Chapter 13

Two days passed in Sky House and Porter finally believed that he had found a place to rest his weary bones. He had been content at Zeb’s house where he was able to rest and regain some sense of balance after his life was turned upside down. He had also been weak and recovering while trying to come to grips with a wild planet and an outrageous gift. Zeb’s had not been comfortable, but it had been stable and a source of many hours of delicious solitude. He had been given time to let the strange and alien become normal and routine.

Sky House was a bustling hive of happy people with amazing gifts and imagination. The House itself was carved out the living rock of a mountaintop. The views were astounding and the ability to watch the forests below made the fortress safe from spying eyes or worse things. The views were so clear that Porter was able to catch glimpses of Kanji as she stalked the woods in search of fresh prey.

If Timisoara was a dedication to geometry, then Sky House was dedicated to the arts. The hallways were soaring walls with vaulted ceilings coated with a soft white glow. Fanciful creatures frolicked and swaggered among great murals as their human friends reclined in the shade or bathed in the crystal waters. The Meeting Hall was a maze of intersecting arches that stretched up into the darkness of the high ceiling. The walls were carved representations of various aspects of the Blue but the carvings themselves had never felt the bite of chisel or hammer. All the carvings and indeed, all the House had been carved, shaped, and sculpted by the Blue. What beauty the human mind could conceive under the influence of the Blue, that conception was impressed upon the walls or ceilings of Sky House.

However, at this moment Porter was in a rather plain room whose floor was littered with rugs piled over each other in a haphazard fashion. The rugs were thick and plush with intricate patterns woven into them, which were even more colorful against the plain white walls. Porter was here to be tested. He had no inkling of what the test entailed or what he would be required to do.

An older man entered, bald as a cue ball and with skin like tanned leather. His eyes were set deep in his head and surrounded by a complex crisscross of wrinkles. He had a demeanor of quiet amusement about him that Porter found calming. He had already counted the number of rugs in the room, estimated their average size and was about to calculate how many square meters of rug were in the room when the old man closed the door behind him.

“Porter, it is a pleasure to meet you,” the old man began. “I am Fane, one of the older residents that they haven’t been able to expel from the House yet. I may still have a little use left in these old bones; one can only hope.”

Porter gave a short bow. “One can only hope.”

“Good,” the old man said. “At least we don’t have to teach you manners. The young lady who escorted you here was one of the rudest, coarsest children I’ve ever met. The words that came out of this child curdled hamox milk at ten paces, I kid you not.”

Porter was forced to chuckle.

“Let us continue this meeting while seated, shall we?” Fane sat down and crossed his legs while Porter faced him, mimicking his posture.

“I want you to close your eyes, Porter. I am going to push against you, and you are going to push back. I am interested in your strength, but I am more concerned about your control. Your task is to push back with equal and opposite force. Remember that I’m an old man and old bones break easily,” Fane admonished him.

Porter closed his eyes and waited. He felt a wall push against him lightly, like a breeze on a warm day. He pushed back, and the breeze receded too far. He ratcheted back his response and the breeze returned.

The breeze became a quiet wind. Then the wind grew stronger. Porter imagined clouds gathering and the skies threatening rain. He maintained his pushing back, trying hard to keep the balance between them equal.

The wind picked up strength and jumped towards gale strength. Porter had little trouble pushing but he had much more difficulty maintaining balance. The gale pressed ever harder and Porter believed that he was leaning into a hurricane. He felt his control slipping. Either he was going to get blown into the wall behind him or he was going to slam down the old man. Porter started panicking as he felt his limbs shaking with helplessness.

He heard the roar of an upset wastecat in the distance that clearly pierced the wail of the hurricane. The distraction was enough to redirect his panic into a solution. Both outcomes were unacceptable, which meant another means had to be found. He had been pushing back like one hand against another and one hand must give way. Porter bent his pushback right at the middle into a point and forced the wailing gusts to sheer off either side of him and dissipate harmlessly.

The hurricane ceased. Porter opened his eyes expecting to see rugs piled up, torn and ripped against the wall behind them, all 2080 square meters of them. The room looked exactly the same, even the smile on Fane’s face.

“That was not so bad, was it?” Fane asked.

“No, but I think we upset my cat,” Porter said.

“I think so as well,” the old man concurred. “Why don’t we wait here a few moments for your furry friend to arrive? I understand that she is rather possessive of you.”

