The Snow Queen

54

Arienrhod took her place on the thick pile of white furs that draped the ship-form ceremonial cart in the palace courtyard. She entered her role in the ritual calmly, with perfect control, with the royal presence of nearly one hundred and fifty years. The cheers and the jeers of the gathered Summers closed around her, as inescapable as death; and the wailing grief of the waiting Winters. Their combined dirge was like the moaning hunger of the Pit, where the sea lay waiting… as the Sea lay waiting today. Her hunger would be satisfied, at last.

Starbuck was already seated among the silver-tipped furs, sitting like a figure chipped from obsidian in his mask and black court garb. She was surprised to find him here before her. You were always so impatient, my love. But I didn’t think you’d be impatient for this. She felt a cold weight drop inside of her. Because I’m not. I’m not. “Good morning, Starbuck. I hope you slept well.”

He turned his face away as she tried to look him in the eye, and said nothing.

“So you think you’ll never forgive me? Forever is a long time, Sparks. And forever is how long we’ll be together.” She put an arm lovingly around his shoulders and felt him shudder, or quiver. His shoulders through the heaviness of cloth and leather felt broader than she remembered. Only a boy, with a man’s strength… and weakness.

At least we’ll spend it forever young, trying again to believe as she had once believed, that she would sooner die than live in a world where she would have to be poor, and sick, and old…

The escort of Winter nobles gathered around the cart, all clad in formless white, amorphous in white-on-white masks that mimed their family totem creatures. Half a dozen of them picked up the traces to draw the cart forward, starling it down the hill; the rest, all bearing some precious off worlder thing, formed a human curtain around it to shield her at least partly from the view, the insults, the occasional pieces of garbage flung by the Summers in the crowd along the way. Then: positions, this menial labor, were both an honor and a kind of penance.

She arranged the fall of her own ancient feather cloak, melting into the whiteness of the furs: the cloak she wore on all ceremonial occasions, the one she had worn at every challenge to Starbuck through a century and a half. Beneath it she wore only a simple white gown. White, the color of Winter, and of mourning. Her hair fell free down her back like a veil, netted with diamonds and sapphires. She wore no mask — she was the only one who wore no mask — so that all the world could be certain that she was really the Snow Queen.

I am the Snow Queen. She watched the richly decorated townhouses of the nobility passing for the last time; imagining how they would look bare of their off world elegance, remembering the loyal service she had been given by their many occupants who had been members of her court down through the years. And even today. She glanced from side to side at her retinue, listening to the defiantly off world song they sang to honor her and to drown out the crowd. A handful of the masked honor guard were nearly as old as she — although none were quite as well preserved. They had proven their loyalty and their usefulness again and again, and they had always been rewarded, while the less useful and less pliant grew old and were banished to the countryside. They grieved sincerely today, she knew, like all the weeping, wailing Winters — and like all the Winters, grieved mainly for themselves. But that was only human. There was no one among them that she really regretted leaving behind: many whom she had enjoyed and even respected, but none for whom she had ever felt any real personal warmth that hadn’t paled again like infatuation over the long reaches of time. There was only one whom she really loved — and she was not leaving him behind. She put a hand on Starbuck’s cape-covered knee; he brushed it away before it could settle. But after a moment, as though in apology, his own hand slipped across her back beneath her cloak, his arm circled her waist. She smiled, until a fish head thumped into the furs behind her.

They had come to the edge of the Maze already. Is this city really so small? She glanced down the flotsam-full alleys, their throats choked with crowd; met the abandoned eyes of the empty storefronts directly. Seeing it all for the last time… which shared something with the first time, every image as perfect and fresh as a walk through new-fallen snow. The first and the last were the same, and had nothing in common with all of the countless passages in between.

And they shared things in common in a literal sense: the Festival crowds, the abandoned and half-empty buildings. But the first time she had seen Carbuncle it had been at the end of Summer’s reign, when she had come here from her family’s plantation to the first Festival in a hundred years, to see the return of the off worlders and to compete in the choosing of the new Queen. Although she had come from a noble Winter family, growing up at the end of Summer had meant growing up barely more civilized than the Summers themselves were. All of the off world artifacts that were so common place to her now had seemed as strange and marvelous to that naive country girl as they must seem to any Summer.

