by Sean Stewart
He had done some work here. The room was very small and dark. The floor was made of concrete and very cold. He couldn’t remember if he had been carried in or if he had walked. He was still wearing his fatigues, but his pockets had been emptied out and his rank insignia cut away. No familiar, of course. He blinked. Even the HUD lenses were gone. He felt naked without them. Nothing left but David now.
He had never married, and had no children. He had been very good at his job, but his job was gone. He had left it. So what was this thing, this David? What was left over when all the uniforms were stripped away? No answer.
By the book, he would be court-martialled and shot.
There would be a tremendous power vacuum with Winter gone. He could think of several people who might try to step into it. General Beranek, for one. Always ambitious, and convinced that he had the best interests of Southside at heart. Jason Paslawski another. Emily of course. Things might not be going by the book for a little while. Emily—so she had made it back after all—Emily wasn’t the executing sort, he didn’t think. Mind you, he had murdered her grandfather. Beranek would take no joy in it, but he would go by the book for sure. Paslawski would be genuinely pleased to see David executed. Prick.
David knew he should be thinking hard about these things, but his mind wouldn’t stick to the task. It kept slipping back to what they had taken away from him. His uniform, his familiar. That’s how rough interrogation worked. Strip the subject of the things that gave him his sense of self. Pressure him. Then give him something to rebuild on—yourself. Give him yourself. He wondered which of his subordinates would be working on him.
Even if they gave him his familiar back, what good would it do? It was trained to analyze politics and memorize maps, to perform unit conversions between greed and dollars and ambition and rifles and lust. Very useful for Major Oliver. Not much good for David.
His fatigues were taken away and replaced with clean ones. Food was left for him three times a day. After two days he had a visitor. “Come in,” he said. “Hello, Lieutenant…” He waited for the name to jump into the corner of his contact lens, but it didn’t. How odd.
“Lubov.”
David nodded. “You look familiar.”
“Yes, sir. Come with me, sir.” Reflexively David noticed that Lubov’s lieutenant’s insignia were brand new. Field promotion in the Chinatown action, perhaps.
It was a watery spring day outside. The sun hurt David’s eyes. Soldiers watched them pass. Lubov brought him to an army truck and asked him to get in. There was a spare foil parka on the front seat. Lubov told him to put it on. They drove in silence to the Parkallen Cemetery. Lubov parked the truck. “See the mausoleum at the top of the hill?” David nodded. “I’ll wait here,” Lubov said.
David got out of the truck and walked through the wrought-iron cemetery gates and up the south face of the hill. Single pine trees stood among the graves. Pockets of snow still remained in the deep gloom beneath their branches, but mostly it had melted away, leaving the graves bare. A few were marked with wreaths or recent ashes. Three had braziers permanently installed within tiny cenotaphs.
Winter’s mausoleum was bigger, of course; an open, pillared enclosure about the same size as David’s cell. Winter’s sarcophagus rested on a low stone table that took up most of the chamber. Candleholders had been hung from each pillar. Each held a beeswax candle. All the candles were lit.
Emily watched the man who had killed her grandfather walk slowly up the hillside. She wondered if she could ever forgive him. But a real leader wouldn’t worry about forgiving him, would she? Winter wouldn’t. Just use him. Use him to the best effect.
Emily was no longer sure that a real leader was something she could be. Ambition was another thing she seemed to have given up for Lent this year. Truly a lean spring, then: she had eaten ambition every day for a long time. She would grow very thin without it.
“Hello, David. God bless,” she said.
He reached the mausoleum, then stopped as if he had no idea of what to do next.
—Very low arousal. Tremendously flattened affect, Emily’s familiar said.
—Go away, Emily told it. I don’t want you here.
—You can’t afford to be emotional about th—
The blue letters scrolling down Emily’s eyes faded abruptly as she turned her familiar off.
“Why did you do that?” David said. Too much the Intelligence officer not to notice.
