Paul hears a sparrow fall

“What are you doing up here all alone on the hill, Cat?” Lasrua asked. “You’re almost as high as the roof.”

“Only watching the clouds,” Cat said dreamily.

“Ach, one cloud in particular, I think,” Flann laughed. “A blond, half-​​naked cloud, almost as high as the roof!”

Cat swatted at her sister’s skirts. “Whisht!”

“I forget, the clouds have pointed ears around here,” Flann giggled.

Cat lifted a hand to help Flann sit on the grass without waking her skittish baby. Lasrua settled herself as gracefully as a feather, on the other side of Cat, as always.

“Do you suppose he could have heard?” Cat asked her.

“I suppose he could have,” Lasrua smiled, “since I can hear my father laughing about it from here.”

“Ach, no,” Cat whimpered.

“Fie! What of it if he does?” Flann asked. “You don’t want your husband to know you like the look of him? I shall tell him if you don’t! Poor lad!”

“Flann!” Cat pleaded.

“I think she doesn’t want him to become even more insufferable than he already is,” Lasrua sniffed. “He already thinks he’s brilliant – you mustn’t tell him he’s beautiful, too.”

“And strong!” Flann said. “Look at him!”

“Look at him showing off, you mean,” Lasrua snickered.

They looked.

Now that he was living on the construction site, Paul had occasion to witness the manner in which men worked. He found their pulleys and levers cunning, but he grew frustrated watching them hoist a plank with ropes when he knew that he could have simply slung it over his shoulder and hauled it up unaided, swinging himself up to the roof with his free hand and his bare feet.

Eventually his impatience had gotten the better of him, and he had joined in. And when Lasrua had been foolish enough to grumble about her brother working like any slave, their father had responded by taking off his shirt and climbing up after him.

They seemed to find it a game rather than hard labor, and it was possible that there was indeed a certain amount of showing off involved on the part of both of them.

Paul was becoming a great favorite of the men who worked with him. Several of them were fathers of children he had saved during that terrible winter, and all of them went forth in the evenings with a possessive pride to tell of his day’s feats of strength and agility.

But one of the side effects of all these feats and all this fasting was his great weariness when he came to bed at night. Cat did not need nor even bother to put a sheet between them now. She did not think he had even noticed. She certainly did, however – every time she woke and found her arm pressed against his side, or her hand upon his chest, or her shoulder against his back.

“There he goes!” Flann hooted. “Thinks he’s a squirrel!”

Paul was climbing down from the roof, and on his way down he sidled across the wall from post to post as if the house were the trunk of an enormous tree.

“A goat on the side of a cliff, rather,” Lasrua said. “Goat!”

“Rodent!” Flann shouted.

He yelled something Cat could not understand, and then he was running towards them, his father right behind. They ran more quickly than any men she knew.

“Tell me they’re not racing!” Flann groaned. “Spare me!”

Cat was not ready. Flann and Lasrua had interrupted her only a few minutes before, and she had not had the time to clear her head of her daydream before its subject collapsed with the grace of a long plume before her. Certainly she had not had the time to clear her cheeks of their flush. Perhaps he would notice.

He only reached up and squeezed the foot that peeked out from her folded skirts. His long fingers wrapped nearly all the way around it, which observation, for some reason, took her breath away.

“Do you always let them abuse me like that, Mina?” he whined.

“That’s a sister’s privilege, right, and duty!” Flann protested.

“Spare me!” he sighed. “You ought to wait at least until we have finished putting a roof over your head before you begin insulting me.”

“Ach, that’s true!” Flann gasped. “That’s my room over there. But you wouldn’t leave a leak in a roof over a wee baby’s head, would you?”

“Fortunately for you, no.”

“Speaking of… ah… getting wet, Rua,” Osh said, “I believe we have time to take a swim before supper.”

Lasrua clapped her hands and leapt to her feet. “Supper can wait, anyway!”

“What about you, my sweetheart?” Osh asked Flann, wriggling his eyebrows in his most ludicrous manner. “Won’t you come? Rua won’t look if you and I make some splashing.”

Flann snorted and waved her hand at him. “Old goat!”

“What about you, Paul?” Cat asked softly.

She did not know what she hoped he would say, and as soon as she asked she wished she had not. She thought it would be a strange thing to swim with her father-​​in-​​law, for the elves swam unclothed, but she supposed she could have hidden behind her husband. On the other hand, that would have required staying close to his side at all times. On the other hand…

“I prefer sunbathing,” he said absently.

“I hope you will take a bath of the getting-​​wet variety before you come in to supper,” Flann said. “As sweaty as you are.”

Cat looked up at her in alarm. Had her sister been looking at Paul’s admittedly sweaty body?

“I don’t stink!” he whined.

