The Snow Queen (69 page)

She turned
back to the phone, changing the subject with an effort of will. Gundhalinu ...
should she call again about him? But she had already called the city medical
center twice, and they had told her the same thing: He was delirious, she
couldn’t talk to him. They didn’t know how he’d managed to stay on his feet,
the shape he was in, as sick as he was; but they didn’t expect it would kill
him.
Reassuring
.
She grimaced, leaning against the wall. Well, maybe by the time she got back
from the meeting with the Chief Justice ... Yes, shed have everything to tell
him, then. And in the meantime she’d better wash up and get back to
headquarters again before it was time for her audience.

She pulled
a pack of iestas out of her pocket, went into the bathroom to wash up and
change. Moon slept on, restlessly, exhaustion setting her free from her fears
about whether Sirus would get her cousin out of the palace. Jerusha still could
not really believe that the First Secretary of the Hegemonic Assembly had ever
agreed to attempt such a thing, even if Sparks Dawntreader was his son—a son he
had never seen, and could hardly be sure was even his. But he had come
willingly to meet with Moon, and he had gone away willing to try.

More
inexplicable to her was how Moon had gotten the crippled Kharemoughi bartender
from Persipone’s to agree to take Sparks’s place. Gods, the girl had barely
been in the city two days! If she really believed Moon’s personal magnetism was
enough to make men willing to die for her, she’d lock that kid up so fast her
head would spin—But there had been undercurrents in the conversation between
the girl and the two men that told her there was more to Herne’s going than
just the way he looked at Moon ... and one glance at his legs gave her a good
reason. In her own private judgment Herne looked like a man the Hegemony would
be better off without; and in any case, she had asked no questions, for fear of
getting an answer she couldn’t ignore.

Jerusha
heard someone stirring in the next room, looked out the refinished the doorway
to see Moon stumble foggily into the hall. “You might as well go back to bed,
sibyl. Time passes faster when you aren’t watching it. For better or worse,
Sirus won’t be back for a while yet.”

“I know.”
Moon rubbed her sleep-blurred face, shook her head. “But I have to get ready if
I’m going to run in the race.” Her head came up, and her eyes were not soft
with sleep.

Jerusha
blinked. “The Summer Queen’s race? You?”

Moon
nodded, daring her to try to stop it. “I have to. I came here to win the race.”

Jerusha
felt someone step on her grave. “I thought you came for your cousin Sparks.”

“So did I.”
Moon looked down. “It lied to me. It never meant for me to save him; it only
used him, to make me follow its plan. But it can’t keep me from trying to save
him anyway ... And I can’t I keep it from making me Queen.”

Millennium come
.
Jerusha
breathed unspoken relief, felt her pity stir.
Gods, it’s true—sibyls are a little crazy.
No wonder
Arienrhod didn’t want her after all.
“I appreciate your being honest
about it with me.” She pulled a fresh tunic on over her damp skin, and sealed
it up the front. “I won’t stop you if you want to try.”
But if you win, don’t tell me; I don’t want to know.

Moon would
not have believed it was possible to clear a space as long as her arm and keep
it clear for even a moment in the quicksand shifting of the Festival mobs. But
somehow order had been created out of chaos; somewhere in the seemingly
formless super entity that was the Festival an underlying structure existed. A
course had been cleared along the Street’s upper reaches for a mile below the
palace, and eager spectators lined the way like the elegant townhouse walls at
their backs. Most who had a viewing place had been holding it for hours, and
the Blues who patrolled casually up and down before them had little trouble
keeping them there. They had come to watch the beginning of the end, the first
of the ancient ceremonies of the Change: the footrace that would thin the
numbers of the women who had come to compete for the mask of the Summer Queen.

Moon had
come out into the Street as soon as the nucleus of Summer women began to form
around an elder of the Goodventure family, who carried in her the blood of
Tiamat’s last line of Summer Queens. Members of that family were forbidden to
become Queen at this Change, but instead bore the honored responsibility of
seeing that its rituals were faithfully preserved and carried out. She had
pulled a colored ribbon from one of their sacks to tie around her head—the
ribbon that would give her a place at the front, middle, or back of the
starting mass. The band she drew was grew, the sea: the color that put her in
the front, ahead of brown for the land, blue for the sky. She tied the ribbon
across her forehead, her face palely expressionless against the triumph and the
disappointment around her. Of course it had been green ... how could it not be?
But a tension born of certainty wrapped her, tightening like tentacles; she
pushed toward the front of the forming field of runners to escape it.

She looked
around her as she struggled to hold a new equilibrium in the jostling mob of
colored ribbons and eager Summer faces in this crowd of strangers. Most of the
women who had come to the Festival intending to run in the Summer Queen’s
choosing had brought with them traditional-style holiday garments: soft wool
shirts and trousers dyed sea-green, summer-green, to please the Lady. They were
all elaborately sewn with designs made of shell and bead and traders’ baubles,
ribbons that dangled fetishes of their family totems. But she wore the nomad’s
tunic she had brought back with her from Persipone’s, the only clothing she
owned, its gaudy color as alien as she suddenly felt herself, among the people
who should have been her own. She had covered her hair with a scarf, to hide
her resemblance to the Queen. Some of the Summers had challenged her right to
run because she wore no totem or proof that she was even a Summer. But then she
had shown them her throat, and they had backed away. She felt the irony of
wearing a Winter’s clothes today, and not ones that were rightfully hers; and
yet somehow it was appropriate.

