Chapter 16 #5
“I have.” It was unexpectedly difficult to keep my hand still.
The centuries between you and I had been reduced to a bare inch, a single gesture, and my arm shook slightly with the effort of restraint.
“And yet, I neither intend nor desire to kill you.” I hoped, fervently and with all my heart, that I would never again wipe anyone else’s blood from my hands.
“However, if you lie to me, or attack me, or scream for help, I will instantly overcome my personal preferences and pull the trigger. I have three shots, but I assure you I will only need one.”
Her hands returned to her sides. She inclined her head, very slightly, and I saw the dull gleam of gray hairs among the brass. I wonder if she ever let it go wholly white, or if she constantly traveled back to her own youth, making herself whatever age she pleased.
“Now. The queens that came after Yvanne—Tilda the Younger, Lysabet I and II, et cetera—they were all you, weren’t they? At different ages, perhaps?”
She tilted her chin, considering me. The gas lamps on the street below cast a ghoulish green-gold light across her face. “The queen is dead,” she said, and spread her hands. “Long live the queen.”
“Answer the—”
“Yes, they were me.” Her lips twisted. “I knew I should have burned the archives somewhere along the way, but it’s a delicate balance. You want a robust national history, but you also want to cover your tracks.”
“And Lazamon and de Meulan, and the others. You gave them this book, the book I wrote, in different iterations?”
“Yes.”
“And then you spirited it away until you needed a new version. At which time you returned to the present, mailed the book to me again, and sent me back to her.”
“Yes.” Vivian was perfectly calm, even a little proud. “You could never refuse me, and Una could never refuse you.”
“Do not,” I advised her, with a little flick of the barrel, “ever speak her name again.” My temper—which had been absent since the day Professor Sawbridge put the cigarette butt in my hand, lost in a tide of urgent hope—was simmering once more in my chest, licking up my throat.
“What I don’t understand is why you had to make it real.
Why not just rewrite the book yourself, however you wanted? Why make me—why make us—”
“I tried that, obviously.” Vivian shook her head, much in the manner of a master craftsman reflecting on the quality of his early-career work.
“But—to my lasting dismay—the truth matters. It matters what the court of Cavallon sees on the day she dies. It matters what the villagers of Dominion whisper to one another, and what stories they tell their children and grandchildren about the time the Red Knight rode past. Without them, without that germ of actual memory, her story is just a story, and your book is just a book. Also,” she added, wryly, “I could never quite capture the tone. You bring a real pathos to the project, Corporal.”
I found my finger had tightened on the trigger. I loosened it, fractionally. “But I wasn’t the first person you sent back, was I?”
“You were not.” For the first time, I detected a note of genuine surprise in her voice.
“It was a bit like holding auditions, for a while. I needed someone who was clever enough to play the part, but not so clever that he would realize he was reading from a script. Someone who loved her legend enough to let her die but loved her enough to write a hell of a eulogy. It’s a—”
“Delicate balance.” My lips felt numb, separate from myself.
“But of course, what I needed most was the person she was willing to die for. I was that person, once, at the beginning.” A look of such longing crossed her face that I understood, against my will, that she really had loved you, and perhaps still did.
But the look passed, and I understood, too, that it did not matter.
She had killed what she loved, over and over, and would do it again, and would not lose a single moment’s sleep.
“None of my other candidates even came close. The Harrison boy—what a disaster. That fucking horse killed him, the first time around. Make a note—if you’re trying to engineer the perfect warhorse, you can only send them back in time about twenty times before they get absolutely demented.
” Oh, Hen, you poor bastard. “Anyway, I tried Harrison a few more times. He never even got her to the dragon. But you…” Another shake of her head, indulgent this time.
“It was like you already knew each other, even that first time.”
The scent of flowers seemed to thicken the air, pooling at the back of my tongue like bile. It was a moment or two before I could ask my final question. “Why?”
“Why does anyone fall in love? Brain chemistry and proximity. Although I always wonder how it works between you two. Do you take turns giving the orders? I hope you listen to her better than you did to poor Colonel Drayton—”
“Stop.” I caught the shine of a jagged gray tooth, the curve of a pleased smile. I thought a little nauseously of that night when you’d wrapped me in your cloak. If you had moved your hand half an inch farther down—if you had begged or demanded, shouted or whispered—
But you hadn’t. Perhaps some wary, battle-tried part of you knew bait when you saw it. You’d wanted me—I’d felt it, smelled it—but perhaps you wanted your free will more.
It was a moment before I could retrieve my line of questioning. “I meant—why did you do it? What could possibly be worth it?” My voice was fraying. My shoulders ached from holding my arms so still. “Did you want to be on the radio that badly?”
Vivian’s smile vanished. “Mallory, look around you. We are standing in the capitol of the most powerful nation on earth. A prosperous, united, peaceful nation, which I have spent a millennium building with my own two hands, my own sweat and blood—”
“Not yours.” My voice dragged across hers, a serrated whisper.
She exhaled, annoyed, then stood. I kept the barrel of the revolver pointed just to the right of her sternum, hardly breathing, but she came no closer.
She edged around the bed and leaned on the nearest windowsill, slope shouldered, infinitely weary.
She looked like a woman badly in need of a cigarette.
“I was nothing, once,” she said to the window. Her face was so close to the glass that her breath misted over it. “I mean that literally: I came into this world lower than the meanest pig farmer, lower even than his scrawniest sow. But I was smart, and I was hungry, and I would not remain nothing.”
I tried to picture her as a girl, spindly and square jawed, perhaps begging on street corners or scrounging scraps from alleys. But it was like imagining an asp as an egg; it may have been true, but I couldn’t see how it mattered.
“I found my way, eventually, beneath the wing of a great man. A powerful man. One night I told my—teacher, we’ll call him—that I would be great, too, someday.
He laughed. He asked me to name a great woman of history.
Just one. And then, in the silence, he kissed me on the forehead.
” One of her hands drifted upward to rub, hard, at her brow.
When she turned back toward me, the light from the street fell full on her face, and I could see the black gash of her lips, the beaten steel of her jaw.
In her eyes I could see what she kept so carefully hidden behind rueful smiles and ugly jokes: a bottomless, terrifying resolve, of the kind that could bend the whole history of the world to its will.
“There were no precedents for what I wanted to become, you see. No stories. So I made my own precedents.” A small, proud smile, here.
“I built my own ladder, rung by rung, and climbed it all the way to the top. And now every child on the street could tell you their names, and every name is mine.” The smile widened, became beatific, so that she looked younger and more alive than I had ever seen her. “Of course it was worth it.”
This part of the speech was, I understood, intended to make her cause more sympathetic to me.
To recast the last few centuries of bloodshed as a noble struggle toward justice.
But all I could see was your face as you died, over and over.
Was it a ladder she had climbed, or a pile of bodies?
Was it justice, if it only served one person?
I thought then of the queen’s other guards, who had not looked as I expected them to look. Who had been altered, erased, unsubtly remade in the image of one woman. “What color was Ancel’s hair, before you made him change it to match yours?”
Vivian blinked. “Red.” Her nose wrinkled. “A Gallish grandmother, I believe.”
“How trying,” I said, dryly. “Last question. Once you had your crown—crowns—why did you rule Dominion so…”
“Competently?”
“Ruthlessly. Violently. Every one of your reigns is marked by wars, executions, arrests. The First Crusade, the burning of the heretics, the conquest of the Hinterlands and the occupation after. The indecency laws—my father—” I choked on the word.