Moments In Time: A Collection of Short Fiction (57 page)

“So what do I do, Janlord, Marshal of Whiners? Offer them all a life up here in the Lifted City, all thousand, all the thousands of them? Who’s left to run the factories and mines and farmlands but rats and alley cats, then?” She moves her empty glass to the table by her bed, misses it by an inch. It drops to the floor and cries out a song of shattering that echoes up to the ceiling and out the windows tall. For this little moment, the wind is silenced and all that is heard is the glass’s ringing lament. “Whatever,” she tells the shards on the floor, then flings herself across the bed.

A man could sooth her right now. One perfect specimen, a brawn of solid arms and thick figure … His weight pressed into her bed, the sheen of his body like a pool inviting her in. That’s exactly what she needs right now.
Yes, yes,
and she smiles, forgetting the world,
yes, in, in, come in …

Janlord is talking now, but she puts an ice-cold hand to her belly, still no shiver comes. The silk of her robes sliding along her shape, up her legs and her breasts and tickling her like an intimate friend … “I have seen many truths,” she agrees, interrupting whatever he was saying, giggles herself silly and rolls across the bed to stare up, up, up. If only stars were there above her bed to look at, up, up, up. Or another man’s beautiful face, up.
But no one has seen my truth, Janlord, not even you, not even wise, all-knowing you …

“You have heard what the people want,” he says with heaviness, “but a good Queen doesn’t give the people what they want; she gives them what they
need
.”

Staring at the draped, silken canopy, she considers what, exactly, the people of Atlas need. How can she, Queen of Having All She Wants, know the first thing of what people need? All her life the only thing that has consumed her is wanting, wanting, wanting. Oh, the men that have come and gone, arriving with empty wallets and leaving with so much more than they knew. It’s possible that half the city already know her, half the men of the Last City of Atlas smitten by a lie, in love with a phantom, never to know freedom from her mad love.

So be it,
she thinks of the weakness of men,
that my immortal Legacy will be one of lovers’ glut.

The Marshal is dismissed, and the world becomes bleak and cold again. Maybe it was already. Standing at the precipice, the warm fingers of brew slowly let go her throat as the minutes swell into hours swell into nightfall. When the moon makes a sickly alabaster of her skin and her chamber and her world, there is another soft knock at the door.
Are you him?

“In,” says the Queen. In comes the boy.

It’s over before it’s begun.

• • •

Her new personal bodyguard is presented to her in the throne room instead of the Crystal Court or the Lifted City Guardian Barracks since it is, as Janlord put it, “too dangerous outside for a Queen with an uprising.” She resents with all the tingling hair follicles on her head that the needy, greedy coin-suckers of Atlas have put her in this degrading position, unable to leave her own home of Cloud Keep even to catch a stroll along the Eastly, or a whiff of the seducing aromas of Lord’s Garden.

“A bodyguard has a name,” she announces dryly, careless that her voice reeks of being unimpressed and annoyed.

Slumped like a dark ancient tree with too-heavy limbs, the man is dressed head to foot in black. The gear he wears, an armor crafted by cruel hands no doubt, clings to his bulky, solid form. His hair juts like needles across his forehead, and when he turns to face her, his rough and blemished face that has seen more fights in his youth than there are stars in the sky is as unsmiling as coal.

Without lowering his face, eyes locked to hers with the grip of a taut chain, he lowers to a knee and says, “Tauron.”

“Tauron.” So many tiresome emotions and worries hanging from her like greedy bloated leaches, she can’t keep the irritation out of even that one simple word, his name.

“I devote my life to you,” he mutters darkly, “and should the rebels climb the Tower tall and break all your sieges, it is my life they’ll have before yours. By order of the Marshal of Order Umber, and the Marshal of Peace Janlord, and the Marshal of Legacy Lyncia, I’m your life protector in day and in night.”

