The Squire and the Botanist

Young Talbot's valour makes me smile at thee:

When he perceived me shrink and on my knee,

His bloody sword he brandish'd over me,

And, like a hungry lion, did commence

Rough deeds of rage and stern impatience;

- Lord Talbot, Henry VI Part 1 [4.7]

The Stripling

Qimmiq learned his name from a Titan cluster slave trader; it meant something polar. When he won his freedom with swift service, he hid in the hanger bay to cut the trader’s throat. He took up with a junker outfit, but soon tired of this and sought to guard the caravans.

Hammock tales of heroism percolated through him; he’d seen through child-wide eyes the painted dropships whirling, dipping, launching proton missiles in hive-silos at the raider fleets.

At fifteen he stole a plant from the orangery on Trinculo, a mere bud. Its name was neatly printed on the base and he paid a junker who could read to teach him the word. He whispered to it in the darkness, a trader’s croon: ‘Rafflesia, Rafflesia, I would know ye, I would care, care, care.’

It answered his prayers with pentagonal bloom. The weight of its beauty pulled a tear down his cheek, like a bead of combi-glass. He left it to die when he joined the caravan guards.

The guards styled their own companies. From Connemara Base came the Order of Thanatosh, their Haut-Capitaines stern and polished. The Venusian Jutes revitalised their legends: Blitzkriegers and Bear Zergars more iron than flesh, supped-up on K-rads and combat drugs, zweihanders in the Landsknecht style, glowing with infrared. The Lethwei - shrewd, compact men - wielded tantos and crudely cut away their lips so to appear forever snarling; as a child, Qimmiq himself had seen the gaudy painted tigers gyrating beneath their stimsuits.

He lost his left hand on the first job. The fight had gone well - an error with the door-seal cut it off. He bellowed in pain; the others laughed. Through frosted glass his still-twitching digits danced away from the vessel. He had to crawl through the pain and the shame of soldiers giggling to the medpack; he forked over most of his winnings for a replacement.

Few places in the Ritou System could do basic synth-limbs anymore. Most came imported from Sirius, but the caravans always price gouged.

Qimmiq wondered if he’d ever see Sirius. He was 21. His lungs were failing by now.

The Hedge-Knight

The Hedge-Knight was kind to Qimmiq. When he first met her - swirling mane of grey-gold hair rippling back from the helm, lion verts emblazoned resplendent, power armour pistons hissing - Qimmiq thought her a Bingmayong of the mythic Graveship Líshān. And that armour! Crystalline plates bound into an exoskeleton of gleaming plasteel, a scabbard bedecked with starsoot.

One of the sloppers in the bar mentioned to him the crest was of ‘The Greenthumb Way’, an outfit of doomed scientists tinkering with botany and Geller fields on a dying part of Mercury. He had been on med-leave. She was amiable, tall, she could read. She was strong, she was old – older than anyone Qimmiq had ever seen. She took him with her when she departed.

Their first mark was a Han Empire refugee. Han stations dotted what was left of Ritou, all decaying. The Hedge-Knight turned her seven-foot form to Qimmiq, pea-green gazer flickering: ‘We are all living in their ruins, he just happens to be one of the ghosts.’ They caught up to the man on Umbriel, eating squalid meats on squalid rock.

He was half-gone with the Stim Squiffs when they got to him, purple foam dripping from his ears. He had taken some of the settlers from an abandoned mining complex in the Terax Crater, poor people hoping to strike… something.

Craters littered Umbriel, and there were plenty of places to hide as he tore their flesh up, sucking lymph and marrow and ox. A taste for haema… worse fates could befall an anachronism, though none sprang to Qimmiq's mind.

The collection was quick. With a bloodcurdling cry he launched forward, clawing at the intruders. They couldn’t hear him; he’d gnawed off his commbox. Qimmiq glimpsed a tattoo on his brow: zhōngwèi.

The Hedge-Knight neatly sidestepped him, cogs whirring, separating torso from legs. With deft movements she sheathed the blade, collecting the identifiable half. The rest drifted off, great welts of scarlet gathering about the atmos. Slowly, the crazed man’s suit decompressed, dandruff wisps of ox cluttering the sky. Dawn daubed old ore-carts bone-white.

Her green knowledge, root-like, grew inside him. She proselytized beside the autopilot. ‘Cowardice is a disease. It turns the belly yellow and the cheeks a sunken grey. The ducts dry up. In the liver of the coward a lily grows, purest white, sporing poisonous fear inwards. The coward has no choice but to find their courage.’

‘Or wha’ Doc?’

‘Or… they implode.’

She planted a daisy that day. The purest act her new squire ever witnessed. How gentle, how dexterous the fingers, as if the power gauntlets were her epidermis, as if she could touch the stem, the leaves, the frail face of the flower with her own semi-skimmed skin. She couldn’t, of course.

They were in the ruins of a starbase circling Saturn at the time. No sealed ox-pockets left; scraps picked by junkers. And yet, amid grey mess, there bloomed holy one white-yellow gift, defiant in the desolation of rock and inky night.

Root-like, she nourished him with knowledge. Her logbooks of pleasant pencil. Her ship enfolded in Titan Arum. Her smile, rare between stern discipline. Wisteria wound about the cockpit; in the galley, neat collections of glass-covered flora were stacked and labelled in neat rows.

