The Summer Queen

TIAMAT: Carbuncle

Reede Kullervo stood on the hidden balcony that overlooked the reception hall, leaning against the rail in voyeuristic fascination, watching the gathering below as he had watched it for hours, all-seeing but unseen. This was only one of many hidden rooms and secret observations points in the palace; he had been shown them all, after the Queen’s arrest, by members of the Sibyl College. The aging blind woman who was the College’s head had ordered them to protect him when the Blues arrived to flush him out; and they had, even the two whose pregnant daughter was Tammis Dawntreader’s widow. He remembered Merovy Bluestone’s quiet, pragmatic manner as she had treated his illness; he remembered her eyes… .

He sighed, filling up his vision with the motion and color of the crowded hall below. He could not remember now whether he had created these quirks of design when he had dreamed of what Carbuncle would be, or whether they had been added later, somewhere in the long, lost centuries between his once-and-future lives.

He was grateful for them, whether it had been foresight or not; because they had saved his life, and because now they let him observe the closing of a circle which he had helped to bring about. The party below, where offworlder officials and Tiamatans mingled in a fragile dance of diplomacy, celebrated the return of Chief Justice BZ Gundhalinu.

He did not dare show himself down there while a single Kharemoughi lingered, afraid that his face, or some random response, might reveal the Smith to the unwanted attention of the Golden Mean. And so he had watched from here as the hall slowly filled, studying the variegated colors of skin and hair and clothing, the varieties of ostentation, sophistication, and simplicity; savoring the sensuous pleasure of the patterns they inscribed on his mind.

The Queen had moved among them, her movements seemingly random except to his observation. His eyes told him that she drifted near the entrance to the hall too often, looked toward it too much, smoothed back her hair and checked the time repeatedly, with restless impatience.

Until the moment they had both been waiting for, without entirely realizing it, had come at last—Gundhalinu had arrived. The music, and all motion, had stopped in the hall: dancing, eating, gossiping, politicking, all suddenly frozen into a magnificent tableau.

Gundhalinu had entered the room, accompanied by Jerusha PalaThion, who wore the uniform and insignia of her position as the new Commander of Police, and the endless silence was broken by applause. Gundhalinu had stopped moving, in the small space left open to him inside the entrance, as if the noise of sudden adulation had taken him aback. He stood, his head up, not acknowledging the welcome, seeming after a moment hardly even to hear it, as his eyes searched the crowd around him.

And then he had found what he was searching for—the Queen, coming toward him as the crowd parted to let her pass through, her hair like snow, her robes made of whispering moss greens, the diaphanous flowing blues of the summer sky. She glittered with crystal beads like stars, like tears of the sea. She wore no crown, but only a simple garland of flowers, as she approached him with her hands held out in welcome.

Gundhalinu moved at last, stepping forward to take her outstretched hands. They stood face to face, daring to embrace only with their fingertips; but in the moment of contact, the unbearably ultimate entwining, there was an ecstasy as pure as if the crowd’s witnessing eyes were a sacrament, and not an intrusion.

Their hands released and fell away at last, as slowly as if gravity had ceased to function in the space around them. Gundhalinu turned briefly and said something to Jerusha PalaThion, gesturing toward the far side of the room. PalaThion nodded, moving away through the crowd as the Queen led Gundhalinu into the tide of congratulations and well-wishers, former enemies and friends who were now indistinguishable, at least for the next few hours. Pematte and the other members of the Hegemonic tribunal were the first to greet him; Vhanu, the former Commander, was conspicuous by his absence.

All at once the hired musicians, who had held their silence since his arrival, began to play again, an exquisite song Reede did not know, but Gundhalinu seemed to have been waiting for. Gundhalinu’s face, which except for his eyes had shown no readable expression until now, suddenly smiled. He leaned over, murmuring something in the Queen’s ear. She turned toward him, her surprise plain. He took the gesture as acceptance, taking her hand again, drawing her toward him, leading her into the motions of a dance.

The crowd fell away around them, watching and murmuring as they moved gracefully to the music through a widening gyre across the floor. Reede watched too, thinking that the most hidebound Kharemoughi Tech in the hall below could not possibly feel an astonishment any more profound than his own as he watched Gundhalinu dance openly with the woman he loved. One by one, other dancers began to take to the floor, until they were adrift in a sea of bright motion.

Reede watched them dance together, with eyes for no one else in the room: seeing in their faces the poignant contrasts, the painful dichotomies that separated their two worlds … seeing in their eyes the only truth he knew.

