The Lily Pond

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The Lily Pond, 1.5k




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The lily pond in the rear gardens of Astrix Manor was a wild, overgrown thing: enormously dark and deep, choked with water-weeds and profusions of shore grass amidst the border stones. It boasted a stone fountain of rearing horses in its center, their stained, corroded hooves clawing towards the sky, a single forlorn viewing bench, and a healthy population of exotic game fish, frogs, and eels. Once upon a time a legion of architects had labored tirelessly to make the pond appear tame, a small wild lake reshaped and reborn as something decorative, something civilized and pleasing; but among the riot of feral shrubbery and the draping fingers of the untended willow trees on the far edge it was now a dark shadow, stretched out upon the manor grounds like a scar.

Shimizu Stellar understood why people said her lily pond was haunted. The water was cool and dark, even during the height of summer, and the tangled stems of the lilies hid any glimpse of the bottom. It was a place to get lost in. A shallow inlet of the pond was blocked from the deeper, wilder waters by a barred gate just below the surface, installed by her father’s father in the vain hope of creating a swimming area that would not interfere with his ambitions as an angler, but the hinges had long since rusted solid and the gate left permanently at half-mast. As a child Stellar and her friends had dared each other to wriggle back and forth through the narrow gap, surfacing slowly and carefully on the forbidden side like malicious, prepubescent crocodiles, eyes and teeth hiding amidst the wild lilies.

Legend held that three people had drowned in the pond. Stellar supposed any body of water in existence had to claim a victim or two over time, but the stories whispered about her lily pond never involved names or dates, just tragic, romantic fancies. A woman who had either drowned herself to avoid marrying a man she did not love, or who had been drowned by her new husband after he discovered she loved another. A foolish child of the manor house who had ignored his mother’s advice and gone to catch frogs at midnight. A young aristocrat, or a newly drafted soldier in some versions, diving for the golden ring her beloved had dropped to the bottom of the pond and becoming entangled in the water weeds, reaching in vain for the surface as she drowned.

“It is morbid though, isn’t it?” Lieutenant Araya asked, trailing his riding gloves over the surface of the concrete viewing bench. He sounded more intrigued than disapproving. “The scarred widow Shimizu, coming back after the war to live alone in her grand mansion with her horses and her haunted fountain--”

“I never married,” Stellar interrupted calmly, “and it’s still Captain Shimizu, thank you, unless they plan to court-martial me after all. I find the pond exceptionally useful for exercising the horses. Swimming is much less stressful on them when they’re recovering from injuries.”

The lieutenant’s eyes flicked helplessly to the absence at Stellar’s side where her sleeve was pinned up. “Do you swim with them?”

The trio of former military horses, all enhanced for intelligence, strength, and endurance, snorted and splashed playfully like colts as they explored the pond, their coats made a uniform inky black by the water. Stellar did not answer, watching them test their weight on legs that had been scarred and mutilated by shrapnel, wires, and explosives on distant battlefields. The wounds had healed, some against all odds, but the muscle might never return. They would never run as they used to.

“I have another five,” the lieutenant said after a moment, watching the sleek ripple of their spines among the lilies. “Three are relatively healthy, just underweight. Skittish, won’t be equipped or handled by strangers, the usual sort of thing. Not that anyone can blame them, poor creatures. The other two are... not well. I understand your specialty is rehabilitation and retraining, but...”

“Bring them all to me.” Stellar rose, leaning her weight more heavily on the silver-topped cane as her bad leg began to complain fiercely. “You can make the arrangements with my secretary.”

In the late afternoons, the horses were turned out to graze among the gardens. It would have scandalized her family to see the makeshift fencing and hoofprints marring the historic landscaping, not to mention the accumulation of horse-apples that would be dutifully retrieved by the drones and transported to the compost piles, but Stellar enjoyed watching the small herd move among the garden paths, lifting their muzzles curiously to the trellis arches and clustering around the apple trees. They moved cautiously, no few of them limping, the shining steel of replaced joints or stretches of artificial bone glinting visibly where their skin had not yet grown back. They were missing eyes and missing ears, great ragged scars etched into their backs and hard, swollen knots of damaged tissue littering their hides. They spooked at loud mechanical noises. They were wary of humans they didn’t recognize, wary of machinery, wary of wire fences and sucking mud. Their close-shorn, regulation length manes were growing out raggedly. They looked like wild horses, unbraided and shy.

