Shadow Though it Be:  An Excursus – Chapter 11

by L. Inman

 

“No onions,” Elisabeth said.

            “No onions,” Giles repeated into the phone.  “And two bags of chips….”

            “Or tomatoes,” she added belatedly.

            He turned to her an aggrieved look.  “Why didn’t you say that before?”

            “Okay, then, I’m fine with tomatoes.  They’re easy to pick off.”

            He snorted and went back to ordering, then turned around again.  “What kind of chips?”

            “Cheetos.”

            “And you propose to touch my books afterward?  I think not.”

            Elisabeth rolled her eyes.  “Of course I’ll wash my hands.”

            “Thoroughly,” he said; and ordered Cheetos for her.

            “On the other hand,” she said wickedly, as he was writing down the total, “I can get my fingers just as clean by licking the orange off.”

            She sat back and listened to his voice, confirming the order, suffer a change in timbre—a stringendo that would have made a violin’s G string snap violently.  But he recovered himself (“Yes, thank you very much.  Goodbye.”), put down the phone, and turned to her, his face bland.  “I’m sorry, did you say something?”

            “No,” she said, equally innocent.

            “They said twenty minutes,” Giles said. 

            “Good.  I’m hungry.”

            Anya was due back from her lunch break in ten minutes; meanwhile, Giles and Elisabeth were in the front of the shop, he to mind the counter and she to explore.  Which she was taking her time about doing.  She had asked him about the Blakes (“Yes, very good trade I made with a demon in Iowa.” “Iowa??” “Don’t ask.”); examined the smudging sticks (“Not as expensive as some I’ve seen.” “And it’s quality sage, too.  Anya convinced me to run a special.”); and run her hand along the spines of a shelf of books she had not seen on her first visit. 

            Now, she wandered up to a display case of statues and idols made of various materials.  She lifted a tall, narrow wooden statue and turned to him with it.

            “What’s this for, or dare I even ask?”

            He glanced up from his pad and calculator.  “Hm?  Oh, that’s for fertility rituals.”

            “It is?”  She frowned at the statue’s chiseled face.  “But it’s so phallic.”

            “Well, you see, Elisabeth,” he said gravely, “there’s a certain thing that happens when a man and a woman—”

            “Yeah, yeah, yeah.  No, I meant that I thought fertility rituals depended on feminine icons for their power—like—like this.”  She held up a small, squat, full-breasted female figure.

            “Well, that’s a fertility god too.”

            “Huh.  So what do people do, do they use different idols for different rituals, or does it matter which one you use? or, I get it, maybe you need both.”  She held up the two idols facing each other and made them talk, giving them each different voices.  “‘I thought you were going to take care of this one.’ ‘No, you idiot, this one’s your fault.  He couldn’t perform, remember?  That’s your jurisdiction.’ ‘Well, what do you suggest?’ ‘I don’t know, you’re the male fertility god.  I just till the ground and add the fertilizing compound.  You’re in charge of the seeds.’ ‘Hey now—’ ‘Probably spilt them all on the way to the casting ground without noticing.  Isn’t that just like a man.  Now there’ll be things growing everywhere except where we want them—’ ‘I don’t need you to tell me my job, you hag—’”  (Elisabeth darted a glance at Giles: he had braced his elbow on the counter, sealing that hand over his mouth.  His eyes were shut, his shoulders were shaking, and his face was going deeply red.)  “‘I don’t care what you say, it’s not my fault she didn’t pass the rabbit test—’”

            “What about rabbits?” Anya said warily from the door.

            Startled, Elisabeth almost dropped the fertility statues.  “Nothing,” she said.  She hastily returned the statues to their place on the shelf.  “Just an expression.”

            “We were—” Giles, still red-faced, cleared his throat painfully— “discussing fertility spells.”

            “But there’s no rabbits in here.”  She eyed them both narrowly.

            “No,” Giles assured her.

            “Good.”  Anya came in all the way and shut the door behind her.

            “Excuse me,” Giles said, lifting a finger with the air of one drunkenly dignified.  “I must visit the restroom.”  He made his way from behind the counter and into the back.  Very faintly, the sound of his convulsive laughter emanated into the front room.

            “D’you think he’s all right?” Anya asked Elisabeth.

            Elisabeth shrugged. “I think so.”

            Anya shrugged in return, and went behind the counter to take up where Giles had left off with the pen and calculator.

