He smiled, taking the mask in his hands, lifting it carefully out of the basket and holding it up to study it. He laid it back in its resting place again after a long moment, and got to his feet, stretching. “Tomorrow,” he murmured to it, feeling his perspective restored; feeling an odd sense of peace settle over him as he climbed the stairs, in search of a resting place of his own.
TIAMAT: Carbuncle
“Jerusha.” BZ Gundhalinu stood aside, letting Jerusha PalaThion enter his townhouse. He closed the door again hastily on the din of Festival revelers. They had been celebrating in his alley, as they had been celebrating all through the city, for three solid days now since the Assembly’s arrival. He felt his face settle into a frown of concern as he saw her expression. “What’s wrong?”
The tight line of her lips curved up into an ironic smile. “I wish those didn’t have to be the first words out of your mouth every time you see me unexpectedly, BZ.”
He laughed, ruefully, as he led her in through the hall to the sitting room. “So do I.” He settled into a chair, inviting her with a gesture to do the same. The room was lamplit; the heavy draperies drawn across the windows in the wall behind her shut out prying eyes and the city’s endless artificial day, letting his body at least pretend to believe that it was night, and time to rest. He sighed, leaning back in his seat. “This had better be good. Riots? Bomb threats? Assassination attempts on the Prime Minister?”
Jerusha shook her head, glancing down. “Nothing so simple, I’m afraid.” She looked up again. “There’s no easy way to say this. Tammis is in trouble. He’s down at the station—”
“Ye gods,” Gundhalinu sat forward. “He’s been arrested?”
She held up her hand. “No. He got beaten up and robbed. He was trying to pick up a male prostitute. He picked the wrong one.…” She shrugged.
“But he’s—” Married. Gundhalinu didn’t finish it, realizing all at once why their marriage was a troubled one.
“I’m keeping him at the station because he won’t go to the medical center.”
“His wife works there.”
She nodded, and ran a hand through her hair. “I thought you’d want to know.”
He sighed, looking away from the unspoken sympathy in her eyes. “Bring him here.”
* * *
He waited. The time passed interminably, until at last there was another knock at his door. He opened it. Tammis stood in the sheltering alcove, with Jerusha hovering like a shadow at his back. He entered the townhouse at Gundhalinu’s nod, moving stiffly; his lip was swollen, his eye bruised. Jerusha raised a hand in farewell and disappeared into the crowd.
“Thank you for coming,” Gundhalinu said, closing the door.
“Did I have a choice?” Tammis frowned.
“No. But thank you anyway.” Gundhalinu led the way to his sitting room again, offered his guest a seat again.
Tammis sat down, warily and painfully. “Why am I here, Justice Gundhalinu?” he said, and Gundhalinu saw him flush as he asked it—afraid that he already knew, afraid of the gods only knew what consequences.
Gundhalinu took a seat on the couch across from him. “Because we need to talk, about the reason why you won’t go to the med center.” He studied the boy’s face surreptitiously, meeting his resentful stare; searching for resemblances, and finding them. He glanced at the trefoil Tammis wore, its clean light winking against the soft folds of his dirt-smudged vest; glanced down at his own trefoil.
“What makes you think that’s any of your business, Justice?” Tammis said, holding himself like the son of the Queen. His voice was not as steady as he probably wished it was. “Are you doing this because you’re sleeping with my mother?”
Gundhalinu stiffened; he did not answer for a moment, trying to pull his thoughts and his resolve together. “Not exactly,” he murmured at last. “I’m not sleeping with your mother. But I am your father.”
Tammis froze as the words registered; although there was no surprise at all in his eyes. He did not ask if it was really true. The silence continued between them, while other emotions claimed the space behind his eyes.
At last Gundhalinu got up from his seat, moving across the room to stand before the boy. He looked down into the bruised, apprehensive face, observing Tammis with a trained eye. “I expect right now you feel like bloody hell,” he said, barely touching Tammis’s bruised cheek. Tammis flinched away from his hand. “But I don’t think it’s life-threatening.” Not meaning simply the obvious damage.
“How would you know?” Tammis said irritably.
“I’ve survived this long,” he answered gently. Tammis looked up at him. “I have some first aid supplies in the bathroom, if you want them.”
“No.” Tammis shook his head, looking down.
Gundhalinu nodded, understanding too why he would not end his physical suffering even when he could.
“You say you’re my real father, and that’s why I should talk to you. But that’s only what you say. You don’t know anything about me. What makes you think you can understand me, if my—my own family can’t?”
“Do you talk to them about the problems you’re having? Can you?” Gundhalinu sat down again, this time taking a closer seat.
Tammis frowned. “You mean, that I can’t decide whether I want to make love to men or women? That’s why this happened to me tonight, you know.”
“I know.” Gundhalinu nodded.
Tammis watched him darkly. “Did you ever feel like that? Did your own father ever call you a pervert?”
Gundhalinu shook his head. “No,” he said. “But he went to his grave thinking I was a coward. Everyone who mattered to me considered me a coward, once. Some of them still do, in spite of everything I’ve accomplished. They also called me a degenerate, for falling in love with your mother, because she wasn’t a Kharemoughi.”
