47 - I get more letters

Chevenga, called Beloved:

It is with deepest concern and love for you that we write this. Please reconsider everything you are thinking and doing, for your own sake; it is the greatest danger to which you expose yourself. The sayings of All-Spirit as conveyed to human ears by the sage Amiya, by which we The Joyous live our lives, state that all events are destined and (as Amiya wrote): “We can no more escape our destiny than escape the clutches of earth as if we were birds, or see that which is beyond the reach of our eyes.”

Unlike most of us, you were gifted by All-Spirit with a glimpse of the unalterable future. What you foresaw was unfortunate, yes; but (as Amiya wrote) “Nothing is less real for being unfortunate, else there would be no suffering.” How can you now doubt the validity of the future your own eyes witnessed? How can you presume that escaping the course of history is possible, when, (as Amiya wrote) “As the past is set in stone, so is the future, for future is but past yet unrolled”?

We love and wish nothing but good for you, dear Chevenga; your death will break our hearts as it will all Yeola-e’s, and if there were any way we could free you of it, no one would move faster to do so than us. But neither we nor you nor anyone can. Not even All-Spirit itself, as Amiya wrote, can revise what has been written. Please understand this, and abandon this futile course, and live out the time you have remaining to you in realism, sanity and love, and with our most heart-felt blessings.

Love and blessings,
Tyeritha Amiyana
[and the thirty-six other members of The Joyous, all of whom, needless to say, signed]

†

Dear semanakraseye:

From my heart, I am astonished and concerned that you’ve been afflicted with this death-wish madness from such a young age. But there is an answer! I learned the recipe from a mountain sage, and with my own eyes I have seen it cure bereavement, falling sickness, kidney-pains, heart-pains, diarrhea, warts, old wound aches, colds, distemper in dogs and a host of other ills. I enclose a bottle with my compliments; take 10 drops under the tongue, morning and evening, with my blessing. Once you’ve felt the wondrous effects, I’m sure you’ll be eager to assist in bringing this miraculous remedy the public attention it deserves!

Sincerely,
Lurao Lehereni,
Cure-All-Ills Juice, proprietor.

†

Dear Chevenga:

I’ve heard and read all about your problem and your healing and your decision, and here’s the thing I don’t understand. You thought you would die before thirty—so what? People die young all the time. There are plagues, there are earthquakes, there are fires, there are young mothers who die in childbirth and babies who are stillborn or die in the stream. And there is war; with war especially, as you ought to know, everyone who goes into it knows there’s a good chance of never seeing thirty years. By All-Spirit, you must have killed with your own sword more Lakans and Arkans than could be counted, who were younger than you are now. Did they not foresee their own deaths in your eyes?

Other people I’ve talked to about this say, ‘The difference is, he knows!’ I say, so what? You’ve been lucky! Most people who die early don’t get to see it coming, don’t get to plan for it, don’t know to try to fit in everything they’d like to do before it happens, or prepare their loved ones, or set their affairs in order. I don’t see how this is a great misfortune.

Please don’t take me wrong, I wish you long life, as I do everyone; I just don’t see why you’re making such a big thing of it, as if suffering only ever happened to you. We all have our grief and our aches and our things that haunt late at night. You’re hardly alone in that. You’re not the only person in the world who deserves to live; and yet death comes too soon and unexpected all the time. That’s just part of life. Maybe it would help your angst to forget yourself for a time.

Sincerely,
Nimao Althela

†

Dear semanakraseye Chevenga:

Are you out of your mind? You’re lucky enough to know you’re going to die young and you’re giving it up?
Listen, my boy – I am so old I hardly remember your age. You have no idea what it’s like!
You’re weak and you’re wrinkled and you’re ugly.
Your hair is all white, and it doesn’t grow any more in places it should, and grows in places it shouldn’t, like it lost its way while it was inside your skin or something.
Food doesn’t taste good any more, you just eat it because you have to, which is fine because the Haian won’t let you eat anything that tastes good anyway.
You have no get-up-and-go, you just want to sleep all the time like you’re already dead, or sit around drinking ezethra with other oldsters talking about how much better things were in the old days and how stupid people are now, instead of drinking wine and being stupid yourself like you’d much rather do.
Everyone you know is dying all the time.
Your voice cracks so you’re too embarrassed to sing.
You can’t have sex all night any more, you can hardly have sex at all, and even if you could, no one wants to have sex with you anyway except other people who are old and wrinkled and ugly, so you don’t want to have sex with them.
You forget everything that didn’t happen before most everyone else in your family can remember, but people who are barely out of diapers, in their twenties and thirties, say, “His mind is still so sharp!” as if that’s some big surprise.
You have to wear diapers yourself so you don’t piss your kilt, and shove Haian stuff up your butt to make sure you shit, and if you break your leg the Haian will say she can do nothing and so your kids will quietly slip something in your drink and then stick a knife through your heart while you’re out—BUT!
IF DEATH IS WHAT YOU WANT, DAMNED IF YOU’LL FIND IT.
I tell you, my boy, I’ve lived ninety years, and the last thirty or forty were crap. You’re best off to go while you still have that thick head of curls and you’re strong and beautiful and everyone still loves you. Trust me!

