Elizabeth Moon: Change of Command

“What?”

“Your ancestors led the rebellion, Esmay. They massacred the family we were sworn to protect.”

Esmay stared. “How can you know that? If no one survived—”

“Listen: Against these our oath is laid: the sons of Simon Escandon, and the sons of Barios Suiza and the sons of Mario Vicarios, for it is they who led the rebellions against our Patron. Against their sons, and their sons’ sons, to the most distant generation. May their Landbrides be barren, and their priests burn in hell, for they murdered their lawful lord and all his family, man and wife, father and mother, brother and sister, to the youngest suckling child. There is blood between their children and our children, until the stars die and the heavens fall. Signed: Miguel Serrano, Erenzia Serrano, Domingues Serrano .”

Silence held the room; Esmay could scarcely breathe, and cold pierced her. She glanced around; the faces that had been welcoming an hour before had closed against her, stone-hard, the dark eyes cold. All but Barin, who looked stunned, but not yet rejecting.

“I never heard this,” she said finally.

“I don’t suppose they would brag about it,” Vida said. “What story did you hear?”

Story. She was already sure that anything Esmay said would be a story, would be false. “In our history . . . there was a war, but also a plague, and a third of the population died of that, including the Founders.”

“Is that what you call the Family?”

“Yes . . . I suppose, though I never knew there was one great family. I’d always thought of them as many families.”

“You never heard the name Garcia-Macdonald?”

“No. Neither name.”

“Ah. I’ve no doubt the rebels destroyed all evidence. There was nothing to show against them when Altiplano joined the Familias Regnant three hundred years later. All we could do was watch—and we did not then know which of the people on Altiplano had been involved. By then the Regular Space Service had formed around us.”

“Was that the family? Garcia-Macdonald?”

“Yes. A family Serranos had served beside as far back as the wet-navy days of Old Earth. Tell me about this war, as you heard it.”

“The Lifehearts and the Old Believers,” Esmay said, dredging up what she remembered of those childhood lessons. “Um . . . the Founders wanted to bring in more colonists, free-birthers and Tamidians, to work the mines and develop the land. There had been a charter—a compact, they called it—promising to settle Altiplano only with those acceptable to those already in place. The Old Believers objected to the number of Tamidians the Founders wanted to import—they knew that they’d be outnumbered in two or three generations because of the free-birth policies. And the Lifehearts wanted development to proceed with due regard for the underlying ecosystem. But the Founders wanted a quick profit—they brought in shiploads of Tamidians, and the Tamidians brought diseases alien to the Altiplanans—diseases they were immune to, genetically.”

It came back to her now—the accusations and counteraccusations. Infant mortality soared among the Altiplanans, as the diseases spread into an unprotected population; they would be outnumbered in decades, not generations. The Tamidians had mocked their beliefs, throwing down shrines and trampling the icons into dust. The Founders had moved people off the open land, herding them into cities, where they sickened faster. Her great-grandmother had told her about the Death Year, when no Altiplanan baby had survived a week past birth, and about the Landbride who had called a curse on the unbelievers, at the cost of her own soul.

“For Landbrides do not curse: they bless. But she was taken from her land, and her children had died, and she escaped from the city to the mountains, and there with blood and spit and the hair of her head she made a gieeim , and offered her soul to the land if it would destroy the invaders.

“I don’t know what she actually did,” Esmay said. “My great-grandmother never told me, if she even knew. In her view, the hubris of the Founders angered God and brought a just punishment upon them. But a plague came out of the mountains and the plains, and up from the sea, and in the first year the Tamidians died as our children had died, spewing blood and rotting as they fell. It was said that they begged the Founders to let them leave, but the Founders brought in more, until the cities stank of death, and the Founders themselves sickened.”

“A bio-weapon?” someone said, behind the admiral.

Esmay shook her head. “No—at least, nothing I know of, and Altiplanans do not use bio-weapons today. But when the Altiplanans wanted to leave the cities, and go back to the land, the Founders denied them, and then there was war . . . but not to massacre them all, only to get back to the land from which they had been driven.”

“That’s not the report we have,” Admiral Serrano said. “That’s not what this says.” She fluttered the paper.

“It’s all I know,” Esmay said. “Are you sure your report is reliable?”

“Why wouldn’t it be? A servant . . . someone . . . escapes—”

“How? To what?”

“Atmospheric shuttle, to the orbital station. Unfortunately, he carried the disease with him, and it infected the station crew. Only three of them lived, but they passed it on . . .”

“I don’t believe it!” Barin reached for Esmay’s hand. “How can you believe a little scrap of paper stuck in a child’s book—”

“Not a child’s book—”

“Whatever kind of book. How can you believe that the real, secret truth was lost so long, and only comes to light just in time to keep me from marrying Esmay?”

Voices rose in an angry gabble, but Barin shouted over them. “I don’t care! I do not care that she’s from Altiplano. I do not care that this—this scrap of paper says her family were murderers hundreds of years ago. Are all Serranos saints? I love her, and I admire her and I’m going to marry her, if I have to leave the family to do it!”

“Barin, no!” Esmay grabbed for his other hand. “Wait—we have to find out—”

“I already know what I need to know,” he said, looking into her eyes. “I love you, and you are faithful and true and brave—and you love me. That is what matters, not what happened then.”

“There was an oath sworn . . .” Vida said.

Barin rounded on her, and this time Esmay could see the family likeness as if stamped in living bronze. “And are all oaths worthy? That’s not what you told me, Grandmother, when I swore to keep Misi’s secrets. There are oaths and oaths, you said, and it’s a wise soul that swears rightly, which is why we swear few.”

For an instant, Esmay thought Vida would scream her reply, but her voice, when she spoke, was soft.

“Then we must find the truth of this matter, Grandson—whether the story as we know it, or as the Suizas know it, is the truth. For if we know at last the names of those who killed our patrons, I see no possibility of peace between us.”

“We have an oath to the Familias,” Heris Serrano said. “As you keep telling the other Fleet families, when they remember who were their patrons. Would you have Serranos unravel Fleet, and possibly the Familias as well, to seek vengeance for ancient wrongs?”

Silence, an uneasy silence in which Esmay could almost hear the unspoken arguments based on rank, active service, combat experience. Barin broke it.

“It doesn’t matter. I’m sticking by Esmay no matter what you say.”

“The question is, will she stick by you, or will she turn traitor like her ancestors?” That was not Vida, but a male Serrano at the rear of the crush.

“Nonsense,” Heris said. “The question is, does she love him?”