One day when I was with Father in the markets outside the encampment walls I saw my beloved and five of his mates progressing through the crowded streets. My dear one was dressed in women's clothing and was leading a donkey on which rode a statue of the lewd goddess Marilyn, a deity whose adherents worship by performing unnatural sexual acts rather than by merely praying as those in most other religions do. Father and I stepped around a corner and watched my dear one's friends playfully strike him with flails as they sang "Happy Birthday" to him. From our hiding post we listened to his friends proclaim what they were going to do to him when they reached Marilyn's temple and performed their sordid rituals. I realized as I looked upon his painted eyes and the red layers of heavy paste upon his grinning lips that he and I were not going to make a perfect union, not even if our joining together included whatever fractions of a soul his five friends and the donkey might have, and I drove him from my heart.
I confess I also once had tender feelings for Harriman, my father's second-in-command, despite knowing he was already married to the daughter of an important family in Garden City. That feeling also passed. The more I knew of him, the more I realized Father kept the handsome young man on his staff because Father saw in him a younger version of himself. Harriman was as recklessly brave as he was loyal. He knew how to make men march from one point to another, and nothing of why they should be marching anywhere, nor did he think to ask why. I expect his marriage to the titled lady in Garden City was no more successful than Father's nuptial arrangement was, and any connection I formed with him would be much akin to that which had once existed between my father and my late mother.
As I have already admitted, I, like many thousands of young women of the age, had entertained feelings for Luke Anthony when I first saw him-feelings I quickly came to regard with disgust. I was so repulsed by the creature behind his pleasing face I came to doubt the sentiments of my own heart, and I decided it was for the best I remain Father's maiden assistant for many years to come. I told myself I would either become wiser over time or else time would lessen the passions within me.
My maid Helen alone refused to give up the hunt for my future husband. She had told me more than I wanted to know about men; some of what she told me was actually true, and that made the subject even more disgusting. She said if I wanted a man I should pray to one of the clay idols she brought along whenever the household traveled. She knew spells I could use to enchant an unsuspecting fellow; I only had to repeat his name over and over, dropping the first and last letters of his name each time I said it until there were no more letters to say. Then the object of my love would be mine forever more.
"Didn't you once tell me that was the formula used to make one disappear?" I asked her.
"This is completely different," she said. "I would use my own name to make myself disappear."
Helen advised me to wear cosmetics to lighten my dark face, a feature she thought made me look like a savage.
"A little mercury powder on your cheeks, child," she told me, "or men will think you're a native girl."
"I am a native girl," I said.
"Lineage is traced through the father," she said as she tried to dust my face. "Your mother could be from India, and you would still be a general's daughter. Now, pay attention to me: when you walk behind the master your father, and the men in the camp can see you, you must keep your back straight and your breasts out."
"Helen!" I exclaimed, though my protests never discouraged her.
"Men are perverse," she said, and tried to adjust my dress into a more suggestive mode. "They like that sort of thing. Things used to be better for us in our great-great-grandmothers' times, but in times of constant war, men naturally have mastery of the world. We have to endure them."
"As you endure Medus?" I asked.
My father's servant Medus was terrified of his domineering wife. If he ever disobeyed her, Helen would threaten to put a curse on him, and the superstitious fellow never did anything but what she demanded of him, and no man in the world had ever been so thoroughly ruled by a woman than he was.
"Heaven gives me the strength to suffer that man's tyranny," she said.
My dear Helen was able to say absurd things of that sort and sound as if she meant them. Luke Anthony himself did not have a greater talent for dissimulation.
I thought for several years after our trip to Britain my father might not mention a possible husband for me ever again. Then, as so many of our other periods of misfortune began, there came a letter from Mr. Golden, Father's financial patron, and trouble arrived in Van City close behind it.
"What a beautiful woman you have become, Justa," Father said to me one evening after dinner.
Father was resting on his couch while his food digested, as he had grown accustomed to doing when we still had television to watch after dinner. I was mending a tunic he had torn on the thornbushes that grow everywhere on that edge of the frontier. Father never complimented anyone other than soldiers who had fought well. I knew something was afoot.
"Thank you, sir," I said.
"Everyone tells me how beautiful you are," continued Father.
"Who is everyone, sir?" I asked.
"Everyone," he said. "Everyone ... you see, Justa. Simply everyone."
"Then I thank everyone for the compliment, sir," I said.
"Any man would be proud to have you as his wife," said Father, revealing more of his mind as he went on. "How old are you, my dear?"
He never made the effort to call me "my dear" any more than he ever complimented me. I was now certain the something that was afoot was going to be something enormous.
"I am twenty, sir," I said.
"Long past the time you should be married," noted Father, straining to sound offhanded, as though telling me I should be wed were something he mentioned every day. "When I was younger, we married later. Now, young people don't know what tomorrow will bring. Getting married young makes sense."
