Chapter 2 #2
I thought you were the saddest and most beautiful thing I had ever seen, like a dead angel. I looked for a long time at the bright line of the sword along your sternum, at the solemn shape of your mouth.
I looked at you for so long and so well that I felt something inside me shifting, irrevocably. It was like dying or being born, or being hit very hard on the head. It was like falling in love. (This was another thing I would only realize when I was much older.)
The longer I looked, the more ashamed I felt.
Sir Una Everlasting—you—had never run from anything.
You hadn’t disappeared from the world—you had burned your name into its surface, carved it so deeply into the stone of history that it was still legible a thousand years later.
You had died, yes, but only because you had found something worth dying for.
You had been born poor, but no one had ever called you a poor thing.
If I turned the book sideways, I could read the letters inscribed on your blade: Erxa Dominus.
For Dominion.
Perhaps if my father had read your stories as a boy, he would not have grown up to be a traitor and a turncoat; perhaps he would have served with honor and come home with a pension instead of just a bad hip and a motherless child.
And perhaps—despite my reservations about gunfire and bloodshed—it was not too late for me.
Here I was visited by a somewhat confused daydream of myself returning to Queenswald in triumph—being swept up, adored, admired.
The ruddy-cheeked boys would clap me on the back and my father would sober up and you would be there, somehow, glowing faintly with holy light.
You would take my hand and guide me down to lie beside you on your bier.
I repacked the basket, fingers clumsy with cold, and went straight home.
My father didn’t even look up when the door closed behind me. He behaved, in fact, as if no time had passed at all, as if the whole world had held its breath while I sat beneath the yew in the heart of the grove that was all that was left of the deep wild woods.
I lingered, wanting him to ask where I’d gone and why I’d come back. If he had, I would have answered, somewhat theatrically: For Dominion.
But I would have meant: For you.
The second time you saved me, I was twenty-three, and we were losing the war.
The Sunday papers printed fresh maps each week, with squiggly red lines to show how far our troops had retreated, how much territory was still held by the Hinterlanders.
They used to list the casualties by name over the wireless, but they’d stopped after a group of dissidents broke into Chancellor Gladwell’s bedroom and wrote the names of the dead on his walls in gory red paint (I’d told myself the red spatters on my father’s cuffs were coincidental).
Now the evening radio hour was reserved for the Minister of War.
Every night she addressed the nation, begging every concerned citizen to tighten their belts, every able hand to take up arms. She recalled our past triumphs against worse odds: Were we not the sons and daughters of Queen Yvanne the First, who united the whole of Dominion and brought the Savior’s light to every hollow and dale?
Had we not stood against the Hinterlands for centuries, bloodied but never beaten?
Surely our nerve would not fail now, on the very cusp of peace?
There had been murmurs and jokes and a run of extremely nasty cartoons when the Chancellor had named a woman as Minister of War, but her speeches were very good, and they left me restless and guilty.
Now, as I walked toward campus, I caught edged looks and suspicious glances, blond heads bent together, muttering.
People wondered, perhaps, where I had gotten my dark eyes and hair, and why I hadn’t been detained with the other enemy aliens and foreign suspects.
Or perhaps they only wondered why a healthy young man was walking down the street with library books tucked under one arm while their own sons were bleeding or killing or rotting in the Hinterlands.
I wanted to point at my spectacles, which were so thick the lenses had to be specially ordered; I wanted to tell them I was from Queenswald, actually, and did not have to register as an alien; I wanted to wave my transcript at them, which had earned me a fellowship at Cantford College and an exemption from the draft; I wanted, with a dispassionate sincerity I hadn’t felt since I was nine years old, to disappear.
I turned down an alley, hunched with loathing—and there you were again.
For one wild moment I felt everything shift around me, the city street dissolving into moss, the chill gray light going softly green. My mouth was full of the clean taste of winter and my heart was, for some reason, breaking.
Then I blinked and discovered that I was staring at a poster pasted to the alley wall.
The poster version of you was similar to the one in The Legend of Una Everlasting.
You were still armored, and your hair was still an unlikely, over-saturated yellow.
