Wedding Read online

  His beatific smile and the accompanying words sent a rush of joy through me, although I couldn’t quite trust it yet. “But you didn’t know,” I said. “You’re leaving now to ask permission to marry me. And you probably won’t get it.”

  Dominic sighed, a heavy, chest-heaving intake and exhalation that rocked me physically as his speech had emotionally. “Amalie,” he said, “if I cannot marry you by the ’Graven Rule in the way I prefer, I will marry you privately before the gods, or in a Christian ceremony—”

  “I’m not Christian,” I said, unable to help myself, “and neither are you. We can’t really marry in a Christian ceremony if neither one of us—”

  “Stop it, Amalie. I’m saying that I will marry you somehow and you will be my wife.” Dominic’s voice grew deeper and more insistent with each word. “Do you understand?”

  “No,” I said. But I was smiling again.

  Dominic was too wrapped up in his reasoning to know when I was teasing. “I know I left things vague. I was frightened and angry, and I didn’t dare say what I felt.” He tightened his hold on me. “But you seem to have made your decision long ago. Everything you have thought and done since I brought you here is precisely what an affianced bride should do. You have conducted yourself like ’Gravina Aranyi from the beginning, learning about the Realm, the fortress and the land, working with Berend and Magali.” He squeezed my waist, proud to have inspired such devotion. “After all that effort, don’t tell me you have changed your mind.”

  I pushed against Dominic’s strong arms encircling me, twisted around on his lap to see his face, wanting to know if this was a serious offer or Dominic’s way of making the best of things, accepting a state of affairs that had developed in his absence. “I never really made up my mind in the first place,” I said.

  Dominic’s inner eyelids began to lose their silvery reflective quality and took on a clear, glassy appearance. I had succeeded, if that is the right word, in making him angry, in wounding him and causing him to fight back. “If you do not want to marry me, you have chosen a strange time to tell me. But I want to marry you,” he said, as if threatening me with a harsh punishment, “and I will marry you, unless you can give me one good reason why not.” The translucent eyes carved through me like laser surgery.

  I nerved myself to return the knife-edge stare. It cut but I felt no pain; I bled but did not weaken. We were having the discussion we should have had months ago, if life had not intervened, and I would not throw this chance away. I listed all the things that had bothered me, that had chased each other around in my mind for so long. “Because I’m Terran. Because I’m not ’Graven. Because you don’t really want a wife and family. How’s that?” I said. “I can give you three reasons.”

  Dominic and I had entered, not communion, but a strange, antagonistic kind of synergy, our emotions bouncing off each other’s mind and rebounding with ever greater force. As I had been hounded by these problems, so had Dominic, and he resisted now by denying them, by rejecting their validity, as he had so often wished he could. “I said good reasons!” he shouted. “Not bullshit!” It sounds worse in Eclipsian, an obscenity beyond the literal meaning.

  “It’s not bullshit!” I shouted back at Dominic, using the same filthy word, enjoying the brute force of it in my mouth and on our eardrums. “It’s not bullshit. It’s real. It’s the truth. It’s what you think, if you ever do think.” As always, once I gave myself up to anger I let it carry me away. I was eye to eye with Dominic but we were both bellowing as if across a valley, our faces growing red, the tendons in our necks standing out. Something Magali had said came back to me. “Now I’m pregnant you don’t want the trouble of acknowledging another natural-born daughter.”

  The corners of Dominic’s mouth quivered. We had not broken eye contact, and slowly, wondrously, his inner eyelids grew opaque, the silver creeping back in, until I saw two small reflections of my angry red face. “Where do you get such crazy ideas?” he asked, smiling despite himself.

  I could not lose my anger so quickly. “They’re not crazy,” I said. “You can’t deny that all those things are true.”

  “Yes I can,” Dominic said. “I don’t have a natural daughter, only a son. So if our daughter is born before we marry, when I accept her publicly as mine she’ll be my first natural daughter, not ‘another’ one.” He laughed at his stupid grammatical quibble.

