by John Daulton
Finally the Queen motioned that the illusionist should cut the image off. She raised her hands for quiet, but still had to wait some time for the crowd noise to subside.
“This,” she said when at last she could be heard, “this is the place where we will always be reminded of our fragility. Our vulnerability. This is where we can come and see what is at stake for us all. This is why our worlds need one another. This is the memorial to our fallen, but also the monument to remind us that we live in a new universe. We can, in our sorrow-filled memories, come here and also recognize our strength.
“A page has turned upon us, and we find ourselves faced with a new reality. Our very achievements, all the things we have learned, discovered and revealed by our magic …,” she paused and turned, pointing to the director and his nearby officers, “all the things we have learned, discovered and revealed by our science …,” she faced back out into the crowd, “these things we have unlocked with our hard work over centuries and millennia, and these things now dictate our need for one another. And it is here, at Fire Fountain, where any who doubt can come and look and understand. Let none of us forget.”
She called for a moment of silence then, a time of prayer and mindful thoughts for all those who were gone. She did not lead them in it, nor did she call for a priest. She simply asked that they do it, that they call up the faces of those who had sacrificed and could not be saved. And remember them.
When it was done, she raised her head and proclaimed that it was time for the feast. And there, revealed by the release of the hiding enchantments put upon it, was spread upon the field behind the crowd a feast so enormous no other in history was its match. There were tables and chairs for everyone, and more notable for the historians than the simple scale of the feast was the fact that there were no special places for the nobles or the dignitaries from Earth to sit. The Queen waited until the crowd had seen it too. She gauged it by the growing waves of whispers and muttered wondering. She smiled. “Today we feast as friends and equals,” she declared. “Now let us eat!”
The crowd roared and many of them ran for the food as if they’d not eaten in all these long months since the war was won.
Her Majesty turned back to face those assembled on the stage. “My hope is that you will all mingle amongst the people and make acquaintances with them. There are none of us holding titles today that do not owe their privilege to those people down there. The blood of the farmer and the housewife paid for our privilege. Today we give that sacrifice its due.”
“Your incompetence bought them their sacrifice,” snapped the marchioness, her voice a raspy whisper. “Don’t think to lecture us anymore this afternoon. We sit through this from you because it is what must be done, but you brought this upon them. You make me sick, standing there in your gleaming armor still today. Arrogant woman. You should be in that prison on Earth with that idiot director they deposed!”
Before the Queen could respond, the marchioness motioned for her teleporter to take her away, leaving the Earl of Vorvington staring wide-mouthed in the space where she’d so recently stood. He looked up at Her Majesty with his red jowls reddening all the more, as guilty in appearance as if he’d said it too.
“Let it go, Vorvington,” said the Queen. “All will settle in time.” She flashed a somewhat embarrassed look at the new director, which he acknowledged with a crooked left side of his mouth. He’d seen plenty of that same sort of thing himself back on Earth, and there would be arguments among his fleet officers, hard feelings and resentment for a long time to come. She shook it off, however, looking to Altin instead. “Sir Altin, if Miss Pewter can spare your attention long enough, would you be so kind as to take the rest of us to the feast?”
He glanced down at Orli, who smiled and giggled as she nodded that of course it would be okay.
“It would be my honor, Your Majesty.” A few moments later the lot of them were engulfed in an adoring crowd.
Chapter 52
Several hours after the feast at the Fire Fountain began, Orli and Altin sat together, legs dangling over the ledge that marked the entrance to Taot’s cave. The feast was still raging out on the prairie far away, measures and miles from them. The people were happy, allowed themselves joy and drunkenness, which most often turned to tears. But they were trying to move on. So were the two young lovers, which was why they were here.
They’d been out on that ledge for some time. The Queen had not only graciously allowed them to go, but when she’d heard where they were going, she insisted that Altin take Taot a full mammoth haunch right off the cook fire and give it to him with her full compliments and gratitude. The dragon hadn’t been much for the gratitude, but he’d been delighted at getting an effortless meal of that size. In fact he’d been sleeping it off ever since. In the silence that had fallen after all the bones were crunched and the tissues chewed and chomped, the two of them had come out upon the ledge and sat together staring up into the stars. For a while they chatted about the banquet and the Queen’s speech. They talked about plans, about Kettle, about lost Tytamon. But for a long time after, they sat in silence, each swept off in their own thoughts, their own memories, and the night was long upon them when Orli finally spoke again.
“The Queen said it’s been a hard-won happy ending for everyone in that last toast she made.” Her gaze fell from the sky as she said it, dropping in the turn of a breath to where it came to rest, staring down into the darkness below. The valley floor was barely visible even with Luria nearly three quarters full, a pale pink arc hanging low in the eastern sky, featureless as a forgotten memory. “Is it really happy, though? For everyone?”
Altin nodded, running his finger absently over the back of her hand, enjoying the cool satin of her skin. “I suppose it is. Or will be. Although I’m not sure when I will feel it all the way. The work on the battlefield in the days after your people came will haunt me forever. I’ll never forget those faces, those bodies all gnawed upon.” He shuddered and forgot for a time to stroke her hand. After a while he started up again, finally looking to her. “But yes, I suppose we will be happy again. If we don’t allow it, then what were we fighting for?”
