Aboard the ferry that chugs through indolent seas as it heads away from Patmos with such patient belief in itself, I pretend to read a book. I pretend a calm that I do not feel. Max stands at the rail, not far from me. He's never far from me anymore. His handsome, rugged face turns into the spray of salt. There is a deceptive ease to his stance.

I study him surreptitiously. I am as vigilant about him as he is about me. Perhaps this is something more significant than either of us realize. There's a feeling associated with that knowledge of self that is just out of reach of my awareness. It is frustrating to almost, but not quite, know.

He is above all an unsolved mystery in my life. It does not deceive either of us, I believe, as if we could suppose that we have somehow already learned all there is to have been revealed about his presence in my life. Just this morning, on the dawning edge of wakefulness, an idea came to me that I have been unable to shake. I wonder what more there could be to this; I wonder when the Gods will feel I have earned the right to know. I fret over the reason that someone has planted this odd notion in my almost-awake mind only to then snatch it back from me when I was fully aware and able to put the thoughts to some order.

If you ask me, just out and out ask me, just ask me right this very second ... I would say, without hesitation, that I will stake my life on Max being a good omen for me. There is an indefinable something about him that makes me believe in the valor that matches the stamina within his body. He is powerful. Sometimes when he looks at me when he thinks I am not noticing, there comes over his face a look of absolute conviction.

He is, I believe, absolutely convinced of several things. He is convinced he knows his duty. He is convinced he knows his heart. He is convinced he knows me. He is convinced he knows he will never falter where I am concerned. He is convinced the impending duty I must accomplish is only one part of my destiny. He is convinced that beyond this immediate duty, whatever my destiny is, it is intertwined with his.

On this last part, I place my fullest trust. It is all I can do. Like him, it is what will keep me moving forward in the dark days to come. It is the light ahead for which I head.

What we learned on Patmos has convinced us each of this above all else: the pilgrimage is now a race against those who will stop at nothing to impede us. It is no longer a question of paranoia. We are being hunted.

Yet for all we seem to know, we both realize that in reality, we do not yet know enough. We do not really know who hunts us, not in a way that would allow us to meet them head on. We are mystified as to the specifics of why they hunt us. My mother had visions and she left messages in her inner sanctum that will guide us, but I have yet to find the clues to decipher her messages well enough for concrete details to really help us.

Max knew before me that danger strode a parallel path with me on this pilgrimage. Just as I have held truth in abeyance from him until the appropriate time, so he felt duty-bound to act as protector, not collaborator. We were each assigned our roles; we must each fulfill them. Such are the ways of the Gods.

His head turns my way and he catches me studying him rather than the book. For just the briefest of moments, there is a softness to his face as he realizes I am consumed in thoughts of him. But then his eyes sharpen and he scans the faces around us. He knows, as I do, that danger can come from the most unlikely of people.

We left London and arrived in Athens with a blessedly easy trip. The air was calm. We passed through all customs checks with barely a sniff in our direction. I had arranged for a hotel in Athens for the night. However, Max opted to change those plans after we arrived and had taken a taxi into the central upscale tourist area where the hotel was located. During the plane trip, Max had studied much of the literature I had brought with us about where we were going on this trip. He took my hand when we alit from the taxi and walked me to a different hotel down the street. There, he arranged for a rental car, telling me casually that there seemed to him no reason to delay heading to the port of Piraeus, which was where I had thought we'd go on the next day to begin the next leg of the pilgrimage.

As was becoming a habit for me, I did not feel the need to question him. His opinion on such matters, it seemed to me, were every bit as valid as mine and I trusted his instincts enough to simply put my fate in his hands.

At Piraeus, I had planned for us to board a ferry to Patmos. The ferry took off late each evening and traveled all through the night until late the next morning. Max felt we had ample time to make it for that evening's trip so we had no real reason to delay another day. We could have slept in chairs upon the deck, but Max arranged for a stateroom for us instead. We traveled in his name, as husband and wife.

Just as I did not ask him about the change in plans, neither did I so much as raise an eyebrow at the registration of us as a married couple aboard the ferry. In Athens, I had felt a distinct sense of unease and had been grateful that I was not having to tell him of this further evidence that I may be paranoid.

