Free Bold as Love by Gwyneth Jones Page A

easily slip away while she was kneeling here. Perhaps that was what you were supposed to do, let the words wash over and meditate. Just look at that green, glossy blade of grass… Olwen Devi was right. She’d never thought of it before but going into no-time did feel like two planes aligning together, two slides from a kaleidescope lining up. The world that Fio perceived moved into phase with this thing, Fio , that was doing the perceiving, so you couldn’t tell the two of them apart. She could well and happily believe that the effect was caused by something chemical going on in her neurons, but it still felt numinous and…an impossible perspective, like an Escher sort of thing. Now she was looking through the tent wall, and looking back to that moment in time where Ax stood, slightly lost in his shabby leather coat, nothing like Rufus O’Niall’s. Ax became a focus point, a point on a disc, and from this point sprang lines of sight, which reached to another disc, another section through the helix of time and here was Ax again, in a different place, in that same old coat, around him a huge crowd. She had the impression he was selling tickets for something, or handing out flyers. They were going like hotcakes (where are these cakes, why are they hot?): and here he was again, an even bigger crowd, a flag with a red cross, people cheering, a knowledge of terrible events, (an intense, violent feeling that she didn’t want to look any closer at that information…) behind the stark, resolute triumph on his familar face—
    Good heavens!
    Fiorinda’s eyes flew open. The Zen Self lecture was still going on. The lotus—kneed people around her were quiet. For a moment a smooth, brown, oval, middle-aged face filled her view, like a close-up on a tv screen. It was as if Olwen was looking straight at her, and knew what had happened to her. Distance reasserted itself. Olwen Devi was far away on her little stage: Fiorinda got up and hurriedly left the tent.
    Back at the van, Sage was standing half naked beside the corpse of a sheep, which hung by its heels from a framework of raw timber. His slick black dungarees were twisted around his hips, blood drizzled over them and his lean, white, muscle-raked torso as if he’d been spattered by a fountain; the whole scene gleaming in sunlight. His unmasked hands, surprisingly deft despite their deformity, were absolutely covered in blood, he was flensing the animal with a long thin knife. The young sheep’s head, adorned with a cute pair of sprouting horns, stood on the grass, gazing at Fiorinda with smothered, yellow eyes.
    ‘Good grief. Where did you get that?’
    ‘Farmer’s market, up the road. We’ve been pursuing the feasibility study: bought this as a sign of good faith. It costs nothing, meat on the hoof. Got some potatoes too.’
    ‘Did you kill it just now?’
    ‘Yeah.’ He stretched his blood-streaked arms to heaven. ‘Yeah!’
    ‘You are as a god,’ said Fio. She sat on the grass to watch. ‘I met Ax. Sage, you know him, sort of. Do you have any idea why he is the way he is?’
    ‘You mean, why does the miserable sod think he has to rule the world?’ The sheep’s hide slithered free and fell in a heap beside the shit bucket, which had been co-opted to hold its innards. ‘Well, I did ask him that question, more or less, one aberrant occasion when we were chatting. Far as I recall, the explanation is…’ Changing to a different knife, he cut some generous collops of bluish-red flesh and laid them on the inner face of the fresh skin. Still life. ‘Mmm, his dad’s a bit of a shite, and he loves his mum but the tv she likes to watch makes him puke. So, he needs to rule the world because he has a normal family background. Make of it what you will—’
    ‘It’s probably genetic.’
    Sage grinned at her, went to the back of the van, and emptied several buckets of water over himself from their rain butt. When he returned, masked and wearing a shirt of homespun