The Modern World

by Steph Swainston

  Cyan stuttered and recovered herself. ‘I, C-Cyan Peregrine, Challenge you, Saker Micawater, for the position of Lightning within the Castle’s Circle.’

  I looked around at all the shocked faces. Even the Emperor had raised his eyebrows. Tornado turned his eyes up to the ceiling, his mouth in an amused twist.

  San announced, ‘I uphold the Challenge. After the current campaign.’

  ‘Very well …’ Lightning managed a dry whisper to Cyan. ‘Now get out of my sight.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘But what? What do you mean, but? Haven’t you done enough? Do you know what you’ve just said? Now the words are out, you can’t take them back! I’ll have to shoot against you now!’ He took a step. ‘How could you do this to me? After all I’ve done for you. You repay me by … Throwing it back in my face! Not a thought of what I’ve given you. I saved you, on the ship. I reached out! I keep reaching out!’

  He spread both hands and shook them towards her. His face and neck flushed so red they were blotched with white. He yelled in fury, ‘Think before you speak! How can you Challenge me? I taught you to bloody shoot! Any man here has a better chance than you do. Any Select archer is stronger than you. What do you want? My attention? Now of all times? You always had my fond attention – now you have my Lord Emperor’s and Her Highness’s and all the bloody journalists’ attention as well!’

  He took a breath, turned and punched the table. Punched it with the other hand, and leant his weight on it to breathe, leaning over the map, his head bowed and massive shoulders hunched like a lion’s. Cyan was too petrified even to cry.

  He continued, more quietly, ‘Nothing I do is good enough. Is it? Nothing I can buy you. All those days I shirked target practice and spent with you. Look at yourself –’ contempt turned in his voice ‘– cashmere and my sister’s ruby pendant. You want for nothing, I made sure of that. You don’t know how privileged you are. I protect the farmers grafting in your fields. I look after the ships lying in your harbour. In return, you interrupt me! You try to get yourself killed and borne off to the Wall! Fractious, captious, ungrateful, delusional child! You’re just like your mother. She took advantage. She betrayed me, and now you do, too. Oh, you are no flesh and blood of mine!’ He collapsed into his chair. ‘ … Fyrdsmen, take her to tower ten.’

  Their footsteps died away in silence.

  ‘We will resume,’ the Emperor stated. ‘Tornado, what is the current casualty rate?’

  Nobody listened to the Strongman. We were watching Lightning. He sat, chin on chest, staring at the floor, numbly unaware of his surroundings. Minutes went by and he seemed to have retracted totally into himself.

  His shoulders were so taut they drew horizontal creases across his waistcoat’s chest; under his shirt sleeves his forearms’ pleated muscles were like iron. His hands dangled on the rests covered by his greatcoat, but all of a sudden he relaxed and the breath went out of him. He stood up, and muttered, ‘I must have some fresh air.’

  As if running on instinct he swept a deep bow to the Emperor and said glassily, ‘My lord, will you excuse me?’

  The Emperor inclined his head.

  Lightning folded his arms because his hands were shaking, and left the hall.

  His few enemies in the Circle looked smug; a couple leant to each other and whispered – the Archer humiliated by his impudent, imprudent daughter. I glanced around the room – most of the Eszai seemed determined to pretend it never happened. They never let someone else’s misfortune affect them.

  ‘Like mother, like daughter,’ I said loudly.

  ‘Shut up, Jant.’ Eleonora crossed her legs with slow deliberation. But I had broken the tension and the meeting continued.

  I remembered, ten years ago, the Emperor saying that Lightning should listen to the child. I wanted to dash out and offer him my sympathies, but I was obliged to attend to the battle plans. In the past, I would have gone after him regardless of the consequences, but that was many years ago, and I am so very different now. Maybe in one of your romantic novels, Saker, your daughter would have loyally complied with your wishes and fought by your side, but real life doesn’t work like that. Real life doesn’t work at all.

