Angels and Exiles (32 page)

The soldier played the cleaver about the flesh of the starboard bulkhead, this time cauterizing the blood vessels he wanted to seal off permanently. His arm shook slightly under the weapon’s weight. He made a false move, suddenly: the cleaver toppled over, the energy blade swung toward his leg. Before it had a chance to touch it, the soldier released the trigger, cut off the beam. The soldier put the weapon on the ground, slowed down his breathing. He drank a swig of water from his flask, then calmly took up the cleaver again. For an instant, there had been a shower of sparks, where the blade had met the pelta’s force field.

“Come here. Hang the lamp on the catwalk,” he ordered in a perfectly mastered voice. He delicately lay the flesh open, revealed a valve that controlled the flow of a major vein.

“Turn the wheel to the left, all the way. Make sure it’s closed.”

Lise did as she was told. The inclined floor hindered her actions. The bulkhead overhung her as if about to crush her. Half-hidden by the pink veils of their wings, the augmented fetuses stirred slowly in their placental pouches all around her. Eyes twice the size of hers stared blindly through the fluids.

“Tie the rope here, and then go fix it over there, so we can use it as a safety line.” Lise began to make knots, but she worked slowly.

The soldier continued his work. He peeled from the bulkhead a piece of flesh several metres square, fractured the bone shield that lay behind it, uncovered a heart as big as himself. The muscle pumped erratically.

“First, stop the incoming blood flow. Second, cut the arterial connections. The secondary heart may then be stopped without causing injury to the local nervous system. . . .” muttered the soldier, as if quoting a procedural manual.

He cut several collateral low-diameter arteries. What little blood was left in the heart pulsed from the severed vessels in thin jets.

To finish the job, the soldier carefully cut the aorta, and just as he finished the cut, Lise opened the valve fully.

The jet of blood struck the soldier full in the face, blinded and choked him. His left shoulder convulsed, as if he was attempting to use the limb he no longer had. He took two steps backward, coughing and spitting. Another jet. Another. The heart had regained its rhythm. Liters of blood drenched the sloping floor.

The soldier’s boots slipped. He teetered, his single arm wavered; he let the cleaver drop and fell to his knees. The weapon slid along the floor and Lise followed it.

She fell, slid, fetched up against the port bulkhead, the cleaver against her leg. She took it in a two-handed grasp, raised the blunt muzzle toward the soldier, who now held himself precariously balanced a few metres above her. She could feel the weapon purring softly.

He swore briefly, then ordered: “Give me that.”

Lise did not move. The soldier gestured, almost fell, deliberately let himself slide along the floor to the wall. He stood up, his single arm against the bulkhead, fingers buried like claws into the ship’s flesh.

“Give me that,” he repeated. The ship’s blood pooled around his ankles.

Lise, almost by reflex, took a step toward him, holding the weapon limply. Then she stopped. The smell of blood dizzied her. She could feel the soldier’s fingers around her throat. She raised the weapon again.

The soldier took a step in turn. “Gimme,” he panted.

There was a ring at the near end of the cleaver, which set the blade’s intensity. Lise turned it as far as possible. The weapon’s buzz rose sharply in pitch, and the soldier stopped in his tracks. His eyes flickered to his pelta.

He looked toward Lise again, bared his teeth.

“Give it to me, or I’ll hurt you so bad you’ll wish you were dead.”

But the Princess of New Avalon had died five years before.

She pressed the trigger.

The energy blade shot forth, struck the intangible shield generated by the pelta. For an instant, the blade was stopped. Then it burst through.

The man’s trunk fell backward. His pelvis and legs collapsed, articulations bending spasmodically.

He still lived. Lise could see the interior of his body, the pale webs that strengthened his lungs, the sac of the second stomach. Around the severed blood vessels, annular muscles contracted to stop the haemorrhage. The intestines uncoupled from the rest of the digestive system, which a harness of contractile fibres pulled up higher into the thoracic cavity.

She advanced toward the soldier, pointed the cleaver at his face. His mouth was wide open; his eyes showed only the whites. He breathed in gasps, the way he had when she’d pulled him out of the dead seeker-tadpole. Lise’s arms trembled; disintegrating tissue made arabesques on his pale skin, then the head became a mash of flesh and bone.

The never-to-be-born children stared at her with unfinished eyes.

