Guardian

by A. J. Hartley

  The marines on the north bank, pinned between Mnenga’s warriors, the laborers and protesters Peter had brought to the city’s defense, and a squad of armed policemen press-ganged into service by Andrews, had already surrendered. They were disarmed and chained until the regular army could arrive to take them into military custody.

  The bodies of Vestris and Norton Richter were recovered from the snag in the channel which Tanish had arranged to delay the yacht.

  There would be no returning from the dead for my sister this time.

  I handed Inspector Andrews the letters the ambassador had given me, which I had kept safely bundled in my satchel. He sorted through them, pale and wordless as he unfolded each one and scanned it. He did not need to tell me that they laid out a lengthy correspondence between the ambassador, the Grappoli high command, and Norton Richter, an indisputable evidence train that mapped the former prime minister’s treason, including the assassination of Benjamin Tavestock.

  He was beyond punishment for that, though Andrews suggested he’d like to see the Heritage party leader’s corpse formally tried and hanged, dead though he already was. The letters implicated Saunders and Mandel, and it looked likely that the entire Heritage party would be disbanded, their most prominent members—including the luxorite dealer Kepahler—having all been implicated in Richter’s various crimes. Many would see jail time. Some would see the scaffold.

  The fates of the captured Grappoli were less sure, though there was at least a code for dealing with prisoners of war. How long that war would last was similarly unsure. It was not clear whether this had been the beginning or a kind of end, but the Grappoli navy had withdrawn badly bloodied and in no state to mount a counterassault on more open terms. The ambassador would be recalled, but it was not yet clear if he would go, and while the letters clearly tied him to everything that had happened, his part in the battle might yet win him asylum in the city he had come to think of as his second home. I made sure I went to him as he was brought off the deck of the yacht, now moored—under heavy guard—back at Evensteps. His eyes found me as he emerged, his hands shackled, his hair and clothes uncharacteristically rumpled, and he managed a bleak smile.

  “I thought they’d kill you,” I said, taking advantage of the moment’s pause Andrews had bought for me.

  “They still might,” he said. “Though whether I will have to go home to face the music or stay here is not yet clear.”

  “You prefer our music,” I said.

  He laughed self-deprecatingly. “This is true,” he said. He gave me a thoughtful look. “What a remarkable person you are. A true princess after all.”

  “No,” I answered. “Just a steeplejack.”

  “Quite so,” he said, smiling and bowing, as Andrews nodded for the dragoons to lead him away. “Quite so.”

  Andrews stood beside me, watching them walk through the crowd.

  “I’m sorry about Madame Nahreem,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. It was inadequate and made him still less comfortable, but I did not know what to say.

  “And the woman who killed Richter,” he said. “The one they are calling the Gargoyle … Was that who I think it was?”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but the words would not come, and he, aghast and uncertain, stood rigid and horrified as I broke down, long wordless sobs breaking from me. At last he took me awkwardly into his arms, and as everything I had held back overcame me, I wept bitterly into his shoulder for a long minute.

  My sister’s grief at Madame Nahreem’s death had been real enough, though I knew she had attacked Richter so that I could not. I did not know what had passed through my sister’s head in those last moments, or what had passed between her and Madame Nahreem in the minutes before the battle, but she had sacrificed herself so that I could live. It was, I thought, her final act of atonement, and she did it safe in the knowledge that neither it nor anything she might do, would ever be enough.

  So I wept for her, and for Madame Nahreem, for Aaron Muhapi, and all those whose names I did not know who had fought alongside us, and in doing so, I wept for the city, and the world, though there were not enough tears, and would never be enough.

  A few minutes later, when Andrews—assured he had done all he could to calm me—fled with relief to help orchestrate the aftermath of the conflict, Mnenga came up from the riverbank and embraced me wordlessly. It felt heartfelt and earnest, but there was a distance between us which the closeness of our bodies could not disguise. I did not need to look over his shoulder to see that Lomkhosi would be hovering close by, wearing the white spot and stripe war paint that was the insignia of the Mahweni warriors.

  He looked at me, and I said, without thinking, “Lomkhosi will make you a good wife.”

  He looked momentarily hunted, as if unsure whether to prevaricate or apologize and then just nodded.

  “I think so,” he said. “And it will be good for our villages.”

  I wished he hadn’t said that, as if the decision were political rather than personal, because I had seen the way he had looked at her as they danced, and I knew that it wasn’t true, but I said nothing. He had earned that and more.

  * * *

  AN HOUR LATER, I was alone. I stood in the niche reserved for the sixth angel, the spot where Vestris had stood, surveying the city and oscillating between life and death. They were a hairsbreadth apart. If I leaned just a few more inches out, I would fall, and it would all be over, the work, the pain, the grief, the loss. One half step, and I would be free, unmissed, and with very few exceptions, unmourned. I thought of Madame Nahreem, of Aaron Muhapi cut down before he could lead the revolution he deserved, of my once shining and beautiful sister Vestris, and of Papa, whose death had reminded me what I was and what I was not. In my heart, I was still a Drowning girl, a Lani steeplejack, and whatever my recent employment had made me, the gulf between me and the Willinghouses of this world remained as immeasurable as ever. The gap was a chasm compared to which the fall from the highest point of the Inns of Court to the cobbled street was a very small step indeed.

