Armiger closed his hand over Megan’s breast. She smiled at the touch, and lay back on the satin.
One candle burned outside their canopy bed. Its light turned her skin deep gold. He slid his fingertips along her collarbone, and kissed her belly lightly. Her stomach undulated from the touch. “Mm,” she murmured. “You are becoming a better lover every time, you know that?”
He grinned at her, but said nothing. Feeling strong tonight, he had conjured fresh strawberries, and crushed a few over her chest as sauce. He could still taste it, a bit.
He had told her that the strawberries came from the queen’s private garden. Megan would have been upset to know he was wasting his precious energies on an indulgence.
She wrapped her legs around him when he came up to breathe, and ground against him. They both laughed, ending the sound with a deep kiss. Then he entered her, for the third time this evening.
Night breezes flapped the curtains; this was the only sound other than their own. Some part of him was amazed at the quiet, but then he had never been under siege before. Perhaps silence was the inevitable response to being trapped for so long. It was the silence of waiting.
She watched as he came, then drew him down next to her. “I’m done,” she said. “You finished me off!”
He was still panting. “Um,” was all he managed. Megan laughed.
For a few hours at a time, he could exchange Armiger the engine for Armiger the man. At moments like this, he knew he treasured such times. He also knew that in a minute or an hour, cold rationality would steal over him, like a settling dew, both bringing him back to his deeply treasured Self, and driving out the warmth Megan made him feel.
Spontaneously, he hugged her tightly. She gasped.
“What is it?”
“Nothing.” For a few moments he couldn’t bring himself to let go. When he did, he flopped back, staring at the embroidered canopy. It was one of the few pieces of bedding in the palace that had not been shredded for the thousand and one needs of a military occupation: bandages, lashing broken spars together, enshrouding the dead. The queen, he thought idly, was unfair; she would never make a decent general if she wasn’t consistent with her sacrifices.
“No, what?”
He blinked. Whatever he had been feeling, it was gone already. “I don’t know,” he whispered.
“What don’t you know?” She propped herself up on her elbow, peering at him in the faint richness of candlelight.
Armiger waved a hand vaguely. “Who I am,” he said at last, “at times like these.”
“Yourself,” she said. Megan put a hand on his chest. “You’re yourself.” She looked away. “It’s practically the only time.”
He smelled strawberries. Strange; he barely remembered doing that. Something was slipping away, moment by moment. He remembered other evenings with her, when after turning away from her he had felt instead that something returned to him.
To forestall the change, he rolled on his side, putting his nose to hers. “Am I that cold?”
“Not right now.”
He ran his hand up her flank. “Why do you stay with me, then? I don’t know how to please you…”
“What do you think you’ve been doing the last three hours?”
“Ah.” But he didn’t know what he’d been doing. Something that felt to the body exactly like rage had taken him over—but it was the opposite of rage in the things it made him do, and in the purity of the release it gave. Rage he understood. Armiger had come lately to identify it as the single emotion he could recall from his time subsumed into the greater identity of the god 3340. Whether that rage was the god’s or his, who could tell? There was no way to know, any more than he could distinguish where his own consciousness had left off, and that of 3340 began.
This, like nearly everything about himself, he could never hope to explain to Megan.
She shook him by the shoulder. “Stop it!”
“Hum?”
“You’re thinking again! It’s the middle of the night. You don’t have to be thinking now.”
“Ah.” He chuckled, and cupped her breast. “I’m sorry. But I’m not sleepy.”
“You don’t really sleep anyway.” She yawned extravagantly. “But I need to.”
“Go ahead. I’ll read.” He nodded to the gigantic stack of books by the bed.
She laughed, and lay back. For a while he watched the jumbled heap of hair snuggle itself deeper into the pillows. Then she said, almost inaudibly, “Which do you prefer?”
Armiger leaned over her and kissed her cheek. “Which what do I prefer?”
“Do you prefer making love, or reading?” He voice held a teasing note, but he had learned there were frequently hidden needs behind her teasing questions.
“To read is to make love to the world,” he said. “But to make love to a woman is to feel like the world is reading you.”
She smiled, not comprehending, and fell asleep.
Leaving Armiger the man behind, or so he imagined, he stood to dress. Freed from the need for dialogue, his mind fell in upon itself, and the myriad other sides of Armiger the god awoke.
All night, as he made love to Megan, these other sides of his Self had been thinking, planning, raging and debating in the higher echoes of his consciousness. He had read sixteen books yesterday, and had been revising his opinions about Ventus and the Winds as he assimilated the knowledge. Now he stood for several minutes, fingers touching the leather cover of the next volume he intended to absorb. He was not so much contemplating as watching the vast edifice of his understanding of Ventus shift, and settle, and grow new entranceways and wings.
