The Summer Queen (6 page)

She looked up at him, her eyes stricken and empty. “I had
to,” she said, her voice as thin as thread. “I had to, and so I did—” The
thread snapped.

“Don’t you know how?” he whispered.

She shook her head, looking down; but her fingers rose to the
sibyl sign at her throat. “Something inside me knew. It made me do it, to make
them believe me ....”

His hands released her reflexively. She looked up at him,
her pale lashes beating, her agate-colored eyes full of sudden pain. He put his
arms around her again; but it was not the same. “Come back to bed,” he murmured
into her ear. “You should be resting.”

“I can’t. I can’t rest.”

“Let me hold you. I’ll help you ....” He led her down from
the dais; she clung to his hand, but her gaze still wandered the room, which
was lit as brightly as day. He followed her glance, looking across the
snowfield carpet; remembering Arienrhod’s courtiers scattered across it like
living jewels in their brilliant, rainbow colored clothing. Gossamer hangings
drifted down from the ceiling, decorated with countless tiny bells that still
chimed sweetly and intermittently as they were disturbed by random currents of
air.

They left the throne room, entering the darkened upper halls
that were empty even of servants now. He was relieved to find himself alone
with her, jealous of these stolen moments. He had thought when they were
reunited at the Change that everything would change for them. And it had ...
but not the way he had wanted. Not back to what it had been. Moon was no longer
his alone, his innocent Summer love. And he would never again be the naive
island youth she had pledged her life to; Arienrhod had seen to that.

He tried to lead her toward their room, but she shook her
head. “I don’t want to go back to bed. Walk with me. Show me the palace—show me
all the parts of it.”

“What, now?” he said. “Why?” She had promised him, after
Arienrhod’s death, that they would never set foot in the palace again. He had
believed her, believed that she would no more want to be reminded of all that
had happened here than he did.

But she had been drawn back to this place, like metal to a
lodestone, as if it were somehow part of the compulsion that had seized her at
the Change. She did not seem to enjoy being here, any more than he did; he knew
she was intimidated by its vastness, its staff of obsequious Winter servants,
the alienness of its offworlder luxuries. She seldom went beyond a small
circuit of rooms, as if she were afraid that she might take a wrong turn
somewhere in its columned halls and be lost forever in time. Only the Snow
Queens had lived here, ruled from here, as secular leaders dealing with the
offworlders who controlled Tiamat’s fate, never a Summer Queen; until now. But
Moon would not leave, refusing to make her home among their own people, among
the watchful, peaceful faces and familiar ways of the Summers who inhabited
Carbuncle’s Lower City.

And now, in the stillness of midnight, she wandered the palace’s
halls like a restless spirit, searching for questions without answers, answers
that were better left ungiven ... forcing him to show her the way. “Why?” he
said again

She touched her stomach, the promise of new life within her.
“This,” she said softly, looking down.

He nodded, resigned but not really understanding. He started
on through the halls, the rooms, one by one. level by level; showing her the
places she knew, how they fit into the palace she did not know—the ordinary,
the common, the empty; the extraordinary, the exquisite, and the perverse.
Light followed them from room to room, at his command, revealing the fluted
curves of doorways, the shellform trim that decorated ceiling-edges, the arched
convolutions of space and the spiraling stairwells that always made him feel as
though he were climbing and descending through the heart of a shell.

The imported technology that had once made the palace seem
like a wonderland to his newly opened senses now lay everywhere like the husks
of dead insects, an ephemeral infestation. Their components had been rendered
useless by the offworlders before the Hegemony left Tiamat. But the palace,
like the rest of the city of Carbuncle, lived forever, existing on its own
terms, on its own power source, as it had since time out of memory. The palace’s
nacreous walls were covered with murals, with artwork, tapestries, mirrors. The
superficial decorations had been added over the centuries by various Winter
rulers, but the palace itself, with its inescapable motifs of the sea, remained
unchanged. He had lost count of the times he had wondered who might have built
this strange place, and why. Now, moving through these halls that reeked of
age, he felt the newness of his life, and Moon’s, with a clarity that was
almost frightening.

