A Rising Thunder

by David Weber

  The one concession she’d made was her bridal train, which stretched far down the aisle behind her as she advanced to meet her waiting groom. Honor and her maids of honor were careful to avoid treading on it as they followed her, and at Rivka’s insistence, Faith Harrington led the entire procession, scattering flower petals across the rich-toned carpet with solemn concentration. Her brother, James, followed her, carrying the Royal blue cushion with the waiting wedding rings and the princess’ coronet.

  Arranging it all had been a long journey and plenty of hard work for everyone, Honor reflected, following Rivka in her own Grayson-style gown and overtunic in deep, rich “Harrington green” with the Star of Grayson glittering about her throat on its crimson ribbon as her only jewelry. Yet despite the bittersweetness of watching Rivka face her wedding without Shamirah, she’d found all that hard work a welcome burden in the aftermath of what had happened to Massimo Filareta and his fleet.

  Of course, finding time for all of it had been something of a challenge. Fortunately, her subordinates had happily conspired to take as much responsibility for running Grand Fleet as they could off her shoulders, and she was grateful to all of them. She’d always liked Rivka; after the last few months, she’d come to understand exactly why Elizabeth approved of her son’s choice so strongly.

  She’s going to do well, Honor thought. She’s exactly what Roger needs. If anyone can keep him sane when he finds himself on his mother’s throne, it’ll be Rivka.

  Not that Rivka didn’t have some qualms of her own. Even now, Honor could taste the undercurrent of trepidation in the composed young woman’s mind-glow. Becoming the future queen consort of the Star Kingdom of Manticore at the age of twenty would have been daunting enough for anyone; becoming the future empress consort of the Star Empire of Manticore was even worse. And the fact that the Star Empire in question faced a fight for its very life against all the ponderous might of the Solarian League was downright terrifying. But somehow Rivka had coped with all of that, and as she and Roger looked at one another, the clean, focused taste of her mind-glow, the joy and eagerness which infused it—and Roger’s—despite her mother’s death and all of those worries, all of those future threats, told Honor how well they both had chosen.

  The procession reached the groom and his party and dispersed into its perfectly choreographed components, and Hamish Alexander-Harrington, standing with Roger, smiled at his wife as she stepped up beside Rivka and took the bridal bouquet—made up of native blossoms from each of the old Star Kingdom’s habitable planets—before the bride stepped forward to join Roger under the white silk canopy of the chuppah. The cathedral roof had been modified with a retractable skylight above the sanctuary to let sunlight stream down from the deep blue heavens of Manticore, and Honor smiled back at Hamish across that shaft of radience, remembering how much simpler (if unexpected) her own wedding had been. Then she stepped back with the flowers as Rivka took Roger’s hand and both of them turned to face Bishop Robert Telmachi and Rabbi Yaakov O’Reilly.

  Planning a wedding within the traditions and canon of the Catholic Church and Judaism had required a certain flexibility of all concerned. In fact, there would be two weddings this day, and the formal pronunciation that Roger and Rivka were man and wife would wait until both had been completed. One or two of the protocolists had seemed a little taken aback by the notion, but it was important—to both families, and especially in light of Shamirah Rosenfeld’s absence. And at least Honor’s experiences on Grayson had accustomed her to dealing with far thornier problems than this! She, Telmachi, and O’Reilly had taken the entire project in stride.

  The Archbishop of Manticore and his Jewish colleague didn’t simply smile—they beamed. Their eyes were alight with happiness, and Honor could physically taste the joy within them. She’d come to know Telmachi well over the past few years, and she recognized his personal joy—his gladness for two young people who were deeply important to him—and the almost equally powerful joy as he recognized this wedding’s healing power for an entire star nation. She knew O’Reilly less well, and he was a calmer, less effusive man by nature, yet in some ways his joy as he’d watched the young woman he’d known since birth walk towards him was even brighter and stronger than Telmachi’s.

