The General's Bride

by M F Sullivan

  “Dominia.”

  The familiar sound was so unexpected that, in the context in which the tiger heard it, the syllables seemed the foreign voice of the sail-eared beast it chased. Only on second repetition did it falter the cat, who paused to study the shape of the call in its ears. This sound was not the deep and breathless grunts of predator animals, nor of the prey that she lost as it vanished into the darkness. This sound gave some sense of self and context and space outside “this” and “that,” outside the arrow drive of primeval hunger. Indeed, it spoke to a deeper hunger: a deeper craving. The tiger thundered after that deeper craving, while within it Dominia stirred at the sound of her own name. She felt again the word “tiger” and recalled an ancient poet whose utterance, “Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright” repeated in her head. A vibrating mantra in her Father’s voice, the deceptive humanity of which shaped her back into a woman as the poem ran its course.

  Perhaps it was the memory of her Father: of how, as he recited the poem while tucking her into bed, he would put such growling emphasis on the word “dare” that she would giggle despite herself. Because, to children who knew better, he was yet so playful and charming and kind that one never hated him as much as one wished. Even now, she heard his words: felt him closing up her ribs with tickling hands that restored a body she knew.

  “What immortal hand or eye dare frame thy fearful symmetry?”

  A woman, she tripped in the darkness as if she’d reached the edge of some invisible cliff. Perhaps she had; she seemed to be hurtling as such. The General fell such a length, at such exhilarating speed, she had no time to be afraid: only to marvel at the sound of wind whipping past her ears. The blackness plunged into her skull after the sound, filling it with immense pressure. Would her head explode?

  The farther she descended, the slower she fell, and the more the darkness assumed newer, colder embrace. It was impossible to tell at what point “darkness” became “water,” or if there had ever been a difference. Perhaps it was a matter of changed depth, viscosity, and perception. The difference was not a concern that came to Dominia’s mind, nor did thoughts of drowning trouble her until she considered she ought to be drowning. Light, though, began to grow in the water before her, for at some point, “down” had become “up”; in that same quantum sphere where “darkness” tangled with “water,” so, too, did these lack discernment. There was only the goal toward which she pumped her burning limbs until, with a violent splash, Dominia emerged from the water, gasping and coughing, good eye too blinded to see until well after she discerned amid her sputters for air the hush of feminine whispers. After a good wiping with her wrist, her eye opened, and the General was taken aback—though far from disappointed—to find herself surrounded by a coterie of exquisite women. Two of them nude, and one draped in wet cloth (which was somehow better)—plus two more pricked their heads from the bushes at the bank. Who knew how many more yet unseen. Odysseus, indeed!

  “Excuse me, ladies.” The General tried not to take too much advantage of her own femininity and looked politely at the nearby trees. “Sorry to bother you, but I have no idea where I am. Or”—she grew aware she stood in a lake no more than waist deep, the way she’d come having been, evidently, closed off—“how I got here.”

  “You are in the True West, although it seems that, to you, this is the East.” The clothed woman rested a hand upon her shielded breast; another sought to smooth the speaker’s hair until one of her sorority also helped. “You are a stranger here.”

  “No kidding.” As Dominia’s eye adjusted, it became apparent that these were not human women, for they were beyond the pale of earthly—or mortal—perfection. Some breed of nymph? Their hair, through of golden luster in the sun (the sun! The golden sun! The General only now registered it as it glowed unburning in the straw and chocolate tangles of the hair that haloed them) revealed the seafoam sheen of algae, and certain regions of flesh where most women’s skin grew darker carmine or dusky brown were here illustrated in the same fragile ivies as the luscious flora surrounding their clear spring. She could not think to speak, but the creatures appeared as content to study her until their clothed leader asked, “You are a woman?”

  “Of course.”

  “It is not often women find our pool. Women with your needs do not often come.”

  Marveling past the beautiful creatures, at the distant golden orb that did not burn, the martyr said, “Well, I’m here, though I don’t know what needs you mean, or where ‘here’ is.”

  They so laughed that Dominia blushed. The water splashing around the limber legs of the clothed nymph rose to her hips; she waded to meet the General, who remained fixed to the spot.

  “I know you now. How did I fail to recognize you? Because you did not recognize me, perhaps?” The girl’s glistening lips parted in a smile. “How pleased we would have been for a woman’s touch! But how pleased I will be, General, to lead you.”

  “Are you thoughtforms?” tried Dominia, somewhat weakly. The nymph before her paused to laugh, that gay, sweet ringing further burning her face until the giggling offender turned back to see her displeasure with a click of the tongue.

  “We are older than thought. We are older than form.”

  With a hand as cool as the darkness from which still-delirious Dominia emerged, the nymph touched the General’s face, lifted her palm, tried to draw her from the water. “Excuse me.” Dominia’s efforts to pull away were foiled, the ethereal woman’s grip deceptively strong. She marveled as she was tugged past the unclothed nymphs and to the bank of the pond. “Where are we going? Who are you? Do I know you?”

