Celestial Matters Read online

  Aeson and I settled on adjacent couches to talk.

  “I need to ask you about Captain Yellow Hare.”

  He sipped thin wine from a dish and shrugged his broad shoulders. “What do you want to know?”

  “Why is a Spartan officer serving as a bodyguard?” I said, finally voicing the question that had been troubling me for weeks. I had not been willing to ask this in Yellow Hare’s presence in case the assignment involved some disgrace on her part. I had not yet learned that nothing could disgrace that perfect Spartan.

  Aeson studied my face for a few minutes. He had that look of serious concentration that all Spartans have when deliberating. I once asked him, facetiously, if there was a course in frowning at the war college. He in turn inquired if there was one in sarcasm at the Akademe.

  “I met Yellow Hare at the Olympics five years ago,” he said. “She took the laurel in pankration.”

  I nearly spilled my wine in shock. I did not pay much attention to the Olympics. My father’s constant prodding at me had taken away any interest I might have had in athletics. But I knew about pankration; it was unarmed fighting with no rules. The participants could use any style of combat, any tricks, any deceptions they liked. Deaths were not uncommon in those contests. I remembered vaguely hearing that for the first time in several centuries a woman had won that competition. Having seen her fight, I was not surprised that Yellow Hare was that victor, but that did not answer my question.

  “But why was she assigned as my bodyguard?”

  “The order to protect you said I could choose anyone. I chose the best.”

  “My father would never have accepted such a lowly assignment.

  Aeson stared for a few moments into the flickering torchlight. “Aias, your father’s name is entered in the Spartan rolls of honor. His advice is heeded by several members of the general staff. He was a great warrior and an able governor.…”

  “But?” I said, hearing the lingering absence of completion in his words.

  “But he only had half of the Spartan spirit. Captain Yellow Hare has all of it.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “But I can’t explain it better than that.”

  Kleon brought me a fresh bowl of wine, which I drank in silence, waiting for some god to explain Aeson’s words to me. But no divinity came to fill my needs.

  “Thank you for trying,” I said to Aeson.

  My co-commander smiled at me. “Any further questions?”

  “Yes. Why did the Archons allow you such discretion in picking a bodyguard?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I have had a few hints from the general staff that the Archons now consider the Prometheus Projects vital to the security of the League.”

  “That’s crazy. Sunthief and Manmaker could be of great benefit to the war effort, if they work, but that’s a very large if, and as for Forethought, that project’s a complete waste of time.”

  He nodded and sipped a little more wine. “That’s what I’ve heard, Aias. I did not say I believed it.”

  I chuckled at the dryness of his Spartan humor and handed him a plate of figs. “Has Anaxamander had any success tracking down the source of that commando?”

  Aeson’s face darkened and he waved away the fruits. “No, he has not. I am beginning to wonder if we need a new Security Chief.”

  “Is there any reason not to replace him?” I said.

  “Yes,” Aeson replied, studying his reflection in the bowl of wine. “Anaxamander knows this ship and its crew. A new Security Chief would need months to learn what he knows. I have given Yellow Hare authority over him, and I have recently been watching his actions carefully. That should suffice.”

  “Did you know that he was interfering in the scientific side of this command?”

  “That I did not,” Aeson said.

  I told Aeson about Phaedra’s encounter with Anaxamander.

  “I will ask him about it,” he said, and I could feel the full weight of Spartan disapproval poised to fall on the Security Chief’s shoulders.

  “Thank you,” I said, and I leaned back on my couch to drink down the bounty of Dionysos.

  Two hours later I said good night to all and walked carefully up the dark tunnel. I had drunk much wine, and much of that fermented honey the northerners brew.

  Captain Yellow Hare was waiting for me outside. I stumbled and she gently took my arm to steady me. Despite her strength her grip was no heavier than a feather’s touch. I leaned against her for support, and nearly recoiled; her skin was like ice. She had stood out in the cold, whipping air while I was down drinking in the warm cave. I felt angry at myself for treating her as an inconvenience. As I looked up to offer an apology, I heard the telltale whoosh of evac cannons firing.