Tammis’s frown faded. For a moment Gundhalinu wasn’t sure which confession had caused the surprise reflected on his face.
“There was a time when even I thought I was better off dead … but one special person changed my mind.”
“Who?” Tammis asked sullenly.
“Your mother.”
Tammis blinked suddenly, rapidly, and looked away.
“Have you tried to talk to your mother about this, or … or to—” Sparks. Your Father. He broke off
Tammis shrugged, a hopeless gesture. “She never has time to listen to anything. She hasn’t for years. And she’s a Summer.… She makes us go to the Summer clan gatherings, and study our traditions, so that we know who we are and what our people believe. For years I’ve heard the Summers, my people, talk about how wanting somebody you couldn’t make children with went against the Lady’s Way.” Habitually he made the triad sign with his fingers. “They say ‘the Mother loves children above all else’—even though they use childbane. They don’t have to have children, somehow that’s all right with the Lady … as long as they always put the right parts together.” His voice turned bitter. “If my mother knew, she might … she might…”
“… stop loving you?”
His face reddened. He pressed his lips together, and nodded. “Like Da. Da … saw me, once.” He lifted his hands, let them drop into his lap, hopelessly. “I’m an adult, I’m a married man. I should be able to solve my own problems!” He shook his head.
“What about the Winters—your friends?”
He shrugged again. “I don’t know what they really think … neither do they. Some of them don’t like it … some of them don’t care about anything. But that’s because they’re like the offworlders, they don’t have strong traditions and values, the way we do—”
“You mean like Summers?”
He nodded.
Gundhalinu smiled faintly. “Oh, you’ll be surprised.… There’s an old saying we have on Kharemough: ‘My gods or your gods, who knows which are stronger?’ That’s why we honor them all—just in case. There are more cultures even than gods in the Eight Worlds, and among them you??
?ll find people who are willing to kill you, or each other, over any difference in belief or lifestyle or physical appearance you can imagine—and some you can’t. They all think they’re right. There’s no Truth, Tammis, only differences of opinion. If that confuses the Tiamatans, they’re not alone.”
“How would they feel on Kharemough, if you wanted to make love to another man, instead of a—a woman who wasn’t like you.”
“Well, that would depend on his caste, and mine, probably.”
Tammis looked at him uncomprehendingly.
“The varieties of prejudice are infinite.” Gundhalinu shrugged. “But if social rank was not a problem, most Kharemoughis I know wouldn’t care what consenting adults did with each other—as long as they did it discreetly. Public displays of affection or flesh are considered in bad taste. On the other hand, in parts of Newhaven, from what Jerusha PalaThion tells me, near-nudity is typical, because of the heat.”
Tammis’s eyes widened briefly, as if the idea that Jerusha PalaThion had ever been a casually naked child was more than his mind could imagine.
“Jerusha used to say she’d never get used to the cold weather here. I used to think I’d never get used to the faces—the eyes. All those pale, cold eyes.” He glanced away from Tammis’s eyes, which were the warm earth-brown of his own.
Tammis shifted in his seat, pulling his soft-shod feet up under him. “But I don’t live in any of those places—I live here! And the people I live with, that I care about, they all hate what I am. They say even the Lady hates it—”
“Just because you’re outnumbered doesn’t mean you’re wrong.”
Tammis pressed his mouth together. “That’s easy for you to say.”
Gundhalinu laughed. “Much easier than it was when I left Tiamat.” He touched the sibyl sign, glancing down. “As far as having judgment passed against you: You wear one of these. You’ll never meet a more terrifyingly impartial judge of character than a sibyl choosing place.… On Kharemough every Technician child is required to go and be judged at one. When I was a boy, I was so afraid of being found unworthy that I lied to my family and said I’d failed the test, rather than go in, and actually know for sure that I was not strong or stable enough to suit it.”
“Then, how—?” Tammis gestured at Gundhalinu’s trefoil, touched his own.
“I’ll tell you that tale another time.” Gundhalinu smiled faintly. “It will prove to you that sibyls aren’t saints.… Do you know who Vanamoinen and Ilmarinen are?”
Tammis shook his head.
“You should. They were responsible for setting up the sibyl net that’s served all our worlds ever since the Old Empire fell. They were two men who were lovers. They’d been lovers for years; and I remember knowing that it was their love that made them believe they could make a difference, even in an impossible situation, when I … That is, one of them was my ancestor. Ilmarinen is the one my family has revered as its founder for centuries.”
Tammis glanced away. “But that means … Did he have both men and women for lovers?”
Gundhalinu shrugged. “I only know that he found his solution. You’ll have to find your own. But if you ever need to know that you have a right to be alive, just look down. Think about what sibyls mean to your people, and why.”
Tammis sighed, stretching out his legs again, as if he were uncoiling a spring.
“But…” he said, looking away, and his fist began to rap silently on the wooden arm of his seat. “But Merovy…”
“What about her?” Gundhalinu asked.
“She threw me out.”
“Because you were seeing other men?”
