61 - From unthinkable to fourteen

The day after the election was the first day of Jitzmitthra. The wing-couriers flying back results from all over the Empire were working, but of course they were mostly A-niah and Yeolis.

I hadn’t had time to plan anything, of course, but Skorsas had. I’d told him to cut the expense of my costumes, since I wouldn’t have time to wear more than one anyway. Just as well to tell the sun not to rise in the east.

Jitzmitthra begins, of course, when the Imperator throws off his robe to reveal the costume underneath. This year, the last year I’d do it, Skorsas had decided, I would be wearing nothing but grease-paint, in the patterns of a fang-lion, and a pretend tail; he’d also had a headpiece made with the teeth long as tusks and a mane broader than my shoulders. And jewels, of course.

“You have the body to pull it off,” he said. “Can you imagine Kurkas… I’m sorry. I’m sorry, love.”

Kallijas was the Mad Imperatrix, complete with her priceless self-torn rags, Niku the Mezem Director, well-padded all over her body and with her face lightened with grease-paint under a blond wig. Vriah was Kvas the parrot, and so perfectly mimicked him mimicking Niku yelling, “Quiiiiiiiet, you stupid bird!” that she had us all in stitches.

Younger Kallijas dusted off Minis’s old puppy costume, which he’d worn when I famously walked him. Minis and Gannara were express-chair bearers, as Minis loved costumes that let him wear his skates. Skorsas was a high-priced dominatrix, but then he was a high-priced dominatrix every year.

Krero was too Yeoli to dress up, as were all my parents except my mother. A Haian who was oddly massive and the shoulders and a little fake-looking in the hair came into the room with the rest of us, and said in the thickest Haian accent, “Everything is going as it should.” I had thought Surya was too Yeoli, too, until I remembered how long he’d been in Arko.

But it was Tawaen whose costume struck me the most. It was his idea; Skorsas had only helped with the execution. He wore a bald and curly white wig and his face was made up with wrinkles, and he came hobbling, bent, leaning on a cane; but he was wearing a semanakraseyeni shirt and the double-white-striped collar of an asakraiyaseye (in Arko he could get away with it).

“What do you mean, who am I?” he growled in as good an elderly voice as a ten-year-old could ever put on, when I asked. “I’m who I’ve always been: Chevenga! Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e! Never in my ninety-nine years have I seen such an ignoramus… young people these days!”

I laughed so hard I cried. I realized afterward, thinking about it, that only he could have thought of it, had the nerve to do it, and, with his resemblance to me, pulled it off. How our children astonish us.

I went out onto the Presentation Platform at dawn, with Ilesias in Mahid Jitzmitthra white, and First Amitzas in black. The crowd was ready, seething with excitement, wrapped in its own grey and tan and beige robes. The priests intoned the liturgical words that no one ever listens to, I was handed the wine flask and the sacred cup.

I turned it upside-down, splashed wine all over the base of it and the perfect white damask table-cloth, put on my fang-lion headpiece and threw off my robe. The crowd burst into a roar, and drabness was flung off all across it, flowering into a thousand brilliant colours and flashes of shine in the rim-edging sun, as they did the same. It was Jitzmitthra.

After what I thought was a decently-long time of moving cat-like through the crowd, hissing at madly-celebrating Arkans and pretending not to see either the flashed glances or the open stares at my tiger-striped manhood, I went inside. The constitution, so close to complete, waited.

“After all the trouble I went to putting that paint on you, a whole bead of delicate, frantically-fast, brilliant work—you’re not washing it off already,” the high-priced dominatrix following me into the bath commanded.

“Fine, I’ll work wearing it all morning then, how’s that?” I growled. I meant that as a joke, but he tightened his blood-red lips and said, “Satisfactory, so long as you put a towel on your chair so as not to grease-stripe the silken upholstery.” He wears what he is in his heart, I thought. So many Arkans do, during Jitzmitthra.

I decided that for the festival, which should be the six last days of my Imperatorship, I’d work in an outside office, with my window wide open. Let the joyful all-Arko Jitz madness be my inspiration. Though he’d even done my feet, and beautifully, I put on my skates. Rafas caught up to me in the corridor by running.

He wore his usual officious, sword-edge-tailored work suit, same as every day, and his face was grim as a surgeon’s when he’s about to make an incision that will save or kill you. Of course Arkans are used to outrageous costumes on Jitzmitthra, so he didn’t really see mine. “I have a report,” he said. “I’ll wait until you’re sitting down before I start.” I laid the towel on the chair, took a deep breath, shifted my tail aside and sat.

