Young Miles - Lois McMaster Bujold [139]
Some of Count Vorkosigan's older political opponents looked as if they'd rather spit, but only Count Vorhalas voted an abstention. Then, Vorhalas had never been of Vordrozda's party, and had no taint of association to wash off.
"Ballsy bastard." Count Vorkosigan exchanged a familiar salute across the chamber with his closest enemy. "I wish they all had his backbone, if not his opinions."
Miles sat quietly, absorbing this most mitigated triumph. Elena would have been safe, after all.
But not happy. Hunting hawks do not belong in cages, no matter how much a man covets their grace, no matter how golden the bars. They are far more beautiful soaring free. Heartbreakingly beautiful.
He sighed, and rose to go wrestle with his destiny.
* * *
The vineyards garlanding the terraced slopes of the long lake above Vorkosigan Surleau were misted with new green. The surface of the water glittered in a warm breath of air, a spatter of silver coins. It had once been a custom somewhere to put coins on the eyes of the dead, Miles had read, for their journey; it seemed appropriate. He imagined the sun-coins sinking to the bottom of the lake, there to pile up and up until they broke the surface, a new island.
The clods of earth were cold and wet yet, winter lingering beneath the surface of the soil. Heavy. He tossed a shovelful shoulder-high from the hole he dug.
"Your hands are bleeding," observed his mother. "You could do that in five seconds with a plasma arc."
"Blood," said Miles, "washes away sin. The Sergeant said so."
"I see." She made no further demur, but sat in companionable silence, her back against a tree, watching the lake. It was her Betan upbringing, Miles supposed; she never seemed to tire of the delight of water open to the sky.
He finished at last. Countess Vorkosigan gave him a hand up out of the pit. He took up the control lead of the float pallet, and lowered the oblong box, waiting patiently all this time, into its rest. Bothari had always waited patiently for him.
Covering it back up was quicker work. The marker his father had ordered was not yet finished; hand-carved, like the others in this family plot. Miles's grandfather lay not far away, next to the grandmother Miles had never known, dead decades before in Barrayaran civil strife. His eye lingered a moment, uncomfortably, on a double space reserved next to his grandfather, above the slope and perpendicular to the Sergeant's new grave. But that burden was yet to come.
He placed a shallow beaten copper bowl upon a tripod at the foot of the grave. In it he piled juniper twigs from the mountains and a lock of his own hair. He then pulled a colored scarf from his jacket, carefully unfolded it, and placed a curl of finer dark hair among the twigs. His mother added a clipping of short grey hair, and a thick, generous tress of her own red roan, and withdrew to a distance.
Miles, after a pause, laid the scarf beside the hair. "I'm afraid I made a most improper Baba," he whispered in apology. "I never meant to mock you. But Baz loves her, he'll take good care of her . . . My word was too easy to give, too hard to keep. But there. There." He added flakes of aromatic bark. "You shall lie warm here, watching the long lake change its faces, winter to spring, summer to fall. No armies march here, and even the deepest midnights aren't wholly dark. Surely God won't overlook you, in such a spot as this. There will be grace and forgiveness enough, old dog, even for you." He lit the offering. "I pray you will spare me a drink from that cup, when it overflows for you."
EPILOGUE
The emergency docking drill was called in the middle of the night cycle, naturally. He'd probably have timed it that way himself, Miles thought, as he scrambled through the corridors of the orbital weapons platform with his fellow cadets. This four-week stint of orbital and free-fall training was due