  I raised my arm to slap his face and Dominic caught my hand and held it and kissed the palm, then pulled me close and kissed me on the mouth. When I resisted he used his gift to pinion me, as he had during festival night. Helpless, I opened my mouth, began to return the kiss as if my body were not under my control, until I found my own crypta strength and pushed us apart.

  Dominic let me go. “Cherie,” he said, “do you think I’m so stupid I’m unaware of all these things?”

  “Yes,” I muttered.

  “No you don’t,” Dominic said. “You couldn’t love anyone that witless.” He lifted my chin with a strong hand and compelled me to look at him again. “Beloved,” he said, “I know a little of what you’ve been going through. It hasn’t been easy for me, either. And always something keeping us apart.”

  I grew calm, surprised into stillness at the echo of my own thoughts. Dominic took my silence for a good sign. “You know I love you, don’t you?” he asked, sure of the answer, not waiting for my nod. “That’s the most important thing. And it’s true, I never did want a wife and family.” As I started to speak, he laid a finger on my lips, hushing me. “Until now. Once I met you, it was different. Can you understand that? I never married before, would not marry just for the sake of being married. But now that I can have you for my wife, and our daughter for my family, I have a real incentive to marry.”

  There was nothing to say, only to accept the statement, not as a gift, but as a right, recognized and confirmed, between partners. I bowed my head in assent and wished the rest were so easy.

  Dominic was with me, keeping pace with my thoughts. “As for your not being ’Graven, I know there’s been a lot of speculation in this house, and elsewhere, about who you are. That you have the third eyelids, and the gift, and you look like ’Graven.”

  “They call me ‘Lady Amalie,’ and think my father wouldn’t acknowledge me,” I said, embarrassed by the way the lie had taken hold in Dominic’s own house.

  Dominic laughed. “It was the only way people could make sense of things. And so convenient, no need to explain.” His voice had developed an edge, and I drew back from him. “No, Amalie,” he said. “It’s not you I was scolding, but myself. There’s something I should have told you before.” He pulled me close again, traced the contours of my nose and mouth, tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear.

  I waited in apprehension. There were so few secrets between us, I dreaded another revelation, something worse than all we had weathered so far.

  Dominic took a breath and let it out slowly. “I do not like to discuss such a thing. But this is relevant to our situation.” Still he was silent. “My mother,” he said at last. “She was not ’Graven. She was not even human. Not entirely.”

  Had I known, or guessed something of this? His height, his slender yet powerful frame, his gift that was not quite like the others’, that had not fit into a seminary. “Thank the gods,” I said. “I thought you were going to tell me something dreadful.”

  “Did you hear me?” Dominic asked.

  “I heard you. But I don’t know what to say. If you’re not human, what are you? And if you’re really a lizard man or have three heads, wouldn’t I have noticed it by now?”

  Dominic didn’t laugh. “Listen to me,” he said. “This is serious. When the first settlers created the world we have now, the forests and the animals, all the things we grow and eat and rely on to live—they tried a few– experiments– that didn’t quite work out. You know they had the genomes for the entire Terran ecosystem?”

  I could only nod.

  “Well, they used them. You
remember the ‘aides’ in the seminary.”

  “Oh, Dominic,” I said. “You’re not a lemur-cat-ape creature. I don’t believe it.”

  “No, not that. That’s one of the other experiments. But there were experiments on humans, too, especially gifted ones. The idea was to speed up human evolution, just as they were forcing rapid evolution of the whole ecosystem, a way to make gifted people better adapted to the cold and the altitude, to the weak sunlight and the harsh conditions of those first years. They tried mixing in genes of some other species with the human genome, and they succeeded. Too well.”

  I waited in silence for him to continue, knew he needed time and no interruptions.

  “My mother was one of these beings, with an extraordinary gift, and too well adapted to the natural environment to live among humans, in houses and wearing clothes. Her people live for hundreds of years, high in the mountains, and can change their sex at will. Or so I’m told.” He dared to look at my face to see how I was taking all this.

