Last Plane to Heaven: The Final Collection

by Jay Lake

  Then the Senate had sent him to a land he’d never meant to visit, to rule over a people with no sense of their needs, only a burning, passionate purpose transcending all reason.

  Out of place, even out of time, he sometimes thought. Certainly the Bridgebuilder lived in a palace, but it was so unlike the wind-whispered halls of his youth. His servants were for the most part sullen would-be poisoners kept in line only by the ever-present guards. The land itself rejected the empire, with short harvests and failing fisheries and blights on the olive groves and date palms, so even the most hard-hearted tax gatherer came back with chests half empty.

  People who have nothing can pay nothing. It was a lesson these fools had taken to heart, until the Bridgebuilder began to wonder if they had fouled their own wells out of sheer, raw spite.

  His only relief came in the light wine that was made up in the hills and shipped down to the lowlands in resinous casks. The flavor reminded him of the piney ferments the servants of his youth drank, which was fine with the Bridgebuilder. He had no pretensions to be anything other than a hopeless colonial, unworthy of the exacting standards of the Eternal City, whose empire he served. He would never sit in the Senate, or aspire to a voice at the emperor’s ear.

  He just wished mightily that he was anywhere but this miserable post.

  Even the nights were hot through most of the seasons. The Bridgebuilder would take his resinous wine and two or three of the serving girls and retire to his apartments on the roof of the palace. There he would command them to bathe him with sponges soaked in watered vinegar. After that he would command them to bathe one another. There was always room among his silks for an extra girl, and as the people of this place hated his virtues as much as they hated his vices, the Bridgebuilder indulged himself regardless.

  One girl in particular he had favored for a handful of seasons—Saleh. She was willing to lie with him in whatever manner pleased him. On nights when he was too far gone in wine to know his own mind, she would lie with him in whatever manner pleased her. And she was never jealous of any favor he showed to other girls. Best of all, she would hold him when the weeping came upon him, and whisper him to sleep with counsels which felt wise in the watches of the night, whatever his morning wit might later make of them.

  So it was that Saleh came to be his confidante in matters of state. Often as not, he wept for sheer frustration, once the wine had done its work. They curled together amid billowing curtains and the salt smell of the nearby ocean as she listened, and spoke, and listened.

  “Is that priestly council your master?” she asked him one time during a particularly difficult bout of religious revivalism among the occupied peoples.

  The Bridgebuilder waved off the suggestion. “No, no, I serve only the demands of empire. My orders come by courier aboard fast galleys, not from a bushel of black-robed schemers on their temple steps.”

  “Of course,” Saleh said. She kissed his ears, nibbling on the edges as he loved so much. “So their words are as the barking of dogs to you, yes?”

  “Yes,” he said, sighing. “I mean, no. No. I cannot simply order them to act. I do not have soldiers enough to dictate from every street corner.”

  “So you are beholden to their goodwill.” Something glinted in her voice, an edge he had not often heard—or noticed—before.

  “Never.” Pride stirred within him, a sluggish beast long put to sleep by the sheer unreasonableness of this place.

  “You are the lion of this land,” Saleh told him. Her hand, oiled now, slipped down to once more seek proof of his manly worth. “Do not let them shave your mane.”

  Later, lost in restless sleep, the Bridgebuilder was visited by two men from out of time. One had the seeming of a savage, freshly descended from some blood-soaked mountaintop. The other was a man of courtly bearing, wrapped in the grave-pale linens of Egypt long past.

  —You deserve your name, the savage said.

  —And the joy of your position, added his companion.

  They spoke in a sort of chorus:

  —Do not judge for the rabble. That is no better than choosing between two rotten fruits. When you are done, you still have only rotten fruit to show for your labors.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  —Sleeping kings of old.

  Not my kings, the Bridgebuilder thought, but he had too much respect for the power of the dream to speak thusly.

