“I’ve asked the captain to take a detour from our route,” she said. “There’s something I want you to see.”

  “Will you tell me what it is,” I said, “or should I be afraid?”

  I often forgot the nearly eight years that lay between us, but when she smiled a true smile, I remembered: It made me think of myself, long before the civil war, when Quinha and I had given each other half the world and Madinabia had been a wild dusting of untouched moons in my radar screens. “Don’t be afraid,” she said. “Listen: The storm is fading. It’s going to be a beautiful day.”

  Behind the storm were the moons, three spindly crescents faded in the light of day. We passed a long stretch of beach, along which lay a pod of sea lions who stared at us without shame, occasionally lifting their heads to grunt urgently at the sun; we passed another ship far in the distance, a Szayeti banner fluttering at its tip, whose people were small enough that they might have been insects but who waved frantically and saluted us through the magnified view of the ship’s telescope; we passed a great hill of sunken crab-litters, legs broken off from their frames, rusting deep in the white sand.

  At last we arrived at an island, so small that the ship could not have fit across it lengthwise. On it sat an enormous tree and very little else, besides a few yellowing patches of grass. It was here that the ship stopped. Gracia and I were let into the little boat, and I rowed her to the island, where she climbed onto the sand and reached out a hand to help me up.

  “This,” she said, “is the largest tree left on Szayet.”

  It must have been about a hundred feet tall. The bark was a bright reddish orange, pinstriped with deeper, darker veins, and you could see where the roots were growing out of the earth, great veiny things wide enough to seat two men each. The branches did not begin until I craned my head up, far up, and then I saw how they clustered and blossomed into a cone. It would have taken twenty or so people to fit around it, holding hands.

  It loomed. Still, it looked strangely naked there in the sunlight. The patch of shadow at its roots, sprawling as it was, seemed small and uncertain beside the sand lying only a few feet from its edge.

  “It’ll fall,” said Gracia, “in a few more decades. It can’t stand on sand. There’s nothing to be done.”

  I looked at her sharply, but to my surprise, she did not seem to be asking for anything. She was not even looking at me.

  “The priests say,” she said, “that there are parts of this world that Alekso spared. There are dry places in every flood. The land that would be Alectelo is one of these, of course. And there were thousands of Szayeti who prayed that they or their children might reach the boats in time, and because of the depth of their faith he heard them, and the waters parted. He was capable of many miracles.”

  I tilted my head back again. There was a quality to the great tree that I could not at first articulate, a peculiarity to the landscape around it. When I looked at the back of Gracia’s dark head, I thought I understood some part of it: Though she had called it the largest tree left on Szayet, it did not seem large at all. It seemed as if it were the size that the world ought to be, and it was we who were unnaturally small, and the island, and the sea, and the sky.

  I was not sure what Gracia wanted to hear. “It’s beautiful,” I said at last.

  “Yes,” she said. She still sounded as if she were far away. “It is, isn’t it.”

  By the time we returned to the ship I could see another dark fingerprint on the horizon, and it was not long after its engines coughed into life again that the rain overtook us, thin and cold. The servants scrambled up to drag the tarps over the ship. In the warm lamplight of our cabin Gracia stretched herself over the bed. I settled beside her and began to comb my fingers through the waves of her long black hair.

  “I remember,” she said, “I remember that I once went with Arcelia to the market square, and we saw a Diajundot couple there, who had a cage full of hoopoes. They had caught them on Cherekku, and they intended to sell them across the Swordbelt Arm. Do you know what the hoopoe means to the Szayeti?”

  “Are they gods?” I guessed.

  She curled on her side, so that I could better run my fingers along the back of her neck. “No,” she said. “Nearly. They were the symbol of the heir to the throne. Szayeti writing is said to be their alphabet. On Sintia they are called kings of all birds, and among the Cherekku, they are thought to be holy messengers. In Alectelo, where all of these people speak and live together—not quite gods. Something approaching gods, maybe. It is said that one can find wisdom by learning the language of the birds.” She hummed when I rubbed a thumb over her ear. “Arcelia wanted to buy one.”

