The Hierophant's Daughter

by M F Sullivan

  “Then he looks and sounds like a stroke victim.” A knock resounded at the door as she added, “If he’s even real.”

  Tenchi’s head appeared in the gap, ready with a smile for the dog, his cousin, and then, shyly, for Dominia. “Sorry again about earlier. Won’t you join us for lunch? You didn’t eat anything when you came aboard, you must be starving!”

  “Let me think about it,” she said, but to her irritation, René slapped the edge of the bunk.

  “That sounds like a great idea. Maybe fresh air, after?”

  “It’s a bit cloudy,” cautioned Tenchi. René, still smiling, nodded.

  “All the better, cousin! A spritz of rain is good for the soul. Come along, Dominique.” Hand on her elbow, René whisked her out past Tenchi, and the dog followed after, tail wagging with each step to indicate him as the most relaxed member of their group. Outside the cabin, the wet smell of metallic fish grew all the more pungent, and from the decks above and below resounded the shouts and grunts and thumps of men processing the catches to be frozen.

  “How large is the crew?” she asked, and Tenchi answered, “Twenty-five, including the doctor and me. Would you believe this thing started life as a fishing trawler, then turned to a battleship? It’s a trawler again, obviously, but to have survived that long! Amazing.”

  “That long?” Now it was René’s turn to be skeptical. “You told me this thing was a trawler even before the year 2000! You can’t tell me it’s the same ship.”

  “It’s been repaired through the years,” protested Tenchi. “But it’s still the same ship.”

  “Remind me to tell you sometime about the ship of Theseus.”

  “It’s quite a vessel,” said Dominia, too tired to suffer their bickering. As they emerged in the mess hall, the General shuffled through every corner of her mind in search of a memory: any sign of whether she had encountered this ship before, during her eastern campaign. She hadn’t, she was sure, because most human ships she’d encountered now rested at the bottom of the ocean, although her service in the navy was neither as fulfilling nor as prolific as her time on land. Even so, one might never be too careful, and if she was keen on avoiding the crew before, now she couldn’t afford anything more than a millisecond of eye contact and a polite nod of her head before they resumed their variety show. The program, which required live interaction from home audience members’ digital devices, had the six crew members on break tapping their watches in hopes of helping their preferred contestant (or victim) reach the other side of a tightrope suspended above a pool of raspberry jelly. From what she discerned, every tap widened the tightrope of the chosen contestant, while diminishing the tightrope of their opponent; thus, it was in the contestants’ best interests to appeal to audience members before setting out on their journey, to make themselves seem as personable and beloved as possible. With enough followers, a player won by default. This was one competition of a near-infinite number of them, officiated by a cute young woman, a stern-looking old man, and a well-trained Shiba Inu that sat in a chair with its paws upon the table: the most impassive and least-invested of any of them, yet, the obvious star. Basil gave a bark of excitement.

  “He sees his friend.” Tenchi placed pair of soup bowls before Dominia and René. “Eat up! You’ll need your strength.”

  She would if she could, and she did sip enough to ease the snarling of her stomach, but in the end, it was a nasty trick to temporarily settle the martyr gut: energy spent on needless digestion would beget no new energy for her to use, so eating food without human components was a surefire way to cause malnutrition. It was the kind of illusory fullness experienced by humans so impoverished they were forced to eat dirt. Yes, her stomach was full. But she was still famished. She felt as she would have after experiencing a full day’s sleep of bad dreams, plagued by that bone-deep ache of dread that pushed her nerves against the underside of her skin so that even the leather of her breeches and the fabric of her once-white shirt scratched her into discomfort. She wanted to tear them off, along with her skin, and scream; she remembered in sudden, sharp relief feeling this way when she was first martyred. She would sit at the table, distantly aware of the conversations of others while she, trembling, wanted to fling her plate and blink her life out in a painless instant. Of course, had she flung away a meal at her Father’s table, the following instant would have been anything but painless; so, in childhood, she had learned to stay measured, contained, and observant. Those lessons served her long into adulthood, even when her teeth ached and her right eye (socket) itched with phantom pangs. She had learned to swallow her food, to think of it as medicine. To avoid thinking about it. A great many martyrs were selected because they took the same perverse joy in their diet as the Hierophant. Dominia was not one of them.

