Hour of Judgement

by Susan R. Matthews

  “ — your fifth-week,” Doctor Howe was saying. “You know how to treat a patient. Only take a little more care, we’re not a ship of war. This is a civilian hospital. My patients aren’t to be told what to do, not like your shipmates. Clear?”

  Yes, someone new. Megh looked across the room, out of the window, at the clear light beyond. There was nothing to see, of course; the window let out onto a courtyard. Sometimes looking out the window helped her to take herself away until she was alone again.

  She didn’t like being handled by anybody, let alone unfamiliar hands. She wasn’t supposed to like it. It was the punishment that the Bench had put her to; and still she resented the treatment she got as a patient. Why wouldn’t they just let her alone?

  But then the orderly spoke.

  “Clear, Doctor Howe. You’ll not have cause to complain of me to my maister, nor to my Chief either. I can promise you that.”

  The small hairs at the nape of Megh’s neck rose in a swift rush of prickly apprehension. Apprehension that was not fear.

  Where had she heard that voice, before?

  “Good-greeting, Maistress Megh.” Doctor Howe stood at a pace’s remove from her bedside, in respect for her privacy. He knew she didn’t like being confined to bed in such a public place as a hospital. “Here’s company for you. His Excellency has loaned him out for the duration, since the Ragnarok will be on site until the investigations are all closed. You can throw him out when you like, but please permit him to apply the ointment before you do.”

  Oh, she had no call to be rude to Doctor Howe. But no one was making her speak peace to him either. It was only that she had conditioning. She would be lowly and submissive. It was her role. “Thank you, Doctor Howe. I’ll bear whomever, as best I can.”

  Turning her head, she spoke to the doctor.

  Turning her head, she saw the other man, who stood beside the doctor staring at her as though his heart could travel through his eyes into her bosom.

  She knew that man.

  She had never seen him before — and she knew him. “Thank you for your gentle courtesy. I’ll be on my way.”

  Doctor Howe nodded to her and to the orderly, and left.

  And shut the door.

  Megh stared; and the orderly stared back.

  Who was this man?

  He had grown tall.

  His uniform said that he was a bond-involuntary, like her, only different.

  It was their uncle’s ghost, risen from the dead and wearing boots.

  It was their father’s brother Fipps, the one who lived nine days’ walk down the coast and fished in a boat for his living.

  “Oh, say a word, Megh, darling,” the ghost said. “Else I’ll explode. It would make such a mess.”

  It was Robin.

  It was her own brother.

  “You are grown.” He knew that, probably, but she could not but marvel it out loud. “And gotten handsome. Robin. It is you. But can it be?”

  He stepped forward to her bedside, falling to his knees. Taking her outstretched hand to numb it with kisses that spoke of the years of loneliness. “Wondered myself, I have, Megh. To have seen you, when my maister came here. I thought that I would die.”

  His maister, and Doctor Howe had said Excellency. She had heard. The orderlies had told her.

  “Robin, you belong to Koscuisko?”

  It was beyond belief. It could not be true. She was dreaming this.

  But as long as she was dreaming it she would make as much of it as she could. She would stare at him until her eyes turned solid stone and dropped from their sockets, and not see enough to fill the void within. She would hold to him until her hands dried into willow-twigs and turned to dust, and still not get enough of his existence.

  Robin.

  And alive.

  And grown, grown to a man, and such a man, tall and so good to look upon. They had always warned her family that Robin was sure to be a beauty, and was to be carefully nurtured that he not bring some too-trusting soul to grief before he knew the meaning of his actions.

  “Anders Koscuisko. Yes. His Excellency. I wouldn’t have known it was you, Megh, the Lieutenant used you so foully. But Skelern Hanner said the weaves. I knew.”

  So it was Anders from the Domitt Prison who tortured Nurail for Jurisdiction, but had brought her Robin safe to her side. Ragnarok that had sent the Fleet Lieutenant who had beaten her, but Ragnarok that had sent healing to her as well, and had brought her brother to be with her here besides. Jurisdiction had taught Nurail how to lament, but Jurisdiction was teaching Nurail how to believe in miracles of coincidence. It was her brother. It was Robin. He was here.

