by P. J. Fox
Under normal circumstances—if anything about war could be called normal, she thought bitterly—the patient was triaged at the aid station and moved further behind the lines for treatment. To an actual hospital. He got what he needed, and space was made for the next poor bastard. Except this time, there was nowhere to go. They were running out of space.
Doctor Shah had some morphine, and he’d been giving that out. A couple of the staff had magnanimously parted with their personal stashes of opium. It was better than nothing.
Shortly after the men from Haldon broke into the compound, Pasha began having hysterics. Aria couldn’t believe her eyes. Hate-crazed lunatics were raping and pillaging on the other side of the wall and all Pasha could do was scream about how she was a daughter of the House of Singh. If Aria never heard that phrase again, it would be too soon. Zerus had tried to quiet Pasha down, but to no avail. She was an important woman, damn it, more important than the rest of them, and she wanted to be rescued! So Aria had done the only sensible thing: she’d slapped Pasha so hard that her head snapped back. Hours later, the imprint of Aria’s hand was still there.
And then she’d screamed. Do something useful!
Zerus, if anything, had been even more taken aback than Pasha.
No one cares who your father is, you nitwit! She’d gestured widely at the gore-filled space. Look around you!
Shortly thereafter, Pasha had begun brewing coffee.
Aria sat back on her heels and wiped the sweat out of her eyes, remembering. She needed a minute. She had no sense of how much time had passed, especially now that she couldn’t see the sun. It felt like years, but she knew it couldn’t have been more than a few hours. Glancing out at the too-dark sky, she guessed that it was about teatime even if it looked like midnight. It was the storm.
With darkness had come a chill wind, and then rain. So much rain. The men who stumbled into the residence were shivering. But the air inside was still humid and close, like a sauna, and sweat poured from Aria’s brow. She felt like she’d been running a road race. Doctoring was hard work and serious exercise. She watched Pasha move through the men, offering coffee and blankets and whatever comfort she could along with a few other women. She’d taken to her task with a grim determination that dared anyone to admit discomfort.
Aria collected a fresh box of bandages. That even Pasha was proving useful gave her hope.
EIGHT
“I’m going out there!”
“You can’t!” The ranking officer, a captain, tried to restrain him. Zerus’ face had gone purple as he strove to escape the man’s clutches. The captain was younger and stronger, but limited by his fear of hurting the old man. Zerus, on the other hand, had no such compunction and drove his knee up squarely between the captain’s legs. He fell back, gasping, as their would-be savior strode toward the door. Zerus’ shoulders were thrown back with a kind of grim determination, and his face was alight with the glow of fanaticism.
Aria tried to stop him. The captain—Biju, Aria thought his name was—held her back.
“He’s going to get killed,” she protested.
Biju didn’t respond. He didn’t have to. Aria did admire Zerus, did like him, but his principles were too inflexible to admit a situation like this.
There was right, according to Zerus, and there was wrong; and, like Ceres had once said, fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim. She knew what he’d meant: that men like Zerus often got so fixated on pursuing some abstract ideal of right that they forgot to consider the actual practical effect of their conduct. A great many men had perpetrated terrible harm while doing the right thing.
Zerus stopped and turned. Aria hadn’t realized that she’d spoken loud enough for him to hear. “No,” he assured her, “I’m not. In fact, I have every confidence that I can put this thing to rest once and for all.” His tone was patient to the point of condescension, as though she were a small child frightened of her own night terrors. He smiled. “We’ve only come to this pass, because we’ve hidden ourselves inside! Once they see us, and see that we mean peace and are willing to negotiate with them, all will be well.”
Aria just stared.
“You’ll see,” he said indulgently.
He couldn’t be serious. No one outside would even be able to hear him! What the incessant boom of the guns and the screaming of wounded men didn’t obliterate, the driving rain did. She could barely hear herself think over the racket, and she was indoors! Moreover, she doubted if either side was even capable of rational thought at this point.
“Please,” she begged, “don’t. Reinforcements will come and—”
“Bah!” Zerus waved her off. “My dear girl, you’re being silly. No one has even tried the diplomatic course—”
“I’m sure that Kisten….”
But Zerus, she saw, was no longer listening. She took another step forward, and Captain Biju tightened his grip on Aria’s arm. He wasn’t concerned with the impropriety of manhandling another man’s consort; the niceties of polite conduct no longer applied, and no one had time to care. She glanced up at him. “Can’t we lock him in a closet or—do something?”
There was understanding in his eyes, but he shook his head. “I can’t spare the men. I’m having enough trouble keeping the ones alive who want to stay alive.” He was right, of course. “I can’t risk their lives—and yours—for one foolish old man who wants to die.”
Aria turned away, and Biju let her go. Kisten had told her about space sickness, and she wondered if Zerus was possessed by something similar. He slipped out the front door and, as he went, he was smiling. Aria was never sure, afterwards, how far he’d gotten. He seemed to have been gone a very long time. She’d gone back to work, her hands busy with an endless repetition of tasks that her mind couldn’t face.
Garja gave her a pill bottle. “Here,” she said shyly, “I thought this might help.”
