Guy Kay - Ysabel

She took the last bus to Arles, walked to the cemetery.

She bought a skirt and blouse very early in the morning, dawn just breaking, at the street fair as it opened, and returned to the cemetery. She had wondered if one of the two men might choose this as his own first destination but they couldn’t get here by sunrise—unless Cadell flew, and she has told him he cannot do that.

He won’t listen (she’d be startled if he did), but he won’t want to be seen transgressing too blatantly in this new challenge she’s set them. He’d fear her reaction. Rightly so.

She knows both men very well. Eyes of one, voice of the other.

Neither seems to be here. She is screened, of course. They will have to find her not just sense where she has gone. Both, at times, have been in this place (one made love to her here, she remembers), but neither likes the cemetery, for differing reasons.

They almost always have differing reasons. It is what they are about. She finds it serene here, herself. Serenity isn’t what she lives for, but there are moments, especially when she’s just returned, is coming to terms again with being in the world.

On the other hand, she is at ease with the idea that one of them might guess and come immediately here, and see the lock of the outer gate picked, and find her resting now on a stone bench in the shelter of the church doorway, past the oldest of the graves. Claim her this bright morning. Right away.

It excites her to imagine. She can picture either of them doing it. She hasn’t yet decided which one she wants this time. She wants both, almost always. She never finds choosing simple, no matter what soul is within her. How could it be simple, by now? Sometimes she declines to choose; they fight, one of them dies, the other comes to her. She puts her hand to his face. Another kind of choice.

But it isn’t as if she wants to stay lost. Seeing them, under moonlight at Entremont, brought everything to her again, as it always does. Right back to the first time, the defining night when they’d become the story of this world. This part of the world.

She is also excited by this new game, in truth. She is still learning who and what she is this time, how she is different. Has been testing that inwardly, through the night, defining herself. She is someone drawn to a green shawl.

The soul within her, each time she’s summoned, alters her a little, makes her behave differently, which is why and how her desire, her need—over two thousand six hundred years—can change.

They never alter. They return each time as what they have always been, gloriously. There are no men alive like these two. How could it be otherwise? With centuries to grow deeper, know more, become more? What man with seventy too-swift years can match these two?

They are always what they are, at the core, but they also have more than before, each time. They bring something new to her. It took Cadell fifteen hundred years, almost, to learn to change his shape and fly. Blessed or cursed, this story? She’s never been able to say. Does it matter? Would deciding affect anything at all?

Can it change, in any possible way, the fact that she came out from the shadows at the edge of the village one night long ago, into a weaving of firelight and smoke, brightness and dark, her hair unbound—in the sight of all the Segobrigae—carrying a golden cup for the man she chose to wed, and she had circled the circle of men assembled there, and saw two strangers? One stranger, really, his eyes.

And seeing him, she did what she did. So small a thing. A cup of water from the goddess’s pool, extended towards a man. A guest at her father’s feast. A stranger from the sea.

The morning sun is higher now. It is springtime in the world, bright and mild. There are flowers along the paths of the cemetery as she walks back through it: pale green leaves on the oaks, silver-grey on the olives.

There were no olive trees here when this story began. The strangers brought them later from across the sea. One of the things they brought. Olive trees, wine. Writing. Straight, wide roads. Eventually, though soon enough, conquest and subjugation.

Springtime. It is always spring when she comes back. Beltaine, fires, blood of the bull. She buries the useless key again, pushes back the boulder. She could throw the key away now, she knows, but doesn’t want to do that. A small sadness as she passes the tomb. A girl who died too young.

She walks the quiet, shaded pathway to the outer gate. No one is there, cars pass by on the road. She slips out when there are none to be seen, clips the bolt shut.

Goes out into the world again.

She uses the forest-green shawl to hide her hair in the light. She could have cut it off during the night, but she doesn’t like cutting her hair. Once it had been hacked off, when she was burned for a witch. Such things happened in plague years, when terror shaped the world. There are enough such memories.

She needs a taxi now. Finds a place where one stands waiting. But when she asks, it seems she wants him to take her too far, that she doesn’t have a sum that will make it worth his time. It is vexing at first, then amusing. She laughs aloud.

When she does that, standing by his rolled-down window in sunlight, the driver changes his mind, agrees to take her where she wants to go.

Later, on the long drive back to Arles alone, he’ll be unable to say why he did that—risking an illegal trip outside his licence zone, wasting a morning and half a tank of fuel on a one-way cut-rate fare—and not even talking to the woman. Just glancing at her in his mirror as she gazed out the window at Provence gliding by.

He can’t say why he changed his mind. But he’ll dream of her for a long time. The rest of his life, in fact.

They walked through Arles for two hours. The street market, the area around the arena, circling it again, standing outside the barred entrance with irritated tourists who hadn’t factored a holiday into their travel plans. Greg tugged at a few of the gates optimistically, unsuccessfully.

They went over the theatre again. Ned remembered talking with Melanie here, two days ago. It was difficult, carrying such images, standing here again. He looked at the grass where she’d been sitting. It felt, for a moment, as if she were dead. It scared him.

He didn’t say anything.

They went on to the remains of the Roman forum on the central square. Everything was closed for the holiday. It was quiet. His father and Greg both kept glancing at Ned expectantly, like they were waiting for some light bulb to go on above his head or something. It could be aggravating, but he tried not to let himself feel that way. What else were they going to do?

He didn’t see Cadell within himself again, or Phelan, or a woman who looked like a goddess with auburn hair.

They had lunch at the only open café near the remaining columns of the forum. The Roman columns were embedded in the front of a nineteenth-century building, weirdly co-opted as architectural support after almost two thousand years. That said something about Roman architects, Ned decided. Or maybe about nineteenth-century ones. The rest of the forum was under their feet, buried, like it was in Aix around the cathedral.

Van Gogh had painted their café, apparently. Ned thought he remembered seeing reproductions of that. His father had insisted they eat a proper lunch, but the food was tasteless. Tourist fare.

They phoned Aunt Kim from the table. The others were in Béziers now. Nothing. They were leaving soon. They would stop in Roquepertuse, a Celtic site like Entremont—skulls found there, too—then head home.

Ned’s father paid their bill.

“What’s left here?” Greg asked. He looked tired, too.

“Melanie could tell us,” Edward Marriner said, with a sigh. “I’d say everything and nothing, if you know what I mean. We can go, I guess.”