But she had learned quickly enough the usefulness of the gifts the off worlders brought to this world — the strange magic of technology, strange customs, strange vices. And she had learned, too, what their patronizing lords wanted from her world in return, and from her as its inexperienced representative — begun to learn, painfully, how to take without giving, how to give without surrendering, how to squeeze blood from a stone. She had taken her first Starbuck, a man whose alien features she couldn’t remember, whose real name she had long since forgotten. Dozens more had followed, until she had found the one…

And meanwhile she had watched Carbuncle transformed into a thriving star port, she had kept learning, year upon year, more about the usefulness of technology, more about the frailty of human nature, more about the universe in general, and herself in particular. Ten lifetimes would barely begin to teach her all that she could have learned, and she had barely been given two. But she had realized at last that this world was an extension of herself, and immortal in a way that no human body could ever be. She had made plans to leave it a legacy when her own reign had to end — to set it free to go on learning and growing when she could not.

But she had failed. Failed to hold onto the key to Tiamat’s future; failed to carry out her altered plan of guiding Tiamat’s future herself; failed again to keep her hold on Moon, when Moon would have been her last hope… And somehow, in the meantime, she had lost her perspective about her own future. She had lived the way the Summers lived, once, but it had been far too long ago now. She could not even imagine going back, doing without, living like a barbarian again. And even if the Summers weren’t allowed to destroy every bit of technology they found remaining in Carbuncle, the city and all of Tiamat would still cease to be even a blurred hologram of the thriving interplanetary stopover that it had been.

She had believed once — secure in her faith that Moon, her clone, would reincarnate her — that she would go willingly to sacrifice. She would play out the traditional role to the end; and death would be one final new experience for a body that had experienced every other imaginable sensation. She would not regret leaving her life behind, because life as she knew it would have ceased to exist.

But after she had lost Moon, and found Sparks instead, after she had begun to build new plans whose foundation lay in herself, she had lost sight of all that. She had forgotten that she and her lover would have to grow old and endure hardship to keep Winter and its heritage alive. No, not forgotten — she had ignored it, because the greater goal, and the greater chance for immortality, had so outweighed it.

But now — now she had failed, utterly, completely. She would end here in this dawn forever; become one more in an endless chain of forgotten Queens who lived and died without meaning. And she wasn’t ready to die that way! No, no — not without leaving her legacy to the future! Damn them, damn the bastard off worlders who had ruined her plans for the future to keep their own intact. Damn the miserable stupidity of the Summers, those jeering, stinking imbeciles who would cheerfully carry out their purge of knowledge… She looked from side to side, radiating her useless fury.

“What’s wrong, Arienrhod? Did you finally realize this is the end?”

She froze, her gaze on Starbuck. “Who are you?” Whispered, it was louder in her mind than all the shouting of the crowd. “Who are you? You aren’t Starbuck!” She wrenched herself free from his encircling arm. Sparks — Oh, gods, what have you done — with him?

“I am Starbuck. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten me already, Arienrhod.” He caught her hand in a vise grip. “It’s only been five years.” He turned his black-helmeted head until she could see his eyes, pitiless earth-brown eyes with long, dark lashes…

“Herne!” shaking her head. “It can’t be — gods, you can’t have done this to me! You cripple, you dead man — you can’t be here, I won’t permit it!” Sparks… damn you, where are you! “I’ll tell them you’re the wrong man!”

“They won’t care.” She felt his grin. “They just want an off worlder body to pitch into the sea. They don’t care whose it is. Why should you?”

“Where is he?” frantically. “Where is Sparks? What have you done to him? And why?”

“So you really love him that much.” Herne’s voice rasped. “So much that you want him in your grave with you?” Black laughter. “But not enough to let him live on without you… or with your other self instead: greedy to the end. I traded places with him, Arienrhod, because he doesn’t love you enough to die for you — and I do.” He pressed the hand he held to his forehead. “Arienrhod… you belong with me, we’re two of a kind. Not with that weakling; he was never enough of a man to appreciate you.”

She buried her hands beneath her cloak as he let her go. “If I had a knife, Herne, I’d kill you myself! I’d strangle you with my bare hands. You see what I mean?”

He laughed again. “Who else but me would want to spend forever like this? You tried to kill me once already, you bitch, and I wish you’d finished the job. But you didn’t, and now I’m going to get my wish, and my revenge too. I’ll have you forever now, all to myself; and if you spend forever hating me for it, all the better. But like you said, love, ‘forever is a long time.’”

Arienrhod wrapped herself in her cloak, shutting herself away, shutting her eyes against the sight of him. But the singing of the nobles was not enough to stop her ears against the wailing and taunting of the crowd; it seeped in through her pores and gave her despair a killing weight and substance.

