Chapter 27
NAVUH
Navuh held the remote control pointed at the tiny television across from his bed and scrolled through the menu of available content.
The clan's library was extensive, but it was all recorded material. Movies, series, documentaries, lectures, and what the menu cheerfully called curated content, which contained nature programs and cooking shows.
He had no access to the news or live broadcasts of any kind.
He could not watch the political theater play out in the parliaments and senates and presidential palaces around the globe, so he couldn’t enjoy witnessing the fruits of the cultivated chaos that the Brotherhood had spent decades planting and watering.
The thing about democracies was that they were so much easier to infiltrate than dictatorships.
The price of a senator was modest. The price of a regulatory commissioner or a district judge was a rounding error in the Brotherhood's budget.
They had been quietly buying or blackmailing the right people in the right offices for years, nudging policy in directions that did not benefit anyone under their jurisdiction or beyond, and destabilizing as many as possible.
A world in chaos was a world ripe for the taking.
But Navuh was not taking anything from his bed in the windowless room of the clan's underground keep. He was watching stupid movies and reruns and waiting for the meals to break up the monotony.
Even plotting was pointless at this stage.
Navuh set the remote on the blanket and lifted his arm.
The cuff that had been slapped on his wrist was thin and shiny, snug against the skin, and he had been warned what it would do if it were activated. A neurotoxin would be injected directly into his bloodstream, and according to Gertrude, the experience would be excruciatingly painful.
He did not intend to test it, and not because he was afraid of the pain or doubted her words.
It would be pointless because he had nowhere to go and nothing he could do would warrant the effort.
His legs were regaining sensation, which was a good sign, but he was still far from being able to move them on his own.
His spine had been reconstructed, but it was not yet strong enough to support him.
He could not even lift himself out of bed without assistance.
The cuff was a precaution, not a barrier.
As the door opened and Gertrude entered, pushing the wheelchair ahead of her, Navuh's mood dipped.
He didn't like the daily excursions, even though they broke the monotony.
"Time for your outing," she said.
He didn't answer.
She positioned the chair beside the bed and locked the wheels. Then she pulled back the blanket, swung his legs over the edge of the mattress, and lifted him as if he were a child.
Navuh hated this part.
He hated being picked up. He hated the small adjustments she made to his body once she had him in her arms, the way she carefully positioned him in the chair and straightened his shoulders against the backrest, the way she arranged his feet on the footrest and tugged the hospital gown down over his thighs to preserve the small fraction of dignity that remained to him.
He hated the blanket she spread across his lap as if he were a convalescent geriatric human.
Most of all, he hated that she did all of this in good humor and with brisk efficiency. It would have been easier if she hated it as much as he did.
"What happened to Azul?" he asked when she was finished.
Gertrude stepped behind the chair and took the handles. "Who?"
"The physical therapist. The little one. She was supposed to start working with me."
"Ah, yeah. That one."
The wheelchair began to roll. The door, which Gertrude had left propped open on her way in, was wide enough to accommodate the chair with a small adjustment of the angle.
"You're not ready for physical therapy," she said. "You won't be for some weeks yet. By the time you are, we'll have to find a different therapist because Azul took on another project."
A project. So that was what he was called now.
It was a shame, though. He'd been looking forward to playing with little Azul.
She was a pretty little thing, with her tiny pixie face and short dark hair.
Not that he cared about her looks. She couldn't hold a candle to his goddess.
Areana was resplendent, spectacular, one of a kind.
But Azul had been a small bright thing in his very narrow horizon, and he'd been looking forward to sessions with her.
"So, who is going to do my physical therapy, you?"
"We'll find someone for you."
He frowned. "Did I scare little Azul? Is that why she took on another client?"
Gertrude sighed. "Yeah. Not everyone has my sense of humor."
He had no idea what she was trying to say by that. "Am I funny?"
"No, but the situation is a little comical. Don't you think? The big bad wolf, Lord Navuh, the archenemy of my clan, is lying broken in my clinic and is at my mercy. The Fates have a sense of humor."
