Wedding

by Ann Herendeen

  “Keep going,” the merchant said. “We could use a little of that here. Warmer temperatures, melting ice.” He laughed as I enumerated Terran disasters that sounded very appealing in the cool Eclipsian summer.

  I tried again. “How would you like a world so hot that the sun burned your skin, gave you a fatal disease if you didn’t cover yourself? Where you had to pay money for every drop of clean water? Where the air is full of soot and dust, and you must breathe it into your lungs from the moment you’re born until you die?”

  The merchant guffawed. “Children’s stories. Ogres and monsters to frighten us.”

  “Why do you think Terrans have gone out all over the universe?” Josh continued his argument as if there had been no interruption. “To help you, Master Merchant of Aranyi, by building a paved road just so you can travel more easily to Eclipsia City, and putting in a power plant so you can enjoy electricity? Think about it. Why should they care about you? All they want is more virgin territory to exploit now that they’ve wrecked their own world.”

  “Oh,” the merchant said, “I see I can’t win against a roomful of ’Graven. All I’m saying is, people want more than you’re willing to give them, and your clever arguments won’t stop people from wanting it. The rebels went about it in a bad way, using that weapon that brought the ’Graven together against them, but their message is real.”

  Yes, I thought, I know it is. I couldn’t keep up my side any longer without betraying my Terran origins. And the facts were unassailable. Human nature is what it is. Eclipsians, the mass of them, are poor. It’s not the desperate, hopeless poverty of Terran cities. It’s just the everyday, hard-working austerity of the farmer and herdsman, the woodsman, even the millers and the blacksmiths. In isolation, people hadn’t known their lives were especially harsh; they were unaware of all they lacked that Terrans take for granted. Once modern Terrans arrived and tried to recreate their home environment, it was impossible for ordinary Eclipsians to remain content with their meager sufficiency. They hungered after the luxuries they had seen in Eclipsia City, or heard of, greatly magnified, from those who had been there, willing to pay a price in what they had in such abundance—clean air, water, and above all, independence. They had no idea these things were finite, or might be worth something in themselves.

  And who’s to say what the relative merits are of toiling at manual labor every day in a healthy environment, wearing one suit of clothes until it wears out, always with the chance of bad weather to wipe out years of labor, or death or disease taking life young, compared to working long hours in an office, with the pressure of deadlines and an extended commute, drinking bottled water and getting lung cancer from the air, trying to earn enough to buy all the things required in the modern world, driven by the economy’s need for ever-increasing consumption? But you have electricity and running water, indoor plumbing and holonet entertainment, a car and—

  Amalie, Dominic thought to me, we’re ready for you. He spoke to Stefan next, an echo of his deep voice sounding faint in the overheard communion.

  “Excuse me,” I said as I stood up. “Margrave Aranyi is calling me.” Never had I been so glad to leave a room.

  “Ah, her master’s voice,” the merchant said. “That’s one thing we can teach the Terrans. Their women don’t know their place. Do you know they actually wear breeches? I’ve seen them, strutting about unashamed, showing everything, bossing men around.”

  I turned, opened my mouth, saw Stefan out of the corner of my eye grinning with a boy’s enjoyment of a fight, and controlled myself.

  “Yes,” Eleonora said in her coldest voice, “you’d think they believed in equality.” She paused for effect. “Didn’t you just say how much you valued it?”

  “For men, my lady,” the merchant said. “Surely, as a sibyl, you understand the importance of maintaining the difference between the sexes.”

  “Oh yes,” Eleonora said. “I see it all very clearly.”

  I left before the real fighting began, Stefan close behind me. “How do you know so much about Terra?” he asked. “Or were you just making it up to keep him from having it all his own way?”

  “Didn’t Dominic tell you?” I asked.

  “That you lived with Terrans?” Stefan said. “Sure. But you sounded like you had actually lived on Terra itself.”

  I checked cautiously as we walked up the stairs to the bedrooms. Stefan had learned his lessons well in his six months of seminary training. All he had to do was explore a little, in one of my many unguarded moments, to learn the truth, but such unmannerly conduct had apparently never crossed his young mind. He had accepted Dominic’s bowdlerized explanation of my origins, and looked no further.

