She fully expected the boys’ parents to be at her house, later, to complain, not to mention at Lassair and Trennus’ house, but she would have the benefit of being able to tell the parents precisely what their darling children had been up to of late, and what in the way of fines and potentially community service that their boys would have been facing, otherwise.
Two hours later, she made her way home, still not trusting her broken feet. Adam wasn’t home yet, nor did she expect him back any time soon. Perhaps I will be healed before he gets home.
The door to the bathroom opened before she was done soaking in hot water. Adam walked in, looked down at her, and his eyebrows rose. “I would ask what happened, and how many of them there were—”
“. . . none. I did this all to myself.” Her tone was rueful.
“—but I already had a phone call from the gardia informing me about the unilateral actions of one of my agents.”
“Ah. They moved on the subject of the itinerant ælagol more quickly than I expected.”
“Sig . . . you really can’t do this sort of thing.”
“Would you prefer that the boys be brought up on charges for harassing Inghean? Assault and battery, for attacking Rig? I could have done that. And they would have received a slap on the wrist, at best, because they’re in the legal gray area of adolescence, and because the attacks were happening off school grounds, they would not even have been suspended. No. Let them know a little honest fear.”
Adam sighed. “I already heard chapter and verse on this from Tren and Lassair. They caught me on the way into the garage. Lassair says you were hurt worse than you were letting on, and didn’t want to come in here and disturb you.” He looked at her face, which still bore bruises, remarkably, a few hours later. Mute indication that she’d probably fractured a cheekbone in the fall, too. “What happened, really?
“Would you believe that I made an enemy of the ground?” Sigrun offered, weakly.
A look. “Did it win?”
“. . . I definitely did not come out the victor in that battle.” Sigrun sighed. “I couldn’t handle the g-forces when Nith decelerated. I, er, fell.” She grimaced. “I couldn’t quite get control back before a roof and I had a brief engagement, which I also lost, and then the ground and I had a similar affray. The bones are healing.”
“God damn it, Sig!” His voice rang back from the tiles.
“I did not expect it to be that bad. I do not think Nith thought it would be that bad.” Sigrun grimaced. “I may need to build leather straps of some sort, so that I can remain attached. If I plan to do this in the future, which I do not.” Assuming Nith lets me ride him again . . . . She shrugged it away. “So, with what was transpiring at the school . . . what would you have had me do?”
Adam shook his head. “I agree with you. And yet, here I am, the head of the local Praetorians. And you’re a member of the Guard. And I’m married to you.”
“Dock my pay for a month. Suspend me. I already paid the damages for the windows.” Sigrun’s voice was terse. She understood the law. She understood repercussions. “Dismiss me from the Guard as a whole, if you feel it is necessary. I will not apologize for my actions.”
He put a hand on her shoulder, showing her that he didn’t mean to fight, and she relaxed. “Neshama. I agree with you.” He sighed. “I think for the sake of appearances, it’s going to be two weeks’ suspension without pay and a letter in your file. Probably attached to a note of thanks from Trennus and Lassair.”
Yes. I believe that I might owe Stormborn breakfast in bed for all of her two weeks of enforced inactivity. Lassair was only next door. She usually, out of politeness, did not converse with them if she wasn’t in the same room, but a quarter acre of space was effectively nothing to her.
Sigrun slipped down further into the tub. “No, thank you. Trennus has told us for years about your cooking.”
Adam laughed, and there was a ripple of amusement from Lassair. “Here. Let me help you out of the tub—no?”
Sigrun lifted herself into the air, still horizontal, shedding water in streams. “I . . . really don’t want to put my feet on the ground right now,” she admitted, guiltily. “But if you could hand me the towel?” She righted herself, so she no longer reclined in the air, and held out a hand, looking sheepish.
Adam gave her a look, wrapped the towel around her, and pushed her back into the bedroom. “Lie down. I’ll give you a backrub or something.”
“Really?” Sigrun perked up. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been on the receiving end of one of those. “Just . . . don’t touch the feet. Or my right hand.”
She used her two-week suspension to work, full-time, in the area being called Mevi'eat Gothia, or Little Gothia now. No radio, because she wasn’t there as a Praetorian, and, because she never knew to which house or apartment she might be called, no telephone number at which to contact her. So she was startled, as she got into her automobile here at the southeastern edge of the city, and Lassair’s voice burst through her mind. Stormborn!
Sigrun’s spine snapped into place and she stared into the rearview mirror at her surroundings, catching, briefly, a glimpse of her own right eye before she angled the mirror away. “What’s wrong?”
Steelsoul’s father. He passes.
“What? He was fine when I left this morning!”
His wife screamed when he fell over. I came at her call, tried to heal him. It was a blood vessel in the brain. So much damage, so quickly. Lassair sounded mournful. I repaired the vein, but . . . brain tissue is delicate. Easily injured. Damage spreads, like a wave. The ambulance is here now, and I have called to Trennus, to tell Steelsoul to go to the hospital. You should go as well.