  Soon after, he refused to hear a case. A man was set to die for some pointless heresy, and the Bridgebuilder could have freed him. “The choice of rotten fruits does not appeal to me,” he haughtily told the delegation of local priests. Saleh had smiled at him from the shadows, but he never saw her again.

  In time, the Bridgebuilder realized that she, too, had been part of the dream; prophecy gone wrong without him ever knowing how to set it to rights.

  * * *

  The angel recorded as faithfully as only one of its kind could do. Mindless in their devotion, they were not made to question. That was the province of men and women, those failed echoes of the creator. Words twisted as much as they ever had, crossing the bridge of meaning between intent and actuality. Still, the page held them.

  The Fourth Sleeping King

  The maid buckled her armor. She was so very tired. The messenger angels did not come so much anymore. It had all been so clear in the years before she’d picked up a sword. Voices in the hayloft, visions of light by night. God spoke through His servants and she listened.

  She was the maid. This was the way of things.

  Now she was accounted an enemy even by the very people she’d saved. The invaders from across the water, of course, said terrible things of her. The maid knew to expect that. Scullery girls argued in the same fashion. In a way, it was an honor to have her name on the lips of enemy nobles. She was the only woman they did not ignore.

  But her own countrymen had turned away from her as well. Their hate bloomed the red-gold colors of mounting flames as surely as the leaves turned away from summer when autumn stole across the forests. This she could not understand. Had she not pressed the fight at Orléans and Jargeau? Had she not saved the very life of the Duke of Alençon?

  There was the truth, of course. To be saved by a woman was more disgraceful than to have been defeated by a man. Their ears were open to the charges whispered from across the water, spread in those places where the armies met and mingled on saints’ days, in whores’ beds, at market towns, around council tables.

  God had not forsaken her, but her own people had.

  Still, she wore these good greaves and chain over a surcoat. Still, she had the helmet dented by a dozen arrows, each turned away in the last moment by an angel’s hand, even while those closest to her fell. Still, she had this sword. The ultimate blasphemy, far beyond the worried mutterings of the priests—that a woman should take up the most male of weapons and prove herself able to cut and thrust her way into the body of the enemy soldiers and their army alike.

  With that thought, she sat to oil and whet her blade. This had not been in the morning’s plan. Mist rose off the fields outside her tent, the smell of horses and campfires, the little sounds of an army waking to a battle day. Even the sound of footsteps echoing on stone was not enough to deter her from her task, though it reminded her that the rest of this was memory, or dream.

  Stroke the blade. Metal gleamed in the oil, a false brilliance which dried all too soon, but for a while made this a sword of heaven. The whicking sound of the whetstone against the edge. The heft of the pommel, more familiar to her now than the hand of any of the lovers she’d never taken in her years among men. The rotten straw reek of the cell where she knew she slept, even as the dream-sword found its edge.

  —There is no more to be done.

  She stiffened, the sword falling away from her hand even though there was no clangor of the blade striking the ground. The stuff of dreams, as real as it had been. This was the first time the Lord’s host had spoken to her in … how long? “I am content,�
� the maid lied.

  —No one is content facing their end.

  “The end of my life on earth is but the beginning of my place in heaven,” she replied piously. Though in truth, she’d long doubted that as well. Too many of the men she’d killed were simply men. Not demons or devils, but ordinary persons with wives and children, who ate too much and farted and slept uneasily and cursed their serjeants and prayed upon their knees to the same God she did.

  Could she truly climb to heaven on a stairway made of the corpses of men who’d died with the Lord’s name upon their lips?

  —Yes. Of course the angel could hear her thoughts.

  With that the maid once more knew this for a dream. The messenger spoke in the words of the enemy, which was not so different from her own Frankish speech, but always before they had whispered to her in the writhing tongue of angels, which is far more like the stirring of snakes in some nest, or the rising of a locust horde, than any simple words from the mouth of a woman or man.

  Had the conversations always been dreams?

