Before the Cube

Fan fiction. This is not Janet Morris, not Perseid Press, and not a scene from any motion picture — because no such picture was made. It borrows names and furniture from the Silistra books and from this archive’s imagined 1980 film. If you want the real story, buy the novel.

The cube was smaller than a child’s fist and heavier than it had any right to be.

Hadrath Banin diet Inderi set it on the low table the way she had once set a chald into a petitioner’s palm: as if the metal might bite. Copper lamps made the Well of Astria look kind. It was not kind. It was a house that kept seven thousand people breathing on a world that had forgotten how to be fertile without a contract. She had been High Couch long enough to know the difference.

In the next chamber Estri slept with her mouth open and one fist in her hair. Seven years old. Already the attendants called her diet Estrazi when they thought Hadrath could not hear, as if a father’s absence were a title. The child had copper in her, and something else — a stillness that did not come from Silistra. Hadrath had seen that stillness once, in a visitor whose skin took the lamps like bronze.

She had not asked him his true name. Wells do not, if they are wise. He had left a daughter and a riddle and a promise that was not a promise. Hadrath, who kept other people’s oaths for a living, had kept that one anyway.

The cube warmed under her palm. A M’ksakkan toy, smuggled through Arlet in a grain jar, paid for in favors she would not write down. It would hold a face. It would hold a voice. It would not hold her. She had walked the desert physicians’ tents that morning and been told, with great courtesy, that the blood would not stay where she put it. A High Couch is not supposed to die of ordinary things. She intended to be inconvenient one last time.

“Estri,” she said, and the cube took the name like a throat taking water. “If they tell you I have gone into the sand, they are only half lying. I have gone looking for the man who is not of this Well. I may not be allowed to come back. That is not your fault. It is not a chaldra you owe me.”

She almost stopped there. High Couches are trained to stop at the useful sentence. Instead she laughed, once, because Estri at seven had yesterday tried to knight a wolf with a table chain, and the wolf had endured it with the patience of a better religion.

“You will be asked to sit where I sit,” Hadrath said. “You will be told the couch is a throne. It is a piece of furniture. What you do with the people who come to it is the only sovereignty this world has left. If the chald feels like a collar, take it off. If it feels like a map, follow it. If a bronze door opens and someone claims to be older than fathers, ask him what he was afraid of when he was young. He will not like the question. Ask it twice.”

The lamps guttered. Somewhere in the lower courts a night singer began the old Astrian hymn that made visitors blush and made the Keepress tired. Hadrath leaned closer to the cube until her own face, doubled in the metal, looked like a girl she had forgotten.

“I am not a hologram,” she told it, and therefore told the woman Estri would become. “I am your mother, and I am running out of night. When you are old enough to hate me for leaving, open this. When you are old enough to stop, open it again. There is a road beyond Arlet that does not care what we call ourselves. If I find it, I will mark it. If I do not, you will. Tasa, little storm. Do not let them make you only beautiful.”

She sealed the cube. She set it in the carved niche behind the High Couch, where a child who liked hiding would one day put her hand without being told. Then she sat with Estri until the hymn ended, counting the girl’s breaths as if they were coin.

In the morning the Keepress was gone. The wolf slept across the threshold. The cube waited, small and heavy, for a daughter who had not yet learned she would have to leave the Well to keep it.