Of course, at that time, I still believed paranoia could be the paint with which I covered over a sense of foreboding that I was being stalked ever since I'd followed my mother's dying instructions and gone to Captiva. On Captiva, inside her inner sanctum, I learned many things but most of all I learned this one all-abiding, timely truth: she was convinced that there was a sect of some type that was obsessed with what signs there seemed to be that her daughter's destiny was to be prevented.

Whatever it was, this risk to my life, it had been a knowledge she had gained in some visions during my birth. It was why my birth certificate carried not the name under which she thought I would be hunted, but another. It was why she'd left me with the monks. It was why she had severed all visible ties to the only daughter she would ever have. She'd done all this and more because she hoped it would allow me to live a long life. It was why she had schooled me in so many visions to remain anonymous, to never rise to anyone's notice. It was why she'd sent me other visions, hoping she was teaching me but aware it was not enough to really help.

She had even sought to be the one to do that which was my destiny to do. She failed. With her death, she believed that I would become the object of an intense hunt for my life that I was unprepared to evade but that I must if I were to fulfill my destiny. It was to give me a protector during this perilous time, I understood then, that she had found a way to put Max in my life. And once I met him, once she knew I was bound to him after that night in Finis Terrae, only then did she give in to the death she'd known was coming to claim her.

Inside her inner sanctum, she left me warning after warning. Not much of it made sense. It was this and it was that ... I walked away from there terrified of every person I saw. I had called Max the next morning and hearing his voice ... How it filled me with dread that he was so far from me. But when I'd been there with him in London, I convinced myself that the danger was not real, that my mother had had no concrete proof, that perhaps there were people who might have both believed and feared what I was, but that did not translate to anyone seeking to annihilate me. And, further, I believed the cloak of my anonymity was going to protect me for who could track me if they did not know my name?

Perhaps my desire to believe the threats of danger were unreal was simply because I believed more in Max. I knew one other solid thing that was so big and had such power to strike me dumb with awe: I was not alone when I was with him.

I had never known this kind of acceptance.

I felt huge gratitude to my adoptive parents and had always thought that was love but I had always felt the knowledge that I was not their blood made me less a part of them. I felt a bond to my mother that I know is love but it had always been a source of anger for me that she had not found me worthy of living my life with her. I have made love with other men but none have ever lingered inside me like Max had. None had ever changed my life as he did.

We spoke little on the drive to Piraeus. Max concentrated hard on the unfamiliar road. I spent time lost in thought, trying to put order to chaos.

When I had left Captiva, I drove to the main library at the nearby city of Fort Myers and took three books with me when I left. They all dealt with the central reason Christians have made pilgrimages to Patmos since the Middle Ages: the Book of Revelations, penned by a disciple of Jesus named St. John the Evangelist about apocalyptic visions he had upon the island of Patmos. I hoped by studying them, I might learn why that vision I'd had on the road to Captiva had been telling me that I had to go to the gate of heaven.

On the flight from New York, I read up on Patmos, on St. John, on his Revelations, on the gate of heaven inside the cave where the visions took place, on the sects that had long ago risen up on three sides of the question of St. John's Revelations: were they the literal prediction of the end of the world or were they an exiled Saint's condemnation of Christians in seven cities of Asia Minor whom he felt should have done more to testify to the power of the Christ or were they exhortations to cheer and fortify the faithful of these seven cities to hold fast to their belief in Christ even in the face of great trials to come?

St. John was surely one of the most mythic figures in early Christianity. His Book of Revelations remains one of the great mystical controversies in Catholicism. Cults and orders and movements from thence until now have swirled and fought around the interpretations of his prophecies of the Apocalypse.

When I was in college, I spent two summers on internships digging and cataloging in ancient ruins. The first summer had been on a Greek island in the Aegean Sea and the second summer had been in Turkey, near its Adriatic coast. So while I was already familiar with this area, I had never been to Patmos, our destination. But when I had read something in my mother's sanctuary about "the gate of heaven," I knew where it was and, further, I realized the unfamiliar landscape I'd seen in my vision had a look to it that placed it in the Aegean Sea area. The gate of heaven is on Patmos, in a cave ... that is about all I remembered of it from my college days. Of all the clues she left me, for some reason, this one seemed of most importance when I put it together with the vision I'd had on the road to her place. That was why I knew Patmos would be my first stop on this pilgrimage of revelations.

