The Will to Battle

by Ada Palmer

  “Pater, Ego quidem vix intellego quid Sim et quid faciendum Sit Mihi. Tumet ignoras. Numquam bibam dum apothecarius num medicamentum sit venenum incertus sit. (Father, even I barely understand what I Am and Must do. You do not. I shall not drink while even the apothecary does not know whether the draught is poison.)”

  Death closed his eyes. If I saw an oak tremble as he trembled now, I would fear some wurm had pierced the taproot. “Numquam? (Never?)” he asked.

  “Fortasse aliquando. Tempore mutante, non possum iurare ‘numquam.’ (Perhaps someday. Within changeable time I cannot pledge never.)”

  “Contemplaberisne? (You will consider it?)”

  “Contemplabor. (I will consider.)”

  Something in MASON’s shoulders eased. “Dum Ius iuras, non licet mihi ut mutes Imperium pati. Licet mihi te protegere, copias praebere, per dominationem mutationemque adiuvare omnium aliorum quos domitare legas; at si tumet Imperium mutare conaris, me oportet te omnibus viribus meis oppugnare. (Until you take the Oath, I cannot let you change the Empire. I may protect you, lend you my strength, support you through the subjugation and transformation of all others you may choose to conquer, but if you try to change my Empire, I must oppose you with all the force at my command.)”

  “Verum’st. (True.)” Jehovah found the strength at last to trust both stone and legs enough to twist around until He sat. “Et dominationem mutationemque aliorumne favebis? Mi valde placeat socii fieri, pater, et gratum faciat. (And will you support the subjugation and transformation of the others? I would be very pleased by this alliance with you, father, and grateful.)”

  No pause before Death’s well-planned answer. “Tantum contra illos qui etiam sunt hostes mei adiuvabo: inter quos ullos qui corruptione Sancti Sanctorum conscientes comperiantur, qui coniurationes ad vitam Imperatoris Destinati adiuvent, etsi condiciones emendationis septimana proxima in Senatu praesentandae vitia corrigere deficiant, Humanistas, Mitsubishos, Europam, Consobrinos. (I will only support you against those who are also my enemies: I include in this any who prove complicit in the violation of my Sanctum Sanctorum, any who support attempts on the life of my Imperator Destinatus, and, if the proposals for self-reform they present to the Senate next week fail to remedy the malformations at their hearts, the Humanists, Mitsubishi, Europe, and Cousins.)”

  “Humanists, Mitsubishi, and Europe!” Felix Faust piped up. “I caught three Hive names in that! And was the fourth one Cousins?” His smile was playful, daring us to wonder why the Grand Voyeur chose this moment to remind us of his presence. We had mostly forgotten him, how his greedy eyes read our every twitch, even if the Latin flowed past him. Worse, I had also forgotten his poison sister, drinking in the gestures of her Son and former lover from behind her feathered fan. Was Faust warning us? A timely reminder from the old Headmaster to “young” Cornel MASON that the virtuoso puppetrix still plans her encore?

  “If you’re done for the moment, Cornel,” Kosala ventured in English in the hush, “I do believe my business with Jed is urgent.”

  Death turned to face the screen. “You are right, Cousin Chair Bryar Kosala. Your business is indeed urgent, if you are discussing the new constitution of your Hive. Your instability endangers my subjects, and you may tell Lorelei Cook, and their Nurturist faction, and Sniper’s fans, and anyone else who is obstructing the progress of your revisions, that if you cannot or will not repair yourselves promptly and to my satisfaction, then, whatever Romanova’s judgment, when the Olympics end I will indeed join my son in war against you, to ensure a world where power rests only with those equal to wielding it.”

  Kosala sighed. “I don’t think threatening Lorelei Cook will help.”

  Death glared. “I was not threatening Lorelei Cook.”

  Faust smiled.

  Kosala smiled too, though hers was forced. “Cornel, please, let’s keep this friendly.”

  Apollo’s hand, soft on deadly MASON’s shoulder, tried to calm him, but he shrugged it off. “I do not have friends, Bryar. I am an Emperor.”

