The Summer Queen

by Joan D. Vinge

  Jerusha stopped moving, looking toward the Queen.

  The Queen glanced her way, looked back at Capella Goodventure. “No,” Moon said softly. “Say what you must.”

  Capella Goodventure deflated slightly, her defiance punctured by the Queen’s easy capitulation. She took a deep breath. “You all know of me. I am headwoman of the clan that gave Summer its last line of queens. I have come to tell you that this woman who calls herself Moon Dawntreader Summer has brought you here to fill your minds with doubt—about yourselves, about the Lady’s place in your lives. She would strip away the beliefs, the traditions, that make us Summers. She wants us to become like the Winters—miserable lackeys of the offworlders who despise our ways and butcher the sacred mers.”

  She turned, confronting the Queen directly. “You do not speak for the Sea Mother!” she said furiously. “You are not the woman who was chosen Queen. You have no right to wear that sign at your throat.”

  “That isn’t true,” Moon said, lifting her chin so that all the watchers could clearly see the trefoil tattoo that echoed the barbed fishhook curves of the sibyl pendant she wore.

  “Anyone can wear a tattoo,” Capella Goodventure said disdainfully. “But not just anyone can wear the face of the Winters’ Queen. There is no Moon Dawntreader Summer. You are the Snow Queen, Arienrhod—you cheated death and the offworlders, I don’t know how. You stole the rightful place of our queen, and now you desecrate the Mother of Us All with this filth!” She faced the crowd again, her own face flushed with an outrage that Jerusha knew was genuine.

  But a woman’s voice called out from the crowd, “I know Moon Dawntreader.”

  Capella Goodventure’s broad, lined face frowned, as she peered into the crowd. The Queen stared with her as the speaker pushed through the wall of faces. Jerusha saw a sturdy, dark-haired island woman in her mid-thirties; saw sudden recognition fill Moon’s face at the sight of her. “Clavally Bluestone Summer,” the woman identified herself, and Capella Goodventure’s frown deepened. “I made her a sibyl. She has the right to the trefoil, and to speak the Lady’s Will.”

  “Then let her prove it!” Capella Goodventure said, her face mottling with anger. “If she has the right to speak as she does, then let her prove it.”

  Moon nodded, looking surer now. “Ask, and I will answer,” she said again.

  “No,” Capella Goodventure said. “A sibyl Transfer can be faked, just like a tattoo. Let her show us real proof. Let the Sea give us a sign of Her Will!”

  The Queen stood where she was, listening to the crowd murmur its doubts, her own face furrowing in a frown as she tried to imagine how to lay their doubts to rest. Jerusha stood unmoving, her body drawn with tension as she waited for a sign from the Queen to come forward and remove the Goodventure woman. But she knew that Moon could not take that step now, without losing all credibility.

  Moon glanced over her shoulder at the Pit waiting behind her like a tangible symbol of her danger; looked back at Capella Goodventure again. “The Sea Mother is with us here,” she said, clearly enough for all the crowd to hear her. “Do you feel Her presence? The waters of the sea lie at the bottom of the Pit behind me. Smell the air, listen for Her voice calling up to you.” Capella Goodventure stood back, a faint smile of anticipation pulling at her mouth. But then the Queen held something out in her hand. Jerusha caught her breath as she saw what it was. “This is called a tone box. It controls the wind in the Hall of Winds; it is the only way for a person to cross the Pit safely.” She handed the control box to Capella Goodventure, and turned back toward the bridge.

  Jerusha swore softly. “No—”

  “Moon!”

  Jerusha heard Sparks Dawntreader call out to his wife, reaching after her as she left his side.

  The Queen glanced back over her shoulder; something in her look stopped him where he was, with dread on his face. She turned away again, raising her arms, bowing her head, and murmured something inaudible that might have been a prayer. Jerusha saw her body quiver slightly, as if she were going into Transfer. The moaning of the winds was loud in the sudden, utter silence of the hall, as she stepped out onto the bridge.