  CHAPTER 19

  LIGHTNING’S CHAPTER

  My own daughter just Challenged me! In front of the Circle and the Emperor – and my lady Eleonora! I think I’m burning up. By god, by god. What has she turned into? With all I’ve done for her! Try as I might, rack my brains as I do, I can’t think what I could have done better. Does she think I don’t love her? – I would have changed the world for her! May the rivers Mica, Dace and Moren flood the world and drown it if she ever had cause for a fraction of one complaint.

  I have failed, for her to turn out like this. I don’t know how. Yes, I do. I have not spent enough time with her. First there was the swarm and then Tris and – why can’t she be patient?

  The girl is my just deserts for being a damn fool. I went against my nature with Ata; I didn’t really love her. She sent for me and I found her sitting, sobbing at her table on the ship. Such a strong woman should never be driven to tears. I put an arm around her to comfort her … fool that I am.

  I must have spoilt Cyan. Yes. Yes, that’s true. My pampering her desires must have led her to think she can demand the world … How dare she? … She doesn’t realise that worlds are hard to come by.

  By god, I haven’t been this angry since … since my family spilt. We all make errors, there’s no need to keep castigating myself about that. Yes, the little mistakes made by princes are devastating on account of our power.

  Who has she been talking to, to turn out so badly? It must be the effect of Hacilith and that rotten brood of Ata’s. Cyan always seemed all right before, but now delinquency hangs around her like a cloud of perfume. I used to love her innocence. She might have been an accident, but she woke me up. A year feels like a year now, rather than ten minutes. I’m alive again – or becoming so – I’m experiencing more now in a year with her than I did in a century before. She invigorated me … more, far more, than even Swallow could. Damn it, I even wished I could be like her.

  Do I have to give up my own daughter like I’ve given up everyone else? No, wait. Take a breath. Step back from this – you know you can, there’s been worse – and think. In a way she has played into my hands. I have a … a legitimate way of dealing with her. She isn’t familiar with the procedures of Challenges. I did the right thing; I’m free of her for the time being and I can talk to her later, at my convenience … I am sure she will be very repentant.

  The way she has turned out is not my fault. Events swept me along too quickly to make time for her … I regret not having the pressure of time that mortals do. Promises are made; time passes and sometimes they are not properly kept. Reality intrudes on the best of intentions: doesn’t every arrow that flies feel the pull of the earth? But, damn it, I have my duty; I can’t neglect it. I knew she was growing quickly, but millions of things demanded my attention … Swallow should have been more dutiful herself.

  But no. When an archer misses the mark, he should turn and look for the fault within himself. A failure to hit the target is never the fault of the target.

  The world is becoming too crass. Oh, that old refrain: everywhere is similar, and becoming more so. In the time that reared me the Grand Tour only took us around Awia, and it startled and inspired us. Now the Tour takes our sons and daughters thousands of kilometres and shows them four lands in the space of a year, and they return unimpressed.

  I am fighting to protect the very ideals that Cyan is trying to change, and … oh, what is the bloody point? I’m sure in the past I never had to justify my every move. There is an informality, these days, that causes uncertainty; nobody knows how to behave any more. It was easier when there were proper codes of behaviour … I am too old and inflexible to bear this blow. Old armour splits; only soft jackets withstand sword blows.

  Don’t talk rubbish.

  The world is chang
ing, though. Changing radically, in ways I don’t care to understand. And what will I be left with? A sense of nostalgia, for the rest of my life in long centuries to come. A terrible sense that I have missed the only thing worthwhile. Be steady, keep calm. Where are the nerves of steel I have when Insects are charging at me and I have to wait for my range?

  I walked more slowly because a recent, mostly healed, rapier wound in my back was starting to catch. I passed into a deep shadow and looked about me, perturbed. I had come as far as the outer road. I must have paced across the square and three streets completely oblivious.

  The tower of the gatehouse overshadowed the barrack blocks on my either side. Soldiers smoking outside on their steps were staring at me in surprise, curious at the sight of Lightning striding down the street in his shirt sleeves.

