WE ARRIVE FOR DINNER after the Raa family has been seated around the low-lying table in a warm stone room that looks out through a glass wall over the plains and an escarpment of uncarved mountain. Oxygen-making ivy creeps along the walls and the domed ceiling, emitting a pale luminescence from white floral bulbs. More than a dozen Raa are in attendance. Rangy and austere even in their own home, they wear handmade rough fabrics of earth tones and sit rigidly on thin cushions around an ovular stone table, at the center of which is a single floating orb of blue light. The table is the only furniture in the room, and the ivy the only decoration.
Cassius and I join, both wearing dark Ionian kimonos and cloth slippers. There were no mirrors in my room to see how the clothing hangs. Ionian Golds believe mirrors promote vanity and obsession with the self. It’s a crime for even a lowColor to possess one. “Of course they don’t want mirrors,” Aja would say. “I’ve dogs handsomer than those Rim dusteaters.”
To be fair, the Raa family is not beautiful by Luna standards. Their faces are too long in the jaw, as though someone took the clay of their visages and pressed them between a vise. Except for Dido, their skin is incredibly pale, their eyes slightly larger than desirable, their hair darker. On Luna they would seem dour, cold creatures without proper refinement. But Seraphina’s words ring true. The absence of courtly behavior and affectation has a brutal purity to it. Grandmother despised most of the fops at court, and while I know she was not fond of Rim Golds, she did respect their stubborn fidelity to the old ways. It is the reason why she had my godfather obliterate Rhea: the hardest iron cannot be bent, only broken.
The serenity in the Raa’s movement and the dignity in their conversation are more impressive to me than all the carver-enhanced visages and pompous exchanges of Luna’s upper echelons. The family is not eviscerating the work of a new artist or lampooning a socialite for some faux pas. Instead, as we join, a quiet conversation debating the moral high ground between the Cyclops Polyphemus and the warrior Odysseus is under way.
“Poor Polyphemus,” says a young girl with wispy hair and dark-ringed eyes. “All he wanted to do was to eat his supper, but Odysseus had to come in and put out his one eye. He didn’t even have one to spare like Father!”
“To be fair, Polyphemus did eat two of Odysseus’s men,” Seraphina says, sparing a smile for me as I sit. “He’s a lesson on how not to be a bad host.”
There’s an empty space at the table beside her where a silver flower rests in place of a table setting. Probably for her sister, eleven years dead but still remembered every dinner. It is not the only empty seat. Though their patriarch is missing, we’re joined by the rest of Romulus’s brood. I’m introduced to them. Young Paleron, a thirteen-year-old silent boy. His laughing delight of a sister, Thalia, the Polyphemus sympathizer, who can’t be more than nine, and is utterly besotted with the color of my eyes. And Romulus’s mother, Gaia, a desiccated old harridan with larva-pale skin who drinks heavily and smokes bitter-smelling weed from a long pipe, which she clutches with spider-leg fingers. She does not touch her food and speaks only to the children in a wandering, frivolous voice.
The rest of the table is filled out by Seraphina’s cousins, including Bellerephon the Bold and his wife, a slender woman with large eyes and a trident diadem of House Norvo of Titan. The well-married man stares at us with pale eyes set in a sullen, cruel face. His long body is hunched like a praying mantis waiting for supper. Despite the earlier violence, Diomedes is also in attendance. He sits serenely at his mother’s side and seems the favorite object of the children’s adoration.
“The heroes of the hour,” Dido says with a smile to her family. “May I introduce Castor au Janus and Regulus au Janus. The men responsible for bringing our Seraphina back to us.” Two bowls are handed to us. Dido stands, takes two pinches of rice from her own bowl, and drops one into Cassius’s bowl and one into mine. Her family follows the same custom, each walking over to us to share from their own bowls, even Bellerephon, who flicks the rice with boorish contempt. His wife smiles apologetically. Last in line, Seraphina meets my gaze as she honors the rite and returns to her seat.
I wonder if her mother knows she visited my room or if her claim of her mother’s ignorance was a deception in itself. I didn’t tell Cassius. He would think it some devious manipulation. Perhaps it is. I’ve not stopped replaying the exchange in my head.
With rice before us, the meal is delayed as per ancient custom, to demonstrate that the Golds are not slaves to the whims of their hunger. My stomach rumbles, but I dare not touch my rice. A Violet with short-cropped hair enters the room carrying a slender harp. He plays a gentle melody and is joined by one of the Pinks from earlier—the woman with the ancient eyes and truculent mouth, Aurae. She sings “A Memory of Ash,” a quiet, famous dirge written after my grandfather burned the rebel moon of Rhea in the First Moon Lord’s Rebellion. No one ever accused the Moon Lords of having short memories. Without the buzz of the cosmopolitan cities of the Core, it must be hard to forget.