Porter blushed three shades of red, “Kanji did not ... I’m afraid Gilly...” and his brain and tongue collapsed together.

It was Fane’s turn to chuckle. “Ah, young love: I remember it fondly. Damn, I hate being an old relic sometimes.”

Fane’s humor brought Porter back to the room and its purpose. “How did I do? Did I do well on the test?”

“I can’t tell you,” Fane said. “Now don’t give me that look of distain. I am the tester, not the evaluator. The person evaluating you is on the other side of the door making notes. She is also about to get a nasty surprise of upset cat at full throttle.”

Fane held up his fist and counted with his fingers, “One, two, three, four,” and before he could say “five” a scream of surprise with a rather high pitch echoed out in the hallway.

Fane flicked the doorlatch with his Blue and Kanji launched herself into the room. She knocked Porter flat on his back and sniffed him from head to toe, making growling noises as she went. Satisfied that he was in one piece, she licked the side of his face and trotted out of the room. In the hallway, another scream emerged letting the two men know that Kanji passed back the way she came.

A middle-aged woman with brown hair piled high on her head appeared in the doorway. With an accusing finger she said, “Fane Weathersmith, you will pay for that amusement! You had better think twice before you step into your apartment tonight.”

She walked away and Zane whispered conspiratorially, “She’s my second wife; she has a wonderful imagination but definitely lacks a complete sense of humor.”

Porter couldn’t help himself. “Keep it up and you may be hunting for your third wife.”

Fane gave a good belly laugh. “Very good advice, young man. You will be given your evaluation this evening. In the meantime, allow me to repay your advice with some of my own: seek out Gilly and pay her some attention. You will be amply rewarded.”

They walked out of the room together; however, Fane turned left, and Porter turned right seeking out the apartments. Porter got lost. He had to ask different people more than once how to get to Gilly’s apartment, but he stuck to the task despite his embarrassment of first, asking, and second, letting people know who he was seeking out. He was determined.

He hesitated before her door and then raised his hand to knock. Before he could strike the wood, a voice called out, “Come in, Porter.”

Porter dropped his hand to the latch and walked into her front room, where Gilly was sitting on the couch with bunches of herbs spread out before her on a low table.

“How did you know it was me?” He asked with puzzlement.

“Blue,” was her answer. Her voice was quite neutral and certainly not warm. Porter immediately felt the urge to backpedal out the door and make a run for it. Instead he took a deep breath and tried to steel himself. He was about to enter virgin territory to him. He couldn’t remember the last time he had been in a single woman’s apartment.

“May I have a seat?” he was a tad tentative.

She was curt. “If you want.”

Porter weighed his options of either polite conversation that beat around the bush or just giving her the chance to thrust the knife into his heart. He chose the less painful.

“You couldn’t be colder and more remote if you tried,” Porter said. “Would you tell me what I did to offend you?”

“Offend me?” Gilly said as the heat of her anger rose. “You are a bundle of mixed signals and contradictions. One moment you are infatuated with me and in the next, you choose your damn cat over me!”

Porter flashed back on the hurricane experience of a few minutes ago and felt the same inundation upon him. “I apologize for any pain I’ve caused you...”

“I don’t need your paltry apologies,” she said, interrupting him.

Porter was perplexed and he started sweating, “Then what do you need from me?”

“You can start with an explanation; but I’m warning you, it had better be good,” Gilly said. Her public face was at the fore, the one that allowed no hint of what she was thinking, the one that made a weaker person want to cringe before her superior control.

Porter felt the tip of a knife pressing at his heart; he was torn between either running for the door or throwing himself onto the proverbial blade. At his craven best, he rationalized that he could claim to anyone who cared to listen that he did apologize. With an apology in place, he could run right now and figure it out later. Yet, he despised the taste of yellow cowardice on the back of his tongue. He was old enough to admit there was more than one way to die and dying by gutlessness after all he had just achieved did not appeal.

Gathering his wherewithal Porter asked, “How much time do you have?”

“I have all day if necessary,” she said even though it was obvious that she did not mean it. Her words dripped with condescension, as if warning him that he had better not be wasting her time. The woman who had kissed his creek at night in the forest was gone, disappeared into distant memory.

“Then may I prevail upon you for a pitcher of water and two glasses? We will need them.”

