’s sense of irony, but he only smiled wryly as he led her out into the sunlight. “May we always love each other as much as we do now.”
“May it please the Lord Our God.”
It was not the combined peoples that waited for them outside the hut, but Ranora, knees pulled up under her determined little chin, peppermint-candy gown pulled down to her ankles. When they emerged, she leaped to her feet, did a quick little dance of celebration, and embraced them both enthusiastically, an astonished B’Mella first.
“I know, I know, I know,” she clapped her hands with delight, “I know!”
She pulled out her little pipe, blew a chirpy dance tune on it, and cavorted around the blushing lovers like an intoxicated elf.
“You must not wish me to be with child so soon, little Ranora,” pleaded B’Mella without much conviction.
The imp girl hooted, grabbed one of them with each hand, and under the blazing sun led them in a dance which was as wild as the most raucous Irish reel but far more elegant. Fertility dance? Nothing like getting down to business.
Then they sank on the grass, panting, sweating, and laughing. The ilel jumped up, dashed into the woods, and bounded back with a huge flagon of dark red liquid and three skinny foot-high goblets. With elaborate ceremony she poured a drink for each of them. “First,” she announced with sudden solemnity, “to the Lord Our God!”
They rose, composed themselves reverently, faced in my direction, bowed deeply, poured a little bit of the liquid on the ground, and then drained their goblets with a single swallow, followed by much laughter. Both Lenrau and B’Mella were well on their way to being tuned by the time the crowds of their people began to drift into the clearing, with the solemn slowness of a congregation filing into 11:15 Mass on a hot summer day.
The ilel took charge of the wedding preparations; no one was brave enough to question her right to do so, save for poor bemused Kaila, who would occasionally whisper a word of restraint into her manic little ear, a warning which would be met with hysterical giggles.
She appointed herself B’Mella’s keeper and gave that poor woman no rest. They spent a whole day trying on wedding gowns. The Duchess, who for all her imperiousness seemed to be a woman of simple tastes, was willing to settle for a comparatively understated dress in red and gold. The ilel shook her head and waved a negative finger. The dressmaker brought out gown after gown to the same reaction. After a time, the Duchess, with remarkable good humor, expressed no opinions, but obediently modeled the dresses for her protector/tormenter and waited for her reaction.
Finally, a shimmering purple gown with deep silver trim earned thoughtful silence from Ranora. She bounded around the Duchess, considering the dress from every angle. Then she pulled the sleeves off B’Mella’s shoulders, revealing lots of throat, arm, and chest, clapped her hands, and pointed her tiny finger in approval.
“It is too revealing.” B’Mella protected her breasts with her hands.
“Just right,” the child chanted. “It’s just right. We’ll take it, we’ll take it, we’ll take it!”
I watched my heroine closely during the wedding preparations. For a woman whose self-possession bordered on arrogance, she was remarkably docile to the wishes of both the Duke and the ilel. From imperiousness she had changed easily to contented and almost passive acceptance. Her personality was flexible, permeable, adaptable. I forgot that earlier I’d used “unstable.”
We seemed well on our way to a “they all lived happily ever after” ending. Proud of my brief stint at Godding I continued to watch intermittently through that day, out of curiosity, to learn more about their culture and social structure. After all, I told myself, I was a social scientist.
I added that I was a novelist, too, and it was time to turn to the serious task of writing a real story. When I begin to look for a premise for a story (“suppose that…”), I often use the self-hypnotism which Erika taught me ten years ago and which started me on my way to storytelling (it has never produced anything as dumb as “suppose that a computer made you God in a cosmos down the street”). Erika claims that I am a “fabulous subject.” The old suggestible kid.
Anyway I put the metronome tape on the stereo, thus making the whole house vibrate, relaxed in the gray chair by the corner windows, and stared at one of the supply of mandalas I keep handy. Sure enough, I drifted away into my own preconscious, aware of the world around me, quite capable of answering the damn telephone if it rings, but also wandering through the world of my right brain (or whatever).
