This Forsaken Earth

by Paul Kearney

He tried to speak, but the effort merely sent the dry breath clicking in his throat. The sight of her, after all this time, smote his heart still.

  “You have grown up,” she told him softly. And the voice was the same.

  He tried to sit up, and she pushed him back in the bed. At that, they both started, remembering.

  She was the same, and yet not. There were threads of silver in the raven hair, fine fans of lines at the corners of her eyes, and deeper shadows under them. But the eyes themselves were still the color of burnished steel, as striking as those of a black-maned angel. And the line of her neck and jaw was as elegant as it had ever been. Her beauty was a thing of wonder to him. All the pretty girls in all the ports of the world dissolved from memory as he stared upon her once again. It could be she was more finely drawn now, and her skin was so white the veins stood out blue in her neck. Not age, but the tear and wear of the choices she had made. Those eyes, that face; they had broken his heart, and as he lay now seeing them again it was as though the years of murder and seafaring were taken back, and he was a mere boy once more, hammering in fear at a strange door.

  He grasped her hand, his bruised head throbbing in time with his heart. All the hard-won knowledge and experience of his venturesome life seemed stripped away, and for a moment he was again that callow boy, a youngster willing to lay that life at her feet.

  She touched his head. “They gave you a fine bump, but nothing worse, I think. Best not to eat for a while; you’ll only throw it up again.”

  With that she rose from the bed and left him. She was dressed in a simple black gown with jet beads sewn on. They glittered and spangled like little iridescent beetle-wings in the light of the fire. Her hair had been piled up behind her head and was held in place with pearl-topped pins.

  Rol swung his legs off the bed. Her bed? he wondered. They had taken off his boots and tunic but otherwise he was still in the travel-stained clothes he had worn into Myconn. The pain in his head made his eyes water.

  He told himself it was the pain in his head. He did not take his eyes off her for one second. She stood in front of the fire and poured white wine into tall flutes, then turned back to him with the flames behind her, the fireplace huge as a wardrobe, the heat shouting out of it. She was a lean shadow, no more, a shapely demon standing before the open gates of some wondrous hell.

  She was the woman he had loved his whole life. She was his sister, the Queen of Bionar. She was—

  “Rowen,” he said aloud, as though getting used to the sound of the name again.

  She raised her glass to him, and sipped from it. “Fisheye,” she said again, the old nickname he had always hated.

  Rol stood up and padded over to her in his bare feet. It seemed strange to be so much taller than her; it did not feel right that she should have to raise her head so to meet his gaze.

  “You grew tall,” she said. “I knew you would. And broad-shouldered as a bear. But what made you plant that thing on your chin?” She tugged at his beard with her white fingers.

  “Shaving at sea is no simple matter.”

  “Ah, yes. You are a mariner now, a man of ships. I heard that, a long time ago.” A shade of sadness passed over her face. She turned away, finished the pale wine in her glass, and picked up the other.

  “Will you join me, Rol?”

  “You remember my true name, after all, it seems.” He took the flute in his brawny fist; it was like holding a wand of glass.

  “Your true name. Yes, I suppose so. There’s a power in names, I’ve been told.”

  She strode away, and sat in an armless wooden chair close by the bed. Leaning forward, she set her elbows on her knees as a man might, and stared at the floor.

  “Now, quickly, tell me of Canker.”

  A moment of bewildered silence, and then his voice came out harsh, loud as a crow’s.

  “He’s five miles to the north with ten thousand men and eighteen guns. He intends to assault the main camp of the loyalists from the rear, as soon as you have made a sortie from the Forminon Gate to pin them in place. Bar Asfal is in that camp, on the Gallitran Road. He must fall in the attack. If you can kill him, and the main body of enemy nobles around him, then the war is won. The rest will capitulate. You must pick a date and a time for this combined assault, and you must take out every able-bodied man you have in order to convince Bar Asfal that this is a tactic of desperation. You must take the field personally, and it must be soon. Canker cannot keep the presence of his army a secret forever.” Rol’s voice had become mechanical, a man reciting a meaningless list that meant nothing to him. Rowen raised her head and stared at him.

