Beneath An Opal Moon by Eric Van Lustbader

Author:Eric Van Lustbader
Language: eng
Format: epub

Beneath An Opal Moon

At length, she did. “I had only been in Corruna a very short time when I met Milhos, you see. Before that directly before mat I had been in Rhein Tudesca on the last of my business assignments for my partner. I had met a man there, a strange, magnetic, beautiful man and for the time I had been in port well, I stayed with him. It was Hellsturm.”

Outside, the nightingale had ceased its song and now even the darkness itself seemed to be holding its breath. But the night seemed a million miles away to him, part of another universe where people loved and laughed, did mundane things such as have dinner, go out to a play or perhaps just stroll quietly down near the sea. Here, a kind of chilling numbness had entered the room at some time when he had been looking elsewhere. Now it seemed to enwrap them both even as the leathery wings of the gigantic man-bat sought to enfold the Daluzan family above their heads.

“Many seasons later, he came to Corruna for he had heard that was where I was bound when I left him. By that time, I was already married to Milhos and deeply in love. But none of that seemed to matter to him. He wanted me. He was persistent, but at last I prevailed upon him to leave me alone. I

BENEATH AN OPAL MOON 153

spent a night with him. Milhos knew none of this, then. I knew how he would take it. He was a man of great honor.

“Then, for many seasons, life went on and I forgot all about Hellsturm. I became pregnant and I had Aufoya. Both Milhos and I were delighted. She grew up. Time seems to accelerate when you have a child. Then, inexplicably, Hellsturm returned as if from the mists beyond time itself and it all began again. Except this time there was Aufeya.” She put her hands against her face, her fingers slender and lovely, her long nails gleaming. When she took them away, her eyes seemed haunted, the green dulled. “She was at an age when everything seems difficult. She is an extraordinarily beautiful girl, my Aufeya, and at that time she was just ripening. She was wild and never more so than at that age. She longed to be a woman and thus delighted in keeping around as many men as she could manage. It was a goodly number. I objected to this most strenuously, sending them away. And she was furious. But I did not think it right. I too, was wild when I was her age and I begrudged her no wildness of her own. But I had had no benefit of parents in my youth and had gotten into so much trouble that at times later I would wonder how I lived to become a woman. This danger I could not allow to touch Aufeya. Yet my restrictions only served to make her more contrary and we argued ceaselessly.

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