The Summer Queen (65 page)

“It isn’t safe for you to go alone,” Jerusha protested, with
the habitual concern of years spent guarding the Queen’s back.

“Tammis and Ariele will be with me.” Moon nodded toward her
children. “We’ll be safe. Not entirely welcome, but safe. Capella Goodventure
may hate everything I stand for, but the duty and honor of her clan are at
stake. She’ll guarantee my well-being.”

Jerusha glanced at Miroe, who made no protest, and nodded
her head grudgingly.

Moon began to strip off the layers of slicker and knitted
wool that had kept her warm on her journey. “I’ll bring Capella back here as
quickly as I can.” She called Ariele and Tammis away from the ship’s rail. They
came to her side, resigned, dressed as she was now in traditional Summer
festival clothing—loose linen shirts and pants dyed in shades of green,
decorated with shells and embroidery. Tammis looked self-conscious but
expectant; Ariele looked resentful as she left Silky’s side. Neither of them
had wanted to come. But they had, at least. Her eyes filled in the image of
Sparks’s absent face, behind them.

Days had passed, after she had learned the news about the Hegemony
and the stardnve, before she had told anyone else about it. She had moved
through those days as if she were still outside reality, endlessly considering
the consequences of what she knew but could not share, and what she must do
about them ... and waiting for a sign, from the sibyl mind, that had never
come.

At last she had told the Council about what she had learned,
and what it would mean for Tiamat. And she had told them that she had decided
to turn all her efforts and the resources of the Sibyl College to finding a way
to protect the mers.

The news had been greeted with shock and disbelief, and
then, in a flood, the reactions she had anticipated and dreaded. She had seen
the hunger come into the eyes of too many Winters, and even newly
tech-proficient Summers, for a future like their past—a life of golden
subservience in which all their needs were taken care of by the Hegemony, and
the only measurable price they paid for it was the water of life.

Some of the new industrial leaders and even the sibyls had argued
against abandoning the push to raise their technological level, saying that
instead they should do everything possible to make what progress they could ...
that they should turn their efforts to weapons research.

She had rejected that outright, knowing from all Jerusha had
told her that they would only be creating the weapons of their own destruction.
But she could not reveal to the Council the reason why the mers’ survival was
ultimately the key to their own survival, and even the Hegemony’s; why
protecting the mers had to come before anything else ... any more than she
could explain to her husband why BZ Gundhalmu wanted to return to Tiamat, and
save their world from his own people.

She could no longer rely on the people she had always relied
on. And so she had turned to the traditional elements among the Summers for
help and support; for their knowledge about the sea and the mers ... which had
meant even more resentment, more resistance, from the people in the city, who
had always been her strength.

And it had meant that somehow she must heal the long enmity
between herself and the Goodventure clan.

She and Sparks had argued over every aspect of her
decisions, even though she knew that for his own reasons he wanted to protect
the mers as much as she did. He had refused to accept any changes in their plan
for progress, even though for sixteen years he had spent as much time studying
the mers as he had spent working with her on the task of building a new Tiamat.
The reasons for his anger and his intractability had been as clear to her,
through all their bitter words, as she knew they must be to him. But neither
one of them had dared to speak the truth that might have freed them ... or made
it impossible for them ever to look into each other’s eyes again.

And when she had asked him to come with her to meet Capella
Goodventure, he had refused to leave the city.

She sighed, pulling her memory and her fears back into the
present, back under her control. She looked at her children, who stood nearly
as tall as she was, waiting for her. She had been with Sparks through all the
years that she had been Queen ... and that was nearly as long as she had been
with him in the islands before that, before the separation that had changed
them, their world, their place in it. It was hard to believe so many years had
passed so quickly—and yet so endlessly. Almost as hard to believe as the sudden
image in her mind of the people they had become: such strangers that the
innocents they had been in Summer would scarcely recognize themselves ... such
strangers to each other.

