Angels and Exiles (30 page)

“Leave,” I said. “You must leave!”

The old man went on: “We have a task. The
Litan
sends to bring back a secret of the dead angels.”

“Then come!” I cried. “Come into the city! Now!”

And I began to run inward. After a moment’s hesitation, they got in motion to follow me.

Then there rose a hollow vibration in the air, which became a dissonant ululation. The intrusion alert. All these hours of conditioning, these grafts of new reflexes necessary for crossing the centuries. Everything had been foreseen. What was to happen would be no more than an immune reaction.

The red hemispheres at the periphery unsealed with the clap of air rushing into a vacuum, pivoted on an axis parallel to the ground, revealing the plasma cannons meant to insure Manoâr’s external defense.

I screamed: “Run!” and fled toward the centre, soon passed by the cobbs running on their six legs. But the guns did not fire.
Emplaced to defend against the outside only
, I thought,
their program forbids them from firing on the city itself.
 . . .

I turned back just in time to see the only shot fired, on a laggard false-dog that had remained outside the perimeter. The animal disappeared in a flowering of energy, the sand vitrified under the impact. Even one of us would have been destroyed. Even one of the dead angels of Manoâr.

An enemy is loose inside the city.
 . . . 
The first defenses have failed.
 . . . 
Operations must be coordinated.
 . . . The thoughts that had crossed my mind when we were hunting Mashak. And which must now resonate in all our skulls. There was only one thing to do: reach Paradise before it was too late.

But it was too late. When we all came into the central plaza, myself in the lead, the descendants of the Others right behind me, they were already there, waiting for us.

Mactaledry held an EM rifle aimed at us. Martegen had put on an exoskeleton from whose joints flowered clusters of electrical spines. Mayter held, two-handed, a tubular weapon whose function I had forgotten; from the power supply ran a copper snake ending in a mask held tightly against his face; electrodes jabbed in at the temples. The luminous dots of the laser-aimers changed targets according to the movements of his eyes.

Mantheor stood among them. He had thrown off the exterior layer of his coat; there only remained the infrangible armor, covering him from neck to ankles. For an instant, I saw him on the deck of the ship; I heard his brief orders, given in a perfectly calm voice from the midst of disaster. But that man was dead.

I took a few steps. Behind me, the caravan had stopped. The old man’s voice rose, but I paid no attention to his words.

Rage seized me once more. But it was no longer self-directed; I had a true objective. I asked Mantheor:

“Now what will you do? Kill them? Kill me, perhaps?!”

I had started to shout. I advanced upon Mactaledry, seized the muzzle of his rifle with both hands. I screamed: “Well, go ahead, shoot! What are you waiting for?”

He freed his weapon from my grip, pointed it toward the caravan. I interposed myself again: “To kill them, you must kill me first.” He stepped back.

Melfidian exclaimed: “There is an enemy inside the city! An enemy . . .” He had the fixed gaze of the blind.

“What enemy?” I shouted. “There is no enemy!”

I could not understand why they had not yet fired. Mayter’s weapon clicked softly, twittering when it acquired a new target. I realized that they were all watching Mantheor, that they waited still, after twelve hundred years, for their captain’s orders.

And Mantheor watched me, his sky-coloured eyes wide open, without a word. I saw him shake. Intermittently, I thought to see the man he had once been, not the Patriarch of Manoâr.

Again, the old interpret spoke:

“The
Litan
sends to bring back the secret of undeath. He offers multitudes of gifts and powers to gain the help of the dead angels and permit not to die.”

I turned to face him: “The secret of undeath will not be given.”

He begged: “The dead man is ired because we attacked him. We ask for his pardon. We buried the dead woman near the God-way for the soul to be fast to the stars. We did not wanted to offend the guardians of the Way. The
Litan
is multitude powerful and sends rich presents. . . .”

I cut him off: “The secret of undeath does not belong to mortals. Only angels are undead. Not men—not women. Only angels.”

He lowered his gaze, spoke in a voice that now betrayed his age: “The
Litan
will be ired. The defeat is regrettable. We will be punished.”

