“Gotten myself beaten.”
“Forget the beating.” Father waved a hand, leaned back in his seat like a Chantry inquisitor about to issue judgment.
Forget the beating. I looked down at my hand prisoned in the corrective brace. Would that it were so easy. Eyebrows raised, I said, “I’m having difficulty with that at the moment.”
“Be quiet.” Father leaned forward so quickly it made me jump, prompting a spasm of pain across my torso. “The people love those games. The Colosso. You’ve now publicly spurned them. It was on the Meidua Broadcast, did you know? Ran for five hours before Tor Alcuin and I could suppress it.” His cold eyes narrowed to mere slits, and he swung out of his seat, moving toward the window.
He was treating me like a child, and perhaps I deserved it. What he said made sense, and I should have seen it—would have but for the pain in my arm. Still it seemed unwise to speak, so I held my silence, watching Father as he surveyed his domain. “Bread and circuses, boy.”
“I beg your pardon?” I recognized the quotation as a very old one. From Juvenal, a man so dead I thought only the scholiasts remembered him or his kind. But then, I was the fool who’d spoken Latin to Father’s men mere minutes before, and Father had secret depths to him.
“Imperial law forbids the planetbound serf class from operating anything more complicated than a groundcar, discounting anything required by the disparate guilds. They’re made to grub around with livestock and combustion engines, and do you know why?”
“Because they might rebel?”
“Because they might start to think they have a right to.”
“Excuse me?” I took offense to that, a blow to common decency I hadn’t known I could feel.
My father did not turn, did not bother to acknowledge the shock or the outrage in my tone. “Look at the Eudorans, the Norman Freeholds, the Extrasolarians. Do you know what they have in common?” Before I could answer, my father slapped his hand against the frame of that round window. “They have no leaders. No order. The Empire is order. Us.” And here he turned, pressed a ringed hand to his thin chest. “It’s the same with the Jaddian princes, the Lothrians. Order. Without that, civilization on a galactic scale is impossible. It breaks down.”
“The Eudorans get on just fine!” I objected, thinking of the nomad caravaners with their net of asteroid stations spread throughout human space. “And the Freeholders.”
“Please.” Lord Alistair sneered. “Those inbreds can’t hold a single planet together, much less a thousand.” And with an impatient hand wave he dismissed billions of human lives from our conversation as one shoos away a fly. “Do you know that some of those Freeholder worlds have countries? Nation-states like those from before the Exodus? Some of those little colonies can’t even build starships! They fight themselves as much as they fight anyone else.”
I shrugged. “And we don’t?”
“The rules of poine have their admirers in the Imperium, I’ll grant. But the Chantry regulates our actions, minimizes collateral damage.”
“They threaten dissident lords with biological weapons, you mean. What has any of this to do with circuses?”
The Archon of Meidua thrust his chin out. “We aren’t like those other nations, son. There’s no congress, no body politic here. When I make a decree, I make it. Personally. No proxies, no fallbacks. The old systems of democracy and parliament only allowed the cowards to hide. Our power depends not on the consent of the people but on their belief in us.”
“I know all this,” I said, shifting forward to the edge of my seat. My nostrils flared. I had not forgiven the man for abandoning me to my injuries. He was my father, in Earth’s name. My father. And I was being lectured because I had been brutalized. Still, he was right. I was not just a boy. I was his son, and there was a responsibility on me to carry the weight of my house. There was power in that responsibility and an accountability, too. It is for this reason that a lord was better than parliament. A lord had no excuse. If he abused his power, as I feared Crispin might, he would not rule for long. If he was cold in the application of his power, as I knew my father was, he would not rule easily.
“No, you don’t,” the lord snapped, smoothing a curling lock of hair back behind one ear. “We have to engage with the churls. We have to show that we are people, boy, not some abstract political concept. That is what they understand. That is why I sent you and Crispin to the Colosso while I treated with Elmira. I am patriarch to the people of Meidua, and you both were sent to represent me and our house. Personally. Crispin played his role admirably; the people love him now because they see him as part of their world. He fought in their Colosso, while you . . . you turned your back.”
