27

Anotine slept fitfully through the remainder of the night, occasionally calling out and at times waving her arms. As for me, I found it impossible to rest after my meeting with Scarfinati. If what he had told me was true, I could possibly save Anotine. But he, himself, pointed out that all memories are not truth. Besides that, he might have been an hallucination generated by the beauty. What were the chances of my meeting him so soon after my experience with the hourglass, and why of all places would he be relegated in Below's memory to this forest? My thoughts revolved with no destination like the Master in his chair.

By the time the sun rose, I was thoroughly confused, but in the end decided that if during our journey I were to come upon the fields of Harakun, I would enter the ruins and locate the memory book. Since the island had been destroyed, there was little chance I would be able to discover the antidote that Misrix had mentioned. One thing that Scarfinati had said stayed with me, namely that it was better to let Anotine believe in the fairy tale that had been projected by the hourglass.

When she finally woke, I immediately confessed my having taken advantage of her through the night.

"I was so tired" she said. "What dreams I had Scarfinati and the weird goings-on at Reparata." She shook her head.

I told her I was sorry again, but she seemed perplexed by my apology. The fact that she did not see my taking advantage of her as an affront to her dignity troubled me. It only stood to remind me that she was a mnemonic creation when what I wanted was for her to be a woman. The phenomenon that linked the sheer beauty to sex became like a snake swallowing its tail, breaking down, through repetition, my perception of her. If I ignored this, she remained absolutely real to me, and I loved her, but the minute the urge was upon me, I could not help myself from again seeing through the illusion.

"Come, Cley," she said. "Let's see what's in this forest." She reached out to take my hand and we began walking.

It was peaceful beneath the pines and oaks, sunlight filtering down in spots onto the carpet of fallen needles and leaves. In order to circumvent my troubled thoughts, I began pointing out for Anotine the different types of plants and mushrooms I was familiar with. She was truly curious as to what each of them might be used for, and I described in detail the physical illnesses and mental afflictions they cured.

"See here," I said, bending low to snatch a rosy piece of flush fern from between the exposed roots of an oak. "This plant induces amnesia, a total forgetting. If you were to take it, you would remember nothing."

"Have you ever administered it?" she asked.

"Once, to a young fellow who had lost his entire family in a fire. He was so grief-stricken, he could not continue with his life, and thoughts of suicide were always upon him," I said.

"Did it work?" she asked.

"I was loath to give it to him, but he pleaded so pitifully that I finally prepared him a tea from it."

"And did he find happiness?"

"He spent the next three years trying to find out who he had been and what had become of him. He discovered the names of his wife and children, but he could never acquire what they had looked like or any of the moments he had spent with them."

Anotine asked no more questions after that, and realizing my mistake, I relented on my pharmacopic lecture. As we walked along, I saw her very subtly lift her hands, as if she were merely adjusting her hair behind her ears. When she did not think I was looking, I saw her wipe tears from her eyes.

We came across the path that Scarfinati had described to me. It wound through the forest with unnecessary turns and loops as if it had been forged by a drunkard. Nevertheless, I made a point of sticking to it. Anotine hummed the tune from Nunnly's music box as we walked, and I lost myself for some time in the beauty of her voice and the haunting nature of that melody.

Sometime after midday, we came upon a small lake that the path cut across the middle of in a narrow land bridge. Being hot and tired, I suggested that we take a swim. Anotine said she had been feeling somewhat faint and agreed that it was a good idea. Leaving our clothes on the bank, we eased into the cool water.

I let myself slip down beneath the surface and slackened my muscles so that I sank slowly like a dead man. In that dark and quiet place, I remembered sinking in a similar fashion toward the bottom of the river at Wenau on the day that Below's metal bird had exploded. This brought to my mind images of the settlement and my own humble home off in the woods. I saw behind my eyes all of my neighbors, and for the first time in what seemed years I thought about the situation I had left them in. Jensen and Roan, the women I had assisted in childbirth, all of the children I had always thought of in some part as my own, beckoned to me for help.

I carried these troubling images with me to the surface, but the minute I burst through into the atmosphere of Below's memory and took a deep breath, I wanted only to find Anotine. Turning to look for her, I was startled when she appeared from under the water right behind me. She neither smiled nor spoke, but swam to me and put her arms around my neck. Her breasts gently pushed into my chest and her legs came up around my waist. The ends of her hair swirled on the surface of the water in spiral patterns as I joined with her and moved toward the moment. Wavelets began to break against the bank, and in the midst of our passion, she told me one of her dreams.

"I was paralyzed in the present, trapped in a block of unmelting ice in the hold of a ship bound for nowhere. I could not breathe. I had no pulse or heartbeat, yet I could see through the clear substance that was my tomb. Time had no hold on me, and all that passed before me, I saw only in the present, so that I saw it all at once. The faces of the crew when they would come down into the hold to stare at me, Below when he would make his yearly visits, the monkey that was bought by the captain during one of the voyages, the destruction of the ship in a typhoon, volcanoes and krakens at the bottom of the sea, my rescue by a strange race of amphibious people, a great city of dripping mounds where my frozen image was worshiped, and you, Cley. You were there somewhere," she said, climaxing with a sigh that sounded like dying.

When we finished, she swam backwards away from me. "It was a love story bound within an instant," she said, and then dived underwater.

The beauty had me in its clutches before I even climbed out of the lake. We dressed without drying off so that we would stay cool well into the afternoon. I felt refreshed and calm as we again began our journey along the twisting path. The effects of the drug helped me to remember the loss of my neighbors I had felt while floating beneath the surface of the lake. It all came back to me with the same vitality that my visions of Wood and the Fetch and the scenes from the hourglass had when wrapped in the afterglow of Anotine's love. What I experienced this time was a single thought, but one so powerful that it caused me to stop in my tracks. What, I wondered, was to be our future? Were we destined to wander aimlessly through Below's memory until it dissolved?

I turned to look at Anotine and in that very second, she put her hand to her forehead and fell into me with a great sigh.

"What is it?" I asked.

"I feel weak, Cley," she said.

"Are you simply tired or are you ill?"

"I'm dizzy and I cannot feel my hands or feet." Her eyelids were half-open and fluttering madly.

I quickly moved my hands beneath her arms and carried her off the path. Finding a moss-covered spot that looked soft, I laid her on the ground and knelt at her side.