“Ghen!” all said.
It is hard, Reader, to find words for the dead when one has no religion. One cannot say the deceased is in a better place, or that they are better off—though perhaps it is so that not to exist is better sometimes than to suffer in the world. One cannot offer prayers, though one may light the votive lamps and send them drifting to the sky. It would be a long while before I lit a proper lamp for Ghen, as it would be a long while before I found myself in a shrine, and when that time came his was but one of several lamps released unto the sky. I think it was Orodes who said the first act of civilization—the moment culture was born—was when those ancient pygmies, our forefathers, held the first funeral. The bright line, he writes, between man and what was before man is drawn by that dignity with which we honor the dead. Man does not leave her dead to rot, but burns or buries or builds, protecting the body and the memory of the fallen. There is civilization: its cornerstone a grave.
“Don’t seem right,” Switch said, having drained his own cup. A rueful smile pulled across his chiseled face. “If it were one of us, that big bastard’d be running down the whole list of dumb shit we did. He wouldn’t have gone all solemn.” He rubbed his sleeve over his eyes; a weak and soundless laugh escaped him. Pallino and I joined in. “If you told me he’d be the one to go first . . . before me . . .” He shook his head, and Pallino clapped him on the shoulder.
“You can’t let that get to you,” Elara said. “It’s just like fighting in the pits, lad. There ain’t no reason he died instead of you or Had or that Greenlaw woman. Like you just said to Had, it ain’t your fault.”
Switch nodded, shut his eyes. When they opened they no longer shimmered with unfallen tears. “No, I . . . I know.”
Of all people, it was Valka who cut in. “He’s still a part of us.” Her strange Tavrosi accent gave a weight to her words. “Every memory we have is still here. I did not know him well as you, but I think you’re right: he would not want us all solemn. Come!” And she told a story about how Ghen had gotten into a fight with one of Jinan’s aljanhi commanders after Ghen made fun of the man’s hat. The man had sent Ghen a matching hat, hoping to shame the Emeshi myrmidon. But Ghen had no shame, and had worn the thing in a heartbeat, and the Jaddian commander had backed down at once. “’Twas the ugliest thing I’d ever seen,” Valka said. “It had these green feathers all over. Where the aljanhi got another I’ve no idea. But Ghen wore the bloody thing for a week.”
“I missed that!” Elara proclaimed, laughing.
So it went on for the better part of an hour, each of us swapping stories about Ghen. Switch recounted a story of how Ghen had kept leaving him fake love notes back in the coliseum at Emesh. “I knew it was him at once. Bastard could hardly spell, but I let on I thought it was this chappie up from Tolbaran I’d had eyes for—this was before you’d come along, Had. He kept it up for weeks.”
“And you just let him?”
Switch grinned. “Yeah! I think he was mocking me for . . . well, you know what he was like, but I kept letting on how much I liked them. He didn’t know what to do with that!”
Pallino had another story, about how Ghen had stepped in at a bar on Ardistama, not so long after we’d left Emesh. “To teach these local boys some manners, he said. To impress the girls, I said. Ghen tossed those blighters round like they were sacks of flour. I ain’t never seen grown men run so fast.”
By the end we were all laughing, and what tears fell were not all of grief. Even I, who among those gathered was perhaps the most somber—having shouldered the blame for Ghen’s death—even I was moved more to laughter than to sorrow or shame. We have little control over our ends, and none over what passes beyond them. But if we live well and truly, those who follow on may remember us for our lives and not our deaths.
Perhaps it was for that reason I blurred the circumstances of Ghen’s death. It was not that I lied, but that I valorized those final moments because the truth is so much larger than those material facts of the world. Better to recall his rough laugh than imagine whatever horrid sounds he’d made with damaged lungs in those final moments in the tea house.
Better the reassuring fable than the clinical truth. Fables are more real than reality. Such are your stories about me—many of which I began, knowing the power of stories as I do. I could not have made peace at the Battle of Aptucca years later if my legend were not more true than myself. By this fact of human nature and belief, we are made larger than ourselves: some better, some worse, some only more complicated. Thus two and two is made five, and so we grow beyond ourselves.
