Cover Him with Darkness Read online

  None of those things happened. It was just an earth tremor, one among many we suffer yearly. A little dust fell from the arched ceiling. My companion didn’t even seem to notice. Instead he looked back into the room, toward me, and stretched out his hand, pleading. I moved to lay my fingers in his and he pulled me against him, holding me tight. I could feel his strong, hard body trembling. Without words we stood holding each other, looking out upon the valley and the village below, with its fields and its brown-and-red tin roofs and the snow-capped peaks of the Durmitor range beyond: the terrifying open vistas of freedom.

  He wouldn’t come out of the sun. It was impossible to blame him for that, but I did try to persuade him, worried that he would be seen from below. He only looked at me with mild curiosity, as if I were singing some pretty tune in a language he didn’t understand. Going right to the lip of the rock shelf, he sat down bare-assed upon the warm stone, his feet swinging in space, and stared off into the distance like he would never tire of the view.

  Lean and naked and as filthy as road crew, every pore stippled with dirt.

  Well, it wasn’t like I could drag him indoors.

  Eventually I left him there with the water bottle and went into the kitchen to find him food. It was all I could think of doing; my imagination had extended no farther than his release. In fact the situation seemed to have robbed me of all my wits. I stood in the middle of the room, my hand on my breastbone, feeling the pressure build in my lungs as my breath came fast and shallow. What had happened in the cave seemed unreal; what sat outside was impossible; what awaited in the future was unthinkable.

  It’s not real. How can it be real? If it is real, how can I have done it?

  “Papa,” I whispered. “You told me not to. But I did. What do I do now?”

  Part of me wanted to rush out again and check that he was still there, and to feast my gaze on those dark eyes and those long hard muscles, the unself-conscious nakedness of his body. Another part of me wanted to hide in my bed with the quilt over my head. Maybe he’d just go away, and the thump of my heart and the tingle in my flesh would be the only evidence left.

  I pulled a helpless face. I’d come in here to feed him.

  He must be starving.

  It took some time for muscle memory to come to my rescue. In five years I’d grown used to such a different way of living. There wasn’t anything fresh in the larder that hadn’t spoiled, of course, but I lit the wood stove and pumped water by hand from the cistern, into pans that I set upon the hob top. Boiling up rice and dried lentils, I fried onion and garlic and the very last of the withered apples from the pantry, found a ham wrapped in linen and carved off slices to add to the mess. Dishing up a plateful, I carried it outside.

  With every step my nervousness grew.

  He’d gone.

  Oh, I thought, my heart swooping into my belly: Oh. The cliff edge was empty.

  Had he melted away into the sunlight? And yet the sheer griminess of his skin had convinced me that he was solid flesh and blood. I’d touched that. I’d felt him. He was a man.

  Maybe he’d set off down the steps toward the village. I hurried to the head of the rock stair, but there was no one visible on the flight, and no untoward disturbance in the village below.

  Surely, if he’s down there, they’d be going crazy? I’d hear the dogs at least.

  He put his hands on my shoulders from behind me.

  I convulsed with shock, and the plate of food in my hands slipped and shattered on the rock, sending the pottage splattering. “Oh!” I yelped.

  “Do I frighten you?” He put a hand on my hair—and perhaps it was meant to be soothing but I felt a hot wet flow sink down through my whole body from head to core.

  “I’m sorry! Oh God, I’ve ruined it,” I panicked. I tried to stoop and pick up the broken pottery, but his hand tightened on my shoulder, just enough to hold me in place. If I wanted to escape his grip, I’d have to make a point of wrenching free. So I froze.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

  My heart was rocketing—not from the silly surprise, but from a deeper fear. I wondered if anyone was looking up from the village—and if they were, could they tell that there were two figures in front of the church?

  “You must be so hungry,” I protested.

  “I am.”

  He let me turn in his grasp to look up at him. That was a mistake on my part. I was inches from his naked flesh. Don’t look, Milja: don’t look.

  I looked into his face instead.

