So it was decided. That night, they boarded the ship and began the journey first back to Cuzzim, where they would return the Nightswift to its proper owner.
From there, they would take the world gates back to Fale, a planet where Thomas wanted to renew an old acquaintance, a planet where Hera and Athena might build a new life.
And from there Tallea, Orick, Gallen, and Maggie would depart for Tremonthin, to make their own homes.
So Tallea felt little sadness when she left Ruin, watched the planet shrink on the Nightswift’s viewscreens. Much had changed on the world. When they’d come a few months before, the planet had been a red, angry-looking orb. Now the whole world seemed white, swathed in clouds that turned rosy pink at the terminus.
Tallea watched the planet recede, till it became a cloudy pearl that shone on a field of glittering diamonds.
Chapter 50
That night, Orick and Tallea slept on the floor of the ship’s hold. Maggie and Gallen used one stateroom with the baby, Orick, while Athena and Hera slept in another. Thomas had passed out on the couch in the ship’s lounge, and so the bears were forced to make do.
Thus it was that Orick woke in the hold, disturbed by a strange scent—a mixture of blood and urine and something more. It seemed out of place here, among the strange odors of the Nightswift’s hold, but he recognized it at once, and something in him stirred.
Tallea was in heat.
Orick lay on his belly and put his paws over his nose. Trapped. He was trapped here on the ship, at least a week out from Cuzzim. Trapped in a closed space with a she-bear in heat.
It shouldn’t have happened. Orick didn’t know Tallea’s chronological age. The Lords of Tremonthin had grown her in a vat, forcing her to reach something near maturity before downloading her memories into the bear’s body. But still, Tallea was small. Orick imagined she would be no more than a year old, though it was hard to tell with bears. A small two-year-old was not much larger than a one-year-old, and a two-year-old could go into heat.
Still, Tallea seemed too young.
But Orick couldn’t gainsay what his nose told him. Perhaps the Lords of Tremonthin had some esoteric reason for making Tallea small and fertile. Perhaps they’d given her maturity while sacrificing size. Whatever the reasons, Tallea was in heat.
In other rooms of the ship, Orick could hear the sound of Thomas snoring, of Gallen tossing on his bed.
Yet Orick lay alone, sniffing the scent of Tallea.
Oh, God, why do you do this to me? Orick wondered. Is this a test? I promised You—never again, never again.…
Orick’s prayer escaped his throat as a whimper, and for a long time he just lay still, trying to control his erratic breathing, trying to still his racing heart.
Tallea lay close enough so he could hear her own deep breaths, watch the rise and fall of her chest. Her rear legs were toward him, her nose pointed somewhat toward his tail. She absently pawed with her hind leg, then moaned in her sleep. Discontent.
Even in her slumber she knew what she needed.
Orick’s own glands responded to her craving. I could just crawl over there on top of her, Orick mused. I could straddle her and deliver the goods right now, while everyone is sleeping.
The thought aroused him further, and Orick raised his own muzzle in the air, half-involuntarily, and sniffed again. The smell of her was growing stronger. Here in this closed atmosphere, such scents tended to become overwhelming—the scents of fur, of Tallea’s sleek fur, and of her need.
The smell made Orick dizzy. His heart pounded so hard, the blood thundered in his ears. It seemed that his brain was afire, burning, and his tongue felt thick and dry in his throat. He whimpered.
Eight more days of this, he considered. Eight days of estrus in these tight quarters. Does God want to drive me mad? Is that it?
Yes, that was it. God would punish Orick for his impure heart, his unclean thoughts, his—Orick had a sudden vision of himself, climbing on Tallea’s back.
The very notion sent shivers of anticipation up his hairy spine.
Sister Tallea. She’s Sister Tallea now, Orick reminded himself. She’s been baptized. She’s my sister in the gospel. That’s it.
Now that she’d accepted the gospel, Satan was tempting Orick. It was the perfect trap! The old dark angel could lure the two of them away and secure both their souls in one fell blow!