"You know I have decided to stay with you, sir," I told him. "I am of use to you here. When I can be of no more use to you, I will go to the Scholars' Library in North Dakota and write a book upon how random possibilities influence evolutionary patterns."
"Women do not become natural philosophers! Or any other sort of philosopher!" said Father. "No one should become one, if you ask me! What good do they do? Stir up a lot of trouble! Have philosophers ever held the center of a line? Have they ever supported an assault? Eh? You tell me!"
"Mathias the Glistening was a philosopher and a scientist, sir," I said.
"Mathias was a good sort," conceded Father. "Different, but good enough, in his way. What's that worth? He's dead now. What's a good dead man worth these days? How is it important a person knows anything anymore? Other than knowing how to fight, I mean?"
As he spoke Father made a sweeping gesture with his right hand and knocked over the small portable table the servants had placed beside his couch. Both Medus and the ever-grinning Mica rushed forward to clean up the mess he had made.
"What I am saying," said Father after the table and the several plates he had broken had been taken away, "is that ... you see, Justa ... I have become, over these many years, very fond of you."
"I have always loved you, sir," I said.
"Don't talk like that!" Father boomed.
His outburst frightened poor Medus, and the man jumped straight off the ground upon hearing the master roar. Though he knew Father was all bluff and never beat his people, Father could certainly still sound like the warrior he had once been.
"Poets talk like that," said Father. "And look at what a sorry lot they are! All that lovey-dovey nonsense! You have better blood in you, Justa!"
"Perhaps, sir," I said, not looking up from my sewing, "it was my Syrian blood making we say such lovey-dovey nonsense. Perhaps, given our situation, I also think it is best I at least love whom I can."
"Our friend Mr. Golden has a young associate," blurted out Father, unable to keep the secret inside him any
longer. "His name is Titian."
"Titian what?" I asked, curious to learn if the man in question came from a decent family and why he had such an absurd name.
"He is a new citizen of the Empire," explained Father. "He doesn't need another name. Or I wouldn't think he would. I understand he uses `Golden' when he has to sign any legal documents."
"What does this Titian Golden have to do with us?" I queried, knowing full well where Father was headed.
"If Mr. Golden, the young man's patron, ceases paying money to the emperor's friends, I will be killed," said Father.
Father arose and went outside. The tension he had created when he made his revelation had been more than he could endure while inside our house's rough stone walls. He returned to me about an hour later, but discussed Titian no more that day. He instead asked if I had made an inventory of the army's food supplies.
Four weeks later, the aforementioned Titian arrived in Van City on a private jet plane, one of the last few to remain flying outside the military. Given the example of Luke Anthony, I should have learned I should not judge anyone by his or her outward appearance. My late instructor Mathias would have expected me to do no less. I will therefore only remark that Titian was so fat he had a hump like a bear at the top of his neck and his neck disappeared into his jowls, and I will not tell the judgment I made of him. Because he had contracted the Swedish disease when he was younger, Titian had grown a heavy beard to cover the rash on the lower half of his face. As was the fashion for bearded men in Garden City, he had used a hot iron to curl his facial hair into ringlets every bit as elaborate as those the patrician women wore atop their heads. Like his patron, he was a fuel factor, a man who buys coal oil and propane and diesel fuel at low prices and sells them at higher rates, and a man willing to consider that sort of skullduggery a true profession.
"The Empire depends upon us," were the first words I heard him say.
I had looked out the upper-story window of Father's house and overheard him discussing his calling with the two officers escorting him into the secure confines of the military camp. The short stroll from the front gate had left him winded, and Titian's enormous body wheezed like a gasoline engine in the grip of the new metal plague when he spoke to his companions.
"We are as necessary to the general well-being of the Empire as you chaps are," he said. "Perhaps more, if I may say so. Mind you, we are well compensated for what we do. That is because of the risk we take."
No one had told Titian that the two men walking with him were Tajik and understood nothing he said to them in proper English.
Helen poked her head out the window beside mine and got a good look at him. The first impression of him that she related to me was he resembled a sow standing on its hinders.
"You must refuse him," she advised me. "He is only recently a full citizen. You are a general's daughter."
"My father may die if I say no," I said.
Helen, being Helen, had many ready schemes for rescuing me from a marriage to this disciple of Mr. Golden's. She had a vial of synthetic blood and a type of paste that would leave a line on human flesh that would resemble a cut.
"You put a bit on your wrists," she told me. "Scatter the blood about, and your papa will think you attempted suicide. The general will be heartbroken, and he will send the fat pig away."
"I cannot betray my father," I said.
"I can get a narcotic designed in India," said Helen. "We all know how clever they are down there. One pinch and you will sleep like the dead for two days. Even your heart will go into hibernation. This toad from Garden City will leave us, and you will awake safe and sound."
"No," I said. "Father would never be safe. Turkey has spies, as does everywhere else; they would tell Mr. Golden I am still alive."
