“What I want,” the Regent said in a cold voice, “is to know when the Family warships and armies will either stand down or take action. Something that will not happen until this boy makes up his mind. We do not need another Dissent. We do not need another false god Declaring and moving our worlds into civil war.”
She continued to stare at him. “I find it interesting, Regent, that you did not at any point mention wanting a new god to Ascend and bring all this uncertainty to a close.”
His face went red and he growled deep in his chest. “If you were not the Missionary General,” he said in a low voice, his hands white-knuckling the sides of his chair, “I would have you killed for those words.”
She smiled. “So you do want the new god to Ascend, for our Emperor of Ascending Light to sleep at long last, knowing his people are safe for a season?”
“Of course I do,” he said. “We all do.”
Now she took her moment. “Very well,” she said. “S’andril bids you to recall your oath in the Yellowing Field.”
His eyes popped, his face went white and his mouth dropped open. “What did you say?”
“You heard me quite well. And I assume that you know what it means.”
Shaking, he stood up. “It can’t be.”
“It is.”
His son looked pale, too, but clearly didn’t understand what was happening. Tana Berrique wasn’t sure herself, but she felt the power from her words and their hard impact.
“He told me this day would come. He told me those words would come.” The large old man started to cry.
“Father?” The son stood as well. “What does this mean?”
“An old promise, son. Go gather your things.”
Tana watched the son’s face go red. “My things? What are you saying?”
“Our work is done,” the Regent said. “We’re going home now.”
“But this is my home. You said so. You said—”
In a bound, the old man stood over his son, hand raised to slap him down. The son buckled and cowered on the floor as his father’s voice roared out: “What I said doesn’t matter. We leave now and hope for mercy later.”
“I’ll let myself in,” Tana Berrique told him.
#
Behind the throne room, in his private bedchamber, the Emperor of Ascending Light lay beneath a stasis field, attended by scuttling jeweled spiders that preserved his life. Tana Berrique stood at the foot of the massive circular bed, her body trembling at the sight of him.
He’d been a big man once, muscled and broad-shouldered, but the years had withered him to kindling. His white hair ran down the sides of his head like streams of milk spilled onto a silk pillow. His hands were folded around his scepter. She stepped forward and dropped to her knees beside his bed, thumbing off the stasis field to awaken him from long sleep. The spiders clattered and scrambled, unsure of what to do with this un-programmed event. The paper-thin eyelids fluttered open and a light breath rattled out.
Tana Berrique bowed her head. “You summoned me, Lord.”
“Yes.” His voice rasped, paper rustling wood. “Are my people well?”
“They are not, Lord. They need you.”
The tight mouth pulled, thin wisps of beard moving with the effort. “Not as such.”
And she knew what was coming now. The reality of it settled in as she recalled the boy’s words. They will not prevent me, he had said, you will. “What would you bid me, Lord?”
“Kill me,” the Emperor of Ascending Light whispered. One hand released the scepter and thin, dry, brittle fingers sought her hand. “Let it all change.” He coughed and a spider moved to wipe his mouth. “It is time for change.”
“I don’t think I can.” She felt the tears again, hot and shameful, pushing at her eyes and spilling out. She wanted to drop his hand but could not. “I don’t think I can. I can’t.”
He shushed her. “You can. Because I am your Emperor.” His lips twitched into a gentle smile. “You will obey.”
Tana Berrique stood and bent over her god. She felt the sweat from her sides trickle forward tracing the line of her breasts as she leaned. She felt the tears tracing similar paths down her cheeks. She shuddered, bent further, and kissed the dry, rattling lips. She placed her hands gently on the thin neck and squeezed, the soft hair of his beard tickling her wrists. The eyelids fluttered closed. She kept squeezing until her shoulders shook. She kept squeezing while the spiders panicked and climbed over one another to somehow complete their program and preserve a life. She kept squeezing until she knew that he had gone. Her hands were still on the throat when heavy boots pounded the hallway.