  The rabbi recognized this wedding’s healing power just as clearly as Telmachi, yet there was a deeper echo of Honor’s own awareness of what a huge and ultimately unfair weight those hopes and expectations were to lay upon such youthful shoulders. But as the people of the Star Kingdom always had, in times of trouble they looked to the house of Winton. They were part of that house themselves—all of them—when it came down to it, because of the Constitution’s requirement that the heir marry outside the aristocracy, and the Winton dynasty had done far better than most at remembering that bond and the responsibilities which went with it. The deep compact between the Star Kingdom’s subjects and their rulers went far beyond the mere letter of the law, and that compact turned Roger—and especially Rivka—into the promise of the future.

  O’Reilly looked at Roger, and the crown prince handed him an illuminated scroll. The rabbi unrolled it and looked out over the packed pews of the Christian church.

  “For our non-Jewish friends,” he said with a smile, “this is the ketubah, the wedding contract between Rivka and Roger. It forms an important part of our tradition, and it is part of that tradition that it be read aloud at this time.”

  He looked back down at the document, signed by Roger and Rivka and witnessed by himself, by Chaim Rosenfeld, and by Justin Zyrr-Winton, then began to read aloud in Aramaic. Honor couldn’t speak that language, but she didn’t have to. She’d read the ketubah in translation, and even if she hadn’t she could taste the clean, joyous communion flowing between Rivka and her groom as the words were read.

  O’Reilly finished, rerolled the scroll, and stepped back slightly, and it was Telmachi’s turn to look out over that same church.

  “Dearly beloved,” he began, “we are gathered together here in the side of God, and in the face of this company, to join together this man and this woman in holy matrimony; which is an honorable estate, instituted of God, signifying unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his Church: which holy estate Christ adorned and beautified with his presence and first miracle that he wrought in Cana of Galilee …”

  The ancient, simple words spilled out into the hushed, listening silence, and Honor Alexander-Harrington reached out as well. She touched Hamish’s mind-glow as he stood close beside her, and Emily’s mind-glow, where her life-support chair sat at the end of the front pew on the bride’s side of the cathedral. She reached out farther, touching her mother and feeling the happiness within her. Touching her father, and tasting the pain still burning at his core … and the healing sifting down to it, as it sifted down to her own, borne upon those ageless, joyous words. The entire cathedral was filled to the bursting point, not simply with human bodies, but with human minds, and thoughts, and hopes, and joy. They pressed in upon her from every side, soaking into her like the sea, but this was a sea of light, of energy—of focus and purpose and promise. It flowed into her like the sun itself, and tears starred her vision as she found herself wishing desperately that everyone else in that Cathedral could have tasted and known what she tasted and knew in that moment.

  It was a simple ceremony, despite its importance and despite the reconciliation of the two faiths represented in it. It was O’Reilly who officially pronounced them man and wife, but it was Telmachi who knelt to place the glass on the carpet before Roger Winton. The crown prince took Rivka’s ringed right hand in his, raised his foot, and brought his heel down on the glass, hard. The clear, crisp shattering sound filled the hushed cathedral, and Roger looked directly into Rivka’s eyes.

  “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem”—he recited the even more ancient words softly but clearly, his voice carrying throughout the church—“let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roo
f of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.”

  He reached out, cupping her face between his palms. Then he leaned forward, and their lips met at last.

  * * *

  “I’ve been to some remarkable weddings in my time,” Jacques Benton-Ramirez y Chou said, “but this one …”

  He waved his champagne glass at the glittering crowd thronging the grounds of Mount Royal Palace. Security was tight, and treecats were much in evidence. Many of them rode on shoulders threaded throughout that crowd, and others—dozens of others—perched cheerfully on the branches of landscaped trees, on ornamental gazebos and roofs. They could be heard every now and then, even through the steady surf of human voices and the music of the live orchestra, bleeking to one another as they enjoyed the human mind-glows swirling about them like rich, heady wine. But there was a perpetually poised, ready watchfulness even in the midst of their delight, and armed air cars and sting ships loitered overhead while the personnel of half a dozen star nations’ security watched the ’cats like miners watching canaries in some ancient coal mine.

