The Snow Queen (41 page)

Something
broke the water’s surface in front of them, sending cold spray into Moon’s
face. She groaned as Silky’s arms tightened around her chest, squinted with
ice-lashed eyes at a shining brindle face gazing back at her. Two, then three
more inhuman faces surfaced, behind and beside the first, to lie like fishing
balls on the brightening water. Recognition rose slowly, like a bubble rising
out of the depths, penetrating her anesthetic stupor: mers ...

They closed
in around her, prodding her insistently, urgently, with their webbed
fore-flippers. Her mind could not form an image of what they wanted from her; but
she knew, with the unquestioning trust of her childhood, that they were the
Lady’s own children come to save her if they could. “S-Silky,” chewing the
words to pieces between her chattering teeth, “let me—g-go.”

He released
her; she sank like a stone beneath the surface. But before she could react, the
sleek, buoyant shapes were raising her again. Web-fingered flippers enfolded
her like the petals of a closing flower, drawing her up into the air—over onto
her stomach on the soft, broad breast of a mer at rest in the water. She lay
sputtering and amazed, held barely clear of the lapping surface of the sea, her
feet still trailing in its insatiable cold. But the mer—it was a female, she
could tell by the necklace of golden fur it wore—wrapped her in its flippers
like a nurse ling cub, feeding her its body heat as it would warm and feed its
own young one. It began a deep toneless crooning, in rhythm with the rocking of
the sea. Too exhausted to wonder, Moon lay her head on its silky breast, hands
beneath her, feeling the toneless song penetrate her shuddering body. Silky and
two of the other mers still hovered nearby; but she did not remember them now,
did not remember anything past or future as her existence telescoped down to
the present moment.

How long in
the time of the greater world she drifted, held in the mer’s embrace, she never
knew, or wanted to know. The sun had crossed the sky, rolling down the farther
slope to its own rendezvous with the sea, before another change came over the
face of the water: the long shadow of a ship reaching ahead to greet them, the
distant heartbeat of its engines breaking their silence more and more
insistently.

“Moon.
Moon. Moon.” Silky spoke her name, wreathing her neck with dripping tentacles
as he tried to make her hear.

But there
was no Moon, no moon above, only the sea, the Sea, to answer him ... the Sea
reclaiming Her own.

“Moon ...
can you hear me?”

“No—” It
was more a protest against the intrusion on her mindless peace than an answer
to a demand. The world was a watercolor painting formlessly flowing ...

Something
jarred her lip against her chattering teeth; hot, viscous liquid spilled into
her mouth and trickled down her throat like flaming oil. She whimpered in
pleasure and denial, feeling the watercolor world congeal, take on a form that
was without reference in her grayed memory—except for the face centering above
her, pulling past and present into a single double-image. “MM-Miroe?”

“Yes,” with
infinite relief. “She’s coming back to us, Silky. She knows me.” Beyond him she
made out Silky crouched patiently, watching, and the round unblinking eye of a
cabin porthole.

“W-where?”
She gulped the peppery-sweet syrup convulsively as Ngenet pressed the cup to
her lips again. Her shivering, shriveled body was bare of the waterlogged suit
and bundled in heated blankets.

“On my
ship. Hauled in safe on board at last, thank the gods. We’re going home.” He
replaced a hot compress across the bridge of her nose, over her cheeks.

“H-home ...
?” Past and present lives ran together again.

“To my
plantation, to safe harbor. You’ve spent enough time walking the star road, and
enough time in the arms of the Sea Mother, mer-child ... almost a lifetime.” He
brushed her sodden hair back from her forehead with a calloused, gentle hand.
“Time to be grateful for solid ground, now.”

“El-Elsie
...” The word hurt her throat like bile.

“I know.”
Ngenet straightened up from the edge of the bunk. “I know. There’s nothing you
can do for her now but rest, and heal.” His voice and the cabin space faded into
the unreachable distance.

