The General's Bride

by M F Sullivan

  Akachi touched Dominia’s forehead, which startled her, as she had covered her eyes; but when she gripped his arm, it seemed in a black and terrible instant as though she had arrived again in the presence of the black sun. The factory fell away and all around them were the howling, writhing bodies of souls that tore at their hair, screaming and weeping and pulling at the sallow skin of their faces. Smearing their flesh with black ash and dirt, they were the only things in sight (waves of sorrow, a sea of sack-clothed screamers) as far as Dominia’s one-eyed soul could bear to see.

  Akachi shouted over the din, “This is what your Father has done! These are all those souls he’s led astray, human and martyr. The Kingdom of God is unknowable in this life, Miss Mephitoli! Those who think it is will find themselves trapped forever.”

  “That’s not true.” Bolstered by thoughts of the Kingdom, she wheeled out of Tobias’s clutch just as a wheezing figure at her feet made to grab a boot that was simultaneously the bloodstained hem of that regrettable kimono. As the circuit between their bodies was interrupted and the vision disappeared as it had come, the General insisted, “Surely those people are just lost. Trying to get into the Kingdom and not knowing how, regardless of their religion. They can’t all be my Father’s fault. Or—are those soulless beings?”

  “Worse: they are beings with corrupted souls. Befouled souls. Your Father has forced them to misunderstand. How long they’ve suffered! And how many more will suffer. They cannot present themselves before God when mired in the lies of the Hierophant. And how many have you, yourself, put into that abominable place!”

  Trying, somehow, to justify away her guilt, the General insisted, “Surely it’s not so different from being lost in the Void,” but she knew after she said it how wrong she was even before Tobias shook his head. The sub-radio frequencies mentioned by the magician and by Lazarus—that must have been what they meant, that altered, hellish zone of screaming souls.

  “One does not have a self when lost in the darkness there, for there, one is part of the true mystery of God while also being separated from any notion of the divine. That is why one is anything there, and nothing; and it is also why there is no suffering there, because there is no knowledge by which one can suffer. But in that place in the Void that is called Jerusalem, an unholy trap, souls congregate: aware enough to never forget their suffering and what they have done to find themselves thus, but never aware enough to liberate themselves. That is true hell, Miss Mephitoli, and your Father is the Devil who puts them there.”

  She was tired of arguing about her Father’s hand in it and opted to communicate her resentment telepathically. She imagined sending Tobias her hatred through their overlapping electromagnetic fields while she demanded, “And what do you expect me to do about it?”

  “You know your Father’s military better than anyone on Earth, except perhaps your brother. You know the plans of his cities and fortresses, the weaknesses he hides and the things he most cherishes. You know the ways of martyrs and can offer a beacon to those wise enough to repent before they die. The only question I have is: Will you repent, yourself?”

  “I won’t repent for being what I am,” insisted the General, her eyes landing on the blonde female in the background of Cicero’s speech. Innocent Lavinia, who was not by any stretch of the imagination there through choice of her own. “And I won’t tell you that martyrs need to repent. You want to talk about repentance? What about you? What about all the people you’ve killed, sent to the Very Low Frequency perception of the Ergosphere? Because I get the feeling you’ve misled as many as my Father. You’re as bad as him.”

  The humor had fallen from Akachi’s face some time ago, but his expression grew particularly hard at that. “So you will roll over and accept you are dead, and your life is at its end? That there is nothing you can do to save yourself, nothing you can do to save anyone else? Martyrs really are less than human. They lack all the human spirit of hope and striving.”

  “Martyrs are more human than you. We kill for food. You’re a bigot, a rapist, and a liar worse than my Father. He doesn’t try to pretend he isn’t evil when you get him alone in a room. He doesn’t shoot a loyal man before an audience, then delude himself about his moral compass. The sad thing about you is that you think you’re good.”

