The General's Bride

by M F Sullivan

  He spoke while opening the steel plate installed in the door, through which she was expected to stick her arms to be cuffed for blood infusions delivered, insultingly, via intranasal drip rather than a glass. “You were so right. I got sucked right into it; read it all in one sitting! Well, kind of. I had a lot of duties last night, so I had to come back to it a couple of times, but—you weren’t kidding! It was beautiful. Made a whole lot more sense to me than all that stuff about begetting…”

  The poor boy. So excited to talk about that book. Probably even more excited to have some way to bond with his prisoner, to redeem himself in her eyes. Baffling, that desperation for approval. After her twenty years in Canada, she had been called back for a war that culminated in this, this moment, wherein she had a choice to make. Her own desperation for the approval of a hollow, evil person had put her there to begin with. Maybe that was why she did what she did, killing the private instead of just knocking him unconscious, or threatening him into silence. She saw a part of herself in him that she hated—a part of herself she wanted to kill. When his excitement over his opportunity to bond with her mixed with inexperience in just the right way, it kept him from fully ratcheting into place the cuff around Dominia’s left wrist. It hung just a little loose as she lowered her hand; he hadn’t done it properly at all, busy as he’d been talking about the angel, Raphael, who instructed Tobit in the use of fish whose organs could cure anything from demonic possession to physical blindness. That same miracle fish was the cause of Benedict’s death in the end, when he opened the door and found that, in the seconds of its opening, the General had already jerked her slender fingers from the cuff, bending the metal to do it: he’d left as much give as a martyr needed, which was not much.

  After six nights of being guarded by an overgrown boy, Dominia walked free while painted in his blood, and the blood of the two men who’d come to oversee her meal. Then she had gone on to kill every man in the ragtag encampment, silent as night, and had not thought again during the Nogales Rampage of poor Benedict, who ended his life twitching in her cell, short blond hair smeared in the same blood coloring her. The same blood with which she had manhandled his possessions in search of his gun and instead found a photograph of his mother, the town of his birth labeled on the back. She tossed it aside and took another man’s gun because it was already in his dead hand.

  She next thought of her jailer in Cassandra’s hospital room, in the presence of the Hierophant. From that point on, Benedict’s death was a trigger—the starting link in an inevitable chain of thoughts, which, like his endless “begets,” led shame by deeper shame to the first human life she ever took under her Father’s watchful eye as a teenager undergoing a rite of passage like any in her world: attending to the deaths of humans during Mass. Now, outside that world, her whole life was a horror.

  As her thoughts reached a peak of sorrow, the dog emitted a soft “boof,” eyes still innocently closed. Drawn from her unfortunate mental cycles to look at the beast, he appeared for all the world as if he’d barked at something in his dream. She knew better. With the same hand that stretched to pat the animal’s side, the General wiped the tears from her face and lay back down in search of a few more precious hours of sleep.

  XII

  The Assumption of Miki

  Those few hours of sleep Dominia managed proved vital. The ceremony was scheduled to begin shortly after the martyr normally roused; but, running on Miki’s human schedule, she awoke at the stiflingly early hour of eleven in the morning. Truly back at war!

  But, it was worth it. Worth it to spend Miki’s last afternoon keeping her spellbound with stories of what Dominia had seen and done in that strange and sometimes terrible place where forty days had passed as a week’s long march. Miki wanted to hear about the Kingdom, so Dominia tried to tell her, but she was at a loss to describe such a glorious place when, while seeing it, the General had lacked one eye, been sleep-deprived, and was overwhelmed by sensory bombardment after a long period of next to nothing. Dominia endeavored to comfort her friend, and to explain that, from what she had seen, the Kingdom was, well—heavenly. The human did her best to be reassured.

  Not long after they awoke, they were brought breakfast: Miki received a platter entirely of fruits and vegetables, which meant that Dominia’s thoughtful steak and eggs and (graphic) bloody Mary elicited the same envious cartoon eyes in the bride-to-be as they did in the dog. Although the General offered her a bite, Miki sagged.

