The Summer Queen

TIAMAT: Goodventure Holding

The small trimaran nosed in toward moorage at the docks, its engines tactfully silent. Moon Dawntreader stepped down onto the mortared stone surface of the landing wearing the heavy woolens and kleeskins of a Summer sailor, with her hair in braids. She knotted the forward mooring rope to an iron post in the chill shadows below the cliff-face; turned, with her cold-stiffened hands resting on her hips, to gaze at what lay waiting for her.

There was no one else on the pier, or on the ancient steps that zigzagged up the dun-colored sandstone slope to the town above. Here and there the steps showed the near-whiteness of fresh patching. A basket attached to a winch-rope, for hauling the day’s catch and other goods up the cliff, sat empty on the stones. Up above was the Goodventure clan’s ancestral claim, which lay a day’s travel north of Carbuncle. During High Winter it had been completely inaccessible, permanently buried under snow. But with the coming of spring it had been reborn; she could see the green of new grasses spilling over the cliff’s edge, limned by sunlight against a rare, perfectly blue sky. Seeds that had lain dormant beneath the snow had neither failed nor waited in vain… . The sight of green high above the bleak, barren shore was a testament to faith and change.

Moon took a deep breath, looking down again. There were thirty or forty other craft clustered at the docks, bobbing offshore, tied up along the pier or pulled up onto the narrow, stony beach below the cliff. Hers must be among the last to arrive for the triad of festival days. To find mooring space had not been the Lady’s luck: a place had been reserved for her, as Summer Queen.

Tradition dictated that she should be the one to oversee these annual celebrations. By rights they should have been held on ancestral Dawntreader lands, because she was the Queen. But the Dawntreaders were an obscure clan, whose few members had been scattered across the far islands of Summer. They did not even have a meaningful holding here in the north, but lived randomly spread among the other Summer families, as they always had. And she had neglected her traditional duties more and more over the years; she had always been too busy defying her heritage to make the time for them.

And so Capella Goodventure had come to oversee the festivals that were held every year at the annual midsummer of Tiamat’s orbital passage around the Twins—the ages-old festivals that must have given rise to the Festival of the Change, When Winter and Summer changed places in the revolving cycle of time. The Great Festivals of the Great Year had become tied to the cycle of offworld exploitation and onworld ignorance only after the Hegemony began coming to Tiamat. Remembering those things, she felt her resolve strengthen, and her belief that she was doing the right thing.

Behind her Moon heard Anele and Tammis come out of the small trimaran’s protected cabin onto its deck. Ariele looked sullen and annoyed, as usual. She shielded her eyes, gazing out across the sea to avoid having to acknowledge her mother. Tammis simply looked glum and uneasy. There was no one else on board. She had brought them here herself; had wanted to feel her own hands on the ropes and tiller, needed to prove to herself that she had not completely lost touch with her past.

Beyond the bright forms of her two children she saw another ship coming in, on a course that would ease it in beside her own craft to a precariously tight moorage. Miroe and Jerusha had followed her up the coast, at her request; not just as guardians, but to help her in what she had to do.

Ariele crouched down suddenly at the stern of the boat’s deck, watching intently until a familiar brindle-furred head broke the water surface. Ariele whistled shrilly and the merling swam toward her, meeting her outstretched hand with a sleek, wet caress. “Silky!” she murmured. “You came. I knew you would … beautiful Silky.” The young mer regarded her with rapt attention as she slid into a series of hums and whistles. Tammis stood behind her, watching silently, listening for the mer’s response.

Moon felt wonder strike her, as she watched her daughter and the mer. The merling had followed Ngenet and Jerusha up the coast all the way from their plantation. It was a triumph of sorts, and not a small one, that they had successfully communicated their request. And beyond that, Silky had trusted them—loved them—enough to leave her home in Ngenet’s bay, and the mer colony that had adopted her, to journey this far with them.

But in this moment Moon was not sure whether the mer’s presence here, or Ariele’s gentle joy as she touched the face of her sea-friend, astonished her more. In the city, in the palace, Ariele showed her nothing but defiance and thorns; until there were times anymore when she looked at her daughter’s face and could not remember any emotion but anger or pain. When all she saw in that face so like her own was Arienrhod. Arienrhod. But in this fragile, unguarded moment she had glimpsed the beautiful spirit of the child she remembered: it was still there, only hidden, like a bud beneath the snow, waiting for spring to come in its own time.

