The Lady's Champion

by M F Sullivan

  Mouth open but soundless, brows knit in deep irritation, the professor relented with a sharp sigh of disgust. “C’est naze,” he muttered. Awash with relief, Dominia clapped him on the shoulder, then strolled into the bathroom to flush the scraps of note.

  “Thank you,” she told him on her emergence.

  “Yeah, yeah…get out of here. Now I have to figure out…” He waved his free hand and shook his head with a stifled Japanese curse. “What a liability…Dominia…”

  The smiling General slipped through the door and left him to his muttering. Too bad, in retrospect, she hadn’t been able to bring the jacket: it would have been a fine alibi, the laundries being relatively close to her Father’s office. But there was no time to look for a better solution. The thing to do was to look like she had every right to be walking where she was—and that was true. She was allowed anywhere in the castle. Only her intentions were suspect, and who knew? She might very well change her mind at the last second. Unlikely, but such a line of internal nonsense helped her look less sinister.

  Only once—one time—was she noted with any scrutiny by anyone she saw. Near a depiction of The Breaking of Saint Severian, wherein Valentinian gleefully bashed the limbs of a man upon the wheel, the General rounded a corner and ran almost face-first into Lavinia’s sharpest little friend. Their martyr reflexes prevented collision. Nonetheless, the scrutinizing girl, wig askew, recoiled as if they actually had impacted and regained her composure with a narrow-eyed, “Oh.” As in: “Oh, it’s you.”

  “Sorry,” said the General, continuing apace toward the chancery, gritting her teeth to feel the girl’s gaze boring into her back. She forced herself to amble all the way to The Interrogation of Saint Titania, seven paintings down, before looking back. There, she found the courtier gone and took a breath that echoed beneath the soft music filling the chancery wing.

  Paranoia wasn’t bad in Kronborg, but even there it had its excesses. Within grasping distance of her Father’s office, this was the ideal time to slip into the night-blackened Void and steal her way behind his lock. She just had to convince herself it was the right thing to do. What good was that place, after all, if not to allow her passage through solid walls? She needed caution—a single step in that place meant a variable number in reality—but she now possessed means of navigation. Information. Regardless of whether the Hierophant had left a computer running in his absence (unlikely), that room was full of information. His sleeping computer, yes, but more analog information: books. Was it not possible that information kept in books could be seen in the Void with perhaps greater ease than information encoded as ones and zeroes?

  Confident she was alone, the General let her body slip through the atmospheric religious music of the chanceries and into the formless, unlit nighttime of that other space. Working with the Ergosphere, whether day or night, was not so much about learning how to create anything as it was about carving the rules of its workings from its own strange substance—and the more that was revealed to one, the more could one reveal to oneself by way of reason. Much as thoughtforms could be fished from the darkness by the magnetism of thought, so, too, could Dominia’s consciousness sculpt from the Void’s black innards a new perception of the data around her.

  As she contemplated this in the darkness, the information adjusted to her thoughts. No longer did it appear as threads demonstrating the connectivity of electronic devices. Rather, information pulsed all around, massed together in great golden clots of foam. Bookshelves. Though each office held an abundance, the General needed only find the brightest assortment of lights. No room in that castle contained more books—and a greater wealth of information—than her Father’s study. In the center of these bright clusters, she spoke the True Word of “reality,” and dropped back into her body.

  Yes: like disorienting magic, there she was. Standing on her Father’s desk instead of the floor, perhaps, but all the same, she’d appeared within a locked room without so much as touching the knob, and laughed at herself in astonishment.

  Then, she was back to business. Careful to keep her shoes from touching another centimeter of furniture, the General dismounted the desk and looked for clues of her Father’s foul intent. The (literal) desktop computer—a hologram PC built into the Hierophant’s otherwise untouched antique desk, a device that amounted to a projector lens set responsible for projecting both images and keyboard—had no doubt been locked, and if it wasn’t locked, then it was a bigger trap than his whole office. If there was a single room in the castle not being constantly recorded, it was this, but she wouldn’t have been amazed if he’d made an exception for her imminent presence and gotten scanners installed the week before.