  —Yes, the angel said again.—But what does it matter? The world is but a dream of God. You will be a king in the history of this dream.

  “A king in death?” she asked aloud. “Surely a queen.”

  —No simpering queen drew on armor and sword, the angel told her reproachfully.

  Queens do not simper, the maid thought, and turned her face away until she tasted straw in her mouth and awoke to a bright morning with the memory of a sword’s heaviness on her lap. The gaze of the priest before her smoldered, and the maid knew she, too, would soon smolder.

  * * *

  The angel paused in its labors. Its kind were Divine intent, in the most literal sense, and so the purposes of the Tetragrammaton were never a mystery. Still, the words spreading from its pen introduced an unheralded glimmer of doubt.

  Doubt was heresy, doubt was the casting out, a star fallen from the crystal heavens to the deepest lake of ice far beneath the middle world of God’s creation. Shrugging off the unaccustomed sense, the angel resumed its toils.

  The Fifth Sleeping King

  The old man sat amid the willow trees and stared out across the Potomac. The waters of the river ran muddy, almost oily, seeming tired as they slipped home toward the sea. He’d been many things. The cicadas in the trees hummed the story of his life.

  Planter.

  Surveyor.

  Soldier.

  Political.

  General.

  President.

  “But never king,” he told the approaching night. In truth, surveyor had always been his favorite.

  —Of course you were a king.

  The old man looked up at the voice, which had carried over the cycling buzz of the insects. An angel stood before him—of this he had no doubt, for all his lifetime of tepid faith. Not recognizing this creature as one of God’s messengers would be like not recognizing the ocean as being made of water.

  It stood before him, a composite of mist off the river and the singing of slaves and the smell of the smokehouse and a few swirling leaves caught up in the hem of its robe. The old man knew he was dreaming then, but knew also that this, alone among all the dreams of his lifetime, was more real than even his waking moments.

  “I beg your pardon,” he said. “I went to some trouble never to be crowned.”

  —Kingship is not a matter of a circlet upon the brow. There was something almost prim in the angel’s tone.

  A question stole unbidden from his mouth. “Is my time at hand?” He was immediately ashamed of the fear that had asked it.

  —I am not that messenger. Kindliness guttered in the angel’s eyes, warming coals for the cold hands of the old man’s soul.

  He resolved to ask no more questions. That revelation should choose to come to him in the sunset of his days was no more, or less, surprising than any of the other things which had overtaken the old man down the now-vanished years. “I thank you for the visit, at least. Most who come to see me want something. Asking, always asking.”

  —I ask nothing of you that you do not ask of yourself. The angel moved, drawing the wind with it as a cloak, so the waters of the Potomac stirred in a way that would have alarmed any waterman.

  “I ask nothing of myself.” Children, thought the old man. Issue of his loins. A swift ending to the fractured mess the politics of his young nation had already become. A brake for the pride of those who had succeeded him in office both high and low. “Though sometimes I ask much of the world,” he admitted with the same ruthless self-honesty that had so often been a stumbling block in his life.

  The angel bent before him. Kneeling?—Here is the secret of your life, it whispered in a voice of willow leaves and the whippoorwill. When it began to speak again, all the old man heard was the dank, close sound of darkness, and the fading of Martha’s crying. He stared at his trembling hands and wondered how long she would mourn him.

  * * *

  The pen scratched on. Scribing, scrying, painting futures in the ink of the past, though all time was one from the vantage of the angel’s copydesk. It had recovered its equilibrium. Angels were pendulums, marking the endless moments of the mind of God, messengers bridging the ineluctable gap between perfected intent and the imperfect matter of Creation.

  It had never questioned why God, who was all things everywhere, should require a book to record His doings, or the doings of His creation. It is not the nature of angels to question, only to answer. It is not the nature of angels to devise, only to record.

  The Sixth Sleeping King

  What the hell was the matter with people? No respect, that was it. His mother had been right. No one ever listened to him like they should.

