Moon set down the crate she was holding, and nodded. “Ask, and I will answer. Input.…” From the corner of her eye she saw Sparks stop his work and move toward her with protective concern as the woman’s voice filled her ears, her mind, and she began the abrupt fall away into darkness.
“… No further analysis.” She came back into herself again, and sat down on the crate as a brief wave of dizziness caught her. Sparks put his hands on her shoulders, rubbing them gently. She felt the eyes of the other dockhands and sailors watching her, watching her differently now.
“Thank you, sibyl,” the woman murmured, smiling and bobbing her head as she backed away. Moon saw two or three others beginning to cluster near her; knew that they would be the next to come forward with questions.
“Well, what am I supposed to make of this?” A man’s voice—Borah Clearwater’s voice—carried sharply and clearly up to her.
She pushed to her feet and went to the small trimaran’s rail, peered over it. “Make of what, Borah Clearwater?” she said, to his turned back.
He jerked around, away from Jerusha’s annoyed expression, to look up at her. He looked blank for a moment, seeing only a plainly dressed island woman with her hair in braids, and not the Summer Queen, answering him. His frown deepened as he recognized her. “If you think you can change my opinion about anything by doing an honest day’s work, you’re wrong.”
Moon laughed, wondering if he actually believed she was here because she was trying to impress him. She felt Spark’s impatience like heat as he came up beside her.
“I’m sorry to intrude like this, Lady,” Danaquil Lu said, edging his uncle aside with an effort. “But my uncle has been … wishing to speak to you about the—uh, right-of-way you granted to our kinsman Kirard Set Wayaways.” From Danaquil Lu’s chagrin and air of resignation, she guessed that Clearwater had not let him rest until he had agreed to speak to her.
She smiled at him, a brief, reassuring smile, before she looked at Borah Clearwater. Leaning on the rail, she met his stare with a calm centeredness that would have been impossible two days ago—two hours ago. “So you think I arranged this for your benefit, Borah Clearwater? Just as you seem to think I granted that right-of-way to spite you?”
Clearwater snorted, but for just a moment he didn’t answer. “Who knows why you do anything? Rot me, this makes as much sense as the other!”
“And who do you think you are,” Gran’s voice interrupted suddenly, “to come here and speak to the Lady in that tone of voice?”
He turned back to look at her as she stood up, putting aside the net she had been mending. “I think I have more business speaking to her than you have speaking to me,” he grunted.
Danaquil Lu rolled his eyes. “Uncle—” he murmured, pulling at the older man’s shoulder.
“She’s my granddaughter, if you must know,” Gran said irritably. “It was my suggestion that she come here and be among her own people and her own ways for a while. She has the grace to respect her elders. Show her the respect she deserves from a Summer, or you might as well be a Winter!”
He glared at her. “I am a Winter, as it happens. But if she acted more like a Summer, and left things well enough alone, I’d be happier to respect her judgment.”
“A Winter!” Gran looked him up and down dubiously.
“We aren’t all perfumed sissies,” he snapped.
Moon looked on, silent with surprise as Gran came to her defense, suddenly and deeply moved by her grandmother’s protectiveness. Danaquil Lu stood beside Jerusha, looking bemused. “But as to the matter of the right-of-way across your lands, Borah Clearwater,” she interrupted, “why is that such a problem for you, really? It won’t interfere with your crops or your fishing rights. You’re going to be paid very well for the use of such a tiny strip of your ground. Is it simply the principle of the thing? Or is it because you hate change that much—because you hate me, and my new ideas?”
He snorted again, his mustache bristling. “I’m not fond of you, Moon Dawntreader. I’ve made that plain enough, and I’m honest enough to admit it to your face, unlike some. But it’s my kinsman Kirard Set Wayaways that I hate. He’s buying out the holdings all around mine for their mineral rights, for development and building factories. There’s metal ores all over my plantation. He wants me to sell out too, but since I won’t he’s made you give him a toehold on my land. Now that he has that much from you, he’s going to keep pushing until he gets it all. Goddammit, you’ve made him believe it’s possible, and now he’ll never rest. The whole Wayaways clan is a spot of gangrene, you ask me—excepting young Dana here, he’s probably crazy but he’s all right. They ought to be cut out, dammit, not encouraged to spread!”