  “Dominic would be proud of you,” Stefan added, “the way you defended our world.”

  “I just said what I thought,” I said, guilty to be winning praise for honesty with such a great lie behind me.

  “That’s a good way to get into trouble,” Stefan said, as if he had had experience. At his age, I imagined, he had known lots of that kind of trouble.

  “Now that you’re an adult,” I said, “you won’t get into so much trouble. At least a different kind. And you were smart to keep out of that stupid conversation.”

  “My father always says to let windbags like that merchant blow themselves out,” Stefan said, not taking credit even for prudent silence. “Once they’re finished, they’ve run out of air, they think they’ve won, and nobody has to hear it anymore.” He shrugged. “Anyway, every time I tried to think of what to say, you and Josh said it for me. And then I’d think what Dominic would say—”

  “I know,” I said, sharing a laugh. “Not something you could say in front of guests. But didn’t you think some of his arguments were valid?” I was curious where his sympathies lay, a younger son with no prospects.

  “You’re joking!” Stefan looked down at me, worried, as so often with the young, that he had failed to catch an adult’s meaning, answering me thoughtfully when he saw I had not been speaking over his head. “No, I think things are better as they are. I see plenty of Terrans, too, you know.” In the Royal Guards, he explained, cadets patrol the streets of Eclipsia City under the command of junior officers, keeping order in the areas where Eclipsians and Terrans mingle, a more trusted presence to the natives than the foreign occupiers. “And that merchant may think Terrans are perfect, but he can’t really know the truth. Terrans don’t think like men.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, “ ‘don’t think like men?’ Do you mean like women? Or not human, a different species?”

  “Dominic says that’s the same thing.” Stefan repeated his lover’s joke, realized his mistake and apologized. “Dominic sometimes leads patrols himself, of squadrons made up only of gifted cadets. And he has us use our crypta on the Terrans we encounter, as part of our training.” He waited to see if I reacted with predictable female disapproval, saw my mood of surprised but friendly interest, and continued. “Dominic says it’s wrong in general, but that it’s more important to know the enemy. And we don’t use our gifts actively, just listening.”

  After I had digested this rather alarming fact, I was moved to ask Stefan to give me a better idea of what he meant.

  He considered his answer, stopping in the corridor while we talked. “Terrans are rich; that merchant wasn’t lying. Sometimes I think I’d like to be rich like that. But all they ever seem to do is worry about making more money. You must have noticed it too, when you lived with them, unless you were too polite to listen in.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I noticed something like that.” I hadn’t thought of it that way, but that was probably because it was all I’d known. What Stefan saw as a limited outlook, I had seen as the common, inevitable lot of adulthood. “But is that your only objection to Terrans? I mean, it’s not anything to aspire to, but is it so different from here, worried about how the harvest will turn out or if you’ll have enough wool from the shearing to trade for a good packhorse in the market?”


  Stefan thought hard, trying to find the right words for the thing that bothered him most, that Dominic had stressed in his odd lessons with the gifted cadets. “They have no pride,” he said at last, “no sense of honor. They really don’t. It’s just not there in their minds when you look. And they don’t have families, most of them, to make them want to behave honorably. Dominic can talk to them in their own language, you know, and he asks them questions, about right and wrong, and honor—and they just laugh. It’s sickening; they laugh right in Dominic’s face.”

  That was hard to imagine. “What does Dominic do then?” I asked, almost preferring not to know.

  Stefan stared at my question, remembered I was a different species—female—and said, “Nothing. They’re Terrans. They can’t fight, they don’t know how to use a sword, and their own weapons aren’t allowed here. So the only honorable thing to do, Dominic shows us by example, is to treat them like children or women. A man doesn’t take offense at a badly-behaved child, and if a woman says or does something vulgar a gentleman simply ignores it. So that’s what we do, treat them like children who weren’t brought up right.”

  Or women, I thought. An inferior species that doesn’t have to be taken seriously.