  The World’s Mom did not flinch. “You have friends, and you know it. Save the bronze-age propaganda for the public. I’m a politician, you’re a politician, and we can negotiate as friends and equals, or you can sulk behind your mythos and pretend you’re not the one plunging us most directly toward war right now. If you’d just leave it to Papadelias to track down Sniper and the Sanctum violators instead of launching a personal crusade against—do you even know who?”

  Static flashed, Voltaire’s coat turning to harsh white blankness as, for three seconds, four, Utopia mourned someone.

  MASON: “The Empire defends itself.”

  Bryar Kosala suppressed a full snarl, but its ghost still manifested cough-like in her throat. “If you let me mediate, if you agree to be lenient with those who attacked the Sanctum if they’ll come forward voluntarily, then we have a chance.”

  “Absolute crime reaps absolute punishment.”

  “Iusiurandumne eripuerunt? (They stole the Oath?)” Jehovah interrupted.

  Caesar stopped breathing for a long moment. “Yes,” in English, “they stole the Oath.”

  “Vulgare ullo momento possunt? (Then they could make it public any instant?)”

  Death faced his Son. “Nothing could do more damage to the Empire, nor to the world, to me, to you, than the exposure of the Oath.”

  Jehovah worked hard on this English. “I neither recommend nor discourage, but amnesty may buy it back, still secret.”

  Caesar’s answer took so long to come that it seemed as if we were waiting for some part of him to thaw, as ice slowly condescends to turn clear at the edges. “To those who surrender willingly,” he began, turning to Kosala, “I extend this boon: that for them I shall summon a skilled executioner, while to those who hide, or flee, I will deliver death with my own un-practiced hand. A second boon I offer to one alone among them, the one who returns my Oath of Office, still safe and secret. All the others’ names, after their deaths, I shall expunge from every record, every document, every account and history, by force if other Hives resist. I shall un-write their every word, erase them forever from human memory as I ensure Damnatio Memoriae. But to the one who returns my Oath I offer this: their name may instead live on in infamy—a curse, with Clytemnestra and Ephialtes—throughout the rest of human history. This is the amnesty MASON extends to those who make themselves archcriminals and then seek mercy.”

  I passed out. Damnatio Memoriae—damnation of memory. Sense, thought, even the precious I fled before such terror, headlong and willing into the fearsome dark that always waits a noose away. But even there I had no respite. I have lived too long beside Achilles, reader. The hero has only spoken three times in my presence of those fields of drifting shadow where the fallen dwell, but the intensity of his few words made Hades’s lost realm feel so real that now it rose before me. I saw the crowd—no, not a crowd—a pool of mixing shades, too weak and empty to remain distinct from one another, like the many shadows of a tree’s leaves. So many. So many and so blank. Some I recognized: intractable and lordly Agamemnon, towering Ajax, Julius the first real Caesar, the ancient poets with their laurel crowns, there satyr-faced Socrates arguing with Cicero, Aquinas, and Voltaire the Patriarch, there terrible and brooding Nietzsche, dread Pascal, there Mycroft MASON, with the blood-badge of his assassination proud upon his brow, and Mercer and Kohaku Mardi tracing notes and numbers in the sands that settle again into forgetful blankness breeze by breeze. But these proud forms were rare as weed-flowers among the grass. So vague the others were, reader. Empty, as the ancients warned us, drained of self as the forgetfulness of history dooms them to forget. Only life gives life, so here the helpless dead retain only that portion of themselves which we living still breathe life into by remembering. If a smith’s shade retains his apron and artisan’s thick hands, some signature on one of his creations saves him: I, Hlewagastiz son of Holt, made this drinking horn. If a smiling matron cradles dear ones in her arms, there stands in some wet yard
a tombstone: Eva Kimelman, beloved wife and mother. Not vain-seeming now, the strict and sacred honors Greeks and Romans paid their ancestors. See, here comes a shade almost shapeless, terrible, no longer slim nor mighty, stooped nor noble, just a shape, and on its fleshless lips one phrase repeated: I am Hildebrand … I am Hildebrand. Somewhere in a dusty archive a baptismal registry records some Hildebrand, and, when that dry page molders … when it molders … I can’t look. I can’t! Behind the shades, the broad gray plain, that sea of shapeless gloom extending on and on across the mockeries of trees, that vast borderless shadow, millions on millions. Souls, reader. That gray waste is all forgotten souls, minds empty of memory, smeared one into another, stripped of self but conscious and eternal still. And to this absolute dissolution Caesar damns his enemies. Damnatio Memoriae. Keep it away! Away! Back, sea of shadows! Not me! I will never let you take me! I will carve my memory into history, by work, by force, by guile, in swathes of blood and ashes if I must! I will! I part my lips to shout my name into the dark, but grope for it, slipping away: I am … I am …

