The Lady's Champion

by M F Sullivan

  Bless Valentinian! She was close to praising him out loud by sheer accident when the professor ruined it all again. “I guess by the time the martyr forces returned, their confidence was back because they’d turned the omen into something in their favor. They even closed in on the Lady.”

  “No!”

  “No, no, it’s— She got away or something, I think. The news is playing it off like it was misreporting, but they were damn certain when I saw the broadcast that Her capture would be any minute. She must have shaken free from their clutches.”

  Thank the Lamb—for the Lady’s sake, and for the world’s. If there was any truth at all to the Lady’s footfalls upon the Earth being the indicator of imminent apocalypse—whether causal or correlative—she could only imagine what a disaster it would be when her Father’s troops tried to force the goddess’s avatar to walk.

  Trying to turn her thoughts to more pleasant issues, she asked, “Did you happen to see or hear who was brought in?”

  “I think I did, but I’m not sure whether I saw everybody. It didn’t seem like many prisoners were brought here: I only saw Farhad and Lazarus.”

  “And Tenchi? Gethsemane?”

  “Nowhere I saw.”

  That filled Dominia with relief as much as trepidation. Hopefully that meant they were alive and in the Ergosphere—Saint Valentinian, walk with them. She was sick enough as it was that the True Protomartyr had been brought in. “You’re sure it was Lazarus.”

  “Definitely. He was placed in the room four doors down from mine. I don’t know what happened at the battle to land him here, but I know he didn’t look happy.”

  “He never looks happy.” Under normal circumstances, she might have smiled while she said such a thing. Now she had no energy. Drained physically and emotionally, Dominia could only try to keep her mind from her condition by asking René the first thing she thought. “Have you ever been happy, do you think?”

  “Always asking the hard questions, Mephitoli-sama…” The professor glanced away, to the gilded pulpit that seemed to float above the room. “What is happiness? I don’t think I know what it is…I don’t think it’s real. I don’t think it’s possible to be happy. It’s not—” His arm, straining, required that he shift her, like Atlas, upon his other shoulder. “It’s not a condition you attain. It’s like…a field.”

  Smirking, Dominia asked, “The happiness field,” and he reacted with a defensive tone, not understanding she only smirked because his supposition was so apropos after all she had lately experienced.

  “Yeah, a field. Like an electromagnetic field, or something… You know how when you run electricity through a coil, you get a magnetic effect—but in this case, the electricity we’re talking about can be anything that engenders happiness, and that magnetic effect attracts more positive things. So, when you ask me if I’ve ever been happy, the answer is no. I guess I haven’t been happy, because I don’t think it’s possible for anything or anyone to actually meet the human ideal of happiness. Nobody can ‘be’ happy. We can’t even ‘be’ ourselves, for God’s sake.”

  “Why weren’t you a philosophy professor, instead of an English professor?”

  “Because I don’t have the patience to waste my time with anything that can’t be proved…if I’m going to be spouting improvable nonsense, I’d rather write fiction. Philosophy, it’s all a bunch of talking in circles.”

  “But sometimes we experience things that can’t be proved. Things unique to our own existence, or beyond the capacity for description.”

  “There’s always an intelligible explanation for any mysterious phenomenon.”

  Thinking of the gun that she had passed to him, she asked, “Is there?”

  How she wished in a way beyond wishing that she could know he’d kept the weapon safe! That she could know for certain that he was on her side. But one could never be too careful. She would have to suffer in agonized curiosity and turn her attention elsewhere: for the remainder of their hour, the two discussed literature.

  Too soon—much too soon—that hour was up, and the Hierophant made his reappearance to wave Ichigawa down the ladder. His Holiness jeered to Dominia as her body sagged back into the hanging position. “I hope you enjoyed your break, my dear. I shall see you again in another twelve-ish hours, yes?”