Kind regards,
Serakana Shae-Lethae

†

Dear Shefenkas, You Whose Life Is The World’s Eternity:

I am drunk as I write this, so forgive me for any incoherence. I am in the book-lined parlour, smelling nobly of leather and polish and scents from faraway lands, of Norii Maziel, partaking of plonk now that he has done the decent thing of opening one bottle of 50-year Kassabrian, which we have finished, and we both realized we want to get stinking, so time to get out the plonk.

All night we have been speaking of you, and I can’t tell you how impressed I am with Norii’s memory, how he fits it all together, remembering the tiniest of signs, even expressions and mannerisms, how he can see, and show, how what you revealed explains everything about you, so there can be no doubting it. We spoke of how it must be, to know your life will be two-thirds training, for the last third; how it must make you count years differently (at thirty, I was still a little buck writer doing obituaries and petty court hearings, knowing I had lots of time to rise to something better); what it must have been to know that Kurkas knew, as he must have since he had you truth-drug-scraped. We laughed our bitter, nail-scraping laugh over the irony that we now see, in the title of the book Norii wrote about you, Life Is Everything. Now I find I want to write, Shefenkas, and I want to write to you. When I asked, and you confirmed, I didn’t know what to say; it wasn’t the right time anyway; perhaps there is no right time. I still don’t know what to say, in fact. Only that there’s something I must.

I knew nothing of you as a gladiator, Shefenkas. I left that all to Roras Jaenenem and tonight’s good host. Next, I knew you as the evil barbarian whose dark-maned armies encroached deeper and deeper into the empire, who came commanding savages on silken wings, flying demons, warrior-women who carried testicles as trophies on their spears, you yourself escaped from Kurkas by some black magic. I knew you as the conqueror who drowned our Imperator in blood and laid waste to the city, made the streets run with our gore and the skies burn with the fire of our houses, so that all that seemed left to us here in our cliff-hole of news was to go like heroes, sending out a final issue that would earn us all our execution at your hands.

But then it was not an arrest, Shefenkas, but an invitation I got… you weren’t going to leave Arko a smouldering pit and the Empire warred over by petty barons for who knows how many centuries, but set yourself up as Imperator, a black-haired, naked-hand-waving, ex-gladiator Imperator. If knowing how to command an army was a qualification, you had that all over Kurkas, we had to admit. You’d put together a bureaucratic corps before you even got here, kept all the existing ones who were left in their jobs, if they swore, didn’t even disband or kill what was left of our army. And you didn’t do what we feared the most: smash the Press.

So I came into your presence, my heart in my throat. The presence of the Hayel-spawn, the Living Greatest demon, the prince of savage night. “He’ll cut off my arm and eat it raw in front of me,” I was thinking—damn you, Shefenkas, I cannot send this to you. I write because I feel like writing, then. What did I see? Two ears, two eyes, one nose, one mouth, all in the usual configuration—a mere man, not a monster. And two arms, both in casts, though I’d thought there were no casualties at all on your side, that night. You offered me Saekrberk. How did your spies find out that was the way to my heart?

And then you… you bitched. About the Pages! Our sacred trust is truth, so the masthead declaims, and yet how much we lie by omission. Why was there never anything about Kurkas’s plans, not military, of course, but for Arko? Why were his ministers never called to account? You have this incredible machine, you railed at me—do you have any idea how much we could use such a thing in Yeola-e, how much we would cherish it? Oh, I know why you never tread on the Imperator’s toes, you told me, Shefenkas. I know. You’d like to keep your heads. Well, you said, those days are over. You are free to write what you wish, so long as it is true. Whatever you hesitate to write for fear, write. Whatever you’ve had folded away in filing cabinets for decades which the people ought to know, write. If I make an idiot decision, write that I made an idiot decision, because it’s the truth. I’m used to it. I come from a people who are free, so I don’t feel right if I’m not being called to account. We have no Presses, though we will.

I could not believe what I was hearing. You saw that in my eyes, Shefenkas, that I did not believe you. Perhaps you knew beforehand I would not. How could I? This was outside of what I could hold in my mind. So you said you would prove it. I could ask you any question, short of Yeoli military secrets, and you would answer it, and I could quote you.

Shefenkas… precious Shefenkas… I wonder what you thought I would ask? You must have considered the possibilities. “Why did you sack Arko when you said you weren’t going to?” “What laws are you going to change, to ensure your wool-haired minions rape us for all we’re worth?” “Those who committed outrages against us in the sack, will you bring them to trial? Starting with yourself?” Probably you were prepared for those. But I was drunk enough to come up with one you weren’t. The Gods work through wine, sometimes, Shefenkas. You Whose Arms Are The World’s Stronghold, how did you break them?

I thought you’d have mine broken, then. But no. You told me… you told me true… I quoted it true. I told all the world you leaped out of a Marble Palace window trying to kill yourself, in remorse for sacking Arko. And you did not have me gruesomely killed. Or even fired. Just keep on writing, keep on telling the world, you asked me to do. You gave us your time, you told us the truth, you kept your word. You treated us as if we did indeed have a sacred trust. Ahhh, scions of Hayel take you, Shefenkas… I am getting drunk faster, now, I cannot write this without swigging, this is what you do to me.

