The General's Bride

by M F Sullivan

  “Why don’t you try to explain,” she had said, “and I’ll try to decide whether to kill you.”

  Then, René told her the story of Lazarus. Not the Lazarus Dominia knew—the imaginary figurehead of a bunch of lunatic cult members. The real story had been so garbled by time and her Father that, even in its accurate tellings, it was Lazarus’s blood that was capable of raising the dead; or perhaps it was something he did in a magical way. On that matter, René had never been clear. But as Dominia had pressed him to know why she should believe this was not a lie, he had said at the time, “Because I wouldn’t mind drinking his blood if some of the things I’ve heard are true—and I would never drink a martyr’s blood.”

  “I’m sorry,” René screamed all of three months later, imprisoned with Dominia in the dungeon beneath the Hunters’ camp. “I’m so sorry, Dominia, I never wanted this, but I can see you in my dreams—I see hunger in your eyes! I see the way you look at me when I sleep and I hear the way you breathe near me when I’m awake; it’s only a matter of time before you can’t help yourself anymore.”

  “René, what the fuck!” The level of violation was impossible to describe. Recoiling against the opposite wall, the General felt her skin crawl on a metaphorical level to join the physical sensation of the slow-leaking wound at the base of her ankle. “Why would you even think this was a good idea?”

  “Because my flesh will be no good to you if I’m a martyr! No matter how hungry you are, you’ll never think of eating me. Hey—maybe we can eat Tenchi together!”

  “Oh, Lord love the Lamb, René, would you listen to yourself?”

  “I didn’t know what else to do,” the man cried, looking for all the world like a bearded, blinded child. “I couldn’t just sit here waiting for you to kill me.”

  “I wasn’t going to kill you, but now you’re definitely going to die. Frankly, I should put you out of your misery, but—shit.” Furious, the General tore a rock from the dirt behind her and hurled it into the bricks not far from René’s head. He winced. It was cruel, but satisfying, because it was the most cruelty she could afford to inflict upon a man whose death would mean a victory for the principles of a thoroughly unprincipled man.

  “Please, Dominia, don’t hurt me. Now I can help you get out!”

  “You still won’t be able to see, you know.”

  “But—but I’ll be able to fight.”

  “You’ll be able to blindly charge off into the night, trip over your chain, and get shot like any other idiot.”

  “But I’ll be faster, right? And stronger?”

  “You’ll be incredibly fucked up and disoriented and probably won’t be worth anything until you’ve had a meal—and I’m not letting you eat Tenchi. Fuck! What are we going to do?”

  The choice had been stupid, burdensome, and now firmly set the responsibility of René’s life on his nonconsensual creatrix’s shoulders. Although she could easily kill him and avoid the whole issue (and get herself a meal before her proteins altered his), that wasn’t an option. She would have to use the situation she’d been given. It wasn’t all bad.

  “Okay,” she said. “Okay.” Then, smoothing her hands over her face and back through hair cropped so short it resembled René’s former professor cut and not his increasingly floppy, unkempt prisoner’s mane, the poor General tried one more, “Okay,” before laughing at herself. Her hand touched Cassandra’s diamond.

  Nobody had more than one chance to do anything in life. She had to remember that.

  “Here’s the deal, René.” The General found some small satisfaction as he responded to her movement toward him by wincing against the brick wall. “Just relax. I won’t hurt you, but it’s important you know you are going to die.”

  As she sat beside him, he leaned away, but she caught his filthy hand and squeezed it until he squeaked her name. “It’s going to hurt. You’ll have a fever, and probably the shits, and those will mostly be blood. Your organs will feel like they’re on fire—like somebody’s just…reaching a hand into your body and squeezing”—she tightened her grip on his hand—“twisting your spine and tangling your intestines.”

  “Jesus, Dominia, do you have to tell me this?”

  “You’re going to die in this cell, floating in a pool of your own bloody sweat and bile vomit, because you chose to do this to yourself. And when you’re dead”—her eyes burned like Valentinian’s fire, so bright even the blind professor might have seen them—“I’m going to use your corpse to get us out of here.”

