Wedding (25 page)

Everything Dominic had told me proved only
that Dominic’s father had been both fortunate in finding such a
superior being and clever in convincing her to become his wife.
Dominic’s discomfort in talking about his mother stemmed from her
death and his own feelings of abandonment, not from her nonhuman
status. And if I was fully human, I was also Terran.

The glow I had felt all day, from my nights
with Dominic and their legacy of enveloping love, faded at last.
Our anger and shouting had not dimmed it, only intensified some of
the heat, but the cold, hard truth we were coming up against now
was going to snuff the flame. Dominic, in his conflicted love for
me, had tried to make a false comparison between us: both
outsiders, he was claiming, both ultimately acceptable to ’Graven
Assembly. Yet we were not. Native Eclipsian “aliens” could be
’Graven, welcomed in assembly, as Dominic was. Terran was anathema.
His misguided defense of me was aimed, not at ’Graven Assembly, but
at himself.

I sat rigid on Dominic’s muscular thighs.
“You won’t say it,” I said in a low voice, “so I will. I’m Terran.
It’s a fact. I’m Terran, and you hate it, and it poisons our love
every time you think of it.”

If I had expected Dominic to leap in and
contradict my bleak assessment with another spirited speech, I was
disappointed. He remained silent, his arms loosely around me, only
the slight twitch, the flinch when I said the word “Terran” proving
he had heard me. We could get around everything else except my
being Terran. Dominic could call it bullshit, but it was what
divided us, not his
vir
orientation, nor his violent
impulses, not my sex or my lack of ’Graven status. It was the only
thing that genuinely bothered one of us about the other, and it was
something that could not be changed.

When I thought about it, it began to seem
ridiculous that a minor biological detail, meaningless in itself,
could threaten us, while so many real problems had been overcome.
“But we are all Terrans,” I said. “Everybody on Eclipsis is Terran,
whether directly from Terra now, or descended from the first
settlers.”

“Except when we’re not,” Dominic said. “When
we’re a genetic variation.” His enigmatic smile deepened the chill
around me.

My stomach lurched, and my face and neck felt
as if they were engulfed in flames. “Oh, gods!” I said, trying to
jump off Dominic’s lap. “I’m not fit to live with.” Two minutes
after Dominic tells me an essential truth about himself and I say
something that proves I haven’t listened or remembered. I wanted to
run from him and hide, in my room if I could flee no further. He
could bear anything except having an idiot for a wife.

“No,” Dominic said, his arms holding me in
place. “You’ll have to stay here, away from decent people, and live
with me.” He did not appear unduly offended. He kissed me as I
struggled and his arms enfolded me ever tighter until I could not
move, not without using
crypta
, which I had no desire to do.
I could not risk encountering Dominic’s real feelings just now,
whatever they were. I sat limp, my head lowered, blinking back the
tears.

Dominic slackened his hold a little, just
enough to let me know I was not a prisoner. “Listen to me, Amalie.”
He spoke more forcefully now. “I must explain things to you. Please
promise me you won’t take offense or be angry at what I say.”

I shook my head. “I have no right,” I said,
my voice as tearful as my face, “to be angry at anything you
say.”

Dominic laughed indulgently at such nonsense.
“I know you better than that. True or not, that would not stop you.
But I need you to try to understand what I must say, and to control
any emotional response you might have at first.”

I had recovered sufficiently to weigh his
demand and answer it honestly. “I can’t pledge such an impossible
thing ahead of time. But I promise to hear you out before blowing
up.”

“Fair enough.” Dominic hesitated, picking his
way carefully, deciding how best to begin. “My whole life I hated
Terrans,” he said, going for the frontal assault. “Yes, I know that
all human life here originated on Terra. But I think you can agree,
now, that some of us are entitled to think of ourselves as
Eclipsian, and the newcomers, those who arrived in the past
generation or two, as ‘Terrans.’ ”

I was still chagrined by my thoughtlessness,
and did not wish to refer to it again. In my thoughts I apologized
to my lover, who accepted the gesture and proceeded with his
argument. “The Terrans came here in my grandfather’s time and they
worked quickly, building and exploring, challenging our customs,
disrespectful of our mores, making their mark on this world that
did not belong to them. Once I was old enough to attend ’Graven
Assembly, I opposed any suggestion of compromise between our ways
and theirs. I was often in the minority, but I never considered
moderating my position.”