Moon
huddled deeper inside the nest of blankets as her awareness shrank inward,
dwindled down to the sensation of hot needles penetrating her cold-deadened
flesh, turning ice-locked veins to spring, unbinding her muscles; setting her
free ...

Jerusha
left the empty rooms of her townhouse behind, left the bread and fruit of her
unwanted evening meal half-eaten on the table, and went out and down into the
Maze. The twilight beyond the walls at the alleys’ ends marked the end of one
more unbearable day that she had borne, somehow—and the promise of another to
be borne tomorrow, and another, and another. Her job had been her life, and now
her whole life had become hell. Sleep was her only escape, but sleep only
hastened the coming of the new morning. And so she walked, aimlessly,
anonymously, through the dwindling crowds, past the shops—half of them empty
now, half still clinging tenaciously to life and profit, hanging on until the
bitter end.

The bitter end ... Why? Why bother? What’s the
point?
She drew the
hood of her coarsely woven striped caftan further forward, shadowing her face,
as she turned into the Citron Alley. Midway to twilight was a botanery she
frequented: herbal remedies and spices, cluttered shelves full of household
saints and charms against ill fortune; all imported from home, from Newhaven.
She had gone so far as to buy the most potent amulet she could find and wear it
around her neck—she who had sneered at her elders back home for wasting q blind
faith and good money on superstitious nonsense. That was what this job had
driven her to. But the damned charm hadn’t done her any more good than anything
else she’d tried in all this tIMe. Nothing had done any good, held any purpose,
had any effect.

And now the
one person who had supported her, kept her from believing that she was a
complete and utter failure, was gone.
BZ
…
Damn you, BZ! How could you do this
to me? How could you—die?
And so she had come here again, telling herself
that she did not know why ...

But as she
neared the shop she caught sight of a familiar face—a familiar shock of
flaming-red hair—Sparks Dawntreader coming toward her, dressed like a sex holo.
She had seen him only rarely over the past few years, during her infrequent
official visits to the palace.

It
surprised her now, seeing him again, to realize that he didn’t look a day older
than the first time she had seen him, sprawled in that alley almost five years
ago. But then, it had surprised her that Arienrhod kept him (in every sense of
the word, she supposed) at the palace ... had she kept him young as well?

Her
interest became self-interest as their trajectories closed; with guilty
preoccupation she assumed that he would see her, assumed that he would
recognize her even in this disguise, and read her hidden motives in her
restless eyes. She slowed, trying to keep her destination obscure until he
passed.
Gods, am I skulking like a
criminal now?

“Hello,
Dawntreader.” Defiantly she acknowledged him first; saw by his start of
recognition that he would not have looked at her twice if she hadn’t spoken.

But the
expression that showed next was none she would have expected, none that she
deserved—a smile that held his flawless youth up like a mirror to show her how
painfully she was aging, when every day passed like a year. His eyes were a
disturbing echo of the Queen’s: too knowing, too cynical for the face that held
them. They moved to the display of god-figures and charms in the botanery
window, back to the amulet hanging at her throat. He pulled uneasily at the
multiple collars of his skintight shirt; the gesture shouted hostility. “Save
your money, Commander PalaThion. Your gods can’t reach you here. All the gods
of the Hegemony couldn’t stop what’s happening to you—even if they cared.” A
mouthful of gall.

Jerusha
fell back a step as the words struck at her like vipers, poisoned with the
venom of her own deepest fears.
Does he
want it?
Even him?
Why?
“Why, Dawntreader? Why
you?” whispered.

Hatred
smouldered. “I loved her; and she’s gone.” He dropped his gaze, pushed on by
her, not looking back.

Jerusha
stood still in the street for a long moment before she realized that he had
given her the reason why. And then she went on to the botanery entrance, dazed,
like a woman caught in a spell.