Ah, the pity of it! Orick considered. She loves me. She yearns for me like no she-bear should. It was unnatural for the Lords of Tremonthin to do that, to give life to a shebear who loved as deeply and firmly as any human woman could. Now the devil would use that love against them.
Orick imagined Tallea as she had been a few weeks before, rising up out of the waters of baptism, the light of God shining in her eyes—those beautiful brown eyes, that sleek dark fur, those shining claws, those inviting legs, those eyes so full of love.
Calm down, Orick told himself. You have to calm down. If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.
But of course that Scripture didn’t apply here. If Orick were to pluck out his eye just because he envisioned himself succumbing to temptation, he’d be eyeless in thirty seconds. But it wasn’t his eyes he needed to pluck out. It was that other thing. It had hardened in an uncomfortable position.
Like a dog, Orick thought. You’re no better than a dog. Orick lay there, perfectly miserable, praying.
At length, Tallea rolled over, looked up at him, sniffed the air. “Something’s wrong!” she whispered. “I smell blood!”
Orick didn’t dare speak. In a moment she recognized the source of it.
“I’m sorry, Sister Tallea,” Orick whispered. “I-I don’t know what to do.”
“Oh, Orick, your vow!”
“Yes,” Orick whispered. “God has chosen to punish me, or test me. Or maybe it’s Satan, I don’t know.”
“It’s not just you being tested. It’s both of us. We should pray.”
“Good idea “ Orick said. He picked up his Bible in his teeth and Tallea commanded the ship to turn up the lights in the hold. Orick had the ship close the door to the hold, so that the sound of their voices would not disturb anyone else. The air was so thick with Tallea’s odor, closing the door only made it worse.
Tallea let the Bible flip open at random, and began to read:
“And from the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and he brought her unto the man.
“And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: She shall be called Woman, for she was taken out of Man.
“Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave unto his wife: and they two shall be one flesh “
Orrick perked up, surprised at the Scripture she had picked to read. “Wait a minute!” He said, “Try another one.”
Tallea closed the Bible and flipped it open again, near the end this time. She read:
“But from the beginning of the creation, God made them male and female. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave unto his wife.
“And they twain shall be one flesh: so then they are no more twain, but one flesh.
“What therefore. God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.”
Tallea looked up at Orick, her snout wrinkled in surprise. “Oh, Orick, do you think God is trying to tell us something?”
Orick frowned. “Wait a minute. Let me see that thing!”
Orick closed the Bible, closed his eyes, then flipped it open at random and opened his eyes. In the dim light, one passage seemed illuminated above the rest—a holy glow, shining down on the paper. He read:
“Marriage is honorable in all, and the bed undefiled.”
The hairs raised on Orick’s back. To open the Scriptures three times and find such passages, it seemed more than pure coincidence could claim. Surely this was a message. He squinted up at the ship’s lights, saw that they were not brighter. He looked back down on the page. Surely that verse stood out more than all others.
He gazed at it for a moment, saw the difference—the paper behind those words was whiter than the rest, somehow highlighting that verse. It was a miracle!
“But what of my vows?” Orick asked.
Tallea looked about warily. Gallen and the others were all still asleep. She whispered, “Perhaps this is God’s way of telling you that it’s all right for us, that this is more important to Him.”
Orick didn’t like the idea of taking spiritual direction from someone like Tallea. She hadn’t been baptized for more than a few months. Her fur was hardly even dry, and here she was expounding the will of God to him.
“One more. Let me try one more!” Orick said. He flipped open the Bible and read silently:
“Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is shame unto him?”
Orick frowned. This had something to do with prayer—Paul spouting nonsense about the virtues of baldness, something Orick sincerely doubted he would ever experience firsthand. But then he saw it, the brightness three verses higher on the page, and he read aloud:
“Nevertheless, neither is the man without the woman, nor the woman without the man, in the Lord.”