“Missionary General!” Captain Vesper’s voice shouted from outside, “Is the Emperor okay? The Regent’s retinue is packing for a rapid withdrawal and no one is telling me any—” She heard him clatter into the room. “What are you doing?” he screamed.
She turned quickly to face him. Panting, eyes wild, face drawn in agony, the young officer pulled his sword. “What are you doing?” he asked again, pointing its tip at her as he took a step forward.
“I’m doing what I’m told,” she said. “And by the Ascending Light you’ll do the same or watch all our Lord worked for crumble and decay.”
He paused, uncertainty washing his face.
“You already know, Alda.” She gestured to the bed. “He wanted more than this for his people.”
The sword tip wavered. “I thought we were working for more,” he spat.
“We are. He was.” She waited. “I’m doing what he said.”
“What proof have you?”
She shook her head. “None but his words to me and me alone. And something about the Yellowing Field. I don’t know what—it meant something to the Regent, though.”
Alda went paler. The sword dropped. “The Yellowing Field? Are you sure?”
“You know of it?”
His shoulders slumped. “I do. It’s a Brigade story from the forging of the Empire.”
“I’ve never heard this,” she said.
He walked forward, looking down at the Emperor. “There are many things you’ve not heard,” he told her. “When S’andril was young he saved a boy who swore he would repay him. ‘I have saved your life today,’ the Emperor told this boy, ‘and one day I will bid you repay me by not saving mine.’” He looked up at her. “I am at your service.”
She sat on the edge of the bed. “We’re not finished yet,” she told him. “There’s more.”
He nodded. “The boy?”
He understands, she thought. He truly understands. Her words came slowly. “It will be bloody. Many will die. But after this, we can rebuild. There will be no further Dissents. The Families will burn out their rage and then we can have peace.” Because, she hoped, if the god is truly dead then the idea of that god can live on without harm.
His voice was firm. “His family, too?”
“No. Spare them but keep it quiet. Just him. He won’t struggle. It’s what he wants.”
“And after?” Alda Vesper stood.
She played the words to herself, then said them carefully. “After, I will Declare the boy myself and give witness to his Ascent.” An eternal emperor, she thought, on the throne of each heart. An invisible empire of Ascending Light.
“God help us,” Vesper said. He spun on his heel and left.
She sat there for a while and wondered what her life had suddenly become. And she wondered what would come after the lie her god bid her tell?
She would return to her guest quarters. She would clear the window and sit in front of it and stare down into the garden, wondering what it would be like to breathe the hot air of Pyrus, swim the boiling rivers of its jungles, pluck the razor flowers by the water’s edge. She would address the Council of Seekers and dismantle the Mission. She would write it all down, this new gospel, for the generations to come after and go into hiding from the wrath of the disappointed and unforgiving.
Finally, she stood to leave.
&nb
sp; Vesper’s words registered with her. God help us, he’d said.
She looked down at the Emperor of Ascending Light one final time.
“He already has,” she whispered.
The Photograph
By Veronica Montes
It was Marivic’s idea of what an old white woman might like: loose black tea, a tin of English lemon biscuits, pink sugar cubes, and—Marivic loved this best—a tea strainer in the shape of a house. She’d packed it all with exaggerated care into a floral gift bag and tied it with raffia to present to Mrs. Jameson, the good, good friend of Jonathan’s mother. But when she smiled and handed the gift to Mrs. Jameson, Marivic knew immediately she’d made a mistake. Better to have brought a bottle of Macallan Scotch or a ladies’ polo shirt from Pebble Beach. She silently chastised herself for ignoring the many hints offered by Jonathan’s mother. “Tish? Tish once played golf with President Bush! The older one, mind you,” she had said. And also, “That Tish loves her cocktail hour.”
“Well, thank you, sweetheart,” Mrs. Jameson said. She fingered the raffia as if it were the hair of an ugly child.
“You’re so welcome. Thank you for having us, Mrs. Jameson.”