And he remembered Mundilfoere, letting the midnight beauty of her face fill his mind … remembering all that she had been to him, and done to him, and sacrificed for him. And he remembered Ilmarinen, whom he had loved … And he wept, in his solitary space, alone.

And when the dance was done, he watched Gundhalinu and the Queen eat and speak and move through the crowd, always together, forcing all witnesses to recognize and acknowledge their unspoken union.

At last the guests began to depart, disappearing like beads from a broken string. The Hegemony’s elite left first, as soon as it was graciously possible to do so; only Gundhalinu showed no signs of restlessness. Reede shifted position as he watched the last Blue leave the hall, suddenly restless himself, as if he had been freed of some oppressive weight.

A sound made him start and turn. He looked behind him, his back pressing the rail. “Ariele?” he said, as she materialized silently in front of him. She was not wearing the clothes he had last seen her in: she had changed her strobe-colored, defiantly sensual offworlder clingsuit for a long, shapeless native robe, its sleeves and neckline covered with smocking. Strings of heavy beads hung around her neck, made of carbuncles and agates and polished shell.

She hesitated, uncertain all at once, and he was abruptly aware of his own reaction, how he stood clutching the railing as if he were expecting attackers … or a ghost.

He straightened away, letting go. “Where were you?” he asked, half frowning in concern, half frowning at himself as he saw her face. “I saw you in the hall when they started arriving; and then you disappeared.”

She looked down, coming to stand beside him in the alcove as he put out his hand. She kept her face averted as he slipped his arm around her; staring at the scene below, as he had done. He felt her hand cover his, tentative but warm. She had seemed somehow insubstantial since her awakening, since her mother had brought her back from the dead. “I did what was required of me,” she murmured. “I greeted the offworlders with the proper hypocritical solicitude. And then I went to my old playroom, and I looked at all the toys that used to be mine, and—and Tammis’s. …” Her voice faded. She was silent for a long moment. “I read some books, and had warm tea and honeycakes, as if I was a little girl again. It was very peaceful, there in my room.” She looked up at him. “Did you watch from here the whole evening?”

“I’m an offworlder,” he said, touching her face, and it was not an answer to her question.

“You’re not like them.” She jerked her head disdainfully, at the Kharemoughis who were no longer in the room below, but whose shadows remained, clouding their future.

“Your father is,” he said, making her turn back again in anger and grief. “Or your father was,” he amended, more gently. He glanced over the hidden railing, seeing the Queen and Gundhalinu still side by side, bound together by an invisible cord of need. She followed his gaze, and he saw her frown. “Let them be happy… . It’s what he wanted them to be. It’s what they deserve.”

She stood motionless, watching them together, her frown slowly fading until her face held no expression at all. Finally she nodded.

“Here.” Reede took his arm from around her, reaching into his belt pouch for something he had carried there, forgotten, until now. “He wanted you to … have this back.” He passed her Dawntreader’s shell flute, its fragile, spiral form traced with hairline fractures, anciently mended.

Her mouth opened; nothing came out of it. She took the flute, held it, pressed it against her cheek, closing her eyes. “I want to go away from here—from the city—and never come back. Aunt Jerusha said that we can live at her plantation. We can be alone, with just the mers. …”

“She said that?” His hands tightened over the rail again, as his body suddenly seemed weightless. “We could do that,” he whispered. “We could. Yeah, that would be good … that would be just fine.”

She looked up at him again, with a bloom of color coming into her ashen cheeks, a smile ripening the full softness of her mouth.

He took her hand, looking at her long, slender fingers, pale even against his own, and the solii ring that she wore, the mate to his own. His throat closed over the words that he tried to say, and he took her into his arms, holding her against his heart, breathing in the sweet, warm scent of her, and the musty, ancient smell of the walls. After a time he asked, “Why did you come up here?”

She broke away from him, to look up at him with a smile, as the music suddenly began again below. It was a completely different kind of music from what had been played before, the refined measures intended to lull hypercritical Technician sensibilities. Reede glanced over the rail, proving to himself that it was really the same group of musicians he heard, suddenly playing the lilting, whimsical melody of a traditional Summer dance tune. “This is the real party, beginning now,” Ariele said. “I wanted you to come and be with me, down there—” She reached for his hand, hesitated; smiled, as he came with her willingly, almost eagerly.

They went down the stairs side by side, entering the sea of bodies and faces, their arrival barely making a ripple. Most of the people around him looked completely unfamiliar; here and there among them he saw someone he had met before. He saw Merovy Bluestone; their eyes locked, before he could look away again. He had lost track of Gundhalinu and the Queen as he reached the level of the ballroom.