Moon turned back as Jerusha and Miroe came along the pier toward her. She crossed the dock to meet them, smiling.

“We made it,” Jerusha said, her own pride and relief reflected in her husband’s face.

Moon nodded, gripping their hands. “We’ve come two thirds of the way. The third part is the hardest.” She glanced at the steps leading up the cliff face. “I hope we haven’t come this far for nothing.”

Jerusha smiled faintly. “Well, there’s strength in numbers.” She gestured toward the way up.

Moon looked back at them, hesitating, and shook her head. “First I have to go alone. I have to show the Goodventures that I’ve come in humility and without arrogance… or there’s no point. It will be hard enough to make them hear me out as it is, without—” She broke off, looking down; looked up again into their faces: offworlder faces. The faces of the Enemy, even more than her own was, to Capella Goodventure. She had long since stopped seeing anything unusual about the appearance of either of them. But she saw now, with sudden clarity, how they would stand out among the tradition-bound Summers up on the plateau. “Let me bring her here to you … and Silky.” She glanced away at the water.

“It isn’t safe for you to go alone,” Jerusha protested, with the habitual concern of years spent guarding the Queen’s back.

“Tammis and Ariele will be with me.” Moon nodded toward her children. “We’ll be safe. Not entirely welcome, but safe. Capella Goodventure may hate everything I stand for, but the duty and honor of her clan are at stake. She’ll guarantee my well-being.”

Jerusha glanced at Miroe, who made no protest, and nodded her head grudgingly.

Moon began to strip off the layers of slicker and knitted wool that had kept her warm on her journey. “I’ll bring Capella back here as quickly as I can.” She called Ariele and Tammis away from the ship’s rail. They came to her side, resigned, dressed as she was now in traditional Summer festival clothing—loose linen shirts and pants dyed in shades of green, decorated with shells and embroidery. Tammis looked selfconscious but expectant; Ariele looked resentful as she left Silky’s side. Neither of them had wanted to come. But they had, at least. Her eyes filled in the image of Sparks’s absent face, behind them.

Days had passed, after she had learned the news about the Hegemony and the stardnve, before she had told anyone else about it. She had moved through those days as if she were still outside reality, endlessly considering the consequences of what she knew but could not share, and what she must do about them … and waiting for a sign, from the sibyl mind, that had never come.

At last she had told the Council about what she had learned, and what it would mean for Tiamat. And she had told them that she had decided to turn all her efforts and the resources of the Sibyl College to finding a way to protect the mers.

The news had been greeted with shock and disbelief, and then, in a flood, the reactions she had anticipated and dreaded. She had seen the hunger come into the eyes of too many Winters, and even newly tech-proficient Summers, for a future like their past—a life of golden subservience in which all their needs were taken care of by the Hegemony, and the only measurable price they paid for it was the water of life.

Some of the new industrial leaders and even the sibyls had argued against abandoning the push to raise their technological level, saying that instead they should do everything possible to make what progress they could … that they should turn their efforts to weapons research.

She had rejected that outright, knowing from all Jerusha had told her that they would only be creating the weapons of their own destruction. But she could not reveal to the Council the reason why the mers’ survival was ultimately the key to their own survival, and even the Hegemony’s; why protecting the mers had to come before anything else … any more than she could explain to her husband why BZ Gundhalmu wanted to return to Tiamat, and save their world from his own people.

She could no longer rely on the people she had always relied on. And so she had turned to the traditional elements among the Summers for help and support; for their knowledge about the sea and the mers … which had meant even more resentment, more resistance, from the people in the city, who had always been her strength. And it had meant that somehow she must heal the long enmity between herself and the Goodventure clan.

She and Sparks had argued over every aspect of her decisions, even though she knew that for his own reasons he wanted to protect the mers as much as she did. He had refused to accept any changes in their plan for progress, even though for sixteen years he had spent as much time studying the mers as he had spent working with her on the task of building a new Tiamat. The reasons for his anger and his intractability had been as clear to her, through all their bitter words, as she knew they must be to him. But neither one of them had dared to speak the truth that might have freed them … or made it impossible for them ever to look into each other’s eyes again.