“I hear what you’re saying, Borah Clearwater,” Moon said gently. “Kirard Set Wayaways is one of the most motivated and effective people I have working with me to develop Tiamat. But I don’t intend to do him any favors at anyone else’s expense. You’ve registered your complaint with me. I won’t forget it.”
Clearwater grunted. “Not until you run short of ores, at least, and I refuse again to let him stripmine my fields.”
Moon frowned. “I want to make Tiamat a better place for our people to live. I don’t intend to destroy it in the process. No one will force you off your traditional lands against your will. I’ve given you my word. You’ll have to trust it. That’s all.” She turned away from the rail, not listening to his continued complaint or even the sharpness of her grandmother’s voice, at him again for questioning the word of a sibyl, of her grandchild. Moon looked back at the curious stares of the gathered sailors. Slowly another of them started forward with a question.
She answered his question and half a dozen more, before she looked up at last and found no one else waiting. Drained but satisfied, she rose from her seat among the crates and started back to work.
But Sparks took her arm, smiling, and led her to the rail, nodding down at the pier. She started as she saw Borah Clearwater still there, still talking to her grandmother—but sitting beside her now, mending net; speaking agitatedly, but in a tone of voice so normal that Moon could not make out the words through the clangor and shouting of the docks. Jerusha glanced up from where she sat with ill-concealed restlessness, saw where they were looking; smiled and shrugged, shaking her head. Moon went back to work, smiling too, filled with sudden gratitude and surprise at the unexpected rewards of this day; feeling a brief pang as she looked out to sea and did not know where to direct her prayer of thanks.
She heard a sudden pain-cry, and the clatter of something dropping on the pier below. She went back to the ship’s rail, saw Jerusha on her hands and knees on the salt-bleached wood, her rifle lying beside her. Moon climbed over the rail, landing on the dock, as Gran and Borah Clearwater pushed to their feet in consternation, as constables came running. Moon saw with sudden bright grief the red stain of blood spreading down Jerusha’s pantslegs. “Sparks!” she cried. She fell to her knees, taking hold of Jerusha as the other woman tried to rise, holding her, holding her tightly; feeling the pain that convulsed Jerusha’s body as if it were her own; remembering the pain of birth, the pain that had come to Jerusha PalaThion too soon, much too soon. “Find Miroe. Hurry—!”
* * *
Jerusha opened her eyes, blinking in a kind of disbelief as she took in her new reality. Her last memory was of the pier, the harbor; the odd sense of peace that had fallen over everyone around her while she watched and waited. She remembered feeling something, as she sat—the slight fluttering movement of her unborn child. Remembered how, for that moment, the world outside her body had ceased to exist, as she became wholly aware of the miracle of life inside her. For that brief moment the peace around her had reached into her and touched her soul, and she had let herself be happy, certain that this time everything would be all right.…
And she had felt the baby move again, and then again, restlessly, and a strange restlessness had overtaken her too; she had lost that fragile, precious sense o
f peace, felt it fly away from her like birds. And there had been a sudden twinge, a pulling tension, that made her rise from where she sat, trying to stretch it out of existence like a muscle kink, trying to make it disappear, because she had felt that sensation before, and she knew what always followed—
Pain had taken her where she stood, as if everything inside her was being twisted and ripped loose, and as the darkness came over her in a terrible, rushing flood, she had been sure that this time, this time she would die.…
But she was alive. She was lying in a strange bed, in a strangely familiar room. She recognized its ceiling. She had seen this sight before: the inside of this hospital room, its odd mixture of old and new: modern fixtures and furnishings, abandoned intact by the Hegemony, but with their systems gutted, like hers. She knew the acrid, alien smell of the medicinal herbs that were used for most of the healing that was done here now. She could feel her hands, her arms, her shoulders, although she had no strength to move them. She could feel her toes. But at the center of her body there was nothing, no sensation at all. Numb. And no one had to tell her the reason why.
