by John Klima
A throne, made of the same huge, crude stones, stood in the middle of the hall. Light from overhead touched the foot of the thing, leaving the queen seated upon it in shadow.
“You come from the river.” Her voice creaked and whistled, as if she didn’t speak much.
“I come from much farther than the river, Majesty,” I said.
The gong echoed again. I turned to snap at Osmio and legs-of-the-gong when I realized we were surrounded by the brass-armored men, all silent as the guide.
“Ah,” I said, turning back.
“There is no law to protect you here.” The queen’s voice was sad.
“Are you not the law, Maia queen in Palatium?”
“No more. There is no law.”
“I come…” I began, then stopped. I was tired of the charade, tired of the stupidity and deaths. I wished I was back in Cermalus fixing roofs and dodging beatings from old Tradelium’s overseers. “I’m just trying to go home, Majesty, only I seem to be doomed to walk the Transept. Palatium is the fifth of seven cities, and I’d like to see Cermalus again before I die.”
“That is an unfortunate wish.”
That made me angry. After all I’d run from, fought, and lost, her hopelessness fired my anger. “Where is the law in Palatium, then? Did you burn the books and turn out the judges? Does no one care for custom, or for contract? What became of you that you should discard my life so easily?”
“Don’t you speak so to me,” the queen snapped.
“Why not?” I jumped into the light at the foot of her throne. “Who are you to tell me not to speak?”
She stood, and I saw how half her body trembled and shook. Her left eye drooped, and that side of her mouth trembled. “I am queen in Palatium, and I tell you not to speak.”
I knelt. “If you are queen then you are the law, Majesty. The law and the judge of the law. As the judge, you are free to choose mercy.”
The gong echoed again. I risked a look to one side. All the brass men were kneeling.
“They have not taken a knee since I was struck down,” Queen Maia whispered.
“They heed the gong, Majesty,” I said. “For it rings with a heart of brass. And the gong heeds you.” I stood and turned, staring at the eunuch. “Legs-of-the-gong, would you stay here and serve the queen as the master of her brass?”
He stared back at me a while, then turned to Osmio with a puzzled expression. The little man shot me a venomous look before nodding at the eunuch.
“He is yours, Majesty. What says the law now?”
She smiled at me, and reached out with her trembling hand. “Go, before I forget myself once more. What is your name, sir?”
“I…” I stopped a moment. Andrade the slave fixed roofs in Cermalus. He did not revive queens in Palatium. “I am the messenger of the blackstar, and I have taken your evil from you.”
We passed into an upland forest, so Pincus called it, populated by tall, narrow trees with needles on high, upswept branches. The tall, dry cliffs gave way to slopes running across our line of travel. Snow and ice gleamed on the heights. The blackstar cast purple shadows, so close none of us dared look skyward.
There was yet a trail here, though not quite so well-kept as the one from the river to Palatium. Still, we did not have to force our way through the underbrush and thistled meadows.
Sullen and bitter, Osmio walked with us. At the last moment he had elected not to stay with legs-of-the-gong. Pincus was happy as a child at festival time, exclaiming over rocks and trees and the most ordinary insects. Ironpants and I stayed close together but spoke little. The guide trailed behind, his function served, but still presumably carrying the evil of Oppius with him.
Was I to burn him, as the prayers were burned?
It was a matter of some days before our supplies gave out, but none of us had the least idea what could be eaten in this high country, save the squirrels and birds and woodchucks which we would need a bow to catch. No one thought that eating flowers and leaves would be wise, and the little flashing fish we could snatch out of the pools were so tiny as to mean nothing to our rumbling bellies.
Three days into the hunger, Pincus slipped and tumbled down a raw slope, slamming again and again into rocks until he fetched up against some trees some sixty yards below us.
His cries for help echoed up the mountainside.
Without the eunuch, the duty of a rescue seemed to fall to me or Ironpants. I looked at the soldier. “I’ll go get him. You watch for…whatever.”
We both knew I meant the guide.
“Bad idea, messenger,” Ironpants said.
“I can’t leave him!”
“Look at him. He’s lying funny. Broken bones for sure. He’s already done for. We got no food, the only water is from those streams, you got no way to fix him up even if you do pull him out of there without hurting yourself in the bargain.”
I felt horribly sick. “He’ll die.”
Ironpants shrugged. “We’ll die if we try to save him. How many of us have died already? He was a useless man, anyway.”
In that moment I hated the soldier. But I hated myself, too, for I knew he was right. We didn’t even have a rope. The chances I could climb down there and drag Pincus all the way back up without hurting myself, and him more, were small.
We didn’t even have a bow to give him mercy.
There was nothing to be done. It was the ill luck of the blackstar, taking another of my people.
When Pincus saw us turn to walk on, he began calling, “Messenger, messenger.”
My gut roiled hot with shame. My heart was hot iron in my chest. How would I feel in his place? But what could I do for him now?
As we walked, I realized the guide had stayed behind as well.
“Oh, holy hells,” I whispered.
“With luck, he’ll never catch us,” said Ironpants.
Osmio made a sort of barking shriek. “What about me? I’m useless, too. You going to drop me down the next ravine?”
