Six more guards came over the rise, and Llama set his feet, and the hour started.
He held.
That was it, and there was nothing else to say about it, because he never once needed to do anything else. He stood in a wheat field with an apron on over a shield, and he broke everything that came at him.
When there were four, he broke four. When there were eleven, he broke eleven.
He did not step forward to make it easier, and he did not step back when it got hard, and he never at any moment drifted so far from her that anything could have reached her. They came at him screaming and they hit him and slid off him and lay in the crop making noises, and he stood in the flattened gold ring he’d made of the ground and waited for the next one, and the ring got wider, and he stayed in the middle of it.
These men had faces I had never seen and would never see again, and nobody anywhere had ever worn one of them first. Eleven of them, and eleven separate ways of coming at a shield. One favored his left hand. One was frightened and came anyway.
The fragment had made them out of nothing, and it had gone to the trouble of making them different.
I stood ten meters back and watched him do it, and I knew exactly how this would get told at the fire afterward, and who it would be told about.
So I made myself watch her instead.
Lumi cut wheat.
On her knees, in the dirt, in a robe worth more than the field. With her braid coming down. With her hands going red, then raw, then wet, because a sickle handle was wood and skin wasn’t.
She cut wheat while eleven men tried to kill the man in front of her.
She cut wheat while the farmer stood at the edge of his own field and screamed at her.
He never came close enough for Llama to have to do anything about him. Nothing happened to him. He stood twenty meters from Lady Luminaria for an entire hour and watched her take his life’s best year apart by hand, and told her, without pause, exactly what she was.
“Look at you. Look at you. Lady, is it? Lady with a sickle.“
“One bucket,” she said, and cut.
“You’ll cut the whole of it. For a sweet. For a cake. You’ll take the year for a cake—”
“One bucket.”
“—and you’ll go through your door and you’ll eat it and you’ll never think of me again.”
Her hands did not stop.
I stood in the wheat where nobody could see me, the farmer’s eyes went through me, the guards ran past me like I was a scarecrow, and I discovered exactly how useless a God-Queen can be if you build the right room for her.
The braid stayed. The chin stayed level.
“Lumi.”
“I’m fine, Majesty.”
“Your hair’s standing up.”
“I said I’m fine.“
The bucket was two-thirds full. The surrounding field had gone to stubble in a rough half-circle, ugly and uneven. Green stalks were going in now because green ones cut easier and Lumi was past caring. Weeds with them. Grit off the roots by the handful, because she’d stopped shaking them out and was only cutting and dropping, cutting and dropping.
“Lumi, look at what you’re putting in the—”
“THIEF!“ the farmer shrieked. “THIEF IN THE WHEAT!”
And she snapped.
A flinch in one shoulder, half a turn of her head, and a single white thread of current came off her hand and went out into the crop. It wasn’t aimed at him. It just left because she’d been holding it in for an hour, and she was tired, and her hands were bleeding.
A patch of wheat two meters across turned black.
The crack of it rolled out across the field. The guards flinched. Llama put one down while he was flinching.
Then nothing. Even the farmer stopped.
Lumi looked at the scorched patch for a long moment.
Then she reached into it, gathered the black stalks up in both ruined hands, and put them in the bucket.
“Lumi.“
“We need the weight.” Her voice was level. “The book says, fill it. It doesn’t say fill it nicely.“
“Leave the black ones. Cut clean.”
She looked around at what was within reach. The trampled ring. The flattened ground where eleven men had been thrown down and got up again.
“Majesty,” she said. “There is no clean left.”
She filled the bucket to the brim.
Then she stood, and her knees didn’t want to, and she carried it back toward the door with her chin level and her braid down her back and blood on the handle. Llama fell in behind her without a word, walking backward, shield up, all the way to the frame.
I went through first.
Llama came through last. He pulled the door shut, and it stopped being a door and started being a wall. Lumi set the bucket down on the worktable and let go of the handle, and there was blood on it in the shape of her fingers.
Nobody said anything about that.
Mill what you cut.
The quern sat on its low bench with the crank sticking out sideways, waiting, and it was the friendliest-looking object in the room. Two flat stones. A hole in the top one. You put the thing in the hole and you turn the handle and flour comes out the sides.