  No one at the reception could possibly tune out that omnipresent security, yet most of the guests had become accustomed to their guardians’ presence. There might be new wrinkles to the threats those guardians were deployed to counter, but there would always be threats, and no one was prepared to let that awareness dampen this day.

  Honor had finally managed to slip away to steal a few moments with her uncle and her family. She’d given her matron of honor’s speech, and with the assistance of scores of personnel from Dame Arethea’s office, she’d made sure the thousands of wedding gifts Rivka and Roger had received had all been properly stored and labeled. Rivka had announced her intention of sending personal thank-you notes for every single one of them, and Honor felt sure the redoubtable young woman would do exactly that … however long it took.

  With that task out of the way, she’d disappeared with Rivka long enough to help her change out of her wedding gown and into the equally expensive (and equally simple yet elegant) formal court dress badged in Winton blue and silver to which she was now entitled. Of course, Honor’s “help” had consisted mainly of offering moral support as Rivka looked forward to her very first day as the crown princess consort of Manticore. It would have been unfair to say Rivka had experienced a case of cold feet at the prospect, but her toes had definitely felt the chill as she prepared to shoulder the public responsibilities which would be hers for the rest of her life.

  Honor had felt the way the young woman braced herself, straightening metaphysical shoulders to bear up under that burden. And as she had, she’d realized that one of the reasons Rivka had been so strongly drawn to her was that Honor, too, had been born of yeoman stock. Neither of them had ever dreamed, during their childhood, of ascending to such dizzying heights, and as she’d tasted Rivka’s trepidations surging once more, she’d put an arm around the younger woman’s shoulders in a brief, comforting hug.

  “It’s not so bad, really,” she’d said, and Rivka had turned her head to give her a smile that was ever so slightly lopsided.

  “Are my willies that obvious?”

  “Well, I do hang around with treecats, you know,” Honor had replied with a smile of her own. “For that matter, I didn’t exactly start out in this crowd myself.”

  “Your mother did, though,” Rivka had pointed out.

  “Yep, and she ran away from it with indecent haste as soon as she got the opportunity. And I promise you, she didn’t bring me up to be queen of the ball, either!” Honor had snorted with amusement at the very thought. “I’m not saying it didn’t help—some—to be descended from the Benton-Ramirez y Chou family, but they were only family, if you know what I mean, and Mother made darned sure it stayed that way. I think that’s probably one of the reasons I stayed as far away from politics as I could for as long as I could, and I never saw any of this coming until Benjamin dumped the steadholdership on me. And then the Queen—your mother-in-law, now that I think about it—decided to open up her toy box!” She’d shaken her head. “Believe me, it’s survivable. And the reason you’re here today, married to Roger, is because of who you are, Rivka, not what you are or what anyone expects you to be.” She smiled again, more gently. “You just go on being you, and you’re going to do fine. Trust me.”

  Now, as Honor looked across to where Roger and Rivka stood on the terrace, smiling easily, laughing as they chatted with one guest after another, she knew how right she’d been.

  “It is an impressive guest list, I suppose, Jacques,” Hamish said now, his tone judicious.

  “‘Impressive’?” another voice repeated. “What? Is that your studied understatement of the day?”

  Honor turned with a chuckle as a life-support chair slid up beside her.

  “I think it’s probably as good a description as Uncle Jacques’s ‘remarkable,’ Emily,” she said. “And you have to remember the source. Neither of them is all that good with the language, you know.”

  “You’ll pay for that later,” Hamish promised her with a devilish glint, and Nimitz bleeked a laugh on Honor’s shoulder.

  “I await the moment with trepidation,” Honor told her husband sweetly, then turned back to her uncle. “However, I have to say that in your own language-challenged ways, you’re both right. I wonder if there’s ever been a wedding quite like it?”

