25 - in which I broach the idea to Kallijas

“Sheng… last time you rattled off the qualities of the perfect Imperator like that, it was me you were talking about, as you chivvied me into taking it on, and so that person did exist, though I’d thought he couldn’t, and so this person must exist, too, which means you’ve found a better candidate than me, in which case I’ll defer to him, of course, and so, Fourth Shefenga, I’m not sure why you’re resorting again to this devious form of persuasion.”

Kallijas had never learned to be, and therefore look, comfortable in the opulent furniture of the Marble Palace; even his muscles, it seemed, were convinced that such things would always be above him, making them want to shrink away. Still, the Scarlet Rosary Room was among the best places for a talk like this, and so I subjected him to it.

“Because if I just say his name, you might not hear his virtues so clearly as if I list them first,” I said. “Minis Aan.”

As I’d expected, he was struck speechless, and regained the ability only gradually. “But… Minis… he… Kurkas… father… empire… them… Sheng… are you out of your mind!?”

I had introduced them three or so days before, thinking that Minis’s political and historical expertise might be of use to Kallijas in his studies, and he’d been sharing it freely; more than once, as we’d bedded down, Kall had said, “I wish I knew a tenth of what that kid does.” As well, Minis had asked where he could train, and Kallijas, feeling he owed Minis, had offered him instruction there. As far as I could tell, through the utterly-impeccable Arkan politeness they showed each other, they got along well. Minis was his own best asset in convincing people of his goodness, but it seemed he hadn’t entirely convinced Kallijas, at least enough to qualify as Imperator in his mind.

“You can get Surya’s professional opinion on my sanity,” I said. “Maybe I should ask you this, since you’ve probably spent more time with Minis now than I have, since he arrived: what’s your impression of him?” As I said, Minis was his own best asset.

“Well… he… I… Sheng… He’s stiff as a board and thinks in black and white, but he’s only eighteen, so that’s to be expected. He’s more religious than I’d thought his father’s son could ever be, and he’s painfully down on himself sometimes, terrified that he’s like his father. I can’t argue with you that he’s knowledgeable, astonishingly so… or that he’s embraced the new way, because he talks about it so much… or that he’s broadened by hardship… Celestialis, Sheng, I can’t dispute any of what you said, as you know full well. But… he’s the son of Kurkas.”

“Do you trust him?”

“Well, I… he’s never given me any reason not to. But I guess I wonder, same as he does, whether some stain of his father’s blood will show up in him in some way, and power corrupt him. I heard all the stories about how everyone in the City lived in terror of him as a child, at least until he somehow miraculously reformed, and of course I eventually heard, no surprise, that you were behind this somehow.”

I’d never told him the story in detail, so I did now, about the first days (“You mean you did walk him like a dog through the city during Jitzmitthra? That’s true?”), how he’d eagerly learned everything he could from me, starting with manners, how he’d mailed my letter home, how he’d had the Mezem baths renovated for my sake, how he’d comforted me after Mana and I had been made to watch the torture and execution of the smuggler we’d hired to get us out, and then again after I’d been injected with the grium sefalian, and finally, how he’d promised to free Yeola-e when he became Imperator. I could have just said, “I saw the good heart in the spoiled brat,” but it was more convincing in detail.

Minis himself had told Kallijas what had happened between when he’d been sent out of Arko and now, including throwing off his father’s plans for his life, leaving the Mahid and getting Ailadas and Kyriala back to Arko, then helping Gannara find his parents. Kallijas had read all his works published as Minakas Akam; that helped also.

Still, he said, “He frightens me in some ways, Sheng.”

“How? Aside from being Kurkas’s son?”

“Well… it’s obvious that he knows politics backwards and forwards, he lives and breathes it, for all he thinks he’s given it up. He asks questions that are so hard to answer… I don't know, he’s more a descendant of Illesias the Great than Kurkas, and I told him so.”

“This frightens you?”

“He’s someone I could follow when he becomes a man, Sheng. I’d just be nervous he’d go too far in an effort not to be like his raising. He’s a better young man than he thinks he is. It’s his fear that I fear.”

“Age will get him over that,” I said. “Not thinking he’s as good as he is is what bothers me about him the most; but Surya would say I’m exactly the same. I’m good enough to live past thirty but don’t think I am.”

Kallijas had had his hand loosely tangled in the hair at the back of my neck. Now he did what he often did when I said such things; clenched it so hard in his fist it hurt slightly, and shook me a little. “We’re going to hold you to life, do you know that?”

“Yes, yes, I know. The intensity of your love is pulling my hair. He doesn’t see the middle ground, I know; but he’s only eighteen, as you said.”

“Yes, he’s—wait a tenth…! Sheng, he’s too young to be Imperator, there’s a law, he has to be third threshold, and the election is in two months… what are you thinking of doing—putting it off? Now that you’re, you know, seeing Surya, you could…”

Kall had said to Minis in one of the conversations with all three of us that the best thing for Arko would be another thirty years of me. Of course he wasn’t going to get thirty, but two was better than two months, in his mind.

