... Continues the Book of Valten:
Libing left after holding Val in his arms, and several hours later the evening meal came.
The time for the evening Endo-Vezdrin injection had passed. Val wasn’t too nauseous to eat, therefore, and forced down the processed protein strip and vegetable side.
He lay back after he ate. Anxiety receded, and he drifted somehow to sleep. He did not dream, he usually did not, and woke warm.
The comfortable temperature came from within and it was the first intimation his faculties were returning. He stretched his limbs, willing his muscles to loosen. Through his garment and at his feet he glimpsed the limpid emanation of his inner life. He rolled to his side, studied his hands. There it was. His chest expanded with gentle, deepening heat. The internal vigor cocooned his mind and tenderly buoyed his senses.
The last night, after the day’s executions, they gathered him up for the shower. Normally there was no soap, the lead guard told him, but Libing had provided a tube of shampoo, so Val was showered with that.
They took him straightaway to the Holding Unit, and though he never saw another prisoner he knew there were four men on the unit with him, closed, as he was, in stone, concrete, pacified with meals and books and a chaperone guard until, in a little under twenty-four hours, they all went down to the Short Room, and from there to the gallows.
The Holding Room was larger than the cell he’d left. There was a blanket now, which was why the guard had to look in through the window, to make sure he didn’t have his hanging too soon. Val lasted the night alert and aware, his power full inside him.
He craved the stir of city air, wished through the endless hours of compressed darkness to feel the oily, metallic pre-dawn eddies thrown by gargantuan black-glossed motor coaches and the ancient trains that whispered across the baleful waterfront sky on sleek but archaic elevated rails. He missed the slick southeastern wind roughened by exhaust from the truck park that abutted the shipyards behind his flat. In the morning, walking up his street after being at Maria’s, he would smell the wind, take it within himself, and use it to prepare for his day. He was rarely tired, he hardly needed more than a breath to get going. Over the hush imposed by the concrete and steel of Zoran Station, Val would have welcomed even the grind of mammoth cranes, belching their funnels of toxic smoke. Nothing lasted forever. And with this thought he clenched his fists, drew his knees far up into his chest, and whispered, “Maria, please.”
It was in the morning, with breakfast, they asked him if he wanted a reporter with him in the Short Room. Many journalists had petitioned. Evidently, the government received a steep fee for certain interviews, the interviews that would boost ratings and bring in advertisement credits. He could have said no. The Short Room, it was explained, lay downstairs and adjacent to the gallows. Prisoners went below at precisely a quarter to the designated hour. The gallery was seated after the Short Room took its charge, and once the gallery was seated, it was usually a few moments before the event. The cameras would go live. Adjustments could be made. Then when the studios were ready, a door opened on a very brief passage, the passage linking the Short Room and the gallows, and that was that.
Val said no, he wouldn’t be granting any fifteen-minute interviews, but then it occurred to him to look at the list. Her name was fourth from the top, behind the names of well-known reporters from Global, Worldwide, and United Technologies. He said he would see Rada Bronya of Western Technologies, and the guard went off, stepping lightly at the prospect of having a televsion celebrity on board.
Around seven or so, the civilian clothes brought in by Libing came to the Holding Unit. Val could feel his mortal heart beginning to stretch and strain. He spoke to it calmly but there was no getting away from the fear, so he let the fear come, took it by the hand, and sat down with it. What had Libing said? We get by. One does what one must.
Val dressed slowly, careful not to miss a button, putting on black trousers and a black crew neck shirt with long sleeves. The clothes carried a faintly fresh and expensive scent. Maria had touched the garments. With hands softened by Zephyra lotion, she had removed the shop tags. He pictured her tenderly folding the clothes ready for wear into the bag for Libing. Possibly she had picked them out. He thought she had.
Val tucked the shirt into his trousers. They allowed him to wear a belt, which somehow seemed a relief. Underwear and socks were, too, special comfort. When the technicians came up, he was in his stocking feet, sitting on the edge of the bed, his cell full of guards. The technicians put down on the floor a black box only slightly larger than two flatdrives side by side. He got up to stand on it.
“With your shoes, please,” insisted the senior technician.