  Something buried deep in my memory was trying to surface. “Naomi is one of them, isn’t she?” I could recognize the similarity between her and Dominic that had disturbed me before. It was what gave her the ability to heal Dominic when other telepaths could not, her physiological resemblance to and communion with her patient that she had taunted me with not noticing.

  Dominic shook his head. “She’s a hybrid, a mix, like me. I don’t think anyone has seen a pure one, apart from my mother. To me, to all of us at Aranyi, she was beautiful and rare, a goddess come to earth for a little while.” His eyes focused inward, the childhood years breaking through the mist of adult oblivion, until he came back to the present, pain contorting his features. “I don’t remember her well. She died when I was five.” His voice was hoarse, with a sobbing note underneath.

  All my natural compassion was aroused by such a strong emotion from my lover. This was what telepathy and empathy were for, to comfort someone dear to me—the best use I could make of what had for so long been only wearying, demanding “gifts” that drained my energy and disrupted my life but gave nothing in return. I tried to form full communion. Tell me, I thought to him. Let me take some of the burden from you.

  Dominic blocked my attempt. “Let it be for now,” he said. He deliberately closed off the unbearable memories, regained something of his everyday ironic detachment. “I mentioned it only because I owe you the truth.” Distaste for the whole subject was evident in the set of his mobile mouth. “And to show you that ’Graven Assembly accepted me as heir to Aranyi. So you see, someone like you—gifted, and human—that should not be so difficult for the council to swallow.”

  Another memory was forcing its way into consciousness. That beautiful book I had not wanted to read, the one written in archaic verse that told the founding myth of Eclipsis. About the sky god Zichmni and the silver-eyed goddess Qiaolian. As far as I could tell, this myth, like all such myths, had a kernel or two of truth behind it: a mingling of Terran settlers, the leader who had taken the name of Zichmni, legendary traveler to an unknown land, and the exceptional, gifted beings they bred from their genomes; whose descendants, half-forgotten, feared and venerated, had left genetic markers in some of their noblest families. Like Aranyi.

  Everything Dominic had told me proved only that Dominic’s father had been both fortunate in finding such a superior being and clever in convincing her to become his wife. Dominic’s discomfort in talking about his mother stemmed from her death and his own feelings of abandonment, not from her nonhuman status. And if I was fully human, I was also Terran.

  The glow I had felt all day, from my nights with Dominic and their legacy of enveloping love, faded at last. Our anger and shouting had not dimmed it, only intensified some of the heat, but the cold, hard truth we were coming up against now was going to snuff the flame. Dominic, in his conflicted love for me, had tried to make a false comparison between us: both outsiders, he was claiming, both ultimately acceptable to ’Graven Assembly. Yet we were not. Native Eclipsian “aliens” could be ’Graven, welcomed in assembly, as Dominic was. Terran was anathema. His misguided defense of me was aimed, not at ’Graven Assembly, but at himself.

  I sat rigid on Dominic’s muscular thighs. “You won’t say it,” I said in a low voice, “so I will. I’m Terran. It’s a fact. I’m Terran, and you hate it, and it poisons our love every time you think of it.”

  If I had expected Dominic to leap in and contradict my bleak assessment with another spirited speech, I was disappointed. He remained silent, his arms loosely around me, only the slight twitch, the flinch when I said the word “Terran” proving he had heard me. We could get around everything else except my being Terran. Dominic could call it bullshit, but it was what divided us, not his vir orientation, nor his violent impulses, not my sex or my lack of ’Graven status. It was the only thing that genuinely bothered one of us about the other, and it was something that could not be changed.

  When I thought about it, it began to seem ridiculous that a minor biological detail, meaningless in itself, could threaten us, while so many real problems had been overcome. “But we are all Terrans,” I said. “Everybody on Eclipsis is Terran, whether directly from Terra now, or descended from the first settlers.”

  “Except when we’re not,” Dominic said. “When we’re a genetic variation.” His enigmatic smile deepened the chill around me.