  “I can’t. I gave up everything delicious forty-one days ago, when Kahlil and I arrived. I haven’t even smelled meat since! But the Lady can’t enter me if I’ve so much as touched it.”

  Vaguely, Dominia sensed this had something to do with the effects of protein on the spirit or soul inhabiting the body, but she could not articulate why or how. Somehow, it made her reluctant to sip her drink or finish the thick steak, which was, astonishingly, a natural side of beef rather than artificial. Not ideal—not human—but she was not sure she could bear to eat such a thing again, and not sure she needed to with the blood of Lazarus flowing in her veins. Whatever the substance, she was glad to eat normal, material food again—and the fine, buttery, almost sweet flavor of the otherwise intensely umami steak was a welcome way to start. Funny how mass quantities of beer paired with idle living made both cows and humans much more delicious.

  Miki downed a big swig of her mimosa, then refilled the glass from a pitcher-size container; Dominia eyed the thing. “But booze is fine?”

  “Shit, are you kidding me? It’s required. I’m pretty sure the incense here is mostly cannabis, anyway.” While Dominia thought about the cigarette the magician had given her, Miki shrugged. “Who knows what they’ll be pumping into the air during the ceremony? Maybe pheromones.” She tacked on a goofy eyebrow waggle, which made Dominia laugh.

  They would probably require pheromones to get the General believing in anything scheduled to happen that evening. Though she may have been to the Ergosphere and met Trisha, the struggle to find direct correspondence between that world and the one she knew was as fruitless as expecting a dream to manifest in physical reality. Oh, sure, her Father’s religion was also adamant miracles were possible: but his religion centered around convincing its worshipers that only the chosen—the highest and mightiest and very, very few—could hope to wield those powers of the divine that mankind called “miraculous.” Now confronted with a religion focusing on the open display of divine miracles, the skeptical, spiritually jaded martyr wasn’t sure how to react. Yes, she had been given her eye and her teeth, but lurking beneath the layers of mysticism was surely a scientific explanation: maybe exposure to the substance brought from the Ergosphere activated her genetic code or sent her stem cells into overdrive to recreate old missing parts exactly as they were. Whatever the explanation, the spiritual trappings over it made her uncomfortable, and left her dubious anything would happen at all.

  Yet, when the time came to wrap up the stories of her Void march and leave the future avatar to her early-evening preparations, the General found herself reluctant to go. She waited for some protest from Miki; but her friend’s face revealed no trace of that fear that, in the early hours, had awoken Dominia, and that was exhaled in one long sigh that left the human still and perfect. A dove, meditating in her nest.

  “I guess it’s time for me to start getting ready.” A Bearer waited in the doorway. Miki laughed for no real reason and then, quieted, reached for Dominia, only to wheeze with surprise as the martyr crushed her with the force of her embrace. “Dominia”—the human made a noise like a hiccup, and turned her face against the martyr’s heart—“thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me for this.” The General fought the trembling of her lips and moved to push away hair not there anymore, for it had been sheared off a month ago. She smoothed back what remained as she said, “If I were any kind of friend, I’d save you.”

  “Now you sound like Kahlil. There’s nothing to save me from.” Her eyes blazing, Miki turned h
er reddened face up toward Dominia. “I’m the one saving you.”

  As Dominia hurried toward Basil and those guards who were too excited to act authoritative, it was with one last kiss on the cheek for a girl who, strictly speaking, had caused nothing but trouble from the first moment she’d electrocuted the General into unconsciousness. How strange, to think they parted as friends! She could not even discern the moment they’d become friends. But the world was a strange place, and the heart, far stranger. The heart was open to as much change as it had love; and of all the people she’d ever met, Miki was most full of love for life and other beings. The only one with more—or the potential for more—had been Cassandra, but that capacity for love, if not shattered, had been damaged in two parts: the loss of Benedict, and the loss of Benedict’s child. Yes, there were always the schoolchildren, but Dominia saw early on it would never be the same. Not the same as a child of Cassandra’s own who she could love and raise and teach to be good, despite their surroundings. Despite what they were. And Dominia, meanwhile, felt for over two hundred years before her wife that she’d endured too much, lost too much, seen too much, to love another person in a full, soulful way. Cassandra’s death confirmed it: what love she had was not enough, or, worse, was poison.