Llama pulled the bench out from the wall with one hand, sat down in front of it, and looked at it for a moment. Then he reached into the bucket and took a fistful of wheat, stalks and heads and all, and fed it into the hole.
He turned the crank.
It went a quarter turn and stopped.
He put his shoulder into it, and it moved, and it kept moving, and it made a wet sound.
“That’s not how it’s supposed to sound,” Lumi said.
Llama stopped and glanced at her briefly. “Do you know how it's supposed to sound?”
“Not like that,” she said, but motioned for him to continue.
He turned it four more times, and then he stopped, and he lifted the top stone off with his fingertips and set it on the bench.
Underneath was a green smear.
Stalk, crushed flat and bleeding. Wet husk. A paste of it worked into the grooves of the stone, and in the middle of the paste, whole and untouched and completely indifferent, a scatter of little hard grains.
The three of us looked at it.
“So,” I said, “that’s grass.”
“That’s grass,” Llama agreed.
Lumi picked one of the grains out of the mess and held it up between two red fingers.
“It’s in the head,” she said. “The rest is the plant.”
I have signed a grain tax. I have approved a mill, at a table, with a pen, while Lola told me what a mill was for, and I nodded and thought about lunch. I had no idea how to make it work.
Neither did they.
Lumi turned the grain over. “The husk comes off too, presumably.”
“Presumably,” I said.
“Presumably,” Llama said.
They started by doing the obvious thing, which was rubbing the heads between their palms.
It worked. That was the maddening part. She took a head of wheat and rolled it hard between her hands, and the grains came loose and fell out into the bowl, three or four of them, sometimes five.
Lumi did it once. She did it with her hands split open to the second knuckle from an hour on a sickle handle, and she did not make a sound, and she set the head down carefully in the bowl and looked at the far wall for about three seconds.
Then she picked up another one.
“Lumi.”
“There are two of us.”
“There are two of you and about nine thousand of those.”
Llama stood up.
He unbuckled the shield off his arm and laid it face-up on the worktable and swept the flour dust off it with the side of his hand. Then he took a double handful of wheat by the stalks, raised it over his head, and brought it down on the shield.
The crack in it went up into the beams.
Grain sprayed. Chaff came off it in a cloud, caught the light, and hung there, drifting, gold and stupid and beautiful.
“Again,” Lumi said.
He did it again.
He beat wheat against the finest piece of defensive equipment in the kingdom, over and over, with an apron on. Lumi worked the other end of the table, gathering what he knocked loose, sweeping it in with the edge of her arm because her hands had stopped being useful for gathering.
Chaff got into everything. It hung in the gold air, and it came down on the tables, and it got in the bowls, and it got in my mouth, and I stood there and could not brush it off my own face.
Some of it went into the fire and popped.
Then there was the problem of separating the grain from all the rubbish it came with, and Lumi solved it, because Lumi could solve it.
“Stand back,” she said, and lifted one hand over the bowl.
She was careful. She was so careful that her tongue was out, and she took a breath before she did it, and I watched Lady Luminaria of Altandai make the smallest thing she has ever made in her life.
It was still too much.
The chaff went. So did about a third of the grain, in a bright horizontal spray, across the kitchen, off the far wall, into the fire, under the tables.
The fire spat. Somewhere behind me, something rolled.
Lumi lowered her hand.
“Second attempt,” she said.
The second attempt was better. The second attempt was a breath, barely a breath, and the chaff lifted off the top of the bowl and went sideways and the grain stayed, mostly, and she did it again on the next bowl, and the next, and it took forever, and it worked.
Llama went and got down on the floor and swept the thrown grain back up with his hands. All of it. Off the flagstones, out from under the bench, in with the grit and the flour dust and whatever had been on that floor since the temple invented it, and he tipped it back into the bowl.
“Llama, that’s—”
“We need the weight,” he said.
They ground fast, which was by ruining two bowls of grain first. Too much in the hole and the stones locked. A thin trickle, and the crank turned, and pale, coarse stuff came creeping out from between the stones and down into the tray.
Grit, the size of sand, and they had to run it through again.
It was the most boring thing I have ever watched two people do, and they did it for half an hour, and at some point, I realized I was watching the fire instead.
The middle oven had gone down to a sullen orange.
“Fire’s low.”
Nothing. The crank turned.
“Llama. The fire is low.”
