There was no answer from behind the tree.

The skalkit with the leg dropped what was left of it and went for leg number two. The female on the tree was… Well, it was far too real and far too gruesome and Denton couldn’t look. He stared at the other skalkit, praying for it to look away, even for a second! But it licked its lips and started moving toward Denton, crouched low, coming in for the kill.

Denton reached up his free hand and ripped out his gag. “Help!” he screamed.

There was a whistle, shrill and yodeling.

It was Eyanna. Denton saw her across the clearing, at the edge of the jungle. She uttered a yodeling call, waving her arms. Denton could see, he could see, that she was terrified—her eyes were sick with death—but she stood her ground. She yelled and hollered at the skalkits, some native chanting thing, jumped up and down.

Denton watched, mouth hanging open. The skalkits watched, mouths hanging open. Then they turned, like a maddened pack of paparazzi, drawn by the irresistible bait. Eyanna ran into the jungle. The skalkits thundered after her.

Denton watched them go and felt a stab of horror and pity. Poor, dumb girl. She didn’t stand a snowball’s chance. He was dumbfounded that she would do this for him, had no idea why. He was so struck by pity, in fact, that it took him a moment to realize this was his own personal lotto ticket. His hands were free. The skalkits were gone.

There was a brief moment where he thought, I ought to help the others, but it was a momentary aberration. He ran.

Denton ran for a long time. He headed away from the gorge and away from where the skalkits had chased Eyanna. It was jungle, just rough jungle, and it was hard going, but still he ran. He crashed and tripped and fell a lot, but he always got up again. At first there were noises in the distance: roaring. He didn’t hear any more screams, though in truth he tried pretty hard not to hear any. And after a while there were no sounds at all.

When he couldn’t run anymore he walked. And finally he reached the big river. It was the same river he’d been following when he’d first come to this world. In the distance to his left he could see the enormous waterfall from the top of which he’d seen smoke in the horseshoe gorge. To his right was the purple hint of mountains.

At the river he felt safe because if any skalkit came, the two he had met or their relatives, he could go into the river and let himself be carried downstream in the current. That was not without its own problems, since he was a mediocre swimmer, but in comparison to skalkits it sounded fine.

His legs gave out and he fell to the riverbank. He began to shake. Bits and snatches of the whole horrible morning came back to him. And the one thing he could not stop seeing, over and over, was not the skalkit putting its jaws around the male Sapphian’s rib cage or even the detachment of the female’s leg. What he could not get out of his mind was the image of himself… running.

I left her to die.

It was a very ugly thing, and if he’d been feeling more himself, he might never have let it into his head. But once there, it was tenacious. He felt bad about it. Eyanna had risked her life to save his. Even knowing what the skalkits were, even knowing, she had come to help him. And in return he had checked her off as dead meat the moment he was free and had run away.

“There’s nothing I could have done,” he said aloud. “And anyway, it’s not like I really know her.” And a few minutes later: “Eyanna’s fast. She might have gotten away.”

And the girl? The one he had made love to? The one who had been tied to the tree just opposite his? How fast could she run tied to that tree? What were her chances?

He lay down on the cool moss. His thoughts were insupportable, so he slept. When he opened his eyes again it was twilight. The stars were dimly visible against a magenta sky. The world around him was empurpled.

He sat up. He hadn’t moved an inch from where he’d fallen and his body was stiff and aching. He stood up, stretched, and went over to the river to get himself a drink. He heard a soft noise behind him and whipped around, heart in his throat.

It was Eyanna. She was dirty and exhausted and had some minor scratches but was otherwise unharmed. She plopped down on the moss.

“Eyanna! Sweetie! How did you get away from the skalkits?”

“Ran. Hid.” Eyanna’s face was exhausted, expressionless.

“Well… um, I am happy you are okay. You are… You are very brave. Thank you.” The words ought to have turned his tongue to salt.

She didn’t acknowledge his words. Her back straightened determinedly. It was a strange gesture and signaled a change about her, a new solidity and strength. She was no longer the girl who skulked in the trees.

It pushed him away without a word and made him feel his smallness.

17.4. Thirty-Seventy Aharon Handalman

Aharon had enjoyed several quiet days of study with The Book of Torment. Well—enjoyed was maybe too strong a word. The spiritual work was hard, and the tension in the House of Divine Ordinance was like caged electricity. He sensed that things were occurring beyond his ken, wheels within wheels. He longed to speak with Kobinski, but since the night when he’d laid out his heart the kabbalist had not come again. The last day of Festival was the day after tomorrow and the heretic would be killed. Aharon himself felt like a condemned man, waiting for the powers on this planet to notice him again, to sweep them up in their current. And like a condemned man, he tried to make his peace with God.

He could see the beauty in the system the manuscript laid out: the sephirot, the ladder, the idea of balance. It had an intuitive right-feeling about it, and that in itself was disturbing. It was so completely different from his old beliefs, from the black-and-white world of the yeshiva. And although those old beliefs had been torn away from him, the memory still lingered of what it had felt like when they were inviolable. Their inviolability had always been the highest principle in and of itself, had it not? Because once you let things slide a little, then where would it stop?

Now he saw that kind of thinking for what it was: a way to keep his mind closed and frozen. But it was still a struggle to let it go. Such a double-edged sword! He decided to put the matter into God’s hands. The manuscript outlined exercises—prayers and meditations—for balancing your sephirot. Aharon was willing to admit, at the very least, that he could stand a little more compassion. So he tried the exercises for chesed, asking God to fill him with mercy, to fill up his heart.

He remembered the feeling he’d had that night, talking to Kobinski, when his heart had opened up and something greater than himself was pouring compassion through him. He wanted that feeling again. He prayed for chesed and he thought of Hannah. He thought of all the times he had been cold and hard because she’d failed his image of what a good Orthodox wife should be. Now it was not these things he remembered, not the times when she’d been obedient or silent. What he remembered was Hannah laughing goofily, like a girl, Hannah smart-cracking or stubborn, even that, yes, sexy rebellious pout, like a Jewish Greta Garbo. In expecting an ideal from her he had missed the opportunity to enjoy what she actually was—a crime and a shame, for both of them.

In response to these thoughts, he felt the blood stir in his chest, the almost physical swelling of his heart. Fill me with love, he asked, and he was filled. He had ignored his heart for a long time, he knew, because the tremors of love and compassion were like the quickening of the dead. But miraculously—and he knew a miracle when he saw one—his heart was not so shriveled that it could not rise again.