Patmos, in ancient times, became an island where the Romans sent their criminals and others they wished exiled from civilization. It surely must have seemed the perfect place for the Roman governor to send St. John when he proved an irksome customer in need of understanding that the Roman officials did not want Christians to be out there so actively spreading this new religion. He was banished to Patmos for 18 months.

So there, on that rocky island of exile, St. John took refuge in a cave. And in that cave, a fissure opened from whence the voice of revelations came forth.

He was not the first person to receive revelations about the future inside that cave. Oracles had long been aware of the cave and it held status as one of the world's sacred places. It is significant, perhaps, that the revelations seemed to come from a fissure in the earth. In times ancient even for St. John, there was a temple of the Earth Goddess upon that very site where she sent messages to oracles who came seeking the prophecies. I remember when I first heard this part of the legend surrounding Patmos. I remember it so well because I had always been interested in prophecies and sacred sites. It had always seemed to me that one common denominator that linked nearly all these prophetic visions and messages at such sacred sites has been their concern with the continuation and protection of life upon the planet.

Odd, I have often thought, the cycle of religious beliefs. The most ancient beliefs in this area of the world are more linked to nature and based on a female figure, the Earth Goddess herself. From there, the evolution in some ways begat the Greco-Roman beliefs of gods and goddesses that humans worshipped, feared and lived with for so long. And then along comes this new religion, Christianity, which the Romans could not control and which did supplant their religious beliefs. It turned from mankind's link with the earth to mankind's desire to enter heaven and it believed in the dominance of a masculine Supreme Being. Christianity really was the death of Greco-Roman religious beliefs, wasn't it? So isn't it odd that a disciple of a new faith based on a paternalistic God heard secrets in a place revered first by pagan believers who worshiped a maternalistic Goddess?

I am an odd mix of religions, I told Max at one point. I sighed as I closed my eyes and leaned back into the seat of the bench we'd taken on the ferry's deck to witness the sunset.

"I was raised Catholic and am forever intrigued by the mythic nature of so many of the Church's secrets from its earliest years. Imagine the Disciples and what they did upon Christ's death? How some of them went forth to preach? How so many of them were sacrificed for this new religion? And how so many of the early believers worshipped in total and obsessive secrecy for fear of their lives? In this secrecy of the earliest believers, I have long wondered, what was lost that should have come down to the rest of us? What should we know that was hidden away out of fear but should have been part of our legacy of knowledge?"

"I am not as familiar with this faith or religion as I should be," Max said softly. I glanced over at him as the setting sun cast magenta and orange glints across his face, a face so dear to me already. It gave him an aura that reminded me of seeing him that second night on the trail to Finis Terrae. "My family's beliefs were not in Christianity."

"Really?" It was an automatic response. And then I remembered to whom I was speaking. I gave him a soft chuckle when his eyebrow went up. "Sorry. I suppose not. Forgive me for my presumptions. But that's just it for me, as well. I have always been eclectic in matters of spirituality, but even I make the assumption that the current religious beliefs are the end all and be all to everyone's frame of reference."

"What is the odd mix of religions to which you refer, Eris?"

"My adoptive parents raised me Catholic. However, as far as I have been able to ascertain, I was never baptized into Christianity." I had told Max nothing of consequence about my birth mother. It was not time yet for him to know of the fact that it was she that was all. "I suppose my parents thought the nuns in the orphanage had baptized me. But I think the nuns figured the monks had. And the monks ... well, I don't think they would have presumed to do it. I mean, I think they figured that eventually my mother was coming for me and if she hadn't done it by then ..."

"And this woman who bore you ..."

"God, I'm sorry. I tend to go off on tangents when I'm tired." I looked out over the sea. "My birth mother was not Christian. She believed in ... well ... a more mystical slant on the world of nature and man's place within it."

"She was a witch? Wicca?"

"Perhaps. She did believe in nature's ability to affect humans. But ... No, not really. It was that but more than that, I think. She did keep alive a faith in ... um ... well, actually, in the early gods. Greeks, Romans, I believe ... the ones that seemed to be the same but for the different cultures. But I think it was the earlier gods, the ones that were the foundation of the Greco-Roman beliefs. And ... I didn't really understand that until... until I was at her home after she died just before I came over here and ..."