When the Violet and Pink have finished, they depart the room to light applause.
Diomedes’s eyes follow Aurae in a way that he should hope no one in his family notices. I file it away for later.
The main course of the meal is served without further delay by minute Browns in dusky gray livery. Their eyes never rise higher than the knee of any Gold, but they are treated with politeness by their masters; thanked for their services and addressed by name. It’s a civility I’ve seen in the halls and the hangars and the bathhouses amongst the Colors from the top down. Each Color within their sphere. There is no undue rudeness, coarseness, or cruelty from Gray to Brown or Gold to Gray. I find it uniquely admirable, especially when I notice the children are not served by the Browns, but must get up and fetch their food from a cart at the far side of the room. Servants are earned with a Peerless Scar, I remember. The Browns skip Cassius and me as well until Dido motions them to serve us. “We’ll forgive the guests their naked faces, for now.”
A small bowl of flowered water sits beside each place setting along with a white linen towel. Recalling my lessons from my grandmother’s steward, Cedric, I dip my fingers and dry them on the towel.
The fare itself is as simple as the clothes: roasted fish from Europa with hearty seasonings of salt to mask the lack of pepper at the table. Flatbreads, hummus, plain rice, and roasted vegetables steam in unadorned bowls, which are passed around and served without utensils. The rice is in abundance, but the cuts of meat are meager in size.
“Regulus, the Archimedes is your ship, yes?” Dido asks.
“She is.”
“A sleek flier, who has seen more than a few years. Older than Gaia even.”
“Hmm?” Gaia asks, looking up from her pipe like a disheveled barn owl.
“I said his ship is almost as old as you. You remember the line, I’m sure. A GD-17 Whisper-class frigate.”
“Who is whispering?” Gaia asks. “No whispering at the table. It is rude.” She goes back to her pipe and stares up at us suspiciously through a bramble of eyebrows as if we mean to do her great harm. I’ve seen enough of intelligence to know how hard it is to hide. The woman does a fine enough effort for this backwater, but her guise wouldn’t last the length of a gala in the Luna courts. The dancing faces worn there are the best in the worlds. Deception, the language of life. But it seems Gaia has everyone at this table convinced she is senile.
Interesting woman.
“Your ship is a rare craft for simple merchants,” Bellerephon says coolly. He traces a finger along the stone table. The man’s a brutish clod with the petulance of a child. Devoid of mystery, a man must have dignity. I find the lack of either boorish. “Hard to see how it would be come by legally.”
“I’m not sure I like your tone, my goodman,” Cassius says. “But the pressure on your moon has befuddled my ears. Perhaps you might clarify so we might have no misunderstandings.” Again with the antagonism.
Bellerephon scowls at him. The rest of the Raa family look on with the faint amusement of people far too comfortable with violence to care much about verbal ripostes.
Seraphina raises an eyebrow and eats her fish.
“He means nothing by it,” Dido says smoothly. “Do you, nephew?”
“Nothing at all.” He stares on at Cassius.
“I won her in a bet six years back from a new-money Silver who couldn’t hold his amber,” Cassius explains now with a smile. “She was liberated from Rising sympathizers.”
Diomedes gracefully removes the bones from his fish with a single pull and shows Paleron how to do the same. “Regulus, you said you served,” he says without looking up.
“I did. I was a centurion within the Augustan legions during the Martian Civil War.”
Diomedes looks up. “Then you fell in the Lion’s Rain?” Respect fills his voice. The rest of the table listens raptly. Mention a battle and their ears perk up like a kennel of dogs hearing a can open.
“I did.”
“What was it like?” Seraphina asks.
“Hell,” Cassius says, disappointing them with his answer. He might not have fallen in the Reaper’s Rain, but it cost him his entire family, save his mother.
It’s a clever game Cassius is playing. By saying he’s an Augustan man, he’s one of the only Core Golds with the same sense of betrayal the Rim must have felt after the bloody Triumph and the failure of their rebellion. A dangerous gambit. He might claim to know the same people. And some of them might have sought refuge here.
“Did you know the Reaper?” Diomedes asks Cassius. I don’t mind being relegated to the background. Grandmother thought talkative men the most hilarious of creatures, so busy projecting that they never notice anything until the jaws of the trap close around their legs. The key to learning, to power, to having the final say in everything, is observation. By all means, be a storm inside, but save your movement and wind till you know your purpose. It’s a pity Darrow and Fitchner au Barca were better students than the last generation of Gold.
“I did not know him personally, no. He was Augustus’s lancer,” Cassius answers. “Peerless don’t socialize with men like me.” He taps his scarless face.
