“In judgment?” Gallen asked.
Tallea spoke up. “The caverns where the cisterns lie are full of bones, Qualeewooh bones, from those who were destroyed for drinking the Waters. Not everyone who drinks is allowed to enter their heaven.”
Gallen studied his old friend’s face, then scratched behind Orick’s ears. Gallen had dozens more questions, but asked none for the moment.
The answers he heard left him unsettled. He knew that Orick was hiding something.
So he celebrated that night with his friends, a grand feast in Felph’s palace. Felph’s latest clone led the celebration, with Hera and Athena in attendance, along with the servant Dooring and all the others in the household staff. To Gallen’s great surprise, Thomas Flynn showed up. Orick had met him in the depths of the tangle, and Thomas played his latest songs on the lute.
One of the songs he sang was a ballad, which told how he had followed Felph into the tangle, and what he the depths beneath Teeawah, when Zeus drank the Waters of Strength. And he sang of his journey out, how Orick and Tallea had fought the horde of sfuz that had begun to revive, that sfuz that barred his way back to, the dronon’s shuttle.
Of all the strange tales that Gallen heard that day, Thomas’s fascinated him most. To lose a companion on one world, and find him in another galaxy, seemed marvelous beyond the telling.
So he partied, and he celebrated the fall of the dronon empire, and in his heart he wondered, and worried.
It was not until four days later that the rains broke for a bit, and then Gallen insisted that he and Orick go for a walk alone in the fields in front of the palace.
The fields were green, new grass sprouting in abundance. Everywhere lay signs of the dronon—great holes in the ground where their ship had set down, the trampled fields where their millions had circled the killing field.
Gallen surveyed the field a bit, then walked over to a spot on the ground, a spot dark with pooled blood. Two pools, side by side. Over the past seven weeks, the blood had first dried black, then soaked into the ground, killing the grass.
Gallen went to the spots, gazed down and touched them with his toe. They told the story that Orick would have hid, and Gallen asked, “Where did you bury us, Orick?”
The kindly bear gazed up, licked his lips, considering what story to tell now.
“Where did you bury us?” Gallen asked. “I want to see Maggie’s grave.”
Orick nodded toward a slight rise, where three hawthorn trees trembled in the breeze. The ragged clouds whipped overhead, so that the trees stood first in sunlight, then in shadow, their leaves rattling softly.
Gallen went to the unmarked graves—two small plots, mud mixed in with the new tendrils of growing grass.
“Maggie’s here, on the left,” Orick said, his voice choked from emotion. “And you’re on the right.”
Seeing the graves did something to Gallen, filled him with a nameless ache he’d never imagined, an ache too large to either hold or express. He wanted to cry out, but that would change nothing. He wanted to deny it.
So this is what I come to, he told himself as he knelt above Maggie’s grave. He brushed his hand over the new grass, as if it were hair, felt the water tickling his palms. This is what I come to.
Orick had warned him. Gallen knelt on the grass and sobbed for a long time, until the pain gave way to emptiness, enough emptiness that he could speak again.
“Maggie doesn’t know about this, does she?” Gallen asked.
Orick shook his head. “No. We checked her memories. She doesn’t really want to know—just as you didn’t want to know. She wants to go back, for everything to be like it was. She wants to live with you, have the baby you planned together. We can’t undo the past. This is the best we could give her. Felph cloned her body. She was wearing your mantle when she died, and she knew her death was coming.
“The mantle downloaded her memories into a crystal. Yours were already stored in Felph’s Al. They’d been radioed ahead.”
“How can she not know that she’s died?” Gallen asked.
“In the end, Felph edited her final memories of the battle. He just altered some of them so that Maggie didn’t recall her final wound being so serious. The dronon took holos of the fight. It was easy for Felph to get images of the Qualeewoohs coming to the rescue. Maggie just doesn’t know they came too late, that they stood over your corpses and fought like dragons.”
“I learned the truth easily enough.” Gallen said. “I knew we were dead. In time, Maggie might figure it out, too.”