  Perhaps it was time for this lost angel to take her last swooping dive—

  “What are you doing, you ridiculous creature?”

  I didn’t turn. I didn’t need to.

  “What do you want, Dahria?” I said.

  “Well, I can tell you what I didn’t want, and that was to have to yell at a deeply unpleasant custodian until he opened the doors and gave me his permission—if you can believe that—to climb six flights of increasingly dusty stairs and finally a ladder—yes, I said ladder—to a roof hatch, so I could stand up here inches from certain death while ruining whatever absurd self-dramatizing ritual you are performing. There’s no one down there, you know. You aren’t impressing anybody.”

  I sighed.

  “Wasn’t looking to impress anyone, Dahria.”

  “Are you sure about that? Because this all feels very theatrical, wouldn’t you say? Or are you auditioning for the circus? I believe recent events have left them with some openings.”

  Now I did turn so that I could glare at her properly.

  “Is it your mission in life to be annoying?” I shot at her. “To spend your days being pretty and useless so that you can spend your evenings tormenting the rest of the world with your inane babble?”

  “You think I’m pretty?”

  “Oh my God!” I said, to no one in particular.

  “You said I was pretty.”

  “I also said you were useless.”

  “You didn’t mean that.”

  “But I meant the pretty part?”

  “Definitely.”

  “How can you tell which parts I meant and which…” I abandoned the question. “Oh, never mind. I’d like to be alone now.”

  “You don’t mean that either,” said Dahria. “And I’d appreciate it if you stepped back from that ledge. It’s making me dizzy.”

  “Well, we wouldn’t want that,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t, no.”<
br />
  “Which is what matters.”

  “My feelings matter to me, yes, as yours do to you, which is why you are up here indulging them.”

  “You don’t know what I’m doing up here,” I said, staring out over the city again to where the Beacon I’d recovered so very long ago blazed in the night.

  “My dear steeplejack,” she said, with sudden tenderness, “I know exactly why you are here. You are standing where your sister stood because you know how close to becoming her you are. But you are better, stronger than she was. You refuse to let the resentments you can’t outgrow master you, so you think it would be better if you fell. You see your other sister’s family, and you think you will never have anything like it. You see your friends—Mnenga, Sureyna, Emtezu—who all have a place in the world, and you envy them. You thought my brother was like you because he’s part Lani and he says all the right political things, but you now see that he is as far from you as the Mahweni tribes in the bush are, separated by birth, by class, and—above all—by wealth. All of which means that however well-intentioned he is, he does not finally understand you at all. You don’t know how much you care about that, but you think you should, and not knowing what to think makes you sad and angry and confused all at the same time.

  “Last, and most importantly, you mistake being alone with being unloved. My brother’s career will get a substantial boost from his days sitting in a cell doing nothing, while you—the one who did all the actual work—will scan every newspaper for even a mention of your name, and you will come up empty. So you came here to look out over the city you held together, as if jumping from the high places where you are most at home will punish all the people who live here for their ingratitude. But you can’t. Because however terrible the city can be, how much it is always on the edge of tearing itself apart, it needs you, and you, I suspect, need it. You are Bar-Selehm’s unsung hero, its guardian angel. You do not know how to be anything else.”

  I stood listening, then thinking, feeling with the toes of my boots just how close I was to the edge, staring out over the city, which pulsed with activity as its inhabitants came to grip with what had happened.

  “I’m not sure that’s enough,” I said.

  Her voice, when it came, was frightened but determined, and it came from an inch behind my ear.

  “Then you must find other reasons to live,” she said. “Some of us need you.” She hesitated, a moment that might have been a lifetime, then added, “I need you.”

  She clutched my hand fiercely, with a passion that came from more than terror of the long drop to the street below. When I turned to her, I was amazed to see her face wet with tears.

  I stepped back and down, pulling her to me, and there was the embrace I had missed from Andrews and Mnenga, the one that collapsed two bodies into one, twining the minds and hearts together in strength. In love.

  I kissed her then and, suddenly and unexpectedly, the world made a kind of sense.

  * * *

  WILLINGHOUSE WAS WAITING FOR me at the bottom. He had a police escort since it would be some time before the formal procedures involved in his release were finalized, even with the ambassador’s clear and incontrovertible testimony. But he looked free, like a great burden had been lifted from his shoulders or he had been taken out into sunlight and reminded who he was.

  He didn’t know how to greet me, how to thank me, and he bowed and shuffled, and extended a hand as if I was an old school friend he hadn’t seen for some time, and made speeches about what I had achieved and how much he was in my debt.

  That was all right. I nodded and said I had only done my job, and he looked concerned that I wasn’t sufficiently happy or proud. I felt calm, however, and when his confused glance fell on my hand, held tenderly by his sister, I just smiled. He made a quizzical face and opened his mouth several times as if looking to begin a series of complex questions. Dahria stared him down, and when she finally said, “What, Joss? You look like a very stupid fish who has just noticed he is no longer in the water,” he just shook his head and backed, baffled, away.

