Free Cold Wind by Nicola Griffith Page A

of an old blues piece by a woman with a clearly detectable English accent beneath the Delta tones. Perhaps there was a paper in it: In this decade, why do English women sing the blues better than anyone since those who invented it? Music traditions flitted from one place to another acquiring heft and solidity as different cultures adopted them. Over the years they became majestic and apparently eternal. They never were.
    The music, at least, did not make me feel like an outsider. It was an old friend. I let it talk to me, let it in, let the fat, untuned bass drum, timed to a slow heartbeat, drive the melody into the marrow of my long bones where it hummed like a bee, and the river of music push against the wall of my belly …
    â€¦ and they were speaking Korean at a table against the wall, which took me back to the biting cold of the Korean DMZ, the mud on the drinking hole sprinkled with frost, the water buffalo and her calf—
    The door slammed open bringing with it a gust of snowy air—and a scent older than anything in the city. Every cell in my body leapt.
    Two women came in laughing. The one in jeans and a down vest seemed taller, though she wasn’t. Her cheeks were hectic, brown eyes brilliant, and not only from the cold. Women have lit up that way for thousands of years when they have found someone they want, someone whose belly will lie on theirs heavy and soft and urgent, whose weight they welcome, whose voice thrills them, whose taste, scent, turn of the head makes them thrum with need, ring and sing with it. They laugh. They glow.
    The other was paler, the red-brown of old ivory stained with tea. Her eyes were brown, too, slanted and wide set. Deep brown, velvet. Snow dappled her hair. She stood by the door, blinking, as people do when they walk from dark into light.
    My aorta opened wide and blood gushed through every artery, all my senses gearing up. But I pretended not to see her. I gazed out of the window, at the sleet turning to snow, the air clotting with cold, and the pavement softening from black to gray. Reflected in the glass the women around me were coming alert, spines straightening, cheeks blooming, capillaries opening.
    She was here. She was real. I’d been right.
    The woman in the down vest smiled, touched the other on the shoulder, and said something. They moved through the doorway to the pool room and out of sight.
    I’d been right. I relished the realization because soon I wouldn’t be able to; soon my mind would be submerged and I’d be lost in a pull almost as old as the turning of the seasons. I watched the snow come down in streetlight cold as moonlight and, for a moment, missed the old sodium lamps with their warm yellow glow, their hint of hearth and home and belonging.
    I pondered her clothes: long dress, with a thick drape; long coat of oddly indeterminate color; boots. Those were long, too. Not shiny. Brown? Black? I frowned. I couldn’t tell. It didn’t matter. She was here. It would go as it would.
    I moved into energy-conversation mode, as in the field when watching groups whose habits you know as well as your own name: reflexes begun but arrested, peripheral vision engaged. Around me the bar moved from hot to simmering and now a new scent undercut the usual wood-and-hops of microbrews and the holiday cinnamon: the sting of liquor. Someone turned up the music. Two women at different tables—one of the Koreans and a gap-toothed white girl—exchanged glances; one followed the other to the bathroom.
    The snow fell steadily. Traffic would be snarling the intersections, blocked by buses slid sideways down the hill. Soon those vehicles would be abandoned and the streets utterly empty. The CCTV would be locked with cold.
    Soon.
    The foam on the inside of my glass sagged like a curtain swag then slid to the bottom. I’d drunk it faster than I’d meant. At the table by the wall a Korean voice was raised—her girlfriend had taken