  “Very good. Canker did well.”

  “He is a capable man,” Rol said tonelessly. He drank back the wine in his glass without tasting it.

  “And a persuasive one. I was not sure he would be able to convince you to come here.”

  Rol met her gaze squarely. “Yes, you were.”

  For a long moment they held each other’s eyes. It was partly a contest of wills, partly a naked search for what was in the other. Rowen dropped her stare first. “There is murder in your eyes now. It was not there before.”

  “As you said, I’ve grown.”

  There was a discreet knock on the door. “Your Majesty?” A man’s voice.

  “Not now, Gideon.”

  “I’ll be outside, should you—”

  “Very well. I am not to be disturbed.”

  A pause, then footsteps retreating along a stone passageway beyond.

  “One of your acolytes?” Rol asked lightly.

  “Gideon Mirkady, commander of my Guard. It was he who gave you your bump. A good man, in his own way.”

  “Does he know who I am?”

  “Oh, yes; why else do you think he struck you?”

  “Well, it’s something to be popular.” Rol took a seat on a stool by the fire. The heat could not stymie the ice gathering heavy about his heart.

  “You also have grown, Rowen.”

  “Indeed? I am the same size I always was.”

  She watched him with an air almost of amusement. Rol cocked one eye at her. If his presence here was important to her, she hid it well. He did not know how to say it, but he felt she had become more at ease with herself, and in doing so had lost something he had treasured about her.

  “It would seem you are now one of the great people of the world, a matter for history to ponder. I wonder that you should even remember me, the boy you once knew.”

  “The boy I once knew.” Rowen leaned back, arms crossed on her knees. Her face was unreadable, and on her mouth there curved that meaningless smile. He did not remember her ever smiling like that before. It reminded him somewhat of Canker.

  “This man you are now, Rol, he is what interests me, not cobwebbed memories,” Rowen said. “The past is over, finished. I have proposals for the future, on the other hand, that may interest you.”

  “Why am I here?”

  She pulled a sad face. “Is it not enough that you see me again?”

  “Coquetry does not become you.”

  “It is something I have had to learn; another skill, like killing.”

  “To be here, I gave up my ship and her company. I tramped halfway across a continent. Now I have seen you, and I ask again: Why am I here?” The blood rose in Rol’s face as he spoke, and in his eyes there grew a light wholly unlike that from the fire. There was within it a wintry chill that held no hope of spring. Rowen nodded, watching.

  “I wanted my brother here, to be—”

  “Spare me the bullshit; Canker has already been down that road.”

  She was silent, white and still as something carved out of porphyry. She had once exuded sadness like a perfume; now it had turned into something rank.

  “I wanted my brother here,” she repeated with dangerous softness. “I wanted someone I valued to be by my side in this great undertaking of mine. Someone I trusted.”

  “Canker you can trust, and that fool outside. They would
slit their own throats if they thought you wished to see the color of blood.”

  “Yes, I have many people about me who would do anything I wanted, but none of them would be willing to say the things you have said. I want—” She stopped and lowered her head again, though her face was coldly angry now, remote and perilous. More like the woman he had known.

  “I’m not here to kill for you,” Rol said. There were so many things whirling about in his brain. He took bitterness, because it was convenient, and flung it at her.

  “I don’t need any more killers,” she retorted. “They’re outside in their thousands.”

  They glared at each other. Once again, this seemed somehow fitting. It reminded them of past intimacies, and the ice melted a little.

  “What would you say if I told you I need a friend?” Rowen asked, her voice hard as a plane and her slim fists clenched white. So slim, so fine, and he had seen them take men’s lives with the consummate ease of a true professional. He craved the feel of them on his skin.

  “I don’t want to be your friend. I have enough of those already.”

  She rose in one fluid motion, like water pouring in reverse, and walked over to him, stood by his side so close he could smell her. Lavender; she had always stored her clothes with it. The smell hurled him back into the fogged alleyways and mysteries of his past. The black, bead-strewn velvet of her taut belly was a foot from his face.

  “I have none,” she said.