  I passed them, then I stopped dead. The banner of Morenzia was flying above the barrack doorway. A red clenched fist. The red fist: the marriage rite. The Hacilith fyrd must have assembled, one part of my mind observed, but with the sight of the flag my other thoughts winged far away, to Savory. My Savory. Cyan was wrong to taunt me about her. If she knew what happened she wouldn’t dare to mention Savory at all.

  The wind gusted and the flag flapped, pulling its cord through its eye hole. It released me from my trance and I looked down, aware I was touching the scar across my right palm, rubbing it with my left thumb and forefinger. I turned and walked slowly back to my room. The civilised parts of Morenzia don’t conduct the blood-red hand ceremony any more, only the people of Cathee still do, but the country has kept it as their device. I am so used to seeing it, it hardly registers, but occasionally when I am pensive I look a little deeper and the realisation of what it means takes me back to Savory. And again I am in the marriage hut, waiting for nightfall.

  I was in the marriage hut, waiting for nightfall. The hut walls were wattle hurdles woven around living trees; I sat on the floor and looked up to the beams of the round roof, constructed in spirals like a spider’s web. Through the smoke hole at the apex I watched folds in the clouds push against one another. The dusk sky was different shades of old gold like the mixture in a bottle of illuminator’s ink.

  After dark she will call me, if she hasn’t had second thoughts, celebrating in the village all day with her friends and family. I heard their laughter as they dressed her up and drank to her, and asked her over and over, as is their custom, if she’s sure, if she’s really sure. Soon I will know if they have managed to sway her conviction; if I stay here well into the night and she fails to call me, then without a word I will go to the trader I had employed as a guide and leave the dense forest.

  Outside was nothing but pine trees behind pine trees all the way up and over the fir-covered ridges of the vast mountain forest of Cathee. Cathee could not be more different from my hunting woods I loved so well; it was dark; it was trackless; it was wild. For hundreds of kilometres from Vertigo town to the Drag Road, from the clay paddy fields of Litanee to the cliffs of the cape there were only trees. Even at the edges where conifers segued into broadleaf forest it lost none of its impenetrability.

  I had fasted in the marriage hut for twenty-four hours, alone, and I was expected to use that time to think about Savory and whether I wanted to marry her. I did with all my heart; Savory, when she called me, would never find the hut door swinging wide and her groom long gone.

  Love filled me and uplifted me. I was intoxicated; I floated; I was full of love. After so long I was about to be married! Completed – as I had never felt complete before. I had always felt as if something was missing. I had always felt unfinished, but two people living together as one is to be complete. Savory did not have wings, so we would not be able to tangle our pinions together and I would not be able to bury my face in the warm, feather-scent in their pits, or stroke my fingers along their serried rows. They couple in a vulgar way, do humans, face to face rather than belly to back, but then my cousin Martyn and I used to throw ourselves on each other that way, when she had the key to the belvedere, or with excitement after the day’s hunt. The smell of deer blood, oiled armour, dry leaves, the perspiration of our eager flesh … It would be strange at first to have a woman without wings, but then it would be strange, so strange, to have a companion at all.

  The beauty of it – waiting outside in a far place, for my love to call me, while sunset dyed the sky strange colours and the light drained out of the forest. I wanted to tell her all my history – the past to be discussed in the future – we would have so much time!

  I glanced up as the first wolf howls carried on the breeze. The Cathee grey wolves were dumb lanky beasts with dirty pelts and eyes glazed by starvation. They scavenged in large packs and scratched ancient things out of the villages’ middens. The few villages sheltered from them behind circular palisades, but I had my new crossbow and I was not afraid. The worst they could do was give me fleas.

  I could hear distant laughter from the village and I felt ostracised, but it would be worth it when they throw open their gates and Savory leads me in, when they accept me as one of their own.

  I wondered what Mother would think of that. I found it easy to picture her face, even after all these centuries. Son, she would say, do you know what you are doing? She has no fine blood whatsoever.

  That never mattered to me.