  In the face of her disdain, his words began to stumble, and all his blustering was revealed for what it was when he was reduced to petty schoolyard insults. “Well—well, we will see if you don’t change your mind when we begin collecting Red Market whores for reeducation and repurposing. For all the time you spent with them, perhaps you are considering becoming one.”

  In lieu of comment, she spat in his eye, and was promptly given by her collar such a jaw-seizing, brain-frying shock that she immediately lost consciousness. Too bad: the General would have appreciated the horror on his face.

  Though she regained consciousness halfway through the drive back, Akachi was, oddly, no longer in a talking mood. This, she gathered from her own gag and handcuffs, and from the way he spared her a repelled glance as she shifted in her seat. The silent treatment was immeasurably preferable to the dentist’s so-called conversational skills, however, and the first scrap of rest she’d received in too long seemed almost regretful to leave behind.

  “Every time we meet, Miss Mephitoli,” he said as they reached the base camp, “you prove you and your kind are animals. A damn good thing your saliva is not a carrier for your disease like the rest of your fluids, eh? Camels and reptiles spit, General. Fish. Civilized beings do not. They possess self-control. With this, you cannot argue. I will prove it. Perhaps when you have humiliated yourself again, and proved me right, you will manage to rejoin civilization.”

  As Akachi parked the vehicle and threw open his door, Dominia was dragged from her side by a pair of burly men covered in the sweat and dust of their nomadic military life. Above the noise of the camp, the dentist shouted Arabic orders. This resulted in her being shoved the direction of a tent that was a cover for a bunker set deep in the dirt. The flimsy ladder down which she was forced to maneuver with wrists still cuffed gave way to a claustrophobic cellar, whose penal nature she divined not by its subterranean position but by the chains mounted in the bricks of its grudgingly added walls. A voice cried out, and one of the guards whipped off the cuffs while the other held the barrel of his gun against her head.

  “Don’t bother calling us unless you’ve killed him,” said one man in thickly accented English.

  “Killed who?”

  Her captors retreated up the ladder, so the only one left to answer was the voice of her fellow prisoner: a voice absent long enough it momentarily registered as a stranger’s.

  “Dominia,” it asked, “is that you? Oh my God! Oh, God, please forgive me! I didn’t want to do what I did.”

  In the darkness of the corner, the General bent over the wincing shape. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she recognized blinded René Ichigawa, who, arms over his head, wept and waited to die.

  XV

  A Rat in the Cellar

  While far from a connoisseur of men, the General had aesthetic sense enough to know what an attractive one looked like. With his pointed, weasellike features and bony frame, the former English professor always appeared too untrustworthy to join that category, but now the poor fellow was genuinely repellent. The sharpness of his features was emphasized by his malnourished state and the dirt that had, over time, caked the corners of his grotesquely crusted eye sockets to seal them shut. Gagging, Dominia tried to redirect her gaze, but there was no better place to let it sit upon him, for his wristbones poked like daggers from his flesh and his belly protruded in a symptom of true starvation.

  “My God, René, have they been feeding you?”

  “The past few days. Mostly”—his voice dropped to a whisper—“I’ve been eating bugs. Oh, God!” His lips trembled into a tearless sob while he admitted, “I hear them scuttling around. That’s how I find them. They get in through gaps in the bricks�
�these are only here for the chains. I don’t even think the ceiling is supported, is it? It could collapse anytime!”

  The five-foot, claustrophobic ceiling that forced its prisoners to sit upon the ground once they had descended the ladder was supported with one courtesy beam, but the General hardly blamed him for not knowing. His short chain kept him trapped in a foul-smelling corner arrayed with straw and newspaper. At least in Nogales she’d been given a toilet!

  “René,” began the General, but the man raised his voice in a series of terrible cries.

  “Please, Dominia, please! You can’t kill me, oh, God, I’m so young. Do you know how young I am? Forty-five! I still have another fifty years to live if I don’t have any engineering done, and now I have to live them blind—but I still want to live them! Please, please! You have to forgive me for the train, and before. You have to forgive me, please! I didn’t have a choice.”