For a minute I had hope. “But I’m not like
that,” I said. “Isn’t that what you’re saying, that I’m different
from the other Terrans you know?”

Dominic stared into my eyes. This time there
was nothing, no emotion. It was like looking at a statue, with
marbles for eyes. “Please, Amalie,” he said. “I must tell you how I
view Terrans, in case you have not guessed it.” He smiled
sarcastically, mouth turned down. “Terrans are the enemy. I do not
‘know’ any Terrans. From the moment of their arrival they
threatened everything that matters most to me and the few like
me—those of us who value honor and our traditional way of life
above commerce.” His face by now had the murderous look we both get
when we must admit the unacceptable. “I think, for ’Graven, every
concession to the Terrans is something we will come to regret, will
destroy us all in time.”

I did not need to see it in his eyes to know
the emotions engendered by his thoughts: furious, resentful,
warlike hatred that had festered for years. I was feeling chilled
to the bone, but I gathered up my courage. “Are you saying you love
me in spite of yourself?” That was the most depressing kind of love
that one person could have for another. I might as well know
it.

“No, Amalie! Never think that.” He stroked my
hair, as with a dog or a cat. “Meeting you has not changed my
feelings. You do not make Terran policy, nor can you influence it.
You have nothing to do with it.”

Dominic had asked me not to give in to anger
or hurt feelings before he began this speech and, as he had
predicted, I had experienced both. What Dominic had expressed, and
more, what I could sense behind the words, was even worse than I
had anticipated. There was no danger now of my interrupting. I felt
Dominic’s thoughts still percolating and sat in silence as tears
filled my eyes.
Why did he want to marry me? If it was this bad,
how could he even bring himself to touch me?
I blinked
repeatedly, willing myself not to cry.

Beloved
, his thought came to me.
I
would not cause you such pain
. Dominic had entered communion so
smoothly I had been unaware until he let the words blossom inside
my head.
You are not Terran to me. That’s what I am trying to
tell you
. His mental caress soothed my jangling nerves until I
could listen to spoken words again.

“Look at me, please,” Dominic said. It was an
order, as if to his troops and, like any of them, I obeyed
instantly, watching the silver eyes that glinted in the dim
afternoon light. “When I look at you,” he said, “I don’t see a
Terran. When I touch you,” demonstrating as he spoke, “when I am in
communion with you, when I make love to you, it is not a Terran I
am touching or loving or kissing. I would be incapable of that.” He
used the same fingertip that had earlier silenced my lips to wipe
away the one little tear that had escaped from the corner of my
eye.

My face, drained of all color, reflected
white in Dominic’s eyes. “What happened in the shelter,” I asked,
“was that because of my being Terran?”

Dominic had a hunted look on his face. “No,
Amalie. If I had thought of you then as Terran—” He shuddered, but
was compelled now to tell me the entire truth. “I would have killed
you, as I feared.”

“But you didn’t,” I said. “You could have,
but you didn’t.”
For what it’s worth
, I thought.

“No,” Dominic said. “And do you know why?”
Dominic didn’t wait for me to guess at all the rotten
possibilities. “Because I
cannot
see you as Terran. You can
remind me of it every day for the rest of our life together, can
shout it into my face for the next fifty years, and I will not
accept it. My mind, my body, simply cannot put the two things
together.” He stared into my eyes again, his own eyes totally
opaque, blocking my attempts to see into his mind.

“But what
do
you see?” I asked. I
remembered so many fond, kind looks I had had from him, even at our
first meeting, when my hair was so short and I had been wearing
Terran clothes. What could he have seen then that was not
Terran?