I looked him up and down, tried to think like Ironpants. “You don’t eat much, you’ll last.”
The soldier snickered; I just felt shame.
When Merope was queen in Sucusa, the blackstar messenger came to her sore of foot and tired from his travels.
Two days later, my stomach hard and beginning to swell, we came to a grove of enormous trees in which a city was strung. Swaying walkways, platforms high and low, people climbing ropes. It was a bit like Oppius, except built within trees instead of along a river.
We came to what might have been a gate, in the sense that the path slipped between two great trunks growing quite close together some little ways inside the grove. Three lithe women met us there. They wore rough homespun tunics and carried small bows unslung. The one standing in the center set her hand toward me, palm up.
“You are the messenger,” she said. There was an odd lilt to her voice.
“Yes.”
“You come by the light of the blackstar, walking with the soldier and the fool. Where are the scholar and the dead man?”
There was a question I didn’t want to answer. The taste of my choices was still quite bitter in my mouth. I glanced at my traveling companions. Ironpants just looked tired, Osmio had a bitter fire in his eyes. “The scholar fell, and had to be left behind. The dead man stayed to care for him.”
“You have strange notions of care in your country,” said one of the other women.
The first extended her hand sideways. “Queen Merope will see you.”
I dipped my head. “Thank you.”
The queen did not rule from a high bower, as I had expected. Nor did she have some seat of polished timbers amid the center of the grove. No, Merope queen in Sucusa was crouched among ferns spearing fish in the swift current of a stream when we were brought before her.
Behind her, really.
She stood and scrambled up the bank. Again, she could have been sister to the other queens. Young, lithe, though her skin was berry brown and her hair the
color of walnuts.
“I see some of you are here.” Her voice was bright bells.
“How did you know to mark our coming?” I asked.
“Your Transept has been the talk of wanderers for some time. Every trader, tracker, and footloose younger son we have seen here of late has mentioned you in some way or another. Did you know that you fly upon a cloud, messenger? And your fool travels in the arms of a giant.”
“I did once, Majesty,” muttered Osmio. “Messenger boy here gave my greatest friend away.”
She cocked her head at the little man. “Was your friend the messenger’s to give?” Then, to me: “I have no great brief for you, messenger, nor any against you. Our laws here are simple and just. You will only swear to do no harm while you stay within Sucusa, and you are free here as long as you wish.”
That sounded simple enough. But I had seen too much already. “What do you define as harm, that I should avoid, Majesty?”
The queen laughed. “Well spoken, messenger. The obvious sorts of things.”
“I will swear willingly not to lift my hand against anyone in your city. But beyond that…if I were to tell the children of your city the strange truths about Fagutal and Oppius, would that be harm? What if I described the hard choice I made when the scholar fell down the mountain? Is that harm? Is it harm to seek the bed of a woman, or a man, here? At what age or time of life may they give consent, and is their consent sufficient in the eyes of your law?”
“Enough, enough,” she said. “You see the trap better than most. Though it is not meant for a trap. Rather, if we would not have books of the law binding us like chains, we must rely on the good sense of everyone who dwells here or passes through.”
“Then I will swear to use good sense to the best of my ability, but only if you swear to respect and honor my good sense, Majesty.”
“Enough swearing,” she said. “Go find food, and rest, and when you are ready to speak to me of your purposes, ask after me. Almost anyone will be able tell you where I am. In our city, the queen serves all.”
“Good day,” I told her.
Rested and refreshed, I wandered a bit to learn more of this place. Eventually I came across a young man whittling arrows from birch twigs. I spent time watching him smooth them, testing their balance on his finger and rolling them to check the true.
After a time he looked up at me and smiled. His teeth were bright in a face as pale brown as the queen’s. “Greetings, messenger. Does my work please you?”
“I find the mastery of craft in others to be fascinating,” I said. Both polite and accurate.
“I am scarcely a master, but it is true; my arrows are said to fly well.”
“It is no wonder.”
He offered me a birch shaft. I tested it as I had seen him do, though the result meant little to me. “How are the winters here?”
He shrugged. “I would not know.”
“Really? Why not?”
“We sleep, of course. Don’t you?”
“All winter?” I blurted, then wished I hadn’t.
“Ask for the heart trees. Someone can show you.”
Soon enough, someone did. I found myself down beneath the soil, having passed through a narrow hole between two great roots. A giggling girl stood with me, her fingers brushing suggestively against my thigh. I wanted none of that just now, with a sick dread stealing upon me.
They had hollowed out wells, down amid the root systems of the forest giants. Each was perhaps fifteen feet deep, the walls combed like a beehive, but the cells were large enough for a man to climb into. Barrels of wax and pitch stood ready at the bottom of the wells to seal the sleepers in.
“We dream together,” she said. “It is another life. A few stay out each season, to breach us in the spring, but the rest dream together.” Her hand slipped inside my tunic, seeking my cock. “You have never known anything of the like.”
Horror stained me. I wanted nothing to do with their soulless, inhuman dreaming. I fled up the ladders and out the hole, racing till I found Ironpants.
“We must go,” I told him. I was panting, sweating from my run.