  “Would you calm down? I’m not going to kill you.” In fact, so many injustices, petty and profound, had occurred since René’s betrayal on the train that she had almost been glad to see him until he’d reminded her of his crimes. Even so, she pushed her irritation aside, because Tobias no doubt hoped she’d ruminate on the betrayal to a breaking point. “That fucking dentist is trying to make me repent by proving some point.”

  “What point?”

  The blood of all those men lying dead in the temple still stained the General’s kimono: and the hot metal of Benedict’s type O still filled her mouth, vivid enough to make her stomach ache with knowledge of its emptiness and its separation from the now-vital sun. “It doesn’t matter, because it’s not a point that’s going to be made. We’re going to find a way out.”

  “I don’t think there is one.” The blind man whined on while Dominia, severely stooped from her full height, felt the walls, the corners, and the dirt-embedded stones. “I don’t even know how long I’ve been here! Two weeks? Three? It’s so hard to tell.”

  Thin as he’d been to start, that meant the cells in his body were breaking down his proteins, or had been until the Hunters started feeding him again; funnily enough, he was now enduring a prolonged version of the experience had by sun-exposed martyrs. “How often do they bring you food?”

  “I think it’s once a day, but it was twice today. Oh, God.” His voice quivered like a preteen’s. “They’re trying to fatten me up, aren’t they?”

  “Then they’re doing a poor job of it.” Grimacing, the General yanked a brick out of place from the wall and frowned at the dirt behind. “We could always tunnel out.”

  “You could,” said René with a jerk of his chain. “I’m stuck here.”

  “I don’t have time for your fatalism, René.”

  “That’s easy for you to say! You’re not chained to the wall like a dog. Oh, Christ, when I was little, we had a dog. I loved that dog! But my mother always kept him in the backyard and never let him inside. Is this karma? Is this what I get for letting her treat the dog that way?”

  Though on the verge of saying the notion was ridiculous, Dominia found herself there again: abandoning Basil in the back of the tanque while she pursued René in effort to board the Light Rail. Valentinian had abandoned her, just like she’d abandoned him. Her incredulous mouth fell open. The real question was whether she was more appalled by her own actions than she was furious at the magician. In that fury, the martyr stormed to René’s side, and while the man flung his cowering arms over his head, the General tore the chain from the shoddy brick in which it’d been anchored.

  “Oh,” said René, groping for, then picking up, the now-freed end of the chain. “Well—thank you.”

  “You know, Tobias tried to intimidate me by having one of his exoskeletons crush a brick, but I’m starting to think the Hunters just make shitty bricks.”

  “Maybe there is a chance,” decided the mercurial professor, clasping his hands, then running the chain through them as he might a necktie. “But what will we do once we’re out of here? You’ve seen the camp.”

  Her knee-jerk response was the same as in Nogales: murder the guard, then sweep through the camp as silent and bloody as the incarnation of Saint Valentinian. Well—poor turn of phrase, considering how sore she was at the moment with her patron saint, but one got the idea. “I don’t know,” began the General, with utmost caution. “Maybe, say…you distract the guard and I knock him out? If we find weapons on him, we kill him and take them.”

  “No! We can’t hurt the guard!”

  “He knows what he’s getting into,” said Dominia as, conveniently, the trapdoor was lifted and the minor glow of interior light showered in alongside a powerful flashlight beam.

  “René!” The instantly recognizable, vaguely girly voice of Tenchi Ichigawa took the wind out of Dominia’s scheming sails. “I brought you something extra today!”

  “Oh, no,” she groaned, while, his expression grim, René asked, “You see?”

  “Who are you talking to down here?” asked the portly sailor. On turning at the bottom of the ladder, the beam of his miner’s cap swung across René’s unresponsive face and into the General’s wincing one. With the delay of a second, Tenchi shrieked and lost the food on his tray as he pressed himself into the farthest corner.

  “Oh! Oh, Mephitoli-san! Oh, Kami-sama, tasukete kudasai! Why didn’t they warn me!”

