The Summer Queen (5 page)

She turned, confronting the Queen directly. “You do not
speak for the Sea Mother!” she said furiously. “You are not the woman who was
chosen Queen. You have no right to wear that sign at your throat.”

“That isn’t true,” Moon said, lifting her chin so that all
the watchers could clearly see the trefoil tattoo that echoed the barbed
fishhook curves of the sibyl pendant she wore.

“Anyone can wear a tattoo,” Capella Goodventure said disdainfully.
“But not just anyone can wear the face of the Winters’ Queen. There is no Moon
Dawntreader Summer. You are the Snow Queen, Arienrhod—you cheated death and the
offworlders, I don’t know how. You stole the rightful place of our queen, and
now you desecrate the Mother of Us All with this filth!” She faced the crowd
again, her own face flushed with an outrage that Jerusha knew was genuine.

But a woman’s voice called out from the crowd, “I know Moon
Dawntreader.”

Capella Goodventure’s broad, lined face frowned, as she
peered into the crowd.

The Queen stared with her as the speaker pushed through the
wall of faces. Jerusha saw a sturdy, dark-haired island woman in her
mid-thirties; saw sudden recognition fill Moon’s face at the sight of her. “Clavally
Bluestone Summer,” the woman identified herself, and Capella Goodventure’s
frown deepened. “I made her a sibyl. She has the right to the trefoil, and to
speak the Lady’s Will.”

“Then let her prove it!” Capella Goodventure said, her face
mottling with anger. “If she has the right to speak as she does, then let her
prove it.”

Moon nodded, looking surer now. “Ask, and I will answer,”
she said again.

“No,” Capeila Goodventure said. “A sibyl Transfer can be
faked, just like a tattoo. Let her show us real proof. Let the Sea give us a
sign of Her Will!”

The Queen stood where she was, listening to the crowd murmur
its doubts, her own face furrowing in a frown as she tried to imagine how to
lay their doubts to rest. Jerusha stood unmoving, her body drawn with tension
as she waited for a sign from the Queen to come forward and remove the
Goodventure woman. But she knew that Moon could not take that step now, without
losing all credibility.

Moon glanced over her shoulder at the Pit waiting behind her
like a tangible symbol of her danger; looked back at Capella Goodventure again.
“The Sea Mother is with us here,” she said, clearly enough for all the crowd to
hear her. “Do you feel Her presence? The waters of the sea lie at the bottom of
the Pit behind me. Smell the air, listen for Her voice calling up to you.”
Capella Goodventure stood back, a faint smile of anticipation pulling at her
mouth. But then the Queen held something out in her hand. Jerusha caught her
breath as she saw what it was. “This is called a tone box. It controls the wind
in the Hall of Winds; it is the only way for a person to cross the Pit safely.”
She handed the control box to Capella Goodventure, and turned back toward the
bridge.

Jerusha swore softly. “No—”

“Moon!”

Jerusha heard Sparks Dawntreader call out to his wife,
reaching after her as she left his side.

The Queen glanced back over her shoulder; something in her
look stopped him where he was, with dread on his face. She turned away again,
raising her arms, bowing her head, and murmured something inaudible that might
have been a prayer. Jerusha saw her body quiver slightly, as if she were going
into Transfer. The moaning of the winds was loud in the sudden, utter silence
of the hall, as she stepped out onto the bridge.

She swayed as the wind buffeted her; froze for an instant, regained
her balance and took another step. Jerusha’s hands tightened; she felt a surge
of sickness as she remembered her own terrifying, vertiginous passages over
that span. She fought the urge to close her eyes.

The Queen took a third precarious step, braced against the
wind. And then something happened. Jerusha looked up as the Queen looked up:
she sucked in a deep breath of wonder. The clangorous sighing of the wind
curtains faded, as the wind spilled from the sails, and the air currents died
... as the open windows high above began to close. Blue and gold sunlight
shafted down through the inert cloud-forms of the curtains to light Moon’s hair
like an aura. “By the Bastard Boatman—” Jerusha whispered, feeling Miroe’s hand
tighten around her arm with painful awe.

“By the Lady,” his voice answered, deep and resonant; although
she knew that he could not mean it.

