The General's Bride

by M F Sullivan

  After a few seconds of thought, the sailor shrugged. “What other choice does a human man have in this world? Especially if he wants to help people in the Front, or do something to contribute to the dissolution of martyr dominance. I mean…it’s sort of your fault.”

  She would have loved to argue, but, in a sense, he was right. The Battle for the Reclamation of Mexico had initially been won by the South American Resistance Army, but it was a costly victory that had shattered most of their best forces and caused other troops to be funneled from the Western Front. This had meant that, when Dominia freed herself and slaughtered the entire camp, then turned around to call in reinforcements before freeing what few captive martyr officers had been claimed from other victories, the two groups cut a bloody swathe across the remaining human militias and left them destroyed. When Cicero’s unit met Dominia’s in Tucson, he found her and her ramshackle group of six martyrs holding down a building that had once belonged to the Resistance and had been, long before that, a bank. In those sweet moments when first she saw her brother again, the martyrs were in the process of trying to break into a heavy-duty vault to acquire the humans within. How helpful Cicero had been at that moment! How good it had been to see him. They met outside the ruins of a nearby mosque whose crumbling façade was still emblazoned with the English block letter phrase, “HAPPINESS IS SUBMISSION TO GOD”. In that reunion, he was more her brother than he’d ever been, or would ever be again. She’s screamed with delight to see him! She longed for that moment, oddly, for although her nights at war were not good nights—that war more than any war she’d fought—they were nights when she had the illusion of Family. Love from her Family.

  Her Family had been all that mattered to her then, even after the Hierophant’s snub. Perhaps that was why the image of Benedict stuck so deep in her unconscious craw, though it had been too simple to murder him and every other man nearby. Perhaps that was why it bothered her so to see Tenchi now, led by fear and ideal into the service of a cause so backward it was downright evil. She saw in the sailor too much of her old self, cutting into that bank vault and murdering a room of trapped soldiers with Cicero’s help—and feeling it was fun. That was the last time she had fun killing anybody: even by that point, death had lost its glow.

  And now, well, violence wasn’t even an option. She could not bring herself to kill Tenchi, and for whatever sorry reason, after he collected René’s tray, she allowed the tubby man to depart. She would need spend at least one night in this wretched place. But, ah, how quickly one night turned to two! Particularly as, to its credit, the cell served as a very fine, very dark place for a martyr—who had been given a psychedelic drug, forced to engage in a battle, dragged on a six-hour road trip, then made to spend another two hours driving in the sun before being electrocuted, and who was still not able to enjoy unconsciousness for more than an hour or so—to sleep, sleep, finally, sweetly, sleep. O sleep, O gentle sleep! Nature’s soft nurse, as wrote the Bard. There was no energy left in Dominia for her mind to connect to the Ergosphere and provide her a dream—except, on waking, the memory of one: Cassandra, standing outside the City’s marketplace, where the General had met Tenchi. She got so far as to touch her wife’s hand, to kiss her orchid lips, before awareness of that dream faded off again.

  When Dominia awoke so refreshed she felt like a whole new person, it was, by René’s reckoning, some twelve hours later. “Not that I have a way to tell,” he added miserably. “I base my guess on how hungry I am.”

  “I’ll buy you a grandfather clock when we get out of here.” Dominia sat with her back to the wall and her legs straight before her. As she bent forward to stretch before she exercised (much as one managed either in such a cramped space), she asked, “What did you think they were going to do to you when you showed up empty-handed, René? Say, ‘Oh, that’s okay?’ Especially when you confessed the truth about your eyes, if that’s how it happened.”

  “It is,” he confirmed with a sigh. “I don’t know. I was desperate! I was terrified the whole way to the Hunters, sure that any minute you would change your mind and come to kill me: or that Cicero or your Father would swoop me up again.”

  “Did they really send you to me, René? What was the Hierophant’s plan with you?”

