The Summer Queen (111 page)

“How would they feel on Kharemough, if you wanted to make
love to another man, instead of a—a woman who wasn’t like you.”

“Well, that would depend on his caste, and mine, probably.”

Tammis looked at him uncomprehendingly.

“The varieties of prejudice are infinite.” Gundhalinu
shrugged. “But if social rank was not a problem, most Kharemoughis I know
wouldn’t care what consenting adults did with each other—as long as they did it
discreetly. Public displays of affection or flesh are considered in bad taste.
On the other hand, in parts of Newhaven, from what Jerusha PalaThion tells me,
near-nudity is typical, because of the heat.”

Tammis’s eyes widened briefly, as if the idea that Jerusha
PalaThion had ever been a casually naked child was more than his mind could
imagine.

“Jerusha used to say she’d never get used to the cold
weather here. I used to think I’d never get used to the faces—the eyes. All
those pale, cold eyes.” He glanced away from Tammis’s eyes, which were the warm
earth-brown of his own.

Tammis shifted in his seat, pulling his soft-shod feet up
under him. “But I don’t live in any of those places—I live here! And the people
I live with, that I care about, they all hate what I am. They say even the Lady
hates it—”

“Just because you’re outnumbered doesn’t mean you’re wrong.”

Tammis pressed his mouth together. “That’s easy for you to
say.”

Gundhalinu laughed. “Much easier than it was when I left
Tiamat.” He touched the sibyl sign, glancing down. “As far as having judgment
passed against you: You wear one of these. You’ll never meet a more
terrifyingly impartial judge of character than a sibyl choosing place .... On
Kharemough every Technician child is required to go and be judged at one. When
I was a boy, I was so afraid of being found unworthy that I lied to my family
and said I’d failed the test, rather than go in, and actually know for sure
that I was not strong or stable enough to suit it.”

“Then, how—?” Tammis gestured at Gundhalinu’s trefoil,
touched his own.

“I’ll tell you that tale another time.” Gundhalinu smiled
faintly. “It will prove to you that sibyls aren’t saints .... Do you know who
Vanamoinen and Ilmarinen are?”

Tammis shook his head.

“You should. They were responsible for setting up the sibyl
net that’s served all our worlds ever since the Old Empire fell. They were two
men who were lovers. They’d been lovers for years; and I remember knowing that
it was their love that made them believe they could make a difference, even in
an impossible situation, when I ... That is, one of them was my ancestor.
Ilmarinen is the one my family has revered as its founder for centuries.”

Tammis glanced away. “But that means ... Did he have both
men and women for lovers?”

Gundhalinu shrugged. “I only know that he found his
solution. You’ll have to find your own. But if you ever need to know that you
have a right to be alive, just look down. Think about what sibyls mean to your
people, and why.”

Tammis sighed, stretching out his legs again, as if he were
uncoiling a spring.

“But ...”he said, looking away, and his fist began to rap
silently on the wooden arm of his seat. “But Merovy ...”

“What about her?” Gundhalinu asked.

“She threw me out.”

“Because you were seeing other men?”

Tammis nodded. “I can’t help myself. I don’t want to do that
to her, but then I start thinking about it, and I hate myself for it, but the
more I hate myself, the more I want to—”

“You never think about wanting other women?”

“Yes, I do.”

“As much as you want to be with men?”

Tammis nodded again. “But they aren’t Merovy, and so I—I
stop. Because I love her, there’s no one else I ever felt that close to. That’s
why I married her.”

“No boy or man you ever felt that close to either?”

“No. No one I really loved. Not like her.”

“Then why can’t you stop?”

Tammis shook his head. “I don’t know ....”He half frowned,
as if he had never thought about it.

“Would Merovy have thrown you out if you’d been seeing other
women?”

Tammis looked up at him. “Probably.”

Gundhalinu shifted in his chair, realizing that he had been
sitting motionless for far too long. “Then maybe the problem you both have is
that you’ve been unfaithful to her at all.”

“I suppose so ....” Tammis rubbed his eyes, and winced. “I
guess maybe it is.”