“I’ve made twelve arrests. But Inatalla Shae-Krisa got wind somehow, and fled the city last night, leaving most of his papers burnt. I have people after him.”

I made the charcoal-sign to the people in the trap-booth, and let out a whistling breath at the same time. “What came out?” He let out a long sigh, and his eyes on me were so full of sympathy I felt sick. “Spit it out, Rafas,” I said. “You were right, and I was right to trust you. I knew in my soul I was.”

“They were plotting to kill you… at one point.”

I must be getting used to this, I thought. From unthinkable to one Yeoli who’d kill a semanakraseye to fourteen, in an eyeblink… maybe I wasn’t getting used to it. I deep-breathed away the spinning.

“By the trail I followed, which started with scraping Faraiko last night, the whole of it is this,” Rafas said. “When your sister Artira was Imperator, they felt they had her fairly well controlled. But of course she was still going to enact your plan to separate Yeola-e and Arko. They were trying privately to talk her into selecting one of them as Imperator then, but she wasn’t keen on that because it had been your intention that Arko should be ruled by an Arkan.

“So they were thinking of just taking over and having her escorted by a polite force of their strong-arms to the border… expediting the separation, as it were. That required one of them to be in control of the military, so they were going to send Emao-e with Artira.

“Then you were in Arko again, letting it be known you disagreed with what your sister was doing and that you wanted the Imperatorship back. They went into something of a panic; it had been the last thing they expected. And I guess they know you well enough, that if you want something like that, you will get it. Next thing they knew, Inatalla and everyone he’d brought along with him onto her staff, had all been fired because he’d intercepted your pigeons to her, as you know.

“Before you were even voted back, they’d decided the ideal action would be to kill you, making it look like an accident or an illness, so that one of them could take over as emergency Imperator, so as to stem the chaos your death would inevitably cause. They were thinking Inatalla, so long as he swore always to rule in truth by council, all fourteen of them as equals. Which he did.”

My people, I thought. Always able to choose by consensus.

“So then he’d just stay Imperator, and negotiate Arkan independence with Artira… do it while everyone was grieving and in shock and not thinking clearly, that was their explicit plan. In a pinch, they wouldn’t negotiate it, but just declare it. Yeola-e was hardly going to go to war to conquer Arko again… especially without you.

“But then they couldn’t figure out how to kill you. Of course you have better security than any other man on the Earthsphere, and weapon-sense plus your own deadly hands on top of that.

“Of course they consulted with professionals. None of the three top assassins in Arko was willing to do it, for any price, nor the three top in Brahvniki. Too difficult, too dangerous, they said. Tell the truth, I think it’s that they like you, over the hawks. Even these heartless, shriveled-souled killers. Well, who wouldn’t?

“So the hawks changed plans. You were going to hand Arko back to Arkans, including an Arkan Imperator, to be elected. All they needed to do, to maintain their place, was buy one of the candidates. None of them would get to be Imperator, but they’d make sure they retained thorough and deep control of what was important to them. It might be better anyway; power is safest where it is invisible. Mil Torii Itzan, they found, was for sale. He is just too affable to see their venality, I think.

“That plan’s been foiled now, of course, and they’ve all been fighting panic, knowing we had Faraiko. Only reason they didn’t all flee the city was that they trusted you—while at the same time siding firmly with the death-in-you, mind you, since you are such a despotic, unprincipled lunatic—to not break your own truth-drugging laws. And they were right; you wouldn’t have, bless you, except that I talked you into it.

“So now they sit in the dungeon—separate, I’d never let them talk—each contemplating, I imagine, how enormously his or her circumstances have changed. I don’t know if you might have been trying to enumerate how many laws they’ve broken—multiplying each by fourteen, of course—but I imagine you’ve probably lost count.”

I could think of nothing to say. I didn’t even want to think. To follow all the paths, trace all the implications, as I should easily and naturally and immediately do, suddenly seemed so hard that it would be easier to die. What did I feel? It seemed like nothing but a bone-deep tiredness, much deeper than from a day’s work, or even months of too much work and not enough sleep. I felt weary of life.