“I don’t know,” Emily said. She looked at the hand that had fired the shot that killed her grandfather. “This is private.”
She had set up a large brazier at the foot of the sarcophagus. Waves of heat rose from it, making the air shimmer. She drew a knife from the sheath at her hip. Pushing back her kerchief, she carefully cut a lock of her crinkly brown hair and dropped it onto the coals. It smoked and writhed and was ash. Then she took the knife and made very small cuts in the fingertips of her right hand. She crossed herself and then shook the hand over the brazier. A few droplets of blood hissed among the coals. Good night, Grandfather.
No answer.
She wished Claire were here.
Emily turned and looked up at the sky, as if contemplating some deep thoughts about eternity. Actually she was trying to keep the tears now pooled in her eyes from spilling down her cheeks. She’d had the idea she ought to handle David alone, but it was hard to feel like a tough-assed leader of men with her breath catching in funny little hiccups in her throat and her nose starting to run. Oh, hell. Here came the tears in earnest.
She cried.
When the worst of it was past, she whispered the Lord’s Prayer; holy God, holy mighty, holy immortal. Praying for—what? Grace, perhaps—her prayers held out like the fingers of a blind woman for the chance to touch that serenity. To see a little better by that uncreated Light. Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy unto the ages and ages, amen.
There. Better. Silly girl. Be practical…Except now Emily knew how terribly practical grief was. How deeply the experience of grief ran into the world. How truly the Crucifixion taught.
She handed David the knife. He cut a lock of his own hair and then stopped, directionless. He stood with the hair in his hand for a while, then dropped it in the fire. More to get rid of it than anything else. “Oh David,” she murmured. “You are lost, aren’t you?”
He gave her back the knife.
All right, girlchick. Pull yourself together. “So, Major Oliver. What am I to do with you?”
“By the book? Court-martial and execute me.”
“There’s been enough killing already, don’t you think?”
He shrugged, half-smiling, and said, “You at least I still understand.”
“I don’t think I can leave you in prison. Too destabilizing to have you there among us, like a bad memory.”
“Then leave me in the stockade until someone kills me. When I’m dead, mount a vigorous and ineffectual inquiry into the identity of my murderer.”
“I am never quite sure if you’re joking when you say things like that, David.”
“Neither am I.”
“Ah. That explains it.” Emily looked out over the hillside. Viewed objectively, it was a glorious spring day. The air felt warm and moist, the small white clouds were clean, the blue sky freshly washed. A few white crocuses rose blooming from their icy beds. “Do you think he’ll go to hell, David?”
“Yes.”
“You seem very sure,” she said sadly.
“He was willing to kill that little girl.”
“I know.” Emily was crying again.
“Christ is merciful,” David said awkwardly.
Emily bit her lip. “So they tell us. So we must believe.” She wiped her face with the back of her hand and then wiped her hand on her fatigues, leaving a faint bloodstain. “I don’t think he was evil. I still don’t. He made a covenant and he strove to keep it. He saved us all, in the Dream. He just…couldn’t change when the world changed underneath him.”
<
br /> “He could not adapt to the New Covenant?” David said. “Didn’t recognize his granddaughter was the messiah, is that it? He could not hear the Good News.”
“Spare me your sarcasm, David.”
“I’m not sure I’m being sarcastic.”
Emily looked away. “The great pyre was yesterday. You weren’t invited.”
“Thank you.”
“But I don’t think he will wake up on the North Side. I think those days are gone. I think this age of the world is coming to an end. His body is in this stone box and his soul is in the hands of God eternal, amen, amen.”
“It isn’t going to be easy for you to stay in power,” David said.
“I’m not enjoying it much. I thought I would, you know. I didn’t want him to die, of course. But I always looked forward to taking over the Southside. It was what I had been trained to do. But now…”
“Beranek thinks you’re a mystic. Imagines you giving money to the Church. He doesn’t think women should hold office. Worries what you’ll do when you get premenstrual or pregnant or menopausal.”