“Why?” His voice was mild.
“These people…are not like us.”
“Of course not,” said Merope, stepping into the little circle of sunlight where we spoke. “No people are like another. How did you find my sister’s subjects in Oppius? Or the wall dwellers in Fagutal? If you want people like you, you must go home and hope they have not changed overmuch in your absence.”
I bowed. “It is time for me to go, Majesty.”
“Scouts tell me the dead man comes. He bears the scholar on his back.” She smiled. I noticed for the first time that her teeth were too many and too small in her face. “Would you not abide for a reunion of your party?”
“They have their own concerns,” I said roughly. “I have done no harm here, as we swore. I would find my way to Velia now and finish my Transept.”
“And will you take your evil with you?” she asked me softly.
“Evil follows me wherever I go. I am the messenger of the blackstar.”
“Then he goes,” she said with a nod to Ironpants. Her voice was hard, a blade. “Three women he has bedded here, and in the heat of passion taken each of them in the manner of a boy without their permission or the good sense to use a little grease. They will all pass blood for days yet. And your fool, who asks disturbing questions and tries to incite murder against you. Take him as well. The dead man, too, is your evil. You have my permission to leave once he and the scholar have departed these woods.”
She turned and stalked away. A number of her young women, with their little bows, remained close by. The strings were taut this time.
Ironpants shrugged. “We keep walking. It’s been months, what’s another walk?”
“You…bastard,” I said, thinking of the women. “We swore an oath to do no harm.”
“They weren’t complaining when I shoved it into them. Besides, you don’t seem to think they’re human. What do you care?”
I lay close to a tree trunk and wept into the moss, wondering when I had become so vile.
When Taygete was queen in Velia, the messenger of the blackstar danced out of the night with the soldier, the fool, the scholar, and the dead man in his train, coming together to sing the blackstar down.
It was a long hike down and east from Sucusa, bending ever toward the north. Velia lay that way, and beyond it Cermalus should I ever choose to return to the city of my birth. The lower woods were warmer and leafier, with an abundance of game.
The Sucusans had patched my tunic and given me better boots. Osmio had traded the last of his silks for child’s leathers. Ironpants still wore his old temple uniform, albeit patched and supplemented with bits gathered along the way. The guide remained naked save for the leather clout and his featureless sack. Pincus…breathed.
He rode now on the guide’s back, clinging like a baby scorpion to its mother. His legs were twisted, his flesh slack and pale, and though nude he seemed as human as a spider’s egg sac. Only the fact that he yet breathed kept me from grasping hold of Ironpants’s spear during some night watch and plunging it into his quivering, leathered flanks. Pincus was worse than what had become of Leutherion. I could make a pretense about the guide, forget a few hours at a time who he had been. It was not my choice which had killed him.
But I had abandoned Pincus. Every shuddering breath accused me.
The cruelty of Queen Merope was exquisite.
My only solace was that the blackstar seemed to be finally diminishing. Perhaps it had followed the course of my Transept, giving truth to Queen Halcyone’s lies.
We marched on.
This trail was well-traveled. From time to time we saw caravans, hunting parties, adventurers. Even a few foreigners, exotics from beyond the Seven Cities. These we knew by their skin color—blue-black in one party, fire red in another—and their strange beasts and stranger dress.
All had heard of u
s, to be sure. We were marked to be respected and avoided. If they saw us coming, they hid in the woods and left offerings of food, wine, and clothing. If they didn’t see us coming, they pulled to one side of the trail and muttered prayers, sometimes tossing coins or flowers as we passed them.
Osmio cursed continuously. Ironpants said nothing that was not strictly necessary. I could not bear to look at the guide or Pincus, so I walked alone.
In time we crossed a gentle ridge. A valley spread wide and shallow, a series of little lakes strung along the small river that ran down it. Autumn was settling upon the trees there, underneath a sky that was almost wholesome once more. A city spread around the lakes, without walls or towers, more a town that went on for a mile or two. There were ruins rising from the middle of three of the lakes, ancient metal towers that gleamed with glass and rust and the afternoon sun.
This must be Velia, I thought. My Transept is done. All I need do is present myself to Taygete the queen, then I can go die of shame in some lowlife tavern. I stopped, turned to my companions. “You are released from any obligation to me. Go find your own interests among your own kind.”
Osmio never stopped cursing, just kept walking without a backward glance.
Ironpants hefted his spear. “Figure I’ll go see who’s hiring. I’d never be able to explain him back home.” He jerked his chin toward the guide. “Try not to get anyone else killed. Including yourself.”
The soldier loped down the trail toward Velia, quickly passing Osmio.
I reached out and with trembling hands touched the guide’s hood. The leather was wet, rotten, and the brush of my fingers raised a horrid stench. “I release you, too, old friend,” I said softly. “Care for Pincus, and when he’s done see that his death is decent. It’s what I should have done. For both of you.”
Slowly I set off downhill for Velia, taking care not to overtake Osmio.
There were no gates nor guards, so I wandered quiet streets awhile. Eventually I worked up the courage to ask a woman where I might find the palace of Queen Taygete. She looked at me as if I were foolish, then sent me to the next lake upstream.