“Don’t you want to know how I did it? Don’t you want to know who put me up to it?” Herne’s mocking voice tangled in the voice of the crowd. She didn’t answer him, knowing that he would tell her anyway. “It was Moon. Your clone, Arienrhod, your other self. She arranged it — she took him away from you after all. She’s your clone, all right… no one else gets her way quite like you do.”

“Moon.” Arienrhod clenched her jaw, keeping her eyes shut. For the first time in more years than she could remember, the fear of losing control in public came back to her. Nothing, nothing short of this could break her — nothing short of losing everything that had any meaning at all. And to know that the last blow had been delivered by herself! No, damn it, that girl was never me — she’s a stranger, a failure! But they had both loved him — Sparks with his summer-green eyes, with his hair and his soul like fire.

And not only had that defective image of her own soul defied her will, and escaped her curse, but she had stolen him back. And replaced him with this — this. She glanced again at Herne, her nails marking her arms. She caught a hint of sea tang in the air; they were in the lower city now. The end of her life’s journey was almost in view. Please, please, don’t let it end like this! Not knowing whom she asked it of — not the hollow gods of the off worlders not the Summers’ Sea… yes, maybe of the Sea, who was about to take the offering of her life, whether she believed in the old religion or not. She had not put her faith in any power beyond her own since she had become Queen. But now that that power had been taken from her, the awareness of her own complete helplessness closed over her, suffocating her like the cold waters of the sea…

The procession reached the final slope at the Street’s foot, and started down the broad ramp to the harbor that lay below the city. The ubiquitous mass of humanity was even more tightly crowded here, a wall of solid flesh, a wall of grotesque beast-faces. The cheering and the wailing rose from below to greet her as the cart rolled forward, echoing and re-echoing through the vast sea-cave. The dank chill air of the outer world flowed around her. Arienrhod shuddered secretly, but pride masked her face.

Ahead, below, she saw stands draped in red clustered at the far end of the pier, tiers filled with off worlder dignitaries and influential elders of Summer families. On the best-placed viewing stands she saw the Prime Minister and the Assembly members — already unmasked, as if it were beneath their dignity to participate in this pagan ritual — gaping without seeming to at her approach. Shimmering deja vu overtook her at the sight of them. She had seen this tableau before, half a dozen times or more, but only once that was like this time: the first time, when she had been the new Queen who stood below on the pier and watched the last of the Summer Queens pass this way — and sent her predecessor triumphantly into the icy water.

All the rest, all the other Festival pageants, had been only dress rehearsals for the next Change, this Change. They had chosen the Queen for a Day by the same ancient ritual rules, to reign over the Mask Night and make this journey at dawn. But only a pair of effigies had been given to the sea at her command, and not human lives.

And only she and the Assembly members had remained unchanged, like the ritual itself, through all of those Festivals, all the long years. But this final time would see the end of her and all her efforts to break free of them, while they went on and the system they symbolized went on forever. Her hands clenched on the soft cloth of her gown. If I could only take them all with me! But it was too late, too late for anything at all.

She saw the Summer Queen at last; standing on the pier in the open space between the red-robed stands, with the bitter-colored water lapping below her. Her mask was a thing of beauty that stirred unwilling admiration in Arienrhod’s heart. But it was made by a Winter. And who knew what homely, undeserving islander’s face was hidden beneath it; what sturdy peasant body and dull-witted mind were wrapped in the glistening fish-net cocoon of silky green mesh. The prospect of that face, that mind, taking the place of her own made her stomach twist.

Herne was silent beside her, as silent as she was. She wondered what his own thoughts were as he looked on the waiting elite of his homeworld, and the waiting sea. She could tell nothing about the expression beneath his mask. Damn him. She prayed that he was regretting his suicidal impulse now; that he felt even a fraction of the despair and regret that she knew, standing here in the ruins of her life’s ambition. Let death be oblivion, then! If I have to spend it with this symbol of all my failures, knowing that I did would be worse than all the hells of the god-damning off worlders combined!

The cart had gone forward as far as it could into the open space along the pier’s edge. The escort of her nobles slowed, stopped, let the traces settle. They circled slowly three times around her, casting their off world offerings into the back of the cart, as they sang their final song of farewell to Winter. They bowed to her at last, and she could hear their individual weeping and lamentation above the crowd’s cries as they began to file away from the cart. Some touched the hem of her cloak to their lips as they passed her for the last time. Some even dared to touch her hand — some of the oldest, the faithful followers of a century and a half — and their grief touched her suddenly, unexpectedly, deeply.

