Jahandar: The Orion War
Page 14
The orange belt of Helvetic stars reaches north until it stops at the lower edge of the blacked-out Dead Zone, a sprawling region of strangely lifeless systems where no human ever settled and no exobiology was ever found, not even the most primitive exobacterium. He’s got no interest in dead systems. There’s no one to dominate or murder there. His glower passes on.
He looks next to a smaller ball of stars contained by a beige halo near the center of the projection. The United Planets of Krevo comprise just two dozen inhabited worlds and moons with 24.5 billion free citizens. Or did. The cluster hangs, unluckily for Krevans, right between the lowest Dauran systems and the upper third of the Grün Imperium. Harsh white laser arrows penetrate from the Imperium halfway into the beige ball, marking the path of invasions to date.
It started with five Krevan worlds attacked all at once, progressing within months to seven more. Two of the second wave have already fallen, and the rest are on the verge. A strong but besieged War Government on Aral authorized what it calls “The Exodus” to five sanctuaries inside Calmari space, planning to head into exile itself on Harsa, a moon in the New Cincinnatus system. After just six months of war Pyotr Shaka III engulfs half the United Planets. Just a few morsels are left for Jahandar to chew, hanging in the eastern third of the shattered orange ball.
He gazes at the last holdout Krevan systems and clustered settlements of several more tiny Neutral star-states, each with no more than ten inhabited worlds or fewer, each marked off on the starmap holo as smaller colored spheres. ‘Grains of barley trapped between millstones, Daura and the Imperium. First I’ll crush the grains to flour, then I’ll break the other millstone.’
His eye moves last to a hazy-blue zone, not an orb but a double-marked frontier balcony that bulges into Dauran space north of the Dead Zone. The blue sprawl spreads west until it stops at the far edge of Orion’s spur. At last the Calmar Union haze is stopped by a patchwork of more Neutrals, some very small. Orion trails off into the globular clusters, where the starmap stops and the mostly starless region of the westward Gap intercedes between Orion and distant Perseus.
He ignores the collage of distant, small Neutrals. Smallness never impresses him, while weakness provokes only his contempt. He focuses on “The Balcony,” as Daurans call a ledge of easternmost Calmari worlds that abut their western frontier, pushing into Daura as a wide bulge.
The starmap replies to his scratchy query. ‘Indicated blue stars of the Calmar Union have a population of 868.3 billion in 217 systems. They are organized as a republican confederation, with twin capitals on Kars and Caspia. The far west Neutrals marked as a rainbow at this scale have a combined population of 47 billion, spread over 35 planets and moons.’
His second mind talks to his first. ‘Churlish and malevolent entity! Blue Onis! Jahandar and not greedy Pyotr shall do for you! We Daurans have borne your insults too long. I’ve built my forces, waited for my own good time to chop at thee. Arrogant secret-keepers! Foreign shits! I’ll break your empire, crumble your stars into my black bean soup like babu’s hard biscuits!’
***
Before he was Jahandar, Soso acquired Tanya Ramos as his wife. He did it for politics, not for himself or for her. He was encouraged to marry by the Party. He did it to climb the pig-greased pole rising to the leadership, to sit with insiders planning a stinking revolution.
They said: “Hurry up and marry some girl. Any girl will do. Do it under your new Party cover name, ‘Tomsk.’ It will help our revolution. Police are less suspicious of married men.”
Behind his back they joked about his ogre scars and pitied his bride her wedding night. Some also knew that he preferred kliba. Either sex, only very young. He could rough them up, dominate and frighten them while he raped them or because he paid them. No one except Tanya ever went with him willingly. Even before she let him the first time, he despised her for it.
Tanya was plain-faced and broad-hipped, with lifeless brown hair and small, mousey and uninteresting eyes. She was a simple and simple-minded Sachi peasant girl, brought down from the high mountains to marry deformed and crippled Soso because she was also well past her due date, a mountain spinster no one wanted or called on anymore. He liked her docility and dog-like devotion and agreed that he needed a family as cover, though more for his crimes than politics.
