George & the Virgin Read online

  “I am not hiding the truth from you—you know I would not. It is as I said: I do not know. I have had visions, but they are visions that make no sense.”

  “Tell me!”

  It was almost noon, and the whole town was gathered at the seawall, milling and mumbling, the mood halfway between that of tragedy and celebration. A dozen flower-bedecked sheep baa-ed from a temporary pen and tried to nibble the garlands off the necks of their neighbors, unaware that they themselves were soon to be eaten.

  The sea had receded past Devil’s Mount, revealing the raised stone causeway that glimmered wetly in the cloud-hazed sunlight, curving like a white snake in its path across the gray muck of the sea bed.

  “I see you in the lair of the dragon,” Emoni said.

  Alizon caught her breath, her blood turning cold and draining down her legs. It was to be her who would be fed to the beast. Her knees buckled, and she caught herself on the seawall.

  “But in my vision, you are unharmed.”

  “Am I about to be eaten?”

  “I do not think so, but there is blood—”

  “Blood!”

  “Not yours!”

  “But blood! Whose, then—”

  “I do not know what it means!” Emoni interrupted, in her voice a desperation that matched Alizon’s own.

  A boy blew a trumpet, startling them. It was the signal that the lottery was about to be drawn and the virgins must take their places.

  “Horrid Tommy,” Alizon said, glaring at the youth. “You know he likes calling us to our deaths.”

  “He wouldn’t be so gleeful if it were his little sister in the lottery.”

  “Wouldn’t he?” Alizon asked bitterly.

  Emoni hugged her. “May God keep you safe from harm.”

  “May He keep us all safe. It is what He should have been doing these past thirty years.” She stepped back from her friend. “There are times I think He does not exist at all.”

  “Do not abandon faith, Alizon. Never that.”

  She touched Emoni’s cheek and swallowed against the tears that tightened her throat. Worse than being devoured by a dragon would be to never again see her beloved friend’s face. “I will never lose my faith in you.”

  She turned then from Emoni and nodded to the widow Bartlett and her sister, who were standing at the front of the mass of townspeople. The widow’s jaw was set, her eyes barely meeting Alizon’s own. As Alizon’s mistress the woman was demanding, but never had she been cruel. No words of affection had ever been spoken between them, but Alizon thought she saw in the rigidness of the widow’s stance the signs of a caring heart. If the widow had felt nothing, she would be chatting with her neighbors or eating a bun like some of the others, not standing as if she were trying to stare down Death himself.

  Alizon looked around. The frightened faces in the crowd belonged to the girls who would be in the lottery today, and to their families: the baker and his wife, each with a hand on their daughter’s shaking shoulders; a widowed fisherman in gray and tattered clothing, standing stiff beside his wide-eyed girl; a merchant’s wife, her rich gown doing nothing to ease the terror in her eyes as she and her daughter’s nurse stood sentinel on either side of the silent girl, whose lower lip trembled.

  The non-frightened faces were those of the other townsfolk, men or women relieved it was not to be one of their own this time to be devoured. They tried to hide their happiness under solemn expressions, but the brightness of their eyes and the quick smiles that slipped across their lips betrayed their hearts.

  The worst of the bunch were the wealthy landowners. These had come to be certain the sacrifice would be made, and their flocks of sheep safe for another year—but they were never the ones who paid the price.

  Alizon stepped up onto a wooden platform with the five other virgins, their ages ranging from twelve to sixteen. The sixteen-year-old, Greta, had been through the same ordeal thrice before, and had become a town joke between her good luck with the lottery and her poor luck at finding a husband. She was a homely girl, with a harelip and a shambling gait. Whenever speculation was made on what would happen if the town ran out of virgins, someone was sure to say, “There will always be Greta.” Alizon took a place next to her and slipped her hand into the girl’s, giving it a squeeze.

  Greta glanced over, and her malformed mouth twisted into a bitter smile that did nothing to vanquish the tears in her eyes, or the knowledge that the only value she had was as a potential meal for a monster. “I wish it would be me this time.”

  “God’s breath, Greta, why?”

  “It would be a relief, to have it over.”

  She gave Greta’s hand another squeeze, for it was a sentiment against which she could not argue. She herself was worn out from the emotions that had been driving her. Now her gut was cramping, urging her to relieve herself, and sweat with the sour scent of fear had broken out all over her body. Her limbs were weak with exhaustion. The thought of finding herself here year after year, like Greta, made her want to lie down and die.

  The village priest began reading off the names of the girls for the lottery, dropping a square of wood for each into a black bag. It was yet another sign of the evil that had come to this town that the priest himself should participate in such a profane ritual. If she had succeeded in getting deflowered, that same priest would have stood beside the midwife as Alizon was examined for evidence of her state, and he would have taken the sworn testimony of her defiler.

  From the platform Alizon looked over the crowd, finding no set of eyes that would meet hers. Even Osbert looked away, as if he had not just this morning been pressing himself against her, his tongue in her mouth. She saw the merchant whose daughter was on display beside her. The man was standing beside his richly garbed wife, whispering in her ear. As Alizon watched, the wife’s expression showed surprise and then tearful relief. She began to turn toward her husband, but he scolded her, and she faced forward again, her expression glowing.