CHAPTER 10
JINAN
OVER THE LONG YEARS since Pharos, when we had acquired the two Norman ships, Jinan’s quarters in the captain’s suite of the Balmung had grown more comfortable one item at a time. The ceramic basin was hers—used for the ritual cleansing of face and hands every morning—and the incense tapers, so often unused and forgotten about in their bronze holder. The various drawers and cabinets in one wall hid behind a red silk curtain she’d found in a Pharos bazaar after Whent’s surrender. It showed a heroic figure fighting a smoke-belching dragon outside the gates of a walking city, the figures all done in cloth-of-gold. She’d liked the dragon, she said.
It is strange how we humans make our homes. We arrive in a place and—finding that place foreign and uncomfortable—place objects just as foreign in it until it becomes lived in and all strangeness is gone.
“Jinan,” I began, unbuttoning my uniform jacket and peeling it away, “we should talk about—” The Jaddians, they say, are men of words only when all actions are exhausted. It is so. She was on me mid-sentence, stooping slightly to press her lips to mine. I banged my head against a cabinet door as she pinned me, and winced. She made a deeper, older sound, and I felt myself responding to some Bacchanalian impulse more ancient than the human capacity for thought. My hands found her trim waist and the slim curve of hips; squeezed. It took all my self-control and my least favorite of the scholiasts’ stoic aphorisms—Love consumes—to stop myself and say, “Can we talk about this?”
Small teeth pressed themselves against the fullness of that bottom lip, and she drew back, keeping one arm planted on the wall behind me as she looked down her nose at me. “About what?”
“About Bassander,” I said, not letting go of her waist, either, “about the council meeting and . . . and going home.”
A breath rushed out of her—I could smell the little wine we had shared at the end of the meal, and she broke away, claiming a seat by her small desk, long fingers tugging at her braid, beginning to unwind it. “You are unbelievable. Can you not let it go for a day? Two? We do not know what was on that terminal you recovered. I’ve said a hundred times.” She pulled her azure ribbon free and shook out her hair; it was like a falling of summer shade beneath some flowering tree. “You are always like this.”
Always. That was a bad sign. I could not afford to make this discussion about always. It needed to remain about now—and about the hurt I felt like a knife in the ribs . . . like a plasma shot in the back.
I found suddenly that I could not look at her—it was like looking at the sun. “It isn’t that,” I said, pacing to cover that shame. “You took his side.” Those words said, I found the strength in me and turning faced her and repeated, “You took his side.” She was unbuttoning her jacket—I wanted to seize her fidgeting hands. I settled for slow breathing instead. Fear is death to reason. And it was fear I felt, not anger. Fear that she would not understand—or would at least fail to see my point of view, which was at any rate so valid as her own. Fear that we would fight, as we had already. Fear that I was losing her to the work. To the mission.
Fear.
That oldest and most animal of demons, older than trees, old perhaps as the trilobites who shuddered at the approach of the predator when Earth was young. Its fingers were on me, cold as she was not. “He’s always hated me, Jinan. Even b
efore we met, you and I.” I gestured past the black metal walls, as if Bassander were some omnipresent force. “That’s all this is about. It’s not about going back to fight or Bassander’s outsized sense of duty. He’s doing this because he doesn’t like me.”
Jinan paused in her removal of her jacket, eyes downcast in thought. At length she skinned out of it and tossed it onto the foot of the bed in its recess in the wall. Massaging her eyes with one hand, she said, “You are being dramatic.”
Must everything you say sound like it’s straight out of a Eudoran melodrama?
I shook my head to clear it. “I’m not. He’s tried to keep me from helping since the Cielcin crashed at Emesh.”
“You are no soldier, love.”
“I am now!” I said, and pointed at myself. “I’ve been fighting for twelve years, Jinan. Twelve years. All across the Veil. Three more if you count every bloody day in Borosevo. I’m as much a soldier as any of you. He just doesn’t . . . believe.”
Jinan’s brows arched, supporting a cathedral of skepticism. “Believe? In what, mia qal? In Vorgossos?”