While he spoke, Father drew a small crystal chit from inside his sleeve. It was perhaps four inches long, one and a half wide. He turned it over in his fingers like a blind man trying to figure out what it was, as if he were weighing a gold hurasam in his hand to determine if it was counterfeit. “It would have been bad enough if you had just left, but you managed to get yourself hurt as well. Our power is intensified when our people understand that we are above them. And you damaged that understanding.”
“By bleeding?” I couldn’t keep the incredulity from my tone.
“Yes.” Father snapped the chit down on the table and retook his seat. I could see his seal plainly visible on top, the red devil glinting against its dark background embossed on the bluish crystal.
“I thought we had to show that we are men, not ghosts.”
“We have to show that we are not abstractions,” he corrected, “that we are tangible powers. Not that we are human.”
In vanished Egypt, the pharaohs were expected to behave like gods: placid and impartial, above the fever and the fret of mortal life. When a pharaoh failed to match these expectations, he revealed his mortality to his subjects, and in so doing invited reprisal from those who had served and worshipped his divinity. We were little different—no lord was. With our genetic tailoring and enhanced lifespans, we were like gods in ways those long-gone pharaohs could never have dreamed. Though he was a mere archon, a provincial governor, Father’s domain was greater than the size of storied Europe, and our family’s distant relation to the Imperial family only elevated us further. My mother’s mother ruled not only a planetary palatinate—a duchy—but an interstellar province. She was vicereine of all the stars in Auriga Province, some four hundred in all, and reported directly to the Solar Throne and the Emperor, who was her distant cousin. Through my mother, I too was cousin to His Radiance and in line for the throne, though several thousand steps removed from it. My father too shared royal blood, but more distantly, as it had been several generations since House Marlowe last wedded into the constellation of the Imperial House. Despite our old blood and considerable wealth—the envy of many newer and more powerful houses—only a scant billion people owed their allegiance to my father or were owned by him: planetbound serfs and artisans and slaves.
“I am sending you to Lorica College on Vesperad to enter the seminary.”
“No!” I actually rocketed to my feet then, knocking the small, delicate chair to the floor with a dull thud. “No, you can’t!”
Lord Alistair Marlowe watched me with only mild surprise, genuinely perplexed. “I thought this would please you. Your faculty for languages would be quite useful there; the Chantry always needs new ambassadors.”
“New missionaries, you mean.” I could barely contain my sneer. I knew what the Chantry was, and I despised it. No true religion, as among the adorators who yet keep the old gods. Only the fist in the Imperial glove, anointed with holy oil. Only the cynical posture of faith, its prayers memorable but hollow, dripping with unearned tradition. It was an instrument of terror and holy awe, the largest circus under Sol. Obedience out of piety. A certain amount of suffering will ever be a part of the human universe, but I call such terrors by their names and love them not.
“Words, words,” muttered the archon distractedly.
The larger implications of his decision washed over me. “You’re disinheriting me?”
The lord’s face darkened, brows drawing down, casting his familiar violet eyes in craggy shadow. “I never declared you my heir.”
“But I’m the eldest!” I objected. I was unable to stoop and right my fallen chair; the mere act of standing had sent a horrid spasm through my chest, and I imagined spiderweb fractures redressing my mended bones, still brittle from their stem cell treatment. I knew that mine was a weak objection, that birth order meant little in the Imperium, less than the decree of the respective lord. “Crispin . . .” I couldn’t get the words out. “Crispin . . .”
Father found them for me. “Your brother will remain here at my side and take my place in his time, provided he continues to prove himself.”
