by Moshe Ben-Or
“So Duke Reginald adopted you?”
“Not exactly,” replied her companion.
“He can’t adopt me. Well, he can, technically, but it would make a horrible mess of things.
“Politics,” shrugged Yosi, “the bane of our existence.”
“So, if he took you in, but he didn’t adopt you…”
“Bah!” he chuckled at her confusion.
“It’s Sparta, honey, and I had my Red Pin. Nobody is going to tell a duke whom he can or cannot host in his castle. Duke Reginald just called up his Registrar and commanded that I be added to the duchy’s residency rolls, and that was that.
“Doctor Nick tried to fight it every which way. Even found a bunch of supposed do-gooders from New Israel allegedly concerned with the welfare of minor orphans and assimilation and all that jazz. They filed a suit and everything.
“It was funny, really. The judge sent them packing. Told them that, firstly, a Red Pin made me legally an adult Citizen so I could decide for myself, and secondly, by The Ancient and Hallowed Consuetude of Ducal Privilege, a duke’s word is law in his duchy, unless he violates the Common Code or the King’s Code. Then he fined them three thousand credits plus court costs for wasting his time.”
“So you just live at the castle? Just like that?” asked Mirabelle incredulously.
“And he pays for you to go walkabout on Paradise? Even when you’re planning to go on the walkabout just so you can kill yourself in a really fancy and expensive way?
“Stupid girl, where’d that come from?” she thought to herself as his muscles jumped under her hands.
The smile was gone as suddenly as it came, and the sadness flooded back in to replace it.
It had just slipped out. She’d been so jealous all of a sudden, and it had just slipped out and now he would hate her.
“I didn’t mean it,” she backpedaled desperately, “I’m sorry.”
“Think I’m an ingrate, do you?” he remarked, almost whispering.
“I didn’t deserve it, you’re right. But Duke Reginald…
“He is just good, you know? Good to the core, all the way. Leo is like that, too. I never knew that people like that existed. That they could exist. I could never repay them. All the days of my life I will try, but I can never…
“There are no words for these things.
“That walkabout…
“It was the only way, I think. I’d have died, otherwise. I spent my days planning how I would do it.
“And then Duke Reginald took me climbing. Real climbing, not the fake stuff with climb suits and sherpa bots. Just you and the face and the ice ax in your hand… Just one insignificant little man in all that vastness…
“The mountains are pure, you know? They’re so huge and eternal and beautiful, and they will kill you in a heartbeat if you’re not careful. Not because they hate you, but simply because that’s the way they are.
“They were there long before you existed, and they won’t even notice when you’re gone…
“You can almost hear the voice of Hashem up there, all alone on the roof of the world.
“‘What is Man, that Thou art mindful of him?’
“I never truly understood how King David must have felt, until I came to the mountains…
“Duke Reginald made me promise that I wouldn’t die, unless I reached the top of San Sebastian first.
“It’s a good place to die up there. Beautiful. I think he knew that I wouldn’t, if I made it to the top.”
Yosi fell silent, overwhelmed by the memory.
There was no “almost” about it. The Voice was real.
It had been a split-second. A moment so brief and yet so endless as to defy all description. Yet for that brief moment he could hear it, though there was no sound and there were no words, just like King David had described. A silent, universe-spanning Voice filled with awesome power beyond all imagining. A Voice that truly could split seas and shatter cedars, strip forests bare and strike tongues of fire and set the desert atremble. A Presence so enormous, so overwhelming, that no mere human words could do it justice.
Four years ago he had climbed, in the slowly brightening twilight of pre-dawn, up to the roof of this world in a single-minded, fanatical quest to receive an Answer or else die trying. And as the sun of the winter solstice shone its first rays upon the fur-swathed, solitary man sitting alone atop the tallest peak in the Dourados, for just a split-second he had heard the inaudible Voice, and he had felt the awesome Presence. For just a split-second before the first day-glo orange Imperial climb suit had poked up over the cliff off to his right, and his soul had returned abruptly from that other place somewhere between the worlds, summoned, perhaps, by his body’s desperate urge to gasp uncontrollably for air.
