Swans Over the Moon

  Swans Over the Moon

  Forrest Aguirre

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2012 Forrest Aguirre

  Discover other titles by Forrest Aguirre at Smashwords.com

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  Chapter 1

  The Judicar stood in the middle of his chamber, chin up, his thick arms extending straight out from the velvet robes that draped his substantial frame. He waited patiently as his two-headed servant lowered a breastplate over his head. The chromium-embossed scene of two majestic swans entwined in mid-flight combat over the cratered surface of the moon passed beneath his bearded chin to rest on his broad chest.

  The servant next dressed his master's legs and solidly-grounded feet in greaves and sabaton. The ruler looked down with limpid blue eyes to the engravings etched into his armor. His irises reflected scintillating scenes as detailed as those painted on the three walls of the chamber in which he stood. Baroque scenes of conquest, ritual, and monumental architecture – built in celebration of the kingdom's glorious history and accomplishment – flowed from one wall to another, save on the side of the room to the nobleman's back. Behind him stood four immense white marble pillars, behind which a complex series of marble-floored hallways and doorways sprawled. Pygmies with eyelids sewn shut (lest their unworthy sight bear witness to the glory of the Judicar, whose palace this was), ran to and fro through the maze of rooms and halls, fulfilling errands and orders with pattering feet through a percussion ensemble of opening and slamming doors. All seemed in a rush, an emergency, bodies frantic at the behest of the royal bureaucracy. Occasionally, one of the slaves would crawl into the chamber on his knees, offering up another piece of the exquisitely-worked armor to the Judicar's two-headed servant, then, with bowed head, the dwarf would slide back on his knees to exit the chamber.

  The Judicar was pensive. “Who say men that I am, Heterodymus?”

  Heterodymus' shriveled, lich-like left head answered first: “Men say that you are mad, that you should vacate the throne and let the people rule over their own interests,” it croaked in a high, scratchy voice.

  He nodded, thinking for a moment, then turned to the other head. “Dexter?” he asked, seemingly unaffected by the brashness of the left-head's comment.

  The right head responded in a cool, reassuring voice whose cheerful tone contradicted the left head's as much as the godlike, innocent beauty of his own baby face opposed the other's extreme ugliness. “Sinistrum is mistaken. Men say that you are the greatest ruler Procellarium has ever known. A genius in trade and tactics, my lord.”

  The Judicar weighed their words for a moment. “Madman or genius,” the noble spoke in a dignified manner, without a hint of boasting or over-confidence, “I am their leader. Judicar Parmour Pelevin. And I will uphold the traditions of my people.”

  “Yes, my lord,” Heterodymus' two heads spoke in unison, bowing to their liege.

  “I'll vote for genius,” a female voice, soft as a distant mountain breeze, declared from between the pillars behind the Judicar.

  He turned, smiled. “Selene. My only comfort. How dare you flatter me?” he joked. “Come in, my dear.”

  She entered the room, gliding over the floor as if the ground itself retreated from her touch in recognition of her standing as the Judicar's daughter. Her waist-length ghost-white hair flowed only slightly behind her crimson robes. Above her floated two apparitions – Tarans, those wispy souls of un-baptized infants that are often seen flitting about in cemeteries or dark woods, bewailing in mewing voices their terrible fates. But these two were quite contented, continually re-arranging a series of red silk scarves around the maiden's head, shoulders, waist, and arms. She simultaneously swelled and retreated, like a beating heart, as she approached.

  Her lips hardly moved when she spoke, and the Judicar, who concentrated his sight through the ever-moving veils and scarves, thought that her full red lips never moved at all. Of course, this must all be illusion, he assured himself. Selene's voice, faint as a whisper, projected forth with a soothing, yet piercing clarity. “And how can a daughter over-flatter her father, even if he is the Judicar?”

  “There you go again, little swan. And what is it you wish from me at such an important hour, my young one?”

