by J. Naomi Ay
“I don't care,” Leesa said with her wicked smile. “I'm going in the water and if he notices me, well too bad.”
“Leesa, you're terrible!” I cried as she tore off her clothes and executed a perfect dive into the pool.
The Karut turned at the splash and gazed at my friend in the pool. She was paddling around on her back exposing to him her beautiful breasts and womanhood.
He turned back to his mower.
“Come on, Mariya!” Leesa teased. “The water is wonderful.”
I glanced at the Karut, but he paid us no mind, and so I too stripped and plunged into the pool. It was wonderful. The water was warm and clear and though the sky above us was false, it felt as if we were truly on the planet.
“What's that,” Leesa said and pointed at the sky.
“I don't see anything.” Of course my eyes were closed as I paddled backward.
“It's a bird! You've got birds here too!”
“No, we don't.” I opened my eyes and followed her gaze. Sure enough circling high near the ceiling above the trees was a bird.
“It's an eagle!”
“How could an eagle get in here?”
“Look, it's so beautiful.” Leesa stood in the shallow water now. “It's black. It's a black eagle.” The bird swooped down in our direction, and it screamed.
“Look how big it is!” Leesa gasped as it disappeared into the forest.
That night I asked my father if there were eagles in the forest.
He laughed at me and told me I was ridiculous.
“Even if we brought an eagle in, there is nothing there for him to eat. You must have been dreaming.”
Leesa and I went again the next day, but we did not see the eagle. The Karut was there mowing the lawns, and he spied us but turned back to his mower again.
“Maybe it's over there,” Leesa said, pointing to the orchard behind the waterfall. We headed in that direction. The apple trees were in full fruit and there were several prisoners on ladders harvesting them. A foreman was sitting on a bench smoking a cigarette. He nodded to us.
“You want some apples, Milady?”
“Sure,” Leesa said.
The foreman stood and gazed across the orchard. Several men were carrying large bushels and loading them on a conveyor.
“Karut!” the foreman called. “Bring some apples over here for the ladies.”
A man stepped out of line and carried his bushel towards us.
“Oh my Saint,” Leesa cried and grabbed my arm. Blessed Saint, I swayed on my feet.
“I told you some, not the whole fucking bushel, you bleeding idiot!” The foreman yelled and raised his whip. “I told you yesterday, one more screw up, and you're back to the quarry.”
The man set the bushel down at my feet. He crossed his formidable arms in front of his chest and waited. He towered over all of us. The foreman looked at me as if I should decide if this was a screw up or not. I had lived many years on my father's colony and have given orders to many prisoners. I knew how to speak to them in a commanding voice and never had I shied from ordering them to do my bidding. My tongue was frozen in my mouth at this moment, and no words could come.
“Lady Mariya,” the foreman repeated. “Do you wish for this whole bushel or just a few apples?”
The prisoner's eyes were very nearly closed but from beneath the thin slits was silver light. I saw it, and Leesa saw it.
“We changed our minds,” Leesa said quickly. “We don't want any.” She pulled me away.
“Women,” the foreman spat. “You, Karut, get back to work.”
Leesa and I ran back to the house. The other Karut on the mower stopped his mowing and watched us. He smiled.
We immediately ran to my rooms. In my bedroom still that pin-up of the MaKennah on the horse hung on the wall. We stared at it as if it would speak to us.
“I saw that,” Leesa said and pointed at the branding on his left arm.
“Are you certain?”
“His sleeve was torn. I saw that, those black marks.”
“I saw his eyes,” I said. “I saw them when I was first introduced when I was twelve, and I remember and they looked the same.”
“He has a scar near his right eye,” Leesa touched her eye, and we peered at the poster. “Must be new.”
“Same hair,” I said. “Definitely same hair.”
“And pale skin,” Leesa added. “How many Karuts have pale skin like that. One?”
“How did he get here? He's dead ten years?”
Leesa walked away.
“Mariya, your father is in Akan's pay.”
“He's not!”
“He is! Mariya, your father is rich, and everyone else in the entire country is poor. Akan is paying your father to hide him!”
“He can't be.” I collapsed in my chair. “That's treason.”
Leesa sat down, as well.
“If it is him,” she said carefully. “We've got to get him out of here.”
“Why wouldn't Akan just kill him?” I asked. “Why hide him away?”
“Maybe he can't kill him,” Leesa suggested. “Maybe he tried killing him, and it didn't work. Remember when we were twelve, and he was in the hospital for so long? That was because Akan tried to kill him then.”
“How do you know that?” I demanded.
“My poli-sci professor said so.”
We sat in silence and thought about this.
“Let's go back tomorrow at the same time,” I decided. “Then we'll know for sure.”
Neither of us slept a wink the entire night.
The next day we returned to the orchard. No one was there. The harvest was finished, and the prisoners had moved on to something else. There was no one mowing the meadow either. We walked around the shore of the lake.
“Look,” Leesa said and pointed at the top of one of the tall fir trees. The eagle was sitting there watching us. We stared at him. Suddenly there was a noise behind us and a dark hand was wrapped around my mouth. I tried to scream. Leesa watched with wide eyes but did not move to help me.