  If only for a while.

  But he was here.

  “Now.” Robin wiped the salt tears of his face with the back of his hand, and it nearly broke her heart to see him do it, it was their daddy to the life. She could endure it. She could live. Her fate had brought her brother living to her. She could brew beer out of spring water and three grains of last year’s wild-grass. She could make cheese out of ram’s-milk. She could do anything.

  “Now. Megh. Oh, darling. There’s an ointment to be laid on bruises, my maister went particularly to beg jellericia blooms from a garden here in town, your Hanner’s garden. Because he knew the fragrance of it would be a comfort to a woman from the hill-stations, and never even guessed until I said to him.”

  She’d wondered about the ointment. She’d even wondered whether the materials had come from Skelern’s garden. “I haven’t seen Skelern, Robin, and I would have thought that he might come see me. Do you know if all is well with him? He’s been kind to me, cousin-like.”

  Something was wrong. Robin ducked his head. “All’s right now, Megh, but there’s been trouble on the path from then till now. For him to tell you, really. But everything is all right now. Everything’s well.”

  He wasn’t only talking about Skelern, but about himself.

  About her. About them.

  For as long as Fleet would grant them time to speak in each other’s company, all unwittingly, by accident — for so long, everything was well with the world. Everything was an right.

  Robin opened up his jar of salve and commenced to daub it at her bruised shoulder, working it up gradually into a gentle massaging sort of a caress.

  She’d never hoped to see Robin alive.

  She would happily forgive the Bench another six such beatings, in return for the joy she had now in seeing her brother.

  ###

  Five days. Hanner was not to be permitted to leave the hospital, not yet, but he had leave to move around a bit. It hurt to walk, although his feet were healing; if he was careful he could take three steps at a time before he had to sit. It ate upon him more to be idle, and to lie in a bed all day when the sun was out and there was work to be done.

  Of course he wasn’t to even think about worrying that the gardening would go to ruin. Sylyphe had told him so; and so sternly that he could have wept at her solemn dignity, poor thing. The Danzilar prince had sent word to the Tavart to excuse him, and the Tavart had been sent gardeners in the Danzilar prince’s pay to keep things up in his absence. He was not to lose his place, though he was to feel free to accept a better offer should one come — as the Tavart apparently felt was likely. It was all but too much for a man.

  It wasn’t as though he’d never been beaten before in his life, and more than once badly, and had mended bones and scars to show for it. There was no comparing to his most recent experience, there was that, but still for all his life he’d been expected to suffer a beating and lose his day’s pay until he could work again, and all for the crime of having been born Nurail. Nothing like this.

  Sylyphe had come to see him on an embassy from her mother, carrying her errand as tenderly as if it had been a newborn infant. She’d done well. But then when she’d done with her errand Sylyphe wept to look at him, tender-hearted as she was. And how was he to comfort her? Him in bed, and in bandages, and hating that she should
look at his uncovered skin.

  Though he had done the best he could Hanner still felt the lack of it. He could never dream to comfort Sylyphe properly, with kisses and love-words. She was too far above him. And she deserved so much better than an under-fed gardener who trimmed her mother’s turves for his wages.

  Five days, and he had leave to dress himself and walk around the hospital with crutches and a mover. Someone had cleaned his clothing, and he remembered that Koscuisko had let him strip himself at his own pace, and stayed the security from handling him too roughly. That had been kindly intentioned, in its way. He’d been wearing the best shirt that he owned, in token of respect for the Danzilar prince — or for the Danzilar prince’s gardens, at any rate.

  The hospital staff said that he might go and see Megh. There was to be someone with her, but Hanner could deal with that; it wasn’t like there was intimacy between them. He came to the place and signaled at the door, and the door opened, and the tall broad-shouldered person whose body blocked the doorway gave him pause and made him fearful. One of Koscuisko’s people. Hanner recognized the troop.

