The Summer Queen (21 page)

Danaquil Lu rolled his eyes. “Uncle—” he murmured, pulling
at the older man’s shoulder.

“She’s my granddaughter, if you must know,” Gran said irritably.
“It was my suggestion that she come here and be among her own people and her
own ways for a while. She has the grace to respect her elders. Show her the respect
she deserves from a Summer, or you might as well be a Winter!”

He glared at her. “I am a Winter, as it happens. But if she
acted more like a Summer, and left things well enough alone, I’d be happier to
respect her judgment.”

“A Winter!” Gran looked him up and down dubiously.

“We aren’t all perfumed sissies,” he snapped.

Moon looked on, silent with surprise as Gran came to her defense,
suddenly and deeply moved by her grandmother’s protectiveness. Danaquil Lu
stood beside Jerusha, looking bemused. “But as to the matter of the
right-of-way across your lands, Borah Clearwater,” she interrupted, “why is
that such a problem tor you, really? It won’t interfere with your crops or your
fishing rights. You’re going to be paid very well for the use of such a tiny
strip of your ground. Is it simply the principle of the thing? Or is it because
you hate change that much—because you hate me, and my new ideas?”

He snorted again, his mustache bristling. “I’m not fond of
you, Moon Dawntreader. I’ve made that plain enough, and i’m honest enough to
admit it to your face, unlike some. But it’s my kinsman Kirard Set Wayaways
that I hate. He’s buying out the holdings all around mine for their mineral
rights, for development and building factories. There’s metal ores all over my
plantation. He wants me to sell out too, but since I won’t he’s made you give
him a toehold on my land. Now that he has that much from you, he’s going to
keep pushing until he gets it all. Goddammit, you’ve made him believe it’s
possible, and now he’ll never rest. The whole Wayaways clan is a spot of gangrene,
you ask me—excepting young Dana here, he’s probably crazy but he’s all right.
They ought to be cut out, dammit, not encouraged to spread!”

“I hear what you’re saying, Borah Clearwater,” Moon said gently.
“Kirard Set Wayaways is one of the most motivated and effective people I have
working with me to develop Tiamat. But I don’t intend to do him any favors at
anyone else’s expense. You’ve registered your complaint with me. I won’t forget
it.”

Clearwater grunted. “Not until you run short of ores, at
least, and I refuse again to let him stripmine my fields.”

Moon frowned. “I want to make Tiamat a better place for our
people to live. I don’t intend to destroy it in the process. No one will force
you off your traditional lands against your will. I’ve given you my word. You’ll
have to trust it. That’s all.” She turned away from the rail, not listening to
his continued complaint or even the sharpness of her grandmother’s voice, at
him again for questioning the word of a sibyl, of her grandchild. Moon looked
back at the curious stares of the gathered sailors. Slowly another of them
started forward with a question.

She answered his question and half a dozen more, before she
looked up at last and found no one else waiting. Drained but satisfied, she
rose from her seat among the crates and started back to work.

But Sparks took her arm, smiling, and led her to the rail,
nodding down at the pier. She started as she saw Borah Clearwater still there,
still talking to her grandmother—but sitting beside her now, mending net;
speaking agitatedly, but in a tone of voice so normal that Moon could not make
out the words through the clangor and shouting of the docks. Jerusha glanced up
from where she sat with ill-concealed restlessness, saw where they were
looking; smiled and shrugged, shaking her head. Moon went back to work, smiling
too, filled with sudden gratitude and surprise at the Unexpected rewards of
this day; feeling a brief pang as she looked out to sea and did not know where
to direct her prayer of thanks.

She heard a sudden pain-cry, and the clatter of something
dropping on the pier below. She went back to the ship’s rail, saw Jerusha on
her hands and knees on the salt-bleached wood, her rifle lying beside her. Moon
climbed over the rail, landing on the dock, as Gran and Borah Clearwater pushed
to their feel in consternation, as constables came running. Moon saw with
sudden bright grief the red stain of blood spreading down Jerusha’s pantslegs. “Sparks!”
she cried. She fell to her knees, taking hold of Jerusha as the other woman
tned to rise, holding her, holding her tightly; feeling the pain that convulsed
Jerusha’s body as if it were her own; remembering the pain of birth, the pain
that had come to Jerusha PalaThion too soon, much too soon. “Find Miroe. Hurry—!”

