by Janet Morris
“Ah, I had forgotten.”
“Not likely. Will you continue on as consul here? I need you more than I like to admit.”
“I suppose, if only to ease your mind that I am not busily at work planning your assassination.”
“Good. Then I can leave and fulfill my promise to Shebat.”
“Orrefors space? Now? You are truly beyond redemption!”
“Most assuredly,” Marada grinned. “I have you here to see about my interests. What fear could I have?”
“Do I get a grade?”
“What?”
“On this test of loyalty. Do I get a rating?”
“You get whatever you expect. But, speaking of ratings, you had better arrest old Baldy and take a hand in the choosing of his replacement. I’ll give you some names, good and bad, so you’ll know if we are being hoodwinked again.”
So it begins, thought Chaeron, wryly.
Chapter Nineteen
Endings and beginnings have a certain thing in common, a thing that darts around in one’s stomach whispering: the change is nigh.
It felt most like an ending to Shebat.
It felt unreal, and likewise supremely real, to be standing on grassy ground with the odor-laden air blowing dust and grit against her skin.
She looked up into the azure sky of earthly autumn dusk, trying to recall the glint of the little shuttle’s mantis shape as it had climbed back toward the stars. The vault, that day, had been a deep, reproaching Kerrion blue. The shuttle, that day, had been Hassid’s: In Hassid, she had flown from Earth; in Hassid, she had returned.
Now the past seemed faded, dream-hazy, dream-distant, dream-lost, as if she tried to catch mist in her fist.
She was almost at the tumbled mounds of the city, that was no dream.
She clung the more tightly, the closer she came to there, to her memory of the little shuttle leaping heavenward on wings of flame.
She had been to Bolen’s town. That had been no dream either, but a nightmare with a tinge of mercy: no one had forgotten the grubby waif who had been Bolen’s drudge. She heard her name in connection with the fire-footed bird landed again just where it had landed once before—in the clearing, a hard ride through the trees.
Bolen was dead unmoumed, and the whole of Bolen’s town rebuilt slightly southward of its original sight.
She had stood a time on a rise of grass burned sere in the drought, and then sauntered down the street so like the street of her indenture with every muscle of her body cringing and every hair aprickle.
Her enchanter’s boots rang loudly on the planked porch of the new inn.
Within it, a dozen folk crowded about the windows watched without breathing as the tall woman in black blazoned with red approached the bar.
The sandy-haired barkeep made a warding sign and called her “Shebat of the Enchanters’ Fire,” and refused to take money for her drink.
Folk whispered like bees in the rafters; shoes shuffled behind her back. Her swallows seemed loud and uncouth as she drank the brown beer, while over the clay tankard’s rim the barkeep’s rheumy eyes weighed something more sinister against his fear.
In the hearth’s shadows a soft noise, half like a mew and half like a groan, gave her an excuse to turn away. A bent-backed youth was the source of it, in rags as she had been, big-eyed as she had been—as one becomes when all the flesh of face is starved away.
She had walked over to him, hearing the rustle of her flight satins and the whistle of the breath down his crusty nose, hearing her inner self counseling urgently that she must fly, flee the inn and its folk who knew her.
She knelt down on unbaked brick and the youth shrank back, eyes all pupil and mouth ajar. From out of that mouth came inarticulate sounds; she reached out and touched his throat, felt the skin tic beneath her palms.
He sighed, cringing like a love-starved cur, brown shock of hair as filthy, body odor as rank, as any poke-ribbed dog’s.
She determined to take him with her when she left, paying in silver coin on which Parma’s profile glittered. The coin said: step carefully. It had come from Marada Kerrion’s pocket. Heeding its warning, she went so softly to the bar that her boot heels hardly clicked upon the planks. She lay the coin down there. The barkeep’s pale brow rose.
In the corners, the ragged folk were unbending, easing onto benches, returning to their drinks.