She stood
in the cramped aisle before the dusty shelves that held what she had come for;
blind to the bittersweet nostalgia of the place, the stubborn refusal of
Newhaven tradition to conform to the standards of a new age or another world.
She ignored the clusters of dragons foot the festoons of garlanded herbs, the
wild tangle of odors in caressing assault on her senses; was deaf to

“Were you
speaking to me?” She became abruptly, resentfully aware that she was not
standing there alone any longer.

“Yes. They seemed
to have moved the powdered louge. Would you know where—?” A dark-haired,
fair-skinned, middle-aged woman; probably a local. Blind—Jerusha recognized the
light-sensor band she wore across her forehead.

Jerusha
glanced over the shelves, saw the shopkeeper caught up in animated gossip with
some other Newhaven expatriate; looked back. “It’s by the rear wall, I think.”
She stepped toward the shelves to let the blind woman pass.

But the
woman stayed aggravatingly in the aisle, her head bent slightly as though she
were still listening. “Inspector ... PalaThion, isn’t it?”

“Commander
PalaThion.” She returned contempt with barely concealed contempt.

“Of course.
Forgive me.”

When the sun turns black
.
Jerusha looked away.

“The last
time I heard your voice you were still Inspector PalaThion. I never forget a
voice; but sometimes I forget my manners.” She smiled in good-humored apology,
radiated it, until unwillingly Jerusha felt her own habitual frown letting go.
“It’s been nearly five years. My shop is next door ... I came to your station
one time with Sparks Dawntreader.”

“The mask
maker” Jerusha pinned an identity on the woman at last. “Yes, I remember”.
I remember, all right. Saving that little
bastard was the second biggest mistake of my life.

“I saw you
talking to him outside.” (
Saw?
Jerusha experienced a < moment’s disorientation as it registered; tried to
conceal her obvious irritation.) “He still comes to see me now and then; when
he needs ; shelter. There aren’t many people he can talk to any more, I think.
I’m glad he talked to you.”

Jerusha
said nothing.

“Tell me,
Commander—have you been as sorry to see the changes happening in him as I
have?” She bridged the void of Jerusha’s silence as though it did not exist.

Jerusha
refused to face the question, or the questioner; touched the hollows of her own
changed face with morbid fingers. “He hasn’t changed at all as far as I can
see. He doesn’t look a day older.”
And
maybe he isn’t, damn him
.

“But he is
,
he has ...”the master said heavily. “He’s aged a hundred years
since he came to Carbuncle.”

“Haven’t we
all.” Jerusha reached out and took a small dark plastic bottle of viriol oil
off of the shelf, hesitated; took another one. She thought suddenly of her
mother.

“Sleeping
drops, aren’t they?”

Jerusha’s
hand knotted possessively, defensively, over the bottles. “Yes.”

A nod. “I
can smell them.” The woman grimaced. “I’ve used them; I had insomnia terribly,
before I got my vision sensors. I tried everything. Without sight I didn’t have
any guide to the pattern of day and night ... and I’m not properly tuned to
Tiamat’s rhythms. I suppose none of us are, really. We’re all aliens here in
the end—or the beginning.”

Jerusha
glanced up. “I suppose so. I never thought of it that way .... Maybe that’s my
whole problem: Wherever I go, I’m an alien.” She heard herself say aloud what
she had only intended as thought; shook her head, past caring. “The more I want
sleep the less I get it. Sleep is my only pleasure in life. I could sleep
forever.” She turned, tried to move past the woman to the shop man at the door.

“That isn’t
the way to solve your problems, Commander PalaThion.” The mask maker blocked
her path without seeming to.

Jerusha
stared, felt her legs turn to soft wood. “What?”

“Sleeping
drops. They only make the problem worse. They take away your dreams ... we all
have to dream, sometime, or we suffer the consequences.” She reached out; her
touch wavered toward the handful of bottles Jerusha held, pushed them away.
“Find a better answer. There must be one. This will pass. Everything passes,
given enough time.”

“It would
take an eternity.” But the pressure remained against her hand ... against her
will ... she felt her hand give way and the bottles go back onto the shelf.