The Caryatids

"The 'Angel of Harbin.'" Sonja sat up straighter. "I hate that stupid nickname! Yes, I'm a war heroine. Yes, I'm a pillar of the state and I am proud of my service! But 'Angel of Harbin'-I never chose that nom de guerre! Harbin was nothing so much."

Lucky was puzzled by this. He spoke rapidly, seriously and at some length, and the translator spat up one sentence. "They say that Harbin was the very worst of the very bad."

"Harbin was only typical. We had a good rescue plan in Harbin. We knew what we wanted to do and we knew how to win there. Now, Shenyang- that was bad. And Yinchuan, where they completely lost electrical power? Dead networks, no water, no sewer? For eighteen weeks? There was no body count there-because they ate the bodies. When we marched out there to dig in-I sent out my surveillance cams-I destroyed all that data. Everybody in that rescue team was on trauma drugs after Yinchuan. Nobody remembers Yinchuan. Nobody wants to remember that place. It is lost, it's nonhistory. Even the state conceals Yinchuan, and no human being will ever ask."

"You were fighting that gloriously?"

"We didn't think we were fighting at all! We were medical teams, we were there to save innocent lives! But: When there's no water in a city? Then there's no innocence: it's all gone. With no water, there is no city-there's a horde. 'Every cop is a criminal and all the sinners saints.'"

That was John Montalban again. Montalban always loved to quote old American poetry.

The Badaulet turned his level gaze upon her. It was his keen black eyes, his abstract, fearless, predatory look, that had first attracted and aroused her. He looked so different from other bandits, and now that she knew about his globe-trotting, jet-setting mother, she understood. Lucky was a native of the Disorder.

Sonja knew what Han Chinese people looked like, and also Tibetans, Manchus, Mongols. To any practiced eye they were easily as physically distinct as French, Germans, Italians, and Danes. Yet Lucky was none of those: he was a global guerrilla, a true modern barbarian. Her lover was one of the new kind.

"Sonja, I have to know: Are there seven of you? Seven sisters?"

"There were seven once-three are dead." Bratislava, Kosara, Svetlana: They had been the first people she had ever seen killed. They'd been killed by a pack of young soldiers, panicked kids really, drunken kids half stumbling over their cheap carbines, kids the age of the Badaulet.

That distant episode on that distant Adriatic island: How empty that seemed to her now. Her twisted world of childhood had exploded in a sudden bloody horror, but, in comparison with the vast bloody grandeur of China, it was such a small world and such a minor horror.

In Mljet, though: that was the first time Sonja herself had killed someone. One could never forget the first time.

"Please don't talk to me about my dead," she told him, "don't talk to me about the past, for I can't bear it. Just talk to me about the future, for I can bear as much of that as anyone..."

Lucky was deeply moved. "Here with you, in this locked bubble, the wind and sky are not free...Everything stinks in here...The future should not stink...Do you love me, Sonja?"

"Yes."

"Why do you love me?"

"I don't need reasons. Love just happens to me. I love you the way that any woman loves any man."

Lucky folded his sinewy arms in a brisk decision. "Then we should marry. Because marriage is proper and holy. A temporary Muslim marriage can be performed in necessity in pagan lands and times of war. So I will marry you, Sonja. Now, here."

Sonja laughed. "You haven't known me long."

"I don't want to know you better," Lucky said. "You have given me your woman's body: the utmost gift a woman gives a man, except for sons. So: I don't want to go to Hell for doing that. It is my warrior calling to serve Heaven, die for Heaven, and go to Heaven. So: You must certainly agree to marry me. Otherwise, you are oppressing me."

"Can we discuss this matter after we leave this airlock?"

Lucky sat cross-legged on the rubbery white tiles of the sterilized floor. "We cannot leave! We are prisoners in here! So let us make our pact now and marry at once. I cannot ask your father to give me you, for you never had a father."

"You know a lot about me, don't you?"

"On the steppes, far outside China, I meet the Provincial Reconstruction Teams, from the Acquis and the Dispensation. They seek me out for my advice on how to survive, for they die there quickly. They know much about the Angel of Harbin. They know things about you that the state does not say. They say that Red Sonja killed five great generals."

"That is not true ! That's a lie! I have never killed any uniformed Chinese military personnel! I swear that, I never did that-not even if they were laying down barrage-fire on my positions."