Their place was taken by a circle of Summers, also masked, also singing, a paean to the coming golden days. She closed her mind and did not listen to it. They, too, circled her three tunes around, throwing their own offerings into the cart — clattering primitive necklaces of shell and stone, colored fishing floats, sprigs of wilted greenery.

When they had finished their own song, a greater silence fell over the waiting crowd; until she could hear clearly the creakings and groans of shifting moorings, made aware of the greater alien crowd of ships that covered the water surface; a near-solid skin of wood and cloth and clanging metal. Carbuncle loomed above them like a gathering storm, but here at this edge of the city’s under structure she could see beyond its shadow, out across the gray-green open sea. Endless… eternal… is it any wonder that we worship you? Remembering that once, in a faraway time, even she had believed in the Sea.

The mask of the Summer Queen came between her and her view of the sea, as the woman came up between the cart’s traces to stand before her. “Your Majesty.” The Summer Queen bowed to her, and Arienrhod remembered that she was still the Queen, until death. “You have come.” The voice was strangely uncertain, and strangely familiar.

She nodded, regal and aloof, in control again of the one thing that was still within her power. “Yes,” recalling the ritual response, “I have come to be changed. I am the Sea incarnate; as the tide turns and the world has its seasons, so must I follow to lead. Winter has had its season… the snow dissolves on the face of the Sea, and from it soft rains are reborn.” Her voice rang eerily through the underworld. The ritual was being recorded by hidden cameras, broadcast sight and sound over screens set up throughout the city.

“Summer follows Winter as night follows day. The sea joins the land. Together the halves become whole; who can separate them? Who can deny them their place, or their time, when their time has come? They are born of a power greater than any here. Their truth is universal!” The Summer Queen lifted her arms to the crowd.

Arienrhod started slightly. She had never said that last line, never heard it before. The crowds murmured; a prickling unease crept in her.

“Who comes with you to be changed?”

“My beloved,” keeping her voice even, “whose body is like the earth, coupled with the Sea. Together beneath the sky, we can never be separated.” The cold wind burned her eyes. Herne said nothing, did nothing, waiting with appropriate stoicism.

“Then so be it.” The woman’s voice actually broke. She held out her hands, and two of the attendant Summers placed a small bowl of dark liquid in each. The Summer Queen offered a bowl to Herne; he took it willingly. She offered the other to Arienrhod. “Will you drink to the Lady’s mercy?”

Arienrhod felt her mouth stiffen against the reply; said, finally, “Yes.” The bowl held a strong drug which would dull her fear and awareness of what was coming. Beside her Herne lifted his black mask and raised the bowl to his lips, grimaced. Arienrhod raised her own. She had always intended to refuse it; rejecting the idea of dimming her awareness of the moment when her triumph would have been clear. But now she wanted oblivion. “To the Lady.” She sniffed the pungent fragrance of the herbs, felt their numbing gall burn inside her mouth. She swallowed the liquid, deadening her throat; the second swallow, and the third were as tasteless as water.

As she finished it and returned the bowl she saw Summers approaching, carrying the ropes that would bind them to the cart, and to each other, inescapably. Terror congealed in her chest, panic darkened her sight. Deaden me, for gods’ sakes! trying to feel the numbness spread. Herne almost resisted as the Summers laid hands on him; she saw his muscles twist and harden, and his weakness gave her strength. She sat perfectly still and pliant as the Summers bound her hands, her feet, bound her body tightly against Herne’s and fastened the ropes to the cart itself. Even though the cart had the form of a blunt-nosed boat, she knew that its bed gaped with holes beneath the heaps of furs and offerings, and that it would sink almost immediately. She couldn’t keep her hands from straining at their bonds, or her body from trying to pull away from Herne’s. His masked face turned toward her, but she would not look at him.

The Summer Queen was back in place before them, but turning to face the water as she recited the final Invocation to the Sea. As she finished, the silence that had fallen over the crowd continued, the silence of anticipation now. Now, at any moment, she would give the sign. Arienrhod felt a dreamlike lethargy creep along her limbs, along her spine; but her mind was still far too clear. Is it meant to work that way? At least now her body was becoming too leaden to betray her, granting her dignity in death whether she wanted it or not.

But instead of moving aside, the Summer Queen turned back to face her again. “Your Majesty.” The urgency of the muffled voice caught at her. “Would you — look on the face of Summer’s Queen before you die?”