“How? How could you know?” Orick asked. “Felph duplicated every mole, every scar. He … he even cloned Maggie’s baby from her womb, let it grow inside her. That was a task, mind you!”
“Oh, I look the same,” Gallen. said, “but I don’t feel the same. The knife scar on my right wrist—it always used to ache when it grew cold, when the rains came. The scar there now looks much the same, but it doesn’t go deep enough. Some scars go too deep.”
“But—you won’t tell Maggie?” Orick asked. “We went through so much work!”
Gallen considered. “It was kind of you,” he said at last. “I won’t tell her. I think she’ll be happier not knowing.”
He sighed, reached into his pocket, and pulled out his mantle. It kept a record of every battle that its wearers had ever fought, recorded far more than perhaps Orick knew.
Gallen had not worn it since reawakening, for he had not been sure he wanted to know how his last battle had ended.
Now, he donned the mantle, pulled its familiar weight over his head, felt an easy tenseness fill his body, as always happened when the mantle made connection, assuming partial control of his neural system.
Then, he sat beneath the tree and asked Orick, “Will you excuse me for a few minutes. There’s something I must do.”
Beneath the shade of the hawthorns, gazing out over the green valley that had filled with dronon warships only weeks before, he whispered to his mantle, “Show me my death.”
Gallen felt the familiar lurch as his viewpoint shifted, and he saw these fields as they had been, the grass much shorter, less alive, with the dronon circling in their millions.
The sight awed him, the dronon queens beneath their crimson pavilions, the sounds of their cheering, the warships in the background.
He watched the entire battle from Maggie’s eyes, felt her love for him, her burning desire to defend him to the last moment, felt how she craved his kiss and his touch, her horror at watching as the Lord Escort slashed Gallen nearly in two.
He watched her bravely kick one last time, trying to strike a blow against the dronon, felt her surprise as Kintiniklintit sliced her nearly in two. For half a second she had looked down, seen her own gut spilling into the grass, and then fainted.
The mantle fell from her head, disengaged from her consciousness.
In that last moment, Gallen had crawled to her, looked into her face, his own visage a study in sorrow and despair. He was beaten and bruised, blood running free. A frothy red foam boiled from his mouth, and his breath came in shallow pants.
In the distance, lightning flashed and thunder shook the earth as a great storm rolled in. Gallen had glanced toward the storm, whispering “Angels,” and then turned suddenly.
In that last moment, he grasped the mantle that had fallen to the grass. With one hand he pulled it over Maggie’s head and whispered the command: “Save her.”
The recording went blank for several long minutes as the mantle diverted all its energies to downloading Maggie’s memories. It was an odd moment, a tremendous wrench in consciousness, for Gallen suddenly saw the world not as himself, but as the mantle saw it. All external sensors were turned off, and the mantle sent electromagnetic pulses through Maggie’s brain, firing all neurons.
Though she lay dying, the mantle was able to draw out her memories, like wispy fragments of vivid dreams, and shoot them through its programs, reconstruct the pathways and scenery of her mind, manipulate it into a
sequential tale, till it formed a coherent whole.
The process should have taken three minutes, but Maggie expired before the second minute finished, and her mantle had to assume some of the autonomic body functions, force her severed lungs to breath, her fibrillating heart to beat, just long enough to finish its download.
When the mantle completed its duty, it turned its external sensors back on, began recording.
Kintiniklintit was in the process of defiling Gallen’s corpse. The Lord of the Seventh Swarm had decapitated Gallen, chopped him into several pieces, and was parading the headless corpse past cheering Vanquishers.
And in that moment, the Qualeewoohs landed in the midst of the battlefield, eyeing the dronon in that stupid looking way that birds have. Lightning flashed from the advancing storm, and its light reflected from the silver in their spirit masks.
Even the dronon recognized that something odd was happening.
Cooharah and Aaw began bobbing their heads, whistling loudly, and Athena was forced to run into Felph’s palace for a bit to fetch a translator. It took nearly half an hour for her to return, for the Qualeewoohs to grasp what was happening, and then to issue their challenge to Lord Kintiniklintit.
