Free Marianne, the Magus & the Manticore by Sheri S. Tepper Page A

voice, "Be warned."
    Marianne had not expected the wine, was not guarded against it, did not notice as it flowed around the controls she had set upon herself, washed away the little dikes and walls of the resolutions she had made, let her forget it was to have been an evening of politeness only, without future, without overtones. She felt herself beginning to glitter, did nothing at all to stop it, simply let it go on as though she were twelve once more, at the dinner table with Cloud-haired mama and Papa and their guests, full of happy questions and reasonably polite behavior, ready to be charmed and charming. 'Tell me about Alphenlicht," she demanded. "All about it. Not the politics, but how it smells and tastes. What it is like to live there."
    "Shall I be scholarly and give you the history? Or do you want a travelogue?" Gods but she is beautiful. In this light, her skin is like pearl.
    "Don't tell me how it got that way. Just tell me how it is."
    She licked her lips un-self-consciously, and he felt them on his own. He turned to look out the window and summon his wits.
    "Well, then. Alphenlicht is a small country. You know that.
    It is a mountainous one. There is no capital, as such. Instead, there are many small towns and villages gathered around the fortresses built by our ancestors, many of them on the sites of older fortresses built by the Urartians centuries before. Hilltop fortresses, mostly, with high stone walls topped by ragged battlements. They march along the flanks and edges of the mountains as though they had been built by nature rather than by man, gray and lichened, looking as old as forever.
    "Outside the walls, the towns straggle down the hillsides, narrow streets winding among clumps of walled buildings, half stable, part barn, part dwelling. We came from Median stock, remember. The Medes could never do without horses, and their houses were always surrounded by stableyards."
    "Hies," commented Marianne. "There would be lots of flies."
    "No," he objected. "We are not primitive. The litter from our stables enriches our farmland. Then, too, there is a constant smoky wind in Alphenlicht. We say it is possible to stand on the southern border of our country and know what is being cooked for supper on the northern edge. You asked what the country smells like, and that is it. Woodsmoke, as I have smelled here in autumn when the leaves are being burned; a smell as nostalgic among men as any I know of. A primitive smell, evoking the campfires of our most ancient ancestors." He thought about this, knowing it for a new-old truth.
    "Our houses are of stone, for the most part. We are self-consciously protective about our traditions, so we have a fondness still for glazed tile and many wooden pillars supporting ornate, carved capitals, often in the shapes of horses or bulls or mythical beasts. There is plaster over the stone, making the rooms white. The walls are thick, both for winter warmth and for summer cool, so windows are set deep and covered with wood screens which break the light, throwing a lace of shadow into our rooms. Floors are of stone for summer cool, but in winter we cover them with rugs, mostly from Turkey or Iran.
    Our people have never been great rug makers.
    "Ceilings are often vaulted, with wind scoops at the ends, to bring in the summer winds. In winter we cover them with stout shutters which seldom fit as well as they should. We say of an oddly assorted couple that they fit like scoop shutters, meaning that they do not..." He fell silent, musing, seeing his homeland through her eyes and his own words, as though newly.
    "What do you eat?" she asked, taking the last bite of her final crab. "I am not hungry any longer, but I love to hear about food."
    "Lamb and mutton. Chicken. Wild game. I have a particular fondness for wild fowl. Then, let me see, there are all the usual vegetables and grains. There are sheltered orchards along the foot of the snows where we grow apricots and peaches. We have