  My stomach lurched, and my face and neck felt as if they were engulfed in flames. “Oh, gods!” I said, trying to jump off Dominic’s lap. “I’m not fit to live with.” Two minutes after Dominic tells me an essential truth about himself and I say something that proves I haven’t listened or remembered. I wanted to run from him and hide, in my room if I could flee no further. He could bear anything except having an idiot for a wife.

  “No,” Dominic said, his arms holding me in place. “You’ll have to stay here, away from decent people, and live with me.” He did not appear unduly offended. He kissed me as I struggled and his arms enfolded me ever tighter until I could not move, not without using crypta, which I had no desire to do. I could not risk encountering Dominic’s real feelings just now, whatever they were. I sat limp, my head lowered, blinking back the tears.

  Dominic slackened his hold a little, just enough to let me know I was not a prisoner. “Listen to me, Amalie.” He spoke more forcefully now. “I must explain things to you. Please promise me you won’t take offense or be angry at what I say.”

  I shook my head. “I have no right,” I said, my voice as tearful as my face, “to be angry at anything you say.”

  Dominic laughed indulgently at such nonsense. “I know you better than that. True or not, that would not stop you. But I need you to try to understand what I must say, and to control any emotional response you might have at first.”

  I had recovered sufficiently to weigh his demand and answer it honestly. “I can’t pledge such an impossible thing ahead of time. But I promise to hear you out before blowing up.”

  “Fair enough.” Dominic hesitated, picking his way carefully, deciding how best to begin. “My whole life I hated Terrans,” he said, going for the frontal assault. “Yes, I know that all human life here originated on Terra. But I think you can agree, now, that some of us are entitled to think of ourselves as Eclipsian, and the newcomers, those who arrived in the past generation or two, as ‘Terrans.’ ”

  I was still chagrined by my thoughtlessness, and did not wish to refer to it again. In my thoughts I apologized to my lover, who accepted the gesture and proceeded with his argument. “The Terrans came here in my grandfather’s time and they worked quickly, building and exploring, challenging our customs, disrespectful of our mores, making their mark on this world that did not belong to them. Once I was old enough to attend ’Graven Assembly, I opposed any suggestion of compromise between our ways and theirs. I was often in the minority, but I never considered moderating my position.”

  For a minute I had hope. “But I’m not like that,” I said. “Isn’t that w
hat you’re saying, that I’m different from the other Terrans you know?”

  Dominic stared into my eyes. This time there was nothing, no emotion. It was like looking at a statue, with marbles for eyes. “Please, Amalie,” he said. “I must tell you how I view Terrans, in case you have not guessed it.” He smiled sarcastically, mouth turned down. “Terrans are the enemy. I do not ‘know’ any Terrans. From the moment of their arrival they threatened everything that matters most to me and the few like me—those of us who value honor and our traditional way of life above commerce.” His face by now had the murderous look we both get when we must admit the unacceptable. “I think, for ’Graven, every concession to the Terrans is something we will come to regret, will destroy us all in time.”

  I did not need to see it in his eyes to know the emotions engendered by his thoughts: furious, resentful, warlike hatred that had festered for years. I was feeling chilled to the bone, but I gathered up my courage. “Are you saying you love me in spite of yourself?” That was the most depressing kind of love that one person could have for another. I might as well know it.

  “No, Amalie! Never think that.” He stroked my hair, as with a dog or a cat. “Meeting you has not changed my feelings. You do not make Terran policy, nor can you influence it. You have nothing to do with it.”

  Dominic had asked me not to give in to anger or hurt feelings before he began this speech and, as he had predicted, I had experienced both. What Dominic had expressed, and more, what I could sense behind the words, was even worse than I had anticipated. There was no danger now of my interrupting. I felt Dominic’s thoughts still percolating and sat in silence as tears filled my eyes. Why did he want to marry me? If it was this bad, how could he even bring himself to touch me? I blinked repeatedly, willing myself not to cry.