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thrown back. She has not attended (that he can see) to her lips or eyes or
cheeks, wears no jewellery at all.
He can only just begin to imagine what this year has been for her.
He swallows hard. 'My lady ...'
'No,' she says quickly. Lifts a hand. 'I am not that. Here.' She smiles
faintly. 'They believe I'm some disgraceful creature, out there.'
'I'm not surprised,' he manages to say.
'Come to lure you with eastern decadence.'
He says nothing this time. Looks at her.
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A year since she laid down her robe on a stony beach, lost a love more swiftly
than to plague, laid down a life. There is an uncertainty now, a fragility, as
she scans his face. He thinks of the rose in her room.
She murmurs, 'I said on the island ... that I trusted you.'
He nods his head. 'I remember. I didn't know why.'
'I know you didn't. It was the second time I'd come for you.'
'I know. When I first came. Why? Back then?'
She shakes her head. 'I couldn't say. No clear reason. I expected you would
finish your work and leave us.'
He makes a wry face. He can do this. Enough time has passed.
'Instead, I finished half my work and left you.'
Her expression is grave. 'It was taken from you. Sometimes half is all we are
allowed. Everything we have can be taken away. I always knew that. But
sometimes . . . people can be followed. Brought back down again?'
He is still trembling. 'Three times? I am unworthy.'
She shakes her head. 'Who is ever worthy?'
'You?'
She smiles a little. Shakes her head again. Says, 'I asked you how you went on
living. After.'
On the island, on the beach. In his dreams. 'I couldn't even answer.
I didn't know. I still don't. I was only half alive, though. Too bitter. It
started to change in Sarantium. But even then I was . . .
trying to stay away, by myself. Up there.'
She nods this time. 'Lured down by a decadent woman.'
He looks at her. At Alixana. Standing here.
Can see her thinking, teasing out nuances. 'Will I ... make trouble for you?'
she asks. Still that hesitance.
'I have no doubt of it.' He tries to smile.
She is shaking her head again. A worried look. Gestures at the far wall. 'No,
I mean, people may know me, from this.'
He takes a breath and lets it out. Understands, finally, that this hesitance
is his to take away.
'Then we will go where they will not,' he hears himself say.
She bites her lip. 'You would do that?'
And he says, swept back into the rush and flow of time and the world, 'You
will be hard-pressed to think of what I will not do for you.' He grips the
ladder tightly. 'Will it ... be enough?'
Her expression changes. He watches it happen. She bites her lip again, but it
means something else now. He knows, has seen that look before.
'Well,' she says, in the voice he has never stopped hearing,'I still want
dolphins.'
He nods his head, as if judiciously. His heart is full of light.
She pauses. 'And a child?'
He draws a breath and steps down off the scaffolding. She smiles.
Aut lux hie nata est, aut capta hic libera regnat. Light was either born here
or, held captive, here reigns free.
-Inscription in Ravenna, among the mosaics
I think that if I could be given a month of Antiquity and leave to spend it
where I chose, I would spend it in Byzantium a little before
Justinian opened St. Sophia and closed the Academy of Plato. I think
I could find in some little wine-shop some philosophical worker in mosaic who
could answer all my questions, the supernatural descending nearer to him . . .
W. B. Yeats, A Vision
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