War in Heaven (51 page)

Tamara, Tamara
, he asked himself,
how is it possible?

He turned to look at Tamara, then, with her soft, dark eyes so full of love. And Tamara looked at him, as if to say, "Do you see this beautiful child that we have made?" And he
did
see this miracle of creation, this child of his dreams sidling up to the warmth of Tamara's furs even as he continued to stare at Danlo. As Danlo looked at Jonathan, there came a moment of terrible beauty as if love and suffering, joy and sadness, past and future were all one. And for the second time in his life, he fell into love.

How is it possible?

Tamara, still holding the sandwich in her hand, noticed that the other woman and boy were eyeing Danlo suspiciously. Always one to respect decorum, she rather belatedly made the presentations.

"This is Pilar Kiden and her son, Andreas wi Novat Kiden," she said, nodding at the red-haired woman and the other boy. Then she turned and used her free hand to pull the hood of Jonathan's furs over his head. "And this is
my
son, Jonathan Ashtoreth."

As she spoke, Danlo bowed to each of them in turn. And then Tamara smiled at him and said, "And this is Danlo wi — "

"Danlo of Kweitkel," Danlo hurriedly interrupted, not wishing for Tamara to speak his full name. "I am called Danlo of Kweitkel."

"Danlo is an aficionado of the gosharp," Tamara explained to Pilar, all the while looking at Danlo in puzzlement. "And he's a wonderful musician himself."

For a while, they all stood about discussing the difficulty — and danger — of playing music on the street in such cold and uncertain times. And then Tamara returned to the miracle of the sandwich that Jonathan had given her.

"I'm so hungry," she told her son as she began to unwrap the sandwich. "But have all of you eaten?"

"We found a restaurant, Mama. We had sandwiches, too."

"The truth is, it wasn't really a restaurant," Pilar said. Except for the colour of her skin, which was almost pink and marred with the rare malady of pigmentation called freckling, she was a good-looking woman. She was a few years older than Tamara, big-boned with an open and kindly face. Her body was almost as stout as Bardo's and, like Bardo's, it suggested all the solidity and strength of the earth. "We found a house just on the west side of the Merripen Green. A couple of wormrunners had converted the lower floor into a dining room. They were serving sandwiches today. The bread is a little old — I think the wormrunners must have been hoarding it quite a while."

Tamara gently broke the sandwich into two pieces then, and offered one to Danlo. She said, "I
know you're
hungry."

"I will eat tomorrow," Danlo said, thinking of the long next day that he had planned to spend in Constancio's cutting chamber. Although they hadn't formally agreed to such arrangements, he felt certain that Constancio would feed him in order to sustain his strength through the coming surgeries. "So please."

Tamara, needing no further encouragement, lifted her sandwich to her lips with great enthusiasm and bit off a piece. Although she was very hungry, she ate with elegance and was careful not to let any particle fall to the ice. Then, too, she considered it cruel to eat in front of hungry people, and so with every skater who passed by her she would hold the sandwich inside her furs for a moment and stop chewing. Thus it took her quite a while to finish her meal. While Jonathan and Andreas began a game of bump-and-skate across the street's darkening ice, Danlo chatted with Pilar about the unusual coldness of the season. And all the while he stole glances at Tamara as she ate her sandwich. He loved watching the bunch and flow of her strong jaw muscles and the deft motions of her hands. She took joy in all the simple motions of eating and seemed intensely grateful for the gift of life. In the way that she looked at Jonathan, as he laughed and struck steel against ice and fairly tore up and down the street, there was a bright and natural goodness, like sunlight on a false winter day. There was hope and pride and fierce protectiveness, but there was another thing, too. Tamara loved life, and she loved love, but deep inside she was always so terribly afraid of losing it. This was the secret of her soul. Danlo saw that if anything ever happened to Jonathan, she would want to die. The brilliance and totality of her love awed him. It caused his eyes to burn and his throat to ache and his heart to beat in waves of red, throbbing pain.

Tamara, Tamara
, he thought.
We have a son.

Alter Tamara had finished her sandwich, Pilar bowed to Danlo and said, "It's falling cold; we should be going. But I'm glad to have met you, Danlo of Kweitkel. I wish you well."