He didn't bother to dignify that with a response.
She wheeled him through the double-door system that separated the clinic from the corridor outside. The first door closed behind them with a soft thud, locking them inside, and then the outer door released, and they passed through into the corridor.
Daniel was at his post.
"Good morning," the Guardian said.
Navuh grunted his greeting.
Daniel nodded a brief acknowledgment to Gertrude and fell in behind them.
Navuh was expecting her to take the right turn that took them past the closed doors and the small common area with the chairs and the magazines, the route they had been doing every day for the last week, but today, she turned left.
"Where are you taking me?" he asked.
"You'll see."
He was not in the mood for surprises, but he was also strapped into a wheelchair pushed by a female he couldn't have stopped if he wanted to, which he didn't, because the alternative was to be returned to his room.
He kept his mouth shut.
They reached the elevator.
He had taken the measure of the elevator on his first outing and had filed the relevant observations even though he had no use for them.
Stainless steel doors. Scanner panel beside the doors with two arrows, up and down, no floor numbers visible.
A small camera was mounted in the corner of the ceiling above the doors.
The cabin would be similarly featureless on the inside.
He was almost certain of that without needing to confirm it.
Gertrude waved her hand at the scanner, which was some kind of biometric or signal-based reader, because she was not pressing anything.
The doors slid open. She wheeled him in. Daniel followed. The doors closed.
The cabin moved, but Navuh couldn't tell whether it was descending or ascending. Whoever calibrated the elevator had done so in a way that made it difficult to determine. Either that or his messed-up body couldn't sense the direction.
After about eight seconds, the doors opened onto a different corridor, similar in finish to the one they had left, but the smell was different.
Chlorine.
She pushed the chair forward.
"Why are you taking me to the pool?"
"For motivation," she said. "Something to look forward to. Once you're well enough to begin physical therapy, most of your rehabilitation will take place in the water. It supports your weight while your muscles do the work of moving against resistance."
The thought did not motivate him.
The thought depressed him further.
Until that moment, the image he held of his future self had been conveniently fuzzy, a vague picture of him standing again, perhaps using a walker with little Azul walking beside him.
Now Gertrude had filled in some of the fuzziness with an image of his emaciated body in a pool, doing exercises that crippled human patients did in pools, supervised by some random therapist, who might be a male.
He really hoped it would be a female.
"Areana can join you for your exercises," Gertrude said. "Did you ever swim with her?"
The question caught him by surprise.
He thought about lying because anything that touched Areana felt private, but the lie was pointless. Gertrude was just making conversation, and he could choose to either respond or not.
"There was a pool in my harem," he said.
"Of course there was. I bet it was fancy."
"Naturally. It was done in blue and gold mosaic. Areana and her ladies enjoyed it frequently, and I joined them on occasion."
Gertrude laughed. "I cannot picture you splashing around with the girls."
That was an insult.
"I never splashed. I swam or lounged and watched."
"Hmm."
She kept pushing.
He thought about the pool in the harem, and for a moment, the corridor and the wheelchair and the woman behind him faded out.
The blue and gold mosaic floor. The arches that framed depictions of gardens and the artificial lighting that mimicked the sun or the moon, depending on the time of day.
Areana's hair pinned up off her neck. Her contented smile because he was there with her.
Daniel went ahead and pushed open the double doors leading to the pool, and Gertrude wheeled him in.
It was an Olympic-sized rectangle of blue water, with marked lanes. The walls were tiled in plain white. The lighting was bright and unflattering, and the air carried the chemical sting of chlorine. This pool had been built for function, not for style.
"It's so depressingly plain," he said. "I thought your Clan Mother had better taste."
"The pool was built for Guardian training, not for spoiled harem girls to splash in."
"Ladies. They are far too old to be called girls. Almost all of them are older than your Clan Mother."
He couldn't see Gertrude's face, but he hoped she looked chastened.
