18
I AM DYING, Martok thought, his soul drifting into the slow-moving currents of time. Lazily, he passed stars and the spidery brilliance of nebulae; he relished the freedom to move around the stars like solar winds.
He had anticipated that death would dredge his memories; that he would journey through familiar landscapes, as a spirit, confronting his enemies, rejoining fallen comrades, paying homage to those whom he still owed debts. And then he would arrive at the gates of Sto-Vo-Kor.
He had not expected his passage to be so peaceful.
In a valley of ice, he rejoined his body gazing up at a night sky so clear, so deep and velvety that he felt he could reach up and pluck a glittering star or the wan-faced moon. Stillness squeezed out sound, save the thrub of his heart, and his puffs of breath made visible by the bone-cracking cold.
He turned around slowly, taking in the whole landscape; on all sides, he was surrounded by [279] snow-sheathed hills and craggy cliff faces bearded with crystal icicles. He could see crevasses where the ice and snow had gaped open, allowing the bedrock far below to breathe. The remains of glaciers sat like monoliths, watchfully guarding the valley. Before him, a wide lake of blue-black waters blanketed by a low-lying white mist carpeted the valley floor. If he listened closely, he could hear the lifeless water shush and slap the icy shore. No living creature could exist in this hostile climate.
He discovered his aloneness.
Dropping his gaze to his own form, he saw he wore a monk’s simple, unadorned robes, and though he wore no gloves or head covering or furs to warm him, he did not shiver in the biting winds.
A silver glow on the opposite side of the lake caught his eye. Of their own volition, his feet began to move. He skirted the water’s edge, leaping from floating ice to floating ice. As he grew closer, he saw a woman dressed in pieces of ancient armor and fluttering scraps of diaphanous cloth. In her right hand, high over her head, she held not a bat’leth, but a weapon Martok recognized as a ch’tak, an edged club that had not been used in thousands of years. In the woman’s left hand, extended before her, she held an earthenware cup. Who is this? Martok wondered. He felt like he should know. But just as his vision faded, he knew.
Kar-Tela, she who had been called the goddess of destiny before the Klingons slew all their gods, had appeared to him. Kar-Tela was the only one of the old gods who escaped that slaughter. And why? Because she was Kar-Tela and no warrior could defeat destiny. She held the club and the cup that might hold water or might hold poison. The penitent could accept the cup and take his [280] chances or he could dash it from her hand. If this happened, then Kar-Tela would joyously offer battle, but, of course, no warrior can defeat destiny.
Martok reached out, though whether to take the cup or strike it from her hand, he could not say.
And Kar-Tela smiled.
19
MARTOK AWOKE.
He was in a sickbay, though on which ship he could not say. The biobed hummed and coughed, and Martok’s back and shoulders ached for want of padding. Perhaps he had spent too much time among humans on Deep Space 9, but there were times when he wondered about his people’s insistence that all forms of comfort were an admission of weakness. Squinting against the bright lights, Martok struggled to sit up and discovered that his arms were bound with restraints.
Someone approached, and expecting either a doctor or a guard, Martok snapped, “Release me! Or am I prisoner?” The realization dawned that he must be much recovered, because he felt some of the old whip-crack in his voice again.
Small hands loosened the restraints, and Martok was surprised to discover how happy he was to hear a familiar high-pitched voice again. “Of course not,” Pharh [182] said. “But you were being a little violent when they were dressing your wounds.”
“Violent?” Martok asked as he rubbed his wrists.
“You kept trying to strangle the doctor. Something about her seemed to irritate you.”
“I was dreaming.” Martok pushed himself up into a sitting position. Someone had stripped off his dirty, blood-soaked cloak and the light armor he had stolen, but had not changed him out of the clothes he had been wearing for the past several days. Klingons have a high tolerance for unpleasant odors, but even they have their limits. Shower, he thought. And soon. And these clothes into the disintegrator. Trying to ignore the smell, he asked Pharh, “Did I hurt her?”
