Chapter Text
One.
Golden-green hills rose on either bank of the quick river. They undulated and folded over again, lined with the vine shelves that had been built into the hard land over centuries of exploitation. Water sprayed its wings at the boat’s nose, glittering yellow in the vicious sun. The sky above was without the scab of a single cloud. The hills below were a wonder of human ingenuity, scabbed and scarred many times over to produce only greater beauty, to flow with the potent nectar of sweet wine, to become, in all the monotony of repetition, a sight impossible to bore of.
Hannibal thought of Will’s skin.
It was their first summer in Douro Valley but their second in Portugal, and Will’s skin glowed no longer the angry reds of two years previous, only a healthy honey brown. It was easier to remember sunscreen further in-land: the heat cloistered in the valley, fattening and sweetening its renowned grapes and further drying its ripe lands, when back in Porto the ocean’s breath had cooled temperatures to middling and inspired forgetfulness. Those days, Will would come home a crabby red, the tips of his ears burnt to a crisp, skin peeling off in itchy little flakes. Hannibal would find them later around the house: sitting atop a pillow, clinging to a sheet, hiding away at the bottom of a porcelain cup.
‘How about that one?’ One hand thrown carelessly over the wheel, Will stood in contrapposto, white T-shirt gone parchment-thin in the sun. It would not last halfway through the summer, and neither would the rich dark of his hair. Already a few streaks had turned a shade off auburn, like veins of sweet resin on ironbark.
Hannibal looked to where Will’s jutted chin had pointed out a half-house abandoned midway up the slope. The roof had caved in over the stone and vegetation had already begun a slow but inevitable reclamation. It might have been a vineyard once. Today, it was ruin only.
Hannibal squinted against the light and distance. ‘There is no road.’
‘We’d have to come in from the river,’ Will agreed. ‘Bank’s a little rocky, but it should be doable. Want to go have a look?’
Hannibal nodded. Will was turning the wheel already. He’d straightened up in focus, hips aligned again with his feet.
They had to go half a mile down the river before they found a place to anchor. They climbed up crags of sizzling rock. Will led the way, easy with his body. Before the heat had come and Minnie had fallen ill, he’d spent hours hiking these trails, gradually instilling in his limbs the confidence of mountain goats. He must have missed the exercise, because when he made it to the top he turned on Hannibal with a radiant smile, blinding like the pierce of sun from up high, and he reached out to help him over the last stretch of height without hesitation.
As he did so, Hannibal was pulled to stand directly beside him, close enough to feel Will’s sweat on his own skin.
‘That’s a view,’ whispered Will, his eyes roaming the panorama which had revealed itself. A wind came from the water to play in his hair. A bead of sweat travelled from his upper lip into his mouth, and he flashed his tongue for half a breath to lick it clean. He would have been tasting his own taste, however briefly: the taste of the salt crystals crowning his lips.
Hannibal turned to look at the view.
‘The valley of molten gold,’ he said. ‘One wonders why the conquistadors felt compelled to travel such a long way, when the land they sought lay just next door.’
He felt Will’s eyes move over his face. He kept his own gaze carefully affixed to the distant contour of the whitewashed vineyards which demarcated entry into Pinhão.
Will cleared his throat. ‘I’ll be molten soon,’ he said. ‘Let’s go find some shade.’
When they arrived at the site of the ruin, they were unsurprised to discover very little shade awaited them, the angle of the sun too wide for the walls to catch shadows. They sat beneath the spotty shield of a chestnut and drank water in large, painful mouthfuls—and then in small, swirly sips so it would last them the way back.
‘You’d need to redo the roof, obviously,’ Will began as he lay back on the ground, arms folded beneath him to prop up his frame, ‘but the walls are solid. I bet you the second floor is whole, too. Some of these vines would need to be cleared off, but much of it’s harmless. Becomes an aesthetic choice.’
‘I like the vine.’
‘Alright. Worst thing about a place like this is probably the water installation. Hard to tell what they even had here if they had anything. I saw a well the other side, so it might be the case of starting from scratch, but that’s just an issue of money and time.’
When they’d seen their first dilapidated construction in Porto, on the first day they’d risked leaving the house together, Hannibal had stopped without thinking. He’d been enamoured with the beauty of old stone hidden beneath the creep of decay; he’d been charmed by how many such houses in ruin clung to their space across the city, suspended between life and death, functionless and doomed yet refusing to let go.
He had said something of the sort to Will, who had walked the four steps back to him when he’d noticed an absence at his side. Will had been jittery then, quick to anger, and Hannibal had felt it was important to explain the delay to avoid confrontation.
Will had looked at the ruins and said, rough through a mouth still twisting around healing tissue,
‘Needs some work.’
