Captain Vorpatril's Alliance-eARC

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  “Wait, she was there? I mean, here? At the time?”

  “Oh, yes.” He yawned and stared sleepily down the street, then perked up slightly as a long, sleek, familiar groundcar turned onto the block. The municipal guardsman waved it into its reserved parking space with studied officiousness, and saluted its occupants as they disembarked. Lady Vorpatril was accompanied, or escorted, by Simon Illyan, with the driver Christos bringing up the rear and holding a large cloth bag that clanked.

  The guardsmen took up parade-rest poses at a respectful distance away, and Christos knelt in the street to withdraw a bronze tripod and bowl from the bag, setting them up next to the plaque. He nodded to his mistress and went to join the guardsmen; they greeted each other and conversed in low tones, then one of the guardsmen went out into the street to direct the growing trickle of traffic safely around the site.

  “Good morning, Ivan,” Lady Alys greeted her son. “Happy birthday, dear.” She hugged him, and he returned her what seemed to be the regulation peck on the cheek. He nodded thanks to Illyan’s echoed, “Happy birthday, Ivan. Thirty-fifth, isn’t it?

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Halfway through your Old Earth three-score-and-ten, eh? Incredible that we’ve all survived so long.” He shook his head, as if in wonder. Ivan grimaced.

  The War of Vordarian’s Pretendership had been more in the nature of an abortive palace coup, as Tej understood it from her recent reading. Shortly after the ascension of the five-year-old Emperor Gregor under the regency of Aral Vorkosigan, the rival Count Vidal Vordarian and his party had made a grab for power. In the first strike, they’d secured the capital city, the military and ImpSec headquarters, and the young emperor’s mother, but the boy himself had slipped through their fingers, to be hidden in the countryside by Vorkosigan’s gathering forces. It had proved an ultimately fatal fumble.

  There had followed a months-long standoff, minor skirmishes while each side frantically maneuvered for allies among the other counts, the military, and the people. Captain Lord Padma Vorpatril and his wife, Lady Alys, relatives and known allies of Regent Vorkosigan, had been cut off in the capital during the coup and gone into hiding. Padma’s death rated barely a footnote, less even than the skirmishes. Had it been a chill and foggy night like this?

  How much more, not less, surreal the tale all seemed, now that Tej had been in the same room—and shared cream cakes—with the grown-up, forty-year-old Gregor. Not to mention…

  The present Lady Alys, composed and commanding, turned to take Tej by the hands. “Good morning, Tej. I’m pleased you came.”

  Tej considered the significant difference between husband shot and husband shot in front of your eyes. She ducked her head, suddenly shy before this woman in a whole new way. “Thank you,” she managed, unsure what else to say.

  “This is the first such memorial service you will have seen, I understand?”

  “Yes. I’d never even heard of them before.”

  “It’s nothing at all difficult. Especially not after thirty-five repetitions. Sometimes people perform it on the anniversary of their loved one’s death, sometimes on their birthday, sometimes other occasions. As need arises. Keeping the memory alive, or getting in the last word, depending.” A dry smile turned her lips. The amber light leached the color from her face, and turned Ivan Xav’s uniform drab olive.

  Lady Alys and Ivan Xav knelt by the brazier. With a brisk efficiency, Lady Alys pulled a plastic sack of scented bark and wood shavings from the cloth bag and upended it into the metal bowl. She pulled a smaller packet from her purse and shook out a mat of black and silver hair clippings atop. Ivan rummaged in his trouser pocket and unearthed a similar packet, adding a fuzzy black blot to the pile. Parsimoniously saved from their most recent haircuts, maybe? They both stood up.

  Lady Alys nodded to the plaque. “This is where my husband was shot down by Vordarian’s security forces. Nerve disruptors—poor Padma never had a chance. I’ll never forget the smell…burning hair, among other things. This ceremony always brings that back.” She grimaced. “Ivan was born not an hour later.”

  “Where was his uterine replicator?” Tej asked.

  Three faces turned toward hers; Lady Alys’s twisted in a wry humor. She touched her stomach. “Here, dear.”

  Tej gasped in new and unexpected horror. “You mean Ivan Xav was a body birth?”

  “Everyone was, in those days. Replicator technology had barely reached Barrayar, and didn’t become widespread for another generation.” Lady Alys stared at her uneasy son in reminded ire. “Two weeks late, he was. Nine pounds!”

