by P. J. Fox
He promised to break it off. He didn’t. He and Lila were in love, and he didn’t know what to do. That she was his commanding officer and screwing her was enough to get him kicked out of the army hadn’t deterred him, why should the fact that he’d made a commitment to another woman? The army had been his first love, and he’d met it long before he met Aria.
There had been others, of course, although he’d claimed that they’d—of course—been meaningless. Just like Lila was meaningless, right up until the point when he’d told Aria that he didn’t think he could end things with her. At least, not right away. And then Lila herself had come to see Aria, catching her completely off guard as she was walking home from the preschool where she worked as a teacher’s assistant. Lila had developed a problem that she believed entitled her to the greater claim on Aiden’s affections: she was pregnant.
Finally faced with the reality of the situation, Aiden broke it off and begged Aria for another chance. He couldn’t, after all, even be sure that the child was his; Lila was married.
That Aiden had turned out to be only human wasn’t his fault. But her discoveries about his character, motivations, and true priorities had led Aria into other discoveries—about herself. Not the least of which was that she’d been using Aiden as an escape. Which, regardless of what he’d done, wasn’t fair to him. She was running from one man into the arms of another, thinking—just like Zelda had, although Aria hadn’t seen it until now—that marriage would solve everything.
She and Grace, another teacher’s assistant at the preschool, had somehow cooked up this crazed scheme and, once again, Aria had found herself running away. Buoyed by a raging, sickening, uncontrollable tide of anger, she hadn’t stopped to consider what she was doing—really doing—until far too late. The first moment of clarity had come in the bowels of a clapped-out freighter, huddled in a blanket and drinking what almost passed for hot chocolate.
She couldn’t be sure whether she was in love with Aiden, but over the weeks and months that followed she’d come to the reluctant conclusion that she’d loved a figment of her imagination. She’d needed him to be her savior, because she’d needed a savior. And he was handsome, and charming, and more than capable of rescuing her. But she’d left, in the end—she realized now—because she’d needed to rescue herself; she’d needed to prove, if only to herself, that she was capable of doing so.
Her wedding date had come and gone and she’d wondered if she’d made the right choice, but as time went on she began to think of Aiden not with pain but with a strange sense of detachment. He’d been such an enormous part of her life for so long and now it was like…she could remember how he’d made her feel, but she had trouble picturing his face.
It hadn’t been love, it had been desperation. It had felt like love, though, and that was what frightened her. She’d almost thrown her life away on a mistake—and but for walking in on Aiden when she had, she might never have known. After that, how could she ever trust her own judgment? She’d forced aside the question, concentrating instead on switching from one tacked-together ship to another and keeping the girls alive and finally she’d come to the conclusion, as she’d spent her last handful of credits for passage aboard Captain Dahn’s so-called cruiser, that she was better off, not to mention safer, alone.
And then, after months of privation, badly injured and burning with fever from a gangrenous wound, Aria had found herself in the arms of another man and this one, too, had promised to save her.
THIRTY
Kisten Mara Sant was born one minute ahead of his twin brother, Keshav.
Most identical twins were not, in fact, identical. Despite sharing the same DNA, after that first initial split they—of course—developed into separate human beings. Their faces and even their voices might be subtly different; one might possess a birthmark that the other did not. And no twins, however identical, had the same fingerprints, as those tiny patterns developed on the skin during the embryonic stage and were influenced by each individual twin’s environment. Which, even within the same womb, was subtly different.
But Kisten and Keshav were identical, which caused no end of trouble for parents and servants alike. Their mother, having married their father at the tender age of eighteen after carrying on a clandestine affair with him for some time, presented him with an heir and a spare some six months later. Their father had just turned twenty-eight, and he was delighted with his new family.
Kisten and Keshav were followed by pretty and patient Sabihah, two years their junior, and then by Arjun and then, finally, by the baby of the family: Zoharin, named for the dawn. A cheerful baby, she was born on a children’s holiday dedicated to the playing of practical jokes.
She was fifteen years younger than the twins, who doted on her. Fascinated by her chubby limbs and bright green eyes, they played with her and talked to her whenever they were home from school. They taught Zoharin her first word: book. Their parents, Mahalia and Rajesh, found this development surprising. Neither of the twins had liked Arjun and, in fact, had tried to toss him down an old well. Which had precipitated their being sent to boarding school at the earliest possible occasion. Thus, the twins saw all of their family but rarely and Zoharin least of all, because they’d left home four years before she was born.
Following in their father’s footsteps and his father’s before him, and his father’s before him, Kisten and Keshav were educated in the finest tradition that the empire could provide. The Ceridou School had shaped generals, chancellors and emperors, instilling in them the sense of duty and necessity of keeping a stiff upper lip considered so essential to all would-be leaders.
Arriving at their new home, a series of draft-ridden, unheated buildings where hot water was considered a luxury, the twins discovered—as their father before them had—the practice of fagging. This glorious tradition involved the younger students acting as personal servants to the older. As nearly all present were aristocrats or, at the very least, scions of the merchant class, they’d grown up with servants and servitude was a concept they understood. Kisten, for his part, found the experience of life at the other end of the spectrum instructional.