Her father was happy to be rid of an unwedable daughter. “Even if I must give her to a groom from the lower valley, a runty gimp all pockmarked with plague scars.”
“At least she’ll have a husband,” her mother said. “We never thought she would.” Only her younger sisters were sorry to see her go, not least because it meant they must marry next.
“He’s a crooked blockhead of a man with a foreshortened leg and uncut nails rimmed with black dirt, like a farmer! And he stinks of sour cabbage and cheap blue tobacco.” Tanya’s too proud father was especially struck by Soso’s jaundiced look when they met. He peered back at his host with unnaturally yellow eyes that gave him the countenance of a feral mountain cat.
“I don’t care about the holes or smells! I think I’ll love him more for those, the poor dear.” That’s what Tanya told her friends, though she did care. She just wanted to be married and have her own home, even more. She didn’t see her Soso’s other, worse defects. She understood him too little to see that his pockmarked corruption plunged far below his surface scars.
She doted on Soso from their first arranged meeting, leading to an outdoor-arch wedding just a week later: her father wanted her out of his house. She was shocked how rough Soso was in bed that first night, and every other time he came to take her whenever and how he wanted.
After the wedding her father said: “I never want to see him again!” He meant his despised and oldest daughter, too. At least Tanya’s mother cried when she left with angry, gimpy Soso.
Not what Tanya hoped and dreamed of as a girl. Still, she had a husband and a home of her own at last. She was away from her brutish father, if only by marrying a brute husband. She wanted to live quietly in Dambatta, no more. Sometimes she went up the mountain to visit her own babu and two younger and much prettier sisters, when they told her that her father had gone hunting. It was her time of simple happiness. But a simulacrum of normal family life in a cottage in Dambatta wasn’t what restless, ambitious Soso wanted. Nor what the Party wanted for Soso.
“You’re ordered to leave Sachi in a week, to resettle on Nalchik. We need you to do prep work, covert Party work. You know, ready things for our arrival when the Revolution comes.”
“And my wife? I’ve married three months ago. She just finished fixing the house.” It might have been a normal husband’s touching concern, except he said later he was thinking only of expenses. That was a lie, too. Against all odds and his corrupted nature, a small part of Soso grew some affection for Tanya. A very, very small part. And grew it like a weed, not a rose.
“Take her with you. Married is good cover. She can work as a servant, if you like.”
Tanya went dutifully, bewildered as she left behind all that she knew: her home village and her homeworld, her fresh painted little white cottage. They moved into a small but well-kept flat in a big tower in Astrana, immense capital city of the whole Dauran Empire. She marveled the day she first stood outside the Caesarium Selo, home to the emperor himself! But novelty wears off when you’re mostly alone and only a very little person in a large and foreign place.
She didn’t understand the hugeness or importance of the city. She was baffled by his constant hushed meetings and secret whispers and business with ugly, violent men. “Why do these cloaked men come into our little parlor? Why do you talk with them in coded whispers?”
“Quiet, woman! Mind your business. Bring us food.”
She served up yams and raw onions and spiced samogon in glass jars, the cheap kind Soso gave her credits to buy in the street market. She sat in a backroom thinking about the Blue Mountains and her babu, until the strange whispers stopped and the ugly, hunched men left.
“Stupid cow! To say that name! Don’t you know that could get me killed? My name is Tomsk now, you bitch!” He struck her across the mouth with the back of his hand, then pulled back and punched her as hard as he could in the face with his closed and heavy fist. And again.
She ran crying to their tiny bedroom with a taste of iron in her mouth from her split and bleeding lip. Also of yams and raw onion from his filthy, unwashed hand. He beat her for the same reason his father always beat his mother, because he could. Because she was little and he was not, she was helpless and powerless and he was not. And because she had questioned him.