Stellar’s prosthetic didn’t have the sensitivity for her to braid her own hair by touch anymore. She had endured a few humiliating weeks under the well-meaning attempts of the nurses at the hospital, and then stolen a pair of clippers from another patient to shave her hair down close to the skull and have it over with. It didn’t matter what she did or didn’t do with her hair under a riding helmet, and in any case the raking scars over her cheek, the ugly eyepatch hiding her uglier replacement optical, and the ruined wreck of her arm were all anyone saw when they looked at her, anymore.

The prosthetic harness went on over her shirt but under her jacket. Stellar could secure it by herself, one-handed, if she went carefully, though her PT drone fussed and buzzed about not being allowed to do its job. Her knee high boots were custom-made to help support her weak leg, her gloves designed to keep the reins in her hands. She ignored the expensive chair parked in the corner with its ultra-light metal and streamlined design, and her attendants dutifully ignored the dress uniform still hanging pressed and fresh in the back of the closet, the only article of clothing with small, intricate buttons that hadn’t already been tossed out as useless to her.

She rode every day, all day, as long as she could stand it. Her gray gelding Kheiron had learned to kneel or even lay down for her, but he would stand steady near the front steps of the manor house, content to wait while she adjusted her stirrups. There were a handful of horses in her stable that had become special projects, horses that had the patience and intelligence to kneel, to wait, that would compensate for what the wars had taken from their riders. On horseback Stellar could move freely again, she could keep up with the herd at pasture and chase yearlings through their paces and bark orders in the arena, wheeling Kheiron with only voice cues, watching the other trainers work, watching the students pretend to work while surreptitiously staring at her. A few of the better informed girls even managed to smile at her, perhaps genuinely, without letting their gazes slip sideways, and one particularly graceful rider who clearly didn't need lessons at all halted Stellar with a bold hand on her knee, dimpling at her own audacity, and invited Stellar out for drinks, to see how the old neighborhood had changed.

Nothing about the neighborhood had changed. Stellar was the one who had changed, though she let herself think about the offer long enough to imagine saying yes. One didn't fraternize with students at the Academy but those days were long gone, and this girl didn't need teaching. Stellar might have asked her to come on as an instructor. They might see each other every day, here at the manor, and go on rides together, and Stellar could pretend.

"Perhaps another time," she demurred, and pretended to not see the flash of pity. Kheiron didn't even need her signal to turn, shifting onto his hind legs with perfect balance and cantering away to the paddocks. She had no trouble retaining her seat, even as he hopped a trundling drone. On horseback it was almost like nothing had happened. As if she hadn’t left pieces of herself back in the mud and the water-filled trenches, deep enough to drown in, and come back a patchwork thing stuck together by medical science and spite, her family's money poured into her care whether she willed it or not. Not all veterans were so lucky. Not all veterans had the opportunity to even think about helping others the way Stellar could, with her expensive facilities and her well-attended riding classes and the means to bring in unwanted ex-military horses, left alive but lost, purposeless.

For veteran horses, training was not about compensating for rider deficiencies. They needed time and structure and healing, and gentle progression with trainers that would compensate for them. Some would never carry a rider again, and some would never be able to disassociate horror from humans. Stellar accepted that. Not all of her horses were meant to go back to the outside world with its loud violence and its expectations. Some of them had no more left to give.

She swam through the lily pond with them, her thighs clamped tightly around the horse carrying her, surrounded by surging bodies and snorting breaths and dark, liquid eyes, long manes and tails tangling around her limbs like water weeds. Sometimes, she let her mount carry her through to the other side of the pond, bearing her out of the water and into the weak spring sunshine. Sometimes she let go as they swam, and let herself float, thinking of the sucking black mud and the inky water that had come pouring into the trenches, flooding by inches.

Sometimes, she let herself sink, the water closing over her head like a casket lid, swallowing her in blackness.