  “I doubt it,” Emily said. “In fact, I’m pretty darn sure there hasn’t been one like it since the Diaspora got everybody off Old Earth, anyway! Let’s see, we’ve got the Empress of Manticore, the President of the Republic of Haven, the Protector of Grayson, the chairman of the Beowulf Board of Directors, Queen Berry, and the Andermani emperor’s first cousin. Not to mention your own humble self as Steadholder Harrington and the commander of the Grand Fleet, followed by a scattering of mere planetary grand dukes, dukes, earls, members of the Havenite cabinet, three other members of the Beowulf Board of Directors, the chairman of the Alliance joint chiefs of staff, the First Space Lord, the Havenite chief of naval operations, the Beowulfan chief of naval operations, High Admiral Yanakov, Admiral Yu, two or three dozen ambassadors, and God alone only knows who else. I’m sure there’ve been other weddings that had the same guest count or better, but bringing all of these people together in one place?”

  She shook her head, and Honor found herself nodding in agreement.

  “I wish those cretins in Old Chicago could see this,” her uncle said in a much more somber tone. She raised an eyebrow at him, and he shrugged. “They still just don’t get it. I think the true problem is that nobody outside their own little world is actually quite real to them. We’re all just inconveniently obstreperous tokens they’re moving around on a game board somewhere. All that really matters is that damned echo chamber they live in.”

  “That’s how we got into this mess,” Hamish agreed, “but I’ll guarantee you there are some other sounds leaking into that ‘echo chamber’ of yours by now, Jacques! They don’t like it, and they’re trying to stuff their fingers into their ears, but they can’t keep it up much longer.”

  “They’ve kept it up long enough to leave all of us one hell of a mess to clean up,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou replied, and Hamish nodded.

  “No argument there. The question in my mind is how long they’re going to be able to stay on the back of the hexapuma. I think they’ve pretty much demonstrated that they’re determined to go on trying to game the situation until the ship sinks under them. But when that happens, when someone else steps into their place, how’s that someone else going to react? That’s going to be the key to the way this whole thing shakes out in the end, Jacques.”

  “And to how many more people we have to kill before it’s all over.” Honor’s mouth tightened as the chill of her own words touched the warmth and pleasure of the day, and Nimitz made a soft sound and stirred on her shoulder.

  “And that,” her husband agreed, putting an arm around her and hugging her tightly. “I’d like to tell
you we wouldn’t have to kill—or lose—anybody else, but it’s not going to work out that way.”

  “I know.” She hugged him back and sighed. “I know. And I promise I’ll try not to rain all over Roger and Rivka’s party.”

  “Oh, your credit’s pretty good with the happy couple, Honor,” Emily told her with a chuckle. “I don’t think they’ll hold a minor drizzle or two against you. No cloudbursts, now, though!”

  “No, Ma’am,” Honor promised obediently with a demure little smile, and her uncle laughed.

  “You three deserve each other,” he said, smiling warmly at all of them. “And I’m glad you’ve got each other. Hang on to it, because, trust me, it’s something special.”

  “I agree,” Honor said softly, reaching down to touch Emily’s working hand, then looked up as the orchestra stopped playing and another round of official toasts began. It was Chyang Benton-Ramirez’s turn to propose the first toast, and afternoon sunlight burned golden in the heart of his wine as he raised his glass. Their sheltered little nook was too far away for any of them to hear his actual words, but they heard the applause when he finished.

  “What?” she heard, and looked at her uncle.

  “What ‘what’?” she asked, cocking her head slightly.

  “You’re thinking deep thoughts again,” Jacques Benton-Ramirez y Chou accused her. “Getting ready to find something else to worry about, if I know you!”

  “I am not!” she protested.

  “Oh, yes, you are,” he shot back. “Nimitz?”

  He, Hamish, and Emily all looked at Nimitz, who gazed back thoughtfully for a moment … and then nodded.

  “Oh, you traitor!” she told the ’cat.