Emily snorted. “He’s getting a bit ahead of himself on the last two counts, isn’t he?”
“Beranek is a good man,” David said. “Paslawski is more problematic.”
“Meaning you don’t have any dirt on him?”
“More or less. He’s also very well off. He’s actually worth more than you are.”
“That I did know. Winter and I talked about him. You think he has designs?”
“I would advise caution. But I’m not in Intelligence anymore, am I? Not in anything.”
“Only in yourself,” Emily said slowly. “That, you always have.” He shook his head abruptly. “You may not know what you are. But God does.”
David didn’t answer.
Well, it probably wasn’t the best time for Sunday School, Emily decided. If God wanted David, a path would be shown to him. Unless she had him shot, of course. That would rather cut short his chances of salvation. “I think I have to banish you,” Emily said at last. “I don’t want you killed but I can’t have you around. You are going to have to leave the Southside.”
“Forever?” he asked. She nodded. “I understand.” A little wind came up. The coals in the brazier breathed deeply of it, flushing as if at the taste of wine. “Is there anything else you wanted from me?”
Emily looked away. “Why didn’t you shoot him in the knee, David? You were behind him, damn it. You could have taken a leg, a knee, a shoulder. Anything. Why didn’t you?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s it?”
He shrugged.
She turned to look up at the sky again, blinking. Damn tears. Go away.
weep
I don’t want to cry anymore. Don’t make me. I’m so tired.
weep
Emily looked into the fire. “I drew the hammer back,” she said at last. “You just pulled the trigger.”
Chapter
Thirty-two
A week after Raining and Lark had been reunited, Emily sent a message to say that she had found Nick’s frozen body in the Municipal Airport on the North Side. She offered to send him back to Chinatown. Raining accepted.
She made a travois, lashing together boughs of pine, and asked Wire to spend a day or two with her in the Forest. When word came early one morning that Nick’s body had arrived, she asked her mother to look after Lark and told Wire to gather matches and kindling. Raining went to her room. From the bottom of her jewelry chest she took a small jade box, a gift from her grandmother long ago. Then she went into the kitchen and took one cloth bag.
The sky must have been paling in the world above the trees by the time she and Wire left Cedar House, for high overhead the first thrushes had begun to sing, but under the great limbs of cedar and pine and Douglas fir, the world was still dark. Grave and respectful, the path picked his way through the gloom, careful that Raining not stumble and fall, gathering speed only when daybreak finally began to filter down to the forest floor.
Three Southside soldiers waited by a simple wooden casket at the edge of the Forest. Raining asked them to lift Nick’s body out and place it on the travois. This they did. When she told them they need not come into the Forest, they looked relieved but offered to help just the same. “The way will be short,” Raining said.
Nick’s body was still cold, and very heavy. It took all her strength and Wire’s to drag the travois down the path. But Raining had been right about the length of her journey. Almost as soon as the Southsiders were out of view, the path entered a clearing high on a hilltop. The air was cool here, and the leaves on the birch and poplar trees were yet unborn, curled tight in their black buds. Raining undressed Nick’s body. The skin on his face was white, his lips blue. Blue shadows in the hollows of his bony forehead. Curls of black hair on his white chest. Shrunken genitals. Nails blue on his toes and fingers. When she kissed his cheek it felt like cold leather.
“Build the fire,” Raining told Wire. When it was ready they placed Nick on the pyre. Then they lit the kindling.
Raining cried.
Hours later, after the last flame had gone out, Raining crouched before the embers. From a fallen tree she cut a piece of bark as long as her arm and as wide as her hand. With it she stirred among the coals, clumsily sweeping up a pile of fine white ash. This she scooped into her jade box. Then she rooted through the fire-bed until she found Nick’s blackened hand bones. These she wrapped in white cloth and put inside the cloth bag while Wire looked on, scared and unspeaking. Then they went home.
