15 - Digression – Who Minis is

He’s written his story himself, so I’ll keep my version short. At ten, he was notorious throughout the city as the fat and over-jewelled brat who could get away with anything because his father let him run entirely loose and no one dared even upbraid him. If he walked into your house and took something he liked, you said nothing; if you were one of a pair of chair-bearers he hired, you might be run back and forth on the same street all afternoon, or made to run races, or directed through the fountains—and he’d never heard of tipping. If he asked you and your brother to beat each other unconscious with his textbooks, you did it, or face the wrath of the two black shadows he always had with him, his Mahid; if he pissed on you from a window, you counted yourself as showered with blessings. He particularly loved to haunt the Press; every now and then he’d yell, just because he felt like it, “Stop the press!” and they’d have to bring the whole immense machine to a clanging halt, no matter whether the Pages should be out that day.

I knew none of this when I was brought chained into Arko; I was just told that for all I had said to the boy who’d thrown me a gold ring that I wasn’t afraid of him, I’d better keep the ring-name he’d given me, even if I and everyone else thought Karas Raikas, which means “Lightning Loner,” was silly, because he was the Imperator’s son.

The Arkan language has five levels, just as the society does, and thus five different ways of speaking, depending on the relative rank of the speakers. The Yeoli language has only one. Thus I was only ever taught that people should treat each other one way. When he came banging against the bolt on the door of the room I’d been assigned in the Mezem, baffled that it had the temerity to be locked against him, I said he need not do that, but only ask politely if he might come in, and I’d let him. If you’d asked anyone in Arko, from the potentates to the street-waifs, they’d have predicted that he’d have his shadows kick the door down and rough me up (or try). Instead, he asked me politely, and I let him in.

Children are perceptive. I think that as well as admiring my fighting style, he somehow knew beforehand that from me, since I was free of any knowledge of his reputation, he’d get what he got from no one else: sympathy. His father had little more to say to him but run along; he’d been taken from his mother at birth and given to wet-nurses, so he didn’t know who she was, just one of his father’s Mahid concubines; his tutors bored him, too dry. He lived like an only child in the Marble Palace, though he knew he had half-siblings among the Mahid. Friends, he could have only in his day-dreams; he told me early on that he and I must pretend to quarrel, because for all his father had little to say to him, any hint of affection on his part for someone else tended to turn into some sort of bitter fate for that someone else; a few people had vanished before he’d figured this out.

He also told me, in a completely matter-of-fact way, of the executions by torture that his father made him witness, wanting his son to be but an extension of himself, with the same tastes. I’ll spare my reader. It was that which made me open my arms to him, in our very first conversation. I cradled him and held my gorge down at the same time.

When I did start hearing the stories of his antics in the city, I was astonished that it could be the same boy; but with a little thought I understood. A child who is denied the two things children need most, love and guidance, will become angry at the world, and take it out on whomever he’s permitted to. So he started coming down to the Mezem instead, as often as it was safe, to get love and guidance from me. Soon it was all over the city how he’d suddenly reformed, for reasons no one knew, with one exception: inexplicably, he went on bedeviling just one person, the ring-fighter Karas Raikas.

Even that had to end, though, the danger too great. He told me in tears, and I didn’t doubt the truth of it for an instant, that he’d have made the ultimate sacrifice of parting with me, by setting me free, if he could have. “Then let me ask something else,” I said, “that you can do: one thing only.”

“Anything,” he said, sobs wracking him despite his resolve to be brave. I took his face between my hands, kissed his forehead and said, “Behave yourself.”

Laughter broke through his tears then. “Forever,” he said. “You are not asking it, but I will promise you this: if my father does conquer Yeola-e, when I am Imperator I will set it free. I swear, Second Fire come if I am forsworn.”

It is easy for a child, who has no idea what the world will be to him when he is a man, to swear such an oath. In my mind I knew it would never happen; he would remember it only as a child’s promise made in an emotional moment to someone now dead anyway. (A prince cannot legally become Imperator until third threshold, or twenty-one, and he was ten years younger than me.) It would be the least of considerations in the scheme of things for one who rules an empire. But, perhaps in the emotional wound-weakness I was living with every day by that time, my heart heard, and froze me, and then it was me who was wracked with tears.

†

What the world will be so often turns out not what we expected. It was not him who’d set free my people, after all, but I who would take his empire from him. What he might feel was the least of my considerations.

I thought I’d likely never hear from him again, unless Irefas captured him and his Mahid—the eclipse court, as Arkans call it, Imperium in internal exile, that his father would want him to set up. But then, just as I’d made the move to be reinstated for my second term as Imperator, I’d got a letter.

Dear Chevenga,

I am just leaving Haiu Menshir. My healer here has been telling me that if I am to get to the heart of what troubles me I must deal with the worst thing I ever did.

I realize that I was forced, and should not condemn myself for it… but I find it very difficult not to.

When I was twelve years old and you were the mind-broken slave of my father… he forced me to use you sexually. I’m sorry to even write this. It makes me sick. It convinced me that I was what my father had wanted all along, another like himself—another twisted pervert to grace the Crystal Throne. In that sense, I am very glad you have freed me of that.

For my part in this—for what I found myself wanting out of that incident—I am truly sorry. I regret having come close enough to you, my friend, to hurt you that badly, even though it was he who was hurting you, through me. My hatred for him knows no bounds at the moment. But I repeat, for my part, I am truly, abjectly sorry. You never gave me anything but good, every moment you could.

I have not written you before because I clung to a child’s idea that if you did not remember this, I could still imagine you my friend. But I am convinced now that this is dishonest. I am sorry to lose that. It hurts. But I must, or live this lie, that you could still be, on most levels, the father of my spirit, after I have done this to you. I cannot imagine it possible for you not to let your despite of my father fall on me, too, now. A harsh judgment, perhaps, but just.

Now you know. And I have told you. Why this no doubt mutually-painful letter is necessary, I do not understand, and I am bewildered because Haians never ask that which causes pain. I am sorry I did not have the courage to tell you to your face.

My sincere best wishes to you in your life, and I hope my father was wrong when he told me that time would deal with you for me. The only thing I can think of what he meant is an illness of some kind. You, of all people that I know, deserve to live long.

Minis Aan

I froze as I read it, with the kind of deep, down-to-the-guts freezing you get when you are reminded of a torture you’ve forgotten. I had to dose myself with calming essence every ten breaths for half a bead just to be able to stand up and walk across my office.

Of course he’d left no way for me to answer or find him, lest I give it to Irefas. So the words that burned across my mind would have to keep burning there, unsaid and unwritten. No, I do not blame you for what he did. No, my despite of him does not fall on you, any more than it ever did—remember what I told you, power and responsibility are one and the same? Listen to your Haian. Understand, understand, you must understand, above all: a twelve-year-old child being made to do such a thing is being outraged himself, no less. Minis, you’ve been left scarred far worse by this than I. Minis, you are bleeding from the soul with it, and I with you. I am still the father of your spirit and this doesn’t change that even slightly. Don’t hate yourself; I don’t! He was out there, somewhere, and must live without hearing these words.

I had no memory of what he described, but then the whole month of my life I was in the oubliette in the dungeon of the Marble Palace, and a few months after, were and still are lost to me. Knowing Kurkas, I doubted none of it. It was his style, to make his son and his most hated enemy rape each other, both at once.




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