  XVI

  The Price of Information

  The positive aspect of René’s adulthood: the protein’s malformation spread faster through the body. The negative: it was much more violent than anything a child experienced. For the fortysomething English professor, the illness took three days. Dominia had been concerned more time would elapse; she would have been in dire straits herself, were that to happen. On the sixth day of her captivity and the third day of René’s illness, as he shivered in the corner, covered in sweat while trying to maintain a conversation about Shakespeare’s use of alchemical symbolism in his late romances, the General opened her mouth to point out how the use of alchemical metaphors stretched back to the cradle of civilization where lay the Middle States—

  René was patting her cheek with a clammy hand and saying her name, as if he’d leapt across the room like the Hierophant. She barked out an irritable series of “What, what!” as she slapped his dirty palm away.

  “I think you were having a seizure—you took a breath like you were about to speak and started choking. You were thrashing. Are you hurt?”

  Yes, actually: her head throbbed, but she was still straight up against the wall and hadn’t gnawed through her tongue. Best to accept the seizure had happened without making a production.

  That same afternoon, René Ichigawa died without fanfare in Dominia’s reluctant arms, and the General was concerned the martyring process that had killed him so hastily would complete his resurrection before Tenchi’s next visit. Though the captives had gone to some lengths to hide René’s state of obvious illness from the portly sailor, he had noticed his cousin’s far sweatier condition on the second night. The third night, René had been too weak to stay awake for his cousin’s visit, so Tenchi left the tray of food at the bottom of the ladder and hurried back up. He must have seen the intensity of hunger in the General’s eyes, their blue tones reduced to mere shadows that matched the ones carved into her face by starvation-emphasized cheekbones.

  The changes were subtle now, but she had already lost muscle mass, and this was a definite concern. She was not sure she’d be able to control herself well enough to maintain their charade. Once, on the ship, she felt a sense of pride about her self-control, and look how that ended! Even if it had been Cicero’s fault, she had to admit she’d been well fed the rest of the voyage. Those last few days of sailing came upon her now with alarming fondness. It was possible that, when placed in front of more than one or two healthy, beating hearts, the General would prove Tobias right: snap as she had when given the chance to free herself from Nogales. And that was with courtesy bags of intranasal blood!

  The worst part was that none of this would have been necessary if the magician hadn’t vanished. If he was so powerful, he should have appeared in her cell to whisk her away at a moment’s notice. Turn all the jihadists into statues, or transmute Dominia into a flea small enough to crawl through the crack where light trickled from the trapdoor. He could create a miracle—that son of a bitch could do it, no matter what anybody said—and he was nowhere to be found.

  Yet—wasn’t it a miracle that René had not woken to his second life the next time Tenchi whistled down the ladder? Who was she to distinguish between miracle and coincidence, fate and good timing, when she’d seen firsthand all space and time were one? With haste, the General gouged her hand on the edge of that same loose plate René had used to steal her blood: this, she smeared across her own mouth, then across René’s throat and the front of a
dirty shirt pre-stained with bloody vomit and bloodier sweat. The importance of gory freshness, however, was key. And it was more important still that Tenchi catch her in the act, so when the beam of light fell across them, she could look from where she hunched over René’s corpse and absorb the sailor’s girlish shriek in deliberate imitation of her Father’s dignified calm. “René is dead. I’m sorry. Please get the other guards, and Tobias. I’d like to talk to him.”

  “Oh, René!” With a cry of terror, the fat man scurried up the ladder at a speed faster than the General would have expected him to even walk.

  Now came the hard part. Now, she composed herself. Now more than ever, her Father’s blood flowed through her veins, and she reviewed all the times he reacted with perfect ease to outward annoyances (those disruptions by boisterous children in Mass that so bothered fastidious Cicero, for instance—why, more often than not, the Holy Father was cajoling them into outlandish behavior to get his Eternal Son’s goat). Wasn’t this that certainty of an educated decision with which his specter claimed it sought to empower her?