Jerusha opened her eyes, blinking in a kind of disbelief as
she took in her new reality. Her last memory was of the pier, the harbor; the
odd sense of peace that had fallen over everyone around her while she watched
and waited. She remembered feeling something, as she sat—the slight fluttering
movement of her unborn child. Remembered how, for that moment, the world
outside her body had ceased to exist, as she became wholly aware of the miracle
of life inside her. For that brief moment the peace around her had reached into
her and touched her soul, and she had let herself be happy, certain that this
time everything would be all right ....

And she had felt the baby move again, and then again, restlessly,
and a strange restlessness had overtaken her too; she had lost that fragile,
precious sense of peace, felt it fly away from her like birds. And there had
been a sudden twinge, a pulling tension, that made her rise from where she sat,
trying to stretch it out of existence like a muscle kink, trying to make it
disappear, because she had felt that sensation before, and she knew what always
followed—

Pain had taken her where she stood, as if everything inside
her was being twisted and ripped loose, and as the darkness came over her in a
terrible, rushing flood, she had been sure that this time, this time she would
die ....

But she was alive. She was lying in a strange bed, in a
strangely familiar room. She recognized its ceiling. She had seen this sight
before; the inside of this hospital room, its odd mixture of old and new;
modern fixtures and furnishings, abandoned intact by the Hegemony, but with
their systems gutted, like hers. She knew the acnd, alien smell of the
medicinal herbs that were used for most of the healing that was done here now.
She could feel her hands, her arms, her shoulders, although she had no strength
to move them. She could feel her toes. But at the center of her body there was
nothing, no sensation at all. Numb. And no one had to tell her the reason why.

She moved her head—let it fall, pulled down by gravity as
she looked toward the doorway. Someone stirred just beyond her sight, in
response to her motion; she realized, from the sudden sensation in her hand,
that someone had been holding it. She forced her eyes to focus, expecting to
see her husband’s face.

Instead, she found the face of the Summer Queen. Moon
Dawntreader’s pale hand tightened over her own in unspoken empathy, in grief
for a loss so fresh she had not even begun to feel it yet. Just for a moment
Jerusha remembered a time when their positions had been reversed; when she had
sat at Moon’s bedside, Moon’s hand clutching hers in a deathgrip, in the throes
of giving birth .... “You shouldn’t be here,” she whispered. Her throat was achingly
dry; she felt as if her body were burning up, a desert. Barren. Sterile.

Moon’s expression changed, turning uncertain.

“You have duties ....”

Moon shook her head. “Time has stopped. It all stopped,
until I knew you would be all right,” she said softly. “Besides, how can I
function, without my right arm’” She smiled; the smile fell away. She looked
down, with a knowledge in her eyes that only another woman’s eyes could hold—not
a queen’s, but a mother’s; the reflection of the most terrible fear she could
imagine.

Jerusha pressed her mouth together, looking away; her lips
were parched and cracked. Moon offered her water, helped her drink it. “Where’s
Miroe?” she asked, finally.

“He took care of you, when we brought you in. He was here
before, for a long time ...” Moon murmured. “He said he would be back soon.”

Jerusha nodded, wearily. She looked at the ceiling again,
its ageless, flawless surface ... wishing that her own body could be as
perfect, as unaffected by time or fate, as impervious. She looked back at Moon.
“I’m all right,” she said quietly, at last. “Go home to your family.”

Moon rose, her hand still holding Jerusha’s tightly, her
eyes still holding doubt. She let go, reluctantly. “I’ll find Miroe, and send
him to you.”

“Thank you,” Jerusha said.

Moon smiled again, nodded almost shyly as she left the room.

