They continued on like this for a good few minutes, but Alexander struggled to make the adjustment. Again and again Crim blocked his thrust. “You don’t need so much force, lad! Highmatter will cut with no weight behind the strike. You’re only tiring yourself out.” He kicked the prince’s foot out from under him and sent His Imperial Highness sprawling to the floor in a tangle of limbs.
“Damn you!” Alexander swore, slapping away Crim’s offered hand.
“The boy has a temper,” Siran muttered.
“He’s young,” I said.
Siran sniffed. “He’s thirty standard.”
“He’s been out of that palace for only a couple of years. He’s still a child.” I watched my young squire find his feet and test his ankle. He winced. “We don’t start growing up until we leave home.” I found suddenly I could not look at anyone as I added, embarrassedly, “The rest is just prologue.” Valka was right, Alexander was more like me than Crispin—or perhaps it was that Crispin was more like me than I cared to admit. What sort of man was Crispin, I wondered?
“He’s still a dick,” Siran said. “Thought princes were supposed to be more . . . princely.”
“I’m sure some of them are,” I said, stoppering my water bottle. “We have dozens of them. But he’s not all bad. This plan was his idea.”
Siran rolled her head around in a circle to relax her neck. “Why does that not make me feel any better?” I could feel her eyes on me, but I did not look up. “Do you really think this is a good idea? Walking into a trap like this?”
“Have you another idea?” I snapped. “If you had to go poking around in dead space looking for pirates, you could do much worse than having two legions awake and at your back.”
“That’s true . . .” she admitted.
Something in her voice made me look up. Siran had undergone the same patrician enhancements as Pallino and Elara, but where the other two of my armsmen had been old before, Siran had been handsome and strong. She still was, and but for the repaired damage some cathar had done to her nose for crimes she never shared with me, Siran looked much as she had the day I’d met her: a strong-featured woman with dark eyes and skin the color of coffee. There was a scar high on her left cheek, though it did not mar her. She reminded me of Princess Tiada from the old holograph operas. She had shorn off all her hair when Ghen had died on Rustam, and had never grown it back.
Being reminded of Ghen, I softened my manner. “Sorry.”
She shrugged.
Alexander was trying to recover his guard, but it looked like he had twisted his ankle from the way he favored his front foot. He hissed, testing the foot, and Crim said, “That’s enough for today. Let’s get you some ice.”
“Your Highness,” Aristedes said, limping forward. “Take this.” And to my surprise he thrust out his own cane for the prince to take. Lorian had had it specially made on Forum when he’d joined us and been raised to the rank of commander, the silver knob decorated with the oak leaf motif of his new rank. It was almost too short to be of any use to Alexander, but the prince took it without nod or thanks.
When the prince said nothing, only allowed Crim to direct him toward a bench near the wall, Lorian spoke up. “We cripples have to stick together, eh?”
Without warning the prince whirled and slashed at Lorian with his own cane. To my astonishment, the intus managed to get his hands up in time to cover his head, but he still went down. I have no memory of crossing the floor from the boxing ring to where they stood, nor any memory of seizing Alexander by the collar of his target suit. I must have stepped over Aristedes where he lay on the floor.
“Apologize,” I said in my best Lord Marlowe voice.
Alexander looked up at me, surprise in those Imperial emerald eyes and just the faintest trace of fear. “He . . . he . . .” he stammered, looking around to Crim and Siran for answers, but none were coming. What few junior officers there were in the gym stopped their exercise to look round.
“He what?” I tightened my grip on the suit front, pressure bruising the synthetic fibers from black to scarlet bright as arterial blood.
“He provoked me!” Alexander said, voice going high.
“He was trying to!” I shoved Alexander away, and with his ankle weak he fell flat on his royal ass, so that I stood between two fallen men. “I won’t have my people fighting.”
Lorian spoke through gritted teeth. “You needn’t worry. I’m not the dueling type.” He sat up, cradling his arm. “Black Earth.”
Mention of duels made me recall Gilliam Vas, and I was relieved at least that this time history would not repeat itself. Lorian could not have challenged a prince of the Aventine family in any case, but I had no trouble imagining that Alexander might insist.