  “But you didn’t,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “No, because—it was winter, and—they were scrawny, and their feathers were sparse. There was one with a great and bright crest. I remember him. I remember how he stared at me. I thought—I was afraid of keeping him in my home, when it was already so cold, and he was already so thin. I was afraid of trying to take care of something, some beautiful thing, and failing. I convinced Arcelia to come and find some other entertainment, and we returned when the sun had set. And he was lying on the floor of the cage.”

  I tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. From this angle I could not see where the wires disappeared into her skull, only where they gleamed at its helix.

  “And you cried, I suppose,” I said.

  “No,” she said.

  My hand paused. “No?”

  “I don’t cry,” she said. “Scream—shout—tantrums, yes, when I was young. But I never shed tears. Not even as a child.”

  “In Ceiao they would say that means you herald ill fortune,” I said.

  “How lucky that you and I aren’t in Ceiao,” she said, and I laughed against her back, and watched how she shivered at the sensation of it, without meaning to.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-THREE

  GRACIA

  We moved from islands into fog, and from fog along the blurred shores of distant islands, and watched them vanish into the fog again. For a whole week it was cold enough that Ceirran and I were unable to stay on the deck. We took our meals in our bedroom and sent the servants away, and lit stained-glass lamps so that the walls of our cabin moved in misty golds and greens. Perhaps it was the absence of sunlight that made Ceirran quieter that week, more subdued. I did not attempt to fill his silence, but spent long hours in bed beside him, reading and watching him from the corner of my eye.

  “Listen to this,” I said on one such evening, after the servants had cleared the plates from dinner and all that was left was the smell of roasted goose and a glass of wine on his bedside table. “Johano Delakruco, who writes four hundred years before Alekso of the last stand of Sintielo against its neighbor Crestona, says— Do you speak Malisintian?”

  “Hm?” he said. He was staring at his tablet, where some dense chart filled with equations lay beneath a scattering of rotating planets. “Oh—a little. On Sintia the lessons were in the modern tongue. I was always told there was only a little poetry where the modern renditions aren’t adequate, after all.” He took hold of a holographic planet, lifted it from its orbit, and pinched it absently into darkness; the equations shivered and reconfigured themselves. “And the prayers, of course.”

  “I will translate,” I said. “He writes of the death of his father, who might have fled the burning city but who turned back to save their household gods, and he says:

  Silent the idol, and silent the gravestone, but swiftly he flew

  through fire, through fortress; and never found I

  his mantle or knucklebone. Nine days, now.

  Silent or dead? Doubt creeps; did some traitor,

  treading twist-paths—that’s an idiom—tasting liars’ honey—that’s just bad poetry—trap him;

  or will Fate speak fortune? He will find me; he is fallen.

  Silent birds, silent companions. Six years gone. So.

  I listen for him; I learn absent footsteps, new language.

  I hesitate. Where now are the high towers? Where is the fire from the heavens?

  … And from there the manuscript is burnt.”

  “Hm,” he said again, without looking up, and I set my tablet down and hooked my chin over his shoulder.

  “Tell me what’s worrying you,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said, “not worrying, only—frustrating. It is an imperial problem. I’m afraid you may find it tedious, after poetry.”

  “Tell me anyway,” I said.

  He flicked at the chart on his tablet, where the planets whirled round and round like a child’s toy. “It’s only policy matters,” he said. “My empire grows, and the calendar’s difficulty grows in tandem. Let me—ah, here: Madinabia K pays annual tax once every two and a half years. Not such a dilemma on its own, but the governor there becomes impoverished while the people grow rich, and she loses both resources and authority. Or here: On Belkayet they celebrate the New Year twice annually already, and within the decade will likely celebrate it thrice. Tllacatl has an orbit nearly the same length as Ceiao’s, but rotates so slowly that Ceians hoping to do business on market day must wait nearly a month. Meanwhile, the Cherekku have their own system of calculating market days, adopted from Kutayet and based on the orbit length of the Kutayeti moon, though of course they claim Kutayet adopted it from them. They refuse to abandon it on religious principle, and no matter which planet they happen to be living on—you understand the gist.” He sighed. “Commander of the greatest empire in the galaxy,” he said, “and leader of the greatest city, and defeated by something as simple as time. It is an impossible calculation.”

