22 - Minis's life II

I am in the Temple of Arko, looking down from near the ceiling as if I am a soul released from the body by impending death. But it is all different: dark and empty like a town square at the death-hour, with dead leaves rattling across the flagstones. The ten niches where the chryselephantine and marble statues of the Ten Gods, truer to life than life and the perfect ideal of human forms, both at once, should be are bare, to my horror, as if a sacking army destroyed them. There are no sparkling glass hands or sculptures, no flowing water, no torch-flames, no swords, no motion in the stones, no life in the floors, no crashing of chimes or soaring notes of choir, no cheering voices, no frenzied crowd. It is a husk of a Temple, as black and dead as the weakly-standing ruins of a house gutted by fire a century ago. It is inconceivable. It makes me sick.

But someone is there: one man, slender and dressed in plain grey that might be white in light, moving. I hear his breaths, the brushing of his feet against the flagstones. I see the motions of his blond head and pale arms, performed by rote, empty of conviction. The motions of the Ten Tens, as empty as a ghost, as useless as a dance performed before eyes blinded by death.

Finished, he kneels at the centre of the barren floor. I hear a faint sob.

I’d had the dream about a year ago, and forgotten it. I assumed that was because it had no significance. I’d tried to think who the man had been, but had given up, baffled. Now it had suddenly come to mind again.

†

“Sheng,” Kallijas said, in a way that let me know he was trying to be delicate. “You’re going to have to kill him.”

“Hmm? Who am I going to have to kill?” I generally like to know. It was good to be with Kall when I did paperwork, and he was studying things Imperial, so we were together in one of the humbler offices, with only fifty candles on its gold chandelier rather than a hundred or two.

“After he’s helped us get his Mahid, that is—sorry. Kurkas’s son.”

“No, I don’t have to kill him, and in fact I can’t,” I said, when I’d recovered my voice. “Arko doesn’t work that way any more… if you haven’t figured that out yet, you’d better study harder, love. If I want to kill someone now, I have to run it through the Assembly of Arko for passage as law.”

“The law’s already there, Sheng. Imperial statutes, Compartment Verbal 14, Segment 8… requires the Imperator to publicly execute anyone who challenges his legitimacy by the fact of his birth. It’s not just by law you’re permitted, but by law you’re required.”

“Oh, pishtosh,” I said. “I overhauled the laws in my first term, and I didn’t just get rid of the stupid or obsolete ones, but the tyrannical ones, everything that looked like the brain-diarrhea of power-mad and toxin-addled Imperators.”

“Shevenga… I’m just reading it… in the new books.” He pushed the volume he had laid open across the double-desk we were both sitting at.

S. 8:-- If a man or boy by reason of his ancestry or birth is likely to, or likely to be seen to, make a claim to Imperium, the Imperator shall arrest him and his immediate male kin, and execute them publicly, in such a way as to produce firm proof of the death of all.

I stared at him, frozen. His eyes were sympathetic. There was no denying this was the new-copied, current law.

“But… but… how the fik…”

“Whoever you assigned to sort through the laws and select the ones for you to sign deleted… must have thought that one was still necessary.”

“Well, fine,” I said, snatching up the golden pen, “I’ll just sign it deleted n— …oh kyash.” Arko didn’t work that way any more. If I wanted not to off Minis, I had to run it through the Assembly of Arko for deletion.

Something like that, they’d want to debate at length, being Arkans; if I asked them to expedite the debate, I’d have to explain why. Then they’d know I had Kurkas’s son, and then the debate would be over his life, and I had a fairly good idea how it would go. Besides, with the rest of the legislation procedure I’d put in place, that would take a good three or four moons, and it was only two months until the election, after which I’d be gone.

†

I called Minis and Gannara into one of the very private rooms that night.

“It was Eleventh Filias Aan who enacted it,” said Minis, in his academic way, when I asked him if he knew about 14-8. “232, Present Age, to legitimate executing his grandson Twelfth Filias by his first son Ninth Amitzas, whom he had disinherited.”

“You didn’t come here and reveal yourself to me thinking it was still on the books, did you?” I asked him.

“I thought it was the sort of thing you’d get rid of,” he said lightly.