  It still, over three hundred years later, came to her in flashes: rousing from bed at a noise downstairs and hearing, like the sounds of a tahgmahr, a distant voice. The Hierophant. What a different person she was at that time, even with a different name—Morgan—but, no matter how far she plunged into memory, history, and myth, her Father was always the same. That first night she met him, he wasn’t her Father. He wasn’t anything more than any other boogieman. On awakening, she’d thought her parents had the television up too loud, but soon recognized that, whatever the muffled contents of his speech, her parents responded to him. The cold fear of that instant would never—could never—leave her. She watched the news. She was young, but she was old enough to understand what happened when children woke up to a visit from the Hierophant, or any martyr. Worse than the Krampus.

  Tiny heart pounding in her throat, Morgan had crept on bare feet into the bedroom of her parents, and found it empty. From their bath, she took her father’s straight razor; then, with this dangerous object folded shut and held between her lips, she wiggled into the closet crawlspace which emerged in their attic. The room’s real entrance was the kitchen, and many times she’d taken joy in hiding above the sounds of her mother’s cooking, her parents’ conversations. Now, her heart pounded. How would she open the trapdoor without being heard? She hadn’t thought this far ahead. Or perhaps it was best to wait here, hidden, and hope that he would leave—

  The trapdoor opened, and Morgan quite literally fell into the arms of the laughing Hierophant. While her mother cried out in dismay, and the girl, catlike, thrashed to free herself from his grasp, the tall, black-suited man adjusted his hold. “Hello, my doll— Here I thought a raccoon had gotten into your parents’ roof. Now, what need has a girl your age of a thing like this?” He plucked the razor from her mouth and showed it to her parents, who hovered at the edge of the kitchen. “Never too young to start getting at that five-o’clock shadow, I suppose.”

  Then he’d put her down, and when she darted to her parents, he bent to ask questions that seemed strange non sequiturs. “Do you know much about taxes, dear? No? How interesting. Neither do your parents. I intended to make examples of them.”

  Intended?

  “Now knowing that you’re here, that changes things! They weren’t reporting you on their census, or their taxes, or even their immigration paperwork. I wonder why?” In that terrifyingly bland way, he smiled up at them. “They are very lucky to have a daughter like you. A brave and clever girl— What is your name? ‘Morgan.’” He repeated it on her speaking and stared into her face as if seeing through her skin, through her skull—into the substance of her thoughts. “Well, Morgan, I have a question for you: What do you think of me?”

  “I think,” said the eight-year-old, “that you’re a real bastard.”

  While her parents gasped in stereo horror and scrambled to explain she hadn’t meant it (and had never, ever heard anything like that from either one of her parents), the Hierophant burst into a spell of laughter so great it left him on the verge of tears. With a few claps of his hands, the Holy Father exclaimed, “How I love children! Not a churchgoing family, are we.” At the reluctant admission of her parents, he said, “That is a pity. Bu
t I find myself interested in Morgan’s religious education. Perhaps we might discuss it over hot chocolate? My cocoa is top-notch.”

  The illness came on her much slower than the so-called industry standard one-week-ill/one-week-dying formula that cured martyrs of all ailments in exchange for their humanity. In Morgan’s unfortunate case, it wasn’t until three weeks later she started shaking; four weeks later, she couldn’t write, could barely speak, and her parents couldn’t stop crying; five weeks in, and she was sleepless, day and night. No one explained what was wrong. It was the flu, her family repeated—the flu, and pneumonia. Then, one day, she fell asleep in bed, her crying mother holding her hand. She did not dream as one would expect from a fever so severe. Instead, it seemed to her as though she awoke the next instant in a bed four times as large, hidden away in a windowless room while the Hierophant read from some book. For the first time in weeks, she wasn’t shaking, or sweating, or in terrible, clattering pain.