            Disturbingly, Giles remained gone, and when the delivery boy arrived with their food Elisabeth cocked an eye at Anya.  Anya was not at all likely to fund their lunch from the till, so Elisabeth mentally girded up her loins and, telling the delivery boy to hold on, approached the little bathroom in the back hall and knocked on the door.  “Food’s here,” she said loudly.

            “One moment,” he said from behind the door, smothering a giggle.

            She decided not to hang around until he came out.  Instead she went back into the main room and told the delivery boy:  “The man with the money is on his way.”

            “Yes,” Anya said, “he’s the man with the money, and I’m the woman with the money.”

            The delivery boy just looked at her.

            Elisabeth said, “I’m sure it will be just a few…,” when Giles came in, considerably pinker around the gills and rather wet-eyed.  He paid the delivery boy, took the large brown sack from him, and retreated into the back room again.  Elisabeth followed.

            She found him examining the contents of the bag with a great deal of care.  “Let’s see,” he said, “this one should be yours—no onions—and this would be your bag of Cheetos….”

            She grinned.  “I do promise to wash my hands.  Thoroughly.”

            “See to it,” he said without looking at her, a flush creeping up his face again.

            Elisabeth plopped into her chair with her sandwich and chips.  She made sure that her piles of books and notes were neatly tidied aside before she unwrapped the sandwich.  For a few minutes she suspended thought in order to attack the food.  After several voracious bites, she looked up and saw that he had barely begun.  He pulled out his handkerchief and cleared his throat into it.  “Your appetite seems to have seen a resurgence.”

            “Yes,” she said, swallowing delicately, “buffoonery makes me hungry.”

            “H’rm, well,” he said.  “Good.”

            She grinned at him and held up a Cheeto preparatory to eating it.  “Didn’t think you’d find my little Punch-and-Judy show quite so amusing.”

            He dared a glance at her, then rolled his eyes and gave an acquiescent sigh.  “I’ll never,” he said, chuckling again, “look at those idols in quite the same way again.  And then—” he curbed another grin with one forefinger— “Anya coming in when she did was just—”  He didn’t try to finish the sentence, but shook his head, laughing quietly.

            “Yes,” she agreed, “that was funny.”

            “So,” he said, taking a large bite of his sandwich and talking around it, “have you quite got your revenge on me for getting you up so early?”

            It was her turn to smile acquiescently.  “I seem to recall swearing at you a number of times.”

            “You did.”

            “Poor Rupert,” she said.  “It was probably undeserved.”

            “It was.  I’ll have you know that I am, in point of fact, a very heartful bastard.”

            She giggled.  “I would not dare deny it,” she said.

            “Good.”  He swallowed and reached to open his bag of chips.  “Though I must say, I gladly accept being called names and tormented with laughter over giving you the shock I did the other morning and leaving you to suffer a nervestorm.”

            She looked up at him wide-eyed.  “Oh…you think you were responsible for that?”

            “Well, I doubt I was any help.”  But she could tell from his tone that he doubted far more than that.  Well, that was easily remedied.

            “You were not responsible for my nervestorm,” she said.  “That train had already pulled out of the station.  And I mean a long time before.  I was ignoring symptoms as early as….”  She thought about it.  “…tea, that first afternoon.”

            “Ignoring,” he repeated, frowning at her, but she went on:

            “The first day…how many days have I been here, exactly?”

            They both thought.  Giles moved his lips and unfolded four fingers, counting.  “Four,” he said.  “This is your fourth day here.”

            Elisabeth was about to say something about how much longer than four days it seemed, but he forestalled her.

            “Is it your common practice to ignore symptoms until it is too late to do anything about them?”

            She went still under his gaze, her pulse going faster.  “No,” she said carefully.  “It’s only that I hadn’t had a bad episode like that in—well, in years, really.  It usually takes much longer to ramp up to that point.  I…I thought that keeping the symptoms out of the fore would make it easier for me to focus on the—the problem at hand.  And I hoped in the meantime that the symptoms would solve themselves in my subconscious.  They didn’t,” she said, looking down at her half-eaten sandwich.  “It was a bad gamble, that was all.” 

            “You might have told me,” he said gently.

            She was too chastened to be angry, but that point needed clearing up.  She looked up at him.  “And if I had?  Could you have dealt with it on top of everything else?  We were still coming to grips with one another.  And—and you were already helping me far more than—”  She stopped, glancing away.

