Alcestis, poised, touch of sunbaked sweat drying onto her. Finding her balance as she stands in the open fields. The odd foreign man behind her, pale and cool as ivory in the heat.
Inside her eyes, all is warm orange. Even with them shut the Agaean sunlight is bright enough to burn inside. She stands, breathing just a little too hard, and listens to his voice pass slowly behind her.
- Feel the wind? he asks. -Just a light breeze. You can feel it against your skin. You're so light, if you lifted up just a touch it could blow you away.
His words form a circle around her as he paces. - There's a rhythm to it. A tempo. Swelling and fading. A slow endless beat, slower even than your heart. It's the longest music in the world.
And she can feel it, spreading across her: individual points of gooseflesh on her arms and chest, the ever-so-slight change in the pressure of her flounced skirt against her legs. She relaxes into it, just lets herself feel the wind blowing through her, as if emptying her mind will make her as light as he says.
He's right by her ear now, but softer than ever. -You can feel it quickening now.
Alcestis shivers for a moment. His breath came against the wind, she could feel it rock her in a different direction. She shifts her balance, raises herself up, light on her toes, ready to take the first step.
- It's got a good beat, you can dance to it. Ask the local eagles. You know there are some people in the world for whom dancing isn't sacred? Oh, give them a tune and they can bounce about a bit, but that's as much as they know or care... They don't know what it means to move with the world, not just through it.
She knows the dance, remembers from her time in the temple. This isn't so different. The tempo is far slower, but she can find it now - in the rhythm of the breeze playing across her skin, as it shifts direction, spirals and eddies, but always in the end leads back to the sea. And the counter-rhythm of his words winding around her.
-Now take the wind to pieces. It's coming from so many directions at once, just look at one of them. Just feel the part that's moving across you, left to right.
She can feel the difference... the afternoon sunfire on her right, just that much warmer than the breeze on the other side. Both sides of her tingling now, shivering in the heat.
- Now the other direction. Just feel the bit of the wind on your front. It's got its own rhythm, you can play the two of them against each other. You'll have to remember that, to keep control.
- And now the other direction. Out of the plane, right angles to everything else, away from the ways you usually move. Straight up and down. You can feel the wind lifting you, can't you? You can't follow it, not yet, but you can feel this pull ready to launch you.
- And now the other other direction.
- You can feel the wind blowing from your past to your future. A breath inside you, fanning the little spark of fire at your core. Feel that now.
And it's as clear and sharp as all the others - the thrumming of her body, that she'd never been able to pick out from her heartbeat. The currents blowing inside her, pulling her to the next moment. She can feel the rhythm running through each second, she knows how to move with it.
Alcestis, ready now to dance.
- Now, up -
And she blows away.
A moment later she's falling, legs flailing in search of the ground. When she hits it's a smack across her chest, driving the breath from her even as she tries to gasp. Suddenly furious with herself, she rolls over in the dust, fighting to breathe, demanding of her body which piece of it has failed her.
She sits up, pushing her hair out of her face and plucking grass from the heavy black tresses. One of her earrings is gone, lost during her instant of flight.
By the time he finds her, on the goat-track, the sun is sinking low. The sunset brings colour to his pasty foreign skin, makes him look like he's blushing. No, she realises, he is flushed - from excitement, triumph, awe, or the last run he took to catch her once he came over the hill. There's a hint of shadow under his cheekbones, a sketch of crows-feet around his eyes, a look of amazement too fierce to be simple joy.
- Well I'm thoroughly impressed, he tells her.
- I'm not, the way I landed...
- Halfway across the island, he says as they turn and head for home. And only then does the low wonder in his voice reach her, and she begins to realise what she's just done.
- How did I do it? How did I go so far?
He begins to explain, one of his complex tales full of moving hands and convoluted gestures. - Well I'd expected you to catch just the edge of one of the temporal currents, but instead you dived right into the middle of them. For a fragment of a second, you held yourself completely still.
- It didn't feel like stillness!
- The Earth moved, rotating and revolving and so forth, and so the next moment there was something else underneath you.
- So I can just... vanish. Get away from them.
He frowns, suddenly stern. - Well that would confuse them, but I don't think it would hold their attention. So it does rather miss the point of the exercise. No, you need to be able to do more than stay still - you need to be able to move as you choose. Catch the current, ride it at an angle, blend it into the other three dimensions of the dance. The way the currents round here are distorted, you can use them to move through space as well.
- And keep riding them?
- Mm, yes. That's all flying is, enough moments of not falling.
They walk together towards the sunset. It doesn't make her think of endings, but of all the days to come.