  Twelvish hours. She could do that. She had passed many hours in total silence, in the military and as a prisoner of war. This was the same. She was a prisoner of life—her Father’s life. Would death not come as liberator? That was how Saint Valentinian was depicted. Why he was the patron saint of slaves and prisoners, as well as death and artists. Was she not freer than she had ever been, hanging by her once-more purpling leg, knowing that no matter what happened, the end drew near? Indeed, the longer she remained in her inverted position, the more correct such a notion of freedom felt. It seemed to her as if her Father’s world had always been upside down. Perhaps her death by this means, trickling back through time to the beginning of her life, was why.

  If her death produced a new world by default, did the creation of a new world mean her death? She was fine with that. How tired she had grown of this life! Of this place! Look at this garish chapel, begging to be seen. The source of such strife, such incomparable heartache! It was one of the most beautiful rooms this life had to offer her, and it was built of human bones and plundered gold. There was a higher, truer world than this. She had known its substance. She had held Cassandra.

  She had held Cassandra.

  Nothing could undo that notion. Nothing could convince her it was only a dream, or a fantasy, as the Hierophant tried to when he ascended the ladder at the end of those twelvish hours and offered her blood-throbbing brain a momentary respite. As he held his daughter upright as easily as most men held a baseball, his attention turned to the Kingdom. She endeavored to avoid so much as the slightest reaction when he indicated knowledge of its existence by asking, “Has the magician bothered to teach you how to come and go from the Kingdom this time? You know—if you taught me, I’d set you free this instant.”

  Faced with her resolute silence, he filled the air with preposterous theorizing. Oh. That was René’s problem with philosophy. She got it, now.

  “I personally suspect the Kingdom is a hallucination instilled in subjects by the magician, which is why I cannot seem to find a way into it.”

  “I believe you will be there,” she opened her mouth to generously say. The Hierophant appeared almost surprised by that.

  “Oh? Because you will show me how to get there?”

  “No. Maybe. I don’t know.” But, by the Lamb, she had seen Tobias Akachi there. A human to rival her Father for the evils he had committed—yet he, too, had been in the Kingdom. Wry humor quirked her lips even in a time like this, and she turned her aching head to lift her eyebrows at him. “You keep trying to get any piece of information you can out of me to get me back to your side—Lazarus, the Kingdom, anything—but I should be the one trying to appeal to you.”

  “To my better nature?”

  “You have no better nature.”

  “Ah!” He chuckled and patted her back. “You took the words from my mouth. To what would you appeal, then?”

  “Your soul.” The statement elicited a patronizing coo as though it had charmed him, but she had thought much on this over the past twenty-four hours. “Your soul can always be saved.”

  The Hierophant’s jolly humor faltered not one iota. If anything, he seemed moved to sheer delight. “You would preach to me while hanging from the cross I put you on!”

  “I would save you.”

  “Wouldn’t you rather save yourself?”

  “That’s not possible. I’ve thought this through, Father—and, remarkably, I’m not so sure you have. What good are your thoughtforms when you have no body? They wish to work through the soul to manifest on Earth. What good is a soul with a dead body? Your study, your books—hell, even your torches and your fires will abandon you. And you know that. That’s why, when wh
atever apocalypse I bring destroyed the culture your forebear built in the last iteration, you fled to this new world. Cicero.” His black eyes sparkled in merriment to be addressed by his secret name, as close to a real name as anyone could hope to know of him in this life. “But you could change all that. Make the choice to change yourself, before Saint Valentinian decides it’s time to force the change.”

  He was unflappable. The head games her Father routinely turned on others broke against his frontal lobe like waves shattering against rocks. “I must say—I have always found it interesting that the magician is capable of using you to suit his needs when he feels. Yet here you are, allowed to hang from a cross. Allowed to lose your leg! A fine way to repay you for all your hard work. Not unlike Bathsheba, no? Perhaps I’d ought to have given the role to you.”

  He wanted to get her into an argument. Wanted to get her passionate about his immortal soul, or the Kingdom’s reality, or the magician’s righteousness. As if it were the magician’s fault that she swayed back and forth like a tetherball, starving, trembling, thinking with increasing fondness of the moment when all this would graciously end.

  Seeing his cursory efforts to seduce her into his service were for naught, the Hierophant lowered her at the end of the hour with a few solemn tuts. “How much trouble you would save yourself, if only you would be reasonable. You are afraid to betray a dream, as if it were more real than reality. As if it were worth more than your Family!”