Dominic smiled and opened his mind. “It’s
like this,” he said, forgetting the painful nature of the
conversation, happy to elucidate his strange mental process. “There
are Terrans,” he indicated his right hand with the inevitable sneer
of contempt, “over there. And there is you, Amalie, my beloved,
over here.” He used the favored left hand for me, his face becoming
benign, softened with love. He was not acting; it was an
involuntary reaction. “And the two things are opposites. They
cannot overlap, cannot so much as exist together in the same part
of my mind.”

“Because they would nullify each other,
cancel each other out, like matter and anti-matter,” I finished for
him, reading his thought. “Yet here I am, alive, existing, both
Amalie and Terran,” I said, deciding I must be brave and articulate
the paradox in order to resolve it. “So what’s the answer?”

Dominic took his two hands, the left and the
right, the beloved and the Terran, and smashed them together, fist
into palm, with a loud thwack. I shrank back at the noise. “I am
proposing marriage to Amalie, my beloved. I promise to be as good a
husband as I know how, faithful and loving. You will always be my
wife, whether we can marry in the ’Graven Rule or simply share
first hearth and first meal like the poorest of commoners. I will
never take another woman in your place. Our children will be
Aranyi. If you bear me a son, he will be Margrave Aranyi after me,
and I will fight as hard as I can in ’Graven Assembly to make it
so.”

“What about the Terran woman?” I asked.

Dominic separated his hands, glaring at his
right palm where the squashed remnants of any Terrans would have
been. “To me, there is no Terran,” he said. “There is only Amalie.”
He shook out his left fist, grinding his teeth. “When I think of
you, a beautiful, gifted woman, alone among ungifted Terrans—it is
like one of the ballads we sing when we wish to be sentimental and
weep after supper.” His voice was deep and musical now, as if he
would sing it himself. As I had ached over his past, so now he was
sorrowing for mine.

“And will marriage to you transform me into a
Eclipsian—’Gravina, or at least natural-born?”

“There is nothing to transform,” Dominic
said. “Because someone is born in a stable, that does not make her
a horse. Your substance needs no changing, only your name. Once you
marry me, you will be ’Gravina Aranyi. What you chose to call
yourself before will not matter.”

“But some people know,” I said, as if that
was the only thing I cared about.

Dominic’s face became warlike again. His hand
went to the hilt of his sword and his eyes widened in a predatory
stare. “They will forget,” he said, very softly. “In my presence,
they will know nothing about it.”

It took me a while to sort out my reactions.
They were not exactly what I expected. When I had one clear thought
I blurted it out. “And in order to be your wife, I must not be
Terran, must forget my origins, or deny them. I must make the past
thirty-six years disappear, or distort them somehow into a big,
fat, fucking lie.”

Dominic returned from his imaginary wars.
“Yes,” he said, his eyes narrowing in a smile as he put his arms
around me. “And I think your choice of words is delightful.” He
tried to kiss me again.

I turned my head away. “What if I can’t?” I
asked. Only later did I wonder why I didn’t ask:
What if I don’t
want to?

“But you already have,” Dominic said,
puzzled. “Nobody here thinks you’re Terran. You admitted as much,
that you never corrected people’s assumptions.” He raised an
eyebrow. “Did you? Did you ever say, ‘I’m not Lady Amalie, I’m a
Terran’?”

“I considered it.”

“But you couldn’t do it, could you? For my
sake, you said nothing.” He nodded his approval.

“Yes,” I said, uncertain of my memories and
my motives. I thought back over the last two months, on my own in
this rambling town of a castle. For all my doubts and fears,
wondering what I would do when Dominic returned, nevertheless, I
had been happier here than I had ever been. I had basked in the
acceptance that came with being the sham Lady Amalie, had grown
accustomed to the comfort, not just of good food and servants and
interesting work, but of belonging somewhere. And I had always
hated being Terran, even when I had not known that was the cause of
my misery. Dominic was asking me to turn my back on something that
had been a source of pain to me all my life, to deny it, to destroy
it by no longer allowing it to exist.

He was asking me to do something I had wanted
to do for a long time, something I wanted more even than marrying
him, although that was a close second. “I think I did it as much
for myself,” I said, raising my eyes to meet his.

Dominic saw the strange look on my face as
the epiphany came to me. “What is your answer, beloved?” he
asked.