Tammis nodded. “I can’t help myself. I don’t want to do that to her, but then I start thinking about it, and I hate myself for it, but the more I hate myself, the more I want to—”
“You never think about wanting other women?”
“Yes, I do.”
“As much as you want to be with men?”
Tammis nodded again. “But they aren’t Merovy, and so I—I stop. Because I love her, there’s no one else I ever felt that close to. That’s why I married her.”
“No boy or man you ever felt that close to either?”
“No. No one I really loved. Not like her.”
“Then why can’t you stop?”
Tammis shook his head. “I don’t know.…” He half frowned, as if he had never thought about it.
“Would Merovy have thrown you out if you’d been seeing other women?”
Tammis looked up at him. “Probably.”
Gundhalinu shifted in his chair, realizing that he had been sitting motionless for far too long. “Then maybe the problem you both have is that you’ve been unfaithful to her at all.”
“I suppose so.…” Tammis rubbed his eyes, and winced. “I guess maybe it is.”
“Then maybe the question you need to give some thought to is whether you really want to hate yourself more than you want to love your wife.”
Tammis glanced down, staring at his trefoil, or seeming to. He looked up again, finally. “Can I go now, Justice Gundhalinu?”
Gundhalinu nodded, surprised and vaguely disappointed by the suddenness of the question. “Yes,” he said.
Tammis got up from his seat slowly, wincing again, and hesitated. “Maybe … maybe I will take something, for—” he gestured at his bruised body, “before I go. If you don’t mind.”
Gundhalinu pointed. “Through there. Help yourself to anything you need.”
Tammis started away across the room, stopped in the doorway, looking back. But he said nothing.
Gundhalinu listened to him rummaging through the medicinals in the bathroom, listened to him re-enter the hall and head directly for the door. At the last possible moment, before the door closed, he heard the words, “Thank you.”
TIAMAT: Carbuncle
Moon Dawntreader stood alone in the center of a hundred glittering revelers in the Great Hall of the palace. Around her they ate and drank, laughed and gossiped and danced and sang—Winters and Summers and offworlders, all but indistinguishable from one another for once, behind the disguises of their Festival masks and exotic clothes.
She wore a mask made for her by Fate Ravenglass—a re-creation of the mask that had crowned her Summer Queen, made of dappled green velvet and shimmering rainbow gossamer, echoing the flowers of the hills, birdwings, the blues of sky and mirroring sea, the gold of the sun. She hid behind it, gazing out through its eyeholes at the people around her like someone peering through at another world; catching only surreal glimpses of color and motion, hearing every sound as if it had reached her from a distance.
She moved to her body’s own slow, instinctive music, drifting with the tide of the crowd. This Mask Night Ball was the climax to an interminable cycle of parties and banquets and functions that she had been expected to participate in as Queen during the Assembly’s brief, endless visit.
She had watched the Prime Minister, and everyone around him, drink the water of life in her presence, like addicts, on the night of their arrival; and then she had left the starport and gone back to the city, making her anger plain by her absence. But she could not afford to ignore every function that had been planned, because to do so would have meant that she lost face, and endangered her position with the offworlders. So she had attended them all, or her body had, although her thoughts were far away, among the mers, trapped inside the greater vision that she was never allowed to lose sight of now.
And she was attending this final ball without pleasure, without illusion because it was required. There was hardly anyone here she recognized, and she knew that even if they wore no masks there would be hardly any faces she wanted to see. It was growing late, and already the crowd was thinning as people paired off to spend the rest of the night together—this night, when traditionally everyone was allowed, and even encouraged, to cast aside their inhibitions and put off their regrets until tomorrow, when at dawn they would symbolically cast the past into the sea.
It was considered bad luck to spend this night alone, without a lover. On the last Mask Night, she had been with Sparks, reunited after so long, and their future had seemed infinite in its promise of joy. But Sparks was not even in the room tonight; he had made excuses, saying he wanted to spend what little time was left with his father, before the Assembly departed. She supposed that much was true. But she was sure he would not return before morning, no matter how he actually spent his night.
Tammis was not here either, not even making a pretense with Merovy; they were living apart, she had heard, but neither of them had come to her to tell her about it. And Ariele … only the Lady knew what she was doing tonight, or who she was doing it with. There was gossip about an offworlder. Tor had seen them together, she was just a little worried, she’d said.… Ariele had not been near the palace in weeks; it had surprised Moon that she bothered to appear at the starport banquet—or that she left it with the rest of her family, when the water of life appeared. She would never understand her own daughter, never understand.…
The Prime Minister and several other partiers, who might or might not be any of his own people behind the mass-produced sameness of their masks, came to bid her good night. She was resolutely gracious, with relief giving her responses a sincerity that they did not deserve. She recognized the voice of Vhanu, the Police Commissioner; there were several Blues, uniformed and unmasked, with the dignitaries for security. She wondered where Jerusha was tonight. On duty for the Hegemony, she supposed; missing her old friend suddenly, painfully. No one … She lifted a hand to her face; encountered the startling textures of her mask, instead of her own flesh. She let her hand drop again.