Gilly grabbed the items and sat them on the table between them with a simple command: “Talk.”

Porter said, “What do you see when you look at me?”

Gilly gave him a sardonic look. “I see a strong, healthy man.”

Porter snorted at her answer, “That is not what I see even though my senses tell me that I am healthy, strong and thin. In my head, I am still 160 kilos of blubbering fat.”

For the next two hours he spoke, pouring out his history and his heart. He stopped when he realized that he was out of water and the pitcher was empty. He steeled himself for the expected reply, “You’re pathetic.”

Gilly looked him dead in the eye, “Are you a virgin?”

Porter blinked. “No, but I might as well be considering the thin nature of my love encounters.”

“A thirty-year-old virgin: this is a novelty for me,” she said, shaking her head slightly as if in disbelief.

A pensive Porter stared at his boots. “Are you going to tell anyone?”

“You pour out your soul to me for two hours and then you ask whether I can be trusted with your secrets. These are the contradictions that I don’t understand.” Gilly was sore all over again.

“Have you ever been betrayed?” Porter asked. Gilly answered with an equivocation of “perhaps.”

Porter hesitated at her admission that was not an admission. Even so, she had shown the first crack in her previously impervious demeanor. Porter took note of her answer but judged the time not appropriate to follow up. He had another point to make.

“I have, more than once. I’ve earned my distrust of people honestly by experience.” Porter drew one last breath and asked, “Have I answered your questions?”

Gilly stood up, “Everything but the cat.”

“I saved Kanji in the Waste, which was the first time I even knew I was Blue Hand. I raised Kanji and we learned how to hunt, together. I don’t control her, and I don’t understand her well. I’m not good predicting how she will respond when she is protecting me, but we must be bonded in some manner of the Blue that I can’t sense but she can. I can’t explain her behavior during our trip, but it was not what I wanted.”

He paused before delivering his most pregnant admission. “I wanted to lie next to you; I wanted to hold you. I wanted you to hold me.”

He stood up and stared at the ground, embarrassed by the tears at the corners of his eyes. He never sensed Gilly walking up to him until she grasped his upper arms with her hands.

“Look at me Porter,” she ordered and he responded. “Kiss me.”

He gently pressed her lips until she pressed back harder. He wrapped his arms around her and drew her into his embrace. He did not stop until she pulled back.

“You have one answer from me, Porter” Gilly said. “Now I am kicking you out of my apartment for the rest of the day. I have appointments still. Go practice your skills and stay away for the rest of the afternoon. Return at sundown for dinner. Can you do that?”

“I guess. I was tested this morning and Fane promised me that I would find out the results tonight,” He said, hoping that she could explain how it all worked.

Gilly gave him a raised eyebrow, “Fane tested you?”

“Yeah,” Porter admitted. “He said that you were a difficult student.”

“I bet he did,” she snorted. “Who did the evaluating?”

“His second wife did; Fane did not give me her name.”

“You were tested by Fane and his wife?” Gilly asked with a smidgen of incredulity.

“Is that bad?” Porter felt suddenly insecure.

Gilly patted him on the arm, “Stop worrying for there is nothing to fret about here. Fane is one of the Elders and his wife is waiting for the next slot, which means you are receiving special status treatment from the high and mighty. Now, get out of here and come back tonight. Don’t return empty handed either.”

She guided him out the door and closed it behind him. Porter was left to puzzle out exactly what he was supposed to get for her. There was wine down in the kitchen in large casks, but he had never seen Gilly imbibe. Flowers were a better choice, but he had not left the Sky House since he had arrived and was not sure he was permitted to leave even if he knew where the other exits were. He knew they existed and that they led out to the north side of the mountain where orchards spread out. Kanji used them.

They had entered Sky House from the south and the continuous ridge of mountains insured no one could approach from the east or the west. The North Slope and the plain that spread out at its roots were safe because it was virgin territory. Porter sighed as he stared out the window at the view; the wind gave him a slight chill, reminding him that he needed a coat soon.

The first item on his agenda was a winter coat. He returned to his own apartment and retrieved the snakeskin he had carried with him all the way from the Waste. In the lower levels of Sky House, craftspeople had rooms where they manufactured by hand or by Blue the tools and clothes of everyday life. He found a seamstress and presented his skin, which she ooed and ahhed over as she laid it out on her cutting table.