In the Lion's Mouth

by Michael Flynn

  “By the way, let me congratulate you,” Oschous said before leading the scarred man inside. “Your performance has been excellent so far, but you are not nearly as disintegrated as you pretend.”

  Donovan hesitated only fractionally. “No, not really.”

  “Why the act, then?”

  “If I failed to meet your expectations, you would send me back to the Periphery.”

  “You can see how well that worked. A tool ought not pretend to uselessness. If you’d been just another Shadow recruited into the struggle, we’d’ve discarded you that first night, in the alley behind the bar called Apothete. There’s a ravine there … But the name of Geshler Padaborn was worth something, even if the man no longer was.”

  Donovan sighed. “And now…”

  “And now I have some matters to ponder privately. Who else knows?”

  “Ravn, of course.”

  “Of course. Based on the reports we had had, I had opposed bringing you back. I expected very little from you.”

  “And now?”

  “I expect a little more.” With his teeth, he pulled the cork from the bottle and spat it to the side. “Here. This is the fenny.” He filled both glasses, raised his, and waited for Donovan to do the same.

  “To the blue skies and the green hills,” he said. “To all that was and all that yet might be.”

  A terrible silence formed between them, into which the Fudir finally spoke the countersign:

  “To the Taj and the Wall and the Mount of Many Faces,

  “That Terra, long a province, be her own world once again.”

  Oschous tossed back his fenny and Donovan watched to make sure he swallowed before he did the same. “So,” he said in the Tongue when both glasses had been emptied, “thou art of the Brotherhood?”

  “Aye and all. And I swear that what we say will be said only here and only now. May I never see Green Terra if I lie.”

  “How, brother, rose a Terran so high in ranks Confederal, being that the Folk suffer much on this hither side of the Rift?”

  “By nosuch else means than the lie of silence. I speak Manjrin with no-but accent. I speak nogot-nothing of Herself. The man who joineth the Abattoir loseth his past.”

  “A thing convenient in this wise.”

  Oschous nodded. “Even so. I will now tell thee a thing so that thou mayest join with us at last. This is the thing. The Brotherhood will in this rebellion support us, and the payment be much of a such, no-but less than Terra free, and autonomous in Her own affairs. And with the right of all Terrans to return there to live their lives.”

  Donovan swallowed and, within the confines of his heart, the Fudir wept. The young girl in the chiton sang. But Inner Child came alert, and the young man in the chlamys remained silent.

  Oschous inserted a rod key into the wall. A tabernacle swung open and from it he removed a casket. This he placed on a small sweetwood table in the center of the little room. The opened lid revealed a few scoopfuls of dirt.

  Donovan stared at the dirt in silence; then he lifted his gaze to his host and the question in his eyes never reached his lips.

  “Aye,” said Oschous. “The soil of Terra Herself.”

  The Fudir extended a hand, hesitated; but Oschous nodded, and he touched the dirt.

  Perhaps it is true that the accidents of dirt are the same everywhere, that a scoopful of Dao Chetty or of High Tara would own similar moisture, similar texture, similar chemicals. But the substance was surely different. This dirt was earth in a way that no other dirt could be.

  The scarred man had few sentiments. Behind the cynical exterior with which he faced the world was a cynical interior. His tears and smiles and anger were mostly constructed for effect. But the tightness in his throat was genuine. It came from none of his nine personalities, but from his body, directly from the soil into his blood.

  “The Brotherhood will join the rebellion?” he said when he could trust his voice again.

  “Not openly. Many who travel with us would part company if they thought this matter Terran. The negotiations are delicate and private. Neither Dawshoo nor Gidula know of them, and thou willt not tell them so. But, ‘aye and all.’ They will be in it.” He let that sink in before adding, “And you, Donovan buigh, Geshler Padaborn … If not for vengeance and not for pride, perhaps for the liberation of the Mother World.”

  The Fudir nodded dumbly. “Aye,” he heard himself say. “Aye and all.”