  “Down!” she said, pushing me flat against the moon rock. Yellow Hare stood over me, gripping her evac thrower in her right hand and her sword in her left.

  Over to port something huge and bat-shaped blotted out the stars: a high-altitude battle kite flying straight toward us. The port-side cannonade shot a dozen huge tetras straight through the body of the bat. It hovered for an instant, then crashed.

  Two more kites dove in low, getting past the gunners before they could aim again. These were one-man kites, supposedly too small to survive that high in the air, and they should not have been that fast. Skimming low across our glistening surface, they flew toward the mystery cave; then they must have spotted me because they turned swiftly and darted toward where I was lying.

  Yellow Hare slammed the back of her sword hand into the butt of her thrower, forcing a spray of tetras out through the rarified air of the tube. The silk wing of one kite shredded. The pilot leaped off to avoid the crash and was met by a second volley from Yellow Hare’s thrower. His broken body fell, staining the silver Tear with blood.

  Aeson’s soldiers poured out of the starboard barracks, evac throwers already aimed and shooting at the final kite, but they were not fast enough. The silken bat flew right over me; its pilot jumped out, letting his aircraft splinter against the hill. He fell toward Yellow Hare. She thrust her sword up to meet him. He speared himself on it, but just before his spirit left his body he pointed something metal at me. There was a momentary gleam of silver and gold in my eyes. Then the object fell from the pilot’s hand as he joined his ancestors.

  His blood dripped on me from Yellow Hare’s blade. A wave of nausea rose from my stomach. But it wasn’t the blood making me sick, or the wine. My head was hot from sudden fever. My legs were like brittle stone; I could neither feel them nor move them. Mead and bile rose in my throat, and I threw up on my gleaming ship.

  I tried to say something to Yellow Hare but no words came out. She reached down for me; I tried to take her hand but night and xaos claimed me first.

  ∈

  The sun beat down on me. In his hands he held a fiery spear as long as the distance between the earth and his sphere; he stabbed me through the chest every time my heart tried to beat.

  “Thief!” ’Elios shouted; his flaming breath seared my face. “Steal my cattle, will you?”

  I tried to explain to him that it was Odysseus who had stolen the kine of the sun, and that I was merely Aias. But his spear thrusts kept cutting me off, tearing the breath from my lungs so I could not get the words out. Worse, each time he withdrew the fire-gold barb, my heart and lungs would draw life from the rest of my body to heal themselves. Like Prometheus chained to the mountain, I had pain without death.

  ’Erakles wandered up to the crystal peak where I was shackled; the hero carried a large bronze club and was dressed in the skin of the Nemean lion. He waved to ’Elios, who nodded a friendly greeting in return but continued to methodically stab me. ’Erakles looked me up and down, said, “This one’s not worth rescuing,” and wandered away.

  A coyote strolled around from the far side of the mountain. He sauntered over to me and watched ’Elios spear me a few more times. The animal scratched itself under its
chin; then, coming to a decision, it skinned itself, unrolling its mangy hide like a roman toga. The coyote’s muscles and veins were exposed, showing the life pulsing in his arteries. He leaned over me and whispered in my ear, “Put on my skin if you want to escape.”

  The Atlantean tribes that knew of him said never to trust Coyote but seeing no other option I slipped out of my fetters and put on the skin. Freed from my chains of silver, I ran away from the Sun on my four paws. I fled across crystal, across air, across water, and finally across stone until I came to the Akademe.

  Aristotle was discoursing in the lecture grove. Sokrates looked on with amused condescension. Plato had turned his back on his teacher and his student and was yelling to the audience of scholars that they should to listen to him. But wanting science, not philosophy, the teachers and students of his Akademe paid their founder no mind.

  I ran up to Aristotle, yipping for attention. He looked down on me with the condescension only divine reason can give and said, “Men are distinct from animals.”

  From his own heart, he drew out an obsidian knife that glinted like the statue of Alexander and flayed the coyote skin from my body. My blood poured onto the altar, and the crowd of philosopher-scientists ran forward to drink it.

