Iron Gold

by Pierce Brown

  She could have learned a thing or two from this man.

  On the dais, Diomedes looks like a man freed from the gallows. His father will be stripped of the Sovereigncy for negligence, but any prison time will be commuted on the grounds of the pending war. Romulus will likely even lead his family’s forces under Dido’s command. It’s a marvel.

  But then, in the chancel, behind the Olympic Knights, a fragile chime shatters all well-laid plans. The council turns to look back at the sound. Chance, hardly ten years of age, stands barefoot and quiet in front of her chair, holding a small iron bell. Her white eyes stare out at the terrifying host. Dido frowns, confused. Seraphina whispers to her friends. I feel the rush of impending doom. The memory howls with warning, because I remember my tutor Hieronymous droning on about ancient codices outlining the rules of an impeachment trial. Most forget that the Whites are not set behind the Olympics for show: they cannot decide a verdict, but they do have one unique, archaic power. It is where the phrase “unless chance strikes” originates.

  Helios beckons the small girl forward. She comes to whisper in his ear. His face tightens. She returns to her seat and the knights discuss amongst themselves. Whatever is said turns Diomedes sheet white. I glance up at Seraphina and can sense her distress even from across the room. Diomedes is shaking his head at Helios, as are two of the younger knights. The Death Knight, an older woman, walks from the end of the dais to confer with Helios and vehemently stabs her finger in the air. The younger knights don’t like what she’s said, but after Helios seems to agree, their objections fade and they slowly nod their heads in compliance.

  Helios calls order to the room.

  “We have discussed amongst ourselves and have come to an agreement. While it is seldom invoked, the Fates are afforded the right to levy additional charges against the accused on behalf of the State. It brings us no pleasure to voice these charges, but we, the Olympic Council, are bound by duty to charge Romulus au Raa with one count of arch treason.”

  The room upturns. Peerless bound to their feet. Dido raves on the floor. “I do not seek that charge!”

  “It does not matter,” Helios says.

  “This is my trial! My charges!”

  “It is the purview of the Fates to request to add charges. You know this. Now sit down.”

  “Diomedes…”

  “The council has spoken, Mother,” Diomedes says. He looks like he’s going to pass out. “You must desist.”

  Enraged, Dido sits, casting a horrified look at her husband: the punishment for treason is death.

  While his men behind him are in a holy rage, Romulus alone seems unaffected and waits patiently for Helios to continue.

  “While the Fates may demand additional charges, it is not in their power to present evidence. Thus it should be a simple matter, and one that should be stated for the record so that there are no lingering resentments that might eat at the foundation of our Dominion as we enter our most dire hour. Our Chance was wise and correct to invoke her right. Let us clear the air and move forward as one people.” He looks at Romulus with a sigh. “My friend, it annoys me to insult you, but I am bound by my office.”

  “Of course.”

  “Two simple questions, two simple answers, and we move forward. Did you know that Darrow of Lykos destroyed the docks, and did you conspire to conceal this from us? Yes or no?”

  Romulus wears a tranquil expression. The same I saw on his face as he dissected his razor when we first met. He stands slowly and steps off his small cushion and lets his lone arm fall down his side to tug on the cape so that it is smooth behind him. He lifts his head to the council, then to his wife, with eyes that seem to gaze far beyond the people in this room.

  “Romulus…” his wife whispers, knowing the spirit of him. “Don’t…”

  “Yes,” says the Moon Lord. “I knew and I did so conspire.”

  The silence of the room shatters a second time. An uproar from the stands, from Dido, from all but Romulus’s men and the council itself. Diomedes sits stunned. Seraphina looks around like a lost little girl.

  “He does not mean it!” Dido hisses to the council. “He does not mean it. Strike it from the record and convene a new trial for that charge.”

  Helios is just as astounded. “I cannot.”