  “Cassandra is my family,” said Dominia, defiant to the end. “More my family than anyone. And I will never betray her again. I’ve let her down enough.”

  “I suppose you have.”

  If she weren’t upside down, she might have spat to watch him walk away. Instead, she tried to breathe and focus on that memory of her wife’s gentlest smiles. Oh! Cassandra. She had to believe they would meet again at the end of this. That it would be in the flesh, in reality. Not, as her Father had said, in some dream.

  Because he did have a small point in that. Whatever the Kingdom was, wherever it was, it was a conception of eternity, but it was not linear reality. Its time and the feeling of its time functioned like a dream, and Dominia could not help but feel that if she lived there, she would never accomplish anything again. Nor would she be able to leave after a certain point. The world would need to end for that, and in that case, she wouldn’t remember anything. So, she might theoretically have Cassandra, but she would be forced to lose her once more even if Dominia would again have the pleasure of reliving (in ignorance) that beautiful moment of their meeting.

  The General couldn’t stand the thought. This had to be the last time. If it meant this was the last time, then she could withstand this. She could withstand anything. She would have Cassandra, and there was no alternative.

  After twelve more hours, Dominia was startled from a dreamless sleep into which she had not meant to wander, nor known she could wander in her current position. Farhad was brought to her, and struggled more to support her weight upon the ladder than would any martyr.

  “You are deceptively heavy,” the pilot exclaimed, his laughter nervous as the ladder rocked back, then forward against the crucifix, while he used both hands to support the General. “You do not look as if you should weigh much more than my sister.”

  “It’s muscle mass, and the fact that I’m dead weight right now. But thank you for doing this, Farhad.”

  “Afwan,” came the grunted response. “I am sorry to see you in such a situation as this. Iblis is a coward who would eliminate you by easy means, rather than honorable ones.”

  “There are no honorable deaths. Just stupid ones, and expected ones.”

  “Which is this?”

  “No reason it can’t be both, right?”

  The slightest smile lit Farhad’s voice. “Even in a time like this, you are a very funny person, Mahdi.”

  “I like to make people laugh. When I do, I almost feel something that’s not…awful.”

  “Have faith, please.” To hear him say it with such insistence gave her pause, and the General glanced over, her blurred vision etching out Farhad’s bearded features like a camera’s slow-to-focus lens. “You will survive this, Mahdi—this trial on the cross like the prophet Isa, who is alive in heaven and waiting for you to heighten the war against Iblis and ad-Dajjal. He will come, then, and unify the world.”

  “He doesn’t need to wait on my account,” said Dominia, much too tired to argue and never having been interested in doing it when it came to religious matters. She had never had particular belief or disbelief in Christ, and now that she understood the workings of the Ergosphere, the fact that Jesus of Nazareth had been possessed—sorry, “descended upon”—by a pan-dimensional archetype now seemed as self-evident as the color of the sky. This simple detail of the nature of reality could trash even the most devoted martyr’s belief in the HMC for just the reason that the Hierophant had carefully limited their understanding of the Bible to a violent brand of semi-literalism. The martyr position on the matter of Jesus as the Son of God was that he was, most certainly, that; and, especially since the Roman Catholic Church had fled Italy (for, sadly, Israel), the Holy Martyr Church had claimed it was the Catholic Church. It was merely an extension of that most revered and historic institution. The real, human Catholic disagreed with this notion, because the Post Testament added a whole new set of blatantly sacrilegious beliefs. Namely, that the Second Coming of Christ had occurred in the earthly form of the Lamb, who was the martyred son of the Hierophant—himself, merely God’s highest servant ever in pursuit of the clearest light of divinity.