  “Not my fault,” muttered Ivan Xav, very much under his breath. He added to Tej, not much louder: “She mentions that every year.”

  Lady Alys went on more serenely, “The friends who rescued us…me, almost in time, hustled me away to an abandoned building in the old Caravanserai district—very run-down and dangerous, back then—not too far from here. Sergeant Bothari, rest to his troubled soul, played midwife, for lack of any other with the least experience in the task, including me. I was so terrified, but I couldn’t scream, you know, because Vordarian’s men were still out there looking for us. Bothari gave me a rag to bite…I can still remember the horrid taste, when I think of it. Nauseating. And we got through it somehow, dear heavens, but I still don’t know how. We were all so young. Ivan is older now than Padma was then.” She regarded Tej in sudden wonder. “I was just twenty-five. Your age, my dear. Now, there’s a strange chance.”

  Half past strange and aiming for very unsettling, Tej thought. But a new, or newly-revealed, reason for this aging woman’s unexpected sympathy to another young refugee mourning her dead grew very clear, like ice, or crystal, or broken glass, or something else with sharp and dangerous edges. Oh.

  She knows. She knows it all, and more, probably. Maybe Lady Alys’s glossy surface had to be so thick and smooth because it hid so much…?

  Simon Illyan’s brow furrowed. “Where was I, during all of this? I do wish I could have been there for you, Alys…”

  She touched his supporting arm in reassurance. “You were smuggling Admiral Kanzian out, to Aral’s great tactical benefit.”

  His face cleared. “Ah, yes, now I recall.” He frowned again. “Fragments, at least.”

  “Trust me, love, after thirty-five years, fragments are all anyone recalls.” She turned again to Tej. “As Ivan’s bride, you are now a part of this—however temporarily. Would you care to lay some hair on the fire as well? Since you’re here.”

  Tej was taken aback all over again. That seemed to be happening a lot, lately. “I…is it permitted?” Not offensive? Apparently, it was perfectly allowable, because all the Barrayarans nodded. Lady Alys drew a small pair of scissors from her purse—secreted for just this hope, or did she always carry them?—and snipped a curl from Tej’s bent head. She handed it to Ivan Xav, who laid it atop the pile and set the wood shavings alight. Little flames crackled up, hot and swift. There did not seem to be any formal words to be recited, because everyone just stood around watching, the flames reflecting in their shadowed eyes as tiny molten glints. The tops of the highest buildings, visible in the distance, sprang into color as the first sunlight reached them, but down here all was yet a pool of damp gray, with the fire a shimmering orange blur in the autumn murk.

  Not formal, but words—very low, from Lady Alys; as though she told secrets. “Padma and I were hiding in what was then a cheap boarding house down the street. Just there.” She pointed to a building a few doors down, half-concealed by renovation scaffolding. The scent of burning hair was very pungent, now. “When I went into labor, Padma panicked. I begged him not to go out, but he was frantic to find someone, anyone, to take over the terrifying task of delivering a baby that women all over the planet had been doing every damned day since the Firsters landed. Though I had the biggest part of the job, and wasn’t going to be able to wriggle out of it by any means whatsoever. So he went out, leaving me alone and petrified for hours with my c
ontractions getting worse, waiting, and of course he promptly got picked up. Once they brought him back and we’d both been dragged out into the street, he tried to stand up to armed men, all penta-drunk as he was. But I knew, then and forever after, that it wasn’t his bravery that killed him—it was his cowardice. Oh, dear God, I was so angry at him for that. For years.”

  Illyan touched her shoulder; Ivan Xav stood warily away. Illyan said, “Kou got you and baby Ivan out, didn’t he?” Giving her thoughts a more positive direction?

  “Yes. Lieutenant Koudelka—later Commodore,” she glossed to Tej, “Kou managed to smuggle us out of the city in the back of a grocery van, of all things. His father had been a grocer, you see. Lurching along in the vegetable detritus—Ivan very hungry and noisy, to be sure, and not happy to be thrust out into the cold world in the middle of a war.”

  The little flames were almost gone, gray ash starting to drift away in the stirrings of air from the passing vehicles. The acrid smell was abating.