"They were pretty birds locked in a gilded cage," she said. "Now they are free, and they can choose to be called whatever they want."
Free.
A picture of Areana eating in a Beverly Hills restaurant popped into his head.
Areana walking through stores and picking out clothes she had bought with money that wasn't his.
Areana telling him about the lives of his sons with a brightness in her face that he had not put there.
The female he'd loved for five thousand years was starting to realize that she had been a prisoner.
She'd never once told him so, and the reason was either because she hadn't thought of it that way, or she did and preferred the fiction they had both created to make it bearable for her.
It was probably the second one.
"How are they doing, my harem ladies?" he asked, so he could stop thinking about Areana and five thousand years of being locked up in one harem or another.
"They're doing well."
"That is not an answer."
"You want details?"
"Yes. I want details."
"They've been settling in. Several have started taking classes in various subjects. They are still exploring their options, making friends, and getting accustomed to being free. It's not something that happens overnight."
"We are all going through adjustments," he said. "What else? Do they go to the city? Eat in restaurants, shop in stores?"
"Maybe. I don't know. Perhaps the males they are dating take them to the city."
He had been expecting that, and yet hearing it landed like a lump of coal in his stomach.
"They are dating."
"Yes."
"That's ridiculous."
"Why do you say that?"
Dating was a flimsy word for a flimsy concept. "Real males don't date. Real males claim."
"Did you claim Areana?" Gertrude asked.
He huffed. "Areana is a goddess. I courted her."
"Dating is the modern term for courting."
"No, it's not. Dating and courting are not the same thing. Courting is intentional. Dating is noncommittal."
"There is something to that."
He was so surprised to hear her agree with him that he tried to turn his head and look at her over his shoulder, but he still didn't have that range of motion.
She chuckled. "Don't look so surprised. Sometimes the things you say make sense."
"I always make perfect sense."
"From your perspective." She turned the chair so he could see the length of the pool.
"That's the shallow end," she said, gesturing at the near end of the pool.
"You'll start there. Hip-deep water, holding the rail.
As you regain function, you'll progress into deeper water.
Eventually, you'll do laps, but that's probably months away. "
"Months?"
"Yes. Perhaps a year."
He had assumed his recovery was going to progress faster now.
He'd been relishing the new sensation in his toes, the small return of feeling in his calves, treating each tiny development as evidence that the timeline was shorter than it appeared.
He had been telling himself a story in which he would be on his feet in a matter of weeks.
Gertrude had just deleted that story and replaced it with something far gloomier.
Not that the other one was cheerful.
"Take me back," he said. "I'm tired."
She studied him for a moment in the polished steel surface of a panel beside the door. He could see her reflection there, faintly, and she looked thoughtful rather than annoyed. Then she shrugged, took the handles of the chair, and wheeled him around.
They retraced their path down the corridor in silence. Daniel followed, the sound of his footsteps at their backs.
The elevator opened on the first wave of her hand, and they rode up the eight seconds, or perhaps it was eight seconds in the other direction, and then they were back in his corridor, and the door to the clinic.
Gertrude wheeled him in and transferred him back to the bed. Then she arranged his pillows and his blanket.
He let her do all that without speaking.
She was about to leave when he stopped her. "Can you check when Areana is coming?"
The nurse turned and looked at him with an expression that was not exactly pity but close enough.
"I am not your secretary, Navuh. Areana will come when she wishes to come, and she informs me of her schedule when she wishes. She did not inform me today."
He looked at her for a moment, and then he nodded and turned his face toward the television mounted across from his bed.
The door clicked shut behind Gertrude, and the mechanical sound of the locks engaging followed.
He lay there and listened to the silence.
The pool was ugly. The ladies were dating. Azul, the therapist, wasn't coming. He would not be on his feet in a few weeks. Areana came when she pleased, and it seemed like she pleased less often than she used to.
He closed his eyes.
She would come today because she always came eventually, and he would wait, because waiting was all he could do now.