And when she had asked him to come with her to meet Capella Goodventure, he had refused to leave the city.

She sighed, pulling her memory and her fears back into the present, back under her control. She looked at her children, who stood nearly as tall as she was, waiting for her. She had been with Sparks through all the years that she had been Queen … and that was nearly as long as she had been with him in the islands before that, before the separation that had changed them, their world, their place in it. It was hard to believe so many years had passed so quickly—and yet so endlessly. Almost as hard to believe as the sudden image in her mind of the people they had become: such strangers that the innocents they had been in Summer would scarcely recognize themselves … such strangers to each other.

She shut that thought out of her mind with finality, not letting herself even begin to wonder whether the distance that had grown between them had become unbridgeable. Or what it would mean to them—to all three of them—if BZ Gundhalinu returned to this world …

She started toward the flight of steps that would lead her into a future that was not the one she had wanted, or intended. Silently she reminded herself that neither was the future she had now one she wanted, or intended.

She climbed, Tammis and Ariele trailing behind her. Her breath came hard by the time she reached the top. She wondered whether it was the years, or only her body’s enforced inactivity that had left her winded. But waiting for her was a sight that made her sudden sense of mortality fall away—a sea of Summer, of sea-greens, grass-greens… fair, sun-reddened faces, young and old, laughing, wrestling, eating, at play. A picture out of time. She moved among the ancient stone-walled houses with their newly rethatched roofs of dried seahair, moving forward into the past as she searched the crowds for a face she recognized. Curious strangers looked back at her, smiling as they saw the trefoil shining against her shirt, and called her “sibyl.” Some of them looked hauntingly familiar; she was not sure if she had seen their faces before, perhaps even dealt with them in the city … or whether they only reminded her of people she had known in her former life. Most of them gazed at her without recognition; but one or two bowed their heads, murmuring, “Lady…” in surprise, before they turned away to spread the news.

She realized then that word of her arrival would travel; that Capella Goodventure might even find her first. She slowed her random motion, forcing herself to be patient, letting herself become accessible, as a sibyl should be. Ariele and Tammis stayed close beside her as she moved out into the open meadow beyond the village, and she realized with fleeting sorrow that they felt far more alien here among their own people than they did among the Winters of the city, with whom they spent nearly all their time. And she realized that, after so long, she did too.

A small voice that was never entirely still inside her reminded her that she was Winter by blood: Arienrhod’s clone. But they were all the same people, the Winters and Summers. They belonged to the same world, and its heritage belonged to all of them. The name she bore, Dawntreader, and the name Goodventure were two of the original shipnames, passed down over the centuries from their refugee ancestors. She and Capella Goodventure were alike, at least in their love for this world. If they could only both remember that …

Tammis passed her a warm fish pie, as Ariele was drawn away, semi rcluctantly, by a handsome blond boy. Ariele disappeared into a group of young Summers who were practicing a triad dance under the guidance of an older woman. Moon’s feet remembered the steps of that dance as she heard its music, and her body began to sway to its rhythm. Her flesh might be Winter’s, but Summer was in her blood…. She smiled at Tammis, who stood beside her watching the dancers. “Do you want to try it?” she asked.

He shook his head, looking down. “No. I’d rather just listen. You need someone with you—” He looked up at her again. She saw both his concern and his instinctive reticence; knew that he was right, and that he would be happier where he was. “I used to dance like that,” she said.

“Do you want to join them?” he asked, curious and surprised, as if it had not really occurred to him that she had ever known any reality besides the one they had always shared in the city.

“No,” she said softly. “It’s a dance for the young. A lovers’ dance.” She watched Ariele step into the circle, swirling with unselfconscious grace among the other dancers, and felt an odd sense of déjà vu.

“Lady,” a voice said behind her, its familiarity startling her. Capella Goodventure stood waiting, her expression guarded and suspicious. She nodded in grudging deference. “I was not expecting you to come.”

“There was a place for my boat at the dockside,” Moon said.

“There is always a mooring-place left empty for the Lady, in hope that she will come. It is tradition. But I did not expect you to come.” A slight emphasis on you.