He got up without a word, crossed the room, put four splits of wood on the fire, and came back and sat down and picked up the crank again. Lumi’s hands opened up again around the fourth bowl. I saw the crank handle go dark, and I saw her keep turning it, and I opened my mouth to say something spectacularly useless.
Llama put his hand on the crank next to hers and turned, and she did not let go, so now they were both turning it, badly and out of rhythm, and considerably slower than one of them alone.
They did the fifth bowl like that. And the sixth.
At some point she looked up at him with flour across one cheekbone, high, like war paint, and he reached over and brushed it off with his thumb, and went back to the crank.
She said nothing, but her ears turned red.
I studied the ceiling with enormous interest.
The sieve was the last insult.
Everything went through it, and what came through was flour, and what stayed behind was the rest; chaff they had missed, husk, sand, green grit from the stalks she had cut soft because soft cut faster, and the black.
The scorched wheat. Two meters of a man’s best year, turned to charcoal by a single white thread off her hand. It had gone through the stones with everything else. It was in the flour now. Fine grey-black powder, right through it, and there was no picking it out and no sifting it out and no unburning it.
The heap in the bowl came up to about the width of my two hands. It was grey. Grey-gold, dull, speckled, with a smell to it that was almost bread and wasn’t.
Two people, one hour in a field, one hour grounding, and that was the pile.
Lumi carried it to me. She held the bowl out with her forearms under it because she could not close her hands.
“Majesty.”
I lifted the scepter, and the hollow socket at its head pulled the light in.
[Attention! Appraisal.]
[Ground Flour]Type: 1-commonQuality: 44%Foreign matter: chaff, soil, stone grit, combusted plant matter.
I shared it with them; Lumi read it, and her chin came up a quarter inch and stayed there.
“Forty-four,” I said.
The fire cracked behind us.
“Right,” Llama said, and stood, and put his apron straight, and looked at the door with the horn over it and the pail off the hook by the door with the horn over it.
“Ready,” he said.
Lumi had washed her hands at the pump. They were still ruined, and she had tied strips of a clean cloth over both palms and knotted them with her teeth, and she flexed them once and said nothing about it.
She put her hand on the latch.
Sound arrived first, thousands of voices, layered and roaring and cut through with brass.
Then the light.
We came out onto a stage, and around the stage was a stadium.
It went up and up and up, tier on tier, a bowl of packed faces under white banners, and every one of those faces was turned to us. There was bunting. There were pennants with a horn on them. A brass band was going somewhere off to the left and losing badly to the crowd.
Across the front of the stage, in letters four meters high, hung a banner:
THE EMPIRE’S 134TH GRAND MILKING
And the stage went out from under me, the fragment teleported me.
Now, I was sitting in a padded chair at a long table below it, in a row with three other people, with a green sash across my chest and a wooden paddle with a 10 on it lying in front of me next to a small brass bell.
The man to my left was enormous and had a napkin tucked into his collar. The woman on my right had a monocle and a clipboard. The fourth was asleep.
The temple had made me a judge.
I looked down at my own hands, folded, useless, in my lap. Ugh, fine.
“GOOD PEOPLE OF THE EMPIRE—”
The announcer was a small, round man in a coat of gold brocade, nearly rivaling Riker’s, standing on a box, and his voice went out over that stadium with a magical amplification Lucy would have paid money for.
“—WE COME TO THE FINAL PAIR!”
The roar went up. The band gave up entirely.
“THEY COME UNSPONSORED! THEY COME UNREGISTERED! THEY ARE NOT WEARING THE COLORS OF ANY PROVINCE OF THE EMPIRE—”
Somewhere in the upper tiers, somebody booed. The rest of the stadium booed them.
“—AND THEY WILL FACE—” the little man let it hang, and the stadium quieted, “—THE THUNDERHIDE!”
The gates at the back of the stage came open.
The animal came out of the dark of the gate at a walk, and the stage boards took its weight and complained about it. Black and the hide moved with light under it, thin blue veins of it crawling and forking across the flank and dying and coming back. Two horns, long, curved, and burnt-looking at the tips. Shoulders at the height of my head. A hump of muscle on the neck.
It had a bell around its throat. Somebody had put a bell on it, tied with a ribbon.
Thanks to static electricity, every hair on my arms stood on end at the judges’ table, eleven meters away.
