Well In Time Part 36

"How beautiful!" Calypso exclaimed.

She ventured out to the edge of the rock and peered over. Below her, slow waves rolled up to the outcrop, splashed lazily and retreated.

"Be careful!" Javier said, slipping his fingers into the back of the waistband of her jeans. "It's still too cold for a swim."

Calypso laughed and spread her arms, leaning outward, moored by Javier's firm grip. "I'm flying!" she cried joyfully.

They sat down with their backs to a sun-warmed rock.

"I almost forgot to tell you!" Javier said suddenly. "A very strange thing."

Calypso felt a jolt of foreboding.

"What?"

Javier raised a calming hand.

"No, nothing bad. Just strange. I was out with the cattle early one morning, just before I came here, and Lobo was with me. But I got busy with the cattle and next thing I know, Lobo is way over at the edge of the pasture near the woods.

"At first I thought my eyes were playing tricks, because Lobo was leaping and running and spinning around. But then I saw that there was another wolf there, too. They were playing. And then Lobo looked at me-a very long, hard look, Caleepso-and then he just turned and trotted away with the other wolf into the woods."

"Just like that."

"Yes."

Calypso's eyes glazed with tears. "He saved my life, you know."

"You saved his life."

"Well, yes. But if he hadn't been with me that last time through the tube, I think I'd still be there. I would have given up. I wanted to die. It was Lobo's nose on my ankle, so cold and wet-so alive- that spurred me on. Without him, honestly Javier, I think I would be dead now."

Javier took her hand and held it lightly.

"Lots of liberation this year," he said gently. "From the past, from work in the present, from dreams of the future. Don't they call a year like this fateful?"

She sighed and looked again out to sea. "He's not coming back, is he?"

"I don't think so."

"But he's not lost either-is he?"

"No. I don't think he is. I think he's gone back to his people, the Wolf Clan."

She nodded and clambered to her feet.

"Then it's just you and me, my love. And the sky's the limit."

He pushed to his feet and took her hand.

"Maybe there are no limits," he said. "Just the illusion of them."

He jumped from the shelf of rock and then turned to lift her down. She was almost insubstantial in his hands.

"My G.o.d, Caleepso!" he exclaimed. "You need fattening. Let's forget the picnic and go to that restaurant we pa.s.sed down the road."

"Okay. Let's."

Hand in hand, they scrambled through the rocks toward the car.

"You know, I just remembered something, too," Calypso said, swinging their clasped hands.

"What's that?"

"That under scopolamine, I called you my husband."

Javier stopped on the shoulder of the road and turned to look at her.

"Is that so?" he said, studying her face appraisingly.

Calypso only smiled in response.

"In that case, we'd better eat a big lunch. It's going to be a bigger day than we planned!"

She smiled at him. "You think?"

He nodded, his eyes filled with a new light. "Yes. I think."

"Where?"

He shrugged. "Anywhere. How about in the next town we come to?"

He opened the car door and settled her into her seat, then went around and folded himself behind the wheel.

"I have a better idea."

"What?"

"How about in the vault with the G.o.ddess for a witness? I'm sure we could find a notary crazy enough to do it-for a price."

He nodded. "Yes. I like that idea. Let's go have lunch and then we can start making calls."

"What about rings?"

"What about them?"

"We'll need some."

"What about an antiques store? Would they have any?"

"Maybe."

"Then we'll stop at every one we come to between here and home."

They glanced at one another in surprise. Calypso smiled.

"Did I hear you say what I thought you said?"

"Yes. Home. But don't forget, we've got two homes now. Like His and Hers bath towels," he grinned his impossibly enchanting grin, "only bigger." He started the car and pulled from the shoulder.

Calypso smiled radiantly at him. "No, not His and Hers-Ours and Ours."

"Will you have to give the statue back to the church, Caleepso?"

They were lying in bed. The window was thrown open and night wind brought the sigh of the plane tree and the clear treble of falling water into the room. It was really too cool for open windows but it made snuggling more expedient.

Calypso, cradled against Javier's chest in deep relaxation, answered dreamily, "No, I don't think so. It's odd, Javier. I asked Monsieur Signac about the desecration of the church here in Brignac. His family's been here since before the Revolution. He told me that a family named Moreau returned the holy figures to the church sometime in the nineteen-fifties. They'd been hidden in an old granary on their mas all that time."

"So that was the Monsieur M. who helped Father Xavier?"

"That's what I'm a.s.suming."

"Then how did the statue get here?"

"That's a good question-and I have no answer. It's sitting on a Louis Quinze table so it had to have been placed there sometime shortly before or after the start of the French Revolution in 1789. The making of Louis Quinze-style furniture pretty much died along with the monarch."

"But it could have been put on that table last week," Javier said reasonably.