Stroke. Apoplexy. Sigrun’s stomach churned. “I’m on my way. Main medical center?”
Yes. Where they repaired your heart, years ago.
“Tell Adam I’ll be there as fast as I can.” Sigrun started the car, hesitated, and shook her head. Traffic this time of day is going to be murder. There’s no way I’ll get there in time. She removed the key, stepped out, locked the door, and sprang into the sky.
At the hospital, Maor was very still in the white-draped bed, and most of the family gathered there, over the course of the night. Adam kept her within arm’s reach, and, at least once, Abigayil looked at Sigrun with hope in her eyes. “Is there . . . is there anything you can do?”
Sigrun put a hand to Maor’s silver-streaked hair, worn long, just as Adam wore his. I know death when I see it. “This is a wound I cannot take for him,” she said, quietly. “I am sorry, Abigayil.”
So, they sat around the bed, and Sigrun remained silent. Humans needed hope with which to live. They needed to think that maybe he’d open his eyes again. A little rehabilitation therapy. Maybe some slurred speech, but he’d still be Maor. He’d still be the man who pinned decryption puzzles to the refrigerator in Sigrun and Adam’s kitchen for Adam to complete, most of them fiendishly difficult. He’d still be the man who doted on his various grandchildren, much to the surprise of his own children, who’d all found him a distant father. He’d still be the man Abigayil had loved since 1924, and had been married to for fifty years.
Sigrun knew better. Valkyrie . . . always knew.
The second stroke hit at eleven postmeridian, while all of them were talking about Maor’s life. Adam and Mikayel actually griping together almost amicably, about the puzzles they’d been set as boys. Chani joking about her father having found her cache of Hellene cosmetics and having emptied them all into the toilet. And then Maor’s eyes opened, but he saw nothing. As they all started, and turned towards him, he gasped, reflexively, and his body arched. The monitors all began to scream, and the family clutched one another tightly as the doctors rushed in, and tried to stabilize him. To no avail, of course. Abigayil wept against her sons’ shoulders, and eventually, they managed to get her home. Kept her surrounded with her daughters and grandchildren.
Sigrun quietly took charge of the funeral arran
gements, dealing with logistics so that no one else had to do so. Much had already been organized; Maor had purchased a tomb for himself and Abigayil, built above-ground in a neat cemetery outside their neighborhood. And she tried, very hard, not to feel as if the house were somehow much emptier, now that she wasn’t listening all the time for the sound of Maor’s cane and his shuffling steps.
Adam was quietly devastated. His father had been an integral part of his existence. Maor had never been a loud man, but he’d always been there. Steady. Sure. Silently proud of his younger son’s accomplishments. His security clearance had been high enough that Adam could talk to him about some of the things he’d done on the job—not all, not by a long shot, but some. Enough that he could get the older man’s advice and opinion on the ethics of the things he’d done, or planned to do. For a time after the funeral, Adam was adrift, and Sigrun didn’t know what to do to help him, besides . . . be there.
Martius 20, 1978 AC
Today was the vernal equinox, a fairly important day in most religions. Passover festivities wouldn’t occur until Nissan fifteenth, of course, under the Judean calendar—next dies Lunae, in fact. But today, there were bonfires set up and ready to be lit on practically every street of Little Gothia, and Adam was expecting the local gardia, as usual, to ask him for Praetorian backup, in case the fires, and their attendant celebrations, got out of hand. Most of the time, the various Goths stayed inside their own neighborhoods, drank homemade honeybeer and imported Gallic uisce beatha, had apparently quite unrestrained sexual relations, and then staggered to work the next morning with hangovers.
Judean conservatives tended to picket outside Little Gothia on these occasions. Once in a while, some of them ventured into the neighborhoods held by the Goths and tried to put out the fires. Two years ago, that had resulted in two or three people with third-degree burns over ninety percent of their bodies, which, barring magical assistance, was more or less a death sentence. The people who’d thrown them into the fires had been prosecuted for murder, and were up for execution, but the case was entangled by the fact that their religious observances had been disrupted. Defense lawyers were arguing for manslaughter charges. Prosecutors were stonewalling.
It made for a stew of resentment that Adam detested. The Goths weren’t proselytizing. They kept their religious practices inside their area of town, as much as the Romans kept the worship of Jupiter, Juno, Venus, and Mars inside their temples, and the Nipponese and Hellene scientists and engineers kept their own faiths tucked away, as well. The sole exception were the games for the Lupercal (held every Februarius, Empire-wide), and even those involved races, and costumes inside the confines of Little Roma, often with a marathon organized by the local Hellenes and conducted throughout the whole of the city.
But there were positive gains, in his opinion. In the past two years, as the war in the north had continued to drag on, many fenris and jotun had immigrated south to join their families in various southern cities. Seeing a jotun or a fenris standing guard at the mouth of a street leading to the bonfires might deter even the most pig-headed Zealot. A seven-hundred pound wolf had a certain psychological effect, Adam had found.
