46 - Constrained in a delicate position

It is traditional for the Imperator to have a spy at the Pages. He is generally a writer in good standing, working and being paid accordingly, and drawing further pay to bring information to the Imperator on matters the Pages doesn’t consider worth publishing but the Imperator might want to know, not to mention information on the actions of the Pages.

I wanted such a person, but not secretly; Kurkas’s Pages spy had died in the sack, so I asked openly, and one of the writers, Soras Efannas, had agreed. I’m not sure how they decided who; drew straws perhaps.

Now he came to me with something of such urgency that he managed to talk Binchera into fitting him between two audiences.

“A servant who works for Kin Immen Kazien came to us saying not only could he prove Kin’s sexual vice, but if any number of us would come with him, we could witness him indulging it,” he said to me breathlessly. “A passle of us including people from Brahvniki News, Tinga-e, from Curlionaiz, and a host of other news places all went. Ser Kazien was in a very, very private, albeit large, room in the cellar of his house, bound hand and foot to a great iron cage with a stallion in it, himself wearing a strap-on horse-tail and horse-head mask and covered with the piss of a mare in heat. I don’t need to tell you what part of him was held so that the horse could, em, reach it, do I?”

I sat so frozen that I realized I should signal charcoal to the trap-booth people. I keep thinking I have heard the weirdest thing that Arkans are capable of, I thought, and then I hear the next.

“This servant, see, was the only other person in the world who knew. His task, with which he has been entrusted for decades, was not only to, em, do the bindings, but undo them afterward. He decided this time to choose differently. I suspect Ser Kazien was perhaps not the kindest master… and perhaps also that said servant was given reason to no longer need employment with him.” By one of the other candidates, no doubt; the man was probably now rich enough to live in ease for the rest of his life. “You should have heard Ser Kazien scream, as we came in.”

“So… the writers just sat and watched the horse… do what he would do, and took notes… instead of setting the poor man free?”

“Tell the truth, Imperator Shefen-kas, I don’t know. I decided I should run straight up here to let you know. I know you appreciate the great sacrifices I make to keep you informed.”

“You mean this is going on right now?” I couldn’t tell which I felt more like doing, laughing my guts out or throwing up. “But then a stallion is… quick…”

“Oh yes, ser, but be assured, Ser Kazien has that solved. There’s a stable of them, trained to spell each other.”

I couldn’t help it. I threw my hands over my face. “Imperator… ser… I was going to accompany you there, but… maybe not?”

I jumped up out of my chair. “Krero!” He came running. “Go double-time with this man with as many people as you need and the thing that’s happening that he leads you to, stop from continuing. I’m sorry I foist this on you but I have to foist it on someone, go!” With a quizzical glance at me, Krero leapt to it, hauling Soras out with him.

All through my next appointment, I tried to efface the images that kept insinuating themselves into my mind, in vain. By the time it was done, Krero was back to report. His face was tight, as it got when he was swallowing an overwhelming urge and trying to hide it. “Cheng, you know—I had to be the impassive guard captain the whole time. Now…” He took a deep quivering breath. “I can let out what I really feel.” He doubled over and sank to the floor, laughing so hard that at first I was afraid he’d choke, and staying there so long that it started to get tedious. I went back to work to the sounds of gasping mirth from below.

More came out in the written accounts. The first thing Kin shrieked to the gathering writers was that the servant had cold-cocked him and put him there. To that the servant calmly replied that he was willing to undergo a truth-drugging right then and there; when the writers asked Kin if he would do the same, he just railed, his voice a little muffled by the horse-head, every word but “yes.”

The story was also belied by the familiarity and affection the stallions seemed to have for him, sniffing him appreciatively before they otherwise acted. To that, he claimed it was normally the servant here, and they normally smelled mare’s piss on him; but that was belied in its turn by the old horse-bite scars Kin had on his shoulders, acquired before he’d perfected the equipment. The writers did indeed truth-drug the servant, and he confirmed that his master had been in the habit for more than thirty years. As well, a close look at the fiendishly-expensive apparatus showed that it had been added to and refined over years by a passionate and dedicated owner.

Thus the nature of Kin Immen Kazien’s mysterious sexual predilection was revealed. You can imagine what Arkan news-sheets made of it, but what they did make of it is probably beyond your imagination, to your credit. It wasn’t the expressions of disgust that would destroy him, I saw; it was the plays on words. As anyone could see who was not wearing blinders, they wrote, having failed to rein in his urges, Kin was saddled with a mounting problem that might hobble his hopes in the electoral race, especially with his opponents making such hay. At the very least he was constrained in a delicate position. I could go on much longer to cite even a small fraction of them, but I’ll spare you. Arkans love this sort of thing.