  She swayed as the wind buffeted her; froze for an instant, regained her balance and took another step. Jerusha’s hands tightened; she felt a surge of sickness as she remembered her own terrifying, vertiginous passages over that span. She fought the urge to close her eyes.

  The Queen took a third precarious step, braced against the wind. And then something happened. Jerusha looked up as the Queen looked up: she sucked in a deep breath of wonder. The clangorous sighing of the wind curtains faded, as the wind spilled from the sails, and the air currents died … as the open windows high above began to close. Blue and gold sunlight shafted down through the inert cloud-forms of the curtains to light Moon’s hair like an aura. “By the Bastard Boatman—” Jerusha whispered, feeling Miroe’s hand tighten around her arm with painful awe.

  “By the Lady,” his voice answered, deep and resonant; although she knew that he could not mean it.

  A slow murmur spread through the crowd, and one by one the watchers dropped to their knees, sure that they were in the presence of a miracle, a Goddess, Her Chosen … until at last only Capella Goodventure was left standing. As Jerusha watched, even she nodded, in acknowledgment, or defeat. The Queen stood a moment longer, her head held high, her face a mask that Jerusha could not read. The air stayed calm; the ancient hall and everyone in it seemed frozen in place. And then at last Moon Dawntreader moved again, stepping off of the bridge onto solid ground.

  She looked back, at the flaccid curtains hanging in the air, as if she were waiting for something. But they did not begin to fill again; the window walls remained closed. She took a deep breath, her shoulders rising and falling visibly, her own face showing traces of the awe that had silenced the crowd. She looked ahead again, with her gaze on her husband’s white, stunned face. She returned to his side; Jerusha saw the uncertainty that was almost fear in his eyes as she took his hand. “It is the Lady’s will,” she said, facing the crowd again, at last, “that I should be here, and that you should be here with me.” She gestured at the span behind her, open to anyone who chose to cross it, now that the winds had ceased. “This is Her sign to you that a true change has come; the ways of Winter are not forbidden to us anymore.”

  She hesitated, looking out at their faces, her own face changed by the emotions that played across it. “We are who we are,” she said, “and the old ways have always been our survival. But no one’s ways are the only, or the best. Change is not always evil, it is the destiny of all things. It was not the will of the Lady that we were denied knowledge that could make our lives better; it was the will of the offworlders. And they are gone. I ask you to work with me now to do the Lady’s will, and work for change—”

  Capella Goodventure threw down the tone box and stalked out of the hall. The echo of its clatter followed her into the darkness. But the rest of the watchers stayed, their eyes on the Queen, waiting for what came next; ready to listen, ready to work the Lady’s will at her bidding.

  “How did she do it, Miroe?” Jerusha murmured. “How?”

  He only shook his head, his face incredulous. “I don’t know,” he said. “I only hope she knows … because she didn’t do it herself.”

  Jerusha looked up, her eyes searching the haunted shadows of the heights, her memory spinning out the past. But all the history of this place that she had experienced spanned less than two decades. The layers of dusty time, the hidden secrets, the haunted years of Carbuncle the city stretched back through millennia. Jerusha rubbed her arms, feeling its walls close around her like the cold embrace of a tomb, and said nothing more.

  TIAMAT: Carbuncle

  Sparks Dawntreader hesitated in the doorway to what had been the throne room, when this was the Snow Queen’s palace; suddenly as incapable of motion as if he had fallen under a spell. He stared at the throne, transfixed by its sublime beauty. Its blown- and welded-
glass convolutions could have been carved from ice. Light caught in its folds and flowed over its shining surfaces until it seemed to possess an inner radiance.

  It had seemed to him to be uncannily alive, the first time he had entered this room and seen her seated there: Arienrhod, the Snow Queen, impossibly wearing the face of Moon, the girl he had loved forever. It still struck him that way, even after all the years he had spent as Arienrhod’s lover … even now, as he found Moon seated there, wearing the face of Arienrhod; sitting silent and still in the vast white space, in the middle of the night, like a sleepwalker who had lost her way.