  “Not yet. My name is Gethsemane.” The smiling nymph stepped up to the grass, and as the water beaded upon her skin to be dried, dot for dot, by the sun, the color of the woman’s flesh resolved from celadon tinges to more human tones. That strange beauty, however, remained. “My sisters and I are the Water Bearers. We are here to aid you.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you. Lady Dominia di Mephitoli, Governess of the United Front, General of the Hierophant, Bitch of Europa, and Serpent of the Southwest.” The girl embraced a slender tree, which, to Dominia’s astonishment, bent its boughs as though to return the affection. When they lifted away, the nymph stood in light armor of bark, with a skirt resembling leaves. “I have awaited you an eternity: you, after all, are the one who crafts the eternity in which I wait.”

  VII

  The True West

  Dominia’s people did not approve of drugs, but that had not prevented teenage experimentation. In the end, she was always partial to liquor, but she dabbled in tobacco, tiptoed into reefer, and, as a young woman during slivers of peacetime, gone through a phase of psychedelics that lost her more friends than it earned spiritual revelations. She had done enough substances to know out-of-body experiences and hallucinations of this degree were, to put it mildly, rare: the closest she had come to something like this was dimethyltryptamine, but even that tended to reduce reality to the pattern of a Persian rug and enhance her imagination rather than take her to any true faraway place and convince her she was awake while it happened.

  This place made her awake and whole as she might have felt on Earth, or more. Yes, more awake than awake—if that last place had been a dark place of dreaming, this land, bursting in hues more exquisite than those she knew, was a land of hyperconsciousness. It was decidedly not Earth. Beneath the merry sun (a wholesome star whiter than Sol, with his angry sheen of city smog and summertime wildfire smoke in the UF), grass reflected an emerald she had seen nowhere on the face of her beloved planet, and the wind whistled a song through every blade. With it carried a fabulous scent, as if to indicate the walkers of this world breathed not some lesser gas like oxygen but rather sweet perfume. Yet, for all the glories of nature that assailed her as she was led from the spring to a distant road that curled along an unmade bed of hills, that most glorious was the spirit guiding her by the hand.

  “Gethsemane.” The General repeated the name
and was rewarded with the lifting eyes of the nymph. Now she had to find something to say. She cleared her throat. “So—did somebody tell you to collect me?”

  “Yes. We have long awaited your arrival. I am sorry I did not recognize you at first; most humans look the same to me.”

  “Oh, I’m not—”

  “There are no martyrs here,” Gethsemane corrected before Dominia made her mistake. “There is no one for the sun to burn; there is no need to shed another’s blood. Not unless it is the will of the king.”

  “A king, huh?” Dominia eyed the girl’s armor and felt for a moment she had fallen into the song of an ancient crew of earthly composers named for an outmoded style of dirigible. “Was he the one who told you to wait for me?”

  “I wait for you because it is my duty. But, no. The king and his queen are on vacation in the East.”

  “I thought you said this was the East.”

  “Your East. We are the West, properly called the True Western Kingdom in the Time of Felicity. It is much easier to say ‘West,’ however, or ‘Kingdom.’ At any rate, no matter where you are, General, there is always an East.”

  “I suppose…uh”—coming out of a daze, or the spell of her dreamily chattering new companion, Dominia thought to ask—“where are you taking me?”

  “To the City, to meet the magician called Valentinian.”

  With perked ears and sweet relief for the familiar name, Dominia said, “Valentinian! He’s here?”

  “If not already, he will be soon, because you are here.”

  “So, he knew we were coming… I’m still not sure how I got here. Is this the same place as before? The dark one, I mean, where I came from.”

  “In a sense. Everything that surrounded you before surrounds you. It has been rearranged.”

  Quite an understatement! To compare this place to the Void was an impossible task. They did not seem in any way the same, and Dominia was certain that mapping them (if mapping the Void was possible) would elicit two different geographies. “It was so dark there; it’s hard to believe this is the same place. I feel as if I’ve been dreaming, and I’ve just woken up.”

  “You have, if it was night’s darkness in which you wandered. The mind dreams in that darkness, which is filled with formless spirits.”

  And formed spirits. Her mind struggled to reconstruct the beast in that darkness, that snorting thing that watched her even before she’d wandered off and lost track of her body. Glimpses of gray, and long horns—no, tusks. “I saw an animal while I—dreamed. I thought I was an animal, too. Then I heard my name.” Spoken by whose voice? In the manner of an interrupted dream, the memories refused to resolve into a functional image.

  “Someone prayed for you, General.” Gethsemane’s explanation was so matter-of-fact that Dominia barked out a laugh.

  “Prayed for me?” A thousand stuffy sermons swept to the forefront of her mind. “I never thought that did any good.”

  “If one is not connected with the spirit, it may not, except by accident; and it has no material use but to bolster the self in the waking day. But you must learn the benefits of prayer if you are to aid in the Lady’s cause.”

  “The Lady…you serve the Lady.”

