Cold Fire

“Boss,” he said, halting beside her table, “I need the rest of the day off. I’ll make it up.”



She finished her measurements and noted down the figures in an accounts book before she glanced up. She looked me up and down. “We’s not running a stud service, Vai. Nor a sly tavern.”



Some of the men had come up to the shelter’s edge.



“Never say yee mean it, maku,” said one of the younger ones. He had scarred cheeks and a keen gaze. “She really that one yee lost?”



“Yes.”



Soft whistles and murmurs greeted this curt pronouncement.



The boss measured me rather as she had just been measuring the plank. With no shift of expression, she nodded. “That change matters, then. I shall expect yee tomorrow, the usual.”



“My thanks.”



“I shall bring yee tools when I come for the areito,” said the young man with the scars.



“My thanks, Kofi,” said Vai in the absentminded tone of a man whose thoughts have already galloped over the next hill. He led me to another shelter, where he let go of me to grab a singlet out of several draped over a sawhorse. After tugging it on, he unhooked a leather bottle from a crossbeam.



“Drink,” he said, unstoppering it. “You look sun-reddened.”



“What is it?” I asked suspiciously.



“Guava juice sweetened with pineapple and lime. You need to drink or you’ll get sun sick.”



It was juice, sweet and pure, and after I had gulped down so much that I burped, he slung the bottle over his shoulder. The carpenters had moved off and the boss had gone back to her measuring. After a hesitation, he clasped my hand in the way of innocent children, palm to palm, and examined me, neither smiling nor frowning.



“Will you come with me, Catherine? Or would you rather not?”



“What choice do I have?” I demanded.



His lips thinned as he pressed them tight as if to hold back words he didn’t want to say. Then he spoke. “Why, the choice I just gave you. Which I meant. Is there something I need to know?”



I flushed, utterly embarrassed. “What do you think you might need to know?”



He looked skyward, released a breath, and addressed me without looking at me. “I must wonder if your…affections are engaged.”



“My affections are not engaged. I do not love any man, if that is what you mean.”



“Of course it’s what I mean! What am I to think, having seen what I saw?”



“Did it not occur to you that he’s the one who abandoned me? In a strange city? Oh, la, darling! I have secret business of my own and I’ll return to fetch you when I get around to it?”



He looked at the ground, his expression flashing through a series of emotions too complex to unravel. Hard to imagine the man who had worn perfectly polished boots and expensive, tailored dash jackets standing in worn trousers and dusty bare feet in a carpentry yard! “I’m sorry to hear you were abandoned.”



“You don’t sound sorry. You sound pleased.”



“Very well, Catherine.” His gaze flashed up to sear me. “I’m not sorry. And I am pleased.” He brushed the scabbed-over wound above my right eye, his touch cautious but his tone trembling as on the brink of a cliff. “Unless he’s hurt you. In that case, I’ll kill him for you, if you like.”



“I don’t find that amusing.”



Thank Tanit, he looked down again, for I could not have borne the intensity of those eyes for one more heart-stopping breath.



I went on. “It would be better just to let it go.”



“How like a woman to say so!” he muttered.



“What?”



“Nothing,” he said too quickly. When he looked up, he had veiled that boiling glare behind a screen of prickly disdain. “My offer still stands. Come with me, if you wish. I ask nothing of you, except that you allow me to offer you shelter. Or go your own way, if that is what you prefer.”



“I’ll come with you.” I didn’t want to let go of a hand that was like a lifeline in a storm-tossed sea.



He closed his eyes briefly, making no reply. Nor did he let go of my hand.



We walked inland. Once away from the carpentry yard we were just another young couple, although I am sure I looked as if I had just been fished out of the sea, so bedraggled was I. The neighborhood was laid out in a grid plan, two-story buildings behind gates and walls, mostly workshops and residential compounds. In the streets, children played a game by hitting a ball with their knees and elbows and calves, and it was quite astonishing how they kept it from touching the ground without ever catching it in their hands. Women dyed cloth in vats and hung the cloth from lines to dry. One pretty woman looked up, began to smile as if to call out a greeting to Vai, then saw me. As her eyes widened, she nudged a companion, and they whispered as they watched us go.