I looked up and a woman in white was sitting on the maroon chair at the other side of a small coffee table. It was not Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White, however, but G’Ranne. She had put aside her uniform and was wearing a white double-breasted suit with a light blue scarf at her neck, white shoes, and a white ribbon restraining her hair. I became conscious for the first time (admittedly in an altered state) of what I had only dimly perceived before: she was the most beautiful young woman I had ever known.
“Good afternoon,” she said respectfully, in dress and manner an able and responsible young professional woman. “I hope I’m not disturbing you.”
The disguise did not fool me. “I know who you are: Grace O’Malley the pirate. You belong in Morgan’s novel. What are you doing in my story?”
“Do I look like a pirate?” Her teeth were perfectly even as she smiled, indeed everything about her was perfect. Ten, at least.
“Grace O’Malley wouldn’t be a pirate if she were alive today. She’d be a lawyer or an accountant. I repeat, why are you in the wrong story?”
“Perhaps,” she lifted her superb shoulders, “because I’ve always been in your preconscious. The perfect Celtic woman, like Nora Cronin or Ciara Kelly in your stories.”
“How do you know about them?”
“It’s your preconscious, not mine.”
“I suppose you want me to change your role in the story too?”
“No,” she said, her vast blue eyes wide with what I feared was admiration. “I trust you.”
“Then,” I demanded irritably, “what do you want?”
“I want to know,” faint trace of heart-wrenching tears, “why you don’t love me. You’re the only one I love and you don’t love me in return.”
“Of course I do…” I knew I should end the trance interlude and get rid of this woman. She was too gorgeous to dismiss. And too sad.
“You never visit me when I pray. You pay no attention to my thoughts. You give me instructions only when they’re not important. You are not pleased with my responsiveness. You don’t care about my love affair with Kaila … and it’s my first love affair. I love him because he’s so much like you. You know that…”
“No,” I protested weakly, “he’s like John Larkin.”
“John Larkin,” she waved a graceful hand, “is in Brazil, you know that. He’s staying at the beach house of Jorge Amado the novelist in Salvador Da Bahia. Kaila is you.”
“No way.”
“All my life, I have lived to serve and love you. Yet you are never pleased with me. What can I do to make you happy with me? Why don’t you listen to me when I pray?”
It was a plea not a complaint, a plea from a rejected lover.
Could I say that the image of her in lingerie was too breathtaking to risk? Better not.
(Various folks in this story have asserted that I like older women and teenaged women. Now it is clear that I also have a weakness for women in their early twenties. Also in their late fifties, as far as that goes.)
“I’m afraid that your beauty and your dedication overwhelm me,” I admitted. “It’s not that you are not appealing. Rather, you are almost too appealing.”
“You made me that way.” She smiled wanly.
“Sometimes,” I was trying hard, “God is overwhelmed by the appeal of the creatures he has made.”
“Really?” She held out her hands in a gesture of happy delight.
“Really,” I said. “After all, God is only human!”
(Now before Cardinal Josef Ratzinger and the bully boys from the Congregation for the Defense of the Faith—as the Inquisition is euphemistically called these days—come after me with their thumbscrews and their heresy charges, I want to make four points.
1. I realize that God is divine.
2. I was in an altered state of consciousness.
3. I was trying to talk my way out of a bad mess.
4. If the incarnation means anything at all, in the terms of the Council of Chalcedon, it reveals the humanity of God: the Person who is God has a human nature. Right? Right. Anyway, in this context all I meant was that God is not inhuman, in the sense of subhuman.)
“I know,” she said affectionately. “God needs us.”
“What?” I demanded, shocked by her heresy.
“The world is unredeemed,” she said enthusiastically, and God is in need of man to be a partner in completing, in aiding, in redeeming. Our lives are a divine need. The meaning of human existence is to satisfy the divine need for the redemption of the world.”
“Rabbi Heschel…” I murmured.
“Abraham Joshua Heschel.”
“How do you know about him?”
“He’s in your preconscious. You’ve been reading John Merkle’s book.”
“I’m dizzy.”
She laughed adoringly. “Do I really do that to you?”
“Indeed you do.”
“Then you do love me!” She jumped up as though she were about to kiss me. Alas, she was much too respectful.