Arienrhod stared uncomprehendingly, felt Herne stare, too. Tradition said that the new Queen did not unmask, casting off her sins, until the old one had gone into the sea; giving the sign for the crowd to follow.

But this woman had stumbled off the ritual path once already. Is she so stupid? Or was it something else? “I would see your face, yes,” forcing the words out between numb lips.

The Summer Queen moved closer to the cart, where the crowd could not see her clearly. Slowly she put her hands to the mask, and lifted it off her head.

A cascade of silvery hair tumbled out and down. Arienrhod gaped at the face that the mask revealed. The ring of Summers surrounding the cart gaped, too. She heard their voices murmur as the wonder spread, as they all saw what she saw… face to face with her own face.

“Moon—” barely even a whisper to betray her. Her body sat perfectly still, as though it saw nothing unusual, nothing remarkable, incredible, impossible. Not in vain. It was not in vain!

“Gods,” Herne mumbled thickly. “How? How’d you do it, Arienrhod?”

She only smiled.

Moon shook out her hair, meeting the smile with forgiveness, and defiance, and compassion. “Change has come… because of you, in spite of you, Your Majesty.” She lowered the mask over her head again.

The Summers around the cart drew away, looking from face to face, their own expressions caught between amazement and fear. “The Queen! They’re both the Queen—” an augury, an omen. The sibyl tattoo was clearly visible on Moon’s throat; they pointed at it and murmured again.

Herne chuckled with difficulty. “The secret’s out… it’s out at last. She’s been off world, she knows what she is.”

“What? What, Herne?” trying to turn her head.

“Sibyls are everywhere! You never knew, did you; you never even suspected. And those stuffed dummies—” glancing toward the off worlders in the stands, “they don’t suspect a thing.” His mangled laughter left him gasping.

Sibyls are everywhere?… Can they be real? No, it isn’t fair, there’s so much left to learn! Closing her eyes, unable to focus her inner sight. But it wasn’t in vain.

The chorus of wailing and execration began to press again, inexorable like the process of change, impatient for the sacrifice. All of the crowd’s overflowing grief, all of its blame, all of its hostility and resentment and fear poured into this fragile boat, onto the helpless beings of herself and Herne, to be taken down with them at the ritual’s culmination. She no longer strained against the contact between her body and Herne’s, grateful at last for someone to share the trial, and this last moment, with her… the passing through into another plane. She had seen too many visions of heaven, too many hells, to choose among them. I hope we make our own.

She turned her gaze outward a last time, to see Moon standing aside from the cart’s path: Her body was taut with strain, as though she were about to speak an unforgivable curse, one that she could never take back. Why should it hurt her? I would rejoice — Not able to remember why she would rejoice, or even whether it was true. She rallied her mind one last time, before Moon could speak the fateful words, to speak her own last words. “My people—” half obliterated by their cries. “Winter is gone! Obey the new Queen… as you would your own. For she is your own now.” She dropped her head, catching only Moon’s eyes. “Where… is he?”

Moon moved her head slightly, a twinge of jealousy in it, but granting her clone-mother’s last request. Arienrhod followed her glance to find Sparks standing among the honored Summers, by the empty place that was the Summer Queen’s own in the stands. But he stood with his eyes closed against the parting moment; or against the chance that she might look up and see him one last time… He cares… he does care. She looked back again at Moon. They both do. In that moment infinitely surprised, eternally confounded, by life’s imperviousness to reason or justice.

Herne’s smoldering stare lay waiting for her when she turned her head back again — knowing whom her thoughts belonged to in this final moment.

“Forever… Herne.”

He shook his head once. “We’re forever. This is. Death is. Life’s what doesn’t last.”

“We live while someone remembers us. And they’ll never forget me now—” Because her reincarnation already stood in her place. She had no will left to let her look back at Moon once more, or at Sparks. Never look back.

Moon raised her hands to the Sea, crying like a gull into the storm of the crowd’s anticipation. “Lady Sea, Mother of us all, accept our gifts and return them ninefold, accept our sins and bring us renewal, accept the soul of Winter and let it be — reborn.” She faltered imperceptibly. “Let spring come to Summer!”

Arienrhod felt the cart lurch as the Summers pushed it forward, watched the oily water surface draw near. The tide was at full, and it lay below the pier’s edge like a distorted mirror. Let it happen. It was not in vain. The howls and moans of the crowd were a hymn to the future, praising her memory. The cart began to tilt under her; she leaned forward, looking for her reflection as it slipped…