No one knew what had happened to him atop San Sebastian. No one except Doctor Sandra and the old Duke. He could tell no one else. To all the rest of them, even to Leo, Yosi, the resident likable but weird lightworlder, had simply returned from his walkabout much improved in spirits, and abruptly chose to re-embrace his Jewish heritage.
As it turned out, most had expected such a thing all along. A Jew always went back to his own kind, to his own faith, did he not? Everyone knew that. Apparently, even the castle’s priest-in-residence had always doubted the permanence of Yosi’s devotion to the Allmother. They’d all believed, deep down, that the Creator would force one of His Chosen to come back to Him, whether Yosi liked it or not. And, in this modern, enlightened age, they would claim, at least publicly and where their sole resident Jew could hear, that they were all right with that. But the public truth and the private truth were two very different things, whether on Sparta or anywhere else in the universe. And never the twain would meet.
The Spartans didn’t worship Gaios Allfather, The Creator and The Destroyer. They quaked in terror before Him. For three hundred standard years, generation after generation, they had spent their lives petrified by His inexplicable cruelty; terrorized by His boundless power; dreading His malicious caprice.
At any moment, for no reason whatsoever, regardless of anything anyone might or might not have done, the Allfather was apt to overturn the world. At His whim, without warning, summer would turn overnight into winter, or spring into autumn. Warm sunshine would become freezing darkness and gentle rains would turn to pitiless blizzards. Lofty cities would be laid waste at the height of their prosperity. Mighty nations would be smashed at the very pinnacle of their power. Herds of screeching, walking corpses would blanket the land. And amid the endlessly piling drifts of snow, behind the proud walls and the barricaded gates, in the sealed, copper-lined inner keeps of the great castles where the Walking Plague couldn’t reach, the fine furniture would be broken up for firewood. And brother would fight brother to the death over the last crust of bread. And mothers driven mad by hunger would slaughter and devour the fruit of their own wombs.
Yet He could also, if it pleased Him for some inexplicable reason, give whole decades when harvest followed harvest without cease, and granaries grew so full that new silos had to be built alongside the old ones.
Whole decades would pass, and children would grow up never seeing a single snowflake. Until suddenly, with no warning whatsoever, for no reason that anyone could fathom…
Perhaps, said Sparta’s holy books, He did these things in fits of pique or sudden rage, when men or even the Allmother Herself upset Him somehow. Or perhaps He did it for casual amusement, the way vicious little boys pull wings off flies.
The sole thing all of Sparta’s holy men had ever agreed upon when it came to the subject of the Allfather and His inexplicable actions, was that only Gaia, the Allmother Who Sustains, kept Him from simply wiping out all life in His cruel madness. And so it was to Her boundless mercy that the Spartans appealed in their distress, and it was Her endless kindness that they praised in their happiness.
They used to sacrifice to Him, up in Ledonia, before the Unification. When the winter wouldn’t lift for years on end, and eve
n the Kerguelen pines would yield no harvest, the day would come when it seemed that there would never again be a spring; that the Allfather had finally condemned all living things in the world to slowly perish from the endless cold.
When the ice closed in and the food ran low, they would beg and plead desperately with the Allmother, so that She would intercede on their behalf. But when the frantic implorations failed, and the warmth wouldn’t come and the snow wouldn’t stop, the priests would call for seven of each kind. Seven of goose and seven of dog, seven of caribou and seven of rabbit, seven of muskox and seven of pig…
And seven from among the race of men. Freewill volunteers. Child and elder, serf and noble, male and female in equal number, led personally by the High Priest of Gaia. They who would go before the Creator and beg for mercy on behalf of all that yet survived beneath the leaden winter sky. The Ambassadors who would add their face-to-face entreaty to the tearful pleas of the Allmother.