“No, not seriously. Her tests said there’s something odd in your blood, so she was afraid to give you a heavy sedative or general anesthesia. The best alternative we had was to tie you down. You punched me, too, by the way.”
“Then you were standing too close.” Martok flexed his leg. It was stiff, but seemed functional. Flipping away the light cover, he studied the wound and saw that it had been treated with the usual Klingon rough battle first aid. There was an angry red scar up two-thirds of his leg that he would have until he died. He grunted in satisfaction. “Where is everyone?” he asked. “Where are Sirella and Worf?”
“Sleeping and eating, respectively,” Pharh said. “It’s the middle of the night here on this ship.”
“Then why are you still up? For that matter, why are you here at all?”
“Here in sickbay or here on this ship?”
“Let us begin with the first one.”
Pharh slumped down onto a low stool and said [283] sulkily, “I’m a Ferengi on a ship full of Klingons. You’re the only one here I know or even understand. The rest of them—well, most of them—insist on acting like Klingons. Where else would you expect me to stay?”
“Most of them?” Martok asked. He was expecting a comment about Worf, but Pharh surprised him.
“The old guy is okay,” Pharh explained. “The one who rescued me. By the way, you owe me for that Sporak now. I had to leave it in the middle of nowhere because of something you did to it.”
Martok contemplated a retort, but decided the Ferengi might have a point. “Fine. I owe you for a Sporak. When I have the currency to pay for one, I will. Do you still have the ring?”
Pharh nodded.
“Good. Hang on to it. It may be the only thing of value on this entire ... What ship is this?”
“Nobody’s told me. I’m pretty invisible to most of these people.”
Martok slipped his legs to the side of the bed and waited to see how he would feel. Stiff joints, a slight headache. A knot in the pit of his gut—hunger, he realized. A good thing, he decided. And dry mouth. “Get me some water.”
“Please,” Pharh said.
“Please what?”
“ ‘Please, Pharh, get me some water.’ ”
Martok turned his head to look at the Ferengi and put as much energy as he dared spare into a medium-powered glower. “Please, Pharh,” he said icily. “Get me some water before I kill you.”
Pharh stood up and went to the replicator. “That’s more like it,” he said, and brought the water.
Martok drained the cup, wiped his mouth, and [284] continued questioning Pharh. “How did you become involved in the rescue attempt? And get me some more water.”
“Please.”
“Please,” Martok said, teeth clenched, and extended the empty tumbler.
Walking back to the replicator, Pharh said, “Well, first there was the instructional voice. It told me I had to come help you.”
“Do you often listen to voices? Where was this voice coming from?”
“I was under a pile of rocks at the time, so I’m not sure, and, no, I don’t often listen to voices. When I came out from under the rocks, he was waiting for me.”
“Kahless.” There was no question in Martok’s voice.
Pharh’s voice took on a dreamy tone. “Yes, Kahless. The old guy.”
“The emperor.”
“Someone else mentioned that. He doesn’t act like an emperor.”
“Do I act like a chancellor?”
“Well, no, now that you mention it. There’s something wrong with Klingons. All the rest of them act like
they run the quadrant, yet you two act like ...”
“Like what?”
“Like you’d rather be anywhere else but where you are. Maybe working at the landfill.”
“I can think of worse professions,” Martok said, setting the tumbler down. “Kahless found you in the wastes?”
“Under a pile of rocks, yes.”
“Incredible,” he said, then decided it was time to try to stand. He slipped down to the floor, then steadied himself. He felt off balance, but overall not too bad. “And then he convinced you to risk your life to save me?”
[285] “No, not really. The voices convinced me to try. Kahless just made me believe we could do it without killing ourselves.”
The doors to sickbay groaned open. I’m on the Rotarran, Martok decided. The door mechanism had been damaged during an attack and never adequately repaired. Martok heard two sets of footfalls. He didn’t need to look up to know to whom they belonged.
“How is he?” Kahless asked.
“Grouchy,” Pharh reported, “so I suspect he’s feeling better.”
