The Lady's Champion

by M F Sullivan

  With a thought for the vial of old Lazarene blood, around her neck along with Cassandra’s diamond even in this place, listless Dominia began to understand her fate. “I’m not saving him. I’m trading myself for him. I’ll show up, have enough time to save Tenchi, and then they’ll ship me off.”

  To Kronborg, in Denmark: yes.

  The Hierophant possessed many castles, but it was Kronborg Castle in the European city of Old Elsinore he most favored for captives, for raising new family members, and for generally enjoying his “downtime.” The climate was favorable to martyrs, and its distance from any (sensible) human-habitable nation was vast. Having grown up around the warm and coastal Mephitolian landscape, with its sweet nights and its dreamlike cities, she had no special love for that dreary place. But, ah, now that she thought on it, how she missed her home! Particularly that real-life Atlantis, Venezia, that drowned city raised from the dead by the Hierophant’s passionate love of restoring that which had been beautiful so long ago that people had forgotten it ever existed.

  Grimacing, Dominia tore her thoughts from nostalgia and leveled her gaze with the Lady. “You’re trying to make me want to go back to Europa.”

  You want to go back, Dominia. Of course you do: it is your home. Do we not, all of us, long for the past?

  “Do you?”

  We are the past, and the future. But most of all, We are the present. All things are present in that which We are: therefore, We feel no particular longing for any one thing. But you have the dubious fortune of fully experiencing the present. Of experiencing desire, loss, and all emotions. Therefore, you are more powerful, and more whole, than We are.

  Laughing, Dominia asked, “How am I supposed to be more powerful than you?”

  Because it is not Our job, or the job of Lazarus, to create the world. It is your job, as much as its destruction also lies in your hands.

  “But really, why me? Why, why? I don’t understand why I’m whipped up in all of this.”

  Because you are the daughter of the Hierophant. And not any daughter. You are one who commiserates with the Lady and her children. You are a hero who shall bridge both worlds. And the strength and purity of your wish, not only to be someone different, but to rectify what you have wronged…this is something that cannot be matched.

  “All I want is Cassandra back. I didn’t wrong her. I didn’t wrong anyone. I was only ever doing my job.”

  The silent Lady studied Dominia’s face, names and numbers floating between the two of them as though to demonstrate how incorrect she was. At the thick silence of the deity, the General scoffed.

  “I suppose you’re right…it’s my duty.”

  You have always known it to be your duty. You have denied the weight of responsibility—have run from it. But will you now take it on? There is more at stake than the life of the human named Tenchi Ichigawa. The goddess plucked the name from the air and held it between Her thumb and forefinger. He is but data.

  As She released the name to fly away, the silent General watched it go, then watched the Lady’s unmoving face as She approached in the company of those grave bells. Now begins the most dangerous phase of your duties. I urge you, no matter what happens, do not forget your loyalty to Us; and do not forget this place. Have you Akachi’s necklace?

  The General nodded, and the goddess touched her forehead. Then make good with your friends when you awake. They will understand.

  “Lady”—Dominia’s body dissolved, but she still had a litany of questions before she proceeded forward in this great task. All of them, she knew, would go unanswered if not asked in these seconds—“tell me, please: How is it that Cassandra’s diamond comes to this place so reliably—Lazarus’s blood, even, or the plane with the blood running through it—when other objects we try to bring within might or might not be with us when we arrive?”

  Because the diamond is Cassandra, of course. And the blood of Lazarus—that is like asking why you can carry a key to the other side of its door.

  As her forehead burst into a trillion golden molecules, the General started awake to find herself by a fire she had made to crackle comfortably beside the dozing airship. Gethsemane lay in her arms and Farhad snored on the other side of the blaze, with Teddy and Tenchi tucked safe into seats of the E4. Around them, darkness relented to the gray of morning.

  Understanding as she did, she wished it hadn’t come.

