Angels and Exiles (20 page)

The darkness did not remain absolute for long: soon flickers of orange and blue spread about, as the inhabitants lit candles or evoked spell-glows, but the streetlights were dead for good and I was able to swoop down into a darkened street like an owl, unseen by anyone. My heart was pounding: the time for action had come. Already other detachments had been at work in Quinzach; the failure of the lights was proof. Now I must link up with the rest of my unit and we would wreak havoc throughout the city, taking its dwellers by surprise, overpowering its weak defences, striking a glorious blow for Melgrion.

What happened instead is that I spent hours crouched in hiding, emerging at times to run through the dark streets without ever managing to link up with my fellow mercenaries. A huge damping field overlay the city, making enspelled communication impossible: our main way of coordinating was inoperable. I had a seeker-spell in reserve for emergencies; after an hour, I decided to use it, but it proved just as impotent as my far-talker. Finding the general area where the others must have dropped was not hard; but once I had reached it, I realized to my dismay that it was in fact crawling with Carhellian patrols: the city was much better defended than our intelligence had said. We were not going to prevail; in fact, if my gut feeling was correct, we were going to be slaughtered. My aerostat had crashed down into the city not long after I’d landed; by then there was so little lifting gas in its bladders that its detonation was almost a murmur. I had hoped it would make for a diversion, but rather it brought the enemy to the pitch of alertness.

After my third narrow escape from a patrol I gave up on any plans to rejoin my unit. If they were still alive, they had fled or were in hiding, and I could not expect to locate them. I just had to make my way out of Quinzach and disappear into the countryside.

As I headed for the outskirts of the city I heard the sharp rattle of small-arms fire from up ahead, and then a low moan that resonated in my bones: the cry of an Aspect let loose. I thought to recognize it as one of ours, and hurried forward, priming my gun with a whispered command.

Fifteen or twenty Carhellians had flushed out one of our squads who’d been hiding in a cellar. The mercenaries had unleashed an Aspect to clear the way as they erupted from the cellar, hoping to lose themselves before the Carhellians could overcome the Aspect. I found myself arriving in the middle of things: the Aspect towered over the Carhellians and roared in fury, reaching out its many limbs toward its enemies. Unfortunately, they had a capable mage with them: he scribed a single symbol in the air that paralysed the Aspect, and then invoked something of his own, a ravening gyre which he sent out after our forces.

I make it all sound clear and neat, everything thus and so; but I lie. I reconstructed events afterwards, for in those few seconds I could understand nothing, only see: the boiling darkness of the Aspect, the huddled forms of men to my left and the madly running ones to my right; the loops of silver fire forming the symbol, and then the blazing mouth of the gyre, which doubled and redoubled itself as it fissioned and sent out copies of itself in all directions, including the one that flew straight at me. At the last moment, I threw myself down; I don’t know if it was training or the instinctive expenditure of my combat-luck. The gyre missed me by a hair; still I felt its power wash through my body, a surge of light and heat searing my nerves and charring my mind like a twig in a fire.

Perhaps combat is different for generals and high officers, who command from afar and send ten thousand nameless men to be slain for the sake of a hill. To them, I could believe, is granted a clarity of vision that the individual soldier forever lacks. War College certainly taught us this, so deviously that even the cynics amongst us could not but accept it as a fact. Yet I have seen enough engagements to know that battle is at its heart chaos incarnate, a matter of terrified men running blindly about, trying to kill before they are killed. I’ve fought with no weapons but my own hands; I’ve fought with a bolt-sword, wearing enspelled armour; I’ve fought with a rifle and a single eternity disc over my heart, and I know: the instruments may change, but the music remains the same.