  “He’s perjuring himself,” Dido says. “It is a lie. He had no evidence. Supposition doesn’t count. We all saw the recording. It can be inferred but not proven. All we have evidence of is his negligence. Diomedes, tell him…”

  “Mother,” Diomedes says helplessly, “by his own admission…”

  “Damn his admission, boy. He’s your father. He’s Romulus au gorydamned Raa!”

  My heart breaks watching her spin helplessly about, as if she were a drowning woman the rest of us could not help. I’m as lost myself.

  “Dido…” Romulus says from behind her. “Please.” She turns to him still in denial, but slowly as she looks into his eyes, she knows that there is no going back and all at once a shiver goes through her that I can see from forty meters back, as her reality, her family, are irrevocably shattered and she knows it is her doing.

  “Tell them you’re lying,” she whispers. “Tell them you had suspicions but didn’t know.”

  “But I knew,” Romulus says. “I knew because the holodrop you sent Seraphina to collect was offered to me first.”

  “What?”

  He looks up at the council as if he’s already parted from the world.

  “It was offered to me. Several images were sent. I invited the brokers to the Rim, where they met around Enceladus. I relied upon my reputation of honor to lure them and the original copy there. I took out a warhawk and killed them all and burned their ship. Of course, as you have seen, there was a copy.”

  “You did this by yourself?” Helios asks, looking at Pandora.

  “I am Romulus au Raa.” He smiles sadly. “You might ask yourself why I did this. Why I tell you this now when it will cost me my own life. All my days I have lived as honorably as a man can. But I have carried this secret for too long. And, as my father would ask, what is honor without truth? Honor is not what you say. Honor is what you do.”

  A cold stone settles in my throat as I watch Seraphina’s heart break. Tears leak down her cheeks.

  “We live by a code. I broke that code, even if my reasons for doing so were just. Let it serve as a warning to you all. I lied because I knew if we saw what the Slave King did to the docks, we would have no choice but to declare the peace void and sail for war.

  “I believe that war will destroy us. All of us, Rim and Core alike. All that the Colors have built together. All we have protected. The legacy of the Society will vanish. Not because our arms are weak. Not because our commanders are frail. But because we are fighting against a religion whose god still lives.

  “At this moment, he is mortal. He strains under the burden of rule, and the seams of their alliances fray. But if we sail on Mars or Luna, the Colors will unite. They will become a tide and their now mortal general will become, once again, their god of war. And if he falls, another will rise, and another, and another. We are too few. We are too honorable. We will lose this war just as surely as I will now lose my life.

  “I urge you to feel my death. To let it be the last casualty, and not the first of this war that claimed my father, my daughter, my son, and now me.”

  Seraphina bursts into tears. Dido hangs her head, her body limp. I feel the stirring of my own grief, a reflection of the grief I felt for Cassius’s death. It is tragic to see a man’s nature doom him, especially when it is a nature so fine as Romulus’s.

  Helios stands. His voice barely even a whisper. “Romulus au Raa, you are found guilty of the charges levied against you. Guards, seize the convicted and prepare him to return to the dust.”

  AMONGST A HOST OF MOON LORDS on a frozen sulfur dune, Romulus says farewell to his children. Only Raa are in attendance. I do not know why I have been invited. Wearing a kryll and a scorosuit,
I watch from the end of their ranks as he bends to press his forehead against young Paleron’s. The child weeps for his father. The tears freeze on his cheeks. Romulus stands before Marius. The two men press their foreheads together stoically.

  “Forgive your mother. Honor me and serve the Rim,” Romulus says.

  “As you wish, Father.”

  Marius watches icily as his father moves on to Diomedes. The warrior looks down at his father like a giant child, hoping beyond all hope for the man to perform some miracle and make this all a dream. “I am sorry, Father,” he says, a huge sob stuck in his chest. His father lays a firm hand his shoulder. “I have failed you.”

  “No. I should never have involved you in this. But what luck I have to call a man like you my son. It is an honor you cannot understand. One day you will have children and if you have just one who is as dear as you are to me, you will understand how blessed my life has been. Stay true to your own heart, no matter the cost.”

