Polystom (Gollancz Sf S.)

by Adam Roberts

  ‘Her co-parents specifically requested,’ she said, slightly flustered, ‘that I look after her into her majority. In so many ways, you see, she’s still a child.’

  ‘Then it’s doubly good of you,’ said Stom, the hint of malice in his voice covered by his smile, ‘to act as guardian. To steer a child to adulthood is chore enough; to continue the labour into adulthood requires particular devotion. May I ask an indelicate question?’

  Even asking whether he could ask such a question was slightly indelicate, too forward, but Elena Marina was hardly in a position to refuse it. She nodded, lowering her eyes.

  ‘Beeswing: is she spoken for? Does she have any – particular admirers?’

  Elena Marina shook her head.

  ‘And, if I may impose upon you,’ Stom added. ‘One further question.’ This next question would make his intentions unambiguous, and was even more indelicate than the last. Properly he should have asked it of his aunt, or some other close family member, but he was enjoying the blushing discomfort of the old woman too much to let it go. ‘Is she of good family?’

  ‘Good family,’ echoed Elena Marina, weakly. ‘Yes, yes. Oh yes. Her co-mother is second-fourth-cousin to the Prince.’

  ‘And her mother?’ Because, when all was said and done, and despite the polite noises everybody made, blood was more important than marriage connections.

  ‘Her mother’s father owns the second largest estate on Kaspian. Very good blood. And her father – I know he was only a contract father, but nonetheless – her father is the son of Rhepidos. You know Rhepidos? The writer?’

  Stom angled his head. Of course he knew Rhepidos.

  Later that day, as Elena Marina doubtless scurried off to gossip about her momentous news with various people, starting with Stom’s unsurprised Aunt Elena, Polystom contrived an hour alone with Beeswing. The pretext was a game of goal croquet; six players, as the rules required, in three teams. Polystom approached Beeswing directly and asked her if they might play together. She looked at him with so oddly distant an expression, as if he were hailing her from half a mile away and she couldn’t recognise his voice. ‘My name’s Polystom,’ he said. ‘Of the Northern Estate. Actually, I’m Steward of Enting. My father was also called Polystom. You’re Dianeira, aren’t you?’

  The faintest of nods.

  ‘Do you mind – I don’t mean to be forward, but . . .’ said Stom, his self-confidence, his self-stature, slipping in the face of her cool beauty, ‘but would you mind if I called you Beeswing? Some people call you it, I know. It’s so strange a name, but somehow poetic. I adore poetry, you see. So, would . . . would that be alright?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, softly.

  Her first word to him: an affirmation. His head buzzed with the thrill of it. How he loved her!

  The goal croquet began. They started off striking the ball, taking turns. He played the game extremely badly because his attention was entirely on her; her silky figure, as she leant forward a little to strike the ball. The way her arms appeared so slender and yet flickered with miniature musculature when she wielded the wooden bat. Her hair, slipping over her face, or bouncing back, a complex blending of dark brown and black. The butterfly blue of her eyes.

  Their team lost the game comprehensively, but Stom didn’t care. He had hoped to use the opportunity of the period of the first jou to ingratiate himself with her, to project himself as witty and man-of-the-world. But in fact he had been rendered silent by the strength of his feeling. Coming back down the course for the second jou he made more of an effort, but she met whatever he said with a dreamy indifference. Not rude, so much as removed. The effect on Stom was intoxicating. He could hardly describe her manner. It was oddly spiritual, yet strangely knowing.

  Afterwards, as the servants started laying a trestle table with lunch foods, Polystom summoned his courage and asked Beeswing if she would come with him for a wander. ‘Down to the copse over there, and back for lunch?’ he suggested, almost stammering with nerves.

  She didn’t say anything, but she did accompany him, and she did allow him to take her arm in his. It was their first time alone together. Stom, obviously, should have made only small talk; should have arranged for a second meeting; should have established the common ground on which they could converse and find out about one another. He knew this, somewhere inside himself. But instead of doing this he found himself talking for long stretches, his own voice spooling itself out and out with details of his own family tree, of his status and his place near the upper echelons of the System, of his personal wealth and estate. It sounded like the preliminaries of a proposal of marriage. Stom was, on one level, appalled at himself, but at the same time he was strangely exhilarated. Beeswing gave none of the signals, as another woman might, of being uncomfortable with the precipitous nature of the conversation. It was as if she, somehow, understood.