She shut that thought out of her mind with finality, not
letting herself even begin to wonder whether the distance that had grown
between them had become unbridgeable. Or what it would mean to them—to all
three of them—if BZ Gundhalinu returned to this world ...

She started toward the flight of steps that would lead her
into a future that was not the one she had wanted, or intended. Silently she
reminded herself that neither was the future she had now one she wanted, or
intended.

She climbed, Tammis and Ariele trailing behind her. Her
breath came hard by the time she reached the top. She wondered whether it was
the years, or only her body’s enforced inactivity that had left her winded. But
waiting for her was a sight that made her sudden sense of mortality fall away—a
sea of Summer, of sea-greens, grass-greens ... fair, sun-reddened faces, young
and old, laughing, wrestling, eating, at play. A picture out of time. She moved
among the ancient stone-walled houses with their newly rethatched roofs of
dried seahair, moving forward into the past as she searched the crowds for a
face she recognized. Curious strangers looked back at her, smiling as they saw
the trefoil shining against her shirt, and called her “sibyl.” Some of them
looked hauntingly familiar; she was not sure if she had seen their faces
before, perhaps even dealt with them in the city ... or whether they only
reminded her of people she had known in her former life. Most of them gazed at
her without recognition; but one or two bowed their heads, murmuring, “Lady ...”in
surprise, before they turned away to spread the news.

She realized then that word of her arrival would travel;
that Capella Goodventure might even find her first. She slowed her random
motion, forcing herself to be patient, letting herself become accessible, as a
sibyl should be. Ariele and Tammis stayed close beside her as she moved out
into the open meadow beyond the village, and she realized with fleeting sorrow
that they felt far more alien here among their own people than they did among
the Winters of the city, with whom they spent nearly all their time. And she realized
that, after so long, she did too.

A small voice that was never entirely still inside her
reminded her that she was Winter by blood: Arienrhod’s clone. But they were all
the same people, the Winters and Summers. They belonged to the same world, and
its heritage belonged to all of them. The name she bore, Dawntreader, and the
name Goodventure were two of the original shipnames, passed down over the
centuries from their refugee ancestors. She and Capella Goodventure were alike,
at least in their love for this world. If they could only both remember that ...

Tammis passed her a warm fish pie, as Ariele was drawn away,
semi rcluctantly, by a handsome blond boy. Ariele disappeared into a group of
young Summers who were practicing a triad dance under the guidance of an older
woman. Moon’s feet remembered the steps of that dance as she heard its music,
and her body began to sway to its rhythm. Her flesh might be Winter’s, but
Summer was in her blood .... She smiled at Tammis, who stood beside her
watching the dancers. “Do you want to try it?” she asked.

He shook his head, looking down. “No. I’d rather just
listen. You need someone with you—” He looked up at her again. She saw both his
concern and his instinctive reticence; knew that he was right, and that he would
be happier where he was. “I used to dance like that,” she said.

“Do you want to join them?” he asked, curious and surprised,
as if it had not really occurred to him that she had ever known any reality
besides the one they had always shared in the city.

“No,” she said softly. “It’s a dance for the young. A lovers’
dance.” She watched Ariele step into the circle, swirling with unselfconscious
grace among the other dancers, and felt an odd sense of deja vu.

“Lady,” a voice said behind her, its familiarity startling
her. Capella Goodventure stood waiting, her expression guarded and suspicious.
She nodded in grudging deference. “I was not expecting you to come.”

“There was a place for my boat at the dockside,” Moon said.

“There is always a mooring-place left empty for the Lady, in
hope that she will come. It is tradition. But I did not expect you to come.” A
slight emphasis on you.

“But I have ... and I thank you for remembering me, even in
my absence, Capella Goodventure.”

The Goodventure elder looked at her a little oddly, as if
she wondered whether Moon meant the words or was mocking her. “And you brought
your children to witness their heritage—for the first time,” she said, in the
same tone. “But not your pledged.” She raised her eyebrows.