  When she mingled among religious humans, particularly Farhad, she learned that the popular human conception was quite the opposite. Oh, sure, she’d heard people call her Father “the Devil,” because he called himself that for a giggle and cherished the title. But what had surprised her was the depth of the demonology that had been applied to the Holy Family, and the almost universal understanding of these theological positions across Christian, Muslim, and Hebrew faiths. (The Catholic Church, treating the Bible—especially Revelations—on a symbolic level, was one of the few ironic holdouts who denied the Hierophant was anything of supernatural power, infernal or divine.) In the eyes of most human faithful, the Lamb was not the Second Coming, but the anti-Christ, and the slave of a foul demon who called himself the God of this world. This had been Kahlil’s belief, but it was all pretty far-out stuff to her, especially when she started asking Abrahamians about their particular stances on Jesus Christ. With perspectives differing so vastly on the subject, it didn’t seem possible to the General any one religion should be more correct than another. Nor was she thrilled at the notion of waiting around for the Second Coming of a Messiah, alive in heaven or not.

  Though she had to admit, the Islamic notion that Jesus never died on the cross was pretty comforting in the given circumstances.

  “Have you considered, Mahdi, that the tether might be undone?”

  “A deficit of free hands aside, they’d be all over me before I made it to the doors.”

  With a reluctant glance over his shoulder, Farhad studied the restraint around her ankle as she had herself studied it closely over the past cycle. Its substance was flexible, with a bounce not dissimilar to bungie cord. Given her position and the fact that one leg was free, it would be easy for her or anyone dropping her to dislocate her leg before it was even amputated. Any effort to free her required guaranteed success. Further, the tether was secured at the top of the cross, strung through the metal loop of a weighted cap that had been slipped over top the two-barred crucifix to render it the horned variant preferred by the HMC. The whole thing resembled a bisected version of the old astrological symbol for Mercury. Maybe she could pull her way up and chew through the tether, but she was increasingly weak from the effects of starvation, and she suspected the tensile substance was as durable as it was conductive. This last thought was posited to Farhad, who looked shocked when she mentioned her hunger.

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nbsp; “I did not know. All this time, I thought you shook from fear. I should have known better than to think you afraid.” Looking around his person with irritation, he said, “They have taken all my weapons, of course, my knives and guns, but I might withstand the pain of your teeth if they are sharp enough—”

  “No, Farhad.” She tried to smile for him and just couldn’t physically manage it. “But thank you. It’s just better. Trust me, being in this position for this long…”

  “I see.”

  “Only about a week more,” the General observed. “I can do it.”

  “You can, Mahdi, and will. I believe in you.” Cassandra’s voice echoing with Farhad’s managed to elicit the corners of Dominia’s smile while the pilot went on, “Please: believe, also, in us.”

  “I do…after you were able to get back from the Ergosphere, especially. I hope I get to hear that story some night.” Hesitant to discuss it with all the monitoring resources the castle had to offer no doubt focused on them, Dominia nonetheless felt obliged to ask, “Did Gethsemane return to Earth with you?”

  Pending a soft exhalation, Farhad shook his head. “The magician you’ve told us about—the man from the study of Iblis—he flagged us down once we had flown for a day, as he promised on the radio. This man…perhaps you do not know this story. He reminds me of the servant of Allah, Khidr, who met and challenged Moses. I do not know why he does the things he does, Valentinian. But I believe he does them in the service of Allah.”

  “What did he do to Gethsemane?”

  “He took her out of the plane with him, and when Tenchi and I emerged, the magician was alone.”

  “How was she looking when he took her away?”

  The man’s expression grew hesitant; he glanced up at Dominia’s leg, perhaps deciding whether it was worth burdening her with the truth in her current circumstances. “When I was a small boy in the state of Syria, my uncle was an imam; he could answer any question about the Quran and tell many of its stories from the top of his head. The one I remember best is the one everyone remembers best. The story of the Seven Sleepers. These men, Mahdi, these Christian shepherds, they enter a cave near Ephesus to hide from Roman persecution, and by the grace of Allah, they are allowed to sleep for three hundred years. Their dog lays across the cave’s entrance”—she recalled Kahlil’s aggravation over dogs, and wondered what he would think of that story—“and even he survives for that phenomenal length of time. When they leave the cave, they return to the city and find it changed—now Christian—and their story is proven true because the coins with which they try to buy food have not been in circulation for three hundred years. After they realize what has happened to them, they die on the spot, praising Allah.”