“Oh, call me Tish. The only Mrs. Jameson I ever knew was my mother-in-law!” She passed the gift bag to a small, doughy woman who seemed to have emerged from the kitchen for just that purpose. “Now let me look at you,” she said. She held Marivic’s chin in her hand—her fingers smelled of tobacco—and turned the young woman’s face from side to side. “Lovely, Jonathan! Your bride-to-be is lovely.”
“Thanks, Tish. It’s great to see you. It’s been too long.” He embraced his mother’s childhood friend, crushing her thin body to his chest. “Mom sends her best, of course.”
“You always were just too, too handsome,” Tish murmured. She excused herself then, explaining that she couldn’t miss her afternoon soap opera. The doughy woman, whose name turned out to be Penny, showed Jonathan and Marivic to their room.
“You look familiar,” Jonathan said. “You’ve worked here a long time, haven’t you?”
“Yes, sir, I have. I remember when you were just a boy. What a firecracker you were!”
Jonathan laughed and turned to Marivic, who usually reveled in stories about his childhood: the time he flung himself off the roof of the station wagon to break up a battle between two squirrels, for example, or how he once ate an entire jar of peanut butter in a single sitting. In fact, they’d come to Albany because Marivic had wanted to see where Jonathan was born.
The first time he took Marivic home to his parents, she’d spent hours leafing through the family photo albums, excavating history and asking questions that no one could answer: When did Uncle Charles begin to lose his hair? Why did Aunt Jenna leave her first husband? Why did this person have no children? Why did that person have so many? Jonathan had been flattered by her interest. His other girlfriends—a harmless group of interchangeable, flaxen-haired law students, marketing directors, junior investment bankers—had not cared all that much, really.
He soon discovered that Marivic’s fervent curiosity was a trait shared by her entire family. Not only did the Lozadas know everything there was to know about each other, they wanted to know everything about anyone who innocently wandered into close proximity. Marivic defended them on principle, but was mortified by their inability to mind their own business. She had yet to recover from the time her Auntie Yeng asked Jonathan how much he had paid for his house. “Excuse me?” Jonathan had said. And then Auntie Yeng repeated the question a little more slowly, thinking that her accent was standing in the way of proper communication. Jonathan skillfully responded not with how much his house had cost, but with how much it was worth on the market.
She’d fallen in love with him that day: his kindness, his patience. Since then, Marivic had devoted much of her time to proving that she possessed a firm grasp of propriety as practiced in Jonathan’s world. She had begun to think of this 5-day trip to Albany as a sort of graduation day, though if you asked her what she was graduating from, she would not have been able to say. Her friends—other Filipino girls she had known since high school and college—teased her about the subtle changes in the way she dressed or the restaurants she had begun to frequent. The collared shirts, she lied, were a career necessity. “Marivic,” they said, “you supervise an after-school program.” She shrugged. As for her new taste in food, well, she was just expanding her horizons. The friends raised their eyebrows and called less often. It was just as well, Marivic thought.
After Penny left the room, Marivic sank into the toile-covered chair near the bedroom window. She could make out a river snaking across her sightline, and she wondered vaguely what its name might be.
“You okay?” said Jonathan. “It was a long flight.” He knelt between her legs, just as he’d done the day he proposed. It was three weeks ago now.
“Was the gift alright?” she asked.
He paused for just a moment. And then: “Of course. Tish loved it.”
He reached for the tiny black buttons that held her cardigan closed, but she instinctively covered her chest. “Jonathan?”
“Hmmmm?” His head was nestled, now, against her stomach.
“What were you thanking her for?”
“Who?” He lifted his head. “What was her name—Penny?”
“No, not Penny. Tish. Were you thanking her for saying I’m lovely? Because that doesn’t make any sense.”
“But you are lovely.” He kissed her neck.
“She practically inspected my teeth. Did you see?”
“Come on, that’s ridiculous,” Jonathan said. He scooped her up as he would a child and lay her on the bed.
