The General's Bride

by M F Sullivan

  “Thank you for coming to me.”

  “Love you, Dominia.” It turned its whispering face toward hers and tried to hide the hollow nature of its eyes with a deceptive smile, lips parted to betray a glimpse of satin tongue. “Love you, love you.”

  “So you’ll be able to come back to Earth, now, in place of him?” The General tipped the thing’s chin up.

  “Uh-huh, Dominia. Love you forever, Dominia.” How dotingly it smiled up at her. The counterfeit’s hot body ground against hers with the promise of mindless, eternal devotion.

  “Good.” She lowered her head to meet the thing’s kiss while lifting her gun to the back of its head. “Thank you.”

  The sensation of the dream suicide was impossible to describe, perhaps because it was all such a terrible implosion that it snapped her back in time and space like a rubber band. In an infinitely small parcel of experience—a Planck, she supposed—she whirled back through all her interactions in the Void to the point in reality where she entered it: poised, with her makeshift stake, to impale the battery of the ALIF-8.

  The tulpa, which had consumed Akachi’s thought-body and, due to the binding of Lazarus’s blood, his real one along with it, emitted a terrible shriek beneath the searing light of the full moon. The repulsive parasite, revealed for what it was, thrashed within the prison of the lifeless exo-suit on exposure to imperfect darkness. As it clawed at itself and its surroundings and her, the General was so disoriented to find them thus that she was nearly swept by its gray hand. The freak twitch of a dying metallic arm offered protection enough for her to spring away in pursuit of an assault rifle that would now prove far more useful. By the time the thing extricated itself from the ALIF-8, the General was ready to unload a satisfying magazine into the twisting thoughtform. When that was empty, she was upon it with the pole; and by the time the pole broke in her hands, the thing was dead.

  Panting, covered in the black blood of that entity that dissolved at her feet into a substance not unlike the oil of the exoskeleton, Dominia looked up to find the encampment of distant Hunters, having ascended from belowground, watched from the negligible safety of their tents. As they began to reveal themselves from their labyrinth, most in superstitious horror but some in what appeared to be genuine awe, the General threw down the remains of her makeshift spear. Amid the slick of the leftover demon floated the dentist’s false teeth, his glasses, and the ampule that once was private trophy of his rule. This, the General secreted before addressing the crowd.

  “Those of you who do not like what has happened here, leave. Tell your like-minded brothers in other cells to do the same. The rest of you belong to me.”

  Absolutely no one moved, save for what it took to translate her words. A few men laughed. Several adjusted their grips on their guns. She didn’t blink.

  “Bring me my traitorous whelp, René.”

  A murmur rose amid some of the men. When she did not move, the murmur gathered to a clamor and movement rippled through the crowd. René’s shocked cry pierced the night, along with the sounds of violence. The discharge of a gun concerned her until, thirty seconds later, the thrashing martyr, too new to be truly dangerous (or even competent), was dragged through the crowd and tossed at her feet by a party of several soldiers.

  He began, as usual, with, “Please,” but, exhausted of hearing him beg, she snatched him upright and covered his mouth. With the blind and temporarily mute martyr under her arm, Dominia scanned the crowd again, and lifted her voice in command to the man who watched.

  “Lazarus. Come out.”

  The crowd hushed. Again, the only sounds that rose from them were the necessary ones—the ones required for the men to part so Lazarus, having been who-knew-where, could meet Dominia with the placid calm of a person who knew precisely what was about to happen. She presented René’s filthy, whining face, one hand still over his mouth and the other now resting on his forehead to drag open empty eyelids. Lazarus splashed the water so abruptly that René could only scream, as had Dominia.

  Around them, Hunters murmured, and the General lowered René to the ground while he screamed about the alleged pain and burning; all the while, he clawed and kicked. Lazarus stepped away, replacing the flask on his person, to watch with a barely suppressed smile. Abruptly, René’s sobbing relented to the hilarious gasps of a small child who realized they had not, after all, hurt themselves.

