Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  Of course, Rath thought in frustration now, being unimaginable was the whole problem. He knew the younger regents had to be getting out. He had heard rumors of them, the secretary general’s guards had reported seeing them, and Ulvane….

  Rath looked over his shoulder at his wizard tracker. He was a shriveled, wizened man, his brother-in-law. What had once been a healthy head of dark, wiry hair with a white streak blazoning down his brow like an obscene tapestry of sex and corruption was now a dirty grayish bird’s nest, and the white streak blended right into the lank mass at the man’s shoulders. Ulvane kept telling him that there were filthy wizards right under his nose, that the foulness of the Goddess had invaded his House of Regents, and it wasn’t that hard to guess the source.

  Anyone could see that Ellyot Moon was just as lousy with the Great Whore’s pox as his father had been. The whole idea made Rath shudder. Ellyot was, as his father before him, uninvited and unplanned. Rath hated anything that was unplanned. The world was ordered perfectly. The twin moons obeyed that law—they rose and set in predictable orbits, and the sun too, could be documented in an almanac with regimented punctuality. It was the wandering moon, the Whoring Moon, that was the aberration. Rath hated the irregularity, the unpredictability of that moon with everything in him.

  It wasn’t natural, and his wife’s death just proved that.

  If anyone had asked him, Rath would have said that he loved his wife. If he were truthful, he would have said that he just didn’t understand her. Had he possessed the imagination he needed to realize that the regents were all sneaking out of the back of the apartment complex and vaulting over the wall to get to the Goddess ghettoes, he would have realized that what he didn’t understand, what he had never understood, was why she would have chosen to love him when he had been the first to admit that the moons that drove them, that pulled at the tides of their hearts, had inhabited two completely different orbits.

  He himself had no choice but to marry her. She was one of the few female regents at the time, and she had such a following that she was sure to be elected Head Regent at the next election. She had looked at him after a meeting he had found irritating because of its disorganization and had winked, inviting him in on a joke he did not get.

  “They’re interested—that’s good,” she’d said brightly. He frowned.

  “It’s messy. We accomplish more when things are quieter.”

  Her grimace had been good-natured, but it rankled at him that a woman would contradict him so publicly. “Well, yes, but accomplish what? A bill to give the regents their own flats? What good is that? Most of them have their own townhouses anyway. Today we’ve funded sewage in all quarters of the city! That benefits people who’ve been trying to stay healthy for years!”

  He had wanted to tell her that if they couldn’t worship some orderly gods, it was simple justice if they fell ill to the chaos of their own squalor, but she had all of that power rolling in her wake. It had made her round face and round bottom temporarily excusable. Even as she grinned at him and asked if he would like some dinner during break, he was making plans to change her diet, so that her face would not be quite so round. Fat was messy, and it offended him in the same way the poor did with their constant disorganization. Any fool could organize a peaceful home; those who couldn’t, he was sure, deserved what fate dealt them.

  So Yahnston Rath had no idea what had attracted his wife to him, but he was honest, at least with himself, about what had made her so attractive to him. Romance and kindness were for fools, but political aspirations were acceptable motivations for anything, as long as one had the greater good in mind.

  Rath felt that his urge to help the greater good excused the fact that his love for his wife was based strictly on what he could gain from her as opposed to what her open heart would have given him freely.

  He almost lost all to be gained when she died in childbirth. He blamed her death on the Goddess moon too. His plans had been perfect, but childbirth was as unpredictable as that damned gloating moon, and her body had rebelled at his seed in it as his body had rebelled at the thought of touching her after she had conceived. Ugh! Her body had been functional but not desirable when he’d shared her bed, but after he’d gotten her with child? Everything puffed up, swelled, grew in size and odium. He didn’t like the female body as it was; things were always jiggling or leaking fluids, and his wife had never had the grace to be embarrassed by this.

  “We’re animals by nature, Yahnni.” Oh how he’d hated that nickname. “The fact that our reasoning is as sharp and bright as the stars is what makes us wonderful!”