"I wish you well, too," Danlo said, returning her bow. "You and your son."

With that, Andreas broke off his game and came over to make his goodbyes. While the two boys leaned against each other shoulder to shoulder, trying to push each other off balance, Tamara looked at Pilar and said, "Thank you for taking Jonathan today. What can I give you for the sandwiches?"

"But you took Andreas three days ago — don't you remember?" Pilar asked. "And fed him
two
meals."

"But that was just kurmash. I'm sure the wormrunners would have charged much more for the sandwiches."

"Haven't I told you that these things always come out evenly in the end?"

"Here," Tamara said, reaching inside her pocket for the platinum chain that the astrier man had given her. "I've had a very good day — please take this."

Pilar's eyes lit up at the beauty of this glittering thing, but she said, "Oh, no, I couldn't — this is worth much more than a couple of sandwiches."

"But it might not be in a few more days. And as you've said, these things always come out evenly."

"Oh, Tamara, no, I really couldn't."

"Yes, you really
can
, and you must."

Tamara gently took Pilar's hand then, and opened her fingers so that they might hold the chain. So great was the force of her will that Pilar made no more protests.

"Thank you," Pilar said. Then she bowed yet again, swept her arm around Andreas, and the two of them skated off down the street.

"I love Pilar," Tamara said. "After I had lost my memories, during that horrible time when I hardly knew who I was, she took care of me."

"I am glad," Danlo said. "She seems an easy woman to love."

Tamara nodded her head as she put her arm around Jonathan and drew him closer to the warmth of her body. To Danlo, she said, "Would you like to accompany us to our apartment? There are things we should talk about, but it's growing cold and I should take Jonathan inside."

"Yes, I would like that," Danlo said. "Do you live far?"

"No — it's only a few blocks from here."

She bent to collect her rolled-up fur and gosharp, and Danlo moved to help with these things. Tamara gave him the fur, but the much heavier gosharp in its silver case she kept for herself. She was a strong woman who had no trouble carrying it in one hand even as she held Jonathan's hand with the other. Together they led the way up the street with Danlo following a few skate strokes behind. As they passed the Street of the Ten Thousand Bars and turned on to a little gliddery lined with blackstone tenements. Danlo smelled the lovely fragrance of Tamara's hair, the rank molecules spraying out of the speech organ of an alien Friends of Man, and almost everywhere, the smell of fear. This last was much more than the acridness of sweat beneath old furs. It was the hurrying of the people as they skated with purpose and passed shadowed alleys; it was wormrunners avoiding coughing autists, and harijan with tight, shrunken bellies, and the inability of men and women to meet each other eye to eye. Danlo was very glad when Tamara left the street and opened the door of an old tenement. Arm in arm with Jonathan, she led Danlo up a flight of worn stone stairs and down a hallway lit with flame globes. Danlo liked the play of warm colours across the walls of the hallway. He liked it that the building seemed clean and well kept. And then Tamara opened the door to her apartment, and he liked it even more that they would have a space to be alone out of the shivering cold.

"You have to take off your boots," Jonathan informed Danlo as they all stood on a large cotton carpet inside the door. "It's one of our rules."

As Danlo knelt to unlace his boots, he looked about and saw that the space in which Tamara and Jonathan lived was almost as small as the interior of his snow house. In truth, there were only two rooms: the fire room in which they stood and an adjoining, fur-lined area too tiny to be dignified by calling it a sleeping chamber. Even the fire-room was misnamed, for it was graced with neither fireplace nor plasma hearth. Danlo remembered how Tamara had liked to dance naked in front of a blazing wood fire, and he wondered if she felt the lack of hot flame tongues licking at her body. Still, the room was warm enough, for along one wall ran a radiator fairly gurgling with water piped up from the hot springs beneath the city. And it was warm in other ways, too. Tamara had filled it with carpets and flowering plants and paintings that she and Jonathan had made. In a corner of the room opposite the door, she had set up a little electric stove. Sometimes, she said, on their lucky days, she would boil kurmash there or heat up a pot of tea.

"Would you like a cup of tea?" she asked as she took Danlo's furs and hung them on a wooden drying rack. "I've been saving a Summerworld green for just such an occasion."