“No. Kall, I happen to know that you, Niku and Skorsas went to talk with Surya soon after he found out who I was, so I know that you know that it’s not a certain thing. I’m going to go on working in Arko as if nothing has changed, and besides, it’s all scheduled. How would it look if I suddenly said I wanted to put the election back two years? The people who say I’m a tyrant would suddenly sound credible.”

“You’re going to change the age law, then? There’s no pretext you could come up with for that that would hide the fact you were doing it to favour him.” However much he doubted it, Kall was learning the ways of politics.

“No, I have another way in mind, and it also helps get around my looking fickle when I change my endorsement, gives him two years and two moons to mature before he puts on the seals, and gives you his very close help while you’re wearing them,” I said, praying for luck as much as I ever do, inwardly. “You as regent, then him as Imperator on his third threshold.”

Kallijas went still. It was one thing to step aside on my behest, and be done with the whole thing; agreeing to act as regent for Minis was as good as endorsing him himself. Their names would be linked in history for all time; if Minis turned bad, Kallijas would be remembered as a fool always, along with me.

“You have time to think about it,” I said. I knew he’d want that; Kallijas rarely makes decisions fast when he doesn’t have a sword in his hand, preferring to think out every implication methodically, and then to sleep on them.

“And speak to him about it also,” he said. “We’ll have to work together all that time.”

“Fair enough. I suggest you have one conversation with him with me there, and one without.”

How the latter talk went I cannot know, of course. In the former, I thought we’d stick to the topic at hand, but we wandered, probably because I was there. They were so stiltedly formal to each other it made me itch, and want to say the sorts of things that make Arkans uncomfortable. I couldn’t resist saying, when Kallijas found out that I’d recommended Surya to Minis, “There’s no problem Kall has that wouldn’t be solved by more sex,” producing the usual deliciously deep blush and cry of “Sheng!”

We talked about the Imperator’s place, about power and responsibility, about Ilesias the Great, whose works Minis had studied well enough that he knew a quote for every topic. “He understood where power truly comes from,” Minis said.

“There is a very old quote about that,” I said. “Do you know it?”

“I know what Ilesias wrote: ‘All the Imperator’s Power is given him by his people; without their support he can do nothing.’” It’s in the Idylls.”

“He probably knew the one I mean. ‘True power comes from the love of the people.’ It's a philosopher of politics who wrote long before the Fire.”

“Ilesias also wrote,” cited Minis, “‘The solas are the strength of the Empire. Keep their honor as your own.’”

“Odd that that even needed to be written,” I said. Ilesias had written aphorisms on how to treat each caste, which Minis rattled off. I knew them, but knew Kall probably didn’t. “The fessas are the intelligence of the Empire. Value their skills as sacred. Those who treat okas like animals obviously do not care to eat. Their labour feeds every caste above them. Treat them with respect or learn to grow your own grain.”

“What did he say about slaves?” I asked.

“Slaves are given into the hands of Arko by the Gods’ will, in order to preserve the best of alien races. Beware that the Gods do not decide you need to learn humility at another’s hands like this. A slave is still a man. A man who may one day be free.”

“Because we alien races, you know, we can’t preserve ourselves,” I said, laughing.

“Well,” said Kallijas, “we did learn humility at your hands.”

I thought Minis might think I was mocking his idol and be offended, but he just laughed. “We forgot that. Arko wouldn’t have had to learn that if my sire hadn’t forgotten everything Ilesias wrote.”

Then Minis said I reminded him of Ilesias. “But all I’ve done, really, is made Arko more like what I know best: Yeola-e,” I said. “And not enough. Were it up to me, I’d outlaw castes completely. And laws that differentiate between men and women in any ways other than what is relevant to what women alone can do, bearing and nursing children.” He said the usual thing, that Arkans would feel the world had descended into chaos. “Yes, so I had to go slowly. I’ve got the start on it by giving women the vote; that lets them have their say on everything else.”

“If they can vote, then they are people, albeit people who have not been trained to be independent, Chevenga. I think their men will push them how to vote.”

“The idea of women not being people would be unthinkable, and completely baffling, in Yeola-e. I think maybe you underestimate their strength, Minis,” I said, grinning. “I've seen plenty of times where the woman pushed the man.” Arkans need to hear such things regularly.

We talked about the Gods, and hearing their music, and for me, how I’d wished I understood more about Arkan spirituality before I’d started. “The way I see it, you both live in both worlds,” said Minis. “Somehow managing the day to day, while listening to the Gods at the same time. You were both raised morally. You have something on which to base your ethics.”

“The person who finds morality without having been raised with it has actually done the harder thing,” I said, and Kallijas assented.

“I had excellent examples of what not to be,” Minis said drily. He meant Second Amitzas as well as his father, it came out. “I find it very hard not to hate him,” he said. “I struggle not to hate… even outrage is something to be very, very careful of.”