Val looked at the man, who was not as old as he expected, nor as physically endowed. This was the executioner, the one who would set the noose and operate the control panel. Val stepped into his shoes, set a knee on the ground, and did up his laces. They watched, the guards and the technicians, aware that his fingers trembled but hesitating to assist. He was not that bad off, apparently.
When he got on the scale, the technicians entered the display data into flex hand-helds. They needed his weight and to look at his neck to calculate the appropriate drop. They wanted to break his neck without decapitating him.
The procession downstairs went quietly. Val had been cuffed, hands in front, and marched away with a guard on each arm. In the Short Room the guards steered Val to a pair of heavy metal chairs placed at the corner of a square table and he sat down. He turned his head to look at the woman standing a little distance away. She carried her flexible mobile access in one palm, nothing else. She wore a slacks suit with sensible shoes. Her features conveyed purpose, and some degree of comfort with the proximity of soldiers, places of execution, and condemned prisoners. Val recalled she had conducted similar interviews before.
She got a signal from his guard team captain and planted herself at the corner of the table facing him. They were close enough that when she leaned forward their knees touched. Val, too, sat up straight. He was having a time getting through her thoughts, as those most salient, concerning his betrayal of Maria and of his country, challenged his defenses. He was cognizant of the briefness of their time, relieved that Rada had no intention of presenting questions relevant to public interest-- she had enough, he realized, from their first evening at Maria’s penthouse if information from his perspective was what got advertisement credits these days. Her motivation and objective was Maria. They shared that, though she did not know it.
She said, “Do I call you Mr. Kessler or Mr. Manegold?”
“As it pleases you,” Val said. He was in distress, regarding her thoughts. “I never cheered the loss of those lives, I never celebrated the Needle falling.”
“How did I get it wrong? You were close enough to us, to the Square to do whatever you wanted. What did you do when eight thousand of your enemies perished in a single moment?”
He could not engage her at this level. She made his stomach knot. “Will you carry a message to Maria?”
“Absolutely not.”
But she’d come for that purpose, to get on her flex for Maria something she could use as evidence of Val’s fraud. It was critical from Rada’s perspective to open Maria’s mind and heart to Val’s manipulations.
She said, “I’m here to try and bring Maria some peace. I think she deserves that much, don’t you?”
“Her peace was the reason I allowed this meeting.”
“May I be candid?” Rada said.
“It would be a novelty.”
Rada sighed. “Maria is connected to a lot of money or she would have been arrested by now. Do you feel bad you used her? Some rich woman, lonely, not very pretty, she’s just going along with her dull life and here you come--”
“Shut -- up.”
“Did I hit a nerve?”
“Did you hit a nerve?” Val shifted long legs under the table. “The sound of your voice plays like distant static.” He curled his hands inside the cuffs suddenly and as abruptly straightened the long fingers. “Now let’s see if you can speak what you mean instead of the words you put in front of you so I won’t hurt you.” For emphasis, he shook the handcuffs. “I won’t hurt you.”
Rada opened and closed her mouth, at a loss.
“ ‘He’s insane,’ ” he said.
He saw her throat tighten, squeezing her vocal chords.
“ ‘What is he saying,’ ” Val said. “ ‘Oh my God he is insane. My poor Maria.’ ”
Her jaw fell. And she thought, Don’t stare at me. Stop staring. Your eyes burn.
Val sighed and pulled his eyes from her face.
He felt Rada’s heart take up a loud, hurtful thud. “Are you reading my mind with an implant? Nobody told me you had an implant.”
“That technology, I think, is a myth.”
“The Holbek Organization has been experimenting for years with implants.”
“So you say. No to the implant, Rada. The Federal Authority would have lasered it by now. I was born this way.”
“You expect me to believe you’re a mindwalker. That you’re a demian.”
“Demian.” Val rolled his eyes. “As a people, we are so superstitious. My mother believed in demians. I am named after one. No, Rada, go to my home village one day when the world is safer, calmer. Go to my village and they will tell you John Manegold has always been a mindwalker.”
-- What am I thinking now?
He said, “ ‘What am I thinking now.’ ”
“It is that pure.”