I turned to Mantheor.

“Let them leave. Captain, let them leave. If you destroy them, others will come. Again and again, for always. But if they leave freely, you will never see them again. You have dreamed; you are dreaming still, though it’s a nightmare. Forget it. Let those who troubled you leave in peace. Forget. There is no enemy. There is no alarm. It was an error. We will cross the centuries like a ship the ocean of night. You will forget the others. They never existed. Mantheor, shut down the defence systems. We are not in danger. Let them leave and avoid contamination.”

I don’t know how long I begged him, but suddenly the captain in him woke up, truly woke up, for a brief moment, and he knew—of that, I am sure—he understood; he manipulated a control box and the siren fell silent.

“Leave,” I said to the caravan. “Leave now, or the angels of the city of the dead will destroy you!”

The old man translated for the others. They began to move away, reluctantly.

Mevianis spoke a single syllable, not even a word. I saw Mashak’s gaze in his eyes, and in this syllable I heard all the echoes Mashak’s scream had ever woken. He calmly reversed his weapon and fired. I believe it was because he had no other means to free the scream in himself.

They made a circle around him; they watched him scream and die. I heard the caravan fleeing, and I thought,
They’re abandoning me
. I understood I would nevermore be one of the Hommorts of Manoâr, and I fled in turn. Behind me, Manoâr’s walls echoed Mevianis’s scream in an eerie perfection; as if it would never cease.

I had caught up with them by the time they crossed the perimeter line; the plasma cannons remained inert. Soon we left the spoke, the God-way, to strike out among the dunes.

I did not need to exhort them to continue their flight; they ran until they were exhausted. It was already late; they collapsed, sheltering themselves from the vesperal winds on the side of a dune, not bothering to set up the tents. I had energy to run for hours still, enough to distance myself sufficiently from Manoâr; but I stayed with them. If Mantheor should yield to what had destroyed Mashak and Mevianis, if he should go down into the lower levels of Paradise and birth a new sun on the face of the desert, I wanted to remain with those who had revealed myself to myself.

They did not understand why I had accompanied them; I gave tangled explanations to the old interpreter, to the effect that I would myself give our refusal to the
Litan
in order that he spare his envoys. I doubt that they believed me, but recent events have so thoroughly gone beyond their understanding that they will sooner or later fabricate a legend to mask what truly happened.

I went to find one of the scouts, the woman who saluted me when we met; I saluted her once more, and when she offered me her palm, I managed to brush my own against it.

I am standing on a dune, looking toward Manoâr. The sun has long since set. I await the explosion that will sweep us all away in an instant, but nothing happens. At the zenith, a few scraps of cloud shine in the light of the projectors that have been lit tonight as every other night, a blind eye turned to the stars. Did Mevianis’s soul follow the luminous ribbon to return to where we came from?

It seems I can hear the echoes of a faraway cry, but it is only the wind.

Lise walked along the shore; toward her came an endless procession of waves crested with bloody foam. Offshore, the cargo ship neared death; its screams had become no more than dulled moans, so low-pitched they resonated in her bones. Gulls fought over scraps of the ship’s flesh; the stolen morsels often as not ended up falling into the sea.

Lise had not heard the battle take place; and yet she had known of it, one way or another. An intuition of death had come to her, like a scent carried by the breeze. She had exited the castle, taken the way to the shore. Standing on a grassy dune, she had seen the ship drifting slowly toward her, alone on the waves, its blood spilling into the sea.

The cargo ship had beached itself on a spit of sand separated from the shore by a hundred metres of shallow water. The Princess of New Avalon seated herself on the damp sand, staining her bare feet and the hem of her dress with carmine. She waited. What else could she have done? The sun was setting. The two halves of the broken moon spun lazily in the sky.

Behind her, to the west, the south, the north, spread her kingdom. An empty kingdom; its fields fallow these past five years, its forests returning to their millennial disorder, its houses thrown down, its people rotting under the earth. Only Lise was left; Lise and the one whose coming she had foreseen, for whom she waited patiently, shivering in the cool evening wind.