            “More than was comfortable?” he said, more gently still.

            She nodded, her lips tightening.

            There was a silence.  Then he said:  “It is no shame to accept help when one is in extremis.”

            She could not look at him.  “It might be a shame to be in extremis,” she said softly.

            “Well,” he said unexpectedly, “that is understood.”

            Startled, she brought her gaze back to his face.  She had forgotten: of course he knew what that meant. 

            The small smile on his lips was both sardonic and understanding.  “Do you have the courage to eat the bread of mortals?”

            She laughed softly, conceding the point.

            He was looking at her again, gently probing with his gaze; she thought she ought to be used to the sensation by now.  He said, his voice tentative:  “May I ask where it comes from?”

            “What, the illness?” she said, though it could hardly be anything else.

            “Yes.”

            She shrugged, managed a glance into his face.  “A number of things.  My personality, for one.  Years’ worth of bottled-up stress, for another.  Nothing earth-shaking, really.”

            “No.  Have you never wanted to stop it at the source?”

            She drew a breath and creased her napkin with a delicate precision.  “The source,” she said... “—the source, I don’t think is under my control.”

            “But the place where it meets you could be, perhaps.”

            She didn’t know, really, what he meant, and didn’t want to know.  But the silence drew the question out of her.  “What are you suggesting, exactly?”

            He paused.  “I was wondering if you had tried something deeper than symptom control.”

            Elisabeth sighed: so they were going to have this conversation.  “Cognitive therapy.  It works, up to a point.”

            He nodded.  “So I should think.  You haven’t tried any, er, non-clinical methods, then?”

            “You mean, like magicks?” she asked, twin tendrils of amusement and horror rising in her chest.

            He lifted his eyes in an endearing Professor-Giles-thought-gesture that only added to her distress.  “Well, not magicks precisely.  I meant more in the realm of meditation techniques.”

            She shook her head definitely.  “I don’t do meditation.  My thoughts move too fast and break themselves off before I can get to any type of meditative state.”

            “I meant, guided meditation.”  His eyes were on her face, gauging her reaction.

            She curled her toes inside her shoes and looked at him sidelong.  “You mean...like the kind you’ve been doing with Buffy?”

            He blinked.  “Well, perhaps not quite on that order, but yes, that’s the type I meant.”

            She shook her head again, harder.  “I couldn’t do that.  It’s too much like hypnosis for my taste.  I fear I’d be too easy to control—and then I would panic, and it would be very bad.”

            “But,” he said earnestly, “the point of guided meditation is to lay the power back into your own hands, not into someone else’s.”

            “I don’t know but what that’s scarier than laying it into yours,” she said. 

            For reply, he gave her a little sad smile.  She studied his face, searching for the slightest trace in his expression of a Messiah complex.  Finding none, she sat back, took a sip of her soda, put the can down, and levelled her gaze at him.  If what she was about to say backfired—

            “And this isn’t a ploy to dig into my brain for hints about the future?”

            He started visibly, blinking.  “I never thought of—”  Then, predictably, the color rose in his face.  He said nothing, nor did he really move, but she could see his anger growing, honing his eyes to a sharpness and thinning his lips.

            A small trembling made itself felt within her, but her face and voice were mercifully calm.  “You know I had to say it,” she said.

            He was working for control: it took a long time for him to reply.  “Do you think I would do that?” he said at last, his voice soft like a silk scarf, dangerous as a garrote.

            “No,” she said.

            “Then I fail to see why—”

            “Because if I didn’t, you’d look a fool.  It’s there, and if you were to try and reassure me yourself, you’d look foolish.”  She swallowed dryly.  “And I needed to know how you would respond.”

            One of his eyebrows quirked up.  “And are you satisfied with the result?”

            “Dammit, Rupert,” she burst out, “don’t get all supercilious on me.  I wasn’t going out of my way to insult you, I was trying to get things clear.”

            “And incidentally to get out from under all scrutiny.”

            “Do you blame me for that?”

            “Yes,” he said, startling her.  “Since as far as I can see, it’s entirely unnecessary.”

            “One doesn’t,” she said coldly, “have to have a criminal record to wish to avoid scrutiny.”

            His mouth moved a little.  “And do you have a criminal record?”

            She couldn’t help it; she had to laugh.  “No.”