“That pure.”
“The military would have drafted you if they knew. No one must know. I am right? Who knows?”
“Everyone knows but Maria. I’ve done nothing for myself telling you. If you make anyone believe you, they’ll cast it in the worst possible light, as you seem determined to do.”
“Why are you telling me?”
“Why am I telling you?” He looked away. “In something around ten minutes I’m going to die. Maybe I want you to know that here”-- he brushed his chest --“inside, here, your true voice lives. The one the gods gave you. I’d like to listen to your voice, Rada. If you’re going to talk, try not to be at odds with your soul’s voice. It grates. And to explain about Maria, you were going to tell me she isn’t beautiful but if you believe that you have never really seen Maria. You certainly don’t see her the way I do. You can’t hear her. The way I hear you now, when you’re saying nothing. Have you any idea what it is like to make love to a woman when you can’t tell where you end and she begins? I haven’t words. I could feel us both, and from the first time, like I was passing through her. In all the time we were together, I never told her this. Now I’m telling you.”
“Why does Maria call you Val?”
“A short while after the Needle fell, I told her who I was.”
“Do you do that with every woman you sleep with?”
He tilted his head. “How many women do you think I sleep with? I was with Maria always. I was always with her.”
“Oh I am so … I am so … angry with you. Why did you choose her? What did you hope for with her, with someone like her? Why did you start this horrible, horrible love affair?”
He had winced not once but three times while she carried on. He found it difficult not to look away, and he did, momentarily, swing his face toward the wall. Was it to end horribly? Yes, yes, of course it was. But he had got through, finally, the hard layers of Rada Bronya, and he had found the soft core of her reason. He could see that Maria’s behavior frightened Rada, frightened everyone. Maria had gone with Caspar Libing to her mother’s estate in the suburbs and then fled, apparently without telling anyone, to the city center, to places she and Val visited together, and to stand outside Zoran on the crowded street where, once, she was accosted by a television cameraman. On many levels she was, to Rada, damaged. Maria defended Val to the chattering television, to anyone who would stand by and listen, to her aunt who had learned to let her niece alone.
Rada sucked in a raspy breath, tightened her fingers around her flex, which she switched to stand-by. “So you love her then, really love her.”
Val turned his head to look at Rada’s lean, hard face. He didn’t need to answer.
“There’s no easy way out of this,” Rada uttered to herself, “is there? How are you doing?”
“We won’t ask that again, will we?”
“But you’re not afraid.”
His eyes swept shut. And he breathed slowly, deliberately for fifteen, thirty seconds. “I’m afraid to feel the rope around my neck. I’m afraid to be made a spectacle of. I am not afraid to die.”
“You’re a believer of reincarnation.”
“If you’ve studied Amarites, you know I’m not. We weren’t taught to fear death especially. There are worse things, things to do with violating the temple--”
“The temple being?” she interrupted.
“We haven’t a lot of time. How much do you know?”
“I know Amarite followers worship a pantheon of gods and your mother god is called Affaraon. Your chief priestess is called the Lady of Waters. She is flesh and blood and holds court in Amorium. Once in your life you’re to make a pilgrimage to Amorium and meet your high priestess. Have you gone?”
“I haven’t. But it is all right if someone makes the pilgrimage for me. Perhaps someone will.”
“Another regret. What if it’s a hoax, and when you die you stay dead like the rest of us?”
“The question,” Val said, looking at her, “cannot be answered satisfactorily under the circumstances. What an Amarite priest will say, when he or she hasn’t hours to ramble, the priest will say that the sky isn’t blue because you believe the sky is blue. The sky is blue because it is.”
“And this, this is all a mistake, a contrivance. You’re innocent.”
“I am not innocent, not in the context of real world events. For instance, I was complicit in crimes punished by execution before I was old enough to know the meaning of the words crime and execution. Cooperation and assistance in the family’s criminal enterprise was essential to survival, but such does not grant the shield of innocence. Put me on trial for any one of those crimes, and I will tell the world what I just told you. However, I did not do the thing that I am here for. If I was still one of them, I would not have destroyed the Needle, or detonated the facilities and conveyances of your world. I would not have come out of the Goraneg to unsettle your existence, Rada, or take from you the lives of your loved ones. Even if it meant I had to die. Know that about me, if you know nothing else.”
