Waves 3

(Author's Note: Dedicated to the incomparable EyeofSerpent: may your tapestry find the immortality it so richly deserves)

She bent down and touched the water. It was warm. She smiled wide because Everyone knows the water near the mouth of the Amazon is as cool as the Atlantic.

But it was warm to her. As warm as His touch.

She laughed. Loudly.

Touched herself down there, just to compare. Even warmer. But still not as warm as His touch.

She had come a long way. For someone who had traveled the world by boat, airplane, balloon, dog sled, bicycle, mule, submarine and foot, she still felt that special tingle down there every time she found a new way to get from one place to another. But nothing like this. She gave a small gasp, despite herself. And touched herself again. Her guide looked at her peculiarly. "You want I should leave?" he asked, in broken English.

She put her hands to her head, as much to keep her yellow hair from whipping this way and that in the wind as to shield her eyes from the harsh glare of the sun as she peered out over the endless expanse of the ocean. "Yes, please," she answered without looking at him. "When should I come back?" he asked, bending down to pick up his pack. "Never," she giggled. She couldn't remember the last time she giggled. How she was looking forward to this.

He looked at her incredulously, even as he slung his sack across his shoulder and took a step backwards. "Pardon?"

She smiled and turned to him, her hand lowering to unclasp her belt. "Here," she said as she tossed him the belt with the pouches attached. "Five thousand more, American. No argue!"

She turned back towards the ocean and bent down on her knees again. "Buy your family a new house."

"But...Miss Sutherland...?" He stooped down to pick up the belt.

"You heard me," she whispered in the same tone as the crashing tide; without turning, closed her eyes and smiled as she heard his footsteps in the sand. Five minutes later, she could still hear them as they stepped from the sand to peat soil. Ten minutes later -- the sound of oars chopping the waves. That made her wonder if she could hear the Sunday church bells back in Toronto if she had a mind to.

She gasped for air once again, and fell to her knees in the sand. Her hands dug deep into her trousers. No, no church bells.

Better.

* * *

"Where did you hear about me?" His voice. His blessed voice. Low as the rumbling of the tuba her father used to play, but twice as deafening. Her first instinct was to cover her ears.

Didn't help.

She began to have second thoughts. This was not at all what she had expected. This...Thing in the hospital bed. Fucking hell, his wrinkles had wrinkles. His right eye was swollen shut from some disease or perhaps simply because he was just so bloody old.

But that voice? It pierced her hands. Deep, endless as the echo you hear when you hold a seashell to your ears.

"I asked you where you heard this from?" He asked again. "What? Are you deaf, woman?"

Her mind reeled from the contradictions. An East Texas accent? But that voice was surely older than any of the six flags that flew in front of the government hospital overlooking Galveston Bay. Hell, maybe this WAS who she was looking for after all.

"Money," she answered, finally, drawing a notebook and pen from her purse. "I'm a fairly rich woman." She flipped open the notebook and swept back her hair with her other hand. "I pay very well for information I'm looking for."

"Bah, money," he made a gurgling noise deep in this throat that startled her a bit. "Never had much use for it myself." He lifted an arm. It was so thin that a small layer of flesh hung down an inch from the bone and swung back and forth as he moved. His fingers was knotted in places where there were no joints. She turned towards the window that overlooked the bay.

"I always bartered for stuff I needed." He chuckled. It sounded to her like, of all things, waves hitting the seawall. "If I ever needed stuff."

Sensing he had finished whatever he was doing with that ghastly arm, she turned back. "The nurse said your name is Rihaku?" She looked down at her notebook. "Pardon me for asking, but you don't look Japanese to me."

He turned his head slightly. His right ear was gone. "I've had so many names that I can't remember 'em all. But I always liked that one best - Umi no Rihaku." He smiled. He had two teeth left. She turned back towards the window again. "Know what it means?"

She grinned despite herself as she watched gulls circle a shrimping boat in the distance. "Rihaku the sea," she answered.

"Yep," he chuckled again. "You're pretty good for a youngster."

She took a deep breath and turned back to him. "Well, let's just say I've been around the world more than once." She tried, she really tried, but found herself focusing on the wall above his head. "How many names DO you have?"

"How many languages you speak?" He smiled again, but she wasn't looking.