  V

  Ten Thousand Leagues Across the Sea

  Theodore was second to wake that morning. Stirred, perhaps, by the General’s soft footfalls as she leaned into the E4 to ensure the well-being of the sleeping men. While she dismissed the fire, her brother crept out to greet her, and whispered in the soft light of dawn, “Get inside!”

  “It doesn’t burn,” she said, hearing Valentinian’s soft reprimand of her bullying ways and therefore avoiding tacking on some unnecessary cruel nickname—though a couple did spring to mind. “It’s not really a sun that’s about to rise. People just call it that because…it’s easier. But it looks black.”

  “Black Sun— Is this Father’s project?”

  With a glance for her sleeping companions, Dominia jerked her head in the direction of the plane’s other side. As she rounded the craft with her relative and got some meters away, she asked, “Do you remember what happened last night?”

  “Do you not? I went to sleep praying all this would turn out to be some dream…considering the way last night went, I guess it’s stupid to ask God for help! What is this place? Are we in hell?”

  All the old familiar questions. How was she to explain any of this to somebody like Teddy? “Well, it’s like—like we’re asleep. Do you know how light is a particle and a wave? Consciousness is like that, too. And when a brain is asleep, or dead, the ego enters a low-frequency wave state that can take our consciousnesses here, too—but a high frequency also allows the state, in a more desirable and controllable…”

  Oh, the look on his face! She drifted off on seeing her own failure to engage him. Now she understood the dilemma of the holy man and his magical son when confronted by her military mind. Theodore had spent a whole life worshiping money and had sought membership in the Holy Family not out of spiritual devotion but financial gain. There was no celebrity on Earth like a Holy Family member, reviled by some but adored by too many—and literally worshipped by an interesting cross section of both camps. Any car in which the Hierophant rode was bound to be the cause of traffic jams and, from time to time, complete closure of whole towns as people suspended business and camped along his travel routes just to fling themselves against the surface of his car, begging for a handkerchief or a ring or a kiss. Such trifles (the kisses especially) he delivered in abundance, but the devotees he loved best were those humans with mental illness severe enough to buy the martyr lie that the fastest, most guaranteed route to heaven for a human being was to be devoured by the Hierophant. If women screamed to sleep with Dominia, men and women alike emerged in morbid handfuls to beg to be eaten, even in part, by His Holiness.

  Failing him, any Holy Family member would do, and the closer they were to the Hierophant, the better. That meant that a martyr on the level of Theodore would never be at risk of starvation. He was a simpering, whining dolt amid his peers, but because he was a famous martyr, he could walk into any club on Earth and attract abundant attention from that most unpleasant subset of Renfielding losers who would settle for a quick fuck and the donation of some blood in exchange for the dubious honor of having been with one of the Family. The General had never been interested in obtaining food from such a source (not to mention the risks of accidentally martyring some stupid fan), but Teddy loved the ease, and although he only had real eyes for Lavinia, he wasn’t hard up for company. Earth held for Dominia’s stupid younger brother everything he ever could have wanted; and, like most individuals martyred in adulthood, his life revolved around a semisecret terror of death. He’d walked the planet for a hundred years, and nowhere in there had he taken the time for any
kind of spiritual or moral insight.

  Yet—hadn’t Dominia been that way? Lamb! Who was she to judge her brother’s ignorance when she had spent over three hundred years doing just the same? Her own wife had taught Noctisdomin school every week for decades before moving on to specialize in music, and never in that time had the General—the Governess—considered such matters, herself. She hadn’t wanted to. They frightened her. In that moment, standing before Theodore and called to answer his questions, Dominia wondered for the first time if a lack of spiritual interest was not rooted in fear. The same fear she saw in Theodore’s eyes and heard on the edges of his questions. The General knew that fear very well. She, too, was afraid—afraid of what God would think of her many atrocities.

  Or was she just afraid of her own opinion? She wasn’t sure. She hadn’t checked in on herself for years. Too busy taking care of other people. After answering a few basic questions about the substance of the place (and the electromagnetic fields that, with the increase of dawn during their conversation, began to appear in those brilliant alien colors to spur only further queries), she asked her brother, “How are you doing, Theo?”