“Tell your lord father the eagle flies in the forest and make him come see,” the man said. He spoke the Noble Mishnese, but his accent was strange. “Will you do so?”
I nodded, and he released me.
“Let me help,” Leesa said to him as if she knew and trusted him.
The man handed her a piece of paper with a number written on it.
“Tell him where we are. Tell him to send him to Rozari. Will you remember this?”
Leesa nodded emphatically.
“Is it really him?” I asked. “He is really alive?”
The Karut looked at me and held my gaze for a moment before he turned and walked away.
Leesa departed within hours. I had called a shuttle for her. She kissed and hugged me.
“We're doing the right thing,” she whispered. “I know we are.”
I nodded. Doing the right thing meant my father was treasonous.
I told my father again about the eagle in the forest.
“You must come see for yourself,” I insisted. “He is huge and beautiful.”
“Oh Mariya, Mariya, you are such a child sometimes,” he said, and he hugged me tightly. My father always loved me best. Because he had been so busy as of late and had spent precious little time with me, he agreed to a walk in the forest.
He admired my mother's roses and the waterfall as if he had never seen them before. The lake glistened beautifully and enchanted him.
“What a good idea,” he said. “We should come out here more often. It is truly a beautiful place. I feel so relaxed!”
“Oh, Papa,” I said as together we sat on the shore. “Look!” In the reflection on the surface of the pond, we saw the eagle circling above us. Together we lifted our eyes to the sky and watched this incredible bird as he glided on our generated wind currents.
“You're right,” my father exclaimed. “There is an eagle here. However could he have gotten here?”
Suddenly, there
was another reflection in the lake. It was the other Karut man, the one who had given Leesa the note.
My father turned abruptly.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded. “Go back to your crew.”
The Karut pulled a knife.
“Your term is over, Lord Governor,” he said.
My father had a laser, and he raised it before the Karut could strike him. My father shielded me with his body and yelled at the Karut. “Where is your foreman? Get back before I kill you.”
“Run, lady,” the Karut said to me. “Run away.”
“Don't speak to my daughter, you savage,” my father hissed and blasted the Karut who ducked away and was not hit. Overhead there was a screech and my father, and I turned our eyes to the sky. The eagle was bearing down on us, his talons long and fierce looking. I screamed in terror and fell to the ground as the creature tackled my father. The beast was enormous, and though my father gnashed about and for a moment his laser swung wildly, the bird overcame him.
My father was dead. His blood ran from the tears in his body and bubbled from his mouth. It ran into the lake and contaminated it. I retched at the sight of this and pulled at my hair, but there was nothing I could do that would bring my father back to life. Still the beast was atop him pulling at his organs with his great beak, ripping my father into shreds as I turned my eyes from this horrific sight.
“That's enough!” the Karut screamed and swatted at it, but the creature remained until the laser bursts hit him. The guards had come, but it was not our guards. It was the Royal Guard, the King's guard, and it was not the eagle who they pulled from my father's dead body. It was the MaKennah.
19
Katie
Senya returned to me a final time the following year when I was fourteen. He must have been seventeen then. Like the first time, he was very ill. He appeared in a flash of light and then haze in my bedroom, stumbling to my bed like a zombie. At first I didn't recognize him, and I screamed, prompting Allen to yell “Shut up!” from the next room. Senya's beautiful long hair was gone, completely shaven away and his body was battered and bruised. He looked like a ghost again.
“What happened to you?” I cried, pulling him in bed beside me. He collapsed on his stomach, burying his face in my pillow. His back was a mess of welts and bruises, old and new scars. “Senya, what happened?”
He didn't answer, just pulled me down next to him and hugged me so fiercely so I could barely breathe.
“I want to die. I want to die.” His voice was like a whisper in my head.
“No, no,” I protested, holding him as his body shook and trembled as he cried.
He stayed with me more than a month that time, never moving from my bed and rarely speaking. Always he laid face down, clutching me throughout the night, his head on my chest. I stroked the fuzziness that remained of his hair and watched the night turn to day, listening to his labored breathing. His wounds eventually faded but still he stayed with me. We never made love like we had the last time. I did terrible in school. Since I was up all night holding him, I slept at my desks during the day. My mother was ready to ship me off to a psychiatrist. My brother Allen accused me of being on drugs. My father came and sat on the edge of my bed one night obviously not seeing Senya or his feet which hung over the edge.
“What's wrong, Katie?” Dad asked. “Is it a boy?”
“Actually, yes,” I admitted glancing over at Senya.
“Well, Sweetheart,” my dad said, clearing his throat a few times. “You can't destroy your future over a boy who is here today and then gone tomorrow.”
“I know,” I agreed. “But he's going through some really tough times right now.”
“That's what they all say,” my father grumbled. “Don't let him pressure you Katie.”
“He's not pressuring me, and he really is going through some tough times.”
“Like what?”
“I don't know,” I admitted.
My father made a face. “Don't ruin your future,” he said sternly and then got up and left.