By the time I regained consciousness, the battle was long over, and only the dead remained. If anyone on either side had noticed me, they must have assumed I was one of the corpses. I myself wasn’t too sure I was alive. I got my arms under me and pushed; my head swivelled upward and side to side. All around me was the night; noises came from far away. I crawled in the other direction, too stupid to know what I was doing. After what felt like ages I reached a house and was able to lever myself upward, clinging to its wall. All my wards had been burned away; my jacket was thin and glassy-slick in patches, and my pants below the knees had melded themselves to my skin. I had been lucky beyond belief: my face, my arms were untouched; in fact my whole upper body was intact, I was in no pain whatsoever, but my limbs felt brittle as eggshell, and my head both empty and huge, a vast echoing hall. I began walking down the street; I may have fallen several times, or only feared I would. This time also has been almost lost to me; but I can be sure that nothing happened in those minutes or hours that I wandered, dazed, along the darkened alleyways of Quinzach: for if anything had happened I would have been either killed or rescued.

No, I only walked alone in an embattled city; and if any saw me and recognized me as an enemy, they were too craven to come up to me and slay me. I like to think I wandered half the night; but probably my walk lasted less than five minutes, and I may even have gone in a circle, for when I decided to enter the house I had reached, it was because its façade seemed very familiar.

The door wasn’t locked; I kicked it weakly two or three times before it occurred to me to turn the handle. The door offered no resistance and I almost fell inside.

I found the woman almost immediately; she was crouched in a corner, whimpering the way Xavier had whimpered aboard the aerostat. When I came into the room, she screamed with her hands over her mouth. Though my arm trembled, I pointed my gun straight enough at her. There was a bit of light in the room, from a glowbead floating in a dish of water on the floor. When I saw the woman better, I lowered my weapon.

“It’s okay,” I croaked. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

I let myself drop on the narrow bed; its springs creaked under my weight. I was panting suddenly, as if the act of sitting down was what had brought me to the edge of collapse.

“It’s all right,” I repeated when she did not change her position. “I don’t fight civilians. Do you understand? You’re safe from me. I just need to rest.”

She looked at me then, and slowly uncoiled from her crouch. I tried smiling. When I asked for water, she brought me some. I carefully explained to her that I would be gone in the morning, that she had nothing to fear from me. I asked her name but she would not tell me, and I was too tired to press.

She brought me water twice more, and food, though I could not make myself eat. She kept darting glances at my legs, where the fabric had intermingled with my skin, then looking away in horror. I tried making a joke about it, but she didn’t laugh. It made me absurdly angry, and I yelled at her, making her cry. Then I apologized, explained how shaken I was.

I must have fallen asleep not long after that. I woke with the dawn—I mustn’t have slept more than two hours. I rose to my feet, feeling weaker than before and yet more solid. I had survived the gyre’s kiss, after all. I noticed that the woman had gone, and told myself that she was in the next room, that I was not in danger. I was just coming out of the room when three Carhellians burst into the house through the front door. My gun was in my hand and I fired in that instant. But the gyre had burned away most of its charge; all that erupted from the muzzle was a thin, ghostly wash of energy.

I had aimed true enough: it hit the woman dead on, as she stood in the threshold, looking in on the scene. The bolt staggered her and she screamed, a full-throated one this time. In the next instant, the Carhellians brought me down with a pulser; as I lay thrashing on the floor, they bound me with elastic straps, then carried me out like a package. The woman was still screaming; in her eyes as I passed I read only loathing and terror. The bolt had burst some blood vessels in her face, giving it a pale crimson, nearly purplish cast. I recalled the mermaid’s little face and its poisoned smile; my left hand burned me like it had on that day so long ago. In that instant I had a revelation of the truth. But I did not want to believe.

I found myself in a prisoners’ camp, along with the last dregs of the Melgrian mercenaries. I spent the next two years a slave, collecting whip-scars as free men collect wages, until the Melgrians conquered Quinzach and the few of us who’d survived were liberated. I was twenty-three years old. I was brought back home; a pomaded general pinned the Silver Claw to my parade uniform, called us all heroes of the war. I spent a few months home, amongst a family that had thought me dead and consequently treated me like a hero of olden days, risen again.

It was a living death. From sitting around idle all day, I gained twenty pounds, all of it fat. Uncle Bernard raised the possibility of my working on the fishing fleet as if it were an honour beyond even the Claw. It was when my marriage to Senemyane was mentioned again that I knew I had to escape.

