by R. M. Meluch
“Why not?” Hall said. “Could be why he hates your looks.”
Alihahd was blond, blue-eyed, and fair, like the infamous general.
“He was not in Shad Iliya’s army,” Alihahd said.
“How do you know?” Hall said. “You left.”
Alihahd hesitated, treading around the edges of a nightmare. He answered deliberately, almost as if thinking up reasons as he spoke. He did not want Ben to be at Jerusalem. “There is no red suffix on his number. He left the Na′id army when he was still a child.” Alihahd’s voice dropped even lower. “What they do to child conscripts is rather harsh. It washes away their pasts and instills a rabid loyalty. The conscripts make more enthusiastic soldiers than Na′id native-borns. But the conditioning methods are extreme. They backfire sometimes. . . .”
Ben had become a Na′id boomerang. Curious, thought Alihahd, the boomerang was one weapon the Itiri had never developed.
“Revenge, Mr. Hall, I understand. Emotion is a human thing. Blind hatred I understand. It is not my place to forgive or condemn. I simply recognize it. It does not horrify.” And underneath the words his eyes spoke: That is why I can endure you, Mr. Hall.
Then his tone changed again, became distant. “Killing for an idea. Killing for justice. Killing for the right. That is horrifying. And that is wrong.”
And killing and liking it . . . I don’t know what that is. . . .
• • •
Guilt. Alihahd felt worse and worse the nearer he came to Aerie, bringing back Jinin-Ben-Tairre—or whatever the man was supposed to be called after the Itiri revoked his name. Try as he might, Alihahd could not justify handing over one of his own kind to a race which had made Ben what he was then disowned him and now presumed to decide his fate. And, upon arrival, Alihahd stopped trying to justify it.
The Fendi Roniva was waiting for the crew of the Topaz and its cargo—Ben-Tairre—within the Chamber of the Golden Dome. Her sword was drawn and flashing in the light of the newly built fire which crackled in the cold hearth. The Fendi was clothed in midnight colors without ornament in these last somber days before the new year, and the dull gleam of the tungsten-plastic blade seemed very bright against her dark figure. In the frigid air, her breath barely showed a frosty cloud, having little moisture in it—and little warmth, Alihahd thought.
Roniva stepped down from the raised dais and advanced, barefoot on the icy tiled floor, toward the captive warrior Ben. Her black knuckles paled on the hilt of her sword. Ben himself was still. It was an inert kind of stillness, like a pale ivory carving. Someone had cleaned the blood off him. His eyes were unfocused, unless they were looking inward. He appeared unaware of what went on around him, unaware that Roniva meant to kill him. And as Roniva drew close to him, her sword arm beginning to lift, Alihahd stepped in between them, barring the Fendi’s way.
Her ebony skin and crimson scars rippled in an expression of disbelief and impending wrath.
Then Roniva’s alien face, with its too-keen lines, its hairless brows, its narrow nose and hard, carved cheeks, abruptly snapped to the side and she barked at an attendant, “Tell this man he is to move aside.”
“No,” Alihahd said with quiet force that gave even the powerful Fendi pause. And he heard himself continue, almost as if someone else were speaking, using his body as an instrument. “It is not your battle.”
Roniva’s head pivoted back so that she was fully facing him once again, her expression more and more astonished by degrees. She couldn’t even talk, astounded to have heard an Earth man speak Itiri law at her.
Alihahd was at least as surprised as she, but he pressed on. “Jinin-Ben-Tairre is dead. I heard the Fendi say so. This man is a human being, the Fendi made him so. Have the Itiri a war with humankind?”
Roniva struggled for words and someone to speak them to. She would not talk to Alihahd. She presented her back to him and gave her face to her snowy owl, which was perched on her throne. She screamed at the owl, gesturing with her sword, her voice ringing off the domed metal ceiling. “It was not meant that this dead warrior take all that the Aerie taught him and use it in a war that is not of the Aerie. It was meant that he go home!”
“The Fendi neglected to consider that perhaps he does not have one,” said Alihahd coldly—to the owl.
Roniva wheeled around, her sword hilt in both hands, her eyes flashing rage.