"Your mother has recently passed?" He asked it in a startled voice. With a dread, I realized, I had never told him.

"Yes. My birth mother ... I never really knew her that well. She died while I was in Finis Terrae. With you." I only told him what I felt he needed to know then. I did not tell him that it was she who sent the visions to me. I did not tell him that it was she who had sent me to meet him. I only told him this: that the connection between mother and daughter might have been distant in the years since she left me with the monks, but it had never been broken. And that when she died, she had left me an inheritance that made it possible for me to quit my job and to come on this pilgrimage.

It should have occurred to me, right then and there, that there was too much ease in what he was willing to accept. That he was not asking too many questions. That it was more like he wanted to be sure I 'felt' like I had told him things about me and my mother that would be important at some time in the future. That when that time came and he seemed to know things, I would think back and say to myself, 'Oh, I must have told him that but just not remembered it.'

The island of Patmos heaved into sight at mid morning. I was standing at the rail with Max, searching the sea's seven blues for the first fragmentary view of Patmos. I turned into his body when I had had a fulfilling look at it from the distance.

As I wrapped my arms around his arm and pressed in close to his side, I felt warm, sated with sun and deeply affected by the night before with Max. He had wanted me to tell him about my mother. I had asked him to tell me about his instead, as I was not yet able to put order to what I should tell him about my mother. He told me elusive memories of his mother. Of watching his father watch her when he would come home to the family when Max was a boy. Of how his mother would look with what he has since come to believe was wonder at the interplay between father and son. Of how he had once dismissed her influence over him but had grown to realize that she had taught him more about putting his heart into his duty than anyone had. It hadn't been just about following orders by rote, he told me. It had been about believing in the dignity of self and how a man sets his dignity by what he establishes as his duty.

That morning, I stood at the rail and noted his formality with me in public seemed an inbred part of him. Not for Max was the touchy-feely giddiness of public displays of affection for new lovers. He held himself in a different manner. Yet, he allowed me a gentle liberty of closeness and soft, affectionate looks and words between us. He might briefly buss me on the lips if I turned my face in expectation to him, but that would have been the extent. He was beginning to teach me, by example, by observation, that his view of honor, duty, allegiance were from such different frames of references, just as our view of the spiritual and religious belief systems were. He made me think, reconsider, analyze. And I thought about this complicated view of duty that he was exposing me to. Do we choose our duty or does duty choose us, and by doing so, bestow upon us honor if we accept it and try to do it well?

Max broke into my reverie to speak of what was driving me to go to Patmos. 

"You were right about the seductiveness of the sea's shifting colors, Eris. I have never been to the Dodecanese before, although I have marched through Asia Minor in my youth. But there was no time then for island hopping," he said, grinning at me when I leaned away to study him. His brief smile gave way to that calm expression of his as he looked off into the distance where the harbor was drawing into view. "I knew little of this cave on Patmos other than it had some mystic significance within your Christian religion."

"For a while, it was not that well known anymore among Catholics even, for sure. However, in recent years, there has been a rise of elements within the Church that seeks a new tie back to the more mystic notions of the early years of our religion. For all the passages in the Bible and all the books within, there is so much more scripture that has likely been lost and even many early beliefs that were never written down. Patmos ... the Cave of Revelations. It's such a place, I think. It appeals to the Catholics who always believe in some nebulous 'other messages' that were hidden in secrecy out of fear that they would fall into the wrong hands."

"All religions are sacred to me, all beliefs must be given honor. I am curious and eager for what our journey will show me about this place. I believe it is said great mysteries were written there ... as great as the oracles of Delphi and Cumae and equally obscure."

"I like that about you, Max," I said as I watched him turn slightly from me and take yet another look around us. "The Cave of Revelations is where St. John is reputed to have foreseen the signs of the Apocalypse. He was exiled in the cave and it is said that in there, he learned great secrets, only some of which he ever wrote down. People who believe in these things say the cave is one of a very limited number of spiritual places where humans can tap into the resources of the living earth to learn about the future as it is even then developing."

"Do you believe this? Is this why we go to Patmos?"

I sighed at the question. How to answer what I myself wished I knew? "Perhaps it is more that I pray it's why I'm drawn there. But I have been drawn to the cave and I must believe that there I will have my own revelations given to me."