Worf approached the biobed and checked the readouts. On Starfleet ships, Martok decided, not without a trace of bitterness, everyone learns how to do that. “He’s recovering, but he needs rest,” Worf announced.
Martok sighed. “Would anyone care to ask me how I’m feeling, or are you going to keep talking about me as if I’m not here?” He glanced from emperor to ambassador to Ferengi.
“How are you, my brother?” Worf asked.
“I am,” Martok announced, “most irritable. And confused. Where are Sirella and Drex? I wish to see them.”
“They will be here soon,” Kahless explained. “I bade them wait until we had spoken to you about your future.”
“My future?” Martok snapped, then barked out a clipped laugh. “I don’t believe I have much of a future unless you count running and hiding from Morjod, Gothmara, and the rest of the Klingon Empire. Or, wait,” he said, his tone growing more sarcastic with each moment. “Perhaps we should head for Federation space. They’ll take us in and I can spend the rest of my miserable existence as a political refugee. What’s the name of the current Federation president? Worf, look it [286] up so I can address him by name while I crawl up to his desk to kiss his ...”
Kahless turned toward the door, grabbing Worf by the arm as he went. “When you are quite through with your bout of self-pity,” he said. “Let us know. We’ll be in the mess hall.”
Martok pointed at Kahless’s back as if his finger were a disruptor. “You stopped me from killing that damned usurper.”
Looking back over his shoulder, his expression as cool as a Romulan senator’s, Kahless said, “You were about to die.”
“Then you denied me an honorable death.”
“No. I preserved an honorable life. And for that you now owe me a debt”
Martok studied the emperor’s face and felt the memory of a dream tickle his conscience, but he thrust the vision away from him only to have it replaced by the image of Kahless wheeling him down a corridor saying, I’ve been busy trying to save your empire. “My empire?” he muttered, then more loudly, “I owe you nothing.”
“But you owe the empire everything.”
Martok regarded him incredulously. “Everything?! Everything?! Look at me!” He stood straight and tore at the ragged clothes that hung from his body. “I have given the empire everything! I’ve given the empire two of my children, my House, my position, my damned and damnable honor. What else could the empire possibly want from me?”
“It wants you to give up your old ideas, my brother,” Worf said. “It wants you to forge the empire anew.”
Ignoring his aches, Martok spun to face Worf. “You!” he roared. “SHUT YOUR DAMNABLE MOUTH! This is [287] your fault! If you hadn’t convinced me to take on the mantle of chancellor, none of this would have happened!” He looked down at his rags and his voice went quiet and cold. “I didn’t want this. I never wanted it. All I ever wanted was to serve the empire as a soldier, to fight and die with honor. This is your burden, Worf. You carry it.”
“It was not Worf who sired Morjod,” Kahless said quietly.
The barb bit deep, and Martok’s only defense was cold fury. “You’re quite right, Emperor,” he said bitterly. “It was I who set these events in motion with a single youthful indiscretion. It was wrong of me to attempt to thrust the blame on someone else and because of it, the Klingon Empire stands on the brink of destruction.”
“You misunderstand me, Martok,” Kahless said. “I didn’t say the blame was yours. This is beyond the single act of any one Klingon. The storm we face is one rooted in history, in destiny. It is a crisis that has been building for centuries and it would be both folly and an act of contemptible pride to claim responsibility. Now the clouds have burst and after generations of corruption and stagnation, the Klingon people hunger for something to believe in again.”
Martok stared at the emperor, struggling to put his feeling into words. Someone, he knew, had been trying to tell him something very much like this, but it was so difficult to accept. If he did embrace this vision—this lunacy—of Kahless’s he knew he would be giving up something that was unutterably precious to him, but he could not say what.
“This is what Worf recognized,” Kahless continued, watching Martok’s face, “when he forced Gowron to [288] accept me as a figurehead emperor. I was to rally the people, renew the Klingon soul, remind them of the ideals the true Kahless had lived and died for. It was a worthy challenge and I embraced it with all my heart.”
“But you failed,” Martok whispered, sad to say the words, but knowing they had to be said.