  “Ah, well said, Gesh!” Oschous exchanged arm-grips with him. “Well said.”

  Slowly, reluctantly, Donovan broke contact with the dirt in the casket, and Oschous closed the lid and restored it to the hidden tabernacle in the hidden room. Donovan said nothing while he did. That Oschous Dee Karnatika had lied to him he was certain. But the nature of the lie so far eluded him.

  CENGJAM GAAFE: THE SIXTH INTERROGATORY

  “So,” says Bridget ban, leaning not toward the now-silent Shadow but toward her daughter, “he threw in with them after all.” There is a mix of triumph and satisfaction in her voice that Méarana does not care for. Her mother had the finest intuition in the Periphery, but sometimes she leapt to conclusions. That was well enough when the conclusion was on the other side of a chasm—who can cross a chasm in small, careful steps?—but sometimes it was simply irritating.

  She strikes her chords sharply, a jarring dissonance. “Did he? He had grave doubts that Oschous had told him the truth, or at least the whole truth.”

  “Then where,” Bridget ban asks with a sweep of her arm, “is he? Leaving the Confederation cannot be impossible, given that that has made it here.”

  That sits on the sofa and grins without comment.

  Deft fingers wrest a defiant tune from the strings. “Sometimes, when you are going through hell, there is only one thing you can do.”

  Her mother cocks her head. “And what is that?”

  “Keep going.”

  Graceful Bintsaif says nothing. She senses that there is a different debate underway than merely whether Donovan joined the revolution. She puts an apple to her lips, but her eyes never leave the Shadow. Her right hand strokes the butt of her teaser. She has not yet refastened the snap. Sunlight slashes through the blinds of the bay window and strikes the carpeting like the burn lines of a light cannon.

  “When a man is in stress,” says Bridget ban, “he runs to his beloved.”

  “He was cooming here when I diverted him.”

  Bridget ban tosses a fleeting look toward Méarana before turning to the Shadow. “So you say. He thought he left something here. But his greatest love has always been Terra. And that is the apple which finally tempted him to bite.”

  Graceful Bintsaif glances self-consciously at the apple in her hand and quietly lays it aside. She thinks about moving her chair before the sun is directly in her eyes.

  “I think, Mother,” says the harper, “that he had a greater love. Or one that with nurture might become so.”

  “You?”

  “We did go on a faring…” The harper hesitates and looks to the Confederal and decides against offering details. “All things have their final causes. We did go on a faring together, and were you not at the end of it?”

  Bridget ban snorts derision. “And you at the beginning. When did he realize that you were his daughter?”

  “Sooner, I think, than you have.”

  Oh, that brings silence to the room! Bridget ban’s face turns marble; Graceful Bintsaif’s wary. Ravn Olafsdottr claps her hands and rubs them together. “I loove family reunions!”

  After a moment, Méarana begins again to play with her harp, trying one theme, then another.

  Finally, Bridget ban says, but as if to herself, “It matters not what he wist. The siren sang, and he has gone off with her.” She does not look at Ravn Olafsdottr when she says this, though her eyes search out every other quarter of the room.

  “Ah, Mother, ye’re a fool. Ye hae e’er been his end, even when he knew it not himself. If he maun topple an empi
re and free a world to make his way here, why, he’ll do it.”

  Olafsdottr raises her brows. “You think he can break an empire?”

  Méarana strikes a gay chord. “He has a habit of breaking things.” But she does not explain.

  Bridget ban has recovered her aplomb. She smoothes her blouse, tosses her hair, and nods toward Ravn. “Then, why is he not here? If this could come, why not that?”

  The Confederal smiles broadly. “I coom to that part shoortly.”

  Méarana misses a string, creates a discord. “He’s deid, isnae he?” she says without looking up. “An’ ye’ve come by here tae torture us wi’ the news.”

  Olafsdottr’s eyes soften fractionally. “Ah, why would I wish to torture you, yngling? For who else here would feel pain at such a tiding? Only you and I.”