  They made their way down to a copse of seven golden-spine trees, grown into interwoven patterns and dressed with carefully manicured nettlemoss. The copse was for display, a sort of living artefact, and it was not possible to enter it or walk between its trees, so Stom and Beeswing walked beyond it, down and up the grassy hillock beyond it and into the Canal Garden, where dozens of little bridges humped over and over the lattice of miniature canals. There was nobody in this garden but an undergardener, trimming the scarlet show-weed from the banks of one of the canals, and of course they ignored his presence. Stom went on talking. They mounted one of the little bridges, and paused at the top of its hump, leaning on the handrail and admiring the view.

  Polystom’s family is one of the most respectably bred in the whole System; one of perhaps only a dozen families to have the same provenance and familial longevity as the Prince of the System himself. His paternal great grandfather was Count Meli, the famous Count Meli, who (Count being a military title of course) formed the very first flying squadron of the Royal Military. His maternal great grandfather had supervised the creation of the canal network that brought ice down from the highlands of the moon of Bohemia. In a touch redolent of the time (this was nearly a hundred years ago, after all) this great man had ground the bones of those workers who died on the job and mixed them in to temper the cement of the canal beds and sides; slightly gruesome, we might say nowadays, but done with the noblest intentions. This way, you see (as the Count might have explained, were he alive to do so) they are forever memorialised by the great work on which they were engaged. Surely burial in a hole cut out of the earth is merely ignominious? Although they were only servants, their deaths are memorialised in stone almost as if they were people of Family. A cousin of Stom’s grandmother’s wrote a tragic operetta on the subject. Very moving. Plangent melodies, and lines beautifully crafted in Old Kaspian, the proper language of opera:

  Paragei tina-a-a-ah kleoo-oona ton kaloumenon

  Paflagona ka-a-a-a-ah-ti bursopo-o-olen . . .

  But she will really have to excuse him. His singing voice is atrocious. He’s very much ashamed of it, and if he hadn’t got carried away in the moment – but poetry has always been important to him. Very important. His father had also loved poetry. But, really, his family; he mustn’t get distracted. Well, on his father’s side he was related to the early Princes of Enting. What else? His great-great-great-really-a-great-many-greats-grandfather had purchased the whole of the northern continent. He still has rights of authority over most of it; certain parts have been given away to friends and relatives, but his estate, the Northern Estate, is still the biggest on Enting. His grandfather, his father’s father, had been a hot-headed type; called Polystom too, of course. He fought a duel, you know. There was a famous poet called Phanicles, you know. And the two of them had loved the same woman. So his grandfather called Phanicles out – shot him too, although thankfully for literature not fatally. This grand uncle was called Chruestom. He was an army commander; the General, he was called, although his rank was more properly Count and that outranks general, as of course you know. He received more decorations tha
n any other military man. This was before the war on the Mud-world started, of course, so perhaps his record has been overtaken now. He put down several insurrections, you know, with bravery. Among his current living relatives, there are first cousins who act as Stewards of Bohemia and Berthing; the current Prince is a second cousin; and his mother’s partner is the mother of the heir to the Princedom.

  He tells her all this, in a tumble of lengthy sentences, and she stands next to him, saying nothing, taking it all in (he thinks) with fascinated absorption. Finally he reaches a pause. He has stunned her with the enormity of his breeding, knocked aside any but the most flibbertigibbet reasons for objecting to marriage. This last word, though, the weightiest of words, has not tumbled from his mouth, however much he has thought it. That really would have been too forward. But it is implied in everything he has said. Surely she realises that!

  After a silence, he starts again. ‘Tell me about you,’ he says, a little awkwardly.

  ‘Me?’ she says, softly. ‘There’s no me.’

  Does this mean, Stom wonders, a little wrongfooted, that there’s no life story worth relating? Or that there is no person behind the beautiful façade of Beeswing’s face and body?