"Was that a question?"

"No, darlin', that was an answer." He made that strange gurgling noise again. "I reckon I got a name in just about every language you speak and probably close to a dozen you don't." She forced herself to look at him and her eyes narrowed as he continued.

"Not counting those new made up ones like Esper..."

"Esperanto?"

"Yeah, that one." He coughed. "Stupid people ain't got enough different ways to talk past each other, they got to go looking to make up more of 'em."

She jotted down some notes. "I guess you've been around a while," she said without looking up. "Exactly how old are you?"

He drew a breath. "Now, that's a really good question." He closed his good eye for a moment. "I'm gonna have to think on how to answer that one."

She noticed a chair near the window and pulled it over to the bed and sat down while he lay there silently for a few minutes. "Depends," he answered, finally.

She crossed her legs and peered at a spot on the wall behind him. "On what?"

"On how bad you wanna know?"

Oh, yeah, she thought, here it comes. She reached for her purse. "I told you I got no use for money," he said, making that strange noise again. It was starting to sound a bit familiar to her. "You listenin' to a word I say?"

"Of course..."

"Well, you sure as hell ain't lookin' at me, so I gotta ask."

She stood up. "Look, I'm sorry if I wasted your time, but I really don't know if I can do this..."

"Of course you can, darlin', you got the waves in your eyes. Your pretty ass ain't made for sittin' and your feet got a lot of miles on 'em. I can tell, darlin', 'cause I've seen thousands just like you, though maybe not quite as good lookin'. Hundreds of thousands in my time. Maybe millions. Hell, they used to pray to me, you know."

She sat back down.

"You liked that last part, eh?" He grinned. "Yeah, okay, so maybe some of that money of yours found the right hands. Not many of those left, I reckon. Who was it?"

She put the pen to her book and forced herself to look at his good eye. "Is it really that important?"

He smiled and it only grew wider when she didn't look away. "Naw, I guess it ain't." He looked at the window and reached for the bed controls. "Not much left to fear, anyway." He continued to stare out of the window as the bed rose to give him a better view. "And I kinda figured once I couldn't move no more it was just a matter of time before someone tracked me down." He wiggled what was left of his eyebrows. "I'm just happy it was someone as pretty as you."

* * *

She tossed her bra behind her and heard it fall on the sand a foot to the left of her shirt. She could feel the very salt in the air as it swept across her breasts. It tickled her nipples. But it didn't make them hard. They'd been like coral for a half hour now.

Ever since she heard His voice.

Even now it carried from wave crest to wave crest and every bill of every gull and egret for miles around sang His opera.

Slowly, solemnly, she stepped into the water. Even through her boots and trousers, she could feel His touch. He called to her, begged to her, cursed at her, but she simply smiled. She was no slut. Sandra Marie Sutherland was no mere whore to be commanded, even by one such as Him. She had always loved playing hard to get and He would have to work for her.

But she tweaked her nipples and giggled just to give Him a proper incentive.

Stepping up to her knees, through her leathery boots, she felt His hands around her ankles, His lips upon her toes. This was more like it. She laughed. She called his name, taunting him playfully. Wondering aloud how the Master of the Deep could be thwarted by mere cowhide and human engineering.

But just as the last of her words escaped her lips, the sand beneath her turned to ice and she fell backwards onto the beach, her back descending onto sheets of silt and salt, her head cushioned by a pillow of brackish water hollowed suddenly in the sand and her yellow hair caressing the shells and pebbles at His command.

She lifted her head and laughed loud and hard as she watched the waves flow over her legs, invisible fingers tugged at the laces of her boots, a strand of seaweed, long and thin and strong, slid underneath her and snaked between her legs. She felt him rush between her socks and her pants and jet up her legs and his teeth grasped hard on the metal of the zipper and she heard a gull cry in victory overhead as the fabric ripped itself from her waiting hips in all four directions.

She broke into fits of giggles as she brought both hands down to the front of her panties. "No, no, please, no," she laughed as she watched her boots sprout fins and finally swim off her feet.

"Help me!" she tittered as the strand of seaweed slid across her stomach and between her breasts and silty fingers rose from the sand to warmly caress her earlobes.