“I need a serf and a horse,” she said clearly. “He will do for the serf—” She indicated the youth by the hearth. “Have you a horse to sell?”
“I’ve a horse, yes indeed. Come with me.” He wiped his hands on his apron.
Out in the unrelenting sun, he introduced himself, and she gave her name.
“I know, we all know. Heard the roar, and the whine—” They went into dark, in the stable.
In her heart was a sick certainty that none of this would avail: she was neither one thing nor the other; not Kerrion, nor Earthly anymore.
She took a black horse and the mute youth and told the innkeep she would take up residence on yonder hill, in the old cave there, and that any could come to her for visions, for portents, for dreams.
But she found a way to heal the mute boy, and though the healing took one weight off her heart, it was soon replaced by another:
The enchanters got wind of her presence.
She came out of her cave one ruddy dawn, smelling an awful smell, and in the cauldron at its mouth a grisly stew bubbled, with yellow fat collecting on its surface and at face she knew staring up from within.
The horse was simply gone.
Her walk to the city had been a long one, fraught with difficulties she had almost forgotten how to surmount.
She had not cried: one does not cry in New York in droughty autumn, lest the moisture lost never be regained. She had walked blisters onto her booted feet before she came to the silted river in whose center a precious trickle ran.
She laughed harshly, decrying the ease with which the old ways came back. The enchanter’s boots had proved to hold an unsuspected magic: along with her fine flight satins, they had kept most men at a distance.
When they had not, she had employed the spell of “passing by unnoticed,” or cast a hastily constructed dream over those whose eyes followed her too long.
Marada had offered her no weapon, and she had not asked for one.
When she ran into a real enchanter, he had warned, she was going to have a problem. The Orrefors yet deployed at Stump and below had not taken kindly to being ousted on account of so distant a change in the tide of power. They had refused to hand over their installations, seeking to hold out on their own.
Marada had thought it might take a year to claim what Kerrions already owned.
It seemed to her, trudging the treacherous riverbed too dry to stink, that it would take forever. The enchanters would not lightly loose their hold on Earth’s grimy throat. She had not heeded his warning to stay away from them well enough, and a boy had died on that account. Should they come after her, no small spell would serve to cloak her in anonymity. Her thoughtless insistence on living her own life had seen to that. She was Kerrion, and the enchanters were Orrefors, and though she had been ousted from the bondkin, the taint was all over her: in her walk, in her clothes, in her memories. . . .
Kerrion concerns were no longer her concern. He had seen to that. He had turned her out without protection into a world to which she was no longer suited, because of him. . . .
Her decision, it had been. They had spoken of it, on the journey. He would not speak of other things: not of what he would do, or what the family would do. Mostly, he did not speak at all, but piloted Hassid in silence.
On the night before they came to the end of the journey, she had deemed it the end of all things. On that night, like every other night shipboard, she lay unmoving but wide awake, her limbs coursed with shivers, waiting for him to slip through the door and over the barrier he had made between them.
When it occurred to her, she could not rem
ember. It was possible she had known she would do it all along. She hesitated, recollecting her clandestine tiptoeing down Hassid’s softly lit corridor, her agonizingly slow opening of his door. When she had stepped into his cabin, she had almost turned and run: Hassid would know; Hassid saw all. But she had had nothing to lose that was not lost: She wanted one last dream to take with her into exile.
She had been afraid that the spell would not be efficacious: most of hers, cast in the cruel light of Consortium logic, had not been. But she must try.
The blue tracings came streaming from her fingers into the air above his head. They danced there, illuminating his visage, less stern in sleep.
The crinkle of ozone fluttered his nostrils. He breathed it in, a soft blue ambiance and a deeper sleep therewith.
Then she lifted the cover from him, and slipped in beside him, to try a new thing: spellsleep mixed with dream dance. Deep where matters bow to mind, she made a peace with him, and a trysting.
The next morning she had hated them both, though Marada had betrayed no conscious inkling of what had transpired while he slept.