-- Maria said, “If he was still with them, Aunt Rada, he would have given his life to stop it. If he was still with them, the Needle might not have fallen. Rada’s thoughts.
Val said, “Maria knows me.”
“She knows what you’ve told her.”
He sighed and turned to her. “Hold out your hand.”
She was alarmed. “Why? When? Right now?”
“The executioner just signaled his assistant to open the door. When they open the door, we’re done, we’re out of time. I’m not going to hurt you. Don’t tell me you’re still worried about me hurting you because I know you’re not.”
Rada waved to catch the attention of the guard captain, thinking foolishly that the captain would be looking anywhere else. “I’d like to do a prayer ritual with the prisoner. It requires holding hands. Is this permitted?”
“Quickly,” warned the captain.
She extended her hand.
Val leaned forward, whispering, “Go home tonight, don’t stay in the city.” He wrapped his warm, dry fingers around her palm. “Fly out tonight, have sex with your husband, and conceive a child for me. I would find it an extremely kind gesture if somehow you were able to remember me the way we were that night in Maria’s apartment.”
She stood up, and he rose with her. He still held her hand.
“I’ll try to remember you. As for the rest, it’s not possible.”
“Thinking of me in a better light?”
-- It’s personal, and no, I can think of you in a better light. It’s not hard to do. But I can’t have a child, and that’s that.
“But you want a child.”
“My husband and I have always wanted a child.”
“The sky, today, is blue, Rada. The rest is up to you.” He lifted his voice a little. “Mother of all life, a child who hears your call beseeches you to show this world a new revelation of love and power. Blessed Lady, it is asked that where there is pain, the light of pure and perfect love grant peace and mercy. Lady of the Blessed Waters, receive into the light an imperfect traveler. The end is only a beginning. By your grace all is made new. Amen.”
Looking up into his eyes, Rada breathed, “Amen.”
The door opened behind them. Val let go of Rada and used a knuckle to touch a bead of blood that had appeared under his nostril. Three guards drew up and so Rada stepped back. Someone was pointing, showing the way to the press box in the gallery, insisting she only had a few seconds to reach it. There was now a lot of activity and anxiety surrounding Val. The guard with his key in the handcuffs had a nervous stomach. The flanking guards worried what Val might do once his hands were released. It appeared they always worried for this moment, which generally passed without complication. Rada was gone. Val shifted his hands behind his back for the cable cuffs. The guards appreciated cooperation, didn’t pull the cable too tight.
“We’re going to turn around now.” This was a disembodied voice.
As Val drifted away, physically and in other ways, he no longer saw faces. He turned the way he was guided, and understood, as soon as he did, why three men were holding onto him.
His legs wanted to melt, they nearly did, and that perfectly anticipated dip, that second of weakness, was so common to the guards’ experience, that they paused in unison.
A voice from the closing shadows spoke to him: “A little while longer. Just walk forward.”
He was looking at a platform on which stood two technicians, and over which dangled the noose.
“Steady now.”
He thought, I am steady.
The noose got bigger, and the rail in front of it. There was a glare beyond the rail but once he realize it was the partition on the gallery and that there were people sitting in chairs looking up at him, he stopped staring at the gallery and saw only the man beside the noose.
The technician said, “Put your heels together.”
He was never conscious of complying but felt shortly the strap drawing tight around his calves. The noose shifted toward him, seemingly of its own volition, then disappeared entirely.
When he lowered his head he felt the rope graze his skin.
The technician moved behind him, and then Val felt the noose like a half-circle tightening under his chin.
He resented it right away. As he flinched, the guards at his arms stepped back. There is darkness at my feet, Val thought, and with a flutter of panic.
The goddess answered, for she was, he had long since learned, usually present at these moments: “There is light, and it is everywhere.”
He had that, in the end, and what the spectators saw were his eyes closing and his features softening, and his chest filling with breath. He fell, and died, and waited in light, but also in darkness, to begin again.