Ariele brought him to an open space where people were dancing now in a way that was as spontaneous as the music was. She pulled him into the motion of the dance, making him dance with her. The steps were simple and he obeyed; feeling clumsy and frustrated, because he still had not completely accepted that his body was no longer the perfect machine the water of death had made of it. He kept on, gamely, and he began to discover that his body liked to dance—had always liked to dance, he realized, although he could not clearly remember ever having done it. They danced together, not simply with each other but within the embracing motion of all the other dancers, to music that was alternately lively and plangent, until Ariele’s face was flushed and laughing, like his own.

But his once-tireless body forced them to the sidelines, to eat pickled fish and drink strangely flavored wine until his senses began to buzz. “I remember this …” he murmured, with unsteady laughter, as the wine went to his head.

Ariele looked up at him. “What?” she asked.

Someone calling his name saved him from having to answer. He looked away through the crowd, seeing three figures moving toward them, in an unexpected juxtaposition of forms: The Tiamatan woman who ran Starhiker’s, and with her his pilot and crew.

“Hey, boss,” Niburu said, and his sudden grin told Reede that he’d probably been drinking too much too.

“Gods,” Reede said, looking from one of them to the other, feeling his face doing odd things. “Where the hell have you been?”

They had been in jail, until PalaThion had finally been named Police Commander and set them free. Since then he had scarcely seen them; something which, he could only admit now, drunk with wine and fatigue, had bothered him considerably.

Niburu looked at him, with a wry glance past his shoulder at Ariele. “Around the city, helping clean up the storm wreckage,” he said. He put an arm familiarly around Tor Starhiker’s waist. Her own arm snaked across his shoulders, rubbing his chest.

Reede raised his eyebrows. “I guess virtue has its rewards.”

Niburu shrugged, and grinned. “She likes my cooking.”

Tor smiled. “It’s plain,” she said, “but it’s very filling… .” Niburu turned red. Ananke stood behind them, wearing the quoll in its sling, smiling and silent; always the cryptic shadow. “You haven’t had much need for a ferryman lately,” Niburu said.

“That’s true,” Reede murmured, glancing at Ariele. “Guess not.” His hand touched hers.

“So,” Niburu said, finally, “what do we do now?”

Reede looked back at him. “Eat. Dance. Have a good time,” he said.

Niburu shook his head. “I mean, after that. Tomorrow. Next week. A couple months from now?”

Reede hesitated, staring at the three of them, at the variety of expressions on their faces, that were somehow all the same expression. “We—Ariele and I,” he glanced down, “are going down south, along the coast. We’re going to try …”He broke off. To find forgiveness. “To find … something we lost.”

Niburu nodded—as if he was satisfied, Reede thought. “Then you still won’t be needing a pilot,” he said.

“Guess not,” Reede repeated, looking away again. “You like boats?” He looked back.

“I don’t like boats,” Niburu said. “They sink. I didn’t like them on Samathe. I still don’t like them. He doesn’t like them either.” He gestured to Ananke.

Reede looked at them oddly. “You want to go,” he said. “You’re leaving.”

“You’ve got somebody to take care of you now, boss.” Niburu smiled. “You don’t need us anymore.” He hesitated. “It’s been a long time. Maybe we all miss something.”

Tor looked down at him. “You sound like you’re never coming back,” she said.

“Well, love, I didn’t say that.” He looked up at her, with his faint smile widening. “I never say never. If I learned one thing from him—” he gestured at Reede, and his smile turned sweet-sour, “it’s never say ‘never.’ …” She kissed the top of his head. He kissed her exposed navel. Ananke rolled his eyes.

And Reede felt a sourceless pain strike his gut. He put his drink down on the table behind him, blaming it. “So when are you leaving?” he asked, without looking up again.

Niburu didn’t answer, for a moment; as if he were waiting for something else, or had expected a different response. “Soon as I can get our cargo set. A few days.”

“A few nights?” Tor asked, running her fingers through his hair.

“That too,” he said, glancing up. “Well,” he murmured, as Reede finally faced him again. “I guess we’ll stop off before we go, and say goodbye… .”

“I hate long goodbyes,” Reede said, blinking. “Don’t do that.” He realized that his nose was running, and wiped it on his sleeve. “Got a cold,” he muttered, and coughed.

“Better take care of that,” Niburu said, his eyes filled with both disbelief and a kind of wonder.

“Take care of yourselves.” Reede offered his hand, and Niburu took it, covering the identical brands on their palms.

Niburu’s smile spread to his mouth again. “That’ll be easy, now that we don’t work for you.”