Alihahd went on unwavering, but speaking directly to Roniva again, “The Na′id were there. This home to which he was to return may not exist anymore. This is his battle, his and the Na′id’s. I thought that was permitted even under your rules.” His tone grew bitter and sarcastic. “But then, who is bound by which law seems to change at the Fendi’s convenience. Is this Itiri justice?”
“Justice?” the Fendi said. She turned her head away, addressing herself to her snowy owl. “I have told this one that there is no justice here.”
“Yes, I can see that!” Alihahd said, abandoning his stand between Roniva and her intended victim, and making straight for the chamber’s exit with long angry strides.
Roniva drew herself erect, extended a pointing arm after the retreating man, and shrilled, “He is to hold!”
Alihahd didn’t stop. Even when two armed Itiri warrior-priests stepped into his path, blocking the bronze archway, he pushed through them, buoyant with the death threat.
He was surprised to make it outside to the snapping cold gray dawn. No one had used real force on him yet. The Itiri could afford their customary patience and caution. A thin, aging Earthman wouldn’t get far if Roniva invoked her true power. Alihahd kept walking.
Under the golden dome, Roniva stood in rigid, quaking rage.
Suddenly she dropped from her frozen pose, abandoned her attendants, her intermediaries, her victim, and she bolted to the arch. Pushing between the same two warriors Alihahd had passed, she ran out onto the Ledge Path shrieking after him, to him. “No one is given what he deserves on the Aerie! There is no one to decide!”
Alihahd halted. That sharpest of all thorns stabbed into his most vulnerable point. He who led, who decided so many fates, who was law, judge, and jury, and so often wrong, he had presumed to a wisdom which Roniva never pretended to possess—to be truly just.
Alihahd turned back. He walked to her and spoke quietly. “You took everything from Ben, and you turned him loose with nowhere to go. He is human. He fights a human war. The odds were one against the trained military personnel of four army installations. By any measure, how can you condemn him?” His blond hair kicked across his tall brow that was permanently etched with deep lines.
Roniva sighed. “Ah. I should have killed him at the first, truly killed him. This would never have come to pass. One cannot separate the dead Itiri from the live human as I tried. My mistake. I should have killed him.”
“That is beside the point,” Alihahd said. “The past is fixed. What will the Fendi do now?”
Roniva brandished her sword. “Correct my mistake.”
“He is human,” Alihahd said. He raised his voice only slightly. “As I am. You kill him, and we are at war—thou and I.”
Roniva stepped backward, her sword before her as if there were real danger from such a dissipated being. For a while she didn’t speak.
Then she sheathed her sword. “O, by the sun, what am I to do with him?”
Alihahd wondered if there was actually anything to be done. He and Roniva were arguing over a man who could decide his own fate. Guilt, Alihahd knew, was the greatest of crippling forces. Alihahd recognized the sudden docility when he found Ben in the space station. After ultimate rage came the mind’s death leap. This whole debate could be moot.
“I could resurrect Jinin-Ben-Tairre,” Roniva said. “He would be mine again, not thine, and I could do with him as I will.” She tilted her head slyly at her human adversary, but then she let her hard shoulders sag and her eyes soften in use
lessness. “But I really have not the strength.” It had taken everything she had to defeat him the first time.
“You could resurrect Jinin-Ben-Tairre and let him live,” Alihahd said.
“Tell me how I could do that, Fendi Alihahd,” Roniva said ironically.
“Your original reason for killing him was...?” He lifted his brows and paused to let her remember for herself before he answered himself. “You feared the Aerie would make him Fendi—or so you told me. Do you think anyone would choose him Fendi, now?”
“No,” Roniva conceded. And with the finality of a decision, a reprieve, she said, “No.” Then she reached out and held her palm flat to Alihahd’s chest as if she could read his heart through her hand. “But, tell me, wherefore this mercy to one who would have seen thee dead?”
“No mercy,” Alihahd said. “To let him live with himself? I am being unspeakably cruel, Fendi.”
“Ah, thou knowest not our Ben-Tairre.” She reclaimed her warrior by the speaking of his name. “Thou speakest not of him.” She crossed her arms and moved toward her throne chamber.
Under the archway she stopped, looked over her shoulder, her onyx eyes glinting from under the shadow of her brow. “So who dost thou know who draweth his every breath in pain?”