But he told himself: ‘The dumb cow deserved it for using my real name.’ He enjoyed it, too. So had his drunk of a father. He pushed that comparison aside, and had another hard drink.
Then the Grim Revolution came and Soso was revealed to astonished Tanya to be a very important man. She had no idea how or why it happened. She was stunned at the sudden turn in their lives and fortunes, yet also pleased and proud. “He’s my husband!” she would boast in hallways and on the street, not seeing the look of horror mixed with pity in a listener’s eyes.
She liked to stand amidst the adoring crowds that swirled around him as he performed feats of public oratory she didn’t know he could, knowing only the short, stubby way he always spoke to her. He never allowed her to stand beside or behind him or acknowledged her in public in any way. Yet she was content at last, except for a nagging homesick longing. ‘I want to tell my babu about Soso. I want to see her and my sisters and my old home on Sachi.’
She knew nothing about the killings, about the terrible purges. So she was puzzled why no one would look her in the eye in the market, but gave her free yams and onions. She didn’t even need them anymore, since Soso made so much more from his handsome state job and servants showed up with anything they needed. She went to market to talk to people, but no one would talk to her. They all moved away or looked frightened when she approached them.
Tanya was bewildered when Soso told her to pack her little things and move with him into the Caesarium Selo. “What happened to the emperor and his lovely family?” No one would say. They gave her a whole wing to herself, with Shishi guards. ‘Now I can be even more lonely.’
She hated its enormous rooms, its glittering cathedral ceilings, and omnipresent Black Robes standing silent at every door, closing them tight as she drew nearer, barring entry to mysterious places where her Soso went alone.
She wandered alone in cavernous halls, then down into massive kitchens full of cooks and waiters who looked terror-stricken at her approach. She started to eat there nightly, seeking company. No one would speak to her, except to ask: “What will be your pleasure, ma’am?”
“My pleasure? I just want a bowl of bean soup and flatbread.”
“Yes ma’am. I’ll shall bring it.” The next night and the next, soup was already waiting when she arrived, so no one had to talk to her at all. Ever again.
She was not allowed into the one room she always wanted to see, the old Imperial Ballroom where she heard fine ladies used to dance. Black Robes barred the door. She knocked anyway. From inside she heard Soso’s angry voice:
“Keep out of My Study, cow!”
Then her Soso became “The Jahandar,” standing atop the tallest palace spire with his arms out, angelic music blaring, claiming to be a god. She knew she had lost him forever, and was glad.
‘Surely now Soso will let me go home to visit babu? We no longer have to hide inside secret lives in grubby places. He is a great man, but I don’t want this palace. I want to go home.’
She asked timidly, after a silent decade alone in the Selo. He raged and stamped his good leg and beat her badly, far worse than when he was just plain Soso. He refused to let Tanya leave Nalchik or bring her family to live in the huge and empty palace in Astrana. His despotism was petty and domestic as well as empire wide and public, absolute in all spheres. It’s one of the most primal things he knows, that he must stop people from leaving.
“Everyone leaves poor Soso.”
Tanya was always alone after that, friendless in the midst of degenerate opulence and Jahandar’s unrestrained decay and decadence. Every day he gave license to his lusts, carnal and political, cruel, terrible and insatiable. She drifted far from him, the dear disappearing Soso who only ever lived in her girlish imagination. She pulled away from his terrible new apparition, this “Jahandar” she didn’t know. Farther with each passing, lonely year spent in his daily presence but not in his life. Only their children kept her interest, inside a palatial prison.
After 20 years on Nalchik she stopped asking for anything. Her silence made him more suspicious than her complaints. He sensed her drift, hated her for it. Turned against her at last.
“The bitch will betray and try leave me one day.” He said it out loud, with no one in The Study, as usual. He wallowed in self-pity over it, himself the only object of suffering that could ever evoke his pity. ‘Everyone betrays poor Soso in the end, everyone. My dear, darling bitch Tatiana will be next to betray Soso!’
