by Robert Reed
This new home was enormous, and that was just the portion of the palace where he was allowed to walk unattended.
The very important boy ruled one big room while the old-man teacher lived behind the next door. The very important man lived at the end of the long hallway, and entering his quarters only brought trouble. The giant with two mouths lived somewhere else inside the palace, and the orphans occupied two nearby rooms. There was a big rich-smelling kitchen and a small dining room to be shared by everybody, plus toilet rooms and playrooms, and there was one long room filled with fancy glass boxes and warm machines and huge cages where dumb animals lived and every kind of book—what he thought of as word-cakes—perched on the shelves. There was also space where three students could sit in their desks while the teacher stood before them, talking for half of the day at a time, saying very little that made sense.
The very important boy was owned. The man with the gray beard and dead wives was one of the owners. There was no disputing that fact. Ownership brought certain duties and obligations, including sharing a bed with the boy. The habit of sleeping together survived after they arrived in this place, but nothing was the same as before. The gray-beard was better than the boy about forgetting the past, but he couldn’t forget that wicked time when the boy shoved him inside a dark sack, which was horrible. And more important, the boy was growing older. He had never smelled human, but as the days passed, he was acquiring the odor of a genuine man.
Grown men didn’t sleep together. That rule was too old to measure.
Every creature had its rank, some distinct measure of worth and respectability, and that man-boy was becoming a potential rival. Snarls and curses were perfectly fine means to coax an enemy off the bed. A pair of fingers got eaten, but they didn’t mean anything to the man-boy. It was the teacher who put a long arm over his favorite student’s shoulder, explaining with words what teeth and violence had not made clear.
“You can’t sleep with Good anymore,” the teacher said.
The boy was sad before that news, and he was sad afterwards. Nothing had changed.
“You’re going to have to find another bed,” the teacher said to the other man in the room.
Stealing more fingers would cause useless trouble. The gray-beard surrendered the ugly bed to the stupid, ungrateful man-boy. But where would he sleep now?
One of the orphans used to be a boy, but he had grown up tall and thin as a stick, and his beard was finally coming in, giving him his own harsh, threatening stink. The other orphan was more woman than girl, and her scent was very pleasant, yes. But she didn’t appreciate his odor or his honest manners, and that’s why he was banished to a playroom, given a bed of cushions in the corner between bare walls—a space where a thoughtful man could lose his gaze in the middle of a long sad night.
The world was sad, and the world was very angry.
Every bad thing was blamed on the war. The war was everywhere and it seemed old and sure to last forever. Every visitor talked about battles and the big fires happening in far-off places. That kind of talk only made the sadness worse. Didn’t they understand? The fire and fights happened in other places. This new home was strong, and there were soldiers here to keep it strong. The palace was at the heart of the world, and while there used to be gunfire and explosions, that was hundreds of days ago. Even miserable people agreed that the fighting was not as awful as it used to be, and the gray-beard understood that what became small often vanished, and that was what gave him hope.
Many nights were spent inside the playroom, but he didn’t sleep well.
To claim that he grieved for his dead family was to miss the truth. Every wife had to die, and being his child meant that life would surely find its end.
Death was no mystery to a smart man like him.
His grief—the deep ache in his bones—was the irreparable loss of his fine, well-deserved life. Each day used to hold the promise of new women and the familiar blackwood tree and the sounds of being outside and the feel of wind and the endless easy joy that came with pissing into the morning sun. But this new life was lived indoors, more than not. And what was outside was not a happy realm for his kind.
The two-mouthed giant was a frequent visitor. He was called the man-boy’s brother, except he looked and smelled like nothing else in the world. People plainly did not understand what the word “brother” meant, which showed how stupid they were. But a creature like him might make a good companion for the man. One day the giant came to the boy’s room. He wanted to talk about the sister that nobody else ever saw. It was just the two of them and the tiny man with the fine old beard and the deep wise eyes, and that seemed like a good time to climb onto one of those slick armored shoulders, biting the first fingers that reached up to brush him aside.
The man’s meaning was misinterpreted.
Thrown into the hallway, he decided to never try to claim any giant for himself. They weren’t worth the bother.
A second door stood across from the boy’s room. The door was closed, as usual, but it wasn’t locked that day.
He eased the door open and peered inside.
The boy’s mother was sitting on the edge of her bed. She had always been old, but she was badly hurt before coming here and she seemed much older now. Her wounds had healed, but what remained was tired and quiet. She often slept longer than anyone else, including her sad son, but she was awake just then, dressed and sitting on her bed, looking at the floor in the same staring fashion that he used during the longest nights.
Something in her posture and her eyes touched the little man.
He approached slowly.
The woman had never approved of him. Never once had she shown him more than grudging tolerance. But when she saw his face, she said, “Hello.”
She didn’t smile, but her expression wasn’t as sorrowful.
“Haddi,” he said.
That was her name.
“Good,” she said.