  “This is a Barrayaran ceremony for remembrance,” said Lady Alys, turning to Tej. “It was always my intention, when Ivan married, to turn this task of remembrance over to him, to continue or not as he willed. Because…memory isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.” Her hand reached out and gripped Illyan’s, who gripped it back in a disturbed little shake, though he smiled at her.

  “Thirty-five years seems long enough, to me,” Lady Alys went on. “Long enough to mourn, quite long enough to be enraged. It’s time for me to retire from remembering. From the pain and sorrow and anger and attachment, and the smell of burning hair in the fog. For Ivan, it’s not the same, of course. His memories of this place are very different from mine.”

  “I never knew,” said Ivan Xav, shifting uncomfortably. “All that.”

  Lady Alys shrugged. “I never said. First you were too young to understand, and then you were too adolescent to understand, and then…we were both much busier with our lives, and this had all become a rote exercise. But lately…in recent years…I began to think more and more about giving it up.”

  By every sign, she’d been thinking about this for quite a while, Tej thought. No one built up that much head-pressure overnight. She looked her alarm at Ivan Xav who, belatedly, slid closer and put a bracing arm around her waist.

  “It was just something we did, every year,” said Ivan Xav. “When I was really little, of course, I didn’t understand it at all. We just came here, burned this stuff, stood around for a few minutes, and then you took me to the Keroslav bakery, because we’d not had breakfast. I was all about the bakery, for the longest time.”

  “They closed last year,” Lady Alys observed dispassionately.

  “Not surprised. They’d kind of gone downhill, I thought.”

  “Mm, that, and your palate grew more educated than when you were six.” She added after a reflective moment, “Fortunately.”

  The flames had burned out. At Lady Aly’s gesture, Christos came back with the bag and a padded glove, upended the bronze bowl and tapped out the ash, wiped it with a cloth, and put it all away again. He stood up with a grunt.

  Lady Alys brightened. “Well. That’s all over with, for another year at least. Given that the bakery is gone, removing an occasion for tradition without any effort on our parts, would you both care to come back to breakfast at my flat?”

  Tej glanced at Ivan Xav, who nodded, so said “Sure! Thank you, Lady Alys.”

  They followed the sedate groundcar in Ivan Xav’s two-seater. Tej looked over her shoulder to see the municipal guardsmen taking down the lighted barriers and putting them away in their vehicle, returning the street to its normal morning traffic, which was growing notably busier. It was full dawn, now, and the city was awake, eager to get started on another brand-new day. Looking forward, not back.

  Thirty-five funerals seemed too many. Yet none was not enough. Tej wondered, if Ivan Xav would help them to it, if she and Rish would feel any better for burning some hair in a little pan for Dada and the Baronne, and Erik. Maybe you had to be raised to this.

  She turned to Ivan Xav. “What a morbid way to start your every birthday, when you were a child. I mean, most children get presents, and sweets, parties, maybe ponies here on Barrayar—even we and the Jewels all did. Well, not ponies, not on a space station. But you know what I mean.”

  “Oh, I had all that, too,” said Ivan Xav. “Later in the day. Quite ornate parties, for a few years, when the mothers in Mamere’s set were competing with each other. All that was damped down by my mid-teens, when we kids were all more intent on moving into adulthood as fast as we could, God knows why.” He blinked reflectively. “Not that their teens are something most people would want to linger in.” And after another moment, “It felt like childhood came to a pretty abrupt halt when I started the Imperial Service Academy at age eighteen, but looking at some of the frighteningly dewy new-minted ensigns they’re sending us these days, I’m not so sure. Maybe that was an illusion on our parts.”

  And, after a much longer pause, while he negotiated a few corners and dodged incoming traffic: “Sure taught me the price of Vorpatrils mixing in politics, though. I didn’t understand much, but I had that down by the time I was eight. I mean—other boys had fathers, most of ’em, even Miles had Uncle Aral, scary as he was—I had a bronze plaque in the street that groundcars ran over. That made Mamere either sad or twitchy or bitchy by turns, but never happy.”

  “Is—was—she always this, um?” Tej wasn’t sure how else to describe Lady Alys. Desperate for escape? “When you do this burning thing?”