  Suspicion raised the hairs on the back of Alizon’s neck. The man’s joy could have been due to faith, or to the acceptance of God’s will. Or it could be from a certainty that had nothing to do with the divine.

  Alizon shifted her gaze to the baker and his wife. Their faces were pale, their eyes fixed upon their daughter. The fisherman was also still plainly fearful, as was Greta’s older brother, and the impoverished parents of the last girl. She knew then that the merchant’s daughter would not be chosen, no matter that the square with her name was supposed to be in the bag with all the others.

  Fiery anger flushed through Alizon where moments before she had been cold. Worse even than the injustice of bribery was her own helplessness in the face of it. There was nothing she could do against this town that tossed its poorest and least comely young women to a dragon for the sake of their precious sheep and houses.

  “You’re hurting me,” Greta said, and she tried to pull her hand free from Alizon’s.

  “Your pardon.” She released Greta’s hand, which she had been crushing in her own.

  The priest began speaking a blessing in Latin, as if doing so could make this unholiest of acts holy. A chill breeze blew up, pulling at skirts and cotehardies, tugging at hair.

  Damn them! Damn them all! Damn every one of them who encouraged these sacrifices year after year!

  She and the other girls faced out to sea, the platform upon which they stood giving them a view over the heads of the townsfolk. For a moment the sun broke through and shone down upon Devil’s Mount, setting aglow the green grasses and trees of its steep, rocky slopes, and the pale yellow stones of the fortress crouched at the top. For a brief instant the island was beautiful, the hideous evil at its heart unseen.

  For a brief instant Alizon could tell herself that there was no dragon, and that, if she were the one to cross that causeway and descend into the dragon’s lair, she would find nothing there but an empty cavern.

  She met Emoni’s eyes, thinking of her friend’s vision of her in the drago
n’s lair, blood all around. Not all of Emoni’s visions foretold the future; some, like daydreams, were but wishes played out in the mind. Which would this one be?

  She held Emoni’s gaze as the priest reached into the black bag. His high voice fluted out over the suddenly silent crowd.

  “She who will honor the dragon this year is named … Alizon.”

  Chapter Two

  Present day

  The United States

  “The monster is going to get you!”

  Five-year-old Gabrielle shrieked in delight and ran down the hall. “He can’t catch me! I’m too fast!”

  “He’s going to get you! Do you hear his big feet?” George stomped on the floor with each step, moving as slowly as a brontosaurus. “He’s coming! And when he catches you, he’ll eat you up!”

  Gabrielle shrieked again and dashed through the door to his bedroom. He gave her time to hide and then followed her in, pausing to claw the air and roar. “There’s a little girl in here, and when he finds her, he’s going to eat her in a hundred bites!”

  “No he won’t!” came from the closet.

  George sniffed and roared and clawed around the room, pretending to look under the bed and behind the curtains, in the bathroom and inside the armoire, and then came to the closet door and lowered his six-foot-four frame to his knees. He growled and was answered by a shriek and giggles from within.

  “I know where the little girl is!”

  He pulled open the door, and Gabrielle flew out at him. He pretended to fall over backwards, and she leapt atop his chest, bouncing up and down as if riding a Clydesdale.

  “I got the monster!” Gabrielle cried. “I got him! And I’m going to eat him all up!”

  She started tickling him, her babyish fingers too clumsy to do it well, but he writhed and begged her to stop.

  “George! You’ve got her all wound up and it’s past her bedtime!”

  George craned his head from the floor to see his sister Athena standing in the doorway, her hands on her hips. Her dark hair was down, and she was wearing a loose dress of green batik. She looked as if she should be leading a group discussion on community recycling, or reading auras at a psychic fair.

  “Peace, man,” George said, holding up his fingers in the V shape. The gesture was a remnant of their childhood, a joke between them long before they were old enough to know anything about the political movement behind the gesture.

  “Peace, Mommy,” Gabrielle said, imitating him and holding up three fingers.

  “There’ll be peace when you’re in bed, young lady.” The words were stern, but both George and Gabrielle knew that she wasn’t angry. Athena—née Elizabeth, and called Elizabeth until she had hit her teens and decided otherwise—was and always had been a softie. It had more than once gotten her into trouble.

  “I want Uncle George to tuck me in.”

  “Brush your teeth first.”

  “Okeydokey, artichokey!” Gabrielle climbed off George’s chest and galloped out of the room.

  George sat up, his smile fading. With Gabby gone, a familiar sense of weariness settled over him. He tried to distract himself from it by examining his bedroom from this lowered perspective, but he saw nothing but beige blandness.

  Why had he not noticed before how empty the room was? Hotel rooms had more warmth, and he spent enough time in them to know; his career kept him on the road for two-thirds of the year.

  “How’s your leg?” Athena asked, coming over and sitting on the edge of his extra-long mattress, the one item of furniture he had taken the time to have custom-made.

  “Good as new. There shouldn’t be any trouble with going back into the ring.”