“Are you all right, commander?” Crim asked, helping Aristedes to stand.
“Only bruised, sirrah. I think.” Lorian rubbed his arm through the wire gauntlets. “Never thought I’d be glad to be wearing these damn things.” He smiled, looking almost half a child with his tangled blond hair and diminutive stature.
Concerns for Lorian’s health brushed aside, I rounded once more on Alexander. “Apologize.”
The prince’s eyes darted from my face to Crim’s to the door. Back to Crim’s. “I . . . no! I will not.”
Coming as it did from the floor at my feet, Alexander’s obstinacy had no force behind it, and I smiled my most unpleasant smile. “Do you think you’re being given a choice?” I asked, crossing my arms.
Alexander half-rose to his feet, but he struggled with his lame ankle and propped himself on Lorian’s cane. “I am a prince of the Sollan Empire, of the blood of the God Emperor himself.”
I kicked Lorian’s cane out from under him and he toppled, sprawling back to the floor. Crouching in front of him so as to better speak to him man to man, I said, “That does not matter here. You are not the God Emperor! You are not even the Emperor!” I’d started off yelling, but by the end my words were practically a snarl. “So for the last time, apologize to Commander Aristedes.”
“Leave it, Marlowe,” Aristedes said, still rubbing his arm.
Alexander’s hand pawed for the fallen cane, but I batted it aside. He would stand on his own two feet or not at all. The cane rolled away in a flat arc, bumped against the edge of the fencing round. I saw venom in the prince’s eyes. It was almost time to stop pushing.
“You are angry because you failed at your sword work. You are not angry at Aristedes. Look at me!” Alexander’s eyes had slid from my face to where Lorian and Crim stood behind me. They snapped back. “Rage is a kind of blindness, Alexander. Let it go.”
To my surprise, the prince nodded, but he said, “You should not speak to me this way.”
“You are my responsibility, my squire, and I will speak to you however I like.” I stood and allowed a gentle edge to creep back into my voice. “Do you remember what I told you on Gododdin?”
He nodded again, but could not hold my gaze. “Yes. If I want respect I must earn it.”
“No,” I said, mimicking the chiding tone Gibson had so often used with me. “You have respect. You’re a prince of the Sollan Empire. Of the blood of the God Emperor himself.” He smiled in spite of himself. He knew I mocked him, but sensed that something in my tone made it all right. “Be worthy of the respect they’re already giving you.”
For a third time, he nodded. “Yes, sir. I . . . Commander Aristedes: I am sorry.”
I looked back in time to see Lorian bow in his awkward way. “It is already forgotten, Highness.”
* * *
After another five rounds in the ring with Siran and a run through the showers, I was making my way back to my apartments in the rear of the ship by way of the equator, following the line of the outer hull above the lighter craft launch tubes toward the tram platform that would carry me back to the officers’ dormitories. Arched supports stre
tched above my head, great buttresses flowing down to the fighter bays below. Snatches of the violet glow of space shone through narrow slices of true window, great rippling currents where the warp effect turned the stars to curling ribbons as we streaked by. Not eager to be back and to report the afternoon’s happenings to Valka, I lingered on the rail, watching a solitary service technician in black coveralls at her work maintaining one of the Sparrowhawks in its berth.
All was quiet; even the distant humming of the warp nacelles—omnipresent even on a ship so vast as the Tamerlane—was hushed. I fancied almost that I could hear the blood flowing through my veins. Then the ship worker began to sing, high clear voice almost lost in the echoing distance between us, faint and remote as the stars beyond the tall, narrow windows.
Hey, carry home my broken bones
and lay me down to rest!
A thousand years of time I’ve known
since I left my home and nest.
A thousand worlds I’ve sailed and seen
Seeking fortune and my fame!
But I’ve lost it all—and gone and died
Where no one knows my name!
“Lord Marlowe!”
“Such a sad song,” I mused aloud, only belatedly realizing that Commander Aristedes had followed me from the gymnasium. “Hello, Lorian.”