"True, but then there's the reliquary and the letter. It seems safe to a.s.sume that they were put there at the same time, since the box was under the same tarp as the statue."

Javier kissed the top of her head. "You should have been a detective, Caleepso."

"Ummmm hummm." She sighed luxuriously.

"Maybe there was an official set of statuary for the church and then a secret one, that the paris.h.i.+oners didn't know about."

Calypso erupted into activity, squirming until she could look him in the eye by the light of the candelabra on the bedside table.

"You know, that's a really good theory. What if our statue was kept hidden, like something apostate? Many churches were built on the ruins of earlier holy sites. Maybe when they built the church here in Brignac, they dug into an older site-Roman or maybe even an Egyptian one. The Egyptians had a major port on the Mediterranean just a few miles from here, you know, called Ratis. There are all kinds of stories about them bringing images of Isis into the area."

"What was the name of the woman who sold you this place?"

"Landrieu, why?"

"I thought maybe her name might have started with an 'M', too."

"No...but she's married. That's not her maiden name." Calypso's voice was rising with excitement. "The family that started this mas lived here until Madame Landrieu's grandparents died in the mid-sixties Their name was Martel!

"That's got to be it, Javier! Father Xavier must have had a much deeper friends.h.i.+p with the Martel family. Otherwise, he wouldn't have entrusted the statue to them and they wouldn't have made the effort to hide the stairs like they did."

"Or maybe She's always lived here. Maybe they put the table under Her and the tarp over Her and then closed the stairs to protect Her during the Revolution."

"That's a possibility, too."

Calypso lay thinking about what little was known of the Black Virgins of southern France. Local myths told that many of the Black Virgin statues were discovered in natural settings like caves or grottoes, or hidden in trees, or buried in the ground near springs. Farmers plowing their fields sometimes turned one up or were alerted to its presence by the strange behavior of their animals that refused to cross the spot where a Black Virgin was buried or were unusually attracted it.

As she explained this to Javier, Calypso remembered that it also was said that a Black Virgin brought from the spot in which She was discovered and placed in a Christian chapel would disappear. Then somehow, She would make Her way back to the place of Her discovery, as if She could not bear to leave Her a.s.sociation with the earth and its life-giving waters and vegetation.

"So if you move Her from here, She might just return anyway?" Javier felt deeply, unaccountably moved by these stories.

"It's possible. One thing I know for sure-if I'm supposed to do anything besides leave Her where She is, I'll know about it." Calypso dangled the locket in the candlelight. "This thing won't let me rest until I do what's right. In fact, I feel like this locket's a homing device and it brought me here in the first place."

"It's very strange, Caleepso. Strange and wonderful." He pulled her close to him and they lay in candlelight, listening to the sounds of the night that flowed through the open windows.

"What will we call this place, Caleepso?"

"Ummm...how about Notre Dame des Benedictions Terrestres?"

"Our Lady of Earthly Blessings? It's kind of long-and besides, it sounds like we're living in a church."

"Are you sure we're not? Anyway, it will have to do until morning."

They lay quietly for a s.p.a.ce. Then, "There's an excavation of a Roman villa just a few miles from here, did you know?" she murmured, snuggling closer under his arm and pressing her cheek against his chest. "Right now, this moment, is so timeless, I feel like we could be Romans in a villa two thousand years ago."

He pulled her closer. "Maybe we are," he said pensively. "Maybe we are."

"One thing I know: we are blessed, my love." She sighed and flung a sleepy arm across him.

"Yes, mi corazn, we are."

A gust blew through the window, flouncing the drapes and snuffing the candles. In the darkness, wind spiraled through the room, dispersing the fragrance of flowers and wet earth. Out in the branches of the plane tree, an owl gave a short, whistling hoot. Somewhere in the garden, the old tortoise was dreaming his earthen dreams, while the water of the spring trickled endlessly from its fountain like muted laughter rising from the depths of the earth.

Epilogue.

The voices of the winds were commanding. A solitary figure gazed across the valley, beyond which the bluffs with their rock-cut tombs glowed white and merciless on the horizon. The heat of midday was stifling and the figure turned briefly to take in the distant ribbon of green that demarcated the river.

Between the healing waters and the valley of death were the winds. They rose up in black, whirling columns, as tall as those on the portico of the temple. She counted thirteen in all, each with its separate voice that whispered or screamed, chuckled or wailed. In her memory, there had never been so many-and her memory was long.

When humankind became riled, nature did, too. This she knew. Political intrigue, social injustice, bigotry, religious intolerance, astounding greed-these were just a few of the ills that stirred within her culture like an evil potion brewing and bubbling on the back of a mighty magician's stove. The spirits of the natural world were rising up in complaint against the human miasma.