            She was glad to see him smile in return.  He said:  “Then tell me: why the defense by means of offense?”

            “You mean, what am I protecting?”

            “If you like.”

            She breathed, and thought about it.  “I don’t know.”

            “Don’t you think you should try to find out?  For your sake, I mean.”

            She looked up at him.  “I don’t think this is a good time to go looking for trouble.”

            “There never is a good time for that,” he said.

            She couldn’t deny him that.

            “And,” he went on, “oddly enough, you’re in a relatively safe place for it.  There’s nobody here whose opinion is vital; no one to judge you one way or the other....”

            “Except,” she said, “your opinion does matter to me.”

            Their eyes met on it: he smiled wryly.  “And apparently your opinion matters to me.  So we are even.”

            There was a silence while they looked at one another over their forgotten lunches.  “Well?” Giles said finally.

            Elisabeth sucked in her lips briefly, her breath thick in her chest—daring—daring—  She quailed.

            “I can’t,” she said.

            He gave a single, accepting nod; then bent his attention to his sandwich, lying on the table with only one bite taken out of it.  He picked it up and began to eat again.

            After a trembly pause, she decided to follow suit, though her appetite had dissolved along with her bonhomie.

            So she wasn’t going to do it, wasn’t going to have to face up to the “source,” as Giles called it, of her illness.  She should be relieved; and she was.  It was probably for the best anyway.  It’d be madness, really, to tinker with her psychological makeup with half her psyche left behind in her home dimension.  She hadn’t even broached that with him, but he’d see the sense of that.  He might argue, of course, that they had very little to lose.  He might even argue that forging contact between her and her fears might clear the air for when they did do the spell.  When they found the spell.  The five-candle-bad-poem spell, whatever it was.  But he would have to concede that it wasn’t an argument that would hold nitroglycerin for five minutes.  Elisabeth chewed the bite she’d taken of her sandwich.  It was taking forever to get it chewed enough to swallow.  Giles seemed to be having no trouble swallowing his food, the—heartful bastard.  A very apt self-description, Elisabeth thought; probably more apt than even he knows.  Though, she mused, finally getting the first bite of her sandwich down, there seemed to be very little the man didn’t know of himself at this point.

            And the rest he would soon find out. 

            Elisabeth put her sandwich down and stared hard at it.  Licked a trace of mustard off the inside of her thumb.  She raised her head tentatively.

            “Giles?”

            “Yes?”  Except he had just taken a bite, and it sounded more like “Ymmmrphl?”

            Elisabeth didn’t even smile.

            “Would it...would it be absolute?” she asked, in a small voice.

            He swallowed his bite painfully whole and said, “Would what be absolute?”

            “The...the meditation thing.”

            A brief light sprang up in his eyes.  She supposed it meant that he was, well, proud of her, and had her suspicions confirmed when she searched his eyes a second later and found that he’d schooled the emotion carefully out of sight.

            “If done correctly,” he said, blandly, “it would be no more and no less than what you want it to be.”

            “Positive?” she said, not making it a question.

            He nodded.

            “Then I might try it.”

            He nodded again.

            “Would you...?”

            His eyes and voice were steady.  “I would.”

            “That is, if you’re not still mad at me for—you know, accusing you....”

            He sighed deeply.  “I had that coming.  Especially after my earlier efforts to worm information from you.  Pax?”

            She stuck out her hand across the table in reply.  Before shaking it, however, he tipped her hand delicately at the wrist and checked her fingers for orange Cheeto grime.  She laughed giddily as, finding none, he took her hand in a firm shake.

            “When shall we do it, then?” she said, now shivering a little.

            “Now, if you like,” he said. 

            “Okay,” she said swallowing.  Her mouth had gone completely dry, so she took another drink of her soda.

            “We should go someplace where the light is better,” Giles said, surveying the lamps and windows with a critical eye.  “There’s a table in the corner of the training room; that would probably be best.  And Buffy won’t be round to train till this evening, so you’ll have the room to yourself for, I should think, the required amount of time.”

            He got up and began to rummage in the same cabinet whence came the preservation supplies.  “I had my book and crystals put away in here, I think,” he muttered, mostly to himself.  “Ah!”  He drew out a thick leather case and set it on the floor, followed by a cloth-bound book with yellowed pages. 

