The Snow Queen (76 page)

When she
returned she found Mantagnes waiting, with supercilious aloofness, in answer to
her call. She returned his salute without expression and ordered him to take
her place in the station.

She stopped
again on the way to the entrance and shook Tor awake. “Wake up, Winter. It’s
nearly dawn.”

Tor sat up,
rubbing bleary misery over her face.

“I’m going
down to the Change ceremony now.” Jerusha gentled her voice. “I didn’t know
whether you wanted to be there. If you do, you can come with us.”
Though I wouldn’t blame you
if you wanted to sleep through it.

Tor shook
her head, stretched out her arms; her eyes cleared. “Yeah ... I guess I will,
after all. I can’t stay here forever, can I?” rhetorical. She stood up, turning
to Pollux, who still stood in the same place beside her. “I’d better go see the
end of the world, Polly; there won’t be another one. And if I don’t see it, I
might not believe it.”

“Good-bye,
Tor.” The voice sounded thinner and even more dreary than Jerusha remembered.
“Goodbye.”

“G’bye,
Polly.” Her mouth worked. “I won’t forget you. Trust me.”

“I trust
you, Tor.” The pol rob raised its hand, imitating a farewell.

“Good boy.”
She backed away slowly.

Still
watching, Jerusha saw Tor wipe briefly at her eyes as she followed them out of
the station.

Arienrhod
took her place on the thick pile of white furs that draped the ship-form
ceremonial cart in the palace courtyard. She entered her role in the ritual
calmly, with perfect control, with the royal presence of nearly one hundred and
fifty years. The cheers and the jeers of the gathered Summers closed around
her, as inescapable as death; and the wailing grief of the waiting Winters.
Their combined dirge was like the moaning hunger of the Pit, where the sea lay
waiting ... as the Sea lay waiting today. Her hunger would be satisfied, at
last.

Starbuck
was already seated among the silver-tipped furs, sitting like a figure chipped
from obsidian in his mask and black court garb. She was surprised to find him
here before her.
You were always so
impatient, my love. But I didn’t think you’d be impatient for this.
She
felt a cold weight drop inside of her.
Because I’m not.
I’m
not.
“Good morning, Starbuck. I hope you slept well.”

He turned
his face away as she tried to look him in the eye, and said nothing.

“So you
think you’ll never forgive me? Forever is a long time, Sparks. And forever is
how long we’ll be together.” She put an arm lovingly around his shoulders and felt
him shudder, or quiver. His shoulders through the heaviness of cloth and
leather felt broader than she remembered.
Only a boy, with a man’s strength ... and
weakness.

At least we’ll spend it forever young
, trying again to believe as she had
once believed, that she would sooner die than live in a world where she would
have to be poor, and sick, and
old ...

The escort
of Winter nobles gathered around the cart, all clad in formless white,
amorphous in white-on-white masks that mimed their family totem creatures. Half
a dozen of them picked up the traces to draw the cart forward, starling it down
the hill; the rest, all bearing some precious off worlder thing, formed a human
curtain around it to shield her at least partly from the view, the insults, the
occasional pieces of garbage flung by the Summers in the crowd along the way.
Then: positions, this menial labor, were both an honor and a kind of penance.

She
arranged the fall of her own ancient feather cloak, melting into the whiteness
of the furs: the cloak she wore on all ceremonial occasions, the one she had
worn at every challenge to Starbuck through a century and a half. Beneath it
she wore only a simple white gown. White, the color of Winter, and of mourning.
Her hair fell free down her back like a veil, netted with diamonds and
sapphires. She wore no mask—she was the only one who wore no mask—so that all
the world could be certain that she was really the Snow Queen.

I am the Snow Queen
. She watched the richly decorated townhouses
of the nobility passing for the last time; imagining how they would look bare
of their off world elegance, remembering the loyal service she had been given
by their many occupants who had been members of her court down through the
years.
And even today.
She glanced from side to side at her retinue, listening to the defiantly off
world song they sang to honor her and to drown out the crowd. A handful of the
masked honor guard were nearly as old as she—although none were quite as well
preserved. They had proven their loyalty and their usefulness again and again,
and they had always been rewarded, while the less useful and less pliant grew
old and were banished to the countryside. They grieved sincerely today, she
knew, like all the weeping, wailing Winters—and like all the Winters, grieved
mainly for themselves. But that was only human. There was no one among them
that she really regretted leaving behind: many whom she had enjoyed and even
respected, but none for whom she had ever felt any real personal warmth that
hadn’t paled again like infatuation over the long reaches of time. There was
only one whom she really loved—and she was not leaving him behind. She put a
hand on Starbuck’s cape-covered knee; he brushed it away before it could
settle. But after a moment, as though in apology, his own hand slipped across
her back beneath her cloak, his arm circled her waist. She smiled, until a fish
head thumped into the furs behind her.

They had
come to the edge of the Maze already. Is this city really so small? She glanced
down the flotsam-full alleys, their throats choked with crowd; met the
abandoned eyes of the empty storefronts directly. Seeing it all for the last
time ... which shared something with the first time, every image as perfect and
fresh as a walk through new-fallen snow. The first and the last were the same,
and had nothing in common with all of the countless passages in between.

And they
shared things in common in a literal sense: the Festival crowds, the abandoned
and half-empty buildings. But the first time she had seen Carbuncle it had been
at the end of Summer’s reign, when she had come here from her family’s
plantation to the first Festival in a hundred years, to see the return of the
off worlders and to compete in the choosing of the new Queen. Although she had
come from a noble Winter family, growing up at the end of Summer had meant
growing up barely more civilized than the Summers themselves were. All of the
off world artifacts that were so common place to her now had seemed as strange
and marvelous to that naive country girl as they must seem to any Summer.

