“Stop thinking,” she said, when this happened.

“You’re thinking,” I answered.

“I’ll stop. You stop, too.”

“Okay.”

Once—and only once—she said: “My lifetime will be the blink of an eye next to yours.”

I almost said: “I won’t go on without you.” But didn’t. Because even though I believed it I knew it would annoy her. She knew I was thinking it, anyway. We were in the cave, lying naked on the bearskin. The fire was low, but we were flushed from lovemaking. She was on her side, one leg bent. I was lying with my head resting on her thigh, breathing the smell of her cunt, which to me had become (had always been; I’d just forgotten it, along with all the other things I’d forgotten and was now being given back) the smell of love. The thought of losing her filled me with frantic energy. Energy that didn’t know what to do, but couldn’t stop believing there was something it could do.

“Promise me something,” she said.

“What.”

“Promise me you’ll live as long as you can.”

I didn’t answer. Nothing I could say seemed right. She was aware of that, too.

“Just promise me,” she said.

After a long time breathing the smell of her and trying to imagine existence without it, I said, “All right. I promise I’ll live as long as I can.”

It shouldn’t have felt such a difficult promise to make.

I told Amlek about her, but not the others.

“And you’re saying … With her it’s …?”

Naturally this was the big thing. Naturally this was what he couldn’t get over.

“Yes,” I told him. “Everything. As when we were human.”

It was just after sunset on my farewell night. Vali was waiting for me in the cave three miles away. Amlek and I sat in a plane tree overhanging the river. The water was a large peacefully moving intelligence. He knew I was leaving with her. I hadn’t needed to tell him.

“How long will she live?”

He regretted it immediately.

“Not forever,” I said.

“I’m sorry.”

“For a little while.”

“Really, I’m sorry.”

“But she’s alive now.”

“Of course.”

For a few minutes we sat in silence. In silence saying goodbye. I felt him thinking of the time and space immediately ahead of him without me in it. Sadness, yes, but also his self’s excitement to be free of anything against which to measure itself. To be the only answer to his own questions.

We didn’t arrange anything. Time, place. We shared blood. We’d see each other again.

“Rem?” he called, when I was moving off in the darkness.

“What?”

I felt him grinning.

“She doesn’t have a sister, does she?”

When I got to the cave Vali wasn’t in it. Its smell had changed, too. Hers was still there, but mixed with a human’s, raw and acrid, discharged in fear or rage. I realised, as I followed both odours back down towards the river, that I was trembling. Here was the cruel joke: We give you bliss then take it away. I’d been right all along.

But I found her, alive, unharmed, less than a mile away. A shallow valley of turf and pale stones descended to a narrow stream with thorn trees growing on its banks. She was kneeling over the body of a man and she was holding a rock in her right hand. The man was face-down. His head was bleeding. The smell of which, though I didn’t need to drink until tomorrow night, pulled on my instinct like a child tugging its mother’s hand.

“He’s not dead,” Vali said.

I knew that from the blood. We can’t drink from the dead.

“Who is he?” I asked her. She looked beautiful. The warmth of what had happened still in her.

“His name’s Mabon. He’s from my tribe. I can’t believe he followed me all this way.”

I understood. He wanted her.

“If he’s come this far,” I told her, “he won’t stop now. Does he know?”

What you are.

“Yes.”

A little flicker of respect for poor Mabon, desire to rip his head off notwithstanding.

“I can’t kill him,” she said. “I won’t kill him.” Which meant: And I don’t want you to kill him, either.

“Tomorrow’s full moon,” she said. “I’ll be able to travel as fast as you. Soon we’ll be far from here. Too far for him to follow. He’s not a bad person.”

“He doesn’t have to be a bad person to be a dangerous one.”

“I don’t care. We’re not killing him.”

“Okay. You’re the boss.”

Pause.

“Am I?”

Said with just enough play to stir my cock.

“You are a bad person,” I said, moving towards her.

We kissed, and felt the option of fucking here, by poor prostrate Mabon—on top of him, why not? But she rejected it. Trivial piquancy. The sort of mean symbolic gesture someone smaller might need. Not her. Little cruelties suggested she still needed help to be reconciled to the big ones. She didn’t.

Mabon, in any case, was showing signs of consciousness, so we took our leave. It was my plan to travel east by the river, skirting the mountains. Water meant people, and the mountains meant easy concealment.

Tomorrow, it had passed between us, we would hunt together.

36

WE HADN’T TALKED about it. We’d known not to. It was the only thing we were uncertain of. She was afraid I’d forgotten what she turned into. I hadn’t, but still, I didn’t know: that first night in the cave, if she hadn’t returned to her human form, would I have lain with her?

“How far is the camp?” she said. It was almost moonrise. We were in a cave I’d kicked a mountain lion out of the day before. He’d put up a fight for a while, but I was too fast. I’d said to him: Look, give up, will you? You’ve lost a lot of blood. It’s only going to get worse for you. And with what was unmistakably a sigh, followed by a roll of the neck and a stretch that was meant to make it look as if boredom had got the better of him, he’d turned and slouched away.

“Less than a mile,” I told her. “Is it always this bad?”

She smiled. Stupid question. She was pale and shivering and wet with sweat. I couldn’t touch her. When it had first started I had very gently put my hand between her shoulder blades. She said: “I love you, but if you do that or anything else to my skin I’ll kill you.”