“But I have … and I thank you for remembering me, even in my absence, Capella Goodventure.”

The Goodventure elder looked at her a little oddly, as if she wondered whether Moon meant the words or was mocking her. “And you brought your children to witness their heritage—for the first time,” she said, in the same tone. “But not your pledged.” She raised her eyebrows.

“He had too much to do … in the city.” It sounded evasive, and was. Moon wondered whether Capella Goodventure believed that he had not come because he had become too corrupt, too much of a Winter—or whether Capella knew more about his past than she thought. The words did not sit well, either way.

“I came because I wanted to feel what it was like to be in Summer again. I have spent much too long in the city myself, as you have rightly pointed out.” Moon felt her speech falling back into the outland cadences of the voices around her. And this time the words were true, she realized suddenly. She had fallen so easily into the pursuit of technology to the exclusion of everything else, telling herself that it was the will of the sibyl mind, the only way to save her world. But the revelation of the Hegemony’s unexpected return had shown her suddenly and profoundly that she had been wrong, all along. She had been thinking like Arienrhod; repeating Anenrhod’s mistakes. It had to be for the ways in which she was different from Arienrhod that the sibyl mind had chosen her. She was the sibyl, not Arienrhod; she was a Summer, and she must forget now that she was anything else….

Capella Goodventure continued to look at her skeptically, without comment. “And I came…” Moon pushed the words out before they could wither on her tongue, “to make my peace with you, if that’s still possible.”

Capella Goodventure stiffened, as if she was sure now that this was some son of trap. “What do you mean?”

“I know that we have never seen eye to eye, all these years,” she said, carefully, “not simply in matters of tradition, but also on the most basic questions about what kind of future this world should have. But in spite of our—differences, I believe that you are a good woman, and that you have only been trying to do the Lady’s will as you see it. And although you find it hard to believe, the same is true of me. Both of us have been trying to preserve the Tlamat we love, and protect both its peoples, the humans and the mers.”

Capella Goodventure half frowned, and twitched her shoulders in an impatient gesture that Moon couldn’t read. “I suppose that’s true enough. I’ll grant you that. But I don’t see anything we have in common beyond that, Moon Dawntreader. Your ways will never be Summer’s any more than your face will be anything but that of the Snow Queen.”

Moon felt her face flush with sudden heat. She swallowed the angry response that filled her throat; aware of Tammis watching her, and Capella Goodventure glancing at him with sharp suspicion. Moon put a hand on Tammis’s arm, urging him with a look to let them have privacy. He left her side reluctantly, frowning as he looked back at them. “I won the mask of the Summer Queen fairly, by the Lady’s will. Do you question Her will—?” She felt every muscle in her body knot in anticipation of Capella Goodventure’s response; afraid that the sudden emptiness inside the words would betray her.

But the other woman only looked down, with her lips pressed together. “The Lady works in strange ways,” she murmured. “Even people of my own clan seem disposed to accept the changes you have forced on us in Her name. But I don’t understand this, and I never will.” She began to turn away.

“Wait,” Moon said, hearing the unthinking edge of command come into her voice, watching with surprise as Capella Goodventure obeyed her automatically. “There is much more at stake here than you know—more than my pride, or yours. I have something to show you. And something to tell you.”

Capella Goodventure hesitated, looked back at her, waiting again.

“Will you walk with me to the steps?” Moon asked.

Capella Goodventure nodded slowly, and followed her. “What is this about?”

“It’s about the one thing that we both believe in with our whole hearts—the protection of the mere.”

The Goodventure elder looked up, startled out of watching her shadow precede her across the grass. “How are they in danger, now that the offworlders have left us in peace? They will increase their numbers while Summer is here; they always do This is their time of mating and rebirth, when the Summer colonies migrate north, and join the Winter colonies.”

“Is it?” Moon said. “Are you sure?” She had heard it as casual lore, but she had no records to compare it to.

Capella Goodventure looked disdainful. “It is part of the common knowledge about the mers. You should have spent more of your time studying the ways of your people.”

“I intend to, from now on,” Moon murmured, as sudden urgency took the sting out of the other woman’s sardonic reprimand. She was not sure how accurate the Summers’ knowledge was; but any new resource they could add to what they had already observed could only help them.