The Duke acted like a mystic. This incredibly beautiful young woman was one, a God-haunted creature of light. No, not haunted as much as haunting.
“That’s all I wanted to know.” She was glowing radiantly. “Now I don’t mind not being able to have Lenrau or Kaila. If it is for my happiness you will send me someone else. Oh, I love you so much …!”
“Lenrau or Kaila?”
“Of course, I loved them both. You must know that. But the Duke must marry the Duchess so that there will be peace, and Kaila is obsessed with that wonderful little imp. I am not jealous. No one can take you away from me.”
Oh, God, I thought.
Fortunately for me, the phone rang and I returned, however reluctantly, to ordinary consciousness.
I never did figure out how she slipped from Morgan’s novel to mine.
I went back to the game, wondering why I had not realized what she was. Had I been intimidated by her beauty?
Who, me?
The game was a welcome relief after the intensity of that glorious creature’s devotion. Sometimes, after all, it is heaven to be God.
Anyway, the crops by which the country lived were slowly turning the fields white and purple, and the trees were blossoming in a rainbow outburst of delicate pastel colors. The land was preparing for the mating of the hero and the heroine—on the Feast of the Three Moons appropriately enough—by a glorious explosion of its fertile season, an explosion which seemed to impose a gentle tranquility on all those who lived in the land.
The people were masters of color and ceremony. The rituals in both cities in preparation for the marriage—which was to take place on the field where the battle had been fought, only a few days ago in my time—reminded me of the carefully choreographed ceremonies of the Vatican, as solemn as the Vatican at any rate, but somewhat more languid and with a lot more ritual bathing than the Curia would tolerate.
It seemed to me that the Duke and Duchess, together and separately, spent at least half of each day in sumptuous bathing pools while various choirs chanted slow, intoxicating hymns over them. They both were, by the way, more than adequately covered during these interludes. Their culture demanded prudery from their love in public manifestations.
But the cultural norms did not prevent Ranora in her bits of peppermint-candy fabric and string from jumping without warning into their pools, and amid much laughter and fighting pushing both their heads under water.
They joined in the merry fun, delighted by their sprite’s playfulness, but neither seemed to dare to dunk her saucy little head underwater.
With the exceptions of the ritual cleansings, Lenrau and B’Mella stayed away from each other during the week of preparation; they were polite and distant when the rituals brought them together, both of them, I suspected, dying of frustration, a reaction which occasioned barely concealed giggles from their peppermint princess ilel who seemed to mock the solemnity of the festival with her clapping, feet-twitching exuberance.
The two lovers did sneak off one spectacularly lovely evening when the rose-and-gold dusk seemed to go on forever. They had emerged from the third ritual bath of the day, this one in open air and beginning just at sunset, and stood at the edge of the pool, modestly cowering in vast towels while their attendants and the choirs packed in for the ceremony.
“You smell like all the flowers of spring,” ’Rau said cautiously.
She turned to him, dreamy-eyed. “You are so beautiful that my eyes dull all my other senses.”
“And I was once told that I looked at you with lust!”
“It is all right when a woman does it.” Giggle. “When we are properly mated I want to paint you totally naked.”
He bowed his head in mild embarrassment. “It is flattering to be looked at so greedily by a woman … but also … disconcerting.”
“I will disconcert you forever.” She looked around. “If only we could talk alone, away from all these people … and from that wondrous little imp.”
“Now they will not leave us alone, in a few days they will isolate us. It is absurd…”
“In my painting chamber in an hour?”
“With my clothes off?”
“Not now for that. Later.”
Their tryst was limited to kisses of the sort with which ’Rau first deprived her of her dagger. There was, despite the pretext for the meeting, very little talk.
“My dearest one, let us pray to the Lord Our God that our love never turn cold.”
“And that when it does it will only be so that it may become even warmer.”
A prudent and discreet prayer, in which she joined fervently.
He touched her breasts beneath her gown. She did not push his hands away. “Be patient with me, my woman, I am not always the person you think I am.”
She sighed with deep satisfaction. “The more I know who you are the more I will love you.”