Reede laughed. “Thanks …”he muttered, and knew that Niburu understood what he was really being thanked for. He reached past Niburu to Ananke; touched the quoll where it lay, contented as usual in its sling. He stroked it for the first time since the day he had fished it out of the well, back on Ondinee. The quoll burbled in congenial surprise, watching him with a black, bead-bright eye. “Take care of that thing, too. You saved its life, you’re responsible for its life, forever; you know the rules.”

Ananke looked up at nun, stroking the quoll, so that their fingers touched briefly. “I know, boss,” he said, his voice soft but strained. “Goodbye,” he said, and there was something in his face that Reede might have taken for longing, except that that wouldn’t have made any sense.

The music changed again, making them all look up. Another song was beginning, and floating above the blend of native and offworld instruments was a new sound, high and haunting, unlike anything he had heard before, but reminding him suddenly, achingly, of the mersong.

He turned, looking for Ariele as he realized that she was no longer standing beside him.

Tor touched his arm, pointing toward the music. He lifted his head, following her gesture, to find Ariele among the musicians; realized then that it was the sound of her father’s flute he heard. He had known she had a gift for music and mimicry, but he had not known that she played.

The music, and his own surprise, held him captive for a long moment. When he turned back, he found the others were already drifting away, out of his reach, across the dance floor. Ananke lifted a hand in farewell, looking back, and then they were gone.

Reede started on through the crowd, trying to make his way closer to the place where Ariele and the musicians were playing. He saw Merovy Bluestone again, standing beside the Queen. Moon’s arm was around her; the two women were motionless, listening, with the same astonishment and grief filling their faces. He remembered that Tanunis had carried a flute; that probably he had played it, just as his sister had … just as Sparks Dawntreader had. He considered the strange patterns woven by heredity and environment, by love and grief; and he wished that he were drunker, or not so much so.

“Kullervo,” a voice said. He looked up, and saw Gundhalinu, who had been standing at the Queen’s other side. Gundhalinu moved away from her, coming toward him.

“Welcome back,” Reede said, without a smile. “To the land of the living.”

Gundhalinu looked surprised at him, as if he had said something completely incomprehensible. But then he nodded, not smiling either. “Yes …” he said quietly. “Thank you. Thank you for your part in it.”

Reede shrugged slightly. Seeing Gundhalinu up close at last, he was startled by the drawn weariness of the other man’s face, the way its lines had deepened—the marks that Gundhalinu’s ordeal in the Camps had left on him, that his sudden reprieve had not begun to erase. The stark black and silver uniform, the reflected light of badges and medals, the cruel curved spines of a trefoil among them, only echoed the hard disillusionment in Gundhalinu’s eyes. “Maybe it makes us even,” Reede said.

Gundhalinu smiled then, barely; as if his mouth had almost forgotten how to form the expression.

The Queen turned, hearing their voices behind her. Merovy had disappeared; Reede suspected that his presence was the reason. As the Queen moved toward him, stopping beside Gundhalinu, Reede was struck by the sight of them: They were like mirrors, each reflecting the other’s suffering, their separate ordeals that had only been manifestations of the same ordeal. He realized that he had not even been aware of how the Queen had changed, until this moment; he had been too preoccupied with his own sea-change. He wondered what they saw in his face.

“I didn’t know she could play,” he said, looking away from them toward Ariele, who was still lost in the rapture of her music. He felt a sudden, unexpected yearning fill him, like the sweet, sorrowful gaiety of her song rising into the air.

“Neither did I,” Gundhalinu murmured, a little sadly.

“Neither did I….” The Queen’s voice was an echo of the music’s joy and plangency. Gundhalinu put his arm around her, drawing her close.

She looked up at him and nodded, as if he had spoken; as if there was no real need for words between them anymore. She looked at Reede again; her eyes were wells of memory. Reede stepped aside to let them pass. He watched as they made their way through the dwindling crowd, heading toward the stairway that he had come down. He watched them go out as he had watched them come in, completing the circle.

He turned his back on the empty stairs, granting them their privacy; looking toward the music, and Ariele. He let his thoughts dissolve into the fluid melody, letting Reede Kullervo become lost in the crowd.

Moon led BZ along the quiet hall, up another stairway, through more corridors, hand in hand. He did not question her, following her with a yielding compliance—as if he were still a prisoner. She looked back at him, aching inside. She had thought she was leading him to her bedroom; but they went on, passing its door. BZ glanced at her in silent curiosity, but still asked her no questions.