When the shuttle had landed in the clearing, she spat at him:
“What you did to Softa, for that I can never forgive you.”
“His fate was one you would have shared, should my stepmother have laid eyes on you even one more time.” But his gaze slid away from hers, and she knew a lie lay somewhere in what he had said.
“That is right, I had forgotten . . . I am a criminal.”
“Shebat . . .”
“Will you tell me why it is that though I am a criminal, I am spared the Consortium’s just punishment, as Softa could not be spared?”
“You asked to come here,” he reminded her, his fists clenched and his eyes well-guarded. “You saved yourself, thereby. I would have suggested it, if you had not. This thing was ill-conceived from the outset. It has not been good for any of us. Having dragged you into peril to which you were not suited, it was up to me to see to the redress in a just fashion—”
“You mean, I am too much a savage to be punished as befits a Consortium citizen!” she accused.
He flinched. “Our lives are too different, too complex. I am sorry. I cannot risk what we have taken so long to build on a whim, an experiment—”
She snarled wordlessly, slammed memory’s gate. She quickened her pace over the riverbed, muttering that she must not think about him any more. Ever. Hurrying, in light ever more uncertain as the day waned, she twisted her ankle.
She sank down there, rubbing it. Then she pounded her fist into the crusty dirt. Words cannot be taken back, nor deeds. If she had hurt them, then they had hurt her, perhaps more so. She had lost everything, whether or not she herself had asked for this fate. . . . She had asked, seeing his face, his disappointment, his accusative eyes. She had asked, because of all the death and because of Chaeron and because Marada Seleucus Kerrion hardly saw her when he looked at her: yes, because of that, most of all.
The worst of it was that she was too changed to sink back into oblivion. The matters she had fled trailed her doggedly; her soul had turned Kerrion, somehow, when she had not been looking.
Marada had spoken to her of what she had cost the family. She had waited, wanting only to step into his embrace as the final increment of that sum.
But he had held her at arm’s length when she went to him: “You are my brother’s wife,” he reminded her in a strained voice, so that she thought for a terrifying instant that he did remember the dream she had danced against him.
She had sneered: “Still?”
“No Kerrion gives up lightly what he has,” he had said softly, taking his hands away. Bowing slightly, he had moved backward toward the little shuttle craft.
You are my brother’s wife.
She shook her head, violently, cursing in Consulese. It mattered no more to her what Kerrions had and what they did not. It could have been said that she had owned, for a few unknowing moments, the very star around which her home planet revolved. When she had been Chaeron’s wife in Draconis, she would have been able to lay claim to her own world, if she had chosen.
But she had not; now she could not. Even if she had, they would have taken it from her. No, that was not fair—this had been her choice.
But the choice had been no choice at all, the part of her which was frightened and horrified and mourned endlessly cried.
Usually, she shouted it down, but now she was tired and the day was failing, and she had nowhere to go, so she must go somewhere for the night.
It was as a monarch butterfly rushed by in search of a bed that she found her pallet in an old cellar half-filled with rubble in the middle of a wide court strewn with Cyclopean stones.
Once Earth had been mighty, but never so mighty as the world Marada had boosted her into as offhandedly as he tossed her upon the tall horse that day it had all begun.
She wept without tears, a dry sniveling heave for what was over, and for what lay ahead. She had no idea what she could do to survive alone in the city. But she must try. There was a chance there. In the smaller towns, she had no chance at all of being more than a drudge-wife to some farmer. If that.
She must try. She had her dream dancer’s skill, and even her old gifts of enchantment seemed to have wakened, no longer compromised by the Consortium’s negation.
She sought peace early in the land of dreams.
But she could not stay in deep dreaming. Her mind kept bobbing to the surface like a dead fish.
“Marada,” she whispered, finally in defeat, “I can do without it all, but for you.” She envisioned the mighty cruiser in her mind, his lights lit in joyous welcome.