  “You’ve come back to the world!” Smiling, he shut his book to take her hand. “My sweet girl. What a tiger you are to have so fought your virus! You will let nothing conquer you, my Dominia.”

  “Is it the soup?” asked Tenchi. Dominia lifted her hand to hide her tears as she laughed.

  “No! It’s great, thank you, Tenchi. My compliments to the chef.” She lifted the bowl to prove she enjoyed it with a big gulp of the hot liquid. While her mouth and vision were obscured, one of the crew members made an annoyed request in Japanese; amid protestations, the channel was changed to Sun Empire News. This was fine for the first few seconds. The peppy Japanese rambling of the woman on the screen meant nothing to Dominia, and was much less grating than the sound effect–riddled chaos of the variety show. It was also less distracting, until, amid all the foreign words, she recognized her own name, pronounced as though it were a series of musical notes: “Doh-mi-ni-ah.”

  The trick was not moving too fast, she told herself as she stood. “I think I’m going to go take a nap,” she said to Tenchi, trying to modulate her volume so as not to let her words attract attention by the universally suspicious susurrus of whispers. “I’m more exhausted than I am hungry.”

  “You’re exhausted because you’re hungry,” chided the first mate, oblivious to the program that changed to live footage of an ostentatious cathedral in Elsinore. The Church of the Sacred Ram was stuffed with weeping mourners, Cicero already at the altar. Spitting image of the Hierophant, that man—so much so that it was easy to (sometimes) believe the story that the Holy Father was an alien who had, cell by cell, replicated the looks of the man to whom he first appeared with news of the protein. From black eyes to high cheekbones to towering frame, the most notable distinctions between the two, outside El Sacerdote’s general preference of the cassock, was age. The Hierophant, clean-shaven, was a far older-looking man than devil-bearded Cicero, and claimed it was because he had already been so long-lived on his own planet, Acetia.

  What did the General believe? The simplest explanation: that they had been relations while human: father and son or brothers much older and younger. But this nonbelief was one of the reasons why she had been forced to flee from the Front, and why she was eager for a life outside her Father’s influence. It was important she survive long enough to enjoy said life.

  As Dominia lowered her bowl into the sink, she made good use of her roving consciousness by trying to detect what hymn Lavinia sang. In a dress that, to the General, was little more than a wild mess of jet gauze and lace, the girl made her way up the aisle toward the high priest. “Be Washed in Blood,” she recognized as, ten feet from the door, three more fishermen bustled into the mess. From the sink, she grabbed a knife and hid it by her thigh. Well, if nothing else, that put nine—ten, including Tenchi—in the room with her. If his math was right, she’d have a mere fifteen more to go. The trick was keeping René alive, and sailing the ship, and all at once there was no time to think, for a great murmur arose among the men. She turned, hand on the door, escape almost good, to see the camera had panned across an array of memorial photographs. Foremost among them stood her and Cassandra’s wedding painting, with the General’s face, in full view, recognizable no matter the number of eyes.

  The air was still on the screen and in the mess hall. As Lavinia stopped before the altar to kiss her brother’s hand, then curtsy to the pews of mourners, the sailors vacated their seats. After jamming the nearest mop through the handles of the mess hall doors, Dominia turned in time to see René stuff Tenchi beneath the table. Sweet relief. She wouldn’t have to kill him. With the brittle steak knife in her hand, the General faced one of the three late arrivals already arming themselves while repeating the various Japanese appellations for “demon.”

  The Disgraced Governess was not a monster. She was a ballerina of death, as the Hierophant had taught her to be. He never got her to believe in the Family, or the Faith, or the alleged Freedom in which martyrs told themselves they lived; but he did teach her to believe in herself. Thus, it was not a lack of confidence that made her regard this battle with unease; it was simply that such a battle was the least desirable outcome, and that disappointed her. But it wasn’t as though they could talk about it. “Konnichiwa, watashi wa Dominia,” was all the Japanese she remembered in the heat of that moment. The furthest thing from helpful. Even if she spoke a language they understood, they wouldn’t listen.

