In Her Name

Kreelan.

“Esah-Zhurah…” he said. Then he stopped, not sure how to continue.

She watched as he struggled with himself for a moment, until the strange strength that dwelt within him surfaced, washing away the creases of doubt on his face.

“There is much for which I feel compelled to hate you, to hate your kind,” he explained, his eyes drawn to the fire as if in search of the meaning of his fate. “For the deaths of my parents, at the hands of the priestess herself. For the destruction of the world of my birth, and the many lives that perished there. For the destruction of the planet from which I was taken, a world I often hated, but which I had come to call home. And for all of the death that has been wrought upon my people, on a scale I will never be able to understand, and will never truly be able to feel in my heart.” He looked up at her, his face betraying an open vulnerability that shocked her as strongly as if she had been doused with freezing water. “For all this, I cannot find it in me to truly hate you, my tresh, my teacher. There are many among my kind who would condemn me to death as a traitor for those words, but they are nonetheless true, and to deny them, or leave them unspoken, would be to lie to myself.” He looked back to the fire, helplessly. “There was a time, not so long ago,” he whispered, “when I wanted to beat you, to destroy you, to make you feel pain a thousand times what I felt every time you beat me. But…” he shrugged. “But I found, after a while, that I wanted your respect, your trust, more than anything else.” He fell silent for a moment. “The greatest fear I have,” he went on, “is that I will fail you, will bring shame upon you. And that… you will shun me.”

Esah-Zhurah did not know what to say. Never had she thought such a time as this would come, when this human, so full of fight and anger, would reveal such a thing to her, something that could be exploited as a terrible weakness.

But that was the point, she told herself. He had laid himself open to her, in hopes that she would not turn his words against him, that he could trust her. And, in a decision that shocked the part of her mind that carried the xenophobic character of her race, a race that had exterminated over a dozen sentient species in past millennia, she committed herself to guarding his trust.

“I will not abandon you,” she said simply, openly. “Whatever the Way brings us, we shall share in it together.”

* * *

Later, after they had banked the fire and lay down for the night, Reza remained awake. His mind was consumed by thoughts that swirled and circled like wolves around a stricken deer, darting just to the edge of focus before they faded into the shadowy darkness once more. The more he watched them, the more they seemed to carry the faces of people he had once known, some of them of a kind his people called “friends,” a relationship that did not exist among the society that had kidnapped him.

One of the wolf faces, an old man with the eyes of a young warrior, especially troubled him. The eyes did not accuse, but Reza could not help but feel that he had somehow betrayed the being that lay behind the mask that lunged and retreated within his mind.

Wiley, he suddenly thought, wincing at the foreign sound of the name even as he breathed it in his mind, am I a traitor?

“Do whatever you can to stay alive, son,” the old colonel had said that day so long ago, “If anybody can make it, you can…”

Wiley, Reza cried to himself, must I become one of them to make it? Do I have any choice? For just a moment, he bitterly resented the old man’s leaving him, going off to die himself as Reza was taken by the cruel fate that had pursued him since the fall of New Constantinople.

But the moment blinked away into nothingness, just as the wolfish thought-face blurred into oblivion. Wiley had been wise enough to know when it was time to die, and had done so with the dignity of soldiers throughout history who had made one last, hopeless stand against the invaders of their homeland. And, aside from the admission letter he had given Reza for the academy, the old man had left Reza with the only other gift he could give: a chance at life. And Reza knew then that if he chose to trust this alien girl, to allow himself that vital weakness before her, Wiley would understand.

Slowly, the beasts in his brain retreated into the darkness, only their glittering eyes remaining, flickering in the glow of the fire.

He blinked, but the glowing eyes remained. Suddenly, he realized that he was seeing the silvery glint of Esah-Zhurah’s talons. Her hands lay on the skins near her face, the ebbing firelight making them twinkle like stars against the satiny glow of her deep blue skin as she slept. Reza felt another sudden twinge of guilt at the thought of how much he had come to need her, to rely on her. Worse, he found that he was beginning to like her.

What might things be like, he thought, should she someday come to lead her people? Would her association with him have any effect, make any difference in how they viewed humanity? It was difficult for a boy, struggling simply to remain human, let alone to become a man, to comprehend the fact that he was an ambassador, of sorts, to these people. While this particular course of his life had not been chosen willingly, he was nonetheless determined to make the best impression he could, to do whatever he could to help the people of his own blood. Who could tell, he asked himself, if the girl who lay asleep an arm’s length away might not someday sit on the throne that commanded the Empire? The thought settled onto his brain like an insistent ache, an itch that insisted it be scratched.

“Esah-Zhurah,” he said quietly, hating to disturb her, but unable to put off the question until morning.

Her eyes flickered open and she looked around, confused. “What is wrong?” she asked, one hand instinctively reaching for the knife that lay nearby.

“Nothing is wrong,” he told her, ashamed now for awaking her. But the question in his brain pounded against his skull. “Nothing. It is just that… I have to ask you something. I am sorry, but I did not think it could wait until morning.”

Ah, she thought, he is back to his normal inquisitive self. Good. Even after the revelations earlier in the evening, he had still remained uncharacteristically quiet, and this urgent need for information reassured her that all was yet well. She knew that he would have to discipline himself against the urgency of his curiosity, but this was not yet something she thought fitting to punish or dissuade; in fact, it was a vice she found enjoyable. “What is it,” she asked, “that cannot wait for the light of the sun?”

For a moment, Reza was almost afraid to answer, suddenly realizing that she had taught him virtually nothing about the succession rites, that his question might put him on perilously thin ice culturally: matters regarding the Empress were not to be addressed lightly. It was something they’d never talked about before.

“I was wondering,” he began, swallowing as he forged ahead, “how… the Empress is chosen. I mean, could you someday become Empress?”

Esah-Zhurah’s expression clouded, became unreadable. Reza feared that he had made a major blunder.

“No, Reza,” she told him after a moment. She spoke not with anger, but with sadness. “Of all the things I may accomplish in my life, I may never become Empress.” She paused. “Never.”

“Why?” he asked, rolling onto his side, propping his head up with his arm to look at her.

“It is because of what happened long ago,” she began, “in a time when our Empire was of one world, when warriors – male and female – answered the call of their blood.” She rolled over on her back, her eyes focusing on the far distant stars. “Mine is a very old race, Reza, far older than your own. We live now in the time of the First Empire, which began over one hundred thousand of your Standard years in the past. But the earliest records of our civilization go back much, much further, perhaps as far as five hundred thousand of your years. And it is in the twilight ages between those times that the legend of the First Empress was born, in the days when the Old Tongue was widely spoken and unbridled warfare was rife across the land.

“Before the First Empire was founded,” she explained, “the legends say that rival city-states vied for dominance, for power. We rose to the pinnacle of civilization time and again during the course of many generations, only to be plunged into renewed dark ages by frenzied, uncontrollable warfare. Many times, leaders banded their nations together with strength and cunning to lead us out of darkness, but when they fell the land was plunged into chaos once more.

“But there came a day,” she said, her voice filled with awe, “when a child was born in the city of Keela’ar, born to a great queen and her consort. The child, whose hair was white as the snow atop the mountains and had rare red talons, was named Keel-Tath.

“Keel-Tath’s parents, as was the custom in those days, entrusted their daughter’s training to one of the