They crossed the flooded valleys of the coast and moved out into the wave-flecked ocean. Benzamir shifted uncomfortably. ‘I’m sorry. I’m being a bad host. I need to go and wake the princess, and then I can explain everything to all of you. I’d rather I only had to do it once.’
He made to leave, and she noticed his limp.
‘You’re hurt.’
‘I know. It’ll fix itself eventually.’
‘I don’t want to fuss.’ She caught his sleeve and held him still for a moment. Then she let her grip fall and said: ‘You don’t need me to look at your leg, do you? You have machines to do that too.’
‘Both inside and out. I’m not—’ And he thought about the problems he’d had telling Said and Wahir where he had come from and how he had got here. ‘I’m only mostly human. I’ve some extra bits and pieces that help me do my job.’
She looked him up and down. ‘You look normal to me. What are you saying?’
Benzamir sighed, and tried to turn her round with a hand on her elbow. She shook him off.
‘Really. What are you trying to tell me? How much of you isn’t a man?’
‘All the magic is done by machines. Some of the machines are inside me; the controls for the rest are also inside. My eyes aren’t real. I’ve a personal shield grown under my skin. Things like that.’ He studied her for her reaction. Her face registered a creeping realization; it was a start. ‘I thought you ought to know. I don’t want to hide what I am any more.’
Alessandra stared, not exactly at him, but through him. ‘Is this a test?’
Benzamir nodded. ‘Yes, that’s precisely what it is.’ He sidestepped round her to the door and hesitated. He thought for a moment that she might say something, do something, even follow him. She didn’t.
CHAPTER 38
BENZAMIR WALKED SLOWLY over to the surgeon’s table, where Elenya lay sleeping. He hardly dared look at her, though eventually he did.
‘Alessandra is right: when Princess Elenya has regained consciousness, I should do some remedial work on you,’ said Ariadne.
‘We don’t have time. They know we’re here. They know how many of us there are and what resources we have.’
‘You mean they’ve worked out it’s just me and you. But they haven’t launched against us. They’ve stayed stealthed.’ She paused. ‘I think they’re frightened of us.’
‘I thwarted their coup. They’re more likely to be furious than frightened.’ He picked up the metal tray in which lay the serrated disc the surgeon had extracted from Elenya’s guts. Blood and flesh clung to its blades. ‘I wish I knew what they were waiting for.’
Ariadne showed him Elenya’s vital signs. They looked well within tolerances for an unmodified human; figures that had had to be dredged out of the archives. Benzamir took the cloth off Elenya’s wound. It had been sealed shut with canned skin, but the bruising was working its way out as an elliptical target in yellow and black.
He put the tray down and did what he could not risk doing if Elenya had been awake. A strand of her hair had stuck to her cheek; he brushed it free with the tip of his finger.
‘Such beauty, such passion,’ he whispered. ‘You could turn a man to good or evil with one smile.’
Her eyes opened, and he stepped hastily back.
‘What were you saying?’
To his relief, he realized she couldn’t understand a word of Nu. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said, too quickly. ‘How are you? Any pain?’
‘No. None. I don’t know what you did to me.’ Elenya looked down and found her dress cut, torn, stained with gore, but no visible wound. ‘Where did it go?’
He fetched her the disc. ‘It made a mess going in, and a bit more coming out again. We think we connected everything back together again the right way. Just don’t do any heavy lifting for a while.’
‘We?’ she asked.
‘Me. Ariadne. I’m sorry about your clothes.’
She tried to sit up and winced as the bruise compressed.
‘Swing your legs round.’ He tentatively put his hand behind her shoulder. ‘I’ll help you.’
As she stood, she felt her insides settle into different positions. She looked around properly for the first time. ‘Where am I?’
‘You’re onboard a starship called Ariadne Shipsister. We’re in a low polar orbit with a period of six hours, and we’re currently at apogee over what’s marked on my maps as the Arctic Ocean.’
She stared at Benzamir. ‘Pardon?’
‘You’re safe, and that’s all that needs to be said at the moment. I’d like it if you ate something, because I need to check that you’ve got peristalsis back.’ He ran his hand over his face. ‘It’s a good job I have a rule that there are no stories without beer.’
‘Where’s Va?’
‘Eating,’ said Ariadne in Russian, ‘like a starved man.’
‘He lived,’ Elenya said. ‘After all that death, he lived.’ Her face grew pensive, then she blinked slowly. ‘Who said that? Who – what – are you? Are you a ghost?’
‘Though I’m supposed to be a machine with infinite patience,’ said Ariadne to Benzamir, ‘even I’m getting tired of that question.’
Without reference to Benzamir, Ariadne spun Elenya a new dress of deep green silk and a woollen cloak of russet, neither of which were silk or wool.
They were clothes finally fit for a princess, and when she entered the room, she appeared embarrassed by the others’ reactions to her. Once, she would have taken awe as her due. Years of living in Va’s shadow had made her forget.
Said got to his feet, knowing he was in the presence of greatness. Wahir stood too, and not because someone else had.
Alessandra did not stand. She closed her eyes and wiped away the tear that rolled down her cheek. She took a deep breath and then looked up at Elenya. She smiled, even though it was anguish for her.
Va turned away in his chair, looking as if he had just seen a glimmer of what he could have once had and then rejected. His face was set like stone, unwilling to show any emotion in case he showed them all.
Benzamir didn’t know what to do. He hovered, undecided. He looked at his plate and felt nothing in his stomach but a strange fluttering. Elenya sat in the empty seat next to Va, and he could see the man wince.
Into the silence she said: ‘Please, sit down, sirs.’
They ended up all looking at Benzamir. He felt sick, but steeled himself and reached forward for the jug of beer and refreshed his drink. Then he took a long pull and settled the glass back down in the ring of spilled liquid that marked its place.
‘I don’t know what to say. We’ve all got here by different routes, but you’re all welcome. I’m sorry. I can only apologize for involving any of you. This fight isn’t yours. It’s mine, my people’s, my past and my future.
‘My name really is Benzamir Michael Mahmood, and I was born on a city-ship that was circling another star, far away from here. My parents and my parents’ parents were all born on city-ships, or on other worlds, and this beautiful place was a only a memory. It held a special place in our hearts. It was the birthplace that we had come from seven centuries earlier; that we had sworn on our lives to protect and preserve.
‘It wasn’t enough for some of my people. They wanted to return and show you what we’d become; what you could become with their help. You die of disease. We don’t. You grow old. We don’t. You get mud under your fingernails and splinters in your hands and you have to work or you starve. Sometimes you starve despite all your efforts. We don’t.
‘So we talked about it, all of us together, for years. In the end we decided that you should be left alone to make your own way. We didn’t know what we might find: you could have all died, or you could be making rockets that would take you to the Moon.’