Kahless agreed without hesitation. “Yes,” he said. “I failed. Gowron, though blinded by his own ambition, was cunning. He accepted me publicly to stave off civil war, but thereafter he blocked my efforts at every turn. He saw me as a rival, just as he saw you, and I became powerless to reach the people. I grew frustrated, then enraged, and finally, I despaired.”
“What happened, then?” Pharh interjected. Martok had forgotten the Ferengi was in the room and was surprised to see that he was hanging on the emperor’s every word. This is a tale to him, Martok realized. We’re like characters in a song.
“Like you, young warrior,” Kahless said to Pharh, “in my darkest moment, I heard a call. I came to see the truth.”
“And that is?” Martok asked.
“That if our people have any hope to be led through this dark night, they need more man a warrior, more than a politician, more than a shaman. They need a symbol.” Kahless laid his hand on Martok’s shoulder. “They need you.”
Martok knocked the emperor’s hand away. “I’m not a symbol.” He shook his head. “I never was. I’m just a man.” And, with that, he pushed himself away from the biobed and lurched to the door. He did not know if his legs would hold him, but they did and he made it through the door and managed to stay on his feet long enough to hear the door creak shut behind him.
* * *
[289] In sickbay, the emperor, the ambassador, and the Ferengi studied each other carefully. Finally, Pharh knew he could no longer stand the silence and asked, “Now what are we going to do? He says he’s just a man.” He shrugged, then looked from Kahless to Worf. “Personally, I would have to agree. I can’t recall the last time I saw someone who looked less like a symbol.”
Looking up at Worf, he thought for a moment that he had gone too far and had earned either a figurative or literal skewering, but, strangely, the big Klingon didn’t seem to be paying any attention to Pharh. There was a light in Worf’s eyes, a light like his mother used to get when she figured out a new way to “edit the company books for clarity.” Inspiration—or madness (it was frequently difficult to tell them apart)—dawned in him and cast a wild glow over his face. “Perhaps,” he said, “there is a way he can be both.”
In her quarters on Deep Space 9, Ezri Dax attempted to sneak in a half an hour of rest before her next appointm
ent. She was working another double shift that day and needed a few minutes of solitude to recharge. The war was over—for now, at least—but they were still dealing with the aftereffects. Ezri had seen more than a dozen patients today, most of them with fairly reasonable complaints, including mild cases of depression or battle fatigue. One or two of them had been serious, however, and she was worried about how badly scarred the Federation’s psyche had been by the losses they had shared. She still felt more than a little raw about her own losses, though neither of them were the kind most of her friends and patients faced.
She missed Benjamin and was worried about the [290] effect his loss was having on Jake. It didn’t make it any easier not knowing whether he was truly dead or merely ... misplaced in time. If that wasn’t bad enough, on an entirely different level, she missed Worf. Ezri was happy for his opportunity. Whether he was willing to believe it himself or not, becoming the ambassador to the Klingon Empire was the position his entire career had been leading up to. Somewhere inside her, she felt Jadzia’s glow of pride and, yes, amusement at the idea. It was difficult to deal with those sensations sometimes, especially since she did not always understand if they were her own displaced emotions or the symbiont’s response to a situation. Still so much to learn. ...
Sleep was not coming on. Too much coffee today, she decided. Maybe she should wander down to sickbay and see what Julian was doing. Perhaps the two of them could slip off for a bite to eat or ...
“Lieutenant Dax?” the new duty officer called to her over her combadge. Lieutenant ... what was his name? Bowers?
She tapped the badge. “Here,” she said resignedly. So much for that idea. ...
“There’s a communiqué for you coming over the secure line.”
Ezri wasn’t expecting any messages. Perhaps it was from the Symbiosis Commission. They had been trying to get her attention for the past several days. Or perhaps it was her mother. Neither possibility pleased her. “All right,” she said. “Feed it to my workstation. I’ll listen to it there.”
STAR TREK: DS9 - The Left Hand of Destiny, Book One Page 24