She moved her head—let it fall, pulled down by gravity as she looked toward the doorway. Someone stirred just beyond her sight, in response to her motion; she realized, from the sudden sensation in her hand, that someone had been holding it. She forced her eyes to focus, expecting to see her husband’s face.
Instead, she found the face of the Summer Queen. Moon Dawntreader’s pale hand tightened over her own in unspoken empathy, in grief for a loss so fresh she had not even begun to feel it yet. Just for a moment Jerusha remembered a time when their positions had been reversed; when she had sat at Moon’s bedside, Moon’s hand clutching hers in a deathgrip, in the throes of giving birth.… “You shouldn’t be here.” she whispered. Her throat was achingly dry; she felt as if her body were burning up, a desert. Barren. Sterile.
Moon’s expression changed, turning uncertain.
“You have duties.…”
Moon shook her head. “Time has stopped. It all stopped, until I knew you would be all right,” she said softly. “Besides, how can I function, without my right arm?” She smiled; the smile fell away. She looked down, with a knowledge in her eyes that only another woman’s eyes could hold—not a queen’s, but a mother’s; the reflection of the most terrible fear she could imagine.
Jerusha pressed her mouth together, looking away; her lips were parched and cracked. Moon offered her water, helped her drink it. “Where’s Miroe?” she asked, finally.
“He took care of you, when we brought you in. He was here before, for a long time…” Moon murmured. “He said he would be back soon.”
Jerusha nodded, wearily. She looked at the ceiling again, its ageless, flawless surface … wishing that her own body could be as perfect, as unaffected by time or fate, as impervious. She looked back at Moon. “I’m all right,” she said quietly, at last. “Go home to your family.”
Moon rose, her hand still holding Jerusha’s tightly, her eyes still holding doubt. She let go, reluctantly. “I’ll find Miroe, and send him to you.”
“Thank you,” Jerusha said.
Moon smiled again, nodded almost shyly as she left the room.
Jerusha lay back, listening to the distant sounds of life that reached her from the corridors beyond her closed door; listening to the gibberings of loss and futility seeping in to fill the perfect emptiness she tried to hold at the center of her thoughts. She imagined the responses of the men she had worked with in the Hegemonic Police, if they saw her now … imagined the response of the woman she herself had been to the woman she was now, lying in this bed. They would have been equally unsympathetic. She had spent years trying to force them to accept her as a human being instead of a woman, and all it had done was turn her into a man. In leaving the force, she had believed that she was reaffirming her humanity. She wasn’t a man … but now when she wanted to be a woman, she couldn’t be that either. She felt hot tears rise up in her eyes and overflow; hating them, hating herself for her weakness, physical and mental. She wanted Miroe, she needed him, to help her now. Why wasn’t he here? Damn him, he was the one she had needed to see, he shared this loss with her, more intimately than anyone. She needed to share his strength, and his grief—
Someone came into the room. She lifted her head, needing all her own strength, for long enough to see that Miroe had come, as if in answer to her thoughts.
“Jerusha.” He crossed to her bedside, his work-rough hands touching her flushed, fevered skin with the gentleness that always surprised her—touching her own hands, her face, her tears. He kissed her gently on the forehead, and on the lips; drew back.
“Hold me,” she murmured, wishing that she did not have to request that comfort. “Hold me.…”
He sat down on the edge of the bed; lifted her strengthless, unresponsive body and held her close, letting her tears soak his shirt, absorbing them, for a long time. She could not see whether he wept too. The muscles of his body were as rigid as steel, as if he were holding grief at bay. She had never wept before, when this had happened to her; although it had happened to her three times already. And he had never wept, either.
“Why does this keep happening to me…” she whispered, brokenly, at last. “It isn’t fair—”
“I’m sorry.” His own voice was like a clenched fist. “Gods, Jerusha—I’ve done everything I can.”