--- Exile continues with the Book of Hephaestion
Libing left after holding Val in his arms, and several hours later the evening meal came.
The time for the evening Endo-Vezdrin injection had passed. Val wasn’t too nauseous to eat, therefore, and forced down the processed protein strip and vegetable side.
He lay back after he ate. Anxiety receded, and he drifted somehow to sleep. He did not dream, he usually did not, and woke warm.
The comfortable temperature came from within and it was the first intimation his faculties were returning. He stretched his limbs, willing his muscles to loosen. Through his garment and at his feet he glimpsed the limpid emanation of his inner life. He rolled to his side, studied his hands. There it was. His chest expanded with gentle, deepening heat. The internal vigor cocooned his mind and tenderly buoyed his senses.
The last night, after the day’s executions, they gathered him up for the shower. Normally there was no soap, the lead guard told him, but Libing had provided a tube of shampoo, so Val was showered with that.
They took him straightaway to the Holding Unit, and though he never saw another prisoner he knew there were four men on the unit with him, closed, as he was, in stone, concrete, pacified with meals and books and a chaperone guard until, in a little under twenty-four hours, they all went down to the Short Room, and from there to the gallows.
The Holding Room was larger than the cell he’d left. There was a blanket now, which was why the guard had to look in through the window, to make sure he didn’t have his hanging too soon. Val lasted the night alert and aware, his power full inside him.
He craved the stir of city air, wished through the endless hours of compressed darkness to feel the oily, metallic pre-dawn eddies thrown by gargantuan black-glossed motor coaches and the ancient trains that whispered across the baleful waterfront sky on sleek but archaic elevated rails. He missed the slick southeastern wind roughened by exhaust from the truck park that abutted the shipyards behind his flat. In the morning, walking up his street after being at Maria’s, he would smell the wind, take it within himself, and use it to prepare for his day. He was rarely tired, he hardly needed more than a breath to get going. Over the hush imposed by the concrete and steel of Zoran Station, Val would have welcomed even the grind of mammoth cranes, belching their funnels of toxic smoke. Nothing lasted forever. And with this thought he clenched his fists, drew his knees far up into his chest, and whispered, “Maria, please.”
It was in the morning, with breakfast, they asked him if he wanted a reporter with him in the Short Room. Many journalists had petitioned. Evidently, the government received a steep fee for certain interviews, the interviews that would boost ratings and bring in advertisement credits. He could have said no. The Short Room, it was explained, lay downstairs and adjacent to the gallows. Prisoners went below at precisely a quarter to the designated hour. The gallery was seated after the Short Room took its charge, and once the gallery was seated, it was usually a few moments before the event. The cameras would go live. Adjustments could be made. Then when the studios were ready, a door opened on a very brief passage, the passage linking the Short Room and the gallows, and that was that.
Val said no, he wouldn’t be granting any fifteen-minute interviews, but then it occurred to him to look at the list. Her name was fourth from the top, behind the names of well-known reporters from Global, Worldwide, and United Technologies. He said he would see Rada Bronya of Western Technologies, and the guard went off, stepping lightly at the prospect of having a televsion celebrity on board.
Around seven or so, the civilian clothes brought in by Libing came to the Holding Unit. Val could feel his mortal heart beginning to stretch and strain. He spoke to it calmly but there was no getting away from the fear, so he let the fear come, took it by the hand, and sat down with it. What had Libing said? We get by. One does what one must.
Val dressed slowly, careful not to miss a button, putting on black trousers and a black crew neck shirt with long sleeves. The clothes carried a faintly fresh and expensive scent. Maria had touched the garments. With hands softened by Zephyra lotion, she had removed the shop tags. He pictured her tenderly folding the clothes ready for wear into the bag for Libing. Possibly she had picked them out. He thought she had.
Val tucked the shirt into his trousers. They allowed him to wear a belt, which somehow seemed a relief. Underwear and socks were, too, special comfort. When the technicians came up, he was in his stocking feet, sitting on the edge of the bed, his cell full of guards. The technicians put down on the floor a black box only slightly larger than two flatdrives side by side. He got up to stand on it.
“With your shoes, please,” insisted the senior technician.