  We had reached the door to the Margrave’s bedroom, and we knocked and went in. Dominic lay naked on the enormous bed, prostrate, his eyes shut, his arms extended straight out to each side. Naomi knelt on the floor beside the bed, her prism-handled dagger in her hand, a beam of yellow light pulsing as it made a slow circuit of Dominic’s naked torso. Naomi moved the dagger back and forth over Dominic’s arm, while an amazing sound like the blare of a brass instrument issued from her throat.

  Dominic opened his eyes. “My two loves,” he said, motioning Stefan and me in. “Come and help make me whole again.” He had a weary look about him, from the pain of the last weeks that he was no longer alleviating with crypta, but he bore it well now that he was to be completely healed. He sensed our discomfort. “You see, the healing works best with the bare flesh. Naomi,” he said, grinning, “shouldn’t you remove your dress at least?”

  The witch stopped her strange chanting and returned Dominic’s smile, teeth bared like fangs. “My lord,” she said, repressed passion in her voice, “you know very well what we should do. But I will do my best for you, despite all your restrictions.”

  Naomi resumed her singing for a short time, then rose to sit on the side of the bed. She touched the beam of light directly to Dominic’s left arm and hand while stroking his head with her right hand. Bend your elbow, she said. Flex. Make a fist. Stretch. Each time he obeyed her command she made communion with that one place in his mind, sensing both the brain’s activity and the traffic along the nerve pathways of the arm and hand—a form of biofeedback.

  Dominic had been suffering from something like the reverse of phantom limb syndrome. An amputee often continues to feel pain in a limb that no longer exists. Dominic’s arm was intact, the flesh wounds healed, but the damage he had suffered from handling the Eris weapon had left scars in the brain and the nerves. Surely, I thought, if a backwoods witch knew about this unusual condition and the sophisticated technique to heal it, others on Eclipsis must, too, in the seminaries and—

  Naomi’s concentration wavered at my unintentional criticism. The witch lifted her head, swiveled her neck and shoulders, glaring at me with a fury that was terrifying. The beam of light glowed in the unlit room, giving her bowed body an eerie halo. ‘Lady’ Amalie. Her sneer was almost audible. What do you know of Margrave Aranyi’s physiology? You think he is like other men? Even after last night, you see no difference? You are as unobservant as the ungifted.

  The hatred and resentment hit me like blows. Dominic startled at the wrath that was exploding around him. “So that’s how it is,” he said. “Perhaps you should leave us, Amalie, while we sort this out.”

  I didn’t wait to be asked twice. I lifted my skirts with an angry jerk and swept out the door. Stefan followed me into the corridor. “Don’t you want to stay and watch?” I asked.

  “No, Mistress,” he said. “That woman could eat us both for breakfast.”

  “If she is a woman,” I said. “And if she gets up before dinnertime.” I wondered if Stefan shared my protective feelings, or if he was too young to see Dominic as vulnerable. “Aren’t you worried about leaving Dominic alone with her?”

  Stefan shook his head. “Dominic can handle women without my help.” He blushed as he caught my reaction to this sentiment that I was too upset to shield. “I mean, she’s a member of his household.”

  As if that made everything all right. I supposed it did, when I stopped to think about it.

  Naomi was not alone with Dominic very long. She emerged from the room just as Stefan and I were wondering whether we should go back downstairs and rejoin that argument about the Terrans. The witch stepped quietly into the corridor, shaking out her skirts with one hand as she walked and recapturing the strands of hair that had as usual escaped from their clasp with the other. Her dress was on inside out, the front lacing of the shift untied, revealing the swell of small, high breasts. She walked toward us with her long, confident stride where we had waited a few doors down, and looked only at Stefan while addressing us both. “You may come in now, to form the communion of healing.”

  Dominic lay much as we had left him, although with a sheet covering him to the waist. He was sleepy, as if sedated, and no longer in any pain. There was a wet spot on the sheet, the smell of a man’s sex. She is a powerful sorceress, Dominic was moved to explain to me. I must pay her price, however extortionate. He winked at Naomi.

