Tara wakes up with Cillian. “What happened to Ross?”
“Oh, he’s fine, baby, he’s better than fine. But I’ve got some stuff I gotta take care of.”
That “stuff” is a result of Christolea’s incompetent reign. The Tasean government, sensing weakness, has been pushing their luck. Violating treaties right and left. Winking at piracy inflicted on Skarsian ships in their territories. Increasing tariffs.
And now they’re doing maneuvers between Skarsian and Tasean space. Playing chicken.
Cillian doesn’t play chicken. If he comes at you, he intends to ram.
The next few weeks are happy ones. Ross works on the disclosure; Ailann and Tara decide an ideal time to announce it will be the day before the Nau’gsh Festival. After a conference with the Cantor, it is decided that Ailann will be the representative of Apple and Rose. This time, there is no grumbling about a violation of tradition. If God decides he wants to do the mass, you let Him.
Driscoll is put in charge of festival planning. His ideas are spectacular and innovative, yet tasteful. Money isn’t poured on it – pelted might be a more appropriate word. Tara has known suffering and loss, betrayal and desolation, but she has never once endured the soul-crushing malaise of poverty. It’s a weakness. Lack of understanding is always a weakness.
In the midst of all this activity, Cillian pops in and out, monitoring the situation with the Taseans. He asks Cuinn for an analysis. Cuinn tells him what he already knows.
Tara is vaguely aware of the troubles. She isn’t stupid. She can hear the news. But Ailann shelters her from it to a good extent. She’s been through a lot this past year. He wants, more than anything, for her heart to be light, for her wedding to be full of joy. They’ve waited thirty years for this.
Tara is aware of all the conferences Cillian has with Rear Admiral Naveeta and General Lemkht. She knows Lemkht has converted to Archonism, which is amusing. She knows Cara the Arrow is on Tasea, sending intelligence back to Mickey. She knows, with her unfailing instincts, that sooner or later, there will be a war.
What she doesn’t know is that Cillian has planned a pre-emptive strike.
It’s a fucking attack, says Cillian. Pre-emptive strikes are for wusses.
It’s exactly the same thing, says Ailann. It just sounds better. A rose is still a rose, by any other name.
You got that backwards, says Cillian. There must be a hundred things called roses, and they ain’t at all the same.
Choice of words does matter, says Evan. If it didn’t, what would be the point of poetry? The fish called orange roughy was once the slimehead. The Norton Anthology of Marketing has a whole chapter on the poetics of renaming.
I am now in enough command of the art of writing to realize that the flow of the narrative is being sorely disrupted. I request that everyone hold their comments until the sequence is finished.
Fasten your pocket inertial dampers, says Cillian.
There are some other things which have to happen – I’m not certain whether I should call them pleasantries or unpleasantness. First, as I have related, the trial of General Panic. But there is another reckoning that must happen – Tara must face her uncle, who has been held prisoner in the dungeons of Sideria since Restoration Day.
Cetin Urhu may have been a miserable bastard, but he was no fool. When the coup was overthrown, he immediately turned himself in, knowing himself safer under guard than left to the mercy of the angry mob. And now Tara must pass judgment on the man who was responsible for most of her suffering. A part of her wants to kill him, but he’s the only close family she has left.
Patrick goes with her. Urhu ignores her, addressing the prince instead: “So I see you have your revenge upon me, Christmas tree.”
Tara is surprised. She didn’t know her uncle was aware that Patrick was nau’gsh. “I’m not interested in avenging myself,” Patrick says. But if Tara wants vengeance, Cillian will be happy to dish it out.
Urhu turns to Tara. “You are a filthy slut,” he says. “First you fuck the farmworker, and then that stallion from my stable.” He laughs. “It’s an apt enough image – in fact, I think bestiality might be a step above what you did, fucking a shrubbery. And it was all going on right under my nose. I should’ve known when you gave that piece of dirt a book for solstice. A book! What would trash like that do with a book?”
“Oh, when we’d ride the horses into the fields in the cool of the evening, he’d read poetry to me. “Leda and the Swan” – that’s appropriate, don’t you think? And then we’d lie in the tall grasses and I’d ride my ample stallion like I was a mare in heat. In retrospect, though, I should have given him Lady Chatterley’s Lover instead.”
She’s lying. That didn’t actually happen.
Yes, it did, says Sloane.
“You disgust me,” Urhu says.
“Then I’ll try to make this as quick as possible. I only have one simple question. Were you responsible for the death of my parents?”
He laughs. “That would be convenient, wouldn’t it? No. The Matriarch was responsible. Once you were born, she didn’t want to chance that they’d have a second daughter who carried the blood.”
Tara is confused now. What he says is entirely possible. “It doesn’t matter,” she replies. “Do you think I’ll ever forgive you for the murder of Daniel?”
