Ventus

27

“Bring me some water, boy. What’s your name?”

“Cal,” she said.

The soldier grunted. “I’m Maenin. That’s Crouson, and the bastard across the fire is the Winckler. We been with this thing from the beginning. You’re pretty scrawny,” he observed. “How long you been with the army?”

“Not long,” she said shortly. Her voice was an octave lower than normal. She liked the way it reverberated in her chest.

Maenin was a huge, hairy man. Calandria thought he smelled as if something had crawled into his boots and died. She handed him a cup of water and sat back on the stone she had chosen as her seat.

A vista of campfires and tents spread out down the hillside, and in the distance the walls of the palace spread in black swathes across the plain. Diadem gleamed whitely, outshining the milky way. Somewhere up there, the Desert Voice was debris or imprisoned. She could only hope that someone would come to investigate when the ship failed to report in.

Meanwhile she had to concentrate on thinking and acting like a man. She spat at the fire and scratched the short hair on her head. On the way here she had modified her body in subtle ways; that and a layer of grime made her look like a young man. With all that, Maenin still seemed to see femininity in her, so it came down to how well she could act. Shakespeare had been uncommonly optimistic about a woman’s chance of successfully masquerading as male, she had decided.

“Oh ho! Seen any fighting? No, eh? Simple farmboy, off on an adventure, are we?”

Cal shrugged. “Soldiers burned our house. Father couldn’t afford to feed us all. I had to join.”

Maenin brayed a laugh. “Now that’s the way to recruit! Hey—you’re not from one of those pervert towns we burned, are you?”

“No. Just a town.”

“Good thing, ‘cause if you were you’d be dog meat.”

“I heard they’re bad,” she said.

“Ho—you don’t know the half of it.”

“Have you been in one?”

“Boy, I been in ‘em all. Burned ‘em all, too. Burned ‘em right to the ground. Same as we’re gonna do that rockpile over there.” He flipped his hand in the direction of the palace.

“All because the queen built those towns?”

“No! Where you been through all this, boy? Don’t you know nothing?”

Calandria pretended to examine her boots. “It didn’t seem so important to know about it, before the soldiers came.”

“The queen, she knew about these oases in the desert for years. Never told anyone. We coulda moved out there, made a good living. She didn’t care, she wanted ‘em to house her damn perverts. So when Parliament found out about ‘em they ask her what she’s doing with ‘em. She tells Parliament it’s none of our business! Same time, she’s asking for all kinds of money, extra taxes, from the nobles. She been bleeding us good folk dry, to feed her perverts!

“So Parliament demands she give the towns back. Stop making these pervert things out there in the desert. And she says no.”

“She dissolved Parliament,” said the Winckler.

“Know what that means, boy? She told all ‘em nobles to get packing! She’d run the country directly.” Maenin shook his head. “She wanted to turn us all into perverts! The towns were just the start. After them, the cities, who knows what we’d be having to say? All I know is I’ll never take orders from no pervert.”

“The nobles who make up the Upper House formed an army,” said the Winckler. “They called on General Lavin to command it. Except he wasn’t a general, then. He was from one of the old families, they gave him the job because he had pull.”

Maenin stood up. “Shut up! The General’s a good man. He’s kept us alive right to the palace, and he’ll keep us alive when we go in. We’re gonna win, and it’s ‘cause of him.”

The Winckler raised his hands apologetically. “You’re right, Maenin. You are indeed right. To start with, the queen’s army was bigger than ours. We licked ‘em, and it was ‘cause of the General.”

“Damn right.” Maenin sat down.

“How did you do that?” Calandria asked, trying to project boyish curiosity.

Maenin and the Winckler told how Lavin had predicated his campaign on knowledge of stockpiles the queen kept in the desert. Summer was traditionally the time for campaigning; in northern Ventus, war stopped when the snows came. Iapysia’s southern desert remained warm, but the population was mostly concentrated along the northern border of the desert, and the seashore.

Lavin launched a phony campaign in summer, and drew the queen’s forces on a long retreat along the oceanside. He had the navy on his side, so the queen’s forces could not pursue his army too far.