  “Specter.” The word made her frown. Her deprived mind scrambled between subjects even as the trapdoor reopened. Was the root of “specter” not “spectrum”? Perhaps she had seen her Father after all, manifesting in her electromagnetic field: her own thoughts about him, summoning him, inviting him the way he invited her each night into his dream-study. One English voice amid several Arabic shouts told her to face the wall. Her mind was elsewhere. A thoughtform, or his true spectral presence non-temporally in her field, mistranslated into the visual cortex. Hallucination by definition, supernatural by speculation.

  Whatever that image was, it had been right. Even as she faced the wall, she felt in perfect power. Perfect control of the situation. She controlled the most valuable asset of all. Not freedom but knowledge. Knowledge bought freedom. Tobias had plenty of freedom, but he lacked the knowledge that René would awaken. He did not realize he had been duped as he made a personal appearance in her prison, one man shoving a gun into the back of her head while the dentist checked the pulse of her dead cellmate.

  “So he is dead. Now you understand what I was saying, General? You cannot help yourself. Moreover, you are so bound to instinct you cannot use reason! Every day I have sent you a fat, tasty pig of a man, and you chose to bleed this skinny rat.”

  “His death came out of more than hunger,” the General explained, calmly studying the roots pricking out of the dirt wall’s surface. “It was owed to René, for what he did to me, and for getting in my way. For getting in the way of our association, Akachi.”

  “Ah? Now, what would you mean by that?”

  “I’ve thought about the ways I could say this: the problem is, I hate you, so I have a difficult time putting it politely. But you’ve forced me into a corner. Almost literally,” she added, sparing a soft laugh for the wall against which her nose was pressed. “There’s no animal so vicious or stupid that, given a long enough time to think and the words to think in, won’t come around to doing what it can to save its own life. I don’t agree with you, or your cause. But if René had done what he was supposed to—if he’d come here with me, become initiated by your group, and given me a chance to consider an agreement with the Hunters without duress—none of this would have been a problem.”

  “This all sounds convenient, Miss Mephitoli.” Dominia was grateful her face could not be seen from this position. “How do I know you are not going to get aboveground and begin killing my men?”

  “Besides the rifles, you mean? Because I would already be aboveground and killing them, if that were the case. Tenchi would be dead and so would these fu— fine fellows pointing guns at me.”

  “Look how you tremble.” The dentist took up her hand so abruptly that she started away. “Your meal did not have much meat on him, eh?”

  “That should tell you how serious I am about working with you,” she said, every word more cautious than the last. “No matter how hungry I am—no matter how many men I could still eat—I refrain, for civility’s sake.”

  Chuckling, Akachi patted her shoulder and said, “Perhaps there is something of a person left within the animal.” In Arabic, the dentist delivered an order, and the man with the gun to the back of Dominia’s head steered her toward the ladder.

  “Where am I being taken?”

  “For a meal, and new clothes! I would like to speak with you again, now that you are feeling reasonable. Perhaps we can forge an agreement! You, and Lazarus and I.”

  Her heart skipped a beat at the thought of seeing a friend who frequently evaded her mind during her duress. If she had thought of anyone, it had been Valentinian, and only in the most malicious way possible. But it was hard to think when one was starving and the cells in one’s body (and brain) were losing the ability to keep themselves shaped. After six days’ imprisonment in that wretched tomb, the General’s brain screamed at sensory stimulus. The cardinal light of the setting sun so blistered her sensitive eyes that she tried to cover them and could not because of her captor’s grip. She cried, instead, to think how weak she’d been made by her hunger, and how tight her skin was under the touch of her captors, and her body’s urge to be free of her collar. How she wished to leap off into the remaining sunlight! The overwhelmed General lowered her head toward the dust as, in surprising numbers, men emerged from their small tents to view the passing martyr. Somewhere, Tenchi wept.