She had not
seen anyone she knew, either among the runners or in the crowd of spectators
beyond. Even though she knew that she could hardly expect to find anyone from
Neith or its few island neighbors in these hundreds, in the thousands that
filled Carbuncle, still she searched, and was disappointed. The sights and the
sounds and the smells of her home surrounded her here; but her grandmother was
far too old to make this voyage, and her mother—“Festivals are for the young,”
her mother had said to her once, with pride and longing, “who don’t have ships
to tend and mouths to feed. I had my Festival; and I hold the precious memory
of it close beside me every day.” Her arm had gone around her daughter’s
shoulders, steadying her on the rolling deck ....

Moon
whimpered, seeing the ugly truth hidden in her mother’s merry begotten memory.
The woman next to her apologized and edged nervously away. Moon looked down at
herself as the half-fearful sibyl-space opened around her again; suddenly glad
that her mother had not come, would not watch her in the race today, whatever
its outcome was. Her mother and Gran must think she was dead, and Sparks, too,
by now; and maybe it was better that way. Their time of mourning must be long
past. Was it better never to let them know the truth, or to always be afraid
that once they had learned part of it they would somehow learn the whole,
terrible truth about their children? She swallowed her grief, choking on it,
turned her vision outward again.

She was not
her mother’s child ... and not Arienrhod’s, either.
Then what am I doing here?
She looked around her in sudden doubt.
She was the only sibyl she had seen here anywhere. Was she the only sibyl among
all the Summer people who wanted to compete? Was it really the Queen’s ambition
running in her blood that made her want to be a queen herself?
No, I didn’t ask for this! There must be a
change; I am only a vessel.
Her fists tightened as she repeated the vow. If
no other sibyl ran in this race, maybe it was only because none of them knew
the truth.

None of them know.
She could read on the faces around her the
spectrum of motives and gradations of desire that had brought the runners here:
some of them hungry for the power (although the power of a Summer Queen had
always been more ritual than secular), some for the honor, and some for the
easy life of being worshiped as the Lady incarnate; some simply for the sheer
joy of competing, a part of their celebration, with no cares at all about
winning or losing.
And none of them knows
why it really matters, except me.

She kept
her fists tight as tension wound its springs inside her, pushed forward again
until she could just see the piece of weighted ribbon that marked the course’s
start. The Goodventure elder was shouting for quiet and announcing the rules.
She did not have to be the first in this race, she only had to be among the
sacred first thirty three—and the course wasn’t long, it was meant to give some
besides the strongest a chance. But there were a hundred women behind her, two
hundred more ... she couldn’t even see them all from where she stood.

The voice
of the Goodventure elder called them all to the mark, and Moon felt her
self-awareness slipping, caught in the swell of many moving forward as one.
Through a gap between heads and arms she watched the fragile bunting that held
back their tide—saw it fall at a signal. The mass of runners surged, sending
her forward, helpless to resist if she had wanted to, and the race of the Summer
Queen began.

She danced
like a reef spotter through the first hundred yards, needing all her
concentration just to keep on her feet in the crush before the knot of bodies
began to loosen. As spaces opened she broke between, not always easily, feeling
elbows bruise her sides in retribution. She couldn’t keep track of how many
were ahead in the shifting field; she could only weave and spring and try to
put as many of them behind her as her feet could overtake.

A mile was nothing,
a mile was hardly enough to quicken her heartbeat when she and
Sparks
had raced along the endless gleaming
beaches of Neith ... But this mile ran uphill, on hard pavement, not yielding
sand. Before she had reached halfway her breath rasped in her throat and her
body protested with every jarring step. She tried to remember how long it had
really been since she had run on that shining sand; couldn’t even remember how
long it had been since shed had enough food or sleep to satisfy the body of a
bird.
Damn Carbuncle!
There were only
a dozen women ahead of her, but they were slowly gaming ground. New runners
began to come up on her and pass her from behind. She saw with a kind of dread
that one of them wore a brown ribbon, not green—the second group of runners was
overtaking the first starters; and she stumbled as her mind left her straining
legs unguided.

Two thirds
of a mile, three quarters, and there were more passing her all the time, easily
thirty ahead of her now, and a cramp in her side that took her breath away.
They’re passing me ... and they don’t know
,
they don’t even know what they’re reaching for!
Reaching after it with the last of her strength, she saw the final distance
hurtle past; suspended all other awareness until the white stone courtyard of
the Winter palace was under her feet, and the next-to-last winter’s garland had
fallen around her shoulders.

Laughing,
gasping, dazed, she was swallowed by the ecstasy of the waiting crowd, joyously
praised with handclasps, kisses, and tears. She made her way through them, took
her place in the circle of winners that was forming at the very center of the
courtyard. Looking back, she heard and then saw the group of musicians dressed
in white, draped in garlands like her own, and wearing black chimney hats with
Winter totem crests. Behind them came a small procession of Summers—more
Goodventures, bearing a canopy of ornamental net woven with shells and sprays
of greenery, held aloft on oars delicately carven with a fantasy of sea beasts.

And beneath
the canopy came the mask of the Summer Queen. She heard the sighs and cries of
admiration, like a wind through the crowd; felt her own wonder rise again at
the sight of its beauty ...
and its
power, the face of Change
. Her gaze moved to the one who carried it, and
she jerked with recognition: Fate Ravenglass. The circle parted to let Fate
through alone; the rest of the procession circled outside, mingling its music
with the crowd’s.

The
Goodventure elder bowed before her, or before the strength of her artistry. “Winter
crowns Summer, and the Change begins. May the Lady help you to choose wisely,
Winter woman; for your sake as well as for ours.” She stood serene in her faith
in the Lady’s judgment.

“I pray
that I will.” Fate bowed in turn, her white gown all but hidden by the mask’s
trailing sunbeams as it rested on her arms.

The Lady will choose ...
Why had Fate Ravenglass been picked
as
Her
representative, if not to choose in turn the
one face, the one heart and mind behind it that knew the secrets she knew about
this world?
But she’s almost blind
.
Could she even tell one face from all the rest? How would she know?