“Then maybe the question you need to give some thought to is
whether you really want to hate yourself more than you want to love your wife.”

Tammis glanced down, staring at his trefoil, or seeming to.
He looked up again, finally “Can I go now, Justice Gundhalinu?”

Gundhalinu nodded, surprised and vaguely disappointed by the
suddenness of the question. “Yes,” he said.

Tammis got up from his seat slowly, wincing again, and hesitated.
“Maybe ... maybe I will take something, for—” he gestured at his bruised body, “before
I go. If you don’t mind.”

Gundhalinu pointed. “Through there. Help yourself to
anything you need.”

Tammis started away across the room, stopped in the doorway,
looking back. But he said nothing.

Gundhalinu listened to him rummaging through the medicinals
in the bathroom, listened to him re-enter the hall and head directly for the
door. At the last possible moment, before the door closed, he heard the words, “Thank
you.”

Moon Dawntreader stood alone in the center of a hundred glittering
revelers in the Great Hall of the palace. Around her they ate and drank,
laughed and gossiped and danced and sang—Winters and Summers and offworlders,
all but indistinguishable from one another for once, behind the disguises of
their Festival masks and exotic clothes.

She wore a mask made for her by Fate Ravenglass—a
re-creation of the mask that had crowned her Summer Queen, made of dappled
green velvet and shimmering rainbow gossamer, echoing the flowers of the hills,
birdwings, the blues of sky and mirroring sea, the gold of the sun. She hid
behind it, gazing out through its eyeholes at the people around her like
someone peering through at another world; catching only surreal glimpses of
color and motion, hearing every sound as if it had reached her from a distance.

She moved to her body’s own slow, instinctive music,
drifting with the tide of the crowd. This Mask Night Ball was the climax to an
interminable cycle of parties and banquets and functions that she had been
expected to participate in as Queen during the Assembly’s brief, endless visit.

She had watched the Prime Minister, and everyone around him,
drink the water of life in her presence, like addicts, on the night of their
arrival; and then she had left the starport and gone back to the city, making
her anger plain by her absence. But she could not afford to ignore every
function that had been planned, because to do so would have meant that she lost
face, and endangered her position with the offworlders. So she had attended
them all, or her body had, although her thoughts were far away, among the mers,
trapped inside the greater vision that she was never allowed to lose sight of
now.

And she was attending this final ball without pleasure,
without illusion because it was required. There was hardly anyone here she
recognized, and she knew that even if they wore no masks there would be hardly
any faces she wanted to see. It was growing late, and already the crowd was
thinning as people paired off to spend the rest of the night together—this
night, when traditionally everyone was allowed, and even encouraged, to cast
aside their inhibitions and put off their regrets until tomorrow, when at dawn
they would symbolically cast the past into the sea.

It was considered bad luck to spend this night alone,
without a lover. On the last Mask Night, she had been with Sparks, reunited
after so long, and their future had seemed infinite in its promise of joy. But
Sparks was not even in the room tonight; he had made excuses, saying he wanted
to spend what little time was left with his full father, before the Assembly
departed. She supposed that much was true. But she was sure he would not return
before morning, no matter how he actually spent his night.

Tammis was not here either, not even making a pretense with
Merovy; they were living apart, she had heard, but neither of them had come to
her to tell her about it. And Ariele ... only the Lady knew what she was doing
tonight, or who she was doing it with. There was gossip about an offworlder.
Tor had seen them together, she was just a little worried, she’d said ....
Ariele had not been near the palace in weeks; it had surprised Moon that she
bothered to appear at the starport banquet—or that she left it with the rest of
her family, when the water of life appeared. She would never understand her own
daughter, never understand ....

The Prime Minister and several other partiers, who might or
might not be any of his own people behind the mass-produced sameness of their
masks, came to bid her good night. She was resolutely gracious, with relief
giving her responses a sincerity that they did not deserve. She recognized the
voice of Vhanu, the Police Commissioner; there were several Blues, uniformed
and unmasked, with the dignitaries for security. She wondered where Jerusha was
tonight. On duty for the Hegemony, she supposed; missing her old friend
suddenly, painfully. No one ... She lifted a hand to her face; encountered the
startling textures of her mask, instead of her own flesh. She let her hand drop
again.