  In the suffocating heat of the medical tent, which reeked of putrid wounds and sweet antiseptic even though it had been some time since the unit had seen combat, Dominia was handed a hot blood bag along with the promised change of clothes. After inhaling the ration (and snatching another from the nearby refrigerator when the guards were busy arranging René’s body on a stretcher at the behest of the medic), the General loosed the stained brass kimono and redressed, ignoring the eyes that struggled to avoid her—and in this case had religious, medical, and prejudicial reasons to do so. They could get fucked, so far as she cared: she’d seen too many naked idiot men snapping towels at each other’s repressed backsides to help but feel by the age of 331 (no, remember, 332, can’t forget), that nudity in such a scenario was about as sexual as a mud puddle. That was her own opinion, at any rate. Some people no doubt found mud puddles sexy. She was getting damn tired of this world, Valentinian.

  The clothes she had been given were not unlike the Hunters’ own “casual” outfits—a shin-length gray kurta with a thick black bar running down its front and a pair of white pants for beneath. At the instance of the English-speaking guard, whose vocabulary on this subject was limited but who managed to cite “religious reasons,” she donned the black kufi and wondered at the point of it since it was the same black as her hair. Better that than a hijab, she supposed, when it came for vision in battle, but greater head covering would have (perhaps falsely) reassured her she couldn’t be whisked off into the Ergosphere due to her own inexperience. However, to her relief, they emerged from the medical tent to find the reddened sun had relented to plum night. She looked for the moon, and as she saw it remembered that trying to enter the Void in earthly night would only deposit her into that place’s more terrible low ebb. A night in which the soul barely existed. It was not worth trying—not that way, anyway. If push came to shove and safety required a regroup in that other, more nebulous space, the General would need another way to enter the Void. Not to mention she’d have to find a way back out, if she were to do so before the sun rose. Her Father managed it. If only she had someone to ask. Oh, Valentinian! Where was that sorry bastard?

  Not many steps from the medical tent, she detected the distant sound of music and realized with an uncanny shock of synchronicity that not only was René right—it was indeed Mozart that Tobias arrogantly played in the middle of a camp full of men ideologically opposed to most forms of art—but tonight it appeared to be that very Requiem that had lit her drunken soul so long ago. Then, as now, she had been separated from Valentinian. Those haunting voices, ah,
how well she knew their notes! Lavinia performed the same in concert, with Cassandra and a choir of other, lesser, singers, after the latter revealed the beauty of her singing voice to more than just Dominia and rooms full of lucky schoolchildren. The Hierophant insisted on making a Christmas gift of lessons for as long as the Governess’s wife desired, then enthusiastically organized the concert not more than a couple years later.

  That had been a fine morning, and it had been good to see Cassandra so happy. So close to their sister. Perhaps that unconscious memory coaxed her into selecting the piece when visiting her Father’s empty study. Ever after, all versions were inferior, but this variant was fine enough, and proved comfort when the quality crisped upon being pushed into Tobias’s tent. No song, however, was comforting as the sight of Lazarus, who read, markedly collarless, beside a generator-powered lamp.

  “Kiddo,” he said as she hurried over to embrace him, the reality of a person friendly to her. Truly friendly, and not a user in the way of René. “You all right?”

  “I wasn’t sure what happened when I didn’t hear from you after the first day, but—I was so stressed and hungry I hardly thought of you. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m fine; you never have to worry about me. Well. Not anytime soon, anyway.” Weakly, the old man smiled, then frowned and tipped up her chin. “Same old story for the past four iterations…still got your collar on.”

  “Is it supposed to be gone by now?”

  Tobias provided her answer as he entered the tent. “A funny question to ask. In point of fact, I toyed with the idea of having my men free Miss Mephitoli in the medical tent, but I decided it was better I do it myself. If she made it this far without changing her mind, I thought that a good sign. Before it was different, eh? You see”—he elbowed Lazarus in an obnoxious way before pushing the cylindrical key into Dominia’s collar—“God inspired my choice, to teach you a lesson about how much you know!”