“What murder?” he says. “I dare you to produce a body. You can’t. The supposedly dead man is standing right there.”
Under Cu’enashti law, Ross says, the murder of a disclosed Cu’enashti is tried as assault. But the murder of an undisclosed Cu’enashti is tried as murder. Tara knows this. She and the Cantor made the laws together.
But she’s faltering anyway. Before anyone else, she’s fearless, and sometimes heartless. But with her uncle, she’s a little girl again, abandoned, lonely, needing to be loved.
He’s dangerous, says Cillian. If he lives, he’ll try to usurp her again, or even kill her. Tara knows this, too.
“I said I would make it short,” she says, turning and storming from the room. And she hasn’t made up her mind. What she’s probably going to do is get a nice big drink. A triple.
For a moment, Urhu and Patrick stare at each other. Then Patrick smiles pleasantly. “The atmosphere in here is horrible, isn’t it? So stuffy and dank. I’ll freshen it up a bit.” And he does. He makes it much nicer.
About an hour later, Patrick dimly realizes that increasing the amount of carbon dioxide, no matter how refreshing it feels, is usually not beneficial to humans.
No one can figure out why Cetin Urhu suffocated. There was no visible sign of a struggle, and the time of death was well after his royal visitors had departed.
It doesn’t bother me at all. It’s like it happened to somebody else.
Two days before the wedding, there is a simultaneous series of sabotage attacks on Tasean production facilities, power plants and military bases. As the planet is reeling from the winds of destruction, it begins to hail. The Skarsian fleet comes out in full force. No feints, no distraction tactics. Naveeta is a war hammer, and Lemkht is no slouch either.
Cillian is very nervous about the whole thing, so he doesn’t hold back. Cillian is very nervous because he can’t be there in person. We still can’t leave the Domha’vei.
Ailann and Tara come up with a sneaky plan. It’s customary for the disclosures to be read in the central squares of Dolparessan municipalities on Moonday mornings. The festival happens to fall on a Moonday evening. So they decide to go to some tiny village, read the disclosure to a handful of surprised locals, and dash off. By the time the news gets out, they’ll be safely locked in Court Emmere for the festival, and by the time they leave three days later, the media will have tired of the whole business.
There is another aspect, one that had been kept, if not exactly secret, then subdued. Cillian planned the timing of his Two-day War carefully. On the morning of the disclosure, he makes a brief announcement to the media. Two days ago, Skarsia had made a secret military strike on Tasea in redress for numerous offenses. The battle was bloody and brutal. Skarsian casualties were few: the Taseans had been unprepared, undermanned and underarmed. At 21:14 GalStandard time last night, they had asked for a cease fire. Admiral Naveeta had called for their unconditional surrender, and they gave it.
“The Tasean System is now annexed by Skarsia,” he says. And then he grins. “I’m getting married today. It’s a wedding present for my wife.”
So stunned is the media by this revelation that it takes a full three hours for the news to pick up the story that Prince Consort Patrick Fitzroy had announced his disclosure in the sleepy hamlet of Veris Port-of-Call. It is another hour before the news director of Skarsia Media Systems runs into the company president’s office, jumps on his desk and yells, “Can that bio of General Lemkht! Whirljack Riordan is the fucking Archon!”
By this time, the festival procession has arrived at Court Emmere. The gates close, and Tara descends the stairway to the street. But before she reaches it, the Archon raises his hand, halting the music. “Is it meet that my wife should walk on mere gravel?” he asks. And with a wave of his hand, the streets are paved with thousands upon thousands of gemstones.
It was Driscoll’s idea; it had all been planned in advance. The areas of the festival were designated “ruby zone,” “beryl zone” and the like; the festival-goers could tell where they were by the color of gem they walked upon. “Touch them not for the duration,” says Ailann. “When the gates open again, there is more than enough to fill your pockets. But if you are greedy, or if you quarrel over them, I will turn them back to stone.”
Ailann takes Tara’s hand, and they walk through the lower gardens to the Central Pavilion. Tara leans in to him. “I dreamed this,” she whispers. “Years ago, I used to dream about this every night.”
“The gardens have been redone,” she notices. “They’re amazing.”
“Driscoll and Jamey did it together,” Ailann replies. “At first the landscapers were a little disconcerted about having to learn sign language, but it soon became clear that Jamey has an unsurpassable knowledge of plants.”
They reach the pavilion. This is a little different from the other times Tara attended the festival. It’s very clear that the ceremonial act of pouring the wine is not only a welcome of the procession to the court, but an offering from a wife to her husband. Ailann drinks, then hands the cup back to Tara. She drinks.