“Then you’ve come up in the world,” Bellerephon says.
“Did you ever see him fight?” Diomedes asks.
“Once.”
“They say he slayed the Storm Knight of Earth and defeated Apollonius au Valii-Rath in single combat. They say he is a true blademaster, the heir of Arcos. That not even Aja au Grimmus could stand against him now.” The dark spirit in me bucks against that claim. I almost break my silence.
“They say many things,” Cassius replies.
“What was your measure of him?”
Cassius shrugs. “Overrated.”
Diomedes booms a laugh.
“Diomedes is the Sword of Io. A blademaster,” Seraphina says proudly. “One of six left in the Rim. He also studied with Arcos on Europa—became a stormson.”
I feel a spike of envy.
“Lorn taught me how to fish with Alexandar and Drusilla,” Diomedes corrects. “His last student misused his gifts.” The understatement of the millennium. “He had no desire to make better warriors, only better men.”
“In that he succeeded.” Seraphina smiles at her brother. “One day, Diomedes will test the Reaper for himself.”
Bellerephon watches as Diomedes humbly returns his attention to his younger siblings. I smile at his jealousy and watch Diomedes with growing respect. We eat in silence for a time. I nurse the small fish on my plate. Cassius is already finished with his. Always a man of appetites. I’m more practiced than he in the art of self-deprivation at the dinner table.
Doesn’t feel so long ago that I was a knobby-kneed boy sitting at my grandmother’s dinner table when she turned her long neck to me and peered down that peregrine nose, and, in a kindly manner, inquired if I intended to sleep outside in the gutter instead of in my bedchamber, because by virtue of the fact that I’d eaten three whole tarts I’d clearly abdicated being a man in favor of being a little pig. It was two days after my parents had died. I seldom eat sweets any longer.
Cassius makes a show of looking around for more food.
“Pardon the portions,” Dido says with the faint hint of apology. “They’re more conservative than you’re accustomed to, I’m sure. We’re in the midst of a ration cycle.”
“Thought you were sitting on a breadbasket here. And Europa is just one big sea. Or did you already eat all the fish?” Cassius asks.
I wait in trepidation. This line of inquiry is dangerous. An innocent observation that will lead inexorably to a casual inquiry about the new ships we’ve seen and the state of their docks and their stores of helium-3. I fear him asking that question.
Dido smiles obligingly. “On the contrary, the fisheries and latifundia have never been more productive.”
“Then a lack of ships, I warrant.”
“Many were destroyed by the Sword Armada,” Dido admits. “And there were…lean years. But no. Not a lack of ships or helium-3. In fact, it was disruption of agriculture on Titan last month that forced us to part with more of our bounty than anticipated.”
It isn’t natural for her to tell us so much.
“A daughter of Venus must have found this place…strange,” I say diplomatically, trying to pull Cassius away from his obvious endgame.
“Ah, so you know my lineage. Aren’t you a well-studied merchant?” she says.
“You’re rather famous,” I reply, playing the overwhelmed youth. I spare a glance at Bellerephon, who has not stopped watching Cassius since he sat down at the table. Something is wrong here. I can sense the sharks beneath the surface. “Even on Mars we know of Dido au Saud.”
“I doubt my father would let me still claim his name.” She leans forward. “Tell me, am I as famous as my husband?”
Seraphina tenses at mention of her father. She’s barely touched her food, and looks uncomfortable, furthering my unease.
“Few are as famous as your husband,” I say to Dido.
Her mouth pinches. “How diplomatic.”
“But on Mars, ‘Romulus and Dido’ is still a fairy tale.”
“A fairy tale. If only.” She smiles at that. “When I came here for the first time, I was a foolish little sun creature raised in the court of Iram. A gahja through and through. I fell in love with a pale wisp of a knight and thought our life would be a poem. But once I arrived here, I felt the darkness, the cold my mother warned me about. I missed the sun and hated this place. Hated my husband’s austerity. He would fret over water left in a glass. A crust of bread uneaten. But then I learned one of Io’s many lessons: here, by darkness, by radiation, by hunger, by thirst, by war, we are always at siege. It is not like the world of my birth, where life grows on every rock and men eat until they vomit. On Io, scarcity makes us strong. It makes us value what we do have.”
She looks around at her family with a warm smile.
Seraphina clarifies. “Father set a decree three months ago that rations are in effect until reserves are back to appropriate levels. No Gold may eat more, as measured by weight ratio, than the agricultural Reds do.”
I’m startled. “You mean to say even you follow the ration limit?”
“Why wouldn’t we?” Seraphina asks, confused. “It is law.”
“Qualis rex, talis grex,” Dido says.
