20 - Minis's life

The day Minis had showed up, I’d told Kallijas, Niku and Skorsas as we were making ready for bed. “You’d never guess who came to see me,” I challenged them. Kallijas came closest with “Kurkas’s ghost?”

But his blunt question a little later into the conversation stuck in my mind afterwards: “What are you going to do with him, Sheng?” To say he was a free citizen in good standing of Arko and so I had no right to do anything with him wouldn’t cut it, of course. Still, I wanted to know what Minis wanted to do with his life before I decided anything for him. By turning himself in and giving me the Book, I gathered, he was relinquishing all claim to the Crystal Throne. He hadn’t said so, but perhaps he thought it went without saying.

Whatever he chose, there was one thing I wanted him to do for me, and for Arko, first. I called him into my office that same evening. He didn’t like to be without Gannara, but this was all politics.

“Yes, I’m relinquishing all claim,” he said when I asked. “I realized a while ago that my being free could become the greatest danger facing Arko. I am here so that no one will be able to start an uprising by claiming ‘I am Minis, follow me to overthrow this false Imperator.’ and plunge the Empire into bloody civil war.” He tilted his head to one side, in his typical way. “Now, or in generations to come. Someone claiming to be my grandson... you know. Besides… you read my letter… you know I’m my father’s son in more ways than I care to think about, the last person who should be anywhere near power.”

“Just you saying that shows you are less your father’s son than you imagine,” I said. He still hadn’t entirely understood that he’d been victim as much as myself, not violator; I wondered how long, and what, it would take to make him see it. Of course, I knew a very good healer.

“Arko is about to elect the Imperator that its citizens believe is best; then his family will become the Imperial line, right? Or will the next Imperator be chosen by election too? If they have sense, it will be Kallijas.”

“Do you think so? Why?” I wanted to hear his opinion. He’d already proven to me, as Minakis, his political astuteness. His article on the mental degradation of Imperators from eating poisoned foods to harden themselves to the poisons had been founded on fact, as had the one on the philosophical influences on Ilesias the Great, so they didn’t show the shape of his mind; but ‘The Definition of Great’ did, and had stayed with me for a while afterwards, even before I knew how young, and thus wise beyond his years, it showed its author to be.

“Integrity,” he said. “Kallijas’s is steel-sheathed, the kind that even years of being Imperator are unlikely to shake. It’s rare… I think the last Aan to have it was Ilesias the Great. Kallijas also knows what war is. He is so close to you he will draw on your experience with the vote and all that goes with it; and none of the others are orators of note.”

I decided to test him with a bit of debate, partly out of curiosity, partly for fun. “Kall would say he is not an orator of note.”

“He turned Toras’s army at Anoseth.”

“More with his sword than his tongue, he’d say. And he’d say that all he did when he was speaking to them was speak from the heart.”

“I know he never trained in it, but it’s his integrity that makes him do as well as if he did, because he cannot help but speak from the heart,” Minis pressed. “Besides, the greatest orators do exactly that; it’s the clear truth that is felt from heart to heart, that others dare not or don’t know how to say, that they speak. You’re a great orator; do you speak from anywhere but your heart?”

He had me, so I conceded. “Fair enough.” Then I found myself being more frank with him than I’d expected. Maybe I knew our old friendship would keep him from noising it, or quoting me to the Pages, once he came out of hiding.

“It’s for all these things I’m endorsing him; I just wish he were more confident about it. You Arkans with your inequality, trained into the bone; he can never forget he was born solas, and so he shrinks his idea of himself in his own mind, as if there’s any more truth to these words than farts in the wind. That can make a person doubt himself at the time he most should not.”

“He didn’t put his own name forward?” Realization lit up Minis’s face. “You put him up to it… of course!” I just smiled. “He needs to find Aitzas who suffered under the old system, who believe in promotion by merit, to support him. They're out there, plenty of them. Second sons who had to deal with Abatzas Kallen and his ilk.”

“Kall would hit it off well with them… he need only tell them what he said to Abatzas the night before he dueled me. Do you know about that?” He didn’t, but had a good long head-thrown-back laugh when I told him.

“Oh that man, and his son... Ilian, that’s his name, was just as bad. He tried to suck up to me, literally, before I was ready.” And we had a Kallen running, Abatzas’s cousin Adamas Kallen; I could only hope he wouldn’t win.

I should say who the candidates other than Kallijas were. There was Adamas, who was in his fifties or so and, as far as I could tell, pretty much fit the typical empty-headed Aitzas mold. There was Kin Immas Kazien, a nephew of Malaradas Kazien, who had fronted for Toras against me for the empire, and had been a great general before his mind had gone from age. And there was Mil Torii Itzan, another unimaginably wealthy old family Aitzas who I knew from having been invited to his notorious parties when I’d been a ringfighter. I had the feeling with him that he was running because the Marble Palace would be the best place to host a party in all Arko.

“There are more good people still not putting themselves forward because it still feels dangerous,” said Minis. “People who would be perfect to support Kallijas in your absence.”

“How do you know? You’ve spoken to them? You must mean those who refuse to work for a wool-hair. I’ve found all the others.”

“However many they are, they’re still waiting, because they know there’s going to be a change in Imperator now, but no one knows to whom. It always happens.”

It came to me why he had such confidence for someone so young. It wasn’t just his intelligence and knowledge; there are plenty of intelligent and knowledgeable people who have no confidence. It was how he’d been raised, free of criticism, and . It had its advantage, after all.