And so I fled back to the waiting arms of the War College. I resumed training, and after another six months was pronounced fit for duty. Five weeks later I was part of the liberation of Drayaltoll, and then came the Parchen campaign. Yet I knew that my escape was only temporary. Knew that I would have to return one day, because that also was my duty. And after all, I had spent years training to obey.

Now the ceremony is done; I have fulfilled the destiny all men aspire to. Tonight, in the connubial bed, I shall engage with my wife in sexual congress. Her family has wished sons on her, many sons, so that they may be sent out to gather food at risk to their lives, so that they may fight in the wars that countries engage in, these play-wars that distract us from the real conflict at the heart of our race. I am of the moiety that goes outward, that dies senselessly, that learns what honour is, so that it may be better betrayed—by the other half of its own side.

People are dancing now, to stupid peasant music that endlessly repeats the same chords in the same order. Old Cruikshank has put his prostheses back on and is waddling about on the periphery of the dancers on his synthetic legs. I wish I had a synthetic manhood; then I would know for certain I would be able to perform tonight. As it is, such things are hit-and-miss these days; I am an old man in his fourth decade, after all, and I’ve spent far too much of that time in close proximity to energy weapons.

Senemyane has been sitting some distance away, talking to a knot of her relatives; she smiles at me when she notices my glance. All the wars in which I have fought have been diversions, minor skirmishes. There is only one true war, which has been going on since the world came into being. They were witches, these ages-gone Doriands who crafted the mermaids; wise women who knew their enemy’s weaknesses and targeted them with care. I cannot, even now, truly hate them, for their weapons taught me more than they intended. The Cremonts who were their enemies are long dead, but still I am the Cremonts’ far-removed son, and I can claim their heritage.

The scar on my hand aches; even after twenty years my flesh still feels the poison. It has taken this long for me to understand the lesson the mermaid was meant to teach me, but then I was always stubborn, and not very quick-witted; ask any of my old teachers.

Senemyane rises from her chair and holds out her arms to me. I incline my head; it feels naked, bereft of its helmet—but though the instruments may change, the music is ever the same. With a smile on my lips and open hands, I go to engage my enemy.

The sylphids had tried to discourage him: “Do not go, Prince, do not go! None come back from Hurt. Your soul will be taken, you will not return!” Canarids, Jayls, Sparrels, they spun around him, cheeping their lament: “Do not go, do not go!”

He had closed his eyes to avoid being dizzied by their flight; and he had said softly: “I will go.”

The sylphids had fallen silent, had stopped their whirling flight to land on the boughs of the garden shrubs. The Prince had opened his eyes again. The sylphids were watching him silently, hands and feet clutching at twigs, wings slowly beating; tears at the corners of their eyes like so many dewdrops.

First had come the calendar: a green marble cylinder, at one end of which were affixed two brass disks, one pivoting upon the other. In the topmost disk windows had been cut; on both disks were engraved numbers and words in a dead tongue. There was also a picture the Prince saw as a sun, and another one that his mother insisted was a ship—but no such thing could have sailed between the stars.

“Look,” the Fourth Queen, his mother, would say, “if you turn the disk . . . like this . . . you align the month with the year and you can tell which day of the week falls on the first. You see?”

But there were too many months: “That is because the months of Hurt were shorter than ours, they only had thirty-one days. And their seasons were terrible! In the warm season, it was so hot that people had to shelter in the shade to avoid being baked like loaves of bread; and in the cool season, it was so cold that the rain froze and made snow, like the snow you see on the mountaintops, but everywhere!”

The Prince sometimes looked doubtful; the Fourth Queen would then state, in a tone that brooked no contradiction: “It is written in the Book of Exile.”

The Prince would turn the brass disk backward, as if he could thus have reversed the flow of time. The days and the months and the pale seasons followed their cycles on the Sleeping Worlds, and always an identical future succeeded to the present. Sometimes, the Prince almost convinced himself he had climbed back up the spiral of time; after all, how could he have told the difference for certain?

The Man from Hurt was incredibly vast: that was the first thought the Prince had had. The breadth of those shoulders, the length of those legs. . . . Then the Prince had been struck by the reddish cast of the skin, the shape of the hands, the smallness of the nose; and even though he knew that many people of home could have had this exact appearance, he had felt in this man all the strangeness of the people of this world, condensed as light was condensed in a prism-lily of Verte.