  “I forgive you, René,” Dominia said, as gently as she had ever said anything to the professor. “For everything. Open your eyes.”

  To the wild astonishment of the Hunters, he did.

  “I can see? I can see—I can see!” René sprang up, screaming the words, clutching his face, his eyes wild. From the depths of the crowd, Tenchi emerged, looking just as amazed to cry at his cousin, “René?”

  “Tenchi! Oh my God, I can see you! My own eyes, my real eyes—Tenchi!” Giddy, the former professor ran for his cousin and, in a move that surprised them both, swept the man in his new martyr’s arms as if his portly cousin were a tiny girl. “I’ve never been so happy to see you!”

  “Others among you who suffer from ailments, come to us and we will cure them.” Dominia looked from face to face in a crowd that dropped to its knees, and she experienced that thrill her Father felt while grocery shopping. Too bad she had to ignore the pleasure of pride in favor of the right thing. She kept waiting.

  “Who among you needs to be healed,” she repeated, and Lazarus translated in Arabic, Farsi, and one or two other languages she didn’t recognize offhand. Now the first man, perhaps not much older than René but limping as though he were twice that, made his unsure way to the martyrs. He paused some meters away, began his sentence with “I—” and then, after reluctant consideration for the General, spoke to Lazarus in Arabic.

  “This man says he has killed many of our kind, and pleasurably.”

  “And I have killed many of your kind, and pleasurably. You need healing.”

  Lazarus repeated this in Arabic, while, with hesitation, the man drew closer. “We forgive you,” she told him while Lazarus blessed him. For this man, the change was less pained, but no less wonderful to behold: in seconds, his leg remembered how once it walked, and ran, and danced, as now it did so before his brothers-in-arms.

  The line of men that grew proved three hours long. When all was finished, and the night found it still had room for rest, the General had her army.

  XVIII

  Shvu’a

  Not as many men left in the night as Dominia had expected. In the aftermath, most deserters crawled off not because she was a martyr, but because she was a woman, and a lesbian. The unit was better off without them; she hoped the rest of the Hunter cells would follow suit, though she had the feeling this one, which had observed the miracles of her battle and Lazarus’s many healings, might splinter off from the rest of the terrorist group, and perhaps manage to maintain ties to one or two small units. Fine by her. She wanted nothing to do with the Hunters, except for those who respected the notion of change.

  Although she had been invited down into the tunnels and thus, the true encampment, Dominia refused that night, seeing them as too close to that prison that she’d shared with René. She slept in bliss, better than she had in many weeks—her whole adult life—beneath the open sky. Without fear of the rising sun! Glory. The next morning, she and Lazarus instructed the formerly crippled, selectively English-speaking pilot, a man whose nom de guerre was Farhad, to introduce them to those who remained. She thought all the while of Valentinian: particularly when one man, too young to have run off to such awful war games as indicated by his enthusiasm for Dominia’s exploits, burst out in the delighted Arabic of an excited boy.

  “He says you are like, ah, a ‘magician,’ Mahdi,” explained Farhad, smiling a little, himself. “Making Tobias disappear.”

  After a few such interactions, it became apparent that Tobias had not been well liked in camp, but his leadership had been accepted. The dead dentist had been right on one count:
they were an exceedingly superstitious group of people, men desperate for a faith to fill the empty, violent hole inside. The dentist’s fundamentalist Christianity had not mattered to most of the camp, which leaned more toward the Islamic branch of Abrahamianism. That they had seen him appear out of thin air had been enough, much as simple observation of the General’s bloody victory had set them straight again. This became clear when she recognized Farhad had called her “Mahdi” as a title. The word rang a bell with the Arabic- and Islam-illiterate General, though she could not remember its context.

  “Is that ‘General’?” she asked Lazarus as they rounded a corner in the mine-shaft-like tunnel system to the hand-carved rooms where “acquired” women slept or cried or kept their children quiet.

  “No—it’s an Islamic thing, or it used to be before the Hunters stole it. The Twelfth Imam, who will dispense justice and battle al-Masih ad-Dajjal during the apocalypse.”

