“Tiamat—?” Gundhalinu breathed.
“Yes, Commander. I thought you’d want to hear that.” Vhanu hazarded a wary smile.
Gundhalinu nodded. “Yes … thanks, NR.”
“My regards to Gundhalinu-bhai. Have a good visit, BZ.” Vhanu cut contact, the table top went opaque. Gundhalinu stood a moment longer, gazing at the painting, at its cascading golds and shadow-greens, a distant haze of blue. He turned away at last, facing his wife.
“Thou’re leaving,” she said. “For Tiamat. Soon.”
“Yes,” he said.
She looked down, folding her arms, hugging her chest. “Ah, well.” She looked up again, smiling at him. “Congratulations, BZ … I know what this must mean to thee, after thou’ve waited so many years; after all that thou’ve done to cause it to happen—”
“I make thee want to—what?” he said.
“What?” she repeated.
“Thou started to say, that when I’m insufferably kind, I makes thee want to…?”
“ ‘Rip thy clothes off,’ ” she said, expressionless. “Thou make me want to rip thy clothes off and make love to thee right here on the floor.” She turned on her heel and went out of the room.
He stood motionless, staring after her, for a very long time.
Gundhalinu sat on the warm, solid wall of the western wing balcony, sipping a drink that seemed to be completely tasteless. He looked at it, looked at the pitcher on the low, random-edged table made from a slab of polished gnarlstone, and remembered that he had told the servo to bring him water. He sighed, and looked out across the dusk-blue valley again; feeling the wind ruffle his hair with a casual hand, listening to the screel of white-winged sikhas circling high in the air overhead. The western edge of the house sat closest to the rim of the pinnacle on which it had been built; from here his view was unobstructed, and he could actually see the ocean when the weather was clear. It was clear today, as it had been yesterday, so clear that he could count the offshore islands.
He had called KR Aspundh and asked him to come to dinner, after he received the message -from Vhanu. Aspundh would be arriving from somewhere across that sea very soon. It would be doubly good to see him now, considering the news. Because it would probably be the last time they would ever meet … and the last chance he would have to contact Moon, before he arrived on her doorstep with the sword of the Hegemony’s might hanging above him in Tiamat’s sky.
He heard someone come out of the house, and turned where he sat. His breath caught as he saw Pandhara crossing the balcony, formally dressed for dinner. Suddenly he could not take his eyes off her; he felt as if he had never really looked at her before. Her hair was elaborately styled with carven combs and glittering pins; a loose, fluid robe of red moved around her as she walked, covering her conservatively from neck to foot, and yet clinging to her body everywhere, changing what it revealed from moment to moment… . He looked away, finally, before she reached his side; struggling against frustration and sudden arousal, wondering if she had done this to him deliberately. But he remembered her on the night they had met; remembered that she was simply a beautiful woman, with the sensibilities of an artist.
It was only a joke, she had said to him, last night, when she had finally come back into the room, clean, neatly dressed in robe and slacks, and perfectly composed. She had only meant to make him laugh; it had happened at the wrong moment, she was dreadfully embarrassed….
He had assured her that he understood; but it had taken him nearly an hour to turn her back from an excruciatingly polite stranger into the quick-witted, laughing woman whose pungent humor and chameleon moods he had been looking forward to sharing for weeks. She had shown him her latest works-in-progress; they had played two games of chama instead of one.
And then, as they sat together drinking lith on the west wing balcony, watching the shifting colors of the night, he had told her about Tiamat. She had not asked him to, but he had seen in her eyes her need to understand, and knew that he could not leave her without any explanation at all.
And so he told her about the sheltered young Tech who had gone to Tiamat full of romance and arrogance, certain of his place in the universe, and its justification. He told her what Tiamat and its people had done to him, to teach him that pain and brutality and futility were his real fate. Death before dishonor. He had sworn the blood oath with his companions at school, never believing that he would ever come to such a place; that, held captive by nomad thieves, caged like an animal, he would take the sticky lid of a food can and slash his own wrists, praying to die….
But he had not died. And then his captors had given him Moon—another dazed hostage battered by fate, a hapless Summer girl caught up in the motion of a Game beyond her comprehension. … Or at least that was what he had believed, then. An illegal returnee who claimed the sibyl net itself had sent her back to Tiamat, on a kind of holy quest. He had thought she was slightly mad. Only afterward had he come to realize how much more she really was … after she had won their freedom, his grudging respect, his unwilling heart … after he had lied to and betrayed his own people to help her reach Carbuncle; after he had become her lover, and led her to the man she was desperate to save, the man she was actually married to … only after she had become the Summer Queen, and he had left Tiamat without her, without betraying her. Leaving forever, or so he had thought.
Only then, trying to rebuild his own life and career, had he realized fully what he had only sensed about her before: that she was right about everything she claimed. And he had believed then that he had been nothing but a meaningless pawn in the Great Game he had not even known the rules of himself.
“And that’s what drove me into World’s End.” He shook his head, gently touched the trefoil sign. “And suddenly I was no longer only a pawn. I was changing history.”
His wife sat silently for a long while after he stopped speaking, her arms wrapped around her knees, staring up into the sky. At last she looked down at him, and shook her head slowly. “Thou are worthy of thy ancestors,” she murmured, and took his hand, lifting it to her forehead in a gesture of admiration.
He pulled his hand from hers in sudden impatience, and said, “I haven’t told thee everything.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Do thou think thy ancestors told the world everything—every single, terrible part of the truth?”
He looked at her.
“‘History’ is merely what someone thinks happened, Gundhalinu-ken,” she said softly.
He stared at her, while behind his eyes he remembered being Ilmarinen, in the beginning: Ilmannen his ancestor, who had committed treason for the greater good, and set the Great Game in motion.… He sighed. “Why is it that the obvious things are always the most difficult to see?”
Pandhara touched him again, hesitantly; her hand slid down his arm and fell away. “Because if it weren’t so, life might actually begin to make sense.” She met his gaze, glanced away again as if it were painful. But her voice was cool and dry as she said, “And we couldn’t have that, could we?”
And somehow after that there had seemed to be nothing more to say; so he had bid her good night, and gone off to his room. Even though he had gotten to bed far later than he had intended, he slept as poorly as a man on the eve of execution.
This morning they had gone to Serakande Center, where the Art and Science Museum was featuring a show of her works. He had worn nondescript civilian clothes, and few people had looked at him twice. Pandhara had been the center of attention; he had enjoyed the luxury of standing unmolested in someone else’s shadow, watching the world interact with her, observing her grace and intelligence, the way her pleasure made her shine, the way it drew them to her.