"What is to be revealed to us? Will we touch the Divine and reveal ourselves? In the words of the inscription at the portals of the Oracle of Delphi, 'Know thyself!' I wish to know what is to be uncovered of our natures there."

Know thyself! I shivered at the words spoken aloud. "We shall soon know. One way or the other."

On this ferry ride, I should have been more observant. Max, however, was vigilant enough for the two of us. As we walked toward the small hostel I had read about in the literature where we would try to get a room for our stay, he asked me about the young man from the plane trip again. He asked me for a more detailed description.

"There was a young man on the ferry ..." Max said softly to me as we reached a street corner and I was looking at a map to be sure of my bearings. The streets of Hora, the harbor where we landed that is the central hub of Patmos, are designed to make travel as arduous for the invader as a labyrinth. It is an island that grew quickly tired of being invaded by those who sought to take over the high hill above Hora where temples then forts and now a monastery were strategic prizes. So they sought various methods over the years to circumvent the apparent ease of taking the structures atop its highest point.

My head jerked up in alarm at Max's query and I turned around, a tight circle, searching in staccato head movements, trying to find the young man from the plane, certain that if he was present here in Greece, it was more than a coincidence and that I was not paranoid ...

"Where? Where is he? I don't ..."

"Eris." Max said my name sharp. Like a whip cracked in the air. My eyes darted to his but then I continued to search for the lurking shadow. "He is not here now, my lady. In fact, I do not believe he is the same man from the plane."

"Are you trying to scare me?"

"No. Never." His hand cupped my cheek. His thumb smoothed under my eye. "You are not sleeping well, Eris. There is fatigue showing here."

"And now you're trying to change the subject? Why did you ask about the man from the plane and then say you'd seen someone on the ferry and then say not and ..."

His other hand came to the other cheek. Just that quickly he held me within his power. His eyes deep in mine calmed me. I felt the overriding sense of Max.

"There was someone on the ferry who took care to tend to your movements. It may have been nothing. However, vigilance is never wasted. Remember your promise to place your safety in my hands and to follow my instructions? Eris? Do you?"

"Yes. And it is a promise I will honor."

"Then all I ask, Eris, is that you abide this wish: do not stray from me unless I specifically grant permission."

I swallowed hard on that. Choked on it, if you might say it. It was not that I was necessarily an independent nature, but I had had to learn a measure of independence as an adult. Habits can be a chore to break. I willed myself to keep this directive not only in the spirit in which it was delivered by Max ... he was not trying to be a domineering chauvinist ... but also to keep it as a foremost guide to my actions.

Even as I nodded and we moved on toward the hostel, it hit me with force. These choices I was making, they were not easy. They might have appeared to be easy, but they were deceptive in what I had to trade off to make them. On the one hand, Max offered me protection. So I made the choice to accept it on his terms. But the trade off was that I bound him to me without him being fully aware of what that meant.

Every coward rationalizes first before he acts. I rationalized that holding truth back from Max was permissible if I would tell him later, when I judged he would need the truth. It wasn't a matter of being fair to Max; it was only a matter of practicality. He would never have believed me. I scarcely believed what I knew. I frankly knew that I didn't know it all yet.

That night, we dined at a small taverna near the harbor where fisherman had tied up their gaily-colored boats. We sat at a small table, our knees brushed up against each other. His eyes never stilled; they searched the faces of each person who entered, they studied the movements of everyone who passed the open window near us. I tried not to notice. I told myself that what would happen, it would happen one way or the other. If I could but believe strongly enough that danger was a figment of my imagination, then I prayed it would not coalesce into anything tangible.

But there was something. I knew it. Even without Max's increasingly tense body language, I would have known it. I have always been sensitive to presages of fate that gather around me, bringing me forward, shoving me toward the time to come. Some call it the gift of prophecy; I call it the burden of foresight. However, in the past, whatever I foretold, it was small and nebulous. Now, it was as if a cloud of steam gathered into a solid form. I could fight back against this feeling all I wanted, but even I could feel it overtaking me. Still, my will is strong. In the face of Max's agitation, I sank into a state of calm.

When our meal arrived, Max prodded me to finish. We did not stay to linger over local wine. He would not consider a stroll along the quay to take a romantic gaze at the moon.

From the hostel to the taverna, it had been about a fifteen-minute walk. The return trip took us no more than ten minutes. Max's hand at my elbow bade me to keep to his pace.