“What makes you say they are in danger?” Capella Goodventure repeated impatiently. “The offworlders won’t be back for nearly a century. And even you have not dared to suggest we begin murdering the Lady’s Children ourselves and drinking their blood to stay young.”

Moon flushed again, and bit her tongue. “We don’t have a lifetime or more before the offworlders come back,” she said flatly. “We have maybe three years.”

Capella Goodventure looked at her as if she had suddenly gone insane.

Moon rubbed her arms, inside the loose, shell-clattering sleeves of her shirt. “I have learned in sibyl Transfer that the offworlders have discovered a source of the stardrive plasma the Old Empire used. They’re building starships right now that can reach Tiamat without using the Black Gates. They don’t have to wait. When the starships are ready, they’ll come.”

Capella Goodventure’s stare turned incredulous, and then disturbed, as she absorbed the full implication of the words. “Lady’s Eyes—” she murmured, walking a few more steps lost in thought. And then she looked up again. “So,” she said. “This was the Lady’s plan.” Moon hesitated, wondenng against hope whether the Goodventure elder had finally understood what she had been trying for so long to make her see But then the other woman smiled bitterly. “You strove to make us like the offworlders, to make us forget our old ways and be like them. And now that blasphemy has brought the Lady’s curse down on you—perhaps on all of us. The offworlders will return with their technology, which you wanted to possess so badly. And they will put the Winters back into power and throw you into the Sea, like the Motherlorn, unnatural creature you are—”

Moon caught the Goodventure woman’s sleeve, jerking her around as they reached the edge of the cliff; as she heard her own unspoken fears mock her from the other woman’s lips. “Are you blind as well as deaf, Capella Goodventure? Goddess! Why can’t you see that all I’ve done to change Tiamat has been to keep us from losing everything to the offworlders when they come back again? Not because I love what they are that much more than what we are! They have things, and ways of doing things, that we can profit from—just as we have things they could profit from understanding, like … reverence … for the mers. Even your own people know that, or they wouldn’t be using that synthetic silkcloth as a tent to shade food that’s been stored in those insulated coolers for the festival!” She gestured fiercely back the way they had come. “But that isn’t the point. The point is that I’ve done everything that I’ve done for the single purpose of protecting the mers.”

Capella Goodventure snorted. “You can’t make me believe that.”

“The … Lady told me that I would have to save them. That it was more important to Her than anything else. That I was Her tool, that I must do anything that as necessary to help the mers, because they … they are … sacred to Her.”

She stumbled over the words, hearing them fall awkwardly on her own disbelieving ears. She hoped that Capella Goodventure would not hear her doubt, but only her desperate urgency. She looked up again, realizing that she had always had a genuine reason in her heart for protecting the mers, one which needed no deeper explanation. “The mers saved my life, once. I would do the same for them, if I can.”

Capella Goodventure was silent now, her eyes hard but clear, her face expressionless; listening, at last.

“I have worked all these years to give us independence, so that the mers would never be slaughtered again. But now everything has changed again—for all of us, like it or not. The offworlders are coming back too soon, we aren’t ready, and they will slaughter the mers before the mers have had a chance to rebuild their colonies They’ll go on killing them, in blind greed, until they’ve killed every single one. And that will be a tragedy beyond imagining, not only for us but for them. We will all be … under the Lady’s curse. Unless I can find some other way to prevent it”

“And how do you think that can be done?” Capella Goodventure asked finally, with doubt still in her voice, but at least without hostility.

Moon started down the steep, narrow stairs, watching her feet; glancing back as she beckoned Capella Goodventure after her. “The Lady has shown me the truth about the mers: that they are … intelligent beings, just as we are.”

“You believe this?” Capella Goodventure asked. Moon realized her incredulity was not for the words themselves, but for hearing them spoken by someone she believed had turned her back on the tradition that held the mers sacred.

“I believe it as profoundly as I believe in my own existence,” Moon answered. “They have a language of their own. One of the things that I have been doing—with the sibyls of the College—is studying their language, so that we can find a way to communicate with them. If we can do that successfully, we may be able to warn them of their danger, at least.”