  She rolled her eyes at me and then I did laugh. A part of me had been dreading seeing her brother, as if doing so would confuse my feelings for her, but all I felt was surety and relief. I respected Willinghouse. I even liked him. I did not blame him for my father’s death, and I understood the reasons behind his clumsy subterfuge as I understood why he was so completely useless at speaking to me as if I was a human being he had come to care for. But I did not love him.

  I squeezed Dahria’s hand, and she gave me a curious look.

  “You all right?” she asked, as if she was holding in some lingering anxiety.

  “Yes,” I said honestly. “Perfectly.”

  * * *

  FRAMED! SANG ONE OF the Clarion’s competing headlines the following morning, over a picture of Willinghouse. TREASON! screamed another over Richter’s portrait. PRIME MINISTER SLAIN BY GARGOYLE! said another. The full account of the Grappoli-Heritage conspiracy would take days to unfold, probably much longer, but for now the news positively spilled from the papers like water from an overflowing rain barrel. It was the talk of every conversation on every street corner, in every tavern and club, the meat of every dinner. I had thought the murder of Benjamin Tavestock had created a kind of unprecedented unity of focus within the city, but that had merely been a prelude to division and rancor along all the old lines. This felt different. But how long it would last and where it would lead, I could not say.

  Heritage was gone. Its existence was simply untenable, and even those members unlikely to face criminal prosecution quickly joined an embarrassed queue to profess the extent to which they had been misled, how outraged they were by their leadership’s activities, how stalwart was their patriotism, and so on. It was mostly performance, but a necessary one, and it cowed those who had so gleefully embraced the government’s recent policies of segregation and disenfranchisement. In the stunned silence from the Nationals, the Brevard party would make hay, not simply overturning the newest regulations, but ramming through some of their own, including an entirely new refashioning of electoral districts, which would give the black and Lani population considerably more power.

  Votes for women would take longer, but a bill had been proposed, cleverly named after the late prime minister, Benjamin Tavestock, and it would officially start the conversation. Dahria felt sure that many society women had been waiting for just such a moment to lend their voices to what had been, till now, an undignified and disreputable cause.

  The cancelled election was back on, though it had been postponed, to allow Parliament to draw new party lines and accommodate the sudden collapse of those on the far right. I was not naïve enough to believe that all those who had cheered Heritage on were truly gone, but their embarrassment had created an opening, and men like Willinghouse had enough pragmatism to exploit it.

  Just.

  Willinghouse had emerged as a martyr who had been snatched from the heretics’ flames at the last minute, and he had a certain amount of what he privately called “political capital,” which he intended to spend wisely. It was unclear what someone as junior as he was could do with his new celebrity, but he had already completed his transition from minor backbencher to someone of considerable power and influence. He was still too young to be considered prime minister material, but that day was not so very far away. You could see it in the way he carried himself, the way he walked, the way he addressed the House on his return, and the way he accepted their applause as if it was no more than his due.

  Dahria wore a heavy veil for the cremation of Vestris and Madame Nahreem, and avoided everyone’s gaze but mine, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief gripped tightly in gloved, unsteady hands. Willinghouse stared unblinking into the fire as if forcing himself to watch his grandmother’s last earthly moments, even as the heat made the rest of the crowd back away. When it was over and he joined the customarily chaotic banquet, his clothes and hair smelled scorched, his face and h
ands were pink, and his eyes bloodshot. His own brand of atonement, perhaps.

  Dahria watched him, then turned to face me.

  “She—my grandmother, I mean—said you were a good influence on me,” she said. “It was the first thing we’d agreed on in years.”

  She tried to smile, but a sob rose in her face, and I embraced her.

  * * *

  AARON MUHAPI’S FUNERAL PROCESSION began at his Morgessa house and wound the long, slow route all the way to Mahweni Old Town and the square where he had spoken several times and which had been the site of the most intense intimidation by the now disbanded civilian militia. Some of the buildings were still streaked with smoke from the firebombs thrown through their windows. The crowd of mourners—mostly, but not entirely black—numbered in the thousands. As they walked, they sang old songs, some religious, some political, some ancient tribal memories that went back a century or more before the city existed in its present form. The songs were high and plaintive, sorrow put to music, but the mood was not all sad. Several people spoke, including Willinghouse, celebrating Muhapi’s life, his beliefs, and his legacy, something that had seemed impossible only a week before.

  Peter stood beside Muhapi’s widow, Samora, and announced that, in accord with the Brevard party’s hastily cobbled mandate, he intended to be Bar-Selehm’s first black member of Parliament in the coming elections, promising to adhere to the values he had learned at Muhapi’s side. For her part, Samora said that she would be speaking to white women’s groups to consolidate pressure on the government, which would, she hoped, bring women the right to vote within the next three years.

  The city was changing, and for the better, but if the last few weeks had taught me anything, it was that progress was fragile and could always be taken away. I thought of the battle on the bridge, the way we had scrambled for every foot, and I thought that that was how things would always be. If you stopped fighting for a second, all the ground you had captured would be taken away.