I nearly choked on the thing in my throat that would not declare itself a laugh or a sob. “Prove himself? By beating another serving girl? Or killing another eunuch in the coliseum? There aren’t two connected neurons in that boy’s head!” I was right up against the edge of the desk now, staring down at my father where he sat. He rose like a bolt of thunder and slapped me mightily across the face. Lightheaded, already unsteady, I went reeling to one knee, then tried to push myself back to my feet. In my haste and confusion I used my injured hand, and though the hellish contraption kept me from flexing my fingers, the mere pressure pushed on all the needles in my flesh and sent pain flashing up my arm. I howled and half expected Sir Roban to come see what the commotion was. But no one came.
“Crispin is your brother. I will not have you speaking of him like that.”
Rather than respond, I recovered my footing, summoning up every last scrap of my dignity. “I don’t want to be a priest, father.”
“You will address me as ‘sire’ or ‘my lord!’” my own father said, coming round his desk like a stalking panther. Lacking other options, I swept into my lowest bow, one meant for a planetary lord. A petty vengeance, as he was not one.
As I straightened, swaying, I said, “I want to be a scholiast.”
The second blow took me on the other cheek, but I was ready for it and turned with the slap, keeping my feet this time. “Is that really what you want? To be an adding machine for some borderworld baron?”
“I want to join the Expeditionary Corps, to travel the stars like Simeon the Red,” I replied, using my good arm to support myself on his desk.
“Simeon the . . .” Father repeated, trailing off. He snorted, and why not? Even to me it now seems a childish dream. He changed tactics, falling back on logic. “The Chantry exercises real power, Hadrian. You could be an inquisitor, perhaps even one of the Synod.” His jaw tightened, lips barely moving. “We need someone in the Chantry, boy. Someone on our side.”
Something hollow and sucking formed in the pit of my stomach. By the Dark, I thought. “You’ve been planning this?” I shook my head. “I won’t do it.”
My lord father stood more than a head taller than I, and he stood a mere inch away, looking down that hawk’s beak of a nose at me, eyes narrowed to microns. “You will.” He pressed the crystal chit into my hand. “You leave for Vesperad at the end of Boedromion.” He referred to the local month that marked the beginning of autumn.
“That’s just three months from now!” I objected, fearing another blow.
“This incident has accelerated our plans. I need you out of the public eye before you cause me more embarrassment.”
“Embarrassment!” I could have screamed. “Father, I—”
“Enough!” And for the first time in the whole conversation, he raised his voice, nostrils flaring, eyes wide. “It is decided!” His lips curled in contempt as he took in the corrective brace on my hand. “Get out before you injure yourself further.”
It was all I could do not to scream, to howl in his face, to take up the small chair I’d knocked over and smash it across his Grecian sculpture of a face. I sucked in a deep breath—as deep as my aching ribs would allow—and, drawing myself up to my unimpressive height, turned on my heel.
CHAPTER 10
THE LAW OF BIRDS AND FISHES
I SAT IN SULLEN silence, glowering at the sea. A fortnight had passed since my meeting with Father, and in that time I had done my utmost to avoid him. So I sat beneath the shadow of a sheltering spur of rock on the stony strand that passed for beach at the base of our acropolis. There, away from the cameras and the eyes of the watchful guards, a boy could sulk as nature intended. My hand fully healed, I reclined against the cliff face, scratching at a page in my journal, rendering a profile of the deep-sea trawler making her placid way to port, dwarfing the little fishing junks—red-sailed and white—that dotted the sea from shore to sunrise.
A gull dove through the salt air and pierced the ocean’s surface, emerged dripping with a fish in its beak. I watched it go, then watched the ship I was drawing slip farther into the distance, rounding the cape and the lighthouse toward the city and the mouth of the river.
The corner of Father’s crystal chit cut into me through my pocket, and I was reminded acutely of the encoded holo it held: a recording of my father, verified by terabytes of authenticating code, declaiming my qualifications for the proctors of the Chantry school on Vesperad. I had watched the recording half a hundred times in the past two weeks. Each time my private stash of the house wine was diminished; each time my journal grew another page.