A slow murmur spread through the crowd, and one by one the
watchers dropped to their knees, sure that they were in the presence of a
miracle, a Goddess, Her Chosen ... until at last only Capella Good venture was
left standing. As Jerusha watched, even she nodded, in acknowledgment, or
defeat. The Queen stood a moment longer, her head held high, her face a mask
that Jerusha could not read. The air stayed calm; the ancient hall and everyone
in it seemed frozen in place. And then at last Moon Dawntreader moved again,
stepping off of the bridge onto solid ground.

She looked back, at the flaccid curtains hanging in the air,
as if she were waiting for something. But they did not begin to fill again; the
window walls remained closed. She took a deep breath, her shoulders rising and
falling visibly, her own face showing traces of the awe that had silenced the
crowd. She looked ahead again, with her gaze on her husband’s white, stunned
face. She returned to his side; Jerusha saw the uncertainty that was almost
fear in his eyes as she took his hand. “It is the Lady’s will,” she said,
facing the crowd again, at last, “that I should be here, and that you should be
here with me.” She gestured at the span behind her, open to anyone who chose to
cross it, now that the winds had ceased. “This is Her sign to you that a true change
has come; the ways of Winter are not forbidden to us anymore.”

She hesitated, looking out at their faces, her own face
changed by the emotions that played across it. “We are who we are,” she said, “and
the old ways have always been our survival. But no one’s ways are the only, or
the best. Change is not always evil, it is the destiny of all things. It was
not the will of the Lady that we were denied knowledge that could make our
lives better; it was the will of the offworlders. And they are gone. I ask you
to work with me now to do the Lady’s will, and work for change—”

Capella Goodventure threw down the tone box and stalked out
of the hall. The echo of its clatter followed her into the darkness. But the
rest of the watchers stayed, their eyes on the Queen, waiting for what came
next; ready to listen, ready to work the Lady’s will at her bidding.

“How did she do it, Miroe?” Jerusha murmured. “How?”

He only shook his head, his face incredulous. “I don’t know,”
he said. “I only hope she knows ... because she didn’t do it herself.”

Jerusha looked up, her eyes searching the haunted shadows of
the heights, her memory spinning out the past. But all the history of this
place that she had experienced spanned less than two decades. The layers of
dusty time, the hidden secrets, the haunted years of Carbuncle the city
stretched back through millennia. Jerusha rubbed her arms, feeling its walls
close around her like the cold embrace of a tomb, and said nothing more.

Sparks Dawntreader hesitated in the doorway to what had been
the throne room, when this was the Snow Queen’s palace; suddenly as incapable
of motion as if he had fallen under a spell. He stared at the throne,
transfixed by its sublime beauty. Its blown—and welded-glass convolutions could
have been carved from ice. Light caught in its folds and flowed over its
shining surfaces until it seemed to possess an inner radiance.

It had seemed to him to be uncannily alive, the first time
he had entered this room and seen her seated there: Arienrhod, the Snow Queen,
impossibly wearing the face of Moon, the girl he had loved forever. It still
struck him that way, even after all the years he had spent as Arienrhod’s lover
... even now, as he found Moon seated there, wearing the face of Arienrhod;
sitting silent and still in the vast white space, in the middle of the night,
like a sleepwalker who had lost her way.

He took a deep breath, relieving the constriction in his
chest, breaking the spell that held him as he forced himself forward into the
room. He crossed the expanse of white carpet as silently as a ghost—his own
ghost, he thought. “Moon,” he said softly, in warning.

Her body spasmed; she turned on the throne to stare at him. “What
are you doing here?” he asked. He heard a knife-edge of anger that he had not
intended in the words, and said hastily, “You should be resting, sleeping ....
I thought Miroe gave you something to make you sleep.” After meeting with the
sibyls this afternoon—after she had stopped the winds—she had come up the
stairs from the Hall below ashen-faced with exhaustion. She had let him support
her as they climbed; he had felt her shaking with fatigue. She had no reserves
of strength these days; the child—or two—growing inside her demanded them all.

He had helped her to their bedroom, and Miroe Ngenet had
given her a warm brew of herbs to calm her, forbidding anyone to disturb her—even
him. He had not argued. When he had come to bed himself she had been sleeping.

But he had wakened in the middle of the night and found the
bed empty beside him, and had come searching. He had not expected to find her
here, like this. “Moon ...”he said again, tentatively, as if some part of him
was still uncertain whether she was the one that he saw on the throne, whether
it was not really Anenrhod. “Are you ... are you all right?”