  He took a deep breath, relieving the constriction in his chest, breaking the spell that held him as he forced himself forward into the room. He crossed the expanse of white carpet as silently as a ghost—his own ghost, he thought. “Moon,” he said softly, in warning.

  Her body spasmed; she turned on the throne to stare at him. “What are you doing here?” he asked. He heard a knife-edge of anger that he had not intended in the words, and said hastily, “You should be resting, sleeping.… I thought Miroe gave you something to make you sleep.” After meeting with the sibyls this afternoon—after she had stopped the winds—she had come up the stairs from the Hall below ashen-faced with exhaustion. She had let him support her as they climbed; he had felt her shaking with fatigue. She had no reserves of strength these days; the child—or two—growing inside her demanded them all.

  He had helped her to their bedroom, and Miroe Ngenet had given her a warm brew of herbs to calm her, forbidding anyone to disturb her—even him. He had not argued. When he had come to bed himself she had been sleeping.

  But he had wakened in the middle of the night and found the bed empty beside him, and had come searching. He had not expected to find her here, like this. “Moon…” he said again, tentatively, as if some part of him was still uncertain whether she was the one that he saw on the throne, whether it was not really Arienrhod. “Are you … are you all right?”

  Her face eased at the words, as if it were something in his face that had disturbed her. She nodded, her tangled, milk-white hair falling across her shoulders. Suddenly she was his pledged again, and barely more than a girl, the porcelain translucency of her skin bruised with fatigue and her hands pressing her pregnant belly. “I’m all right,” she said faintly. “I woke up. I couldn’t get back to sleep.…” She brushed her hair back from her face. “The babies won’t let me rest.” She smiled, as the thought brought color into her cheeks.

  “Two—he whispered, coming closer, stepping up onto the dais beside her. “Gods—Goddess—” barely remembering to use the Summer oath, and not the offworlder one, “we’re doubly blessed, then.” Ngenet had told him the news, after insisting that Moon should not be disturbed from her rest.

  “Yes.” She made the triad sign of the Sea Mother with her fingers. Her hand fell away again, almost listlessly, although she still smiled, still shone with wonder. He glanced at the sibyl tattoo at her throat; covered her hands with his own on the swell of her soft, white sleepgown. Once he had believed it was impossible for them ever to have a child together, and so had she. Summer tradition said that it was “death to love a sibyl.…” That saying, the fear behind it, had driven them apart, driven him here to the city … into the arms of Arienrhod.

  But it was not true, and here beneath his hand lay the proof of it. He felt movement; heard Moon’s soft laugh at his exclamation of surprise. She got up from the throne, in a motion that was graceful for all its ungainliness. He had always been fascinated by her unconscious grace, so much a part of her that she was completely unaware of it. He remembered her running endlessly along the beaches of Neith, their island home; saw her in his mind’s eye climbing the crags in search of birds’ eggs and saltweed, never slipping; or darting along the narrow rock-built walls of the klee pens, never falling. He remembered her dancing, held close in his arms while the musicians played the old songs.… She was not tall, and so slender that Gran had always said she barely cast a shadow, but she was as strong physically as any woman he knew. Strength and grace were one in her; she rarely doubted her body’s responses, and it rarely betrayed her.

  Ngenet had told him that carrying twins was doubly hard on a woman’s body, especially under circumstances like these, when Moon pushed herself endlessly, relentlessly. He had tried to make her listen, but she would not stop and rest, even for him—as she had never stopped pursuing anything she believed in, even for him. He could only hope that her body would not fail her in this, but see her through until their children were born into the new world she had become obsessed with creating. Her strength of will had always been as much a part of her, and as unquestioned in her mind, as the strength of her body. It had not been easy, sometimes, loving her, when her stubbornness had collided with his own quick temper. But their making-up had always been sweet, back in Summer.… “I love you,” he murmured. He put his arms around her, feeling the shadows of lost time fall away as he held her close. She kissed his mouth, her eyes closed; her eyelids were a fragile lavender.

  “What were you doing here?” He nodded at the throne as their lips parted; half afraid to ask, but asking anyway.