“Do you know anything of the Ordeal?” he asked me.

“No, but I’ve wished I did the whole time I’ve been here, so as to know whether it’s something I should reinstate. My copy of the Book mentions it but doesn’t detail it. I’ve asked around, but no one either can or will tell me what it is, and it’s not even anywhere in the archive, that my people have found.”

“Tatthanas Aan excised it from the public histories. That also meant any copies of the Book other than the original, so it’s only in the original. You have it in your hands now. The Arkan people could call an Imperator to the Ordeal if he made too many unpopular decisions. They’d gather in the square and raise gold kerchiefs… if enough did it, he would have to prove himself to the people and to the Gods in a three-day trial by thirst.”

Accountability, for Imperators; who’d have thought? But then, like yesterday, I was thrown back to something Kallijas had told me, while he was still my prisoner, of sorts, in the war.

“My grandfather had a little square black box in the back of his dresser drawer,” he’d said. “It was lacquered, polished, and never moved from there, so I knew it was very precious. Once I asked him what was in it, and he told me he would tell me when I came to third threshold. When I did, he opened it for me. All it had inside was two satin kerchiefs, one of gold thread and one of black, folded perfectly square. He said, ‘It’s illegal to have one of these, has been for many, many years. I will leave it to you; perhaps, somehow, in your day it will be made lawful again, and you’ll be taught again how to use it. If not, you must leave it to your son.’” How many other Arkans had passed kerchiefs, folded away and hidden, down the generations?

“How the Ordeal was abolished isn’t in the Book, though maybe it’s somewhere in the archive,” said Minis. “Oh to have cared about what was in the Imperial archives, when I had access to them…”

“But I wrote you a note to get in, in the library of Terera,” I said.

“I didn’t have the sinew to use it.”

“Well, surely you do now.”

“Yes, but I should get you to approve it since the note is to the former Imperator, your sister.”

“True.” I wrote him another. He took it eagerly, tucking it away in a pocket.

“My father told me, as a lesson in case Arkans ever got too restless,” he said, returning to his topic in such a professorial way, for one so young, that I had to stifle a grin. “Tatthanas declared the Ordeal abolished, as too strict a control on an Imperator in a time of war, when he should be most free to defend against enemies. The people filled the square, angry, all with the gold kerchiefs raised. He’d drawn up an army of men from the outer provinces, who didn’t have kin or friends in the city, and set it on them.

“The bodies were so many they were in piles—thousands of them. He had them guarded so their kin could not claim and bury them, for an eight-day. Only then, when they begged him, did he relent. Then he struck a law that made even owning one of those cloths illegal. It’s still on the books, though hardly anyone knows why any more.”

“Actually it isn’t,” I said. Part of what I’d done in my first term was set a department to rooting out laws that were obsolete or just plain silly, put in by Imperators whose minds were poison-addled, such as the edict against striped or spotted cats. I remembered signing on that one, because it had particularly baffled me. “What was wrong with owning a piece of cloth?” I said. “The law experts said it was something to do with some old ritual that some Imperator hadn’t liked, and so I struck it out without thinking about it much.”

“He ordered the massacre a little before your War of the Travesty,” Minis said. “There’s good evidence that Notyere spent time in Arko in his youth, and they were friends… as I was saying in the audience. In the treatise I’m going to contend that Notyere’s attempt was inspired by Tatthanas’ success.”

“I hate to think that the only reason he failed is because he didn’t order in an army from far enough away… well, I’ll look forward to reading it.” This brought to mind what I had to ask him: what he wanted to do with his life. I avoided it a little longer. “So you’d have the Ordeal reinstated, if it were up to you?” I asked him.

“Yes. We were a better people and a better empire for it.”

With less than two moons left before the election and an Assembly to run it through, it was too late to try to reinstate the custom now, at least legally. Even morally for that matter; it would look as if I was trying to make the lot of the next Imperator harder. It probably depended on Kallijas winning. If he swore to bring it back if he were elected, it might give him an advantage… I had to introduce Minis to Kallijas, I saw, and have that part of the Book copied out and—why not—published in the Pages. As well as a full and accurate account of the massacre. I knew just the person to write it—unless there was something else he wanted to do with his life.

I’d gone long enough without asking him. I did.

“What I want to do with my life?” he said incredulously. It took me back to Haiu Menshir, two years ago, so vividly it was suddenly strange to have Marble Palace walls and not the beach and the palm trees around me, saying exactly the same thing to Alchaen.

“I’ve given it into your hands,” he said. Of course; what else would he say? “I haven’t thought about it.” He pulled on the ends of his hair, as if he wanted to chew them as he had when he’d been a child, but found them too short, at fessas-length, to reach his mouth, so I didn’t have to yank them out. “There are things I’m doing as Minakis I want to finish… the best I could imagine is being allowed to continue as an Imperial scholar.”

How many Arkans had I had to say this to? “Minis, don’t think of the best you can imagine, think of what you most want. We’ll start from there. At any rate, think about it. There's no pressing date.”

He sat for a bit, looking confused and ill-at-ease. I knew that feeling so well, these days.

“There is one thing I want to ask you to do, definitely,” I said. “Those Mahid of yours; are you willing to help us catch them?” If not, I’d have him truth-drugged for all the information he had that would help; yes, he was a friend, but to my mind capturing the Mahid was a duty of office. I hoped he’d understand. But more likely, I guessed from how he’d spoken of them, especially Second Amitzas, he’d be willing.

“Oh, certainly,” he said. So it was just a matter of working out the details.




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