Since then, it had been Hannibal’s favourite pastime to seek out buildings that had breathed their last breaths and collapsed their last walls, and have Will walk around them, kicking at the stone and plaster and mumbling about the cost of this or that contractor.
He judged the houses salvageable every time.
It was more challenging these days to add to Hannibal’s collection, as ruins in Douro Valley were spread out over larger distances and often secreted in the folds of the hills. The valley was his sea and the houses its pearls; he had told Will so, and on that day Will had brought him fresh mussels from the harbour in Régua.
‘Would you bring me back here another day?’ Hannibal asked. Will had offered him this trip on an apparent whim, and Hannibal had come ill-prepared: no sketchbook, no pencils, no food.
Will’s mouth twisted. The scarring on his cheek, blanched by the sun, made it so that his frowns resembled sometimes smiles, and so that his smiles all had teeth. Hannibal remembered what it felt like to see joy on Will’s face unmarred by danger. He remembered the lines on Will’s smooth cheeks that had once demarcated happiness or pain, and remembered how to read each arrangement they would have set into—a dictionary’s worth of knowledge now wholly obsolete.
‘We can bring Minnie. Make a day of it.’
‘She won’t be able to brace that climb,’ Hannibal said.
‘I was thinking of buying one of those dog-carrier backpacks. If she took to that, she could still see a bit of the world before—There’s a store that has them in Lisbon. I might go at the weekend.’
Hannibal felt the edge of a frown tease at his lip. ‘There’s nothing closer?’
‘They sell on-line, but I’d rather see them first.’
What Hannibal wanted to say stayed in his mouth. It had the distinct flavour of a bitters.
The sun still sat high in the skies when the boat’s side butted once more against Régua’s pier, but it was possessed of a somewhat downward inclination. Workers milled around, setting up for sunset cruises or locking up for the night. One had rushed to catch the rope Will had thrown, and another helped Hannibal step over the edge, his hand calloused and smelling of shellfish.
Will was laughing. ‘What’s with the royal treatment?’ he said in his awkward Portuguese, fluent with the words but forever unsure about the sounds. It had been so little time, yet his Portuguese had already evolved away from Hannibal’s. It ate up the sounds Hannibal had always thought essential and elongated others; sometimes when he heard Will speak with his friends from harbour, he did not recognize half the words.
Among the dying sound of the engine and a travel guide’s attempts to herd her tourists, Hannibal lost the men’s answer. He could well imagine what had been said. Will fixed their boats and helped with their catch, never thought himself too good for any job that needed doing, kept his fees reasonable and provided the sort of half-scandalous gossip they could safely take home to their wives. The men here liked him. The men here liked even more when Will’s wealthy partner took to harbour to look out of place and be fussed over. The pace of life in the valley picked up with the summer’s tourists but never fully broke away from its usual crawl, and any deviation from routine was a thing to be celebrated.
As the murmur of Will’s foreign Portuguese blended with that of the men, Hannibal ambled over to the only stall still open beneath the umbrella of an orange tree. Two women were trying on straw hats, angling their necks to catch a good enough reflection in the miniature rectangle of mirror taped to the display. Hannibal had no current need of a hat, but he had been thinking of buying a new basket. He had found a fine one in darkened straw by the time Will tugged at his shirt to get him to move.
His fingertips brushed against Hannibal’s side. He had the easy stance now of a man who knew who he was. Will did know who he was, here in the harbour. The sun reflected in his eyes when Hannibal met them. Like this, they appeared almost translucent.
‘Are you ready to go?’ Hannibal asked, wanting to delay the moment they went.
‘Yeah,’ Will said in English. ‘Martim is going to save you some bacalhau tomorrow.’
‘What is he going to save me?’
Will smiled at being indulged. ‘Bacalhau,’ he said another way, still nowhere near close. Hannibal thought he had probably learnt how to say it properly by now, but for whatever reason chose to pretend.
‘I suppose dinner tomorrow will have to be a surprise. I cannot begin to guess what you are trying to say.’
It was time to go: goodbyes had been said, a fresh supply of cod ordered, the basket bought and the running joke dutifully repeated. For a moment, they both stood in the in-between, unwilling to move.
It was the right time exactly to do it, so Hannibal took Will’s hand. It was clammy from too much heat and rough from too much water. Will’s mouth twisted in its favourite expression: not smile, not frown, not a thing that could be understood.
Hannibal had parked in their usual spot, a little way away in a back-end alley that had not taken deliveries since the restaurant had gone out of business. They walked slowly, their shadows growing longer, the air buzzing with the evening song of Régua’s cicadas.
Once they could no longer be seen by the men in the harbour, Will let go of his hand.