  This scarcity of love in Dominia’s heart made the love radiating from Miki that much more precious. The General had long since closed herself off from trust: from feeling. Once that brief golden window had closed to her for good, she thought of love as an organ—attached to her, but useless and dead, or perhaps entirely missing. A phantom limb. But here, led down the hall by a bounding dog intent on a direct path to the gardens, the General felt that dead organ pulse again. Alive with love for the world through which she walked: a donation from Miki’s bottomless resources.

  The gardens that night were a sight to behold, more than any other night for the past two thousand years. On first emergence, the exquisite statues seemed to have multiplied, animated, begun to talk and laugh and sing with all the gaiety of birds: only the priestesses, relieved of their duties and given run of the liquor stores for Lamb-knew-how-many hours by the time Dominia joined in. Though the General paused upon the threshold with an anxious glance for the faint veil of sunlight still sharpening the edges of Cairo’s skyscrapers and cell-phone towers, Basil gave a supportive bark and charged outside. Her body tense with the three-hundred-year instinct of pain, and the forty-/seven-day instinct of being swept into the heart of Sol, she crossed the threshold and found both her fears to be, at best, wastes of energy. If anything, she felt refreshed and alive—more than she’d felt in years. But the most remarkable effect of standing in the sun for those few seconds, in her own, real world, was the purity of it. In her mind, and her body. She didn’t need to ask Lazarus or Valentinian: she felt in the base of her heart, as Cassandra must have felt those first inklings of pregnancy, that the normal food and bovine blood given her earlier, in concert with the sunlight, would keep her proteins from structural collapse. Perhaps a Lazarene martyr who chose to live at night still required blood. She hoped she would never have to test that theory, though felt as if, in the hoping, she had invited the experience by clumsy accident.

  No matter. That was the sun, the real, earthly sun upon her face so long denied, and she was relieved that it sparkled through the trees, intent on sinking past the roofline of the courtyard; when she gazed toward the source of its light (as uninitiated humans were taught never to do under any circumstances, for fear of burned retinas), the boundaries of her body began to dissolve. The edges of her vision flickered with darkness, and against her skin rose the slightest vacuum pull—

  Basil’s bark tore her vision from the sun as if she had been but musing, deep in meditation. Had the orange trees spreading their leaves above not obscured the light, her untrained mind certainly would have whisked off to the Ergosphere. Ahead, the dog flirted merrily from woman to woman, taking advantage of his fuzzy appearance to receive the giddy embraces of perfumed arms and squealing kisses mashed upon his fur by so many pairs of painted lips that the white portions of his forehead bore the rainbow refraction of a prism by the time he halted at Kahlil. The young man’s pensive study of the warrior Morrigan was interrupted by a pair of paws that, planted upon his back, shoved him forward. If he’d held a wineglass like everybody else, he’d have left both himself and the dog drenched. While the General tried to restrain her laughter so as to whistle for the border collie, Kahlil looked upon them both with bleak annoyance.

  “Now there’s a face I hoped I’d never see again,” the man grumbled at the dog who’d shot him. “Tobias was right. If it’s going to rain in Cairo, I’ll bet I could tell you.”

  “Good thing that doesn’t happen often. Other than that, you healing all right?”

  Blandly, the man shrugged, then noticed Dominia’s own empty hands. “You don’t drink?”

  Only all the time, as often as she could, for the past three hundred thirtyish years. “I’ve already had three or four this evening.” Kahlil’s vaguely impressed look transformed to one of religious scorn. “Just thought it was time for a break.”

  “How long ago?” On his asking, she was so baffled by the question that he had to repeat it. “How long ago was your last drink?”

  “I don’t know—they laid off a while, then brought me the last one about…an hour ago? I guess because they knew my time with Miki was wrapping up. Why, are we going swimming?”