Their week of wedding preparations lasted my Monday afternoon and evening. There wasn’t much for me to do as my day wore on, because the ordinary dynamics of human love required little intervention from the Lord Our God, whether it be the Other Person or the Player of Nathan’s God Game.
I did wonder if the Other Person approved of the way I was playing the game. Since She had pushed me stumbling and bumbling, first into the storyteller role and then into the port between two cosmoi, if She were not fully satisfied with my work, that was Her problem.
You do your best, they told us in the seminary, and you leave the rest to God.
Nonetheless I decided to look around to see what my various other creatures were doing.
Malvau and N’Rasia were sleeping next to each other at as far a distance from each other as they could while still being on the same bed. As the love in the main plot waxed, their love had waned. What would ’Rau and ’Ella be like in fifteen years?
Marriage is but keeping house,
Sharing food and company
What has this to do with love
Of the body’s beauty
If love means affection, I
love old trees, hats, coats and things
Anything that’s been with me
In my daily sufferings.
That is how one loves a wife
There’s a human interest too
And a pity for the days
We so soon live through
What has this to do with love
The anguish and the sharp despair
The madness roving in the blood
Because a girl or hill is fair
I have stared upon a dawn
And trembled like a man in love
And in Love I was, and I
Could not speak and could not move.
Well, Walter James Turner was surely right, but only about one phase in the cycle. As another poet, Roger Staubach, put it in response to yet a third poet, one Broadway Joe Namath, the trick is to fall in love over and over again with the same woman.
That, it seemed to me, was a modest enough hope for my hero and heroine, even if the chances seemed minuscule for yet another rebirth in love for the characters in what had become, despite my better judgment, the principal subplot.
As for the other subplot, G’Ranne was gracefully disentangling herself from Kaila, both physically and psychologically, not displeased with the fire they had created between each other and certainly unwilling to hurt him, but well aware that there was no future for them together.
She was, I concluded, a classy broad, and it was a shame that the constraints of my story didn’t permit me to know her better. That one, at any rate, would never appear with complaints in my dreams.
ACCESS MAD SCIENTISTS.
YOU MEAN THE THREE STOOGES?
EXECUTE.
I needed none of the 286’s wisecracks at the moment.
Larry, Curly, and Moe were huddled over a small package in a room in one of the distant corners of Lenrau’s pavilion.
“It will,” said Larry, “fit nicely under the altar.”
Curly: “And destroy them both at the height of the ceremony.”
Moe: “The climax of their marriage.”
They laughed like certified lunatics.
Larry: “It will destroy all of the priests.”
Curly: “And most of the people.”
Moe: “We will rule forever.”
Right. A thousand-year reich.
ZAP MECHANISM.
EXECUTING.
It didn’t even ask for details this time.
The black box started to steam and glow and spin, this time like a Fourth of July Roman candle. The Three Stooges jumped out of the chamber and began to run.
There was a derisive “pfft” sound. They hesitated, crept back to the door, and cautiously peered in. Where their precious black box had been, there was only a pool of liquid.
“Hot,” said one, touching it.
“Water,” mumbled another, tasting it.
“Maybe we ought to quit and find ourselves some women, like the Duke has done.”
“And not skinny wenches like her either.”
So they closed up shop, temporarily.
Not so elsewhere.
ACCESS ADMIRAL.
The priests were busily merging bureaucracies. Similar activity was happening all over the land as the two duchies, with what I thought was astonishing ease, worked out their combination into one. Both the Cardinal and the Admiral presided over the preliminary festivities of the marriage with éclat and enthusiasm. I did not trust either of them for a moment, however.
The Admiral was rushing down a forest path by himself, late it would seem for a conspiratorial meeting.
He would be real late. While I was watching and before I could lift a finger, a large shape loomed out of the night, raced behind him, and buried a knife in his back. The loquacious Admiral uttered not a word in protest.
Stylo curiae.
The next morning there was a more private ritual bathing, preceded this time by anointing with a substance which, to judge from B’Mella’s facial expression, was foul smelling.
In the pond (the ceremony was outside in a lake with only one choir chanting away in the background) she giggled and whispered to her love, “Now I am a foul-smelling whore.”
“You are not a whore,” he replied gallantly, “and there is only one smell of yours I know, and that I love.”