  ‘You ran away from home when you were younger,’ he says. She doesn’t reply to this at first, so he prompts her. ‘Why?’

  ‘I felt buried alive,’ she says, still in her dreamy voice, her eyes still focused on the distance.

  ‘This was with your parents?’

  ‘Yes. Their house.’ She breathed out, a slow exhalation like a smoker enjoying a cigarette. ‘It was a prison. Not like a prison, you know, but actually one.’

  But she need say no more. His sympathy is entirely hers; his heart throbbing like it too was buried alive and is shouting for attention, ‘Bring me out into the air! Make me known to her now!’

  And, although he says nothing more to her in the canal garden, this is what he does, in effect. He takes her arm and walks her back to the House, and they walk in silence the whole way because (he is so sure!) they have established a real affinity. And the following day, when he arranges a meeting with his aunt and with Beeswing’s guardian, and the three of them discuss marriage, the sense of the rightness of what he is doing hums in his very bones. And the day after that, when he makes his plans known to her – letting her know of her guardian’s consent, that a message has been sent to both her mothers, that the ceremony would take place by the month’s end – she didn’t say yes, exactly, but she certainly didn’t say no.

  [third leaf]

  After the wedding, Stom took the Ornithos, his two-seater biplane, and flew his new wife back to her new home. He made sure to circle through the air several times to give her the opportunity to see the estate in detail from above. But from his rear pilot’s cockpit he could see that she wasn’t looking down. Her head was cast slightly back, her eyes fixed on the blue-violet of the sky.

  There was no point in calling to her during the flight. His words wouldn’t carry. But on landing he stood up and leant forward, supporting himself on the rear rim of her cockpit: ‘I was flying around,’ he said breathlessly, ‘to show you the estate. It’s beautiful, you know.’ He felt foolish saying this last thing. It shouldn’t need pointing out.

  ‘The sky is lovely,’ she said as she took off her leather helmet. This wasn’t a direct contradiction of his words of course, but in an obscure way it felt like it was. ‘I’d like to be taught flying. I’d like to learn to fly a plane such as this.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ said Stom, suddenly angry, as if thwarted.

  They climbed out of the plane as servants steadied the wings. They walked over the turf together. Stom had told the Head Grass-Gardner to mow their two initials into the lawn before the house: P and D. It had been nicely done, the letters a slightly darker green against the brightness of the spring grass. ‘Look!’ he said, touching her elbow and again feeling foolish that he needed to point it out. She should, he felt somehow, have noticed it herself, gasped with delight, clung to him in happiness. Instead her eyes barely followed the line of his pointing arm, lingered less than a second and looked away.

  Indoors, a sumptuous lunch had been laid in the Mahogany Room. The two of them ate, Polystom punctuating the silence with nervous comments about the food – these are grown locally, you know. This is balloon-boated in from Berthing, very expensive. She barely smiled. Over coffee, as servants cleared everything away, Stom pulled his chair closer to her, suddenly intensely nervous. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘We could wait until tonight, of course. But I thought, perhaps . . . you know? Consummation. Of the marriage, I mean. We could do it now, this afternoon.’

  For once she didn’t seem abstracted. Instead she seemed to be concentrating intently on his words, which was in a way even more alarming. Stom felt his hands trembling, as if the fingerbones were buzzing, like loose canvas on a plane in flight. She looked directly into his eyes. ‘Whichever you would prefer,’ she said.

  ‘I wondered if . . . I think I’d prefer . . . well, once the food has gone down a little, of course, but I wondered if we shouldn’t . . . wondered if we couldn’t do it this afternoon?’

  She nodded, as if she had deeply considered and was deeply agreeing; slow, careful nods. ‘Get it out of the way,’ she said.

  Although this sentiment had been implied in Polystom’s words there was something about the way she said it out loud that was actually rather upsetting. Stom swallowed. In a way that was what he had meant. But did she have to say it right out like that? As if making love with him were, somehow, a chore to be disposed of as quickly and painlessly as possible. The quiet, singsong way she had said that, get it out of the way, sounded in Stom’s ears as a rejection. An insult. Him! He was Steward of Enting, as if she didn’t know. His estate was the largest on the world. The Prince was his second cousin.

