“I shall,” I promised. “I will live a virtuous life, and I will use this Gift to do so.”
“Good to hear,” he said. “And Adrian, there is one more thing.”
“Yes?” I asked, not certain whether to be excited or nervous.
“The Helm’s power lies in its subtlety,” he said. “When it is obvious, it loses it. Don’t let it be obvious.”
I would have asked what he meant by that, but it was at that moment that I awakened in the hospital bed. My vision was still blurry, and I couldn’t stop yawning. The Aesculapian was checking me over, making certain that I wasn’t suffering any aftereffects from the Gifting.
“He is fine,” she finally said, allowing my parents to come in and see me.
They both came over and hugged me. My limbs were a little shaky, but I still returned the hug.
“How do you feel, son?” my father asked.
“Tired,” I said with another yawn. “Really tired.”
“That’s perfectly normal,” my mother said. “What did you see?”
I didn’t answer right away. I almost did, but I hesitated. Pluto had told me to keep my Gift from being obvious. “I didn’t see anything,” I finally said. “Just a lot of weird colors and noises.”
Guilt stabbed into my chest like a knife as my parents began to cry. “An oblitus,” my mother wept. “Our son is an oblitus!” My father tried to comfort my mother, but tears were streaming down his cheeks as well.
It was rare, but on occasion, a person went through their Gifting without receiving a Gift at all. Such an individual was called an oblitus – a forgotten one. In their darkest moments, people sometimes despaired of their Gifts, saying that they were useless and that it would have been better if they’d been an oblitus. It isn’t true, though. The worst possible fate for someone who survives their Gifting intact is to emerge from it as an oblitus. Now I had falsely taken that burden upon myself, letting my parents and the world believe that the Gods had forgotten me. It was the right choice, but it still made things harder on my parents.
***
Marko had already held the Scepter of Jove for three years before my own Gifting, though nobody yet knew what he would do with it. Back then, it didn’t really strike me as important to my own life. I was busy trying to learn how to use my Gift, while still trying to hide its existence from the rest of the world. My parents doted on me constantly, but there was always this edge of pity to it. It isn’t that they didn’t love me. They did. I never once questioned that. But their attention still felt wrong. Every day, I thought about revealing my Gift to them, to make them see that they didn’t need to spoil me or be overprotective of me. I wanted to show them that I would be just fine. I didn’t, though, and with each passing day, I realized that it would be harder and harder to do so. If I didn’t tell them, then the guilt would eat me alive. If I did, then I would need to see the look of disappointment in their eyes when they realized that I’d been lying to them for so long.
In the second year of the 839th Olympiad, Tiberius Verus died and Marko was recognized as king by the Enyo Senate; the distant Imperator and Imperial Senate could barely be bothered to send their approval and congratulations. He was seventeen years old at that point. This was the same year that I, merely fourteen, realized that I couldn’t continue to live as I had been. The year that Marko made himself king is the year that I ran away from my responsibilities. I’m not proud of it, but I’m also not so sure that it was the wrong idea, either. It devastated me to do it. I never wanted to leave my parents, but I also couldn’t live with their smothering pity anymore. I knew they meant well, but I was tired of being treated like a tragedy. So I left.
I walked out into the blazing desert, using my Helm to slip by anyone who might have discouraged me from my journey. There would have been plenty, as most people saw the Wastes as a death sentence. At the time, I thought they might have been right, but I didn’t know what else to do. I did know how to find water, though. My father had felt that it was important for a warrior to know how to survive in any environment. Since he’d hoped that I’d follow in his footsteps, he showed me how to survive in the Wastes. The first rule was to avoid the cracks. The reddish sand and stone of the desert was split in many places, and some of those cracks were pretty deep. Most of them would be too thin to do more than trip me, but it wasn’t a danger of falling that had led to my father’s warnings. The desert was full of small burrowing rodents that only crept to the surface during the cool nights. The cracks in the ground were full of desert reapers hunting them. Stepping into the wrong crack could result in a swift but painful death. I’d taken that rule to heart. I also took the second rule to heart. Look for the tracks. The burrowers did not dig directly to the natural springs that appeared here and there throughout the desert. Many of them were basins of solid rock where the water bubbled up from below. By finding the tracks, I could find the water.
There was a nice cave located less than a day’s journey from the city, and a mere hour from a sizable basin, and it was there that I decided to make my new home. It was solid rock, so there were no burrowers, and I saw little evidence of the desert reapers, either. It would give me shelter from the blistering heat of the day as well as the frigid winds of the night. There was even a hollow towards the rear of the cave which I’d be able to fill with water, if I could obtain something to carry it with. That became my first priority.
Learning to use the Helm was my second priority. Initially, bending the light around myself was disorienting. I found it difficult to navigate while invisible because of the distortions to my vision. Gradually, I learned to compensate for that.