“Dear sweet man…” Hesitation, deep breath, then a rush of words. “Where do you go when you go away, ’Rau?”
Reassuringly she grabbed his arm, rather, I thought, to the displeasure of the clerics who were presiding over the ceremony.
“You have noticed?”
“How could I help but notice? I am not angry, only curious.”
“I don’t know.” He sighed and patted her clinging fingers. “It is a wonderful land of colors and lights and peace and love. I … I do not think it interferes with what I must do in this land. If you wish me to stop…”
“There is a woman there.”
“Yes, but I do not see her face closely.”
“What is she like?”
“I draw closer to her each time … now she seems tall and slender and dark with breasts like mountain shadows at sunset.”
“Silly.” She slipped her hand up and down his forearm.
“It is true,” he insisted. “I have wondered for years who she is, and now I know that she is you.”
Well, that will do for an explanation, but how do you live with a mystic who drifts away in search of you in another world when you’re right next to him?
Was it our cosmos into which the Duke drifted, or another one with a cognate, perhaps, of B’Mella? Was he involved in another story there? Or had he perhaps become a participant in a distant cognate of Nathan’s God Game?
The premarital festival went on. For a festival it was. The Duke and the Duchess were right: everyone except the sullen priests and wizards and viziers seemed overjoyed that love was replacing war. It all seemed too good to be true.
It was.
Why was I still playing the game since it looked like the required happy ending? Does not a good storyteller quit while he’s ahead?
As a social scientist I was curious about the culture of this world. But that was a minor motive. Truth is that I was hooked on my characters, an occupational hazard of a storyteller/God. I was a little less sanguine about the outcome than was my friend and ally, the ilel Ranora. After all, the Duke and the Duchess both had been married before. His spouse had died of battle wounds, as had both B’Mella’s husbands. The casualty rate in the warrior class to which both the Duke and the Duchess belonged must have been terribly high. What was important, however, was that neither had produced children, a subject which caused some anxious whispering, even among such reasonable men as Linco and Kaila.
“Don’t worry about that,” the ilel announced in one of her happy chariot rides between the two camps on the day before the wedding—the chariot pulled by the white animal decorated with red streamers that might have been a horse, but wasn’t quite.
“We have to worry about it,” her “protector” insisted. “If there is not an heir…”
In exasperation the pixie informed him, “Let’s worry about getting them married first. The poor dears are so frightened that we may have to drag them to their mating couch.” Then she flicked the reins and her red-and-white-striped chariot sped off like a teenager’s convertible buzzing Lakeview Avenue.
The medical technology of their world (I don’t use planet because I think it is somehow our planet) was like most everything else, subtly different from ours. They had medications which seemed to be like our antibiotics and fairly elaborate inoculation systems—the bride and groom were given physical exams the day before the wedding and equipped with pills and injections—and seemed to have developed methods for healing wounds and replacing limbs far more sophisticated than anything we know. But there were no x-ray machines, in fact practically no machines at all in their hospitals, if that’s what you can call the pavilions where their medical people worked. Families seemed to be small to medium sized, so they probably had some kind of fertility control, though the subject was never mentioned.
I suspected that they had no notion of what to do about infertility and, except in the case of their Duke and Duchess, not much concern either. However, as the week of preparation before the wedding drew near, there was a lot of prayer being directed to the Lord Our God that the ducal couple be blessed with offspring. I figured I’d hang around until they were married and then push the TERMINATE GAME function key, appropriately F10. Whatever powers I might have among these possibly real people, curing infertility was certainly not one of them. Nathan’s parser was not that clever.
Which showed how little I understood what was going on.
Anyway, I decided I’d visit the bride and groom when they said their final prayers before departing their pavilions for the midnight marriage ceremony. Yeah, midnight, with tens of thousands of people and hundreds of choristers holding hand lanterns in the middle of what a little more than a week ago had been a field of battle. Their bodies were indeed to be a bridge to peace.
Maybe.
