He bows again and leaves me there.
This room reflects the pre-Color heritage of the Raa more than any other. It is traditional and austere but for the use of wood. Tatami flooring, woven from pale igusa grass, stretches to a bank of windows overlooking the frozen waste. Entire tree trunks, stained a warm honey color, support the stone ceiling. A length of cypress forms the tokonoma, a raised alcove where a small tree grows and a razor hangs in midair above a gravWell. I’m drawn to the room’s lone eccentricity: a grand old piano made out of heartwood. It is a marvel. Of course, Ceres and some of the larger asteroid depots have pianos, but those are cheap plastic synth jobs. The wood to make this must have come from Ganymede or Callisto.
I run my hands over the piano’s keys. I was wrong. The piano is old. Perhaps older than the Society. Two golden S-shaped markings are imprinted on the fallboard above the keys. My hands run over the polished fiddleback grain. I close my eyes and imagine I can feel the energy that grew this tree on my face, that I can hear birds in the sky again. After ten years, they sing like I heard them yesterday. A flicker of a memory, no longer than the flash of a lighting match, burgeons in the recesses of my mind. A feeling, a scent of something lost.
Am I just homesick? Or is it something more?
“Do you know how to play?” a woman asks.
I turn to see Romulus’s mother, Gaia, shuffling into the room. Her back is crooked, shoulders slumped. In her youth, she would have been a slight thing. Her wrists are fragile as the stems of wineglasses, and her skin paper-pale and veined like bleu cheese. In fact, it seems all that keeps her from tipping forward and shattering on the floor is a thin wooden cane and the enormous arm of the grand Obsidian who escorts her. She clutches to him as if he were an old friend. He is aged, like her. A hunched gray golem with intense beetle-black eyes buried deep in the folds of an ancient face. His head is a boulder. His ears chipped and pointed at the tips. The lobes filled with gold disks the size of chicken eggs imprinted with the lightning dragon. A long uncut white beard hangs down the front of his gray scorosuit and is tucked into his belt.
“No,” I answer. “I never learned.”
“A child of Hyperion alien to music? What a crime. But you must have been a busy little thing. Your grandmother no doubt teaching you the alchemy of turning moons to glass instead. Or were those lessons the province of your godfather?”
The senile mask she wore before her family is gone. Curious.
“My godfather taught me to finish a fight,” I say. “Two hours of strategic instruction every day.”
“If only he had taken his own lessons. Then Darrow would be a memory instead of a ten-year plague.”
“My godfather is still the only man to ever best the Reaper in battle,” I say. “And I rather think it the habit of an indolent mind to indict a single man for a civilization’s failure.”
“True. Back and forth they go. But now a peace.”
“So they say.”
“What a thing it must be for you. Lorn for a grandfather. Octavia for a grandmother. Magnus, Aja, Moira, Atalantia…trapped between so many giants and having to watch the birth of two more.”
“Two?”
“Darrow and Virginia. I rather think it the habit of a boy’s mind to believe the man could exist without the woman.” She smiles.
I feel a sudden surge of enjoyment at the riposte.
I like this woman. She reminds me of Atalantia.
“All others here call him the Slave King, yet you do not?”
“That brat is flesh and bone. Why feed the legend?” She wheezes as her Obsidian helps her sit on the flame-maple bench. “Thank you, Goroth.” He turns from her to take a place at the window, and as he does I see a screaming skull has been tattooed to cover the back of his head in blue ink. “Don’t let the old blackeye frighten you,” Gaia says. “He’s as batty as I am.” Goroth shakes his head in disagreement as he reaches the window. “Oh, quiet, you.” She pats the bench beside her as she produces a thin white pipe from her robes, along with a match. “Sit here with me, Lysander. I will teach you.” She strikes the match on the calluses of her heel and holds the flame to the pipe bowl.
Glancing uneasily at the Obsidian, I sit down in the cloud of smoke at her side.
She pats the piano. “My husband gave this to me as a gift when I was twenty-nine. Do you want to guess how old I am now?”
“You hardly look older than sixty,” I say with a smile.
“Sixty!” She cackles. “What a rogue you are! That Bellona philanderer rubbed off on you, I see.” She scrutinizes me. “I hope you didn’t catch anything from him.”
“He was like a brother to me.”
“Well, that’s not saying much in the Core.”
“My home is Luna. Not the Core.”
“Pfah. It’s all the same to us.”
Why am I here? In accepting the invitation, I’ve walked into some scheme. Is this a test of some sort? Just because I’m grieving doesn’t mean the dance has stopped. If anything, the pace has increased as the coup solidifies and the dissenters are clipped one by one. While Cassius may be gone, I still have Pytha to protect. Seems a lofty goal at this point.
Gaia is unaware of my inner turmoil as she touches the keys and strokes out a simple melody. A strange sense of belonging courses through me and I forget about the dance.
“Must be grotesque for you, seeing age,” she says. “I know how the deviants in the Core love their rejuvenation therapy. Pfah.” She hacks something into a crusty handkerchief, examines the prize, then makes the kerchief disappear back into her thick kimono. “Your grandmother never looked older than sixty, but I remember her when we were both girls dancing at her father’s galas. I was a plain little thing to her. She had such jewels. Such refinement. But was always so haughty. Pretending she didn’t know who I was. A sizable stick up her gahja ass, that one. But now I have the last laugh!” She cackles again. “How old are you, child?”
“Twenty.”
“Twenty? Twenty! I’ve ingrown hairs older than you.”
I laugh despite myself. “You’re not very discreet, are you?”
“Ha! I’ve earned indiscretion.” Her cloudy eyes soften and she pulls on her pipe before pointing it at me like a finger. “I know you wear the mask of court. What did they call it again?”
“The dancing mask.”