Her face eased at the words, as if it were something in his
face that had disturbed her. She nodded, her tangled, milk-white hair falling
across her shoulders. Suddenly

—\\<-v §[\

^ i w *

I

she was his pledged again, and barely more than a girl, the
porcelain translucency of her skin bruised with fatigue and her hands pressing
her pregnant belly, “I’m all right,” she said faintly. “I woke up. I couldn’t
get back to sleep ....” She brushed her hair back from her face. “The babies
won’t let me rest.” She smiled, as the thought brought color into her cheeks.

“Two—he whispered, coming closer, stepping up onto the dais
beside her. “Gods—Goddess—” barely remembering to use the Summer oath, and not
the offworlder one, “we’re doubly blessed, then.” Ngenct had told him the news,
after insisting that Moon should not be disturbed from her rest.

“Yes.” She made the triad sign of the Sea Mother with her fingers.
Her hand fell away again, almost listlessly, although she still smiled, still
shone with wonder. He glanced at the sibyl tattoo at her throat; covered her
hands with his own on the swell of her soft, white sleepgown. Once he had
believed it was impossible for them ever to have a child together, and so had
she. Summer tradition said that it was “death to love a sibyl ....” That
saying, the fear behind it, had driven them apart, driven him here to the city ...
into the arms of Arienrhod.

But it was not true, and here beneath his hand lay the proof
of it. He felt movement; heard Moon’s soft laugh at his exclamation of
surprise. She got up from the throne, in a motion that was graceful for all its
ungainliness. He had always been fascinated by her unconscious grace, so much a
part of her that she was completely unaware of it. He remembered her running
endlessly along the beaches of Neith, their island home; saw her in his mind’s
eye climbing the crags in search of birds’ eggs and saltweed, never slipping;
or darting along the narrow rock-built walls of the klee pens, never falling.
He remembered her dancing, held close in his arms while the musicians played
the old songs .... She was not tall, and so slender that Gran had always said
she barely cast a shadow, but she was as strong physically as any woman he
knew. Strength and grace were one in her; she rarely doubted her body’s responses,
and it rarely betrayed her.

Ngenet had told him that carrying twins was doubly hard on a
woman’s body, especially under circumstances like these, when Moon pushed
herself endlessly, relentlessly. He had tried to make her listen, but she would
not stop and rest, even for him—as she had never stopped pursuing anything she
believed in, even for him. He could only hope that her body would not fail her
in this, but see her through until their children were born into the new world
she had become obsessed with creating. Her strength of will had always been as
much a part of her, and as unquestioned in her mind, as the strength of her
body. It had not been easy, sometimes, loving her, when her stubbornness had
collided with his own quick temper. But their making-up had always been sweet,
back in Summer .... “I love you,” he murmured. He put his arms around her,
feeling the shadows of lost time fall away as he held her close. She kissed his
mouth, her eyes closed; her eyelids were a fragile lavender.

“What were you doing here?” He nodded at the throne as their
lips parted; half afraid to ask, but asking anyway.

She shook her head, as if she was not certain either. “I
wanted to know ... how it felt when she was Queen.” Arienrhod. “Today ... today
I was truly the Lady, Sparkie.” Unthinkingly, she used his childhood nickname.
But there was nothing of childhood in her voice, and suddenly he felt cold.

The Lady is nol the Queen. He didn’t say it, afraid of her response.
The Summer Queen was traditionally a symbolic ruler, representing the Sea
Mother to her people.

But from the first ceremony Moon had led as the Lady, she
had broken with ritual and tradition. She had claimed that it was the Goddess’s
will, that this Change must begin a real change. He knew that she did not
believe in the Goddess anymore; not since she had learned the truth, that
sibyls were human computer ports, and not the Sea Mother’s chosen speakers of
wisdom. Sibyls existed on all the worlds of the Hegemony, and probably on all
the other worlds of the former Empire. They were speakers for the wisdom of an
artificial intelligence, not the Sea Mother. But Moon had told him the sibyl
mind spoke to her, not simply through her; that it had commanded her to bring
Tiamat the technological enlightenment that the Hegemony had denied it for so
long. He had found the idea as unbelievable as the idea of the Goddess now
seemed to him ... until he had watched her today in the Hall of Winds. “How did
you do it?” he asked, at last. “What you did today. How did you stop the wind?”