“Is everyone in this house on some kind of drug?” Aria asked, but without rancor. At this point, she was merely curious.
Garja colored. “They’re not mine.”
“Are you…alright?” Aria asked. “In the kitchen?”
The little maid nodded. “People have to eat. I’m not much of a cook, but at least I can peel vegetables.”
And then Garja was gone. Aria lost herself in cleaning, swabbing, bandaging, and then cleaning, swabbing, bandaging…. Those they couldn’t help, they dosed with what drugs they could spare. Shah cursed the Gods—he’d forgotten that he was supposed to be a monotheist—for abandoning them here, and cursed the worthless sons of goats at the fort.
The door opened in a howl of wind.
It was Zerus.
God alone knew how he’d gotten back to the residence. He’d crawled back on his hands and knees and he was so caked with mud and blood as to be unrecognizable. His face and hands were black. He fell over onto his back just as two of the stretcher bearers reached him, and Aria saw the glistening ropes of his intestines. She’d expected them to be red—to the extent that she’d ever thought about what intestines must look like. But they were a delicate bluish gray, like the skin of a dolphin, and they glistened in the harsh electric light.
“Don’t look.” It was her patient. He only had a broken ankle.
Very gently, they carried Zerus over to the corner of the room and propped him up against a column. Pasha brought pillows; Aria recognized them as coming from her own bed. She watched, unable to move or speak, as Doctor Shah arranged a blanket over him. Zerus’ eyes were closed. His face had a waxy pallor that she’d already come to recognize.
Then, straightening up, the doctor pulled Aria aside.
“Is he…?” She bit her lip.
“If we could get him into an operating theatre,” he said, but didn’t finish. There was no need.
Aria looked past the doctor at the old man. He didn’t look like someone who was dying, she thought crazily.
“Would you like to sit with him?”
&nbs
p; Sit with him until he dies, that’s what he meant. She didn’t respond.
“Here.” Shah pressed something into her hand. “It’s all we can spare. Give it to him if he wants it.”
“You need me,” she protested, but without emotion.
“No I don’t. Go.”
She went.
It was quieter in this corner; the main fighting had moved around to the other side of the house. Aria sat in silence, listening to the beating of the rain on the roof and the beating of her own heart. She gave Zerus some of the opium, which seemed to ease his pain. Neither of them mentioned his wound, or really spoke at all. But watching his chest rise and fall beneath the blanket, Aria felt a stab of sharp, poignant despair. Not so much for Zerus, but for the death of his high ideals; ideals too lofty for such a gray world. Reaching out, she took his hand. His skin was clammy and cold, which she knew came from blood loss.
He hadn’t spoken much and, given the circumstances, she hadn’t expected him to. So she was shocked when, apparently at random, he began to mutter in low tones. At first, she thought he was rambling. She couldn’t even fathom the agony he must be in, and he’d been given a great deal of opium. But then she realized that, no, he was telling her a story.
The blessing of opium was that it stole away fear and left, in its place, a pleasant sort of lassitude that felt like dreaming. Aria had tried the drug, once; she’d tried a lot of things, since meeting her husband. Opium also lowered inhibitions, and what Zerus was saying now was something that, quite obviously, he’d kept buried inside for a long time. No longer truly conscious of his pain—the body, too, had its own ways of coping—he let the words pour forth.
Why here, why now, Aria didn’t know. But she held his hand, and she bathed his forehead with a cool washcloth, and she listened. Occasionally she gave him small sips of water to drink, and he seemed to like that. He coughed once or twice. His lips were chapped.
Aria felt herself pulled in and down…and down….
NINE
There was only Zerus, and his saga.
Aria had heard some of it, before, from Kisten and from Ceres. Kisten, of course, had gotten his facts from Mahalia herself. Piecing all the different elements together as she listened to Zerus talk, she was able to create a more or less coherent narrative of the events leading up to his estrangement from his daughter. His words came slowly and with effort, but it was obvious to Aria that the gulf of years between then and now had no meaning.
To Zerus, Mahalia might as well still be a child.
She’d been a precocious thing, introspective and calm while her friends chattered about parties and boys and clothes. It was perhaps for this reason that Zerus neglected to notice that his daughter was growing up. Until, indeed, it was far too late to do anything about the problem.
When she was young, she’d been as tall and ungainly as a giraffe: all spindly arms and scab-covered knees, her large eyes set slightly too far apart and her hair always in a tangle. She’d compensated for failing to meet the current standards of feminine beauty by being smart. She might not have the delicate round face and elfin stature so prized on Brontes—and in its outposts—but she could out-reason, out-figure, and out-think every girl in her form.
Like her son, she loved mathematics. But she was fascinated, not with the purity of its expression but with its application. In particular, to finance. To say that Mahalia loved money would be incorrect; she didn’t. She was, in fact, remarkably indifferent to whether she had money or not. And, having grown up in a middle class household that flirted with what might euphemistically be called genteel poverty, she understood what it was to go without. But none of this mattered to her; so long as she had a pad of paper, a pencil and a light to use them by, she didn’t care what else she had. Except, possibly, a cup of coffee; she dearly loved coffee.