B’Mella was strutting around her suite in a fever of ill-tempered anxiety. She had reduced her nervous bevy of servants to frequent tears. Ranora, sitting crosslegged on a stack of cushions, giggled at each new outburst. Ilels were doubtless protected by a lot of taboos, but the taboos didn’t forbid looks that could kill, looks which sent the pretty little imp into new paroxysms of giggles.
Then B’Mella dismissed the lot of them. Ranora bounded across the room to help her remove her robe.
“When you marry, wicked little girl,” the Duchess said affectionately, “I will perform the same service for you.”
Ranora laughed merrily and, robe in hand, scampered away into an antechamber.
B’Mella knelt in front of me—the game seemed to have been arranged so that when they prayed, they faced directly into the camera, if camera it was. She sighed sadly, a Boris woman in purple-and-silver straps and lace facing a funeral instead of a wedding. Head bowed, shoulders drooping, she prayed with a voice in which one could hear the tears.
“You of all people know what a miserable and vile woman I am—arrogant, proud, ill-tempered, vindictive, moody, vicious. You must put up with me all the time. I do not know why you permit me to exist. Now this poor dear man, so sweet and gentle and loving and so easy for me to twist in knots, will have to endure my evil almost as much as you do. It would be better if you slay me this night instead of sending me to his wedding couch.”
She paused as though she expected the lightning bolt.
No way, kid.
She continued to wait.
MARRY LENRAU AND LOVE HIM, I typed in.
She lifted her tear-filled eyes, smoky-brown swamps. “I do love him. That is why I fear to marry him and destroy him.”
I pushed the REPEAT key.
“Very well. You know, since you know all things, how eager I am for his couch. You drive me to what I want more than I have ever wanted anything.”
What the hell was I supposed to say now?
BE GRATEFUL FOR YOUR LOVE.
Sobs, near hysterics. “I am grateful, I am. But you must promise to transform me so that I will be a good wife … and mother.”
NO FREE LUNCHES, I told her, getting into the swing of things now.
I DO NOT KNOW LUNCH, the dumb PC insisted.
SMALL MIDDAY MEAL.
“You always have been humorous with me.” She smiled through her tears. “I understand that I must work hard. But you will help me, I know you will.” She did not require an answer because she clapped her hands. “Now I must call this magic child whom you have sent to my man and me, lest she choke from holding her breath.” She giggled, temporarily a child like Ranora again.
That worthy flew into the room, dashed out again, and returned with the vast purple gown, inside of which she had almost disappeared. Bustling about importantly she helped the poor Duchess attire herself for her wedding, making sure, by the way, that the gown was as low as it could be without falling off.
“Some day this will happen to you,” the Duchess warned. Both young women giggled and, my eyes smarting for some reason, I cut to Lenrau’s pavilion with a touch on the DUKE key.
Morale was not especially high there either. Lenrau wasn’t crying, but he had buried his face in his hands and was pressing his fingers against his temples as if he were afraid his brains would tumble out of his head if he did not restrain them.
The wedding robe which Ranora had chosen for him (of course she made the choice) was stark vanilla white laced with thick threads of gold, his brief loincloth made of the same material, well matched for both the public ceremony and the private consummation. I was sure that B’Mella would dote on him.
If he showed up, that is.
That did not seem at all certain. His long silence after I wandered in, so to speak, was broken by a loud groan. “Lord Our God, this is folly.”
Yeah?
“I cannot pray, even on the night of my marriage to a woman I adore. Why am I such a worthless, impractical dreamer, preoccupied by fantasies I cannot name even to myself?”
Don’t ask me, fella. If your fantasies are not about her tonight, they didn’t check your hormones during that physical.
“She is in my dreams, as you know. I can think of no one else since I first saw her. But the dreams are…” he moaned again “… vague and fantastical, not what a ruler should imagine. She at least will be able to rule. My dreams, my melancholy, my nightmares, the songs I hear in my head will not harm our people. But she deserves a man, not a dreamer.…”
Would you believe a man who dreams?
“Release me from my promise to her. I will fail her as I have failed all the others.”
NO WAY, I typed in on the keyboard.
“I miss her every minute, but I will destroy her like the others. I am a foolish, empty dreamer and poet…”
MYSTIC, I observed.