Val looked at the man, who was not as old as he expected, nor as physically endowed. This was the executioner, the one who would set the noose and operate the control panel. Val stepped into his shoes, set a knee on the ground, and did up his laces. They watched, the guards and the technicians, aware that his fingers trembled but hesitating to assist. He was not that bad off, apparently.
When he got on the scale, the technicians entered the display data into flex hand-helds. They needed his weight and to look at his neck to calculate the appropriate drop. They wanted to break his neck without decapitating him.
The procession downstairs went quietly. Val had been cuffed, hands in front, and marched away with a guard on each arm. In the Short Room the guards steered Val to a pair of heavy metal chairs placed at the corner of a square table and he sat down. He turned his head to look at the woman standing a little distance away. She carried her flexible mobile access in one palm, nothing else. She wore a slacks suit with sensible shoes. Her features conveyed purpose, and some degree of comfort with the proximity of soldiers, places of execution, and condemned prisoners. Val recalled she had conducted similar interviews before.
She got a signal from his guard team captain and planted herself at the corner of the table facing him. They were close enough that when she leaned forward their knees touched. Val, too, sat up straight. He was having a time getting through her thoughts, as those most salient, concerning his betrayal of Maria and of his country, challenged his defenses. He was cognizant of the briefness of their time, relieved that Rada had no intention of presenting questions relevant to public interest-- she had enough, he realized, from their first evening at Maria’s penthouse if information from his perspective was what got advertisement credits these days. Her motivation and objective was Maria. They shared that, though she did not know it.
She said, “Do I call you Mr. Kessler or Mr. Manegold?”
“As it pleases you,” Val said. He was in distress, regarding her thoughts. “I never cheered the loss of those lives, I never celebrated the Needle falling.”
“How did I get it wrong? You were close enough to us, to the Square to do whatever you wanted. What did you do when eight thousand of your enemies perished in a single moment?”
He could not engage her at this level. She made his stomach knot. “Will you carry a message to Maria?”
“Absolutely not.”
But she’d come for that purpose, to get on her flex for Maria something she could use as evidence of Val’s fraud. It was critical from Rada’s perspective to open Maria’s mind and heart to Val’s manipulations.
She said, “I’m here to try and bring Maria some peace. I think she deserves that much, don’t you?”
“Her peace was the reason I allowed this meeting.”
“May I be candid?” Rada said.
“It would be a novelty.”
Rada sighed. “Maria is connected to a lot of money or she would have been arrested by now. Do you feel bad you used her? Some rich woman, lonely, not very pretty, she’s just going along with her dull life and here you come--”
“Shut -- up.”
“Did I hit a nerve?”
“Did you hit a nerve?” Val shifted long legs under the table. “The sound of your voice plays like distant static.” He curled his hands inside the cuffs suddenly and as abruptly straightened the long fingers. “Now let’s see if you can speak what you mean instead of the words you put in front of you so I won’t hurt you.” For emphasis, he shook the handcuffs. “I won’t hurt you.”
Rada opened and closed her mouth, at a loss.
“ ‘He’s insane,’ ” he said.
He saw her throat tighten, squeezing her vocal chords.
“ ‘What is he saying,’ ” Val said. “ ‘Oh my God he is insane. My poor Maria.’ ”
Her jaw fell. And she thought, Don’t stare at me. Stop staring. Your eyes burn.
Val sighed and pulled his eyes from her face.
He felt Rada’s heart take up a loud, hurtful thud. “Are you reading my mind with an implant? Nobody told me you had an implant.”
“That technology, I think, is a myth.”
“The Holbek Organization has been experimenting for years with implants.”
“So you say. No to the implant, Rada. The Federal Authority would have lasered it by now. I was born this way.”
“You expect me to believe you’re a mindwalker. That you’re a demian.”
“Demian.” Val rolled his eyes. “As a people, we are so superstitious. My mother believed in demians. I am named after one. No, Rada, go to my home village one day when the world is safer, calmer. Go to my village and they will tell you John Manegold has always been a mindwalker.”
-- What am I thinking now?
He said, “ ‘What am I thinking now.’ ”
“It is that pure.”
