Part 30 (2/2)

Now you're scaring me.'

Indeed, he had all but stopped listening, gazing instead with fixed intensity upon the mystical substance before him.

'I want to try, Sylviana, if only for the pains it cost me to bring it here.' He looked at her intently. 'Where Avatar leads, I want to follow if I can.'

'I can't stop you, but..... Oh, Kalus. I'm so afraid you'll hurt yourself. And after all we've been through.'

He saw the wisdom of this, and her deep concern. 'What if eat just one, and you are here with me?'

The endless conflict between safety and wild freedom once more presented itself. Both felt it clearly. She hesitated, then said.

'If we do it, we do it together.'

'All right.'

Kalus put a bud in his mouth. Sylviana did the same.

'This is amazing.'

Roughly an hour had pa.s.sed, and these words so broke the stillness that it seemed as if Kalus had then and there invented speech. And indeed, so far as concerned the virgin sea on which they now sailed, eternal and boundless, these were the first words, and he and the woman-child, the true Adam and Eve.

For some time now he had remained as a near statue, only his eyes and forehead working, studying in alternate wonder his hand, the circle of stones, then the altar and mirror behind it. Sylviana watched him, feeling the same awe of the experience, and perhaps to a greater degree, the accompanying danger. She answered simply.

'Yes.'

Her voice, like a pebble in a pool, touched the gla.s.sy waters of his spirit, sending out ripples of thought and feeling which seemed as endless as the pool itself. Regaining his center, he became placid with the wisdom of silence, until the shoots that stirred within him were ready to blossom once more in true speech. Sylviana was becoming concerned, but he had not forgotten her.

'All my days,' he said finally, 'I've judged life by the pale shadow of it in which I've often been forced to live, never guessing that the heart. . .the very bones of it. . .are ALIVE.' He paused.

'It seems to me now, as it did when I was a child, that no hope, no dream is ever fully lost, so long as the least fragment remains alive inside you. It becomes like a seed---sleeping, dormant. But not dead.

Until, if we can endure, and fight our way to a better place where sun and water yet flow, it is called gently back to life.'

He looked at her, tears streaming down his face. 'I am alive! And you, my endless miracle. Are alive, and here with me.'

She took his hand, so close, and pressed it to her lips.

'Be gentle, my loving Kalus. Be gentle. There are still so many wounds.'

<script>