He arrived at nightfall. Encased in a seeker-tadpole whose flagellum thrashed the water with an abnormal frenzy. The emergency craft convulsed once it had reached the beach, attempted to climb as far from the water as it could; but the tiny legs could not find enough purchase in the sand.

Lise approached it, laid her hands on its head. Already the black eyes were losing their glitter, the body grew cold: the tadpole was dying. It must have been damaged in the attack; Lise would have to open it herself. She located the expulsion slit and tried to open it by pulling on the lips, but it remained sealed. Then the Princess of New Avalon found a piece of seashell and sliced the flesh; this time, the entire head of the craft opened, and the protective fluids spilled onto the sand.

The soldier had only partially escaped the bone-smashers: his left arm had been pulped from the elbow down, his left hip shattered, his femur cleanly snapped. He was covered in blood: his own, his companions’, the cargo ship’s? Now that his lungs were drained of the oxygenating liquid, he breathed with difficulty: every inspiration was a wail.

Lise eased him out of the survival pouch, detached the now-useless umbilicus; the dead tadpole could no longer help him in any way. The air would soon turn chill; she must shelter the soldier in her house.

She had difficulty carrying him; he was terribly heavy in her arms, and every false step she took tore another cry from him. She finally reached the castle, managed to open the door, laid the man on her bed.

When she made light, he opened his eyes; his nictitating lids beat asynchronously. Lise moved the candle away, leaned over the soldier to soothe him. The man’s intact arm suddenly reached out; he seized Lise’s throat. In a very clear voice, he said “My pelta,” then let his arm fall back and closed his eyes.

She undressed him, clumsily. None of his fractures were open, and he seemed not to have taken any other wounds than those from the bone-smashers. The left arm was already cold; when she removed the vest, Lise noticed a dark line circling the shoulder, a sign of imminent amputation. She went to fetch water at the well, heated it, cleaned the blood and mucus, dried the man, covered him.

She was afraid to leave him; afraid that he would no longer be there when she came back, like the wounded rainbow-winged bird she had found one evening on the beach and which had vanished the next morning. Slowly, she wrapped herself in a coat of old plastic. Then she went out. What else could she have done?

The wind had already become chill. Clouds to the south and west reverberated the light of the false-suns making up the static defensive line emplaced by the Alliance at the frontier of her kingdom. Far away, above the sea, a dozen red dots blinked lazily. The running lights of a fleet of lancer-owls, perhaps. Was it their bone-smashers that had killed the ship? Had it been the victim of a pack of killer-sharks, of a bombard-whale?

She found the corpse of the seeker-tadpole, a shapeless black mass in the orange light. She buried her arms to the elbow in the survival pouch, probing among fluids turned cold and viscous. Her fingers closed on a metallic disk no larger than her palm. She extracted it from the carcass, went to wash it in the sea. Then she put it in a pocket of her coat; she could feel its chill through the plastic when the coat beat against her thigh.

There was a meteor shower. A whole quadrant of the sky filled with pale dashes of light: a broken orbital tower returning to Earth. Lise crossed the village which had been the capital of New Avalon. The ruins were overrun by sand and weeds. Only the castle was left standing, a two-storey stone house whose entrance still bore a frayed oriflamme in the kingdom’s colours. Blue, a deep blue, the blue of a blood-freezer’s beam. White, the white of the bones of all those who lay in the mass grave dug behind the castle. Red . . .

The soldier had thrown back the coverlet in his sleep. The fragments of his hip crawled slowly under the skin. Lise covered him up again, returned to the living room, examined the pelta in the light of an oil lamp. A convex disk with a dark red crystal in its centre. A handle on the inner side, several swellings along the edge. Triggers? Impossible to be sure, but best to be prudent and avoid touching them. She returned to her room, laid the shield next to the soldier.

She could not have said why she felt like crying. The soldier had pale skin, light brown hair, a straight and rather long nose, a thin-lipped mouth, wide cheekbones. His augmentations were not visible, apart from the breastbone jutting out from the middle of his chest, the better to anchor the muscles of his arms. His uniform bore no identifications save for the Greenland ear of wheat.