  Apparently, René was supposed to spy on Dominia and stay with her to provide a consistent location to the Hierophant. Had things gone to plan, he explained, the Holy Family would have followed them all the way to the Hunters, and then to Lazarus. “He and Cicero came to me because he knew my cousin’s connection to the Hunters, and threatened to kill me for it, saying I was probably a spy. But he thought we could make a deal, too.”

  “Why you, specifically? Surely there are plenty of humans he could have used.”

  “I don’t know. A lot of my colleagues were busted before I was approached, which must be how they got my name. I think he spared me because of my education.”

  Entirely possible, or even probable. The Hierophant had a profound love for all art and music, but Western culture was his soulmate, and those involved in its preservation and transmission were, to him, salvageable. It was the same reason why Dominia had been introduced to the human from the start. When, three months after Cassandra’s death, the Governess managed to look another person in the face without finding herself on the verge of tears, she forced her hollow body to attend a party hosted by one of Cassandra’s artist friends. The whole thing had been twice as depressing as it sounded on recounting (exactly as depressing as she had expected at the time); but it seemed worthwhile to stretch herself, even as she, antisocial and avoidant, skeptically allowed the human to be introduced to her while she brooded about her exit in the corner of a black sofa.

  “Dominia,” the well-to-do friend had been saying, “Dominia, I have somebody here I think you must meet, and he’s said he wants to meet you, too—pretty bold for a human, I thought, but, oh, what a riot he is! This is René Ichigawa. He’s a professor at Berkeley and just too funny. You’d think he was a martyr if I didn’t tell you!”

  “I’m a poet, too,” he’d been swift to add, as all poets are.

  “It must be hard to be a human and an artist,” Dominia remarked. René had laughed.

  “I think it’s harder to be a martyr and an artist. What struggles do you have to write about? Not even mortality oppresses you. A martyr will always have his home, but a human might be eaten tomorrow. That means I have to write like I’m about to die, all the time—and that means every new work I create is the best work of my life.”

  By that standard, Dominia was ready for her magnum opus. Tobias had a fair point when he said she was dead, thus liberated. This truth was comforting and depressing. Yes, she could go anywhere—in hiding. Yes, she was free—to live a lie and forever await violent death. She supposed she could just disappear, move to the City, but that required her to get outside, if only in moonlight, until she found better means. If only there were someone to help her. Say, a mystic, or a magician.

  The magician, she almost understood. He had things to do, and was probably also passive-aggressively teaching her a lesson about abandonment. But that Lazarus had been in this camp, yet not tried to break her out, was a matter of mild concern. The idea of having come this far only to have something happen to her most valuable companion was an infuriating one, and she tried, to no avail, to get information out of the younger, rounder Ichigawa when he came the second day.

  “You haven’t seen a bearded man, have you? Martyr, older, maybe still stuck in a kimono?”

  “I don’t think I should talk to you about what goes on in camp,” answered the dubious man, who sat just inside the squat dungeon to eat dinner with his cousin, ready to scramble back at a second’s notice if the famished martyr got any ideas. “Nobody’s gotten me in trouble over the chain because I don’t think anybody’s willing to come down here, but I know that if I say anything about anything, it will haunt me.”

  René brushed off his saliva-dampened hands, having finished
a plastic tray of repulsive mashed potatoes, sad vegetables, and saltine crackers. “Here’s a question for you, then! Why’s the boss such a hypocrite? I heard him crying about the debauchery of Western culture when he was yanking out my DIOX-Is, but what should I hear while I’m being dragged to my new hole? Mozart!”

  “I like Mozart,” said the sailor defensively. René raised his hands in agitation.

  “Don’t we all! That’s my point. These religious nuts try to condemn basic human qualities like a deep love of music, then fall into their own traps because they can’t resist them! They just want an excuse to fuck up, the masochists.”

  The notion made Dominia laugh, recalling, for fleeting seconds, dear Miki. That first proper meeting in the dining car. As her smile faded with sudden longing for her friend—and pain at the knowledge they could not meet again on Earth—the General cleared her throat. “The Hierophant and Dr. Akachi could put aside their differences if we just got them together at a concert. My Father loves Mozart, too.”