  Thou art Mycroft Canner.

  I am Mycroft Canner! I weep for joy as it comes to my lips: my name, my past, my self. Draw off, vain shadow! I will never be yours! I am armored against you forever now, with this strong Master Reader at my side. Draw off, and hear me laugh, and know that you will never have me!

  The dead look up hearing my laughter, great Agamemnon rising from his game of dice with Ajax. But … that is not Agamemnon’s face. It is inhuman, art’s primitive parody, as anonymous as the generic face that decorates some urn or shield boss, and as far from life-mask as a child’s doodle. What is this face? Can I even call ‘eyes’ these scratched slits between shapeless metal cheeks? I recognize it now: this is no flesh face but the death mask in thin hammered gold, doubly lifeless, doubly frozen, which archaeologists extracted at Mycenae from the king’s supposed tomb. The mask thousands have seen in its museum case, a face the living know, while all who knew his flesh face are themselves dust. Is even kingly Agamemnon so forgotten? I cannot say that such eyes stare, but I stare, trapped by the frozen horror of the gold’s cold surface, polished like a mirror, and in that mirror the reflection of … whose face is that reflected, reader? Mine? I do not know it. Is that the face you imagine for me? Fancy and shadow assembled at your whim? Your favorite nose, a haircut you associate with murderers and Greeks and slaves and tricksters? Where is my own face? Lost with the last of those who knew me, lost forever and forever. I scream. I scream and scream and scream until I wake again to life, Earth, senses, and Saladin’s tear-drenched shirt.

  “Merci-ful C-aesar too just.” The syllables stumbled planless from my lips. “Unjust Fate force you spa-are me, me, the killer that bereft you Apo-po-pollo, should have condemned, infli-i-cted me Damnatio Memor-or-i-ae, I deserve it, I deserve, shadow, forever, but you spare me, still, me, necessity of office, necessity of Earth makes you, too cruel, deprives you of revenge, good Caesar, too pure for this twisted world, thank you, thank you, I’m sorry, I can’t curse the Plan that forces you spare me, unhappy Caesar, Earth does not deserve you, thank you, thank you, thank you.”

  Kisses hushed me, Saladin tasting of sweat and feta cheese. He helped my breathing slow if not my pulse. Caesar slowed that, standing over us, still death black. I can’t know if he understood my babble. Even had he not been backlit, I had not the strength yet to read a human face. But he has long understood, I think, what I finally realized then, that the world which forces such unconscionable twists of circumstance upon this perfect Emperor does not deserve him.

  「“«¿Mycroft, art thou now well?»”」 I saw Him too now, the God too Kind to Will a thing like Acheron, standing close behind Apollo, who leaned over me to administer some soothing substance by painless snakebite. Voltaire—sorry, reader—not Apollo, this was Voltaire.

  「“«Yes, Ἄναξ, I’m myself again.»”」 Speaking His title made me so.

  “Then I go to Casablanca,” He announced in English for us all.

  “You and Kosala have reached a compromise?” I asked. She was no longer on the screen, and the level of brandy in Faust’s decanter testified that Sleep had held me for some time in Hades’s fields.

  “No compromise,” He answered. “I will help rewrite the constitution, save the Hive, and then make war on it until I have its unconditional surrender.”