  He had torn a muscle a few months earlier, during a match for Champions of the Universe Wrestling, where he was one of the top three stars. The injury had kept him out of the ring, but after the surgery he had alternated between being a guest commentator and playing parts in the backstage storylines. Those dramas had become as important a part of the entertainment of professional wrestling as the matches themselves.

  The writers at CUW—or “Cow,” as those who so profitably milked it for cash called the organization—had put him in a metal leg brace in which he creaked around backstage like a long-haired Frankenstein, ambushing foes with folding chairs and lurking in their dressing rooms, trying to gain the sympathy and betrayal of their girlfriends. It was a male version of the soap opera, with him playing the part of the wounded and misunderstood brute.

  “No trouble with the leg, maybe,” Athena said. “What about the heart?”

  He shrugged, said nothing. He didn’t want to talk about it. Talking made it impossible to ignore the hollow feeling that was expanding inside him with each passing day.

  “Don’t play the Neanderthal with me. I know those television reporters have gotten to you. About the only time I see you smile is when you play with Gabby.”

  She was right, as usual. He sometimes wondered if Athena had a sixth sense when it came to the emotions of others, or if her intuition was just a refined version of the male-baffling perception that most women possessed.

  A few weeks after he had ripped his muscle, right at that point in his recovery when he was getting depressed by the limits on his activity, the national news media had broken the story of a ten-year-old boy in Missouri who had tried to imitate his signature move, the Slayer: leaping off the top turnbuckle in the corner of the ring, doing a forward flip through the air, landing sitting on the shoulders of his opponent, then with his legs wrapped around the man’s neck arching into a back flip through the man’s parted legs. The flip dragged his opponent along for the ride in an echoing somersault, both of them ending up lying flat in the ring, he on his stomach and his opponent on his back.

  It had taken intense training to be able to perform the Slayer safely, and he never did it without previously working with the other wrestler to be sure that neither would be hurt when it came time for the match.

  Wrestlers who could perform such aerobatics were known as “high-flyers,” and George had worked hard to be able to fly higher than any other. He weighed 235 pounds, which made him slender for his sleekly muscled height; but then, you couldn’t be heavy and fly.

  The boy in Missouri—who was indeed heavy and had little hope of flying—had had no training beyond tumbling in his grade-school P.E. class, and had decided that the roof of his ranch house would make an adequate substitute for the top turnbuckle of the ring. Luckily or unluckily, he had partially missed his landing on his unfortunate friend. Both had ended up in the hospital, the novice high-flyer with a bruised spinal cord and his landing-pad buddy with a broken leg.

  Professional wrestling was sports entertainment, but that didn’t mean you didn’t get hurt. Wrestlers were in an almost constant state of injury, and continued putting on shows despite the pain. By the time they reached age thirty most were forced to change their moves to suit a permanently damaged body. In the ring they pretended agony when attacked by an opponent, but the real pain and harm usually came from moves they did themselves. A truly professional wrestler put the safety of his opponent far above his own.

  The Missouri boys’ mothers, when they heard who and what had inspired the roof-jump stunt, had gone to the local news in outrage. The story had spread through the national media like a summer wildfire, and was just as impossible to stop. Anything George said on camera only served to fan the flames, his words taken out of context and twisted.

  News magazines did exposés on backyard wrestling and aired clips of him executing the Slayer over and over, and every expert and organization who had ever debated the link between violence on television and violence in children focused on him— George Arlington, known in the ring as the Saint— as their poster villain for all that was wrong in today’s entertainment industry.

  “He Ain’t No Saint” went from being the cheer of fans, painted on posterboards they held above their heads during matches, to the mocking headline in tabloids.

 
After a while, being reviled coast to coast had a way of getting to a guy.

  Every time it seemed the story would die down, there would be a fresh injury in a backyard in some other state, and the story would revive, coming back to life like a smoldering hot spot touched by the wind.

  He had tried to visit the Missouri boys, had tried to call them, but their mothers refused. He felt obscurely guilty about their injuries, as if he owed the two youngsters an apology and a lecture both.

  All the publicity had done nothing to hurt sales of the Saint merchandise, though, and cable pay-per-view viewership of CUW events had doubled since the story broke—even though George himself wasn’t wrestling in any matches because of his surgery.

  He had been rich before the brouhaha, his place in the CUW secure for the time being, but now he was worth tens of millions to the company in publicity. His name and that of the CUW were spoken in households that had previously known nothing about professional wrestling: an unforseen effect that he was sure chapped the hides of those mothers in Missouri.

  Still, however much his career had been helped, however strongly he argued that professional wrestling was family entertainment where fathers and sons—and some daughters, too—came to cheer and boo at comic-book heroes and villains, there was a small part of him that wondered if, maybe, all the pundits and angry mothers had a point.

  All he had ever wanted to do was put on a good show with the flash and daring of a circus act and the Good vs. Evil themes of Superman. He loved the physicality of wrestling, loved the theatricality, and loved the interaction with the crowd. He even loved his fellow wrestlers, who were for the most part a bunch of pansies once they dried their hair and took out their wallets full of baby photos. Some even knew how to chew with their mouths closed and could spell big words.