  In other words, Dominia knew she would get caught. It was a matter of gathering as much information as possible before in the hopes that, somehow, in a dream or the actual Void (maybe even after her death if that was what it came to) she could transmit the knowledge to her friends. Even help herself. If there was any evidence of past efforts or future plans, it was worth the risk.

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, she needed only look far as that desk on which she’d manifested. Papers sat, still arranged as they’d been during the earlier meeting. Those papers front and center were none other than The Curse of Bathsheba, the final treatment of the Hierophant’s play. He’d been working on it while she spoke with him, and the scene in question was troubling: drawn not from the human Bible’s story of queen mother Bathsheba, but the martyr variation. In the Old Testament, Bathsheba was mostly an unfortunate married woman who was lusted after by King David when he saw her bathing. Whether or not she was raped as so many mythological women was unclear, but she and David were nonetheless punished unilaterally by the death of their first child. May have had something to do with David angling her husband to the front lines where the man died, thus allowing the king to marry Bathsheba—but that was a matter of debate. Whatever the reason, after the first kid, many others followed: including the future king, Solomon. A magician, Dominia noted wryly. In the human version of the story, this child claimed the throne by peaceful means, through his mother’s influence on the still-living David.

  All that was in the Old Testament, though. The Post Testament revisited the queen’s story, and many other stories, with purportedly true versions handed down from the priests of Acetia. Hogwash: from the Hierophant’s degenerate imagination. Beneath his pen, everybody in the Bible had their bad qualities ramped beyond reason, and there was quite a lot more amputation, cannibalism, slavery, and black magic than in even the Old and New Testaments. One had to admit this was almost impressive. When it came to the story of Bathsheba, the focus was on her rise to power as queen mother, assisted by the prophet Nathan. David died more or less at the start of the story, and a few—one might say, “liberties” had been taken with the essential natures of the characters in the story. Not to mention the means by which Bathsheba and her son attained power! Mostly, as one might have expected, this was through the mass slaughter of their enemies.

  The play evidently meandered for some time before it got to that point, because it looked like it was Act III or IV before King David was confirmed dead. In the scene Dominia’s Father had been touching up, Bathsheba was responding to news of her husband’s intended heir—Adonijah, the son of another of David’s wives—with an anger most humans might have considered extreme. In her rage, martyrs said she wished the children of mankind to die before being talked down to simpler solutions by Nathan; but before his intercession, her wish was not for death by simple means like flood or plague.

  ACT IV

  SCENE III

  (Queen Bathsheba’s chambers. She paces in agitation while the prophet Nathan watches. Smoke rises outside: Adonijah sacrifices cattle in a public demonstration of his claim to King David’s empty throne.)

  BATHSHEBA

  The constancy of od’rous meat poisons

  A scent meant to call us to the table,

  Emulating instead death’s fecund stench
<
br />   And rend’ring that which was once called “sweet,” foul.

  NATHAN

  The sacrifices of Adonijah.

  Fatted calves and oxen for the Lord,

  To celebrate—and thus cement—his rule.

  Haggith’s son always thought himself the king.

  BATHSHEBA

  Let no one think this impudence will stand.

  To dream! My son, his royal seat displaced,

  Standing at odds with uncertain future—

  How can the Lord allow me such a slight?

  NATHAN

  His retribution comes in subtler ways:

  Namely, within the actions of His men,

  Acting without knowing themselves actors.

  BATHSHEBA

  And doth the Lord not possess women, too?

  NATHAN

  Aye.

  BATHSHEBA

  Then find his retribution in me.

  Find justly rage within this breast, Prophet,

  For I burst with it, as Death’s bloodied air

  Marks a battle lurking on dawn’s rose cusp.

  NATHAN

  You would do violence in your good son’s name?

