Joan Vinge - The Summer Queen

He had helped her to their bedroom, and Miroe Ngenet had given her a warm brew of herbs to calm her, forbidding anyone to disturb her—even him. He had not argued. When he had come to bed himself she had been sleeping.

But he had wakened in the middle of the night and found the bed empty beside him, and had come searching. He had not expected to find her here, like this. “Moon …”he said again, tentatively, as if some part of him was still uncertain whether she was the one that he saw on the throne, whether it was not really Anenrhod. “Are you … are you all right?”

Her face eased at the words, as if it were something in his face that had disturbed her. She nodded, her tangled, milk-white hair falling across her shoulders. Suddenly she was his pledged again, and barely more than a girl, the porcelain translucency of her skin bruised with fatigue and her hands pressing her pregnant belly, “I’m all right,” she said faintly. “I woke up. I couldn’t get back to sleep. …” She brushed her hair back from her face. “The babies won’t let me rest.” She smiled, as the thought brought color into her cheeks.

“Two—he whispered, coming closer, stepping up onto the dais beside her. “Gods—Goddess—” barely remembering to use the Summer oath, and not the offworlder one, “we’re doubly blessed, then.” Ngenct had told him the news, after insisting that Moon should not be disturbed from her rest.

“Yes.” She made the triad sign of the Sea Mother with her fingers. Her hand fell away again, almost listlessly, although she still smiled, still shone with wonder. He glanced at the sibyl tattoo at her throat; covered her hands with his own on the swell of her soft, white sleepgown. Once he had believed it was impossible for them ever to have a child together, and so had she. Summer tradition said that it was “death to love a sibyl…” That saying, the fear behind it, had driven them apart, driven him here to the city… into the arms of Arienrhod.

But it was not true, and here beneath his hand lay the proof of it. He felt movement; heard Moon’s soft laugh at his exclamation of surprise. She got up from the throne, in a motion that was graceful for all its ungainliness. He had always been fascinated by her unconscious grace, so much a part of her that she was completely unaware of it. He remembered her running endlessly along the beaches of Neith, their island home; saw her in his mind’s eye climbing the crags in search of birds’ eggs and saltweed, never slipping; or darting along the narrow rock-built walls of the klee pens, never falling. He remembered her dancing, held close in his arms while the musicians played the old songs… She was not tall, and so slender that Gran had always said she barely cast a shadow, but she was as strong physically as any woman he knew. Strength and grace were one in her; she rarely doubted her body’s responses, and it rarely betrayed her.

Ngenet had told him that carrying twins was doubly hard on a woman’s body, especially under circumstances like these, when Moon pushed herself endlessly, relentlessly. He had tried to make her listen, but she would not stop and rest, even for him—as she had never stopped pursuing anything she believed in, even for him. He could only hope that her body would not fail her in this, but see her through until their children were born into the new world she had become obsessed with creating. Her strength of will had always been as much a part of her, and as unquestioned in her mind, as the strength of her body. It had not been easy, sometimes, loving her, when her stubbornness had collided with his own quick temper. But their making-up had always been sweet, back in Summer. … “I love you,” he murmured. He put his arms around her, feeling the shadows of lost time fall away as he held her close. She kissed his mouth, her eyes closed; her eyelids were a fragile lavender.

“What were you doing here?” He nodded at the throne as their lips parted; half afraid to ask, but asking anyway.

She shook her head, as if she was not certain either. “I wanted to know … how it felt when she was Queen.” Arienrhod. “Today … today I was truly the Lady, Sparkie.” Unthinkingly, she used his childhood nickname. But there was nothing of childhood in her voice, and suddenly he felt cold.

The Lady is not the Queen. He didn’t say it, afraid of her response. The Summer Queen was traditionally a symbolic ruler, representing the Sea Mother to her people.

But from the first ceremony Moon had led as the Lady, she had broken with ritual and tradition. She had claimed that it was the Goddess’s will, that this Change must begin a real change. He knew that she did not believe in the Goddess anymore; not since she had learned the truth, that sibyls were human computer ports, and not the Sea Mother’s chosen speakers of wisdom. Sibyls existed on all the worlds of the Hegemony, and probably on all the other worlds of the former Empire. They were speakers for the wisdom of an artificial intelligence, not the Sea Mother. But Moon had told him the sibyl mind spoke to her, not simply through her; that it had commanded her to bring Tiamat the technological enlightenment that the Hegemony had denied it for so long. He had found the idea as unbelievable as the idea of the Goddess now seemed to him … until he had watched her today in the Hall of Winds. “How did you do it?” he asked, at last. “What you did today. How did you stop the wind?”

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.