Those who failed to perform their duties to their masters’ satisfaction were beaten unmercifully and, in some instances, raped. If one could survive one’s first five years at Ceridou, the blazing sun and filth and racial hatred of the colonies would seem like a joy. Of course, some of the relationships were consensual; there was a hierarchical system of sexual favors, accepted and bestowed, that came to remind Kisten a great deal of his time in prison. Indeed, he would in later years attribute his survival through months of torture, disease and forcible starvation to his tenure at boarding school and the lessons he’d learned there.
One additional consideration, which would shape his brother’s life far more than his own, was the fact that if one was found in flagrante delicto with one of the maids then one was expelled and had to explain the situation to one’s parents; but being found with a boy only resulted in severe lectures. When, at age fifteen, Keshav was discovered in bed with a friend from his same form by his house master, he was famously informed that that venerable man did not object to mutual masturbation, but drew the line at buggery. Keshav—who preferred women but was not particular—imitated him to great effect and thus a legend was born.
Kisten, on the other hand, did have pronounced gender preferences and when one upperclassman tried to press the issue Kisten broke his jaw in two places. After that, no such episodes were ever repeated. He was, however, subjected to various programs of sweeping, dusting, ironing, toasting sandwiches, fetching glasses of water and delivering messages. It was taken as a given that in order to become a leader, one must first become a follower. In some of the boys, being forced into this system gave them a sense of belonging and, in return, produced an odd sort of hero worship. That the striking and witty captain of the polo team should deign to let his boots be shined by a mere mortal!
And although Kisten had no partic
ular objection to shining boots and even as a child had a keen sense of self-preservation, he would only allow himself to be pushed so far. The more revolting orders—warming the toilet seats being a favorite—were met, as time went on, with increasingly mortifying practical jokes. With the result that, within a year or two, Kisten and Keshav had developed their own staff—of upperclassmen. And as Kisten abhorred tormenting those who couldn’t defend themselves, as in addition to being unfair it was also far less entertaining, he became quite popular with the younger forms as well.
As did his brother, although in Keshav’s case it was in spite of any real interest. He was attractive and charming, and these attributes alone gained him admirers; male and female alike. But Keshav sought no true companionship other than that of Kisten and Kisten, in turn, saw his brother as more an extension of himself than any true individual in his own right.
There was a great deal of concern expressed by their masters about going soft. It was the principal mission of Ceridou, as an educational institution, to prevent such a tragedy from ever occurring—although in Kisten’s opinion, they were in absolutely no danger. Indeed, he decided early on that the majority of his masters—his physics master in particular—would see it as a dereliction of duty to treat their students with kindness. Gentle souls were estranged, degraded, and tortured into creatures their mothers wouldn’t recognize; less gentle souls, like Kisten’s own, were nourished on their own vices.
With the result that the shy, kind-hearted boy Kisten vaguely remembered himself as being no longer existed by the time he turned eighteen. It was true that he and Keshav had tried to drown their brother or, at the very least, break his neck. But Arjun was a fat, ill-tempered slug with a mean streak who’d done something he shouldn’t have; first to a neighbor’s dog and then to the neighbor, herself. A strong sense of honor prevented the twins from betraying their compatriot into the hands of adults so, perversely, they’d taken it upon themselves to punish him directly. And while they were being beaten to within an inch of their lives at Ceridou, the less academically inclined Arjun was left at home to pull the wings off of flies.
Kisten, as an adult, would joke with his brother that Arjun represented the down-side of inbreeding.
Kisten often wondered, too, if his father had endured the same things he had—or worse. But at home, such things were never discussed. Nothing was ever discussed. At dinners, at races, people could only look at each other and conjecture. Whatever a man had endured at the hands of his classmates, open accusations of torture, rape and worse were written off dismissively as exaggeration. That people “dramatized themselves” or “remembered things as worse than they really were” were common claims. Describing oneself as other than a poor, beleaguered, misguided chap who owed his school all was seen as betraying both school and empire; although why this should be, Kisten was never entirely sure.
He knew that, in some cases, terrible things had happened to various men of his acquaintance. His fifth form roommate, Jamsetji Tata, had survived the tortures of hell. But as even ocular verification of the crime was suspect—if those involved claimed that nothing happened, then nothing happened, regardless of how one’s senses lied—life outside of school began to feel like a hall of mirrors.
Moreover, as a man who liked women—not just in the sense of sexual objects but in terms of enjoying their company as people—Kisten found his transformation rather discouraging. The problem was this: even if one had ever had anything in common with girls, one didn’t after a few terms at school. Those few girls not educated in the comfort and solitude of their own homes by a troupe of hand-picked tutors attended schools that, to Kisten, resembled resorts.
Setji was hung out of a sixth story window while clutching a white-hot poker that he dared not drop on pain of breaking his neck. Third degree burns aside, he was counseled by the infirmary staff to get over it. Kisten’s sisters, on the other hand, were exclaimed over and petted if either so much as tripped and skinned her knee.
