She found him sitting on the grass, watching the sun go down past the fringe of willows along the lake, his buckskin tethered nearby. It was rare to see Rawhide sitting still, but only two days had passed since his return to full health, two days during which he'd been relentlessly normal.

Big Norse had been sure the shock of the last few weeks would catch up with him, and equally sure that he would ask himself to shoulder that shock alone. What she didn't know was whether he would accept her company now.

She moved forward to join him; though he must have heard her approaching, he gave no sign of it and remained unmoved even as she settled down beside him. They sat silent for a time, and then she spoke.

"Beautiful, ja?" Big Norse said gently, nodding her head at the splendor in the sky.

Rawhide dropped a hand to the lush grass, curling his fingers into the rich green blades. "This's generous land-- anything'll grow here," he answered, seemingly off the point. "Sometimes beauty... is clearer where it's stark." Never a man to discuss his feelings easily, he shook his head as if impatient at the limitations of language.

"You would like Jutland," Big Norse said, thinking of the long gray sweep of Denmark's ancient peatlands.

"I've never seen it," Rawhide acknowledged. He turned his head to look at her. "Maybe you'll take me."

Big Norse dropped her eyes from his in sheer surprise. "How much I would like to," she said swiftly. There were many things she knew he would never say; some of them could be understood from the way he'd found time for her piano lessons from the very beginning, the way he shortened his stride to hers-- but there had never been anything remotely like talk of the future.

"Inshallah," she added, raising her eyes to his again. It was a word she'd learned from him one night over karakoumiss: if Allah wills it; I hope so.

It was the right word. Rawhide broke out with one of his short, powerful laughs. "That was Mohammed's favorite word," he said. Big Norse had seen Mohammed ibn Rashayd al-Whaafa in the photograph on Rawhide's dresser, a precious element in his handful of possessions.

"One night he told me something his father said-- 'Any idea too complex to fit into poetry is of no value to remember.' We were talking Erdisch prime number theory, and he just came out with that. So I got all set to argue the point. And before I could get a word out, he says, 'My friend, this means all our physicists must be poets.' And with a straight face, he said, 'Inshallah!'" Rawhide laughed at the memory. Big Norse, thrilled by this unprecedented reminiscent mood, kept silent.

Rawhide's expression grew serious. "A couple years after that, I met Buckaroo." His eyes focused somewhere in the far distance.

The physicist who is a poet, and more, Big Norse supplied, wondering at the dramatic change that meeting must have made in Rawhide's life.

He seemed to grow aware of his surroundings again. The sky had turned deep violet-blue, and starlings were making their nightly journey to the west.

Rawhide drew a deep breath and stood up, offering a hand to Big Norse. He pulled her up and hung onto the hand, then reached up to run his fingers lightly down her golden hair. He looked all around him, at the Institute's grounds, the gentle sweep of its hills, and the buildings where lights were coming on. He ended by looking down again, full into Big Norse's eyes.

He smiled at her, a gentle smile that widened and turned wry. "You know how much..." he started, waving his hand in a gesture that encompassed everything around them as well as their own presence in this exquisite evening. Rawhide stopped, seeming to search for the exact words.

Big Norse knew that if she waited, he would find the words, but why put him to the trouble? She slipped an arm around his waist and fitted her head to the hollow of his shoulder.

"Ja," she told him, "I do know."

~ 30 ~