  As a country, the Empire of the Risen Sun had long since decided that beheading was the way to deal with martyrs. Interpreting with the help of Tenchi and René was out of the question. Time slowed as her body took over for her mind, her motions tumbling with the grace of a river down its ageless path. One thousand battles she had fought, and the first man to charge her, a sink-wet boning knife clutched in his hand, caught the weight of each of those one thousand in the quick in and out of her knife into his lungs while her free hand bent him into the blow. As he cried, she tossed him aside and greeted the next with his comrade’s knife: first to gut him like a fish, then to shove him so hard into the stove that the great pot of soup scalded his screaming face. A bare-fisted moron came after her before she descended into regret; from her right, three more rushed over. She was able, with a quick hand, to drop the solitary comer, and was left with only the group.

  “Only.” It didn’t feel like “only” when one of them grabbed her by the hair to smash her face, hard, into the metal of the refrigerator door—the blind spot was already making itself known. Nor did it feel like “only” when she twisted around and got her hand up in time so, thanks to its tremors, it was “only” half impaled. Better than having her throat cut or, somehow, a vertebra severed, though the latter seemed unlikely, given the quality of the kitchen knives. On the rest of the ship, though, where fish were processed day and night, who knew? The men did, like the remaining three television watchers who had lingered behind during the start of the fight. Now, on seeing Dominia occupied, they took their chance to snap the useless broom and burst, screaming, through the mess hall doors. Teeth clenched, the General used her knee to wind one of the men, but thought herself mere seconds from losing her good eye as the most tenacious of the trio, still clutching that knife, pushed it farther through her hand, up toward her face. Martyrs were stronger than humans, but this one was nearly the exception when poised against her hunger-weakened body: this was a sailor carved by years of manual labor, baked hard by the eye of the sun. Knife fights, fistfights, gunfights. The man was ready for anything, except for a dog to run up and bite him on the ass, and, when he wheeled with a howl of pain, the groin.

  “Where were you when your family was murdered?” she asked the dog before catching sight, with a snort, of René’s shiny shoe as he disappeared through the door with wheezing Tenchi. After yanking the serrated blade from her hand, the Disgraced Governess crammed the tool into the smaller man’s eye, impaled the heart of the weedy guy who’d been smart enough to let her go at Basil’s approach, then focused on the unlucky muscle head who had thought the next minute would se
e him a hero instead of a corpse with a slit throat. After a second’s consideration for her growling stomach, she grabbed the great man around the neck and hauled him to the half-emptied pot of soup; while he refilled it, gurgling like a caught fish, she attended to the death of the one-eyed man with an apology. Basil watched her drop the body with a wag of his tail and the happy eyes of a dog who knew himself to be a good boy.

  “Do dogs like soup?” she asked. When, despite the light of understanding in its eyes, the dog tilted its head, she fetched a pair of fresh bowls, pushed aside the dead sailor, and filled them both with something more suitable to the needs of the quivering martyr. With Basil on the floor beside her, and chaos growing outside the mess hall, Dominia cured her weakness with a meal and watched her own funeral. There was no point in rewinding: she had heard bits and pieces of it, though was distracted by the fight. It hadn’t been worth listening to, anyway. All conventional drivel about martyrs being already chosen and saved and having no need to fear death—and about the forgiveness of the Hierophant and the Lamb, the latter being depicted with great, upturned eyes and prayer-clasped hands in the stained-glass window towering behind Cicero. For his part, El Sacerdote watched as the parishioners rose from their kneeling stance for a prayer being spoken in the name of Dominia’s soul, that it might find its way home to the bosom of God and not be lost in purgatory. The beard and mustache he wore in the fashion of the fictional devil who provided his name to Dominia’s home country did not even wiggle with amusement. He stayed solemn, still. He took no joy in this at all, the goodly priest, but instead delivered up another soul to God. People stood and knelt and sat and he took no relish in it. All standard, until Lavinia rose again from her seat to the side of the altar, then joined Cicero at the pulpit.

  “This being, under normal circumstances, the point at which I would refer to thoughts given us by the family of the deceased, I will unconventionally use this moment to give myself a few seconds of grief. She was, after all, my sister. And I—”