“You know, I see it in Arkans all the time...” I felt this point strongly enough that I jumped up off my chair to pace as I said it. “And part of me never knows what to make of it... so many of you are afraid of yourselves, as if you cannot choose what you will do... with anger, outrage, fear or what-have-you.”

“Well, my sire did what he wanted with his,” Minis spat, “and look where that got him and Arko.”

“Your sire... was not right in the head.” He couldn’t disagree with that. “The world outside of himself, he didn’t see, as if it had no reality. I’ve seen other people like that, but I think in truth they are few.”

“Very few people have no controls on themselves, and no conscience,” said Minis.

“But there we go again,” I said, pacing on the thick rug. “Such an Arkan thing, to see controls on a person and conscience as the same thing, as if every desire is evil.”

“Aren’t they?” asked Minis. Kallijas looked at me with the same question on his face, the two pairs of blue eyes identical in expression. Peas in a pod, I thought.

“No, of course they aren’t! Conscience is doing what is right, by choice; controls on a person are imposed.”

“Perhaps they’re the same thing for me,” Minis said. “After all, look at my blood. The will to do all of this is there. It needs to be recognized and controlled.”

“But, Minis, every moment you are choosing.”

“Oh, Muunas, this,” Kallijas said long-sufferingly. “I got so much of it when I was staying in Yeola-e.”

“The will to do all of what?” I asked Minis.

“The will to hurt, or be careless, or just selfish.”

“Who do you want to hurt? I didn’t think you had it in so much for anyone any more.”

“No one right now, but if I were presented with Second Amitzas…”

“But everyone feels that, with someone who’s hurt them as badly as he hurt you. That will happen every time. Maybe I need to ask it like this: why is it, ‘I must enchain my desire to hurt,’ rather than, ‘I just won’t hurt that person’? You make it so hard!”

“You don’t see a child as born bad, so he must be trained to good?” Minis asked. Again, Kall was with him, sharing the Arkan ethos.

“Of course not. Why would a child be born bad? That part of Arkan belief never made any sense to me. You feel the Gods are all-wise, yes? And good? Why would they create children bad, so that the children must suffer to be made good?”

They were both giving me that typically Arkan ‘No one’s allowed to think so independently’ look. “People create children out of their sinful bodies and out of a sinful act,” said Minis, with a tone a little as if he were quoting from the Arkan holy book. “Their souls yearn to the good but their bodies are rooted in the dirt.”

“Everything we eat is rooted in the dirt, or itself eats something that is,” I said. “But what we eat is good. Kahara, I shouldn’t… I’ve had this debate with so many Arkans. They’ll ask me, ‘How can you think pleasure is a good thing?’ I think, ‘How can you think pleasure is a bad thing? And pain is good? Did your nerves grow in backwards or something?’”

“Chevenga,” Minis said, with a tone of ‘I’d better make this simple for him,’ “is there no difference between body and soul?”

“There is a difference between blue and red, but does that make one bad and the other good?”

“Sex and the body are a reflection of the mortal earth, of death and dying, control and chaos. The soul is above all that.”

“I hear the words, but I’ve never been able to make sense of the idea. Whatever the body and soul are a reflection of, however integral or separate you consider them, getting pain and pleasure mixed up is madness.”

“I got a lot of this training from Second Amitzas and Third Eforas, and both of them have the two firmly tangled together,” he admitted.

“Well, I suggest that what they taught you, you ignore,” I said. “Unless you would live your life as they live theirs, that is.” He shuddered. Maybe the point was finally getting home.

So it went, and was great fun, until we ran out of time. Over the next day or so, the three of us had a few more, as did the two of them.

“Well?” I asked Kall, afterward, when we were alone.

“I see your point… I feel he would make a good Imperator… but I’m not sure that I’ve got my measure of him,” he said, knitting his blond brows. “You know how it is; I never totally trust myself to sort the truth from the lies in words. There’s only one way I am absolutely certain I truly know a man.”

Our eyes caught. It was always without words that he and I do the sign of the duel, moving as one, since words are not necessary when two are of one mind. It was that way the first time we did it, both inventing it simultaneously, in my war-tent. The edge of his first two shield-hand fingers touched the edge of those of my sword-hand, and as always I felt ecstasy and lifting and the thundering power of awe all over my body, and knew he did too.

In instructing Minis, Kall had tested him gently, and got him to work to exhaustion more than once so as to loosen him; no doubt any war-student of Second Amitzas would need this. He had never tested Minis hard, though.

I didn’t witness it, as it was on a no-training day for me, and again, was between them anyway. But when they were done, Minis came in dragging, red and sweat-soaked, but glowing, and said, “I think I saw the slightest glimpse, maybe a hundredth of a hundredth, of what it was for you.” And Kallijas said, when we went to bed that night, “Yes, Sheng. I’ll be his regent.”

Two for two; now all I had to do was convince the people of Arko.




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