He had discovered something: the Winds were not mad. They were up to something.
Armiger cursed softly. He no longer saw the candle flame, or felt the hard cover of the book. For it was all there in the histories and philosophical inquiries, if one knew how to read the signs. The Winds acted capriciously, but everyone knew they ultimately acted in the interests of Nature. They were the guides of the terraforming process, he knew. Terraforming a planet was neither a quick process nor one that had an end. The climate of Ventus would never achieve equilibrium; without the constant intervention of the planet’s ruling spirits, the air would cool and the oxygen/carbon cycles oscillate out of control. The world would experience alternate phases of hyperoxygenation and asphyxiation, coupled with disastrous atmospheric circulation locks; parts of the globe would be under almost constant rain, others would never receive rain at all. Everything would die, in the long run.
The Winds exercised great intelligence and forbearance. They played the clouds and ocean waves of Ventus like the most grand and complex instruments. Their symphonic teamwork was perfect.
So: capricious they might be, but the Winds were not purposeless. Everyone on and off Ventus knew this. When it came to dealing with other intelligent entities, however, they did at first seem mad. The histories he had been reading, which were more extensive than those available offworld, told of massacres and blessings, following no apparent pattern, which the poor human residents of this world had struggled for centuries to justify and predict. The accepted theory was that they viewed human activity as an assault on the ecosystem, and acted to defend it. Armiger had read enough by now to know that it simply wasn’t so.
Throughout the history of the world, men and women had appeared who claimed to be able to communicate with the Winds. Sometimes they were hanged as witches. Sometimes they were able to prove their claims, and then they founded religions.
The Winds were difficult entities to worship, because they had the annoying characteristic of possessing minds of their own. Gods, one philosophical wag had commented, should conveniently remain on the altar, rather than rampaging indiscriminately across the land.
The Winds were utterly inconsistent about enforcing their ecological rules where it came to Man. He had seen it himself; there were smelters in some of the larger towns, pouring black smoke into the atmosphere, while the tiny waft of sulphur dioxide he had used in chemical warfare in one battle had cost Armiger his entire army. The Winds had obliterated every man involved in the engagement. Armiger had stood helplessly on the crown of the hill where he was directing his troops, and watched as they all died.
He had felt nothing at the time. Remembering now, he suppressed an urge to pick up the book he touched, and throw it through the window.
Something was going on here. The Winds were neither malicious, nor mad, nor were they indifferent to humanity. They were obeying some tangle of rules he simply hadn’t seen yet. If he could find out what it was…
Something made him turn. There was no one in the room, and Megan hadn’t moved. Nonetheless, he sensed someone nearby.
A woman was weeping out in the hallway.
*
Armiger dressed, then blew out the candle, which itself had been an extravagance. In his time here he had heard more weeping than laughter. There was nothing unusual in it. But without knowing exactly why, he found himself walking hesitantly to the door.
It opened soundlessly onto a pitch-dark hallway. There were windows at either end of the corridor, but they didn’t illuminate, only served as contrast to the blackness within.
For a moment Armiger stood blind as any man, surprised at the helplessness of the sensation. Then he remembered to slide the frequency of his vision up and down until he found a wavelength in which he could see. A few months ago, that action would have been automatic. He scowled as he looked around for the source of the sound.
The woman was huddled on the floor halfway down the hall. She cradled something in her lap. An infant, perhaps? Armiger opened his mouth to speak, then thought better. He cleared his throat.
She started visibly and looked up. “Who’s there?” Her head bobbed back and forth as she tried to see. She was middle-aged, matronly, dressed in a peasant frock. Strange that she should be in this part of the palace… no, perhaps it was stranger that these halls hadn’t yet been turned into a barracks.
“I heard you,” he said. “Are you injured?”
It was what he would have asked a man. He didn’t know what to ask when a woman cried. But she nodded. “My arm,” she whimpered, nodding down at it. “Broken.” As if the admission cost her more than the injury, she began to cry all the harder.
“Has it been seen to?” He knelt beside her.
“No!”
“Let me see.” He gently reached to touch her elbow. She winced. Feeling his way, he found the break, a clean one, in the tibia. The bones had slid apart slightly, and would have to be set. He told her this.
“Can you do it?”
“Yes.” She had a tattered shawl draped over her shoulders. “I’ll use this to immobilize it. Just a moment.” He needed something for a splint. The furniture had been completely stripped out of here, but the walls were wood, with a good deal of ornamental panelling and stripping. Armiger found a beveled edge to one of the panels, and with several quick jerks, pulled the wood strip away from the wall. It groaned like a lost soul as it came. He broke it over his knee and returned to the woman.