She blinded a whole row of them, cut at random in the ship’s flesh, burst other arteries, broke the supports of a catwalk which immediately collapsed. When the door refused to respond to her hand, she tore it into shreds.

She crossed the dead corridors, lit solely by the light of the cleaver’s blade. She destroyed the sphincters that barred her way, dug long trenches into the walls to mark her way.

She came to the hull; breached it with a bloody door.

She landed on her knees, painfully, when she slid along the half-buried keel. She got to her feet, leaning on the deactivated cleaver as on a cane. Behind her, the ship trembled from stem to stern, screamed one last time, a raucous, breathless cry. And frenetically accomplished its ultimate duty.

Lise watched it die; when it was all over, she went forth into the sea, caught one by one the six eggs the ship had just laid, pushed them back to the spit of sand.

She activated the cleaver; its blade was already dimming. One by one, she opened the shells. Midway through the sixth, the energy blade faded away; so Lise finished the job using the weapon as a crowbar. She spread the fluids on the sand and crushed the embryos, in whose depths keels and frames were already apparent.

When night fell, the Princess of New Avalon crossed the arm of the sea that separated her from her kingdom. She walked in a stately fashion, as befits a princess. The water rose to her hips. The halves of the broken moon drew a magic way on the water’s surface to guide her home.

The sand glued to her arms and chest was her armor. The bloodstained locks of her hair were her weapons. The false-suns shining in the distance were her crown. Bombardments thundered, heralding her return.

This one is for Nathalie

Along a sloping gutter, a young man crawled painfully. It had not rained in Wessendam for days on end: beneath him the stones were dry and gritty with dust. Autumn’s first dead leaves, which lay at the bottom of the gutter, crumbled under his palms, and the largest fragments stung his flesh like needles.

To his left and to his right, the high houses of Wessendam leaned over him, as if calling down mute imprecations. The gutter was barely half as wide as his body, and the alley at whose centre the gutter lay was no more than three feet wide: a passageway necessary but ignored, if not despised, separating the back of a house on the Sommerstrass from that of its counterpart on the Herbstestrass.

In accordance with this contempt, no windows opened in the back of the houses, save a tiny round aperture just below the roof and a pair of low windows, barred with black iron, a few inches from the ground. Impossible to beg help there, assuming help might have been granted. He would have to climb the alley to its summit—to descend would have led him straight to the icy waters of the Schwarze Kanal and the drowning that had haunted his nightmares since childhood.

He stopped crawling for a moment, to wipe with his shirtsleeve the blood that dripped from his nostrils. He wanted to stand up, but each time he had tried it, he had not managed three steps before the alley’s slope vanquished him. The ghost of a sob escaped him, but he pursed his lips and compelled himself to silence. He was too old to cry now, even after having been beaten within an inch of his life. He would reach the end of the alley, and cross the little square on top of the hill, and he would descend the Ligeiastrass to the inventor’s house, and only there, in the arms of the old man, would he allow himself to cry.

He began to crawl once more: right arm, left leg, left arm—agony in his elbow, the club might have broken the bone—right leg. . . . He heard a buzzing sound getting louder and louder, but he believed it existed only under his own skull, until his hand came down upon the wasp’s nest and broke it.

The swarm rose about him, singing a metallic hymn to pain. The young man cried out in distress and rage; he rose trembling to his feet, took two steps away from the nest and then collapsed again, rolled to fetch up against one of the basement windows of a house on the Sommerstrass. He saw with supernal clarity the first wasp land on his hand, raise its abdomen and bury its stinger, again and again. The venom spread its burn through his flesh.

There was a clink at his back, then a jangle of metal, and the feeling of emptiness. . . . Two hands grasped him, one at the shoulder, one at his belt, and a female voice cried: “Help me, I can’t pull you inside alone!” The young man bent double and pushed laterally with his arms and legs—a cluster of burns on his right thigh, a drop of lava on his ankle, the insects converging toward his eyes—and suddenly he fell vertiginously, slammed against a wooden bench, a farewell blow, dropped to the ground and rolled to a stop, his face against a cold and damp stone floor.

The jangle of metal came again, then the voice rose once more: “Help me if you can, we have to put the pane back or these horrors will come in.”