  “Because they’re hoping I’ll kill you, too. They saw how I let you go on the Jun’yō, and they’re wondering if I’ll do it again now that I’m starving and you’re between me and freedom.” Frankly, if either human was likely to whet her appetite, it was the porcine one, and not his skinny mustelid cousin. What a good opportunity this would be to test her self-control, along with her certainty about her need of direct sun! She tried not to dwell on the thought and found home in annoyance, demanding, “What are you doing here?”

  “I—the same thing I was doing the last time you saw me.” The trembling man held the plastic food tray like a shield over his heart. He seemed ready at a second’s notice to spring back up the ladder to which he looked with increasing frequency. “You know—serving…the resistance…”

  “Tenchi!” The chide provoked such a wince in the man that the martyr almost laughed and strained to drop her tone from a drill sergeant’s bark. “You can’t seriously think that the Hunters are in the right here. Don’t you know about them? They go from human town to human town, conscripting the men and using their daughters and wives as sex slaves to recruit more men. Some cells even try to ‘reform’ women like me through rape. Any human who doesn’t practice an Abrahamian faith is liable to be literally stoned to death in some of the crazier cells. Stoned.”

  “In the year 4042,” added René. This elicited a dirty look from the General, who swiftly remembered he could not read it and told him, “What are you talking about? You were a part of the Hunters before my Father got to you! That’s why they put you here.”

  “I was a free agent who was used and abused by both sides,” insisted the sore man, crossing his arms and tsking at the jingle of the chain. The noise attracted Tenchi’s attention.

  “Your chain! What happened?”

  “I happened,” explained Dominia.

  Full of terror, the chubby man remembered himself and drew back the step he’d just taken into the low room of the dungeon. “I’m going to get in trouble for this.”

  “Good! I hope you do.” Her sleep-deprived, miserable irritation needed an outlet, and she unleashed it on the man who’d been hand-selected to taunt her through no fault of his own. “I can’t believe you would be a part of this, Tenchi! You seem like a nice guy. You can’t know everything these people do and accept it without examining the implications of what it says about you. You’re supporting violence and theft from other humans, and you’re directly aiding that human suffering by being here. And for—what, some stupid war you’re going to lose? Have you ever even been in a fistfight, fisherman?”

  “Did you see the suits?” asked Tenchi meekly.

&
nbsp; The General snapped, “Yeah, and I’m not impressed. Your shitty dentist boss can take the suits and his teleporter and shove them up his—”

  “I think they would give us a chance in a conflict…” As though remembering why he was here, Tenchi looked at the platter in his hands, collected the few scattered packages of food, and slid it across the floor toward René. The blind man leapt at the sound, groped across the dirt, and, with fumbling, desperate fingers, tore away the cellophane. As both Tenchi and Dominia grimaced at the sight of the starving man cramming his mouth full of ration-grade honey cakes, the General waved a hand.

  “You’ve let them make you party to treating your cousin like this.”

  “Oh, no! If it weren’t for me, they would have killed him outright. Everyone was upset when he showed up without you, and with those eyes. I’m so glad I was there! I begged the guys—I mean, begged, it was kind of embarrassing—”

  “Really embarrassing,” glutted René through a mouthful of nuts.

  “—and Dr. Akachi said, ‘All right. If he can survive until Dominia arrives, your cousin will be free.’”

  “They just didn’t tell you he was going to have to survive like this. Tenchi, why would you trust them? Honestly, I’m baffled. I’d think you knew better after staying in the magician’s City.”

  The General realized she’d made a chronological gaff only after Tenchi’s brow furrowed. “City,” he repeated. “Magician?”

  Vaguely, she remembered Gethsemane warning the sailor against revealing the future to Dominia. “Nothing. Never mind.” Hopeful she would not slip up and kill him in the future, and that the portly man could be turned away from his so-called brothers-in-arms, the General pressed him. “But how can you accept being a part of this? How can you think what the Hunters do is an appropriate price to pay for overthrowing my Father?”