The intus peered over the rail. “The sailors are always singing sad songs. Who can blame them? Almost none of them go home again, and if they do, everyone they knew is dead.” Some people believe the flow of time is different aboard ship than it is on worlds, that time slows as vessels ply the dark between the stars, but it is not so. Once, perhaps, it was. The late Golden Age had been dominated by slower-than-light seed ships carrying men and machines and embryos to colonies surrounding Old Earth system. Pushing light speed, those ships had traveled into the future, so that decades and centuries had passed on Earth while mere months passed for the sailors aboard. Not so anymore. Time passed aboard a ship at warp no differently than it did for those worlds we sailed between. It was only that space was vast and empty, and we might be decades at our travels.
Decades were all some people had.
“How’s your arm?” I asked.
“Bruised, but I’ve had worse.” Lorian pushed back his sleeve to reveal an ugly brown and yellow wheal blossoming there. He offered a papery smile. “May I walk with you?”
I gestured for him to proceed and resumed my course along the equator beltway, careful to move slowly to better allow the intus to keep pace. His cane and our boots tapped their quiet rhythm against the deck plates. We proceeded thus in silence for a minute or so, the mechanic’s singing growing ever fainter behind. “I am sorry about the prince,” I said at last.
“Whereas I feel sorry for him,” Lorian answered. “The boy’s another dogged contender . . . struggling to get his head up above his siblings so he doesn’t end up an old man dying alone in some gilded cage on Forum. I’d be angry, too.” His cane counted the next dozen seconds striking against the floor before he added, “Not that I’m ungrateful for your defense, my lord.”
“Lorian,” I said. “I think it’s well past time we dispensed with the formalities, eh?”
The smaller man grunted. “As you wish, Hadrian.” We passed by one of the lift tubes that ascended at an inward angle toward the empty barracks where the pilots would live once they were decanted from their fugue creches. “I can understand his anger. But I’ve always felt it best to pity such people. You should almost keep him awake for the whole journey, give him time to grow up . . . you’re for the ice soon, aren’t you?”
My self-imposed limit was nearly up, and it would be years before we reached the datanet relay. We’d planned to pause just outside the eighteen light-year radius Varro had described around the relay long enough to get our bearings and to communicate with Gododdin and the scout ship that had spent the last several years probing the void. Thence we would resume our approach and begin awakening everyone aboard the Tamerlane, the Pride of Zama, Androzani, Cyrusene, and Mintaka—a process taking weeks. But that wouldn’t be for nine years, during which period fewer than a hundred of the Tamerlane’s more than ninety thousand souls would be awake and active. We were well under a thousand even then.
“I won’t be long now,” I said. “Valka’s been talking like it won’t be long now before she goes under, and after that . . .” I trailed off, not quite knowing what to say.
Lorian chuckled. “Nothing to live for, eh?”
I snorted. “Something like that. And you?”
“I mean to stay awake a while longer,” he said. “I’m not eager to put myself back in the coffin, you know?”
I glanced down at the small man with his papery skin and spider-thin arms and hands. “Is the freeze hard on you?” I asked, realizing how little I knew about the commander’s condition. It had always felt rude to ask. It still did.
“It’s the waking I can’t manage,” Lorian answered. “Nerves don’t work right, I’m numb for weeks. It’s not dangerous—it’s not getting worse—but it’s not pleasant.” We walked on in silence a moment before Lorian asked, “What of you, lord? Ah, Hadrian?”
“I dream,” I said. “I know that’s impossible. I know they say you don’t dream in fugue. But I do.” I had to stop and turn back, for Lorian had stopped suddenly. He was looking up at me with a strange light in his eyes, head cocked, mouth slightly open. “What?”
Only belatedly did I realize what must be happening. I had been seeing that expression in the faces of men and women around me for decades. I had not expected to see it in Lorian Aristedes. “Is it true?” he asked, and I no longer felt embarrassed about my question. “Do you dream the future?”
“Aristedes . . .” I began, using his right name to generate a bit of formal distance between us again and forestall this line of questioning.
He didn’t notice. He’d worked up enough momentum not to notice, as if a dam had broken. “I wasn’t here when you killed Aranata, so I don’t know what happened. But a lot of very smart people on this ship, people I respect—even the scholiast—seem to think you’re some kind of god. Can you dream the future? Did you really die?”