“That pure.”
“The military would have drafted you if they knew. No one must know. I am right? Who knows?”
“Everyone knows but Maria. I’ve done nothing for myself telling you. If you make anyone believe you, they’ll cast it in the worst possible light, as you seem determined to do.”
“Why are you telling me?”
“Why am I telling you?” He looked away. “In something around ten minutes I’m going to die. Maybe I want you to know that here”-- he brushed his chest --“inside, here, your true voice lives. The one the gods gave you. I’d like to listen to your voice, Rada. If you’re going to talk, try not to be at odds with your soul’s voice. It grates. And to explain about Maria, you were going to tell me she isn’t beautiful but if you believe that you have never really seen Maria. You certainly don’t see her the way I do. You can’t hear her. The way I hear you now, when you’re saying nothing. Have you any idea what it is like to make love to a woman when you can’t tell where you end and she begins? I haven’t words. I could feel us both, and from the first time, like I was passing through her. In all the time we were together, I never told her this. Now I’m telling you.”
“Why does Maria call you Val?”
“A short while after the Needle fell, I told her who I was.”
“Do you do that with every woman you sleep with?”
He tilted his head. “How many women do you think I sleep with? I was with Maria always. I was always with her.”
“Oh I am so … I am so … angry with you. Why did you choose her? What did you hope for with her, with someone like her? Why did you start this horrible, horrible love affair?”
He had winced not once but three times while she carried on. He found it difficult not to look away, and he did, momentarily, swing his face toward the wall. Was it to end horribly? Yes, yes, of course it was. But he had got through, finally, the hard layers of Rada Bronya, and he had found the soft core of her reason. He could see that Maria’s behavior frightened Rada, frightened everyone. Maria had gone with Caspar Libing to her mother’s estate in the suburbs and then fled, apparently without telling anyone, to the city center, to places she and Val visited together, and to stand outside Zoran on the crowded street where, once, she was accosted by a television cameraman. On many levels she was, to Rada, damaged. Maria defended Val to the chattering television, to anyone who would stand by and listen, to her aunt who had learned to let her niece alone.
Rada sucked in a raspy breath, tightened her fingers around her flex, which she switched to stand-by. “So you love her then, really love her.”
Val turned his head to look at Rada’s lean, hard face. He didn’t need to answer.
“There’s no easy way out of this,” Rada uttered to herself, “is there? How are you doing?”
“We won’t ask that again, will we?”
“But you’re not afraid.”
His eyes swept shut. And he breathed slowly, deliberately for fifteen, thirty seconds. “I’m afraid to feel the rope around my neck. I’m afraid to be made a spectacle of. I am not afraid to die.”
“You’re a believer of reincarnation.”
“If you’ve studied Amarites, you know I’m not. We weren’t taught to fear death especially. There are worse things, things to do with violating the temple--”
“The temple being?” she interrupted.
“We haven’t a lot of time. How much do you know?”
“I know Amarite followers worship a pantheon of gods and your mother god is called Affaraon. Your chief priestess is called the Lady of Waters. She is flesh and blood and holds court in Amorium. Once in your life you’re to make a pilgrimage to Amorium and meet your high priestess. Have you gone?”
“I haven’t. But it is all right if someone makes the pilgrimage for me. Perhaps someone will.”
“Another regret. What if it’s a hoax, and when you die you stay dead like the rest of us?”
“The question,” Val said, looking at her, “cannot be answered satisfactorily under the circumstances. What an Amarite priest will say, when he or she hasn’t hours to ramble, the priest will say that the sky isn’t blue because you believe the sky is blue. The sky is blue because it is.”
“And this, this is all a mistake, a contrivance. You’re innocent.”
“I am not innocent, not in the context of real world events. For instance, I was complicit in crimes punished by execution before I was old enough to know the meaning of the words crime and execution. Cooperation and assistance in the family’s criminal enterprise was essential to survival, but such does not grant the shield of innocence. Put me on trial for any one of those crimes, and I will tell the world what I just told you. However, I did not do the thing that I am here for. If I was still one of them, I would not have destroyed the Needle, or detonated the facilities and conveyances of your world. I would not have come out of the Goraneg to unsettle your existence, Rada, or take from you the lives of your loved ones. Even if it meant I had to die. Know that about me, if you know nothing else.”