Slowly and passionately, wave after wave formed thin sheets of foam that lathered over the skin of her legs and hips and stomach, sliding softly and warmly over every inch of her lower flesh, glossing and polishing and oiling away the cursed dryness of her birth, making her over into that which could be blessed by His nature.

Of this, she could say nothing. Her lips could only tremble at the glory of the seduction. She could never, in a hundred lifetimes, dream this.

Her arms lifted from about her sex and lay floating in His hands, His watery mouth taking each finger in turn, each nail cleansed to the root and the fragile hairs inhaled and combed and replaced as they were. His sand rose up between her toes, scouring the tender bottoms of her feet, and she could feel his tongue tenderly tasting of the flesh about her ankles.

Tears began to roll down her cheeks to her mouth, her salt mixing with His upon her lips.

The waves came more frequently now and she could feel the sand beneath her begin to move again. Sensing His intentions, she opened her legs for Him. Holes opened up in the earth beneath her feet and as each of them fell into place, she felt the sand cover them and grasp her ankles firmly. Velvety sheets of silt ran up and down the underside of her legs to her thighs and back down again.

The green and blue seaweed strand was suddenly joined by dozens of its slimy brothers and sisters. They wrapped themselves around her arms, and under her back, weaving a mesh of salty rope that slid into knots about her wrists and elbows. Foam from the tips of larger waves kissed and licked at her breasts, one after the other after the other after the other in an unending assault. Involuntarily, she spasmed, her back arched up, but the waves rose up to meet her and the kelp rope tightened about her, forcing her once more to the sandy bed.

"Fuck, yeah," she grunted.

Deep within, she felt her own wetness rush out to meet his. She could feel His fingers on her cotton prison, the only remaining remnant of her dryness. "Fuck, yeah," she repeated. "Do it."

"Do it!"

Suddenly jets of water whipped around and between her thighs. She could feel the water pressure around her hips and waist increase tenfold. Something hard pressed firmly against her throbbing clit. Ten thousand microscopic fingers slid between the cotton and flesh and pulled in ten thousand directions. The seaweed constricted, squeezing her arms together underneath her. A tendril of sand shot up from the sandy bottom and danced between her asscheeks.

She screamed.

More than once.

* * *

"You got all your fingers?" He was still staring out the window. She closed one eye and peered at him. It was getting just a tiny bit easier for her now. "Yes, last time I looked."

"Nails painted?"

"Uh, no." She glanced down at the pen in her hand, just to make sure.

"Good." He turned back to her. "I got no use for decorations no more. Used to be a big thing with the Children, some kind of holdover from the old days, I guess..." He craned his neck and peered over the edge of the bed with his good eye. "How 'bout your toes?"

Instinctively, she shuffled her feet underneath her chair. "I don't see as how that..."

"Let me see 'em." His neck made an odd, slight crinkling sound -- like Christmas wrapping paper -- as he edged further out over the bed.

She drew her hands into her stomach and grasped the pen and pad tightly. "Really, I don't..."

Suddenly his head drew back over the bed and he stared right through her. "You want to know how old I am? Take off those sandals and show me your toes."

She hesitated for a moment, then smiled. Fucking dirty old man. She unfolded her legs from beneath her skirt and stuck them out and rested her feet on the side of the bed. "You do it."

His head did not move. Neither did his lips. "That is not our pact."

The voice rumbled, low, slow, vibrant, and seemed to flow in with the sea breeze through the open window. Startled, she turned her head there for a moment and raised a hand to her neck.

He cackled loudly as she turned back to him. "I learned that from a holy man down in Peru, back before there was a Peru." He pointed to her sandals. "Now show me your toes."

She took off her sandals and placed them below her chair, then raised her legs, one by one and placed them on the side of the bed again. She noted he barely glanced at them as he spoke. But that thought rested in the back of her brain for only a bare second, because the voice, that amazing voice, seemed to flow from everywhere and nowhere. It hung about her ears like mist, tickling the hairs within her very lobes and running right down her throat.

Again, his lips did not move.

"For every toe on your right foot, I have lived two lives. For every toe on your left foot, with the exception of that especially cute little one, I have lived a thousand years per life. Your left thumb represents the ten percent of all my lives spent in quiet contemplation of who and what and why I am and how I came to be. For every other finger on your thankfully unmanacured hands, I have wasted ten percent of all my lives in hedonistic and violent pleasure, existing only to fulfill my carnal indulgences."