For the first year, I frequented the city, taking what I needed in order to make my little cavern livable. I even stole some soil, fertilizer, and seeds, so that I could grow a little food on my own. I didn’t like stealing, but there was no way to buy what I needed without my parents finding me, and the Helm made it easy to get away with, as long as I wasn’t stealing anything too large. I worried that I might be displeasing Pluto, but at the time, I didn’t see any other alternative. I’d like to think that I made up for that a little by stealing mostly from the cruel and corrupt, and by helping other people I saw in need. I figured that if I was stealing food for myself, there was no good reason not to provide it to others who needed it as well. There were also several corrupt vendors that would have been utterly shocked to discover that they’d made unwitting donations of their hard-swindled money to those same people that they’d cheated just minutes before. I had no real use for it, but as long as I was taking things anyway, there was no good reason not to set things right while I was at it.
That all changed after that first year. I had heard of Regis Marko by this point, as he was the subject of many people’s conversations. At first, it hadn’t mattered much to me. A new young king … What difference would it make to a young hermit like myself? That all changed, though, when I learned that three other people blessed with the Scepter of Jove had been executed as planetary security risks. Marko had used his Gift to eliminate those who shared it. It wasn’t long afterwards that I learned that the few known Plutonians were sharing their fate. At that moment, I realized that I had made the right choice by hiding my Gift. That day, I took as much as I could possibly carry, and promised myself that I would never return to the city.
***
The desert reaper drank slowly of the spring water, basking in the blazing sun even as it cooled itself in the shimmering water. The air rippled around me, as it always did when I put on the Helm. My hand darted down, snatching the reaper just behind the head. It hissed and tried to struggle, but I swiftly snapped the neck and held it until it stopped twitching. I cleaved the head off with my knife and tossed it into one of the nearby cracks so that I couldn’t accidentally step on it. These days, though I respect the deadly serpents, I no longer fear them, and desert reaper is one of the major parts of my diet. It was easy to preserve the meat in the sun if I cut it into thin strips quick
ly enough and laid them on my makeshift rack. Burrower needed to be cooked and eaten right away, but desert reaper could be made to last.
I was almost finished placing the latest reaper’s flesh on the rack when I heard the sound of metal being rent apart. I froze in place, my heart thudding. I was usually the only person within a day of this place. A young girl screamed. Men shouted. I activated the Helm, wrapping the light around me as I went to investigate. From the top of the rocky outcropping near the basin, I saw a girl with tanned skin and curly brown hair running from three soldiers. Though not garbed in the blood red of the traditional Martians uniforms, the men in their black uniforms with stylized golden lightning bolts down the center were obviously soldiers. Two identical vehicles were nearby, one of them torn open along the rocks.
I silently cursed. The soldiers were armed with thunder rays, the sleek chambers having been painted black and gold to match their uniforms, rather than the traditional dark blue and silver of my father’s day. The girl, wrapped in the same white cotton tunic that all children wore after their Gifting, was unarmed and screaming for help that she didn’t think would come. One soldier raised his weapon and fired a bolt; lightning flashed from the muzzle with a clap of thunder. The girl collapsed to the ground. I silently prayed that the rays had been set to stun rather than strike.
“Got her,” the larger soldier said, picking up her limp form.
“She was a fast one,” the second soldier panted, holstering his weapon.
“She totaled the damned cruiser,” the third one cursed, holstering his own weapon while analyzing the wreckage. He was the one I decided to target. There was no way that a girl that young, especially one who had obviously just fled a hospital, could have done anything to justify such an excessive show of force. While the other two were busy loading the girl into the functional cruiser, I slipped down the rock face, silently slipped up behind the third soldier, and snapped his neck. Lowering the body to the ground, I picked up the thunder ray and turned the dial from stun to strike. My father had taught me to fire one as a child, because he felt that it was important that the strong protect the helpless, and felt that knowledge of the proper use of weapons was the first step towards doing so. I’d gotten pretty good at it, and had even killed a desert reaper with one from a safe distance when my father took me out into the desert for target practice. This would be the first time I actually turned a thunder ray upon a fellow human being, though. Though I had occasionally tripped guards or criminals in the city to help a fleeing person, until my act of deadly violence moments before, I’d never taken a human life at all.
His communicator crackled. “Amandus, forget the wreck. We’ve got the girl. Let’s go.”
I didn’t respond. Instead, I trained the thunder ray on the door of the cruiser, and tried to quiet my mind to the guilt I felt at the murder I had just committed and the two I was about to perform. A moment later, the other two soldiers emerged.
“Amandus?” one of them called. “Amandus!” The larger soldier rushed forward to check on his fallen friend, as the second soldier pulled out his communicator. I fired at him first, preventing any emergency communications. The clap of thunder shattered the concentration required to keep the Helm active, and I knew that the surviving soldier could now see me. His ray was only halfway up when I fired into him. I waited a minute for the electricity to finish coursing through their bodies before checking to make certain that they were dead.
I climbed into the still-functional cruiser, and found the girl’s unconscious form. Judging by her clothing and the pattern of bandages scattered over her arms, neck, and face, she had definitely just gone through her Gifting. Her tanned face looked so peaceful in her unconscious state, the terror of the last several moments no longer a concern. I slung her over one shoulder and climbed back out, wondering why they had gone to such lengths to capture one little girl. I didn’t wonder long, though. I tossed the thunder ray down by the side of the first soldier, knowing that there would be some sort of tracking device on it. At least if I took the rack of meat with me and kept to the rocks, I might be able to keep us hidden for awhile before their fellow soldiers found us.
