The Wicker Tree by Robin Hardy

Author:Robin Hardy [Hardy, Robin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Luath Press Ltd
Published: 2012-11-27T05:00:00+00:00

At the Sacred Pool

THE ISLAND CONSISTED of a lush field of long grass, its banks lined with bull rushes and several willow trees weeping into the fast moving, vapouring Sulis. In its centre was some collapsed masonry, part of what might once have been a temple. It rather resembled a crude throne. Both Lolly and Steve dismounted, tethering their horses loosely to a bush and a willow respectively, allowing them to graze.

'So you won, Steve,' she called through the mist. 'You'd make a good Laddie.'

'I won?' laughed Steve. 'Prince won! Isn't Sulis, like, the name of some kind of goddess?'

'How d'you know that?'

'I already met up with Sulis,' said Steve, 'on the front of Lachlan's Rolls. I didn't realise goddesses could be that cute.'

'I'm glad you approved of her. I posed for that little statue. It was a great honour… I like to come here and swim, especially when the air is cold like this morning – besides this is a sacred spring.'

Steve now had the uncanny feeling that he was dreaming, that nothing he was seeing or hearing was quite real. As an average young man, even one committed to the Silver Ring Thing, he managed to desire several women every week. A waitress here, a girl in the Seven Eleven store there, a cheerleader seen at a football game. But even though he might visit them in his waking imagination or in his dreams, he never hoped for them to materialise, to throw off their clothes and beckon him on. Why? Because he knew it was just lust. And although this was, he admitted, a convoluted way of looking at it, the Lord never rewarded lust.

But here was Lolly taking off her shirt and riding britches, her bra and her panties, as naturally and unhurriedly as anyone who had no other motive but that they were getting ready to plunge in for a swim. She looked ethereally beautiful in the mist, like one of those nymphs you'd see in very old Coca-Cola ads. This was not 'come and get it' nudity like you saw at the Big Bamboo club in Fort Worth, where the girls writhed down a slithery steel pole from the ceiling to bumps and grinds music. Notatall! This – hell, she, Lolly was beautiful and if she was doing this for anybody – well, he was that anybody.

Still he must cling to reality. He was here on a mission with Beth. They were Redeemers come to save people like Lolly.

'I think you're kidding us with all this Goddess shit,' he forced himself to say. He feared the spell he thought she was casting upon him. The cruder his denunciation the safer he'd feel from its effect. He went on: 'I guess you think Beth and me, we're a couple of retards. You're just kidding me – right? It's just a hot spring, Yeah, I think I can smell the sulphur – right?'

But Lolly had started to part the reeds and walk into the river.

'You believe

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