  But she had been ill with her pregnancy, which had made it easier and easier for him to usurp her duties. She had won by popular vote, and her people followed him out of love for her. He had resented that as much as he’d enjoyed using it. They were fools for following a creature who was such a slave to puffy ankles and queasy moods. Women were weak, but the men who let them believe they had anything approaching the ability to lead were simpering idiots, and he had no sympathy for the way he used their affection. If they had attended to the matters at hand—the elimination of weakness and disorganization—in the first place, he wouldn’t have been so driven to intervene.

  Her death had almost undone his entire three years of duplicitous servitude to a woman who repulsed him. How could he keep the regents under control when the person he was supposed to be serving as proxy had died?

  He would never admit that it had been his wife’s midwife who had provided the answer.

  Rath detested the man on sight. What sort of man made his livelihood tending to women during the abomination of childbirth? It stunk of magic (which he refused to believe in, all evidence to the contrary), and the warmth of the man’s smile and the brown of his kind eyes reminded Rath of composting shite.

  But hate him or not, Torrian Shadow had calmed the terrific caterwauling that accompanied the junior Rath’s entrance into the world, and for a moment, Rath had been supremely grateful.

  And then the man stuck his head out of the birthing room and started commanding Rath’s very own servants. His arrogance had been horrific. Remembering the moment, Rath could hear the echo of the man’s voice, even in his sanctified, clarified, sterilized white sitting room that surveyed the very seat of power of the strongest, most civilized nation under the three moons. The voice set up a vibration of unease that seemed to penetrate Rath’s stomach. If he’d had an imagination, or believed in magic, even in a magical land, he would have said he was haunted.

  “You, come here and hold the baby. Yes, he’s fine. Now rock him. You, come here—I need your hand here. Please, just keep pressure. Oh Goddess, that bleeding….”

  The commands had been done softly, without heat, and Rath had been content to let Torrian Shadow do his work while Rath did the paperwork from the day’s regent session. Standing now, nearly twenty-three years later, Rath could recall that it was legislation on the river—some simpering soul seemed to feel that it should be allowed runoff, or the current would be enough to sweep the unwary through the slough and over the falls at the edge of the city. Rath would veto it eventually, but he had been seriously surprised when the midwife had stormed out of the bedroom in a fury to confront Rath, when Rath hadn’t so much as looked at his wife straight in the previous six months.

  “Did you know she was like this? Was she complaining of being thirsty? Of dizziness? Of nausea?”

  Well, how was Rath to know? She was always whining about something. Who knew what was important and what was simple puling weakness? Rath had been busy trying to run a country toward civilization—he hadn’t had time to sort out whatever she had been babbling during their time together. He had, in fact, done his damnedest to tune it out. Some of his disgust must have shown on Rath’s face, because the healer had shaken the white streak from his eyes and sneered.

  “Oh, I see. You’re a twin fanatic. Go back to pretending this doesn’t involve you, and I’ll try to keep your property alive.
”

  The words had been a slap in his even-featured, aesthetic face, and Rath found himself suppressing a snarl, but Torrian hadn’t even stayed to see him react; he’d gone back into that foul-smelling, chaotic room, ordering around Rath’s staff as though it were his gods-given right.

  At last it was over. His wife died, calling his name, but he had seen no reason to go in. She was dying, and even the magic-fouled healer could do nothing to stop it. Rath was busy pacing, trying to plan a strategy to keep the ruling position that his wife had given him. He was honestly surprised when the midwife approached him, holding a contented baby, who seemed to be sucking some sort of milk from a clean rag. It was helpless and wrinkled and ugly, and Rath knew immediately that it would resist any schedule he tried to set for it. Well, that’s what his staff was for.

  “You’re not interested at all?”

  No. It was a boy; that was the best thing that could be said about it. Dimly, in the back of his mind, Rath was wondering if he could cull a suitable female from the horde of regents’ sisters and daughters who attended the weekly balls and social events that were a deplorable part of his duty.