  The troop recognized him as well, luckily, and stepped aside; and having petitioned for entry Hanner felt that he could hardly not go in. Even if there was one of Koscuisko’s people here. Even if the last person in the world that Skelern Hanner was interested in seeing was anyone with anything to do with Andrej Koscuisko. His Uncle had dealt fairly with him, in the end, but it was too terrible in Hanner’s mind for him to find any charity in his heart to spare for Black Andrej.

  “Here to look in on Megh,” Hanner explained. Surely unnecessarily — wasn’t so much obvious by the fact that he was here? “How does she go? Is she awake to greet me?”

  The troop closed the door behind them, and Hanner crossed the room to look. Megh, in the bed, the covers drawn up very prettily over her shoulders, and someone had done her hair into a braid. The troop? Surely not. But it wasn’t the kind of braid a woman did on her own, not easily.

  And if Skelern thought about it that one troop was Nurail.

  He knew the man.

  He’d met him before.

  Hanner had thought he looked familiar, from the start.

  “Asleep, the poor darling,” the Security troop said; and it was unlike anything that Hanner would have expected to hear from a bond-involuntary troop, surprising him into a fresh stare at the man. And then once he started staring there was something he could not stop staring at.

  The last time he’d seen Megh she’d been marked in the face, blue and black, bruised and swollen. But her face was more familiar to him, now, and there was no mistaking the similarity when the Security troop glanced over at her with transparent fondness.

  Hanner checked the sleeves of the troop’s uniform with a quick sidewise glance. Just to make sure of it. Green piping, bright green, like wet-moss or the bloom-canker on the sweet-starchie flowers that ruined the crop.

  Bond-involuntary.

  And had spoken so to Koscuisko in the garden till Koscuisko, not understanding the point, had sent him sternly away — the thing he did not have, not him, not Hanner, but Megh’s brother had to be from Marleborne —

  He didn’t know what to say. He had no right to be here with her brother, no right to be between them for the short time they would have before the Ragnarok left Burkhayden space.

  “She, does she know you’re here?” he asked, his voice hushed in the surprise of it all.

  Robert St. Clare, that was his name. Megh’s Robin. He grinned, and rubbed a spot at the back of his neck behind his ear in a gesture that was familiar to Hanner. “We talk when she’s awake, but the pain-meds make her drowsy will-she nill-she. She’s mostly sleeping. They let me look after her, to see that she gets her meals and lacks for nothing.”

  Hanner could understand the love, the longing in those words. He was so glad, for Megh; but her brother pulled himself away from staring at her, as if he was distracted.

  “How did it go with you, man, and my maister?”

  Koscuisko. Hanner shook his head. “Oh, let’s not speak of it. I was so feared of him.”

  St. Clare nodded, as if he understood. Well, of course he’d know, from observation; but no, it didn’t seem to be that he was talking about something that he’d only just watched. “I came under his hand, once, at the beginning. Before he knew that I was to be bound to him. Before it was decided.”

  There was nothing Hanner could say about that surprising idea. Perhaps Megh’s brother had just wanted to offer comfort to him? Because he was still talking.

  “And I was feared of him. I still am when the mood is on him, even though he’s my good maister. I mean to tell him so, if I can catch him right before they put my governor back in. He’d not believe me, otherwise.”

  Hanner could only look at Megh’s brother with wonder, not understanding why the man should say these things to him. But Megh’s brother nodded yet again, and as if it had been a question asked, this time.

  “It’s malfunctioned, you see, and the doctor had to pull it. So I can speak to Anders Koscuisko like a man, and he’ll know there isn’t any constraint to the telling of it. So I can tell you what you need to know, young Hanner.”

  Young Hanner? Oh, no younger than St. Clare’s own self, from what Megh had told him. What did he mean, tell what was needful to know?

  “The doctor’s to come in an eight, there’s not much time. You’ll want to concentrate. The first thing that you need to know is the traveling. From the corn-field stock. To the brook foot-path. To the post at the edge, with the shelf and the dipper-cup.”