  “See,” insisted the blind professor. “Everybody loves Mozart.”

  There was something therapeutic about being able to talk to more than one person at once, but it was also relieving when Tenchi finally ascended the ladder. Tobias wasn’t entirely wrong: the fat Ichigawa cousin was a tempting target for her appetite. With the bone-deep hunger of a martyr instilling itself back into her body on the denial of sunlight, the craving for human flesh was stronger than ever. Blood received from René could keep her alive, it was true, but nothing would offer the satisfaction of an actual meal quite like a shank of human flesh. The idea was almost impossible to ignore once she got it into her head. Everything in her sought to rationalize, say, borrowing one of Tenchi’s fleshy arms. That wouldn’t necessarily kill him, would it? Easy to replace, too. But, no. It wasn’t right. Not knowing that he was in the City, and not knowing it was what Tobias wanted.

  More than any problem with Tobias, Dominia could not stand to slip back into the roles of the old person she’d been; she could not relive Nogales, no matter how simple a way out violence formed.

  “You look bad,” Tenchi told her on the third night, sucking chocolate pudding out of a cup. How he acquired it in a camp where even basic rations were surely precious, she did not know.

  “No shit.” The General rubbed her forehead to work away its ever-growing throb. “I’m starving, Tenchi.”

  After a thoughtful moment, the fat man rolled her the apple that had formed a neglected splotch upon his tray. Dominia almost snorted, almost told him, ‘That won’t do any good,’ but when her mind revived in a flash the image of Benedict, she bit her tongue and thanked him. It was the illusion of sustenance, she supposed, something to keep her stomach from dissolving its own lining. But it wouldn’t help her shaking, and in the long run, it would increase the damage of starvation, because calories her body expended in digestion would be replaced, but the food wouldn’t provide her body with the protein her dysfunctional cells required to maintain their own stability. She’d end up malnourished, like a duck fed bread instead of seed.

  As, night by night, René filled out, being given more food than the scraps he’d received on his previous schedule, the General felt her muscles growing not only weaker but harder to control. Sit-ups had become a chore at an alarming pace in the dungeon, and push-ups grew out of the question as her hands lost the ability to manipulate objects. Part of the problem was her age. As a young woman, she could’ve gone without eating for a longer period of time; but around the age of three hundred, most martyrs experienced an increase in metabolism that was regularly attributed to the increasing instability of their cells. This was not a problem so long as one kept oneself surrounded with food or regularly attended Church for the blood of the Lamb, which was why martyrs had popularized cities to an extent surpassing even humans. It was also why, as the martyr population expanded to uncomfortable sizes, humans across the globe grew more nervous. Some even sought to donate their children to martyrdom (another popular cause of illegal immigration into the Front) as though to circumvent the problem altogether—or, in all likelihood, spare their own lives.

  What a horrible thought that had always been to Dominia, who had been martyred not only without her consent, but without her knowledge. The way it happened was horrible, but also gentle. Morgan had been fortunate: too young to comprehend what it meant to be a martyr, or, say, know the symptoms of the disease that heralded its transformation. Thus, so far as she had been concerned, she was just a girl sick at home, like a hundred million other girls, future and past, sick at home. It had been scary, especially because her parents had been so upset yet so silent about what was going on. But, in retrospect, it was a kinder fate. Those last few days, her father sat with her and told her stories about the family genealogy so she wouldn’t forget. Her parents were from the Front; her father was shrewd with investments despite his rural background, and they’d struck gold on stocks related to then-recent Martian terraforming developments. That same acuity with investments—and disdain for taxes—would someday attract the Hierophant to their door. Give him an excuse, anyway.