-- Maria said, “If he was still with them, Aunt Rada, he would have given his life to stop it. If he was still with them, the Needle might not have fallen. Rada’s thoughts.
Val said, “Maria knows me.”
“She knows what you’ve told her.”
He sighed and turned to her. “Hold out your hand.”
She was alarmed. “Why? When? Right now?”
“The executioner just signaled his assistant to open the door. When they open the door, we’re done, we’re out of time. I’m not going to hurt you. Don’t tell me you’re still worried about me hurting you because I know you’re not.”
Rada waved to catch the attention of the guard captain, thinking foolishly that the captain would be looking anywhere else. “I’d like to do a prayer ritual with the prisoner. It requires holding hands. Is this permitted?”
“Quickly,” warned the captain.
She extended her hand.
Val leaned forward, whispering, “Go home tonight, don’t stay in the city.” He wrapped his warm, dry fingers around her palm. “Fly out tonight, have sex with your husband, and conceive a child for me. I would find it an extremely kind gesture if somehow you were able to remember me the way we were that night in Maria’s apartment.”
She stood up, and he rose with her. He still held her hand.
“I’ll try to remember you. As for the rest, it’s not possible.”
“Thinking of me in a better light?”
-- It’s personal, and no, I can think of you in a better light. It’s not hard to do. But I can’t have a child, and that’s that.
“But you want a child.”
“My husband and I have always wanted a child.”
“The sky, today, is blue, Rada. The rest is up to you.” He lifted his voice a little. “Mother of all life, a child who hears your call beseeches you to show this world a new revelation of love and power. Blessed Lady, it is asked that where there is pain, the light of pure and perfect love grant peace and mercy. Lady of the Blessed Waters, receive into the light an imperfect traveler. The end is only a beginning. By your grace all is made new. Amen.”
Looking up into his eyes, Rada breathed, “Amen.”
The door opened behind them. Val let go of Rada and used a knuckle to touch a bead of blood that had appeared under his nostril. Three guards drew up and so Rada stepped back. Someone was pointing, showing the way to the press box in the gallery, insisting she only had a few seconds to reach it. There was now a lot of activity and anxiety surrounding Val. The guard with his key in the handcuffs had a nervous stomach. The flanking guards worried what Val might do once his hands were released. It appeared they always worried for this moment, which generally passed without complication. Rada was gone. Val shifted his hands behind his back for the cable cuffs. The guards appreciated cooperation, didn’t pull the cable too tight.
“We’re going to turn around now.” This was a disembodied voice.
As Val drifted away, physically and in other ways, he no longer saw faces. He turned the way he was guided, and understood, as soon as he did, why three men were holding onto him.
His legs wanted to melt, they nearly did, and that perfectly anticipated dip, that second of weakness, was so common to the guards’ experience, that they paused in unison.
A voice from the closing shadows spoke to him: “A little while longer. Just walk forward.”
He was looking at a platform on which stood two technicians, and over which dangled the noose.
“Steady now.”
He thought, I am steady.
The noose got bigger, and the rail in front of it. There was a glare beyond the rail but once he realize it was the partition on the gallery and that there were people sitting in chairs looking up at him, he stopped staring at the gallery and saw only the man beside the noose.
The technician said, “Put your heels together.”
He was never conscious of complying but felt shortly the strap drawing tight around his calves. The noose shifted toward him, seemingly of its own volition, then disappeared entirely.
When he lowered his head he felt the rope graze his skin.
The technician moved behind him, and then Val felt the noose like a half-circle tightening under his chin.
He resented it right away. As he flinched, the guards at his arms stepped back. There is darkness at my feet, Val thought, and with a flutter of panic.
The goddess answered, for she was, he had long since learned, usually present at these moments: “There is light, and it is everywhere.”
He had that, in the end, and what the spectators saw were his eyes closing and his features softening, and his chest filling with breath. He fell, and died, and waited in light, but also in darkness, to begin again.
--- Exile continues with the Book of Hephaestion
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