Frustrated, I shut the book on my pencil and leaned my head back against the stone. My hand still ached where it had been shattered, though I knew that would fade in time. I massaged it with my left hand, noting the collection of tiny pinhead scars that stippled the pale skin from fingertips to mid-forearm. They shone in Delos’s silver sunlight, and I flexed the creaking fingers, baring my teeth a little at the discomfort. Tor Alma, my family’s physician, swore the bones were back in working order, but I swore in turn that they’d grown oddly, were as uneasy as new teeth.
“Is this where you get to when you want no one to find you?”
I didn’t need to look round to know who it was. “Apparently not.”
Tor Gibson, leaning heavily on his ash-wood cane, bobbed into my view from the right, having just descended—incredibly—a flight of several hundred steps cunningly masked by the craggy randomness of the cliffs. The hem of his fine viridian robes trailed in the sand, though if he noticed he did not seem to mind. “You were late for your lessons.”
“Impossible. It’s ten in the morning.” I shut my eyes and rested my head back against the stone. Still I sensed him looming above me, and I cracked an eye to see the almost, almost bemused expression on his wrinkled, leathery face.
“It was three hours ago,” my tutor replied with a desultory nod. “It’s nearly noon.”
I stood so fast an onlooker might have thought I’d burned myself, or else been stung by one of the anemones common along the seacoast. “I’m so sorry, Gibson. I didn’t realize. Must have lost track of time. I . . .” I fumbled for an excuse, had none.
The old man raised a hand. “Don’t worry about it. You didn’t really need another rhetoric primer.”
I made a face. “Perhaps not.”
With exquisite slowness, Gibson lowered himself onto the last of the steps that ascended the cliff face toward the castle. I hurried to help him, but he waved me away. “That’s the second time in as many weeks that you’ve missed a lesson, Hadrian. It’s not like you.” I only grunted in response, and Gibson let out a great rush of air. “I see. Maybe you could use that rhetoric primer after all.”
Scowling, I turned away and walked out to where the stone ended and the sand ran down to silver-glass waters. With no moon to pull at it, the sea was always placid, eddying only a little over the beach. “I still can’t believe it. The blasted Chantry, Gibson.” We’d already had this discussion. Twice.
“You could be great, you know.”
“I don’t want to be great, damn it.” I kicked a stone with the inside of my foot, sending it skittering out over the water. Out there, another gull dived. “I told Father I wanted to be a scholiast. I told you that, didn’t I?” There was utter defeat in my voice, tempered by mocking self-criticism, as if only the Emperor’s own fool would do such a thing.
The other man was silent a long while—for so long, in fact, that I almost repeated my question. At last he quavered, “You told me.” Looking back over my shoulder, I found the scholiast—his green robes blown by the sea wind—sitting with his chin propped on the brass handle of his cane, misty eyes glassed over in thought. “You have the aptitude for it. You’re sharp enough. I’ve spoken to your father about it myself on a couple of occasions. He rejected the idea out of hand.”
Glossing over this additional news, I pressed, “But I could do it? Be a scholiast?”
Gibson shrugged both shoulders. “Given time, they could teach you to think properly, aye. But Hadrian, you should not challenge your father in this thing.”
Affecting my best face of patrician contempt, I said, “It’s my burden to bear. Is that what you’re saying?”
Abruptly switching to Classical English, the scholiast said, “If survival calls for the bearing of arms, bear them you must.”
I raised an eyebrow at the man and in my native tongue asked, “Shakespeare?”
“Serling.” He looked up at the sky, at the threaded clouds like windblown gossamer in the white sunlight. “Though I suppose the quote would be more fitting if it were the Legions your father were sending you to join.”
“There’s the Inquisition,” I said, scowling. “They’re worse.”
Gibson rocked his head in the affirmative, keeping his chin planted squarely on his cane. “True enough.” He scratched one leonine sideburn, speculation in his shriveled face. “I don’t see that there’s a way out of this for you, my boy. If your father’s gone to the trouble of drafting the letter on that chit, you can bet he’s waved it on to Vesperad. The deal’s done. Sealed.”
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