CHAPTER 41

Va was sitting hunched on a rock at the brow of the hill. Ariadne’s drive pod loomed over his head, blocking out what light there was that came from the leaden sky. The sun had spiralled away behind them, low on the horizon. It was inexpressibly cold.

‘Brother?’ said Benzamir. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Looking for answers. Finding none. And you, Maghrebi?’

‘More or less the same.’ Benzamir kicked a rock down the slope, and watched it tumble and bounce away.

‘The ship, Persephone. Did you heal it?’

‘No. It was a fool’s errand from start to finish. She was dead; now she’s mad. All she does is sing.’ He sat down next to the monk. ‘For some reason Ariadne takes comfort in that. She used to play among the stars, and she’s reduced to this. I should never have agreed to meddle with her.’

‘So why did you?’

‘Because,’ said Benzamir, ‘I have an insatiable urge to try and fix things. Situations, ships, people. It makes so much trouble for me.’

Va stared into the distance. ‘Then you should stop.’

‘I know. What’s to be done with the princess?’

‘You seem to ask as if I had some power or authority over her. She is free to do whatever she wishes.’ Va rubbed his hands together slowly, squeezing the problem between his palms to make it more malleable. ‘I loved her once. No, that’s not true. I thought I could possess her once. Own her body and soul. Her rejection of me was like a fire that would never go out. And now it is me who is glacially cold towards her, and she who burns every moment of every day.’

‘I would’–Benzamir stared at his feet, even as he felt his cheeks colour despite the cold–‘I would fix her.’

Va looked at him suddenly, as if noticing him for the first time.

‘What? What is it?’ asked Benzamir with increasing urgency.

‘Should I laugh or cry? Listen, Maghrebi, this is not a game that you can win. Even you are not magician enough to change the way Elenya feels about me. Sometimes I wonder if any power in Heaven or Earth can. If you took her beyond this world, as I believe you can, and showed her every wonder of creation, do you think it would make her want me less? And you more?’

‘I don’t know what I’m thinking,’ confessed Benzamir. ‘I used to. Before I met her.’

‘You’re not the first. Look at me.’ Va swept a hand over the scars on his head. ‘Look what I’ve done, what I could do. I am a monster. And yet she loves only me.’

Benzamir swallowed hard. He felt almost weightless. ‘It’s time we went.’ But he didn’t move. He stared out to sea, searching fruitlessly for the line which divided the ocean from the sky.

         

The hum of the ship invaded Benzamir’s cabin and kept him from sleep so long that he never noticed the slide into unconsciousness. One moment he was staring, dry-eyed, at the wall, the next he was awake again with a figure sitting at his feet. There was no transition, no sense of time passing, no feeling of being rested.

He could see in the dark. What light there was from the pinpoints marking the door frame was sufficient.

‘Alessandra? How long have you been there?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘A while.’

Benzamir blinked. ‘Ariadne should have told me. In fact, Ariadne shouldn’t have let you in.’

‘She said you couldn’t sleep.’

‘I’ve become unused to this room. All the places I’ve slept in: cots, beds, floors, hammocks slung over the decks of ships at sea. And now I have problems. I should have gone to the flight deck; there’s something about that chair.’

‘She said she was worried about you.’

‘Ariadne is always worried about me. It’s part of the arrangement.’ He rubbed his face. ‘Except she’s not talking to me at the moment. I suppose I could see this as a thaw in relations.’

‘Why are you angry with her?’

‘Because Ariadne has an armoured hull and a gigawatt laser. You don’t. She has no business asking you to risk your neck in any battle plan we might come up with. I told her so, and that was pretty much that.’

‘You’re going to fight them, aren’t you?’

Benzamir dialled the lights up enough to allow her to see him, wrapped in a sheet, face slack with fatigue, and for him to see her properly, hunched over, tense as a steel wire.

‘It looks likely,’ he said. He shifted so he could sit. ‘I don’t want to. If they won’t come with me, I’ll have to make them. It’s what I was sent to do.’

‘Are you going to die?’ Her face was pinched, pale, tight-lipped.

‘It depends on how willing they are to kill me.’

‘That’s not an answer.’ Alessandra stood up and began to pace the few steps between the walls.

‘It’s a sort of answer,’ he said hopefully.

Her face twitched with a not-quite smile. ‘And you expect me to stand by and watch?’

‘I had to stand by and watch you save Elenya. Do you think that was easy for me?’ Benzamir tightened the sheet in front of him.

Her breath caught in her throat for a moment. Then she said: ‘I could have done nothing. It would have been easy for me to do nothing.’

‘I think I know you better.’

She didn’t reply, just paced and paced until she threatened to wear the floor down. Benzamir watched her, going through a series of gestures that betrayed his nervousness: palm wiping, nose scratching, toe wriggling.

Eventually she stopped and sat down again. ‘Even if you live, you’re going to go away.’

‘Alessandra, of course I’m going away. The whole point of me coming was to make sure you’d all be left alone.’

‘Left alone?’ she snorted. ‘You’ve interfered with everything you touched.’

‘As has been pointed out to me by our Orthodox friend.’

‘You’ll go away and leave us with our memories, and our dreams of something greater than ourselves. It seems cruel.’

She was quiet for a while, and Benzamir checked the time on his internal clock. He watched the seconds tick by in the corner of his vision.

‘So where will you leave me, Benzamir Mahmood?’

When he didn’t answer, she left him. The door slid shut behind her, but he continued to stare at the place where she’d been. He thought about lying down again, but knew it would be pointless.

He put on his pilot’s coverall and went to find some peace.

         

It was a part of the ship he rarely visited, and he assumed that his passengers wouldn’t have found it yet. But when he reached the door, it was open, and there was a pale, flickering light inside.

She had taken two candles from their place in an alcove and placed them on the stand in front of her. One was already lit, and she was reaching out with a taper to light the other when she stopped in mid-stretch. Benzamir was certain he hadn’t made a noise.

‘Sorry, my lady.’

Elenya completed her task, holding the wavering flame to the candle wick and waiting for it to catch.

‘You appear in the most surprising places, Benzamir.’ She blew the taper out and turned to face him. ‘You see it as your duty to save the weak and raise up the fallen. We only have to say your name, and you come to our aid. Are you a saint or an angel?’

‘Neither, Princess. Not with the thoughts that I’ve had.’

‘But you’re no mere man. I saw you fight.’

Benzamir took a candle of his own, held it to a flame and sat it in the holder. The three lights gave only the barest illumination.

‘I don’t do religion very well, any of them. I don’t know if that makes me deficient in some way. I sometimes believe in a god. Sometimes I think he believes in me. Today? It had mixed results.’ As he stared at the candle, he remembered Ibn Alam, he remembered Persephone.

‘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 bloodline 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.’