No, Mahalia was fascinated with the emotion behind money: why people thought and felt about it as they did, and what confidences the coin of the realm represented. It was the why, always the why. If a well-meaning relative gave her money for a new dress, she was just as apt to spend it on gifts for her siblings or donate it to a soup kitchen as use it to its intended purpose.
But I have clothes, she’d said to her aunt once.
That dress, my dear, is half a decade out of date.
It covers my nudity, Mahalia had replied, to great scandal. Isn’t that what clothes are supposed to do?
Eventually, her family had given up.
In the interim, Mahalia—long indulged by her father and regarded as an old maid in training by everyone else—became a beauty. Almost as tall as the average man, she’d never lost her broad shoulders and strong, square hands. She had, however, developed a willowy build that spoke at once of profound strength and almost crushing vulnerability. Her features, in time, had grown to suit her face with such perfection that within a year or two no one admitted to ever having thought her anything but a beauty. Her large, wide-set eyes were a stunning violet; her bow-shaped lips were the kind that men sometimes referred to as kissable.
If Mahalia herself noted the transformation, she gave no sign. She made little to no effort over her personal appearance, a fact that some of the women in her life found vexing. Particularly her stepmother. Even worse, from a certain point of view, was that Mahalia’s severe manner of dress only drew attention to her charms. She wore her blue-black hair in a casual bun, which drew attention to a swan-like neck that her husband would one day find quite irresistible.
She met the man in question when she was seventeen. He’d come with his father on a state visit to Goliath V, a detestable heap of a place and the only home she’d ever known. Zerus, like their guests, had grown up on Brontes. As had Mahalia’s mother. When Zerus was stationed on Goliath V—his academic career having floundered somewhat, he’d taken refuge in the civil service—his consort had come with him. Mahalia was born a few years later, and her mother had died in a car accident a few years after that.
If Mahalia thought that her father had remarried rather…quickly, some might say, she gave no sign. She wasn’t quiet, so much, as conscious of the power of words.
For various reasons having to do with a lack of suitable accommodation for such an august group, Ceres and his son were being put up with the Political Agent: Zerus. Mahalia hadn’t found out until the last minute and she was scandalized. The last thing she wanted was some old, wizened crumb of a man and his undoubtedly equally old, wizened crumb of a son poking about in her house. Why couldn’t they go somewhere else?
Tell him I refuse to come downstairs, she’d informed her stepmother, referring to her father.
You have to. Laila’s tone was uncompromising. It’s a state dinner.
All the more reason for me to excuse myself! As though women were relevant to state dinners, or any other state functions! With all the gravity of youth, Mahalia crossed her arms and sulked.
She’d only emerged from her room when her father threatened to take her favorite calculator away.
Feeling abused and put upon, Mahalia had presented herself in the dining room. And stopped. There, lounging negligently in one of the chairs, was the handsomest man she’d ever seen. He certainly wasn’t old, although he was much older than she was. Regardless, she didn’t consider that all this beauty was relevant to her. For one thing, at seventeen, thirty might as well have been fifty. This god belonged with her father, not people her age.
And for another, he was a toad.
If not as readily apparent as his physical attributes, this unappetizing characteristic was abundantly apparent by the time she’d sat down. By the time the first course was served, she hated him with a passion. He was arrogant. He thought he knew everything. And when she’d first come into the room, his eyes had lingered on her in a way that made her feel naked.
They glared challengingly at each other across the table, like two cats. He was unusually pale, and his eyes were a frightening shade of green. Like pools of acid.
If Zerus noticed
, he gave no sign. Laila noticed, and was acutely uncomfortable. Not, Mahalia thought, because she cherished sincere hopes for the state of diplomacy in the empire. More likely, she worried that a faux pas now might reduce her chances of seducing the toad later. That Rajesh Mara Sant was willing to be seduced—and probably by anything that held still long enough—Mahalia didn’t doubt. She’d encountered his type before.
She wasn’t impressed.
She was even less impressed when the young princeling launched in on a rather protracted, and entirely incorrect, assessment of the transport situation in the mines. His problem wasn’t, she reflected, that he was stupid. He obviously wasn’t, despite every appearance to the contrary. His facts were correct and his reasoning was sound—it was just incorrect.
So she told him so.
He laughed at her.
She excoriated him.
Smiling sweetly and retaining her best manners, she sifted through his argument point by point and explained, in grueling detail, why he was wrong. What he’d missed, what he hadn’t thought of and what, undoubtedly, he hadn’t been in a position to know before he’d arrived. He’d suggested that she stop worrying her pretty little head about economics; she’d suggested that he stop worrying his pretty little head about things other than eating and polo.
By the time dinner drew to its merciful conclusion, Rajesh had made up his mind about something. Mahalia didn’t know yet, but he was in love with her.
TEN
It happened, he said later, between one breath and the next. She was the first and only person who’d ever made a fool of him. She was not impressed, at all, with his polo handicap—it was a four—or his vast wealth or his good looks or, indeed, his ability to govern. She thought he was an ass. And so, despite the insistence of the adults that she join them for drinks, she’d excused herself and left. They could sit around in the library drinking sherry and making fools of themselves for as long as they liked; she wanted to read a book.