I struggled back to the cave that I called home, praying that it was windy enough today to cover up any tracks that I left. My cave might not be obvious, but I didn’t have any illusions about whether they’d find it if they were desperate enough to do so. I laid the girl down on the pile of blankets that I used for a bed, then set the rack of snake meat off to one side. I’d need to cook it quickly if I was going to keep it from going bad before they began hunting for us. I decided to risk it, though, and built a small fire. It had just finished cooking when she began to stir.
“Where am I?” she asked, looking around nervously, the fear having returned to her face.
“My home,” I said quietly, offering her a piece of steaming meat on a smooth stone which served as a plate.
“What is this?” she asked.
“Desert reaper,” I said, smiling a little at the obvious fear and discomfort that crossed her face. “You’re supposed to eat it,” I added, taking a bite of a piece myself.
She looked at it nervously, but took a tentative bite. I could hear her stomach growling with hunger. “Who are you?” she asked, after finishing her first bite.
“Adrian Payne,” I replied. “I ran away from the city a long time ago. This is where I live. This,” I said, holding up the meat, “is how I live. And you are?”
“Lucy. Lucy Celandine,” she said quietly.
“Why did you run away?” I asked.
“I just went through my Gifting,” she said. “I received a vision from Phoebus. He told me to keep myself safe.”
“I’m a Plutonian,” I said. “I stayed away because they started hunting my kind down. Have they started doing that to your kind?”
“I think so,” she said. “It’s been five years since anybody’s even seen a Phoebean. They all just ... disappeared ... and the soldiers were very active at that time.”
“Mmm,” I said. “So, you can see what’s happening in other places, then?”
“No,” she said. “I get glimpses of what’s going to happen. I saw that they were going to take me, so I ran. I didn’t want to go into their glass pod. It was my death. I know it.”
I felt a shudder run down my spine. “You saw your own death… That must have been terrifying. What did you do?”
“Well, when I was asked what I saw, I told them that I was an oblitus,” she said.
“I did the same thing.”
“It didn’t work, though. King Marko was going to come down to see all the newly Gifted. I didn’t want him to find me. He was the one that wanted me, who would put me in the glass pod, and he was on his way… So I waited until they turned their backs, then ran. I stole the key to a cruiser, and I headed for the desert. But they followed, and I crashed, and now I’m here.”
“Why did you come to the desert? Why not just hide in the city, where you could have gotten lost in the crowd?”
“I… I don’t know. I didn’t really think about it. I just knew I wanted to get away as quickly as possible. I didn’t want Marko to find me, and put me into a glass pod. This is just where I thought I should go.”
I nodded. I wasn’t going to argue with a girl who could see the future. Besides, I’d made the exact same choice myself ten years ago. “Well, I guess you’re safe for now,” I said. “Not for long, since they’ll come looking for us, but at least you should be able to get a little rest here while we figure out what we’re going to do.”
“You’re going to let me stay?” she asked hopefully.
“I’m in the same boat you are at this point,” I said. “If they find you, they find me. And they will find us eventually, if we stay here. But I might be able to come up with a plan. Now you get some sleep, and there will be more snake when you wake up.”
Lucy looked like she might protest, but in the end, her fatigue from the day’s events won out, and sh
e drifted off into a fitful sleep. I crouched down next to the basin of water, which I knew would need to last us a while if we were going to keep from getting spotted. I let my thoughts drift where they would. For ten long years, I’d hidden from everything. My parents, my society, my responsibilities .… I had kept myself safe, but at what cost? I’d abandoned everyone I’d ever cared about to the mercy of a tyrant. I’d thought that as long as I was safe, everything would be fine. Now, thanks to a momentary act of heroism, that was no longer an option.
I jumped awake myself when I heard Lucy sitting up in bed. I hadn’t even realized I had fallen asleep. Lucy didn’t look quite awake herself. Her eyes were staring off into the distance, unfocused. I started to get to my feet to check on her, when she began to speak.
“His eyes,” she said softly. “A ring of glass holds jewels of sight, all within his gaze. His eyes hold the world. The universe. Every person, every thing. All he surveys belongs to him alone. There is no future. There is no past. There is no hope. There is no you. There is no me. There is only Marko.” She collapsed back to the blankets, shuddering and crying.
I could feel chills running up my spine. “What does it mean?” I asked her quietly, though I feared I already knew.
“It means … he’s going to win … He’s going to put me in the pod .… And that’s the end.”
I shook my head. “We won’t let that happen,” I said.
“What can we do?” she wept. “There’s nothing!”
“We’re going back to the city,” I said, with a calm tone I didn’t actually feel. “Your vision hasn’t come true yet. There’s still time to change it.”
“If we go back to the city, they’ll find me,” she said. “Then he can make me tell him everything. It’s hopeless!”
“Not if he doesn’t recognize you,” I said. “They’re looking for a little girl. We’ll make you look like a boy. It might buy us a little bit of time. Not much. It won’t fool them long, but maybe long enough for us to do something about this.”
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