#
In the pocket of time that existed after the sex and before leaving for dinner at the country club, Marivic saw the photograph for the first time. It hung over an antique desk in what Penny the maid mysteriously referred to as “the great room.” There were many objects of interest in the great room, and Marivic was embarrassed to realize that she was standing in the center of it, spinning around slowly to take it all in. The action seemed contrived, insincere. She stopped immediately and stepped gingerly towards the head of a buck emerging from the wall above the fireplace. She stared up into its nostrils, and noted with satisfaction that several cobwebs had collected there. Then, because no one was looking, she stepped into the fireplace and laughed at the absurdity of its size.
A two-foot by two-foot diorama was built into another wall. It housed a parka-clad adventurer scaling a snow-covered mountain. The diorama was as out of place as Marivic. And yet she was holding her own. Surely Jonathan had felt the same way the first time he visited her parents’ cramped, everything-covered-in-plastic living room in Daly City. Or had he? The truth is that Jonathan had spent so much of his life fitting in that even when he plainly didn’t, he remained blithely unaware. Marivic flicked her fingernail against the glass of the diorama and looked around the room. She wasn’t alone.
“Isn’t that something?” said Mr. Jameson. “I hate the thing, but it sure makes for good small talk.” He took a sip of his scotch and raised it in Marivic’s direction. “Hello. You must be Marivic.” He pronounced her name like this: Mary-Vic.
“Yes, I’m Marivic,” she confirmed, gently correcting his pronunciation to the more musical mar-ee-vic. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Jameson.” She felt as if she’d been caught fingering the family jewels. How long had he been standing there? Had he seen her walk into the fireplace? She scrambled for something to say. “But what is this doing here? It’s uncommon, isn’t it?” she asked, pointing with her lips at the diorama.
“Oh, I should hope so. The man who owned this house before us used to build the things—well, on a much larger scale, of course—for the Museum of Natural History.”
“I see,” said Marivic. She was aware of Mr. Jameson watching her, and elected to deflect her discomfort by moving continuously around the perimeter of the room with her hands
folded behind her back.
“Where are you from, dear?”
“I’m from San Francisco. Well, a suburb of San Francisco.”
“And before that?”
“Before that? Well, nowhere. I was born there.” Marivic was used to the awkward attempts that strangers made when trying to extract her origins, and she knew the type of answer they wanted to hear. For years now—ever since a run-in with a nasty woman at the grocery store who kept yelling at her for being “a Chinese”—Marivic had resolutely refused to give it. She continued her stroll around the room.
And then there it was.
The photograph was presented in modern gallery style: a simple black frame and three inches of white matting surrounded the sepia-toned centerpiece. “But where…?” she said. “Where did you get this?”
Mr. Jameson joined Marivic in front of the photograph. He wasn’t drunk, as far as she could tell, but the sharp odor of alcohol hovered around them. “Oh, this,” he said. “My uncle—sort of a black sheep, you see—took photographs for the government. He took this in the Philippine Islands,” he said. He said it as if she wouldn’t already have known it, as if she couldn’t feel the tug of the string that tied her directly to the image.
“Do you know what year it was?”
“I don’t know much about it all, really. Early in the century, I suppose.”
Marivic thumbed through the sketchy history she carried in her head. “It must have been for the 1902 census,” she said, trying to keep her voice from rising in excitement. To release her sudden excess of energy, she bounced lightly on the tips of her toes.
“I can’t say for sure,” said Mr. Jameson. He took another sip from his drink as he considered the possibility. “Sounds right, though. Yes, that must be it.”
Marivic didn’t know where to begin; there was so much to discuss. She pointed her body in the direction of the couch—shouldn’t they sit?—but Mr. Jameson remained rooted to the floor. And so she tried to pick a starting point, a door into the conversation. “I have a relative who worked as a clerk during the census,” she began. “I’ve seen the punchcards they used to categorize people—all these little boxes to fill in what color a person was, if they were Filipino, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese. If they were ‘superior’ or insane or dumb or blind.” Marivic shook her head in a sort of fascinated disbelief.
OUTPOURING: Typhoon Yolanda Relief Anthology Page 3