But you were alive now, caught mid-battle, an angel gone to war.
Valiance—the sword you pulled from the yew, the blade that built Dominion—was held dead level in your hands, pointing straight out at my chest. Behind you, legions of Hinterlanders skulked in the shadows.
Their faces—leering, animal-like, with eyes so dark they appeared to have no sclera at all—bore no resemblance to my own, or to any human face I have ever seen.
Neither did you, really: Your features were perfectly symmetrical, your cheeks marked by two circles of maidenly pink. Your cloak swirled Dominion-red behind you, and there was a faint halo around your head.
Only your eyes seemed real. The expression in them was exactly right, I thought: grave and proud, faintly contemptuous, as if you were asking for help but very much expecting to do everything yourself. Just their color, a floral and frivolous blue, was incorrect.
The caption read: DOMINION NEEDS YOU!
I looked at the poster for a long time. At you, who were everything I wasn’t and everything I wanted.
Then I turned around and walked straight to the recruitment office. I cheated on the eye exam, lied baldly about my exercise regimen, signed several forms, shook two hands, and then I was an enlisted man.
Three weeks later I was at the front. I’d had to return my library books by mail, at a cost I didn’t like to contemplate.
The third time you saved me, I was twenty-six, and we were winning the war.
It was harder to tell the difference between winning and losing, from the front.
I had found that both states involved an enormous amount of marching and suffering, endless days spent eating shitty tins of beans, and endless nights spent praying to God you got to eat one more shitty tin of beans and wishing you’d said a proper goodbye to your father.
I hadn’t even spoken to him before I shipped out.
I’d posted a brief, slightly nasty letter explaining that my country called in her hour of need and that I, unlike certain others, was not afraid to do my duty (I was).
In reply I had received a single telegram which read, when decoded: WOULD PREFER TO DISOWN YOU IN PERSON SO DONT DIE LOVE DAD.
I hadn’t died.
True, the first time we charged enemy lines I had puked from sheer terror, and when it was over, I had wept, helplessly and hard, like a child—
But I hadn’t died.
After the weeping had subsided to irregular hiccups, Colonel Drayton had taken me aside. “It’s like swimming,” he’d said, with the pride of someone delivering a line they’ve written themselves. “You drown, the first time. But the next one will be easier.”
The next one had not been easier.
It had in fact been infinitely harder because I knew then how a bullet sounds when it hits bone, how intestines feel beneath a boot, how desperately and cravenly I did not want to die, no matter how noble the cause.
I had begun to cry before the order was even given, that time, and survived only because I turned out to be—to the bafflement of my commanding officers, myself, and everyone who’d ever met me—the best shot in the 2nd Battalion.
There was no rational explanation for it. My vision was terrible and my reflexes were worse; at school I had been chosen for teams only when every other option was exhausted, including younger siblings and girls.
And yet: The rifle settled so sweetly to my shoulder, and the revolver lay so tenderly in my palm.
The motions of loading, firing, reloading—the fall of the hammer and the kick as the bullet left the barrel—all of it was like a clapping game I’d learned as a child.
I’d forgotten the words, but my muscles remembered the rhythm.
I didn’t even have to aim. I only lifted my arm and pulled the trigger and my enemies fell like bottles at a carnival game, and later I would vomit until I couldn’t anymore.
I was not well-liked in the battalion. There had been a rash of ugly jokes early on, which Colonel Drayton quashed, somewhat clumsily.
(Drayton was a liberal, which meant he thought boys of every race and class ought to be allowed to die for their country.) Then there had been an awkward encounter on sentry duty, where I’d been obliged to tell another private, politely, that I didn’t fuck men, and he’d said neither do I!
with confusing venom. The others had pointedly ignored me, since then.
But after that second battle they regarded me with sullen hostility, as if they suspected me of playing an elaborate trick on them.
After the fourth battle, when it was clear the shaking and crying were not an act, they accepted me.
Not as a fellow soldier or even, really, a fellow man—but as a sort of embarrassing lucky charm, like an unwashed sock or the foot of a dead animal, which they carried along against their better judgment.