Then he struck inland, and captured the desert stockpiles. When the end of the campaign season arrived, the queen’s forces had exhausted their supplies, but Lavin’s forces had several months’ worth of grain and dried fish. They drove north, as the queen’s forces suffered desertion and attrition. By the spring of this year, they had taken two-thirds of the country. The queen retreated to her summer palace, and Lavin marched a small force into the desert to clean out her experimental towns, and strike at her palace from the south. That force had encountered no resistance, and arrived here sooner than expected. The queen’s forces were engaged west of the palace by the bulk of Lavin’s army. He had no time for a decent siege of the walled summer palace. Lavin would have to throw them against the walls in a day or two, or face the retreating royal army.

“It’s okay, though,” drawled the Winckler. “He’s got a plan, as usual.”

Maenin squinted through the roiling wood smoke. “What? What plan?”

“Haven’t you heard? He’s going to meet the queen tomorrow, to get her to surrender. If he does it, we don’t have to fight at all. The war will be over!”

“Shit. Really?” Maenin shook his head. “That’d be something. Be too bad, though, I kinda wanted to taste one of those noble ladies she’s hiding there. The perverts were no fun. They had no spirit. I want a woman who’ll try and claw my eyes out!” He laughed, and the others joined in. Calandria showed her teeth.

They speculated for a while about how well the noble ladies would perform, and even the queen if they should catch her. They teased Cal for being a virgin, and promised to show the boy how to rape if they had to storm the palace.

Cal expressed her gratitude.

Maenin yawned. “Fine. Sleep time. The bastards ‘ll wake us up before dawn, and the Winds know what’ll happen tomorrow. Where you sleepin’, boy?”

“By the fire,” she said quickly.

“Wise.” Maenin glared at the Winckler. “Stay in sight, that’s my advice.” He stood, stretched, and walked scratching to his tent.

The others drifted away over the next hour, leaving Calandria to tend the fire. The supply of wood was meagre, but she built the fire up anyway—not because she was cold, but because she had a use for it.

When she was confident she would not be interrupted, she rummaged in her pack and brought out a slim metal tube. She uncapped it and poured a few small metal pills into her hand. She arranged these and peered at them in the firelight.

There was fine writing on the flat beads. When she had found the one she was looking for, she put the others back in the tube, and dropped the chosen one into the center of the fire. Using the tip of her sword, she maneuvered it onto the hottest coals at the core of the flames.

From another pouch, Calandria took some rusty metal rivets she had found on the way here. She dropped these into the fire near the metal bead. Then she sat back to wait.

It would take a couple of hours for the seed to sprout and grow, but she couldn’t afford to nap. If someone came, she would have to distract them, lest they look into the fire and see something impossible gleaming there.

*

Lavin ignored the glares of hate that followed him. He and his honor guard of two were safe, he knew. Galas would never let him come to harm. So as he walked he did not look at the soldiers ranked on either side of the narrow courtyard that led to the citadel, but cast his gaze above ground level to examine the damage his siege engines had caused to the buildings. The defenders had hung bright banners across the worst of it to frustrate such scrutiny; the festive cloth looked incongruous against blackened stonework, above the pinched faces of grim soldiers.

He felt more optimistic than he had in weeks. Galas had agreed to parley. Now that her situation was hopeless, she was finally seeing reason. This madness had to stop, and there was no reason it should end with deaths, hers included. All the while she hid in her fortress, and he threw men and stones at the walls, Lavin had been in an agony of fear that some one of those stones would find her, or that dysentery would run through the palace, or her own people assassinate her to escape. He couldn’t live with the thought.

But he couldn’t live with the thought of anyone else being in charge of this siege, either. She would lose; he had always known that. There had never been any question of his joining her cause, because all he could do for her was delay the inevitable. He might win her admiration and love, but she would be brought down at last, and he wouldn’t be able to stop it.

This way, the outcome was in his hands. And though she might hate him, this way he might save her.

In his late-night conversations with Hesty, Lavin had lied about all these things. He had claimed to hate Galas, and the fact that he hated the things she had done leant credence to his words. But it hurt him to talk so, and he often wondered if Hesty saw that, and doubted.