But she had
learned quickly enough the usefulness of the gifts the off worlders brought to
this world—the strange magic of technology, strange customs, strange vices. And
she had learned, too, what their patronizing lords wanted from her world in
return, and from her as its inexperienced representative—begun to learn,
painfully, how to take without giving, how to give without surrendering, how to
squeeze blood from a stone. She had taken her first Starbuck, a man whose alien
features she couldn’t remember, whose real name she had long since forgotten.
Dozens more had followed, until she had found the one ....

And
meanwhile she had watched Carbuncle transformed into a thriving star port, she
had kept learning, year upon year, more about the usefulness of technology,
more about the frailty of human nature, more about the universe in general, and
herself in particular. Ten lifetimes would barely begin to teach her all that
she could have learned, and she had barely been given two. But she had realized
at last that this world was an extension of herself, and immortal in a way that
no human body could ever be. She had made plans to leave it a legacy when her
own reign had to end—to set it free to go on learning and growing when she
could not.

But she had
failed. Failed to hold onto the key to Tiamat’s future; failed to carry out her
altered plan of guiding Tiamat’s future herself; failed again to keep her hold
on Moon, when Moon would have been her last hope ... And somehow, in the
meantime, she had lost her perspective about her own future. She had lived the
way the Summers lived, once, but it had been far too long ago now. She could
not even imagine going back, doing without, living like a barbarian again. And
even if the Summers weren’t allowed to destroy every bit of technology they
found remaining in Carbuncle, the city and all of Tiamat would still cease to
be even a blurred hologram of the thriving interplanetary stopover that it had
been.

She had
believed once—secure in her faith that Moon, her clone, would reincarnate
her—that she would go willingly to sacrifice. She would play out the
traditional role to the end; and death would be one final new experience for a
body that had experienced every other imaginable sensation. She would not
regret leaving her life behind, because life as she knew it would have ceased
to exist.

But after
she had lost Moon, and found Sparks instead, after she had begun to build new
plans whose foundation lay in herself, she had lost sight of all that. She had
forgotten that she and her lover would have to grow old and endure hardship to
keep Winter and its heritage alive. No, not forgotten—she had ignored it,
because the greater goal, and the greater chance for immortality, had so
outweighed it.

But now—now
she had failed, utterly, completely. She would end here in this dawn forever;
become one more in an endless chain of forgotten Queens who lived and died
without meaning. And she wasn’t ready to die that way! No, no—not without
leaving her legacy to the future! Damn them, damn the bastard off worlders who
had ruined her plans for the future to keep their own intact. Damn the
miserable stupidity of the Summers, those jeering, stinking imbeciles who would
cheerfully carry out their purge of knowledge ... She looked from side to side,
radiating her useless fury.

“What’s
wrong, Arienrhod? Did you finally realize this is the end?”

She froze,
her gaze on Starbuck. “
Who are you?
”
Whispered, it was louder in her mind than all the shouting of the crowd. “Who
are you? You aren’t Starbuck!” She wrenched herself free from his encircling
arm.
Sparks—Oh, gods, what have you
done—with him?

“I am
Starbuck. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten me already, Arienrhod.” He caught her
hand in a vise grip. “It’s only been five years.” He turned his black-helmeted
head until she could see his eyes, pitiless earth-brown eyes with long, dark
lashes ...

“Herne!”
shaking her head. “It can’t be—gods, you can’t have done this to me! You
cripple, you dead man—you can’t be here, I won’t permit it!”
Sparks ... damn you, where are you!
“I’ll tell them you’re the wrong man!”

“They won’t
care.” She felt his grin. “They just want an off worlder body to pitch into the
sea. They don’t care whose it is. Why should you?”

“Where is
he?” frantically. “Where is Sparks? What have you done to him? And why?”

“So you
really love him that much.” Herne’s voice rasped. “So much that you want him in
your grave with you?” Black laughter. “But not enough to let him live on
without you ... or with your other self instead: greedy to the end. I traded
places with him, Arienrhod, because he doesn’t love you enough to die for
you—and I do.” He pressed the hand he held to his forehead. “Arienrhod ... you
belong with me, we’re two of a kind. Not with that weakling; he was never
enough of a man to appreciate you.”

She buried
her hands beneath her cloak as he let her go. “If I had a knife, Herne, I’d
kill you myself!
I’d strangle you with my
bare hands
.

“You see
what I mean?” He laughed again. “Who else but me would want to spend forever
like this? You tried to kill me once already, you bitch, and I wish you’d
finished the job. But you didn’t, and now I’m going to get my wish, and my
revenge too. I’ll have you forever now, all to myself; and if you spend forever
hating me for it, all the better. But like you said, love, ‘forever is a long
time.’”

Arienrhod
wrapped herself in her cloak, shutting herself away, shutting her eyes against
the sight of him. But the singing of the nobles was not enough to stop her ears
against the wailing and taunting of the crowd; it seeped in through her pores
and gave her despair a killing weight and substance.

“Don’t you
want to know how I did it? Don’t you want to know who put me up to it?” Herne’s
mocking voice tangled in the voice of the crowd. She didn’t answer him, knowing
that he would tell her anyway. “It was Moon. Your clone, Arienrhod, your other
self. She arranged it—she took him away from you after all. She’s your clone,
all right ... no one else gets her way quite like you do.”

“Moon.”
Arienrhod clenched her jaw, keeping her eyes shut. For the first time in more
years than she could remember, the fear of losing control in public came back
to her. Nothing, nothing short of this could break her—nothing short of losing
everything that had any meaning at all. And to know that the last blow had been
delivered by herself!
No, damn it, that
girl was never me—she’s a stranger, a failure!
But they had both loved
him—Sparks with his summer-green eyes, with his hair and his soul like fire.