Orick’s heart pounded, and he could not think straight. Surely the Lord willed that Orick take Tallea to wife, and Orick could think of no commandment he would rather keep at the moment, yet somehow it saddened him.
He felt, in a way, that God rejected him. Orick set the Bible down.
“Tallea, will you take me to be your lawful husband?” he asked. It was a simple vow, the kind poor folks who could not afford donations to the church would make back home. Yet all his life, this vow had been treated as sacred by everyone he knew.
“Yes,” Tallea said, not knowing the more proper response. “Will you take me?”
“How can I not?” Orick whispered. “God commands it.”
“Then I don’t want you,” Tallea said, turning away. “You can just go off and do whatever. I won’t have you as my husband!”
“What?” Orick asked, shocked at the anger in her voice.
“If you’re marrying me only because He says so, then I won’t have you. When you’re hungry and I haven’t got dinner fixed, I don’t want you getting mad at Him. And if someday you do get mad at Him, I don’t want you taking it out on me. If you want me, then take me because you want me.”
Orick did not speak for a moment, simply gazed into Tallea’s eyes. In that moment he forgot she was in heat. He forgot to feel that he was inspired to make this decision. For one brief time that seemed both infinitesimal and eternal, there was only Tallea crouched on the floor of the hold before him, the woman who had given her life for him fighting the giant Derrits in the tunnels of Indallian; Tallea who had given away her dreams so that she could join him when the Lords of Tremonthin gave her back her life in the body of a bear. She’d given her life for Orick, given all her dreams for him. Certainly Tallea deserved only the best, and Orick wished he could give her all she deserved.
“Every breath I breathe from this day forward,” Orick said, “I will draw for you. Every dream I dream, I will dream for you. Now I know why God so seldom gets involved in matchmaking: because there’s only one she-bear like you.”
“Good,” Tallea said. “That’s the way it should be. Now will you say it in public?”
Orick agreed, and together they woke the others on the ship, and as captain of the ship, it was Maggie who married them, and all of it was recorded by the ship’s Al.
So Orick and Tallea took their vows that night flying amid the stars, in the quiet of the ship’s lounge, and Orick would always remember how Tallea’s eyes outshone the stars.
No woodland chapel could have been more beautiful, more reverent, or sacred.
Chapter 51
A few days after the wedding, once the travelers had landed on Cuzzim and made their way through the world gates to Fale, when Tallea and Maggie were alone feeding the babe while the men were off introducing Hera and Athena to civilization, Tallea asked Maggie about her part in the wedding.
“You had my Scriptures for those three days,” Tallea accused. “And now those verses on marriage are permanently stained.”
Maggie didn’t deny it. “It doesn’t take much for a Lord of Technicians to figure out how to train a Bible to open to certain pages. Simply crack the spine and add a line of liquid at the base of each page, so the paper thickens. If you want to highlight some verses, a little acid will bleach the paper enough so that some words stand out more than others. I did nothing wrong.”
“But Orick thinks it’s a miracle!” Tallea said, her heart sore. She loved being married to Orick, but she couldn’t rid herself of the feeling that she’d done something sneaky.
Maggie merely shrugged. “Orick wanted God to tell him to get married. He could have figured it out earlier, if he trusted the Tome completely, but he wanted to see it in the Bible. All I did was show him the verses in the Bible where God already commanded him to get married.”
“What if he finds out that we tricked him?” Tallea asked.
“Did I?” Maggie asked. “God is the one who made you go into heat. Orick believes that God is the one who put those words in the Bible in the first place, and I won’t argue the point.”
So it was that Tallea accepted Maggie’s maneuver, and the next day, Maggie, Gallen, their son, Tallea, and Orick took their leave of Hera, Athena, and Maggie’s Uncle Thomas, none of them ever to meet again.
In that last meeting, more than a few tears were shed, and Hera surprised everyone by making a present to Orick. “There is something more you deserve,” she said, producing a small crystal vial from behind her back.
“What’s this?” Orick asked.