  Trying not to roll her eyes, the General said, “They were calling me ‘al-Masih ad-Dajjal’ until last night.”

  Farhad, overhearing them, explained, “That was the fault of Dr. Akachi. The true al-Masih ad-Dajjal and Iblis misled him, as he misled our people. The world. If what you told us last night is true, about the ship and the hospital, then Iblis has gone to enormous lengths to ensure all societies view you as we are viewed. A terrorist.”

  Though she may have inherited an army of them, the title blanched her face with irritation. “I’m not a terrorist. I’ve never bombed a marathon because the Hierophant was there.”

  “If you wish different means”—the man gave a shrug—“that is up to you. We will follow. But the tools we have used on our jihad until now have been useful.”

  “Against your own kind,” the General snapped, having seen plenty enough of the kidnapped, abused women. “Your guerrilla methods mean nothing to the Hierophant, to any martyr. It would be like humans fearing the collusion of cows. Collect the women and bring them to the surface with whatever things they’ve been allowed to keep. They’re leaving.”

  Looking as though he had been slapped in the face, Farhad turned helpless eyes toward Lazarus, then back to Dominia. “Mahdi, please. These sabaya are fair property, granted us by Allah: men of all faiths, Abrahamian or not, keep women in this camp. Not even Akachi meant to separate us.”

  That was where she’d heard that title before. Her brain presented her with the fact at as inappropriate a moment as ever: there was a science-fiction novel, about a man who was Mahdi of a bunch of space people—it was one of her favorites as a kid, after she got out of dystopian fiction and into straight sci-fi stuff. Turned out a huge series about a guy—a displaced duke—who had named himself after a space mouse contained a bunch of deep, metaphysical stuff. Proof that sometimes even beneath her Father’s tight censorship, foreign notions had slipped through the cracks, protected by the veil of literature. Every story she had ever read had prepared her for this journey, in a way. How funny; how frightening. How reassuring. The nature of her mission was amplified by the fiction as she gazed into the face of tragic reality.

  “That’s because it wasn’t Akachi’s duty to dispense justice.” She spared a glance into one of the chambers and met the thoroughly tired eyes of the woman within it, who grew slightly more awake in the face of her confusion to see a free female staring back. “Send all the women up. If any are left behind, I will know, and there will be consequences.”

  Farhad, gritting his teeth, watched the martyrs turn the way they’d come, then snapped in Arabic for the listening women to do as they were bid. On the surface, Dominia waited beneath the sun. Soon, confused, displeased rabble drifted from the many entrances to the tunnels below. Beneath the ground, a loudspeaker emanated through the halls. One by one, the women emerged, thrusting their hands over their eyes and squinting in the light, huddling together in a mass of covered heads and ankle-length gowns. Pain clutched the heart of the General, particularly to see the children, but she kept her breathing level right along with her head.

  “This encampment has changed its allegiance.” Lazarus translated her words in curt Arabic. “The process of this change will be long and painful for the men, but for you, the change will be sudden and joyous. You are all free, now.”

  As a murmur arose, half excited and half frightened, one woman on the end spoke up. “To go where?”

  A fair question. Jerusalem, even from Dominia’s short drive to an industrial suburb nowhere near the tremendous city’s center, sat in sorry tatters. Beyond all the traffic and crumbling cement sound walls, her drive with Tobias had revealed innate war-inspired poverty, with many empty and unkempt businesses tended by none but impoverished citizens. Unable to work due to injuries or lack of status, the extremely poor could not even lease and herd genetically engineered goats as those in rural regions. When the Hunters had fallen upon the city, the city model had become unsustainable, and in the face of a staggering death toll alongside crumbling infrastructure, the whole state of Israel was no longer exactly prime real estate.