  Quite suddenly Hanner was chilled to the bone with an icy shock of unimaginable power that stunned him. He could hardly think, but he had to think, he had to hang on, and he reached for the words like an anchor to steady himself with.

  “From the edge-post shelf to the left of the break, to the ridge of the roof.”

  To the Ice Traverse.

  He’d claimed the name to claim the right to see her, never dreaming. Never meaning to lay his hand on what was not of his, ready to steal the name of the weave to get his way and nothing further meant by it. Not to pretend that he had a right to it. Not to pretend he knew.

  “Talk it to me, cousin, state you your claim, and call my Megh your sister like an honest man.”

  There was no more profound a gift in all the Nurail tongues than to give a weave. And him a gardener, not from the hill-people, but to stand from now on with the proud folk, and equal with any —

  Hanner closed his eyes, thinking hard, steadying himself with one hand against the wall. “The Ice Traverse stems from the ridge of the mountain-roof. To the right from the break, where the valley parts. To the pitch of the roof of the way-shed rest, to the post at the edge and the brook foot-path. To the corn-field stack, in the field, with the reapers.”

  St. Clare was smiling at him approvingly when he opened his eyes from his concentration. “And the next things that are needful to know are the callings of it, see, these kinds — ”

  He had the Nurail right, then, if St. Clare approved his Standard of it. He could not stop to congratulate himself; St. Clare was telling out the pattern with his fingers, and Hanner recognized the first part of a lullaby, the mid part of a drinking song, the fifth part of a workingman’s chant, all recombined, all reunited to form the background that upheld the weave.

  That held the power.

  A unity too perfect to be challenged or forgotten, once it was but recognized in whole —

  And the power frightened him, but it had to be borne, because the gift of a weave was beyond any fear, and this could be the only chance that Megh’s enslaved brother would have to recite it for years. Or forever.

  “The first part of the second thing is conny-towing, seabird-tumbling, sense and pease and coin. Right?”

  The pattern was there. And, oh, but it moved him. “So, the second part of the second thing must be dark tan leaf and water blowing, blue clouds in the half-sun sky, and ba
rge turned over on the shore-sand.” He hoped, he thought, it was so strong within him. It was so right. St. Clare alarmed him, grasping him at the back of his neck suddenly, and kissing his mouth in the fashion of the hill-folk with tears in his eyes. But smiling.

  “Thou art a man, and a very clever man, to have caught this — caught this — caught this, thing. And the third thing, third thing, what would be the third thing, can you tell me the third thing, cleverness, my cousin?”

  The Ice Traverse, a gift, a weave. It still could not be sung, but it was passed, and it would not be lost. He was its keeper. His to see the pattern would survive, to hold a piece of the great heart of his scattered nation.

  “Oh, I. Could hardly say. If it were not. To say the fourth.”

  The pattern led to the tune, and the tune led to the telling, and the telling and the tune and the pattern all together held power that even the Jurisdiction’s Bench had feared.

  Would fear again?

  No, he was a gardener. He never would have dared to claim the weave, not even to see Megh, if he had known that there might be a man who knew the weave, with him having no right to it.

  “Then there would be such mockery that kites could not collect the air, if salmon ran in podge-meal, while the sisters pondered.”

  He had to mind the gift, to take it perfect from the only man who lived who had preserved it.

  And he had to concentrate.

  Governor or no governor Megh’s brother was taking a significant risk, speaking his weave. Hanner had to learn it as quickly as he could, and give it back whole and entire, complete and correct.

  Before Megh chanced to wake.

  A woman was not to hear her mother’s weave. It was indecent.

  He had to hold it carefully, for Megh’s children.

  Chapter Twelve

  The Danzilar prince’s business meeting room was in a library at Center House, middling in size, luxuriously appointed to the tastes of a Danzilar Dolgorukij with rugs and printed texts. The Record stood out as an anomaly in this place, and somehow Jils felt out of place as well, although the number of people in the room who were in uniform outnumbered the single man in civilian dress by four to one.