That wasn’t his name. The boy heard him say that word several times, and he misunderstood its meaning. “Good” meant good, nothing more, and his true name could only be spoken by the tongue of orange-headed men.
Once again, he said, “Haddi.”
She thought of making the man leave. He could tell from her mouth and how the eyes got cold for a moment.
Without words, he jumped up on the bed, avoiding her reach while starting to pull gently at the softest blanket. Maybe if he were quiet and careful, she wouldn’t notice his presence.
The old woman decided to say nothing about the interruption.
She stood slowly and did nothing, deciding what to do. Then she walked to a big box filled with little boxes. On top of the big box was a picture of her dead husband. The clearest, brightest pictures of Merit were lost with their home, but the very important man who lived down the hallways had found this picture. He had brought it to Haddi as a gift, and despite its age and the yellowing paper, she had squeezed the picture under glass surrounded by a frame.
The orange-headed man understood pictures, and better than some of his kind, he respected the magic people saw in such things.
“Sad face,” he said.
Haddi didn’t react. She didn’t seem to hear him. But she picked up the frame, pulling the dust off with a fingertip, and then turning to him, she quietly asked, “Are you tired?”
It was still morning, and he was making a nest in her bed. Yes, he was tired, and saying so wouldn’t lighten his burdens.
Haddi opened her mouth, golden teeth glowing. Something less than a smile broke out, and she asked him, “Do you ever think about our old tree?”
There were more important matters to think about than one lost tree. But the little man didn’t have the energy or focus to explain even a portion of his busy mind. Instead he made one small and very mournful sound, hunkering down against the blanket, wishing for the chance to nap.
“All right,” she said.
What did she mean?
“You can sleep here
,” she said. Then she gave both of them a good lie, saying, “Sleep here, but we’re never going to be friends.”
The past was jammed with lost belongings.
Diamond’s father was trapped inside unreachable days. The boy’s old room and simple bed and Mister Mister and all of the loyal lifeless soldiers were trapped there too. He used to be surrounded by trusted faces, and other people had been polite to him and often friendly, and the days were generally pleasant, and life pretended to be as stable and strong as a giant blackwood.
Any other child would be within his rights to cry about all that was gone.
But what Diamond missed as much as anything was an idea—the wrong silly stupid idea—that he was ill.
There were moments when he remembered being the weak child, a fragile little shadow of a boy who was sure to die any time, and he clung to that memory, wishing it could be true again.
But death wanted nothing to do with Diamond.
Even worse, an unbreakable brain lived inside his human-shaped skull, and that brain was powerful by any measure.
Waking in the middle of the night, normal people forgot sometimes where they were and who they were with.
Diamond always knew where he was and that he was alone.
Tonight he was lying at the edge of a giant bed. He was awake for a long while before opening his eyes, and then he looked across the room. Little splashes of light huddled near the door. Otherwise the vast space was filled with inky darkness. Good was sleeping soundly in Mother’s room. When Diamond sat up, nobody noticed.
He sat up and rubbed at what his dream had done to him, and he stared at the dream, which was as ordinary and empty as any that he had ever experienced. He was standing inside the Archon’s quarters with the faraway ceilings and the magnificent furnishings. List, the Archon, was standing beside King, the two of them discussing the war’s progress. Nobody else was present. Every phrase had been yanked from overheard conversations. Battles that would win the war were about to happen. Except of course those battles had come and gone and nothing had changed. Every military ship named in these plans had been destroyed long ago. List and his son were firing giant bombs that didn’t exist anymore. They were going to scorch papio cities that were already left as ashes. Key trees and installations had to be defended, except all of them had fallen into the sun hundreds of days ago. And most remarkably, father and son spoke as if they were generals, as if they had any genuine role in the endless waging of war.
Everybody in that dream was trapped in the past, and nobody knew it.
Diamond quit rubbing himself. A fancy metronome stood on the table beside the bed. Touch the button and it glowed inside. Even if this was a short night, the night was young. Why was he awake? Putting his bare feet against the fur-covered floor, Diamond shut his eyes again, listening intently. Eventually one sharp blast found him, followed by a bigger explosion that came rolling in from the same direction, passing through the room before hurrying across the darkened world.
The war wanted to be noticed.
The war was an angry baby that screamed loudest when it was ignored.
Diamond dressed in yesterday’s clothes. His room’s main door opened with a touch, and he stepped into the hallway. A sentry was at the end of the hallway, guarding List’s door. There was just enough light that the sentry could watch a boy cross to the toilet. No rules were being broken. Nothing needed to be said. Other guards were nearby, but the rooms and passageways were designed to keep most of their protectors out of sight. What passed for home was a self-contained space buried inside the Archon’s ancient palace. Only three routes led inside and out again, and each of those doors was kept locked. Home was a hard-shelled seed tucked in the middle of a giant fruit. The palace was the fruit wrapped inside a fortune in corona scales, but this interior house sported its own layers of scales and skin as well as cunningly hidden sacks filled with water—a stopgap means to frustrate the fire bombs that still hadn’t managed to come this far.