“I need to go back,” Senya said after that and pulled himself to his feet.
“No, you're not well yet,” I protested.
He sat down heavily where my father had just been and reached for my hands.
“You need to do well in school. You need to get into your academy.”
“I will,” I insisted. “I'll do better. Lay down again. You can stay longer.”
“You need to find me.”
“I will. Just tell me where you are.”
“I don't know.”
“What do you mean? Are you in a hospital?”
“No,” he shook his head. “I don't know where I am.”
“You won't die if you go back, will you?” I put my arms around his neck. “I love you.”
“Aw Kate,” he wrapped his arms around me. “I won't die. Someday I will hold you for real. Someday I will make love to you all night long.”
“Senya,” I cried, and I lay my head against his chest. How could I hear his heart beating if he was not really here? "Who are you?"
He took my chin in his hand and raised my face to look at him. His eyes were open, and that strange silver light was shining through.
“You will find me, Milaka MaKani. I will wait for you."
“I will find you,” I promised. “Don't die!”
“I love you, my Kate.” He was gone. No door opening, no flash of light, he just dissipated into the air.
Four and one half years later I entered the Spaceforce Academy and three years after that I was commissioned as an Ensign and assigned to the SpaceShip Discovery. I had never been on a date, held a boy's hand or kissed anyone. Don't think I wasn't asked, I just always said no. I couldn't be with anyone. I belonged to Senya.
20
Meri
It was the worst time ever in my memory. My beloved Senya was dead, and the old king’s heart was broken. He cared naught for us, his people anymore and Prince Akan took advantage of the void that was left. Ruling by edict, Akan transformed Mishnah. Those we had elected, he replaced with those of his own choosing. Laws that had existed to protect and safeguard our people since the time of the Saint, Akan tossed out and declared his voice a law unto itself. Our government no longer stood for the people but stood instead for Akan and nothing could be done. The courts that had held blindly to justice and the written word of the Saint from a thousand years were compromised by judges who sought only Akan’s favor and the rewards he would bestow up on them.
Akan taxed us for our very breaths claiming each of us emitted too much carbon into the atmosphere. He took control of every business and institution because they too polluted what had once been a clean and beautiful planet. There were no jobs in Mishnah anymore. There was no one willing or able to engage in commerce for if they did, they were regulated and taxed such that their efforts were effectively confiscated by the Crown. Akan ruled us with an iron fist by raising an army of jackbooted thugs. This army was comprised of the homeless youth who might otherwise have worked in the trades that didn’t exist anymore. He gave his army food, lodging and clothing though their conditions would have been deplorable by the standards before his reign. He issued them weapons and granted them permission to fire upon his own people. He sent them to Karupatani to pillage and rape the few who remained and to steal their crops for their own consumption. The Duke of Segefor, Senya’s father, holed up in his palace with only a small staff of loyalists to fight against Akan’s army when Akan sought to reclaim the Duke’s holdings for himself. When the Duke’s guards were dead, it was said that he fled back to Karupatani only to discover his entire village decimated, his people and the King hiding in the hills.
It was as if the heavens saw the tragedy of that which Rehnor had become and wept with us. For ten years, every winter the snow fell as never before creating frozen mountains in the streets making it impossible to pass, impossible to leave even so that one might buy a morsel of food with our few remaining
pennies. The summers cried upon us too, the rain falling endlessly from day until night and then again until the winter set in and returned to the snow. What had been a land of abundance became swampland unable to nurture a crop to feed our starving people and so famine and disease were added to our already troubled lives.
I owned my buildings outright and diligently put coin away for many years so that I could pay the taxes. My tenants were devastated, without employment or coin to pay the rent. Some left, too proud to live off my charity. Rather they chose to live or die among those that wandered the streets. The few that remained became my family. We shared food, what little could be found, and during the coldest of times, clustered together in a single room for heat. The men swept the snow and boarded the windows as they cracked and splintered. The women turned whatever cloth we gathered into something that could be worn again or stuffed into a shoe. For fresh water, we boiled rainwater and snow over a fire in the hearth, the firewood once a chair or a table beside a bed. For entertainment we told stories to each other as books that did not glorify Prince Akan were forbidden to read, forbidden now to print. In a hushed voice I told the tale of Senya and soon my hallways became crowded with those who had come to hear of him, of his sparkling silver eyes and his magic. They wept when my tale was ended for truly it seemed that the Saint had sent him to us and finding us unworthy, had taken him away from us again.
Occasionally, a fancy speeder would go by slowly, and pennies were tossed to us in the street. My tenants and I counted what we collected and then I took them to the grocer, walking up and down between his barren shelves, desperate for something that could be made into a soup that might last us more than a day. If I was lucky, he might have secreted away a cup of milk powder for the only child left in my buildings, a small girl who at eight years looked no more than four. He had a bone or two and a carrot or beet that would fill a soup pot enough, and though I paid him what I held in my hand, I brought him home with me too to share our supper.
One morning I woke up, and the sun shone in through my window, and I knew in my heart and soul that something had changed. It was August, and for the first time in ten years, summer heat began to warm my room.