Grail - Elizabeth Bear [119]
“What are you doing? You’re hurting her—”
“I’m stopping the bleeding, curse you. Waste and wreck, let go of me!” The pulse of blood against his fingers ceased; he swore more fervently. “Her heart—check her pulse, check her pulse.”
Gain reached for Perceval’s throat. Danilaw had just enough presence of mind to realize his mistake before she got there. Had Gain been impeding him on purpose?
He grabbed her arm with his free hand and pulled her aside. “Not you,” he said. “Get the medic now.”
“Alive,” Perceval said, her voice a wheezing rasp. “Stopped heart—blood loss. Can fix.”
“Perceval? Perceval!”
Gain pushed back at him; Danilaw looked up from the alien he’d dragged half across his lap and fixed her on a stare like a bayonet. “Don’t.”
“Good,” Perceval said, sliding into ever more boneless limpness. “I’ll be back.”
23
another tiny bird came to her hands
Morgen is her name, and
she has learned what usefulness all the herbs bear
so that she may cure sick bodies. Also that art
is known to her by which she can change shape
and cut the air on new wings in the manner of Dedalus.
When she wishes, she is in Brist, Carnot, or Papie;
when she wishes, she glides out of the air onto your lands.
—GEOFFREY OF MONMOUTH, “Avalon”
(tr. Emily Rebekah Huber)
In the house of her fathers, Cynric Conn opened stolen hands and let a bird take wing. Beside her, Benedick craned his head back and watched it whirr toward the ceiling, a blur of liquid green. It vanished into the topmost branches of the olive trees that guarded the gates of Rule.
“Another one scrubbed clean,” Cynric said, with satisfaction. “It makes me suspicious, though. This tawdry little virus—it’s a distraction, not a serious attempt. You know Ariane—”
Benedick shook his head. “If we’re staying here, we’re taking the world apart. Fixing them could be wasted effort, you know.”
A cage full of parrotlets rested by Cynric’s feet. She bent from the waist and pushed her hands through the transparent, flexible membrane that closed its aperture. Her hair fell all around her face, making a tunnel of her vision. She could not see Benedick, but she could feel him there beside her, breathing, shifting from foot to foot.
Another tiny bird came into her hands. Feather, bone, heat, and fragility.
“DNA is an aggressive molecule,” she said, extricating the parrotlet and caging it between her fingers as she stood. It kicked against her palms; she kept its wings pinned gently to its sides so it could not do itself an injury. Having cleared their program, she could have just sprung the cages and unleashed every one of the birds simultaneously, but the older Cynric got, the more she believed in ceremony.
She turned to her brother and extended her hands. “Here, you take this one.”
“Does it go with the non sequitur?” His long, vertically creased face nevertheless brightened as she pushed the little bird upon him. “Just let it fly?”
“Yea, verily.”
He was awkward, opening his hands crookedly, not giving the bird the toss that would throw it into flight. Still it kicked off his palms, leaving pinpricks of blue behind where talons had scratched, and flogged into the air.
He looked at her, holding his hands wide as the blood pulled itself into his body and sealed the wounds. “Was that a lesson, Sister?”
She tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. “For you, or for the parrotlet? It wasn’t a non sequitur, Ben. But think—the bird wants to live; it wants to propagate its species. On a visceral level that has nothing to do with what we deem cognition, it needs to survive. It carries the Leviathan’s ability to engineer its own future by wanting; I created it for that. For wanting life, and getting what it wants. It’s just possible that its wanting is what got us here.”
Benedick did not speak, but his expression said volumes about doubt and ethics and frustration. Cynric studied the empty air where the birds had flown.
She owed him something for the suffering she had inflicted upon him, the guilt and grief by which she had manipulated him into becoming the man who no