His right hand was soft: no calluses at the joints, no scars, no traces of implants. A hand that was not in the habit of handling a gland-burner or a heart-breaker. Lise was scared to touch it. Her throat still hurt where the hand had grasped it, as if the man had maintained his grip at a distance all this time, through the power of his hate.

But she was not his enemy. She was neutral. New Avalon had always been neutral. It had been born from the confusion of nations that followed the Years of Flame, an eye of tranquillity on the margins of the continental chaos, a blot on the maps, at the limit of the ancient boreal forests. All through the beginning of its life it had been able to pretend that the War was a thing of the outside. That within New Avalon’s borders, among a few hundred dreamers, the War had begun to end.

Lise was fifteen. A princess of New Avalon, a princess of spume and sea-wrack, a princess who still found beauty in the false dawns engendered by the rape of the magnetosphere, in the distant rolls of bombardments.

It was she who had first welcomed the soldiers of the Alliance. With a curtsy and a trembling smile, because she could smell the death that surrounded them.

It was perhaps more because of this curtsy than because she was a king’s daughter that she had been chosen to survive.

They had all been put in a row along the wall of a barn: barons, duchesses, free citizens. One by one they had collapsed, along the trajectory of the heart-breakers’ beams. In the distance, a trio of mercy-vultures patrolled above the kingdom’s fields and woods. Their blood-freezers fired with precision; after each shot, the vultures would dive and climb back with another paralyzed victim in their talons.

Her father had been honoured with a formal execution: a telechiral had seized his throat and crushed his larynx. The King of New Avalon had not looked at his daughter before dying. His eyes had remained fixed on his executioner, on the hand that clenched, ten metres away from him, and pulped his throat.

The amazon commanding the tactical squad had gravely bowed to Lise. “Highness . . .” Four holomedals glittered on the skintight uniform, as if to draw attention to her mutilated chest.

Lise had been left to rule over this bit of land. New Avalon still existed on the maps. The Alliance’s hands were clean.

She woke up still sitting at the soldier’s bedside. It was long past daybreak; summer nights were short at this latitude. He had again thrown back the covers in his sleep. His hip was of a single piece now, and his leg was straight.

The Princess of New Avalon went to the kitchen, heated some soup and brought back a plate. When she touched the man, he opened his eyes. His irises were too dark to be natural; a network of fine silver threads radiated from the pupil.

The man sat up with effort, stared at her a long while; Lise brought the spoon close to his lips, and after a few seconds he deigned to open his mouth.

When he had finished the plate, he asked in a monotone: “Status?”

“Neutral,” she answered, and in response to his suspicious frown she added: “You are in the Kingdom of New Avalon, exsanguinated by the Alliance five years ago.”

“Remaining population?”

“One.” Lise’s voice shook, but she controlled herself. “Who are you?”

After a pause, he gave his name and number.

“You don’t have to treat me as an enemy,” the Princess of New Avalon said, and her voice shook again.

“You’re not an ally.” Like a formal charge. “I have no right of requisition.”

“I won’t refuse you the necessities.”

The soldier rose unsteadily, got to his feet. He took a deep breath, bit through his lip until he had burst a subdermal ampule of muscle-warmer. He sucked meticulously on the wound.

After a moment he was shaken by a violent shiver, then his movements became smooth and controlled. Lise averted her eyes; suddenly she was ashamed to see him naked. The man grunted in amusement and picked up his pants one-handed; silently, Lise helped him to put on the rest of his stained uniform.

He found the kitchen, took some bread in a bag and hung a flask of water on his belt. He came back to the bedroom for his pelta. It seemed he no longer saw Lise, as if she’d stopped existing. The bed kept his memory, a partial silhouette in crimson on the sheets.

She watched him go out and walk toward the beached ship.

A half-hour passed, an hour. The Princess of New Avalon put on her best clothes, went out. She came to the beach. The tide was low. The water rose no higher than her knees when she went to the ship.

What else could she have done?