  I set the tablet with the poetry on my bedside table. “Difficult,” I said, “but not at all impossible. Haven’t you ever been in a Szayeti ship?”

  He looked up, abruptly interested. “What do Szayeti ships have to do with the calendar?” he said.

  “I’m surprised you don’t know that Alekso Undying was addressing this very problem at the time of his death,” I said. “Caviro continued his work as well as he could with the Pearl’s aid. Our map rooms have standardized time across most of the Swordbelt Arm, even up to the Great Maw—granted, a territory much smaller and less complex than the Ceian Empire, but the principles of Sintian mathematics apply and may be expanded. I studied them myself as a child. Quicksilver pearl has a capacity for thought that even the Library has not yet found the limits of.”

  Ceirran’s mouth curled. “When you said Alekso Undying,” he said, “I was afraid at first that you would tell me he was making a tool that would pull all planets into the same orbit and rotation.”

  I laughed. “If that was what I had said, what would you have answered?”

  “I would have said, don’t tempt me,” he said, smiling; and then the smile vanished, and he worked his lip between his teeth. “I wonder sometimes,” he said eventually, “why your people use quicksilver pearl to decorate.”

  “It seems a great waste of resources,” I said. “Is that right?” He tilted his head, apology or agreement, and I leaned back against the headboard and looked through our porthole. The ocean was an uneven field of grass today, olive green but for the tessellating white of the waves. Nothing was visible beneath.

  “I said that quicksilver pearl has a capacity for thought that the Library has not found the limits of,” I said. “If I’m honest—I don’t think the limits of quicksilver pearl is what the Library is searching for. Or rather I think that, before they find that limit, they will find the limit of the human imagination. What did Alekso manage to do, in the short time he was able to touch the stuff and take it apart?”

  “He broke a moon in three,” said Ceirran at once. “He destroyed a whole world.”

  “And what did the Ostrayeti conquerors do before him?” I said. “Travel a twenty-millionth of a light-year and snatch power from those who could not fight back? And what have Alekso’s heirs done, now that he has no hands to build with any longer—calculated the days of the week?”

  “Is that nothing?” said Ceirran.

  “I don’t mean that it’s nothing,” I said. “I mean that you mistake the pearl’s purpose. You speak as if it gave our god extraordinary powers—it did not. It allowed him to demonstrate that he was an extraordinary man. Why do we waste it on decoration? As well ask why Ceiao wastes human beings on factory labor or cannon fodder, when they might be sailing to new galaxies, or discovering cures for death—or writing poetry.”

  “That’s a queen’s answer,” said Ceirran, smiling. “The Sintians have asked that question, some of them. They might tell you that any man could conquer the Swordbelt Arm, given the opportunity, and it is only the deliberate suppression of his opportunities that denies him such a conquest.”

  “Perhaps any could,” I said. “But only one has. If there has been anyone since with his grandeur or clarity of vision, I am still waiting for him.”

  He looked at me for a while, then, and after a minute reached out for me, and his hand hesitated just before my face.

  “May I see it?” he said, almost gently.

  I began to tilt my head down and then understood what he meant, and stopped.

  “What do you want with it?” I said.

  He pressed his lips together. “I see the way the people look at it, on the islands,” he said carefully. “I just want to—touch it. To see what it feels like. You don’t have to.”

  Perhaps it was that last that changed my mind. In any case, I raised my hand to my ear. For a very brief moment, I thought I saw a face close to mine, its mouth open and eyes wild—and then it was gone.