They said that up in the Northern backwoods, where modern civilization and modern education didn’t quite reach, there still were places where the Sacred Puukko of the Allfather tasted human blood in the depths of the deepest winters, and the inhabitants ate of the sacrificial meat.
It made perfect sense to Leo’s people that the Allfather would take a nation for Himself from the midst of another nation, with signs and wonders, with a strong hand and an outstretched arm and fury poured out. Unlike, say, the Imperials, with their ever-rational Philosopher Buddha and their Rightly Guided Son of Heaven, it did not strike the Spartans as in the least bit strange that the Creator of the Universe would care to turn a mighty river to blood, lay a great kingdom waste with plagues and rain fire from the sky, topple statues and slaughter firstborn, split a sea and drown an army of countless thousands, all to march a herd of liberated slaves deep into a howling wilderness where, from atop an obscure mountain, from the midst of a raging, all-consuming fire, He would dictate to them a convoluted and inexplicable Law.
The inhabitants of Sparta did not see it as at all odd that the Creator would demand from His Chosen People exclusive worship on pain of horrific punishment, and promise in exchange for faithfulness a specific Land upon a specific world, and a boundless river of rewards. It made perfect sense to them also that the Allfather would then spend the next five thousand years alternatively plunging His Chosen Nation into unspeakable catastrophe and then showering it with untold blessings, in unpredictable sequence. It did not surprise them in the least that He would destroy the Land and even the planet itself in a fit of rage. Nor did the Spartans doubt that the Allfather could, and possibly would, someday restore to the Jews all that He had promised them.
The Allfather could do anything, if it pleased Him. And He did. Without warning.
From the Spartans’ faith it followed quite logically, that all who came near the Allfather’s Chosen could, at any time, be caught up in their inexorable fate, both for good and, more importantly, for inevitable ill. If the more pious among them had had their way, Sparta to this day would have no contact whatsoever with either Haven or New Israel. Only a keen awareness of their own weakness a mere century after emerging from Steam Age barbarism, coupled with the imminent threat of Imperial conquest, had compelled them to yoke their kingdom into a military, economic and political alliance as close as the Delta Triangulae League had become.
For two centuries they had faithfully kept to all that they had signed at the Conference. And for two centuries, deep down, they had feared. Even now, after two hundred years, Spartan merchant ships would avoid routing jumps through Jewish space if they could help it, and brave indeed was the Spartan exchange student who signed up to come study on New Israel.
It was a terrible enough thing for an entire nation to attract the personal interest of the Allfather. How much more so if the Creator had deigned to focus His attention, however briefly, upon a specific man…
Even doctor Sandra had clutched, involuntarily, at the Allmother Crystal she wore around her neck when Yosi had told her about the Voice. For all her self-professed enlightened agnosticism. For all her claims that the thing was just a bauble she’d taken a fancy to as a girl, just a bit of pretty antique jewelry she liked to wear.
And then she’d worked tirelessly to convince herself that the whole thing had been an altitude hallucination, just a normal, natural, medically explicable phenomenon brought about by anoxia and general exhaustion and an excess of religious expectation. Something that would fit neatly and seamlessly into her carefully constructed, rational universe, and had nothing whatsoever to do with any terrifying Allfather.
Duke Reginald, at least, had been more intellectually honest.
“Well,” he’d harrumphed, pouring himself a large shot of brandy from the crystal decanter in which he kept the stiffest stuff, “It explains quite a bit about your life, doesn’t it?
“Perhaps I’ve made a better decision, taking you in, than I’d realized at the time.
“Don’t know if I’d have done so, had I known.
“Not that I could have avoided it anyway, if it truly was His will...
“No sense in crying about it now, either way,” he’d added, tossing back the generous drink.
“What’s done is done. A Freeman doesn’t go back on his Given Word.”
“Keep this thing to yourself, son,” the old Duke had remarked after a thoughtful pause, hand still resting casually upon the cut-crystal neck of the decanter, as if debating with himself whether or not to pour another brimming glass.
“Not the kind of business you want to bandy about, not even here in the Core Duchies, where we all claim to be so impeccably enlightened and modern.”