Though I wouldn’t have gone as far as Adamas did—“If I were caught in that position,” he said down his narrow Kallen nose, “I’d commit suicide,”—I expected Kin to withdraw from the running. To my amazement, he did not. There is no law on the Arkan books prohibiting his habit, no doubt for the same reason there isn’t in the Yeoli: laws generally aren’t made prohibiting something no one imagines anyone will ever do in a thousand years. He argued, fairly, that he’d harmed no one. Of course his remaining in the race ensured that the unremitting, merciless tide of puns would continue.

Kallijas, Minis and I were all asked, naturally, what we thought. I mostly demurred, steeling my face and saying only, “I won’t judge a candidate on personal matters; Arkans may judge for themselves when they vote.” Kall demurred entirely, saying “I have no comment at all on that,” and blushing beautifully all the way to his wrists. Minis said, without a twitch of a smile, “Should Arko decide that my honourable opponent is worthy to be Imperator, I am reasonably sure they won’t have to worry about the verbal influence of his lovers.” I’m glad I wasn’t there; I would never have been able to keep my face steeled.

Kin would never live it down, I saw, not before the election, or after; not if he survived to five hundred. The quips would enter history and so last far beyond his death, his best claim to immortality. It’s as the old saying goes; you may build bridges all your life and never be known as Rao the Bridge-Builder, or farm corn fifty years and never be known as Iri-lai the Corn-Farmer. But you fik one horse… and of course he’d been the fikked, not the fikker—Arko being Arko, that was almost more the scandal than what creature he was doing it with. Never let it be said that Arkan politics is boring.

†

Yet when I lay awake in the death-hour, thinking when I should be sleeping, the laughter grated. Why? It’s not as if I got caught giving myself to a horse. My mind wasn’t going to stop and rest anyway; I chased down the feeling, asking myself as Surya had taught me, ‘What is in it?’ Why does the laughter still feel blasphemous, and a slight to me somehow?

In time it came to me: this election would determine how Arko would be for a generation at the very least, maybe more. It would touch the lives of millions of people. But these child-rapers couldn’t take it seriously. They were making a mockery of something they should hold sacred, if they loved their own people as they all claimed to. It’s slighting me also because they’re making a mockery of what I do.

‘Oh come on, cockerel,’ another part of me snorted. ‘Don’t be so full of yourself.’ I felt dashed down to ten, then filled with anger so intense and sudden I got out of bed to keep my loves from feeling it. The corridors of the Marble Palace were too opulent, too ornate, too oppressive, even in darkness, but I had nowhere else to pace. What is in it? What is in it? What is in it?

My mind was wrenched back to the last time with Surya. What would have happened had you decided not to do the Kiss of the Lake? I wanted to shrink away from these words, these thoughts. Go into it, what is in it? I demanded of myself. If I look at all you’ve done for Yeola-e, and at what cost, I can’t even begin to imagine how anyone in their right mind could distrust you even slightly. Why had he said that? Why did he have to? Why when it raked my soul like the ten studded beads of the Arkan whip rake the skin? Curse you, Surya Chaelaecha. I felt as if he’d somehow started an earthquake.

They distrust me because I am semanakraseye, nothing more. It’s nothing personal. Down the gold and marble corridors, suddenly it was Kusiya’s old cracked voice again, chasing me. Do we ask so much of our semanakraseyel that they should get these feelings? Now the wound started hurting, too. By the time I got to the Greater Baths, I was shaking and prickling all over with rage, and couldn’t see what was in it for the life of me.

You know what to do. I threw off my bathrobe and stepped into the great pool. In the one-in-ten torchlight that was usual for night, the water was dark, like the night of the sack, when I’d drowned Kurkas here. I couldn’t see the bottom, where I stepped. It was a technique of Surya’s to tease out truth by trying things; he’d approve.

Let a pillar double for the spear, and a mid-pool planter for the fire-dish. I knelt. Don’t take a deep breath… imagine you’ve been called out… The rage-trembling had eased; now it came back harder again. I suddenly wanted to fight, berserk, as I had against my Arkan escort after they’d stabbed my Yeoli escort in the back as one.

I looked down into the black depths, and I understood. In them I would destroy myself. Doing up the shame-list for Surya, I had not put the Kiss of the Lake on it; but it was the ultimate shaming. In those depths I would admit I might be false; in those depths I admitted, I don’t deserve to live.

I leapt up and tore out of the water. One of the lesser pools I’d changed over to ice-water, for when my head needed clearing or my body hardening. I flung myself into it and went right under, opening my eyes so they would burn with cold. I stayed in, coming up only to breathe now and then, until the shivering was severe enough to make the wound-pain into agony, and drive out of my mind with tendrils of chill the implications of these thoughts.

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