  “Oh, God.” He waved both hands in the disgusted fashion of an old woman waiting for Saint Valentinian because she found life too exhausting. “Who knows? Who cares? I feel like I’ve had my whole concept of existence upended—my whole life! Everybody here is acting like this stuff is no big deal. You know…when I was a kid, I wanted more than anything to be adopted by some martyrs.”

  Here, the General did not smirk, because that was a fairly common dream among a certain brand of human. Nor had she been blind to the way Theodore preened about for his first twenty or so years as a quasi-immortal being. “If only we had traded places.”

  “If only! Some nights I would pray—really pray, Dominia, feverish prayer for hours after I should have been asleep—that my parents would be killed, and all my potential could be seen.”

  “Prayer doesn’t work like that, buddy.” With an awkward glance over her shoulder for the jet shielding them from their human companions, Dominia tried to give him an out. “Were they…abusive to you?”

  “Oh, no,” he said, crushing the last possibility of empathy for his personality. “They would just send me to bed without supper for things like back talk, or what-have-you…but that’s a sin, you know, denying children food!”

  “Is it? That’s what Father says. Maybe it’s a cruel act to withhold food from a martyr child, knowing what starvation does to us, but is it a sin?”

  Teddy wore the answer on his haggard expression. “That’s just the thing. I was sure it was days—has it been days? I can’t tell here, I know we just got here, but for some reason—anyway, I was sure of that days ago. And now…he tried to disappear me, Dominia. Like I was somebody he didn’t even know. First he damned my soul without any recourse; then he tried to make me think I didn’t exist!”

  “That’s the Holy Father for you.”

  “But he’s not supposed to be like that to me. I’m a martyr! His child!”

  “Welcome to my world. He’s culled his children in the past.” Before them, extending across the landscape like the kings of Macbeth’s vision, Dominia saw the generations of historical Holy Family members who had been martyred and had their martyring completed long before her human birth. She did not ask if her vision was as sensible to feeling as to sight, nor if the vision was only of her mind. There was no difference here, and no real answer. Not even Theodore’s lack of response for the image marked it as true hallucination—perhaps it was but a reality only she saw. She tore her eye from those many bleeding and eviscerated Family members whose memorial paintings were forever seared into her brain, and continued her warning to Theodore. They would vanish if she ignored them. “Father’s children get too powerful, or get their own ideas, or discover something about him and his society. Then they have to be taken out.” There: already gone.

  “But not me! Let’s face it, Dominia—I’m a gross little sycophant!” While his sister laughed in shock, Teddy offered a small, self-deprecating grin. “I mean, for most of my adult life, I’ve made it my job description to do whatever he wants me to do. He should know I’m not going to hurt anybody, let alone him! I’m not a threat, not on anybody’s side in—whatever this is! I don’t even want to be involved with all that stuff in the Front. You think I want to be all the way out there, with all those human hicks, dealing with their half-person problems?”

  Prickly, Dominia said, “I love the people of the Front. They’re good, kind, hardworking people. Hopeful people. Martyrs have been living in their territory for almost two thousand years, and openly ruling it for centuries—but they still believe it’s a worthwhile place to live. That being near their friends and family and neighbors is worth the risks.”

  “Of course you love the Front, Cassandra was there for you! But me? Once I’ve slept with a woman once or twice, she won’t give me the time of night! I have to settle for humans… I guess I shouldn’t judge you.”

  “Maybe your problem is that women aren’t into sycophants.”

  “I know that.” He sighed pathetically and stared out into the graying Ergosphere, at the peaks of solid ocean water that drew themselves, crystalized, from the darkness. “It’s not like I haven’t tried to make a name for myself. I’ll have you know I graduated—very high in my class in my medical program. I had so much promise. I knew so much!”

  “That’s why the Hierophant tried to get rid of you. He knows how much you know, and he doesn’t want you telling me.” Yet allowed him to come this far—why, she now understood with sickening clarity. Her brother protested on.