Hera undid the stopper. “A children’s toy: we called it the Wind of Dreams. A scent to make you feel like a hero, a conqueror. Zeus and Herm used to make bets with one another for the right to take a whiff of it.”
Hera undid the stopper, and the sweet scent of gardenias filled the air, but it was more than that, more than all the flowers in the world. It was a feeling that filled the air, a sensation that made Orick feel he could stride across the clouds, a feeling that he owned the universe, and the universe felt unbounded gratitude to be in his possession. A feeling that the day had been long, but the labors all well worth it. A feeling of love and acceptance.
It was a sensation heroic … an emotion a god would feel, resting in heaven.
“You deserve this, Orick,” Hera said, “for all you’ve been through.”
Orick looked at it in surprise. “I’m not sure anyone deserves that.”
“But take it anyway,” Hera asked. “To remember me by”
Gallen smiled broadly at Orick. “Take it, Orick,” he said. “I swear: first Everynne, then Tallea, now Athena. I don’t see why a hairy brute like you should appeal to women.”
“Och, it’s only because you’re half-blind. Anyone ought to be able to see my charm.” He gently licked Hera’s cheek, kissing her goodbye.
When Maggie said goodbye to her Uncle Thomas, the last thing in the world she would have expected was a tearful farewell. He’d never been much of an uncle; had never offered a strong arm to lean on when she needed it.
But when she’d wakened after her battle with the Lords of the Seventh Swarm on Ruin, Thomas had been the one at her bedside, and he’d not left her night or day for the first three days.
She’d never expected the kind of gentle attention he’d shown her after that battle, and, frankly, she’d grown to be the kind of woman who no longer had much use for it.
Except for his songs. For he sang to her during those first dark and painful days, sang songs that were soft and sensitive and full of pain. Songs he’d composed himself.
She learned from Thomas that he’d been captured by Lord Karthenor, knew that the Aberlain had wrung information from Thomas, information that had led to Maggie’s own capture. But she never did find out exactly what Thomas had to endure.
Magg
ie only knew, by the look in his eyes, that the old Thomas was gone, dead. Something had died behind his laughing eyes, a fire had sputtered and extinguished.
The evening before she said goodbye to him forever, Thomas came to her room on Fale with a mandolin and played for baby Orick in his crib. Lately, the lad could hardly be put to rest without Thomas’s lullabies. So Thomas had told Gallen and Maggie to go for a walk by the starlit river outside Toohkansay while he cared for the child. Yet even after Gallen and Maggie returned, Thomas sang for long hours to the sleeping babe, as if hoping this gift of song would fill the boy’s sleeping head, last the child a lifetime.
Maggie had listened, and when at long last Thomas fell silent and sat gazing out the window to the starlight shining on the river, Maggie said, “Your singing is more beautiful now than ever. How is that?”
“Och, I used to sing for myself,” Thomas confided, “so that I could hear the praise of other folk. Now, I sing for the babies, and the children, and the young lovers in the back corners of the room, and for the old folks ambling off toward forever.”
“Thank you,” Maggie said.
“For what?” Thomas asked, leaning over with a grunt to put his mandolin in its case.
“For your songs. Maybe Orick won’t remember, but I shall. And when he’s old, I’ll try to sing some of them for him.”
Thomas’s eyes misted at those words, and he gazed up at Maggie, then sat back in the deep rocking chair. “You’re a good girl, Maggie. It’s proud I am to be having you as a Flynn.”
“Thank you,” Maggie said.
“You were your mother’s favorite, you know,” Thomas said. “Three strapping boys she had, and when you were born, I told her she ought to toss you in the river—a worthless, skinny little girl, you know.
“But you were your mother’s favorite. She said you were her reward for living a good life. The jewel in her heaven.”
“I laughed at the notion,” Thomas recalled, “but now, now I think maybe she had pegged it right. You would have made her proud. You’ve made me proud.”
Lords of the Seventh Swarm Page 41