  Human once more, I tried to stand on my two feet, but the grassy ground of the Akademe dissolved into a field of cushions. My feet could find no purchase on the shifting pillows, so I fell over. My head struck something hard, the stone leg of a statue. I looked up and found myself staring into the huge, languid eyes of Morpheus of the Forms. The god of dreams towered over me, standing between the gates of horn and ivory, his pale lips gently curled into a knowing smile.

  “Will you have a true dream or a false dream?” he asked, stroking each pillar in turn. No words came out of my mouth, but the god nodded as if I had answered him.

  I was on the fields of Troy, staring up at her spiraling towers. Their marble pinnacles cut through the thunderclouds massed above the battlefield. A thousand sky docks piercing the air, a thousand arrows aimed toward Olympos, poised to rain up death on the deathless gods.

  Heroes were killing and dying all around me. ’Ektor slew Patrokles thinking he was Akhilleus, Akhilleus slew ’Ektor and dragged his body around the city walls, Paris shot Akhilleus with one of the arrows of Apollo. I ran through the ’Ellene battle lines, ducking arrows and spears, dodging between the mountainous wheels of the chariots, keeping low to the ground in order not to attract the notice of the heaven-gazing heroes around me.

  I nearly made it to the line of burning ships hauled up on the beach, but I was stopped by an ox-hide shield seven feet tall.

  A tall man, broad of shoulder and angry of visage, looked over the top of the shield, while a small wiry man armed with a bow looked around the side. Tall exchanged glances with small, then both looked down at me.

  “Well, Aias the Lesser,” said the large one to the small. “This is our namesake.”

  The small man’s mouth twisted into a smile. “I see him, Aias the Greater. What should we give him with our inheritance of our name. My drowning? Your madness?”

  “No, Aias the Lesser,” said the giant. “Not the mercy of a hero’s death. Give him the pain of a hero’s life.”

  Aias the Lesser nodded his agreement. He drew back his bow, pulled a goose-fletched arrow back to his cheek, and released, piercing my arm with his shot. I yelped like a coyote and sat up in sudden startlement at the tickling pain. Then I fell back shivering onto the couch and gathered the blankets around myself.

  Couch? Blankets? I blinked my eyes to clear away the crust. The green blur around me resolved into the green-painted cave that served as private ward in the ship’s hospital caverns. And the white blob leaning over me became my ship’s chief doctor, Euripos, a sixty-year-old Roman who had once been my father’s battlefield physician. He had just removed a goose-feather quill from the spot on my arm where the arrow of Aias the Lesser had shot me, and was placing it on the mahogany instrument table behind him.

  Captain Yellow Hare loomed over me and peered down into my eyes with a golden gaze of worry and anger.

  Aeson stood directly behind the table, watching me with the stoic face Spartans used when staring directly into the eyes of death. Anaxamander stood at attention just inside the curtained entryway that led up to the rest of the hospital.

  “Talk fast,” Euripos said to Aeson. “I don’t know how long he’ll be coherent.”

  “Aias,” Aeson said, “you’re suffering the effect of some new unknown Taoist weapon. The doctors don’t know how to fix what it did to you.”

  I nodded and smiled, completely undisturbed by the news that I was incurable. In fact, I found the idea funny, so funny I started to giggle.

  “What’s the matter with him?” Yellow Hare asked.

  Euripos picked up a needle and a thin sheet of papyrus. He took a little blood from my finger and spread it on the paper. A purple stain appeared and spread quickly, impregnating the papyrus with a royal color my Phoenician cousins would have given anything to be able to sell. “His body’s producing incredible amounts of Jovial Humour. I told you the balance of his fluids was fluctuating uncontrollably. The injection of Sanguine I gave him won’t keep him stable for long.”

  I nodded sympathetically. The whole room suddenly smelled like a tomb. I began to moan loudly as if I were a paid mourner at my own funeral.

  A jaguar’s growl jumped from Yellow Hare’s mouth. “If you can’t cure him, find someone who can!”

  Aeson shook his head. “No one in the League understands Taoist medicine.”

  My bodyguard turned to face him, Spartan to Spartan. “Commander, you must obtain a Middler doctor from a prison camp.”