Indeed, the insects’ buzzing had not stopped; the young man raised his head laboriously and saw, against a luminous sky streaked with black from the window bars, the nest’s scouts wander inside. He rose to his feet, but had to sit down heavily on the bench to avoid collapsing again; he didn’t have the strength to help his rescuer put back into place the glass pane that sealed the window’s opening.

Four or five wasps had been able to enter the room. Apparently disoriented by the passage from light into shadow, they flew about at random. The young woman seized a notebook from the top of a pile of folios and slammed it methodically upon the insects. When she had killed the last wasp, she took up a candle in a copper holder and turned to him. “Are you all right?”

He did not answer. His poor head was too busy. He had barely had the time to understand that he was in the basement of one of the aristocratic houses of the Sommerstrass. And now that he saw his rescuer face to face, he had to exert additional effort to grasp that this could not be one of the servants; that it must be the daughter of the house, however incongruous her presence in the basement might be.

She kneeled to look at him closer; her face, in the candlelight, was like an icon. “You haven’t been too badly stung,” she said. And because this sentence did not call for comment, he was able to say: “No, Damoiselle.”

“What is your name?”

“Pieter Havel, Damoiselle.”

“Why were you beaten, Pieter?”

He opened his mouth to lie, but the young woman’s dark eyes tore the truth from him: “Because I rejected the head cook’s advances; he got revenge by accusing me of stealing from my masters.”

The young woman’s face expressed pity and anger. “If you can stand up,” she said, “I’ll take you to a more suitable bed than this bench.”

He protested: “No, Damoiselle, I must return home, I can’t stay here—”

“In the state you’re in, it would be a crime to make you walk more than ten yards. There is a room just beyond that door; I’ll help you walk.”

He rose; she put her arm around his waist and supported him as he staggered. Her body was tall, straight and slim, and from her warm flesh rose a floral perfume, a kaleidoscope of roses and jasmine. To his shame, Pieter felt his own body, however stung and beaten, reacting ardently to the young woman’s contact.

She opened the door, which gave onto a small windowless room, three quarters filled by a bed and a small chest of drawers. She laid Pieter on the bed, and transferred the flame of her candle to the wick of a candle stub in a faceted pink quartz bowl.

“My father had this room built for me when I was little,” she explained. “I want you to rest; I will come back to see you once you’ve slept.”

She went out and shut the door behind herself. A pinkish light filled the tiny room, flickering in time with the flame; it seemed to Pieter that the light was like a balm. He felt his eyes close; a slight vertigo took him; he no longer knew if he was awake or asleep; the walls that surrounded him had become insubstantial. He heard the door opening and the young voice telling him “My name is Anna.” Then he slept.

The sun set. Pieter slept in the bed that was too small for him, his sleep tormented by exhaustion and the wasps’ venom. Two floors up in the vast house on the Sommerstrass, Anna went to find Stefan, the only one of the servants she trusted fully. She told him in a few words what had happened, swore him to silence, and asked him to go see to the young man.

Stefan descended the stairs to the basement, and went to the little room Anna’s father had had made for her tenth birthday, yielding to one more of his only daughter’s many whims. For a long while he looked at Pieter, who moaned deep in his throat; then he roused himself. He undressed Pieter without awakening him, cleaned and bandaged his wounds. When he was done, he covered the young man up as best he could; Pieter’s sleep was no longer agitated. Stefan heaved a deep sigh, half-pained, half-satisfied, then blew out the candle stub.

He went to report to his mistress; he was about to knock at her door when another domestic gestured for him to wait: the lady of the house, he explained in a murmur, was in conference with her daughter about tomorrow evening’s reception, and she was not very happy. Stefan nodded in understanding and waited. From beyond the door came the sounds of a tense conversation and a few outcries quickly repressed.

“I cannot understand you,” Anna’s mother was saying. “The son of the Dynast himself is coming here tomorrow evening to meet you, and you treat it as something trivial, even boring! You still have no idea what you will wear, or how you will arrange your hair. You empty-headed child! Are you telling me you wouldn’t like to be the future Dynast’s wife?”

“The son of the Dynast,” said Anna in a chill voice, “is thirty-two; I am seventeen. I have little interest in someone twice my age, even if he were the Dynast himself.”