“He had too much to do ... in the city.” It sounded evasive,
and was. Moon wondered whether Capella Goodventure believed that he had not
come because he had become too corrupt, too much of a Winter—or whether Capella
knew more about his past than she thought. The words did not sit well, either
way.

“I came because I wanted to feel what it was like to be in
Summer again. I have spent much too long in the city myself, as you have
rightly pointed out.” Moon felt her speech falling back into the outland
cadences of the voices around her. And this time the words were true, she
realized suddenly. She had fallen so easily into the pursuit of technology to
the exclusion of everything else, telling herself that it was the will of the
sibyl mind, the only way to save her world. But the revelation of the Hegemony’s
unexpected return had shown her suddenly and profoundly that she had been
wrong, all along. She had been thinking like Arienrhod; repeating Anenrhod’s mistakes.
It had to be for the ways in which she was different from Arienrhod that the
sibyl mind had chosen her. She was the sibyl, not Arienrhod; she was a Summer, and
she must forget now that she was anything else ....

Capella Goodventure continued to look at her skeptically,
without comment. “And I came ...” Moon pushed the words out before they could
wither on her tongue, “to make my peace with you, if that’s still possible.”

Capella Goodventure stiffened, as if she was sure now that
this was some son of trap. “What do you mean?”

“I know that we have never seen eye to eye, all these years,”
she said, carefully, “not simply in matters of tradition, but also on the most
basic questions about what kind of future this world should have. But in spite
of our—differences, I believe that you are a good woman, and that you have only
been trying to do the Lady’s will as you see it. And although you find it hard
to believe, the same is true of me. Both of us have been trying to preserve the
Tlamat we love, and protect both its peoples, the humans and the mers.”

Capella Goodventure half frowned, and twitched her shoulders
in an impatient gesture that Moon couldn’t read. “I suppose that’s true enough.
I’ll grant you that. But I don’t see anything we have in common beyond that,
Moon Dawntreader. Your ways will never be Summer’s any more than your face will
be anything but that of the Snow Queen.”

Moon felt her face flush with sudden heat. She swallowed the
angry response that filled her throat; aware of Tammis watching her, and
Capella Goodventure glancing at him with sharp suspicion. Moon put a hand on Tammis’s
arm, urging him with a look to let them have privacy. He left her side
reluctantly, frowning as he looked back at them. “I won the mask of the Summer
Queen fairly, by the Lady’s will. Do you question Her will—?” She felt every
muscle in her body knot in anticipation of Capella Goodventure’s response;
afraid that the sudden emptiness inside the words would betray her.

But the other woman only looked down, with her lips pressed
together. “The Lady works in strange ways,” she murmured. “Even people of my
own clan seem disposed to accept the changes you have forced on us in Her name.
But I don’t understand this, and I never will.” She began to turn away.

“Wait,” Moon said, hearing the unthinking edge of command
come into her voice, watching with surprise as Capella Goodventure obeyed her
automatically. “There is much more at stake here than you know—more than my
pride, or yours. I have something to show you. And something to tell you.”

Capella Goodventure hesitated, looked back at her, waiting
again.

“Will you walk with me to the steps?” Moon asked.

Capella Goodventure nodded slowly, and followed her. “What
is this about?”

“It’s about the one thing that we both believe in with our
whole hearts—the protection of the mere.”

The Goodventure elder looked up, startled out of watching
her shadow precede her across the grass. “How are they in danger, now that the
offworlders have left us in peace? They will increase their numbers while
Summer is here; they always do This is their time of mating and rebirth, when
the Summer colonies migrate north, and join the Winter colonies.”

“Is it?” Moon said. “Are you sure?” She had heard it as
casual lore, but she had no records to compare it to.

Capella Goodventure looked disdainful. “It is part of the common
knowledge about the mers. You should have spent more of your time studying the
ways of your people.”