Carve the Sky by Alexander Jablokov

Author:Alexander Jablokov
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2019-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

Anton’s breath steamed slightly in the sharp cold air of the Rapier's tearoom. He pulled the quilted robe around himself and watched the water rise in the tube of the teamaker. Coals glowed red under the bowl of water ready to boil. Miriam fed the fire with twigs of sandalwood, filling the air with aromatic smoke. The octagonal chamber, its walls hung with blue damask, was dark, and the fire caught the muscles of the silver panther that leaped across her hair.

A sword in a scabbard of dark lacquer with embedded silver crystals rested across Anton’s knees. While it was illegal to carry a sword in the passageways of the Charlotte Amalie, it would have been impolite not to carry one within the Rapier, so she had lent him one.

“I remember this,” he said, running his hand across the scabbard’s old nicked and scratched surface.

She looked up, her dark agate eyes unreadable. “You learned on that sword, and fought your first duel with it, in Pyramid Square. I thought it would help you.”

He held it tightly, with all of its memories, and felt a mixture of pride and melancholy. In other words, he felt Martian.

When the tea was ready, Miriam poured them each a glass. Anton took a sip of his tea. It was strong and bitter, and its smell and flavor completed the work of the sword. The years dropped away. He sat in a room alone with a woman he had once loved desperately and once again felt an inconvenient surge of lust. He had been young and she had been wise, perhaps not the best combination, but it had changed him forever.

Miriam lowered her eyelashes at him. She now wore a domestic robe of midnight blue, darker than the damask of the walls, so she seemed a deeper shadow in gathering night. They hadn’t talked about the duel, and wouldn’t, though Plauger now lay somewhere aboard the Rapier, badly wounded. The refusal to discuss what everyone knows to be true is the essence of civilized behavior. He rather suspected that they were not going to discuss Martian troops crawling around a space vessel bound for the Neutral Zone either.

He looked at her and imagined another woman, slender, with dark eyes and braided black hair. Vanessa Karageorge was now somewhere aboard the Charlotte Amalie. Where was she? How could he find her?

“Have you ever fallen in love with someone you thought could betray you?” Anton asked. “Not personally betray you—that’s almost anyone. We are never safe there. I mean betray what you believe in, your House, your profession, your world.”

She did not have to think. “No,” she said. “I don’t think that’s possible. That implies an emotional laxness I just cannot accept. “ She looked levelly at him, realizing that he was not just asking an abstract question.

He wanted to lean on her Martian certainties. “But we can’t help falling in love....” He stopped, realizing that he sounded ridiculous. What could he say? Vanessa’s loyalties were obscure, and so, for that matter, were Miriam’s.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.