“Pardon me,” I said to him, and laid my head in my hands. It was only when I felt the faint slipperiness between my palms and my forehead that I remembered that Skorsas had left only my fingertips and my face unpainted, and realized I’d just imprinted my forehead with black and white leopard spots. It was so like my life.

“Shefen-kas…” I looked up at him. His face showed not a twitch. “They are not really Yeolis any more. Do you understand that? They ceased being Yeolis the moment they seized so much spoil for themselves alone, rather than for their nation. Yeola-e, by my lights, means… the whole first. Like family.”

I found my eyes searching his, wondering how it could be that an Arkan understood, so easily. You are more Yeoli than they.

“So: they spurned that, their true ways, out of greed. They aren’t Yeoli, and haven’t been for a long time. In spirit, I suspect, they never were.”

I signed a weak chalk. “What else, if anything, did you find out?”

“They owned even more than they let on, Inatalla especially. All their papers are confiscate pending the full investigation. It’s going to take months for my men, I mean my people, to go through all of it, and I imagine they’ll find enough illegalities for an army of regular thieves. Out of your hands, Shefen-kas… you’ll be able to go home and forget about it. No one ever deserved it more, by my book.”

“I don’t need to tell you a thing, then,” I said. “If you need anything, more dispensations or permissions or knowledge that I have, you need but let me know.”

“I obey… but I don’t think I will. They are condemned out of their own mouths. You finish the work of saving us, Imperator Shefen-kas. Did I ever tell you…” Rafas’s cliff-face visage suddenly got a look I’d never seen on it, a kind of shyness. “Did I ever tell you… thank you?” I guess my eyes said, for what?

“Starting from the day after you took up the reins,” he said, “I’ve seen some real justice in Arko. Some true honesty. You cleaned out the whole cesspit. So—thank you.”

“You're a thousand times welcome, Rafas. And you know—this matter is a very good example—that I could have done none of it without you, and all who work for you.”

“I’ve been able to do the right thing for the first time in my life,” he said, with the first smile of today. I remembered Intharas’s letter, saying the same thing.

“All it is,” I said, “is freedom. You are more welcome than I know how to express.”

He stared at me for a moment; then got up suddenly from his chair and prostrated himself. When an Arkan does it from the heart, it strikes to the bone. “Gehit, gehit, Rafas, please. I thank you, for all the right things you have done… especially this one, finally correcting the biggest wrong I did here, aside from the sack: letting the hawks get a hold. They’re destroyed now.” I reached out my hand, and he took it, paint and all.

“You scared me shitless, that first day, Shefen-kas, when you took it up and put out the call for all of us.”

“What, the first day I was Imperator? Why? I didn’t exactly look impressive, in bed with both arms in casts and scratches and bruises all over. Much more so now, I think.” I spread my striped and spotted arms, and he chuckled.

“You were burning with the need to fix things—”

“That was scary?”

“If you were going to start cleaning house completely, I figured I was head of the list.”

“You mean you thought I’d chop your head off. I can understand why you’d think that.” Like all good Arkans, he’d tried to take some of Kurkas’s fault onto himself.

“We didn’t know you then.”

“How could you? I was just the barbarian conqueror and former Mezem sword-buck. Only Arkans who knew me well were Skorsas and Iska and Norii Maziel, and no one would listen to them.”

“I had to lock up a dozen of my own who would have run away that day with their records and cash-boxes,” he said. “They came around when I came downstairs again, with my head still attached to my shoulders.”

“Another thing to thank you for.”

“I look forward to working with your security people when you come back on state visits, Shefen-kas.”

“I look forward to that too. I’ll miss Arko. I know some would never believe it, but I will. You can’t work that hard for a people, I guess, without falling in love with them in some way.”

He looked at me in silence for a moment, and I suddenly got the sense his grey eyes were near to tears. “It’s Jitzmitthra,” he said. “Do you have a bead to spare, to go out for a drink, like everyone else in all Arko is doing, with one of your humble ministers?”

It hurt to say no. “Drink an extra cup for me. Or better still, now you’ve thrown everyone implicated in the clank, set Ikal people to find Inatalla, and put up your feet.”

“I will. Once I’ve done all I must do.” Of course there was more, same as me.

I held out my arms. He accepted my embrace, telling himself, perhaps, that the tinted grease would wash out of his clothes. I felt in his touch that he wanted me, but he was far too proper an Arkan, feeling himself vastly too far beneath me, to ever say it, so that I could not either.




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