“Good. Janlord spoke enough about you, trusting and principled and idealistic as he tends to be.” She gives a smirking sidelong glance at Janlord who, stoic as ever, only returns a simple nod. “Let’s hope, then, that I have no need for this bodyguard.”

Says the one called Tauron: “There is always need.”

Even that ugly darkness in his eye she might, in any other mood, find appealing, but in this touchy hour, it only inspires revolt and sadness in her stomach. But a bodyguard they’ve assigned her, and perhaps with all the city wrestling about her Keep spitting hate and wrath and sourness at her toes, it’s all for the better.

When the message comes many hours later, the Queen is occupied in her private chambers with a man twice her size and weight in bronzed muscle, his eyes a lustrous copper that reflects the hard and sweaty work of an axe-swinger. Whether he swings said axes to cut trees or behead children, she doesn’t care; he swings them with two biceps the size of her head, biceps that flex when he holds her down and touches his stubble-hugged lips into her neck on his long and patient way from one end of her body to the other.

She prefers them shaven, smooth and innocent … but with all the uprising and disorder, she didn’t even think to reprimand them for sending her such a rugged thing. She just took the man in all his unkemptness, smiled herself drunk, and slowly drew him to her bed like all the others.

Are you him?

But now the messenger waits at her door, and when a Queen has a million desserts at her disposal, she can simply set aside this rugged man for now—her heart an overworked drummer, the blood in her body thumping with the urgency of tiny deaths—and take to her head the heavy crown of duty.

“What is it?” she sings, out of breath at her chamber door.

There is a possible security breech, the messenger explains. Rumor has touched the ears of Lifted City officials that members of the rebel groups responsible for leading the uprising have somehow infiltrated the Lifted City. Yes, even beyond both the Outer Gates and the Heaven’s Stair.

Just to the left of her door, the bodyguard is stationed, and Atricia nearly mistakes him for a statue before his eyes move the slightest, taking in the messenger and hearing with irritated eyes the messenger’s news. He looks such an animal, as though beneath his layers of armor there are, yet, layers of bear fur and stench.
Yes, if I am in trouble, you are in trouble too, you big ugly thing.

“And where is Guardian, my protectors?” she asks, whipping her attention from the thing called Tauron to her messenger boy. Why must such a message reach her at a time when her heart is already racing? She can’t separate sexual exhilaration from menacing matters of life and death. Or maybe they’re quite the same. “
Guardian
,” she repeats, annoyed. “Where is
Guardian
, the very people charged with the duty of eradicating
such rebel groups?”

Most of them are tracking down any signs of the rebels, admits the messenger. “Yet others,” he goes on, visibly shaking, dreading his next words, “have turned out to be traitors themselves. Six members of Guardian have been taken into holding so far … and they await your judgment.”

“So far? Won’t be long before all of Atlas is awaiting my judgment,” she gripes bitterly. “Alright. Thanks for your message, messenger. Go and get Janlord, get the Marshals, get all of them. This has to be put to an end.
Today
.”

The messenger goes, and the bodyguard’s eyes sit heavily in the dark. She hardly addresses the brute, simply sighing, then lets shut her chamber door with a tinny thud. The meat still sprawled naked across her bed, his face buried in a pillow and his rippling backside facing her, Atricia drinks in one very long look at him, drinks in the beautiful sight, just as beautiful as the hundreds before him.
How long will it be until these sights are no longer beautiful? How long will it be until these sights are no longer mine?
She drinks up the man until she chokes, his back muscles, his tight ass, his thick calves and slippery feet. She drinks with her eyes until her eyes drown and she sees nothing at all.

A beauty in my bed to protect my heart, a beast at my door to protect my life.
The meat in her bed stirs, peering up from the pillow like a puppy and blinking his eyes. “My Queen?”

She isn’t even finished with him, still clutching a silk sheet to her breasts, covering up her pride and her majesty, if there is any left. Uprising, they say. Her once-brethren coming to eat her up. Her once-kin, swelling like bacteria at her feet, climbing her every inch microscopically. These once-friends, now already tasting her blood on their queen-craving tongues.