Its eyes found Lumi and it lowered its head.
“THIRTY-ONE YEARS!” the announcer howled. “THIRTY-ONE YEARS SHE HAS COME TO THIS STAGE! ONE HUNDRED AND SIX CONTESTANTS! THE RECORD STANDS AT—” he consulted a card, “—TWO FINGERS!”
The man beside me with the napkin leaned toward me and said confidingly, “Nobody’s ever filled a cup. That’s the Thunderhide.”
“That’s a cow.”
“She’s very rare,” he said, and went back to his sandwich.
Llama walked to the animal.
He did it without hurrying, and he handed the pail to Lumi as he passed her without looking at her.
The bull, the cow, whatever, over a ton of standing weather, came at him.
He met it.
There was a sound like a door being closed on a mountain, and the boards under them cracked, and Llama’s boots went back ten centimeters through the wood and stopped.
The crowd made a noise I have never heard a crowd make.
He got one arm over the neck. He got his shoulder into the hollow of its throat. He set his feet, and the animal heaved, and threw its head, and came off the ground with its hindquarters, and came down, and he was still there.
Lightning went through him. Straight through, blue-white, up his arms and over the plate and out through the boards.
He did not move. “Hold,” he said, to himself, or to the cow, and held.
The animal stopped.
It stood there, shaking, with a man’s arm across its throat, and its flanks going, and the little bell under its chin ringing and ringing and ringing.
“IT’S HELD!” the announcer screamed. “IN ONE HUNDRED AND SIX ATTEMPTS I HAVE NEVER—IT’S HELD! IT’S HELD!“
Lumi walked out to the animal with the pail in one hand, and she took the whole stage on the way.
She stopped at the mark. She turned to the north tier, and bowed, slow, one hand at her waist and the other out to the side with the pail hanging off it, and she held the bow.
The north tier stood up.
She turned to the east and bowed. The east tier stood up.
She took the strips of cloth off her hands and dropped them on the boards.
She knelt beside the animal, under it, with her braid hanging into the wreckage of the stage, and she put her bare palms on it, and the lightning went into her.
It came out of the hide in a sheet. It went up both her arms and lit the inside of her sleeves and jumped from her shoulders to the boards, and her braid came apart, and her hair stood straight up off her scalp in a white corona, and she took hold of the animal and she milked it.
The first stream hit the bottom of the pail and rang.
The crowd loved it, and the stadium fell apart.
She milked it through the second discharge, and through the third. She got up on one knee and put her shoulder into the flank when it tried to shift its weight and she never lost the rhythm, and the milk came in white ropes and it was glowing, faintly, blue-white, and it filled the pail up past the rivets.
At the fourth discharge she turned her head and looked out at the crowd with her hair on end and smoke coming off her sleeve.
She winked.
Fifty thousand people lost their minds.
She milked that animal until the pail was full to the brim and the milk stood a finger above the rim without spilling, and then she milked it four more times because the crowd was chanting, and then she stopped, and set the pail down, and stood up.
She put one bleeding hand to her lips and threw a kiss to the north tier.
She threw one to the east.
She threw one to the west, and then bent double laughing when the west tier tried to throw them back, and straightened, and put her hands out to both sides and turned once, slowly, all the way around, smoking, with her hair up off her scalp and burning white at the ends.
Llama, with a ton of storm folded against his shoulder and one arm locked across its throat, watched her do it.
He was smiling.
The announcer was crying. Openly. Into his amplification.
“—AND WE GO TO THE JUDGES—”
The woman with the monocle wrote something down and held up a 9.
The man with the napkin held up a 10 and shouted something with his mouth full.
The sleeping one woke, held up his paddle upside down, and went back to sleep.
Then the whole bowl turned and looked at me.
I could not lift the paddle. Lifting the paddle was an action, and an action ended all of it, the scenario, the cake, the day, her hands. The temple had set a ten in front of me and left it lying there, and I sat with my palms flat on the table in a green sash with the empire waiting.
Fine.
“They win,” I said.
It carried. It carried out over the stadium, and every stone in that bowl took it up and threw it back.
Hats. Programs. Somebody’s boot. The band, revived, playing something in the wrong key at full volume.
The announcer lay flat on his back on his box with his arms out.
“WE HAVE A WINNER!”