He removed his face from his hands, handsome agony, and stared up at me. “That’s what the ilel says, but my beloved deserves better than that.”
She doesn’t even know you’re a poet, you geek. LOVE DUCHESS, I told him.
“I do love her,” he insisted. “I can’t live without her.”
What was I supposed to say to that?
“I will be good in bed with her.” He smiled, mildly satisfied with his masculinity.
Hooray for you, buster.
“But I am not at heart a warrior. I should not be Duke.”
So that’s it. Let me see. Aha: YOUR PEOPLE NEED WISDOM, NOT WAR. YOUR WOMAN NEEDS A WISE MAN, NOT A WARRIOR.
He laughed, amused, but also bitter and ironic. “I doubt that either they or she know it.” He struggled to his feet, ready to go forth to meet his destiny.
TEACH THEM, I pounded out on the keyboard. What’s the point in being God unless you have the last word?
“I will try,” he sighed, “but I will need much help from you.” He hefted the massive wedding robe over his strong solid shoulders.
I CAN’T DO WHAT YOU WON’T DO, I informed him with wonderful theological precision. BESIDES, THERE IS NOT ANOTHER MAN IN THIS WORLD WHO WOULD THINK IT AN UNHAPPY FATE TO GO TO THE DESTINY TO WHICH YOU GO TONIGHT.
He smiled, a genuinely charming, boyish smile. “For tonight, at least, it will be a pleasant fate.” He hummed a song, a love song, I’m sure, as he pushed aside a screen and joined his entourage for the journey into the warm night. I supposed that he had written the song himself; where my ancestors came from, it was thought to be a great grace to have a king who was also a bard.
Despite the heat, the ceremony was impressive. They didn’t use rings, but the bride and the groom, nervous, solemn, and sweating, exchanged vows, clasping each other’s right arms below the elbows, kind of like an athletic team before a game. I don’t know what they said, because the ceremony, presided over with notable éclat by the beaming Linco, was in an archaic language which I could not understand, though the hymns sound something like the Old Slavonic hymns the choir used to sing in the seminary.
It was all very beautiful, but kind of ponderous, the one light touch being the inevitable Ranora, trying to keep a straight face for the occasion and quite pleased with herself in a formal version of her peppermint-candy garb—form fitting and with a décolletage almost as extreme as that she had imposed on the now misty-eyed Duchess. Her solemnity endured only to the end of the ceremony when she began to dance. She presided over the dancing throngs till sunrise, long after the bride and groom retreated to a special little pavilion erected for them by the same lake where they had first loved each other. The ilel was so busy with her dancing that she merely waved goodbye to them—with a hint of anxiety on her pert little face.
So you have your doubts too, small one.
’Rau did indeed sing for B’Mella. On the tiny beach by the side of the lake, he sang the love song he had hummed when he went forth to claim and be claimed. She did, as expected and required, melt into his arms. They went through the motions of praying to me inside their tent, two sweaty, exhausted young bodies, pretending to be devout and to beg me for help, when they had very different things on their mind.
They were timid and gentle with each other and I bade them farewell. The Other Person maybe had the right to be a voyeur, but I didn’t.
In another part of the land, G’Ranne shook her head in sad refusal to Kaila. He knew it was coming. He knelt to her in gratitude and, gallantly as always, took his leave.
And as the sun rose, N’Rasia and Malvau staged a wild fight, beating and pounding each other with manic fury. I think he had the worst of it.
Well, they can’t all live happily ever after, can they?
Now you see why I didn’t press the TERMINATE GAME button after the wedding ceremony. Lenrau and B’Mella were no longer two characters in a fantasy, larger than life perhaps but one-dimensional. They were flawed but appealing human beings with more awareness of their own limitations than I would have believed possible. They were both nearly paralyzed by self-hatred which, if they weren’t careful, would destroy them and their marriage. A typical pair of human newlyweds in other words. Why else be God unless you can help such folks?
So, although I told myself it was time to bow out of their lives, I did not press F10, but only F5, SUSPEND GAME. I pretended I would not be back but I knew I would. They needed me, you see.
Not that I expected them to cooperate with my grace.
See how far gone I was?