“How was the light today?”

“Big. Hot. Broad. Yellow-white. The sky’s blue was like a drumbeat. I watched the black tree shadows revolve. When the sun went down it was like someone’s hand was pulling it, very gently. It was soft-edged and orange. The land went purple, then dark blue and grey, then black. Then you opened your eyes.”

Sometimes, kissing her, I could smell the sun and the air on her skin. It aroused me beyond reason.

The other discrepancy was that I had to feed every fourth or fifth day. But killing with her had made killing without her an enraging chore. I pushed it. Six days, seven, eight. It was the one thing she scolded me for. But when I timed it just right—starved myself so that the thirst reached a debilitating intensity on full moon—the reward was unholily sweet. There was nothing—nothing—like our union then, wedded in blood, a lawless law unto ourselves.

“We go at night,” I said. “I come with you.”

“I don’t want you to come with me.”

We’d come back because she’d dreamed of her mother, dying. Her human mother. Whom she hadn’t seen since the tribe had driven her out. Her mother had fought for her to be allowed to stay. Until her father had beaten her into silence—and near death. Now, because of the dream, my beloved wanted to see the old woman again, one last time.

Once, I said to her: “Vali, it’s just a dream.”

Only once, because when she answered “I have to do this,” and looked at me, I knew it would be pointless to argue. She believed in dreams. Not comprehensively. Perhaps five or six times since I’d known her she’d dreamed something and been unable to ignore it.

We should go south tomorrow.

Why?

I dreamed it. There’s something bad waiting in this direction.

You dreamed it?

Yes.

I didn’t argue. She was so unsuperstitious in all other respects it left the value of the exceptions high. And who was I, after all, to argue with dreams? I had none. Had had none since my Turning. Sleep was an uninterrupted blackout. Sometimes I woke with the vague feeling that something had been going on—that my slurped-down dead had been boisterously up all day—but there was never any content. Waking then was like coming home to a house perfectly in order and nonetheless knowing the kids had had a party while you were away.

“I’ll come with you as far as the edge of the camp,” I said. “I won’t come in with you. No one will even know I’m there.”

We were still a day’s journey from her tribe, whose annual peregrinations she was assuming unchanged. A dangerous assumption, I thought. For all she really knew there would be no one there. Or a different tribe altogether. A hostile one. A more hostile one.

“Vali?”

“We’ll talk about it tomorrow. Come on, it’s getting late.”

Early, she meant. We were in a mossy forest of giant trees and tiny bluebells with a green-and-black stream running through it like liquid malachite. No cave. I’d dug out an earth in the bank under a dying oak, half the roots of which emerged from the turf like a wizened hand. (Daylight protection in those days was a drag. Stones, brushwood, skins, logs, holes in the fucking ground.) I’d fed, joylessly, three days ago, and in anticipation of coming deprivation—Vali wouldn’t need to eat for another eight days, and I wanted to wait—the thirst had started a preemptive protest in my chest and calves.

“Don’t go far,” I said to her.

“Calm down,” she said. “This forest is going to be pretty in the sunlight. Besides, I’m exhausted. Give me a kiss.”

I remember that kiss. Soft and lingering and tender. Her hand wrapped in my hair, one fierce squeeze. The smell of her skin, the dark glimmer of her eyes.

That day, that sleep, I had a dream.

I was in a meadow, just after sunset. Daisies and buttercups like shy little spirits in the dusk. A line of dark trees to my left, rolling hills to my right. I didn’t recognise the place. I was looking for Vali. Every blade of grass said she’d been this way, recently; the land was rich with her scent. But something resisted me. My legs laboured, weakened with each trembling step. The air was first soupy, then pliable, then quagmire. Eventually, I lay down on the ground, utterly exhausted. I seemed to lie there for a long time, watching the stars, wondering what would happen when the night was gone and the sun rose. Or rather, knowing what would happen, but wondering how it would feel. The sadness of not seeing Vali again before I died kept expanding in me. It kept reaching what I thought must be the limit of what I could feel and still go on existing. But the sadness just kept getting bigger.

Then I felt her, next to me. It seemed impossible that I hadn’t heard (or smelled) her coming near, but I turned, and there she was, lying next to me. She was naked, but her skin was warm.

“I will come back to you,” she said. “And you will come back to me. Wait for me.”

When I woke, I knew she’d gone to her tribe without me.

38

I DID THE twenty-hour journey in six.

When I got to the camp, daylight was less than two hours away. Skin tents, cooking sticks, a few women already awake, lighting the fires. A sleepy lookout, leaning on his spear, standing with his left foot on top of his right, a little way beyond the perimeter.

He didn’t see me coming. Didn’t hear me. Didn’t smell me. Instead found himself lifted by the throat and whisked with marvellous mystery into the cover of the trees. He’d dropped his spear (needing two hands for the pointless attempt to dislodge my one, which was cutting off his air) but there was a sharpened flint at his hip that would do. I pinned him, sat on him, showed him the flint, let him feel it at his throat. He grasped the situation immediately.

“Cry out and you die,” I said to him, in his own tongue, Vali’s tongue. “Understand?”

He nodded, eyes bugging from the choking. He was a long-bodied fellow with a big head of thick, matted black hair like a large fur hat. I put my finger to my lips—breathe, but do it quietly—then released the pressure on his windpipe. Much gurning and wincing as he struggled to keep the noise of recovering from near-strangulation down. The flint had already drawn a little blood from his neck. He swallowed and gasped, gasped and swallowed. I gave him a moment. He smelled of river water and cured skins and some animal fat they rubbed into their hair.

“The woman who came here,” I said, pressing on the flint. “Where is she?”