  BATHSHEBA

  Why should I not do violence? After all,

  ’Tis what my husband imparted on me

  When, by his violent passions, he conceived

  To lure me from my poor Uriah’s home

  And first, to trick the man—then see him die.

  NATHAN

  Of these acts, Queen, our Lord did not approve,

  Nor now does He approve of this ascent.

  Monarchy is given divine consent,

  Which Adonijah hath not in this case.

  BATHSHEBA

  Yet he burns oxen at my son’s altar!

  Those wretched sacrifices rot the air

  So Valentinian’s perfumes plague my mind.

  All I can think now is of sweet Death

  For those who are the source of my cruel grief.

  After all, the Lord hath punished me, too,

  Taking my first child by David’s loins

  And killing him, unnamed, soon after birth.

  Even now, God grants me no recompense!

  NATHAN

  Being the king’s best wife, no recompense?

  BATHSHEBA

  Not when my real power is a fraud

  And I’m belittled by that very might

  That, in hollow victory, comes with crowns—

  And costs the lives of my husband and babe,

  Firstborn through no fault it could name

  To death that keeps me awake counting stars.

  The Lord hath let so much slip from my grasp—

  I will not lay down and let this go, too!

  I will not long suffer this rancid stench!

  Ah, how my breast burns with fury, Nathan!

  That’s the flame that boils my blood to venom

  And fills me with a wish I’d dare not speak

  Were David not in Death’s red velvet hand

  While remnants of my power ebb away.

  Canst thou not see it in my very eyes,

  This foulest wish of which I am not proud?

  Look! Look into my eyes. Look deep in them.

  Lookst thou in my eyes and see my pure wish:

  That every human know firsthand my pain

  And by their own hands murder their children—

  As David, by his treachery and lust

  Marked our first child for death by the Lord

  In a cruel retribution for his sins.

  Let no firstborn escape their parent’s clutch

  Until the heart, once started by love’s hands

  Is culled to silence by the very same.

  May second, third, and fourth, and so on thrive.

  My Solomon, wisest of my litter

  Was fifth from my womb, yet he is the best:

  While first born of me soon thereaft’ withered.

  There were no such problems with all the rest!

  Much as Adonijah is Hagitth’s boy,

  A harlot David met while off in war:

  And how much trouble he causes me now!

  You see? Those firstborns robbed us first of joy,

  And to an altered life they formed our lure.

  Therefore, cave in their skulls! Make sure they’re dead!

  Slay all God’s firstborn children in their beds.

  NATHAN

  Surely you don’t mean that, Your Majesty.

  “Do you like it?”

  Her Father’s voice, unexpected at such an intense moment of the reading, startled her into dropping the page. His movement across the study was so quick that he not only caught the paper before it fell but also caught her hand before she sprang away. Holding it there and staring into her frozen face, his own bearing the smug expression of a cobra, the Hierophant spared the briefest of glances to the text. “The atmospheric alteration rockets are ready for the climactic storm sequence, the orchestra has practiced until their hands malfunctioned, and every seat in the house is sold out. Yet, with the premiere right around the corner and rehearsals nearly wrapped, I can’t keep from making the odd change here or there. The language must be perfect! This word, that dash—Shakespeare would understand.”

  “I wouldn’t call this Shakespeare.” She assessed the hand whose bones he could snap by tightening his fingers a quarter pound of pressure more. “Webster or Ford, maybe. Very dark.”

  “Perhaps, but who could blame poor Bathsheba? She did suffer a lifetime at David’s hands, and by Act IV we find her on the cusp of seeing her lineage denied its glory. After all she endured, it is only right the throne go to her favored son. Her reaction may be rather extreme, I admit, but the Bible can’t be corrected, can it?”

  “No more than can its author’s brain.”

  With a banal grin, he said, “At any rate, Nathan goes on to talk her down into a subtler scheme. She is only mortal! All mortals say things that they mean with only fleeting emphasis. I don’t think Bathsheba’s reaction is all that irrational. We all know what it is to suffer a broken heart, don’t we, Dominia.”