  “Well,” began the General, “the Hunters own buildings in Jerusalem.” She based this assumption on the single factory she’d visited, but this was true in less a legal sense and more a territorial sense when it came to the city. Indeed, it was just beginning to settle on her that, although other groups would murmur, technically it was not her group that was the splinter faction. Those who refused to follow would be splintering from her. In sweeping Akachi from his place, she had become the leader of the Hunters, inheriting their property along with their war and reputation. Not all bad, she supposed. “It is not desirable to go back to a place of painful memories, I know—for most of you, Jerusalem was not even your home to begin with. But that is a place to start, if you wish, or if you wish, I will gather the resources to send you to your homes.”

  Another English-speaking, now-former sabiyya spoke up with disdain. “Look at the big Western heroes, fixing slavery. Some liberating army! Half of these women have not even been to school. Their homes are destroyed! The ones here longest think al-Mawta have displaced the martyrs and now rule the world. They are mad, ill!” The girl’s eyes filled with tears. “If I had stayed any longer, maybe I would have been. They killed my father, my brothers—what is there for me now? What is there for any of us?”

  Distant footsteps reverberated through the Earth; the General mistook them for those of her belowground men amid a mind which sought a means to soothe such pain. “Maybe I can’t help you. But this is Lazarus,” began Dominia, until the old man caught her gesturing hand.

  “They won’t know who I am, most of them. Women around the Hunters aren’t allowed to study their doctrine. Not beyond the basic Abrahamian parts of it.”

  “Why is that?”

  She felt the Lady’s voice seconds before she heard it, rattling deep in the center of her own diaphragm, and the diaphragms of all those many around. They know it takes few steps, upon learning of Lazarus, to learn of Us; and once a woman learns of Us, the world of men has lost her forever.

  Dominia, startled by the clarity of the voice, turned to see the litter, still in the distance, borne by the four older Water Bearers who had whisked away the Lady. Where the others had vanished to, or where the rest of the many women of the temple had gone, the General could not be sure. Nevertheless, it was with an admixture of relief and pleasure she saw, walking in procession before the litter with a parasol that shaded her ornately decorated dreadlocks, fair Gethsemane.

  These women are Ours, the Lady declared. We told you, Dominia, you would lead Our army. This is that army; so are the men belowground, though they do not yet know.

  Smirking, and forgetting, perhaps, that the distant face was only Miki’s in theory, the General arched a brow. “I did the killing, but it’s your army?”

  All armies are Our armies, borrowed or stolen. We’ve stolen this one back. Or would you, General, reject the gift We offer in exchange? You’ll command an army thrice the size of this, if only you would
battle in Our name.

  Here, the General was reluctant. Now divine and inter-dimensional politics were muddied into an already filthy matter that looked ever more like war. She could not believe in her heart the things known by followers of the Lady, no matter what miracle she had seen or what festival she’d attended. Perhaps this was related to her bitterness over Valentinian’s abandonment. Yet, she somehow could not shake the idea that her reluctance to tout the banner of any one self-proclaimed deity was borne, in part, from knowledge of what Valentinian would want of her. He would not want to see her kowtow blindly to any one faith. But did that mean she kowtowed to him? She wasn’t sure. They hadn’t discussed it. Was she being a child about this, like a girl who thought if she were good enough, her parents would reclaim her from martyrdom? Was she, deep down, acting out of hope that right behavior would draw the magician back into her sphere?

  “I can teach my men to battle in your name,” the General allotted, “because they cannot do battle without a name to do it in, and my name isn’t enough. That is why I must do battle in my own name: nobody will do it for me, since everybody’s so busy fighting for you.”

  You do battle in your name, and the name of the magician, mused the goddess as Her litter paused at respectable distance. The parasol-holding Bearer lowered her sunglasses to wink at Dominia. The latter flushed, but did not move, and did not deny the increasingly apparent position of her neglected fealty. Very well. This is fair. You will come to Us in time, as do all women. And all Our women will come here. You have the drives?

  Farhad, graciously, had shown these to the General and the mystic during their tour of the tunnels. Dominia assured Her of this until the goddess bobbed Miki’s silent head in pleasure. Very good. We shall summon Our scattered women to the city of Jerusalem; the time is long overdue.