  She ran her hands into his hair, and he encircled her slim waist, pulled her close, and buried his face in her warmth. He could feel the toned muscle of her back through the stuff of her dress. Beads popped off under his fingers and ticked onto the floor. He rose, his face nosing between her breasts, up to her collarbones, the small of her neck, her ear. Their eyelashes butterflied together. He set his mouth on hers and felt it come to life under his lips. The tips of their tongues circled each other, their body’s water mingling.

  She drew back. A low moan in the air between them, and neither knew who had uttered it.

  “No,” she said, and her voice was thickened and raw. “We can’t do this. Have you forgotten, Fisheye, who and what we are?”

  “I don’t give a fuck,” Rol snarled. “People may think what they like. Even now, we could be happy, Rowen. Alone in all the world, we are the only people who could make each other content.”

  “No,” she said softly, and turned away. Her feet crunched the jet beads underfoot to tiny shards of broken glass. “I must go now; there’s a lot to be done. We’ll talk later.”

  “Rowen!”

  But she left the room without looking back.

  Some time later—a long time, it seemed—the door of the room opened and a maid peeped her head round it. “Sir, it is past morning, and if you will break fast now, I have things here for you, and a valet awaits also.”

  Rol did not reply. He was sitting staring into the dead depths of the fire and picking a stick apart with his fingers, feeding it splinter by splinter into the last flame. The maid rustled into the room with a tray, wide-eyed as a mouse. There was a table, which she set for one, laying out food and drink with clicks and small clatters and the glug of good wine hitting the bottom of a glass. Rol raised his red-eyed face. Rage and grief had carved it into something not quite human. “What’s your name?”

  “Eben, sir.” She clutched the wine decanter to her bosom as though it were a protective talisman. Rol stood up and cast aside his gutted stick. He pried the decanter from her warm fingers and looked her up and down dispassionately. She was a short, black-haired girl with fine green eyes and plump breasts that peered over the rim of her bodice. Rol took one of those breasts in his hand, staring down in her face. Her mouth opened, and he bent, kissed it shut again, his teeth biting down on her lips. His other hand seized her rump through the folds of her dress and kneaded it. She made piteous little squeaking sounds. He grasped her white throat, his tanned skin dark as leather about her windpipe. She moaned in fear, tears gathering thickly at the corners of her eyes.

  “Get out,” he said, and slapped her on the buttocks. “Send in your damned valet.” He drank back a tall, bulbous goblet of red wine and felt it warm the black passageways of his innards. Ah, Psellos, he thought with bitter amusement, would you not be proud of me now.

  “Sir, the Queen has requested that your wardrobe be refreshed in a manner fitting your station.” This from a tall, thin, whey-faced fellow whose nose and Adam’s apple vied for prominence in an otherwise forgettable face.

  The Queen. I had almost forgotten.

  “Indeed; well, show me your wares.” Rol sat down and began wolfing chunks of roast chicken, wedging slices of ham between slabs of bread and spreading all liberally with mustard. He was starved; he did not know if it was night or day outside, but his stomach had not eaten its fill in longer than he could remember. He bit into the food as though it had somehow slighted him, and washed it down with throat-aching swallows of wine. Damn you, he was thinking. Damn you. Damn ambition and the stupidity of people’s pride and the fucked-up fantasies of all damaged souls.

  The valet stood perspiring, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down like a fisherman’s float. Rol finally wiped his mouth and rose from the wreckage of the table. His head swam, and his stomach performed a greasy, interminable roll. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

  Court clothes, stuff that looked well enough in a warm hall but which would be sodden rags within half a day if worn out in the elements. Rol picked through it in disgust. A shirt with a ruffled front as proud as the breast of a pouting pigeon. A wide scarlet sash more suited to opera than practical wear. He could not bring himself to pick anything else, but donned once more his travel-worn breeches and filthy boots, which had been piled beside the bed.

  “What is this room?” he asked the valet, hauling on his damp footwear. He knew now it was not Rowen’s chamber. It had been touchingly absurd of him to even hope it.

  “We’re in the East Wing, on the upper side, sir,” the valet said diffidently. “The Guest Wing.”