• • •
A silent ghost of the Aerie, his head and broad un-Itiri-like shoulders shrouded in a hermit’s hooded black cloak, Ben moved through the halls like one without a soul, having no eyes for the world around him, his sight turned inward, lost and locked there. He drifted, mute, bearded, and strange.
Arilla shaved his face to make him appear more an Itiri, and so that he might know himself when he met his own reflection. She didn’t call to him down in the darkness where he was. He would come out when he was ready, when he was healed. Or he would die. Or stay mad forever.
Alihahd passed through an arcade, his gaze chancing inside a stone vault where a shaft of sunlight fell from a single tall window across the hooded figure kneeling in meditation, a sword across his knees. Alihahd knew the shape and the winding of the thick muscles beneath the black pall of the concealing cloak, and was frightened by the sight. Not the sword, but the madness itself terrified. Visions of dreadful memory called to him.
Alihahd shuddered and passed by.
• • •
The door to Serra’s cave swung in with a swirl of icy air. A shimmering apparition in black and gold extended a long black hand, jeweled and sparkling in starlight. The Fendi never came to Havenside, and all those within the cave, startled by the visitor, were at once on their feet with a kicking back of stools and falling over of cushions.
Gold pendants dangling on delicate chains from many rings were sent into wild pendulum dancing with the slow waving of the beckoning hand that was for Alihahd. “Come know us,” Roniva said.
Behind Alihahd, Serra turned over an hourglass, and Layla whispered to Alihahd as he stood motionless and puzzled, “It is the first of the Sword.”
Amerika ran outside to look at the stars, and comprehension came to Alihahd. The Sword was the first sign in the Itiri calendar. The new year had arrived, the year of the Opal Crown.
Alihahd joined the dazzling Fendi on the Ledge Path underneath the glowing field of the Milky Way. Amerika seized his hand and pointed straight up at the sky with a small gasp of discovery at a familiar occultation, a sign of the vernal equinox. And from up on the sentinel’s ridges came a crash of bronzes. From all over the Aerie rose a squalling that made Alihahd think of a den of beasts trapped in fire. But the raucous sounds were the alien voice of celebration. Out of all the caves and arcades poured shrieking, bright beings. Torchlight blossomed on every terrace. Alihahd’s senses were stunned by the sudden cataract of color after the muted days of restraint. All the ledges filled with the crush of celebrants, and on various levels the lively tap of wooden instruments started up different beats heedless of one another.
Roniva now appeared sedate in her shimmering black robe and gold pendants, standing tall and stately above the mobs of ranga that thronged the paths of Havenside. Her thin fingers closed on Alihahd’s upper arm. Her hand was hard, but her grip was not tight. She spoke close to his ear to be heard without raising her voice. “Thou shalt see.”
Thou shalt, the Fendi said. It was not invitation. It was mandate. Alihahd yielded to the pressure of her grip.
As he was drawn away with her, he looked back to Amerika, whose hand had slipped from his. He was losing sight of the little girl as the crowd flowed into the widening gap between them. “Are you coming?” He had to shout.
Amerika hung back, her hands clasped in her full skirts, her round cheeks burning in a red blush. He couldn’t have heard her had she tried to yell. She motioned no, her head down to the side, and she was enlisted into a gaggle of jubilant ranga to festoon the arcades with flowers and ribbons. Alihahd was pulled in the opposite direction toward the bridge, and he had to turn and watch his own step when he began to cross, starting with his right foot and counting twelve steps.
In the tempest of sound and color and firelight and motion through which he was led, one impression pounded at Alihahd ever louder like a wind brass: inhuman.
On one side of the abyss short, stocky cherubs bubbled in an alien speech, their skin white in the night except those closest to the torchfire, who had turned half dark. The ranga were cheerful.
On the other side of the crevasse, the warrior-priests celebrated with more imperative. All impression of humanity they’d ever given Alihahd jangled against what was jumping before his eyes and blaring in his ears. Civilization dissolved into feral howling and dancing. Alihahd’s nostrils narrowed in aversion. Everything, down to the smallest details suddenly struck him very wrong—the warriors’ nailless fingers, their long toes, their inhumanly lithe, white bodies, their neat white teeth without canines, their hairless limbs, their gem-green eyes, and the crimson burn scars on their smooth faces.