She had spent every day of the interminable weeks between the tribunal’s arrival and his return working from dawn until far into the night, pressed on all sides by the demands of renegotiating Tiamat’s relationship with the Hegemony and overseeing the city’s recovery from the storm’s disastrous passing. But every night, when she lay in her bed at last, alone, she had imagined him lying beside her: the sound of his breathing, his heartbeat; the warmth of his touch bringing her cold, grief-wracked body back to life.

And yet here, now, when they were alone at last, she knew that it was not what she wanted, or needed. The first giddy rush of joy they had felt at the sight of one another had carried them gracefully, painlessly through the party’s public eye. But here in these empty halls, that bright, thoughtless moment of pleasure was fading, letting memory overtake her, letting in ghosts and shadows. And looking up at his shadowed, weary face, she knew that it was not what he needed, either, to be hurried into intimacy.

And so she led him on through the halls and up the final spiral stair, leading him to her private room at the palace’s, and the city’s, peak. The night sky opened out around them, glowing with the fire of countless stars. The cool, blue-silver face of Tiamat’s single large moon was a luminous mystery rising over the sea.

She heard BZ draw a breath of astonishment, as he saw what lay before and below him. “I had no idea this existed …” he whispered, and she did not know whether he meant this secret room, or a view of such beauty. She rested her head against his shoulder as they stood together, looking out; holding one another but perfectly still, forgetting their own existence.

Something broke the water’s surface, far out on the placid dark-bright mirror of the sea: one silhouette and then another and another, stitching tracks of blackness across its shimmering surface; a reminder of all that lay hidden beneath its illusion of calm. “Are those mers?” he asked.

“I think so,” she said softly. “I can’t be sure, at this distance.”

He sighed. “I thought I’d never live to see this world again,” he said. “I thought I’d never see your face—” He looked away from the ocean, into her eyes; touched her face tentatively, with a work-scarred hand. “They tried to kill me …” he murmured, at last.

“Who?” She would have held his gaze, but he looked out at the sea again.

“The same ones who wanted to kill the mers.” His face hardened like a fist. “The same ones who were congratulating me on my return, and licking my boots downstairs tonight, probably. They didn’t have the influence—or the courage—to kill me outright. So they sent me to that place… .”He broke off. “And hoped time would take care of things. Except that you saved my life, again.” His expression eased, and he kissed her hair, a tender, passionless kiss.

She did not answer, did not move, her body insensate and unresponsive: remembering how thin a membrane lay between life and death, remembering all the things that could not be changed, ever.

“Moon …” He closed her in his arms in sudden compassion. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry… .” And in his broken voice she heard the memory of sounds torn from her throat by her own mourning.

She shook her head, feeling her flushed cheek brush the cool, impersonal cloth of his uniform jacket; feeling the armor of hard-edged medals he wore press into her back, her neck, as he held her. Feeling no comfort. “Mother of Us All,” she whispered, gazing out at the sea, “I would rather have died than have had my heart torn out of me.” She thought of Arienrhod then—of her bones rolled eternally in the dark depths of the sea—with pity and terror.

He had no answer, this time; only went on holding her, until she began to feel the warmth of his body penetrate her skin like a soothing balm. “Look,” he said at last. “Those are mers. You can see it clearly now.” His arms still held her tightly; his voice insisted that she look.

She raised her head, to see them, a whole colony rejoicing in the night at the interface between worlds. Their lives were complete again, their reason for existence secure again; although she saw in the hidden forms of their abandoned motion, their courting dance, that in their timeless world, existence itself could be reason enough. They had far more in common with the sibyl mind than they had with the human servants who shared their spiritual bondage to it. She watched them appear and disappear, leaving the subtle patterns of their passing imprinted on her mind as they winked in and out of sight on the star-filled surface of the water. “I envy them …” she whispered. “They live without regret.”

“Then-lives will never again come to an unnatural end, because of us,” Gundhalinu murmured, against her hair. “And no human lives will ever again be unnaturally prolonged by their deaths. A balance has been restored… . Maybe now we can get on with our own lives. With our life together. We’ve lost so much time that we can never get back—” Moon closed her eyes, remembering an eternity where time’s arrow had lost its way, and pointed all ways at once. She opened them again, looking out at the sea and sky on fire with stars. She could not find the line where one ended and the other began; it was as if there were no separation, but instead a single continuum flowing from the depths of the sea into the depths of space. “ ‘Time will take care of things,’ ” she repeated softly, remembering his bitter words. “It has … it will. It owes that much to us.” She looked up at him again, seeing the night reflected in his dark eyes.

He smiled at last and nodded, holding her, warming her. “I look forward,” he said, “to growing old with you.”