  “Where are my friends?”

  “Sir?”

  “I should have been brought here with three others, one of them a halftroll.”

  The valet’s brow cleared. “They have rooms in the Old Wing, near the ground.” He gave a significant look which passed Rol by. He simply nodded, and stamped his toes into the end of his boots. “And where is my sword?”

  “I know of no sword, sir. You had best broach that matter with the commander of the Guard. It was his men who brought you to this room. You had no weapon on you that I could see.”

  Rol smiled grimly. “I see. Thank you…”

  “Harkenn, sir. Abel Harkenn. I am to be your bodyservant.”

  “There’s a first for everything, I suppose. Right now, Harkenn, I want you to find me a bucket, because I believe breakfast is about to reappear.”

  Rol had never walked the corridors of a palace before. Upon leaving his room, feeling a little hollow but no longer queasy, he was joined without invitation or fanfare by two sturdy fellows in well-made black livery that was trimmed in scarlet. They bore long poniards and a pair of pistols each, and as he caught their eye they nodded like men who have kept an appointment.

  “What’s this, an escort?”

  “Orders of the Queen herself, sir.”

  “Why? To keep me from getting lost?”

  They stared at him woodenly. Rol rubbed his forehead. “All right, then. Tell me, where can I find this Gideon Mirkady?”

  “The commander of the Guard?”

  “The very man. Take me to him, if you please.”

  The two soldiers looked at each other. One shrugged fractionally. Preceded by one and followed by another, Rol made his way through a series of narrow and bewildering passageways, all built out of well-plastered and painted stone and lit by swarms of oil-fed lamps which flickered above head height. Passing them, there came in motley succession a traffic of maids, manservants, palace guards, who
acknowledged Rol’s escorts with minute nods, no more, and much grander men and women who made walking into a processional and would have looked down their noses at Rol had they been tall enough to do so.

  He realized that with his mismatched court finery and ragamuffin traveling clothes, he looked like nothing so much as a gypsy thief, and that thought gave him a little pleasure as he winked at noblemen and leered at their daughters. More than anything else at this moment, he would have liked one of them to take offense and seek redress in some time-honored manner that would result in the spilling of blood. He would never fit in here, and did not ever intend to, so he would play the part of boor. Why not? Much of his education and inclination lay that way.

  Below all of these merriments there burned the blackened embers of a dream he had not even admitted to having, all these years. Whatever it was—and he did not care to examine it too closely—he knew that Rowen did not share it. He knew now that none of this would end happily.

  Down they went, descending marble and granite stairways on which coaches could have passed without touching axles. The palace, or this wing of it, opened out. It seemed to have been built as a series of vast reception rooms interconnected by a bewildering series of passages and corridors and serviced by kitchens, storerooms, and servants’ quarters all tucked neatly in convenient but largely unseen orbits about these huge central spaces. Once, Rol found his way to a long avenue of windows as tall as Gallico, and he looked out of them upon a city that was not the greatest in the world, but which had certainly been the epicenter of the world’s greatest power. The winter-dark beyond the glass defied his efforts to decipher what time of day it was, and he had to ask one of his escorting soldiers. The man looked at him strangely.

  “It’s late afternoon, sir.”

  He had been unconscious longer than he had thought. This Mirkady packed a shrewd blow. And now he had Fleam, it seemed. Well, that would have to change.

  The business of the palace seemed little affected by the fact that Myconn was under siege, and if anything it seemed to be mustering a surfeit of revelry. Rol passed packed ballrooms where dancing and masquerades were in full swing, and legions of waiters stood by with silver trays amid the hoot of woodwind and whine of strings. Admittedly, there seemed little enough upon those trays. More liquor than food, it seemed. Perhaps that added to the frenzied nature of the gaiety. He passed one gorgeously caparisoned masked couple fornicating in a less than discreet alcove, the lady’s skirts hitched up high over her silken thighs, the man pumping into her with clenched teeth, as though he were performing a noble but necessary chore. Rol turned to one of his taciturn escorts. “How many levels are there to this palace?”