As he spoke in that marvelous voice, she found her eyes move down to her feet, then her hands, until finally she was staring at one thumb that was extended in front of her face. She blinked, then shook her head. Her pad and pen lay on the floor.

"And you're lookin' at the leftover thumb, darlin'." He laughed and leaned back to look again out of the window.

After pausing only a moment, she picked up her pad and pen and did some quick mental calculations. "Nice trick, but your really can't expect me to believe you're THAT old," she sighed. "And you know you can't really ADD percentages..."

He smiled broadly at her math lesson, peering out the window and changing the subject. "You know why they built that seawall out there?"

"Hurricane, I imagine," she shrugged. "Now, what exactly did you mean by the..."

"Not just a hurricane, darlin', THE hurricane," he interrupted. "Blew in here about a hundred years back, killed more folks than damned near every hurricane before or after. A Lover's knife, it was, and the reason I'm sittin' here talkin' to you now. She tried to get me then 'cause I snubbed Her one too many times, I reckon, but I thought it was actually kinda sweet in a Medea kinda way. So I stayed around these parts, just to piss Her off."

"I'm not following."

"You were gonna ask about that last thumb, right?" He turned back to look at her. "Why I'm sittin' here talkin' to you like one of the locals crabbers down on the piers instead of in ancient Greek or Latin or somethin'"

"Okay, I'll bite," she smiled and put her pen to pad again in anticipation.

He cackled loudly again, then that voice went low and soft and rolled across the room like a dense fog. "It's 'cause I AM one of the local crabbers down on the piers, darlin'," it whispered. "After thousands of years of tryin' and tryin' I finally got it right. And She don't like it one bit."

She started to jot something down, then stopped. "She?"

He leaned back in his bed and coughed. "Take off your shirt." He said it casually.

"I will not," she smiled and shook her head as if he made a bad joke.

"The nurses know better'n to come in here unless I call 'em." He winked at her with his good eye.

She laughed. "I don't take off my blouse in front of just every ordinary crabber, you know."

"Fair enough," he exhaled through that wide, toothless smile. "We can talk about something else, then. Maybe about what the best time of the day is for watchin' the dolphins? Or where along the beach you can find all the best shells. I know tons of stuff."

She looked at him for a moment, then put down her pad, gave a heavy sigh and reached for the bottom button.

He turned back to the window. "Now, I don't know what you come here thinkin' to find, but I figure it was some good-lookin' hunk with magic tricks and death rays or whatever, 'cause that just what those folks who took your money told you to expect. Well, truth is, most of us that been around a long while are not a whole lot different from you right now."

She'd reached the third button and paused for a moment.

"The world sees this nice, smooth, pretty synthetic skin 'cause that's what we want 'em to see, but underneath it's all appendectomy scars, bullet wounds, cuts that never healed right, elbow surgeries from tumbles down hills..."

She stopped at the top button and bit her lip as he turned and looked through her again.

"Scars from bad boob jobs."

She crossed her arms in front of her and started to get up.

"What?" he shrugged. "You wanted magic tricks, I'm giving you magic tricks."

She sat back down, but kept her arms crossed in front of her. The smile was gone. The bravado was gone. She hung her head and slowly, very slowly, opened her blouse to him. "I..."

"You come to me seeking to walk where there are no footprints. To swim in a sea that has never tasted human flesh. You look at the moon each and every night and do not see the Eye of the Ancients, but only a place where there stands an American flag - a symbol of the reach of mankind. You come to me hoping that there is a place for Sandra Marie Sutherland in the written history of the world."

As the blouse fell from behind her shoulders to drape over the back of the chair, he drew a heavy sigh and looked away.

"Sorry, darlin', but what you really want is somethin' I just can't give you."

* * *

She leaned back in the sand and smiled up at the sun. They always told her that you cannot look at the sun without harming your eyes.

Her smile grew ever wider as she stared.

She studied the trees, the bushes, the clouds. She imagined the clouds were sheep, mountains, elephants, barbecue potato chips, her grandmother's smile.

The peak of Everest, where she left her wedding ring.