Far Horizons: Tales of Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror. Issue #19 October 2015 | Page 6

Then the girl pointed and said something to her brother. The boy focused on Mikkel and grinned, revealing
a missing tooth. Both children waved and ran toward
the gate.

Mikkel stood watch as the overdressed
groomsmen took control of the horses and the cart.
The setting sun glittering from the palace’s glass face
blinded him, and he had to train his eyes on his boots.
The guardsmen at the gate saluted him, squinting.
Mikkel nodded at each of them as he walked past.
He had not learned all of their names. That seemed a
great crime now. They reminded him of himself, so
very many years ago, when the world was new and his
responsibilities were less crushing.

Mikkel swallowed hard. “Sergeant. Take the
clothes up to the house.”
The sergeant shot his captain a questioning
look. He looked from Mikkel to the children, who
had stopped waving at the edge of their garden and
now seemed confused by their grandfather’s lack of
response. He looked back at Mikkel again. Then he
reached down for a bundle of silk and hopped over the
side of the cart without speaking.

The emperor, he knew, would still be in the
room at the top of the spire, many flights of stairs
above the ground. Resigning himself to the long walk,
he trudged upstairs to make his report.

The young guard tousled the boys hair and
chucked the girl under her chin. The younglings
trailed him up the cobblestone walk and watched him
knock on the door. A woman opened the door, drying
her hands on her apron. Mikkel watched them talk,
and the sergeant gave her the emperor’s gift. Her
sounds of delight piped into the air.

This room, too, twinkled with bars of refracted
light. Red and yellow bands danced across the marble floor, colouring the young man in the crown and
robe. Mikkel thought of the emperor’s father, who had
always been so regal in his sunray crown. He heard
his own father’s voice whispering, The emperor is the
son of the Sun. His blood can heal any illness, as they
stood together to watch Mikkel’s first parade. The old
emperor had seemed so much like a god to the young
boy that the man had never questioned it.

Mikkel closed his eyes against tears. As the
sergeant hopped back over the side of the cart he
heard his daughter-in-law call, “Thank you, Father
Mikkel! They are so beautiful!”

Emperor Alliot sat in the same slumped position he had assumed for five days. In a distant corner,
a chamber pot stank. He defecates like a man, Mikkel
thought, and wondered if his father would slap his
mouth for such a blasphemous thought.

He did not look at her. “Go,” he said instead,
and the cart rumbled onward.
On the mountain above the city sat the Emperor’s palace with the city sprawling around it. From the
town below, it seemed a mirage; at once Mikkel could
smell pig shit and see a shining spire of glass glinting in the light of the setting sun. Closer, up where
the nobility lived, that great glass structure refracted
sunshine into a thousand rainbows to splash against
the streets and buildings. Everything was awash with
colour up there. Down in the dirt, beautiful girls died
all the time, some of dysentery, some in childbirth,
some murdered by cruel lovers, some by worse. But as
Mikkel and the other soldiers drew closer to the grand
structure, he realized he understood something new:
when one had spent his entire life lit with rainbows,
ugliness became unbearable.

Alliot watched a girl on a bed with embroidered blankets. She was still and pale, long eyelashes
shadowing her cheeks like traces of butterfly wings.
Her lips were soft, her cheekbones were high enough
to cast their own shadows, and her skin was smooth as
cream.
Cut flowers piled around her in a f Ʌ