  Naomi smirked as she saw my reaction. “Margrave Aranyi needs the true communion of love,” she said, “to be healed from a false wound.” As before, her skepticism and mistrust were directed all at me.

  Dominic raised himself on one elbow. “It’s all right, Naomi,” he said. “Amalie will not ruin all your good work.”

  Naomi went to stand at the foot of the bed and motioned Stefan over to Dominic’s left side. She harbored no resentment against Stefan as she did with me. Because he was Eclipsian, I guessed. Or because he was not a woman.

  Because he is not pretending to be something he is not, Naomi thought to me. Because he loves my lord for himself, not for his castle and his lands and his– his cheese!

  Naomi, Dominic said, laughing at the last incongruous accusation. It is as well Amalie values my possessions, since they will be hers, too. It does not diminish the force of her love or make it less real. He reached his hand to me, his thoughts moderated by Naomi’s ministrations to lazy good nature. I have a fondness for cheese myself, he said.

  Naomi shrugged and gave up the fight. Standing on three sides of the bed, Naomi at the foot, Stefan on Dominic’s left, I on his right, we formed a miniature cell as in La Sapienza. We did not hold hands or touch; our communion flowed around and through Dominic, connecting each of us directly to him and to the others. It was an imperfect cell, blocked by Naomi’s distrust of me, my nervousness at her intense dislike, and Stefan’s skittishness at the witch’s awesome power.

  Yet the cell was effective in its mission. Dominic did not need perfect harmony in his household, only the healing love of the people who could give it to him, whatever their differences. Communion heals if it is genuine, as Naomi had been at pains to tell me, and each of us had true communion with Dominic. As the communion surrounded him, his eyelids drooped and closed, his breathing slowed. His arm relaxed, the fingers flexing and stretching, until he was ready for the deep sleep through the night that would complete the healing process.

  Naomi broke the communion with surprising delicacy. “I must sleep, too,” she said, a smile for once softening the harsh contours of her face.

  Dominic’s thoughts, on the edge of unconsciousness, called to us. Sleep with me, he said. Both of you, sleep with me.

  Stefan and I stared at each other in consternation for a moment until I understood. Dominic was making a literal
request, not for a sexual group, but that we spend the night in communion. Come, Dominic commanded again. Join me.

  I shrugged. “Go ahead,” I said to Stefan. “Lie down on that side, I’ll stay over here.”

  When Stefan lay down carefully on top of the sheet, Dominic whispered, “Naked, cheri.” His voice was groggy with impending sleep. “You heard Naomi. It must be the bare flesh.” His eyelids fluttered but did not fully open.

  “But, Dominic,” Stefan said, “your lady is here.”

  “Good,” Dominic said. “Where are you, Amalie? Come on, get your clothes off.”

  I remembered Berend’s warning. “Dominic,” I said, “do you understand that Stefan and I are both here with you in the same room? Neither one of us is really comfortable with the idea of being naked in front of the other.”

  “Darkness and damnation!” Dominic said. “You’d think this was a Christer household, all this respectability.” He was in danger of waking, losing the hard-won benefit of crypta-induced anesthetic. “Which would you prefer, unsullied decency with a crippled husband, or nakedness and health?”

  Dominic was enjoying the carefree attitude that comes with drink, with drugs and sleep. Awake and sober, he might have a very different outlook, and I was unwilling to risk doing something that would leave him forever suspicious or feeling betrayed. Eventually I thought of a compromise, and imparted my idea to Stefan.

  The Margrave’s bedroom is the central room of a suite, connected to the wife’s and companion’s rooms by bathrooms. I went through my luxurious bathroom into my bedroom, Stefan into his, and we undressed. Stefan signaled to me in thought when he was ready, going in first to lie down on Dominic’s left side. I waited a few minutes, then entered the room in the dark. While Stefan kept his eyes resolutely shut, I removed my robe and slipped quickly under the sheet on Dominic’s right. As Stefan and I came to rest in the embrace of Dominic’s loosely bent arms, we created an unusual triple communion.