How long had he been waiting to ask those questions? Aristedes had never been shy with questions—less shy with his opinion or advice, that was certain—but not shy with questions, either. Not shy in general. And yet there was something in his tone that told me he knew. Defiance? Was he challenging me to lie?
I caught myself wishing I had my cape. Such emblems and amulets grant us power by our attitude toward them. Thinking of amulets, I touched my pendant through my shirtfront, the bit of shell I’d received from the Quiet.
“I assume Pallino showed you his suit footage.” Of all the people who had been with me by that lakeside on the Demiurge, Pallino alone had captured a clear recording of what had happened to me. Ilex had discovered it after the battle, while I still slept in Kharn Sagara’s custody regrowing the flesh of my arm. She’d had the presence of mind to go though every suit recording from the battle aboard the Demiurge that she could access before Titus Hauptmann could sic his people on them. She had found nothing except on Pallino’s camera. The man had been facing the right way at the right time, and had caught it all: Aranata striking off my sword arm—my right arm—and my head after it. I had watched it only once, and ordered the recording scrubbed from any networked device and placed in a storage crystal kept in the Tamerlane’s vault. No one was supposed to know about it. No one from the Imperial Office had come to me about it, either, and so I was certain Ilex had done her job well.
I was not surprised that Lorian had discovered it.
“He did,” Aristedes said, “but if he hadn’t, you’d have just given up the ghost.”
I did not laugh.
“Have you considered that you’re not you? That you’re a replica Kharn Sagara put together and sent
among us?” He surveyed me coldly, both hands folded on the head of his cane. I realized I’d misjudged Lorian Aristedes a moment earlier. He was not another of my cultists, no true believer at all. He was the most ardent sort of skeptic, the sort who disbelieves despite even the evidence of his eyes.
I did laugh, then. “That was the first thing I considered, of course. But the data don’t match up.” I had been having visions of the Quiet long before I came to Vorgossos, since Calagah, in fact. Perhaps since Meidua. Whatever was happening to me, it was bigger than Vorgossos, bigger than Kharn Sagara and his pet daimon. The Brethren said the Quiet had pressed them into service, forced them to deliver the vision they had given me because the Quiet had foreseen that I would meet the Brethren, and because the Brethren—being perhaps the most intelligent creature ever to exist—had perceived the Quiet when they peered across the luminous deeps of time. I told Lorian all this, and when his frown deepened I said, “You don’t know everything. I don’t know everything, but I am me. Here.” I pushed back my sleeve then, showing him my right arm. “You showed me yours, so I will show you mine.”
Faintly visible in the stark light shone the pinpricks of a hundred tiny scars. They dotted the back of my hand, my palm, my forearm. “When I was a boy, I was mugged in the streets of Meidua returning to my father’s castle. They shattered my arm and nearly killed me, and I spent weeks recovering. I wore a corrective brace—I’m sure you know the type. See the scars?” I pointed, watching for his response. But Lorian’s face was not readable. I shook my sleeve back down. “If you have seen the recording, you know full well it was the right arm I lost to Aranata. Feel it.” I offered my hand, and he took it carefully. His own hand was dry and light as a skeleton’s. “And feel the other.” I extended the left, let him feel the false bones there.
“The first time I went into fugue I wore my family’s signet ring,” I said, working Aranata’s ring off my thumb to show him. “Cryoburn took all the skin off from here to here.” I traced a line from one thumb joint to the next. “When I came back to life,” I said, haltingly, aware of how insane those words sounded, “it was my left arm I had lost, not the right. And I had this back.” I held up my right hand again for inspection, scars and all. “That is not the sort of mistake a machine would make. And besides, when it . . . happened.” I could not say when I died. “When it happened Kharn Sagara was dead. Offline. Rebuilding himself. The whole ship was dead.” I did not tell him about my final meeting with the Undying Lord of Vorgossos, the way that xanthous king demanded my secret of eternal life, a secret I did not possess. I had given him enough proof. “I do not know what happened to me, Lorian. But I know I am me.”
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