As we walked back to the hostel, I kept gazing up at the Monastery of St. John, with its white stone walls, which stood now in the place where temples and forts in this island's past had been. Every time I looked up at it, I felt myself floating toward the cave that was well beneath its apex. Though I could not see the cave's entrance, indeed did not quite know where to look for it from where we lazed, still I tried to visualize the Cave of Revelations.

All I seemed to see were hands clasped together. When I concentrated on the hands, they seemed clasped in anger, not held in peace. That night, I lay next to Max and dreamed of those hands. When at last they parted and seemed to be coming toward my eyes, I felt myself drop into a type of dream state that presaged a vision. Perhaps what I dreamed was generated by the unspoken fear I'd read in Max since we'd arrived in Greece. He'd been alert for something, some unnamed threat. I had tried to ignore it.

But inside this visionary dream, it haunted me. As those hands came toward my eyes, I turned to avoid them and looked out upon the path I'd seen in an earlier vision. It was the path that had trees and lighting that told me it had to be upon an island in this sea. I understood in that moment that the path led to the Cave of Revelations, to the gate of heaven that I sought. The white owl that I'd seen in that earlier vision was sitting high up in one of the trees along the path. Her feathers ruffled in a breeze that did not touch the trees. I noticed splatters of red upon her feathers. I looked away at the sight. My breath caught. Upon the path, I saw the woman who'd sat across from me in the airport in London. She was dressed now in material draped about her body as the ancient Greek women wore. She waved to me to get my attention. She called to me to hurry before it was too late. I looked back for the owl. She was gone as if she never existed. I looked back to the woman. She was also gone. The hands appeared before me again, gripped in fierce anger before opening abruptly to show me the dying owl.

I woke with a start.

It was daybreak.

Max still slept.

Next to him, I trembled with the force of the dream. What message was I being given? But I think a part of me knew. On shaky feet, I rose from the bed. I crept to the window, parted the curtains and peered out. A white streak in the sky caught my attention. I peered closely and followed it as it swooped low over trees until it coalesced into a compact form and alit in a high branch nearby. When it gazed at me, I leapt back from the clear panes with a gasp.

"Eris? What's wrong?" I heard Max behind me, a voice with sleep still strong within its raspy edges.

"An owl. A white owl. I just saw it." I turned to look at him. He was sitting up in the bed. His big hands were rubbing his eyes. "We need to go. We need to hurry."

We were on the trail to the cave within an hour. Max had listened patiently to the old woman at the hostel's front desk give instructions on finding the path and then how to follow it. It was an old goat herder's trail. Tourists most often took a taxi up the long twisting and convoluted roads to the top of the hill and then hiked down a short way to the cave, she told him. But people coming on a pilgrimage were known to hike up the traditional route. In point of fact, she said, if we hiked briskly, we'd make almost as good a time than taking a taxi as the road wove far out of the way before snaking back and forth toward the summit.

I had insisted we would walk. I had seen the path in a vision. This much I knew.

We were about ten minutes up the trail when I told Max why we had had to walk. I reminded him of the vision I'd had of the landscape. I had known, I told him, somewhere deep inside that one does not question, that it was this path. And that my destiny was to walk it. The dream of that morning, I told him, was a warning to immediately see to the completion of the pilgrimage to Patmos.

It was early enough that we passed no one. The day woke up as we ascended the trail. It was a more arduous climb than I had anticipated. After we'd been on it for about thirty minutes, we came upon a small, rocky stream. We sat on some of the bigger rocks and cupped our hands to sip the cold water. We ate apples and dates that we had taken from the hostel's breakfast area.

Trees and bushes surrounded us. Everything was so peaceful. But I could not shake the sense of foreboding the higher we climbed. I told myself that the dream had been more about my subconscious reaction to my fear that we were being followed than it was any accurate portend that something would endanger us if we had not immediately gotten on the trail. Perhaps, I thought, I was simply anxious about what would be revealed to me at the top of this path, inside that cave.

I breathed in deeply as I looked up into the trees above me. The air was so still, so calm. If you just forgot where we'd come from, I told Max, you could imagine that we were back in the time of St. John, couldn't you? He smiled at me and seemed to get lost in those thoughts. I wondered if he longed for home. I wondered if being in this time was ever an easy thing for him.