She had searched the crowd all evening for the black uniform
of the Chief Justice, the silver flash of a trefoil among the dazzling
abundance of jewelry and medals. But she had not found him. BZ had appeared at
every other function in the days between the disastrous arrival banquet and
this masked ball; sitting beside her when it was required, but seeming to take
no more pleasure in anything than she did. She had seen in his eyes both apology
and resignation, and they had spoken to each other only when it was necessary.
Tonight he must have left early—if he had even come at all, since with masks to
hide behind anything was possible .... She started on, moving slowly toward the
stairway at the far end of the room. The Prime Minister had gone, there was no
one here anymore that she was required to wait for.

A sudden flash of reflected light caught her eye. Turning,
she glimpsed a mask through the blur of colors that made her stop in sudden fascination.
In the crowd of bright repetition, someone was wearing a mask as distinctive as
her own. Something indefinable about it told her that, like her own, it had
been made by Fate Ravenglass. But she knew all the masks that Fate had made,
only a dozen or so—by hand, in the old way, after she had been given back her
sight. Fate had given them to Moon and her family, to Tor, to a few other
people she considered her special friends. There were other surviving
maskmakers, and some of them had gone back into business, selling handmade
masks to rich Tiamatans and offworlders. But Fate, who had been counted the
best of them all, had said she would not be bothered this time with masks that
were not gifts of friendship.

Moon wondered who it was who had received this gift, only
able to tell that it was a man, from this distance. The shine of the mask
caught her eye again as its wearer turned toward her, as if he felt her staring
at him. The mask’s face was a mirror, reflecting the light and color and motion
all around him, until it became a star in the heart of the night-blackness that
framed it. She stood where she was, motionless, as he began to move toward her
through the crowd. She watched him come, hypnotized by her own reflection
gradually becoming visible in the mirror of Was face, growing clearer, more
distinct, as he approached her. And suddenly she knew him, by his motion, in
the same way she had recognized the workmanship of his mask.

“BZ,” she said, softly and with certainty, although he was
not in uniform. She lifted her hand to him.

“Moon.” His voice; his eyes, looking back at her from the
heart of her own bizarre, masked reflection. He took her hand in his, touching
it palm to palm in a warm caress. His fingers cupped hers and did not release
them.

“I thought you hadn’t come,” she murmured. “It’s almost
over.”

“I almost didn’t come.” He shook his head; his mask rustled
like soft laughter. “But Fate sent me this mask. It would dishonor her gift if
I didn’t use it tonight.”

She looked down, at his hand still holding her own, seeing
her fingers clinging to his, unable to let go. She looked up again, at his
eyes, her eyes, the blackness of space and the wild profusion of spring
reflected around them.

“Where’s Sparks?” he asked, and she felt her heartbeat quicken
suddenly. “Isn’t he here?”

“He wanted to spend time with his father.”

“Tonight?”

“His father won’t be here after tomorrow.”

“Ah,” he said. “But still, it’s Mask Night—”

“I know.” She looked down at their hands again, still locked
tightly together, holding them prisoner. She tried to pry her fingers loose.

BZ’s other hand came up, to capture her free one. “Dance
with me, then. There’s still music, still time ....”

She stiffened, feeling suddenly awkward and provincial as he
drew her close with gentle insistence. “I don’t know your dances—”

“I taught your memory how to dance, once,” he murmured. His
arms went around her, guiding her body into a formless motion against his own. “It
doesn’t matter what we do, only that we do something, so that I can put my arms
around you again and hold you against me ....”

Her arms had nowhere left to go, except to go around him. A
shockwave of heat rose through her as her hands felt the muscles of his back
beneath the fine, almost silken cloth of his shirt. “This isn’t like you,” she
murmured, and she would have laughed if her stunned, incandescent body had been
able to breathe.