Maybe it would all end today. The thought was uplifting, and he had to restrain himself from smiling. To smile, while walking through the ranks of the enemy, would be cruel. Lavin did not think he was a cruel man.

He ran his gaze across the battlements anyway, measuring for weaknesses. All responsibility lay on his shoulders, after all; he had won this far because he was able to plan for hard realities without flinching. If Galas rejected his ultimatum he would need to know what walls to throw his men against.

One of the banners hung by the defenders caught his eye. This one was bright blue, with a gold-braided knot as its central design. The banner had been unfurled above the gate to the palace citadel, on a wall that appeared quite undamaged. He would have to walk under it to enter.

Lavin had only visited the summer palace once, many years ago. The visit had coincided with the spring festival, and there were many banners flying at the time. Strange coincidence, that they should be hung again now, for such different purpose.

But, the banner over the citadel gate was the spring banner itself. On that earlier occasion, it had hung in the palace’s reception hall, alone in a shaft of sunlight.

Under it, he had told Galas he loved her.

“Are you all right, sir?”

He had stopped walking. The courtyard seemed to recede for a second. He leaned on the arm of one of the guards.

“I’m fine,” he grated. Then he stepped forward again, eyes now fixed on the banner.

She must have had it hung in his path deliberately. It was an intimate, hence cruel, reminder of all that they had once meant to one another. Now his chest hurt, and he could feel the muscles in his face pulling back. I must look like these men, he thought, just another soldier with pain indelibly stamped on his face.

Yet below the banner stood an open door. She had reminded him of their past; and she had opened a way for him.

Maybe things would work out. Somehow, though, nothing had prepared Lavin for what he was feeling now. In all his planning, he had been able to avoid his own feelings, lest they stand in the way of his saving her from herself. By this one gesture Galas had let him know that whatever happened during the next few hours, for him it would be like walking through fire.

*

Inside, the citadel showed no signs of the siege. The sumptuous furnishings were still in place, and liveried servants waited to guide Lavin and his guide up the marble flights to Galas’ audience chamber. Last time he was here, there had been nobility everywhere, posing lords and ladies smiling and exchanging the barbed words of their intrigues. The candelabra overhead, now dark, had blazed brightly, bringing life to the fantastical figures painted on the ceiling. He remembered Galas, on his arm, pointing up at the images, and telling him stories about them. She was girlish for once, and his heart had melted so that he barely heard the words themselves, so entranced was he by their tone.

He steeled himself to his purpose, and looked down to floor level. The thief Enneas had schooled him in the layout of the basements of the palace. Enneas had never been above ground level here; Lavin never below it. Together, they had assembled a rough map of Enneas’s secret path into the building. Lavin had only moments as he walked to try to spot the entrance they believed led down to the catacombs.

He was nearly at the top of the marble flight when he spotted it, below and beside the stairs. The archway was invisible from the main entrance because it was behind the immense sweep of the stairs’ bannisters.

Shoulders slumping in relief, Lavin let himself be guided forward down the palace’s main hall, and thence to another flight. The archway was there, and if Enneas was right, below it the maze of halls contained a chink that led to a ‘spirit walk’. The spirit walk would be just a narrow gap in the masonry at the palace’s wall, an exit for ghosts who could slip through an aperture only centimeters broad. According to Enneas, this walk had once lain under the processional causeway that ran through the east gate and to a temple complex that was now ruined. Over centuries, thieves had widened the spirit walk so that one or two people at a time could squeeze through it into the precincts of the palace.

The ruins existed, and so did the hole Enneas had said led to the tunnel. In any other situation, Lavin would have dispatched sappers into it, to undermine the east gate. Bringing the gate tower down would save a lot of lives he would otherwise lose storming the walls.

There was only one life Lavin wanted to save. Knowing that Enneas was right both about what lay in the ruins, and about where a certain door existed within the palace, heartened him. He had an extra force to use to outflank Galas, if it came to that.

The audience chamber lay at the top of the second flight of stairs. The sweep of the main hall lay behind him, and Lavin heard the sounds of men massing there. He would not give them the satisfaction of seeing him turn to look, but he knew they were there to kill him at the slightest signal. More soldiers flanked the entrance to the audience chamber. They had taken his weapons at the palace gate, but obviously still feared an assassination attempt.