It was almost out of my mouth ... to ask him about an idea that just popped right into my brain just then ... something I'd never thought about before and as soon as the thought came into me, I wondered why I hadn't. I turned to him to say, "Max, why did you come into our time in the first place? And who sent you here?"

But the words lodged in my throat. His eyes were hard as granite. He was tense. His face wary. He looked slowly, carefully into the woods around us.

The hairs on my nape shivered in the chill of what I read in his stance.

"Eris, we must move. Now."

He grabbed my arm and yanked me up. His hand slipped to my wrist. He dragged me swiftly to the path. He made us stop. His fingers were on his lips to warn me to be silent. He peered up and then down the path. It took him barely a breath to decide.

"We go up. We must continue on. You stay before me. Speed is essential but we must be cautious as well. Swiftly, Eris. And when I give you a command, follow it without fail and without hesitation."

"I will, Max."

Our eyes met.

My heart thudded.

He held tight to my wrist and thereby set the pace. It was a fast one but we were not running.

What happened, happened so abruptly, that to say it would take away the bang-bang-bang way in which it truly happened.

A man appeared before me in the path. The man had a sword. I froze and Max shoved me behind him. Max lunged without a pause. The man was not expecting this attack. He thought we would retreat. He planned on it. But Max is a man he had not reckoned upon. I could not see all his movements. They were too efficient, too brutal, too sure. I saw the fall of the sword upon the rocky path as if from a great distance.

I heard a shriek. It was me. The arm around my neck cut the sound off mid-stream. My eyes swept to the trees above me and noticed a wind moving them. Then my eyes swept back down and I was looking at Max as he straightened from picking up the sword and half-turned to glance in my direction.

Something within him seemed to change. I cannot say what it was but the closest I could say is that Max became the hunter. He became the Roman warrior grunting and clawing and heaving and hacking his way through those who had chosen to stand before Rome's might and insist on being crushed rather than surrender. Any veneer of modern civilization's modulating influence was erased.

In one fluid motion, the sword was turned in his grip and Max stabbed the sword into the chest of the first man, now immobile at his feet. Then, with a guttural roar, he swung the sword about in his grip again even as he charged at the man who was strangling me as I clawed at the arm that held me fast and kicked at my assailant's legs as I was lifted off my feet.

Max's arms went up, the sword clutched within his hands, a look on his face of pure malice, a kind of blood madness. The man tightening his hold on me seemed to hesitate. I couldn't breathe even still. I knew only this: I must keep fighting to survive. My vision darkened and then I saw red. Voices were behind me. Two of them; the man holding me did not speak, only grunted with the exertion of holding me as I struggled while backing from Max. The other voices, though. Male. Devising a plan to take Max's attention away until I should be killed by their compadre. But ... there was one voice before me. It belonged to Max. It gave a grated warning to these others even as the man holding me suddenly fell away from my body.

I stumbled to the right. Turned wildly to face this assailant who'd been strangling me. A man writhed on the ground, blood spurting from a deep gash to his shoulder and his arm hanging down while the other tried to hold it to his body. He suddenly howled in agony as the reality of the blow Max had delivered made itself apparent to his shocked mind.

Without looking at me, Max issued his command of me. "Eris! Run. Go to the cave. I will find you there. Go! Now!"

His hand shoved me out of stunned inaction and I staggered a few steps. I turned to look at Max but he was already advancing on two other sword-bearing men coming up the path from the direction in which we came.

I saw Max hold the sword in one hand, out from his body, almost haphazardly. I saw the two men glance at each other and move to put distance between them. They began a slow movement to circle Max even as the only noise in the forest was their friend's whimpers of pain.

The last vision I had of Max was a detail. It was as his hand tightened its grip upon the sword. As my entire being focused on that detail, I heard the memory of his voice inside my head. His words, repeated words to me, telling me ... preparing me for this moment in which I must follow his orders without question, without fail.

This was the choice I had already made, even as I turned from him: to obey him.

I ran.

I ran as fast as I could.

And as I ran, I stumbled and picked myself back up. Behind me, unseen, Max fought for both our lives. The sounds of that violent fight were unlike any I had ever heard before. They grew dimmer the further I ran until the sound I heard more distinctly was the beating of my fearful heart as I at last found the cave's entrance.