He showed Moon through what had once been his suite of
rooms, still filled with the clutter of high-tech equipment that Arienrhod had
allowed him for his amusement. All his life he had burned with curiosity about
the technomagic of the offworlders who had been his father’s people. He had
come to Carbuncle seeking something that had been missing from his life. But
Carbuncle had not filled that void in him; not the city, not its people, not
the endless imported devices he had ruined in his need to learn .... He had
only learned how well his father’s people kept their secrets from his mother’s.

He showed Moon through the hidden passageway that led directly
from his room to Arienrhod’s. Moon looked around the Snow Queen’s bedchamber,
with its panoramic view of the sea, its furniture that echoed the pale opalescence
of the walls—chairs, tables, cushioned seats made of what seemed to be polished
shell. He had never known whether they were only a clever imitation, or whether
on some world—even somewhere in Tiamat’s own all-encompassing sea—there were
shelled creatures that actually grew so large.

Moon glanced toward the bed, with its fluted headboard made
of the same jeweled-and-gilded shellforms. Arienrhod waking had been like a
vision of the Sea Mother rising from the waves to him; he had never said so, because
he had been afraid she would laugh at him.

Moon looked back at him, her eyes filled with dark
curiosity. She turned away again, suddenly searching for the way out.

And stopped, in astonishment, staring at the wall in front
of her: at Arienrhod, dressed all in rainbows. A portrait—a painting, not a
hologram; but somehow it seemed more real to him than any three-dimensional
representation of her, almost more real than she was herself. It was as if the
artist had trapped her soul there. Even now it seemed to him as if the eyes of
the portrait were watching him, watching Moon, all-knowing, pitying, baleful.

Moon moved forward slowly, stretching out her hand until she
touched the hand of the woman in the painting, half-fearfully. She stood that
way, touching the portrait’s hand, as if she were hypnotized. Sparks looked
from her flushed, transfixed face to Anenrhod’s, which was as pale and coolly
prescient as if she had just been told a secret about them, one that even they
would never know.

He came forward to stand behind Moon, holding her again as
she faced the image that could almost have been a mirror. He felt her tremble,
inside the warm circle of his arms that were no protection from Arienrhod’s
memory—Arienrhod’s legacy.

Finally Moon tore her gaze from the painting, and let him
lead her out of the room. When they stood in the empty hall again, he murmured,
“Are you ready to sleep?” asking it so softly that even the echoes did not
waken.

But she shook her head; her purple-shadowed eyes looked up
into his. “Where is the room where we ...” She glanced down at the swell of her
stomach. “I want to see it.”

“Moon, this is—” He broke off. “All right,” he said roughly.
“I’ll show you where it is. But if you ever go there again, you’ll go alone.”

She nodded, her eyes filled with apology. He took her back
through the halls, moving against his will, against the flow of time, until
they reached the door of the sealed room. No one had touched it, opened it,
entered it, since Arienrhod’s death. He was not even certain how many hands
besides his own could make its door respond.

The door slid aside under his touch as if it were avoiding
him, and brilliance dazzled their eyes as the lights came up, redoubling from
mirrored wall to mirrored wall. The walls and ceiling of the room were filled
with mirrors, reflecting back their faces, their bodies from every angle as
they entered, multiplying every motion until he stopped, giddy. He had
forgotten how entering this room made his thoughts spin.

He looked toward the room’s center, toward the bed that was
its only piece of furniture. The bedclothes were still rumpled, untouched since
the last time someone had lain in it ... since the night during the final
Festival of Winter, when Moon had come to the palace and reclaimed him from his
living death. He searched for a single shattered mirror-panel, found it, its
cracked surface dulled with dried blood. His blood, from the moment when he had
struck out at his reflection, at all that he had become. He remembered how the
blood had flowed, red and warm, proving to him that he was still alive, vital,
young; that he had not grown old and died, behind the soulless mask of his
face.