  You just picked her out of the ranks!

  I always knew I would meet my true love on the battlefield.

  She is probably not even a virgin. Some fyrdsman or woodcutter will have taken her en passant.

  Oh, let me marry whom I love.

  Mother raises her eyebrows: Ah, but is she your true love or your latest substitute?

  She is my true love, and besides, she has the strong will I admire and she is my equal in intelligence. I am immortal and I need someone of whom I will never tire.

  Son, immortal or not, you vex me. What are you thinking of, participating in barbarous rituals?

  True, I had always assumed I would be married our way, but Savory wanted this, and the way she explained the ritual seemed to be more deeply binding than anything invented in Awia and the Plains. Back home, bride and groom simply stand at the front of the audience and together proclaim, ‘We are married.’ To undo the union is just as simple a procedure, but there could be no separation when Savory and I are wed. This was to be her last visit to her homeland, and I agreed to the suggestion with delight, although later that night her face seemed strangely clouded. I would not have denied her anything. I was determined to know everything about her, and become familiar with her circumstances, the places that she had known and loved. I wished I had met her earlier, and I knew too little about her and the Cathee, but I thought I could learn quickly through taking part. I fretted; where is she? Surely it’s nightfall. Why hasn’t she called me?

  Powders for preening feathers were not imported this far south, so I felt rather unwashed. I fiddled with the red plaid cloak they had given me, because it kept slipping down. The rough wool was unbearably scratchy and I was not at all sure that I had folded it correctly.

  I first saw Savory – the doyenne of hoydens – at the front, sitting on a bench outside a pavilion, waxing her bowstring. I was struck that moment by love’s arrows, and they sank their barbs deep beneath my skin. The first arrow was her beauty; it entered through my eyes and from there to my heart, where nothing I could do would extract it. The second was her simplicity, her few belongings, her careless mode of life. Like all the Cathee she lived within her skin as if it was someone else’s coat she may well have to pawn for her next meal. The third arrow was my own memory, of Martyn, because Savory had the same fox-red hair. Unbraided, it tumbled on her shoulders, pooled on her lap. Its tips brushed the backs of her knees as she sat with one leg over the other, massaging linseed oil into the risers of her bow. From that instant I was her willing servant; my heart belonged unreservedly to her.

  Savory had seen the seasons, slept outdoors and laboured hard. Martyn, on the other hand, had s
kin as pale and clean as split sycamore wood. Martyn was taller than any forester and Savory did not have her upright bearing, but Savory’s sparkling, little-girl lightness shone through her experience of harsh realities – like cultivated flowers in a garden grown wild.

  Savory had left Morenzia owing to a blood feud between her family and another in the village. It had whittled down her family until she was the last. The forest had nothing wholesome to offer her, so she joined the fyrd and led a division of Cathee woodsmen, the best archers outside Awia. I pieced this together from her broken language, because I could not speak Morenzian. I yearned for a word that we could share, that might begin our courtship, and for agonising weeks I stayed silent and watched from afar.

  She taught me her language over six months, though I remained hesitant and only Savory could fathom my accent. She had heard of Lightning in old legends, but they were rarely accurate and she only half-believed they were about me. I tried to impress upon her how different her life would be from now on but, having never seen my palace, how could she understand? She was strong enough to break through my reserve. After all, it had been a hundred years since I had …

  I loved her the more because she did not hang back, afraid. Her antics made me laugh. She was not so headstrong as to ignore my sincere advances. Neither was she afraid of the depth of my devotion, retreating into reserve of her own. She reciprocated. I would have given her roses if we hadn’t been stranded at the front. She would have found herself with half of my estate. So then, I asked her to marry me, as composedly as I was able, although I felt like froth inside, like bubbles in Stenasrai wine.

  She hung on my arm and looked up, all smiles as she consented. She did love me as I loved her! If perfection blooms only once in a thousand years, that’s enough, because I can pick that bloom and it will live the next thousand years too, and on into forever. Constancy is rewarded, I know that much.