  Death’s eyes, still recognizable in Caesar’s face, forbade me to rise and follow as Jehovah left. The Imperial car and Alexandria’s strong citadel waited for me. With a fresh check of my pulse, Voltaire proclaimed me fit enough to be moved, if not to move myself, and Apollo and my salt-sweet Saladin helped me onto Aldrin’s unicorn, which bore me to the abbey gates.

  “I hear father and Son might become enemies.” It was Achilles’s voice, light-feeling after so dark an hour.

  Death turned. A slim side garden framed the nunnery wall, and here Achilles had consented to wait as Jehovah paid His filial visit to she whose threshold the lionhearted son of Peleus knows better than to cross. The Great Soldier sat on a tree stump, baring his arms to Phoebus’s rays, and fingering in his small, thick hands an iron-gray Familiaris armband. Aldrin stood with him, a living slice of man’s next kingdom as Griffincloth turned a waiting car into a space-scarred shuttle, and the stubbled abbey lawn to asteroid.

  “I do not think we will be enemies,” Caesar answered.

  “I’m glad to hear it.” The famous runner rose and took a light step closer. “I would be gladder to believe it.”

  In his hesitation, Caesar must have tried to guess, as I did, how much Aldrin had repeated to the veteran of what Voltaire’s swissnakes reported of the—should I call it a fight?—inside. “You still want to side with me?” the Emperor asked.

  “Fates willing,” the hero answered.

  Caesar smiled. “And call me friend, and lead my Empire in battle?”

  Achilles rubbed the gray cloth with his thumbs. “I prefer to fight beside someone whose mind I understand enough to call ‘friend.’ In this strange age that means almost only you.” The ‘almost’ brought Achilles’s eye to me.

  A smile again; look, reader, while in the guise of Caesar, Death can smile. “And you want to destroy Sniper?”

  The crack of the Great Soldier’s knuckles told me that Bridger’s shade rose before him, vivid and unavenged. “Above all others living on the Earth, yes. But I know what plan is taking shape on your lips, MASON. You are about to say that we can all be allies temporarily, that so long as O.S. remains a threat, you, I, Jehovah, even Papadelias and the Censor, are friends joined by a common foe. But that’s not enough. I cannot join a man for the first half of a war, trust him with my back, my honor, while knowing that a second war is coming in which every blade I lend him might fly back at me. Strength deserts a battle line when trust does.”

  Caesar nodded. “I agree. But I do not intend to fight my son.”

  “He intends to fight you,” the soldier warned.

  “Then we must make Jehovah change their mind. We still have time to make them change their mind. Will you help me?”

  What thoughts, Achilles, in your silence? Thinking on the many prayers of the Trojans, ten years of prayer that could not make the thundering father on Olympus change his mind?

  “What side would you take if my son did turn against me?” Caesar asked.

  Silence again.

  Caesar pressed on. “You’ve already said you prefer to fight beside someone you understand enough to call ‘friend.’ I don’t think anyone on Earth can say that of Jehovah.”

  “That’s true enough.” The hero sighed. “I’ve said it before, Mycroft, your Jehovah often seems a lot less human, and a lot less comprehensible, than Father Zeus, or Hera, or Athena.”

  I shook my head. “Not often. Always.”

  He smiled at my honesty. “I understand creating sides. I understand wanting to purge O.S. and remake the order that depended on it, but if an enemy stings me I gather friends and alli
es and conquer that enemy. I don’t declare war on my own father, or my own people.”

  I saw a stony satisfaction in the set of Caesar’s jaw. “All I have asked of Jehovah is that they accept their patrimony, honor the customs and duties of their predecessors, and be a good leader to the many subjects who choose to trust themselves to the Empire’s promise of strength, justice, stability, and honor. I fully expect Jehovah to accept, but if they don’t, would you really be happy fighting for someone who so betrayed their father?”

  “I would find it hard,” Achilles answered, slowly. “Very hard. You are the only part of this future we ancients would recognize. The only part that’s like what we imagined. But I would also find it very hard to take a different side from Mycroft Canner.”

  I met Achilles’s eyes, my strong, staunch comrade, but what was this in them? Doubt? Quiet shadows veiling private thoughts? Doubting what? Doubting me? My lips trembled. “Achilles, you wouldn’t consider…”