  “I am Her Bearer.”

  “Then—do you know Miki Soto?”

  “Not in this place, at this time. In a different place, and in a different time, yes.”

  Someday, someplace, Dominia would meet a person who gave straight answers. For now, she’d given up worrying about it. Failing to keep sarcasm from her voice, she asked, “So, what are the…benefits of prayer?”

  “You’ve felt the real benefit. It reinforces the souls of those who pray and those for whom they pray. One must be in the Unspoken to observe the impact of thoughts and speech upon Earth.”

  The Void, the Unspoken, the Bardo, Purgatory! Pick a name! “Does that place have anything approaching an agreed-upon title?”

  “No,” said Gethsemane, in a tone flat enough that the General once more laughed. The nymph smiled slightly at the sound. “Your holy books tell a story called ‘the Tower of Babel’…that place is like the tower. It cannot be directly communicated one way for all to understand because your people speak so many different languages, and each believe only one of those languages correct. I speak of spiritual symbolism, General. Not true language. It is hard to find a neutral word that can describe something across all tongues without ire, just as it is hard to find a neutral symbol that can describe something across all faiths. But there is a man in the East—our East, General—who is a very wise man: the Wisest in the World. When he is in the West, he must labor to repent for crimes he committed out of arrogance. But, when he is in the East and has worked off his burden, he is called the Engineer, and he is as good to his people as any king. I have spoken to him many times before, and he once told me Earth’s globally preferred term for the Void. He said learnéd men believe it is what they call ‘the Ergosphere.’”

  “The Ergosphere,” repeated Dominia. “Isn’t that—isn’t that the area around a black hole?”

  “A rotating black hole of the sort once a sun; yes, those are the words that people of Earth prefer to describe these places.”

  “We were in a black hole,” enthused the General, mouth opened, hand releasing Gethsemane’s in surprise. The girl, without any sense of wonder, looked plainly up at her.

  “No, General. We are currently in it, or, at least, upon what you would call its event horizon, where all the information of eternity is stored. The black hole that waits at the end of time for all life to return home is existent in your time, has been existent since the creation of Sol, and before. It does not seem as such, because time’s illusion has hidden it; if you viewed all things from the black hole’s perspective, you would understand all things simply are.”

  Her hands upon the top of her head as though to contain its contents, Dominia marveled up and around. “But there’s a sun in the sky,” she tried. The nymph nodded.

  “The sun exists, General. Therefore, the sun must be here. Long, long ago, your scientists corrected the notion that black holes are mouths made to devour reality. They are mouths that speak it: holding all words upon their tongues until the moment they must manifest as sound, yet containing them even once they have been spoken so as to use them again in a different way, during a future conversation.”

  It took some fantasy naiad to tell her a science fact that would have made her understand the Void weeks ago! “Why didn’t Valentinian and Lazarus just explain that to me?”

  “Such a notion is frightful to those who fear standing at the end of eternity; and while in that space where the Ergosphere has exposed the malleable field of the universe that magicians call ‘aether’ and scientists call ‘the Higgs field,’ misunderstanding this revelation can cause total destruction of the body and mind. Anything one thinks may become reality there. Even brief thoughts of total annihilation can be deadly. Therefore, one must come to understand the nature of the space when they are upon solid ground of one form or another; it keeps them from being carried away.” With another look at the sun, Gethsemane extended her hand. “If you please, General. We have some ways to walk, and the day here passes as it does on Earth: regardless of how we spend its minutes.”

  Pretty embarrassing, to have spent so much time in the Ergosphere that basic facts of reality needed re-explained. “But if we’re in a black hole now and when we’re in that—Ergosphere, what is the black sun in the sky?”

  “It is Earth, General, standing at the end of time, at the outer edge of the Ergosphere along whose inner edge you walk. When you look up into the black orb, you are putting your attention back on your home planet and time: ‘coming down to Earth,’ you could call it.”

  Behind the nearest hill sprawled a vast and well-manicured orchard. Seeing it, Gethsemane cut off the main path. The house was so large it seemed not a home but an inn; Dominia suspected this was so based on the two sets of sprawling stables. Amid the trees,
she was back begging for help from the ill-fated McLintocks; but the parallels only increased when Gethsemane, rather than using the orchard for a shortcut and passing by the house, stopped to knock upon the front door. After a moment, a gentle-looking woman lined by middle age answered them, smiling pleasantly, her “Yes?” becoming an “Oh!” when she recognized the General. “Oh, my,” said the lady, and Gethsemane smiled.

  “Please, miss?” The Bearer seemed to be asking something implied, and the woman inside looked delighted by her unexpected guests.

  “I didn’t know they were my horses… Eric”—the woman called to a boy unseen—“would you watch the pot? I have to take care of something.”

  The woman, wiping her hands upon her apron, stepped outside and shut the door behind her. As Dominia tried to find something recognizable in her face and found nothing—to her relief, as she’d half expected Carol McLintock at the door—the smiling woman assessed her in return.