“It’s not going to be happy for us all,” she said. “Some of us will never be. One of us anyway.” She pressed her lips inward, her sad eyes resigned.
This startled him, and he turned to her with fright dawning like frost commencing upon his heart. “What do you mean? What are you saying?”
She could see the rise of terror in his eyes, the frantic look beginning, the fear of losing her somehow. Again. She could read it as plainly in his moonlit face as if he’d worn a sign. She smiled and stroked his cheek with the curl of her fingers. “Not us,” she said. “We’ll be happy. I am happy now. But I’m sad for Blue Fire because she’s out there all alone. Alone and violated. It’s not fair.”
“He never made it, though,” Altin pointed out. “He didn’t get to her. He was still tunneling when he died.”
“Does it matter?”
He looked away. “No. I don’t suppose it does.”
“I wish there was something we could do for her.”
He nodded. He let go of her hand. Felt guilty for it. That he could be happy, that he got to have Orli in his life. It was true Blue Fire had nothing now. She was silent all the time. She had no joy in the victory. Nothing to celebrate. Only memories of fear added to that long-abiding loss she’d known for millenniums beyond count.
Altin scooted back far enough to lean against the rock face, only his calves and ankles dangling out into the open space above the valley far below. She reached out and absently ran her fingers through the soft hair on his shins, her gaze still directed down into the valley as his returned to the sky.
Luria hung in the darkness as a wide crescent smile, and he thought that at least she was happy all the way. Altin gazed upon her bright face for a long time, thought about how much had come to pass since that first time he’d gone there, his first time standing upon another celest
ial sphere, a world that was not his own. He remembered the first time he’d seen that red, rocky place, how alive he’d felt staring back at Prosperion.
And then there had been Red Fire. Another red place. This time angry and violent. Two ends of a long trail. He let go a long sigh as he thought through it all. All his new friends, all the ones he had lost.
Orli heard the breath leaving him and looked back at him. She smiled, her eyes sparkling as Luria’s pink light caught them just right. She scooted back against the cliff face beside him, snuggling up close for warmth in the chill of the night. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to spoil the mood.”
“It’s all right,” he said, putting his arm around her and drawing her tightly against him. She always smelled so wonderful. “It’s going to be a while before we stop doing things like that.”
“It is,” she agreed. She looked out across the end of the valley, far to the west between the pair of mountain peaks where the sun had lost itself behind the mountain range several hours ago. A lone star hung there now, dangling between two spires like a brilliant jewel lying in the cleavage of the world. She watched it for a while, and then, suddenly, she started, nearly jumping to her feet as she turned to face Altin again. Breathless, she asked, “Is that Hope?”
Her urgency startled him, the energy that radiated suddenly in her words. He frowned and asked, “Is what hope?”
“That,” she said pointing back toward the star. “That star. Is that the Hope star?”
He leaned forward, looking around her, then nodded. “Yes, that is Hope.” The star of Hope, named for a mourning woman of Prosperion myth. The eternal lover waiting in the sky for a lost sailor only the gods knew was never going to return.
“It’s a blue star,” Orli said.
He nodded. “Yes. It is.” He didn’t know what else to say. She seemed all aflutter now, like a flock of birds had taken flight in her.
“Altin, it’s a blue star. Like Yellow Fire was. Like the original Blue Fire. Blue Fire’s lover.”
“Okay,” he said, smiling but still completely lost.
“Think about it. How did her husband die?”
Altin blinked a few times, trying to catch her intent, but could only answer the question without insight. “You said the sun blew up.”
“No, not blew up, it flared. Solar cycles. It blasted the world he lived in.”
Altin nodded. He’d understood it well enough when she explained it to him before.
“Don’t you see it? We killed Red Fire in the heart chamber.”
Altin continued to nod, but he still wasn’t seeing what she saw.
“We blew up his heart. But not the life. Or at least, I don’t think the life. It’s all still there. In the living things.”
“Yes, but, Orli, what are you on about?”
“Altin, it’s the exact opposite from Blue Fire’s mate.” Altin’s blank look forced her explanation on at increasing speed. “They need both to live. Don’t you get it? To kill Blue Fire, we were going to destroy all the life on her world. She needs the living things, remember? That’s why she was ‘defending’ Andalia. She thought the Andalians were killing the essential life. It was a prospective nest for her. The life came first. Life provides life; it’s the life energy for them, for her species. Life is the spark … or something like it, and the heart chamber is the soul. It must be. And if it is, that means we can bring him back!”
“Bring who back?”
“Blue Fire’s husband. Yellow Fire.”
He looked completely perplexed, his eyes narrowed, his head moving marginally side to side. “What are you talking about?”
“We can go get his heart.”
Altin’s eyes narrowed even more, but his mouth fell open, and by the look of him, she might as well have just told him the sky was made of foxtails and that Queen Karroll was an orc.
