The Best of Nancy Kress Read Free Page B

event was pivotal to her life, a dividing point past which she would never be the same person again. How could she? She had been shown the depths to which humanity, without the Church of the Holy Hostage and the All-World Concordance, could descend. Burning eye sockets, mutilated genitals, a general who stood on a hill and said, “How I love to see the arms and legs fly!” It had been shattering. She had been shattered, as the orientation intended she should be.
    The boy with the violet eyes was crying. Lambert wanted to step down from the platform and go to him. She wanted to put her arms around him and hold his head against her shoulder…but was that because of compassion, or was that because of his violet eyes?
    She said silently to him, without leaving the podium, You will be all right. Human beings are not as mutable as you think. When this is over, nothing permanent about you will have changed at all.
     

     
    Anne opened her eyes. Satan leaned over her.
    His head was shaved, and he wore strange garb of an ugly blue-green. His cheeks were stained with dye. In one ear, metal glittered and swung. Anne crossed herself.
    “Hello,” Satan said, and the voice was not human.
    She struggled to sit up; if this be damnation, she would not lie prone for it. Her heart hammered in her throat. But the act of sitting brought the Prince of Darkness into focus, and her eyes widened. He looked like a man. Painted, made ugly, hung around with metal boxes that could be tools of evil—but a man.
    “My name is Culhane.”
    A man. And she had faced men. Bishops, nobles, Chancellor Wolsey. She had outfaced Henry, Prince of England and France, Defender of the Faith.
    “Don’t be frightened, Mistress Boleyn. I will explain to you where you are and how you came to be here.”
    She saw now that the voice came not from his mouth, although his mouth moved, but from the box hung around his neck. How could that be? Was there then a demon in the box? But then she realized something else, something real to hold on to.
    “Do not call me Mistress Boleyn. Address me as Your Grace. I am the queen.”
    The something that moved behind his eyes convinced her, finally, that he was a mortal man. She was used to reading men’s eyes. But why should this one look at her like that? With pity? With admiration?
    She struggled to stand, rising off the low pallet. It was carved of good English oak. The room was paneled in dark wood and hung with tapestries of embroidered wool. Small-paned windows shed brilliant light over carved chairs, table, chest. On the table rested a writing desk and a lute. Reassured, Anne pushed down the heavy cloth of her nightshift and rose.
    The man, seated on a low stool, rose, too. He was taller than Henry—she had never seen a man taller than Henry—and superbly muscled. A soldier? Fright fluttered again, and she put her hand to her throat. This man, watching her—watching her throat . Was he then an executioner? Was she under arrest, drugged and brought by some secret method into the Tower of London? Had someone brought evidence against her? Or was Henry that disappointed that she had not borne a son that he was eager to supplant her already?
    As steadily as she could, Anne walked to the window.
    The Tower Bridge did not lie beyond in the sunshine. Nor the river, nor the gabled roofs of Greenwich Palace. Instead there was a sort of yard, with huge beasts of metal growling softly. On the grass naked young men and women jumped up and down, waving their arms, running in place and smiling and sweating as if they did not know either that they were uncovered or crazed.
    Anne took firm hold of the windowsill. It was slippery in her hands, and she saw that it was not wood at all but some material made to resemble wood. She closed her eyes, then opened them. She was a queen. She had fought hard to become a queen, defending a virtue nobody believed she still had, against a man who claimed that to destroy that virtue was love. She had