So we wrote the truth, and the world read it. We wrote, and the world read, the truth of Shefenkas being an asshole and a fool when you were, and you didn’t stop us. We wrote the truth of the duel in Karoseth, the truth of you setting out to abolish slavery, the truth of you putting down the slave rebellion in Temono, the truth of you permitting women to become literate, the truth of you abolishing purification, the truth of you inviting Arkans to vote, the truth of you giving yourself up to be dethroned if it was the only way you could make us take up that power. And suddenly there were engineers—probably the same people who built the siege-engines with which you vanquished us—poking about the Press, seeing how it worked, building small ones. The word “spawn-press” had to be coined, for suddenly everyone and his brother had one; but then there were ones as big as ours being built, in Brahvniki, in Terera, in Curlionaiz, too.

We wrote the truth of our spurning you in the first vote Arko ever really took. We wrote the truth of losing you. Truth suffered then, Shefenkas, from the Yeoli hawks—perhaps vultures is a better word—and your sister who listened to them. Suddenly we were looking over our shoulders again. Do you wonder why, when we found that you might come back, we got behind you? Do you think we are not in fear now, when we’re about to lose you again?

And… damn you, Shefenkas, the tears are falling into my cup. Damn you for making me water it down. We felt it like a call. Give someone permission to be more than he has been… and he will be that. He will grow bigger, rise above himself. But it is not only that we were suddenly allowed to be more than we had been; we were allowed to be what we had always claimed to be… what we always should have been. You let us do what we were capable of, Shefenkas. You let us tell truth, you let us be truth. Finally, for the first time in my life, our masthead did not lie, and we were doing what we were meant to do, what was sacred. I’ve never told you what we all felt. Some couldn’t bear it and had to leave. But the rest of us… I can’t write for weeping, Shefenkas. Pardon the dissolved words where my tears hit the ink.

When you are set free… you find parts of yourself that you forgot were missing, vistas within cut off that are suddenly open again, views that you lost sight of without noticing you were going blind. You suddenly stop feeling pain that has hurt for so long that you’ve forgotten it hurts. It’s like your soul crept away without you knowing, and suddenly it’s back. You are bewildered at how it feels, at first. But then… you are suddenly so big inside you feel you’re going to burst. You fall in love with yourself all over again, like you didn’t since you were a tiny child, and you fall in love with your work, and in love with life. You realize that you have forgotten what it is to be close to your God, because suddenly, you are, again. Curse you, Shefenkas… I get so maudlin when I’m really drunk.

You gave us this. You gave us this, more precious than a palace full of gold, more satisfying than a hundred grand feasts, more joyful than a thousand nights of the sweetest drunkenness. You gave us ourselves, Shefenkas. You gave us our true selves, our whole selves.

And now you have told me, and let me write for the world, truth again… even though telling it ripped you apart from the heart outward, and you showed even that to me. Shefenkas… this is the part of the picture of you that has always been missing. We couldn’t see that it was missing before we knew it was, but once the piece was back in place, it was clear as day that the lacuna had been there. Every question about you is answered, for everyone, now. I write to you just as I would talk to a man as I stood beside his new-dug grave, his casket waiting to be lowered into it. Too freely, using your given name all over it, so I will never send this.

Shefenkas, who gave me back my soul, where is yours? What have you done to yourself? Why do you, how can you, think such a thing? Must I, miserable little Intharas Terren, the wretchedest and scrawlingest of the wretched scrawlers, convince you, who gave me my life, that you should give yourself your own? Shefenkas, when you look in the mirror do you see a man who should not be? Shefenkas, you stupid piece of shit, what in Hayel is wrong with you, will you snap the fuck out of it for the love of every single Gods-damned God?

Shefenkas… I make an act of drinking like a fish, but it’s an act. Let’s just say, there’s a tradition up here. But I don’t. Except tonight I do. I’m jelly-mouthed now, can hardly feel my face. And I am thinking of the future. I trust Kallijas to let us stay free. I trust even Minis, if you do. But I trust them more with you still alive. I trust any of them more, I trust the world more, with you still alive. I don’t want to go back to how it was before, Shefenkas. When I think of it, I’d die before I went back to how it was before. That’s not life anyway, it’s a living death. We were all shadows, shells, people-shaped wisps of fog, stinking of booze. Maybe, if I had to go back to that, I’d die a slow death of the wine-flask, making my stupid act a reality, like so many men who cannot bear their lives do. But I don’t want to die, Shefenkas.

In your heart of hearts, I think, neither do you.

Shefenkas… I don’t know what will make you listen. I don’t know what else is being said to you, by whom, whose opinions you value far more than mine. But Shefenkas… it’s this fucking simple. You deserve to live. That’s all. You deserve to fucking live. This letter is my lit candle. If I ever meant shit to you, which I doubt, fucking listen. You gave me my life, my soul, and you have touched so many other people the same way. The world doesn’t fucking deserve to lose you, and you deserve to live.

Sincerely,
Intharas Terren fessas,
High Editor, The Pages