By then, the storm had come in full upon them; the towering thunderheads turned morning into a mockery of night. Rain pounded the ground, and thunder shook the skies. Raging winds whipped across the battlefield, blowing the crimson pavilions down.
And in the driving storm, the Qualeewoohs took flight with Lord Kintiniklintit. Across the fields, the dronon jeered the ungainly Qualeewoohs, who were so much smaller than a dronon Lord, so much more slender and less powerful.
Yet when the Qualeewoohs took to the sky, they were a marvel! They swooped and soared through the pounding rain, and while Kintiniklintit began to circle in an effort to get up to battle speed, the Qualeewoohs swooped in from behind, began pecking out his rear eye cluster.
The great Vanquisher redoubled his speed, seeking to escape. The labored sound of his buzzing wings came as a weary drone, and on the fields below, the dronon hosts fell silent, their cheers forgotten.
It was apparent from the opening seconds of battle that Kintiniklintit could not win.
He tried to turn, and maneuvers that had seemed sleek and deadly before now looked ungainly beside the Qualeewoohs. They stooped in behind him, began attacking his wings, ripping off the back edges so that they fell away like scales.
Those wings had been deadly to a human. The reinforced cartilage along their leading edge could chop a man in half. But the Qualeewoohs were attacking from behind, ripping the wings apart at their weakest point.
Kintiniklintit fought madly, trying to slap his wings backward, strike a blow in flight. Twice he smashed Aaw in the face, knocking the little Qualeewooh backward, nearly felling her from the sky. Gallen’s heart went out to her.
But the Vanquisher’s tactics only enraged Cooharah, so that he fought more vehemently.
In a last effort to dodge his opponents, Kintiniklintit veered upward, as if trying to escape in the clouds. Climbing toward a wisp of fog, Gallen thought he’d almost make it. He imagined that the dronon could then swoop down, playing hunt and hide in the mist.
Till lightning struck, a blinding flash that blew the dronon lord from the air, so that he tumbled in flaming ruin.
This astonished Gallen. For the manner of Kintiniklintit’s death was nothing like the story told by Maggie. But then Gallen had to remind himself, Maggie wasn’t really there to witness the battle. She bore false memories.
Afterward, Cooharah and Aaw had swooped low, clawing Cintkin so that she lost her right to rule as Golden Queen.
Then, with some coaching from Hera, the birds realized that they had to perform the same feat over and over again.
Five times they challenged the dronon Lords, and Gallen watched as the Lord Escort of the First Swarm crashed to the ground, just as Maggie had described.
He watched the magnificent Qualeewoohs battle, saw Cooharah get struck down, wounded in his third skirmish, so that Aaw had to fight on alone.
Not all their victories were convincing. Not all the battles pretty. With each victory, the surviving Swarm Lords were forced to fight with greater desperation, greater cunning.
The final Lord Escort did not even leave the ground; he instead opted to fight on land, his great battle arms poised, batting almost blindly at Aaw as she swooped time and again, too fast, too fast for him to react, till she left him blind and crippled. She could not finish him. She didn’t have the strength to pierce his thick chitin. So he lived, in shame, as she went after his Golden Queen.
It was, perhaps, an unprecedented move. Gallen knew from his mantle that Lord Escorts were never spared in battle. If a Lord Escort chose only to wound a Golden Queen, leaving her alive, then he would become her mate. But a living Lord Escort, one horribly wounded and disfigured, could serve no purpose in dronon society. It would only be killed by workers, used to fertilize the fields.
So for Aaw to leave this useless Vanquisher alive was the ultimate insult.
When at last Aaw struck the final Golden Queen, the dronon Swarms fell silent. Indeed, they were more than silent. They were unmoving, statuesque. Gallen wondered if they had died. He’d never seen a dronon in shock.
But now the entire dronon worlds stood astonished, as Cooharah and Aaw landed in the midst of the field, growing muddy from the pounding rain, and sat panting, preening their feathers.
Through all this, Orick did not arrive.