  Oh crap. How had I ever thought his eyes were black? They were silver. Not just gray, no, but metallic silver like the molded garments adorning icons of the Holy Family. They caught the light and they threw it back. His contracted pupils were almost lost in the shine, and—weirdly—it made him look blind.

  I licked my dry lips, trying to hide my shock. “There’s more in the pan. I’ll just…”

  “It’s kind of you. But there’s no need.”

  “You need to eat…”

  “But not beans.” His chuckle was soft and dark, like soot. His eyelashes were sooty dark too, I noticed, and long—the sort of lashes that made women weak at the knees, that let a man get away with murder. But it was his words, and the undisguised intent behind them, that made me blush and drop my gaze to the hand on my shoulder. I noticed then that his wrists—which had been scoured raw by the tight bonds, I knew that, I’d seen the bleeding flesh—were whole and uninjured. It made my own skin creep, just a little.

  I swear the pounding of my heart was audible.

  “Where are we?” he asked, mercifully. “What’s that city down there called?”

  “Uh. Stijenjarac. It’s not a city. It’s a…it’s just a village.” I dared lift my gaze to his again. “It’s nowhere. No one’s ever heard of it.”

  He lifted one eyebrow.

  “Things have changed while you were…” I swallowed. “A lot.”

  “It seems so.”

  “How long? I mean…do you know how long it’s been?”

  His mouth made a half smile that had no humor in it. “How could I count?”

  “What are you going to do?” I whispered.

  His eerie eyes never left mine. I was starting to think that he didn’t blink, ever, and that was more unnerving than I cared to admit. “I don’t know, yet,” he answered, whispering too. He might almost have been mocking me. I couldn’t tell.

  “You’ll need clothes. You can’t go down there naked. I’ll find you some…spare pants.”

  He took the hint and let me go.

  My hands were trembling as I walked away, and my clothes felt too hot and too damp and too tight.

  It felt horribly wrong going into Father’s bedroom to get him clothes, but I had little choice. I found clean black drawstring trousers and a black shirt folded in a bottom drawer—the pants would be too short in the leg, and the shirt would hang upon his torso like a sack—and I brought them into the kitchen. I hooked down the tin bath from its place on the wall and filled it with water from the stove-top and the cold cistern. There was no point in putting him into clean clothes, I told myself, if he was as filthy as a coal miner beneath.

  The heat was going out of the day as I went out to fetch him. But not even the golden afternoon light could touch the dark of his unkempt obsidian hair. That gave me pause; I could have sworn that he’d been graying, when I saw him underground.

  “I’ve drawn you a bath,” I said awkwardly, standing well back. “Please…please come in and wash.”

  He was hunkered on the cliff edge this time: a bird of prey waiting to swoop on the land below. Every ropy muscle of his body stood out stark, like an artist’s drawing in charcoal. He glanced one last time into the sun, full-on, without blinking, and then rose from his perch to go with me. Already his movements were stronger and more assured.

  Oh, beautiful. Oh God, he’s so beautiful it’s crazy. It’s not natural. I can’t deal with this. I am so out of my depth.

  I looked a
way quickly. Then I preceded him into the kitchen, feeling his gaze upon me. That evoked memories of his mouth and his hands that made me feel even clumsier in comparison. And it was so hard not to look at his crotch.

  “Are you sure you don’t want food?”

  He shook his head, with a half smile.

  I pointed at the bathtub. “Well, there you go.”

  He barely glanced at it; his attention was already on the other fittings of the room. He walked about, frowned at the stove—I was ready to yell a warning if he made to touch the hot surface—ran his hand over the stone sink and the handle of the pump, circled to a wall and looked closely at two framed photographs that hung there. One was a formal one of my father, beardless in those days and clutching his university graduation scroll. The other was of Father and me. I must have been eleven or so when it was taken; my hair was worn in bunches back then and I’d had big goofy teeth. I was so pleased now to have grown out of both.

