“‘Never’ is a long time, Orick.”
“Never, Gallen,” Maggie said firmly. “Never! We have the Qualeewoohs’ promise.”
Gallen felt startled, uneasy. “How can they keep that promise?”
“Cooharah and Aaw have drunk from the Waters of Strength,” Orick said. “I found it, but too late to do you any good. The dronon will never beat them in combat.”
Gallen considered. Qualeewoohs that would never die. Conquerors of time and space, nature and self. He wondered at what it all meant.
Glancing from face to face, he settled upon Orick. “You found the Waters?”
Orick nodded slightly.
“And you, drank from them?”
Orick shook his head, looked down at the floor. “I didn’t dare. They weren’t made for the likes of us. Zeus tried to drink from them. What happened to him was too terrible to tell. The Qualeewoohs’ ancestors came to judge him, and they killed him.”
“But what of the sfuz? They drink the Waters, and derive some benefit.”
Orick shook his head. “That’s debatable. Lord Felph has a theory. He believes that the Waters create a construct based upon your consciousness. And while the sfuz show some signs of intelligence, they don’t seem to be fully self aware. So they don’t get the full benefits from the Waters of Strength, and the ancestors don’t feel the need to put them in judgment.”
“In judgment?” Gallen asked.
Tallea spoke up. “The caverns where the cisterns lie are full of bones, Qualeewooh bones, from those who were destroyed for drinking the Waters. Not everyone who drinks is allowed to enter their heaven.”
Gallen studied his old friend’s face, then scratched behind Orick’s ears. Gallen had dozens more questions, but asked none for the moment.
The answers he heard left him unsettled. He knew that Orick was hiding something.
So he celebrated that night with his friends, a grand feast in Felph’s palace. Felph’s latest clone led the celebration, with Hera and Athena in attendance, along with the servant Dooring and all the others in the household staff. To Gallen’s great surprise, Thomas Flynn showed up. Orick had met him in the depths of the tangle, and Thomas played his latest songs on the lute.
One of the songs he sang was a ballad, which told how he had followed Felph into the tangle, and what he the depths beneath Teeawah, when Zeus drank the Waters of Strength. And he sang of his journey out, how Orick and Tallea had fought the horde of sfuz that had begun to revive, that sfuz that barred his way back to, the dronon’s shuttle.
Of all the strange tales that Gallen heard that day, Thomas’s fascinated him most. To lose a companion on one world, and find him in another galaxy, seemed marvelous beyond the telling.
So he partied, and he celebrated the fall of the dronon empire, and in his heart he wondered, and worried.
It was not until four days later that the rains broke for a bit, and then Gallen insisted that he and Orick go for a walk alone in the fields in front of the palace.
The fields were green, new grass sprouting in abundance. Everywhere lay signs of the dronon-great holes in the ground where their ship had set down, the trampled fields where their millions had circled the killing field.
Gallen surveyed the field a bit, then walked over to a spot on the ground, a spot dark with pooled blood. Two pools, side by side. Over the past seven weeks, the blood had first dried black, then soaked into the ground, killing the grass.
Gallen went to the spots, gazed down and touched them with his toe. They told the story that Orick would have hid, and Gallen asked, “Where did you bury us, Orick?”
The kindly bear gazed up, licked his lips, considering what story to tell now.
“Where did you bury us?” Gallen asked. “I want to see Maggie’s grave.”
Orick nodded toward a slight rise, where three hawthorn trees trembled in the breeze. The ragged clouds whipped overhead, so that the trees stood first in sunlight, then in shadow, their leaves rattling softly.
Gallen went to the unmarked graves-two small plots, mud mixed in with the new tendrils of growing grass.
“Maggie’s here, on the left,” Orick said, his voice choked from emotion. “And you’re on the right.”
Seeing the graves did something to Gallen, filled him with a nameless ache he’d never imagined, an ache too large to either hold or express. He wanted to cry out, but that would change nothing. He wanted to deny it.
So this is what I come to, he told himself as he knelt above Maggie’s grave. He brushed his hand over the new grass, as if it were hair, felt the water tickling his palms. This is what I come to.
Orick had warned him. Gallen knelt on the grass and sobbed for a long time, until the pain gave way to emptiness, enough emptiness that he could speak again.
“Maggie doesn’t know about this, does she?” Gallen asked.
Orick shook his head. “No. We checked her memories. She doesn’t really want to know-just as you didn’t want to know. She wants to go back, for everything to be like it was. She wants to live with you, have the baby you planned together. We can’t undo the past. This is the best we could give her. Felph cloned her body. She was wearing your mantle when she died, and she knew her death was coming.
“The mantle downloaded her memories into a crystal. Yours were already stored in Felph’s Al. They’d been radioed ahead.”
“How can she not know that she’s died?” Gallen asked.
“In the end, Felph edited her final memories of the battle. He just altered some of them so that Maggie didn’t recall her final wound being so serious. The dronon took holos of the fight. It was easy for Felph to get images of the Qualeewoohs coming to the rescue. Maggie just doesn’t know they came too late, that they stood over your corpses and fought like dragons.”
“I learned the truth easily enough.” Gallen said. “I knew we were dead. In time, Maggie might figure it out, too.”
“How? How could you know?” Orick asked. “Felph duplicated every mole, every scar. He … he even cloned Maggie’s baby from her womb, let it grow inside her. That was a task, mind you!”
“Oh, I look the same,” Gallen. said, “but I don’t feel the same. The knife scar on my right wrist-it always used to ache when it grew cold, when the rains came. The scar there now looks much the same, but it doesn’t go deep enough. Some scars go too deep.”
“But-you won’t tell Maggie?” Orick asked. “We went through so much work!”
Gallen considered. “It was kind of you,” he said at last. “I won’t tell her. I think she’ll be happier not knowing.”
He sighed, reached into his pocket, and pulled out his mantle. It kept a record of every battle that its wearers had ever fought, recorded far more than perhaps Orick knew.
Gallen had not worn it since reawakening, for he had not been sure he wanted to know how his last battle had ended.
Now, he donned the mantle, pulled its familiar weight over his head, felt an easy tenseness fill his body, as always happened when the mantle made connection, assuming partial control of his neural system.
Then, he sat beneath the tree and asked Orick, “Will you excuse me for a few minutes. There’s something I must do.”
Beneath the shade of the hawthorns, gazing out over the green valley that had filled with dronon warships only weeks before, he whispered to his mantle, “Show me my death.”
Gallen felt the familiar lurch as his viewpoint shifted, and he saw these fields as they had been, the grass much shorter, less alive, with the dronon circling in their millions.
The sight awed him, the dronon queens beneath their crimson pavilions, the sounds of their cheering, the warships in the background.
He watched the entire battle from Maggie’s eyes, felt her love for him, her burning desire to defend him to the last moment, felt how she craved his kiss and his touch, her horror at watching as the Lord Escort slashed Gallen nearly in two.