Fiction

Horses of the Sun
by Craig Snyder

The tall brunette with the flashing dark eyes bent lithely and removed her sheer silvery nylons, tossing them over her shoulder and turning to face him. Her nude body seemed to glow in the light of the full moon shining through the hotel window. She jumped onto the bed suddenly and began bouncing up and down in a fit of ecstasy, of childlikeness. The girl was beautiful, but he didn't notice: she was his cover and nothing more. He seemed cold to her.

"Join me," she said, her perfect breasts glistening with dewy sweat.

"In a minute," he answered impatiently. He was in shock—brain-punched to the breaking point. He slowly reviewed the words whispered into his ear just hours ago by the dwarf clown. He'd been repulsed by the clown's leering face, it's painted and cracked surface—eerily lit by the glaring lights mounted high under the big top—seemed to reveal a world both fascinating and horrible. The clown had whispered his message in controlled bursts under the groaning bleachers while he knelt there, listening, the faint crunch of dirty, spilled popcorn and used syringes under his feet drowned out by the madly cheering crowd. In a matter of moments, the carefully constructed scenarios he'd been fed by his contact in Budapest had been torn to shreds.

It was a double-cross.

They were probably watching him right now. Somewhere, out there, in the greasy darkness of a dreary European night, ghostly agents, efficient and tireless as greyhounds, were planning his death with a studied indifference usually reserved for ordering Chinese food after art-film marathons at the local bijou.

Years ago when he'd first entered the game as a virgin player, a situation like this might have completely un-manned him. Now, weary of the shadowy and often meaningless intrigue of international politics, he was constantly poised on the head of a deadly pin, ready to jump in any direction. Experience had taught him that his own life was valueless. He was just one piece on a vast chessboard in a game that never ended. Only the information—held in electronic trust by the black silicon mass embedded in his hindbrain, and wired to a deadman switch synced to his heartbeat—was important.

It was time to move, he thought, time to squeeze fate's grudging hand and force it to deal the cards he wanted, to disappear once again into history's velvet cover...

"Come on," said the girl, tossing her head petulantly. Transformed by moonlight, her long, silky hair was a vision of lusty sexfulness. "I want you."

"Change of plans," he told her. He fumbled through his pockets, coming up with a wad of local currency. "Take it," he said, thrusting it into her hand and folding her slim fingers over it. "Buy yourself something nice."

"You're so strange," she said, "such a strange man..." And her voice seemed to come to him from a great distance, thin and small. She looked at her closed hand and then at him, her face full of wonder and something more, but he didn't know what.

"I can't stay," he said, but then out of nowhere a vision—compact, intense, a history of her from child to woman—flashed before his eyes, and it howled, demanding his attention, and replaced the shadowy nothingness of the brooding cold men who waited for him outside, gleeful in the evil dark, and its warmth destroyed the chill-set his bones had drunk for so long.

"Maybe," he said, wondering if he'd lost his mind, "maybe we could..." But she was already moving, wrapping a thin, dark green raincoat over her naked form and slipping her shapely feet into silent black slippers smartly cut by a French designer who knew clothes and wine and nothing else.

"We'll go together," he heard her say. And he took her hand in his, and parted the curtains with his other hand, and seeing nothing, they slipped out the door and escaped, dodging fate's kiss, and her relentless, dry lips, and if they were pursued they never knew it.

When time killed the night they were gone.

The boat rocked sluggishly, its keel caressed by blood-warm blue waters. White sea birds wheeled in random patterns overhead, darting into the sun-drenched waves to snatch small fish and uttering their raucous cries in shrill counterpoint to the relentless slapping waves.

He sat on the wooden deck in white cut-offs and a pale blue unbuttoned shirt, watching her as she slept under the shade of flapping canvas, one of her tan, scissored legs knifing into the sunlight. He stared at her pale foot-bottom with its perfect toes, thinking nothing; his body's blood surged in rhythm with the waves.

Presently she awoke, and seeing his watching eyes, smiled.

"I'll make tacos," she said in a sleepy voice. She rose like a new goddess and padded off into the cabin. When the food was ready they sat in fiber-webbed deck chairs crunching the shells and sucking the warm grease off their fingers and watching the watery world and feeling they owned it all, and themselves.

In the red twilight, in the middle of a silent sea, she touched him, and he knew he'd found the better secret he'd always been looking for.