  “Well, don’t worry about the political cost. I’m sure you’ll get more than enough pity to stay on the throne.”

  Oh? At last, a solution to his conundrum. A light at the end of the tunnel; people would pity him, and he would stay in power. How marvelous—and his wife was dead. He’d never have to answer to her silly thoughts about the feelings of the poor, or her ridiculous, softhearted ideas about how little it really mattered what moon a body was born under. Of course it mattered; the moon you were born under put you in your place, and your place in this world was everything. Now there was no sweet-voiced, beloved, erratic creature of emotion to interfere with that true tenet of leadership. And of all people, the healer that Rath would rather have run over in the road than have in his apartments had been the person to present the idea.

  Rath smiled then. It was his first honest expression in front of the midwife, and the man actually recoiled. Rath’s glacial, colorless eyes had met the brown eyes of the healer, and Rath was surprised again by the man. There was cunning and rebellion there, a desire to protect the child in his arms that seemed stronger even than the desire of the dead woman in the next room to bear it.

  In a sparking instant, the healer bent his head over the child in his arms and started to whisper over it.

  “What are you doing?” Rath wanted to know. And still the whispering, the hurried, frantic whispering. “Stop it. Stop it! He’s my child. He’s my flesh and blood!” As Rath approached the midwife, his arm upraised, determined to stop the man from fouling what was his, the man with suddenly blue eyes looked up, a terrible flash in triumph.

  “I’m done. I’m done, and you have better things to do than hold your own son. Don’t worry, Consort. He’ll grow up just fine without you.”

  “What have you done, you filthy heathen? That’s Yahnston Rath the Second,” Rath growled, furious that this man should have any relationship with his property other than simply catching it as it slid out.

  “His mother named him Djali—all of your staff heard it,” the midwife said. After that, and for the rest of the night, Torrian Shadow ignored him, as though he knew for certain that Rath would rather vomit on his own lap than go into the room with the blood and the shite and the carcass that had incubated his heir, he simply held the baby to his chest and crooned to it, pushing past the door and into the bedroom. There he gave the baby to one of the maids, who managed to take one of the back hallways and put the infant in the nursery that Rath’s wife had prepared. When the maid was gone, Shadow finished singing his rites for the dead.

  When he was done, he donned his cloak (it had been a chilly night in late fall) and after some hasty instructions to the maid about diet, had gone to sweep out of the room.

  “What have you done?” Rath stood in front of the man, by the door to the bitterly chill night beyond, and the man merely looked at him evenly, his triumphant brown eyes promising… something that Rath instinctively knew he would be unable to fathom.

  “I wished him to know love,” Torrian said after a moment. When Rath’s lips might have curved in a dismissive sneer, the king consort was surprised to see that Torrian held the same sneer, and it was aimed at his monarch!

  “That is an inconsequential wish.” But his voice was uncertain.

  “I wished him to only trust love,” Torrian corrected, that superior expression still taunting Rath to do something about it, “which means that he may have spawned from your loins, but unless you change your heart, King Consort, he will never be your son. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have my own family to look to.”

  And then the arrogant bastard had swept out of the room.

  Even today, the memory made Rath shudder. He had tried very hard not to believe in it. After he’d had Ulvane track down the healer by his gift and the man had died by the side of the road, gagging on his own blood, Rath had tried to convince himself that there was no such thing as magic, and that a person would trust the man who sired him and gave him food and clothing. Love was irrelevant and almost as imaginary as magic.

  But somehow, things had gone sour.

  To start with, Ulvane had fallen into a corkscrew slide to madness. Rath told him that the healer killed his sister, and it had been enough to turn the man into a raving lunatic, a perfect killing machine. But after that, every time Rath made him track down a wizard, a user of the gift, a child of the Goddess, Ulvane had become less and less of a man and more and more of a rabid child, chanting to himself, agonizing over his words, lost between what Rath told him to do and what his gift told him to do, and the blood that he’d seen spilled in the name of his poor sister, the one person who had ever done him kindness. Rath relied on the man less and less, until he was simply penned up in these rooms, roaming them aimlessly, like a feral cat confined to a packing shed, muttering to himself in a kaleidoscope of times gone by.