Two men carrying halberds stepped in front of him at the door. One of them scowled, and said, “She insists on seeing you alone. None of us trusts you for a second, general. I’m going to be waiting with my hand on the door handle, and the archers’ bows will be cocked. If we hear the slightest sound we don’t like, you’ll be dead in a second. Do you understand?”

Lavin glared back. “I understand,” he said tightly. His heart was pounding, but not because he was afraid of this man, or in fact of any man. Again, he felt himself becoming disembodied, and strove to breathe deeply to anchor himself in the moment.

The door opened. Lavin took one step forward, then another. And then he was inside the room.

The hall looked exactly as it had that other time. The weight of memory threatened to crush him for a moment; he blinked, and saw the queen.

She stood near the throne, hands clasped together. She appeared composed, but, he supposed, so did he. With age, one showed less and less of the emotions one actually felt, and hers had never been easy to read.

He moved tentatively toward her. In the autumn light flung by the tall windows he could see lines of care around her mouth that had never been there before, and streaks of grey in her hair. She looked very small and vulnerable, and the ache in his heart grew almost overwhelming.

He cleared his throat, but now that he was here, he couldn’t speak. He had even rehearsed a speech, but the words seemed vapid and irrelevant now. Falling back on ceremony, he bowed.

“Lavin,” she said almost inaudibly. He straightened, and they made eye contact, for only a second before each broke off.

“I am glad to see you again,” she said. He could hear the guardedness in her voice.

“I, too, am… glad,” he said. His own voice sounded husky to his ears. She seemed to listen intently as he spoke, as if she were trying to discover something behind the actual words.

She held out her hand. “Don’t stand so far away. Please.”

He came to her, and took her outstretched hand. Slowly, he raised his eyes to hers.

“I see lines,” she said, “that weren’t there before.”

“You haven’t aged at all,” he replied with a smile.

“Lavin.” The reproach in her tone was gentle, but it stung him deeply. “Don’t lie to me.”

Face burning, he let go of her hand.

“Come,” she said, gesturing nervously. “Let’s not sit in this drafty place. It won’t help.” She led him to a door at the side of the chamber. Beyond this was a small room with a lit fireplace, single table and two chairs. Galas clapped her hands, and the room’s other door opened. Two serving girls approached timidly.

“Have you dined yet today?” she asked. Lavin shook his head. She waved to the girls, who curtsied and exited. As Lavin and the queen seated themselves, the girls returned with mutton and stew, a bottle of wine and two goblets. Strange, Lavin thought, that he had never dined in such privacy with the queen, in all the years he had known her. Did it really take the total overthrow of tradition and royal honor for them to reach such a simple act? He shied away from the thought.

The girls left, and they were alone again. Galas gestured at the food, and smiled.

The simple act of sipping the broth released a knot of tension in Lavin’s shoulders. He indulged himself in the food for a moment, while she poured wine for both of them. By the time she had reached for her own spoon, he felt in command of himself again.

“I’ve come to make sure we can do this again,” he said, gesturing to the food. “And more.”

Galas sipped her wine, brows knit quizzically. “What do you mean?”

He borrowed from the speech he’d prepared. The idea for this argument had come from his reading of her own captured journals. “You’re acting like there’s only one possible outcome to all this. But everything you’ve ever done—the very reason we are where we are today—is because you’ve refused to accept that there should only be one way of doing things. You’ve fought inevitability your whole life. Why change now?”

She was silent for a while. “Maybe I’m tired,” she said at last in a small voice.

“Galas, you’ve used nothing but your own strength to try to change the whole world. You’ve never accepted that of anyone else. Maybe it is time for you to rest. Is that so bad?”

“Yes!” she flared. “You’re saying you’ve come to take my kingdom from me. I already knew that. Say something new, if you really have alternatives.”

“You’re acting like there’s only victory or death possible here. I’m saying it’s not too late. Victory is impossible for you now, but death isn’t inevitable. That’s what I’ve come to prevent!”

“Victory wouldn’t be impossible,” she said, “if I’d had you at my side.”