  His brows drew in. “No. She’d never told me some of those crazy details, before. Funny thing, that. I mean, she’s the one who had that damned plaque installed in the first place, right? Makes me wonder—if she didn’t enjoy this, and I didn’t enjoy this, and my father, whatever he was or would have been, is decades past caring, why do we keep doing this? She didn’t have to wait for me to get married to stop. She could’ve stopped any time.”

  “Some passing-of-the-generations thing?” Tej hazarded.

  “I guess.” Following Christos, Ivan Xav turned in at the garage under his mother’s building, and offered no more illumination.

  Chapter Twelve

  The rest of Ivan Xav’s thirty-fifth birthday passed quietly, although he did take Tej and Rish out to dinner at an intimate restaurant featuring Barrayaran regional cuisine, where he appeared to be well known by the staff. Rish drew stares and whispers as they entered, but no overt insults.

  “I thought they didn’t like mutants, here,” murmured Tej.

  “Byerly says my appearance goes so far beyond what Barrayarans usually think of as mutants that their categories break down,” said Rish. “Although he did warn me to stay out of grubber venues if I don’t have outriders. Except he didn’t say grubber, oh, what was that Barrayaran term…”

  “Prole?” said Ivan. “Plebe?”

  “Prole, that was it.”

  “Yeah, probably good advice, till you know the territory better.”

  To Tej’s surprise, they were guided to a five-person table with two seats already occupied. A solid, dark-haired man who looked to be in his forties, not handsome but striking—blade of a nose, penetrating nutmeg-brown eyes—stood up as they approached; a younger, athletic blond woman, taller than her partner, smiled across at them, clearly interested in but not shocked by Rish. This must not be a grubber venue.

  “Happy birthday, Ivan,” said the man, shaking Ivan’s hand. “Congratulations on making it this far alive.”

  “Yeah, really,” said Ivan Xav, returning the handshake and smiling in evident sincerity. “Tej, Rish, I’d like you to meet my friend Duv Galeni, and his wife Delia.”

  The blond woman waved in a warm way; Galeni bowed Vor-like over Tej’s hand and murmured, “Lady Vorpatril,” and shook Rish’s, “Mademoiselle Rish.”

  After they were all seated, studied the menus, had the Vorgarin District-style stroganoff recommended, and placed their orders
, Tej asked, “How do you all know each other?” Because Galeni was no Barrayaran Vor, certainly; wrapped within that cultured voice Tej heard a faint Komarran accent.

  “Delia, I’ve known all my life,” Ivan Xav explained. “Her father, Commodore Koudelka, worked for my uncle, back when. Aide-de-camp and secretary.”

  Not unlike Ivan Xav’s job, this seemed to say. “Wait, was he the lieutenant who smuggled baby-you and your mother out of this city back when it was under siege?”

  “Yep, that’s the one. Three more daughters, y’know. Where are they all, at the moment, Delia? Because I figured Tej could stand to meet some more Barrayaran women.”

  The blonde replied, “Martya’s down in the Vorkosigan’s District with Enrique, working on one of Mark’s projects. Kareen’s on Escobar with Mark—I’m not sure when they’ll next be back. And Olivia’s out in the Vorrutyer’s District with Dono. Would Count Dono count, do you suppose?”

  “No,” said Ivan Xav, then hesitated. “And anyway, that’s a lame pun.”

  Delia grinned unrepentantly; Galeni hid a smile behind his hand.

  “And you and Ivan Xav?” Tej inquired of Galeni.

  “I don’t go as far back as Delia,” he replied easily. “I first met Ivan when I was senior military attaché at the Barrayaran Embassy on Earth, and Ivan, as a wet-behind-the-ears lieutenant, was assigned as one of my assistants. About…has it really been ten years?”

  “Eleven,” said Ivan Xav, a bit glumly.

  “My word.” The crow’s-feet at the corners of Galeni’s eyes crinkled.

  As the first course arrived, Galeni and Delia took it in turns to draw Tej and Rish out about their own travels. Rish was describing their time on Pol when Tej, overcome with a sense of Morozovian déjà vu, turned to Galeni and said suspiciously, “Wait. Are you another ImpSec man?”

  “Well, yes, but I promise you I am off-duty, tonight,” he assured her.

  His wife put in proudly, “Duv’s been head of ImpSec’s Komarran Affairs department for the past four years. He was one of the first Komarrans to enter the Imperial Service, as soon as it was opened to them.”