the icon, the fingers clutched more tightly, and the old man’s eyelids fluttered as a rasp of breath escaped his lips.
Ish released the icon. Its one-eyed stare now seemed accusatory.
“Okay,” he said heavily. “Okay, Granddad.”
LORD NINURTA VOWS JUSTICE FOR LADY OF ISIN
POLICE TO PROTECT LAW-ABIDING NOMADS
LAWLESSNESS IN SIPPAR
POINTLESS REVENGE MISSION
LYNCHINGS IN BABYLON: IMMIGRANTS TARGETED
SIPPAR RISES UP
THEY CAN DIE
III. KINETIC PENETRATOR
When Tara came home she found Ish on a bench in the courtyard, bent over the broken icon, with a glue pot and an assortment of scroll clips and elastic bands from Tara’s desk. They’d talked, when they first moved into this house not long after Mara was born, of turning one of the ground-floor rooms into a workshop for Ish, but he was home so rarely and for such short periods that with one thing and another it had never happened. She kept gardening supplies there now.
The projector in the courtyard was showing some temple news feed, an elaborately animated diagram of the nomads’ weapon—a “kinetic penetrator,” the researcher called it, a phrase that Tara thought should describe something found in a sex shop or perhaps a lumberyard—striking the city’s outer shell, piercing iron and ice and rock before erupting in a molten plume from the steps directly beneath the Lady’s feet.
Tara turned it off.
Ish looked up. “You’re back,” he said.
“You stole my line,” said Tara. She sat on the bench next to Ish and looked down at the icon in his lap. “What’s that?”
“An old man gave it to me,” Ish said. “There.” He wrapped a final elastic band around the icon and set it down next to the glue pot. “That should hold it.”
He’d found the broken corner of the icon on the floor not far from the old man’s couch. On Ish’s orders they’d abandoned the pointless mapping expedition and taken the man to an aid station, bullied the doctors until someone took responsibility.
There, in the aid tent, the man pressed the icon into Ish’s hands, both pieces, releasing them with shaking fingers.
“Lady bless you,” he croaked.
The artillerist, at Ish’s elbow, gave a bitter chuckle, but didn’t say anything. Ish was glad of that. The man might be right, there might be no command, there might be no soldiery, Ish might not be an under-officer any more, just a man giving orders. But Ish was, would continue to be, a soldier of the Lady, a soldier of the city of Isin, and if he had no lawful orders that only put the burden on him to order himself.
He was glad the artillerist hadn’t spoken, because if the man had at that moment said again
He’d unzipped the flap on the left breast pocket of his jumpsuit and tucked both pieces of the icon inside. Then he’d zipped the pocket closed again, and for the first time in five days, he’d gone home.
Tara said: “Now that you’re back, I wish you’d talk to Mara. She’s been having nightmares. About the Corn Parade. She’s afraid the nomads might blow up her school.”
“They might,” Ish said.
“You’re not helping.” Tara sat up straight. She took his chin in her hand and turned his head to face her. “When did you last sleep?”
Ish pulled away from her. “I took pills.”
Tara sighed. “When did you last take a pill?”
“Yesterday,” Ish said. “No. Day before.”
“Come to bed,” said Tara. She stood up. Ish didn’t move. He glanced down at the icon.
An ugly expression passed briefly over Tara’s face, but Ish didn’t see it.
“Come to bed,” she said again. She took Ish’s arm, and this time he allowed himself to be led up the stairs.
At some point in the night they made love. It wasn’t very good for either of them; it hadn’t been for a long while, but this night was worse. Afterwards Tara slept.
She woke to find Ish already dressed. He was putting things into his soldiery duffel.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“Lagash.”
“What?”
Tara sat up. Ish didn’t look at her.
“Lord Ninurta’s fitting out an expedition,” Ish said.
“An expedition,” said Tara flatly.
“To find the nomads who killed the Lady.”
“And do what?” asked Tara.
Ish didn’t answer. From his dresser he picked up his identification seal, the cylinder with the Lady’s heraldic dog and Ish’s name and Temple registry number, and fastened it around his neck.
Tara turned away.
“I don’t think I ever knew you,” she said, “But I always knew I couldn’t compete with a goddess. When I married you, I said to my friends: ‘At least he won’t be running around after other women.’” She laughed without humor. “And now she’s dead—and you’re still running after her.”
She looked up. Ish was gone.
Outside it was hot and windless under a lowering sky. Nothing was moving. A fine gray dust was settling over the sector:
An express took Ish to the base of the nearest spoke, and from there his soldiery ID and a series of elevators carried him to the southern polar dock. As the equatorial blue and white of the city’s habitable zone gave way to the polished black metal of the southern hemisphere, Ish looked down at the apparently untroubled clouds and seas ringing the city’s equator and it struck him how normal this all was, how like any return to duty after leave.
It would have been easy and perhaps comforting to pretend it was just that, comforting to pretend that the Corn Parade had ended like every other, with the Lady’s blessing on the crops, the return of the images to the shrines, drinking and dancing and music from the dimming of the Lady’s House at dusk to its brightening at