Roniva, as if sensing fear, firmed her grip and led him beyond the Aerie to a place where a bonfire blazed in a great stone pit partly sheltered by a tall, undercut cliff which formed a shallow cave. The smoking, flaming firepit was circled by savages—bright, dancing beings wielding naked blades, screeching wordless cries, and stamping the stony ground with bare feet. It wouldn’t have surprised Alihahd at all to be thrown into the pit as sacrifice to some god. But at the pit’s edge, Roniva let go of him and he was free to fade back to the fringes of the crowd, away from the fire’s heat, into deep shadow, until he backed into a granite wall.
He felt dizzy. He wanted to leave. He wanted the cold, rough-crystalled rock to swallow him up. Whether from something in the smoke or the lateness of the hour or his own imagination run riot, an intoxicated feeling of unreality was overtaking him.
He saw Roniva in flames. She was dancing. Other warrior-priests followed her into the pit, leaping, becoming one entity with the tongues of fire, tearing the last common thread that bound the two species, theirs and Alihahd’s. He closed his eyes and tried to breathe without smelling smoke, and to close his ears against the hideous sounds.
The dancers moved out of the fire and into the shadow of the cliff where Alihahd was cornered now. His hiding place reddened with the licking light of firebrands.
At another edge of the throng within the grotto, Alihahd sighted Harrison Hall and Layla. He made his way along the granite wall toward them, proceeding in starts, halting to avoid brushing the violently writhing bodies of the dancers who clawed the air in vicious motions as if tearing unseen enemies.
By the time he reached Hall and Layla, a cold sweat had broken out over his body. He hoped the flickering red firelight would mask his paleness. He swallowed. He hated aliens. And he really hated savages.
The Nwerthan Layla was a little barbaric herself. She was wearing animal skins. She had a gold-fringed shawl tied around her waist and a chain of berinx teeth hung around her neck
, but she wasn’t swept into the ferocious tide of the dance. She was just watching, her gay smile showing crooked teeth, a shine of exhilaration on her freckled cheeks.
Hall was a pillar of swaggering dignity. His worn, dusty brown redingote and rawhide boots were sober shadows amid the bright dancing colors. He clasped his hands loosely behind his back. The ruddy light played across the planes and hollows of his wedge-shaped face. He surveyed the spectacle, interested but removed from it, a gentle curl on his lips at some secret jest, like the master of the show.
His eyes slid aside toward Alihahd.
All the muscles in Alihahd’s face felt slack but for a twitch under one eye.
“Are you unwell?” Layla’s voice jarred him, but he couldn’t speak.
“I didn’t realize our captain was so tender-hearted,” Hall said. “It seems we have shocked his finer sensibilities.”
Alihahd turned his wide eyes back to the warriors.
Roniva danced in the center of the mob. Her robe was singed. Soot dulled her glossy skin. She circled around a level platform of stones that slowly and awfully took on the aspect of an altar.
Roniva’s barking laugh reported above the rest, with no gaiety in it, only lust and cruelty. The sleeves of her robe were torn and they flapped in clawed ribbons from her elbows. Her laugh rose to a shrill scream, carrying a chorus of others up with it, so high it was a siren catching the harmonics of the rock grotto and swelling to a skull-splitting pitch. The sound peaked and shattered into cackles.
Alihahd backed against the granite wall and stiffened, breathing shallowly as if the air itself were poison. He wanted to shut his eyes but couldn’t. Through the swirl of black smoke, he witnessed the Itiri descent into the dark elemental side of all that was noble and spiritual in them.
Their voices resolved into a chant. Out of the crowd two celebrants came lugging a spiny-hulled melon that looked like a quilled creature as big as a pig. They hefted the spined thing onto the altar and drew back into the crowd.
The chant grew louder. A sword appeared in Roniva’s hands. She screamed a rapish scream. Tungsten-plastic flashed in a lightning strike onto the altar, splitting the melon in two. The pulp oozed out red as blood. The red juice pooled. Roniva dropped the sword and leaped onto the altar. She plunged both hands deep into the spiny hull. She wrenched out fistfuls of stringy, dripping insides and held them up toward the sky. She threw back her head and bayed like a wolf creature in primordial triumph, the red juice dripping onto her face and down her arms.