“I’m not blaming you.” She pulled away from him, to look at his face. He would not meet her eyes.
“You should,” he muttered. “I can’t heal it, I can’t make it right.… If you weren’t here, if you were anywhere else, you’d have healthy children by now.”
“No, I wouldn’t,” she said. “I wouldn’t even have a husband. I wouldn’t be with you. It’s the Hegemony’s fault—” A surge of anger and resentment pushed the words out of her throat. But the Hegemony was far away, formless, faceless, unreachable, and she found herself suddenly angry at the man who held her, for making her ask for comfort, for making her comfort him when it was her loss.… Our loss. It’s our loss! she told herself fiercely. But she let herself slide out of his arms, as his arms loosened; falling back into the bed’s cool, impersonal embrace.
He looked at her, his eyes clouded and full of doubt, looked away again. He reached into a pocket of his coat and took something out: a small jar full of what looked like dried herbs. “Jerusha,” he said quietly, “I want you to start using this.”
“What is it?” she murmured, straining for a clear sight of it.
“It’s childbane.” He met her gaze directly at last.
She felt the last embers of hope die inside her. “Birth control—?” she asked numbly; not needing to ask, or to have it explained to her.
But he nodded. “I almost lost you this time, Jerusha. You nearly bled to death. I don’t want to take that risk again … I don’t want you to take it.”
“But Miroe—” She tried to sit up, fell back again, as her body pressed the point home. “I’m forty-three. I don’t have much longer—”
“I know.” She saw a muscle stand out as his jaw tightened. “The risk will only grow, for you or for a child. Maybe it’s time we faced the truth, Jerusha: we’re never going to have any children. Not here, not in this lifetime together.”
She stared at him bleakly. “You know I don’t believe in that—in reincarnation, in another chance. This isn’t a dress rehearsal, Miroe, it’s my life, and I don’t want to stop trying!” She broke off, clenching her teeth as something hurt her cruelly inside, through the layers of deadened flesh.
He tensed, and shook his head. “I love you, Jerusha. I love you too much to kill you, or let you kill yourself, over something that’s impossible. If you won’t use the childbane, I won’t sleep with you anymore.”
“You don’t mean that,” she said, her voice thick.
“I do.” He looked away, pushing to his feet. “I can’t take this anymore. I’m sorry.” He crossed the room, and went
out the door.
She watched him go, unable to get up, to follow him, to confront him; without even the strength to call after him. She looked over at the bedtable, at the bottle of herbal contraceptive he had left behind. She knocked it off the table with a trembling fist. She fell back again, staring up at the ceiling; felt the numbness at the center of her body spreading, filling the space that held her heart, filling her mind until there was no room left for thought.…
* * *
“Commander PalaThion! What are you doing here?” Constable Fairhaven straightened away from the grayed wooden railing of the pier, with surprise obvious on her long, weathered face.
“Just doing my job, constable: the same as you.” Jerusha returned her salute. Fairhaven’s salute was sloppy to the point of being almost unrecognizable, like most of the Summers’ salutes were; but she was a calm, shrewd woman, and those were qualities Jerusha had come to realize were far more important than discipline, in a local constabulary where the police and the people they watched over were frequently neighbors and kin. Jerusha leaned against the rail next to Fairhaven, breathing in the heavy, pungent odor of the docks, the smell of wood and pitch, seaweed and fish and the sea. The maze of floating piers was lined with fishing boats and transport craft from all along the coast.
“But so soon—?” Fairhaven said. Her frank curiosity clouded over with concern, at the look Jerusha felt come over her own face.
“I’m fine,” Jerusha said mechanically, looking away, down at the pattern of ropes and chains, of shifting light and shadow on the water’s surface. She looked up again, at the ships. Miroe had sailed from here yesterday, going back to the plantation, leaving behind the city he hated, and the pain of their shared loss, her pain. Leaving behind the frustration, the recriminations they had shared too, as they had turned anger at the random indifference of an uncaring universe into anger at each other. Avoiding all that: their dead child, their dying dream. Her …
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