            She stood up to follow him out of the room and down the hall into the training room.  “Here also,” he explained as they entered the room, “we are less likely to be disturbed—though a word in Anya’s ear wouldn’t go amiss—”  He turned and shouted through the doorway:  “Anya!”

            Anya clacked past the bookshelves into view.  “Yes?”

            “Elisabeth and I are going to be trying meditation techniques in here.  We don’t want to be disturbed, so don’t come back here or let anyone else come back here, please.”

            “Will it take a long time?” Anya asked.

            Giles shrugged.  “It might.”

            “Okay.  No visitors in the training room.  —Can I have the rest of your sandwich?” she said brightly.

            Giles blinked several times, assimilating this fresh blow to his British rectitude.  “Yes,” he sighed, “I suppose you may.”

            “You can have mine too,” Elisabeth told her, “if you want.”

            “Oh good,” Anya said.  “I thought I saw some Cheetos in there.”  She clacked off toward the back room.

            Giles had been moving on into the training room, but he stopped still and shouted again:  “And don’t touch the books after eating those disgusting chips without washing your hands first!” 

            They heard no response from Anya, but he pretended there had been, and moved again.  “Feel better?” Elisabeth asked.

            “Much.”

 

*

 

With the table set up in the middle of the training room, precisely placed to catch the most of the natural light streaming in from the windows, Elisabeth settled herself in her seat, trying to breathe naturally.  “Give me your glasses,” he told her, and she took them off and handed them to him.  He tucked them away in the inner pocket of his jacket and opened the book, leaving her to blink in mild myopia at the light of the room.

            Giles was hemming and hawing over his book.  “Now, I did say ‘guided meditation,’” he said, “but with practice these are techniques you can learn to use on your own.”

            “I can hypnotize myself?” Elisabeth said, skeptically.

            He glanced up at her with an amused smile.  “It isn’t hypnosis.  It’s a different order of mental therapy.”  He opened the leather box and inspected its contents, resettling his glasses on the bridge of his nose.

            She leaned forward and looked into the case.  Nested in cut foam lay several rows of crystals of varying shapes and sizes, neatly labeled in a hand she recognized as Giles’s.

            “What are the crystals for?” she asked.

            “They’re....”  He paused.  “Are you familiar with the art of photography?”

            “A little.”

            “Well, then, perhaps you know how color is derived in our vision.  A green leaf, for instance, holds all the colors in the prism except green, which it throws back at the eye, which then registers the leaf as green.  The crystal, in meditation, operates on a similar principle.”

            “It takes mental energy from me...”

            “...and focuses back one quality in particular.  Precisely.”

            “I see,” she said, cocking her head as she watched him touch first one crystal, then another.

            He was muttering again.  “Let’s see...need to find a good way of ascertaining the appropriate crystals...Do you know your Sun sign?” he asked her, not raising his eyes from the case.

            “Sagittarius,” she said.

            His mouth quirked into a wry smile.  “I should have guessed.  The wanderer and the philosopher.”

            “And the Archer,” she said.

            “And the Archer.”

            “I have you pegged for a Gemini,” she said lightly.

            His only response was a startled glance; pretending not to hear, he flipped through the book.  “Now,” he murmured, “what crystals are associated with...?  —Ah.”

            He chose one crystal, then another, then another, until he had a small cluster arranged on the table before her.  She peeped at the labels of the empty slots:  citrine, amethyst, aquamarine, jade.  And a large quartz dominating the group.  “May I touch?” she said.

            “Of course,” he said absently, his attention buried now in the book.

            She picked up the aquamarine and held it to eye level so that it caught the light.  It was a lovely color, shot through the heart with the light.  She laid it down and picked up the citrine.  Turned it over lightly between three fingers.  She was just trying to decide whether she felt anything toward these crystals, and whether it mattered, when he said:  “Any of them especially appeal to you?”

            “The citrine,” she answered him; it felt right.  “What does it do?”

            He smiled.  “Among other things, it promotes a better integration of the self.”

            She laughed.  “I guess that one’s called for, then.”

            “Very well.”  He collected the amethyst and the jade and set them off to one side, leaving the citrine, aquamarine, and the quartz in front of her.  It was then that she realized that he had been watching her.  “What is the quartz for?” she asked him.

            “That is primarily for focus.”

            “The F word,” she said promptly.

            “Well, yes, it does begin with an F.  Very good.”

            “Sorry.  That was a flashback to my high school band director.”