Moon had reached the foot of the steps now. She nodded to Jerusha and Miroe, who stood together on the pier. Behind her she heard Capella Goodventure’s footsteps stop suddenly.

“What do they want?” Capella Goodventure asked. “Why have you brought them here? They’re not welcome—”

Sudden motion in the water interrupted her, as a mer’s head and long, sinuous neck appeared suddenly beside the two waiting figures. Silky looked quizzically at Jerusha and Miroe, away at the new arrivals, and back at them. Jerusha crouched down, murmuring something inaudible, stroking the merling’s head. The Goodventure elder watched as if she were hypnotized.

“I asked them to come because she is theirs,” Moon said softly.

“No one owns a mer,” Capella Goodventure snapped. “And certainly no offworlder has the right—”

“They raised her,” Moon said. “They found her orphaned on the shore about seven years ago. They are her family. She left the bay at Ngenet plantation, where she has lived all her life, and followed them here … because they asked her to. That’s why they’ve come. To show you that I’ve spoken the truth.”

Capella Goodventure went slowly past her, moving toward Jerusha and Miroe She moved as though every muscle in her body resisted it, as if she was helpless. under a compulsion. “Did you raise this merling?” she asked.

Miroe nodded. “We did.” Jerusha still crouched down, holding on to a mooring post for support as she coped with Silky’s head-butting caresses.

“How is that possible?” Capella Goodventure said bluntly, unable to reconcile what her eyes showed her. “You aren’t Tiamatan.”

“My family has lived on Tiamat for three generations,” Miroe said, looming over her, matching her irascibility with his own. Moon remembered her own first meeting with him, and felt a brief flash of pity for Capella Goodventure. “My wife chose to stay on Tiamat when the rest left here for good, because she preferred this world to anything she’d seen out there. How can we belong here less than you? Your own people came here as refugees from somewhere else, on a ship called the Goodventure. Only the mers are truly of this world.” He glanced over his shoulder at Jerusha and Silky. “I’ve studied the mers all my life. My life was protecting them in any way I could, until Winter’s end… . But it wasn’t enough. I don’t ever want to see again what I saw on my own shore—” He looked back at her.

Capella Goodventure studied their faces a moment longer, then turned back to Moon. Moon met her stare; felt as though the Goodventure elder looked at her and really saw her for the first time in sixteen years. “I feel as though I must be dreaming,” Capella Goodventure murmured, as she looked out at the sea. “Perhaps the Lady has spoken to us all, in Her way.” She looked again at Moon, at Jerusha and Miroe. “You claim that you can actually talk to this merling; that she followed you here at your command?”

“Request,” Miroe corrected.

Jerusha nudged him into silence. “It was as much out of trust as real communication,” she said. “There seem to be very few concepts we have in common … we don’t even know how to ask them questions. So much of what they do seems to involve mersong—and the mersong is incomprehensible to us.”

“The mersong is how they worship the Lady,” Capella Goodventure said flatly. “No more, no less. It wasn’t meant for us to understand.”

“But we’ve found patterns in the mersong that are like those in traditional Summer music,” Moon said, forcing patience into her voice. “We would like to speak with people at the Festival today and record songs they remember, especially songs about the mers—and any lore they know, stories, superstitions. If you would help us, then all of Summer would begin to understand that what we’re doing is vital to everyone on this world.”

Capella Goodventure hesitated again, looking uncertain.

Moon glanced away from her, as unexpected motion on the steps caught her eye. She realized, surprised, that it was Ariele and not Tammis coming down to them. Ariele was trailed by three Summers, two boys and a girl; she swept past the four adults on the pier like a warm breeze, calling out to Silky with a series of trills. Silky came obediently back to the pierside, and she presented them to the merling with the obliviousness of youth.

Capella Goodventure watched them, and Moon watched all that the other woman saw: Ariele, so much like her mother, growing up in the city and yet somehow in her element, here with the mers. The Goodventure elder shook her head m something that could only be resignation. “Very well,” she said slowly. “I never thought I would live to see this day; but I have.” She looked back at Moon. “You and I have one goal from this day forward, Moon Dawntreader. We will do the Lady’s work together, from now on. I only hope that we can do it well enough.”