He had expected her to say it, but he still had to look away as he replied. “That’s unfair. What choice have I ever had?”

“Lavin, why did you side with Parliament?” She looked stricken. “You know I never wanted any of this. I never wished harm on my country. It was Parliament who started this war, and you who so expertly destroyed everything I’ve ever held dear. And yet, you, of all people…”

“You were going to lose,” he said. “I was trained at the military academy, groomed to be a general. When Parliament decided on war, I sat in on the planning session. I was on your side. Of course I was! How do you think I felt, sitting in the gallery, listening to them insult you, laugh about bringing you down? They were a pack of traitors. But I saw the plans they were laying out. They were going to win. Even if I’d stolen the plans, and brought them to you, it wouldn’t have helped. It would only have prolonged the slaughter.

“The night I really knew in my heart that they would win, I sat in my bedchamber and cried. What could I do? I was the highest-born graduate of the Academy. To appease both the nobles and the commons, Parliament would ask me to lead the army against you.

“I could stand aside. Or I could join you, and die at your side. Or I could lead the army myself—and then at least if I was in control, if the responsibility were mine, maybe we could salvage something, it didn’t have to come to this!” He sat back, the ache in his chest making it hard to breathe. “If anyone else led the army, how could I prevent your death?”

“There was another choice,” she said coldly.

“What? How can you say that? Don’t you think I thought of them all?” He grabbed his goblet and drank, glaring at her.

“You could have misled the army, Lavin. You could have fought badly.” She smiled sadly. “You could have let me beat you.”

“Not a single day’s gone by when I didn’t think of doing that,” he said. “Your generals never provided me the opportunity. Your nobility just weren’t a match for the Academy. But no, wait, it’s more than that. Listen, I’ve stood on a hillside, and watched ten thousand men fight in terror and rage in the valley below me. I’ve had men on horseback, waiting for my orders, and there was a moment when I could have failed to give an order to let the cavalry flank your men. The order was crucial. If I gave it, thousands would live on both side. If I didn’t, I would stand on this hillside, and watch while men who trusted me were put to the sword.” He faced her grimly, hands gripping the table in front of him. “Perhaps every day before that, and every day since, I’ve thought that I could deliberately send men out to fail and die. I’m a man capable of hard decisions, Galas. But at that moment, I wasn’t able to do it. And however much I might lie to myself every day, in the end I would act the same way again. Everyone has a moral line they can’t cross. For me, that was it.”

She stared at him in silence. Lavin loosened his grip on the tabletop, and numbly turned back to his food.

“So what are your terms?” she whispered.

“More people don’t need to die. At this moment you’ve got Parliament in a position where, if you don’t surrender, there’ll be a bloodbath. That will not be popular. Neither is regicide. With no one on the throne, the state will be in chaos. However hopeless things look, they still need you.” He looked straight at her. “I can guarantee your safety. You’ll be placed under arrest by Parliament, but it will be my men who guard you. Parliament may hold the purse strings to the army, but after all this time, the men are mine. No one else could have guaranteed your safety after all that’s happened. But I can.”

“I believe you,” she said with a touching smile. “And this house arrest—what does it mean?”

“You remain the head of state. Parliament rules in your place. An arrangement is made for a proper heir. You renounce all your political, economic and social experiments.”

“I can’t do that.”

“You must! Otherwise you remain the head of a rebel movement, who will act in your name whether you lead them or not. The chaos will just continue.”

She reached across the table, and took his hand. “My love, you’re asking me to throw away everything my life has meant. How is that different from death?”

“It’s gone anyway. Your choice is how to cope with the fact. Your options are suicide, or to rise above it, as you’ve always risen above things.” His mouth was dry now, and his heart pounding. It all came down to this conversation, and this moment in it.

She shook her head, but not at his words. “Lavin, did you just tell me that you led the army against me because you loved me?”

“Yes.”

“Worse and worse,” she said. “Worse and worse!” She stood up; her chair fell over.

The door opened a crack, but she waved her hand impatiently, and it closed again. “Every day of my life the people who’ve guarded me have taken away some thing just as I came to realize I loved it.” She dragged her hands through her hair, flung it back, and came to stand over him. “You’ve taken it upon yourself to do that too. What do I have left?”