List’s quarters were in the center. Diamond’s people lived on this side of List’s quarters, and King lived on the other side, near the Archon’s offices. Windows were forbidden, which was for the sake of security and very reasonable. But it was an absence that never stopped reminding Diamond of his first room, closed off and secret, and that made it easier to remember how small and fragile his body had felt in those times.
Diamond used the toilet and flushed the bowl, and he let the sentry watch him return to his room, which was his plan.
The door floated on greased hinges, and by turning the knob, he made the hard sounds that a sentry expected to hear when the bolt was resting in the jamb.
The nightlights were luminescent yogurts. He stared at them and waited for the sentry to begin his routine rounds.
Another distant rumble arrived, following the same pathway.
Diamond was no little boy anymore. He wasn’t grown either, but the enduring body was showing interest in maturing. What had always looked small was gaining meat and strength. He would never be half as powerful as King, but when they trained together—and they trained every day, without fail—it was apparent that Diamond was going to wield more power than most fit men.
The curly thick hair was very long just three days ago, but then it was sheared off and sent to a factory making armaments for the war. Like everything else about Diamond, his hair only looked human. But it was as strong as the best kinds of silk, and if woven together in the right way, a mass of his hair could become the armor that an important soldier wore over his heart.
The world was that desperate. One boy’s hair could win the war.
The sentry wasn’t moving.
Diamond waited.
Humans, true humans, grew sick when they were sad. Beasts called grief and depression engulfed the soul with blackness, and the blackness could kill even the strongest among them. Mother was depressed for a long time after Father died. Diamond had worried about her. Everybody was concerned about her state-of-mind. But then Good couldn’t sleep with him anymore, and somehow the monkey ended up inside her room. After that, she wasn’t so sick with misery. Not that Good made her happy, because he didn’t. But his face looked at Mother when she spoke, relating thoughts that she kept from others, and the monkey was older and better trained now, which helped the two of them live together. Mother was so comfortable with her friend that she had begun planning how she would have to change her life to care for an orange-headed monkey as he moved into old age with its endless, unremarkable problems.
Sadness and blackness and every shape of worry had found Diamond, and each clung to the deepest reaches of his mind.
Yet his mind was unbreakable, stubbornly free of numbness, or worse, the hopeless serenity that came to some people when they suffered an absolute collapse.
Diamond could not stop remembering who began this war. In his head, a button was waiting to be pushed or be left alone, and the boy pushed it willfully, without hesitation. There was no forgetting the moment or the very good reasons that shoved him into that moment. He could summon every doubt and every smart regret suffered over the last five hundred and ninety-one days. But doubt and regret didn’t wipe away one event. The Ruler of the Storm launched its worst weapons, and the war eventually killed the airship and half of its crew, and most of the survivors had perished in a string of less historic, relentlessly tragic battles.
Diamond had memorized the crews’ names, and because those tallies were published on occasion, he studied the pages for those names. That was an important, awful chore. And despite the misery, Diamond was prepared every day to read another long line of dead names.
The palace was ruled by security. No part of the world was genuinely safe, but these rooms were secure enough that hundreds of known faces could work close to the unbreakable boy, and every day brought strangers through the guarded doors. There were events to be attended—symbolic meals and symbolic meetings and audiences with dignitaries eager to see both of the corona’s child
ren. Standing beside Diamond, some visitors made it their duty to assure the odd boy that nobody blamed his finger for the war. That was a lie, of course. But sentries and servants, ambassadors, and various generals felt it was important to remind him that the Eight did horrible things to the world. It was the Eight who killed his poor father, and revenge was something that everybody understood. There was also blame for the papio and certain awful people among the human ranks, and there were plenty of hatred that was already ancient and would survive this business just fine. “As inevitable as the days,” they said about war—a phrase too old to have any author. And then the optimists would claim that if Diamond hadn’t punched that button—if his courage had failed him—then the next war would have certainly found them on even less decent terms.
Strangers could afford to share a single comforting position. But those who saw Diamond every day had offered a variety of opinions, conflicted and often contradictory. The Archon’s aides and the generals had told him that he was blameless but wars should never be launched without planning and every advantage. Office workers assured him that vengeance was right, even noble, but a hundred days later, the same voices claimed that nothing right had been accomplished and nothing good could be found anywhere. Everyone liked to talk about evil people dying, yes, but they couldn’t stop from praising the heroes and the innocent who died every day. Nissim and Elata and Seldom were trusted voices: each had held Diamond by a warm hand, claiming that their lives would have looked much the same without war. Or maybe they were talking to themselves, wrestling with doubt. With or without the war, this odd family would have come to the District of Districts. They were destined to stand behind heavy walls and locks and paranoia. That was the future and always had been, at least since Marduk fell, but it was hard to argue that the rest of the world would been the same tonight if one salvo of reef-hammers had remained asleep inside their tubes.