“As the king, so the people. But you have power,” I say, intensely curious. “You can do what you like.” Cassius shoots me a not-so-subtle look. He wants me to shut up and eat my food, leave the games to him, but my curiosity gets the better of me. My tutors called the Moon Lords impractical isolationists. But there seems little here but practicality.”
“An errant claim. Romulus and I believe it important to teach our children to be more than just powerful.” Dido slowly picks the meat off the bones of her fish with her fingers. “Gold was meant to be an ideal, to inspire. Don’t you agree?”
Why does she bait me?
Cassius’s eyes tell me to be careful. And so do Seraphina’s. “I’m just a merchant,” I say with a humble shrug. “My family wasn’t like yours.”
“Oh, please. Don’t be ponderous, boy. Peerless aren’t the only ones with opinions. Pray tell, do you agree? Speak plainly or don’t speak at all. Were we meant to be more than just force? Weren’t we meant to inspire?”
“Yes. But then we forgot it.”
“See! An opinion.” She looks over at Cassius. “You really should let him have a mind of his own, my goodman. Sighing like that when he speaks his mind? Not good to quash the naturally inquisitive.” She turns back to me. “Now, Castor, it’s been ten years since we purged the Sons of Ares from our moons and eliminated the last of the Slave King’s terrorists. Out of curiosity, how many rebellions and terrorist attacks do you think Ilium has had in the last year?”
“Forty-three,” I say instinctively, based on the ten-year annual average of reported incidents before the Fall. Seraphina’s eyes narrow at the precise number.
“Two,” Dido replies.
“Just two?” Cassius asks in suprise.
“A shooting and a bomb. The hierarchy has not changed. Do you know what inspires this loyalty to the Compact from all Colors? Honor. Honor in work. Honor in morality. Honor in principle and family. Our rules are harsh, but we obey them from Gold to Red. Romulus eliminated the rigged quotas in mines and the latifundia, has begun to phase out the Obsidian gods, and makes each man understand he is part of the same body. He has replaced subjugation with participation. Given a reason to sacrifice for the betterment of all. And it starts with us at this table, the head of the body.”
“Each man and woman given liberty to pursue achievement, with the best of his virtue and abilities, and rise within the station for which his flesh was made—a sacrifice of the Self for the preservation of All.” I murmur the words of the Compact like scripture. “Admirable.”
“Yes,” Seraphina says, her eyes warmer to me than ever before.
“Why did you not carry on the fight? Why become traders?” Diomedes has been nursing the question, waiting for a pause in the conversation. The timing is awkward.
“You mean fight for the Ash Lord?” Cassius asks, sipping his wine. “I think not. His daughter murdered my friends at the Triumph.”
“What of you, Castor?” Dido asks. “Don’t you want revenge for your family?”
I feel Cassius’s gaze on me, the weight of expectation as I regurgitate his lessons, his maxims. “What good would it do?” I answer loyally.
“Is that your answer…” Dido nods to Cassius. “…or his?”
How many times have I lain in my bunk on the Archimedes lonely, fantasizing of strength, of revenge? Of sailing home and taking back my grandmother’s scepter, her chair, and putting Darrow and his rabid wolves in chains? I always thought it a fantasy, something that could never be. But now that I see how much strength is left in Gold, how much of the old virtues, it grows harder to see it as the vain, idle fantasy of a little boy any longer.
Gold is not dead.
“Is that why you want war?” Cassius asks. “For revenge?”
“In part, yes,” Dido replies. “To avenge the wrongs the Slave King has done us. But also to heal the chaos that he has made. His Republic has had ten years to create peace. They’ve failed. The time is right for the Society to be rebuilt. We have the will, the might. But we need the spark. That is why I sent my daughter to the Gulf. To retrieve that spark. Thanks in no small part to you, she brought it home.” She pauses a moment to smile with no kindness in her eyes. “But now, I fear it is missing.”
Finally, the twist. The reason behind all these innuendos and games.
“Is that an accusation?” Cassius asks warily.
“Oh yes, my goodman.”
“That’s why you went back into the Vindabona…” I say to Seraphina. “But you didn’t bring anything back with you.”
“I brought your razor,” she says.
My heart sinks in my chest. I missed it. I’ve walked straight into their trap. They’ve been toying with us, with me. And here I was admiring their civilization like a gorydamn anthropologist.
“And where is your razor?” Dido asks. “We’re dying to know.”
“It was lost,” I say.
“Our hull was punctured and the razor pushed into space before the cellular armor could close the breach,” Cassius explains.
“Is that so…Regulus?” Dido leans back. “The fish has left a foul taste in my mouth. I think it is time for dessert.” She motions to the servants and the door to the room opens. Two Obsidians with bulging pale arms enter carrying a load between them, which they set in the center of the table.
It is our safe.