“You may leave.”

The next day when she sits in the throne room among her men and her women, her eyes search the Court the way one surveys their own face for imperfections. Pressing a finger to the cheek, to the nose, lifting eyelids and pulling ears …
I feel the liars and the betrayers and the treasons like an itchy rash. I will scratch you all out the same.
Janlord gave his counsel earlier, that she should put on her gentlest face and give her best to the people, pour her gold into their happiness the way she pours brew into a glass, but what message does that send? Defy your authorities and be handsomely rewarded?

No. Queen Atricia has birthed overnight a far simpler solution.

The criminals brought before her, men and women and children, are all given a fair and just opportunity to speak on their crimes. “The least lives you take, the better,” urges the Marshal of Peace Janlord, but he has no worries, surely not.
None of these greedy rebels will be dying today.

She doesn’t lift herself a hair off the throne when she asks of the men, of the women, of the children brought before her one by one, “Would you truly wish your Queen Of Truths to die?”

“By a knife through your neck,” says the man.

“Horribly and alone,” cries the woman.

“Starving, the same way my daddy starved,” threatens the child.

Staring into the man, into the woman, into the child … through them, to their brains where synapses fire and make left or right of all choices, she lets glow the modest strength of her Legacy and says to them: “But why would you wish death on the Queen Of Truths, whom you love?”

The man flashes the whites of his eyes. The woman’s mouth gapes in realization of her error. The child flinches, stirred by a sudden change of heart.

“I’m so sorry,” says the man.

“You’re right … What came over me?” asks the woman.

“They made me do it. I don’t hate you, I don’t want you to starve, please, I’m sorry,” begs the child.

They will all love me,
Atricia realizes, her face brightening. Every last rebel, turned from her worst enemy to just another desperate lover. Every single one of them must be brought in front of her now. She will turn this uprising the other way, press back into the grime below the wash that’s come up.
They will love their Queen, and lovers do not kill the ones they love.

Already, half the men of Atlas are madly in love with her. Why not add the rebels to her ever-expanding fandom?

“Broadcast these judgments to the whole city,” the Queen later orders her crew privately. They listen, heavy of eye and nervous of ear. “Broadcast to all of Atlas the love their Queen bears for her greedy, gold-hungry people. They wish her to die, you heard them … but she will not die … and instead, Queen Atricia, Queen of Truths, the Slum Queen gives them her
love
…”

She pretends not to notice Janlord’s downcast expression, his silent dissent, the misgiving that hangs on his face like heavy skin.
Let him doubt,
she thinks acidly.
They all doubted me since I was a girl, and here I am.
On a throne the height of a city, at the summit of Cloud Tower, high above the wispy Cloud Keep, higher still than the Lifted City, so high the slums are but a sour spread of darkness beneath her … there sits on the greatest chair a girl they call Queen.

A girl from the slums.

Commanding that adjustments be made to the cameras before their next broadcast, the Queen also adds to the light that hits her throne, sure that the glass tiles and the mirror-clean walls of the room reflect her flawless complexion. It’s really important for a Queen to appear flawless, no matter the sickness wrestling in her bowels like fidgety snakes. “Bring the camera close,” she instructs a man, “but not
too
close.”

She judges each rebel the same as she did before, except now it’s broadcast to the entire city. Every citizen will watch as each rebel is brought before her and shown the sweetest mercy. “I see the truth now,” they sing. Yes, yes, she shows them truth. Each of these once-uprising and violent men and women … now reduced to tears of affection and pleas for the heavens. “I’m so sorry,” they beg. “I love my Queen,” they realize. “Forgive me, please, please,” they chant.

Just like another lover in her bed, these men and women and children fall in love with her before the eyes of the world. They fall in love with her and they confess their guilt, confess their allegiance, confess how their whole life has been empty until the Queen filled them up with her cold-hot nectar … a nectar that
almost
tastes of truth, if one closes their eyes.