  ‘Well,’ he said, nonplussed. ‘If you don’t mind.’ And then, because that sounded feeble in his own ears, he amended it to, ‘Maybe that would be best. Yes, that would be the best thing to do.’

  So he waited twenty minutes, fidgeting, attempting cul-de-sac conversations. Finally he stood up. ‘Shall we go upstairs then?’

  Servants had prepared a separate bedroom from the one he normally slept in. He’d pondered that point at some length, and decided it was a good idea not to be distracted by his familiar things during this, their consummation. Coming into the room behind Beeswing he regretted that decision. He felt surprisingly agitated at the prospect of having sex with his wife. He missed the comforts of being in his own space. It had never been like this before. Playing with the daughters of local servants and farmers, bringing them wide-eyed and palpitating into his own house, or coupling with them in fields and barns. In all the scores, hundreds, of such experiences he had always had the gut-solace of his own superior status. Now, and despite his better breeding, his greater wealth, despite his better education and everything else, he felt somehow lessened in the presence of his wife. She was a tiny human being, so fragile-looking you might fear to embrace her for the damage you’d do, and yet she walked with a straight stride into the bedroom, and it was Stom who shuffled behind her, tongue-tied and blushing. When she was inside she looked all about the room, pulling the drawers open, fluffing the curtains out to check behind them, before settling down cross-legged on the bed.

  ‘Shall I?’ Polystom began to say, but the words stuck in his throat and he coughed. ‘Would you prefer it if I – wore a guard?’ A reasonable question; one he had thought through in advance. They had not married, as many did, merely for legitimate offspring. It was a true co-coupling. Accordingly, whilst children would clearly be desirable at some stage, they – she – might not want to become pregnant too soon.

  ‘Yes,’ said Beeswing, with uncharacteristic firmness. ‘I don’t want to become pregnant.’

  Stom coughed again, went to the bedside cabinet and pulled opened the little door. ‘Eventually,’ he said nervously, fetching out the prophylactic spray, �
��you’ll want children of course. Of course, we’ll both want children eventually.’

  ‘Pregnancy,’ she replied, more dreamily, her attention apparently distracted by the lozenge-shaped patterns on the painted ceiling. ‘It’s not for me,’ she said, distantly.

  Stom thought of contesting the point, but was fearful of spoiling the mood. They would, he resolved silently, come back to that another time. So, holding the prophylactic spray in his left hand, he unbuttoned his shirt and eased his body out of it. Beeswing turned to look at him and her dreamy eyes rested on his belly, on his chest, and on his face in turn. Then she uncrossed her legs in a single graceful movement, slipping off the edge of the bed. She was wearing a double-skirt, gathered at a button knotted into her hair at the back of her neck. It looked like a complicated arrangement, the cloth bunched and buttoned, intertwined with the braids of hair, but it took only a single touch with her right hand to untangle it all and leave the dress sliding off her body to gather in folds on the floor. She stepped free and sat down again on the bed. Stom took in her nakedness with one look before blushingly turning away. Her tiny breasts seemed all nipple and aureole, bruise-coloured circles with tiny thorn-shaped tips; her belly curved inwards, her hips traced out the slightest of arcs; her buttocks were flat, her thighs so slender that an inch showed between them as she stood. Her bush marked out a precise triangle, black against the silver of her skin. Only her feet were out of proportion in this faery-frame, for they were surprisingly long and broad. Stom, looking away, not understanding why he felt so abashed, pulled off his trousers. He flipped the top off the prophylactic spray. Erotic tradition suggested that the woman apply the stuff, as one of the preliminaries of lovemaking, but Stom felt inhibited from asking Beeswing to do this. The awkwardness, the sensation of inward block, made him somehow, distantly, obscurely angry. His own member was hard as ivory, and he quickly sprayed the prophylactic around the end and up and down the length of it. It imparted its cold, plasticky sensation. He turned to face his wife again, and she was sitting, cross-legged, watching him. Again he felt an inward quailing, and he drowned it out by telling himself that she was his wife, that they were doing a proper thing, that he had a right to do this thing.