Jerusha lay back, listening to the distant sounds of life
that reached her from the corridors beyond her closed door; listening to the
gibberings of loss and futility seeping in to fill the perfect emptiness she
tried to hold at the center of her thoughts. She imagined the responses of the
men she had worked with in the Hegemonic Police, if they saw her now ...
imagined the response of the woman she herself had been to the woman she was now,
lying in this bed. They would have been equally unsympathetic. She had spent
years trying to force them to accept her as a human being instead of a woman,
and all it had done was turn her into a man. In leaving the force, she had
believed that she was reaffirming her humanity. She wasn’t a man ... but now
when she wanted to be a woman, she couldn’t be that either. She felt hot tears
rise up in her eyes and overflow; hating them, hating herself for her weakness,
physical and mental. She wanted Miroe, she needed him, to help her now. Why
wasn’t he here? Damn him, he was the one she had needed to see, he shared this loss
with her, more intimately than anyone. She needed to share his strength, and
his grief—

Someone came into the room. She lifted her head, needing all
her own strength, for long enough to see that Miroe had come, as if in answer
to her thoughts.

“Jerusha.” He crossed to her bedside, his work-rough hands
touching her flushed, fevered skin with the gentleness that always surprised
her—touching her own hands, her face, her tears. He kissed her gently on the
forehead, and on the lips; drew back.

“Hold me,” she murmured, wishing that she did not have to request
that comfort. “Hold me ....”

He sat down on the edge of the bed; lifted her strengthless,
unresponsive body and held her close, letting her tears soak his shirt,
absorbing them, for a long time. She could not see whether he wept too. The
muscles of his body were as rigid as steel, as if he were holding grief at bay.
She had never wept before, when this had happened to her; although it had
happened to her three times already. And he had never wept, either.

“Why does this keep happening to me ...” she whispered, brokenly,
at last. “It isn’t fair—”

“I’m sorry.” His own voice was like a clenched fist. “Gods,
Jerusha—I’ve done everything I can.”

“I’m not blaming you.” She pulled away from him, to look at
his face. He would not meet her eyes.

“You should,” he muttered. “I can’t heal it, I can’t make it
right .... If you weren’t here, if you were anywhere else, you’d have healthy
children by now.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” she said. “I wouldn’t even have a husband.
I wouldn’t be with you. It’s the Hegemony’s fault—” A surge of anger and
resentment pushed the words out of her throat. But the Hegemony was far away,
formless, faceless, unreachable, and she found herself suddenly angry at the
man who held her, for making her ask for comfort, for making her comfort him
when it was her loss .... Our loss. It’s our loss! she told herself fiercely.
But she let herself slide out of his arms, as his arms loosened; falling back
into the bed’s cool, impersonal embrace.

He looked at her, his eyes clouded and full of doubt, looked
away again. He reached into a pocket of his coat and took something out: a
small jar full of what looked like dried herbs. “Jerusha,” he said quietly, “I
want you to start using this.”

“What is it?” she murmured, straining for a clear sight of
it.

“It’s childbane.” He met her gaze directly at last.

She felt the last embers of hope die inside her. “Birth
control—?” she asked numbly; not needing to ask, or to have it explained to
her.

But he nodded. “I almost lost you this time, Jerusha. You
nearly bled to death. I don’t want to take that risk again ... I don’t want you
to take it.”

“But Miroe—” She tried to sit up, fell back again, as her
body pressed the point home. “I’m forty-three. I don’t have much longer—”

“I know.” She saw a muscle stand out as his jaw tightened. “The
risk will only grow, for you or for a child. Maybe it’s time we faced the
truth, Jerusha: we’re never going to have any children. Not here, not in this
lifetime together.”

She stared at him bleakly. “You know I don’t believe in that—in
reincarnation, in another chance. This isn’t a dress rehearsal, Miroe, it’s my
life, and I don’t want to stop trying!” She broke off, clenching her teeth as
something hurt her cruelly inside, through the layers of deadened flesh.

He tensed, and shook his head. “I love you, Jerusha. I love
you too much to kill you, or let you kill yourself, over something that’s
impossible. If you won’t use the childbane, I won’t sleep with you anymore.”

“You don’t mean that,” she said, her voice thick.

“I do.” He looked away, pushing to his feet. “I can’t take
this anymore. I’m sorry.” He crossed the room, and went out the door.

She watched him go, unable to get up, to follow him, to confront
him; without even the strength to call after him. She looked over at the
bedtable, at the bottle of herbal contraceptive he had left behind. She knocked
it off the table with a trembling fist. She fell back again, staring up at the
ceiling; felt the numbness at the center of her body spreading, filling the
space that held her heart, filling her mind until there was no room left for
thought ...