The Man from Hurt was called Gerard Chun and bore the esoteric title of Grp III Xeno Admin. He could not stand to remain motionless for any length of time; all through their discussion, he would rise from his chair, pace for half a minute, sit down, only to rise again the next instant.

“You cannot comprehend, Highness, the risks that you are running.” He spoke in an ancient, graceless version of Farance. “Outside the polar areas, you will not be easily accepted. We have little contact with other planets anymore, other than through a few thousand Orbitals. I cannot even guarantee the reactions of the polar cities—but the continental religions are almost all violently xenophobic. If you were a non-human, you would immediately be torn to pieces, do you understand?” He was drumming the fingers of his left hand on his right thumb. “But can someone from a planet which has no concept of God understand?”

“I know quite well what a religion is, we have many records. And at any rate, I
am
human, am I not?”

“Unfortunately, yes. You are indeed human, despite two hundred years of genetic drift. But anyway, what is the point of venturing onto the continents? There is nothing there to see, especially for someone like yourself. . . .”

“Nonetheless, I wish to go. If you cannot prevent me, I do not see what more we have to say to each other.” The Prince spoke this ancient dialect easily, given its lack of declensions and stripped-down tenses; but he regretted not being able to use the didactive mode of the tongue of Bleue, which would have put Gerard Chun back in his place.

“Our government will send a formal protest to the higher authorities of the Sleeping Worlds.”

“I have already told you my father was not opposed to this trip.”

Gerard Chun had closed his eyes. Exasperation could be plainly read on his alien face.

“So be it. But I must warn you that we shall not be responsible for your security. Whatever your fate, we shall not be accountable to your fath—your government. Your refusal to cooperate frees us from all responsibility.” He spoke loudly and distinctly—the Prince had deduced that their conversation was being recorded for legal purposes.

“Will you let me leave, now?”

“Wait.” Gerard Chun had called for a biogineer. “At the very least, we’ll implant a protection module; remove your blouse, please.”

But the Prince had stepped back, aghast.

“I will not let you. . . . I cannot. . . . You may not ask this of me!”

The Man from Hurt had sighed: “I had forgotten your taboos on bodily integrity. In that case, we will put it inside a ring. Will this be agreeable?”

“If it will make you happy,” the Prince had replied.

They had both waited silently for the ring to be brought. While Chun knotted and unknotted his fingers, swaying from one leg to the other, the Prince had focused his thought on Amarille, the train’s Navigating Astrochele.

Amarille? Are you there?

Always there, my Prince.

They have allowed me to go down where I will. I shall soon touch the true soil of Hurt.

We are all happy to be able to serve you, my Prince.

Gerard Chun looked out the porthole. The Prince had joined him. The ochre crescent of Hurt blazed under the fires of the Sun, and a few cable’s lengths from the orbital station floated the six turtles who had brought the Prince from the Sleeping Worlds, four hundred and sixty light years distant from the planet that had borne humankind.

There had been the frenzies of the polar cities, the capricious frenzy of pleasure of the Antarctics in their park-burgs, the puritanical frenzy of interdicts of the Arctics in their floating cities of metal and crystal.

Two weeks in Corianne-the-Capital, scattered among the valleys of Eternity Range. Two weeks of impromptu parties in his honour, of banquets, of games, of sexual overtures it would have been improper to refuse.

Five days in New-Thule [NT57] and Sankte-Brendan [SB80], one hundred twenty hours spent watching the ocean through the lensed windows of deserted observation galleries. One hundred twenty hours spent listening to the apostles of Stellar Transmigration preach to faithful who seemed to have already Transmigrated: empty husks, dead eyes.

Still, it had been in the floating cities of the North that he had felt the more readily accepted. The Antarctics’ fervour, he had realized as early as his second day among them, masked an almost absolute revulsion toward him. He could not have said why their laughter cracked when he came near, why their faces froze while they listened to him speak, why the women who made love to him kept their teeth clenched as if to hold back vomit.

