Swans Over the Moon Read Online Free Page A

parental
affection was lost in the formality of his voice.
    She nodded and, as she did, a low moan
sounded from the surrounding Scaramouche, a moan that rose and
dipped, struck and eddied, wheeled into a plaintive, beautiful
song.
    The Judicar looked from side to side, fearful
and perplexed, but saw that his enemy's bayonets no longer pointed
at him. “What is this witchcraft?” he demanded, pushing her chin up
again with his blade.
    His daughter, nearly breathless with the
effort it took to stay awake, replied. “Listen. You will recognize
. . .”
    He acquiesced for the honor of the oath. The
hair on the back of his neck stood on end when he placed the
haunting tune.
    Images of his daughters and wife wheeled back
in time, like a stack of daguerrotypes being flipped rapidly
backwards from present to past by some invisible hand, the light of
his memories fluttering like candlelight in their wind. The visions
slowed, then stopped on a scene of his wife playing a harp, the
blue of earthlight at night cascading down through the glass roof
above the royal bedchamber, oceans dripping liquid music from the
instrument's strings. Her voice, warm and serene, almost filled
their bedchamber, the cooing of a baby – Cimbri, and, years later,
her younger sister Basia, then Selene. The room was filled with a
fulsome warmth that created a feeling of sanctuary from the dying
world on the cold lunar surface above the bedchamber.
    The comfort of those most private moments
filled him, momentarily. But the bedchamber evaporated before his
eyes as nervousness, then a deep-welling resentment, flowed from
him as he returned to the present, surrounded by Scaramouche
singing this song, a song that only his wife could have fully
known. “How?” he questioned, his voice full of accusation. “How do
they know this song? This was your mother's song.”
    “No,” Cimbri cried, “It is their song,
father. It tells of a mother's miraculous discovery that she could
feed her child from her own breasts, that the child need not kill
to eat until it grew, and the peace that entered childhood as a
result of that discovery. It is one of their founding myths. I did
not teach it to them. They had it first.”
    “Then your mother,” a searing revelation
dawned on him, “your mother learned it . . . from them?”
    A weak smile creased Cimbri's pallid face. “I
see beauty where you see darkness. And in that darkness, mother hid
this thing from you. She feared that you would not see their beauty
as she and I did. I fear she was right.”
    The song slowed and the Scaramouche sauntered
northward just as the sound of hoofbeats sounded from the south.
The Judicar's freshly-rallied troops crashed into the rear column
of the retreating Scaramouche, breaking them into small pockets
that gave little resistance to the slaughter inflicted on them. The
hoofs of the Procellarians’ horses became encrusted with a pink
paste composed of the soil of a dying world mixed with the blood of
a retreating army. The Judicar involuntarily fell to one knee and
watched the waning battle paint the landscape in long streaks to
the north.
    The Procellarian knights cheered the rout,
then helped their enfeebled commander onto the back of an abandoned
steed. He rode back to the cliff and ascended with assistance,
wounded, but un-defeated. Selene greeted him with a kiss and a
glass of wine, which he drank deeply, not stopping until the vessel
was empty and dry as the plains to his back.
    “Father,” Selene said dramatically so that
all would hear, a theatrical performance as much as a greeting.
“Another victory for our people. Hurrah!”
    The women and girls cheered him as his
knights, working on the bleak plain below, constructed a gallows
with the bones and muskets of the dead and dying Scaramouche. There
the Judicar's traitorous daughter was hung for treason on the
bodies of those she mistakenly loved and led, astride their weapons
of sedition.
    The Judicar, weakened by his wound,