  But that was not the worst of it.

  The worst of it was that the healer’s curse had come true. Djali never learned to trust his father and was never grateful for the ordered, perfect world of school, clothes, and functions that the boy was given. During Rath’s once weekly visits to the nursery, Djali buried himself in his nanny’s skirts—any nanny, because Rath continually dismissed the women. He disliked it that his son trusted them more than his own father, and although the dead healer’s mocking laughter followed him whenever he turned a woman out on the streets for doing her job, he continued to try to make a difference with the boy.

  It was no use. Djali was willfully dreamy, just like his mother, right down to his mother’s repugnant moon face and her recalcitrant, colorless hair.

  Djali had been ripe for the plucking when Ellyot Moon came to town, and Rath could not, for the life of him, figure out what his son was doing on his rest days with the son of the one rival he’d hated even worse than Torrian Shadow.

  “He never raised rebellion, you know.” Ulvane had a horrible habit of speaking to the things that Rath was thinking and not what he had actually said out loud.

  “The secretary general says differently,” Rath answered. Of course, the man hadn’t been the secretary general then. He’d just been an ambitious soldier who was all too happy to subscribe to Rath’s idea of order.

  “The secretary general would sodomize his own father if you asked him.” Ulvane giggled, and Rath looked at the man, absolutely shocked. Mad, yes. Frighteningly truthful, sometimes, but crude, for no reason? Unless, of course…. “But he’d rather sodomize you!” Ulvane giggled some more, spittle flying out of the corner of his wrinkled mouth. Ulvane was actually younger than Rath, but his broken mind seemed to have broken his body, and he moved and looked the picture of dotage and senility.

  “You shouldn’t say such things,” murmured Rath faintly, truly disturbed. One of his own? A filthy sodomite? Surely not. Surely it was Ulvane’s madness… but even in the pit of madness,
Ulvane had never been wrong about the Goddess’s children before.

  “You doubt,” murmured Djali’s uncle, a crafty, sly-ways look coming into his rheumy eyes. “No doubt that Owen Moon was a traitor, but you doubt that the man who would condemn a family to death would sell his soul to suck your—”

  “I said you shouldn’t say such things!” There was a cracking sound as Rath’s fist slammed into the glass-topped table in front of Ulvane.

  “Your brain is full of shouldn’ts,” Ulvane sang, “which is why it’s full of can’ts.” He giggled again, right in Rath’s face, and his spittle flew out as Rath gaped at his own fist, the center of a network of cracks working its way outward to the white metal frame.

  “You need rest, Ulvane,” Rath said, his voice steely. He called for Ulvane’s keeper impatiently, and the man was shuttled away, but his words, in that whiny, senile voice, would not leave with him. Not that pap about the secretary general—nonsense, of course. Although, rumors about his soldiers and the things they had done in the ghettoes were… upsetting. The fact was the man had done more to further Rath’s agenda of order than anyone else in the administration. The secretary general was a stouthearted man who didn’t quail from the distasteful things that needed to be done, that was all. Satisfied on that account, Rath tried very hard not to dwell on the destruction of Ellyot Moon’s family.

  It would have been easier, of course, had Ellyot Moon and his sister not survived.

  Rath always wondered who had burnt down the barn. He had left orders to let it stand, to paint it with the blood of the family in the symbol of the three moons, with the Goddess Moon ascending. Everybody would know the Goddess trash Owen Moon had given haven to had repaid his kindness with the violence and anarchy of their kind.

  To have his monument to misdirection burned down, when he’d thought nobody had lived…. Well, it had not been a part of his plan, and Rath didn’t like it when things didn’t go to plan. But he had never imagined the barn had been burnt down by family.