‘I haven’t thanked you yet,’ said Elenya. ‘Even in my moment of madness, you wouldn’t let me go.’
‘You don’t have to—’ he started, but she laid her finger over his lips.
‘I do. I am not cured. Not yet, not perhaps for years. But my fever was broken in that frozen sea. He wouldn’t rescue me, even when I was prepared to kill myself. But you were.’
She replaced her finger with her lips. The taste was warm and sweet, brief like a wave that washes up the beach then sinks through the sand.
‘What is more important is that you were all there. Said and Wahir, whom I hardly know. Alessandra, who of all people has reason to get rid of me. Her decency, her humanity, overcame her jealousy. She is much better than me.’
‘What am I going to do with you, Princess Elenya?’
She knelt in front of the candles, not to pray but to stare into their fire until it blotted out everything else. ‘I understand Va better having met you. When he looks at me, he sees me as I was. When you look at me, you see what I could become. Neither of you see me as I am, but until today, neither did I. It’s time I went home and faced myself. Will you take me back to Novy Rostov?’
‘Is that what you want?’ Benzamir looked down at her bowed head. Part of him wanted to reach out and touch her, and it warred with the knowledge that if he did, neither of them would ever be happy.
‘Being a princess doesn’t give you much freedom,’ she said. ‘You’re always expected to behave in a certain way even if you feel like kicking and screaming; marry who you’re told without any thought of love, to breed little princes to keep the blood line going. I’ve done none of those things for the past six years. Instead, I’ve sat and waited at the gates of a monastery for a man who will not have me.’ She crossed herself twice, and almost a third time before she stopped herself. ‘Old habits die hard,’ she said, and rose from the cold floor.
They were face to face.
‘I’ve seen many things as I’ve travelled, many people. I met a man, a boat builder, called Rory macShiel; I saw him with his wife, how they behaved with each other, and for the first time in a very long time I thought of someone else but Va. I thought of my parents, and my brothers and sisters. They must think I’m dead. So I think I have to go back, even if I don’t stay.’
Benzamir nodded. ‘As you wish, Elenya Christyakova. I have something I must do tomorrow, but then I will take you home.’
‘You know where your rebels are?’
‘Once we found Persephone, it all fell into place. There will be, well, a reckoning, one way or another. We shall see.’
‘Have I disappointed you?’ she asked quietly.
He took his time to answer, daring to stare into her eyes. Eventually he said: ‘No. For all will be well.’
‘You say that. Do you know that?’
‘I hope that, because that’s all I can do.’ He bent low and blew out the candles one by one.
It was dark again, the only light leaking from far down the corridor.
‘We need to go,’ he said.
‘I can’t see.’
‘Then take my hand.’
CHAPTER 42
THEY WERE ALL subdued. The others looked on, pensive, waiting, while Benzamir looked at the rebels’ encampment on the display, marking out features with his finger and letting Ariadne label them in luminous white. Biodome. Living hab. Primary power plant. Beached skimmers resting on a dark shelf of rock. Tubes leading down into the sea, sucking up minerals and carbon to use in the replicator.
The domes were camouflaged, blending seamlessly in with their surroundings by means of chameleonware. They had only found them because Benzamir’s bugs had been tracked to the precise location.
Hunting the desert inland, he found pop-up gun emplacements and mobile mines. He weighed up in his mind whether he had enough armaments to win a head-on assault. The name on his map said Skeleton Coast. It wasn’t a promising start.
Benzamir stared deep into the heart of the image. ‘They must know we’re coming. Why won’t they talk to me?’
‘Because they want you down there. All prudence dictates that you destroy them from here and collect their charred corpses for burial later, but they know it’s you now. They know how you’ll behave. You won’t fire first.’
They spoke in Nu, and Ariadne would not translate.
‘I still have to inform them of the Council’s charges.’
‘Then write it down, put it in a drop-pod and ram it through their ceiling.’ Her voice was sharp, brittle with almost human anger. ‘They killed a ship. They don’t deserve consideration.’
‘And I have to work under different rules to you. I have to live within the law.’
‘You can still negotiate from a position of strength. If I land, we’ve lost that. If I stay up here, I am a threat.’
He thought about it. ‘Well, there’s more than one way down, though I can’t honestly say that halo is my favourite form of travel.’
‘In full armour.’
‘As you say, in full armour. Oh joy.’
Ariadne wiped the display and replaced it with the real-time image of north-east Africa, hanging stationary underneath.
‘It scares me when you don’t orbit,’ Benzamir said. ‘It feels like there’s nothing holding us up.’
‘So I flaunt my inertial drive,’ she said. ‘What equipment do you need?’
‘Give me everything. If I don’t use it, it doesn’t matter. If I do, I’ll need it straight away.’ He turned to the people who’d travelled with him and whom he now considered friends. ‘I’m going down. I need to try and persuade them to give up and come with me.’
‘And when they don’t?’ said Alessandra.
‘I suppose I’ll have to make them.’
‘Can’t you just . . . you know . . .?’ She pointed her finger.
‘Yes. I could.’
‘Your course is honourable, Maghrebi, but you lack faith,’ said Va. ‘There’ll be no need to fight your rebels. God will not be thwarted, and it’s His will that the books are returned.’
‘I am not going naked. And yes, I lack faith. I trust in doubt to keep me alive.’ Benzamir watched Va’s face sour, but he was in a fragile mood. ‘I woke up the bugs on the book I gave to the emperor. I expect they’re all in one of the domes below, except the one you lost.’
Va narrowed his eyes and said nothing more.
‘Come on then. If you’re going to lend a hand, now’s the time.’ He led them to the cargo bay – all those who didn’t think armour weakness and weapons wrong. Ariadne brightened the lights and signalled with coloured telltales where the pieces of Benzamir’s battlesuit were stored.
It took a little while to put it all back together. Said helped, as did Elenya and Alessandra. Wahir played with the parts until they were needed, when he reluctantly gave them up.
‘Are you seriously going to wear this?’ Alessandra looked at the result of their work, a huge figure with oversized limbs. ‘It’s so heavy that four of us can barely lift one part of it.’
‘You don’t wear it, not how you think of wearing it.’ Benzamir went round the back of the giant and pulled and twisted two catches. ‘It carries you. Really, you didn’t think my head would go up into the helmet with my feet still on the ground?’
‘Master would have to be twice his height!’ laughed Wahir nervously. ‘But what do you do then? It looks very fierce.’
‘You crouch inside the body.’ He heaved, and the back split from waist to shoulders. ‘Everything is controlled by movement and thought. Like a big puppet. I walk, it walks. I run, it runs. Like this.’ He clambered up until he was balanced on the suit’s back like an new insect inspecting its larva-casing.