            He blinked at her, apparently unsure whether to smile.

            “Sorry,” she said again.  “You’re trying to tell me something, and I’m crackin’ wise.  Go on.”

            “It begins this way.  You take the light by means of the crystals—that is, see only the light that comes through first this one—” he touched the quartz— “and then the others.”  She tried this and found to her surprise that she could do it.  “You are surrounded by light, but the only light you see is at that one fine point.  Do you see it?”

            She nodded.  Found herself speaking:  “I read somewhere that young intellectuals are the easiest to put into a hypnotic sleep.  Why do you suppose that is?”

            He answered her with equanimity, and it wasn’t until later that it occurred to her that he might have a personal stake in the question.  “If anything, it is probably because they want to lay the burden of thought on a power not their own for a while.”

            She nodded again.  It made sense.

            “But you are not going to sleep.  You are coming more awake....”  His voice was even, detached, but also warm and ductile.  She was reminded again of Atticus Finch, but the thought did not register deeply enough to interfere with her eyes on the heart of the quartz.  “Your posture is changing, so that your spine is straight like a strong reed....”  And it was so.  Under the confluence of Giles’s voice and the focused light, Elisabeth’s hands relaxed on the table, her breathing evened, and her eyelids fell to the half-mast of contemplation.  She had no thought of doing anything except to stay here, in this place, where calm energy poured over her like clear water.

            Giles’s voice suffered no change, and so she did not immediately recognize where he was taking her:  “...and now that you are here, quiet and surrounded by light, you close your eyes, so that you are enclosed in the darkness of your mind.  This place too is quiet.  Before you is a stair going downward.  You take it...slowly...a step at a time...deeper into the darkness—”

            Elisabeth’s eyes popped open.  “But Giles,” she said, “I’m afraid of the dark.”

            “And if you weren’t, this would be a pointless exercise,” he said with some asperity.  “You must trust that you will be able to navigate not just in spite of, but because of the darkness.”  He said nothing else, but waited for her response. 

            She met his eye a moment, then looked back down at the quartz.  “How do I get it back?” she said.

            “We will simply resume,” he said.  “Breathe slowly and find the place where you were.” 

            She was finding it.  Elisabeth thought to herself that despite his assurances that she would be able to navigate, it was his voice she trusted, not her mind’s ability to find its way through the dark.  She closed her eyes again and let him lead her once more to the dark stair, and down.  It wasn’t until she was several steps down that she thought (dimly) that his voice had after all given the authority back into her hand: had she been at the surface, she might have trembled and wept at the grace of it, but she was deep now, and her mission lay not that way. 

            Her mission lay farther down, countless steps down into velvet-black ink, past forgotten thoughts, quiet like leaves undisturbed by any breath of wind

(What is the color of things in dark places?)

and then her hand unerringly found the door at the bottom.  She set it open; and though the darkness did not change, she knew she stood at the quiet junction of many rooms.  At her bidding any one of them would open to her.  But her mission did not lie here either.

It lay behind a solid wall at the center, which she walked through silently and without feeling resistance.  It lay under a mound, under a mould of thought-leaves and dirt, which rearranged themselves for her touch.  It lay under a blanket perhaps even darker than the darkness;

(What are you protecting?)

she reached out and pulled the blanket away.

Nothing.

At the center of it all was Nothing.

A cry, like the death-scream of a kite, rent the quiet air, like the breaking of a thousand ancient-thick stained-glass windows; the light and the darkness rent themselves together over and over; the Nothing rose and swallowed her, leaf-mould of thoughts and all, and all that was left was a voice, broken on the wheel and grieving past hope.

 

*

 

Glasses askew, Giles scrambled up from the floor without bothering to set his chair upright.  “Oh dear,” he murmured.  In his ears was her voice, alternately keening and sobbing, and scattered across the table and over the floor lay the shattered remains of the citrine, the aquamarine, and the quartz.  “Oh dear, oh dear....”

            He was picking up the pieces of crystal with shaking hands when Anya rushed into the room.  Her hands flew to her ears in a halfway attempt to shut out the sound of the weeping.  “Giles,” she said over a fresh wail, “what did you do?”

            “I didn’t—” he uttered, clearly panicking.  “Go—go and shut the door.  I’m sure it will run its course.”  He sounded not at all sure, however, and Anya hesitated before backing away from the sound and closing the door, leaving him alone with it.