While Danlo sat crosslegged on the floor and Tamara made the tea, Jonathan stole off into the sleeping chamber as silently as a snow leopard. He returned a few moments later holding in either hand his two most prized possessions: a small, simple five-holed flute made of black shatterwood and a black clary model of a lightship nearly two feet long. He set the flute on the carpet near a cushion; he came over to show Danlo the lightship, pointing out the areas behind the fuselage that housed the rockets and spacetime engines.

"I'm going to be a pilot someday," he told Danlo. And then, after telling the story of the battle of Mara's Star that he had heard from Andreas, he said, "If there's another war when I'm bigger, I'll have my own ship and fight battles around the stars. Do you think there'll be another war?"

At this Danlo smiled sadly and said that he didn't know. And then he looked at Jonathan and told him, "When I was a boy, I wanted to be a pilot, too."

Jonathan clearly approved of Danlo's ambition; he smiled at him knowingly as if they both shared a secret, then said, "I want to take my lightship to the stars of another galaxy. My mother once told me that not even Mallory Ringess has journeyed so far."

For a while, Danlo sat with Jonathan recounting the journeys of great pilots such as Rollo Gallivare, the Tycho, Leopold Soli and Mallory Ringess. And then Tamara came over with their tea, which they sipped from delicate little blue cups. Twice, Tamara refilled these cups before asking Jonathan to pick up his flute so that they could begin his evening lesson. Danlo watched carefully as he listened to him play a song that Tamara had taught him. And Jonathan kept looking at him, occasionally missing his fingering and trilling out a sharp, skirling note in his desire to please Danlo. When he had finished, he put down his flute and said, "I just learned that yesterday, so I'm not very good at it yet. But I can play the first two Songs of the Sun — would you like to hear them?"

"No, Jonathan, it's late and you should be asleep soon," Tamara said.

"But I haven't had my story."

"I'll tell you two stories tomorrow night," Tamara said.

Although Jonathan could be a wilful boy — in truth, more wilful even than his mother — it was not his way to whine or argue. But neither did he like to defy Tamara outright. And so, as he often did, he simply pretended not to hear her. "Will
you
tell me a story?" he asked, turning to Danlo.

Danlo noticed Tamara smiling her approval, and so he looked at Jonathan and said, "This was one of my favourite stories when I was a boy."

While Jonathan scooted over and sat in his lap, Danlo told him of the Two Friends. On the third morning of the world, he said, wise Ahira had befriended the youth named Manwe, teaching him to hunt, to mate and to take joy in the beauty of the newly created world. And to fly. Manwe was the first human being to fly, and he took to sky with all the rare grace of the
Snowy Owl
. Together he and Ahira soared over green-shrouded islands and the cold blue sea. They flew around the world, wing nearly touching hand, feasting on fish and occasionally tricking Totunye, the great white bear, out of his dinner of seal meat or salmon. And then, on the third evening of the world, they flew up beyond the sky. They looked down upon the forests and mountains and the sea's white ice. Their bright eyes shimmered in the night-time sky like silver lights, and this was how the first stars came to be.

"But stars are really fusion fires of hydrogen and helium, aren't they?" Jonathan asked as Danlo finished his story.

"But how do you really know that? Have you ever touched a star?"

At this, Jonathan laughed and said, "No — they're too far away."

"Stars
are
fusion fires," Danlo said. "But they are also something more."

"But stars can't really
see
, can they?"

"Haven't you ever looked at a star and seen it looking back at you?"

Again, Jonathan laughed, and he looked at Danlo for a long time. He said, "You're a strange man."

"Truly, I am."

"And you have a really big face."

"Thank you," Danlo said, smiling, not knowing how else to respond.

"Will you tell me another story?"

Here, Tamara finally interrupted and said, "No, Jonathan, it's time to sleep now." She stood up and came over to lift him off Danlo's lap.

"I
will
ask you a riddle," Danlo said. "It is the first of the Twelve Riddles — my grandfather asked me this when it was time for me to stop being a boy."

Jonathan didn't wait to see if this might be all right with his mother. He simply looked at Danlo and said, "I love riddles."

"Very well, then — how do you capture a beautiful bird without killing its spirit?"