  Must? Through the foggy gloom in my heart, I found comfort in that imperative.

  Aeson looked questioningly at Euripos.

  The old Roman nodded his stiff neck slowly. I could see he didn’t like the idea, but knew he had no choice.

  “Commander,” Anaxamander said. “We cannot compromise Sunthief’s security by letting a Middler on board this ship.”

  Aeson turned on his lieutenant. “Without Aias there is no Sunthief.”

  “You’re a real friend, Aeson,” I said, suddenly elated. “That’s so nice of you.” I coughed out a huge gob of phlegm. “I mean it. It’s honestly wonderful of you.” I couldn’t stop talking.

  Euripos put a cold compress on my head and made me lie down again. My eyes shut and I started to drift off, but an argument broke out.

  “As chief of security, I can’t allow this,” Anaxamander said.

  “As Military Commander I’m overruling you!” Metal-soled feet tramped noisily off.

  I collapsed into a pool of pain.

  A man stabbed a many-barbed spear straight toward my eyes. I was paralyzed, not from pain or fear, but from not knowing whether to jump left or right, front or back. The spear stopped an inch away from my face.

  “This one thinks too much,” the old Spartan trainer said. He waved me over to his left, where all the other failed applicants to the war college were assembled. We looked over sullenly at those on his right, who were lining up at attention, waiting to be taken inside the iron walls and transformed into Spartans.

  Thinks too much! After two weeks of torturous tests during which nine out of ten dropped out, I had persevered. All that had remained was the Test of the Spear, and I had failed with the single explanation that I thought too much.

  At seven years of age, I had to return to face my eager father and had to tell him that I would never be a Spartan because I thought too much. He said nothing, just handed me over to my mother and returned to his governmental duties.

  Tears ran down my cheeks. I reached up to wipe them away, but my arms and legs had been tied down. I blinked grit out of my eyes, expecting the blur in front of me to become Euripos, but instead I saw an old, lined face, parchment yellow in color, framing two almond eyes red from lack of sleep.

  I panicked,
struggling against the ropes that tied my limbs. Had I been captured? Had the Middlers taken over my ship? Then I saw that Captain Yellow Hare was standing behind him, holding her unsheathed sword over his head.

  “He should be well now,” the Middler said in ’Ellenic thickly accented with the ’Unan dialect of his native land. He leaned forward, tapped my wrist, and smelled my breath. “I’m amazed I could cure him,” he muttered in his native language. “How do these barbarians survive without real medicine?”

  “Do not move,” he said to me, switching back to my language, not knowing I understood his. “Your Xi flow needs time to stabilize.”

  “What does that mean?” I snapped, feeling that flash of irritation every scholar in the League felt when confronted with the enemy’s nonsensical but frustratingly real science.

  “You must keep still,” he said. “And do not let this man”—he indicated Euripos with the tilt of his head—“use any of his counterfeit medicines on you. Now, permit me to finish your healing.”

  The Middler picked up a bowl full of red paint and a brush and drew a line across my forehead. As soon as he finished the stroke, I was asleep. This time ’Upnos and Morpheus blessed me with dreamlessness.

  When I woke again, Euripos and Yellow Hare were on the opposite side of the room, near the large, glass-fronted medicine cabinet etched with the intertwining snakes of Asklepios. My bodyguard was whispering to my doctor and I could not make out the words, but the tone of concern was clearly audible. I sat up slowly. There was a numbness in my muscles, and my skin was tingling as if I were in a cool rushing stream.

  “Could I see a mirror?” I asked through a painfully rough throat that gave my voice a sound like charcoal scratching on slate. Euripos walked over and handed me one of those little round mirrors doctors use to see if their patients are dead. My face was haggard and worn, and my whole body was covered with a tracery of strange red lines, as if my skin had been dyed. “What is all this?”

  Euripos shrugged. “I wish I knew. When they brought that Middler in, he asked for twenty silver needles, twenty gold needles, a horsehair brush, and a pot of vermilion paint. Aeson had all the slaves on the ship search the storage cave until they found what he needed.