  “Only to wish you good fortune.” She handed him a crystal flask containing a phosphorescent golden liquid. “And to present you a gift in preparation for the upcoming engagement.”

  He looked at the flask, then to Selene. “My thanks, dear. You are, indeed, reason for good cheer. You brace my confidence.”

  She curtsied, smiling, the Tarans lowering and rising with her, like balloons on tethers. With a slight nod, she turned to glide between the pillars and into the maze of halls and doors, sightless pygmies parting before her like fog before sunlight, so powerfully was her presence felt.

  “And now,” he said to himself as he watched her leave, his smile fading with her departure, “it is time.” He turned his back to the pillars as Selene disappeared through a distant doorway. A wrinkle of determination fixed itself to his brow. He breathed in deeply, then exhaled slowly through his aqualine nose, steeling himself to face some enemy.

  “Sinistrum, begin the recounting,” the Judicar said. Heterodymus' left head raised its slit-like eyelids to reveal yellowed orbs buried beneath manifold layers of wrinkled flesh. “Recite to me The Doom of Change.”

  Sinistrum spoke slowly, deliberately. Apprehension pricked the back of his parched and withered throat:

  Tradition demands

  The Doom of Change be spoken,

  Else that stands shall fall,

  That built is demolished,

  Law falters and fails man,

  And decay consumes all.

  This is the doom.

  The right head spoke next, its features evincing an articulation at odds with their infantile appearance, its voice a sing-song entirely inappropriate for the gravity of the circumstance in which it spoke. “Sinistrum speaks rightly, my lord. It is so.”

  “Now, Dexter. Explain the carvings on this ailette,” the Judicar tapped his left shoulder piece beneath the war-blade that jutted out like a shredding saw from his rotator cuff. It showed a pillar, cracked in half, falling over onto a single rose that grew up out of the lunar soil. Behind the pillar, shoving the column over in the direction of the flower, stood the naked figure of the Judicar, his long, curly hair cascading over the taut sinews of his neck and shoulders.

  The servant's baby-head let out a long, high-pitched sigh. He lowered his gaze to the floor. Dexter did not want to say what was required of him. Nevertheless, duty over-rode desire, and he spoke while fastening the Judicar's mail and leather armbands and gauntlets over his velvet sleeves and lace cuffs. “This is the consequence of ignoring The Doom of Change. One Judicar defied The Doom, missing the required ambulation of the Krieger pools. At the Hour of Ambulation, this Judicar and his wife bathed at the palace, putting the pleasures of the flesh above the order of the kingdom. They exited the bath, but when the gongs of deep midnight sounded, at the exact moment when the ambulation should have ended, a pillar cracked free from its footing, falling and crushing the life-breath from the Judicar's wife.”

  “And who was this . . . foolish Judicar?” Pelevin asked in a stern, yet trembling voice, impat
ient for an answer.

  Dexter's head lowered, silent.

  “It is you, my lord,” Sinistrum answered. He handed the Judicar his ornately-carved blunderbuss pistol, then fastened the warrior-ruler's rapier around his liege's waist.

  “And that,” the armed and armored Judicar Parmour Pelevin stated as he turned toward the pillars of his palace and the labyrinthine halls beyond, “is why I go now to kill my daughter, Selene's sister, the ever-wayward and increasingly unpredictable Cimbri Pelevin. She will not see the next star-rise. Prepare my steed. Ready my men. We ride.”

  The Judicar quaffed the contents of the crystal flask given to him earlier by Selene – nepenthe and absinthe to nullify the pain of the past and bolster his courage for the forthcoming engagement. He threw the flask to the floor in resignation, causing it to explode into a hundred shards, then strode out into the hallway, blind pygmies scattering before him like sheep before a wolf, only to gather behind him, picking up the glassy slivers left in his wake. Their knees and fingers bled on the armory's floor, beneath the swans of the moon.