  The man who had been commander in chief poured himself another drink. He wasn’t supposed to, had given it up years ago so far as anyone knew. The gap between what he said he did and what he actually did had ceased to matter so long ago that the ex–commander in chief rarely considered it anymore. What he said, what he believed, was the truth. The messy details were just that: messy details. No one’s business.

  Disappointment, that was it. So many things which should have happened never did. Promises from Scripture and politics alike had been betrayed by niggling traitors. No one saw his goodness, his rectitude. Not even Laura, who’d always stood beside him, shrouding her thoughts in a smile.

  He really ought to have married a girl like Mom. A man could rule the world with a woman like that at his side. Daddy had, damn him.

  The ice in his glass clinked like the fall of coins. The outside sweated cold and heavy. He knew then he was dreaming, he really hadn’t touched a drink in years. Not really. Not that counted. The ex–commander in chief simply didn’t stand around mixing a highball.

  He had people to do it for him.

  Even in his dreams, a man had to laugh at himself.

  A young fellow in a suit stepped close. Dark skinned, but not obviously any particular kind of colored. The ex–commander in chief didn’t recognize the guy, though he wore the regulation gray suit and translucent earpiece.—Sir. The fellow’s voice slipped through another layer of dreaming into a space of soaring naves and thundering sermons and the safe, blind glory of prayer.

  “This is about the red heifer, isn’t it?” Where had that come from? He wasn’t supposed to talk about it. The glory would come, in his lifetime, he’d been promised. He knew.

  —Sir. Something hung in the fellow’s eyes, expectant as a launch code.

  He felt his breathing grow shallow and hard. “Is it time?” The promise, it was coming to pass!

  —Sir.

  A familiar peevishness rose inside him, that his handlers had so long fought to banish. Too bad for them, he was the boss here. Always would be. Didn’t matter how he got to the top, nope. He was here now and not climbing down. No sir. “What is it,” the ex–commander in chief demanded. “Speak up!”

  —Sir. The voice sounded haunted, as if coming from an empty hallway far away.
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  He tried to shake off his dream, to wake up gasping amid the sheets. He hated the feeling of being wrapped in self-doubt, and always shed it as quickly as he could. Mother said too much thinking was bad for a man. The ex–commander in chief had learned to trust his gut. Facts changed depending on who brought them to you. Feelings were the hard truths.

  Right now he was feeling very worried indeed.

  —Sir. A terrible fire blossomed behind the fellow’s gaze. The ex–commander in chief threw his drink at the flames, but they only passed outward along the arcs of liquid and ice and shattered glass until his dream was consumed by fire and a great voice echoed from the heavens, asking him if this was truly what he intended.

  Still, he did not doubt himself. Not him. Nope. No sir.

  * * *

  The angel finally set aside its pen. The book was done, or would be until it was opened again. Words were the oldest, greatest magic. God had spoken in the beginning, and He would someday unspeak the end, swallowing Creation down in a sweeping blur of undoing: oaks shrinking to acorns; cold cinders swelling first to red giants, then reduced to their starry births; old men climbing from graves to step backwards to life until they climb puling and mewing back to the salty delta from which each had first flowed.

  As done, undone. As lived, unlived. Time, helical, alive, autophagic, endless as a circle, with as many corners as an egg.

  All of this best stated in the language of dreams. Consciousness was too linear for even the angel itself to properly comprehend the sweeping swirl of God’s Creation. How so for His poor creatures of clay and sweat and breath?

  It smiled, preening a moment, feeling a rare sense of accomplishment before moving on to the next task: to bear the book away so it might someday be read.

  The Seventh King

  She is just a girl. She doesn’t know her parents, though there are people who live in her house and clothe her and feed her and call her by a name not her own. At night a favorite uncle crawls out of the wainscoting, thin as a shadow, heavy as a star, and whispers to her the dreams of sleeping kings long dead.