  “I didn’t know you had such an organ.” As she studied his hand and her own within it, her twisting mind formed a blender of terror. “Lavinia is playing Queen Bathsheba.”

  “And all those people—hundreds of thousands of human families from all across the globe—will be paying to watch.”

  The General mentally catalogued the room in search of an actual, physical exit, and was as relieved as she was disappointed she had already gotten rid of her gun. This play, this scene. He had left it out to mock her. Left it out because he knew she would come looking. Because he wanted her to know that, buried within the text of his play, was an order designed to come out of the mouth of a girl capable of controlling the minds of watchers who made eye contact with even her recording. Some weaker willed wouldn’t even need visuals. The words would suffice. Lavinia was being taught to give an order of genocide.

  And the Hierophant wanted Dominia to think there was nothing she could do about it.

  Her lips were dry as they parted to form hushed words. “Don’t you understand this is a war crime?”

  “Of the highest order! In fact, if I get the prose to a fine enough quality, I am not sure the condition will be curable. You know how it takes fine art to overcome Lavinia’s mental viruses; but when the virus itself is embedded in fine art, well…”

  “Why?”

  He released her hand to study the page in the lamplight. “I have been waiting for an opportunity like this for quite some time. It was important that tensions already be high before I made my move, that war already be underway. No sense in ruining a perfectly good world! Better, in my opinion, to let you stir everyone up first. Give them a reason to get curious again about the martyr world and give them a night when, burning with curiosity to know the fate of the surrendered General, they tune into the paid livestreams and end up with the
ir own family’s blood on their hands.”

  “You think it will be good for the martyr population if their food source dies out?”

  “Now, my dear, try to be less dramatic. It is only the firstborn that parents are being urged to euthanize. The second, third, and so forth, these will all be safe, and many deaths will be inconsequential ones—of older generations who turn on their adult children and suffer. Although I do wonder what shall happen in the case of stepchildren…”

  “You’re an animal,” said the General, not even thinking of Tobias as she spoke.

  The Hierophant smiled. “Aren’t we all, in the end? Animals capable of crafting consciousness, and consciousnesses capable of crafting reality—nonetheless, housed in animals. But think of what this will do, Dominia, aside from imparting a sense of seriousness in the humans and sparking interest where political isolation has been the rule for centuries—China and India, in particular. All the other Asiatic countries have overflowed into ours, and the South American ones. Think how this will ease the burden of mankind upon the Earth!”

  “Not all martyrs are as strong willed as Holy Family members. What if they kill their children?”

  His hands spread in a mild shrug. “Then they hadn’t will enough to be martyrs in the first place, and will be arrested or turn themselves into their local police in the aftermath. I fail to see the dilemma.”

  She didn’t know how to argue with someone so completely insane. She could only remain quiet and calm as he lifted his brows. “You think me some super villain, but rest assured, I did not come lightly to this decision. The most important point imparted by this method of extermination is clear: the evil resting within martyrs is that same evil resting within humans.”

  “Of course it is,” said Dominia. “Because martyrs are just humans.”

  “Yes, well, you know I prefer to discourage that line of thought. We are so much better than that! This has always been a matter of dissent between us. It was from the start of all this—from the moment you began to pout about my Project Black Sun. Do you not understand what it is of which you are a part? This is the Fourth Roman Empire, my girl! I dare not speak such a thing aloud, dare not announce it to the world—the last man who did was a racist, petty methamphetamine addict. Although I have more claim to the Empire’s lineage than he, to speak such a thing before the geopolitical stage would be as conducive to diplomacy as Lavinia striding into a party while announcing she’s the prettiest girl would be to her making friends. We all know what this is. The humans know this is beyond them—this destiny of the Empire to revive eternally—and that is why the Caliphate hunts our kind. Not out of a humanist ideology but an envy for our power. Even these wretches, my child, these murderers and terrorists with whom you’ve run for a year—even they believe martyrs and humans are different creatures.” At the obvious tension of her whole face to be captive of another lecture, he lowered the page.