  Bridget ban mutters, “Ha!” But Méarana stares at the Shadow. “You?”

  Her mother answers for her. “You forgot, did you? Donovan made his choice well before—when he might have turned back with her but did not. She saved him from the Frog Prince; and he nursed her afterward. There’s a bonding in that. But never forget this…” And she pointed toward the Shadow as if toward an inanimate object. “They ne’er do aught by chance. Every word she’s spoken since coming, every gesture of her body, even her choice to chant her story like a skald, has been to a purpose. Everything has an end, you said? Aye, an’ ’tis true, or Nature would not follow laws. You say that you and I are the end that the Fudir pursues? Ask yourself, then, what is Ravn Olafsdottr’s end?”

  The Shadow chuckles into the silence. “A nameless grave, moost like. But coome, my friends, this tale regards me noot. Let’s leap ahead to Yuts’ga, there to find deceit and ambush foul, where in her darkened alleys Shadows—and worse—do prowl.”

  VII. YUTS’GA: A ROLE, IN THE HAY

  Yuts’ga, whose star, once spied from Earth

  In nameless twinkle, whose seas once swam

  With proto-life prolific, joined in metazoan joy,

  Her skies well crossed by many streams, convulsed

  At times by strife to seize them, has now in gentle peace

  Reposed these slumb’rous years, to dream … of what?

  Here too, a crucial bottleneck where messages

  Must criss and cross their way among the stars,

  A place where proper hands may stay or speed

  Intelligence sore-needed elsewhere by the foe.

  And so have Shadows dimmed Fair Yuts’ga

  To gather all into that fatal commonwealth

  In which we all find membership. In stealth

  To play the game upon the razor’s edge;

  Life sweetly-dreamed along the borderlands of death.

  Yuts’ga was known once as Second Earth; but that was in the Commonwealth’s palmy days, when comparisons to Terra were made openly and with pride. She bulked larger than the Homeworld, tugged a bit more than bones or muscles liked, and spun more slowly. She owned a moon too, which they called “Djut Long Dji,” which meant “second moon” in some ancient tongue of Terra; but their grandchildren’s grandchildren wondered why it was called “second” if there was only one and the name eventually collapsed into Tchudlon.

  She was a large moon as such things go, and it was a rare thing for a small planet to have a large moon; but she was not so large as Luna, and so was less of a pestle to Yuts’ga’s mortar. The seas were stirred by moderate tides; life was ground, but not so finely as on Earth.

  Still, life was life. It was more than the prokaryote cryptolife that was the fruit of most worlds’ groanings; more than the lichens that had graced the downy cheeks of Dao Chetty. Her vast world-sea was called the Wriggling Ocean because there were—by the gods!—worms burrowing in the ooze. Who knew what might next be found?

  The answer, as it turned out, was nothing; and as world after barren world followed, men ceased to care. Worms? They vanished under the bioload of the terraforming arks. An easy job, the old captains said. Yuts’ga had done half their work already. They stroked her seas and quickened her with fish and insects and smiling crocodiles, graced the land with pine trees and waving grasses and fragrant rhododendrons. They did remember to save a few of those ur-worms, and studied them closely and found them much like Terran acoels; but they did not let them get in the way of things. There was work to do! A galaxy to conquer!

  Much later, the world was called “Tikantam,” which meant “the sensible horizon,” because her star was the farthest of the Commonwealth suns plucked by eye from the skies of Terra. But it was not too long after that men ceased to care what could or could not be seen from Terra. There were convulsions, wars, cleansings. In the end, as epigones reconnected their ancestors’ bones hoping that they might once more live, the older name was rediscovered and she became Yuts’ga once more.

  Somewhere along the way, they lost the worms.

  * * *

  Yuts’ga was now a moderately prosperous world, dimly aware that she had once been important. But importance was gathered now into the Secret City like pretty baubles into a raven’s nest, and the Yutsgars hunkered down and did as they were told. Now and then, the plates trembled and the sea floor turned over and the night breezes brought the stench of the ooze onto the land. “Worm weather,” the Yutsgars called it, though no one remembered why.