  “But you know everything I do. More!”

  “We know different things. And I think there’s at least one thing he’s sworn you to total secrecy about…I know what it is, but there’s something I think you can help me confirm.” The edges of an admission ached a jaw she shifted in silence before she continued. “I think it’s sort of true, what he was getting at yesterday. I don’t think it mattered much to him that we were able to acquire you. In fact…I think he even prefers it. He knows this is the most expedient method of getting his hands on me. Trading you for me.”

  As he took her meaning, Theodore hacked out a high laugh. “You’re going back to him? After you went to all the trouble of getting me?”

  “I have to. Our man, Tenchi— I have to.”

  “That sailor? What about him? He’s sleeping in the plane!”

  “Time is very complicated here. I can’t get into it now, but”—she thought of brave Gethsemane once more, accepting entry into the Void and taking Valentinian’s word that he would come for her—“this is bigger than me. The Lady guided me here, insisted certain people be here with me—She set all this up so that I would have to turn around.” With a surge of bitter laughter, the General covered her face in her hands. “Oh, you bitch. It was the only way to make me return to Europa.”

  “You can’t just kidnap me, then leave me with these strangers while you get to go home!”

  Her hands dropped. “You really want to go home to the guy who tried to annihilate your soul because it would ruin my mental state?” At Teddy’s immediate silence, she continued, “Ultimately, I’m going back to save Lavinia, so you should be grateful. At least, so far as I’m concerned, that’s why I’m going back.”

  “Save Lavinia! Save Lavinia from what? Herself? Not Father— She’s the only person in the world he wouldn’t hurt.”

  No time like the present. Even so, that present seemed long, and her forehead burned with unspoken thoughts. Focused off on the dusty dawn as seen through the warping bands of her field, she wished for but a moment she could be anywhere but the body whose mouth formed the words, “I’m going to ask you a question, Theo. It’s something I’d like confirmed before I make this rash move. I just need you to remember that I probably know the answer, so it’s okay to tell me. And, anyway—you have nothing to lose after what happened last night.”r />
  Visibly dubious at the idea of releasing sensitive information, even cut off from reality and the Family, Theodore asked, “What is it?”

  How to say it? How to ask? More importantly, how to ask it in a way that would elicit the truth? She hadn’t thought on it much, hoping the words would come in the moment. Thankfully, they did when she opened her mouth. It gathered its sound after but a second of hesitation.

  “Does Lavinia understand that she’s fertile, or has he somehow hidden it from her, too?”

  The look on Theodore’s face, from the brief, gobsmacked part of his lips to the bloom of his pupils, told Dominia all she ever needed to know from him. For just under sixty-eight years, Lavinia had been in the public eye. Throughout that time, the General feigned ignorance of her condition with the kind of acting that deserved not award but prosecution.

  Perhaps because he had nothing left to lose, or because of the way she chose to ask the question, his response was: “No—she has no idea.”

  She found sweet catharsis embedded in those words. So Dominia was not a fool to do this, this going home. Not a complete fool, anyway. There was a reason for her return. A far more foolish thing would be leaving the world’s only fertile martyr at home with the Holy Father until he decided the time was right to start experimenting.

  “But how did you know that?” asked Teddy, whose bafflement never faded.

  Maybe she did know more than the Governor had ever known. Maybe the problem was Dominia’s, for being unable to admit those facts she held. “He keeps her locked away, doesn’t he?”

  “Well, yes, but she’s also dangerous. That’s plenty of reason to control her movement, it’s no reason to think…really, though, how did you know she’s fertile?”

  With one more look at the edges of her sleeping companions, Dominia waved her brother close. When he bent his head, she cupped her hand and whispered for a time in his ear. Just two short sentences. Two small facts, which Theodore hadn’t known, and which so shocked him that he pulled away from Dominia with a new, perhaps visible, appreciation for her evil. Or maybe she was just projecting.