Back at Cedar House, Raining made up her paint. She separated three duck’s eggs, letting the whites drip down into a clean glass bowl. These she whipped into a meringue. She placed the whipped egg whites on a shallow platter and collected the glair when it ran off. She divided it into two pots. To the larger she added the white ashes she had scooped from the hottest part of the fire, stirring until she had a fine, luminous white. Then she took Nick’s blackened finger bones and made ivoryblack, scraping the carbon residue into a pestle where she ground it into finest powder. This she added to the smaller pot.
Then she painted the last portrait she would ever make, a study of Nick in black and white, a few simple lines, a man standing alone on the vast naked prairie.
Standing alone.
The rest of her art for the years of her life would be full of trees and rivers, branches and leaves, clouds and fish and her beloved birds, but never again would she paint a human form.
Five months after Nick had died, Wire stood peering up the stairs of Cedar House. “Rain? Are you ready yet?”
“Almost.”
“You said that ten minutes ago.”
No answer.
Lark tugged on Wire’s leg. “I want to come too!”
“We’ve already been through—Aa! What have you done!”
Lark was splotched and splattered with red paint everywhere. It was on her hands, her clothes, her face, her hair. She looked as if she had been rolled through a slaughterhouse and then left to dry in the sun. To Wire’s horror she could smell the musty woody smell of Western Hemlock bark. She and Raining had spent days, whole weary days, stripping flitches of bark from hemlocks in the Forest, and peeling out the soft inner bark to make the red dye now coating Lark. Tomorrow they were supposed to boil the bark with mordant and strips of thin hempen cloth which Raining could then use as watercolor cakes.
Lark beamed at her. “Even I been painting!”
With a little moan Wire jumped down the corridor to Raining’s workshop. The big covered pail they had put the dyestuff in lay on its side like a pig with its throat cut. Rust-colored dye lay pooled on the stone floor. It was soaking nicely into the bottoms of a stack of canvases Raining had left against the wall. A wood chisel lay in a puddle of dye on the floor. Wire picked it up. You could see the ring of pressure marks on the dye pail where Lark had used the chisel to pry the lid open. Smart kid. Strong, too.
She heard
Raining’s voice coming downstairs. “Wire? Wire, what do you—Aaah!”
Shrieks, screams, tears, yelling.
More shrieks.
Wire squinched her eyes shut. Probably she ought to go back.
Raining had Lark by the shoulders and was stooped over her, yelling, wild as a hawk. “These are Mommy’s paints! Mommy’s! Not for you!” Shake. “Do you understand me!”
Lark flopped down on the couch—splat! “You get everything and I get nothing,” she said, pouting hugely and trying to squirm away from her mother’s grip. She used to cry when Raining yelled at her. Now, just shy of her fourth birthday, she was more likely to get mad. She was going to be some kind of teenager. Wire shuddered.
“Lark, why don’t you get Grandma to give you a bath. Bell?” she called desperately. “Bell?”
“You’re hurting,” Lark whined. Raining hissed at her daughter; bit her lip; let go.
“That’s good, that’s good, all right,” Wire said. “You really are too little to paint by yourself, Lark. Tell you what, maybe tomorrow Mommy could show you—” Raining made a low, snarling noise. “Maybe Aunt Wire and you could do a little painting together,” Wire said quickly. “How about that? We could go back in the workroom—um, I mean, we could go out by the stream and take some pencils and draw together, how about that?”
“Want paint.” Pout. Pout, pout, pout.
Raining’s mother came down the stairs. “Wire? Did you—oh my.” She blinked, looking at her granddaughter and then at her sofa. She grimaced, then smoothed her face over and smiled. “My, someone has been having a lovely time! Maybe we better go have a bath, sweetheart. Mommy and Wire are going to a very important dinner tonight and they need to get along.”
“I want to co-o-o-me.”
“Oh, not tonight, dear. They’re going to be up well past your bedtime. But I promise you we will have every bit as much fun here. I was thinking I might make…” Bell pursed her lips and frowned at the ceiling. “I might make…”
“Cookies?”
“Cookies. That was the very thing.”