It’s a beautiful night, but she lets him lead her inside. Ailann is always worried about propriety. The first time Jack took her, it was in the garden. It’s festival, it doesn’t matter who sees. But Ailann will get her into that big, beautiful bed. She realizes that she’s shared it with so many of Ash’s emanations, but never Ailann.
First he takes her out on the verandah. In the distance, she can hear the drumming, see the festival fires in the villages. Below them, the party is just getting started. “Wait,” he says. “Something will happen.”
It gets darker and darker as the last rays withdraw from the landscape. And then suddenly the gardens, the fields, the hills rolling into the distance are covered with tiny blue lights. Ailann hands Tara a flower. It’s clear, and glows with a blue radiance. For a moment, she thinks it’s glass, but it’s not. It’s a real flower.
“It’s called eternium tara. Davy made it. It will bloom once a year, and for one night only, the first night of festival.”
“It’s lovely,” she says, burying her face in his neck. She doesn’t want him to see the tears in her eyes. She feels foolish. She’s not a sentimentalist. Instead, she sits on the bed, leans back. “Do you want me?” she asks.
“Is that a serious question? But first we have to consummate our marriage.”
“I thought that’s what we were doing.”
“In the Cu’enashti way,” he says. He reaches into his pocket, pulls out a blue apple and hands it to her. “Eat me,” he says.
The minute Court Emmere opens its gates, the reporters swarm inside. Fortunately, they are distracted by the glittering gemstones that, over the course of the three days, have become scattered everywhere by the feet of the revelers. While the journalists are groveling in the dirt, Tara and Ailann scrunch low into the back of a small hovercar. The driver, a slight, dark youth with piercing blue eyes, waves at the reporters as he passes through the gates.
“What’s your name, boy?” asks Ailann. “And when is the wedding?”
“Malik. And we pretty much decided that we’d get married during festival next year.”
“That’s a good choice. Then Premma can have eterniums in her wedding bouquet.”
Malik sighs. “I wish I could make my own flowers for her. I suppose that’s why you’re Archon, and I’m parking cars.”
They get to the spaceport, to the Matriarch’s private dock, uneventfully. The yacht is already prepared. We’re going to Eirelantra. But sooner or later, we have to face it.
“We should call a press conference. Try to get it under our control,” Tara suggests.
“Maybe we’d better see what they’re saying about all this.” Ailann keys in in SkMS on his newspad.
They’re running Late Darkshift with Lester, an IndWorld talk show. Lester’s doing his evening monologue. “What do you call Earth’s one hundred most prominent citizens?” he asks his sidekick Bumbo the Mudloosely. After waiting a suitable moment, he answers his own question: “The President’s hit list.”
The audience laughs. Then Bumbo asks, “Well, what do you call Skarsia’s one hundred most prominent citizens?”
“That’s easy,” says Lester. “The Archon.”
“OK,” says Tara. “We’re not going to get it under control. What’s Plan B?”
Ailann switches to another outlet. It’s a talking heads show, where four political commentators debate.
“It’s cynical, very cynical,” says a pundit called Mosha Raval’li. “Did you notice how fast attention got deflected from the Two-day War? Do you think that’s coincidence? Now everyone is talking about she-really-did-do-the-gardener-but-it-wasn’t-cheating-since-he’s-one-of-her-husband and no one is talking about the overnight annexation of an entire system.”
“It’s the other way round,” mutters Ailann. “The war was supposed to be the distraction.”
“That’s so typical of you,” says Bobert Crandon, the most conservative member of the panel. “Don’t you remember the Restoration Day speech? If God wants to declare war on Tasea – or to plant bulbs in the garden – who are we to question?”
“Bob,” Mosha ripostes, “you’re an Archonist, but I’m not. The Archon is not a god. He is a very powerful alien life form…”
“Alien is pejorative,” Sara Howe-Dumfaller interjects. “The nau’gsh were here before we were.”
“Thank you,” Ailann says.
“Turn it off,” Tara moans. “This is terrible.”
“Ross tried to warn you,” Ailann says.
“We just shouldn’t watch our own press.”
“We’re better off knowing than not knowing,” Ailann says. He tries yet another, a news show this time. “…Seventeen people arrested in a fight which broke out at Dalgherdian dance club Gnoobie’s. According to eyewitness accounts, violence erupted when a party-going reveler tripped over several devout Archonists who had fallen to their knees during the playing of the BioDiversitee remix of Blackjack Riordan’s ‘Coordinate System (You’re the Galactic Axis).’”
He tries yet another. A reporter is interviewing some half dozen fourteen-year old girls. They are all wearing shifts bearing the silhouette of the Atlas Tree and the letters OPL on the front.
One of them smiles at the camera and points at the letters. “O-P-L. That’s One Perfect Love.”
The girl behind her says, “If you don’t have leaves, don’t call me.”
“I’m starting to miss the Great Silence,” Ailann says.