She dreamed of him, of surfing the choppy waves of gravity’s sea in his care. And she dreamed of Chaeron, of those few nights they had been wed. But it was when she dreamed of the arbiter whom she had loved and who had decreed this as her fate, that she woke screaming in the night.
She had not been three days in the city when she realized that she was so lost as to never hope to stumble out by chance.
She had met no one with whom she would choose to join forces, though she had happened upon a few who looked at her with interest.
Was that what it would be: joining forces? When she had had better from which to choose, she had chosen wrongly. Marada Seleucus Kerrion was in love with Hassid, as she loved the cruiser Marada above all men.
It was late on a night whose heat she had thought to evade in dreams that a soft singing sound from under her head woke her, shivering.
It came again, from a spot by her ear.
Sitting up in a clatter of pebbles, she leaned against the brick of the corner she had chosen as her bed.
Dumbfounded, she raised her wrist to her ear.
Once more, the bracelet Chaeron had given her sang. A soft glow came from the middlemost of the large green stones.
Shebat bolted to her feet and began to run, her eyes returning to the bracelet which kept a beeping time while the glow coming from it grew brighter, then dimmed, then brightened again as she changed direction.
She refused to reason upon it, conjecture about it. She hardly watched where she sped in gibbous moonlight among the broken paving stones.
She forgot everything but how bright the bracelet glowed, how surely it sang.
From a shadowed shelter, a hand reached out, grabbing her around the neck, fumbling toward her mouth: “Don’t scream. It’s all right. It’s all right now.”
She went limp in his grasp. For an instant, he thought she had fainted. He took his hand away, to support her more surely.
She wriggled, turned round, peering up blinking into the gold moon’s light.
“Chaeron?” she trembled.
“Who were you expecting?” he grinned, as if it were nothing.
“But—how? Why? I—”
“Sssh, we’ll talk about it later, if we make it out of here. There’s nothing less welcome on Orrefors Earth than a Kerrion. Come on, we must hurry!” Let
ting his grip slide to her hand, interlacing her fingers with his, he tugged her into motion.
‘Twelve coils binding,” she whispered into the wind. “Be it so then—bind and be bound; both ways.”
Running slightly ahead of her, he did not hear.
They ran down dim city streets, dodging a groping blind man; a scatter of tumbled brick; a band of brigands chasing a shrieking quarry into an alley.
“Back! Hide!” she whispered urgently. They flattened themselves against rough brick.
Clop-clop, clop-clop, he heard, his cheek pressed to the abrasive wall, peering round the corner.
As the staccato clatter neared, silence fell: even the girl in the alley stopped shrieking. A cloaked enchanter on a magnificent, blue-eyed black horse ambled past unconcernedly.
He dared not breathe; he shifted from the strain of trying to keep perfectly still. A pebble shot out from under his foot to strike a piece of metal. The metal rang, hardly more than a click . . . But the enchanter pulled the frothmouthed black up on its haunches. It wheeled in place.
Facing them, its metal-shod hooves striking sparks as it pawed the pavement, it seemed to listen.
“Seek,” said the enchanter, leaning forward to stroke its neck.
Dancing, snorting, its chin tucked in so that froth dribbled on its mighty chest, the blue-eyed steed headed directly toward them.
“Run,” wailed Shebat.
Even as he ran, he knew it a hopeless defiance. Discovery had come too soon.
They ducked into an alley, bolted pall-mall through it, came out into an intersection. Around them burst a deep-throated growl. Shebat’s bracelet began a high-pitched, steady keen.
“Keep running,” Chaeron begged, as the intersection was limned in daybright floodlights and the enchanter’s horse began to scream.
Out of the dark above the glare, the noise grew deafening. From the brightness something descended, writhing like a snake in death throes.
Chaeron and Shebat jumped as one for the emergency ladder dangling from the Marada’s little black shuttle. The floodlights winked out.