“This is unbelievable,” said Anna’s mother, who had married a man ten years her senior, for his money, and had never forgiven herself. “How have we brought you up? Your father always yields to your caprices, he’s spoiled you rotten. Anyone else would sell her soul for the chance to spend a quarter of an hour with Radulf, and you turn up your nose at him!”

Anna capitulated. “I didn’t say that. I will wear the white and gold dress, the one that goes so well with my complexion, and I will arrange my hair the way it was on my fifteenth birthday, the style that you liked so much. And I promise to be polite to Radulf—but I won’t throw myself at him.”

Appeased, Anna’s mother allowed herself to be magnanimous: “Poor child! I never asked you to behave like a young ninny, only to be your usual charming self. You’ll see, Radulf is a wonderful man; as soon as you have met him, he’ll turn your head.” She rose to leave and smiled a fake smile at her daughter.

When she had left, Anna made claws of her fingers and buried them in her pillow. “‘A wonderful man, whom we want to see you marry, dear daughter, for our own glory and fortune. You will be happy with him, because we order it.”

There was a knock at the door; Anna started, went to the door and opened it on Stefan. “It’s you! How is he?” she whispered, as she let the servant enter.

“He is in pain, even in his sleep, but none of his wounds are dangerous to his health. He is at an age when one doesn’t die.”

“I want you to see to him every two hours, make sure everything is going well. When he wakes up, come tell me, I want to speak to him myself.”

“Yes, Damoiselle.” Stefan understood the feelings that roiled within the young woman: concern for another person, which she had never been able to truly express up to now; the childish pleasure of having a secret of her very own; and especially the desire to act contrary to her parents’ wishes: they would have been appalled to see her worry about the fate of a servant. She would have done as well, and probably better, to send Pieter to one of the Heilendhäuse, where a doctor would have seen to him; but Stefan would never have dreamed of blaming his mistress for her decision.

The stars spun in the night sky, whirling around the axis that transpierced Polaris. Anna yielded to sleep within her silken bedclothes; she dreamed of Radulf, the son of the Dynast of Neuerland, and her dreams were not pleasant.

In his house on the Ligeiastrass, the old inventor Johann Havel busied himself about the time machine to which he had devoted nearly twenty years. He sat on the black leather seat, spun the pedals through a few revolutions. Above his head, the vast horizontal gear pivoted about its axis, imitating the celestial sphere, and the stars, the comets, and the moons of shining metal hung to the rim of the gear began to spin. Johann Havel let the movement of the cogs stop by itself, then climbed down from the seat. He felt in the grip of a slight vertigo, as if he had just come out of sleep or was falling into it. The walls of his house seemed to become insubstantial. He closed his eyes and leaned his forehead on the cool glass of the window a moment, then he went to sit heavily in a faded velvet armchair. Morning sunlight surprised him; he had no awareness of having slept.

Pieter woke up. His bruised body seemed to have rusted, like the gears of the old clock on the Starkplatz that had forever stopped at half past noon. He threw off the sheets and extracted himself from the too-small bed.

The room was dark. Pieter felt for the candle stub; his fingers encountered a metal tray on which lay a quarter-loaf of bread, slices of ham, a wedge of cheese, and a full carafe. He was so hungry that he did not bother to search further for the candle and feasted in the darkness.

Once his belly was full, he found the block of quartz and half a dozen matches. He struck one aflame, then lit the wick. In the pink light, he examined his injuries: they had been cleaned and bandaged, the wasp stings had been rubbed with a medicinal unguent. Despite the unguent, the numerous purple swellings were still tender; the surrounding flesh was burning hot.

Pieter sat on the bed and endeavoured to put his clothes back on. He hadn’t been aware he had been undressed. Who had done this? At the thought it might have been Anna, he felt a flush rise to his cheeks, but the fantasy, delightful though it might be, was certainly false. He finished buttoning up his vest, all scraped and torn by his trip along the gutter.

What now? He could stay here no longer. He must return to his home. He would certainly never see Anna again, but this was in the order of things.

He pushed the door open and entered the house’s basement, cluttered with books, nailed crates, furniture draped with dust sheets. Daylight entered by the barred windows; the morning was already well advanced: he had slept far too long. As he navigated among the clutter, Pieter had a brief vision of Anna as a child, playing among these treasures, and he suddenly understood why she had asked for a room of her own to be built among what had to have been to her a place of wonders.