  “You’re bleeding,” said Ceirran, and reached up for me.

  “It doesn’t hurt,” I said, but I let him wipe at my temple with his thumb. My right ear felt cool, as if there was a wind in it. I could feel the faint impression of dust on my cheek.

  “Here,” I said, and put the Pearl in Ceirran’s open hand.

  He rolled it gently along the furrow of his palm. Against his calluses it looked like ice. I almost feared it would dissolve.

  “It’s so small,” he said.

  “He wanted it to be small,” I said. “He wanted it to be smaller. If he had had his way, it would have been small enough to pass into your lungs, it would have been seeded in the soil at every spring. There would have been a Pearl of the Dead in every fruit at harvest, in every summer rainstorm. If he had had his way, they would have passed into the body of every subject he conquered. An empire of Oracles, in every arm of the galaxy.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Ceirran. “Why should immortality need duplication? He had given himself a body that would never die. Why would he want thousands of them?”

  I smiled a little. “Now that is a Ceian’s question,” I said.

  “Is it?” he said. “What does a Ceian sound like?”

  “Oh,” I said, “trying to list out the rules. Trying to see how you could have done it more cleverly, were you in his place. You think of divinity as a list of set qualities, added together: infinite knowledge, infinite destruction, life everlasting. You might read his diaries. He was never trying to build immortality in the first place.” Ceirran raised an eyebrow, and I amended, “He was—but not for its own sake. Before he came here, before he ever thought of drowning the world, he was conqueror, king. A god later, an emperor first. You put too much importance on how he reached apotheosis. You forget that what he wanted, above all, was worshippers.”

  In his hand, the little seed slowed and rattled into the crease between his palm and thumb. Ceirran said casually, “You speak of him in the past tense.”

  “Do I?” I said. “My mistake,” and closed my hand over his. Between our fingers, the voice of Alekso Undying was a hard kernel, cool despite the warmth of our skin.

  I bent to kiss Ceirran, and he made a pleased low noise and reached up for me, fingers strong around the back of my neck. When I lifted the Pearl from his hand, there was only a moment of resistance before he let it go.

  I woke the next morning to a colorless, close-pressed mist at the windows, and the distant rumble of the ship’s engines. Ceirran was gone to the deck, but the impression of his body beside me was still warm. I stretched out into the heat.

  “Lord,” I said.

  Alekso was never shy, but he never seemed to like to come too close to me. Today he was sitting at the foot of the bed, cross-legged, chin propped in his hand. In the dim lamplight his face was round and soft, and his hair was falling into his eyes.

  “We thought we would have more time,” he said.

  I sat up in bed. “We?” I said. “You mean you and Caviro?”

  “He built Alectelo,” he said. “He gave it my name. I thought I would find a way to use pearl as small as a molecule. I thought I would find a way for them to replicate themselves. I thought we would have more time.”

  He smiled then, a dreamy, distant smile. “It would have been a different galaxy,” he said. “You shouldn’t call it an empire of Oracles. There would have been so many that they wouldn’t have been Oracles at all—there would have been no need to transmit my law to my people through this clumsy medium of kings, of human beings. There would have just been me; my voice, my name, in every atom, in every breath. Infants would have had me in their heads from the moment they cried. I would have been in the bones of the dead when they were laid in the ground. You wouldn’t have needed to touch that thing in your ear in order to speak to me—there would have been no moment I was not present, there would have been no silence, there would have been nowhere else to go. Then—then I might have been a god… then I might truly have been able to rest in that tomb you put on the Island of the Dead. My body, my city. The endless Pearl of my soul.”

  “But instead you had prophets,” I said.

  “I had Caviro,” said Alekso. “He built Alectelo, and he carried me. It was enough. It had to be enough.”

  He looked away. “But when he died,” he said briskly, “yes. I had you.”

  “And your empire split into pieces among your generals, and that was all,” I said. “You accepted defeat.”

 

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