  “No, you—” Annoyed, Kahlil’s voice dropped as he neared the General. “There’s acid in the liquor.” She almost laughed before he qualified: “Lysergic acid.”

  “What,” the martyr practically shouted. “No, I’ve been drinking all day—”

  And those first drinks hadn’t left her quite like this. The lovey feelings; the hyperacuity rising over her; now that he mentioned it, she’d attributed that strange vibration in her feet to the sunlight, but she could place it now. Kahlil looked furiously up at her, a few curls of hair springing into disarray as his hands waved with his words.

  “They started doping everybody two hours ago. I’m telling you, the women here are crazy. It’s a cult! I knew they weren’t going to tell you—I should have mentioned it yesterday when I saw you, but I…I had other things on my mind.”

  “How did you discover this?”

  Annoyed to have to admit it, he said, “I looked around the place a bit, when I could shake them off my trail. They’re up to no good; I’ve known it from the start. Then, last week, they were making a big fuss about something, and after I probed around with the girls I’ve been—hanging out with, and it turns out they have a lab to synthesize their own psychedelics. They have—basically gallons of it.”

  The phrase “gallons of LSD” may have been thrilling dirty talk to a certain breed of counterculture artist—she suspected it was to Valentinian, the way Basil’s tail went nuts—but to the General, who still absorbed the fact that her brain currently processed its first molecules of lysergic acid since 1709 AL, the phrase was something out of a tahgmahr. Was this how the so-called miracles of the ceremony were accomplished? Where was the divinity in a base, drug-inspired hallucination? Oh, she’d dabbled acid and liked it fine, but then she came down and got back to her life like the rest of the world. Then, there were the bad trips, which made her stop for good: LSD, notorious for its self-insight, was not the best drug for cannibals dealing with the trauma of their first twenty-year war. It was one thing to try it a few times as a fortysomething kid. It was another thing to be given it nonconsensually as a centuries-lived General responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of human beings.

  “What would be the point of that?” The General pressed Kahlil even as his attention was drawn over her shoulder. “I mean, don’t people usually charge for drugs?”

  “It is a sacrament, General,” intoned Gethsemane, who had approached from behind and now stooped to greet enthusiastic Basil. “Like the blood and flesh ingested in your ceremonies.”

  “Sac
rilegious,” admonished Kahlil, spitting on the ground. “The both of you. I’m ashamed to even be here. Astaghfirullah.” After one scalding glance of disappointment for the General, the boy marched back to the temple with a disgusted shake of his head. “Astaghfirullah, astaghfirullah…”

  “God has already forgiven you.” Gethsemane’s call merited a nasty look from the man, who doubled his pace. Smiling, the Bearer rose to explain to Dominia, “The earthly mind is bound by laws that will be violated tonight. Because Kahlil has not engaged in the sacrament, he must sit out; these laws cannot be violated in the presence of a closed mind, for that closed mind would be destroyed. Tonight, the veil of the physical world will be torn to shreds and remade, and the witnesses must have the veil parted in their mind if they are to survive. Not all the women here are initiated into the truth of the Ergosphere, either; and these more than any require the sacrament, so their minds may justify what they see.”

  The Bearer took Dominia’s hand. “Will you come with me, General, before the ceremony starts?”

  Reluctant to follow anybody anywhere after being drugged, she gruffly asked, “Come where?”

  “Everywhere.” The girl tilted her head to press that soft, silk mouth—softer than that of the nymph’s, somehow—against Dominia’s lips. Annoyance giving way to arousal, the General embraced the Bearer’s slim body until the human turned her mouth away.

  “I don’t know.” The martyr sighed and held the woman, whose heavily lidded eyes were the physical quality that most resembled the Ergosphere’s naiad. “My wife—and then there’s you. There’s danger in messing around with a martyr.”

  “Only if you feed me your blood, General, or if I lose all self-control, as I was afraid I might yesterday…but I am clearheaded today. Bearers need nothing of the sacrament. That makes me the best person to attend to you. Won’t you come along? We must make sure you’re full of joy before the festivities begin.”