So that she could never leave, he confined her to a small cottage he had built inside an enclosed courtyard of the Caesarium Selo. He picked a place he could watch from a window of his bedchamber. Shishi brought him reports on what she did and the few people she’s allowed to see, like silent cooks delivering soup. Until he allowed no one at all. Meals came in via a hatch cut into her cottage door. Her prison was complete.
‘You’ll not leave. You’ll not betray me, bitch! Traitor!’
Tanya was insignificant in his affection. Yet it pleased him to torment her in petty ways as his mind grew dark against her. She only left the cottage when he forced her to attend state dinners, where she always sat alone wearing a plain country frock. Her best, but out of place even among the rough crew that surrounded Jahandar in his stolen palace. He mocked her coarse manners and plain speech and stupid dress in front of his guests, forcing them to laugh at her.
Then the pederast dangled that night’s kliba in front of her for all to see, parading his next teenage rape around the table before Shishi took the boy or girl to his dead emperor’s bed to wait for him. Or he doted on the prettiest girl or boy he seated at the head of table, in Tanya’s rightful place. She shuddered with hurt and jealousy, as he wanted. Then he sent her under guard back to her little white cottage jail, to sob long and all alone through the night.
For Jahandar sex was a bodily function, best done quickly with as little mess as possible. Terrified klibas of 14 or 15 years, boys or girls, it didn’t matter to him, were seized by his Shishi off Astrana’s backstreets and brought to his rooms to be raped. Afterward, the drugged child was dumped onto the street by a stone-faced Selo guard. Soso was always a brute in bed but Jahandar grew less obsessed by carnal things. He turned more to his one true lust, for absolute control over the hundreds of billions scuttling in their aphid lives on all Daura’s hundreds of captive worlds.
“He’s a psychopath,” doctors would surely say if any were allowed to examine him and live. “Though one oddly in control of his own psychoses.”
At least, he was at first.
“Oho! You would poison even my children against me, will you? No, you won’t! I knew you would betray Soso, you bitch-traitor!”
The worst torment of Tanya he took years to finish, a slow twisting of the knife of his cruelty. He removed each of their children in turn, as they reached age ten. Until Tanya dreaded children’s birthdays.
Tanya had with her a favorite child’s globe, given to her by her mother on her fifth birthday. It was a little one with a white-tailed deer bounding past a cottage under an ever-falling mountain snow. Another globe she had made for herself. It showed
a tiny Tanya posing all alone on her wedding day, with stupid girlish happiness for the future on her face. She’d shake and show them to her daughter, to laughing, delighted Vashti whose artificial eyes changed color on the hour just to delight her doting mother.
Then Vashti turned ten, and cruel Jahandar took her away, taunting Tanya as he slammed the cottage prison door as she reached up for her crying, terrified, last and sweetest and youngest child. She never saw Vashti’s eyes again. All color was taken from her life.
He never let her leave again, this simple mountain girl so far from the old home and mother and sisters she never saw before her babu passed. When he took away her last child, too, her only daughter, it was too much. After 40 years torment in his cottage prison, with her parents gone and her own children denied to her sight, suicide loomed as the only escape. So she took it.
She ran from him into the sweet freedom of death, lying on her stone floor smelling of warm humus, broken stems, and crushed black leaves. For she did it with poison herbs secretly grown inside a samovar in her cottage prison. She held the holed pot overhead for painful hours each day, raising it up into a strong beam of natural light from a high kitchen skylight. It was the only window in the cottage, placed so high so that she couldn’t break its glass to cut her wrists. It took her two years to grow enough to die. Then she brewed the bitter black herbs into strong tea and drank and drank until the porcelain cup fell from her trembling fingers to shatter on the stone floor where she slumped, to curl in dull and dim-lit pain, in hope she might see her babu soon.