Life experience became an unbridgeable chasm and then, after Kisten enlisted and was sent off to war, he discovered that he had nothing to discuss with women at all.
The only constant in his life, the only person who truly understood him was—and had always been—his brother. So, perhaps unsurprisingly, they found themselves turning ever more toward each other. And as the date of his proposed enlistment loomed, Kisten was forced to recognize the fact that he and Keshav had never truly individuated. Neither of them saw themselves as a whole person, complete without the other, and the mere idea of separation was agonizing.
It was because of his brother that he’d survived as long as he had; because of his brother that he thought and felt as he did; because of his brother that he was himself, and he couldn’t conceive of how to face life on his own. And so, discussing the problem with Keshav, he’d—they’d, there was no difference—decided to do what any two reasonable, well-adjusted young men would do in their situation: kill each other.
THIRTY-ONE
They’d been born at the beginning of summer during a lunar eclipse.
When they were twelve and Kisten was sentenced for various infractions to spend the night outside naked in the snow, Keshav had come outside and sat down beside him. Also naked, so as not to appear unsporting or be accused of attempting to break the rules. They stayed there all night, chatting and laughing while the upperclassmen watched. And at eighteen, Kisten and Keshav had come to the conclusion that they’d neither of them be able to lead anything approximating a normal life unless they could convince themselves, and each other, that they were capable of independent survival.
If one of them succeeded in dispatching the other, he’d de facto prove the point—both that he could live alone, and that he was willing to. And so they shot each other, poisoned each other, and tried to rip each other apart with their bare hands. On several occasions, each almost died. In the end, however, the twins grew bored with their social experiment when they decided, jointly, that they’d learned all it had to teach.
Although neither of them had formed anything close to a lasting attachment with a woman, they had at least learned to live without each other. And so Kisten enlisted and studied and fought and almost died and Keshav became involved with the war effort as well, in his own fashion, and they didn’t see each other for several years. During which time Kisten was promoted on a number of occasions, made the acquaintance of several different and equally charming women and, perhaps most surprisingly of all, learned to laugh again.
Kisten’s education in the realities of life began, one might argue, shortly after his eleventh birthday. But he received an education of a different sort when he was sixteen. He’d come home for the mid-winter break and was staying in his old room when he was visited by Sahila, one of their maids. Her name meant guide, and she was. It began with her coming in and opening his curtains in the morning and ended with her hot and eager body in his bed. She was several years older than he, perhaps twenty or twenty-one, and she found him to be an apt pupil. So apt, in fact, that she tried him on several of the more advanced courses.
She liked to inflict pain, and have it inflicted on her; so, Kisten discovered, did he. He liked the relaxing feeling of being helpless and he liked, too, venting the darkest part of his nature on unsuspecting flesh and knowing that it was wanted. That he was wanted, in all his dark glory.
Because he’d known, even then, that he wasn’t a nice man.
Kisten was mildly distressed to discover that his lover was married, not due to any feelings of misplaced jealousy but because the husband in question had come looking for him. That Kisten was his—theoretical—master made not one bit of difference to Adzit, his father’s valet, and the thrashing he’d received at Adzit’s hands had been only slightly more bearable than the thrashing he’d received at his father’s. After which Sahila and her erstwhile husband left the household and Kisten returned to school—for the first time in his life somewhat relieved to be doing so.
&nbs
p; Still, those first encounters had awakened a lifelong passion that he would come to regard as both blessing and curse. No man whose fondest memories of his childhood included caring for his baby sister could fail to love women as people. But friendship and mutual regard were as far as his feelings ever extended. He’d always been popular enough, but he knew that even his supposed friends would describe him as difficult to know. And he was.
He had no desire to fall in love. Now and then, he’d find himself considering certain women and the logistics of a possible life with them, and the exercise felt like a chore. He might have—almost certainly could have—talked himself into caring for and perhaps even loving one of the many eligible and enthusiastic bachelorettes he’d met over the years, but no matter how content he eventually fancied himself he’d never be able to forget the fact that he’d made a conscious choice to settle. He knew that. And he didn’t want love—or what passed as love—borne of a rational decision. His whole life was a series of rational decisions, and giving up this last part of himself seemed too much like admitting defeat.
In the face of what, he wasn’t sure. But he wanted to feel the same longing that he’d felt when, as a child, he’d looked up at the stars and dreamed of freedom. Women had come and gone, in the meantime. There had been one, during the war, who’d lasted for some time. In the end, though, they’d wanted very different things. He’d been sad to see her go, but not regretful, and he still thought of her fondly.
As the years passed, the only constant in his life other than the navy had been his brother. Which was what made their present situation so ridiculous. As neither man was overtly stupid, both had seen the writing on the wall as concerned Karan. And both had planned accordingly—or, rather, Keshav had planned and Kisten had railed and Keshav had talked him into a scheme that, if successful, would put Keshav on the throne.