He didn’t warn her before taking her forearm and pulling it straight. She yelped, but it was all over before she had time to tense or really feel the pain. Armiger aligned the stripping with her wristbones and wrapped it quickly with strips from her shawl. Then he bound the whole assembly in a sling about her neck.
“Why wasn’t it set earlier?” From the swelling, he judged she had broken it earlier in the day.
“I shouldn’t be here,” she said.
“That’s not what I asked.”
“Yes, it is you see because the soldiers, they, some of them are hurt, so bad, and there’s not enough people to tend them. I, I went there, but one man, his stomach was open, and he was dying but they wouldn’t leave him, and another his eyes were burned somehow. And I stood at the doorway and they were all hurt so badly, I, I couldn’t go in there with just my silly broken arm. I couldn’t…” She wept, clutching him with her good hand.
What Armiger said he said not to comfort her, but because he had observed this in human men: “But the soldiers would have gladly given up their beds to a woman.”
“Yes, and I hate them for it.” She pushed him away. “It’s the arrogance of men that leads them to sacrifice themselves. Not real consideration.”
Armiger sat back, confused. “How did you get in here?” he asked at last.
“I’m a friend of one of the maids. She offered to shelter me when, when the soldiers came. I… I didn’t know where to go, I couldn’t go back and tell her I didn’t go into the infirmary. I had nowhere to go.”
He knew the room next to his was vacant. “Come.” He lifted her to her feet and guided her to it. There was enough light here to make out the canopied bed and dressers, and fine gilded curtains.
“I can’t sleep here.” Her voice held shock.
“You will.”
“But in the morning—if the queen finds out—”
“If they ask, tell them Armiger authorized it. Sleep well.” Without another word, he closed the door. His last glimpse was of her standing uncertainly in the center of the room.
For a long time he stood, arms folded. He heard her climb on the bed at last. Only then did he turn and walk to the stairs.
*
A stable had been taken over to house the infirmary. Despite the lateness of the hour, it was far from quiet as Armiger walked in. Men groaned or wept openly. In a curtained alcove, someone screamed every few seconds—short gasps of unremitting agony. No one else could sleep with that going on, though a good number of men lay very still on the straw, their eyes closed, their chests rising and falling shallowly.
There were twenty men and women here tending the injured. They looked like none of them had slept in days.
These wounded were merely the casualties from the withdrawal of Galas’s hillside defenses. When Lavin stormed the walls this stable would oveflow.
Actually, it would burn, he thought as he walked along the rows of men, appraising their injuries.
“Are you looking for someone?”
He turned to find a red-eyed man in bloodstained jester’s gear watching him from a side table. The table was strewn with bottles and medical instruments. The man’s arms were brown up to the elbows with old blood.
“I can help,” said Armiger.
“Are you trained?”
“Yes.” He knew the human body well, and he could see inside it if he wished. Armiger had never tried healing before.
“It’s hard,” said the jester.
“I know.” Armiger had realized, however, that the same lack of empathy that allowed him to send a squad of young men to certain death for tactical reasons, would allow him to act and make decisions to save them, where other men’s compassion would paralyze them.
He nodded toward the curtained alcove. “What is his problem.”
The jester ran a hand through his hair. “Shattered pelvis,” he said briefly.
Armiger thought about it. “I’ll take a look.” He glanced around. “First though, let’s see the others.”
The jester led, and Armiger moved down the rows of men, and performed triage.
*
Near dawn, Galas stood watching from the window in her bed chamber. Behind her were the carven trees and fauna of a fantastical woodland scene. It was no regular pattern of pillars cunningly disguised, nor a frescoed wall carven and layered with images; the architect had denied the privilege of rectilinear space here. Like a real forest, the lower boughs obscured vision and prevented movement between different parts of the chamber, and the great roots of the stone trees sprawled across the floor with no regard for the cult of the level surface. There was no order to the staggered forms, nor any symmetry save the aesthetic, which made this room into a group of bowers inside the straight-edged castle tower.
The window itself looked like a gap in the foliage of a jade-carved hedge. Each tiny leaf had been faithfully reproduced in stone, and in daylight they shone with a verdant brilliance that would normally soothe the queen’s heart.
She had seldom been here in the day. As she traced the outline of a leaf with the tip of one finger, she knew she might never have the time to be, now. Odd that the possibility of never seeing this window in daylight again, should be what now struck her with the horror of her coming death.
She thought about the strange Wind, Maut, as she sat by the window to watch the moon set. He was letting her look straight into the labyrinth of eternity, at the moment when death was inevitable and imminent. She hated him for that.