“In peace!” I almost shouted. “In an end to all this. It’s like I told Olorin: soldiers don’t end wars, not usually. Wars end after the fighting’s done, not during.”
She rolled her eyes. “It is not that simple.”
“Of course it’s not that simple!” I sagged onto the footlocker against the far wall that held all I’d shuttled over from the Pharaoh, hands open before me. “What part of this is simple, Jinan? We are fighting a war of extinction with the Cielcin. Where do you think that will end? How many more worlds do we have to let them burn before all is said and done? How many of their ships will we destroy? How many billion dead? On both sides?”
Jinan was silent a long time, as if she were lost deep beneath the surface of those dark eyes. In a voice like dry leaves, she asked, “Why does this matter so much to you, Hadrian? Making peace?”
“Why?” I almost laughed, lurched uneasily to my feet. “Why?” I searched the gloss ceiling for an answer, for the words to an answer so plain to me it had needed no words until that moment. I had wanted to help, hadn’t I? On Emesh, when the crisis came, when the Cielcin ship had crashed. Everyone at the Calagah dig site had been running away from the noise and fire. I had run toward it, had begged that Veisi centurion to let me go with the relief force. It had been the only thing to do. And then . . . “You weren’t there, Jinan. In the bastille in Borosevo. You didn’t see what the Chantry . . . did.”
I could smell it. The copper smell of blood, the stench of filth and sweat and rotting meat. Burning lead, shattered teeth, the torment and torture and the endless questions.
Why have you come to Emesh?
When does the next invasion fleet arrive?
Why have you come to Emesh?
Why have you come to Emesh?
Why have you come to Emesh?
Man’s inhumanity. What could be more human?
“You saw the scar on the planet?” I asked. “The old city? Suren?” She had. “I saw scars, too. I saw what the Chantry did to that Cielcin captain, Jinan. I’m not blind. I know the evil that we do. I was part of it. I’m still part of it.” Pacing about the room, I remembered the Umandh slaves in Borosevo, the coloni xenobites scarred and abused, their stony hides chiseled when they disobeyed. And then there were the human serfs, the ragged poor as I had been—choked and dying in the streets, wracked by plague and unhelped by the palatines in their castle. “They’re good people, Jinan.”
“Who?”
“Our people,” I said, encompassing the fleet with a hand-wave. “Switch, Pallino, Otavia, Ilex, everyone. They should not have to live like this. No one should have to live like this.”
A sad smile stole over my captain’s face, and sharply was I reminded that she had been a soldier for far longer than I. “Why do you think we do what we do? What do you think an army is for? So that the rest of the people can go on living, Hadrian.”
“It’s intolerable,” I said, “It’s intolerable that good people should spend their lives fighting.”
Jinan pushed back in her chair, crossing her arms in a way that emphasized the strength of her shoulders beneath the white shirt. “Better good men do what we do than bad ones.”
“It would be better if no one had to do it at all.”
“Then you will wait until the stars are embers and all men are dead,” Jinan said. “The need for soldiers will not go away when this war is done.” She shook her head, blew air out past her teeth. “You take a lot on yourself.”
“That’s not what I mean,” I said, and fretted over resuming my seat. Deciding against it, I pressed on. “That’s why I’m here. Because better me than . . . than someone like my brother.” Jinan knew a little of Crispin, and I saw her face flicker. Was that doubt? I couldn’t sit down. “I know I can’t stop war, Jinan. But if I can make this war just a little bit better, than maybe—maybe—a few good men can stay at home, and maybe we can go home when it’s done. You and I.”
Only I had no home. I would not return to Emesh whence I came, where lay an arranged marriage to trap me in the arms of Anaïs Mataro, who by now was twice my age, a woman grown. I could not return to Delos, to the house of my father, whence I fled in terror of him and his plans for me. To Jadd, then? To Ubar? To retire and run Jinan’s family spice business while she finished her service to her prince? I imagined myself living out my days in peace, a silly old country squire with a passion for museums and alien artifacts—a passel of children underfoot. In Jadd, it was said, the genetic keys that held the palatines in thrall to the Imperium were held by the nobiles themselves, by the eali al’aqran of the Principalities. There perhaps whatever proprietary code there was in my blood might be undone, and Jinan and I might start a family.