The Greenthumb Way had had some success on Mercury. Qimmiq guessed she’d originally been attached to the military detail – her power armour bore an Imperial issue serial number. Not even the oldest of the allflesh guards could boast that. Yet often, as the ship sung them to sleep, he’d catch a sad look in her eye, as if all she’d been able to rescue were her plants.

They were never well-off - Qimmiq bet a scientist wouldn’t be taking hunter work if otherwise. They lived well when they could: timtams and protein bars and juice packs, sweeteners so intense he could feel little sphincters vacillate throughout him. Aspic wobbling inside and outside, reformed from his waste, wasted on his palette.

She showed him the jewels amid this rubble of a system. Stratospheres of limoncello. Wavelengths of pleasure in the last bastions of decadence, hidden in and amongst empty rocks.

Dying, she was stuck by a Gileno spear through the midriff, draining her like an inkstand. Black bubbles of blood caught the many-mooned light. Dying, she pressed a copper locket into Qimmiq’s glove. Her brow furrowed, last words seeping out of her – a solemn bequeathing, a soliloquy at length. No use. The tip had ruptured her commbox; Qimmiq heard only static. He nodded tearfully for show.

Spirals of Loss

He recovered in the alkaline glow of Thalassa Base 4. Moons purpled under his gaze. The great belt returned his lament:

‘The blooms… they can’t do without ye, they’re all gonna die. Master… my master… where are ye?’

Paralysed, he fell into haunted dreams. Var-tigers with their irradiated fur and triple-paired eyes, set like rhinestones. Queen Medusa of the Fifth Sea, rumoured slinking in her palace on the dark side of Adrastea. Trees crashing down. Flowers wilting. Han relic-seekers and raiders and traders and junkers and filth and not being able to sleep for the stims or the sound or the silence; Qimmiq wept without the Hedge Knight, wept in his atheism.

Through tears remained the locket, calling to him. He took caravan work, it called to him. He took intravenous stims, it called to him. He took himself aloft, adrift in his module between the remaining moons of Jupiter, the dull wink of the locket on the dash.

It was her temerity in the copper. Her voicelessness. To… to open...? Had she been warning him away? Or should he give in to its gravitational pull? Should he take the precious contents with him, beyond? He salivated at thoughts of the clean metallic click, of the heart-shape opening. He wondered what morsel of her lay within.

His body was failing, bit by bit, but he wouldn’t hear the little messages it gave him. Qimmiq tore away from his mind. He pushed harder, raging against the torpor. Raging, he contorted his muscles for even the most basic physical tasks. He dock-loaded in record time. He over-tinkered. He fought and piloted recklessly, pushing his module to the limit.

Rafflesia Returns

It was at Latifundium, off the Galle ring, that it all caught up to him. Ships on fire made new craters through plasteel walls. Billowing flames swallowed ox-pockets, then petered out. Tachyon guns rattled off, their lights only visible post-impact.

His module was caput, systems dormant – he crawled from the wreckage like a beast, hyper-boosting his jets to reach a row of Han-made hills. He found a cave peppered with luminescent gemstones and pushed his wounded body inside. The synth-stone propped up his weakening body, it’s smooth edges grey and taut.

He checked his scabbard. The console was chipped, the blade’s infra-red edge sparking. He had lost his sidearm in the crash. He could hear them approaching the hills.

His heartrate slowed and he thought of beginnings. His plasteel boots holding him to the parched ground. His clay cup. His Rafflesia. The snow he would never see again. The spots on the sun, the places of worship. The calamari girl who had thrown back her flaxen rope of hair and flashed a smile towards him amidst… amidst the xenon light. Blood… it seeped out of his stimsuit.

He uncurled his synth-fist, and there it was. The locket – he must have subconsciously reached for it.

Comm static. They weren’t far.

The latch on the locket was looking back at him. He slid his thumb against it. There was no click, but, with the energy of a coiled spring, it popped open.

Bare before him was a leaf of dock, the first-learned. It all came trickling back.

A glass case depressurising as the Hedge-Knight removed the cover. Rumex obtusifolius. She had sounded out the syllables for him. She had been patient with him.

Quite quickly, the single leaf was melting into drab brownness, shedding the verdancy of chlorophyll. No words, no embrace could contain it - like confetti, it broke apart and went away on stellar winds. A fluttering noise amidst the static of his commbox. Then, nothing.

He squinted his eyes, laughing a low, chuntering laugh: ‘Dock from a Doc in a locket’ – the sibilance made a giggler of him. His breath shallowed and he began to cough.

Memories broke apart with their owner. Creon flows and do-si-do’s. Corny music and corned beef. The simulacrum of love on an iron dance floor. A cloud of idioms bubbled like phosphorous, like candour, up out of him - now pain, now tears - twisting out. He squeezed them from him; he was a juice pack.

Qimmiq’s head rolled back, and his eyes closed. ‘Gimme just a breath, then I’ll... I’ll stick those...’

Rafflesia… there it was, in swirling spots.

Hidden behind the dock leaf, tucked under a copper latch, lay a small photo. Miniscule. Delicate. A woman, swirling golden hair, face creased with post-natal exhaustion, held an infant to her. Her smile glittered in the gem-covered cave.