Her own expression shaped impatience and more than a little frustration too. She knew that she was talking too fast, that she was skipping parts that needed to be filled in, but in her urgency, her elation at this epiphany, she could hardly contain herself. She pulled in a long, slow breath to calm herself, and began again. “All right. Look, do you remember when we were in Blue Fire’s great cavern getting the Liquefying Stones for the Citadel mages? Remember what you told me about the heart chamber? How she had that cluster of dark green stones in the middle of it? The core of the heart chamber, you said. She told you it was the father’s gift. It was some kind of something special. Remember?”
He nodded. He remembered it quite clearly.
“Well, Red Fire had one too. It wasn’t blue, it was orange, but otherwise it was just like you said it would be, a concentrated batch of different crystals, a patch that was clearly a different type of stone. The father’s gift. Or maybe it was the mother’s gift in this case. I don’t know. But what if that part is still alive? What if it’s dormant or something? Plants do it all the time, geophytes with storage organs like bulbs and tubers. The precedent is totally there.”
He shook his head a little then. He didn’t speak what he was thinking, but he thought it anyway. They weren’t talking about a dormant plant. They weren’t talking about plants at all. And more importantly, Yellow Fire had been dead for thousands and thousands of years. Maybe even millions. They didn’t really know how long it had been, but however long, it was longer than any flower bulb was going to stay alive.
She could see what he was thinking simply by the way he moved his head, by the way he lowered his eyes briefly when she’d finished saying what she’d said. She saw and knew precisely what was going through his mind. “And don’t think it’s a matter of time either. These creatures are made of stone after all. They live for millions and millions of years. Far longer than any of the organisms on their surfaces do. Who knows how long a perennating organ for one of them might last? What if we could transplant that? What if we could go to his world and find that part, that piece of him? What if that is him? What if that’s his mind and soul, and all the rest is … like skin or some other body part?”
Altin watched the light of her enthusiasm grow. Her eyes were wide and glistening with it, her hands moving frantically as she spoke. He wanted to share in that enthusiasm, but it didn’t really make enough sense for him to get caught up in her energy. “What if it’s not?” he said. “What likelihood is there that it is? You’re making wild assumptions here. What has ever happened to suggest that this is how they, how Hostiles, work?”
“It’s not about likelihoods and suggestions, Altin. It’s about hope. Don’t you see? It’s so obvious. Just ask her. Ask her if it’s true.”
Altin looked down at his thick silver ring and touched it, turning it on his finger slowly. The pulsing light from under it painted his finger green and part of his hand to match. “She doesn’t like to talk to me anymore,” he said. “I make her sad.”
“Well she can deal with it for this. Just ask her. She’s probably already heard us anyway, so go on and try.”
“I don’t know. I think you’re shooting at pretty high-flying fowl with this.”
“Just do it. Please. Don’t make me beg.”
“Fine.” He drew in a long breath of the chill night air and sent the idea as best he could to Blue Fire. He asked the question through images, asked if she thought it might be true, if she thought perhaps there was a chance that the essence of her mate might still be there, waiting in silence like some lonely iris bulb, an ancient thing lying in a lifeless cave on a dead moon, orbiting a dead planet, orbiting a moody blue sun.
Unlike the Blue Fire he’d come to know before the war was won, the creature she’d become since did not send forth waves of anger or remorse. She didn’t send forth much of anything. It was as if her strength had been taken away. Sharing thoughts with her was akin to watching a bird that’s flown into a pane of glass and now lies on the ground, not quite lifeless, the forces that animate it still working, but the thing that it was, the vibrant thing, now somehow gone.
He tried to show her the image of a human heart, the essence of it beating in his chest. He did likewise with the mind, conjuring in his mind the images he’d seen on Doctor Singh’s monitors, the drawings in Doctor Leopold’s offices. He linked those ideas to what he understood of being. Of life in its essence. Of souls. He contrasted that with images of body, of arms and legs and toes. He connected that to things of the world, to trees and grass and creatures roaming there. Things of blood and tissue. Of hair and hooves and, well, and meat. One part was physicality, one part was essence, spirit. One was animating, the other animated. He tried to convey the essence of me and then you to her, all wrapped around those two ideas, the shape of what it was to be someone rather than something. He shaped it as best he could, reiterated it, made it feel the way a question feels, adding it to the idea of that lonely bulb, in turn attached to the image of the father’s gift in her own heart chamber. He asked, and then he waited.
He waited for a long time, the silence in his mind as uncomfortable as had been the endless hum of her misery before Red Fire died. So it went for several minutes, him staring blankly out of his eyes, listening to his own thoughts for echoes of another’s with tension in his body, expectant and on edge as if he expected twigs to snap somewhere in the dark woods of a nightmare. He’d just about given up when finally a thought came. It was as close to a maybe as she could communicate. She didn’t know.
He sent the whole pack of images again, wanting to be sure she’d at least understood the question properly. Wanting to make sure that feeble response was what he thought it was, neither confirmation nor denial. She had. And it was.
“She doesn’t know,” he said at last. “I don’t think they think about themselves in that way. Souls and selves are things for priests and philosophers, bulbs and bodies for botanists and people of biology, doctors and the like. None of that is really the kind of thing they have concepts for. At least that is the impression that I got.”