  They say farewell and Romulus goes to Seraphina. Guilt and grief rack her. He puts his forehead to hers. “My burning one.”

  She recoils from him. “You don’t have to die.”

  “If I live, I divide the Rim. You might forgive, but how could the Codovans? How could anyone on Ganymede who lost a son, a daughter? They’ve been denied justice because of my lie. I hope this cools their blood. But…if the Rim does go to war, it must go as one.”

  Seraphina says nothing. He touches her face. “The same spirit is in you that was in my brother. Do not let it consume you like it did him. You have nothing to prove. Glory for others is nothing.” He touches her heart. “What matters is in here. Honor your conscience, honor your family.” His eyes crinkle as he smiles behind the kryll. “One day you will understand why I’ve done this.”

  “I will never understand.”

  He tries to embrace her, but she pulls back from him and walks away from the family across the dune as Diomedes calls to her. Romulus watches her go. He does not move on to Dido, or his mother, who chose not to come watch her son die, but instead he walks to me.

  “Lord Raa,” I say, lowering my head.

  “There are some who would say I should bow to you, heir of Silenius,” he says.

  “Most who’d say that are dead,” I reply. “Besides, I am a guest in your home.”

  “Very true.” He motions for me to follow him and we walk a few paces away from his family. The cold wind howls around us, flinging debris into the reflective goggles I wear. The kryll warms the air as it passes through the membrane into my mouth. Romulus looks back to his family. “They wonder why I have brought you here.”

  “They’re not the only ones.”

  He examines me with his lone eye. “You look very much like your mother.”

  “You knew her?”

  “Not well.” He sees me look at Seraphina, who sits on the edge of a distant dune watching us.

  “Why did you ask me to come here, my lord?”

  “There is still a chance to stop this war, Lysander. Maybe not to stop it from beginning. I fear the blood has risen too high for that. Even my death will not stop it. But there is a chance to stop it from destroying us all. Our strength before the Rising did not come from our arms or our ships. It came from our unity. Long ago, Silenius au Lune, your blood, and Akari au Raa, my blood, stood together. One the scepter, one the sword. They gave birth to the Pax Solaris. They freed us from Earth’s dominion. You face a choice that will touch lives far beyond your sight. Run as you have these last years, or become the echo of those great men.” He leans forward, his voice husky and full of emotion. That lone eye seems suspended in his face, celestial and untethered from its mortal body. He sets his hand on my shoulder. “You saved my daughter. Can you now save the worlds?”

  He does not wait for a response, which I am far too stunned to give. He walks back to his family to say farewell to his wife. I’m left overcome with the weight of his question. I already took the first step in ignoring Cassius’s dying wish. The second with the betrayal of Gaia. Do I have the strength to take the rest? Can I bear the burden of my blood?

  I watch Romulus say his final farewells. The great man looks at Dido with so much love I know I can’t fathom it. I have never known love like theirs. Seraphina sits alone on the dune and I wonder how Romulus felt when he first saw Dido all those years ago on Venus. If he loved her so much, how could he be so brave as to choose to say farewell? Is it really true, pure honor? After having been ripped from my family, I’m at a loss, unable to understand how a man, a father, a husband, could value something more than love.

  It awakens something deep inside me. A desire to be as noble as he is now. A need to honor his memory, though I barely knew the man.

  “These ten years I’ve been looking for the man I married,” Dido says to her husband. I strain to hear them over the wind. “Now I see him again. The young Moon Lord who burned a city for a girl of the pearl shore. Romulus the Bold. Dido of Numidae. What a pair they were. What an end they had.”

  “No,” he whispers. “This is not the end. I loved you before I ever met you. I will love you until the sun dies. And when it does, I will love you in the darkness. Goodbye, wife.”

  Stepping close, he removes his kryll and, holding his breath against the toxic air, gently unfastens Dido’s to pull her into one last kiss. Steam billows from their lips as they cling at one another. Then Romulus pulls away and tosses his kryll on the ground to step backward down the dune.