  Cambertown was the largest city in the Arwadhy District and the site of Number Three Spaceport, and several Confederation Sector Offices. The people there spoke a dialect that was a mixture of the old Taņţamiž lingua franca and the cant of the Zhõgwó, who had held the Mandate of the Heavens before the Vraddy. Consequently, they spoke Manjrin in an antique manner that otherworlders found alternately charming and exasperating. Definite articles were nowhere to be found; “is” and “have” lurked in elliptical constructions; and parts of speech oft jammed together into a single word. They would serve you up a word, and then start decorating it like a Festal Tree, adding markers for voice, tense, aspect, person, and sometimes just for the hell of it, negation, so that after you thought you had grasped the gist of it after all, it was turned at the very end all topsy-turvy on you. “Of course, you help ing do will I—not” was a favorite punch line on scores of nearby worlds.

  * * *

  The Mountain Dragon Inn stood on Fishbound Street in the Seventh District of Cambertown, just off the Ring Road. There were no mountains in the surrounding countryside; and even dragons were more rumored than seen, so where the name came from no one knew. It was justly famed for its own brew: Bartholomew Black.

  Domino Tight was a small man, well formed of countenance. His hair curled in tight, black ringlets; his lips curled in perpetual good humor. A good man to drink with; a good man to sport with. During one assassination, he had reduced his target to helpless laughter while in the very act of killing him. “Screams of laughter,” he liked to say when he told the story on himself, which was often enough that it had grown tedious.

  He had settled himself into a companionable silence in a booth near the inn’s rear exit with a schooner of Bartholomew Black. But a Shadow like Domino Tight does not wait for no purpose. He waits for signs and portents. He was on Yuts’ga to move the Talker of the Yutsgar Nexus. Once that unfortunate was cleared away, the Third Undersecretary for Information could take charge of the Interstellar Comm Clearance Center, and message packets entering the Sector on their way to Dao Chetty would thereafter be inspected, censored, and cleared by the Revolution. But while the Talker was a dead man walking, he was under the protection of the loyalist Shadow, Pendragon Jones; and so he might yet walk a little farther.

  It was a matter of insertion between Pendragon Jones and the Talker. Domino Tight had narrowed the search to Cambertown and had scattered his magpies to scour the city for signs.

  From time to time, young men and women garbed in the current fashions of the Arwadhy drifted into the Mountain Dragon, some for a “pint o’ th’ Black,” others for the free lunch, but still others to drop a word or two in
the ear of Domino Tight. Pendragon’s magpies had been spotted here, there, moving thus. The Shadow collected these words and pricked them off on a chart he kept on his pocket screen. The screen pondered vectors and applied algorithms of the mathematical art, searching for the barycenter of the motions, for at that centroid would, like mistress spider, lurk Pendragon Jones.

  Among those lifting “pints” in the Dragon were three of Domino Tight’s magpies—Two, Five, and Fourteen—forming a cordon. There was also a man at the bar who reminded Domino Tight of steel wool. He did not grow hair so much as bristles, and the eyes above the thin mustache were a deadly topaz. Domino Tight wondered if he might be in the Life and crooked a finger at Two, who shook her head at the question.

  “Not one of Pendragon’s men,” she murmured when called to his side. “We’ve pegged them all. A courier for someone else, maybe, just passing through.”

  Or a local thug—a mover, a scrambler, or whatever they called their petty criminals in Cambertown. He sat on a bar stool and drank his Black and seemed to pay no mind to the comings and goings of magpies, by which Domino Tight knew he was paying very keen attention indeed.

  The rear door to the Mountain Dragon creaked open and Domino Tight released the safety catch on the teaser he held unholstered in his lap. A bilaterian, like many Shadows, his left hand oft worked independently of his right.

  The light from the wall lamps blotted out and the entry to the booth was eclipsed by a presence. Domino Tight reengaged the safety catch. “G’day, Jacques. When did you blow in?”