Part 29 (1/2)
Senlin stared at him wordlessly.
”Would you go outside tomorrow if I went with you?”
”I do not care for the world outside.” Emotion, electric and fleeting, transformed her face. ”It is harsh and ugly. It is evil. I long only for the days before the war.”
”We will never return to that.”
”You can be most cruel.” There were tears trembling at the corners of her eyes.
”I speak only the truth.”
Those enormous eyes dropped from his and when she spoke next it was in a tiny whisper. ”You asked before why I spoke with you and not with my husband. Now you have answered your own question.”
Zilin thought about that for a moment. ”He has lied to you.”
Her head came up. ”Only because he lies to himself.”
The confirmation of his own suspicions came like an electric shock. He saw the tiny tremor in her temple and decided to change the subject. ”You cannot stay inside the villa for the rest of your life. That is a kind of death.”
”What does it matter? I am already dead!” Her eyes held in their depths the green burning flames of a land wholly alien to Zilin. He did not know what to do for her. He only knew that he must try to end her strange inner-directed torment.
Outside a crack of thunder reverberated nearby. Senlin started, her head jerking around on her neck. Her eyes were open wide as the first burst of rain slapped against the windowpanes.
”It is nothing,” Zilin said. ”Only the rain.”
”It is everything.” But she seemed not to be talking to him.
”Senlin.”
She gave a great shudder and her eyes fluttered closed. He reached out and she slid against him. His arms went around her to hold her up. Then just to hold her.
Her face was but a breath from his. He felt her warmth and more, the pulse of her. He felt as if he had downed a bottle of whiskey in one thirsty gulp.
Light-headed, unable to catch his breath fully, he drew her closer to him.
”Senlin.”
Her lips were half-open and her sweet breath fell upon his cheek like spring rain. The heavy cascade of her hair fanned out. It seemed to caress him as if, with a life of its own, it was part of some mythical creaturea Qilin, perhaps. Then he realized that she was swaying, her long pent-up emotions breaking through the barriers of icy iron she had erected so that now the two of them, linked by the warmth of their bodies, were tossed as if on a tide.
Closer and closer so that Zilin felt the softness of her cheek, a peony's petal, against him.
”No!” With an inarticulate cry, Senlin broke away from him and, staggering to her feet, ran across the length of the study.
”Senlin!”
”Please a” Thunder booming, rain beating its rapid tattoo. ”Please!”
He took a quick step toward her, not knowing what she would do or even what she meant by that single strangled word.
The reflection of the rain ran obliquely across her pained face as she wrenched open the gla.s.s door out to the garden and the weather came rus.h.i.+ng in with the fierce whip of a tiger's tail.
The shades rattled, an eerie unsettling sound, and Senlin rushed out into the rain. Zilin followed her, calling her name. The deluge had turned night into the pitch blackness of a well. Branches like a spirit's withered arms shuddered and shook in the wind which, caught between the side of the villa and the high garden wall, swirled around upon itself, picking up strength. The sound of its pa.s.sage through the trees moaned in their ears.
Zilin caught up with her just as a violent streak of lightning forked downward overhead. By the flutter of its acid illumination, he saw her abruptly reverse herself, flying into his arms, burying her head in his shoulders, molding her body to his.
He moved to bring her inside but she refused to be budged. She brought her face up to his, her lips opened. Rain danced off her face, flew through her hair as if they were both part of the wind. Zilin felt as he had atop the horse, riding bareback with Ross Davies up the slopes of the Red Silk Mountain. Together, they dropped to the sopping ground.
He pulled aside her clothes as she frantically opened his. Never hadhe felt such urgency, not with either of his wives, not with his mistress or all the women who had followed them into his bed. The physical, the emotional were both supplanted at this moment. But by what he could not say.
His flesh tingled at her touch, her lips, when he enclosed them in his, tasted of the most exquisite nectar. The rain drumming on them, all around them, pressing leaves and twigs to their bare flesh, felt to them like an extension of their own molten pa.s.sion. The rumbling of the thunder sounded in their ears like the growling of some great primitive cat, rampant and eager.
When Zilin bared her b.r.e.a.s.t.s he nearly wept with longing. His fingertips traced her skin, drinking in its superb smoothness, free of blemishes or wrinkles. His lips soon followed as he moved down her.
In the shadowed dell between her thighs, he discovered the heat and he made her cry out, her lithe body undulating upward, her head back, mouth open, drinking in the downpour while her neck arched.
In a moment she had taken him in her two hands, guiding him through portals flowering open like an anemone. Instantly he felt in the midst of a dream. In China, it was this way: as one slept, one's hunspiritemerged through the top of one's head at the spot where the bone was the last to harden at the beginning of one's life. What one dreamed, one experienced. It was as simple as that. Dreams, therefore, were no less real than waking life.
Now as Zilin penetrated to Senlin's soft, clinging core, his spirit rose out of his body. In the midst of the kinetic storm it mingled with that of his partner's.
Upward they flew in an endless helix of motion, sound, color, scent. The sweet smell of wet gra.s.s, the cant of a curious pair of plovers huddled within the s.h.i.+vering branches of a pine, the color of the wind, turned mauve and electric blue by the raging tempest. Motion.
Force.
Qi.
As their cries of pleasure mingled with the long moaning cries of the wind, Zilin was at last made witness to Senlin's unleashed qi.
And understood everything.
”War.”
As Zilin had predicted, the following day had turned out fine. But Mao was in a foul mood; even the exceptionally clear weather had failed to soften his att.i.tude.
”War,” he fumed, ”is all around us. Our economy can ill affordanother warespecially one in the foreign land of Korea. Our people cry out for peace. They look to us for leaders.h.i.+p and support not for a further effort which will leave Chinese blood soaking into the ground of another country.”
”Perhaps,” Zilin said, ”we should be looking for a way to turn war to our advantage.”
”You do not understand,” Mao said impatiently. ”The Americans, the Nationalists are like hungry sharks lurking in the waters just offsh.o.r.e. If we go to war they will wait until the military expenditures have further weakened us. Then they will strike. As of now the counterrevolutionists are relatively few and weak. A renewal of war will give them fuel. Like pouring kerosene on a fire, their cause abetted by the Nationalist agents will begin to pose a serious threat. Do you suppose I can allow that to occur?”
”Not at all,” Zilin said.
Mao stood quite still. They were still in quarters that had been turned into a suite of offices from hotel rooms. Out the window was Tienanmen Square. The whirring of the clouds of bicycles through the wide avenues was a constant sound through the open windows. ”I want you to understand this clearly so that, at a later time when, perhaps, you have a different taste in your mouth, you will not come to me with your conscience bleeding and pet.i.tion me for surcease.”
”What are you asking me?” From another office, Zilin could hear the clack-clack of a barrage of antiquated typewriters upon which propaganda leaflets were being banged out by a squadron of efficient clerks.
”Just this,” Mao said. ”War with Korea will bring disaster here, no matter what advantage you may cook up for us internationally. The economy will collapse yet again and, worse, there is the distinct possibility that our actions will create our own political nemesis.
”In order to forestall such a catastrophe, we will be forced to depend more and more on the Ministry of Public Security.”
”The secret police.”