She turned to her maid, Ninete, who sat slumped on a divan nearby. Ninete was required to remain awake as long as Galas, and tonight the queen had not slept at all. “He knows there is nothing I can say to him,” said Galas intensely. Ninete was startled at being addressed as a person; she said nothing in reply.
Galas fixed her gaze on the maid. “He is cruel, to put it plainly. Why is he telling me these things? I know he is only telling the truth. It is that which is so terrible. He is telling the truth. As to things which should properly be lied about.”
Ninete recovered herself. “Let me comb out your hair,” she said. The Queen rose with a nod and went to her dressing table. Ninete stood behind her and began letting down her hair into dark waves which tumbled down her back.
“Perhaps he thinks it really will not hurt me to know my whole life has been lived in vain. I wanted to change things, that was what ruled me. I wanted to change what could not be changed, what had never been seen as anything but absolute. I wanted to dissolve the absolute. Maut… Maut, says this has been done before.
“I knew that everything now absolute was once a phantasy. What is good was once evil. He is unaware how devastating such a realization is to human beings. In fact, he’s not really bothering to speak of that. He takes it as a starting point. Takes it as given that this upheaval which has been my life is like the dance of dust-motes in sunlight—just an alternation, and change in height of those motes in the galaxy of relations visible to us. He neglects that I am such a mote myself…”
Bothered, Ninete combed silently. In the mirror Galas could see her uncomprehending look. “We could die in two days,” she said.
“I know,” says Ninete simply. Galas waited for more, but it didn’t come.
“Aren’t you afraid?”
“My Queen, I’m terrified.” Ninete’s expression shifted from the neutral silence it had held to an ashen tautness. Her lips thinned, her eyes lost their focus. “I don’t want to die now.”
Queen Galas looked at her, her own eyes taking on a certain coldness Ninete had seen so frequently in them. But Galas’s hand trembles as it searched among the combs, hairpins, pots of makeup on the dressing table.
“You don’t want to die. But you understand what death is.”
“The soldiers will kill us, Lady. I’ve seen people die.”
“Resume.” Ninete brought the brush up again. “Ninete, you will die a good death. You see death so simply. Death to you is the General’s men storming the castle. It is missiles from the air, swords, vindictive rape and humiliation. Most of all never to see those you love again, never again to hold those talks, to make love… You understand death, you have studied it the way all folk do, and for your understanding you have recourse to the religious teachings, the rituals, the tragic lovers in stories. You understand it, in the lyricism of fear you have been taught.”
Galas’s hand hovered over this comb, that pin, uncertainly. “I don’t understand it at all. I don’t see those lovers, I cannot imagine the body laid in its tomb, those somber brown poems… they don’t speak to me. Death says nothing to me. I wish it did. I wish I could see what was going to happen to me, two, three days hence.
“Maut is himself death, but he can’t tell me.” She turned to look up into Ninete’s face. “He refuses to make it into a sign for me. That is what is so cruel.”
Her hand descended on a long golden hairpin. “Ninete, leave me! Work on my breakfast. See it is the best you have ever orchestrated. I have no need of you now.”
Sullen, Ninete left. Galas watched the emotions play across her shoulders, down her hips as she walked. Ninete read even this rejection like a scene in some traditional play, Galas saw. She had been sent away. And just when she was hearing the Queen’s heart speak.
Clutching the pin, she rose and went to the window. A stone bird watched from the carven boughs above her head.
“Where is this coming from,” she asked, staring at the tremble in her hand. What she had been saying just now made no sense to her. Her fear made no sense. She was angry with Maut, but did not know why. Her mind swung round and round the things he had talked about today. Behind his words she sensed a kind of…bewilderment in him, as though the engine of human speech remained incapable of rendering his experience to her, however precise the mind of the god that powered it.
Nothing explained her fury just now, however, not even the General’s campfires in the valley outside. In fact, they were rather beautiful…
She raised the long pin, and stabbed it into her left shoulder. The pain pulled her to her feet—she hissed and pulled the pin out, casting it furiously out the window.
There it was, the agony of terror and fury. It came boiling up from some hidden source inside her, taking form in blinding tears, as she curled around herself, holding her shoulder. She tried to escape the pain, turning, turning, but it moved with her. Slumping onto a stone root, she began to cry in great gusts. There it was: confusion, chaos. She wanted to run, run anywhere, and it was her body that was telling her this. Run, escape.
