This is the story the House Prime told me as he lay dying in the vast hall while all was burning around us. Of all the servants and attendants and maids which once had numbered in their hundreds, only the Lady and I remained, watching over him during his final hours oozing blood and black bile onto the tessellated marble floor.
I had been pledged to the House a mere few months before its fiery end, my parents unable to feed me and the rest of their brood—a common occurrence amid the city throng. I know nothing of what happened to them as the cities burned, here and among the stars.
While you might find it hard to believe that people ever went to the stars, I am telling you, it is true. Once upon a time, there were ships which crossed the empty night, like those who go far at sea, looking for fish and hoping for treasure. There were men and women then who did not flinch at the eternal darkness surrounding them, or succumbed gasping in the cold and too-thin air. I do not know of such things myself of course. Back then, I watched the palace wall screens exalting the Prime's conquests of worlds beyond ours, and applauded his bravery and might as his fleet rewarded him and the House with riches for keeping us safe from the barbarians.
None of that survives now. The screens shattered, the booty melted into the ground, the smoke carried the riches away into the clouds. Soon there were no more spaceships, no more cities, and everybody became as ignorant as the rats which infest our villages, and the sparrows which eat our crops.
Nobody but I remembers those days. Recalling the past is a dangerous exercise I've been warned. We took the tyrant down, destroyed his House and all that stood for it, they say. Swept away the corruption and filth. Brought freedom to the people. Distributed the wealth, although I've always wondered about that because all I ever got was one good meal before being sent to a reform camp. But our virtuous leaders must be right. Who am I to say otherwise when I was only a child all those decades ago, a victim of the House's shameless and cruel way of life.
So I have been told.
I was coarse and curious and quick on my feet then, put to work as an errand boy to the Lady of the House. I didn't know her name. The Prime did not tell me in his dying breaths. I thought at the time he might have forgotten it, his memory failing him as was his body. I saw and heard much, but understood very little of the minds of those I served.
His body pierced like a kitchen sieve, the House Prime recounted what started the fall of the House that had stood for more than two hundred years and six generations. The Lady, he spat out, his eyes cloudy as I sat by his side, was the one who started it all.
This is the story he told me. This is the story of the woman I know only as the Lady.
The narrator is a direct descendant of the boy in 'Souls' by Joanna Russ. Her novella won the Hugo Award in 1983 and is the story of the Abbess Radegunde stopping the Viking from pillaging her abbey, as told by her young protégé.
Gifted to Voyagerfictionfan.