The Ridge Above the Sage

The path had gone thin and rubbly an hour back, and I'd kept climbing anyway, because that's what you do on the third day of a holiday when your legs finally stop arguing with you. Crete in late September. Thyme crushed under my boots, the sea a hammered sheet of bronze far below, the sun working its slow arithmetic on the limestone.
Then I came over the ridge, and the world rearranged itself.
She was sitting in a field of wild sage, waist-deep in it, a silver-green haze of it spilling down the slope and she was singing.
Not performing. Singing the way people sing when they think the mountain is the only witness. A low, unhurried thing, half lullaby, half lament, in a scale my ear couldn't name but my chest understood immediately. Her voice carried the way sound carries over water, clean and strange and enormous.
Her hair was soft and gold, and she had woven it up into a crown of sage, stems bristling out of the braid like a laurel. She wore a thin white dress and nothing sensible at all, no hat, no pack, barefoot on the hot stone.
I sat. There was a flat shelf of limestone at the ridge's lip and I lowered myself onto it like a man easing into a church pew, and I did not move for a long time.
She sang and the field moved around her. Bees worked the flower heads in lazy, drunken arcs, so many of them the air hummed in a second key under her voice. Butterflies stitched through the silver cabbage whites, one impossible sulphur-yellow one. And at the edge of the field, in the shade of a lentisk, a deer stood with its head up and its ears forward, absolutely still, watching her like a thing that had forgotten it was wild.
I know how that deer felt.
She finished on a long falling note and let it die out into the cicadas. Then she stretched her arms over her head, rolled her shoulders, and looked around.
She looked up. Straight up, to the ridge, to me.
I raised a hand, awkward, caught out. She smiled wide, unembarrassed, delighted, actually and waved me down with a sweep of her arm, and said something I couldn't hear over the wind.
I went down. Scrambling, half falling, boots skidding on the loose scree, and by the time I reached the field's edge my heart was going like a bird in a box.
Up close she was younger than I'd expected and older than the singing had made her sound. Sun brown, crow's feet at the corners of her eyes, a smear of ochre on one forearm. "You listened," she said. Her English had a soft rolling weight to it. "Nobody listens. They take a photograph and go."
"I didn't want to interrupt."
"You didn't. You waited." She looked at me a moment too long, in a way that made me aware of my own pulse in my throat. "Eleni."
I told her my name. She repeated it, and it sounded better in her mouth than it ever had in mine.
"Come and walk with me," she said, and turned and started off down the slope without checking whether I would.
Of course I followed.
The path dropped through olive terraces, and she talked the whole way, about the bees, about the shepherd who let her camp in his field for the price of a painting, about the deer she called a nuisance because it ate her fig saplings. She walked fast and barefoot and picked up a snail shell and put it in my hand for no reason and laughed when I didn't know what to do with it.
"Where are we going?" I asked, finally.
"My house. You'll see the sea from the terrace." She glanced back. "You'll want to see the sea from the terrace."
The house was at the bottom of the hill, whitewashed and low, tucked into the rock like it had grown there, blue shutters, a fig tree bent almost horizontal by years of wind. Beyond it, past a low wall, stretched the water, vast as hammered bronze.
She pushed open the door and said, "Don't look at the mess, look at the walls," and I stepped in and stopped dead.
The walls were covered.
Canvas after canvas, floor to ceiling, and every one of them was the same woman Eleni, in sage and ochre and raw umber, singing, crouching, lying back with her hair fanned out, her body rendered in bold confident strokes, thighs and belly and throat and the long curve of her back all painted with an appetite that made the air in the room feel thick. Some were finished. Some were only underpainting, ghosts of her. The whole house smelled of linseed and sage and salt.
"You did these," I said, stupidly.
"I did these." She watched me take them in, and there was nothing coy about the way she watched. "People come for the view. They buy the little ones of the harbour. Nobody ever wants these."
"They're incredible."
She came and stood very close, and took the snail shell out of my hand and set it on the sill. "You're shaking a little."
"It's been a long walk."
"It has," she agreed, and then she put her palm flat on my chest, over the noise, and said, "It hasn't."
I kissed her. Or she kissed me. Somewhere in the middle of it the distinction stopped mattering, her mouth hot and open and tasting faintly of sage, her hands in my hair pulling me down to her, her body fitting against mine like a key going home. My hands found her waist and then the small of her back and then the hem of the thin white dress, and she made a low sound into my mouth that was nearly the note she'd been singing.
We got the dress off somewhere near the doorway, and then she was standing in the late gold light in just her skin and the sage crown, and she was more beautiful than any of the paintings, and she knew it, and she was pleased with herself about it.
"Come on," she said, and led me by two fingers to the low bed under the window, and the sea roared faintly beyond the glass.
I laid her down and took my time, because she was clearly a woman who would notice if I didn't. Her throat, the soft underside of her arms, the salt damp hollow behind her knee. She hooked a heel around my back and dragged me in and said my name twice, impatient, and the second time it was an instruction.
When I finally got inside her she arched up off the mattress and held there, suspended, her mouth open and her eyes shut tight, and then she came apart in a long shivering series of waves that had nothing to do with how long we'd been at it and everything to do with how long she'd been waiting on that hillside for someone to come over the ridge and listen.
Afterward she lay half across me, sweating, laughing quietly at the ceiling, the sage crown crushed to a wreck beside her on the pillow. The light went from gold to rose to a thin red line at the edge of the shutter. Bees knocked against the glass, confused by the hour.
"Stay for dinner," she said. "There's fish. And then tomorrow you can sit on the terrace and I'll paint you badly."
"I don't want to be painted badly."
"Everybody wants to be painted badly," she said, and rolled over, and kissed my shoulder. "You just don't know it yet."