53 - The main witness for the defense

The world knows the rest.

Having learned which house in the town of Aratai was Sharaina’s, Krero sent two of his people around to the back door, and knocked on the front. She lived alone there, and so was the one who answered his knock. When he said his name, and that it was a security matter concerning the semanakraseye, there was a silence, and then she slammed the door in his face and ran out the back door, straight into the arms of the two. Of course she protested the unconsenting truth-drugging of a free Yeoli citizen, but by his position Krero was authorized to do so on sufficient suspicion, of course, and her attempting to run out the back after he’d said what he’d said constituted that.

Her plan was just as I had dreamed and Jinai had seen. She named five names. Bartelao Shae-Ima had agreed to his part, so Krero arrested him too. Two others whom I shall not name had been asked but were leaning against; if they had been older he might have arrested them for aiding a conspiracy by not reporting it, but they were both only seventeen, so them he just gave a thorough talking-to. After he had spelled out for them what would likely happen to them, and their families, if it became publicly known that they had had any thought of it, he was satisfied that they had come to a full enough appreciation of the gravity. In trying to persuade them, Sharaina had never used words such as kill or assassinate, she had only spoken of eliminating the danger and solving the problem and so forth. No wonder they’d been so shocked in my dream.

The last two youths were for contingency only; she only planned only to mention the idea to them if the former two decided against. Because they didn’t even know, Krero let them be.

Because neither I nor Jinai ever met any of them in person, nor learned their names in dream or vision, no one will ever know which two of the four would have been my killers. So it is, in county Aratai, two young men live and work and go about their daily business, who otherwise, perhaps, would have taken my life, and their own lives with it, and ruined their families’ names as well—and they have no idea. Fate is a strange thing.

Krero did all this, brought Sharaina and Bartelao to Vae Arahi and locked them up in the cellar of Assembly Palace, all without a soul but himself and his two people knowing, until he told Artira, and the prosecutor Akana Tenasinga, who was assigned the case.

Now the Imperial election was seven days away. I would have to leave the vote-stealing investigation and prosecution entirely in the hands of Rafas until I got back. I got down on my knees before Surya. “There’s only one way I can be back in time,” I said. “You know I am obliged to be at that trial, you know what the election means to me, you know I don’t want to die now…” I clasped his feet. “Please let me relay.” He stepped back from my hands distastefully, gazed at my aura and assented. “But,” he snapped, “I’m coming with you.” There were enough relay-trained flyers these days that it was possible. He trained in the procedure for half a bead. I, who could do it myself almost without waking up, found I couldn’t bear to watch him do it.

By the time we got to Vae Arahi, the news was out, so people were all over me right from when the catchers helped me out of my wing-harness on the Independent roof, even though it was near midnight. There were about twenty writers. I invited them into the hot-tub room to grill me while I soaked.

Since I’d been in the sky for two days, they had more news for me than I for them. Mostly they wanted answers to the hardest and most horrible questions: how I felt, and how I thought my people must feel. In answering honestly, I found myself repeating some of what I had said in the dream, and fighting tears.

Sharaina and Bartelao had both been charged with conspiracy to murder and conspiracy to commit treason, which in Yeola-e is defined as an act that will either cause severe detriment to, or which is contrary to the express will of, the people. The evidence was their own confessions under truth-drug. Bartelao was pleading that he’d been under the sway of Sharaina. Sharaina had no advocate, as none would take her, so she planned to defend herself, pleading justification.

The two sides had, as usual, entered summaries of the arguments that they’d make, and one of the writers had a copy of Sharaina’s, which he read to me. I should be killed for the good of Yeola-e, she wrote, because I was a power-monger and a latent tyrant—all the same arguments she’d made pounding her chair-arm when she’d been in Assembly, but with some new ones added. I was insane, for example, and had lied to the Yeoli people in my madness, by hiding my foreknowledge, a breach of the statute semanakraseyeni (which was true). She even wrote that the death-in-me was in truth the God-in-me, wishing what was ultimately best for me as well as for the people. When he was finished reading, I ducked right under in the tub. “Sorry, I just needed to be completely immersed for a moment, after that,” I told them when I came back up. “What do I think of it? I disagree.”

Now that I was here, the trial would start tomorrow. I told the writers I wasn’t sure exactly why I was needed, since I had no evidence for the prosecution, and it had sufficient evidence anyway in confessions both under truth-drug and not; I’d come trusting Krero’s request. A few of them glanced at each other, before Lurai Athal of Proclamatory told me. “Em… you’re named as the main witness for the defense.”

I was shocked speechless for a bit, and several made note of that. “You mean,” I said when I could, “Sharaina’s hoping to get me to admit on the stand, ‘Yes, you’d have been right to kill me’?” Some laughed; others glanced at each other a touch nervously again.