The girl was getting ready to ask another question. Through the invisible connection between them, Yosi could feel the itch begin upon her tongue as she formed the words in her mind.
“Go to sleep, honey,” he muttered casually, still lost in the memory of the Voice, still trying to capture the fleeting understanding that he had almost, but not quite, felt in that moment upon the mountain.
“Go to sleep. It’s all right.”
And he didn’t notice how abruptly a dark wave of oblivion washed over Miri’s consciousness; how suddenly, like the flip of a switch, her body went flaccid and still, collapsing into dreamless slumber.
Some minutes passed before Yosi, staring silently into the darkness, finally noticed the limp, evenly breathing human rag doll whose hair he’d been mechanically stroking while his mind wandered elsewhere. Carefully disentangling himself from the senseless girl in his arms, he turned over onto his back and, putting his hands behind his head for a pillow, stared up at the tiny patches of star-studded sky that the poncho tent could see peeking out, here and there, among the shelleaf’s dense canopy. Through his mind, just on the edge of not-hearing, like the faraway noise of sea waves running endlessly upon an impossibly distant shore, wove a wordless, silent, loving whisper.
* 27 *
Miri opened her eyes. In the pitch-black nighttime sky above her hung a malevolent, horribly pockmarked, lopsided disk the color of dried blood. Amid the wispy clouds, by far outnumbering the familiar, friendly stars, sparkled countless garnet specks. A spray of bloody ichor, befouling the firmament. Sinister shadows danced in the bloody moonlight, writhing to a frightful discord of gusting castanets.
Melaina, thought Miri. The Dark Moon. Invisible to the human eye; detectable only by the huge tides she raised at perigee. The Fortress of the Dead; the dark castle whence rode the Lady Katarina with her entourage of skeletal Attendants, to mark the souls for her grim husband’s scythe.
That’s what she was hearing. The Attendants laughing at the world. The flapping jaws of a thousand empty-eyed skulls beating out a tattoo of macabre amusement at the fragile universe of the living as they went about their merciless task; like the little skull rattles and dancing skeletons-on-a-stick that little boys ran around with on the Dia de Finados, multiplied a thousand times.
She must be dead. The L
ady Katarina had marked her after all, and her husband El Barão Morte had taken her as she’d slept…
With a start, Miri woke up fully.
How silly, she’d thought. Just a stupid little kids’ tale, that Fortress of the Dead. A dumb excuse for the herdeiros to drink themselves stupid on rum and tequila, gorge themselves on fiambre and pan de finado, and run around with sugary skulls and marigolds and cheap little skeleton rattles.
In the real world, death didn’t ride upon a bony horse, scythe in hand, looking for invisible little roses left behind by his skull-headed wife and her ghostly attendants. In the real world death came with nuclear fire, and contrails in the sky, and panicked news bulletins on the cube, and hunger and thirst and disease, and vicious two-legged beasts from the barrio who’d figured out suddenly that there were no more police to hold them in check…
It was simply late in the night. Both Daphne, the friendly yellow crescent you could have read a book by these past few nights, and Kleodora, the tiny white lamp bright enough to cast shadows as she rushed across the nighttime sky at her perigee, must have long since set. In the pitch darkness, the poncho shelter rendered Melaina as she appeared in the infrared. The slasher immersie colors, instead of the usual ghostly whites Miri had come to associate with poncho night vision, were just the AI’s way of telling her that the ample invisible radiance of the Dark Moon obviated any need for image enhancement by photomultiplication of visible starlight.
And the ghostly rattles? Just the shelleaf above, swaying in the gusty nighttime breeze.
Just the ordinary, real world. No mumbo-jumbo.
Yosi had his back to her, puffing away and muttering softly in the midst of some dream. She could feel his feet twitching ever so slightly on the other side of the blanket-like partition that separated them. She’d wanted to ask him something, before she’d fallen asleep. Something important. But she couldn’t remember what it was anymore.