  Seraphina watches from her perch on the dune. It does not seem right for her to be alone now. I find myself walking toward her up the frozen sulfur. She says nothing as I sit beside her to watch her father’s last rite.

  Under the watchful gaze of two Obsidian adjuncts to the White Justice, Romulus removes his boots. His cloak. His scorosuit beneath. His liner and his undergarments, till he is naked and pale there on the frozen sulfur. Across the waste he must walk for eighty steps to reach the resting place of Akari au Raa, the founder of his house. The Dragon Tomb is a giant black obelisk shaped like a winged beast at the top of a stubby crag of rock. Hunched frozen bodies litter the dune around the tomb and cling to the rock formation itself—Raa who in old age or punishment or shame came here to die and in death seek to reach their ancestor and erect a humble monument to their own strength. Only four have ever made it to the Dragon Tomb. Romulus seeks to join the honorable dead.

  It is below negative one hundred degrees Celsius. Convulsing from the cold, he turns to face us, hiding nothing. His chest is scarred and pale. His stomach flat and muscled. His ribs stand out. His remaining arm is corded with stringy fibers. And as the wind ripples across the waste, his extremities begin to purple from the cold. His hair unbound behind his head whips till the moisture in it freezes.

  He roars.

  “I am a son of Io. A child of the Dust.” Steam clouds his words as he spends his last breath. His fist thumps his chest with each proclamation, leaving a shadow of pink over the paling skin. “I am a dragon of Raa. An Iron Gold. Akari, bear witness!” He whispers something to himself.

  Then he turns and walks down the dune toward death, his hand at his side, his shoulders proud and square, head held back in defiance of the cold and poisoned air. The frozen sulfur crystals crack under his feet, wounding the skin. By the tenth step, blood smears a glittering red trail behind him. By the twentieth, his body shudders against the wind.

  “Twenty-nine,” Seraphina whispers, counting her father’s steps. Romulus clutches his chest with his one arm, desperate to keep his spirit of warmth from the gnawing moon. “Thirty-two.” His spine stands out as he hunches. “Thirty-seven.” His hair is frozen and no longer whips in the wind but clumps to the back of his neck like a dead animal.

  “Forty-five.” He drifts sideways, his path bending away from the monument. “Fifty.” He falls to his knees. Paleron sobs at his mother’s side. Dido watches without blinking. Frost crusts her eyelashes. Romulus wills himself up. Blood pours down his knees and freezes
to his shins as he stumbles on, his will inexorable. One foot after the other. They are black and red now. Blood frozen onto the bottom of the dead flesh to make a shoe.

  “Sixty.” Seraphina’s voice grows louder, wishing her father a triumph in the end. “Sixty-four.” The man will not stop. His will is immense. All the pain of all the years has culminated into this single testament of will to prove to the moon that despite its horrors, it is under his power.

  “Sixty-eight.”

  I find myself wishing strength.

  “Seventy…” Romulus takes another impossible step up the side of the dune. Then his legs betray him. He falls hard to the ground ten steps from the monument, striking his head on the ice before sliding back, supine. His black hand paws at the ground. Steam seeps from his mouth. But with one arm, he cannot lift himself up. He heaves himself upward one last time. The effort is in vain. He does not stand again. Soon, he does not move. Ice crusts over his white body amongst the corpses of his humbled ancestors. Ten steps from the honored Golds who reached the monument lies the greatest man of a people.

  “Pulvis et umbra sumus,” Seraphina whispers, and I alone hear her. Below, the family weeps. The moon howls, the darkness quickens, and the Raa leave their father behind and, like the dust, fly away with the wind and fade into the ebbing twilight.

  DIDO SITS SLUMPED IN a low chair by a window that looks out over the sulfur plain. The weather is clear. Her arms hang off the edge of the armrests. Her large, angry eyes look out into the waste but are trained on her past. She is an island of regret, bled of pride, of spirit, and swollen with the torpor of loss.

  “What is it you want, Lune?” She asks this without turning around when Seraphina and I enter the room. The young woman escorted me in silence.