  Dominia was from Mephitoli, but little Morgan had been named after an American ancestor who was herself the daughter of a North American and a South American. That North American line, further back in time, well—they really had been from Meph(Italy) if you picked the right set of ancestors. So, they’d moved there. But with every member of the Front at that point in time a mutt of lineage, they could have justified moving anywhere when Morgan was on the way. If only they’d picked the German ancestors, the Irish, even the Polish! But Poland, like every Slavic state, was martyr country in excess of even Mephitoli; Morgan and her family could have been murdered and eaten before she’d learned to walk.

  Which was the worse fate? She had gone to sleep one day and died, like so many of those other girls sick at home. But, like a proportion far fewer than even that number, Morgan rose from the dead to find herself with a new Family, a new room, a new life, a new name. A new genealogy, to replace—or supplement, she preferred to think—the one her father had spent her last days teaching her. It was traumatic at the time, but naturally there wasn’t much choice in the matter, and that made the trouble far easier than the struggle undergone by a martyred adult. Being powerless simplified the pain as much as being, in the way of children, unconscious to the horrible details of existence.

  She shuddered to think what Cassandra had endured. In Dominia’s current opinion, an adult’s decision to become a martyr was sign of mental illness. Before Cassandra, she’d romanticized it. After the suicide, Dominia understood why her Father impressed upon his people the importance of martyring children, and enforced the taboo nature of human-martyr relations.

  All this was why it was so disorienting when Dominia, awoken by pain in her ankle, looked down to see the metal plate of René’s chain, its sharp corner darkened by rust. Or—no. That was blood, certainly blood. Certainly her blood. And its source, no doubt, was that to which René had alarmingly attached his lips. Ravaged by hunger and torn from dreamless sleep, the General hardly understood what these images indicated until the pitiful professor, caught in the act, scrambled away, wiped his bloodied lips, and cried for the umpteenth time, “I’m sorry!”

  Perhaps it was all just a shock because, in the past three days, the General and the professor had exchanged surprisingly few words. What words they had exchanged had often been literary quotes. Between the two of them, they were able to remember a satisfying amount of Macbeth; and Dominia regaled him with her own recitation of “The Raven”—in her opinion, more soulful than Cicero’s. This had been most of their relationship, to be frank. After the bootlicking would-be-Renfield had forced his calling card into Dominia’s hands (at the time, she thought it the action of your typical martyr-chasing human who could nonetheless come in handy as a future slave/tool/meal; now she understood it as the action of an inept spy), the Governess found him soon trying to make an appointment with he
r office, ostensibly to petition for an artistic grant. In reality, once he had her ear, he passed her a book.

  “What is this?” she had asked that hot July evening, bending to view the pages through which she flipped with one hand while unbuttoning, with the other, her stifling suit coat. “The focus of your grant? I expected it to be artistic, not scholarly.”

  Perfectly cool—no doubt trained in this, or vetted for this quality, by the Hierophant—smiling René stroked his trim goatee. “This, Governess, is something that could get me killed. But I don’t think it will, because of what it means to you.”

  “And what does it mean to me?”

  “Having your wife back.”

  She could have crushed the spine of the book like it was René’s bony one. Indeed, she had been forced to set the volume down. “What would you know about my wife, human?” she asked him, her tone razor sharp.

  The professor had not batted an eye. Instead, he proved the first to say what so many others along her journey had said in response to that same question.

  “I know you loved her very much. Otherwise, you wouldn’t…” He tapped his chest to indicate the diamond over Dominia’s heart. “But I think you wear—her because you know there’s hope.”

  She nearly laughed, but there was nothing funny about Cassandra’s invocation by this know-nothing human. The Governess had thought seriously about killing him. Maybe she should have. In some universes, perhaps she did. Instead, in this one, she had flipped back through the book and found it to be a foreign holy text in an unknown language. There had been drawings that, at the time, had meant nothing to her, but had depicted a temple full of women, the arrival of a man, the sacred marriage of that man to one of the women, and that woman’s ascension as a goddess. It had impressed her so little that she did not internalize any of the images well enough to remember them concretely: any, except for the image of the old goddess shedding her skin and fleeing, naked, upon the back of a tiger, ready to fly off the page and upon Dominia’s desk.