  He ran his fingers across the picture glass. “How is this done?” he asked. “It’s no painting. A true likeness.”

  “Um…light-sensitive chemicals.” Once again I caught a glimpse of the depths of his ignorance, and it made me dizzy. “It’s complicated. I can explain sometime.”

  “Such wonders.” He glanced along the wall and his gaze fell on the bookcase next. He tilted his head. “Those…those are all books?”

  “Yes.” So how does he know what printed and bound books are, then?

  “I saw them in your dreams,” he said as if answering my unspoken question.

  I startled, not knowing whether to be more worried about what he’d just said or the fact that he’d known to say it.

  “So many.” He reached out and touched the spines gently, almost with reverence. I felt a twinge of pity.

  “No. These are very few; we have more in the other room. And there are millions and millions of books in the world. In every language. For children, for adults… Books about everything.”

  He looked sideways at me. “Which one of them is the most important? Which should I start with?”

  “Huh. Um, well…my father would say that one.” I pointed at the Bible. “It’s our holy book.”

  He reached out to take it off the shelf and I found myself going suddenly tense, as if something terrible were about to happen. But he only opened it and leafed through the thin, densely printed pages toward the beginning. I saw pleasure dawn in his face.

  “Such perfect, tiny script!”

  “It’s printed, not handwritten. By machines. Ah. I’ll… You’ve got a lot to catch up on. Don’t worry about it yet.”

  “What language is this in?”

  “Serbian. The script is Cyrillic.” Which, of course, you’ve never seen in your life.

  “Ah yes,” he said, as if at a casual reminder. His gaze drifted across the text. Then he read out from the second page—early in Genesis, of course: “And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever: Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden.”

  There was a pause. He blinked heavily—the first time I’d seen him do that—and when he looked at me again there was a very strange look on his face. I found myself stepping backward.

  “You should bathe before the water gets cold,” I said, nervously. There was suddenly something horribly ominous about this tall, naked, filthy man standing in my kitchen. The late afternoon light through the window behind him cast his face into shadow. He hadn’t moved, but he seemed to loom, somehow.

  What have I done?

  He nodded slowly, as if he were listening to a different voice altogether, and slotted the Bible back into the shelf. Then he turned to the tin tub—and hesitated. “What do I do?” he asked.

  The question was so unexpected, so gauche, that I laughed out loud—and then covered my mouth in embarrassment. But he smiled too, hitching one angled brow.

  Oh hell but he was handsome, despite the dirt. Far too handsome to be safe. I could feel my cheeks glowing pink.

  “Sit in the tub,” I suggested, and tried not to watch too intrusively as he complied, folding his long legs and settling into the warm water. I busied myself preparing soap and washcloth and rinsing cup.

  “Soap,” I said helpfully, handing it to him. He looked at the green bar, sniffed it cautiously, and then looked back at me with a quizzical expression.

  Of course, I told myself. Even soap probably wasn’t invented when he was…he was…

  I couldn’t even imagine how long ago that was. I chose to concentrate on something a little less nerve-racking. “Okay,” I said, kneeling beside the tub, taking the bar from his hand and dunking it in the water. “Like this.”

  I started on his shoulders and back, lathering up and stripping the dirt off. It wasn’t, I reasoned, like he could reach his own back anyway—he needed a helping hand. I wasn’t trying to be provocative, honestly, any more than he was trying to be provocative by sitting there naked. It just… moved that way. His shoulders were hard and muscled, and warm to my hand. He moved under my massaging fingers, reacting with little stretches and grunted exhalations of pleasure as I worked down the knotted muscles of his spine. The skin revealed beneath the grime looked sallow now, but as if it would brown easily if it had the chance to spend time under the sun. His head was turned, watching me.

  Silver, hot-metal eyes. I felt like I could feel his gaze, as if it were a tangible thing, lingering on my hips and thighs and breasts.