“Well, there’s been some suggestion,” Lurai said, “that, em, with what’s come out about your own feelings in regard to your own life, semanakraseye, that it might not be as ludicrous a strategy as it seems on first glance.” They all poised her notebooks. “Any comments on that?”

I was dumbfounded again for a moment. “As a witness,” I finally said, “all I will do is what a witness must do: answer the questions I am asked with only the truth, clear and complete to the best of my understanding. Then the jury will decide as they will. That’s all I will say.” My head was spinning; I needed to make sense of this within myself. Suddenly I was glad Surya was here.

“It’s interesting how life can manifest outwardly the questions we wrestle with inside ourselves,” he said, when the writers were gone and he’d got into the tub with me. Interesting, I thought; that’s one way of putting it. “We spoke of an Assembly within you, but one might see it also as a court of law, in which the prosecution is the death-in-you and the defense your will to live. Until you began with me, the verdict and the sentence were both certain; then you entered an appeal. Now, before a judge and jury in life, Sharaina, the Servant of the constituency of the death-in-you, is planning to play the role she always wanted, prosecutor; on the chair of testimony, you will have to speak in your own defense.”

I closed my eyes. I’d slept most of the way here, even during the day, catching up for sleep I’d stinted on in Arko, but I was still bone-tired. “Somehow I don’t find this heartening,” I said.

“Well, the part you need to understand is this: in the court in life, it is actually those who would kill you who stand accused, as is appropriate, rather than you, for all Sharaina will argue as if she were a prosecutor, citing your errors and flaws. So it should be with the death-in-you also. And when you argue, as I can’t imagine you won’t, that no error or flaw of yours could ever justify her murdering you, so that your errors and flaws are irrelevant, the death-in-you will have no choice but to listen.”

I went under the water again, not wanting to hear more. Some part of me, aided profoundly by fatigue, rebelled against understanding this. He just patted my shoulder gently when I came back up. “In short, everything is going as it should.”

Though Shaina and Etana welcomed me into their bed in sympathy for my otherwise being alone, I slept only about two beads. They gave me a note that had been sent up by Akana, asking if he could visit me at sixth bead in the morning, for some reason; I wasn’t sure why, when he wasn’t going to call me up. He was past sixty, so at cock-light I dressed for court and went down to catch him at Assembly Palace to save him the climb up to the Independent. He took me into his office in the legal wing.

“You’re right to think I need no testimony from you for my part, semanakraseye,” he said. “The jurors all already know who you are, what you’ve done and whether they think assassinating you is justifiable. But I imagine by now you know Sharaina is going to call you onto the chair of testimony?” I signed chalk. “It’s that I want to talk about. You’ve read her summary?” I signed chalk again.

“So you know: she’ll throw at you all the same accusations that she did in Assembly, as well as some new ones. You know it inside-out. The difference is that since you’re not in the semanakraseye’s chair and therefore required to keep your silence, you’ll be able to argue to your heart’s content, so long as you do it in the context of answering her questions… or pretend to, you know how it goes. The only thing is…” Akana peered at me under his copious gray brows. “It’s all an assertion that you deserve to live. It’s necessary that there be no… hesitation, or withholding, or conceding, on that matter, on your part.” So that was why we were meeting.

I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and did what I knew he wanted me to do: imagined how it would be, arguing in theory for my life, against a woman who was arguing in reality for hers. He sat patiently waiting, while I played it through in my mind.

Done, I opened my eyes and told him the gist. “Akana, there is a part of me that has an argument with the worth of my own life, yes. At this point I can’t deny it. But there is no part of me that has any argument with the Yeoli laws that, together, forbid murdering a semanakraseye in good standing. It’s madness that I should even have to say that my record doesn’t justify assassination. I could be the worst people’s-will-enactor in the history of Yeola-e, and murdering me would still be murdering the people’s will. We have effective legal means of getting rid of bad semanakraseyel, and I have never, for a single moment, claimed that I was not subject to them; I have been impeached, for the love of All-Spirit, and I did absolutely nothing to fight it, even when many Yeolis said I ought to because an overwhelming majority charcoaled it here. And then I was reinstated. Akana, I remember when my father was assassinated, the shock and grief everyone in Vae Arahi felt, that must have been the same all over the country… it would be ten times, a hundred times, worse if the assassin were Yeoli. We’d never be the same people again.” My eyes were suddenly stinging with tears; in the dream, living what in real life had been averted, I had not been willing to admit this. “I won’t hesitate or withhold or concede a hundredth of a finger-width on that, on the chair. Trust me.”

“All right, good. You take Yeola-e’s part rather than your own, that’s an even stronger case.” Had I? I thought I’d taken my own. “I recommend saying that all from your heart, as you just did.”

“Should I also say the whole thing makes me feel unreal, as if I’m in a dream world? That would be from my heart, too.”

He patted my shoulder. “If I have my way, semanakraseye, lad, you’ll wake up into sane reality before the close of the day.”





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