  She shook her head, as if she was not certain either. “I wanted to know … how it felt when she was Queen.” Arienrhod. “Today … today I was truly the Lady, Sparkie.” Unthinkingly, she used his childhood nickname. But there was nothing of childhood in her voice, and suddenly he felt cold.

  The Lady is not the Queen. He didn’t say it, afraid of her response. The Summer Queen was traditionally a symbolic ruler, representing the Sea Mother to her people. But from the first ceremony Moon had led as the Lady, she had broken with ritual and tradition. She had claimed that it was the Goddess’s will, that this Change must begin a real change. He knew that she did not believe in the Goddess anymore; not since she had learned the truth, that sibyls were human computer ports, and not the Sea Mother’s chosen speakers of wisdom. Sibyls existed on all the worlds of the Hegemony, and probably on all the other worlds of the former Empire. They were speakers for the wisdom of an artificial intelligence, not the Sea Mother. But Moon had told him the sibyl mind spoke to her, not simply through her; that it had commanded her to bring Tiamat the technological enlightenment that the Hegemony had denied it for so long. He had found the idea as unbelievable as the idea of the Goddess now seemed to him … until he had watched her today in the Hall of Winds. “How did you do it?” he asked, at last. “What you did today. How did you stop the wind?”

  She looked up at him, her eyes stricken and empty. “I had to,” she said, her voice as thin as thread. “I had to, and so I did—” The thread snapped.

  “Don’t you know how?” he whispered.

  She shook her head, looking down; but her fingers rose to the sibyl sign at her throat. “Something inside me knew. It made me do it, to make them believe me.…”

  His hands released her reflexively. She looked up at him, her pale lashes beating, her agate-colored eyes full of sudden pain. He put his arms around her again; but it was not the same. “Come back to bed,” he murmured into her ear. “You should be resting.”

  “I can’t. I can’t rest.”

  “Let me hold you. I’ll help you.…” He led her down from the dais; she clung to his hand, but her gaze still wandered the room, which was lit as brightly as day. He followed her glance, looking across the snowfield carpet; remembering Arienrhod’s courtiers scattered across it like living jewels in their brilliant, rainbow-colored clothing. Gossamer hangings drifted down from the ceiling, decorated with countless tiny bells that still chimed sweetly and intermittently as they were disturbed by random currents of air.

  They left the throne room, entering the darkened upper halls that were empty even of servants now. He was relieved to find himself alone with her, jealous of these stolen moments. He had thought when they were reunited at the Change that everything would change for them. And it had … but not the way he had wanted. Not back to what it h
ad been. Moon was no longer his alone, his innocent Summer love. And he would never again be the naïve island youth she had pledged her life to; Arienrhod had seen to that.

  He tried to lead her toward their room, but she shook her head. “I don’t want to go back to bed. Walk with me. Show me the palace—show me all the parts of it.”

  “What, now?” he said. “Why?” She had promised him, after Arienrhod’s death, that they would never set foot in the palace again. He had believed her, believed that she would no more want to be reminded of all that had happened here than he did.

  But she had been drawn back to this place, like metal to a lodestone, as if it were somehow part of the compulsion that had seized her at the Change. She did not seem to enjoy being here, any more than he did; he knew she was intimidated by its vastness, its staff of obsequious Winter servants, the alienness of its offworlder luxuries. She seldom went beyond a small circuit of rooms, as if she were afraid that she might take a wrong turn somewhere in its columned halls and be lost forever in time. Only the Snow Queens had lived here, ruled from here, as secular leaders dealing with the offworlders who controlled Tiamat’s fate, never a Summer Queen; until now. But Moon would not leave, refusing to make her home among their own people, among the watchful, peaceful faces and familiar ways of the Summers who inhabited Carbuncle’s Lower City.

  And now, in the stillness of midnight, she wandered the palace’s halls like a restless spirit, searching for questions without answers, answers that were better left ungiven … forcing him to show her the way. “Why?” he said again.

  She touched her stomach, the promise of new life within her. “This,” she said softly, looking down.