Of the five hundred thousand Goths in the whole of Judea now, Adam had to estimate the number of jotun and fenris in the low thousands, each. Even so, they were being snapped up for guard work. If a jotun wanted to be a bouncer, walking into a taverna was usually resume enough. The same was true of private security, such as being the doorman at certain hotels or apartment complexes. But because of the low-income nature of the refugee community, there was the added danger of organized crime syndicates forming, and they absolutely could not permit the jotun to become entangled in that.
He had no idea how Alexandria, Rome, Athens, Spal in Iberia, Byzantium, or any of the other major cities of the Empire were handling the issues, but there were all of three god-born and god-touched of the northern gods in all of Judea. Fritti now held the fairly senior title of ‘refugee coordinator.’ Rig was all of fifteen. And there was Sig, whom he thought spread thin enough to see daylight through. He had her in Little Gothia almost every day, not that she wouldn’t have been there anyway, given a choice. But with four hundred thousand of the five hundred thousand Goths in Judea right here in Jerusalem, they needed their single most visible god-born where they could see her.
It helped, enormously, that dozens of the jotun and fenris remembered her. They’d fought alongside her, or she’d helped drag the fenris’ minds back from madness. Helped Saraid give them voices. If Sig told them to stay out of trouble, they tended to listen. Or at least, when they found trouble, they called her, first.
It was clear to almost everyone, that eight years on, most of these people were never going home to the north. Many of them had had children here, who now went to Judean schools. Their own teachers were in the school system, as well. Adam was amused by the cottage industries that had sprung up around the city. Trennus reported that there were swarms of house-spirits entering into contracts with the people who lived in the southeast corner of town. “At least we’re not the only people in town who have them now,” Adam had responded, over lunch. “I feel much less like I have a target painted on the roof now.”
Trennus had grinned. “Yes, but it means that there’s a need for arcessitors now, as never before. Summoners and negotiators. Which means that the local priests are getting snippy, but so long as the summoners aren’t offering contracts to Judeans, I don’t know why they care.”
Adam had rolled his eyes, and left the topic well alone. He and Sig had guardian contracts with a few earth spirits to watch the house, a couple of minor contracts with air spirits for cleaning and mending services, and one more earth spirit, who looked after the garden and chased away pests. No pesticides, no harmful chemicals, and he was out a loaf of bread and some milk a week. He rather thought this was a bargain, and was grateful to Trennus for having arranged it. Most people couldn’t even see the spirits. A good thing, too, because otherwise, he thought his mother might have had a heart attack by now. As it was, she kept wondering, out loud, who had brought her the reading glasses she needed, and who had fixed her favorite pair of shoes for her. And just as often, Abigayil put it down to failing memory, and moved on. A kind of peaceful denial that let her live with the fact that there were spirits in the house. Adam was grateful for that, too.
Summoners weren’t the only new industry being fueled by the immigrants. The jotun and the fenris in particular had needs that existing companies couldn’t meet. So many of the nieten were building businesses oriented towards their larger compatriots. Jotun-sized furniture? Houses built specifically to jotun standards? All beginning to be produced.
The fenris were their own special problem, of course. Ordinary citizens didn’t see them as being . . . people, not at first. One of the reasons the fenris were starting to congregate here, however, was that Saraid made her home here, when she wasn’t off in the north. Here, and in the north, they could have voices, which made it much harder for others to claim that they weren’t human. Of course, they also lacked hands, which made purchasing items in stores particularly difficult. Some of them had nieten helpers, and some were pushing, hard, for technology that would allow them to be self-sufficient. Locks that they could open and close with teeth and paws, for instance. Key-cards had been developed for high-security labs over a decade ago, and the magnetically-encoded technology was adapted from into small tags that each fenris carried on their collars . . . which, so long as there was electricity, allowed them to enter their homes. Others chose to carry warding stones, allowing them to unlock their doors with magic.
Not that anyone in their right minds would want to rob a fenris domicile. The fenris had few if any valuables—mostly mementoes of their past lives, pulled down to the south on sledges and carts. Many of them had chosen to leave all reminders of their past behind. I am not that human being anymore. That is no longer my face. And I do not remember my old name. There was also the issue of th
ere being between two to eight seven-hundred-pound wolves inside a fenris home. It discouraged random burglaries.
Transportation for both jotun and fenris was also an issue. They had needed to book space on cargo planes and ships to come south, and the best anyone could do for them in the city was offer them a ride on a flatbed or cargo truck. But fenris were human, and they still had . . . human quirks.
The birthrate from female fenris had evened out, for example; they birthed puppies that were just as likely to be female as male, which meant that the first generation of fenris, which had had a larger proportion of males than females, would probably reduce rapidly in number, through combat attrition in the north, and then the population should stabilize in a generation. Female fenris of that first generation were courted, and while wolves were strictly monogamous in nature, there was just enough human involved to make them more . . . Adam hesitated to say ‘dog-like,’ so he tended to go with ‘more socially fluid.’ As such, there were fenris marriages, and divorces, which they and the Gothic priests did their best to regulate. There were families . . . but there were also packs, which helped mothers care for their young.
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