  Chapter 2

  On a high, white bluff overlooking a vast lunar flatland, Selene Pelevin sat in a wicker chair under an oversized pink parasol. A cadre of pygmies attended the young noblewoman and the two hundred other women and girls similarly positioned atop the cliff. Some served the women tea and biscuits, others waved palm fronds to keep the moon dust from soiling the ladies' lily-white silks. The servants were as busy as the women were sedentary.

  Selene, like the other women, wore a billowing white dress altogether too large for her slim frame, which gave her the appearance of a pulsating albino queen-ant whenever a breeze blew. Her Tarans entertained themselves by playfully winding and unwinding her scarves around her head and arms as she sipped tea, a bloated insect-puppet on strings, two infantile puppeteers dancing in the air above the pom-pom fringed umbrella.

  The other women also wore voluminous dresses and brimmed hats adorned with flower blossoms. They spoke of past battles and the bravery of Procellarium's knights, of how the blue-skinned savages of Wollaston had fled before the glistening blades of the Judicar's guard chittering in their insectoid tongue as they were crushed into submission under hoof and steel. Between war tales, they gossiped about theater and fashion, their gardens and hobbies, how good help was so difficult to come by. The sound of hooves from the valley below interrupted their whispers and giggles. A hush blanketed the women, and their pygmy servants produced small brass telescopes and mother-of-pearl-inlaid opera glasses from wooden boxes, proffering them to their ladies. Hundreds of lenses soon glittered with miniature reflections of the plains below, all moving in one sweep, like a giant cliff-side kaleidoscope.

  The southern rim of the Rüinker Plateau was cut by a line of mounted riders 100 wide. Silver potiels adorned the horses' heaving breasts, reflecting a hint of blue from the immense planet that nearly filled the dark sky above the battlefield. Mail shimmered from beneath the saddles, giving the thin line a blue-white iridescence in the dark of night. The Judicar and his Procellarian knights appeared to ride on a glowing wave of hooves as they crossed that once-fertile plain, laid desolate, along with the rest of the moon some millenia ago by industrialization, massive over-farming, and environmental recklessness. Perhaps, in time, mankind might reach outward to that planet that glowed blue and green, as the moon once had, not with mere crater-pockets of bare subsistence, but throbbing with life. In the meantime, the decrees of conservation were all that the Judicar and his people could cling to. All else was a continuation of decay, the fulfillment of decrepitude. Everything has its equal and opposite reaction, the Procellarian scientists had found, and the Procellarian nation stood to oppose entropy by embodying and enforcing order. In time, they concluded, law would prevail.

  The Judicar held his gauntleted hand up to the square, commanding his army to halt. The smell of horse foam and sweat caught up with the men, settling into their nostrils as they awaited orders. The discomfort and stench, not to mention the distraction of their wives and daughters spectating from the overlooking bluff, added to their unease.

  After sending out a squad of vedettes for reconnaissance, the Judicar beckoned Heterodymus to his side. Then, having raised a long brass spyglass to his eye, he dictated to his two-headed assistant, Dexter nodding, looking at the scroll on which he wrote, while Sinistrum squinted, looking at the northern horizon where a black mass marched toward them, a low cloud of dust in its wake.

  The Judicar spoke slowly and deliberately:

  “In the star-illumined twilight I could see them marching in a firing-line across the plateau, several hundred strong. It was difficult to judge their exact numbers because of the manner in which their shadows fell on each other, like blackened match sticks constantly re-arranging themselves in an ever-tightening box as their amoebic mass assumed fighting formation. An ebony army of marionettes. Everything about them was long and thin, from their proboscopic-nosed ivory masks to their black top hats, some four feet high, to the razor-thin, single elongated slits in their masks that served, somehow, as eye-holes. Even their weapons, wide-butted flintlock muskets with barrels longer than a man's full height, bespoke aphotic darkness thrusting like a knife into the light. That gaunt army bristled like a black nest of stilettos. We stood ready to quench the dark fires of the Scaramouche, like our fathers before us.”