And when Maggie’s body had grown cold, and at last the dronon swarms had begun to recover from their shock enough to prostrate themselves and offer obeisance to the Qualeewoohs, then Orick’s shuttle came, through the pounding rains, and the poor bear rushed out onto the battlefield, checked Maggie’s body, sorrowed over Gallen, then bore a canteen of water to the two bedraggled birds.
Gallen took readings from the clock in his mantle. Two hours. Orick had come to the rescue two hours too late.
When Gallen removed his mantle, he sat for a long moment and rubbed his eyes.
So, there was truth to Orick’s tale. The dronon were defeated. Perhaps forever.
Gallen talked with Orick for a long while, until clouds blew in and it began to rain anew. In the shelter of the hawthorns, Orick related much of what had happened. He had gone into the tangle, retrieved the Waters of Strength, and escaped back into the tangle with Thomas, fleeing to the ship that Karthenor had loaned Felph.
Cooharah had at first rejected the Waters. “This life is not given to us for our own use,” he had said. “We exist to serve one another, nothing more. You cannot purchase my life. I give it freely.”
Yet in the end, he had agreed to accept immortality, commune more deeply with his ancestors.
“But why didn’t you drink the Waters yourself?” Gallen asked. “It could have been you fighting the dronon.”
“Och, man, after what happened to Zeus?” Orick said. “You couldn’t have paid me! Besides, I’m not one to spend eternity lording it over a bunch of dronon. I’ve got better things to do, thank you.”
Gallen asked, “What of the canteen, the one filled with the Waters? Surely the birds did not drink it all?”
“No,” Orick said. “They didn’t. I sold it to Felph. He didn’t have a recording of what had happened when Zeus drank, so he wanted to try it himself. I sold it to him cheap. I just asked him to give you and Maggie the rebirth, pretend that nothing had ever happened.”
“And what happened to Felph when he drank?” Gallen asked.
“He hasn’t, yet,” Onck answered. “He’s just held on to it.”
“For seven weeks?” Gallen said.
“l think he’s debating.” Orick grumbled. “If he drinks it, he won’t have a sample left to analyze, see if we can duplicate it. But if he keeps testing the stuff, he soon won’t have anything left to drink …”
“I see,” Gallen said, satisfied. He got up from under the tree, stood thinking f
or a long time. “Orick, you once told me that l should not fight, that I should cease to struggle. You said I could run from the dronon, or hide. In effect, you said that if I quit fighting, God would fight my battles. The world would go on without me.”
“I did?”
“You did,” Gallen said, grateful that he remembered anything at all from the past. “Maybe your god didn’t fight for me, but the Qualeewoohs fought in his place. Maybe you were right.”
“Are you certain it wasn’t God who fought for you?”Orick asked.
“I’ve been thinking on it. Maybe the Qualeewoohs were just His tools, in the same way that David and Joshua were His tools.”
“You think?” Gallen asked.
“And if that’s true, maybe you were right to fight, Gallen. Maybe God needs people like you.”
Gallen shook his head, uncertain. He affected his old brogue accent, putting it on now as if it were an old, favorite cloak. “Orick—right now, I don’t think I ever want to fight again. It’s a long rest I’m wanting. Certain I am, I don’t want to expose Maggie to more dangers.”
“Och.” Orick sighed. “Well, if anyone ever deserved a rest it’s you.”
“But I doubt I’ll rest easy,” Gallen said. “In a few months, maybe a year, I’ll hear of some outrage, and I’ll want to go right to it. The Lords of Tremonthin made me that way. It’s in my blood. We are our bodies. I can’t be any different. I’m afraid that sometime in the future, you’ll just be burying me again.”
“Maybe,” Orick said, “maybe not. You say you are your body, but I’ve a feeling there’s more to you than the Lords of Tremonthin know. I’d say that you’re also your body. You’re a being of spirit, too.
“Gallen, you and Maggie are good friends. I managed to win you back from the, grave once, but I don’t want to see you there again. I want you to live forever. If not here, then in the Kingdom of God.
Lords of the Seventh Swarm Page 39