He remembered how he had made love to Moon, there in that
bed, in this room; rekindling their life together, planting the seeds of new
life within her ....

He looked over at her, in time to see a spasm of pain cross
her face. He did not know whether it was physical pain or the pain of memory,
but she came with him willingly as he turned back to the door. As he resealed
the room behind them, she whispered. “I never want to see it again. I never
want anyone to see it ....”

He nodded, hoping that this would be the end of all their
night’s agonizing reminiscences. But she glanced toward the spiral staircase
that rose into the secret darkness above. “Where does that go?”

“To Arienrhod’s private study.” he said. “She never let
anyone else up there ....”He started forward, surprised to find that he was the
one who was eager, leading the way this time. She followed him slowly,
carefully up the narrow steps, up through the level of another floor and into
the space beyond it.

His breath caught; he heard Moon’s small gasp of
astonishment behind him. The room they stood in now lay at the peak of the palace—at
the peak of the city itself. Its transparent dome rose to a star-pointed
pinnacle, and beyond it the glowing forge of the sky surrounded them, fired by
the countless separate suns of the stellar cluster into which this footloose
system had wandered eons ago. Tiamat’s single large moon was not visible tonight,
but one star stood out among the thousands over their heads: the Summer Star,
whose brightening marked their system’s approach to the black hole which had
captured the roving Twins and made them its perpetual prisoners.

The black hole was an astronomical object with a gravity
well so powerful that not even light could escape it. The offworlders called it
the Black Gate, and among the things they had never shared with Tiamat’s people
were the starships capable of using such openings on another reality for
faster-than-light travel. Through the Gate lay the seven other worlds of the
Hegemony, some of them so far away that their distances were almost incomprehensible.
They were bound to each other because the Black Gates let starships through
into a region where space was twisted like a string, tied into knots so that
far became near and time was caught up in the loop.

But as Tiamat’s twin suns approached the aphelion of their orbit,
the unnatural stresses created by their approach to the black hole destabilized
the Gate, and the passage from Tiamat to the rest of the Hegemony was no longer
simple or certain. And so the offworlders had abandoned Tiamat, as they did
every time the Summer Star brightened in its sky.

They had taken their technology with them, forcing Tiamat’s
people back into ignorance and bare subsistence for another century, ensuring
that Tiamat would remain exploitable and eager for their return, when it was
finally possible for the Hegemony to come back again. They bound Tiamat to them
with chains of need because Tiamat’s seas held the mers, and the mers’ blood
held the secret of immortality. They called it the water of life, and it was
more precious than gold, than wisdom, even than life itself ....

He looked down, over the city’s undulations gleaming in the
darkness, out across the sea. He searched the dark mirror of the water for a
sign of life, the telltale motion of forms that might be mers swimming. But the
ocean surface lay calm and unbroken as far as his eyes could see.

When he could force himself to turn his back on the sea and
sky, the room lay waiting. Its rug was made from the hides of pfallas, which
were herded by Winter nomads in the harsh mountain reaches inland of the city.
Moon moved across the pristine surface hesitantly, her bare feet sinking into
the pile as if it were drifted snow.

He began his own slow trajectory through the room,
witnessing a side of Arienrhod that he had never seen.

He studied a cluster of dried flowers preserved inside a
dome of glass. The blooms were so old that they had lost all color, so old that
he could not even tell what kind of blossoms they had once been. He touched a
cloth doll, worn and one-eyed from a child’s love, dusty now with neglect.
There were other things clustered together on the same small, painted table—fragile
remains of a childhood spent at the end of the last High Summer.

Arienrhod had been born into a world much like the one that
he and Moon had shared in their youth. But then the offworlders had arrived;
she had become the Snow Queen, had taken the water of life. She remained young
through Winter’s one hundred and fifty years, changeless but ever-changing,
until she became at last the woman he had known. Arienrhod had told him many
times that he reminded her of things she had lost, of memories almost
forgotten. He had thought the words were lies, like too many other lies she had
told him. He stared at the forlorn mementos bearing silent witness on the
table; at last he turned away.