  Heterodymus put his stylus away. Dexter looked up at the Judicar with an expression of awe, while Sinistrum continued to assess the enemy's strength. “It is a worthy account, M'lord,” Dexter said in admiration. Sinistrum nodded, grunting his assent, not taking his eyes off the approaching army.

  “Now the record is in your keep,” the Judicar nodded to Dexter. “I ride, for duty demands it.” He spurred his horse forward.

  The Judicar broke from the line, galloping across the monochromatic wasteland. At a carfax halfway between the two armies, he halted and dismounted, inviting the enemy to parlay with a shouted challenge.

  “Forth, coward! We, the unbending, bring desolation to your lands, unless you surrender forthwith.”

  The black box pulsed, as if preparing to burst, ejecting some foreign object from its mass. Finally, when the anfractuous gyrations of the formation bulged at the front, a breach appeared, revealing the onrushing figure of a young woman, black hair whipping behind her tightly-muscled body as she sprinted toward the carfax, a bird of prey on the hunt, arms held out like wings for balance. She stopped suddenly still, only two footsteps from the Judicar's stone face. She stood glowering, as tall as the Judicar in her ankle-length vermillion gambeson, a bright red star in the blackness. A thin basket-hilt rapier hung from her belt. But her main weapon was the same as that of her troops, a long-barreled flintlock affixed with a long, thin stinger of a black bayonet. She looked up at the blade, slowly tracing the blood groove down toward the stock with a long finger, admiring the utility of the weapon. Finally, she focused her attention on the Judicar.

  “Father,” she nodded a grudging acknowledgment.

  “Cimbri.” His voice lacked emotion.

  “I tried to burke your treason. A demarche was sent.”

  “A demarche meant to expire this night, whether heeded or not. And your challenge,” she sneered, “is, of course, without honor. Surrender? So that your noble knights can fall on the Scaramouche without the fuss of a fight? That is not nobility. That is genocide.”

  “It is our praxis.”

  “No,” she breathed in through her nose, trying to contain her anger, though her disdain was clearly evident. “It is yours alone. I reject it, in the name of my noble mother.”

  “Your mother is dead, girl, as you soon will be unless you call off this foolish escapade and surrender.”

  “I cannot surrender. Mother would not approve,” she said, seething.

  “Damn you, silly girl!” He shouted so loudly that the echoes of his words stopped only just short of the spectator-womens' ears. His knights chuckled uneasily. “Renoun
ce your disloyalty, reject your insolence, and you shall live.”

  “Disloyalty to whom? To you? Your office? Your dedication to the outdated traditions that put you in this despicable situation in the first place?”

  “I have put myself in the hands of our praxis to preserve my people.”

  “And what of the people who die as a result? What do you care for them?”

  It was his turn to sneer. “What other people?”

  She looked over her shoulder at the army behind her, then turned her gaze back to him, hatred burning in her eyes. “You see in the Scaramouche only long-nosed ebony masks, empty eye pits. You see them as inferior creatures, mere beasts whose only worth is to suffer at your hands. You fail to understand them, therefore you despise them. I see a race of beauty, a people of rich cultural heritage, individuals with dreams and loves and passions and families; a people who, every year at this appointed time – your appointed time, not theirs – are subjected to the raids of your kin and kingdom, not because they pose any real threat to Procellarium, but because stale tradition dictates this course. A curse on your pestiferous praxis!”

  He spat his response: “I see an ancient plague of creatures birthed from the blackest crater mouths of the dark side, spewing forth like crawling rivers of tar toward my kingdom, my homeland, for generations untold. And now,” he stood erect, slowing his speech to emphasize his words, “at their head I see a traitor to the kingdom of her birth, to her family, to her people, and to the memory of the mother that brought her to life.”

  Cimbri's brow creased with rage, her scowling face approaching the crimson hue of her armor. She wheeled from the Judicar and bolted back to her troops, disappearing in their midst.