Gannara’s eyes widened. “It’s… it’s… still…”

Minis’ silver-pale eyebrows rose. “You… didn’t?”

“I didn’t mean not to.” With the help of my best Arkan legal mind, Amanas Mirenas, I’d traced what had happened; just as Kallijas had suspected, the men I’d assigned to it had felt that this law was not beyond the pale at all, and in fact still needed. They’d been thinking specifically of Minis, in fact. They couldn’t imagine I might still be friends with him, and thought he would likely outlive me anyway, being ten years younger, to become the next Imperator’s problem.

“We were your philosophy students, so we knew your mind,” Amanas explained contritely to me. “We saw it coming: you’d give up the right, for yourself and all future Imperators, to eliminate who you saw fit when you saw fit, along with everything else arbitrary. We felt we should leave in place a means for Imperators to protect Arko from pretenders legally…”

Now Gannara stared furiously at Minis, and I knew exactly what he was thinking. Insufficient reconnaissance. Everything was open now; just a quick check at the Ministry of Scales in his fessas disguise would have let them know.

“I would have come anyway,” he said, resolve in his eyes. “For the sake of Arko, now and into the future. It’s as I said: I put my life into your hands.”

I took a deep breath, and when that wasn’t enough to start me thinking, got up and paced.

Part of me just wanted to let it out that he was here, and stand back, daring anyone to try to enforce that law. (A law requiring an Imperator; how had it ever been enforced?) But I’d prided myself, very publicly and very repeatedly, on not being above the law. And in two months he’d be in the hands of the next Imperator, whoever that was.

No matter how I looked at it, it came down to two possibilities, so I laid them out. “Either you disappear again, and do your best to do it in such a way that no one can kidnap and make a puppet of you, or claim to be your descendant—or we try to talk for your life to Assembly. I don’t like either of them, but at the moment at least I see no other… do you?”

“Chevenga, would you have me leave and become a threat to my country, my home, again? I can’t do that. Against Arko, I am nothing at all. As are you.”

I had to concur with that. “Yes. Kahara—your father should have had a hundredth of the sense of responsibility you have.”

Gannara turned away, and pressed his face into the plush back of his chair. For the first time it truly sank into me: Minis, who was guilty of absolutely nothing, might die here, soon, and there was nothing I could do about it. That came hard. I wasn’t used to not being able to do something, about anything. I’d have to get used to it.

“I can speak for you,” I said. “You know I will do that. If anyone will be believed about you, it’s me, who suffered so much at the hands of your father.” So I hoped, anyway.

“I know you would do that,” he said softly. “Thank you.”

“And no one knows you’re here except the three closest to me, and I told them to keep it quiet, so that gives us time to try to think of something else.”

There is always a solution. I felt the tiniest breath of the singing wind. “Minis—you gave an answer to my question, what do you want to do, but it was a small one: finish some works of Minakis. I want you to answer it more completely. What do you want your life to be?”

“I only thought as far as here, Chevenga,” he said.

“Think further. If you had fifty, sixty years of life ahead of you: what would you want to fill them with?”

Pinned both by my eyes and Gannara’s—they could be intense too, another resemblance—Minis answered instead of trying to squirm out of it. “I… I said finish the Minakis works… If I could live, I would probably make a middling-good political scholar, tucked away here in the archive. That would be a good life.”

“Never mind ‘if you could live’—I’m asking, if every option were open, if nothing were stopping you from doing whatever you wanted. Tell me that.” Where these words were coming from, I didn’t know, except that I’d heard the singing wind.

“Every option…” His eyes flicked from me to Gannara and back again, as if we’d cornered him.

“Even if it seems like only a dream. Tell me.”

“A… a family… would be nice. I always thought I would have one.”

“And your work?”

“Something…” He shrank back into the chair, as if he wanted to disappear into its cushiony velveteen depths. “…political.”

“To what end?”

“For the good of Arko… administration… maybe Kallijas, or whoever wins, will need another hand…”

“Good enough.” Something about the answer made me feel all would be well. Everything is going as it should... “Let me think on it, and you think on it too. We’re not doing anything public until we deal with your Mahid anyway.”





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