He shook his head.

“I loved you because you never tried to guard me,” she said. “You were never my keeper. Yours was the one face at a banquet I could look at when I needed to share a laugh, or a real smile. I would have made you my consort if I could have, Lavin.”

He shrank back from the directness of her gaze. He could hear the bitterness in his own voice as he said, “You defied every other tradition. Why didn’t you try to overthrow that one too?” Custom and politics had dictated Galas marry a royal son of a neighboring nation; she had avoided doing so.

It was her turn to look away. “I was afraid.”

“Afraid? Of offending tradition? Of Parliament’s reaction?”

“Of you.”

“Me.”

“Afraid of having you; afraid of losing you.” She angrily righted her chair and sat down again. “Afraid of everything to do with you. And… I thought we’d have the time… for me to get over that fear.”

“We may yet,” he said quickly. “Do you still trust me, after all that’s happened?”

“I don’t know… yes, I do. Lavin, I trust you to follow your heart, even if it leads you into an inferno.”

“But do you trust that I love you?”

“Yes.”

“Then let me protect you now!”

Galas smiled sadly. “You know me too well. It is not I who am faced with a choice here, my dearest. You knew that when you came. You are the one that has to decide between self-annihilation and love. I’ve made my choice, and will die for it comfortably. If there is a tortured soul at this table, it is you.”

Lavin felt the words as blows. He couldn’t respond; all his strategies had evaporated.

She knew him. The greatest doubt and mystery of his life had been whether Galas really understood him; had she really thought deeply about him? Was he real to her, the way she was to him?

She understood him too well.

“Your choice, dearest friend,” she continued, “is simple. You will either join me, and turn your men against Parliament now that you have their loyalty; or you will raze my walls, kill my people, and find me dead of poison in my bedchamber.”

Her words were so simply spoken he could never have doubted her determination. Inwardly, Lavin reeled in panic. Everything was slipping away. He opened his mouth, almost to surrender to her, for the sake of a few days of bliss before they were defeated and killed. Then he remembered the thief Enneas, and his other option.

He heard himself say, “I come back to where we began. You have defied either-or choices your entire life. You can rise above this dilemma too, and regain your kingdom. Maybe you can pursue your policies in a gentler fashion, and still salvage some of what you worked for. The alternative is to lose all of it, and your life as well.”

Her expression had hardened. “Very well. There is another option, but I had hoped not to have to use it. In some ways it is the worst of all.”

“Why worst?” He shook his head, not understanding.

“Because I wanted to avoid defeating you, Lavin. I never wanted you as my enemy.” She rose before he could reply, and rapped on the chamber’s inner door.

Lavin stood, alarmed. Was she about to order his capture or death?

A man stepped into the room. He appeared stern and noble, but Lavin judged him of foreign breeding, since his hair was long and braided. He wore the uniform of the palace guard.

“Your siege will not be easy,” Galas said. “General Lavin, meet General Armiger.”

Lavin was thunderstruck. Armiger was supposed to be dead! Yet… perhaps he had defected, slipped away from his failing fortunes in Ravenon, at some offer by Galas? It made no sense.

These thoughts raced through his mind as he stepped forward to clasp the hand of his new adversary. “Your reputation precedes you,” he said formally.

“Thank you,” said Armiger. “Your own skill is respected in every land. I look forward to matching my strength against yours.”

Lavin stepped away, and bowed formally. “In that case, your highness, I will take my leave. With General Armiger at your side, I will need to make extra preparations if I am to win the day.”

She stood, hands clasped in front of her, and said nothing as he turned to go. Her face was a mask of eloquent sorrow.

Lavin barely noticed the ranks of hostile, waiting soldiers, nor did he hear his own men asking how the meeting had gone. The sun had dimmed in the sky, and touch, hearing and smell had faded like the autumn leaves. Somehow he found himself outside the palace walls, issuing orders in a steady voice as Hesty rode up. Within him raged a storm of emotion such as he had never felt. It overwhelmed reason; he could not have told anyone what he was going through, nor what it meant to him.

At the core of the storm, however, was a single mental image: of General Armiger standing at the side of Queen Galas.