Medus came upstairs and informed us Father wished me to come below. In the lower chamber the general introduced us to the fuel factor. The servants and I bowed to him, for Titian was a man of property and needed to be shown some measure of respect. Upon beholding me on the stairs in my tailored white gown, Titian flexed and unflexed his pudgy hands several times.
"My special friend Mr. Golden said you were beautiful, Justa," said Titian as he bowed to me. "He did not tell me half the truth."
(He did not speak as plainly as I report it here, for in the fashion of all smart young men in the capital Titian put a North American aspirate in front of every exposed vowel, a habit that gave his English a repetitious, hissing sound.)
"I am pleased to meet you, sir," I said, taking care to lower my eyes for him.
"She has good manners," said Titian to my father. "My special friend Mr. Golden said she would. Everyone knows he seldom lies."
"No, he lies frequently," I thought, and I again bobbed my head to Titian in response to his sweet words.
"Enough chatter," snarled Father, who I could sense had formed an unfavorable opinion of our guest.
We ate some dried fruit and fried corn cakes for our midday lunch, a not-uncommon meal on the Eastern frontier. The rotund Titian was very hungry from his long trip from Garden City, yet he deigned to eat nothing we served him. He fingered at the small repast Medus sat before him like a stray dog pawing a dead cat, and made dreadful expressions of disapproval.
"Is this everything there is?" he asked Father.
"You are in an army camp, sir," huffed the general. "We eat what we have."
Titian then promised us he would soon show us what a real meal could be. He would rent a house in Van City and bring the necessary supplies from the imperial capital.
"Justa will need to learn how things are done in Garden City," he said, and smiled at me. "Seeing as how she will soon be living there."
My bowels felt ice cold in response to his glance. I again bowed my head to him and left my thoughts unspoken.
For the next two weeks Titian threw himself into the preparation of this grand dinner, at which I dreaded we would be wed by one of the cult chaplains on the base. Each day, at my father's behest, I went to Titian's rented house and sat on a couch opposite the fuel factor while he ordered about his enormous household of more than fifty servants. I nodded my agreement when Titian spoke, as my father would have wanted me to do. My husband-to-be meanwhile spoke of his estate outside the capital and of the vast wealth he had acquired by manipulating fuel prices after problems in the electrical grid made it impossible to create hydrogen and the Empire had to again use fossil energy. As he spoke, he slyly-or in what he thought was a sly way-touched my legs as he gesticulated and leaned his ample frame into my breasts.
"The secret to my success is my special friend Mr. Golden," he told me. "He has many important contacts within the emperor's court. Everything in business was tied up when Mathias ruled and we had to act so proper. His son has opened up so many new opportunities for those willing to cultivate the right sort of relationships."
I quickly learned his special friend was Titian's favorite subject. Mr. Golden had stolen more money from citizens of the Empire than a freight train could safely carry, making him in Titian's eyes the most admirable man in the capital and the very model of what the younger man wanted to become.
"My special friend has dined in the palace with the Concerned One himself," he said. "That, by the way, is what the emperor wants everyone to call him these days: the Concerned One. Luke Anthony sounded too much like his late father's name. My special friend addresses him as such: the Concerned One Who Rules. Oh, the meals they have! Our little dinner will be fine, for here in Turkey; it will hardly be as they have in the palace! There they have runners on the remaining hovercraft going back and forth from the Sierra Madre Oriental, bringing them snow they mix with crushed fruit to make a delightful dish to cool the stomach after eating spiced meats. They could just eat ice cream, but ice cream had been done to death, don't you think?"
An entire caravan of overladen trucks were needed to transport the food and utensils for Titian's feast from the airport into Van City. He ordered his men to show me eac
h of the items they brought through his front door. He said since I would be presiding over the banquet with him I should know the food in order to participate in the event as I should. From local merchants he purchased sundry types of fish from the Black Sea and five butchered lambs. From his personal collection he brought forth two complete dinner servings, enough to provide for a hundred diners; one set consisted of golden plates on the edges of which were depictions of General Halifax's expedition to China in 2078, and another set of plates were of silver and on them were scenes of Captain Marcels's landing upon the planet Mercury in 2114. The Garden City goldsmith who had fashioned the tableware had made General Halifax and Captain Marcels both resemble Titian, a device that would keep the guests mindful of their host throughout the feast. The wine we were to drink came from California. The markets in Van City supplied Titian with live birds kept in cages and dead ones stored in gelatin. From the seaport at Trabzon he brought twenty barrels of shellfish so foul after they had ridden in trucks that no longer had refrigeration compartments they made the dogs along his street bark when Titian's men brought them to his house.
"This will be a treat for you," Titian told me. "You have never lived like a human being before."
Each day I visited his rented house Helen insisted I wear a lovely lapis lazuli necklace she had borrowed from the household of another officer. The dress she made me wear during my visits was pure white and had light green silk woven into the long skirt so that it appeared there were blades of grass gently rustling about my legs as I walked. But the blue stones she had me put on must have cost as much as the gown and my father's entire estate back in Garden City put together.
The Martian General's Daughter Page 12