Her body was afraid, it was her body which was speaking in her anger at Maut, and in her fear of death. She had been neglecting it, living in her understanding and within that realm she had just accused Ninete of inhabiting: the realm of the story. How could she fail to see in her mind’s eye, the riders coming through the gate, the expressions on her people’s faces as they ran from her, to join the other side… It was the story of her death she had been telling herself, even as she tried to listen to Maut, tried to see his images, his life.
She could no more escape into his life than she could bring her death to herself here, now, by her worry.
She watched the line of blood move down her breast. The pain was intense. She revelled in it, for with it the phantasms of the day after tomorrow had fled, and Maut’s story was mere words again.
In tears, the wonder of despair and release welled from her with the blood. She remembered that once, she had loved her life.
Afraid that Ninete would hear her and come running, Galas put her head out the window. She let herself cry out, once, then hung her head.
“Your highness?”
The voice came from below. She blinked away tears, and looked down the battlement fifteen feet below. A man stood there, his form outlined in the silver, rose and black of predawn light. It was Maut.
She cleared her throat. “Are you sleepless too?” Her words sounded unsteady, frightening to herself.
“Yes.” He seemed cool as the night air, as always. “I was helping in the infirmary.”
“Really?” Galas wiped at her eyes. “How are my men?”
“Holding up bravely.”
“And you?”
He didn’t answer, but turned to look out over the courtyards of the palace.
“Maut,” she said on impulse, “join me in my chamber.”
His silhouette nodded. He vanished from sight like a ghost, and she pulled herself inside, wincing.
First, she must bandage herself. Galas tore a piece of embroidered linen and wrapped her wound clumsily. Then she selected a high-necked black gown and wove herself into it. Without a maid to help, she couldn’t do up the back. So she sat back on the divan, feeling the cool velvet against her back. The sensation set her skin tingling.
She gnawed her thumbnail, a habit her mother had never cured her of, and waited.
Presently there came a polite tap on the door. “Enter,” she said.
Maut’s hair was disheveled, and faint lines were etched around his eyes and between his brows. He had discarded his jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his white blouse. He nodded to her like an intimate, and sat on the chair near her bed. She glimpsed Ninete peeking around the edge of the door, and waved her off impatiently. The door slid closed.
Neither spoke for a while. Outside, she heard the first voicing of a morning bird.
“Will you join me for breakfast?” she said at last.
“I would be honored.”
“No, Maut. Don’t say that. Will you?”
He smiled wanly. “I would like to, yes.”
“Good.” She gestured impatiently. “I have no more time for ceremony.”
Maut drew up one knee and clasped his hands around it, like a boy. He could only look more at home, she thought, if he sat sideways in the chair.
He cocked his head and looked at her appraisingly. “Ceremony has never suited you, has it?”
She laughed shortly. “No. It’s only familiarity that gets me through it. The words come automatically. Even if they’re so often like ashes in my mouth.”
“I find it hard to believe that this alone is the root of your passion. Because your passion radiates from some deep source. It catches up everyone around you. That’s why they follow you, you know. Not because you’re queen.”
“Ah.” This was a compliment she had never heard before. “I’m sure you know my story. Am I not the scandal of the kingdom?”
He shrugged. “I’ve heard things. They were obvious distortions. I came to you because I wanted to hear the story from the source.”
“Why?”
He considered, staring out at the amber sky. “I have been reading the books in your library. They all point to something… a mystery. I mean a mystery in the religious sense, almost. A meaning. When I came here I thought I was after facts, but now I see I’m after more than that. I want answers.”
“You? The man whose very mind is an impregnable fortress of history?” She laughed. “You astonish me.”
Serious, he said, “In the bits and pieces of your story that I’ve heard, I catch echoes of that mystery. I believe you know more than you realize. You have wisdom you have hidden from yourself.”
“And can you show me this wisdom?” Her hands trembled, as they had in the garden when his messenger fluttered down to land on her knee.
“I don’t know.”
“You toy with me!” She had leaned forward in anger, and felt the folds of her dress fall apart at her back. Galas sat back again quickly.
“No.”
“And what will you give me in return for my story? I think I no longer wish to hear your own tale.”
He looked at her for a long moment. Something like a smile danced around his lips. Galas found her heart racing at his examination, and her eyes traced the muscles in his arms, the set of his shoulders.
Then he did smile, rather impishly. “I should be very much surprised if you do not have the answer to that question by noon,” was all he said.
“Well.”
Maut leaned forward, the weariness returned to his eyes. “Tell me your story,” he said.
Galas closed her eyes. In her life, only one other had asked her for this—not the story, but her story. Grief choked her momentarily.
“All right. I shall try to tell it as a tale—as I’ve often wanted to. I… I pictured myself sometimes, setting my child on my knee and telling it. There will be no child. But here is the story.”