I went to her and knelt like a knight receiving the sword at his investiture, took her hands in mine. “Bassander’s way is just more fighting. We’ve had almost four hundred years of fighting now. It’s not enough. If I could make peace with one Cielcin clan, that clan could help make peace with the others. Our prisoners can unlock the end of the war, and we can go home.” My hand squeezed hers, and she returned the gesture, smiling but sadly. “We could be together, Jinan. You and I. In Jadd or back on Ubar or wherever you want.”
“Ubar?” She smiled, and a piece of me broke. “Hadrian, please. I do not know what to say to you.” We’d spoken of this before. So often when she spoke of home it seemed there was some piece left unspoken, as if it were a hand lurking just below the surface of some deep water waiting to drag me down. Her fingers squeezed mine, but the smile slackened, as though it remained on her face only by the half-attention of her muscles—and not at all by her heart. “We do not know if we have anything, and even if we did, there is no guarantee we could find this . . . Vorgossos place.”
My hands slipped out of hers and I slumped until I sat at her feet. “So you keep saying.”
“What are we supposed to do?” she asked, shifting her legs apart and stooping over me. “You heard Bassander. Another planet destroyed. That is more than a dozen since we left Emesh. Do you expect him to do nothing? He has orders from his commander.”
I ground my teeth. “I had hoped he’d see sense.”
“Sense?” she asked. “And do what? Disobey orders? We are talking about Bassander Lin, are we not?” She had a point, but she wasn’t finished. “Mia qal, he has given decades to this venture. We all have. We have been chasing ghosts now for so long, and I am not convinced we are any closer to an ending here than we were when we started. We lost people at Pharos. We lost people here. You have to see it from his point of view: we’ve been fighting battles that have nothing to do with the crusade. Everyone we have lost should have been back fighting the real battle.”
“I have to see it from his point of view?” I turned my face away from her where it rested on her
thigh. “Jinan . . . what if . . . what if Ilex comes back with a lead? The coordinates to this . . . Extra trading post? Would you go with me if Bassander refused?” Refused. The thought lodged itself in me like shrapnel in an innocent chest. I could refuse. I was glad Jinan could not see my face to see the way those words lit something in my violet eyes. It was a thought.
The muscles tightened in her legs beneath me, as if she’d been stunned. “What?”
Turning, I looked up at her and—catching her hand—kissed it and did not let go. “Hauptmann is not your commander,” I said. “We go on to Vorgossos, you and I.”
“You should not be joking about these things.”
“I know,” I said, but the damage had been done. Ideas are like sparks and my mind was dry with exhaustion and the need for new invention. I blazed, but shuttered my eyes, burying my face in her lap. I was tired also, and pressed thin as a sample under glass. “Jinan, if we go back . . . I’ll never see you again.” She would return to her people, and they to their own mission.
Already tense, she stiffened. “I know.”
“I don’t . . . don’t want . . . I want us to stay together.” I broke off and looked up again at her oval face, at the canny arch of brow above the wide, deep eyes; the faint scar white on her golden cheek; those lips and the sharp tongue behind them and the knowledge they would as soon smile at me as that tongue might cut. “I love you, Jinan.”
There was that smile, and the throaty voice saying, “Well, you’re not wrong.” She tossed her hair. I pushed her chidingly in the shoulder, and she laughed, leaning toward me. “I love you, too, you strange man.”
I snorted, but she kissed me all the same.
I could taste the fire there, the desperation, but cannot say if it was on her tongue or mine. Critics of the oldest stories used to say that men believe women to be goals, prizes to be won or bought. They did not understand. No man could think such a thing and remain a man, for to love is in part the attempt to become a creature worthy of love. That Jinan was worthy was self-evident as the stars. It was my own worthiness I questioned. Like the prince in every storybook legend, like Cid Arthur and Tristan and Ram, I knew I might become worthy only through my deeds and present myself to her as a knight before the throne of some mighty queen. So love is not merely an emotion, but a vow made one to another. A vow renewed in each moment, until it hardly needs making at all.
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