“No, you don’t, and I find it uncanny. I like a man that smells like a man.”

“Stinky!”

“What of it? But if he looks like an elf, so much the better.” She patted his arm and then gathered her knees under her to prepare to rise.

“Where are you going?” Cat gasped.

“Rua says – ” Flann planted a hand on Cat’s shoulder and pushed herself up with a grunt. “ – supper can wait for her. And I say I can’t wait for supper. I’m going down for a snack.”

“But wait!”

Flann clapped her hand on Cat’s shoulder again, but this time it was to prevent Cat herself from standing. “You need some sun.”

“But I’ve been – ”

“Then you need some cloud. And you don’t have a hungry wee one as an excuse for a snack, until you tell me otherwise, and this gangling goat is fasting, so I get all the jam to myself. I shall see you at supper.”

Flann’s hints could not have been more pointed without breaking skin, so Cat stopped protesting and watched her go. The men too were packing up their tools, and already Osh and Lasrua could scarcely be heard as they walked down to the pond. She and Paul were as good as alone.

“You’re quiet,” she said after a while.

“Aren’t I? Strange isn’t it?” He smiled at her. “I thought I heard something when I was on the roof, but I can’t hear it any longer.”

“Something such as what?”

“I don’t know.”

His smile faded, and he looked back up at the sky, where clouds were beginning to gather after days of clear blue.

“I didn’t know,” he murmured, “but I didn’t like it. An injured bird, I think. I wish I knew where.”

“Ach, not one sparrow shall fall on the ground without the Lord Paul knowing.”

He smiled again, but he did not look at her.

After a time she began to feel lonely, though he was so close to her. She was not accustomed to a quiet Paul. She was thoroughly tired of his fasting and his fatigue and his meditation on the matter of forgiveness.

She had been trying not to look at him lying almost naked in the grass before her, but when once she dared peek she saw that he was falling asleep. This was too much to bear. She would lie down beside him, and then he would notice her.

Of course, she reminded herself, every night she lay down beside him, and he scarcely noticed her. She had been glad of it at first, but as the weeks passed and as she tasked herself with not kissing him, not touching him, not doing anything to make his penance more difficult than it was, she found herself desiring more than anything to kiss him and touch him and to… do anything.

And now she found herself hurried along by the very hillside, for the slope on which they lay was so steep that she could not help but roll almost on top of him. His every breath lifted her body slightly.

He looked at her at last and smiled, but his eyes remained vague, and after their first glance they seemed only to look through her at the sky behind her head. His eyes were so blue they seemed themselves like wells of sky.

She stared down into them, wondering what to do. As she wondered, her unattended fingers stroked idly over his forearm, over the pale hair that was invisible until it caught the light, over the veins that snaked up just beneath the skin from his wrist nearly to his elbow.

She only noticed what they were doing when they stopped, for his eyes began to fall closed again, and her fingers feared to wake him.

But there was something about his lips, about his flared nostrils that made him seem more alert than ever, and exquisitely aware. Was it because she was touching him?

She let her hand slip off of his arm. His belly too was furred with fine hair, but it was coarser. She had never touched it, and she realized now that she had always longed to.

Now she wondered whether she dared move her hand.

She looked up at his face again. His eyes were still closed, but he was not breathing slowly like a sleeper. She decided she might at least dare to kiss him. She leaned closer, but she was almost obliged to slide her hand across the skin of his belly to keep her balance.

He sat up abruptly. He tried to lift her gently away from him as he did, but she nearly fell over in surprise and embarrassment. She had done the wrong thing. Never, never, never would she have the courage to touch him again.

She squeezed her eyes shut and clamped her teeth down over her lips from the inside. She would neither cry nor cry out, but he would see her grimace… But he saw nothing. When she opened her eyes into quivering slits she saw that he had not even turned his head to look at her.

She thought her heart would break. She thought it would spoil everything – her day, her spring, their marriage, her life – if he did not look at her now. He did not understand how much courage it had cost her.

She tried to whisper his name. “Paul” is not a name that whispers well when one’s mouth is wet and trembling from holding back a sob, but he heard. He still did not turn his head, but he held up his hand, beckoning her to be still.

Suddenly she understood that he was not angry or offended: he was only listening.

She was so relieved that she scarcely noticed anything unusual about Lena and Aengus when they came through the gate on the far side of the yard. In any case, she knew what they did in the forest, and she would not presume to guess in what state such activities might leave a man and a lady immediately afterwards.

She did not realize anything was wrong at all until Paul leapt up. Lena left Aengus standing dazed in the yard, and she ran to Paul, sobbing, “Nés! Nés!” which Cat knew meant, “Lord! Lord!”

Cat did not notice what was truly wrong with the scene until Paul cried, “Alla asím Penedict la?”

She did not know what it meant, but she thought she could guess.