It was only among the disciples of the Transmigration, in their cities that seemed always empty outside the mandatory recreation periods, during their communal meals eaten in absolute silence, that he had been able to breathe. These people should have held him in abhorrence, he who came from a world even more paradisiacal than the spheres promised to the Transmigrators, but who was only a man, a man with suspect mores, to boot. And yet they treated him with a courtesy icy but impeccable.

It had only been toward the end that he had understood. He was pacing along one of the observation galleries, the sound of his footsteps muffled by the thick gray and black, geometrically patterned carpet. He had been watching the ocean behind the salt-spattered windows, and had not seen the little girl. She seemed not to have noticed him either, had bumped hard against his knees.

“Careful!” had cried the Prince, worried that she might have hurt herself. He had grasped her shoulders to prevent her from falling, had leaned over her.

She had frowned, pinched her nostrils as if she was smelling something foul. She had murmured, tonelessly: “Let me go, animal.”

He had stepped aside to let her pass; had he not done so, he almost believed she would have walked through him.

He often dreamed of the
fête
that had been given to celebrate his departure. Always, certain details were changed: it was not Hurdi, the Fourth Infanta of Rosamund, who accompanied him, but Swyle of Faudace, whom he had never seen again after the Third Cyclades of 722; his mother wore yellow instead of blue, as if she had been in mourning; the guests refused, for no perceptible reason, to drink the syrille liqueur.

Bleue’s interpreters would have found many unfavourable portents in these alterations; but the Prince had never believed in oneiromancy.

At the time of departure, five sylphids had suddenly appeared. Two Jayls, a Cardallow, a Nightgalen, and last, a Silverine, whose race had been thought extinct for fifty years.

The sylphids had formed a half-circle around the Prince and spoken to him only, ignoring the higher-ranked nobles, even to his father, Verte’s Sovereign.

“Prince, let us leave with you. Let us. That you should not be alone to cross the heavens.”

He had nodded in agreement—how could he have refused?—and the sylphids had climbed with him aboard the car of the aerostat-shuttle. All through their ascent to orbit, they had chirped and laughed. Once in weightlessness, they had launched themselves from one end of the car to the other, whirling, dizzied.

When the ship emerged from its first overspace transect, all the sylphids were dead. Their tiny corpses still floated in the auricle where they had fashioned their nests, their shining wings slowly beating in the air currents. The Prince knew he would never be able to force himself to unseal the exterior vacuole and release their bodies to space.

Hurt has shrunk
. The thought echoed ceaselessly in the Prince’s mind.
Hurt has shrunk. The waters have risen, the continents have desiccated. All that remain are deserts bordered with diseased jungles. I cannot make myself believe we were born of this world.

He had come down from orbit in a snub-nosed shuttle, all of metal and glass. Its repulsors spat out long pennons of amethystine light, moaning in a low tone like the song of a birthing Oceanid.

The same craft had conveyed him from Antarctica to the Arctic along a ghost-meridian, rising so high in mid-course that the planetary curvature changed the horizon to the rim of a plate, above which the purplish-blue sky dyed itself with the black of space. Under the shuttle spread the deserts of Hurt: grayish-ochre extents, punctuated by the dark blots of dead cities, bordered by a muddy green ribbon.

“I want to go down,” the Prince had murmured without noticing he was thinking aloud. “I want to touch the soil from which I came.”

“The last authorizations have not yet come, Highness. You will have to remain in the Arctic until—”

“Be silent.” The Prince had shivered. He could not bear hearing the metallic voice of the shuttle’s thinker. All the thinkers of Hurt had the same voice, a voice that could not be mistaken for a human voice, so that the people of Hurt could never mistake the words of a mere machine for those of a human being.

Every time he heard the voice of a thinker of Hurt, the Prince would force himself to remember the old, half-senile thinkers of the First Ship, on Bleue; their voices, soft or harsh, sometimes amused, sometimes sad, but that could always be fancied to come from a human throat. So that he would not think about the voice of the sylphids, the singsong phrasings of the Silverine who had embarked with him to cross the heavens and who floated, empty-eyed, in an auricle of the orbiting ship . . .