            Giles stood up trembling with the bits of crystal in his hand and allowed himself to look at her.  She was sitting with her legs drawn up, her feet flexed off the floor, her arms up with hands clutched but not touching her head, her chin tucked in so that her face was hidden.  Rigid, and weeping harder than he had imagined anyone could.  He wanted to weep himself.

            Instead, shaking more than ever, he tipped his collection of crystal bits onto the table, brushing off those that stuck to the sweat of his palms, and wiped his hands on the flanks of his jacket, attempting to think.

            He couldn’t tell if she were still in the meditative state, or if she were with him in the room.  If the former, it would do no good and possibly harm to speak her name or to touch her.  If the latter, it might harm her if he didn’t.  He stood, waiting to think what to do.  And kept standing there.

            So that when the door opened and Willow and Tara bundled into the room, it seemed to him that he had been there with the weeping both forever, and no time at all.

            “Anya called,” Willow said, her voice low and nearly obscured by Elisabeth’s sobs.  “She said your meditation with Elisabeth went...” she glanced at where Elisabeth still crouched at the table— “wrong.”

            Tara’s eyes were wide.  “I’ve never seen an aura like that.”

            “I’m not—” Giles cleared his throat— “sure what to do.”

            Willow looked over at Tara. 

Tara had not taken her eyes off Elisabeth.  Now she said:  “I don’t think we can do anything but let her go.”

            Willow said uncertainly, “D’you think we could mind-walk with her?”

            Tara shook her head definitely.  “It’s too risky.  She’s in chaos.  We just have to wait till the chaos settles.”

            “How long do you think that will take?”  Willow was the one who said it, but the question was written more loudly on Giles’s face.

            Tara shook her head.  “I could try to give her a focus point, maybe.  But she may not be able to respond to that.”  Carefully, she approached the table and righted the chair Giles had occupied.  She sat down in it and placed her hands in a position half of prayer and half of preparation to dive, and rested them together lightly on the surface of the table.   Her eyes rested steady on the top of Elisabeth’s head, which bobbed slightly with every sob.

            After a few moments it became clear to them all that although the mind was nowhere near finished grieving, the body was growing tired:  Elisabeth’s head lowered and finally slumped to the surface of the table, cradled in her hands, and her feet found the floor again.  The weeping changed gradually from the hard keening to the sobbing of an inconsolable child.  Tara sat before her, quiet and unmoving; neither Giles nor Willow felt able to ask if there had really been a change. 

            Willow, in fact, had gone gradually rigid where she stood, the weeping filling her ears.  She broke away suddenly and strode as quickly as she could to the door.  “I’m going to—going to look up—”  She never said what it was she was going to look up, and the words did not appear to register in Giles’s face, anyway.  The door closed between Willow and Elisabeth weeping at the table.

            Giles now stood alone, watching Tara watch Elisabeth.  Time passed; and it wasn’t until he saw a change in Tara’s eyes that he could hear the change in the sound of Elisabeth’s weeping.  Tara moved her hands apart and cocked her head, looking for some sort of sight contact and not finding it.  “Elisabeth?” she said softly.

            At the sound of her name, she broke again into frightened sobs, curled her arms about her head, and buried her face in them.  And this time it was clear that she had come back to the land of the living, albeit badly shaken.  The sobs finished slowly, petering out one by one; and then she was breathing quietly, draped in exhaustion on the chair and over the table.

            Tara fingered the shards of crystal lying on the table, then turned to Giles, who came to himself at her glance.  He found that he had propped himself up on the pommel horse; the blood seemed to have pooled in his feet, and his head was giddy.

            “She’s asleep,” Tara said.

            He nodded.

            Tara looked at him steadily, like a cat observing and taking everything in.  “You might go and make some tea,” she told him.

            Giles cleared his throat.  “Yes,” he said huskily, “yes, I think I’ll do that.”  He patted his jacket fronts for his handkerchief, felt something hard, and reached into his inner pocket.  He pulled out Elisabeth’s glasses; stared at them a moment, drawing a shaky breath.  Then he moved (tentatively, making sure his feet made proper contact with the floor at each step) to the table and laid the glasses near Elisabeth’s elbow, for when she woke up. 

            “Tea,” he said; Tara gave him a confirming nod, and he made his way out of the training room, letting the door fall gently to behind him.

 

*

 

Chapter 12

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