  If he knew how wet I am down there…

  When I’d finished with his back, I came round and started on his chest. I had no excuse for that, and I did not meet his eye. Maybe I was hoping he wouldn’t notice. But my hands were just so hungry for him, burning to explore the hard lines of collar and breastbone and the rough, dark hair drawn like ink lines down his torso. For most of my life his body had resided in the deep places of my mind; it had dominated my dreams and burned in my fantasies. Now it was out in the light, a chiaroscuro no longer but a sculpture in three dimensions. My hands blurred across his form, learning its shapes and textures, turning memory into actuality. It was like I needed to make him real.

  But anyone who’d ever bathed a dog, or a child, knows that you can’t keep your own clothes dry. It just doesn’t work that way. I was aware that my blouse and skirt were clinging to me in soapy damp patches. I was aware that he was looking at those. I got about as far down his torso as his diaphragm when he lifted a wet hand from the bath and trailed his fingertips across my cheek, then dropped it to cup my right breast. Drips of water slipped from my blushing face like tears. His hand burned a dark print on the cotton of my top.

  My breast fitted perfectly into his palm, I noticed, as he squeezed me softly. A nervous little noise escaped my lips.

  “Milja,” he said, a hoarse edge to his voice. “In the darkness, you were a light to me. Light and hope and sustenance.”

  I used you, I thought. I used you for my own needs, selfishly, like a child using a toy. But I couldn’t say that. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered.

  “You keep saying that.”

  “I didn’t mean to abandon you. I never forgot, I thought of you all those years…”

  “I know.”

  That made me tremble. “Forgive us. Father was so afraid you would harm me, that’s why he sent me away.”

  His brows drew together. “How could I harm you?” His calloused thumb, slipping beneath the layers of my clothes, played with my puckering nipple. “I was bound fast.”

  “Spiritually, I mean,” I whispered, my eyes fluttering as sensation raced like fire across my skin from the point of my breast.

  “Hm.” He released my nipple, only to take my soap-lathered hand from where it pressed against his chest and push it into the bath water, down between his thighs. “Like this?”

  “Oh,” I squeaked, my eyes widening. I don’t know why I should have felt surpr
ised. I’d held what waited there in my hands before, eagerly—but as I found in its surging rise how very little patience it possessed in waiting, I was taken aback at my own reaction. My slippery fingers seemed to have a mind of their own. As they wrapped about his length I felt it thicken.

  “But you are not afraid, are you Milja?” he growled, his lips brushing mine.

  He was crediting me with more courage than I thought I possessed. In truth I didn’t understand how my hand was so bold when my heart was racing with fear. I squeezed him tighter, awed by his utter solidity. And that was when I saw it in his eyes: the change. It was like…it was like watching the pilot light on a domestic furnace just as it catches the gas and goes from a single point of intense heat to a roaring blue conflagration. Something in him changed like that; an elemental ignition from interest to implacable intent.

  He rose to his feet in the bath in one long fluid motion, water streaming down his body, every muscle limned and glistening. I wanted to touch the scars hacked into his hard flat stomach; I wanted to trace them with my tongue. From miles above, or so it seemed, his face looked down upon me, ominous as Judgment. Since I was still kneeling upon the floor, his stance put me face-to-face with the dark object of all my secret fantasies and all my father’s fears.

  And I wanted to kiss it, like a pagan woman giving worship to her idol hewn from wood or stone, just as the Prophets condemned over and over again in the Old Testament. I wanted to draw his length into my embrace as if I could take his pain into me. But I was too scared.

  He filled his lungs in a great breath that seemed to go on forever. I felt his hands on my head, fingers entwining in my hair. When they tightened, the sweet sharp pain ran through me in flash, from scalp to core. Suddenly I was drenched with heat, and I quivered as if I’d been slapped.

  I hadn’t known anything about this. I’d never guessed that I’d react to having my hair pulled like that—in many ways I was still so inexperienced. But he felt it: he knew. One hand in my hair, he lifted me to my feet. Then he stepped out of the bath, looming over me, and pushed me back across the room. There was absolutely no mistaking his intention now.